1
The last person known for certain to have seen Charles Latimer alive was the Avis counter clerk at the airport to whom he delivered the key of his rented car. The time was just before noon.
A French passport inspector at the nearby frontier post on the road to Ferney-Voltaire reported seeing an elderly man answering Latimer’s description. He had been travelling in a car with two other men, and the time had been about 12.30 p.m. However, the inspector could not be sure of the day. He had remembered the man, who had been carrying a United Kingdom passport, chiefly because he had been wearing very dark sunglasses. The inspector had asked the man to remove the glasses so that he could compare the photograph in the passport with the face of its holder. He had no special recollection of the other two men.
It was established that this particular inspector was unusually fussy about sunglasses and frequently asked travellers to remove them. His evidence was dismissed in the end as inconclusive; but it tended to confirm the cantonal police in their already well-founded belief that Latimer had left Switzerland alive and well, and of his own free will. Thereafter, their interest in his subsequent fate could only be academic; and, in the complete absence of further evidence of any kind about his movements after May 31, public interest also faded. When there are no developments to report, unsolved mysteries rarely stay long in the news.
Valerie said at one point that I admired and envied Latimer. I did indeed admire his work; it has given me many hours of pleasure. Perhaps I envied him, too; I certainly wish that I had known him better. I still find it hard to think of him as dead. Of the manner of his death I try not to think at all. My great regret is that, during the period immediately prior to his disappearance, our relations, which earlier had been more or less friendly, had become soured. My refusal to tell him about the security investigation had annoyed him, and I in turn had been piqued by his attempts to pump Valerie on the subject. She and Dr Loriol dined with him once or twice; but, although I too had been invited, I didn’t go.
It wasn’t only pique that kept me away, though he probably thought it was. I was at the time beginning to build up my translation bureau. Using the apartment as an office with Nicole Deladoey as a part-time secretary had been all right at the beginning, but as the work began to grow it became necessary to make other arrangements. Nicole’s going to work for Latimer precipitated the move. I hired a full-time girl to replace her and installed a mimeo machine. The people living in the apartment below soon complained about the noise, so a proper office became essential. I hadn’t much time to spare for Latimer during those weeks.
The news of his disappearance disrupted everything. In spite of the cover-up job done by the security people, Latimer’s connection with the Intercom affair and the fact that he had been at work on a book about it couldn’t be hushed up. Paragraphs mentioning the forthcoming book had already appeared in American and British publishing journals.
We shall hear more about those paragraphs later. Almost certainly one or another of them triggered the disappearance. First, though, I must explain my own position.
The immediate effect on me of the disappearance was that for a few days I became news again. With no solid leads to go on, the reporters naturally dug around for some sort of angle on the story, and I was it. That was not only bad for my new business, it also brought me once again to the attention of the bogeymen and the police. But I had learned my lesson. I was extremely careful what I said, and mostly I said nothing. As I had hoped, the reporters became bored with me and it wasn’t long before the police decided that I could be of no help to them in their efforts to trace Latimer. Nicole Deladoey knew, of course, that Latimer had been sending me a carbon of the first draft manuscript, chapter by chapter, for comment; but, even if it had occurred to her to mention the fact to the police, I doubt if she could have persuaded herself to soil her lips with my name. By the time I heard from the publishers about the revised first draft in her possession, I was, as far as the police were concerned, of no interest as a source of further information.
So, when I got hold of the revised draft and began to read between the lines I was able to keep what I saw there to myself.
I use the phrase ‘read between the lines’ in a loose sense. In fact, it was the changes Latimer had made in his first draft that enabled me to get at the truth. Two of those changes were of major importance.
Chapter One, which had originally consisted of an exchange of letters between us, had been rewritten as a ‘narrative reconstruction’ with some passages from the letters quoted to give the effect of dialogue. However, in one of those passages there was a significant deletion. In a letter to me he had written, ‘Through a friend in the country where I spend the autumn of my days I became acquainted with the man I am calling “Colonel Jost” in the book.’
The words that I have here italicised were deleted for the second draft.
Why?
