Farthing (12 page)

“Sir James Thirkie is also generally hated by the Jews and other refugees from Europe who dislike the peace they consider him responsible for.”

Yes, very well, and painting his chest red was an attack on the well-known Farthing robin, and there was the star. But why now?

“Current political program: Thirkie was sponsoring two bills in the House. One was the Higher Education

Bill, expected to pass this session, limiting access to Higher Education to those educated in Preparatory and Public Schools. The second was the School-Leaving Age Bill, presently in committee in the Lords, lowering the school-leaving age to eleven in rural areas.”

Not the kind of thing that would encourage anarchists to climb into your bedroom window and kill you, those. Carmichael sighed.

“It is expected that in the coming government reshuffle, those of the Farthing Set, including Thirkie, would have been given more prominent positions. Thirkie was widely tipped for either the Home or the Foreign

Secretaryship.”

Well, that might be something. Who might get the job if he didn’t? Anyone here? Carmichael put the sheet down and rubbed his head. He noticed a cooling cup of coffee beside his left hand and took a gulp of the unpleasant substance.

Who next? Kahn? No, stick to politics for a little while. Mark Normanby was next. Foreign Minister, lots of travel, especially to Europe, also America in the last year. He’d been at Eton with Thirkie, and also gone on to Cambridge with him, though he’d been a Trinity man. He’d got his first in Law, and gone on to be called to the bar before going into politics at the 1935

election. He’d been a step behind Thirkie then, but he was overtaking him now. He was tipped to be Chancellor at the reshuffle, with the hope of becoming Prime Minister later. Thirkie couldn’t have hoped for that, any more than Lord Eversley could.

They might lead their party but not the country; they were in the Lords. The very highest offices, the

Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, always went to men who had been elected.

It was the one advantage England gave to the commoner.

If it had been the other way around, he could have believed Thirkie killing Normanby out of jealousy, even if he was his brother-in-law. By all accounts they were close though, going upstairs together and waking him in the morning. They’d married sisters. Might there be some sexual element in the friendship?

Possibly. It would be a good idea to talk to Normanby himself and get a feeling for that. He had married

“the Hon. Daphne Alice Dittany” in 1936 when she’d been eighteen—Carmichael wondered when she’d taken to staring out of windows and smoking. No issue, in fourteen years. There could be something wrong there. But even if there was, it wasn’t necessarily connected with the murder. Unless it was something Thirkie could use to blackmail Normanby, and then Normanby could have killed him to stop it. Half the murders that weren’t spouses killing each other were blackmail victims killing blackmailers.

Dangerous profession, blackmail.

There was no report on Daphne. The one on Angela was perfunctory, giving no real information. The one on Lord Eversley was four pages thick, and he was hesitating over it when the door opened, revealing

Inspector Yately, in a neat and pressed uniform, looking very pleased with himself.

“I have the report,” he said.

“Any surprises?” Carmichael asked.

“Oh yes.” Yately’s smile broadened. “Strangulation, didn’t you think?”

“You mean it wasn’t?” He couldn’t have been stabbed after all. His face was suffused, and there hadn’t been any blood. It came to him at once. “Carbon monoxide poisoning?”

Yately’s smugness faded a trifle. “Yes.”

“There was a gas fire in the room, but I doubt the doors are airtight.”

“There’s a fitted carpet that goes underneath them.” Yately spread his hands suggestively.

“Maybe it was suicide all the time.”

“But the lipstick—-the star!” Yately objected.

“He might have wanted to kill himself and frame his political enemies.”

“Why would he want to kill himself?” Yately looked perplexed.

“I don’t know of any reason. And you forgot to mention the thing that really stops it being suicide—the knife. A man could conceivably dress up in a way that would embarrass his enemies, but he can’t stab himself with his own dagger after he’s already dead.”

“No…”

“It’s your job—make sure it gets done.” Carmichael wasn’t in any mood to let Yately do things his way.

“Also check all the cars.”

“The cars?”

