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For a moment, she panicked. What if he left her here, alone, in the black night with no idea of where she was going? She was an idiot! How could she have trusted him? Did Peter Howard have any idea what he was doing? Or, worse, had he sent her here to test Aiden, to prove finally whether he was for England or Germany? She was the sacrifice to find out!
She felt his fingers close over hers and she grasped them with all her strength. Then she thought that if he were going to drown her, this was the last thing he would have done. But she had no defense anyway: he was only a yard away and far stronger than she.
“Come on,” he said sharply. “Elena! Move!”
She did not answer, but pushed her way closer to him in the black water, and her feet felt a muddy bottom hard enough to stand on. His grip was strong, pulling her forward until she was level with him. Then he put his arm around her for a moment. It was almost as if the past were back again. This could have been the clean cold water of the North Sea, off the coast of Northumberland, not a black canal running somewhere through the heart of Trieste. An adventure, not an escape.
A sudden thought rushed into her head. The list! Would the water destroy it? She felt it against her skin, the paper folded many times. Perhaps that alone would protect its vital information.
His fingers tightened around hers, and she gave an answering grip.
CHAPTER
17
Peter walked slowly up the slight incline of the path at the edge of the field. Not because it was steep, but because he was early for his meeting with Lucas. This was deliberate, because he wanted time alone, here in the early evening light.
The air was cool and smelled sweet. The sun was low on the horizon, making long shadows from the stocks of straw still uncollected after the harvesting. It was too early for the winter wheat to be sown. Then there would be new-turned lands waiting for it, good earth. It was one of the few things that did not change.
As he walked, the wind was gentle on his face, his eyes narrowed against the light tinged with red-gold as the sun sank toward the low cloud bank in the west. A flock of starlings rose from a nearby copse, black dots against the sky, all wheeling at once, as if a single mind were directing a thousand birds.
He found himself smiling for no reason. He was not particularly happy. Lucas had sent for him with urgency. In fact, he had said it must be today. Was he going to ask about Elena? Peter had not heard from her. As far as he knew, she was still in Trieste and had located Aiden Strother. But there had been nothing from her for almost a week. He should not worry. In May, in Berlin, she had proven herself brave and resourceful. She would not communicate unnecessarily, and above all, not dangerously. She had had a lot of training since then, but was she really cut out for this work? Had he taken her on simply because she was Lucas’s granddaughter? Or because she knew Aiden Strother? Were those enough reasons?
He came to the end of the rise. The hedge beside him was full of orange hips where the wild roses had been, and darker red clusters of berries from the hawthorns, which had been covered with white blossoms, like snowdrifts in the spring. The perfume was almost too heavy. He paused and mourned its loss, but he acknowledged its glory was in its transience. It would come again another year. Would that everything else could come so easily, or so surely, but each loss grew a little heavier, a little harder to deal with.
Lucas had called this meeting, but what could Peter say to him that would ease his mind, when he himself was anxious about what was happening in Trieste? He had other sources, naturally, but the word from Vienna, Berlin, Rome was all imprecise. It was Aiden who had worked his way to the core of the Fatherland Front conspiracy, after years of patient labor gaining the trust of the Nazis. But was there a split in the Front? A seed of something else hidden in the heart of it?
The shadows from the stocks were growing longer. A gust of wind blew straw dust in the air, giving it a sweet, clean smell. He was at a high point, only a slight swell in the land and yet, as he turned slowly, he could see for miles the gentle fields rolling away into the haze of the distance, and here and there a copse of trees, some of them hundreds of years old. He felt an aching love for it, the sight, the sweet-smelling wind in his face. He knew this was fragile; it could be broken like anything else.
The moment was shattered by the hard thump of Toby throwing himself at Peter’s legs in total certainty of the welcome he always received.
Peter bent down and put his arms around the dog in a quick hug. He felt him wriggling, as if his whole body were made of muscle. He knotted his fingers in the thick fur, then let him go and stood up.
Lucas was still twenty yards away, but rapidly approaching. Even at a distance, Peter could see the weariness and a certain grief in his face. The lines from his nose to his mouth were deeper; he was smiling very slightly, but there was no sense of pleasure coming from him.
“What is it?” Peter asked, as soon as Lucas was close enough to hear him.
“Let’s walk,” Lucas replied, turning and beginning to go back in the direction he had come, toward the woods again.
Peter fell in step with him, and Toby—now certain of where they were going—bounded ahead of them.
“You know Stoney Canning?” Lucas asked.
Peter did not hesitate. “Of course.”
“He’s dead,” Lucas said, eyes down at the rough ground. They were walking across giant roots protruding through the ground, the shape of claws grasping the earth. “The police say it was a stroke or a heart attack. I’m sure now that it was murder.”
Peter felt the shock ripple through him, followed instantly by grief. He knew Stoney only slightly, but he liked him very much.
“The police called me because Stoney has no one else, and he left his affairs in my hands,” Lucas explained. “Josephine and I went to his house immediately. He was found at the bottom of the stairs.” His voice was level, as devoid of emotion as he could make it. “At first glance, it looks as if he had an attack and fell down, probably dead before he reached the bottom. But I think if the pathologist looks hard enough, investigating the bruise on his head, he’ll find it didn’t come postmortem but was actually the cause of death…and it happened in the potting shed, nowhere near the stairs. There were blood traces there; he had no other cuts.” Lucas stopped, glancing at Peter and then walking on, his step slower, as though waiting for Peter’s reaction.
“Did you say that to the police?” Peter asked. He felt the weight of something far bigger, far darker, beneath the surface.
When Lucas did not respond, Peter felt anger rise. “So, they told you to go home and they’d take care of it,” he summarized, making a guess. “What do you think really happened and why? I mean, why did it happen?”
Lucas smiled briefly, a moment of light in his face, and then it was gone again. “Stoney came to see me a week ago. He told me he had sheets of figures representing money he believed—was sure?
?someone has been moving through MI6 accounts. It comes and goes. All appears fine…until you look more closely. You need a head for figures like Stoney’s to understand it, and—”
