Farthing (18 page)

Sir James Thirkie got us out of the Jewish war? Maybe in the penny dreadfuls people who are certain to be caught kill for that kind of motive, but not in life.” He hesitated, and I sat down again. “Do you ever watch the cartoons?” he asked.

I nodded. “Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and so on? I’ve seen them at the movies.”

“Yes… well, it seems to me that someone wants me to find a simple cartoon story, the kind that would make sense for a cartoon but doesn’t in real life, where people aren’t drawings of mice and rabbits who can squash each other with anvils and after being squashed flat walk away blowing themselves up again.

And what worries me is who would do that and what would they expect to get out of it, and how many innocent people might get squashed flat along the way.”

Mummy, I thought again; she’d steamroller David and me anytime without even a qualm. Then I remembered the gunman, and I knew that was nonsense. Mummy wouldn’t be involved with anything like that.

“You’re forgetting the Bolshevik gunman,” I said. “He’s real, not something from a brightly colored cartoon.”

“He’s real and he’s dead and he raises an awful lot more questions than he answers,” the Inspector said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kahn, you’ve been very helpful.”

16

Carmichael sat alone in the office, staring out of the window at a huge blue hydrangea bush. His mother would have loved that bush. Her hydrangeas would only ever grow a muddy pink, and
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these were splendidly, brilliantly, blue. Probably some secret the aristocracy conspired to keep from people like his mother, who merely aspired. How Lady Eversley would have condescended to her if they had ever met.

He shook his head. The hydrangea had nothing to do with the case and neither did his mother, poor woman. He had been cooped up in here too long, they all had. He should go for a walk—and risk being shot at by more snipers? He should collect Royston and take him back to the Station Hotel for dinner.

Or perhaps they should even go back to London. Anything to be discovered about Guerin/Brown would be done there, not here. There wasn’t anything left here. Farthing would keep its well-bred secrets. He had already told the papers about the Bolshevik assassin Lord Eversley had shot, and seen them all but licking their lips over the sensation. There could be little doubt that he was Thirkie’s murderer. He should let everyone go, let air back into the house. Yately had even suggested it when he went back to Winchester for the day. But Carmichael kept on sitting there, stubbornly, because it didn’t feel right. If it was a hunch, it was the kind to follow through.

Royston tapped on the door and came in without waiting for an answer. “We’ve found the lip paint, sir,”

he said.

“Specially imported from Russia, I suppose, Sergeant?” Carmichael asked.

Royston checked and frowned. “Sir?” he asked.

“I’m fine, sergeant, just making a joke.”

Royston gave him a sideways look. “It belonged to the housemaid, Molly,” he said. “That’ll be Mary

Cameron on your list, sir. She says it was stolen from her room on Friday night. She noticed it missing on

Saturday morning, and mentioned it to one or two of the other servants then, and afterwards she forgot about it with all the fuss. She remembered it today. It seems that this is her evening off, and she wanted to go off to the bright lights of Farthing Green looking her best. She mentioned the theft to Lizzie when asking to borrow some of her lipstick, and Lizzie had the sense to bring her to me.

“Good girl, that Lizzie,” Carmichael said, touching his empty tea cup reminiscently. It was very thin china, white with a tracery of gold flowers painted around the bowl. “Had you talked to Molly, before this?”

“Inspector Yately had,” Royston said, expressionlessly.

“Ah,” Carmichael said, noncommittally. “And the lip paint was right?”

“ ‘Woolworths in Winchester; price sixpence; red of a shade called Carmine; lip paint to be applied with a brush,”“ Royston read from his notes. ”This is the brush.“ He held up a little make-up brush, green-handled, the bristles stained blood red of a shade that matched Carmichael’s memory of the front of Thirkie’s nightshirt. He took it from Royston and turned it in the light.

“That’s it, all right,” he said. “Well done, sergeant. Very well done. She’s sure it was Friday she missed it, not Saturday or Sunday?”

“Absolutely sure, and more to the purpose, so is Lizzie.”

“Then as that is progress, it calls for celebration,” Carmichael said. “We’ll go back to the Station Hotel for the night. There’s not much chance of the Yard having anything more for us before morn-mg.

