Farthing

  "I'll speak to her in the morning," I said.

  "Would you like tea with your sandwiches?" Jeffrey asked. "Or there's a bottle of Montrachet that was opened this morning for Lord Manningham to take his tablets. He has to take them in Montrachet, doctor's orders, he says. But there's only one glass gone out of it, and it seems a shame to waste it."

  "You could drink it yourself, Jeffrey," I said.

  "Montrachet? Filthy stuff," he said.

  David laughed. "You need to educate your palate, Jeffrey," he said.

  "Yes, sir," Jeffrey said. "Shall I bring it out with the sandwiches, then?"

  "You may as well," I said.

  He went out, smiling, and when I turned to David he was smiling too. This was just what I'd hoped for in suggesting a nursery tea, to make David understand that for years my relationship with the older servants at Farthing was one of conspiracy—a conspiracy in which they and I were on the same side, and Mummy and Daddy were on the other. I wanted to establish to them that David was firmly on my side, and to David that the servants understood.

  It's a funny thing, really, having servants. They're employees, they're paid to serve you, to live in your house and take care of you—picking up your mess, cooking your meals. It can't possibly be an equal relationship, and it's not surprising that some servants come to absolutely despise their employers, and others come to be terribly snobbish about the most absurd things. I once heard Uncle Dudley's valet telling another valet that he wouldn't dream of lowering himself to work for anyone less than a Marquis, now that he'd worked for an Earl. I'm quite sure he meant it, that he'd have happily accepted a job with a Duke for less pay than he got from Uncle Dudley, but never one from Daddy, for more pay, because Daddy is only a Viscount. Yet what does it matter, really? His employer's rank wouldn't objectively make the slightest bit of difference to the man, whereas the things that would matter, how much he was paid, how comfortable the situation was, whether his employer was a nice person, wouldn't count with him.

  Abby taught me long ago to see servants as people. She was in an ambiguous position herself, as a governess, not quite a servant, but never a member of the family either. She'd been governess at several houses, and at some had a terrible time, even being raped by the elder brother of her charges once, when the little girls were in the next room and she could not cry out. She taught me not to take servants for granted, to see that we live very intimately with them and that they know our secrets, that we cannot purchase loyalty with pay. She said servants sometimes took out their resentment on people like her, in-between people, giving her bad service, not cleaning her shoes or returning her laundry, refusing to answer her bell. She made me see how privileged I was, and how I might unthinkingly make a servant's day worse, simply because I was bored or lazy. It's a commonplace that old servants become almost family, and that well-treated servants will stay with you, but it's also true in a way that the commonplace doesn't touch. Abby was my governess between the ages of six and thirteen, and she looked after me in the holidays until I was seventeen. She taught me to appreciate poetry and do simple arithmetic, but her accomplishments didn't extend much beyond that—I found out when I went to school that my French was the worst they'd ever heard. But she loved me, she taught me right from wrong, she taught me how to live, and she was far more of a mother to me than Mummy ever was.

  David and I went out into the garden. The whole estate is garden in one way, but what we call "the garden" was a little sunken garden at the back of the house. There are wooden chairs and tables out there, and we keep cushions for the chairs inside so they don't get wet. We sat out there in the sunshine, though there were clouds coming in from the north and I could tell the bright weather wasn't going to last. We ate our salmon sandwiches and finished up the Montrachet and sat and read our books until the clouds came over quite heavily, when we went in to the library, taking our cushions in with us.

  I don't know if it was the Montrachet, or the disappointment, or the baby starting to change my body, but I felt quite tired, although it was hardly two o'clock. I kicked my shoes off and put my feet up on the leather couch in the library and settled down to read The Treasure Seekers for about the thirtieth time. David sat on the chair where Mummy had been sitting the other day, under Portia, and took up Three Men in a Boat, which he said he'd never read and always meant to. Before long he was completely engrossed.