His literary conscience could have been troubling him, of course. ‘The autumn of my days’ is a pretty dreadful euphemism, and, although he had a weakness for mandarin adornment, he wasn’t that dreadful a writer. But if the deletion had been decided upon for reasons of taste, why had he not replaced the euphemism with the information it had partly concealed? No reference to his age, coy or otherwise, had been in the least necessary. Why had he not said, ‘Through a friend in Majorca I became acquainted …’ and so on?
The answer must be, I decided, that Colonel Jost was now living in Majorca and that Latimer had seen that even an oblique reference to the place in that passage would have given the game away.
The other deletion that especially interested me was more substantial. I had given him a detailed account of the meeting I had had in the Intercom offices with the man calling himself Werner Siepen. I had suggested that the man was really Colonel Jost and had carefully described him to Latimer. He had agreed that my description fitted the Colonel Jost he knew.
The whole of my account of the meeting and all later references to it had been cut out. And not just crossed out; eight pages of the typescript had actually been removed. Bridge sentences had been pencilled in on the pages preceding and following the cut.
My reactions to this cut were mixed. I was annoyed at first. I thought that he had cut those pages because they made him look less well informed than he had claimed to be. Then annoyance gave way to relief. For about half a minute I felt quite grateful to Latimer. He had seen, and I hadn’t, that anyone known to be able to identify Colonel Jost might have a thin time with the bogeymen when the book was published.
That was the moment when my head began to clear, when I began to re-examine the whole picture that had been presented to me.
It looked, on the face of it, as if Latimer had made that cut to protect me; but how had he proposed to protect himself? By disappearing and leaving his book unfinished? Clearly not. How then?
As a distinguished scholar and a well-known writer he was probably in a position to cock a snook at the spooks and bogeymen. Moreover, he lived on a Spanish island, and Spain is not a member of NATO. Any revelations he might have had to make about the nominal purchaser of Intercom would no doubt have been answered with a bland denial, and any speculation about the intelligence agency which had financed the purchase would have been coldly ignored. Providing that he didn’t make a wrong guess about the purchasing company and get sued for libel, he had nothing much to fear from those quarters.
With Jost and Brand, however, things would be very different. If they were identified they would be exposed in their own countries as traitors and in their country or countries of refuge as politically undesirable crooks. The consequences would be at best highly unpleasant. Latimer and his book represented an appalling danger to them. He had made no attempt to conceal the fact that he could identify Jost. It was more than likely, too, that he knew Jost’s true nationality and probably Brand’s as well. No doubt he had written his first narrative reconstruction in the belief that he had made it useless as an aid to positive identification. Most of the little circumstantial touches he had put in – for example, the casual mention of the fact that Jost came from a country with a coastline exposed to North Sea gales – were clearly red herrings. As defences against professional investigatory techniques, however, such story-teller’s tricks would be hopelessly inadequate. There are only fifteen nation members of NATO and only eight of them were occupied by German forces during Hitler’s war. For someone on the inside with access to security records and data-processing equipment, the task of identifying the two would not be difficult. The moment they discovered what Latimer was up to, Jost and Brand would have to do something to stop him, or at least try to.
Latimer himself had seemed unaware of that aspect of the situation. True, in a letter to me he had spoken of taking risks, but he had never referred to them in our discussions. His attitude towards the project had been like the attitude he had ascribed to his two colonels on the threshold of their conspiracy; he had been playing a rather amusing intellectual game of ‘let’s pretend’. I had assumed – reasonably, I think – that publication of the book would come as a big and disagreeable surprise to Jost and Brand; and, remembering what I had been through, I had looked forward to the moment. As far as I was concerned the bigger and more disagreeable the surprise the better. It had never occurred to me that Latimer might have neglected to take precautions against premature disclosure of the book’s subject matter.
