Ha'penny (12 page)

“Fate!” I said. It was so exactly like Siddy. I could hear her saying it.

“Well, fate it is now,” he said. He smiled at me. “Why did you come along?”

“I thought Siddy was in some sort of trouble,” I admitted. “I thought it was real trouble, not all this nonsense.”

Devlin stopped smiling. He took a breath, and let it out again. “Well,” he said. “At least you have some family feeling. That’s more to work with than if you were pure selfishness all the way through.”

I had been terrified, but now I was furious. I just stared at him.

“I’ve sisters myself,” he said, and he pulled me closer and gave me a most unsisterly kiss.

My first reaction as he moved towards me was to pretend to like it. I’d been kissed often enough on the stage, I was sure I could fake a response. But it would be a lie to say it was entirely unwelcome. For one thing, like his hand on my arm, it was, however wrong it might be, charged, exciting. For another it was oddly reassuring. If he meant to kill me, surely he wouldn’t kiss me? At the same time I knew this was nonsense. Men raped women before killing them, never mind kissing them in a car. It wasn’t at all like a stage kiss. It was firm without being rough, gentle without being timid, just like Devlin himself.

“Ah now, I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, as he moved away from me.

There was a tiny smear of lipstick on the side of his face. I suppressed an urge to wipe it away. He had let go of my arm. I didn’t try to leap out of the car. “Because it will make it harder to kill me?” That was what I hoped, of course.

“Because you’ll think I’m trying to seduce you into helping, and then you’ll think you can go along with that and tell the police everything after,” he said.

I was affronted. “If that had been a possibility, don’t you think I’d have done that from the first moment? Agreed with Uncle Phil and then betrayed you? I gave my word. That might not mean anything to you, but it does to me.”

“Ah, Viola,” he said. “I can’t trust you to keep quiet. I can’t. That option doesn’t exist, do you understand? I’ve seen too much in Ireland of people saying they won’t talk and then talking. Your options are what you said before, dead in a ditch or dead blowing up tyrants. And isn’t dead blowing up tyrants the better choice? For one thing, it doesn’t happen for near enough two weeks, and we can have some fun in that time, while dead in a ditch happens now, today. For another, it might not matter to you how you’re remembered after you’re dead, but if you die in a ditch you’ll be forgotten when the last person who saw your plays dies, and if you kill Hitler you’ll likely be remembered forever. For a third, well, that way you might not die at all. This way’s certain.”

He had big capable hands, and blue eyes that always seemed to have a smile in the corner, and I couldn’t doubt that he’d kill me as competently and with as little fuss as he drove the car.

“A fortnight . . .” I said, thinking for the first time about really doing it, really carrying a bomb into the Siddons. Being remembered for it didn’t excite me. It would cast a shadow over my career, the same way nobody remembers anything about Mata Hari except that she was a spy. But a fortnight more of life, and after that I might survive. And even if the bomb did wreck the play, it wasn’t the only play there would ever be, or even the only production of
Hamlet
there would ever be. “All right.”

He didn’t smile. “You won’t be able to go home. We thought you could stay with Siddy . . .” He let the sentence trail, looking at me.

The thought of turning back to Coltham and tamely saying I’d changed my mind, and then staying with Siddy, who knew her friends were taking me off to kill me and who hadn’t even got up to say good-bye, filled me with claustrophobia. “I have to learn my lines!” I said. “I have to learn my lines today. You might as well kill me here as brick me up with Siddy and expect me to be able to work. You can let me go home. If I don’t, Mollie and Mrs. Tring will worry and probably call the police. They might call the police even if I told them I was staying with Siddy, they’d think she kidnapped me.

I’ll do it for you, Devlin, and I won’t talk, but you have to let me go home.”

“You sound more desperate about that than about dying.” He raised an eyebrow, and looked skeptical.

“Dying’s grand and noble, and terrifying in the abstract, but not really real; even when it’s about to become the dead in a ditch kind, death is an abstraction. Being shut up with Siddy is petty and appalling and all too well remembered,” I said, fervently.

“You could stay with me,” he offered. “I could drive you home and you could collect your script and whatever you need, and you could tell your friends where you were going to be, that you were spending time with a man. Would that be so unusual?”

