Farthing

  "Anne Bonney was a woman and she was a pirate," I said. "And there was another one too, Mary . . . Mary someone. They were pirates in the Spanish Main, not pirates' wives, pirates themselves. Anne Bonney was a pirate captain."

  The sergeant looked at me in frank scepticism, but it's absolutely cross my heart and hope to die true, and you can look it up for yourself if you don't believe me. Abby gave me a book about them for my birthday when I was ten. "Catch your horse, now," was all the sergeant said.

  I caught Manny, who hadn't gone far, but didn't want to come. She was eating clover, which was terribly bad for her and likely to blow her out if she got too much. I had to drag her away from it. I've always wondered why horses have so little sense of self-preservation. It's amazing really that they lasted long enough to be domesticated and looked after by people. Still, if they had more self-preservation I don't suppose they could be ridden into battle, not that anyone does that anymore, not since that time the poor Poles tried it in '39 and got mowed down by tanks. But Manny had cavalry horses in her ancestry—she's a direct descendant of Great grandfather's mare Agincourt, whom he rode into battle in the Indian Mutiny and the conquest of Sind. Perhaps horses who are descended from more peaceful ancestors have more sense.

  "I'll take him back to the stable for you if you like, miss," the sergeant said, dubiously, looking up at Manny as if she were an elephant.

  "Her," I said. "And I'll take her, she knows me, and I get the feeling you're not all that happy with horses."

  He laughed. "Not so many of them where I come from, miss."

  "Where do you come from?" I asked. We were walking along now, me leading Manny.

  "Camden Town, in London," he said.

  "No, there wouldn't be many there," I said. I knew Camden Town, at least I'd been through it. It was one of the poor areas that suffered a lot in the bombing. Just a few weeks before, David had told me about lending money to a family there to rebuild a shop they used to have. I couldn't tell the sergeant about that, of course. It was business, and David had told me in confidence. I'd have liked to have told him though, if I could.

  "The police would have taught me to ride if I'd wanted to, but I never did. I don't care much for horses, great huge things that would step on you as soon as look at you. They're obsolete now, to my way of looking at it, so I learned to drive instead."

  I laughed. "Cars are nice too, and you're right, horses are mostly just for fun these days. But Manny's very gentle. I don't know about police horses—they use them for crowd control, don't they? So I don't suppose they can be gentle."

  "I never did any of that. I went straight into the Yard after being a runner, miss," he said.

  "My name's Lucy," I said, because I didn't want him calling me "miss" when we were being so friendly; it didn't feel right. Anyway, "miss" is wrong; now I'm married it ought to be "madam."

  "I'm Sergeant Royston, Mrs. Kahn," he said, confusing me, and making everything revert to stuffy formality where we had been having such a nice conversation. It disconcerted me that he knew that, knew my name, knew who I was, and kept on calling me "miss." Some of the servants who had known me for years still called me "miss" and "Miss Lucy," but there it was a case of finding it difficult to break a habit. There wasn't any habit with Sergeant Royston, and still he didn't treat me as if I was really married. That made all his friendliness before when we were talking about pirates and horses seem like a sham.

  "Come along," he said, after I'd just stood there for a moment, one hand on the handkerchief and the other in Manny's reins. "You really ought to get inside, Mrs. Kahn. We don't know that the terrorist your father shot was alone."

  I hadn't thought of that before, but he was right, the woods could have been crawling with assassins. I walked on thinking about that, which made my back feel sort of super-sensitive. I kept feeling I needed to keep my spine very straight just in case. I was relieved when I came around the corner of the house to the stable yard.

  I took Manny in. Harry came rushing up right away and took her from me with lots of clucking about how terrible these murderers were and what a blessing Daddy took the gun. It was, too, so I started thinking about that. How strange to be alive because of Harry wanting jugged hare!

  Sergeant Royston went off somewhere, probably back up the hill to look at the dead terrorist, where he'd doubtless been dying to be all this while he'd been wasting time looking after me. I went into the house.

