The Collaborator Read online

  GERALD SEYMOUR

  The Collaborator

  www.hodder.co.uk

  COPYRIGHT

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Gerald Seymour 2009

  The right of Gerald Seymour to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN: 978-1-848-94621-7

  Book ISBN: 978-0-340-91886-9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  A division of Hodder Headline

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  For Harriet and Georgia and Alfie

  PROLOGUE

  It was a hot afternoon, stinking hot, and the sun beat up from the concrete path, dazzling him. A ridiculous afternoon to be out in a London park. He’d met friends for lunch, arranged long back, on the south side of the park – two guys from college days – but they’d had their girlfriends in tow, like trophies, which had made him feel awkward, as if he, not they, were the intruders. And, truth was, he’d been bored because the togetherness of the couples seemed to shred the spirit of mischief that ran in him – some called it ‘happy go lucky’ and his dad ‘Jack the lad’ – and he’d wanted to be gone before the loss was terminal. It had all been too damn serious, which seldom fitted well with him.

  He’d eaten the meal, coughed up his share of the bill, and walked away from the Underground station, had crossed Kensington Road and gone into the park, over Rotten Row, and been within a few yards of the dog-leg lake before his mind had kicked back into gear. By now, the couples would be talking mortgages and future prospects. He was in the park where heat reverberated off the scorched grass and concrete. There wasn’t half a square centimetre of shade close to him, and it was a pretty silly place to be – no skateboarders or football to watch, no promenade of stripped-down girls.

  He looked for a bench to flop down on. He wasn’t stressed by the heat or the lack of entertainment – his own little world gave him no grief – but it was damn hot.

  The bench he saw was blurred, but a haven. He heard, far away, the shouts of children playing at the water’s edge, but round the bench there was quiet. His eyes were nearly closed as he sank on to the wooden slats, which grilled his backside and lower spine. Jumbled thoughts loitered in his mind – home, parents, work, food, getting back to the north-east of the city, money – all easily discarded. With his eyes sealed against the light, maybe he dreamed, maybe he dozed. Time slipped on a July afternoon on the last day of the first week in the month.

  The idyll was broken.

  ‘Excuse… please.’ A clear, uncluttered voice, an accent. He jolted upright. ‘I’m sorry. I…’

  Eddie Deacon never considered that responding might change his life, push it on to a road unrecognised and unexplored… His eyes snapped open.

  He saw the girl – dark hair, light skin, dark eyes. Hadn’t been aware of her coming to the bench… might even have been there when he’d taken his seat…

  Mutual apologies. Sorry that he had been asleep. Sorry that she had woken him.

  She wore a cotton skirt, short, not much of it, a white blouse, brief sleeves, and a textbook lay open on her lap, with an Italian– English pocket dictionary.

  Strangers pausing, wondering whether to go forward – and blurting together.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Please, I am confused.’

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  They both laughed, chimed with each other. Eddie Deacon pushed hair off his forehead. He saw that when she laughed the gold crucifix, dangling from a chain bounced on her cleavage. That was what he saw – and she would have seen? Him writing the script: not a bad-looking guy, pretty well turned-out, good head of hair, a decent complexion and a smile to die for. And she would have heard? A laugh that was infectious, not forced, and a voice with a tone of interest that was honest and not patronising. Well, he was hardly going to short-change himself.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t understand this – “turn over”. What is “turn over”?’

  Eddie Deacon grinned. ‘Is this “turn over” in bed? Or “turnover” in business?’

  ‘Business. It is a book on auditing accounts in English – and it says “turn over”.’

  He asked, ‘You’re Italian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He said, ‘In Italian, “turnover” is fatturato. You understand?’

  ‘Of course, yes, I do… and you speak Italian.’

  He shrugged. ‘A little.’

  ‘OK, OK…’ She smiled – her teeth glowed, her eyes were alight. She riffled again through the pages of her book. Her finger darted down and stabbed at a line. ‘Here… For “balance” we have soppesare in my dictionary, but that is not the Italian word for the commercial balance of an account. What should it be?’

  ‘To “balance” an account is bilanciare, and a “balance sheet” is bilancio di esercizio. Does that help?’

  She touched his hand – fleeting, a natural, spontaneous gesture of gratitude. He felt the tips of her fingers on his skin. He liked girls, liked their touch, but would have admitted, if quizzed, that he was currently ‘between relationships’. God, who needed commitments? He’d nearly been engaged, to a local-government kitchen-hygiene inspector, two years back but his mother had become too fond of her too quickly. He hadn’t found a soulmate.

  ‘I have a very good helper.’