His game-playing approach to the material had also produced some strange inconsistencies. In one place he described Jost and Brand as hard-headed, self-reliant and resourceful men ‘with the special skills needed for the successful conduct of clandestine operations’ and habits of discretion that were instinctive. Yet, in another place, and in order to authenticate his narrative reconstruction, he had explained that Jost ‘liked to talk’. If Jost had talked as freely as the reconstruction suggested he would appear to be one of the blabbermouths of all time and about as well suited to the successful conduct of clandestine operations as a skid-row alcoholic. If I had not had first-hand evidence of the existence of the Arnold Bloch conspiracy, I would have been tempted to dismiss the narrative reconstruction entirely and to conclude that Latimer’s ability to deal with fact had at last been overcome by his talent as a purveyor of fiction. As things were I could only treat it with reserve and remember that its author had unaccountably and under strange circumstances vanished.
Latimer had once described me as being in the position of an innocent bystander caught in a bank hold-up or that of the victim of a practical joke perpetrated by strangers. Was it possible, I wondered, that he had without knowing strayed into one of those positions himself?
Two months after the disappearance, his London publisher came to see me. I discussed with him some of the questions I have raised here. The outcome of our discussion was that I received a commission to act in Latimer’s absence (now assumed to be enforced) as a kind of editorial salvage man, to gather what further material I could and attempt to tie up some of the loose ends. My first task would be to go to Majorca and try to locate Colonel Jost. In the event (thought to be unlikely) of my succeeding, I was to make a cautious approach to him and find out if he were prepared to be interviewed by me, or, if he were not, whether he would be willing to make a statement for publication.
I flew to Majorca at the end of the first week in August.
Latimer’s house was on a hillside above a small inlet town on the southeast coast of the island. The town was flanked by steep pine-covered slopes rising from beaches of soft sand and was overpoweringly picturesque. At that time of the year it was also very hot. Luckily I was able to get a room at an inn with a pleasant outdoor dining terrace.
I took the room for a week. If Jost were living in or near the town I thought that would give me time enough in which to find him; and if I failed to find him in that time I could reasonably conclude that he didn’t live there. In the latter event I would check the nearby towns and villages – there were two villages and one other town within a ten-kilometre radius – and if I still failed, that would be that. I would go home.
I was neither pessimistic nor optimistic about my chances. As a young reporter I learned that in order to find and interview persons who don’t want to be found and interviewed you often need luck as well as ingenuity and persistence. For luck you can only hope. I was relying on the other things. True, I knew neither the name Jost was using nor his nationality, and I had to remember that either or both could be assumed; but I did know what he looked like and that he was a foreign resident. I also had a possible lead. The man from London had told me that the Majorcan couple employed by Latimer as cook-housekeeper and gardener were still in his house and, since Latimer had not then been presumed dead, were still being paid by his accountant in Palma. It was my intention to talk to the couple and find out who in the neighbourhood had been Latimer’s friends and acquaintances. If Jost was among them I felt sure that it wouldn’t take me long to track him down. I had decided to go up to the house first thing in the morning.
I never went. There was no need to go.
I dined at nine-thirty. That is early by Spanish standards and, since the Anglo-American tourist invasion hasn’t yet reached that particular town, I had the terrace to myself for a while. It was a fine Mediterranean night. The air was still, but it had cooled off a little and the sounds of crickets and the waves on the beach below were soothing. I ate a mountainous paella and drank a bottle of white wine. Around ten-thirty the terrace began to fill up and I began to think of sleep. However, I didn’t immediately do anything about it. I was comfortable where I was and I knew that my room would still be hot and stuffy. I ordered a brandy.
And then Jost came in.
2
He looked about ten years younger than when I had last seen him. His face and arms were deeply tanned and the sun and sea had bleached his hair white. The bifocals were gone. He wore a blue linen beach shirt, denim slacks and espadrilles. He exuded good health, and though he still wore a regretful little smile there was something fat-cat about it now. With him was a girl young enough to be his daughter, but obviously not his daughter. She had long, light-brown hair, a Modigliani face and a lean, seductive little body. There was nothing incongruous about the pair of them. If she was the kind of girl who liked going to bed with older men, he was the kind of virile older man that kind of girl usually has in mind. Evidently Colonel Jost had found a better cure for boredom in retirement than talk and detective stories.
