A Capital Crime (7 page)

‘Of course you’re not, darling, but you might know – even if you don’t know that you know – a man who is.’

‘Claude, you mean?’

‘I didn’t, but I suppose it’s possible. He’s in Palestine, and Jock says the Soviets are giving the Israelis an awful lot of help.’ Lally rolled her eyes. ‘Trying to get them to join the club … Would you like another drink, darling? It’s jolly good, isn’t it? Jock knows a lovely wine merchant …’ She made a dramatic finger-to-lips gesture.

‘Thanks.’ Diana held out her glass.

As Lally got up to refill it, she said, ‘Can’t remember if I told you, but he’s written a book. Naval history – all very learned. I’ve been reading bits of it, but it’s terribly hard going because his handwriting’s impossible.’

‘I can type it for him,’ said Diana, eagerly. ‘I had lots of practice in Hampshire. A woman from the village taught me properly, so I could help Evie with the WVS and billeting and things.’ Seeing Lally’s raised eyebrows, she added, ‘Oh, she was in her element, with the chance to boss so many people around. Honestly, Lally, I’d be delighted to help Jock. It’s so good of you to put me up at such short notice – it would be wonderful if I could do
something
in return.’

‘I should think Jock would jump at it, but I don’t suppose he’ll be back for ages, so why don’t—’

Hearing the sound of the front door, Lally stopped. ‘That’s odd. It can’t be anyone else, but he told me—’

She stopped again as Jock Anderson walked into the room, an unhappy tension about him that was a world away from his usual urbane and cheerful self.

‘Darling!’ Lally sprang off the sofa. ‘I thought you were out being grand.’

‘Something came up,’ he said with heavy irony, dumping his briefcase on the floor and sitting down in the space that Lally had
vacated, head in hands. He rubbed his face for a moment, said, ‘Christ!’ and then, spotting the visitor, ‘Evening, Diana. Didn’t expect to see you here.’

‘She’s staying with us, darling.’ Lally went to the tray. ‘Have you had an awful day? You look as if you could do with a drink.’

‘Thanks. Scotch.’

Sensing that she might be surplus to requirements, Diana said, ‘Why don’t I go and unpack or something?’

Jock put out a restraining hand. ‘Thanks, but no need to be tactful. You might as well know. It’s F-J.’

‘We were just talking about him, weren’t we, Lally? What’s happened?’

Jock stared at her for a moment, as if he hadn’t seen her properly before, and Diana noticed that the muscles in his jaw were clenched. ‘He’s dead.’

Chapter Ten

‘Dead?’ Diana echoed the word in disbelief. ‘F-J?’

‘I’m afraid so. The housekeeper found him this morning, at his flat in Dolphin Square. He’d hanged himself.’

‘My God.’ Lally handed Jock his drink, her face blank with shock. ‘Why? Did he leave a note?’

Jock sighed, a long, uneven sound like a last exhalation. ‘He didn’t need to explain. He’d been arrested.’

‘Arrested? When? For what?’

‘Yesterday evening, for importuning.’ Jock sounded weary and disgusted. ‘In a public lavatory. Chap turned out to be a plain-clothes policeman.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Lally. ‘What was F-J doing there in the first place?’

‘Presumably,’ said Diana, keeping her tone brisk to disguise her horror and embarrassment, ‘he wanted to relieve himself.’

Jock shook his head. ‘The place is known for that sort of thing, apparently.’

‘But why go in there?’ asked Diana, bewilderment giving place, with horrid clarity, to understanding. ‘I mean, surely F-J doesn’t – didn’t – have to … well, you know … Go into public places like that.’

Jock sighed. ‘It appears that was the attraction. Meeting a … a certain type of person. Excitement outside one’s social circle. Like a married man who visits a prostitute, I suppose. Really, Diana,’
he added irritably, ‘I don’t understand it any more than you do, but that’s what happened.’

Diana thought of the night in Apse’s flat during an air-raid when, hidden inside a cupboard, she’d overheard his conversation with the male tart he’d brought home, the unlikely coquettishness in his tone, and the rhythmic noises of their congress.

‘F-J said he was a fool to think he could get away with it,’ said Jock. ‘Mind you, he said the policeman came up to him first, but the policeman said it was the other way round, and of course there’s no doubt as to who would have been believed.’

