The Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear (the best electronic book reader TXT) 📗

It was an hour and a half later, having listened to Joan Hillman’s entire romantic history involving three engagements, coldfeet on the morning of her wedding—the expected culmination of engagement number three—and a series of wild affairs with “utterlythe wrong sort,” that Maisie climbed the stairs to her room at the top of the house. She was grateful for Hillman’s nonstopmonologue, for she had not felt obliged to offer a shred of information regarding her own personal affairs, beyond the factthat she was a widow with a child. Now she craved some peace and quiet, a time when she would sequester all thoughts of MarkScott in a separate corner of her mind and heart, leaving room to apply her full concentration to the task at hand. She layback on the bed, took up Gabriella Hunter’s manuscript and turned the first page, then the second and the third, feeling herbreath become faster as she began the hunt for the former agent’s hidden message—a communiqué left in secret because she fearedfor her life.

Chapter 18

“According to my mate,” said Billy, “he doesn’t know a lot about the Free French, other than de Gaulle meeting with Churchilland speculation about what they think of each other. But he does know that Major André Chaput is quite a high-up bloke. Apparentlyhe was decorated in the last war—awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery in battle.”

Billy flicked open his notebook. “Mick—my mate, known him since the war—poked around a bit and found out that after the war, Chaput was sent to the Levant, to Syria, because—and I’ve got to get this bit right . . .” He looked at his notes again. “Because of what went on between the British and the French out there. All right, I don’t want to get into all the details—mainly because I didn’t really want him to get into all the guff about it, but he said that the Arabs, who’d been our allies in the war, had all come together and planned a new sort of agreement, based upon peace with all the countries there—Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Mesopotamia. It looked very promising; we, the British, were supporting them—that’s his words—because they’d been our allies, but then we sort of did the dirty on them and handed it all over to the French, who wanted to get in there.” Billy looked up at Maisie. “Bit rough, when you think the Arabs were on our side, eh? Anyway, Mick said the Arabs got angry—and of course, they’re all different, from the different countries—because they were afraid of being pushed around because they knew exactly what they were doing and especially considering the hard work a bloke called Faisal had done. It was their land, after all, not anyone else’s. French soldiers were sent into Syria, and Chaput was put in charge of a band who were trained in a different sort of fighting. This was more like skirmishing, fighting with knives and pistols as well as grenades, and they’d been trained to kill with their bare hands. They fought dirty, and it was all done in secret. Not exactly a very nice way to treat your allies.”

“The pathologist who conducted the postmortem on the man dragged from the Thames thought he had been killed by an assassin,and could well have been one himself.”

“Looks like we might be able to make a guess about where they learned how to do that, eh?”

“We might.” Maisie picked up her own notebook, and looked up at Billy. “Last night, as I was reading through Gabriella Hunter’smanuscript, I came across information that corroborates your friend’s report. Now, it’s not clear to me why Gabriella wasin the Levant in 1920, but she was, and after I went to see her to ask if she had any information that might help me withthe Hackett case, I think she was able to dig up a few things over and above what she already suspected. Sadly, I believeit was the digging that led to her being attacked.”

Maisie studied her notebook, scanning pages she had filled the night before in the small guest room at Joan Hillman’s house,a cozy bedroom with electric lighting that enabled her to read Gabriella Hunter’s manuscript from the first page to the last,and where she found a folded sheet of paper between pages 50 and 51, with “Lady Margaret Compton” printed in bold lettering.Having refreshed her memory regarding certain details in that letter, she reached for her bag and put away her notebook.

“Billy, about the dead man, the one Freddie Hackett saw murdered—we know he was a member of the Free French intelligence services, but he was also with Chaput in Damascus and another place called Aleppo—they were part of one of those units your friend told you about. There were a number of other men in this special strike group. I understand one of those men, named Claude Payot, was something of a . . . well, I suppose you could call him a troublemaker. Miss Hunter wrote that Payot and Charles d’Anjou—the dead man pulled from the Thames—are one and the same man. While in this unit, Payot constantly made fun of Chaput’s features—certainly he could pass for a Levantine—intimating to the other soldiers that Chaput might be more loyal to the Arabs than France. Payot was ambitious, according to Gabriella’s notes, and wanted to undermine Chaput. The cohesiveness of the unit was crucial because their orders were fraught with danger. Payot put the whole operation in peril. However, it is also true that Chaput might have been having doubts about the orders, not so much based upon the fact that he indeed has Arab blood in him—a Lebanese grandmother, I believe—but because he had begun to wonder if what he was doing was right, something he had never experienced before, according to Gabriella. The moral ambiguity of what he had been asked to do weighed upon him.