Ha'penny

  “What are you intending to do?”

  “Miss Gilmore was one of us.”

  “Lauria Gilmore?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “There are true patriots in unexpected places.”

  “I suppose there must be,” I said, doubtfully.

  Uncle Phil hesitated. “I know I can trust you, Viola, whether you help us or not?” He looked at me sternly.

  “Of course, Uncle Phil,” I said. It was true too, I would never have gone to the police to denounce him.

  “Miss Gilmore had read my speeches and realized that I was a lonely voice speaking out against the government. She wanted to help. She and Peter Marshall were building a bomb, which she was going to place in a box in the theater on the opening night when Mark Normanby and Herr Hitler will be attending the play. Removing them will cause a power vacuum both here and in Germany, and I will be standing by to step into that vacuum here and turn back what the Farthing Set have done. I won’t seize power myself, of course. I shall attempt to persuade Mr. Churchill to come back and form a government.”

  He was living in a dream of 1940, when this had actually worked. Mr. Churchill was even older than Uncle Phil, he must have been nearly seventy.

  “If he won’t come back, I shall attempt to persuade Mr. Attlee to form a government. He is the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, after all.” He sighed. “Whoever does it must be better for the country than Normanby. We will remove an incipient dictator, for the general good.”

  “But Lauria and Mr. Marshall blew themselves up,” I pointed out.

  He looked at me, and frowned.

  “Are you asking me to plant a bomb for you?”

  “Security at the theater will be very tight, with the Fuhrer and the Prime Minister attending the performance,” Uncle Phil said. “You will have the perfect reason for going in and out, as Miss Gilmore would have.”

  “But even granting what you say about England and incipient dictatorship, aren’t you asking me to take a tremendous risk?” I asked. “Lauria blew herself up and didn’t even take Hitler and Normanby with her.”

  “That’s why I asked Sir Aloysius to bring in an expert this time,” Uncle Phil said. “Mr. Connelly will do all the difficult and dangerous work with the bomb. He knows about these things. I wish I’d consulted him before this tragic accident. All you’ll have to do is get the device into the theater. You’ll have to work quite closely with Mr. Connelly, of course.”

  And then what happened? I could imagine the theater, the first night, smuggling in the bomb and putting it in the box, inside a box of chocolates perhaps. I could imagine the explosion, the disruption of the performance. Uncle Phil’s mind then leapt to the political vacuum he would fill. Mine saw the bleeding bodies of the innocents who had come to see Hamlet—and my body. That’s the way the script had to go. If I survived the blast, I’d be hanged, perhaps with an affecting speech about some vague freedom that had never been real anyway. It wasn’t me they wanted, it was Saint Joan. The brave heroine part they were expecting me to play would inevitably end with me dead. I hadn’t come here to audition for that. Ginns, Siddy had said. Well, that wasn’t enough.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, Uncle Phil. Of course I won’t tell anyone what you’re doing, and I wish you all the best of luck with it, but I really don’t care enough about all this to take that sort of risk.”

  “You’re afraid because of what happened to Lauria?” Uncle Phil asked, quite gently.

  It wasn’t fear, or not the way he thought. “Not only that,” I said. “You say Normanby had a bloodless coup. What’s the difference between that and the bloody coup you’re suggesting? I think you’re exaggerating how awful they are and how much difference you could make. Nobody cares. You’re a good man, but politics is politics. Mr. Churchill, or Mr. Attlee, wouldn’t really do anything differently from the way Mr. Normanby’s doing it. As for Hitler, what happens in the Reich isn’t any of our business. Why is any of this something that I should be prepared to die for?”

  Uncle Phil looked tired and old and didn’t say anything for a moment after I said this. It must have hurt him to see that I was in accord with the papers and everyone else in thinking him crazy. “Even if you don’t see it as your patriotic duty, will you talk to Malcolm?” he asked.

  “Of course I’ll talk to Malcolm,” I said. “But I can’t see how he could change my mind. I’m decided.”

