Ha'penny

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “Thank you for listening to me, Antony, I really appreciate that.” Mrs. Tring took one of the vases into her own room and came past me with the other towards mine.

  “We all want to keep the actors happy,” he said. “Good-bye now, Viola, see you on Monday, and make sure you know your lines.”

  “You know I always do,” I said. “Good-bye, Antony.”

  “What did he say?” Mollie asked.

  “He immediately thought I meant you for Gertrude, because his mind’s full of Lauria being blown up, and he thought you’d be wonderful at the sobbing. He must have seen you in Dunkirk, you cried a lot in that, didn’t you? But he was afraid you weren’t old enough. I tried to say that Gertrude has to be sexy as well as old enough to be my mother, so he wants to see you tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday. He likes your voice. I’d try to look mature but sexy, if I were you.”

  Mrs. Tring laughed. “Mature and sexy, that’s quite a job. I don’t know how you dress for that one.”

  “Like my sister Pip,” I said, thinking of a recent photograph I’d seen in the papers. Pip’s only two years older than I am, but she’s had four children and she’s always had a matronly figure.

  “Which one is that,” Mrs. Tring asked. “The one who’s married to Hitler or the one who paints?”

  “It isn’t Hitler, it’s Himmler,” I said, humming the “mm” and stretching it out. “And yes, that one. The one who paints is Dodo.”

  “I don’t know how you keep up with your family,” Mrs. Tring said. “One married to Himmler and practically queen of the Czechs from what they say, one married to a duke, one a communist, one married to that atom man, and you. Not a normal one among you.”

  I laughed. “I’m perfectly normal. And Rosie, that’s the one married to the Duke of Lancashire, she’s perfectly normal, apart from being batty about hunting. She did everything just as Mamma expected. And my oldest sister, Olivia, who was killed in the Blitz, was normal, except for going to Oxford. And come to that Dodo’s normal apart from the painting. You can’t blame her for being married to a scientist. It’s only really Pip and Siddy who are eccentric.”

  “And the absurd things you call them!” Mrs. Tring said.

  “Well, you have to call people something, and with the absurd names Mother gave us, we had to make up something better.”

  “Your mother liked Shakespeare, I don’t see what’s wrong with that,” Mollie said.

  “Olivia, Celia, Viola, Cressida, Miranda, Rosalind,” Mrs. Tring said. It had been a kind of catechism in the society papers at about the time when Mamma brought Dodo and Rosie out together.

  “Tess, Pip, me, Siddy, Dodo, and Rosie,” I countered. “And they used to call me Fatso.”

  “You could have changed your name,” Mollie said. “Though I suppose you did, in one way. Why do you call yourself Lark in the theater instead of Larkin?”

  “I didn’t want people who read the Tatler calling me ‘the one who acts,’ ” I said, looking at Mrs. Tring, because of course it was from her weekly perusal of the Tatler that she knew so much about my sisters. “Though they do anyway, of course. Besides, Mamma said they were casting me out of the family. I couldn’t keep using their name after that.”

  “Most of the time, nobody would think you were any different from anyone else,” Mrs. Tring said. “But it does show through sometimes.”

  “I hope not!” I said, horrified. “Point it out to me next time it does so I can change whatever it is.”

  “You’ve changed your voice,” Mollie said, reassuringly. “It’s not that awful bray anymore.”

  “I didn’t mean anything bad, dear,” Mrs. Tring said. “It’s just strange thinking of you being brought up in a castle and now living in a flat with the rest of us.”

  “The flat’s a great deal more comfortable than the castle ever was,” I said, which is nothing but the truth. “Pappa doesn’t believe in using more coal than he absolutely has to, so Carnforth Castle is always icy, especially the bedrooms. If anyone dares complain, he tells them they shot people for less in the trenches.”

  “If I’m playing your mother, maybe I ought to play her like your real mother,” Mollie said, smiling to herself. “Would you think Gertrude might have been like your mother?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Not very like. But as nobody ever murdered Pappa, I’m not sure how she’d act in those circumstances,” I said.