  Everyone was gathered round in the hall as if to hail the conquering hero, which made me want to laugh. I suppose I was feeling a bit hysterical. Mummy wasn't there, but I think everyone else was, even Angela, and a lot of the servants. David came up at once and hugged me. He seemed far more shaken at the scrape than I was. He was terribly pale. "You could have been killed," he kept saying. "Oh Lucy, my darling, you could have been killed!"

  I think I did go into shock then, which I hadn't before. Maybe it was David saying that or maybe it was knowing I was safe inside again. We went into the library, just the two of us, and Jeffrey brought us tea, which we both drank gratefully. I didn't even notice whether it was China or Indian. After I'd had it, Sukey took me to the downstairs bathroom. That was the first time I got to see my face in the mirror, and it looked perfectly frightful. Fortunately, most of it was dried-on blood, which came off as soon as Sukey attacked it with warm water and cotton wool. Once that was off, I just had a row of cuts, a scrape, really. I did look like a pirate or maybe a gangster's moll. Sukey dabbed Dettol over the scrape, which made it burn and hurt worse than it ever had. She fussed over me dreadfully. I resisted all her efforts to make me go upstairs to lie down. I couldn't see what good it would do. She had already called the doctor, to look at Daddy's arm, and insisted that he'd see me as well, over my protests. It wasn't the kind of thing where stitches would help. She fastened a strip of gauze across it, held on by sticking plaster.

  Then the police came back, which I'd known they would, which was why I'd resisted going up. I knew they'd want to talk to me. The doctor came at the same time and took Daddy off upstairs to patch him up. A police van was also there, which I suppose was for the corpse.

  I was just hanging around, waiting for the police to want me and letting David fuss over me, when Mummy came into the library. She was wearing ordinary clothes, country tweeds, but she still managed to look like a dreadnaught sweeping into some foreign harbor to claim it for the British Crown. She sat down under the bust of Portia and arranged her skirts as carefully as if they had swept the floor.

  "Mr. Kahn," she said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd let me speak to my daughter alone."

  I immediately grabbed David's hand. "Anything you want to say to me, Mummy, my husband can also hear."

  "Do you have to be so tiresome, Lucy?" she asked, as if I were twelve years old.

  David would have left us to it, but I clung onto him and wouldn't let go. As it was, I think he only stayed because I was wounded. I wanted him there not just for comfort but because she wouldn't be so savage in front of a witness. David said once he thought I was too afraid of Mummy and that gave her power, that if I stood up to her she'd back down—though when I did stand up to her, about marrying David, she didn't back down an inch, ever. Daddy forced her to come to the wedding, and she was threatening right up to half an hour before to go in mourning clothes.

  "I don't want to intrude on your privacy, Lady Eversley, but Lucy wants me to stay," David said.

  "Oh very well, what does it matter anyway," she said. "While you're here, Mr. Kahn, I'll take the opportunity of asking you if you'd speak at a subscription dinner we're having in London on June sixteenth. It's a dinner for managers and businessmen, and the idea is to put across the case against the menace of trade unionism and Bolshevism. I wondered if you'd like to give the financial angle."

  "I'd be happy to give the financial angle against Bolshevism, if you mean against the USSR," David said, giving a little bow. "That is, I can tell them that collectivized economies and human nature d
on't work well together, and even explain some financial details of that. But I'm afraid I see nothing very much wrong with trade unions, financially, there's no reason the workers can't combine to get a better deal for all of their labor, any more than would be true of a steel manufacturers group doing the same with their steel. Labor is the worker's capital, Lady Eversley."

  "But they have no right to withdraw their labor and paralyze industry," she said.

  "By the same argument you could say that a factory owner has no right to close his factory and throw thousands out of work," David said.

  Mummy frowned, clearly without an answer to David's lucid reasoning. "Well maybe you'll keep to the Bolshevik side of things and leave the unions out," she suggested.

  "I'd be delighted, Lady Eversley," David said, giving me a look that said: See, I told you your mother would become reconciled to the marriage eventually! I gritted my teeth.