They were valued patrons. The innkeeper’s wife herself showed them to their table, fussing over them and chattering as she took their order. I heard her pass it on to the kitchen.
‘Crayfish,’ she said; ‘large portions for Señior Siepen and the Señora.’
That name really startled me. No doubt my mention of it had startled Latimer when I told him about Jost’s visit to Intercom. It also explained something. That big cut in the manuscript had been made to protect not me but Colonel Jost.
He hadn’t seen me and I was glad he hadn’t. I needed time to think.
Werner Siepen of Hamburg was clearly a very well-established and well-documented identity; Jost had probably been building it up for years. It suited him. The West German passport that went with the identity was doubtless impeccable, and in Majorca there would be few to notice that his German accent wasn’t quite Hamburg and fewer still to care.
But it had been careless of him to use the Siepen identity in Geneva. As far as I was concerned he was blown. All I had to do now was to let him know it, but to do so in such a way as to inform him at the same time that, if he was prepared to answer some questions, he had nothing to fear from me.
He still hadn’t seen me. I sipped my brandy and wondered what would be the best approach. It wasn’t, I knew, going to be easy. Blown he might be, but he was in a strong position. My weakness was that I still didn’t know his true identity. Those who did know it, his former chiefs, had almost certainly concluded by now that their former Director of Defence Intelligence had been one half of the partnership know as Arnold Bloch. Clearly, they would not advertise that conclusion unless they were obliged to do so; politically the revelation would be horribly embarrassing. When the Intercom scandal broke, Colonel Jost had had a choice of two courses. Course One meant staying on the job and, if suspicions were aroused and awkward questions were asked, standing pat, denying everything and counting on being believed. Course Two meant clearing out ahead of the questions, leaving those with the red faces to draw their own conclusions, and becoming Werner Siepen.
Wisely, perhaps, he had chosen the second course. True, he had forfeited his pension and lost his good name; but who needed a colonel’s pension when he had a million Swiss francs in the bank, and who cared about losing a good name when the loss remained on the secret list? There was not very much left to expose about Jost. All he really had to fear from me was inconvenience – the inconvenience of having to change his identity again and find another place to live.
He was pouring a glass of wine for the girl when he saw and recognised me. For a moment our eyes met, then he went on pouring. He didn’t spill a drop. He was a cool one.
I considered going over to his table, then decided to wait and let him come to me. He would have to find out whether my presence there was coincidental or not, and it would be better to let him make the first move. Once he had made it, though, I would have to get a hook into him. Until he had realised that he would be better off if he came to terms with me, there was nothing to stop him taking the first plane to the mainland in the morning and simply avoiding me. Even if I could have kept track of him – a big if – I was in no position to go chasing all over Spain; the expense money wouldn’t have run to that.
I had another brandy and watched them eat crayfish. They both had hearty appetites. To pass the time I tried working myself up into a rage about them – or him anyway. Jost–Siepen had, after all, been instrumental in giving me a bad time – one of the worst I had known – and he had done so simply in order to have money in the bank and be able to sit on a terrace with a sexy girl friend and stuff his belly with crayfish. And I wasn’t the only casualty now of that game for two players. Latimer, too, had been carried off the field. The nature and extent of his injuries were yet to be ascertained, but it was unlikely that they had been superficial. And here was Jost–Siepen, one of the winners, living it up like a bloody lord and …
But it was no good. I couldn’t get angry. The only emotion of which I was capable just then – if it is an emotion – was curiosity. I badly wanted to know.
Eventually, Siepen called for the bill and they got up to go. As they did so I saw him say something to the girl and motion with his head in my direction. She smiled and then with a casual glance at me left the terrace. Colonel Jost, as I shall call him now, came over to my table. I stood up.
‘We’ve met before, I think,’ he said in Spanish. ‘Señor Carter, isn’t it?’
Spanish is not one of my languages. I knew he spoke English, so I answered him in it.
‘Yes. We met in Geneva, Colonel.’
His eyes flickered at the word ‘colonel’, but he was still smiling.
‘My name is Siepen.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember. But we have mutual friends, Colonel, who know you better than I do.’