‘Do you mean,’ said Diana, ‘that there are policemen who specialise in that sort of thing? Trapping people?’

‘Handsome young policemen,’ said Jock. ‘And this one,’ he added, viciously, ‘will doubtless be commended for behaving like a male prostitute. F-J gave a false name, but even if no-one had recognised him, he wouldn’t have been able to carry on working for the Service – too much of a risk. He was due in court this morning. God …’ Shuddering, Jock took a large gulp of his drink. ‘It was horrible, seeing him like that. Blank. As if he’d been stripped naked. He talked about it afterwards. How he put it was that men like him have two sets of friends. Two lives. He said he’d always been afraid that they’d collide and that he’d tried to leave it alone, but the loneliness … impulses – and sooner or later he’d always fall back into his former ways. He said that was a relief at first, not having to pretend all the time, but then the shame …’

‘What about his wife?’ asked Lally.

Jock shook his head and looked into his glass – now empty – then went to the drinks tray and poured himself a second Scotch. His back to them both, he said, ‘I telephoned her. Someone had to tell her. It was …’ Lally went to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘I’m sure you were kind,’ she said.

‘She made it easy for me,’ said Jock. ‘When I’d told her how he’d
died, she didn’t ask me why he’d done it, or if he’d left a note, or anything.’

‘Well, they did lead fairly separate lives, darling. Perhaps she knew about him.’

Gently, Jock pushed Lally’s hand away and turned to face them. ‘I don’t know … If she did, she certainly didn’t want to hear me say it. I can’t blame her for that … F-J talked about her, too. He said that if things had been different, he would have told her what sort of man he was when he proposed, but he couldn’t. He said, when he married her, he honestly thought he could begin again – wipe out the past.’ Jock paused and looked directly at Diana, and a dull flush spread across his face. ‘He told me he was …’ he grimaced, ‘
in love
with Ventriss.’

‘I know,’ said Diana. ‘I overheard them talking once.’ She took a sip of her drink and lit a cigarette in order not to have to look at Jock, remembering how she’d stood outside the door of F-J’s office and heard Claude taunting him.
Apse did it because he thought he could get away with it. After all, most of his friends do, don’t they, Charles? At least I’m honest. I don’t use women as camouflage … You made damn sure that Evie Calthrop got to know about Diana and me, didn’t you, Charles? But I don’t think you’re in any position to preach morality, are you?
She remembered, too, the conversation she’d had later with lovely Inspector Stratton. He’d been so kind and understanding when she’d blurted out about Claude’s hold over F-J and her suspicion that Apse’s death was not, as officially recorded, a suicide …

‘He said something about that – thinking they were alone and hearing the door of the flat close. He wondered if it was you.’

‘Yes, it was.’

Although she was only about six feet away from Jock and Lally, the silence between them, as the implications of this sank in, felt like an immense void. She stared down at her shoes, knowing that she’d never be able to talk to them about it, even if it were allowed.

The chime of the hall clock made them all jump. ‘Oh, Lord,’
said Lally. ‘We’ve got the Tremaines coming to dinner in half an hour. Does Davy know?’ Davy Tremaine had been a colleague of Jock’s since the war years.

‘Yes.’ Jock drained his glass and set it on the tray. ‘Better go and dress, then.’

Sitting at the dressing table in her room, Diana brushed her hair mechanically. She could picture F-J quite clearly, as if it was his face reflected in the mirror and not her own – the round, dark eyes with their long lashes and the squashy button nose that gave him the slightly querulous charm of a pug. The first time she’d met him, she’d been tempted to pat him, despite his formidable intellect. She remembered his flat-cum-office in the monumental Art Deco grandeur of Dolphin Square, with its strange mixture of sturdy Edwardian brass-and-wood masculinity and the feminine delicacy of the
toile de Jouy
and petit point she’d assumed had come from the wife that no-one ever saw. And that strange painting of the naked boy bather that had been a gift from Neville Apse … She thought of his desk, always – in contrast to his dapper appearance – so untidy, and of how, after one of her first successes gathering information, he’d given her a jar of bath salts. That was when she’d trusted him. That was before his jealousy about her and Claude had led him to take steps to ensure that Evie got to hear of their affair, and before he’d arranged, quite deliberately, that she be the one to find Apse’s body. It had been his way of warning her – telling her that he knew she knew about him and she’d better keep her mouth shut, or …

