Ha'penny

  Royston’s already red face blushed to beetroot. “It wasn’t me, I didn’t say a word,” he said.

  “Then somebody saw you,” Carmichael said, lightly. He hadn’t meant to remind Royston of his betrayal. “But now. Worth it or not, drive me to the Yard.”

  “Yes, sir,” Royston said.

  They drove the half mile along the Strand, around the Aldwych and up the Kingsway in stately silence. Carmichael opened the door to get out, leaving Royston sitting in silent misery. Carmichael took pity on him. “As I said before, if I hadn’t done anything wrong, you’d have had nothing to tell. Don’t worry about it, sergeant. This is a new case, and if I’m not wrong, we’ve almost cleared it up.”

  “Apart from Nash and the Greens,” Royston said.

  Nash, and the Greens, yes. They were loose ends that couldn’t be left. Carmichael thought about Nash as he walked up the steps. The Greens were Jewish, and could have just run for no better reason than being afraid, like David Kahn. But there was no explanation for Nash. Nash must know whatever Marshall knew. How long could he stay in hiding? And where was he? Carmichael pushed open the doors and saw, in the glass booth that passed for a desk, the jowly face of Sergeant Humphries. He nodded a greeting. Was it Stebbings’s day off? Or perhaps he was ill? “Morning, sergeant, where’s Sergeant Stebbings this fine morning?”

  Humphries rolled his eyes. “Gone to his daughter’s wedding, in Brighton. He’ll be back at work Monday morning. Sergeant Pomfret will be here Sunday, like always. I ought to issue a bulletin, or put up a sign, because everyone coming in has been asking. He’s not the only one capable of sitting in this glass case, you know.”

  Carmichael laughed. “I should think he’s worn that chair pretty smooth by now.”

  Humphries, who must have weighed several stone more than Stebbings, obligingly shifted his weight about and made the chair creak. “Very comfortable,” he said.

  “I want to see the Chief if he’s time for me. He’s probably half-expecting me.”

  Humphries looked ponderously down his list. “Nothing here, but I’ll ask if you can see him and call through.”

  As Carmichael was turning to go, a young woman came tentatively through the doors and up the steps towards the desk. She was tall and dark-haired, and wore a green dress sprigged with spring flowers, like a meadow. Carmichael watched her hesitate and advance towards the desk. He wondered why she was here. The general public didn’t like coming to the Yard. They didn’t even like falling under its shadow, and crossed the road to avoid it. She certainly didn’t seem like a criminal. Someone’s witness, Carmichael thought, and went off to his room.

  He read with some surprise the report on Mercedes Carlos. It had taken some time to come through, because it had required inquiries in Spain, but he had expected it would be completely routine. On the contrary, it seemed her parents were Anarchists who had fought against Franco in the Civil War, her brother was missing, and she had been smuggled back to Britain by Gilmore in the guise of a maid after her Spanish tour. He stared at the paper, astonished. Anything less like an anarchist than Mercedes Carl with her piled-up hair and confiding way of speaking he couldn’t imagine. He counted on his fingers and worked out that she would have been twelve or thirteen at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Whatever her parents were, she had been just a child. She had looked afraid, he remembered, when he had asked her if she’d go back to Spain now that Gilmore was dead. He would have sworn she was genuine. She had stayed put, when the Greens had run. He would have to speak to her again.

  The telephone rang. “Humphries,” Humphries said at the end of the line. “Got a young lady here wants to see you; well, wants to see someone in connection with the Gilmore bomb.”

  “Not a nut, you’re sure, sergeant?” Carmichael asked. There were always a few loons turning up in a murder case. Mediums with messages from the dead, people who had seen suspects where suspects couldn’t have been, people coming in to confess who regularly confessed to everything. He would have trusted Stebbings to weed out a nut.

  “I’m pretty sure not, sir,” Humphries said.

  “Oh all right. Put her in the little interview room, I’ll see her. And send Royston in, if you can find him,” Carmichael said.

  As he made his way through the gray corridors to the interview room, his hopes rose. Perhaps she was Nash’s girlfriend and had been hiding him. He ran into Royston just outside the door and they went in together.