‘Do we?’ His eyes were very watchful now.
‘Charles Latimer, who was your neighbour here.’
‘Ah yes. And you were a friend of his?’
‘I knew Arnold Bloch of Munich better, Colonel. In fact it was he who suggested that I should come here and see you.’
He took that blatant lie calmly. ‘About a money matter, perhaps?’
‘About a matter of information. He said you had some to sell.’
‘What price did you have in mind, Mr Carter?’ He spoke very quietly now.
‘Anonymity, Colonel,’ I said. ‘Your privacy here.’
He pursed his lips, then nodded. ‘I see no reason why we should not at least discuss the matter. Tomorrow perhaps? Or the next day?’
‘Either would do.’ He made a movement as if to leave and I went on quickly. ‘Colonel, when we last met you gave me some advice. The man of sense, you said, submits to pressure with good grace. If for any reason you should not be available tomorrow or the next day, if, for example, you were suddenly to be called away on business, I would have to conclude that anonymity and privacy were of no value to you.’
He shrugged. ‘Privacy is of value to every man of sense. My car is outside and a lady is waiting. Join us if you wish.’
His coolness was disconcerting. ‘Now?’
‘Why not, if your business is so urgent?’ He turned and started to walk out. I caught up with him at the kitchen door.
‘Just a moment, Colonel,’ I said. ‘Where exactly are we going?’
He stopped and gave me an amused look. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Carter. You’ll get back safely.’ He put his head inside the kitchen and called to the innkeeper’s wife. ‘Señor Carter is an old friend. He is coming with me to my house to join me in a glass. Don’t lock him out, Señora.’
She came out, beaming, to assure him that she wouldn’t. I received a look of approval. As a friend of Señor Siepen I had clearly gone up in her estimation.
The car was a B.M.W. and the girl was sitting at the wheel. Jost introduced me to her as he got in beside her. ‘This, mein Schatz, is Herr Carter. He is a friend of Herr Lewison and we have a little business to discuss. It won’t take long.’ He patted her thigh.
He did not tell me his ‘treasure’s’ name. As I climbed into the back seat she gave me a quick smile and then started the engine.
Jost’s house was on the other side of the inlet at the end of a hillside road crisscrossed by low-voltage power lines. He spoke only once on the way. We were passing a heavy wooden gate at the entrance to a driveway.
‘Lewison’s house,’ he said. ‘Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘A very nice property. It has a lemon grove.’
His own place was among fig trees and looked like a remodelled farmhouse. The living room – the only room I saw – was furnished in a Spanish provincial style with upholstered chairs and sofas added for comfort. There was a large fireplace. A paved terrace had been added on the side facing the sea and vines were being trained over a rustic pergola to give shade from the sun. From the terrace a steep path led down to the beach some distance below.
When we reached the terrace Jost lit candles mounted in wrought-iron brackets and then turned to me
‘Brandy or Scotch whisky?’ he asked.
‘Brandy, please.’
The girl went back inside the house and presently an old maidservant brought us a bottle and some glasses on a tray.
Jost had motioned me to a chair, but he made no attempt at small talk. Neither did I. He lit one of his panatellas and we sat there in silence until the old woman had gone. Then he poured two drinks and pushed one towards me.
‘Let us understand one another,’ he said. ‘We met once, briefly, when I purchased a subscription to a publication you edited. We have a mutual acquaintance, a writer named Lewison or Latimer, who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. That is the extent of our connection. I know nothing of this Arnold Bloch of whom you spoke. If you choose to ask hypothetical questions, my answers will be equally hypothetical. If you care to believe them, that is your affair. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Quite clear, Colonel. You know nothing, you admit nothing.’
He blew a cloud of smoke and eyed me through it. ‘Addressing me as Colonel, Mr Carter, will get you nowhere,’ he said; ‘and if you think that that sort of knowingness impresses me, you are very much mistaken.’
‘It wasn’t intended to impress you,’ I said untruthfully. ‘Since this is a hypothetical discussion, I assumed that a hypothetical courtesy would be in order. In his last book, the book I am now employed by his publishers to complete, Latimer said that you were a colonel. I accepted that. If he was wrong, of course …’
He flicked the subject away with his cigar ash. ‘It is unimportant.’
