Farthing (2 page)

For a moment he kept on looking pained. Then he smiled and hugged me, and for the time being everything was all right again.

He took my hand and we walked out into the garden, where Mummy’s ghastly bash was now in full swing.

What I was thinking as we walked out there was that David and I really did have a tremendous amount in common, books and music and ways of thinking about things. I don’t mean usual ways of thinking, because I’m scatterbrained and not really very bright while David is tremendously clever, of course. But time after time we’ll come to the same conclusions about whether something is sound, starting from different places and using different methods of logic.

David never bores me and he never gives me the

feeling that other tremendously brainy people I’ve known have given me of leaving me streets behind. We can talk about anything, except perhaps some of the trickier bits of our own relationship. There are some things best left to the subconscious, after all, as David himself says.

I gave his hand an extra squeeze just because I loved him, and he looked down at me, for once not picking up what I meant but thinking I wanted something. So I put my face up to be kissed, and that was how we snubbed stupid insensitive Angela Thirkie, who was married to the most
Page 4

boring man in England, who everyone knows didn’t even want her, he wanted her sister, by kissing like newlyweds on the lawn when in fact we’d been married eight whole months and really ought to be settling down to life as old respectable married people.

But anyway, when I heard that Sir James Thirkie had been murdered, that’s the first thing I thought of, Angela Thirkie being mean to David the afternoon before, and I’m afraid the first thing to go through my mind, although fortunately I managed to catch the train before it got out of the tunnel that time so I didn’t say so, was that it well and truly served her right.

2

Inspector Peter Anthony Carmichael had been vaguely aware that Farthing was a country house in

Hampshire; but before the murder he had only really heard of it in a political context. “The Farthing Set,”

the newspapers would say, meaning a group of loosely connected movers and shakers, politicians, soldiers, socialites, financiers: the people who had brought peace to England. By peace was meant not

Chamberlain’s precarious “peace in our time” but the lasting “Peace with Honour” after we’d fought

Hitler to a standstill. The Inspector included himself in that “we”—as a young lieutenant he’d been one of the last to get away from Dunkirk. He’d cautiously welcomed the peace when it came, although at that point he’d had a sneaking fondness for crazy old Churchill’s fighting rhetoric and been afraid Hitler couldn’t be trusted. “This Farthing Peace isn’t worth a farthing,”

Churchill had wheezed, and the newspapers had shown him holding up a farthing mockingly.

But time had showed that the Farthing Set were right. The Continent was the Continent and England was

England, and old Adolf admired England and had no territorial ambitions across the Channel.

Nine years had been enough to test the terms of the Farthing Peace and show that England and the Reich could be good friends. The Farthing Set had been vindicated and stayed at the centers of power. And now there had been a murder in Farthing House, so Farthing changed its meaning for him again and Inspector

Carmichael found himself being driven through a green, peaceful, and very beautiful England on a Sunday morning early in May.

Carmichael came from Lancashire, not the industrial southern Lancashire of cotton mills and unemployment, but the bleak northern uplands of moorland and fell. His father lived in a crumbling house not much better than the farmhouses of his tenants and struggled to send his sons to minor public schools.

Carmichael’s had been so minor it had since perished, with no loss to anyone, especially Carmichael. If he ever had sons, which he increasingly doubted, he’d certainly not have chosen to send them to that hellhole to be starved and beaten. Still, that, with the Dunkirk experience, had been good enough for

Scotland Yard, and he was a full inspector now at twenty-nine, with good pay and excellent prospects for advancement. Many hadn’t done as well in the lean post-war years. His older brother, Matthew, whose public school had been better, if still minor, was living in the North helping his father with the sheep. He didn’t see civilization more than once a month when he went into Lancaster to the bank and the solicitor and maybe a stop for lunch at the King’s Head and a quick hour at the pictures in the afternoon. It wasn’t much, and Carmichael sometimes paused in his enjoyment of the good things in life to consider the pitiful lot of his distant brother.

