Farthing (29 page)

start counting by feet at that point, I was conscious that we were in the wrong. Mrs. Smollett probably shouldn’t have given us the caviar. On the last foot, she’d insulted me directly with the last word. If it had been “Jew,” that would have been all right, but “Jewboy” was out and out insulting. I just stood there with my mouth open.

Before I could make up my mind to say anything at all, Mrs. Simons went on. “As I understand the situation, you are not really even guests in the house. Mr. Kahn has been forced to stay here by the police as a kind of arrest. In the circumstances, I think my duty is rather to prevent his escape than to make him excessively comfortable.”

“Mrs. Simons,” I said, my voice shaking. “I don’t know what you imagine you can achieve by talking to me this way, but I think I am still sufficiently a daughter of this house that I could prevail upon my parents

to have you sacked.”

“I doubt Lady Eversley would let me go at your behest,” she said, openly sneering now. “She has often spoken of you in my presence.”

Yes, I bet she had too. I could just imagine what she had said. I thought of her remark about the Jews in front of Hatchard on Sunday morning. “Nevertheless, Mrs. Simons, I’d thank you to remain polite,” I

said, holding on to my composure with both hands, and probably both feet too.

“Well then, Mrs. Kahn, do you have any special requirements while I am doing the marketing in Winchester? I’m not accustomed to providing for Jewboys, so please do inform me.”

I wanted to ask for roast duck and buttered lobster and perhaps some special wax polish for David’s tail, but I thought better of it. “I simply came down to let you know you should be aware that the household will contain two more people for the next few days and to take that into account while in

Winchester,” I said, as icily as I could manage. I wasn’t going to ask her for talcum powder—she’d probably buy itching powder instead.

I swept out of her little room then, thinking the most uncharitable thoughts, such as being glad she had an ink-stained old escritoire while at home I had a gorgeous old Arts and Crafts writing desk, and that she was ugly and nobody had ever loved her. I wished she’d be hit by a bus in Winchester, or struck by lightning on the way. I was shaking a bit, and almost crying, but I didn’t want to see David and have to explain to him what it was about. He’d be either in Daddy’s little office (the one where Inspector

Carmichael had been working) or, if he’d finished on the phone, in the library, so I went out into the garden and pretended to admire the lilies of the valley and harebells and primulas while I got control of myself.

The funny thing was that normally insults like “Jewboy” and so on didn’t upset me at all. They usually made me laugh. It took me a little while out in the garden on my own to work out what the difference was. It was power. Mrs. Simons had, or felt she had, power over us. She said her duty was to keep

David here. She acted like a jailer. She took the petty little power she had of knowing Mummy didn’t like me and used it to humiliate me. I thought of how she’d said she’d prefer to be told directly, rather than informed by a servant, when she was a servant herself. Probably she’d had to put up with a lot of slights and insults and unthinking cruelty; probably she had to put up with it regularly from Mummy. I’d gone out of my way to make the servants’ lives easier. I always went out of my way to consider them as people, I had for years. But considering them as people only went so far; it was perfectly possible to dislike people as people. I didn’t like how quickly I’d resorted to threatening to sack her, but at the same time I was quite sure Daddy would back me up in it. I wondered how she behaved to Mrs. Smollett, who had no redress at all. That made me think about the people with the stones in their hands smashing the windows of her restaurant.

Mrs. Simons would have had stones in her hands. She already had them in her mind.

I heard the sound of the station wagon puttering down the drive, and knew she’d gone off to Winchester.

The very air seemed relieved to have her gone, almost as if she’d been a thunderstorm, or, for that matter, Mummy. I paced about the garden for a while, getting calm, and after a while David saw me through the library window and came out to join me.

26

The only new thing on Carmichael’s desk at the Yard in the morning was a note about Captain Oliver

Thirkie, the heir to the Thirkie baronetcy, should Angela’s baby prove to be a girl. He was ten years older than Sir James, had two sons, one at Winchester and the other at Oxford, and was serving with the

Army in India. He clearly had nothing to do with anything, just another loose end that led nowhere.