“Yes, sir,” Royston said. “Can’t say I’ll be sorry to get out of here for a bit.”

“You wouldn’t think it was a place people usually angle for invitations to,” Carmichael said, ungrammatically. “But maybe it’s the gloom of the deaths and it’s usually very jolly.”

No Lady Eversley intercepted them on their way out tonight. The family and guests were at dinner.

Carmichael informed the butler that they were leaving and would return early in the morning.

“Very good, sir,” he replied, in sepulchral tones, opening the door.

It was dusk; the sky was almost purple and the air was cool. Royston opened the car. “Do you think it might rain, sir?” he asked, seeing Carmichael taking deep breaths.

“Why would they steal lip paint from a servant?” Carmichael asked, rhetorically, unable to remove his mind from the scene as easily as he could remove his body.

“Why did they do any of that rigmarole?” Royston countered, as they both sat down.

“Yes, that is the question. They could have shot him easily enough. They could have got away with it too;

nobody would have been expecting it. So why did they gas him and dress him up and all of that?” The engine purred to life and the Bentley puttered down the long drive in moments. The avenue of elms reached above them like great open arches, dark against the darkening sky.

Venus was just visible in the east.

“They must have wanted to make a point,” Royston said, drawing to a halt for the bobby to open the gate for them.

“What point?” Carmichael felt his hands bunching into fists; he unclenched them. “There is no point. It’s pointless.”

“Good night, sir,” the bobby called. There were still two lone journalists slouching around the village, Carmichael noticed. He wondered which papers they represented, and whether they were foolish or optimistic. They looked up as the police car passed but made no attempt to intercept them.

“Maybe it’s pointless,” Royston said, as they sped through the village. “Maybe they wanted to make the point that they were here and powerful and we should be afraid of them. Just shooting him wouldn’t do that, but showing they could get into someone’s house and make a mockery of them, painting them up like a robin, and leaving their calling card, maybe they thought that would make people afraid.”

Carmichael considered it for a moment as they passed through a dark spinney and came out into wheat fields. “Would it make you afraid, sergeant?”

“It might if it was somebody I knew,” Royston said.

“Then who could it be meant to intimidate? Lord Eversley? Normanby?”

Royston shook his head. “I don’t know. Being shot at is frightening, but not in the same way, if you know

what I mean.”

“Yes, it’s cleaner somehow. More manly. Strange, really, dead is dead.” They passed through a village, one of the Farthings. The inn doorway shed golden light into the street as a fat pretty woman came out, pausing a moment in the doorway to say something to her friends inside.

Something witty, from the look on her face, Carmichael thought, envying her companions their cheerful evening.

“Murdered in your own bed has a very different feel from shot out riding,” Royston said.

Carmichael’s mind, never far from the case, came straight back to it. “But if it was the Bolsheviks killed

Thirkie, how could they have done it? We already established that they couldn’t get into the house.”

“They must have had an accomplice on the inside,” Royston said.

“And who would your bet be on that?” Carmichael said.

“Kahn, maybe?” Royston suggested. Carmichael frowned. “Or there’s a cook who’s Jewish, a refugee years back, changed her name to Smollett from the heathenish thing it was before. She’s
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one of the permanent staff. She could easily have stolen the lip paint. She might have got past Mrs. Simons somehow, or Mrs. Simons might be in collusion with her.”

The car bumped over the railway lines of the level crossing and drew up outside the Station Hotel.

Carmichael barely noticed. “You think she’d have opened the door for the Bolsheviks? Where’s Mr.

Smollett? Perhaps still in Poland? Maybe they said they’d hurt him if his wife didn’t do what they said, or that they’d let him out to England if she did.”

“I’m not sure there ever was a Mr. Smollett,” Royston objected, opening his door. “Female upper servants get called Mrs. as a courtesy.”

“But she might have left family behind her in any case.” Carmichael liked the idea. He stepped outside, and looked up. There were more stars now, more stars than you ever saw in London.

Country stars, the same here as they were in Lancashire, though the landscape and the people were so different.

