Lydia was sleeping when Wilde arrived at the hotel. He didn’t disturb her, just left her a message, and then studied maps supplied by the concierge while waiting for the car and pistol. They arrived ten minutes later.
He drove out of London at speed. He knew where to find Wall Hall, but more importantly he needed to work out where the Kennedy convoy of cars was heading. A place of special significance, the butler had said. Somewhere north of Wall Hall, and about an hour from the estate. That had to mean something between thirty and fifty miles – a huge amount of territory to consider, from Brackley in the west, to Bedford due north or Saffron Walden in the east.
But the Kennedys were renowned for their Catholicism, so it had to be a Catholic church or chapel. How many of those were there in this Protestant country?
Something like the shrine at Walsingham in north Norfolk – too distant for today’s journey, but that sort of thing, surely? The Roman Catholic cathedral in Norwich? Again, too far. Perhaps the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in south-east Cambridge. Wilde knew it as a nineteenth-century edifice of questionable beauty, but that also, surely, was too far.
Wilde reached Wall Hall within fifty-five minutes. The gun weighed heavy in his jacket pocket as he followed the footman through the halls and corridors of the elegant mansion to the office of the butler, Hobbs.
Wilde tried to speak, but the butler, dressed in formal attire, raised a finger to stop him. ‘Professor Wilde, if I may just get a word in edgeways. You haven’t told me why you are worried about the ambassador’s wellbeing?’
‘There’s a death threat – a possible assassin. I am working with the British intelligence services. Mr Kennedy needs to be warned – and he needs protection.’
‘He does have a security man with him.’
‘All to the good, but that may not be enough. Now, what can you tell me?’
‘Very little, sir. I have asked about, but no one seems to have details of where he has gone. I think the person best placed to talk to you would be Miss Ulyanova, who has been organising things, but she is not here at the moment.’
‘Miss Ulyanova?’
‘Indeed, sir. I believe she suggested the destination to Mr Kennedy.’
‘Is she with them?’
‘She went ahead.’
‘This Miss Ulyanova – what is her role here?’
‘Ah, now, sir, that is not easy to answer. I would say she is a secretary or personal assistant, but she is quite new so defining her role is not straightforward.’
If the butler was suggesting some impropriety, he concealed his suspicion with great skill.
‘Can you describe her?’
‘Not tall, fair-haired . . . very pretty, I suppose.’
‘And she has her own car?’
‘Indeed she does. A rather splendid Morgan two-seater.’
‘Not red by any chance?’
‘Indeed, it is, sir.’
Red sports car. Elina Kossoff. It had to be. ‘And Lincoln Tripp was here, too?’
‘Yes, sir. I believe he also has been involved in today’s celebrations and I am told he has booked a most remarkable young tenor as the highlight of the religious event. One of England’s finest voices, it is said.’
‘I need to use your telephone, Mr Hobbs.’
*
There was something in the back of his mind. Some memory from long ago. But he couldn’t place it. The phone was ringing, but no one was picking up. He was about to cut off the call when Carstairs answered.
‘Forgive the delay, Professor Wilde. I was away from my desk for a few moments. Let me put you through.’
Eaton was frustrated. He hadn’t got anywhere in his efforts to identify the Kennedys’ destination. Nor was he hopeful of the police finding the ambassador’s convoy of five cars. ‘We’re talking hundreds of square miles, Wilde. Not quite as bad as needles in haystacks, but far from easy.’
‘Lincoln Tripp is with them. He has invited a tenor along.’
‘Marcus Marfield?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Dear God. We have to find them!’
‘There’s more. Kennedy has an employee with an office here who has been involved in organising the event: name of Ulyanova, but I’m sure it’s Elina Kossoff. She’s not in evidence either.’
‘What do we do, Wilde?’
‘I was about to ask you that. Eaton, in the far reaches of my mind, there is a memory – something relevant, but I can’t nail it down.’
‘Well, there are scores of Catholic churches . . .’
‘We can’t scour them all.’
‘We don’t have a lot of staff here, but the secretaries are phoning around the priests associated with each church or Catholic establishment. Could it be a Catholic school, do you think?’
Possible. Worth a phone call, certainly.
‘Come on, Wilde, you’re the history man. You must know all the sites of interest to Catholics. Something to do with the Reformation, for instance? The persecution of the Catholic martyrs . . .’
Wilde’s hair prickled. ‘Stop there, Eaton. I think I’ve got it. It’s not a Catholic church – at least not any more. It’s a small, half-ruined Protestant church. St Peter’s on the Gilderstone estate. Look on the Ordnance Survey. I’ll explain all later. Send reinforcements. I’ve got to go. Pray God I’m in time.’