  For some reason they both found this frightfully funny and started to shriek with laughter, so I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine and took it back into the bedroom with me where the script was waiting.

  4

  Carmichael and Royston got back into the car outside the Hampstead police station. Carmichael held a piece of paper with the names of the servants, as well as a signed photograph of Lauria Gilmore as Kate in Happiness, provided by Inspector Jacobson and showing some signs of having been recently removed from a frame.

  “Where next, sir?” Royston asked.

  “It’s half-past four,” Carmichael said, looking at his watch. “We can’t expect the servants to be coming back yet, assuming they’re going to come back. Let’s go out to Amersham and have a word with Mrs. Kinnerson, whose husband seems to be the other victim. We ought to be able to find out something there.”

  “Break the news as well,” Royston said, glumly, putting the car into gear. “Not one of my favorite jobs. And difficult, with a grieving widow, to explain that her old man’s been blown up with his fancy piece.”

  “She may be relieved to be a widow, sergeant,” Carmichael said. “A merry widow, perhaps, relieved of a philandering husband.”

  Royston grunted.

  It took them nearly an hour to wind their way out to Amersham. “We’d have been quicker coming on the train,” Royston grumbled.

  Carmichael didn’t like Hampstead, but on the way to Amersham he reflected that Hampstead was at least a part of London. It had the Heath, an open piece of parkland, and the houses had little gardens, but houses and streets were packed closely together in recognition that land was precious. It was outer London, perhaps, but it was the city. Amersham, on the outer edges of the Metropolitan line, was far leafier. Houses stood detached in their own plots of ground. They were laid out along streets, as in town, but stood separately, as in the country. Miss Gilmore’s house, before the explosion, could be recognized as kin to Royston’s house. Mr. Kinnerson’s house in Amersham, with its gravel drive and garage, its shrubs and lawn, looked as if the kinship it wanted to claim, at whatever remove, was rather with Farthing and the other great country houses. If Hampstead had been a village two hundred years ago, Amersham had still been one at the end of the Great War. The coming of the railway had brought speculators here to build houses and season-ticket holders here to live in them. The houses were new, almost painfully so.

  “Thirty years ago, this was probably some farmer’s field,” Carmichael said, as they parked outside one of the identical villas.

  “There isn’t a shop or a pub for miles,” Royston pointed out.

  “Probably is in the old village. A shop with a little van that delivers.”

  “I wouldn’t live here for all the tea in China,” Royston said. “Neither one thing or the other, is it, sir?”

  There was a Morris Traveller parked on the driveway. The garage door behind it gaped open, showing a workbench and a pile of boxes. There would have been plenty of room for the car.

  They walked past the car and Royston pressed the bell-push beside the neat front door.

  A little maid in a neat cap opened the door, and when they asked for Mrs. Kinnerson disappeared inside. The hall had fitted peach carpet and clean white paintwork. There was a mirror on the wall above a pine telephone table.

  The maid came back and showed them into an empty room, furnished with a sofa and two matching armchairs, a huge veneered wireless and, on top of it, a television set. The peach carpet extended from wall to wall in her
e. The curtains matched it, and the walls were painted a pale peach. There were no pictures, or photographs. There was a clock hanging on the wall. The hands pointed to twenty-five to six. The maid left them standing there. Royston raised his eyebrows.

  The door opened again to reveal a woman in her mid-twenties, with neatly permed fair hair and an anxious expression. She wasn’t at all what Carmichael had expected; much younger and prettier. You wouldn’t expect a man to run around with a woman thirty years older than his wife. Still, there was no accounting for taste.

  “It’s my husband you’ll want,” she said, without hesitation. “I only drive to the station to meet him, and I’ve never been over the speed limit. You’ll have to talk to him, and he’s not here. I’m about to go and pick him up.”

  “Sit down, Mrs. Kinnerson,” Carmichael said. “My name is Inspector Carmichael, of Scotland Yard. I’m not here about the car.”

  She looked at him anxiously. “I have to go and pick my husband up from the station. I’ll be late.”

  “Sit down, please,” Carmichael said. “And might I sit down? And perhaps you could ask the maid to make some tea?”

