Ha'penny (18 page)

“That’s not good,” Siddy said. “They’re sure to check it pretty thoroughly.”

“What’s the outside of the box like?” Loy asked. “The front of it?”

“It curves, it’s white, and it has a gilded shield on it,” I said.

“Could you fasten something onto it?”

“I suppose so, I mean maybe someone could, but it would be extremely conspicuous.” I couldn’t picture it at all.

Loy looked at Devlin expectantly. “The trouble is getting the charge right,” Devlin said. “If it’s inside the box, that’s easy. If it’s fastened to the outside, then if we make it big enough to be sure to kill them, then there’s going to be a lot of collateral.”

“It’ll show if it’s on the outside,” I repeated.

“Not if it’s under a flag,” Devlin said. “He never goes far without his flags.”

I thought of the hundreds of swastika flags you always saw in pictures from Germany. “How can you be sure they’ll put a flag there, even so?”

“They’re going to put two, a Union Jack and a swastika, together. It couldn’t be better if we’d planned it,” Loy said.

“Privileged information, Vile, they’re not about to tell you how they know,” Siddy said. “But the truth is there’s a chap in the Foreign Office in Moscow’s pay who’s helping us.”

“Shut up. I know too much already,” I said. I was actually relieved to discover that there was more to the conspiracy than the people I’d already met.

“How easy would it be for you to get up to the front of the box, during a rehearsal?” Loy asked.

“Impossible,” I said. “It’s twelve feet up in the air. The only way would be a ladder. It would be fairly easy for me to go into the box. Antony has us sit in the stalls while we’re waiting to be rehearsed, watching the others. I could quite easily go out of the back of the stalls and up to the circle and through into the box, and I suppose I could lean out and get to the front of it that way, though someone on stage would probably see me.”

“Wouldn’t they see you going up to the box?” Siddy asked. She still looked a little suspicious of me, though the men both seemed quite trusting. They were professionals, but then they didn’t know me as well.

“They might, but if they did I suppose it wouldn’t seem like an impossibly eccentric thing to be doing. I mean we’re supposed to sit quietly and watch, but getting up and wandering about quietly would come under the category of stretching our legs.”

“What they let you do now and what they let you do next week before the performance might well be different things,” Loy said.

“Would they let me in, do you think?” Devlin asked. “They know I’m your boyfriend, and I’m burned anyway. Would they let me come in and sit and watch, and maybe go up to the box?”

“I could ask Antony,” I said, dubiously. “You’d have to be as quiet as a mouse when he’s directing. And he might ask Jackie or someone to take charge of you.”

“Let’s try that tomorrow,” Devlin said. “I’d like to have a look at the place for myself.”

“Wait a moment, how soon can we get it in?” Loy asked. “How far ahead of the time? Because if we could get it in tomorrow, or before they even think we know they’re going to be there, it would be something their security has already noted.”

“Unless their security finds it,” Devlin said.

“It should be either a long time before or immediately before,” Siddy said. She got up and walked around the kitchen, peering into empty cupboards.

“It depends exactly what we use,” Devlin said. He leaned back looking comfortable, in complete contrast to Siddy’s twitchiness and Loy’s alertness. “Most times the simplest thing is to use an alarm-clock timer, and that means you can’t set it more than twelve hours before. But we could have it in place well before that, if Vi can get up to the box on the day and wind the clock.”

I flinched. They all looked at me. “If I were caught winding it, it would be the chop without any tyrant slaying,” I said.

“Would you be nervous, then?” Devlin asked.

“She’d be bound to be,” Siddy said, for once seeming sympathetic. Her pacing had brought her behind my chair; she put a hand on my shoulder.

“Vi’s been very calm so far,” Devlin said.

“Vi’s been half-believing she could get out of it at the last minute, so far,” Siddy said.

I twisted and looked up at her, annoyed that she had guessed. “I’m not!”

“I know how you are when you’re pretending, and how you are when you’re committed. You’re pretending.” All those years of games, of alliances and betrayals, sister against sister, against parents and servants, all of us in that crucible atmosphere where adult supervision was brief and arbitrary, where we were supposed to be educating ourselves we had at least learned each other.