  I felt like dozing off, and yet I didn't. I just lay there, half-reading the very familiar episodes, and looking over at David now and again, feeling quite content really, because I didn't mind being at Farthing at all now. It was Mummy who made me feel claustrophobic. I started thinking about the murder, and about the Bolshevik, and what could really have happened, and about Inspector Carmichael thinking he'd been led by the nose. I was sort of facing up to things I'd only thought about before in between thinking of other things and wanting to get away. Someone had killed Sir James. Someone had shot at me and Daddy and Daddy had killed him.

  I thought about the murder of Sir James. Daphne had found him, and gone into a state of shock; then she'd got Mark to lie and say he'd found him. Daphne couldn't have killed him, she loved him. She was probably the only one who did, if it was true what Eddie said about Angela's baby not being Sir James's. Could Angela have killed him? She certainly had a motive. She could do what she liked now—even if Mummy and Mark were trying to bully her. What had Mummy said to her, doing little enough for all the benefit you're getting. What benefit? But Angela was too silly and feminine to have stabbed Sir James, too irresolute to have carried through a course of action like that, and much too silly to have thought of trying to frame it as a political assassination.

  Wondering who else benefited, I could see why Inspector Carmichael wanted us to stay here. I could see his case against David very clearly. It frightened me. The only thing that would really clear David would be finding the real murderer.

  I don't suppose you've ever considered what it would mean to know that someone close to you had done something unspeakable— and by that I don't mean shooting a fox or putting lemonade into a single malt, the way Daddy would. I knew David hadn't done it, but just for a moment I considered it as if he had. He'd have had to have got out of bed without my noticing it. He'd have had to have made certain preparations in advance without my knowing, getting the star and so forth, and probably getting a dagger as well, as I'd never seen him with one. He had a revolver, an ordinary military revolver, which he kept at the bottom of his underwear drawer. So he'd have had to have prepared, and then got out of bed and got the things, and gone down the hall to Sir James's room—it was between our room and the bathroom, nothing would have been easier—and gone in and stabbed him in his sleep. Then he'd have to have washed off any blood that got onto him—Daphne had said there was blood all over the body—and come back into bed with me.

  I couldn't imagine it. I could imagine him killing someone, even killing Sir James, but that wouldn't have been the way he did it. Of course, he had killed people, lots of people, during the war, but they'd all been Luftwaffe pilots.

  Just then David chuckled at something in the book and looked up and saw me looking at him. He read a passage out to me, it was the bit about the tin opener, and as he read I knew it was absurd to think he could have done it. If he'd decided to assassinate Sir James for the Jewish cause, though how it could advance it one jot was beyond my understanding, David would have at the very least woken him and shot him, and probably taken him out somewhere a long way from the house. He wouldn't have left his body there for Angela or Daphne to walk in and find. David's a very thoughtful person. He'd never have done it that way. To do that he'd have to be someone else, someone entirely different. Maybe Inspector Carmichael could picture that different David, but he didn't live with the real David as I did.

  So it definitely wasn't David, which would have been a load off my mind, except that if it wasn't David it had to be Mummy. I'd known that for days really, if I'd been prepared to face up
to it, ever since Inspector Carmichael had said he felt led by the nose. Mummy had the resolution, and the planning. She might not have been up to it physically, but as usual she wouldn't have had any difficulty finding someone else to do it for her. Her motive was the only difficulty. Sir James was an ally. She'd undoubtedly have ditched him without a qualm, but why would she need to kill him? But given that she had a reason, if Mummy had done it, she would have had someone else do the actual stabbing. Daddy? Mark Normanby? And could Angela have known about it and could her widowhood be the benefit?

  Frankly, I didn't feel any happier at the thought of her doing it than I did at the thought of David. They hang people for murder, and while I didn't exactly like Mummy, she was my mother after all. Though do they hang Viscountesses? Worse than that, if she'd done it she'd have been much too clever for them ever to catch her. There would be no possibility of them hanging her. She'd have defense in depth.

  "Do you think Mummy knew, and invited us down so you'd be a suspect?" I had asked. And David had replied in a tone of humoring my fancies: "That would mean she knew Sir James was going to be murdered."

