Death at Rottingdean (29 page)

“Do I want to be in on it?” Kipling grinned jauntily. “I'm always up for a jolly good adventure. But I checked the glass this morning, and it was beginning to fall. There may be a bit of a blow later this evening—not in time to spoil the picnic, however,” he added, with a little bow to Kate. “I'll tell Josie she's been invited. It'll please her mightily, and she can spend the morning in the kitchen, making her own sandwiches.” He went off whistling.

It was a busy morning at the stables. In the yard in front of the smithy, under the beechnut tree, a farrier bent over a horse's hoof, setting a new shoe. Behind him another smith hammered noisily at a bar of hot iron on his anvil while the smith's boy worked the bellows. Two whiskered gentlemen were studying the configuration of a large gray hunter, a uniformed trainer was working a recalcitrant colt in the exercise paddock, and a barefoot, ragged boy was dragging fouled hay out of the loose-boxes. The boy pointed the way to the stablemaster's office, and Charles took the liberty of opening the door without a preliminary knock.

Harry Tudwell was seated behind a scarred wooden table, gazing out the window in the direction of the smithy. He turned at the sound of the opening door, ready to lash out angrily at the interruption. But when he saw that the intruder was a gentleman, he got hastily to his feet and put on an amiable smile, which, Charles noted, did little to disguise the lines of worry that crossed his freckled forehead. The office smelled of tobacco and horse liniment, and the walls displayed old newspaper clippings. The London
Times
lay in a heap on the floor, a mug of tea sat on the table, and a cheap glass dish, a souvenir of Brighton, was overflowing with cigarette butts.

“G'mornin', sir,” Tudwell said with as much cheer as he could muster. His sandy hair was tousled and his pale blue eyes, rimmed with light lashes, were red. It appeared that the stablemaster had not slept well. “ ‘Ow can I 'elp ye? Are ye in th' market for stablin‘, or is't a 'orse ye're lookin' for?”

“Neither,” Charles said, and extended his hand with a show of great politeness. “I am Lord Charles Sheridan, Mr. Tudwell. I am here at the request of the Crown to look into the murders of the two coast guards.”

At the sound of the name, an anxious furrow appeared between Harry Tudwell's eyes. “Lord Sheridan?” he said. “The ... Crown?”

“Exactly so.” Charles sighed. “These deaths are a sad matter, of course. As you might imagine, there is a great deal of concern about the affair at the very highest levels. I have already spoken to several other people in the village, who suggested I talk with you.”

“They did, did they?” Harry Tudwell's eyes narrowed. “ ‘Oo was it? 'Oo told ye to talk to me?”

“I'm afraid I can't disclose the names of my informants, Mr. Tudwell. May we sit?” Charles pulled out a chair and sat down, crossing one leg over the other, being ostentatiously careful not to destroy the crease in his trousers. He took off his Homburg hat and perched it carefully on his knee, pulled out his pipe, and began to light it.

Eyes fixed on Charles, Harry Tudwell slowly lowered himself into his chair, reaching for a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He pulled one out and lit it with a hand that was trembling noticeably. “Well, I don't know why anybody'd send ye to me,” he muttered. “Ye're wastin' yer time. I don't know a thing.”

“I was informed that you might be able to say why the two men were killed,” Charles said in a conversational tone, sitting back with his pipe.

Harry Tudwell's ruddy face was growing redder. “Why they was killed!” he exclaimed hotly. “ ‘Ow should I know a thing like that? I 'ardly knew either of ‘em. Anyway, I 'eard George Radford killed hisself. Are ye tellin' me 'e was murdered?”

“Regrettably, yes,” Charles murmured. He glanced up. “I have been given to understand that Captain Smith was a particular friend of yours, Mr. Tudwell. I was hoping that you might have some knowledge of his personal affairs.”

“A partic‘lar friend!” Tudwell snorted. “I don't know 'oo ye've been talkin' to, but that's wrong. I knew ‘im to talk to, o' course, but as for 'is pers'nal affairs—” He paused and his mouth took on a calculating look. “I can name a name or two, though, if ye're lookin' for th' captain's friends. Or for someone 'oo might've ‘ad reason to kill 'im.”

