Peter Dickinson - Death of a Unicorn

‘It certainly felt like that.’

‘And the Barbados deal couldn’t go ahead if there was a threat of investigation. Then this gewgaw turns up and he can use that instead, so he can make the Barbados deal legitimate, though I don’t see why, if he does that, he’s got any need to settle with his blackmailer.’

(Because it would have been cheating me, of course. Curious how you can suddenly be perfectly certain of something as apparently unknowable as that.)

‘And as we are aware,’ said Ronnie, ‘a deadline was eventually met, in an unpleasantly literal sense.’

‘He was a terrible coward. I mean, he didn’t give a hoot what anyone said or thought, but the slightest scratch and he wanted trained nurses hovering over him with antiseptics. That’s still one of the worst things about it for me, though I tell myself it must have been over in an instant.’

‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Ronnie, casually. He had probably never, even at his liveliest, been much interested in questions of pain and blood, but the more theoretical side of what had happened seemed genuinely to have caught his imagination now.

‘One more point before I contribute my mite,’ he said. ‘These men who interviewed you in Brierley’s flat, they more or less told you they were expecting to hush the whole thing up?’

‘Oh no. All they said was they’d try and keep me out of it.’

‘Very altruistic.- Think of it the other way round. If they want to play it down, how enthusiastic do you think they’re going to be about the newspapers learning that a glamorous and titled young lady has been the dead man’s closest friend? I think I mentioned this when we met at Cheadle. Doesn’t it strike you as extremely odd that nobody from that day to this, in spite of intense journalistic speculation at the time and continued interest ever since, has asked you whether you have any light to throw on the matter?’

‘I’ve always taken it for granted. I shut that door, you see. It was all over. But I do see it’s a bit odd.’

‘More than a bit. Remember the fuss over the Dockers? In the papers for months on end. If there hadn’t from the very first been a decision to hush things up, you’d have been there too. A decision from somewhere quite high up, what’s more. Not because of the Barbados swindle, either. They’d have wanted all the publicity they could get for that, to discourage the others. One’s conclusion is that Brierley had been up to something which if it became generally known would thoroughly embarrass the British Government.’

‘But he wasn’t remotely interested in politics.’

‘One doesn’t have to be. We are now moving into what you might call my territory. If I may say so, Mabs, you yourself did not at the time give much impression of political awareness.’

‘Lord, no. I was totally self-absorbed. I’ve just been reading some stuff I wrote about it soon after. A mass of things must have been going on—Korea, the Cold War, the King dying, Eisenhower getting elected, all that business with Mossadeq in Persia—but you’d hardly know from what I wrote that it had been happening at all.’

‘The Cold War is the element that concerns us. You may have since gathered, Mabs, that I was not quite the dilettante Party member I made myself out to be at the time. I was, in fact, quite a hard-line Stalinist and was very well in with King Street. My function was that of an agent provocateur, really. I posed, I am sorry to say, as the kind of civilised chap to whom Party members with doubts might turn for advice, and I could then warn King Street—or in certain cases, Moscow—that they were no longer to be relied on. I tell you this to some extent to show good faith. You have put yourself in my hands and I am offering a reciprocal hostage. I have not so far admitted it to anyone else.’

‘You didn’t have to.’

‘Well, I’ve done it now. What are you up to?’

‘Eating a crumb of pie. Like your champagne. Sealed in blood.’

‘Don’t tell Fred or he will smother you with Levi-Strauss. Yes, I was, you might say, the traitor’s traitor. But when Brierley took over at Night and Day I got a message from my control demanding an emergency meeting. He gave me instructions that I was to do all I could to find out the source of Brierley’s funds. I assumed at the time that he believed them to emanate from the CIA, and that the object was to use Night and Day for crypto-propaganda purposes, as with Encounter?’

‘Oh yes, that’s what they were doing, but no one had told Stephen Spender.’

‘Something like that. You may be amused to know that Dorothy Clarke is convinced that Brierley got his funds from the Kremlin, for the sole purpose of manoeuvring her out of her position and thus undermining the self-confidence of the British ruling caste.’

‘Mrs Clarke! It was her who told you about me and Mr B!’

‘Not exactly told. She’s stood the years pretty well, but she’s stone deaf now, almost. She misheard something I said and took it that I knew already. What do you think about her suggestion?’

‘It must be nonsense, surely.’

‘I think so. What about the CIA?’

‘I don’t think it was anything like that. I mean he wasn’t getting funds from anywhere. Not a steady flow. He’d made a bit of money somehow and started gambling with it in the City and done well enough to persuade other people to let him gamble with theirs. He told me once that he lived by surfing an ever-breaking wave. I don’t think there was ever money coming in that he could rely on.’

‘My view entirely, and I think also my masters’. When I reported Naylor’s appointment as editor as evidence of an incipient pro-Washington line, my control was not remotely interested. Again I think we can assume that my side thought that Brierley had been up to something that might embarrass the British Government.’

‘But he hadn’t anything to do with the Government.’

‘Not then, perhaps, but in an earlier stage he had been in their employment, like a great many other men of his age. He had been a soldier. He had been on the staff of the British Control Commission in Germany. The morsel I have to contribute is that he was in the department concerned with the confiscation of Nazi-owned property and its return, where possible, to its rightful owners.’

‘Was he stationed in Hamburg?’

‘Don’t know. Why?’

‘That’s where he used to go.’

Was it, indeed? It would certainly fit in. There would have been excellent opportunities for corrupt officials to acquire property in Hamburg, and also to arrange for the owners to disappear and not come back.’

‘Oh, God. He got money from the Jews.’

‘Uh?’

‘Something somebody said about Mr B.’

Did they now? Can you tell me more?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘You see where this might lead us? The Cold War in full swing, West German democracy just staggering to its feet, to the accompaniment of bellows from the East that the Allies were deliberately reviving the menace of National Socialism in order to attack Mother Russia once more. Suppose it is now made public that a British official had, while still in Government employ, used his position to help Nazis to conceal their ownership of property, to realise their assets and to transmit funds after them. Look at the fuss there’s been about Klaus Barbie, thirty years later. From what I learnt from my control it appears that my side may already have had wind of this as an opportunity to embarrass the British Government, a view with which Whitehall apparently concurred, to judge by their treatment of you after the shooting. It also strikes me as significant that Brierley was killed in South America, admittedly in a country which had a fair record for not harbouring war criminals, but tolerably neutral ground for parties who may not have much trusted each other, one coming up from, say, the Argentine and the other down from Barbados. Does the theory distress you, Mabs?’