Now, she found that she felt no anger towards him, only pity. All his precautions had come to nothing because, in the end, he’d betrayed himself. Setting down her hairbrush, Diana began powdering her face. Why on earth had he done it? Thinking of Claude, and the reckless way she’d behaved over him, she supposed she did understand, a little …

The Tremaines arrived and everyone acted, in an exhaustingly resolute and determined way, as if it were an entirely ordinary evening (‘Our Mrs Robinson’s such a treasure, she can conjure the most marvellous food out of thin air …’). Sitting over drinks, then dinner, trying to talk normally, was like being caught up in a bizarre nightmare. Jock and Davy discussed China and Mao Tse Tung. They even had an argument about it, but it seemed manufactured, a repetition of familiar positions without conviction or passion. Jean Tremaine and Lally nodded, asked occasional questions and looked interested, and no-one said a word about F-J. Diana stared glassily at her plate, toying with her food – which was anything but marvellous, being the colour, texture and, probably, the taste of Thames mud – and, pleading tiredness from travelling, went up to bed as soon as she decently could.

Lying on her back, staring into the darkness, she thought that, in the end, F-J had lived up to the ‘code’ of behaviour that bound them all. Just like all those Romans he must have learnt about at school … She tried to imagine him as a boy, inkily cramming at his books, reading about senators ordered to commit suicide by emperors, doing the classical equivalent of the decent thing. We flatter ourselves that we’ve progressed so much, she thought, but we’re just like they were: impaled, like butterflies are in display cases – not by belief in the system of things but by the
necessity
for that belief, whether we like it or not. Then, as now, it meant war and treachery and casualties, but it was immutable. We must think the same, say the same,
be
the same, and if, in any way, we find ourselves unable to conform, we must pretend. Hard on the heels of that idea came another: I’ve spent my life trying to conform and pretend, and I’ve failed. I don’t want to try any more. I want to change.

Chapter Eleven

It was well after one in the morning when Stratton and Ballard, accompanied by the piles of clothing removed from the bodies, returned to West End Central in a police car brought to the Middlesex for the purpose. The car nosed its way slowly through the acrid, sooty smog that swirled around it, reducing visibility to a few feet, despite the street lamps and the headlights of occasional passing vehicles.

‘Message for you from DCI Lamb, sir,’ said Cudlipp the desk sergeant, when they arrived. ‘DI Grove and DS Porter went down to Merthyr Tydfil to collect Davies. They ought to be there now – they’re awaiting your instructions, sir. Shall I place a call?’

‘Yes, please.’ Stratton blew his nose. It came out black. ‘A real pea-souper out there,’ he said, shoving the handkerchief back into his pocket. ‘And if you could put these,’ Stratton indicated the piles of clothing brought in by Ballard and the driver, ‘in the Charge Room, and rustle up a spot of tea … We’ll be in my office.’

‘Right you are, sir. That their clothes, is it? Her and the nipper?’

‘That’s right.’

‘This Davies sounds a right one.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘This came through, too. From Constable Williams in Wales, sir. Statements of a Mr and Mrs Howells.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Right.’ Stratton put down the receiver. ‘Grove and Porter will bring Davies back by the early train. They’ll say nothing to him about finding the bodies – as far as he knows, it’s still just the briefcase we want him for. The train gets into Paddington at ten past ten, so we’ll need to organise a car to meet it. I’ll go along. We’ll need the formal identification first thing, and once we’ve interviewed Davies, which we’ll do straight away, we need to get the Backhouses in to make separate statements. Then there’s the workmen. Backhouse said they were at the house three weeks ago, which means they must have been around when Muriel and the baby were killed. We need to find out who they are and have a word with them, sharpish. Presumably the bodies weren’t in the wash-house before they arrived, or they’d have spotted them – they seemed to have used the place for storing paint and whatnot. And we need to find out when they gave Backhouse those floorboards for firewood, assuming that’s where they came from.’