Charles beamed. “Then I
have
come to the right man after all!” He pulled a leather-bound notebook out of his pocket, uncapped his fountain pen, and waited expectantly.

Harry Tudwell pushed his mouth in and out as if he were considering something. When he finally spoke, it was with a tone of finality. “Ye should talk to Trunky Thomas. Trunky owns th' bathin' machines at the Gap an' ‘as 'is own fishin' fleet. ‘E 'ad reg'lar dealings wi' the captain.”

Charles was writing busily. “And what sort of dealings would those be?”

There was a fractional pause, and Harry Tudwell's sandy eyebrows came together. “Now, that's none o' my business, is it?” he said. “I don't go round th' village nosin' into people's affairs. I give a ‘and 'ere and a ‘and there, when I see a need, and I keep a eye out to make sure things is goin' good. I
am
an elected member o' th' Parish Council, y' know.” He allowed himself a small smile. “But I keep my business to myself an' I don't ask questions about other folks' business.” Having delivered this speech, he sat back, more at ease.

Charles studied his notes. “A very commendable attitude, Mr. Tudwell. But, I fear, without benefit to the Crown.”

“I can't ‘elp that, now, can I?” There was a barely disguised edge of triumph in Harry Tudwell's voice. “But Trunky'll be glad to 'elp th' Crown. As I said, ‘e was close t' th' captain.”

“Thank you,” Charles said. He looked down at the notebook for a moment, then glanced up. “Perhaps, though, you can tell me about the tunnels.”

Harry seemed to catch a lungful of smoke and began to cough violently. It took him a few moments to recover, with the assistance of a gulp of cold tea from the mug at his elbow. “The tunnels?” he asked, when he could speak again. “You mean, those ol' smugglers' tunnels that was dug under the village, way back, which've been closed off for years an' years?”

“Yes,” Charles said. “Those tunnels.”

Harry's jaw worked. “There ain't much to tell. Ain't anything left of ‘em, either. It'd be dangerous to 'ave something like that open for children to lose theirselves in, now, wouldn't it? Why, there was a little boy, over in Kent, got into a tunnel an' got lost an' died. I read about it in th'
Times,
not six months ago.”

“So the tunnels are no longer in use?” “O' course not,” Harry said, in a voice that implied that Charles was a fool to ask the question. “Wot'd they be used for, I'd like to know.”

“Storage, perhaps. I understand that some of the cellars in the village open onto the tunnels.”

Harry returned a hollow laugh. “Storage! This is a
poor
village. Nobody's got much t' store, short of winter provisions.”

Charles spoke in an even tone. “Weapons, perhaps.”

Harry stared at him blankly.

“Explosives as well,” Charles added.

Harry blinked. “Ye're talkin' about guns? Ye' mean... rifles?”

“Then you know nothing of weapons and explosives being stored in the tunnels?”

“Rifles an' dynamite?” Harry exclaimed, incredulous. “Why, that's ridiculous, that's wot it is!” He half rose out of his chair. “ ‘Ooever told you there's guns down there is lyin' through 'is teeth. Why, there's nothin' down there but—” He stopped. “There's nothin' down there at all,” he said. “Tell me ‘oo said it, and I'll—”

Charles sat forward, emptied his pipe into the glass dish, and stood. “I believe I have taken enough of your time, Mr. Tudwell,” he said briskly. “If you think of anything else that might be of help, you may reach me at Seabrooke House. Good day.”

Harry sat for a moment after the gentleman had gone, shaking his head. “Rifles an' dynamite,” he muttered to himself. “Rifles an' dynamite. Why, I never 'eard such foolishness.”

A mask tells us more than a face.

—OSCAR WILDE

 

 

 

 

 

T
he photographer, dressed in gray tweed knickerbockers and a gray bowler, stood behind his camera and tripod on the high down, his head under the black cloth hood. Delicately, he adjusted the focus of the lens, perfecting the inverted image of the scene below on the ground glass screen at the back of the camera—a wide view from Beacon Hill to Saltdean, including the quiet village drowsing in the sun and the sea beyond. A beautiful view, one that would delight any sightseer and charm any number of viewers at home. A view so beautiful, in fact, that it almost distracted him from his present compelling difficulties and made him forget his purpose.