Carmichael tossed the report onto a pile. One of these days he really should sort out the desk, he thought.

Royston came in, looking not the least the worse for his indulgence the night before. “Taking the car to

Southend, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Carmichael said. “We could go on the train, it’s probably quicker, but we may want to go straight on to Campion Hall without bothering to come back here.”

“Yes, sir.”

They exchanged nods with Stebbings on their way out. “Seen the papers this morning, sir?”

Royston asked, as he slid automatically into the driver’s seat.

“No, I didn’t feel like facing the news,” Carmichael said. He had lingered in bed, and got up in time to gulp a cup of tea and a biscuit. “Anything relevant to the case?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. It’s just that they’re going to introduce new ID cards with pictures on them, like passports I suppose. That’ll make this sort of thing easier, and a lot of other things too. If Brown had one of those, we’d know who he was for sure.”

“Any paper we can put out, some villain will find a way around it,” Carmichael said, pessimistically. “And you know what they say about making things foolproof—do that, and God will come up with a better fool.”

Once they were out of central London, they drove quite fast. They were going almost due east most of the way and had the sun in their eyes, but most of the traffic was going in the other direction, into

London. It was built up almost all the way, towns and suburbs, odd patches of fields, but no deep country such as they had been in at Farthing. The roads were good and they reached Leigh before ten, and stopped for a late extra breakfast at a little transport cafe next to a run-down secondhand bookshop on the high promenade. The Channel lay, chilly and rumpled, far below them—the high promenade ran along the edge of a steep slope leading down to the water. After a greasy but satisfying breakfast, which they justified by saying that now they would need no lunch, they walked along the upper promenade.

“We’ll try the photographer first,” Carmichael said. The proprietor of the cafe had displayed no knowledge of the girl in the picture.

There were benches every few yards on the side of the road that faced the sea view. The other side rejoiced in a little parade of shops. There were very few people about, as May was too early for Leigh to be enjoying the height of its “season.” The photographer had a sign in the window saying that he would be open from eleven until four. Without discussion, the men continued to walk on past it, downhill, towards the lower promenade, and eventually, Southend and the actual sea.

A little way down the road was a tea shop of enviable gentility, painted with pastel flowers and patronized by a group of elderly ladies whose hair was rinsed a delicate powder blue.

“Let’s try in there,” Royston said, indicating it.

“You can’t want more tea already, sergeant,” Carmichael said. “And if you did, that wouldn’t be the place to get it.” He pushed open the door, making a set of chimes jangle. A middle-aged waitress came bustling up from the back, clearly astonished to see two relatively young men in her domain.

She squinted at the picture and thought there was something perhaps vaguely familiar about it.

Carmichael was used to this reaction; he smiled and praised her. He tried it on the customers next, and

got a bite at once.

“That’s Agnes Timms. She works at Chicks,” the first blue-haired lady said.

“Where is Chicks?” Royston asked, eagerly.

“Mrs. O’Sullivan meant to say Colette’s Chic Hair Salon,” another blue-haired lady interrupted.

“And it’s just up the promenade, not a quarter of a mile.” She indicated the direction in which they had just come.

Colette’s Chic Hair Salon lay just beyond the secondhand bookshop, and their car. Inside it was an old lady under a heavy hair-drying machine, a middle-aged lady seated at the cash register, and the young lady of the photograph, looking so exactly the way she did in the picture Carmichael had studied for so long that he almost wanted to poke her to be sure she was real.

She was pretty as only girls of her class could be pretty, with a brief bloom that was destined to fade too quickly.

“Miss Timms?” Royston asked. “We’re police. We want to talk to you for a moment.”

“I’m working,” she said, indicating the woman under the device, and giving a desperate look to the woman on the cash register.

“I’ll take care of it, Aggie,” the other woman said, her face registering stern disapproval.

“Come outside, if you would, Miss Timms,” Carmichael said. It would clearly be hopeless trying to talk in the shop, where there was no privacy at all.