  Uncle Phil got up, patted my shoulder, and left the room. I looked out at the view, not really seeing it. They couldn’t do it without me, so I didn’t need to let anyone know, which I had in any case promised not to. Poor Uncle Phil. Poor Siddy. They must have been desperate. What a feeble alliance. I really didn’t understand how they could imagine it would make a difference.

  8

  Jacobson interrupted them as they were coming back downstairs. He didn’t look Jewish, Carmichael thought, with that sandy hair and handlebar mustache.

  “Any news?” Carmichael asked.

  “I’ve found the servants,” Jacobson said. “They came here last night and seeing as they had nowhere to go and we knew you’d want to speak to them, we put them into a hotel in Belsize Park overnight.”

  “All three of them?” Royston asked.

  “Yes, all of them. They said they’d been given the day off. The Spanish girl knew about the bomb, she’d seen the papers, but it was quite a surprise for Mr. and Mrs. Green.”

  “Did you question them?”

  “Not really. I didn’t want to tread on your toes. We looked at their papers, asked what time they’d gone out and how long they’d been employed here, that’s all.”

  “Good,” Carmichael said, pleased. It would be much better to talk to them himself, and have their first reactions. “Did you ever meet Miss Gilmore, Inspector?”

  Jacobson colored. “I saw her act as often as I could, but I was never introduced to her.”

  Carmichael decided not to break the news about his idol’s bomb-making activities just yet. He very much wanted to talk to someone who could shed some light on precisely why a successful actress might decide to make a bomb.

  “Let’s get on and see the servants,” he said.

  “They were asking about their belongings,” Jacobson said.

  Royston glanced at Carmichael, who nodded. “Their rooms, at the top of the house, aren’t much damaged. There’s no reason they can’t have their things, once we’ve gone through them a bit more.”

  “Anything we might want to look at would be papers, not clothes or anything like that,” Carmichael added. “Do you have a discriminating constable who could do that?”

  “Not here,” Jacobson said, blandly. Carmichael belatedly remembered the anti-Semitism of the constable on guard. “I can send someone round to do it.”

  Carmichael nodded. “Tell them not to touch Miss Gilmore’s room. For one thing, it’s not really safe.”

  Jacobson came with them to Belsize Park in the Bentley. It made sense because he knew the way, but Carmichael found his presence surprisingly inhibiting. He was used to using their interludes in the car as times to talk to Royston uninterruptedly, to toss ideas at him.

  The hotel looked grim enough in the sunshine that Carmichael was glad not to have seen it the day before. There was a neatly lettered sign proclaiming it the Hampstead Gardens Temperance Hotel, prop. S. Channing.

  “Give me a nice pub any day, sir,” Royston said, echoing his own thoughts.

  “Do you often use this place, Inspector?” Carmichael asked Jacobson.

  “Often enough,” Jacobson replied. “If we have a witness come up from the country, maybe, or if there’s someone, like now, we want to hang on to without putting them in a cell. It’s respectable and quiet, and not too dear.”

  It was respectable enough, in fact painfully, excruciatingly respectable. The spikes of the iron railings repelled, the narrow windows seemed to frown, and the window boxes were all bare.

  Jacobson knocked at the front door, which o
pened to emit a faint smell of much-boiled cabbage, mixed with the kind of starch used to stiffen tablecloths. The maid who opened it shrank back a little at the sight of the men. “Mrs. Channing’s ever so cross,” she confided to Jacobson.

  “We want to see the people Sergeant Griffith brought here yesterday, please,” Jacobson replied.

  The maid retreated inside, and the policemen followed her into the front hall of the hotel. It was painted dark brown and held a little desk, like a lectern, bearing a diary and a telephone. There were flights of stairs leading both up and down, and a number of closed doors. One of them opened with a bang, increasing the smell of cabbage considerably.

  The figure who opened it was clearly by her bearing and ample proportions not a maid, but the landlady herself. She was frowning. “Mr. Jacobson, I am disappointed in you,” she declared.

  “Mrs. Channing?” Jacobson replied in an inquiring tone. The maid who had opened the front door took the opportunity to escape down the stairs.

  “Two of the persons Sergeant Griffith brought here last night proved to be Jews, once I had the chance to inspect their papers.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Green, yes,” Jacobson said, patiently. His face was wooden.

