Farthing (25 page)

Carmichael could picture that different David, but he didn’t live with the real David as I did.

So it definitely wasn’t David, which would have been a load off my mind, except that if it wasn’t David it had to be Mummy. I’d known that for days really, if I’d been prepared to face up to it, ever since

Inspector Carmichael had said he felt led by the nose. Mummy had the resolution, and the planning. She might not have been up to it physically, but as usual she wouldn’t have had any difficulty finding someone else to do it for her. Her motive was the only difficulty. Sir James was an ally. She’d undoubtedly have ditched him without a qualm, but why would she need to kill him? But given that she had a reason, if

Mummy had done it, she would have had someone else do the actual stabbing. Daddy? Mark Normanby? And could Angela have known about it and could her widowhood be the benefit?

Frankly, I didn’t feel any happier at the thought of her doing it than I did at the thought of David. They hang people for murder, and while I didn’t exactly like Mummy, she was my
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mother after all. Though do they hang Viscountesses? Worse than that, if she’d done it she’d have been much too clever for them ever to catch her. There would be no possibility of them hanging her. She’d have defense in depth.

“Do you think Mummy knew, and invited us down so you’d be a suspect?” I had asked. And David had replied in a tone of humoring my fancies: “That would mean she knew Sir James was going to be murdered.”

She’d have arranged a scapegoat, and that scapegoat could perfectly well be David, because she didn’t like him, and she didn’t care a scrap about me. We’d been lucky so far because Inspector Carmichael wasn’t stupid, but we couldn’t count on our luck lasting.

I started to make a plan then as I lay on the sofa, half a plan. I expect it looked to David as if I was falling asleep. What we could do, where we could go, what we should take, if it came to it.

Who would help us, who we could really trust. Every so often I’d look over at him as he sat there smiling over the book. He was a man, and he’d fought in battle, and nearly died—he had medals to prove it though he never wore them or used the letters he could put after his name.

And he was a Jew, one of the most persecuted people in Europe, and he knew more about what went on in the Reich than I did, and what I knew was quite nightmarish enough. Yet I felt he was innocent in a way I was not, that I knew more about evil than he ever could, because he had parents who loved him and wanted the best for him while I had grown up with Mummy.

22

It was half past four when they got to the Yard. London looked dirty and wet and run-down.

Even the trees, which had leafed out in their absence, seemed thin and shabby compared to the lush spreading trees of the country. Black taxicabs dodged in and out of traffic, sending up sprays of water that drenched the pedestrians, scurrying in their drab raincoats and black umbrellas towards red buses or the beckoning mouths of the Underground. Royston drove Carmichael down the Strand, around half the crescent of the Aldwych and up the Kingsway, the dreariest street in London. He pulled up smartly on the double yellow line in front of the new Scotland Yard building, which had been built at the end of High Holborn when the old “New Scotland Yard” building had been put out of action in the Blitz.

They just called it the Yard, as usual. Carmichael had never known the old building, so he generally ignored the complaints of old-timers for whom the new one would never be a replacement. Today, in the rain, the building, halfway between Palladian and deco, and lacking the virtues of either, looked particularly dreary. He could understand the superstition that had grown up that made it bad luck to walk in its shadow. Respectable lawyers from Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn crossed the road and then crossed back again later rather than pass too close to the portals.

“Park and come to my office,” Carmichael said to Royston, ducking out of the car and preparing to dash up the stairs past the bas-relief abstract sphinxes that flanked them.

The bobby on duty opened the door for Carmichael with a lackluster salute. Stebbings was, as usual, at his glassed-in desk in the central portico.

“Back at last,” he greeted Carmichael when he put his head around the door to say hello.

“Any news of my villain?” Carmichael asked, going completely inside the glass box. Stebbings’s desk was neatly organized, with papers in tidy piles and alphabetized pigeonholes. There was a wireless set and four telephones, three standard black and one a daring cream.

“Which villain?” Stebbings asked.

“Brown. I can’t imagine there being any more news of Kahn at present. I left him safely tucked in at

Farthing.”