All the same, there was enough of the Northerner left in him to distrust the Hampshire countryside that

was doing its best to beguile him. The trees, so much more frequent and so much broader here than on his native moor, were in fullest leaf and cast a delightful shade. Beneath them spread as solid a carpet of bluebells as he had ever seen, sending their scent drifting into the car as he was driven on past them. The sun was shining from a deep blue sky, as it rarely shone on Lancashire, the fields were ploughed and planted, the hay was already high, the grass was a verdant green, and the birds were singing. As if this wasn’t enough, every few miles the road wound its way through a little village with a church, a pub, a post office, thatched cottages, and just sufficient individuality to tell it from the last one. One might boast a manor house, a second a duck pond, a third a village green, or a mighty oak with two old men sitting beneath it as if they were about to hand down the wisdom of the elders. Carmichael sighed.

“What’s wrong, sir?” Sergeant Royston, at the wheel of the police Bentley, spared a quick glance for his superior. “Didn’t fancy Sunday duty?”

“Not especially,” Carmichael said. “Though I hadn’t anything special to do today, and I might as well work now if the Yard needs me and have a free day in the week when the shops are open.

It’s just this countryside depresses me somehow.”

They swept into another little village. This one had a pretty girl feeding white Aylesbury ducks outside one of the cottages. “It is lacking a bit of life compared to town,” Royston said as he rounded the curve back into the endless fields and spinneys.

“It’s not that,” Carmichael said, as it suddenly came to him what it was. “It’s all so fat and complacent somehow, as if it’s had too long living on its rich soils and warm summers. It’s fallen asleep in the sunshine. It could do with something to give it a shake and wake it up, like a famine, or a plague, or an invasion or something.”

Royston slowed as they came into yet another village. Just past the church was an unpleasant reminder of the invasion that had nearly happened, an Anderson shelter, with children playing, running in and out of it.

Royston said nothing, but Carmichael felt the red tide of embarrassment burning on his cheeks.

He hadn’t meant the Germans, nothing had been farther from his mind, he’d been centuries away imagining Vikings or pirates descending on these smug sleepy peasants.

“I don’t much care for bluebells myself,” Royston said. “If we had to drive down this way, I’d have preferred to do it a few weeks ago in primrose season. Primroses are a beautiful color, very cheering.”

“I find them a bit on the soft side myself,” Carmichael said. “Bluebells, now, we do have them in the

North. I wouldn’t have thought you cared for flowers at all, sergeant. I thought you were a strictly town man.”

“Well, I was born and bred in London myself, but my mother’s family lived in the countryside.”

“Round here?” Carmichael asked.

“Kent. I have an aunt who still lives there; some of the family go down to see her at Easter and for the hop picking. Easter’s when we used to see the primroses, when I was a boy. It’s a good way east of here, but I suppose from the perspective of Lancashire it would count as these parts.”

Carmichael laughed. “All these years, and I’d never have suspected you of having a Kentish aunt, Royston. You hide it very well.”

There was a fork in the road ahead. Royston slowed to a halt to check the arms of the little signpost.

“Would we want Farthing Green, Upper Farthing, or Farthing St. Mary?” he asked.

“Castle Farthing.” Carmichael checked his notes and his map without effect. There was an area on the map labeled unhelpfully the farthings. “Head for Farthing St. Mary,” he said, decisively.

“Yes, sir,” Royston said.

Carmichael knew the first secret of command, which was making a decision, right or wrong, but going ahead without hesitating. He might have sent them off the wrong way and condemned them to an endless trek through the barely charted Hampshire countryside, but at least he had made a decision.

By pure luck he was right. The next sign offered castle farthing on one of its branches, and the lane it led down, with its heavy hedgerows, came at last to an end with a loop around a village green. There was a church, larger than most, a pub, the Eversley Arms, a row of cottages, and a high wall containing a pair of wrought-iron gates with the word farthing scrolling indolently across them as if there were no other possible Farthing, as indeed, for anyone beyond this little corner of Hampshire where people no doubt knew one Farthing from the next, there was not.