*
No one could chance upon the church of St Peter. Half-ruined, covered in ivy, it stood in ancient woodland in the very heart of the ten-thousand-acre Gilderstone estate. Elina Kossoff met Marcus Marfield in a small glade, a few hundred yards from the narrow pathway that led through the trees to the church. There was no road access, so cars had to be parked hundreds of yards away.
He had been waiting there for three quarters of an hour for her to arrive with the weapons.
She handed the bag over to him. ‘I’m sorry, I had other business.’ She didn’t bother telling him that she had been over every inch of the weapons to erase her own fingerprints.
‘The service will be under way in half an hour. The full Tridentine Mass. I need to conceal the guns.’
‘Why not simply walk in there firing?’
‘I have to sing first.’
He was a strange one, but then she had always known that. Why did he have to sing for these people before killing them? The answer, of course, was that he wasn’t singing for them – he was singing for himself. This had always been about Marcus Marfield.
‘Well, it’s stripped. You have to reassemble it.’
‘The work of two minutes.’
She watched as he opened the bag and removed the Thompson sub-machine gun and knelt down, placing the parts on the unwrapped cotton. He examined each constituent element, then began to click them together, his hands moving fast as though he had done this a thousand times before. He probably had.
‘You didn’t tell me you had a brother,’ she said.
‘Is it relevant?’
‘Yes, I think it is. He teaches at a school in Essex. Did you know that?’
‘No. I haven’t seen the bastard in nearly three years.’
‘I went there this morning, but he wasn’t there. That was all the office would give me. I was wondering if you have any clue as to where he might be.’
‘Of course not. Anyway, what’s this all about?’
‘He has the other film. Your father sent it to him, not Wilde.’
Marfield stopped his work on the stripped gun and gave her a hard look. ‘I don’t believe it. My father never had any time for Toll.’
‘It’s true.’
‘That’s not what my mother said.’ He held up the reassembled gun, slid the bolt and tested the safety catch and the trigger. ‘Smooth as silk,’ he said. He picked up one of the two magazines and slotted it into place. ‘Ready to fire.’ He pointed it at her. ‘Now then, what’s this about Ptolemy?’
‘Your father sent him the film. Your mother knows this, but she lied to you. She’s afraid of you, Marcus – she fears what you would do to your brother.’
‘And how have you come to this conclusion?’
‘I went to visit your mother. I saw Ptolemy’s picture – and it all became clear to me. She told you the first thing that came into her head, which was Wilde’s name. Wilde has never had the film.’
‘But he’s seen it.’ Marfield shrugged. ‘Anyway, he’s dead now. And dead men tell no tales, as someone once pointed out.’
‘Maybe. But we still need the film. And so I’m going to leave you now and find your brother.’
‘Did it occur to you that I might have an objection to you hurting my own flesh and blood?’
‘I didn’t say I was going to hurt him. But we must have the film.’
‘Did you do anything to my mother?’
She sighed. ‘No, but would it really matter to you if I had? You loathe each other.’ She leant forward and kissed him. ‘Good luck, Marcus. Get the Thompson hidden quickly. This is a remarkable thing you’re doing. You’re a brave man.’
‘Oh no,’ he said without looking up. ‘This is easy. I hate Americans. All Americans.’
That helped, of course. But Elina was still curious. ‘Why, Marcus? Why do you hate them?’
He stopped his work and looked at her with an enigmatic smile. ‘Do you really want to know?
‘Tell me.’
He shrugged. ‘OK. I was on a choir trip to Munich with the school. It was 1934. We sang in the Frauenkirche and various concert halls, but after the rest of the choir went home, I stayed on with the family of an old friend of my mother’s. They had a boy of my age, Gottfried, and we got on well, really well. We went hiking with his Hitler Youth troop. It was a pure life, a true life. I felt at home.’
She tapped her watch.
‘I was made an honorary member and I wanted to stay there, but of course, I had to come back to Suffolk. However, I persuaded my parents to let me go again the next summer, 1935. I didn’t tell my father about the Hitler Youth, of course. Not then, at least. He would have been outraged and kept me in England.’
‘Something happened?’
‘One weekend our troop was hiking and camping in the mountains around Garmisch. It was early evening and we were singing around the campfire: For today Germany is ours! Denn heute, da gehört uns Deutschland . . .’
‘. . . und morgen die ganze Welt. And tomorrow the whole world.’
He nodded. ‘A band of American hikers came upon us, all loaded down with rucksacks. No, they descended on us. They were all a couple of years older than us – jeering college idiots. They insulted our uniforms, insulted the swastika, finally they insulted the Führer. Gottfried had had enough. He launched himself at them with his hiking stick. One of the Yankee oafs, half a foot taller than Gottfried and twice as broad, pushed him hard. Gottie stumbled, fell on to rocks. His head split open and he died instantly.’