  She drew herself up. “You were aware of this?”

  “We’d seen their papers, naturally. Mrs. Channing—”

  Carmichael decided to interrupt with a little charm.

  “Sometimes duty compels us to unpleasant tasks,” he said.

  Unmollified, Mrs. Channing turned her frown on Carmichael. “And who are you?”

  “Inspector Carmichael, Scotland Yard,” he said, taking out his police identification.

  “Well, your duties might, mine do not extend that far,” she said, raising her chin.

  “We would like to speak to all three of the people who were brought here yesterday,” Carmichael said.

  “You can see the Spanish girl in the lounge if you want to, but I sent the others off,” Mrs. Channing said.

  “Do I understand that you refused to house Mr. and Mrs. Green?” Carmichael asked.

  “They were Jews! This is a respectable house! I am a respectable widow, and this hotel is how I make ends meet. I’m under no obligation to have Jews here. The police pay, but I have my other customers to think about. They come here because it’s respectable. What would they think about sitting down next to dirty Jews?”

  “Where are Mr. and Mrs. Green now?” Carmichael asked, as calmly as he could.

  “How would I know?” she asked, sullenly.

  “They didn’t say where they intended to go, having been cast into the night?”

  “I certainly didn’t inquire.” She sniffed.

  “You just let them go?” Jacobson asked.

  “This is not a prison,” she said. “This is a hotel. The police can tell people to stay here if they want to, but I’m not responsible for keeping them here. And I will not have Jews sleeping in my beds. I’d have had to burn the sheets. Never send any here again, do you hear me, Inspector Jacobson?”

  “I think you’ve made your feelings perfectly clear. It remains to be seen whether we send you anyone again. For now, then, I think we’ll talk to Miss Carl,” Jacobson said.

  “Wait in the lounge,” she said, opening a door.

  The lounge was a cheerless room with mismatched chairs placed at geometric angles to each other on a square of carpet. A fire was laid but not lit. There was a large wireless set on a table under the window. The three men looked at each other for a moment, then Jacobson laughed, and the others joined him.

  “What an outburst!” Carmichael said.

  “It’ll make it twice as hard, needing to find them again,” Royston said.

  “Doesn’t she know you’re Jewish?” Carmichael asked.

  Jacobson stopped laughing. “Of course she does. Her husband was Jewish!”

  “So she’s the respectable widow of a dead Jew?” Royston said, and guffawed again. “She’ll have to burn every sheet in the place.”

  Carmichael ignored him and turned to Jacobson. “She let them go?”

  “Looks like it. Though that was a hell of a performance. What beats me is why they needed to be let go. We didn’t have anything against them. What could they have known? Unless they were the bombers?”

  Carmichael thought of the faded notes on bomb-making on Lauria Gilmore’s desk. But she could have been in a conspiracy with her servants, as well as PM. “They’ve just risen very high on my list of suspects,” he said.

  The door opened and a girl came in. She had heaps of dark hair, done up on top of her head, and she was dressed quite smartly in a pale pink dress trimmed with lace. Carmichael realized as he saw her that he had been subconsciously expecting her to be like poor Agnes Timms, who had been a lady’s maid before she became a hairdresser and was shot for knowing more than she should have. One look at Mercedes Carl was enough to dispel the thought. She had a pretty, lively face, big dark eyes, and nothing of Agnes’s air of taking careful thought for the future. She looked apprehensive now, but despite that her face looked as if she liked to laugh.

  “Miss Carl, thank you for coming,” Jacobson said. “Please sit down. Inspector Carmichael has a few questions for you.”

  Mercedes took a frayed red velvet chair in front of the door.

  Carmichael had been standing by the wireless. He hastily sat down himself, next to Royston, on a spindly legged chair. Jacobson remained standing, by the fireplace. Royston took out his notebook and pen.

  “Your name is Mercedes Carl?”

  “Carlos,” the girl corrected. “I call myself Carl here, to be easier, but properly it is Carlos. But please call me Mercedes.” She had a noticeable Spanish accent, but that wasn’t what disconcerted Carmichael. She didn’t speak like a servant, but as if she considered herself his equal.