  Eddie Deacon said he should be good – he was a language teacher. He didn’t add that if he’d put his back into it he might have made interpreter level and gone to Brussels or even the United Nations, but it would have been a hassle. He taught English to overseas students. His core tongues were German, French and Spanish but he also had useful Italian. She told him she was on two courses in London: in the morning she studied English language and in the afternoons she did accounting and bookkeeping. Eddie Deacon wondered why a pretty girl in a tight skirt and a tight blouse, from Italy, bothered with any of that, but didn’t take it further. The sun seemed, in mid-afternoon, to spear his forehead and shoulders. The men and women who walked past the bench wore floppy hats or had white war-paint daubed on exposed skin, while little parasols shaded tots in push-chairs. There were squeals and shrieks from the lake, and splashing. He assumed that swimming in the Serpentine was forbidden and that the gauleiter men would be there soon, yelling that it was verboten.

  He stood up.
‘It’s a bit warm for me. I prefer to be out of the sun.’

  She said, ‘Where is to be the new classroom? I need all opportunities to speak English. I have a teacher. I do not wish to lose him.’

  It was, he thought, a challenge. She must have realised he intended to walk away, but her chin had jutted, her shoulders were back and now she was almost blocking his path. He reckoned that she was used to getting what she wanted. He didn’t push past her. Now, for the first time since he had woken up, he looked at his self-enrolled pupil. She was lightly built, had narrow hips, a squashed-in waist and a good-sized, but not gross, bosom. Her face fascinated him: a fine jaw, a delicate nose and a high forehead, the hair pushed back. But it was her eyes that caught him. They had authority, did not brook denial. As a general rule, Eddie Deacon did not fight authority. He was one to go with the flow. He didn’t look at the hips, waist or breasts of the girl before him but was carried deep into her eyes.

  He asked where she was heading, and she told him. He told her he lived nearby – a small untruth: it would probably have taken him almost an hour to walk from Hackney to where he lived on the west side of the Balls Pond Road. He suggested they find a pub, with open doors, big fans and a cool interior. There, he said, they could have a hack at any accounting or bookkeeping language that was giving her grief. Her books were in a bag now, and he took it, slung the strap across his shoulder. She hooked her hand into the crook of his arm.

  Her hips swung as she walked, and she threw back her head, letting her hair fall between her shoulder-blades where the blouse collar had slipped.

  ‘By the way, I’m Eddie Deacon.’

  Her name was Immacolata.

  On the north side of the park they took a bus and sat on the top deck with the window open beside them so that a zephyr of cooler air reached them. She leafed through the textbook, found English commercial expressions and quizzed him for the exact meaning in her mother tongue. They walked a bit on his territory – Balls Pond, Kingsland, Dalston – reached a pub and sat in a corner of the saloon. Eddie Deacon sensed that she was the most special girl he had ever spent an afternoon and early evening with. He was captivated. Couldn’t think what he offered her beyond a few words in Italian and explanations of a few phrases of more colloquial English, but she seemed to hang on what he told her. Precious few stayed around to listen to him on where he lived or where the language school was, his anecdotes about the daftest Lithuanian students, where his parents lived, what excited or what bored him to death, and when he made jokes she laughed. It was a good rich laugh, and he thought it was genuine, not produced to humour him; he decided, in the pub, that she didn’t laugh often the way her life was.

  As dusk fell, they left the pub, her hand again at the bend of his elbow. Now he called her ‘Mac’ – had drifted into it without a prompt from her – and she seemed amused by it.

  He walked her almost home, but at the end of a street off Hackney Road, she stopped and indicated they would part here. Now, a streetlight beamed on to her face. He had been with her a few minutes short of seven hours. He wouldn’t have known what to do, but she led. She offered her right cheek and he kissed it, then the left. She was grinning – chuckling as she kissed his lips, and her smile was radiant. He asked if they could meet again. She told him where and when, without asking if it was convenient – which didn’t matter to him because any time and any place were fine. She turned and left him. He watched her going away down a street of little terraced homes that the new rich had taken over. She passed the low-slung German sports cars and the gardens filled with builders’ skips. She was Immacolata, she was twenty-five, two years younger than himself, she was from Naples, and would meet him again in two days’ time. What did he not know? She had not told him her family name, or given him her address and phone number.

  She was between two lampposts and the light fell on her hair and on the white blouse. She went briskly and did not look back.

  Why had she spent seven hours of her day with him, laughed and joked with him, listened? Because he was attractive and handsome? Because he was a success and taught in a language school? Because of his humour and culture?

  Eddie Deacon thought the girl – Mac – was lonely. Sad too.

  He would count the hours till they met again, and thought himself blessed.

  She was round the corner, gone from his view. He would tick off every hour until they met again and hadn’t done that for as long as he could remember.

  Eddie Deacon kicked a can down the pavement then across the width of the street, and was euphoric.

  1

  She started to run. There was no pavement, only a track of dried dust at the side of the road. She ran past the stationary cars and vans that had blocked her brother’s little Fiat. Faced with an unmoving jam more than three hundred metres long, she had had no alternative but to get out of the Fiat and head on foot towards the distant gates of the town’s cemetery. To be late for the burial would have been intolerable to Immacolata Borelli.

