Hope

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t.’ She stood up and gathered the sugar and milk jug, and put them on the tray.

‘I’d rather stay with you,’ I said.

She smiled a lonely distant smile. Her sadness almost broke my heart. I was going to stand up and embrace her, but while I was still thinking about it she had picked up the tray and walked away. In such instants are our lives changed; or not changed.

With characteristic gravity the news men made the high winds of October 1987 into a hurricane. But it was a newsworthy event nevertheless. Homes were wrecked and ships sank. Cameras turned. The insured sweated; underwriters faltered; glaziers rejoiced. Hundreds and thousands of trees were ripped out of the English earth. So widespread was the devastation that even the meteorological gurus were moved to admit that they had perhaps erred in their predictions for a calm night.

I contrive, as far as is possible considering our relative ranking in the Department, to make my travel arrangements so that they exclude Dicky Cruyer. Several times during our trip to Mexico City a few years ago, I had vowed to resign rather than share another expedition with him. It was not that he made a boring travelling companion, or that he was incapable, cowardly, taciturn or shy. At this moment, he was practising his boyish charm on the Swiss Air stewardess in a demonstration of social skill far beyond anything that I might accomplish. But Dicky’s intrepid behaviour and reckless assumptions brought dangers of a sort I was not trained to endure. And I was tired of his ongoing joke that he was the brains and I was the brawn of the combination.

It was a Monday morning in October in Switzerland. Birds sang to keep warm, and the leaves were turning to rust on dry and brittle branches. The undeclared reason for my part in this excursion was that I knew the location of George Kosinski’s lakeside hideaway near Zurich. It was a secluded spot, and George had an obsession about keeping his name out of phone books and directories.

It was a severely modern house. Designed with obvious deference to the work of Corbusier, it exploited a dozen different woods to emphasize a panelled mahogany front door and carved surround. There was no reply to repeated ringing, and Dicky said flippantly: ‘Well, let’s see how you knock down the door, Bernard… Or do you pick the lock with your hairpin?’

Across the road a man in coveralls was painstakingly removing election posters from a wall. The national elections had taken place the previous day but already the Swiss were clearing away the untidy-looking posters. I smiled at Dicky. I wasn’t going to smash down a door in full view of a local municipal employee, and certainly not the sort of local municipal employee found in law-abiding Switzerland. ‘George might be having an afternoon nap,’ I said. ‘He’s retired; he takes life slowly these days. Give him another minute.’ I pressed the bell push again.

‘Yes,’ said Dicky knowingly. ‘There are few worse beginnings to an interview than smashing down someone’s front door.’

‘That’s it, Dicky,’ I said in my usual obsequious way, although I knew many worse beginnings to interviews, and I had the scars and stiff joints to prove it. But this wasn’t the time to burden Dicky with the adversities of being a field agent.

‘Our powwow might be more private if we all take a short voyage around the lake in his power boat,’ said Dicky.

I nodded. I’d noted that Dicky was nautically attired with a navy pea-jacket and a soft-topped yachtsman’s cap. I wondered what other aspects of George’s lifestyle had come to his attention.

‘And before we start, Bernard,’ he said, putting a hand on my arm, ‘leave the questioning to me. We’ve not come here for a cosy family gathering, and the sooner he knows that the better.’ Dicky stood with both hands thrust deep into the slash pockets of his pea-jacket and his feet well apart, the way sailors do in rough seas.

‘Whatever you say, Dicky,’ I told him, but I felt sure that if Dicky went roaring in with bayonets fixed and sirens screaming, George would display a terrible anger. His Polish parents had provided him with that prickly pride that is a national characteristic and I knew from personal experience how obstinate he could be. George had started as a dealer in unreliable motor cars and derelict property. Having contended with the ferocious dissatisfied customers found in run-down neighbourhoods of London, he was unlikely to yield to Dicky’s refined style of Whitehall bullying.

Again I pressed the bell push.

‘I can hear it ringing,’ said Dicky. There was a brass horseshoe door-knocker. Dicky gave it a quick rat-a-tat.

When there was still no response I strolled around the back of the house, its shiny tiles and heavy glass well suited to the unpredictable winds and weather that came from the lake. From the house well-kept grounds stretched down to the lakeside and the pier where George’s powerful cabin cruiser was tied up. Summer had ended, but today the sun was bright as it darted in and out of granite-coloured clouds that stooped earthward and became the Alps. The air was whirling with dead leaves that settled on the grass to make a scaly bronze carpet. There was a young woman standing on the lawn, ankle-deep in dead leaves. She was hanging out clothes to dry in the cold blustery wind off the lake.

‘Ursi!’ I called. I recognized her as my brother-in-law’s housekeeper. Her hair was straw-coloured and drawn back into a tight bun; her face, reddened by the wind, was that of a child. Standing there, arms upstretched with the laundry, she looked like the sort of fresh peasant girl you see only in pre-Raphaelite paintings and light opera. She looked at me solemnly for a moment before smiling and saying: ‘Mr Samson. How good to see you.’ She was dressed in a plain dark blue bib-front dress, with white blouse and floppy collar. Her frumpy low-heel shoes completed the sort of ensemble in which Switzerland’s wealthy immigrants dress their domestic servants.