  It was the tall girl in the green dress. She was sitting in one of the uncomfortable chairs when Carmichael came in, and she jumped to her feet. Close up it was clear that despite her height she was younger than he’d thought, perhaps no more than eighteen or nineteen. She’d be a bit young for Nash, but men often did like young girlfriends. “Inspector Carmichael, Sergeant Royston,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Rachel Grunwald,” she said, and shook hands with both of them.

  Not Nash’s girlfriend then. Carmichael found himself reassessing her. She didn’t look Jewish, and her voice was an educated London one. “Sit down, please, and show me your papers, and tell me why you’ve come.”

  She pulled her papers out of the little leather bag she carried. He glanced at them. Yes, Jewish. Rachel Ann Grunwald, born 1930, Amsterdam, British resident, not citizen. He passed them to Royston, who diligently wrote it all down.

  “It’s about my uncle and aunt,” she said, sitting down.

  “And your uncle and aunt are?”

  “Well, their real name is Grunwald too, but they call themselves Green.” She hesitated, and Carmichael did his best to look noncommittal and encouraging. “My uncle changed it when he got married. Aunt Louise thought it was more English. It was Grunwald in 1940 when we all came over here. They both worked for Lauria Gilmore.”

  “They’re missing,” Carmichael said.

  “I know.” She swallowed hard. Royston passed her back her papers and she stuffed them into her bag without looking, keeping her eyes on Carmichael. “They’ve been moving from family to family since last Saturday night, trying to get to my father. My uncle was the youngest of the family. My father was the oldest. He feels—my father feels—protective towards him. Father brought him out of Holland with us. Uncle Hem was twenty-four, a university student at the time. I was ten. My brothers and sisters were even younger. And my uncle believes my father can work miracles. He thinks he can get him away again. But he can’t. He’s mad to risk it. We’re not the sort of people who know about those things, and we can’t afford it. It might be all right for rich people who can live anywhere, or people who have nothing to lose, but not for people like us. We already lost it all once, when we left Holland. I said to my father that he’s endangering us all, if he helps Uncle Hem, and he’s bound to be caught. But he says I’m just a girl and what do I know about it?”

  Carmichael untangled this. “So your uncle Mr. Green is seeking aid from your father, Mr. Grunwald, and you feel your father is inclined to give it, despite the risk to the rest of his family?”

  “I don’t know what my uncle’s done. I don’t know if he was involved in the bomb. But if I tell you where they are, will you arrest them now, and stop my father getting himself involved? He’s trying to see dangerous people, and he doesn’t know any of them or the first thing about how to go about it and he’s going to get himself arrested. Then they’ll pack us all straight back to Holland, and you know what that means! But you mustn’t tell my father it was me who told you.”

  Carmichael looked at her. There wasn’t any “if” left in the matter of her telling him, whether she realized it or not, nor was she in a position to make bargains. “When I know where they are, I’ll undertake to have them arrested immediately. They’re not at your home?”

  “No. There isn’t anywhere to hide them there. Too many children.” She shrugged. “They’re at 141 Acacia Gardens, Golders Green. They’re in the attic, my father says.”

  Royston wrote down the address. Carmichael watched him then looked back
to the girl. “What does your father do, Miss Grunwald?”

  She seemed a little disconcerted by the question. “He’s a doctor. He was a doctor in Holland, and now again here.”

  Yes, she looked like a doctor’s daughter. “And how many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “There are five of us,” she said. “I don’t quite see why you’re asking this?”

  “And is your mother alive?” Carmichael continued.

  “Yes, of course she is!” Rachel Grunwald looked frightened now.

  “So you think your father is risking the seven of you for the two Greens, and that he’s making a bad bargain?”

  She looked at Royston, who was writing, and back at Carmichael. “Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”

  “Do you like your uncle and aunt?”

  She pushed back her smooth dark hair. “To be perfectly frank, no. Uncle Hem has never made anything of himself, he’s a servant still, after all these years. And my aunt Louise is always putting on airs about being born British, as if it makes any difference, when I’m as English as she is after all this time. And they’re so Jewish! I mean we keep the Sabbath and have two sets of dishes, but that’s not good enough for them. And now building a bomb, or whatever they were doing. They’re mad. I just don’t want them to drag me and my family down with them.”