  She'd have arranged a scapegoat, and that scapegoat could perfectly well be David, because she didn't like him, and she didn't care a scrap about me. We'd been lucky so far because Inspector Carmichael wasn't stupid, but we couldn't count on our luck lasting.

  I started to make a plan then as I lay on the sofa, half a plan. I expect it looked to David as if I was falling asleep. What we could do, where we could go, what we should take, if it came to it. Who would help us, who we could really trust. Every so often I'd look over at him as he sat there smiling over the book. He was a man, and he'd fought in battle, and nearly died—he had medals to prove it though he never wore them or used the letters he could put after his name. And he was a Jew, one of the most persecuted people in Europe, and he knew more about what went on in the Reich than I did, and what I knew was quite nightmarish enough. Yet I felt he was innocent in a way I was not, that I knew more about evil than he ever could, because he had parents who loved him and wanted the best for him while I had grown up with Mummy.

  22

  It was half past four when they got to the Yard. London looked dirty and wet and run-down. Even the trees, which had leafed out in their absence, seemed thin and shabby compared to the lush spreading trees of the country. Black taxicabs dodged in and out of traffic, sending up sprays of water that drenched the pedestrians, scurrying in their drab raincoats and black umbrellas towards red buses or the beckoning mouths of the Underground. Royston drove Carmichael down the Strand, around half the crescent of the Aldwych and up the Kingsway, the dreariest street in London. He pulled up smartly on the double yellow line in front of the new Scotland Yard building, which had been built at the end of High Holborn when the old "New Scotland Yard" building had been put out of action in the Blitz. They just called it the Yard, as usual. Carmichael had never known the old building, so he generally ignored the complaints of old-timers for whom the new one would never be a replacement. Today, in the rain, the building, halfway between Palladian and deco, and lacking the virtues of either, looked particularly dreary. He could understand the superstition that had grown up that made it bad luck to walk in its shadow. Respectable lawyers from Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn crossed the road and then crossed back again later rather than pass too close to the portals.

  "Park and come to my office," Carmichael said to Royston, ducking out of the car and preparing to dash up the stairs past the bas-relief abstract sphinxes that flanked them.

  The bobby on duty opened the door for Carmichael with a lackluster salute. Stebbings was, as usual, at his glassed-in desk in the central portico.

  "Back at last," he greeted Carmichael when he put his head around the door to say hello.

  "Any news of my villain?" Carmichael asked, going completely inside the glass box. Stebbings's desk was neatly organized, with papers in tidy piles and alphabetized pigeonholes. There was a wireless set and four telephones, three standard black and one a daring cream.

  "Which villain?" Stebbings asked.

  "Brown. I can't imagine there being any more news of Kahn at present. I left him safely tucked in at Farthing."

  Stebbings put his hand in his G pigeonhole, but did not draw out the paper. "Report here from the Garda, saying nothing known. In private they say the same thing. Michael Patrick Guerin could be anybody or nobody, all three names are common enough, but they don't have any records on any specific fellow. Jenkinson, who always deals with them since that business with De Valera's dog, says he's sure they'd have told him at the very least that they weren't going to tell him anything to pass on to his English masters, if that was the way of it."

  "I didn't think he was one of theirs," Carmichael said. "There was something about him. Liverpool Irish is my guess. Any joy from Runcorn?"

  Stebbings drew a sheet out of his B hole and read from it. "Chap of the name Alan Brown—sounds like a pseudonym, doesn't it— born in Runcorn on the date specified, educated at Runcorn Boys Elementary School, left in 1936—what a wonderful year to enter the workforce at the age of eleven I don't think—no police record, whereabouts unknown."

  "If you were a fitter of the name of Brown, why would you make up a name like Guerin?"

  "A nom-de-guerre?" Stebbings suggested, and almost smiled. "Maybe his Bolshevik pals said he needed a nom-de-guerre and as a workingman without much French and with friends among the Liverpool Irish even if he wasn't one himself, Guerin came straight to mind."