“One of the commonest forms of carbon monoxide poisoning is sitting in a closed garage with the car engine running. People kill themselves like that all the time.”

“But that would be an accident,” Yately said. He was biting his lip and clearly only one step from rubbing his head.

“You mentioned moving the body. It’s possible this may have been an accident, or suicide, which someone else then came along and took advantage of for their own purposes. Or murder even, for that matter.”

“You mean somebody might have killed him and then somebody else might have moved him
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and dressed him up like that?”

“It’s possible,” Carmichael said. “Check the cars. I expect it’ll prove to be that he was gassed from the fire in his room, but it won’t do any harm to check everything out.” Yately was about to go, when

Carmichael remembered the other thing. “We need to issue a press release,” he said. “I’ll have to go down and give it to them. They expect Scotland Yard in a case like this. But you can write it.

Tell them what we know so far.”

“What we know? What, everything?”

“No, just what we want them to know. That Sir James was killed by a person or persons unknown and that we are investigating.” Carmichael sighed again. “Never mind, I’ll deal with it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Yately said, looking immensely relieved.

Carmichael turned back to the papers, then looked up again as Yately was leaving. “You know, if they did move the body, whether it was the murderer who did it or an accomplice, it wipes out all the advantage we have of knowing the time of death. We still need to know movements up to the time of discovery.”

“Yes, sir,” Yately said, and scurried out, doubtless before Carmichael could load any more work onto him.

Carmichael considered throwing something at the door, but couldn’t see anything suitable. He picked up the next sheet.

Manningham, Sir Thomas, turned out to be a self-made industrialist who had recently been made a baronet. He controlled business interests and owned factories in England, France, and Germany. He traveled on business fairly often. His wife, Catherine Barbara, was the daughter of a country clergyman.

Carmichael wondered why they were here, and being given ringside seats by staying for the whole weekend. Being courted by the Farthing Set, he thought. Industrialists and magnates were part of the Set.

They were a party within a party, not really a democratic organization at all. Sir Thomas Manningham didn’t have any political power, but he had money, and there would be things he wanted that money couldn’t buy—laws against strikes and trade unions, perhaps.

Dudley, Earl of Hampshire, was considered to be firmly one of the Set, but not a great originator of policy. He deferred to both Lord and Lady Eversley. He was Lady Eversley’s first cousin. He was a widower with three grown but unmarried children, Lord Timothy and Lady Edwina, who were here, and

Lord William, who was not. Lord Timothy bred racehorses. He had a seat in Parliament and apparently voted as his father told him. Lady Edwina had recently broken off an engagement to the heir of the Duke of Stirling. Carmichael was always seeing her picture in the papers, “sharing a joke” as they put it. The

Earl of Hampshire was very rich, most of the money in land or in coal, he didn’t take much personal interest in it.

Even straining hard, Carmichael couldn’t think of any reason why any of the three of them might have wanted Thirkie out of the way. He’d have to interview them to see if they’d seen or heard anything, but if they wanted to go home today they could. The same, he supposed,applied toSir Thomas and Lady

Manningham, though he’d ask them all to keep in touch with the police in case he wanted to speak to them again.

He picked up the thick file on Lord Eversley again, and put it down. He drew a clean sheet of paper towards him and took out his fountain pen. “May 7, 1949: Press Release,” he headed it.

He took another sip of his coffee, which was now stone cold, and began to write as clearly and concisely as he could.

The breakfast room was empty when I got there, though there were signs that several people had breakfasted. There was even a copy of

The Times on the table. I don’t know how it had got into the house—maybe the policemen had brought it. The headline was screaming about Sir James being dead, with a picture of Farthing and another of Sir James, which must have been a fairly recent studio portrait.

They said the police were about to make an arrest, which made my blood run cold for a moment until I

remembered that the papers flat out make things up. The things they said when I was engaged were beyond belief. I had to stop reading them when they said I was going to have a baby.

I rang the bell and called for tea and a boiled egg. Meanwhile, I flicked through the paper. There was an obituary inside, much calmer and more the kind of thing one would expect of The Times.