“Not pretending,” I protested, not sure myself as I spoke if I were faking sincerity or meaning it now. “But it all seems so—unreal. Dramatic.” There had been moments it had felt only too real. In the car, freewheeling, and when Devlin came out of the bedroom with the gun. I hadn’t seen that again, but I knew it must be there all the time, hidden somewhere in his easy reach.

“It’s real enough,” Loy said. He turned to Devlin. “I thought you said—”

“Vi will do what she needs to do when she needs to do it,” Devlin said, evenly.

Nobody said anything for a moment. I ate some more of my rapidly cooling dinner. Loy swallowed down the last of his wine. “Enough of this gnat’s piss,” he said, and brought a fifth of whiskey out of his pocket. He poured for himself and Devlin, in the wineglasses. Siddy sat down and pushed her glass forward. Loy hesitated, and poured for her too. I thought how she had said on the phone that the thought of her being drunk was a good joke. Loy looked at me, his head cocked.

“No,” I said.

Siddy cupped the wineglass in both hands and sniffed, then tasted the whiskey with her tongue, catlike. “It’s your beastly Irish stuff,” she said, putting it down on the table.

“There’s others will drink it if you won’t,” Loy said, pouring it into his own glass. Siddy laughed, a little shrilly.

“If it isn’t a clock, if getting into the box on the day to wind it might be difficult, it will have to be a detonator,” Devlin said, as if he were going straight on with what he’d been saying before. He’d finished his dinner and put his knife and fork neatly together bisecting the empty plate. It was my job to wash the dishes, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Siddy and Loy, especially Siddy.

“I think they’d notice a long fuse sizzling away like in a pirate film,” Loy said.

Devlin laughed. “I was thinking of a radio detonator. That would be better than a clock in some ways. For one thing, it’s silent ahead of time, and even the quietest clock ticks and draws attention to itself. Also, it means the timing is more exactly controlled. With a timer there are always possibilities, an early interval, someone leaving to go to the toilet. With a detonator we can pick our moment.”

“You say we,” Loy said. “Who?”

He wanted it to be him, I could see it in the set of his body. Devlin took a slow pull of his whiskey and smiled at Loy. “Vi,” he said.

“Oh no!” I said.

“You’ll be on stage, you’ll be able to see everything in the box, and you’ll have a nice straight line of sight,” Devlin said, as if that settled it.

“But if she doesn’t do it the whole thing will be wasted!” Loy said.

“She’ll do it,” Devlin said.

“I might have a straight line of sight, but I’ll also be trying to act,” I said. “I can’t be acting Hamlet and thinking about lines of sight and whether they’re all in their box! And I can’t be carrying around a great big detonator or whatever it is! Anyway, you don’t know how dark the house looks from the stage. It’s just a dazzle of darkness against the lights. They could all be in the bathroom and I wouldn’t know.”

“Do it when you stab Polonius through the arras,” Devlin said. “It’ll be a little box. It can go in your pocket.”

“I won’t have pockets!”

“I’ll make it as small as I can and you’ll easily be able to hide it.”

“Let me do it,” Loy said. “You and Vi get the bomb into the theater, and I’ll sit in the audience and blow the detonator.”

“You can be backup, the way we discussed before,” Devlin said.

Loy frowned, but nodded. He sipped his whiskey.

“What about afterwards?” I asked. “I can’t see me saying my boyfriend told me to squeeze this trigger and I didn’t think it would do any harm. How would I get rid of it?”

“We could put it inside something nobody would look inside, something you could get rid of afterwards,” Devlin said.

“Yorick’s skull,” Siddy said, and gave a horrified giggle.

16

C
armichael spent the days between Tuesday and Thursday trying to get hold of the Greens, Nash, and Bannon, and talking to those of Gilmore’s friends he could find. His picture of the actress didn’t much change, and his idea of her motivation in building a bomb didn’t clarify much either. He discovered that the bomb-making pamphlet was one produced during the war for use by the civilian population after the projected German invasion. Jacobson and the Hampstead police interviewed the Greens’ Jewish connections, without finding any sign of the Greens themselves. Mrs. Channing was pulled in and questioned, but stuck to her story that she wasn’t going to allow Jews in her respectable establishment. She broke down when confronted with the evidence of her husband’s Jewishness, and cursed Jacobson as a traitor, but either did not know or would not reveal the location of the Greens. There wasn’t anything to charge her with, so they had to let her go.

