A Woman Involved
JOHN GORDON DAVIS
A Woman Involved
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1987
This edition 2014
Copyright © John Gordon Davis 1987
John Gordon Davis asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007574438
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008125370
Version: 2015-02-11
Dedication
To Minna and Max Lucas
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Volume 1
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Four
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Five
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Volume II
Part Six
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Part Seven
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Part Eight
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part Nine
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Part Ten
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Keep Reading
About the Author
About the Publisher
Rome, 1978
‘Who murdered you?’ people cried at the corpse.
There was no autopsy to find out why he died. Yet he had been in excellent health. No death certificate was ever published. And when he was embalmed, within twelve hours of his death, the morticians were forbidden to draw one drop of blood off his body. For three days Pope John Paul I lay in state in the Basilica of Saint Peter’s, and thousands of people filed past the coffin to pay their last homage to the Pope who had reigned for only thirty-three days. At seven o’clock on the third day the doors of Saint Peter’s were closed, and the body lay in flickering candlelight for the last night, Swiss guards standing vigil at each corner of the catafalque. But at seven-thirty, through a side door, entered some more pilgrims. They came from the Pope’s birthplace, and they had received special permission to come late to pay their last respects. They began to file past the body, mourning. Then something strange happened.
Suddenly a group of Vatican officials and doctors appeared. The pilgrims were told to leave immediately. They did so, bewildered. Then the Swiss guards were ordered to leave. Then big crimson screens were erected around the body, so that nobody who had chanced to hide inside the massive basilica could see what was happening. The officials and the doctors began an examination of the Pope’s body, behind the screens.
The examination lasted one and a half hours. The press demanded to know whether this had been a belated autopsy, but the Vatican announced that it had been a routine examination, lasting only twenty minutes, by the morticians and a professor of medicine to check on the state of preservation of the body.
But neither the morticians nor the professor were even present.
Rome, May 1980
He was probably the most popular man in the world when they tried to murder him.
There were thousands of people in Saint Peter’s Square to attend the papal audience in front of the basilica. At about five pm Pope John Paul II appeared in his popemobile and a roar went up from the crowd. He stood in his vehicle, beaming, dressed in white, his arms outstretched, waving and leaning out to touch people as he rode slowly between them. Then suddenly the shocking shots rang out.
They were fired from seven feet away. Two bullets struck Pope John Paul II in the abdomen, three more grazed him. He clutched himself and lurched, then he fell back into the arms of his private secretary. There was pandemonium. The screams from the crowd, the shock, the horror, the surging. A young man was trying to race away, dodging and shoving, but within moments outraged people overwhelmed him.
He was a Turk. His name was Mehmet Ali Agca, and he claimed he had been hired by the Bulgarian secret service to assassinate the Pope.
Falkland Islands, 1982
It was bitterly cold. The windswept South Atlantic was icy. On the archipelago of hard, bleak islands the Royal Marines were outfighting the Argentinian soldiers who had invaded the far-flung British colony. But it was in the skies that the outcome of this war could be determined, since the British forces were over seven thousand miles from home and their troop ships and lines of supply were very vulnerable to aerial attack.
The fighter plane of the Argentinian Air Force came screaming out of the bleak west, and suspended under its wings were deadly exocet missiles. Out on the black ocean the British warship steamed towards the rocky beaches. When the Argentinian aircraft was still miles away from the ship the pilot pressed the button and the exocet’s rocket fired, and it unleashed itself.
The rocket went streaking over the sea, its electronic equipment unerringly telling it where to go, homing in on the man’o’war. On board the British warship they hardly knew what hit them.
It hit them with a mighty blinding crash that rent through the ship, steel and machinery flying midst flesh and blood and bone, and within minutes the ship was engulfed in terrible fire and killer smoke, and men were jumping into the freezing sea to escape the flames.
London, 18th June 1982
It was before dawn when they found him.
The man hung from the ironwork of Blackfriars Bridge, his arms limp by his side, the rope gouging into his neck. He was podgy and smallish, with a bristling black moustache and black, thinning hair. His eyes were bulging, and he was very dead. The police hauled him up, and when they searched through his well-cut suit, they found ten kilos of bricks in his pockets, and over fifteen thousand dollars in cash.