But the photographer was far too well disciplined to lose himself in the beauties of nature. Recalling himself to his task, he slipped the plate box into the camera and squeezed the pneumatic bulb that worked the shutter. Quickly, he took another shot of the same view, then ducked out from under the hood and searched through his camera bag until he found his compass. He noted the bearing of St. Margaret's church in the middle of the scene, and then took careful bearings on the abandoned windmill to the west and a barn on the cliff to the east, laying the compass on the stone wall beside him as he finished his notations. Without these measurements, the photographs would be merely pretty, like the snapshots the day-trippers took of the picturesque Sussex shore to show their friends and relations at home. With them, the view was not only pretty but immensely useful, for it allowed the features of the landscape to be precisely positioned on the most recent Ordnance Survey map and used for strategic purposes, rather than for mere entertainment.

For the past year, off and on, the photographer had been engaged in taking pictures of the entire South Sussex coast from Seaford to Worthing. Watching him, observing the care with which he planned his photographs and documented their position, someone might have thought that he was preparing these views for publication in a magazine or book. But these photographs would never be published, and only a handful of people would ever see them. They would be filed away against that future day when they would become vital to the national interest. And in the meantime, anyone who saw him at work would believe him to be an eccentric tourist engaged in an earnest, endless search for scenic beauty, doggedly seeking to capture on film the great, wide sweep of the downs and the sea.

He allowed himself a brief, secret smile. It suited his purpose that real sightseers thought him oddly eccentric and kept their distance, while the local folk knew he was not one of theirs and left him alone. But he was no more a tourist than he was any of the other identities he adopted from time to time. Who was he? Except on the rare occasions when he received news from home—from his mother or one of his sisters, say, imposing on him an unwelcome sense of familial obligations—he seldom thought of his real identity. In fact, if the truth be told, he had all but forgotten who he was, for over the many years he had worked at his profession he had developed the useful faculty of totally losing himself in his current identity, as an actor might lose himself in a role and become one with the characters he played on stage.

For a moment, the photographer allowed a flickering reminiscence to distract him. In his youth, he had had a great interest in the arts, especially in the theater, and had spent long hours studying the methods of actors, the way they absorbed themselves in their roles. To this day, he spent whatever time he could at the theater, taking special delight in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann, like that wonderfully wicked comedy,
The Beaver Coat,
which he had seen recently. In fact, he would dearly have loved to become an actor, but his father had put an end to that nonsense. He had become a cadet, graduating just in time to serve as a young lieutenant in the last great war. It was not without serious misgivings that he had undertaken this service, because his mother had been born in an area that was then France.

But he had served with courage and distinction in a particularly challenging assignment, and his achievements were noticed in high places. That had been more than twenty-five years ago, and since that time he had been given the freedom to design and pursue a number of projects more or less of his choosing, developing as it were his own entrepreneurial schemes and recruiting a cadre of hand-picked men to carry them out. These projects had been for the most part successful, one or two of them stunningly so, and had won the admiration of his superiors.

The photographer's current mission, however, was far more daring than any he had proposed and carried out in the past. Some even called it reckless and foolhardy and warned that failure or discovery (the two were synonymous) would seriously set back any similar efforts on the part of others in his division. Even the skeptics, though, had to admit that his idea, if it succeeded, would pay unimaginable dividends. If it succeeded, it would change the course of empires.

But the success of this venture was now in grave doubt, and his experience told him that there was little he could do but watch as events played themselves out. There was no point in self-recrimination, of course, but it was good to know where one stood. Objective as always (for objectivity was one of the essential skills of his trade), he acknowledged that he had made one, perhaps two, fundamental miscalculations. Those he might have survived, had it not happened that he had also suffered one or two bits of infernally bad luck. Taken together, his mistakes and his ill fortune could very likely add up to catastrophe—but it was not necessarily so. When all was concluded, he would choose which of two plans to execute. He would—