  "And Lucy," she said, turning to me. "When you speak to the police about this assassin, this double-murderer, who is, I hear"—she turned to David—"actually a card-carrying Bolshevik, the next thing to a fifth columnist. In any case, Lucy, make sure you tell them your father shot him in self-defense. We need to put up a united front here. If there's any suspicion that your father needn't have shot him, it could become difficult. The police are, of necessity, not really gentlemen, and they sometimes like to feel they have power over a person who is a gentleman. I don't suppose for a moment that any jury would bring in a verdict against your father, but let us make sure there is no possibility that it will need to come to that."

  "I really didn't see what happened," I said. "I know he shot first." I put my hand up to my check. "And he shot Daddy too. I can't imagine anyone would question it was self-defense."

  "Yes, that's the right line to take," Mummy said. "I think Mr. Carmichael will want to see you soon; Doctor Chivers is still digging the bullet out of your father's arm."

  She smiled at me with a wintry approval that was still the most I had won from her for several years, and swept out of the library again.

  I thought about what Daddy had been saying earlier about perverting the course of justice. It really was self-defense, but Mummy didn't care about that at all. She wouldn't even care if Daddy had just murdered some innocent farm worker; she just cared that there wasn't a messy trial just at a time when there was a chance of Daddy getting a better government position.

  "A Bolshevik assassin," David said, looking almost pleased. "That should stop the police from being so suspicious of me. And see, your mother is starting to find it useful to have a banker in the family. I knew she would."

  Before I could say anything the door opened, revealing Jeffrey. "Inspector Carmichael would like to see you in the little office now, if you have time, Mrs. Kahn," he said.

  I hugged David and went off to give my evidence, much less happily than if Mummy hadn't come to make sure I was going to tell them the right thing.

  14

  The whole incident of the rifleman infuriated Carmichael. It didn't make sense; it didn't form part of the picture he'd been carefully constructing at all. If he had a rifle, why gas Thirkie? And how could he have had access to the house—did he have an accomplice inside? None of it made sense. It was as if the jigsaw pieces he had been assembling had been shaken up so that what he had thought was a piece of sky turned out to be part of the eye of a whale. This always happened in a complex case, but there was something wrong about this, Carmichael felt, something he couldn't put his finger on, that made him feel the whole business was a clever conjuring trick.

  Lord Eversley sat on his horse, looking down over the hedge at the dead man. Yately bent over the body, examining it. Carmichael stood to the side, where he could watch Yately and spot anything he missed. Izzard leaned over, breathing heavily from the uphill run, blocking everyone else's vision.

  Royston came up just as Yately drew out the bloodstained card from the corpse's pocket. A hammer and sickle leered up at them and the name Michael Patrick Guerin, 1769830. "Looks like you got it wrong this time," Royston murmured in Carmichael's ear.

  Carmichael looked sideways at him and he subsided. He didn't mind being chafed. It did look as if he'd had it wrong. It just didn't feel as if this was right either.

  "A Bolshevik, by God," Lord Eversley said, craning forward to look at the card. "Haven't potted one of them before."

  The word "potted" grated on Carmichael. It put the dead man in the class of game shot for sport. Carmichael had often dealt with policemen and householders who had shot miscreants in self-defense. He had noted that they usually had a sense of being appalled by what they had done, which sometimes they demonstrated by shocked silence, but more often led them to put up a defensive bluster about it. Lord Eversley, despite being slightly wounded, sat imperturbably on his horse seeming merely pleased and curious.

  The dead man was young, in his early twenties insofar as Carmichael could judge when most of his head was missing. He was splayed across the dark earth and the green sprouting wheat, where he had fallen back when the blast hit him. It had taken him in the side of the head, so he must have been running sideways, under the cover of the hedge. His rifle lay where it had fallen near his outstretched hand. Dead, whatever he was, and all his secrets dead with him.

  "Izzard," Carmichael said. "Follow the hedge for ten minutes and see what you find."

  "Yes, sir," Izzard said, and set off downhill.