His name was Roberto Calvi. He had a forged passport, and he had recently been convicted of serious currency offences in Italy. He was the president of Banco Ambrosiana, financial adviser to the Vatican Bank, and he was called ‘God’s Banker’.
Grenada, Caribbean, October 1983
There were still some pockets of resistance in the jungled mountains, but the island was quiet for the first time since the war began. There was a curfew.
On the runway, an aeroplane stood ready to fly the bodies of soldiers back to America for burial. In the mortuary the coffins stood in rows, labelled, ready to go. In the dispensary, Medical Corporal Smythe was drinking Coca-Cola and surgical alcohol. His portable radio was on, but he was drunk and hardly interested in it; but then he heard something that made him pay attention:
‘It has been officially announced by the Pentagon that the number of American servicemen killed in the recent invasion of Grenada is only eighteen. Their bodies are being flown home from Grenada tonight … ’
Corporal Smythe wondered if he had heard right.
Eighteen? … But he knew there were only seventeen! He had laid the poor bastards out.
Corporal Smythe felt a flash of self-importance. He was in the news – they were talking about his job! … Millions of people across the world were being misinformed, and only he knew the Pentagon was wrong! He wanted to tell people. And he couldn’t. Then frustration turned to indignation – the goddam Pentagon had made a boo-boo …
Corporal Smythe sat there, then he got up aggressively. He opened the dispensary door, and started down the corridor.
He came to the mortuary door, and unlocked it.
There were the coffins, in three silent rows. Corporal Smythe pointed at the first one, and started to count.
He had only counted half when he realized that the radio had been right: there were six coffins in each row!
He stared. He counted again. Six times three makes eighteen …
Corporal Smythe stood there, astonished. Where had the other one come from?
He walked indignantly to the first coffin. He peered at the typewritten details fixed onto the lid.
He went down the row, reading each label. He remembered each name. Halfway down the second row he stopped.
This label he certainly did not remember … This label he was absolutely sure he had not typed!
Name: Steven M. Jackson
Sergeant, Delta Force …
Corporal Smythe was astonished.
Who had put another body in his mortuary without telling him?
If he had not been drinking surgical alcohol, perhaps Corporal Smythe might not have been so indignant; perhaps, but for the surgical alcohol, he might not have found it extraordinary that at the end of a war, in the middle of the night, another body was found and encoffined without anybody waking him to tell him; perhaps, but for the surgical alcohol, he might not have been so aggressively disappointed to find out that he was not in the news after all; but Corporal Smythe began to unscrew the coffin lid.
He stared down into the open coffin.
There was no corpse in the coffin. No Sergeant Jackson. Only sea sand.
1
The sun shone bright and the sea was like glass.
A launch lay at anchor near a coral reef off the Caribbean island of Grenada. A man sat on the after deck, in swimming trunks, drinking a bottle of beer. Near him lay an airtank, goggles and flippers. His name was Max Hapsburg, and he was half German with big blue eyes that were very intelligent, but his dark good looks came from his Greek mother. He was about thirty-eight, and he was known to most big bankers of the world.
He was alone on his boat at the moment. His guests and his wife were somewhere along the reef, under the water.
Anna Hapsburg did not know where the others were. She had not seen them for almost half an hour.
She swam slowly along the magnificent coral reef, fifteen feet below the surface. The sunshine shafted down onto the multitude of beautiful shapes, onto growths and flowers and animals all the colours of the rainbow: the kaleidoscope rambled, rugged and smooth, sparkling and dark, with bays and grottos, going on and on, fading into mistiness. Anna loved the reefs. She swam slowly in her underwater wonder-world, her long golden legs gently flipping, her long blonde hair streaming silkily behind her.
When she was about two hundred yards fhe was halfway out of throm the boat, she saw the sharks.
There were two. They were indistinct, to her right, on the surface. Her heart missed a beat and her stomach contracted; she stared at them a terrified, heart-pounding moment, then she frantically turned for the boat.