‘He also wrote that you liked to talk.’
His mouth hardened. ‘I know only too well what he wrote.’
‘You’ve read his manuscript then?’
‘Part of it, yes.’
‘He gave it to you to read?’
‘No, Mr Carter, he did not. When it was learned that he was writing a book on the subject of what the newspapers called ‘the Intercom affair’, an interested party decided to look at the contents.’
‘Without Latimer’s knowledge?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Was the interested party you or Colonel Brand?’
‘I know no one of that name.’ He shrugged. ‘Let us say it was Brand.’
‘And he passed it on. I see. It must have come as an unpleasant shock to both of you.’
He took a sip of brandy and gave me a sombre look. ‘Mr Latimer was a very clever man,’ he said; ‘he was also, I regret to say, completely irresponsible. Because of those things he wrote I was accused of betraying a valued friend.’
‘You mean you didn’t tell Latimer the things he says you told him?’
‘Of course I didn’t. What do you take me for?’ He was indignant now and jabbed the air with his cigar as he went on. ‘Because I thought I liked him, I told him a few stories, anecdotes about intelligence work. I knew he’d been in British intelligence during the war, an adviser in SOE or some such thing. We would sometimes – how do you say? – swap yarns. And then one day I told him about the Mexican forger. That was the only mistake I made.’
‘But there was nothing secret about that story,’ I said. ‘It was reported. There are published accounts of it. It is common knowledge.’
‘It is, now. But he hadn’t heard of it and I told him, and I used the phrase “nuisance value”. One afternoon a few days later he came to me and began talking about the Intercom affair.’
‘You mean he’d put two and two together?’
Jost dropped his cigar on the stone paving and ground it out with his heel. ‘He had made one or two shrewd guesses,’ he said bitterly. ‘Like a cheap fortune-teller. Of course he told it to me as a story that he’d invented. It was a great joke for him. At times he could scarcely get the words out for laughing. He had even found out the date I bought this property and added that to the indictment.’
There was nothing hypothetical about the discussion now. He was reliving that afternoon.
‘What did you do, Colonel?’
‘What could I do? I, too, treated it as a joke. What else could I have done?’
‘You didn’t deny it?’
‘Of course not. I told you. It had to be treated as a joke and shared as one. Most of it was a joke – pure rubbish.’
‘Except for the dangerous bits he’d guessed right about. I see.’
He frowned. ‘I couldn’t be sure, you see, what he really believed. Did he believe the story itself or only that he had invented it? I thought that if I shared the joke he would become tired of it.’
‘But he didn’t. Why do you call him irresponsible, Colonel?’
He bristled. ‘To distort a man’s idle confidences and then use the distortions against him without his knowledge – you call that responsible? Or honourable?’
I felt like saying that Arnold Bloch could answer that question better than I, but refrained. I was there to listen, not score debating points.
‘When he went away,’ Jost went on, ‘I was at first relieved. It meant that I no longer had to see him and listen to his nonsense. Then I heard that he was working in Switzerland and became anxious. Not on my own account so much as on Brand’s. He is a sick man, you know, and still in his own country. He also has a family there.’
‘How did Latimer know that Brand had a kidney disease?’ I asked. ‘You must have told him that.’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘I once told him about a clandestine meeting with a colleague who had been to Evian to consult a kidney specialist. That’s all. I didn’t identify the colleague. Latimer did.’ He pushed the brandy bottle towards me and motioned to me to help myself. ‘That was one of his most dangerous guesses.’
‘Perhaps you told him more than you realised,’ I said. ‘After all, Colonel, you’d kept it all bottled up a long time. They say that the unconscious can play strange tricks on a man.’
He looked at me with distaste. ‘Psychological mumbojumbo has never impressed me, Mr Carter. Latimer was shrewd, I grant you, and I should have known better than to tell him about the Mexican forger. I’ve admitted that. It put the idea into his head. But all the rest was guesswork on his part.’ He took out a fresh cigar and pointed it at me. ‘Guesswork, pure and simple.’