  “Well, thank you, Miss Grunwald, you’ve been very helpful,” Carmichael said, standing up.

  “And you won’t tell my father I came here?” she asked.

  “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do what I can,” Carmichael said, in the old formula of the Yard. It reassured the girl, and she went out, clutching her bag.

  “Sickening, somehow,” Royston said, shutting the door behind her.

  “However sickening, get a team of nice solid constables together and go and pick up the Greens, and whoever’s hiding them. We’ll need to talk to Mr. Grunwald too, to see what sort of feelers he’s been putting out to try to find the Jewish terrorist underground. But get the Greens, right now, before she thinks better of it and tips them off.”

  “Not coming yourself, sir?” Royston asked.

  “I have to see the Chief about the Hitler box thing,” Carmichael said. “He might be waiting for me now.”

  Indeed, Humphries sent Carmichael upstairs to Penn-Barkis. The lift once more wafted him to the top of the building, and the astonishing view of the kingdoms of London spread out before him, looking particularly enticing in the sunshine.

  “News on the Gilmore bomb?” Penn-Barkis greeted him. “I hope so.”

  “Yes, quite a bit of news,” Carmichael was pleased to report. “I know what they were going to do with it. It seems when Mr. Hitler’s in London next week, he’s to see Hamlet, with Mr. Normanby, and it’s the production Gilmore was going to be in.”

  Penn-Barkis nodded briskly. “Good work. Is there proof?”

  Carmichael shook his head. “Balance of probability only.”

  “Well, they’re dead,” Penn-Barkis said. “The play can go on uninterrupted.”

  “There is the question of Nash,” Carmichael said.

  “Who’s Nash?” Penn-Barkis frowned.

  “Marshall’s friend, the one who has disappeared. He and Marshall were apparently like David and Jonathan.”

  The implications of Penn-Barkis’s sneer angered Carmichael, but he plowed on regardless.

  “There are Gilmore’s servants as well, the Greens, the ones who vanished, but we’ve got a line on them. In fact, Royston should be picking them up as we speak. But I’m worried about Nash.”

  “You mean you think he might try to carry on where Marshall left off?” Penn-Barkis asked.

  Carmichael hesitated. “I suppose it’s a possibility. I expect Marshall and Gilmore being blown to kingdom come put an end to it, but I can’t rule it out altogether.”

  “Do you think we ought to warn the security services, and the Germans for that matter? We could cancel the visit to the theater. But it is being announced today, it’s too late to cancel without publicity. Is there enough of a risk to make it worth it? It’s a big thing, canceling something like that, makes it look as if we can’t handle our own people, in front of the Germans, who certainly do know how. Bit of a black eye for us, really.”

  “I don’t want to decide that now,” Carmichael said. “I want to talk to the Greens, who may know something about Nash and about the plot. Probably, without Gilmore to get the thing inside, the plot will be off anyway. But if we have to cancel, since there would be publicity whenever it happened, we can get them to cancel right up to the last minute, can’t we, and there’s still a week.”

  “A week, yes, plenty of time,” Penn-Barkis said. “Very well. Don’t tell the press anything, let them think you’re still investigating. We don’t want to tip Nash off. And we’ll increase security on the theater, and on Covent Garden as well in case they change their venue with the loss of the actress.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carmichael said.

  “Good work, Inspector,” Penn-Barkis said. “Take the weekend off. Rest. You can afford the time. Go to a show. Relax.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carmichael said again, more decided than ever that he would hand in his resignation at the end of this case.

  21

  I don’t have to explain, do I, that when we went to Coltham Siddy and Uncle Phil were of exactly the same mind as Devlin and everything was perfectly bloody? I can hardly bear to think about it. I’ve already written far too much, there’s no need for me to go into the details of all that. We all sat there in Coltham, all the same people as the week before but in the Chinese parlor, because it was raining, and ate scones and seed cake and little delicate cucumber sandwiches, and they tried to explain to me that a sister more or less made no difference, if you could get rid of a couple of dictators at the same time. Siddy at least had the grace to look as if her conscience was a bit troubled by it.