“It would, actually, but they’d believe it much more readily, especially if you come in and wow them talking about
Saint Joan,
” I said. It took every ounce of stage skill to keep my voice even as I said this, because I suspected he was about to kiss me again, and indeed he did, as soon as I’d finished speaking.

“I said we could have some fun together, and I think we could, don’t you?”

He put his arm around me and held me against him. It didn’t have anything to do with love, it couldn’t, love was excluded from our relationship almost by definition. I’d always persuaded myself before that I was in love with anyone I felt like going to bed with, even if the love burned itself out as fast as the passion did. With Devlin there was never that illusion. He said he thought we could have some fun together, and I melted, I could hardly wait for decent privacy and a bed. Then, thinking about the night, I remembered. It was Sunday. “I still need to learn my lines. I need to learn my lines tonight!” I’d promised Antony I’d be word perfect by Monday morning.

“We’d better get on then, hadn’t we?” Then, without starting the engine Devlin took off the brake and began to freewheel down the long winding hill. I didn’t scream, or close my eyes, or flinch, just sat close beside him staring straight ahead until at the bottom the engine caught and he went into the next uphill stretch as if it had been nothing out of the ordinary. He looked down at me and smiled, the bastard, and I knew he’d meant it all along, just like bloody Shaw, meant it for a metaphor.

10

C
armichael left Jacobson and his men to organize the search for the Greens and headed towards the Yard. It was past noon, and he wanted to know if Peter Marshall had turned up at his ship. “No point in you waiting about, sergeant,” he said to Royston as they drove down Great Russell Street. “I’m going to call my way through Gilmore’s address book. I’ll probably be all afternoon. You go back to her house and collect all her papers and have them brought here.”

“Everything?” Royston confirmed. “Right, sir. I’ll get on with it.”

“Keep the car, it’ll make it easier for ferrying them about,” Carmichael said.

Royston raised an eyebrow at the irregularity. “Are you sure, sir?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Royston, it’ll save no end of time, and it’s Sunday, nobody’s going to be checking whether I’m in the car every moment. Regulations ought to let sergeants have the use of a car if they need it.”

“Yes, sir,” Royston said, dubiously, pulling up outside the deco monstrosity on High Holborn that was New

New Scotland Yard. Carmichael climbed out and waved him away.

There were no messages waiting so he went to his office and called the Portsmouth number. It seemed there was still no sign of Marshall, and Captain Beddow agreed to send someone up to London to attempt identification.

“Who was Marshall’s best friend?” he asked.

“That would be Nash,” Beddow replied. “But Nash is off on leave. He was also chummy with young Tambourne, who’s here on duty. I’ll send him up to London on the next train.”

Carmichael confirmed train times and arranged to have Tambourne met at Waterloo at five-thirty and brought to the Yard. Then he called Hampstead and left a message for Jacobson there.

He sent the bombing leaflet through for identification and analysis. He asked the Sunday desk sergeant to see if the Yard could identify the ownership of the red Austin they suspected of being Marshall’s. He asked for information and any records on Gilmore, Marshall, Gilmore’s servants, and Antony Bannon. Then he couldn’t put it off any longer. He pushed aside the piles of paper covering his desk sufficiently to clear a space large enough for a fresh legal pad of paper and Lauria Gilmore’s address book and appointment diary. He proceeded to stare at them for a few moments, before opening the address book and picking up the phone.

By the time Royston came back with the papers he had reached
D.
Many of Gilmore’s friends, including Antony Bannon, seemed to be away from their telephones on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. The rest seemed to be the theatrical mix he had been expecting, and only too glad to make appointments to see Inspector Carmichael in the coming week.

“Go to Waterloo for the five-thirty from Portsmouth, Royston, and pick up a young naval lieutenant called Tambourne. Come back here to collect me, and we’ll all go and look at Marshall’s body.”

“At five-thirty?” Royston said, only the slightest hint of being hard done by in his voice.