She swam desperately, resisting her screaming instinct to thrash her legs. She swam and she swam, her heart knocking, her eyes wide: she glanced back frantically, and she could not see them any more, and that was worse: she swam and swam and swam for what seemed an eternity; then she saw the keel of the launch ahead, and it seemed the sweetest sight she had ever seen. She looked back desperately over her shoulder again; then the keel was coming up, the swimming ladder gleaming. She rose, arms upstretched, and she grabbed the ladder and broke surface and she began to scramble up. She spat out the mouthpiece and gasped: ‘Sharks …’
Max got to his feet. ‘Where?’
She pointed behind her. Max saw the fins on the surface. He snapped: ‘Have you warned the others?’
She was halfway out of the water
‘No …’
‘Go and warn them! I’ll follow.’ He snatched up his flippers.
She stared at him, horrified, her hair plastered to her head. But oh God yes of course they had to warn the others … She clung to the ladder a terrified moment more, then she crossed herself and rammed the airhose back into her mouth, and she sank, with dread, back into the water.
She swam back the way she had come. And her fear was the purest she had ever known.
She did not see the sharks on the way back. Within two hundred yards she saw Bill and Janet Nicols. She signalled to them desperately, Shark … She turned back towards the boat.
The keel came into view again. They swam and they swam, hearts pounding. Anna made for the swimming ladder and grabbed it, and heaved. She scrambled up onto the sun-beaten deck. Janet came up the ladder frantically behind her. Anna grabbed her hand and heaved her onto the deck. Bill came scrambling up after her.
‘Where’s Max?’ Anna swept her eyes over the sea.
‘Here I am …’
Anna spun around. Max Hapsburg was coming out of the saloon, a grin all over his handsome face. ‘Anyone for tennis?’
She looked at him incredulously, and he burst out laughing.
‘They were dolphins! Dolphins … ’
She was absolutely shocked.
Max laughed, ‘You should have seen the look on your face–but any fool could have seen they were dolphins … ’
She screamed: ‘You beast–!’
She ripped her goggles off her head and hurled them at him: ‘You beast–!’
2
It was five years since Jack Morgan had seen Anna Hapsburg. But he still dreamt of her often; and they were always intense and beautiful dreams, and his heart sang because he was with her again at last; and when he woke up he was filled with yearning. He tried to go back to sleep so he could be with her again, but he could not, and she was gone.
Only three months they had had together. In those lovely days her name was Anna Valentine, and she was in her final year at Exeter University; he was a young lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy on ninety days study-leave at the same university. She lived in a women’s residence on the campus; he had digs nearby in town, a bedsitter with a gasring. ‘We have not yet met,’ he had said on the telephone, ‘but I’m the ardent admirer who sent you those flowers this morning.’
‘Oh, yes … Well, thank you, Mr Morgan, they’re lovely roses and I’m very flattered,’ she had replied, ‘but as it happens I am engaged to be married.’
This was terrible news. ‘Married? When?’
‘At the end of this term, Mr Morgan.’
‘This is very depressing news, Miss Valentine. But where is this painfully fortunate man?’
‘In Grenada. That’s a small island in the Caribbean, you mightn’t have heard of it.’
Relief. ‘Certainly. A spice island. You grow nutmeg.’
‘Correct! Most people think it’s a city in Spain.’
‘So did I, but when I heard you speak at the Debating Society last night, I made enquiries about you, then looked up Grenada in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so I would impress you over dinner. I know all about Grenada, Gross National Product, per capita income, birth rate, electricity problems, the works.’
She smiled. ‘I am impressed, Mr Morgan. But I’m afraid dinner together wouldn’t be appropriate, because I’m getting married in three months’ time.’