  “There isn’t time,” she said.

  “I think you’ll find there is,” Carmichael said.

  She made a gesture, spreading her fingers. Carmichael found her hard to interpret; was that a shrug, a shudder, acquiescence, negation? She perched on the edge of the sofa, but did not summon the maid. Royston and Carmichael took the chairs. Royston took out his notebook and pencil.

  “You are Mrs. Kinnerson?” Carmichael asked.

  “Mrs. Matthew Kinnerson,” she replied, proudly.

  “And your Christian name?”

  “Rose,” she said, licking her lips nervously. “I don’t quite see—”

  “And you were expecting your husband, Matthew Kinnerson, home tonight?” Carmichael went on.

  “Yes, on the five-forty, and I need to be at the station to meet him or he’ll have to walk home and he won’t like that.” Her fingers played with the fringe on the arm of the sofa.

  “And where has he been?”

  “To work. He works at Solomon Kahn, the merchant bank.”

  He must be doing well there, too, to be able to afford to run both these houses. Though perhaps he had private means. “He works Saturdays?”

  She looked puzzled. “Yes. Well, not every Saturday, but quite often, yes. He’s working today.”

  “You weren’t expecting him to go to the house he owns in Hampstead tonight?”

  She looked up, startled. “No. What do you know about that?”

  Carmichael felt like a brute. “Mrs. Kinnerson, it seems your husband may have gone to Hampstead this morning, to see Miss Lauria Gilmore.”

  “No,” she said. “No, he was going to work. He wouldn’t have gone there. He’d have told me if he was going. Anyway, he wouldn’t have gone in the morning, he’d have gone after work.”

  “Did he spend the night there last night?” Carmichael asked.

  “No. Spend the night? I don’t know what you’re talking about. He was here last night and he left here on the eight-fifteen, I drove him to the station myself. I don’t suppose he’s ever spent a night in Hampstead in his life.”

  Royston and Carmichael exchanged glances. Royston shook his head pityingly at the depth of her denial. “Do you think we might ask for that tea, now?” Carmichael prompted.

  Mrs. Kinnerson’s eyes went to the clock on the wall, and realized that five-forty had come and gone, and with it the train. She shrugged again, and went to the door. “I don’t know what my husband will say,” she said. Then she stepped out into the hall. Royston shook his head. They could still hear her. “Hannah! Bring tea.”

  “But what about—” they heard the maid ask.

  “Never mind. I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on. Mr. Kinnerson will just have to walk from the station, that’s all there is to it. Bring tea, the police gentlemen have asked for it.”

  She came back into the room and sat down more firmly. “Now, I’ve ordered tea for you, so could you please tell me what this is all about?”

  Carmichael took a deep breath. “There was an explosion this morning in 35 Bedford Drive, Hampstead. Miss Lauria Gilmore was killed in the blast. There was a man with her. He was also killed, killed instantly. We have good reason to believe he was Mr. Kinnerson.”

  She didn’t collapse into hysterics as he had half-expected. She sat silent there for a moment. “No,” she said. “He was going to work, he wasn’t going to see Lauria today.” Then she began to weep, hopelessly. “She was always pestering him when there was trouble. The burglary last year, and when she was ill in the winter, and now this I suppose.”

  The maid came in with the tea, and left, giving only one look to her weeping mistress. Royston poured a cup for her, adding milk and plenty of sugar. “Drink it,” Carmichael said. “It’ll do you good.”

  She took the cup. Her hand was shaking so much that her teeth chattered against the rim and she slopped half of it into the saucer.

  “Have you any idea why anyone would want to bomb your husband, or Miss Gilmore?” Carmichael asked, as gently as he could.

  She looked at him incredulously. “Reason? What reason could there be? My husband works for the Jews, they wouldn’t want to murder him. It must have been left over from the war. That would have been just like Lauria. She’d find a bomb left from the war in her garden, and she’d have called Matthew to sort it out for her, called him at work, instead of the police. And he’d have gone round straight away, and, oh God!” She began to cry again.