‘Don’t forget,’ I said, ‘that he’d read about the Intercom affair in the newspapers. When you see two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that may fit, you put them together, If they do fit, you start looking for the other pieces nearby. That’s not guesswork.’
‘Call it what you like. That fairy story of his was dangerous – dangerous for Brand anyway.’
‘What did you do about Brand?’
‘I wrote alerting him to the situation.’
‘Using a French ten-franc note?’
He ignored that. ‘He wrote back sending me a clipping from some magazine, a booksellers’ guide. It was about the book Latimer was writing. Brand wanted to know if I knew Latimer. I told him I did.’ He paused. ‘And then he wrote me this letter accusing me of betraying him. I made allowances, of course. A sick man …’ He broke off with a shrug and reached for his matches.
‘What happened to Latimer?’ I asked.
He took his time lighting the cigar. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally; ‘I can only speculate. As I said, Brand was a sick man and no longer able to think clearly. He believed that it was possible to silence Latimer by – ’ he made little circular motions with the spent match – ‘by disposing of him. I warned him that that was not the way, that there would be records inaccessible to us, documents left behind, other persons involved. I was right, or you would not be here. I proposed instead that we should approach him, separately or together, and reason with him, persuade, pay him off if necessary.’
‘You wouldn’t have succeeded in paying him off.’
‘Perhaps not. But we might have persuaded him to eliminate the dangerous material. However, Brand no longer trusted me. He wouldn’t listen. He said that he was more vulnerable than I was and would make his own decisions. I tried to argue with him, but by then it was too late.’
‘What happened to Latimer?’ I asked again.
He poured himself another drink. ‘I would guess that Brand wrote to Latimer in Geneva saying that he was willing to meet with him if Latimer was interested in further material for his book. But the meeting would have to be in a place of Brand’s choosing and under conditions of extreme secrecy. He probably gave him that cover story about the NATO interview in Evere along with other instructions.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I am sure that Latimer enjoyed participating for once in a little of what he chose to call “this cloak-and-dagger foolishness”.’
‘What kind of other instructions?’
‘You know Cointrin airport. That new arrival-and-departure building is a big place. Until you have handed in your ticket and gone through passport control no one checks or controls your movements. Once Latimer had delivered the key of his car and walked away from the Avis counter he was as good as lost. Brand probably told him to go through the building and out to one of the other car parks where there would be someone waiting to drive him to a meeting place in France.’
‘You think he was taken via Ferney-Voltaire? There is, as you may know, some evidence that he was seen there.’
‘I think it probable.’
‘And then what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you can speculate.’
He sighed. ‘I have speculated a great deal. I will tell you what I believe. It can make no difference now. Brand is very ill. By the time this book of yours and Latimer’s is published he will be dead.’
He was silent for a moment. I waited
‘When it comes to killing,’ he went on slowly, ‘every man is a specialist. The one who can use a knife will always prefer it to a pistol. The poisoner never strangles, and the strangler does not carry a bludgeon. In time of war, when there is a wider choice of weapons and the killing is legal, it is the same. The combat soldier favours the weapon that best suits his temperament; the field commander tends to employ the arms and tactics that best suit his, usually those with which he has had an earlier success. Brand was no exception to the rule. He always thought tactically in terms of ambush and burial.’
‘Burial?’
‘Brand,’ he said, ‘was trained originally as an engineer officer. He knew a great deal about the use of dynamite and high explosives. Quite early in the German occupation he succeeded in burying some enemy supply trucks by dynamiting a hillside above them. The terrain he fought over was suitable for that kind of operation and he was able to repeat that first success a number of times. On one occasion he derailed and partly buried a train by dynamiting a cutting. When he spoke of the need to deal with an opponent, he never spoke of defeating him but always of digging his grave.’
‘It’s a common enough figure of speech.’