I expect the

Telegraph was even more adulatory. I skimmed this one, as it was in front of me. It lingered on his achievements, and what it called the “miracle” of the peace: In May of 1941, the war looked dark for Britain. We and our Empire stood alone, entirely without allies.

The Luftwaffe and the RAF were fighting their deadly duel above our heads.

Our allies France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Denmark had been utterly conquered. Our ventures to defy the Reich in Norway and Greece had come to nothing. The USSR was allied to the Reich, and the increasingly isolationist USA was sending us only grudging aid. We feared and prepared for invasion. In this dark time, the Fuhrer extended a tentative offer to us. Hess flew to Britain with an offer of peace, each side to keep what they had. Churchill refused to consider it, but wiser heads prevailed and sent young Sir James Thirkie to negotiate in Berlin. He was the obvious choice, a rising man in politics, noted for his personal integrity. The country held its collective breath as the bombing stopped. Then Thirkie returned, proclaiming “Peace with Honour.” Not only would we each keep what we had, but Hitler agreed to let us take control of the French colonies in North Africa, while he, his flank secure, could at last do what he was born to do, turn East to face his true enemy, the Bolshevik menace. It was Thirkie’s greatest hour of triumph, and the joy of the country, reprieved after two years of war, was comparable to that at Trafalgar or Mafeking.

I could remember the rejoicing. I was in school, it was high summer, term was nearly over, and we were being examined on the year’s work. I always hated exams. I was sitting in the exam room, writing an essay on the Armada, making most of it up as usual because I couldn’t remember the details. A beam of sunlight was falling on my desk, so I was shading the paper with my hand. A bee had somehow come inside the room and was stuck at the high window, buzzing and buzzing but unable to find its way up to the top where the thing was propped open.

The sound reminded me of a bomber’s engine far off. In that drowsy warmth and buzzing, I heard another, shriller sound, and thought at first it was a fighter coming to take on the bomber, though the bomber was a bee, and there had been no siren so there wasn’t a raid. I kept on writing, wondering if they’d make us carry our papers down to the shelter if there was a raid or if we’d get out of the exam until later. I was almost hoping for the disturbance a raid would cause, though there were hardly ever daytime raids. The noise came nearer, and at last I could make it out. It was cheering. The mistress invigilating got up to investigate, walked to the back of the room, and then stepped out for a moment to speak to someone in the corridor. She came back in and walked back to the front. I

could still hear the cheering, and the girls were starting to look at one another.

The mistress was flushed pink and smiling. “Girls,” she said. “It’s peace. Sir James Thirkie has
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done it.

Victory. The war is over.”

We all cheered, and some of us threw our papers up in the air. That night we tore the blackout material off the windows and made a bonfire out of it. Nobody else’s brother or mother or father would die. We sang. I was happy, except when I thought of Hugh. Then I wondered gloomily what the whole thing was for, what we had now that we hadn’t had in September 1939, why we’d bothered to be in the war at all.

Lizzie brought my egg, with bread and butter, just the way I like it, and a pot of very weak tea.

“You

spoil me,” I said.

“Mrs. Smollett knows what you like,” she said.

“Oh, so Mrs. Smollett is in charge this morning, that’s why I’m in favor,” I said, and Lizzie laughed. The servants had taken sides in the debate over my engagement. Mrs. Smollett, whose real name was

Szmolokiewitsz, or something like that, and who was a refugee, naturally took my side. Lizzie was another of my old friends; she supported me because she believed in love.

“Mrs. Richardson isn’t up yet this morning,” she said. “She leaves getting breakfast to the Farthing staff.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. There was longstanding rivalry between the “London” staff who traveled down with Mummy, and the “Farthing” staff who stayed in Hampshire whether the family were in residence or not. Mrs. Richardson, who was head cook at whatever establishment Mummy found herself, was one of the servants who very much disapproved of my marriage.

I sipped my tea and looked down at the grainy and much reproduced picture of Sir James stepping off the cutter waving his treaty. Daddy was just recognizable in the corner. I had been a child when I