  She had left the car door open. Behind her she heard it slammed, then Silvio’s call, his head protruding from the sun hatch perhaps, for her to run. Everything about the day, and the schedule, had been – so far – a disaster. The call had come to her mobile the evening before, from Silvio, the youngest of her three brothers. He had told her of a death notice in that day’s Cronaca di Napoli detailing the passing of Marianna Rossetti, from Nola, the funeral to be held tomorrow at the Basilica of SS Apostoli, followed by the burial. Immacolata had been in the kitchen of the Hackney apartment she shared with her eldest brother, Vincenzo, who had been shouting questions at her – Who was on the phone? – because he was paranoid about her using a mobile. She had told Silvio she would be on the first flight the next day; she had told Vincenzo that the language school had changed the time of classes, and that she was required early. She ran past the cigarette smoke puffed from the motionless vehicles, and past the cacophony of car horns.

  She had not been on the first flight out of Heathrow: it had been overbooked. Her wallet on the check-in counter, opened to display a wad of twenty-pound notes, had not made a seat available. The second flight had seats, but its takeoff time had been put back forty minutes by a leaking toilet. Had anyone ever heard of aircraft stacking over the Golfo di Napoli before landing at Capodichino? There was work in progress on the runway, military flights from the NATO detachment had priority and…

  She had not been able to find Silvio because some arrogant bastardo in uniform had not allowed him to park in front of the terminal, and that was more delay. Normally there would have been a minder to sit in the car and tell the official to go fuck himself, but this journey was not normal, had been made in secrecy and was far outside the business of her family. It was only twenty-five kilometres from the airport to the centre of Nola, but there were roadworks and the lights controlling the single lane of traffic were broken.

  They had reached the basilica. She had grabbed her handbag off the back seat, snatched up the little black hat with the attached veil, flung herself out of the Fiat, dumped the hat on her head, glanced at her watch as she charged up the steps to the main doors, run inside, heard the crisp echo of her heels on the flagstones and allowed moments to pass before her eyesight could function in the gloom. The space in front of the high altar was deserted, as were the forward pews. A nun had told her that the cortège of the Rossetti family was now well on its way to the cemetery. ‘Such a fine young woman, such a tragic loss…’

  Immacolata had gone back down the steps at speed, had nearly tripped, had accosted three people – an idiot, a woman who was stone deaf, a young man who had ogled her – and demanded directions to the cemetery.

  She hitched her skirt hem higher.

  It was eight months since she had arrived in London with her eldest brother. They had driven all the way north to Genova, then taken a flight to Prague, driven across Germany to Hamburg and flown into the British capital. He had used doctored papers but her passport had been in her
own name. In those eight months she had had no contact with her father – it would have been difficult but not impossible – had not spoken to her mother, which could have been arranged but would have brought complications, and had relied on rare, brief conversations with the teenage Silvio. She was now familiar with life in north-east London.

  The heat of the summer had gone. Two days after she had met Eddie, the heavens had opened and a thunderstorm of epic proportions had broken, sheet and fork lightning, claps that shook windows, torrential rain, and then cool. The day she had met Eddie, London had been as hot as Naples. It was as if that storm, biblical in its scale, which had caught them out in the open space of Clissold Park, had severed a link with her home city. The deluge had drenched them and they had kissed, then gone to his single room to take off the sodden clothes… and she had lost the link to her city, with the roasting heat, the stench of the streets, the strewn litter, plastic strips and discarded paper, the dumped kitchen gear and the slow rot of dog mess. All were with her now, as she ran on the dusty verge towards the cemetery entrance, as were, ever sharper, her memories of the young woman she had once been proud to say to her face was her ‘best, most-valued friend’.

  By hitching the hem of her skirt higher, flashing more of her thighs at those gawping at her from the cars, Immacolata could lengthen her stride. It shamed her that in London her best, most-valued friend had almost slipped from her mind. She was within sight of the gates. Eight months before, she had promised to stay in close touch with Marianna Rossetti; in London she could have justified the rupturing of the thread. Not now. Silvio’s hesitant words resonated in her mind, and his stumbled reading of the notice in the Cronaca. She didn’t know the cause of death, only that her friend had passed away in the Nola hospital. She assumed an accident had been responsible. There was, as she knew it, no history of illness.

  Her heel broke. She had left the London apartment early, while Vincenzo still slept, but had taken the precaution of wearing clothes for a language class. She had put her black suit, stockings, shoes and handbag in a zipped holdall. She couldn’t have guaranteed that Vincenzo wouldn’t appear at his bedroom door, blinking and bleary, to query why she was wearing funeral best to go to the school. She knew about security, the care that must be taken. It was ingrained in her, like grime embedded in the wrinkles of a labourer’s hands. She had changed in the toilet of the delayed flight and had looked the part of a mourner when the aircraft had dropped down to the tarmac at Capodichino. Her trainers were in the holdall, which was in the boot of the Fiat, which was stuck in traffic more than two hundred metres behind her. Immacolata swore, and heard laughter billow from an Alfa level with her. She scooped up the damaged shoe, from which the broken heel hung at an angle, and pushed it into her bag.