He shook his head. ‘With Brand it wasn’t just a figure of speech. That was the way he thought. I should know. Once, a few years ago, when we were driving together from Brussels to Cologne, we were held up on the road by some construction work. They were building a crossing for a new autoroute, and we saw them pouring concrete to make one of the supports. The caisson went deep into the earth and there was a big cage of steel reinforcing rods. We stopped to watch. It was an impressive thing to see the concrete pouring in – tons and tons of it. Brand was fascinated. When we moved on he said something I afterwards remembered. “If I ever wished to dispose of an unwanted person I would have him taken to a construction site.” ’ He gave me a meaning look. ‘I have thought about that more than once since Latimer disappeared. Between Ferney-Voltaire and Strasbourg there must be many construction sites, I would say, and many deep graves ready to be filled.’
I said nothing; I was feeling rather sick.
I must have looked it, too. He made clucking sounds. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr Carter. Brand was never a barbarian. He would use experienced operatives. However it was done, I am sure that it was done quickly and that Latimer suffered no pain.’
The girl came out of the house wearing a towelling beach jacket and carrying a flashlight. She announced that she was going for a swim. Jost reached out a hand as she went by and caught her by the sleeve of the jacket. From the way she held the front of it I guessed that that was all she was wearing.
‘I’ll be down in a few minutes, my treasure,’ he said. ‘On this fine night I am sure that Herr Carter will not mind walking back to the inn.’
‘Not in the least,’ I said, and I meant it. I couldn’t have taken much more of Colonel Jost. But there were still questions I had to ask.
When the girl had gone I said: ‘Why did you involve Skriabin in that bulletin about the seismograph? Was that Brand digging his grave?’
He chuckled. ‘Oh, that was my idea. Skriabin was the KGB residentura in Oslo and he had become a source of great irritation to our Norwegian friends. It occurred to me that a public embarrassment might quieten him down a bit. His masters transferred him to Syria. They must have been quite annoyed.’
‘They were,’ I said. ‘I should know. They worked off some of their annoyance on me.’
His eyes widened. ‘Surely, Mr Carter, you are not complaining.’ He spread out his hands in the gesture of benediction I had seen once before. ‘Think how much you have benefited from our association.’
‘Benefited!’ I had the last of my brandy in my throat and I choked on it.
‘Certainly.’ He leaned forward and tapped my knee. ‘You are a different man from the one I met a year ago. Then you were tired and contemptuous of the work that you did. You disliked yourself. Now, I detect a new confidence in you. Think. You are engaged in completing a book for the late, respected and much lamented Mr Latimer. Would his publishers have employed the man you were a year ago? I doubt it. You have come to terms with yourself. If you are wise and take care of your health, happier years may lie ahead of you, a whole new future.’
‘Or to put it another way,’ I said sourly, ‘watch your step, Carter, and don’t try double-crossing me. If my anonymity and privacy are threatened by anything you write, you and your future will find a grave like Latimer’s. Is that the message, Colonel?’
He stood up, his smile firmly in place. ‘I’m glad we understand one another. Before you go, perhaps you will satisfy my own curiosity on one point. Did Latimer ever find out who it was who bought our shares?’
‘He had a short list of four companies whom he suspected of having acted as agents for the real buyers. However, Swiss security impounded his records, so I don’t know the names. Who, in fact, were the buyers?’
The smile became pained. ‘My dear Mr Carter, I was hoping that you could tell me. Brand thought it must have been the KGB. My belief is that it was the BfV using CIA funds. But I don’t know. It is most annoying.’
‘Why!’ I asked. ‘You have the money. What does it matter now where it came from?’
He looked surprised. ‘Naturally it matters. The operation was ours, Brand’s and mine. We planned it and we executed it. It was superbly successful. Not to know exactly how it succeeded, not to have all the information in one’s hands, is intolerable. I shall find out eventually, of course. These things can’t be hushed up indefinitely. Sooner or later somebody talks.’
As we went through to the front door he suddenly gave a snort of amusement. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘for all his shrewdness, Latimer had his blind spots. He was completely wrong about one thing – completely and utterly wrong. Neither Brand nor I was ever in the least bit arrogant. Ambitious, yes, but never arrogant.’
Once past the gateway to Latimer’s villa I enjoyed the walk back to the inn.