Carmichael sighed. “I know it’s working late, and on a Sunday, and I suppose I could have someone else do it, but even though I’m not expecting much joy out of the identification from what Jacobson was saying, I want to talk to Tambourne and find out what I can about Marshall. We’ll probably need to go down to Portsmouth and talk to all his friends at some point. I can get someone else to go with me if you’re in a hurry to get off.”

“I am expected at home,” Royston said. “But if it’s all right with you, sir, I could pop round there now and tell Elvira what’s up so she’s not waiting for me, and then get back to Waterloo in plenty of time for five-thirty.”

“You do that, Royston.”

He was a good man, Carmichael thought, as Royston went. He shouldn’t keep holding it against him that he had betrayed Carmichael to Penn-Barkis over the Thirkie case. In most ways, it was a shame Royston couldn’t be promoted past his present position. He was as intelligent as any of the officers in the Yard, and had better police instincts than most of them. Impossible to contemplate, of course. Royston betrayed his social origins in every word he spoke.

Carmichael picked up the telephone and settled down to it once more.

At
M,
the desk sergeant came back with a positive identification of the Austin as belonging to Lieutenant Peter Marshall of Portsmouth. Carmichael thanked him, and went on. Nash, Robert, was listed under
N,
with the same Portsmouth number as Marshall. Tambourne’s identification seemed to be very much a formality. Where was Nash on leave, he wondered, and where had he been on Saturday morning? He made a note.

He had reached
R
and filled up much of his week when Royston next put his head around the door.

“I’ve got Tambourne in the car,” he said.

“I’ll just get my hat, sergeant.” Carmichael stood and stretched. “Oh, and you were right, the car’s Marshall’s,” he added.

“Makes this identification bit of a waste of time, doesn’t it?” Royston said.

“I want to know why Marshall and Gilmore would build a bomb,” Carmichael said. “This Lieutenant Tambourne might be able to help there. What’s he like anyway?”

“Young,” Royston said. “Tall.”

Lieutenant Tambourne was a long-legged young man in naval blues who seemed to fill most of the backseat of the police Bentley. “I don’t know why they sent me, I suppose I was the one Old Bed thought he could best spare,” he confessed frankly.

“Captain Beddow said you were a friend of Marshall’s,” Carmichael said, twisting his neck to look at the young man as Royston drove them to the mortuary.

“Well we messed together,” Tambourne said, dubiously. “Don’t know that I’d say I was his friend.”

“Who were his friends?”

“Well, he and Nash were thick as thieves. Apart from that, well, he was a matey fellow, on good terms with everyone, everyone will miss him, but he didn’t have any other particular pals. I suppose Old B— I mean Captain Beddow must have thought we were friends because he and I used to play tennis together sometimes. The
Valiant
’s a training ship, you know, pretty much permanently at Portsmouth, and we have our own courts there. Marshall was very keen, but Nash doesn’t play at all. He found out one day from something I said in the mess that I play a bit and nothing would do for him than to get up a game. Then we used to play any day it wasn’t raining and neither of us was working. I wasn’t in his class, he always beat me, but I could make him run sometimes, and he liked that.” Tambourne pushed back a lick of hair that was falling into his eyes, in what was clearly a habitual gesture.

“What sort of person was he?” Carmichael asked.

“Open, friendly . . . good at tennis . . .” Tambourne didn’t seem to understand what he was being asked.

“You’re doing your National Service, aren’t you?” Carmichael asked, to put him at ease.

“Yes, and in September I’m done with it and I’m off to Oxford, and I can’t say I’ll miss it.”

“Marshall was career Navy though?”

“Oh yes. And his father and grandfather before him, I remember him saying. He was frightfully Hearts of Oak and all that. A little bit intimidating for some of the fellows. There was another National Service lieutenant who was just counting the days and couldn’t get on with him at all. They used to have rows about, well, whether National Service was necessary for everyone, and whether Britain really needed a navy. But then the other man, Phelps, had funny notions. He’d been to some little school—” He shrugged apologetically.

“You were at Eton?” Carmichael suggested.

“Harrow,” Tambourne said, apologetically.

Carmichael smiled, thinly. He himself had been at “some little school” so insignificant that it barely counted as a public school at all. “And Lieutenant Marshall?”

“Oh, he was at Eton right enough,” Tambourne said cheerfully.