“Any family would do for blackmailing her into helping them,” Royston said.

“But it doesn’t solve the problem of how anyone could have killed him by sitting him in his car and putting the exhaust in through the window,” Carmichael said, locking the door of the car and checking at the tightly wound window with London caution.

“So say he killed himself,” Royston suggested, as they walked up the hotel steps. “Say he killed himself, in the car, and she found him, and thought, here’s this bastard, this man who stopped Britain from freeing the Jews of Europe before Hitler had his way with them, and he’s dead.

Why don’t I humiliate him now, put my own star—no, it can’t be. Put some star I have from somewhere on him, paint his breast red, arrange him back in his own bed.”

The landlady came up to them as soon as they stepped inside, smiling with professional cheer.

“Dinner, is it, gentlemen?”

“What do you have?” Carmichael asked.

“How about some nice steak and eggs?” she asked.

“Sounds good to me, sir,” Royston said.

“Two, in the dining room,” Carmichael agreed. “And bring us a couple of pints of your best bitter.”

They went into the room where they had breakfasted and sat down at the same table. It felt almost like home. There was one man sitting in the corner, eating sausages and reading a book; otherwise they had the place to themselves.

Carmichael spoke quietly, so the stranger wouldn’t overhear. “That’s a nice scenario, but what you’re forgetting is that she’d have had to have stolen the lip paint the night before, which argues an unlikely degree of premeditation. And could she have carried him up two flights of stairs? No Bolsheviks there to help this time. How old is she, anyway?”

“About fifty, but very hale.” Royston screwed up his face. “I bet she could. She’s a cook—she carries sacks of potatoes and things around all the time. And the beauty of it is, if she was caught doing it, then she was outside because she went to get a drink of water or whatever, a breath of air, and she found him and was bringing him in. As she wasn’t caught, she could go ahead with her scheme.”

“That one would work with anybody finding his corpse after he’d killed himself,” Carmichael said. A

barmaid brought their beer, two brimming pints with foaming heads, in old-fashioned pink china tankards.

“Anybody who had reason to humiliate him, anyway.” Kahn, he thought. He couldn’t imagine Kahn murdering him, but would he have done that? He sipped his beer.

“But why would Thirkie kill himself?” Royston asked. “And if he did, why would just the wrong
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person come along first to play games with the corpse? And why would the Bolsheviks come around the day after with their little rifle?” He took a draught of his beer, and smacked his lips.

“What would make a man like Thirkie kill himself?” Carmichael asked. “A man with a national reputation, a career that looked to be getting itself back on track, a pretty-enough wife, a baby on the way, and a much praised air of personal integrity.”

“Exposure,” Royston said, instantly. “Some scandal that was going to get out and lose him everything.

Better a dead lion than a live jackal.”

“Yes,” Carmichael said, putting his beer down. “That would do it. But what disgrace?”

Homosexuality?

Could Normanby have threatened to expose him, perhaps as part of some power game? Say Thirkie wasn’t queer, say he’d had a passage with Normanby between his marriages, an experiment, one that

Normanby wanted to continue but he didn’t, not now he was happily married and had a kid on the way.

Then if Normanby threatened to expose him unless it went on, said he’d come to his dressing room the next morning and expect to find him ready—yes, that might be enough to drive a man to choose death with his reputation unstained.

The landlady came bustling in with two plates of steak, fried potatoes, fried eggs, mushrooms, and onions, A concession to namby-pamby ideas of healthy eating could be found at the side of each plate, where a single lettuce leaf, one thin slice of cucumber, and a quarter of a tomato wilted, topped with a few strands of mustard and cress.

“Do you think anybody ever ate one of these salads?” Carmichael asked, poking at his.

“I’ve never eaten one,” Royston admitted, his mouth full of steak and potato.

“Neither have I, and I doubt one man in a hundred does. Yet the cooks keep carefully arranging them on plates in inns all over England, and just as carefully scraping them off again into the dustbin afterwards.

Yet they must imagine, somehow, that people want them. I’ve been served this same pathetic excuse for a side salad from Bodmin to Skegness.”

Royston shook his head. “No accounting for women, sir,” he said.