  "It runs down between my land and Adams's farm until it comes to the road," Lord Eversley said.

  "Thank you," Carmichael said curtly.

  Lord Eversley looked down at Royston. "How's my daughter?"

  "Mrs. Kahn's safely in the house," he said.

  "Good. Not badly hurt?" Lord Eversley asked.

  "It's just a scrape," Royston said, smiling about something. "They're going to call the doctor to look at it, and at you too, sir."

  Lord Eversley merely grunted again. Carmichael had to admire his physical courage. He wasn't sure he'd have sat calmly on a horse chatting about a corpse with a rifle wound in him. The newspapers used to characterize the British as "the bulldog race," and there was something very like a bulldog about Lord Eversley, ugly and unappealing, but unquestionably brave and tenacious.

  "Irish." Yately tapped the card.

  Maybe, Carmichael thought, looking back to the body, but more likely London or Liverpool Irish than bog Irish. His clothes, clean but scruffy, were town clothes, and his shoes were definitely English. While you found individual Irishmen anywhere in the world when there was a scrap going, the Comintern got short shrift in the Republic these days.

  Yately checked another pocket and drew out an identity card. "This is made out in the name of Alan Brown," he said.

  "So, he operated under a pseudonym!" Lord Eversley said.

  "If he was Irish, and a Communist, he'd have had trouble doing much in this country without good false papers," Yately said.

  "Is that a good false paper?" Carmichael asked. He took the card and turned it to the light. Brown's year of birth was given as 1925, which would have made him twenty-four. His place of birth was Runcorn, which Carmichael knew to be a hellhole of an industrial town very near Liverpool. It might be worth inquiring with the police there. It gave a current address in Bethnal Green, one of London's East End slums. He would have judged the card genuine, which might mean it had been officially issued to someone who already had his false identity established. The address would certainly be worth checking in any case.

  "Photograph with it," Yately said, handing that up. Lord Eversley craned to see, so Carmichael glanced at it once and handed it over. It was an ordinary snap by a seaside photographer of a young woman, tolerably pretty, a servant or perhaps a shopworker, Carmichael would have guessed from her clothes and hair. Lord Eversley handed it back with a grunt and Carmichael turned it over to read the name of the photographer's studio, which was printed in florid typescript: Burton and Sons, The Promenade, Leigh-on-Sea. Leigh was th
e smart part of Southend, near enough to London to do in a day on the railway.

  "What's this?" Yately said, in sudden excitement, pulling something from the outside pocket of the corpse's coat. Carmichael almost laughed when it proved to be a handful of shells for the rifle and half a bar of Fry's chocolate. The other pocket contained a piece of string, two pound notes, and about five shillings in change, much more than Carmichael would have thought a man dressed like that would be carrying around. Carmichael took one of the coins, a bright copper farthing, and turned it in his hand, looking at the robin on the obverse. That was the other side of the British character: if the aristocracy were bulldogs, the poor were robins, hopping about cheerfully in hope of finding something good, never fleeing the winter but putting a good face on it, dowdy brown with one flash of bright color. Yet it was used as the symbol of this group of upper-class politicians—from the house, of course.

  "Did this house give its name to the coin or the other way around?" he asked Lord Eversley, putting the coin into his pocket.

  "Eh? The other way," he said, taking the unexpected question in his stride. "One of my ancestors lent a devil of a lot of money to Henry VII, and in return he handed out this manor—this whole area they call the Farthings—for a farthing rent a year to the crown. We still keep up the payment. Wouldn't like to get behind on a thing like that!" He wheezed with laughter. "A farthing wasn't worth very much more then than it is now. It was still only a quarter of a penny. Maybe Henry VII could have bought a loaf of bread with it, while I doubt George VI can get more than a slice!"

  Izzard came back, red-faced and gesticulating. "I've found a motorcycle!" he said, when he was near enough to hail them. "Under the hedge down there, by the road!"

  Guerin/Brown could have run back to it in a couple of minutes, and been off and away before any search for him could have begun.