Beneath the name was the ubiquitous robin, the obverse of the farthing coin, the political symbol of the Farthing Set. With a start, Carmichael realized that considering the antiquity of the gates, a century if it was a day and probably more, this particular robin must pre-date the “Set” and was doubtless the prototype for the whole thing.

Meanwhile, the gates were closed. Judging from the ruts in the gravel, this was an unusual state of affairs.

“Probably the local police shut them to close off the house from press and sightseers,”

Carmichael said, indicating the ruts.

“Sightseers? Here?” Royston’s London face dismissed the possibility. “All the same, they should have left a bobby on the gates,” he said, his tone reproving the absent local constabulary. “Shall I try if they’re open, sir?”

“You do that, sergeant,” Carmichael said. As a young officer he’d have got out to try them himself, and lost all his subordinate’s respect in the process. Now he sat back and watched Royston crunch across the gravel.

With the engine off, the bird-song seemed very loud. A nearby but invisible blackbird chirruped,

“Look at me. Look at me. This is my territ’ry.” He was answered by other birds seeking mates, building nests, or defending their boundaries. They stilled to silence when they heard the clang of Royston shaking the gate, then started up again, for all the world as if they were gossiping about it. Royston started back towards the car, shaking his head.

Carmichael stuck his head out of the open window. “Let’s give them a quick blast and see what that roots out,” he said. Royston grinned. Carmichael leaned across the driver’s seat and tapped out a quick salute on the horn: “Pa pa pa paaaarp!”

The only immediate result was another avian hush, and Carmichael was about to try again when a middle-aged woman came hurrying from the nearest cottage, wiping her hands on her apron.

“You’ll be the police,” she said. “Excuse me not hearing you, but I was just getting dinner out.”

As if to authenticate her statement, the church clock suddenly chimed through its sequence and then struck noon. It was so close that none of them could speak over the clamor.

“Isn’t that a bit loud?” Royston asked, taking his hands down from his ears.

“Oh, we’re used to it,” the woman said. “It has to be that loud so they can hear it up at the house.” She nodded towards the gates.

“Are you the gatekeeper?” Carmichael asked.

She blinked. “No… and I’m not rightly the gatekeeper’s wife neither, because there hasn’t been a gatekeeper since my father died. The gates stand open, mostly. I was saying to Jem this morning that I

don’t know when we shut them last.”

This confirmed Carmichael’s observation. He nodded. “They’re not closed even at night?” he asked.

“No, not for ever so long now,” she said. “Not since my father died probably, the same year the old king died.”

It was as Carmichael had thought. Anyone could have driven up to the house. The gravel held tracks.

The local police would have driven up it this morning, but it might be possible to find some evidence even so. He got out of the car and stood beside Royston. “So, if you’re not the gatekeeper, who are you?” he asked the woman.

“I’m Betty,” she said, “Betty Jordan. My husband Jem is the mechanic up at the big house.”

“Mechanic?” Royston asked, surprised.

“He keeps their cars and that going,” she said.

“But you have a key to the gate?” Carmichael asked.

“Yes, and the policeman from Winchester said you’d be arriving and to let you in when you did,” she said, brandishing a large iron key inset with a robin to match the robin on the gates.

“You are the London police, aren’t you?” She took their silence for assent and went on immediately. “Isn’t it terrible, anarchists murdering Sir James in his bed like that?”

“And to think it might have been prevented if they’d only locked the gates,” Carmichael said, taking the key from her unresisting hand. “I’ll be sure to lock them behind me now, and to see that this key is returned to you later. We’ll also need to interview you and your family—does your husband sleep at home?”

“Jem?” she asked, as if he might mean some other husband. He smiled at the thought that a bigamist might ask that question that way. “Yes, he does, he sleeps down here.”

“And did you see any signs of anarchists last night? Any unusual cars?

“Well, yes,” she said, very flustered now and twisting her apron in her fingers. “Any number of them. But they were having a party. People were to-ing and fro-ing all the time. Who’s to say who any of them were? Half of them could have been terrorists and assassins and we wouldn’t know.”