Stebbings put his hand in his pigeonhole, but did not draw out the paper. “Report here from the

Garda, saying nothing known. In private they say the same thing. Michael Patrick Guerin could be anybody or nobody, all three names are common enough, but they don’t have any records on any specific fellow. Jenkinson, who always deals with them since that business with De Valera’s dog, says he’s sure they’d have told him at the very least that they weren’t going to tell him anything to pass on to his English masters, if that was the way of it.”

“I didn’t think he was one of theirs,” Carmichael said. “There was something about him.

Liverpool Irish is my guess. Any joy from Runcorn?”

Stebbings drew a sheet out of his hole and read from it. “Chap of the name Alan Brown—sounds like

B

a pseudonym, doesn’t it— born in Runcorn on the date specified, educated at Runcorn Boys Elementary

School, left in 1936—what a wonderful year to enter the workforce at the age of eleven I don’t think—no police record, whereabouts unknown.”

“If you were a fitter of the name of Brown, why would you make up a name like Guerin?”

“A nom-de-guerre?” Stebbings suggested, and almost smiled. “Maybe his Bolshevik pals said he needed a nom-de-guerre and as a workingman without much French and with friends among the Liverpool Irish even if he wasn’t one himself, Guerin came straight to mind.”

“It’s as good an explanation as anything I can think of,” Carmichael said.

“We’ve been through his house top to bottom, and found nothing of the slightest interest to anyone.” He put the paper back in under “There are copies on your desk if you want the details.”

B.

“Have you traced the girl? I sent you the picture.”

“No joy with the girl yet. We’ve been showing it around Bethnal Green but not a nibble.

Probably not important. No luck tracing any of Brown’s Bolshevik connections yet, either.

We’ve rounded up a lot of

Bolshies and fellow travelers, which is Simpson’s department. He’s pulling them in and booking them all as accessories to this. He’s quite grateful to you for giving him an excuse to bring them in—he knew who they were all right, some of them outright publish Bolshie articles in the papers, but they’re very canny about keeping their feet on the right side of the law. Catch one of them on something that looks like spying or treachery, then they’ll be splitting hairs and calling for their lawyers. The law’s too soft on them.

It’s not like we’d be able to do that in Red Russia, not while preaching bloody revolution and going around shooting people.”

“Any of them admit to knowing Brown?” Carmichael asked.

“Not a one of them, not under either name. That’s what you’d expect them to say, of course.”

Stebbings sounded mildly regretful.

“Of course,” Carmichael said. He couldn’t find it in his heart to be very sorry for Communists, even if they weren’t connected with Guerin/Brown.

“Chief Inspector Penn-Barkis wants to see you. I think he’s hoping for a final report.”

“This afternoon?” Carmichael rolled his eyes. “He’s got a hope. I want to sniff around myself after Brown and see what I can find.”

“Tell the Chief,” Stebbings said.

“Thanks for the tip on Normanby, by the way,” Carmichael said. “He’s a nasty piece of work.

He’s definitely been telling us lies, too, only I can’t work out why. He can’t have done it—or rather, he probably could, technically, but he’s got no percentage. The dead man was his friend.”

“Evening Standard is tipping him to be Prime Minister tonight. Should have done him for gross
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indecency when we had the chance, dirty bugger,” Stebbings said, in his usual flat tone. “No justice, is there?”

“None,” Carmichael agreed. “Well, I’d better push off and see the Chief.”

Royston was in his office when Carmichael pushed the door open. “I’m off to see Chief Inspector

Penn-Barkis,” he said. “Did you park the car all right?”

“No problem. Got it into the lot—Inspector Blayne was just coming out as I got there.”

“That was a piece of luck.” Carmichael put down his case on his chair. His desk was covered with toppling piles of paper. He scanned the piles for anything recent and on a second try pulled out the report on Brown’s lodgings. “Read through this and get familiar with it. We’ll be doing some scouting around after Brown.”

“You still want me to check into Thirkie’s valet?” Royston asked.

“Yes,” Carmichael said. “Tomorrow will do for that.” He hesitated. “This case is like a big ball of string, with ends sticking out all over. I get the feeling that if we pull on the right one, it’ll all come loose at once.

Brown’s a good place to start pulling, because Brown’s the one we know is a villain and a murderer. But the chauffeur, valet, whatever he is, he’s definitely another loose end.”