“Shall we sit on a bench?” Royston suggested. They crossed the road and sat down, Agnes Timms between the two men.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said, as so many people did. A little breeze played with a strand of her light hair; she pushed it back impatiently.

“Do you know a man called Alan Brown?” Carmichael asked.

She didn’t try to deny it. “He was my fiance,” she said.

“Do you know what has happened to him, Miss Timms?” he asked.

“It was in the paper,” she said, and tears came to her eyes. “I knew something had happened when he didn’t ring me Sunday night like he said, and then on Monday it was in the paper. It had all gone wrong, and they’d killed him.”

“What had all gone wrong?” Royston pounced on that.

“His joke. But you can’t make me give evidence against him; he was my fiance.”

“That’s only wives,” Royston said. “Besides, if you were engaged, where’s your ring?”

“Colette won’t let me wear it at work, because of catching on hair,” she said, prosaically, and reached under the neck of her dress to show them the tiniest gold hoop with a pitifully small chip of rhinestone.

“There. See. Now that’s all I’m saying.”

“Anything you know could be of inestimable value to us,” Carmichael said.

She put her chin up. “Why should I care? Alan’s dead, and now I’ll never get married or have children,

or lead any sort of life. I’ll carry on being a spinster in a hair salon until I die.”

“You might be able to save the life of an innocent man if you can tell us what Alan’s joke was and why he was playing it,” Carmichael said.

She looked at him indecisively for a long moment. Carmichael held his breath. “All right,” she said, in a very small voice. “It can’t matter at all now anyway.” Tears started to run down her face, and

Carmichael, breathing again, handed her his handkerchief.

“When did you last see him?” Royston asked.

“Saturday,” she said, and blew her nose on Carmichael’s handkerchief. “He came down on Saturday. I

have a half-day, and since he was laid off from Mottrams it makes no difference to him. Usually he stays for Sunday as well, but not this week. He told me he had work to do on Sunday. I last saw him Saturday evening, about seven, when he set off back to London.”

“On the train?” Royston asked.

“No, on his motorbike,” she said, and began to weep seriously. “I’m sorry,” she said, between sobs.

“It’s just thinking of him on that bike, in all weathers, with his black coat flapping like an old crow, and

I’ll never see him again, never speak to him, never tease him about it.”

They sat for a moment and let her weep. Royston raised an eyebrow at Carmichael, who shook his head.

After a while, Carmichael asked, “Did Alan tell you where he was going on Sunday?”

“Not exactly.” She blew her nose again and got control of herself. “He told me he was doing a job, and it would be enough money that we could get married, and we’d be able to get a house and he could get a job as a fitter somewhere they didn’t know his reputation.”

“What reputation would that be?” Royston asked.

“He tried to organize a union at Mottrams,” she said. Good, Carmichael thought, she’s decided to tell us the truth. “He thought it would be better for everyone. They sacked him right away.

The whole thing was crazy, I knew it was.”

“Was he a bit of a Red, then?” Carmichael asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“Come now, he must have been a bit of a Red if he wanted to start a union.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you, but actually it was me who voted Labour and him who voted Tory. He wanted a union for better conditions, that’s all, and I don’t care if you believe me.”

“Would it surprise you if I told you he was a Communist?” Carmichael asked.

“It would do a lot more than surprise me,” she said. “But I think I can tell you about that. The job he was supposed to be doing on Sunday was to frighten someone, as a joke. He’d been given a rifle, not a real one, a rook-rifle, but it looked like a real one. He’d also been given a card, a Communist card, with someone’s name on it, some Irish name, Patrick Somebody Something.

He showed it to me. He was supposed to go to a certain place, and hide his bike where he could run back to it easily, wait until he saw this person coming, then shoot past him a couple of times, drop the rifle and the Communist card, and run back to the bike.”

Carmichael and Royston exchanged a glance of bemusement.

“But poor Alan wasn’t quick enough, and Lord Eversley shot him instead,” she finished.