  “And how old are you?”

  “I am twenty-five.”

  “And how long have you been working for Miss Gilmore?”

  “Three years now,” Mercedes replied.

  “Your English is very good,” Carmichael said.

  She smiled. “When I came it was very bad.”

  “Why did you come here from Spain?”

  “Lauria was playing in Barthelona, and she stayed in the house where I was then working. My mistress lent me to her, to help her dress, and we liked each other. When she left she asked me to come with her, so I came.”

  “Do you like England?”

  “London, I like. I like the cinemas and the shops and the Tube. Other parts of England I have seen when Lauria is on tour, I do not like so much.” She gave a little shudder.

  Carmichael noticed that Royston nodded approvingly and Jacobson went so far as to give a sympathetic shudder. Lancastrian that he was, Carmichael still had sufficient sympathy to smile at the girl. “Now, tell me what you did for Miss Gilmore.”

  “I looked after her clothes and her hair and helped her dress. She was beautiful, but she was getting older, and when you get older beauty takes more effort and time. I used to read the papers for her, Vogue and the papers from Paris, and if there was anything that would do for her I would show her. Making her look good was our shared project.” She smiled, then stopped smiling abruptly. “I can’t believe she is dead. She was very good to me. She helped me so much. I had plenty of time to myself, not like in Spain. When I first came she had one of her friends act as tutor to help me learn English. And she always took an interest in my affairs. She was a friend as well as an employer. She helped me get papers.”

  “I suppose I should look at your papers,” Carmichael said, and extended a hand. She produced them from her bag. Carmichael had expected to see a work permit, and was surprised to see that they were British identity papers, proclaiming her place of birth as Barcelona, her parents as Spanish, and her religion as Roman Catholic, but nevertheless recorded her as a naturalized British citizen. Lauria Gilmore had certainly not stinted her help with papers.

  “Will you go back to Spa
in now?” Carmichael asked, looking up again.

  “I? Spain?” For a moment she looked almost afraid, perhaps realizing how empty her future was without Lauria Gilmore. Then she smiled. “No. I will look for work here. I like London too much.”

  “Do you have any idea why Miss Gilmore might have been killed?”

  She shook her head. “None. I was shocked when I saw it in the Standard. Why would anyone bomb Lauria? She was kind and good.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about bombs?” Carmichael asked, though it was a long shot.

  Mercedes looked puzzled. “You mean the Blitz? Yes, sometimes, stories about the war. She worked in a canteen.”

  “What were her political views?”

  “She hated Mr. Normanby.” Mercedes smiled again. “How she would go on about how she hated him. She hated Hitler in Germany too, and Franco in Spain, Stalin in Russia, and all the others. She liked democracy, voting, that’s why she got me my papers, so I could vote. She liked little people, underdogs she called them. She liked Mr. Bevan, very much, and Mr. Atterly.”

  “Atterly?” Carmichael asked.

  “Attlee, she means, sir,” Royston said, looking up from his notebook. “I’ve written down Attlee.” Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, the Official Opposition, a colorless man who Churchill had once described as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.”

  “Atterly, yes,” Mercedes confirmed, smiling at Royston.

  “Did she know them personally?”

  “She had met, yes, at parties, you know how it is, theater people, political people meet sometimes. She had to sit at dinner once next to the one who was killed, Thirkie, she told me about it after. She said he was the best of a bad lot.” Carmichael could hear the echo of the mistress saying it in her maid’s voice.

  “So, yesterday,” Carmichael said. “Was Saturday usually your day off?”

  “Not usually, but if I want a day, Lauria usually lets me change, unless she needs me particularly.”

  “And did you especially want to be off yesterday?” Carmichael asked.

  “Yesterday, yes, because I was meeting someone.” She looked down coquettishly. “My friend was free Friday and Saturday, and I asked Lauria if I could change and have one of those days, and she said yes, she didn’t need me after Friday morning. She had an appointment for lunch on Friday, with Antony at the Venezia, which meant a part.”