  “Did your husband know about bombs?” Royston asked. “Was he in the sappers in the war? Or the ARP?”

  “No, he was in the Navy. He wouldn’t have known anything.” Mrs. Kinnerson blew her nose, noisily.

  Carmichael wanted to know about Kinnerson’s relationship with Gilmore, but couldn’t think of a way to approach the subject.

  “How long has Mr. Kinnerson owned the house in Hampstead?” he asked.

  “How long—” She pushed back her hair with both hands. “Years. Years and years. I think he bought it right after the war. Before we were married, anyway.”

  “So Mr. Kinnerson and Miss Gilmore have been friends a long time?” he asked, gently. Before he married? And had she known about it all the time but continued to deny it?

  “Friends?” she asked, and then began to laugh, peal after peal of hysterical laughter. Carmichael considered slapping her face, but settled for offering her more tea. He sat down beside her on the sofa. She drained the cup. “Did you think they were lovers?” she asked, hiccuping. “That’s just her theater manner. No, Inspector, though she dressed like lamb and called him darling or sweetheart every few words, Lauria Gilmore was my husband’s mother.”

  “Well, that explains why he bought a house for her,” Royston said, calmly.

  Carmichael thought that he’d flay Griffith the next time he saw him for so misleading him. How could he have built so much on the impressions of an insensitive Hampstead sergeant? “Who was his father?” he asked.

  “Oh, it all was perfectly ordinary,” Mrs. Kinnerson said. She wiped her eyes. The clock struck six. “Matthew’s father was a naval officer called Harold Kinnerson. He was married to Lauria Gilmore briefly. Matthew was born, and the marriage foundered because she cared more about her career. She went back to the stage, and Matthew was brought up by his father, when he wasn’t at sea, and by his Aunt May, who is still alive and the sweetest old lady imaginable. She lives in Leigh-on-Sea, in Essex. This is going to break her heart. I always said Matthew should think of her as his mother, not Lauria. But Lauria had the glamour. She didn’t want him as a child, but as an adult he was useful to her, someone at her beck and call. He adored her. His father was killed in the war, sunk with his ship in Norway. Matthew was twenty, twenty-one. He sold his father’s house and he used most of the capital to buy that place in Hampstead for Lauria. After that it was a case of
her lifting her little finger and getting him to do things for her. They’d have terrific rows sometimes, but she’d always charm him again. She was always asking him around. And now her silliness and her selfishness have killed him.”

  The door opened. Carmichael looked up, expecting the maid, and saw a self-possessed man in his early thirties, in a pin-striped suit and Marlborough tie.

  Mrs. Kinnerson screamed. Royston looked horrified.

  “Hello, I’m Matthew Kinnerson,” he said, inquiringly. His tone said that he well understood how to use politeness as a weapon.

  “They said you were dead!” Mrs. Kinnerson shrieked.

  “Well, the reports seem to have been exaggerated, as they say, so do calm down, Rose. Who are these gentlemen?”

  Carmichael stood. “I’m Inspector Carmichael, of Scotland Yard, and this is Sergeant Royston. I’m afraid there’s been a mistake.”

  “Ah.” Kinnerson looked Carmichael up and down. “Should you perhaps be next door? Might it not be as well to check on such things?”

  “Your mother, Lauria Gilmore, is dead,” Carmichael said.

  “I am aware of that, although your colleagues neglected to inform me and I had to garner the information from the pages of the public press,” Kinnerson said, tapping the newspaper under his arm. “ ‘Actress Blown to Bits.’ Poor Lauria. Yet in a way, she would have liked to go with a bang. Am I to believe that you had reason to believe I was blown up with her?”

  “Somebody was,” Carmichael said. “He was unrecognizable.”

  “And you jumped to the conclusion that it was me? Why didn’t you telephone my office, where I’d have been delighted to speak to you, instead of driving all the way out here and distressing my wife?”

  That was a very good question, and one for which Carmichael had no good answer. “The Hampstead police had your home address, but not your work telephone number,” Carmichael said. “I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

  Kinnerson raised an eyebrow, and Carmichael squirmed.