I could never have helped Pascal Fougères, even if he’d found me — that would only have been possible if Agnes was alive. But she’s dead, as if by my own hand.
Part Three
‘Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done …’
(Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves’, 1942)
Third Prologue
6th January 1996.
The slow, physical destruction was matched by an increased mental clarity, a loosening between flesh and spirit. Agnes often felt a fluttering in her stomach, as though something roped to a ground peg was trying to take off. She wondered if she was going to be sick.
Agnes had lain day after day and night after night upon her back, or on one side and them the other, Wilma doing the dutiful, turning her this way and that. And then came the ointment, and the jokes, for the bedsores. The job done, she was left alone.
Agnes never realised there was so much to contemplate in one room: the paint lifting ever so slightly on the window frame, soon to be a soft curl pulling away from the wood; the pattern of faint shadows changing imperceptibly with the movement of the cloud, lighting little things with a barely noticeable difference. But once Agnes had seen all there was to see she got very bored. And then, for no apparent reason, she remembered how Merlin had taught Wart, the future King Arthur, the art of seeing — by changing him into another animal. So Agnes imagined herself as a bird, looking down from on high at the intricate mingling of things, like a hunting kestrel afloat on a bearing wind.
She saw the boat upon the Channel, bound for France, and her father staring anxiously out to sea with a little girl by his side — a beautiful girl, standing on the first rail, her hair adrift and her red coat about to be thrown leeward before he could stop her or see the abandon upon her face. She saw Father Rochet holding her boy in a parlour, just after the baptism, staring bravely through those infant eyes to another place and another child. She saw Madame Klein by the split boards of a cattle truck, pushing other mouths away from a thin stream of air, standing on a fallen, wheezing mound. Agnes turned into her pillow with a low moan and rose higher still, above the gathering wind. Through the first swirls of evening mist she saw a light upon the Champs-Elysées and a young man behind a desk, checking address lists and the timings of the next day’s work. His face was set hard. Down she swooped, faster and faster, over the chestnut trees heavy with leaves, and into the room, through the slate-blue iris and into his shivering optic nerve.
And Agnes understood. She finally saw into Victor Brionne, the traitor. Slowly she raised her hands, frail fingers extended and shaking. She could not speak. It was too late to write anything now And she could no longer dictate.
Wilma bustled through the door with a cup of ice cubes, a saucer and a teaspoon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1
The trial of Eduard Walter Schwermann opened on a warm morning in the second week after Easter. Queues for the public gallery stretched from the Old Bailey towards Ludgate. The Body Public sat on canvas chairs nibbling sandwiches. Flasks of tea stood like skittles on the pavement. Many in due course would be turned away when the Porters informed them there were no storage facilities for their hampers. Anselm, on his way to meet Roddy, was forced off the kerb. He crossed the street and looked back at the noble inscription high upon the court walclass="underline" ‘Defend the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer.’ Anselm gazed upon the crowds and moved on, discomposed by the faint hint of carnival always attendant upon the airing of other people’s tragedy
Two weeks beforehand, Schwermann had moved out of Larkwood at six in the morning, hidden among a loud convoy of vehicles and motorbikes. He would be held on remand for the duration, Milby had said with yawning indifference. Schwermann’s stay at the Priory had lasted a year. That same afternoon, Anselm and Salomon Lachaise met at The Hermitage for a glass of port over a game of chess. Reviewing their many matches, Anselm had been judged the overall winner, although that did not reflect the distribution of talent between them. Luck, it seemed, had played the better part. The ensuing match was a draw, each not truly wanting to win. Salomon Lachaise had left the next day for London. He would be staying in a small flat above Anselm’s former chambers, overlooking the main square of Gray’s Inn and a short walking distance from the Old Bailey The offer had come from Roddy on his last visit to Larkwood (while he didn’t believe in God, he often came to the Priory just to ‘peep over the rim’). Such an offer, from the old rogue’s mouth, meant no expenses would accrue. And thus the subject of remuneration, always delicate for the recipient of kindness, was quietly and happily dismissed.
Walking briskly, Anselm turned his thoughts to what lay ahead. First, he’d arranged to meet Roddy at chambers for a low-down on the principal players in the trial — a taste of old times. Afterwards, however, Anselm would catch a train to Paris to see the Fougères family — for a more unpalatable task. Milby through DI Armstrong, had suggested he might go on their behalf, given the unpleasant legal realities that required sensitive explanation.
‘I think the boss is right,’ DI Armstrong had said. ‘It would be better coming from someone like you.’
Anselm had agreed, but had found himself seizing the opportunity to request another favour, made tawdry by a hint of bargaining: ‘I have something to ask of you. It relates to Victor Brionne.’
‘He’s gone, I’m afraid.’
‘Can I have the same assurance as last time? If I tell you what more I know, will you allow me a first interview?’
DI Armstrong had looked Anselm directly in the face. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, Father, but you must have crossed a line, morally and legally I think you should step back. Go home.’
‘I’d like to, but I can’t. I haven’t yet worked out where the line was.
‘No, Father, we all know where it is.’
‘I’ve said something very similar to other people in the confessional. I’ll never say it again.’
‘I can’t forgive sins, you know that.’
‘I give you the same assurance as I did last time. What I am doing is in the interests of justice.’
‘All right, go on.
‘A man came to see me. He told me Brionne died after the war. In a peculiar way everything he said struck me as true — and it still does, even though I am sure now it was false. Intuition tells me he’s related to Victor Brionne.’ He’d given the signposts he had remembered: Robert B, the Tablet subscription and the rest. She’d written them down in a notebook, saying, ‘Father, you really don’t have to make a deal with me. I’d do this even if you refused to go and see the Fougères family’
Anselm had reddened under the reprimand, all the more so because he sensed DI Armstrong no longer saw him in quite the same light. The monk wasn’t that different after all.
Roddy was languidly smoking a cigarette while studying a wall of closed files as if they were strange objects uncovered by the Natural History Museum. He was dutifully engaged in that old internal debate, the outcome of which was already decided: to read or not to read?
‘VAT fraud,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘I find the facts tend to get in the way of a good defence. Good to see you.