‘I’m looking for Mr Kosinski,’ I said. ‘Is he at home?’

‘Do you know, I have no idea where he has gone,’ she said in her beguiling accent. Her English was uncertain and she picked her words with a slow deliberate pace that deprived them of accent and emotion.

‘When did he leave?’

‘Again, I cannot tell you for sure. The morning of the day before yesterday – Saturday – I drove the car for him; to take him on visits in town.’ Self-consciously she tucked an errant strand of hair back into place.

‘You drove the car?’ I said. ‘The Rolls?’ I had seen Ursi drive a car. She was either very short-sighted or reckless or both.

‘The Rolls-Royce. Yes. Twice I was stopped by the police; they could not believe I was allowed to drive it.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t see any too clearly. George had always been very strict about allowing people to drive his precious Rolls-Royce.

‘In downtown Zurich, Mr Kosinski asks me to drive him round. It is very difficult to park the cars.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I hadn’t realized how difficult.

‘Finally I left him at the airport. He was meeting friends there. Mr Kosinski told me to take… to bring…’ She gave a quick breathless smile. ‘…the car back here, lock it in the garage, and then go home.’

‘The airport?’ said Dicky. He whisked off his sun-glasses to see Ursi better.

‘Yes, the airport,’ she said, looking at Dicky as if noticing him for the first time. ‘He said he was meeting friends and taking them to lunch. He would be drinking wine and didn’t want to drive.’

‘What errands?’ I said.

‘What time did you arrive at the airport?’ Dicky asked her.

‘This is Mr Cruyer,’ I said. ‘I work for him.’

She looked at Dicky and then back at me. Without changing her blank expression she said: ‘Then I arrived here at the house this morning at my usual hour; eight-thirty.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. And bingo – he was gone,’ added Dicky.

‘And bingo – he was gone,’ she repeated in that way that students of foreign languages pounce upon such phrases and make them their own. ‘And he was gone. Yes. His bed not slept upon.’

‘Did he say when he was coming back?’ I asked her.

A look of disquiet crossed her face: ‘Do you think he goes back to his wife?’

Do I think he goes back to his wife! Wait a minute! My respect for George Kosinski’s ability to keep a secret went sky-high at that moment. George was in mourning for his wife. George had come here, to live full-time in this luxurious holiday home of his, only because his wife had been murdered in a shoot-out in East Germany. And his pretty housekeeper doesn’t know that?

I looked at her. On my previous visit here the nasty suspicions to which every investigative agent is heir had persuaded me that the relationship between George and his attractive young ‘housekeeper’ had gone a steamy step or two beyond pressing his pants before he took them off. Now I was no longer so sure. This girl was either too artless, or a wonderful actress. And surely any close relationship between them would have been built upon George being a sorrowing widower?

While I was letting the girl have a moment to rethink the situation, Dicky stepped in, believing perhaps that I was at a loss for words. ‘I’d better tell you,’ he said, in a voice airline captains assume when confiding to their passengers that the last remaining engine has fallen off, ‘that this is an official inquiry. Withholding information could result in serious consequences for you.’

‘What has happened?’ said the girl. ‘Mr Kosinski? Has he been injured?’

‘Where did you take him downtown on Saturday?’ said Dicky harshly.

‘Only to the bank – for money; to the jeweller – they cleaned and repaired his wrist-watch; to church – to say a prayer. And then to the airport to meet his friends,’ she ended defiantly.

‘It’s all right, Ursi,’ I said pleasantly, as if we were playing bad cop, good cop. ‘Mr Kosinski was supposed to meet us here,’ I improvised. ‘So of course we are a little surprised to hear he’s gone away.’

‘I want to know everyone who’s visited him here during the last four weeks,’ said Dicky. ‘A complete list. Understand?’

The girl looked at me and said: ‘No one visits him. Only you. He is so lonely. I told my mother and we pray for him.’ She confessed this softly, as if such prayers would humiliate George if he ever learned of them.

‘We haven’t got time for all this claptrap,’ Dicky told her. ‘I’m getting cold out here. I’ll take a quick look round inside the house, and I want you to tell me the exact time you left him at the airport.’

‘Twelve noon,’ she said promptly. ‘I remember it. I looked at the clock there to know the time. I arranged to visit my neighbour for her to fix my hair in the afternoon. Three o’clock. I didn’t want to be late.’

While Dicky was writing about this in his notebook, she started to pick up the big plastic basket, still half-filled with damp laundry that she had not put on the line. I took it from her: ‘Maybe you could leave the laundry for a moment and make us some coffee, Ursi,’ I said. ‘Have you got that big espresso machine working?’