“Yes, sir,” Royston said.

Carmichael bent to check his hair in the mirror on the back of the door, put there so he could see behind suspects he might be interviewing. He walked down the hall and pressed the button for the lift.

Penn-Barkis’s office was at the very top of the building. The lift came and took Carmichael up, his stomach following just a little later.

Penn-Barkis’s office was said to have one of the best views in London, looking south over Lincoln’s Inn

Fields past the original Old Curiosity Shop towards Fleet Street. Today the windows were clouded with condensation and running with rain. Penn-Barkis himself was sitting comfortably in an armchair, smoking a cigar. He was not an impressive-looking man, being bald, slightly tubby, and with heavy white eyebrows, but he succeeded in intimidating all his subordinates. He was said, in whispers, to have an

excessively domineering wife, but it may have been wishful thinking from people who wanted to believe that there was someone who could put the Chief Inspector in his place. In his presence, Carmichael tried hard to modulate all his vowels and sound as Southern as he could, because Penn-Barkis had once said he had Lancashire on his breath the way another man might have whisky on it.

“Ah, Carmichael,” he said. “Take a seat. Have you finished all that Thirkie nonsense?”

“Nonsense, sir?” Carmichael sat in the other armchair and waved away a cigar.

“Members of Parliament and Bolsheviks and Jews, all waiting around for you to finish talking to them—it sounds like nonsense to me,” Penn-Barkis said. “But now you’ve evidence that the Jew and the Bolshie did him in between them, and we can close the case?”

“No, sir,” Carmichael said. Penn-Barkis’s eyebrows went up. Carmichael took a deep breath.

“The case on the Bolshie’s clear enough, he was standing there with a rifle in his hand, a .22, but a real rifle, good enough to kill someone. He shot at Lord Eversley and Mrs. Kahn, wounding both of them. But as for his involvement with the Thirkie murder, it’s impossible that he should have done it. He couldn’t have got into the house. Thirkie was gassed in his car, sir, and then his body was taken into the house, which must have needed help from inside at the very least. There he was arranged in his bed as if he’d been stabbed, with lipstick over his chest to simulate either blood or the red breast of the Farthing robin, and a Jewish star attached by a dagger.”

“Why go to all that trouble? Why not just stab him in the first place?” Penn-Barkis asked.

“Possibly to intimidate Thirkie’s friends, or possibly to implicate the Jews in the murder, sir,”

Carmichael said. “Or it’s possible that there were two parts to the business—one party who killed him, and another who arranged his body later. It’s even possible the death was suicide.”

“Why would a man like Thirkie kill himself? He had everything to live for. If the vote tonight goes the way it’s looking, he’d have been Home Secretary.”

“Yes, sir.” Carmichael thought about the vote. “Maybe someone else wanted the job.”

“Do you have any evidence of that?” Penn-Barkis sounded incredulous.

“No, sir,” Carmichael said. “I do know that Mr. Normanby lied to us about the time he last saw the dead man alive, and I don’t know what purpose he had for lying, but that’s all.”

“Probably something perfectly rational.” Penn-Barkis puffed at his cigar and sent out a cloud of smoke.

“Or he might have been mistaken. Did you ask him?”

“There’s no possibility he could have been mistaken, sir. But as you say, he could have been lying for some reason unrelated to the murder, and I didn’t like to press him too hard, as he’s a member of

Parliament and also as he had no reason to kill Thirkie.”

“I thought you implied he wanted his job.”

“Mr. Normanby was tipped to be Chancellor, and now he seems to be tipped to be Prime Minister.

Thirkie would have been junior to him in any case, sir.” Carmichael frowned.

“And what about this Kahn, the Jew?” Penn-Barkis asked. “Have you arrested him?”

“No, sir. He had no reason to do it, and the crudity of the star rather points away from an intelligent man like Kahn than towards him. He’s also a rich man and a banker. The only real evidence against him are

some letters in his possession from a man called Chaim, a Jewish revolutionary, not a Bolshevik, an anti-Bolshevik, calling on him, as recently as last Tuesday, to blow up the whole Farthing Set.