On Thursday, after a flurry of messages and miscommunications, he managed to speak to Bannon’s secretary directly. She established that Bannon was always at rehearsal, but that he would see Carmichael at rehearsal on Friday morning.

The papers made the most of Carmichael’s story, and vilified Gilmore even more than they had praised her before. They couldn’t find as much to say about Marshall, but they did their best, calling him a traitor and a man in the pay of Moscow. Meanwhile, appeals for Nash to come forward were unavailing. “If he were innocent he’d have been here by now, leave or no leave,” Carmichael said to Royston. “I want to look through Marshall’s things. I’m either going down to Portsmouth or I’m going to get Tambourne up here again to tell me about Nash.”

Carmichael called Beddow, who preferred to send Tambourne up, and Tambourne seemed quite enthusiastic at the thought of another night in London. “I doubt I’ll be able to help much, though,” he said.

Carmichael took him to one of the nicer interview rooms in the Yard. Tambourne looked around warily, as if he believed the stories about truncheons and castor oil and lead-lined hoses. It was windowless, like most of the rooms, but furnished with table and chairs and lit with strong electric light. He sat down, and Royston brought the strong stewed tea that was all the Yard could produce. There was also a plate of pink wafer biscuits. Royston set cups in front of all of them and took out his notebook.

“So, you told us about Marshall, now tell us about Nash,” Carmichael began.

“I brought this,” Tambourne said, and passed over a snap. It showed two men in naval uniforms sitting in a canoe. They both had the sun in their eyes. One of them was laughing, the other was holding up a cup of some kind. “That’s Nash with the cup. It’s this year’s Portsmouth Harbour canoe races. They won the two-man.”

“Did you take this, sir?” Royston asked, as Carmichael wordlessly passed the snap across.

“Yes,” Tambourne said. “With my little Brownie. It’s the only one I have of the two of them. There’s also this one.” He handed over another snap. Marshall, dressed for tennis, with a black Labrador. It was clearly a shot of the dog, not the man.

“Whose is the dog?” Carmichael asked.

“Mine, that is to say my sister’s,” Tambourne said, embarrassed. “You can’t have pets in the Navy. Dot brought Sally over to see me one weekend, and brought her down to the courts. This was just a few weeks ago, the weekend of the Thirkie murder.”

“She looks like a lovely dog,” Royston said, diplomatically.

Carmichael looked again at the picture of the two men in the canoe. They were wearing caps, but it was possible to see that Marshall was fair and Nash dark. Other than that they looked almost indistinguishable not only from each other but from half the middle-class young men in England. There they had been, winning a two-man canoe race and petting dogs in all innocence, and where were they now?

“Nash seems to have gone into hiding. He doesn’t seem to have any family, and Captain Beddow doesn’t know where he is,” Carmichael said.

“He’s still on leave until Saturday,” Tambourne pointed out. “He might be somewhere where he hasn’t seen the papers, or heard the wireless.”

“I thought serving officers weren’t supposed to leave the country without permission?” Carmichael asked.

“No, that’s right, but he could have gone over to Paris for a few days even so. Or he could be fishing somewhere remote in Scotland,” Tambourne suggested, clearly racking his brains. “No, it isn’t very likely. You’re probably right that he’s in hiding. I don’t have any idea where, though.”

“I take it he didn’t confide in you his plans for his leave?”

“No,” Tambourne said. “I really didn’t know Nash all that well.”

“It seems nobody knew him well except Marshall, or Marshall well except Nash.” Carmichael sighed. “Do you think Nash would have known what Marshall was up to?”

“Yes,” Tambourne said, very definitely. “I find it hard to believe that Marshall was building a bomb, but since it seems he was, then I’m sure Nash knew about it as well, and was probably involved.”

There hadn’t been any meetings with Nash indicated in Gilmore’s appointment book. But all her appointments were indicated with one set of initials, even if she’d been meeting more than one person; Carmichael had learned that from his meetings with her friends. Nash could have been present at the bomb-making meeting, and survived somehow to escape afterwards.

“Was Nash involved in explosives?” Royston asked.

“No. He’s an ASDIC man. Radar, you know?”

“And his politics? The same as Marshall’s?”