‘On the contrary, all the more urgency about this dinner, Miss Valentine. Because I’m going back to sea in three months’ time and I think it highly important that we have the opportunity to consider each other before then, because it’s a crystal-clear case of love at first sight, Miss Valentine. I’ve never resorted to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a florist in the same context before …’
And, oh, why, why had they not done it? Why, after three glorious months of love and laughter and absolute happiness, that made them want to dance in the streets, that made the whole world seem a bowl of cherries and terribly amusing, happiness that made the whole world laugh with them, and envy them, happiness that gave them daydreams in the middle of lectures, that gave them the giggles every night as he smuggled her up to his digs past his landlady (House Rules: No Visitors of Opposite Gender, No Drink, No Cooking for Visitors, No Curries, No Music, No Pets, No Confabulations, By Order, Mrs Garvey), happiness that made them make love all night when they should have been cramming for final examinations, the happiness of talking talking talking about everything under the sun, and the rapture, rapture, of each other’s bodies – oh why, at the end of those three glorious months, when the examinations had somehow been written and passed (though not with the flying colours expected of both of them), why had they not just walked into the nearest registry office and married and lived joyously ever after? – Oh how different the world would have been.
But, they had not. Because she was a Catholic and she wanted a proper church wedding, with her family around her. So they had flown back to Grenada for their last few days together, to introduce him to her parents and tell them that their darling daughter was going to live in darkest England for the rest of her life. They were going to be married on his next leave, four months hence. Then he had gone back to sea in his goddam submarine.
He had never seen her again.
It was that shark story that had finally made up his mind to go back to Grenada, after five long years. Janet Nicols had looked him up on her last visit to England, and the tale had come out.
So now here he sat in a dark aeroplane, staring out of the window at the moonlight, at long last doing what he had so often dreamt of doing, flying across the Atlantic to try to see the woman he had once loved so madly. He had no idea what was going to happen. He had not told anybody he was coming, not even Janet Nicols. He did not know if he would set eyes on Anna, even from a distance. Maybe she would refuse to see him. And now that he was actually doing it at last, fulfilling his dream, he was not even sure what he wanted to happen. Did he really still love her so madly? Or was she just a dream? And if so, was it not best that he just keep her as that, his lovely dream-girl? When you’re lying in your lonely bunk in your submarine, or sitting in your lonely farmhouse drinking whisky in front of the fire, home is the sailor home from the sea but the home is empty, it is easy to be sure that you still love her with all your heart, you are even glad to be sad, thinking of what might have been – but now that he had finally made up his mind to go, he was not so sure. It was unreal. He was very excited, but wasn’t all this foolishness? What the hell are you doing? he asked himself many times that long night – why are you flying halfway round the world just for the chance of seeing, of only glimpsing maybe, the woman who once loved you and left you and married another man? What right have you got to try to interfere with her marriage now? What makes you think you’ve got a chance? The shark story? Because Janet Nicols cautiously admitted, under cross-examination, that Anna’s marriage to Max had not been going well? But had Janet said that Anna ever spoke of him? No. Indeed, Janet had said that Anna would never leave Max because she was a devout Catholic, marriage is for better or worse … What makes you think she’ll even want to see you? So, what foolishness is this? – and now that you are actually on this aeroplane at last, are you even sure you really still love her? Don’t you really prefer to be free to be glad to be sad? … Don’t you even resent her, for breaking your heart? …
Many times in that long, unreal night it was like that. But then, a little later, it was different again. Because you had another dream about her, he said. Because she came to you again, and she was beautiful and smiling, and you felt her whole loveliness pressed against you again, and you smelt her scent and you looked into her lovely eyes and oh God yes you still loved her, and oh yes she still loved you, and when you woke up your heart was breaking and you desperately tried to go back to sleep, to be with her again. And for days afterwards you could not stop thinking about her, and there was such yearning …
And then the sun came up, glorious and red and gold, and the Caribbean was born below him, the turquoise waters, and the reefs, and the white beaches, and the palms, and he glimpsed again the golden girl; this was her part of the world, where she lived, he glimpsed her hair swirling across her laughing face as she ran across the white sands into his arms, he felt her warm-cool body against him, and he knew that he did still love her, that she was in his blood. He was very excited when the plane began its descent and the island of Grenada came up out of the sea, mauve and brooding in the sun, the blue sea fading to turquoise around it; and his heart was beating deliciously, and he knew he still loved her.