‘My God.’
‘So you see . . . killing Americans is easy.’
*
They had put mother and child in a small private room of the hospital. Willie was sitting up in bed telling him about Mrs Cullanan and how she had looked after him and how Mr Cullanan had found Ma. In the other bed, Juliet was asleep, heavily sedated and bandaged. There were no broken bones, but she had tendon damage to her right forearm, some deep cuts to her torso and trauma to the spinal column. But the injuries were not life-threatening.
Jim Vanderberg could not wait to talk to her, to hear what exactly had happened. He also had other tasks on his mind; he needed to contact the family of Joyce Harman to break the news to them and give his condol-ences. Willie had told him how she had kept them fed and how much she had helped in the days adrift in the dinghy.
Most of all, he wanted to take a boat over to the island to give his personal thanks to Cathy and Martin Cullanan, without whom Juliet would certainly not have survived.
He needed to call the embassy, too. With both Herschel Johnson and the ambassador unavailable, he had had to leave a message with young Lincoln Tripp. His first thought was that that would be fine, but since then doubts had crept in. The line had been bad and somehow Tripp’s response had seemed a bit casual. In fact the more he thought about it, the less certain he was that Tripp had understood the urgency of the warning at all.
*
The Gilderstone estate lay in the vast agricultural folds between Steven-age and Saffron Walden. Wilde had only been there once, to a special event. Four years ago on this very day, 12 September 1935. St Peter’s was indeed a Protestant church, but like every English church of four hundred years old or more, it had once been Roman Catholic.
And not all these old churches, though nominally Church of England, had ever truly cast off their Catholic past. St Peter’s was one of these. Every year, it remembered a day in 1589 when a martyr of the Church of Rome was captured during Mass in this little hidden place of worship.
It was a church in which names such as Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell, John Gerard and William Weston had sought sanctuary and brought the Mass to their forlorn flock, suffering under the harsh Elizabethan regime. They were all fugitives, all hunted mercilessly.
On the evening Wilde went there, the way was marked by pitch torches, and the interior was lit by dozens of candles. It was both eerie and ethereal. He had known the story of the poet martyr Barnaby Gilderstone well, and had written a sympathetic article about him, which was why he had been invited. It was not exactly a secret cere-mony, but it was not publicised, for the parish priest knew that many in his flock disapproved of honouring the saints of Rome. And anyway, they didn’t like coming to this ruin of a Saxon church, deep in the woods, preferring the lighter and warmer confines of the fourteenth-century church in the village.
Barnaby Gilderstone was a Jesuit, a son of the family who lived in the hall. He had been tracked remorselessly by agents of the state, and he had finally been betrayed and surrounded here in this tiny church where he had felt safest of all.
Wilde was not the most religious of men, but he had been moved that night by thoughts of the young priest. Even with his faith, he would have known the horrors that awaited him. As an ordained priest – particularly one of the hated Jesuits – coming into England in secret, he was automatically guilty of high treason, and there was but one penalty for treason – hanging, drawing and quartering. Wilde knew all this, for the religious strife of the late-sixteenth century and the machinations of the Elizabethan secret service were his subject.
The little candlelit gathering Wilde attended had been a solemn, spiritual occasion. Christ himself might have approved of the simpli-city of the church, for it amounted to little more than a pile of old flints, scarcely held together. The church had fallen into ruin in the nineteenth century, and its tower had collapsed into the nave in the 1890s. With no money to repair it, all that could be done was to make it safe.
*
As he drove up, Wilde could see five large black cars parked on the gravel outside the long-abandoned Gilderstone Hall. The drivers stood together by the wall of the old building, smoking, staring at him without interest. Fleetingly, Wilde wondered about recruiting them, but they were unarmed, and explanations would merely take up precious minutes.
Climbing from his car, Wilde checked the Walther pistol in his pocket, looked about to get his bearings and saw the path into the trees that he had taken four years earlier.
He ran at a loping pace. The path was overgrown in places, trees had been blown down, brambles ripped at his jacket and trousers and threatened to trip him. He ran as softly as he could; he had to be fast, but he did not want to announce his approach.
His first glimpse of the crumbling flint church made him stop in his tracks. Lincoln Tripp was standing outside the porch beneath the sheltering branches of a yew tree, wearing the same rather foppish suit in which Wilde had first seen him at Chelsea: silk kerchief dangling from his breast pocket, trilby at a rakish angle. At his side was a man Wilde did not recognise. He was broad and strong with an American crewcut, and held his hand inside his suit jacket. Surely that must be Kennedy’s bodyguard.
And then Wilde heard the voice. The voice of the angel.