  I’ve said I almost never saw my family and kept up with them from Mrs. Tring reading the society papers. That’s true. I often went for months without seeing any of them. I saw Dodo most often, once or twice a year when she came up to London for the day. I hadn’t seen Pip for years. I could dislike them quite intensely—at that moment, I almost hated Siddy. But we’d all been brought up together in a way quite unlike the way normal people are brought up, even people of our class, and that made a bond. Whether I saw them or not, whether I wanted to see them or not, they were my sisters and I cared about them. From one angle, I could see how ghastly they were, and that was the angle on which I had changed my name and made my life in the theater. There was another angle though, a very deep one, and from that angle everyone else came and went but my sisters were the only ones who were real.

  There were six of us. Pappa wanted a son, and so he made Mamma keep on having babies, as fast as she could until she just couldn’t do it anymore, and they kept being girl after girl. There’s a story that when Ma was carrying Rosie she made Pa promise that this was the last, and he’d agreed because he was sure it was a boy this time. A gypsy told him. Then when Rosie was born they both wept, Ma with relief and Pa with disappointment, and afterwards he would never allow gypsies to camp in Gypsy Hollow.

  The title, and Carnforth Castle, will go to some boring Larkin cousins in Northumberland. You’d think this was a tragedy and the end of a way of life the way Pa carries on, but it happens every couple of generations in every family in England and somehow everything stays the same. For that matter, Grandfather was the nephew of the previous Lord Carnforth, and Pa himself was a younger son. If Uncle Bartie hadn’t been killed at Ypres he’d not have inherited. In fact, Pa was in line to inherit anyway, because according to some letters Tess found inside The Symposium our sainted uncle was as bent as a paperclip. But if he’d had to wait for Bartie to die in the usual way, we wouldn’t have been brought up at Carnforth.

  Carnforth isn’t much like Elsinore really. It’s in Oxfordshire, about twenty miles from Oxford itself. They cal
l it a castle, but there’s only really the keep and one tower that’s medieval. Most of the house is eighteenth century. The medieval castle was built by some Norman Larkins who tramped over tediously from the Continent with William the Conqueror. They lived in it through the Middle Ages, no doubt finding it drafty and inconvenient, assuming the rest of it was like the bits that are left. The Elizabethan Larkins had the good sense to move to London where they could go to see original Shakespeare plays, and let the castle decay. I always say I’m a throwback to them. After the civil war, unfortunately, the Restoration Larkins decided to go back to Carnforth. Perhaps they didn’t get on with Nell Gwyn. They built a charming manor house beside the falling-down castle. That manor house burned down at the end of the eighteenth century, just in time to be regarded as charming ruins by the Regency Larkins, who rebuilt the castle. There’s a painting of the Restoration house in the billiard room, and one room of it survives as a sort of barn. We used to spend a lot of time in it.

  People think it must be frightfully grand living somewhere your ancestors have always lived, but they don’t think of the horrors of eighteenth-century kitchens, miles from the dining room so that the food is always cold. They don’t think of trying to heat the Hall—that’s the old keep, the central part of the house, where you come in. Most of all they don’t imagine being cooped up there for eighteen years seeing almost nobody but your family.

  We didn’t go to school. Pappa had the theory that school made girls vulgar and ordinary. Nor did we have a governess. Pappa thought Mamma quite adequate to teach us, not really considering that she had never had much of an education herself. Mamma did teach us all to read, more or less, but her lessons never got much beyond that. Fortunately there was an excellent library, mostly bought by the yard by our grandfather. None of the books were modern, except for Pappa’s collection of books on the Great War, but it was possible to read anything worth reading that had been written before 1875. Those of us given to reading read a lot. Tess did, and I did, but Pip hardly opened a book and I don’t believe Rosie ever did. For me, it was something to do. I sometimes say it was good training for an actress. I read widely. I learned to memorize and to recite—Pappa was awfully fond of having us learn poetry. I had most of Marmion by heart before I was ten.