  "It's as good an explanation as anything I can think of," Carmichael said.

  "We've been through his house top to bottom, and found nothing of the slightest interest to anyone." He put the paper back in under B. "There are copies on your desk if you want the details."

  "Have you traced the girl? I sent you the picture."

  "No joy with the girl yet. We've been showing it around Bethnal Green but not a nibble. Probably not important. No luck tracing any of Brown's Bolshevik connections yet, either. We've rounded up a lot of Bolshies and fellow travelers, which is Simpson's department. He's pulling them in and booking them all as accessories to this. He's quite grateful to you for giving him an excuse to bring them in—he knew who they were all right, some of them outright publish Bolshie articles in the papers, but they're very canny about keeping their feet on the right side of the law. Catch one of them on something that looks like spying or treachery, then they'll be splitting hairs and calling for their lawyers. The law's too soft on them. It's not like we'd be able to do that in Red Russia, not while preaching bloody revolution and going around shooting people."

  "Any of them admit to knowing Brown?" Carmichael asked.

  "Not a one of them, not under either name. That's what you'd expect them to say, of course." Stebbings sounded mildly regretful.

  "Of course," Carmichael said. He couldn't find it in his heart to be very sorry for Communists, even if they weren't connected with Guerin/Brown.

  "Chief Inspector Penn-Barkis wants to see you. I think he's hoping for a final report."

  "This afternoon?" Carmichael rolled his eyes. "He's got a hope. I want to sniff around myself after Brown and see what I can find."

  "Tell the Chief," Stebbings said.

  "Thanks for the tip on Normanby, by the way," Carmichael said. "He's a nasty piece of work. He's definitely been telling us lies, too, only I can't work out why. He can't have done it—or rather, he probably could, technically, but he's got no percentage. The dead man was his friend."

  "Evening Standard is tipping him to be Prime Minister tonight. Should have done him for gross indecency when we had the chance, dirty bugger," Stebbings said, in his usual flat tone. "No justice, is there?"

  "None," Carmichael agreed. "Well, I'd better push off and see the Chief."

  Royston was in his office when Carmichael pushed the door open. "I'm off to see Chief Inspector Penn-Barkis," he said. "Did you park the car all right?"

  "No pr
oblem. Got it into the lot—Inspector Blayne was just coming out as I got there."

  "That was a piece of luck." Carmichael put down his case on his chair. His desk was covered with toppling piles of paper. He scanned the piles for anything recent and on a second try pulled out the report on Brown's lodgings. "Read through this and get familiar with it. We'll be doing some scouting around after Brown."

  "You still want me to check into Thirkie's valet?" Royston asked.

  "Yes," Carmichael said. "Tomorrow will do for that." He hesitated. "This case is like a big ball of string, with ends sticking out all over. I get the feeling that if we pull on the right one, it'll all come loose at once. Brown's a good place to start pulling, because Brown's the one we know is a villain and a murderer. But the chauffeur, valet, whatever he is, he's definitely another loose end."

  "Yes, sir," Royston said.

  Carmichael bent to check his hair in the mirror on the back of the door, put there so he could see behind suspects he might be interviewing. He walked down the hall and pressed the button for the lift. Penn-Barkis's office was at the very top of the building. The lift came and took Carmichael up, his stomach following just a little later.

  Penn-Barkis's office was said to have one of the best views in London, looking south over Lincoln's Inn Fields past the original Old Curiosity Shop towards Fleet Street. Today the windows were clouded with condensation and running with rain. Penn-Barkis himself was sitting comfortably in an armchair, smoking a cigar. He was not an impressive-looking man, being bald, slightly tubby, and with heavy white eyebrows, but he succeeded in intimidating all his subordinates. He was said, in whispers, to have an excessively domineering wife, but it may have been wishful thinking from people who wanted to believe that there was someone who could put the Chief Inspector in his place. In his presence, Carmichael tried hard to modulate all his vowels and sound as Southern as he could, because Penn-Barkis had once said he had Lancashire on his breath the way another man might have whisky on it.