House of the Hanged. Mark Mills

them into his jacket pocket and made his way back downstairs.

      Olivier was loitering in the reception area while a silver-haired woman, seated at the desk in the office, gabbled away on the telephone.

      ‘It turns out all she wanted was to check on her cat,’ he announced irritably. ‘I think she’s even trying to talk to it.’

      He was all smiles and kind words, though, the moment the woman had finished her call. While Olivier fussed around her, Tom took the opportunity to restore Minguzzi’s key to its cubbyhole. As soon as the woman had wandered off, wet-eyed with emotion after her feline communication, the charade was followed through. The register was checked; a third-floor room with a sea view was reserved for the week commencing the fifteenth.

      Strolling home along the narrow coast path, Tom struggled to draw any satisfaction from the success of his mission. Yes, he’d managed to gain access to the assassin’s room undetected, but what exactly had he learned? Very little; almost nothing other than that one of Minguzzi’s last living acts had possibly been to have sex with a Swiss German woman almost twice his age.

      He could envisage Leonard’s barely disguised look of disappointment when he got to hear Tom’s account of the past hour. For all his skills as a back-room spymaster, Leonard had never been a convincing dissimulator in person; he wore his feelings far too readily on his face. His true talent had always lain in selecting operatives who didn’t.

      It had been there all along, but Tom became intensely aware once more of the Beretta tucked into the back of his waistband, hidden beneath his jacket. He knew that it would be on his person, or within easy reach, until this thing was over. He found himself wondering if he was being observed, even now, and he tried to estimate his reaction time based on a man stepping suddenly from the undergrowth up ahead and pointing a gun at him. He calculated that he wouldn’t stand a chance. He would be dead, his blood leaking into the sandy soil before he could even draw his weapon.

      He moved the Beretta to the hip pocket of his jacket, closing his fingers around it, narrowing the odds on the imaginary assailant.

      It seemed like a deeply symbolic act.

      It had taken him a good couple of years to shake off the paranoia which had ruled his life for so long, to learn to walk down a city street without checking to see if he was being followed, to not glance up every time a new customer entered a restaurant where he was dining, to accept the innocent attentions of a stranger for what they really were.

      Depressingly, the same paranoia he had come to despise might once more prove the saving of him. He could list the moments in the past when it had come to his aid, just as he could identify the times when, had the other man been more suspicious or alert, things might well have turned out differently for both of them.

      Paulette never appeared before ten, which gave Tom a little less than an hour to deal with Hector.

      He smoked a cigarette on the terrace, steeling himself to the grim task. He then armed himself with a spade from the tool shed and headed for the gulley.

      The low morning sunlight slanted through the trees overhead, dappling the rock walls around him. By noon, the building heat would have silenced the unseen choir scattered about the branches, but for now, the trilling birdsong rang loud and clear, a fitting accompaniment for the occasion.

      Buried near the well, the Italian had said, but when Tom surveyed the ground in the vicinity of the brick wellhead he saw no obvious signs of digging. For a terrible moment he feared he might be denied his final farewell, but then he found the spot.

      Hector had been hidden in a sloping bank of debris at the base of the rock face, where it had slowly disintegrated over the years. He scraped at the scree and the stones with his hands, revealing the black pelt, usually so lustrous, now dimmed by dirt. He scraped till Hector lay fully exposed, stretched out, lying on his right side, as he liked to do in front of an open fire in winter.

      The soil clung to the congealed blood at the back of his head. Tom ran his fingertips along the noble snout, up and over to the wound, feeling the depression where the skull had been caved in.

      He could picture the scene. Poor Hector, all bark and no bite, so trusting. An extended hand, even that of a stranger, would have been enough to silence the low, rumbling growl. A few soothing words and he would have drawn closer, tail wagging, panting in anticipation of the tasty morsel contained within the closed and empty hand. His greedy eyes would have remained locked on that hand; they wouldn’t even have registered the rock raised high in the other.

      Was that how it had been? Maybe not. But probably something close to it.

      He gently scooped Hector out of the earth and laid him in his lap, cradling the limp and heavy corpse, rocking him, smoothing his fur.

      ‘I’m sorry, my friend. It was me he was after.’

      He wanted to say more, but a wave of emotion muzzled his lips. All he could produce was a sudden loud sob.

      It seemed for a moment that he had it under control, but he was weeping now, all composure gone, hot childhood tears washing away the last vestiges of his self-possession.

      Chapter Seven

      Others came and went over the summer months, and some even stopped by out of season, but the two weeks spanning late July and early August – when Leonard, Venetia and family were in residence at Docteur Manevy’s house – had always been sacred to Tom.

      That sunstruck fortnight was the one fixed point in his calendar. It was also his gift to them, a hopelessly inadequate ‘thank you’ for all their kindnesses to him over the years. There was more to it than mere gratitude, though. Leonard and Venetia had nursed him through the worst of times, and he wanted them to see that their efforts hadn’t been in vain. He wanted them to know that he was all right now.

      All this, he imagined, was lost on the two boys, if not Lucy. What were they to know of his troubled past? What did they care? Young minds were not inclined to unpick the tangled histories of their elders. Maybe that would come later, but for now Tom was simply an old friend and former colleague of their father’s who happened to be much closer to their mother in age, and whose company they were obliged to share for two weeks every summer.

      He assumed that they favoured their fortnight in Le Rayol over the annual springtime pilgrimage to Aix-les-Bains, where they twiddled their thumbs and took French classes while their mother subjected herself to every conceivable form of water torture, from skin-wrinkling immersions through to high-pressure pummellings. Leonard was spared this annual mortification of the flesh by the ‘sudden and pressing work commitments’ which seemed to materialize as if by magic every Easter, shackling him to his desk at the Foreign Office.

      Leonard’s devotion to Le Rayol had never been in question. He had fallen hard for the place during their first visit five summers ago, and each year he threw himself headlong into his ‘annual brush and polish on the Riviera’ with characteristic gusto. He was an outdoorsman by nature, surprisingly slim and sinewy for a man just shy of his sixtieth birthday, and although he wasn’t averse to a bit of loafing on the beach with a book, he was at his happiest when fishing or boating or bathing. He swam vast distances with no apparent effort, never fearing currents or cramps. He also spent endless hours prowling the craggy headlands with his fishing rod, as sure-footed as a mountain goat. He had once described life in Le Rayol as ‘a foretaste of paradise’, which wasn’t entirely true. Leonard’s perfect paradise would have included a grouse moor, a shallow chalk river for fly-fishing, and a golf course.