The Bear's Tears Read Online Free PDF Page B

him.

PART ONE
FALL LIKE LUCIFER'S

    'O how fall'n! how chang'd
    From him, who in the happy Realms of
Light
    Cloth'd with transcendent brightness
didst outshine
    Myriads though bright.'
    -
Milton: '
Paradise Lost'
,
Bk.1
     

ONE:
After the Fall
    Paul Massinger balanced his whisky on the small table and then eased
himself, left leg extended, into the deep armchair. His face creased
into lines of irritated pain for a moment until he settled his
arthritic hip to greater comfort. Ridiculous. Within his aging form, he
had felt so much younger since his marriage to Margaret. He had belied
his fifty-nine years; defeated them. Now his body persisted in its
reminders of his physical age; it was pertinent yet false, just as the
elegance of the Belgravia flat occasionally reminded him, falsely, how
easily he, a mere American, could be charged with having married for
money. In many eyes, he knew he had at first been - still was to some
people - little better than a colonial buccaneer, a gold-digger. At
least, that was what other gold-diggers said. None of it hurt or even
affected him. Margaret had entered his long widowerhood firmly and
purposefully, and opened a new door to this.
    The
Standard
lay still folded on the arm of the chair. He
dismissed the consideration that he must arrange to have an operation
on his worsening hip - not yet, not yet - and pressed the button of the
remote control handset. The television fluttered and grumbled to life.
Margaret was not yet home. A sense of absence filled him to the
accompaniment of the signature tune of the early evening news. Alistair
Burnet's comfortable features filled the screen. He heard a key in the
lock, and surrendered to the small, joyous sensation at her return. He
turned in his chair in order to see her the moment she stepped into the
drawing-room. There was an excited tightness in his chest. His hip
twinged savagely, as if envious of his emotions and the object of his
attention. In the same complex moment he was young and old.
    The long fox fur coat and the matching fur hat; a high colour from
the evening drop in temperature made her younger than her forty-three
years. The confident, unselfconscious step… The smile faded from his
lips. Alistair Burnet's voice was that of an intruder upon the scene.
She had halted abruptly in mid-step, and the colour had blanched from
her cheeks. One gloved hand played about her lips. Her eyes looked
hurt, bruised. Massinger turned his head towards the television set,
and gasped.
    A grainy monochrome picture of a man of forty or so, fair hair
lifted by a breeze; half-profile, lips parted in a smile, eyes pale and
intent. Handsome. Massinger did not hear what Ailstair Burnet said to
accompany the photograph. He did not need to hear the appalled, choked
word that Margaret uttered:
    "Father…!"
    He knew it already. Robert Castleford, almost forty years dead.
    Margaret dragged the fur hat from her head, dishevelling her fair
hair. Her mouth was slightly open, as if there were other things she
wished to say; lines she had forgotten.
    Massinger said, stupidly, "Margaret, what's going on… ?"
    She moved to his chair but did not touch him, except to brush his
hand as she snatched the remote control handset from the arm of the
chair. Burnet's voice boomed in the drawing-room.
    "… the accusations, said to have been made to the CIA by a Russian
defector now in America, involve the circumstances surrounding the
death in 1946 in Berlin…"
    "Why?" was all Massinger could think to say. He looked up at his
wife, but she was staring at the screen, her body slightly hunched like
that of a child expecting to be struck.
    "… the Foreign Office has declined to comment on the matter, and
will neither confirm nor deny that any investigation of the head of the
intelligence service is under way, as this evening's edition of the
Standard
newspaper claims…"
    Her hand scrabbled near his sleeve like a trapped pet. The crackling
of the folded newspaper was followed by