The Black Seraphim (26 page)

The next moment they were on the floor.

“I’ve never been so surprised in my life,” said Major Mortleman. “I was up in the gallery and I came along to see if the court was empty and there they were, damn it, rolling about on the floor like a couple of copulating grass snakes.”

“Do you mean,” said Brigadier Anstruther, “that they were actually—”

“No. I don’t think they were actually—”

“Oh, well, then, I suppose it’s not too bad.”

“It’s a bloody disgrace. Isn’t her father a dean or something?”

“That’s right. Rather an unusual man.”

“Rather an unusual girl, I should say. You simply can’t do things like that in a squash court.”

James had managed to get both arms around Amanda and this was making driving difficult. She said, “It’s no good, my sweet. Let’s wait until we’re married and can do it properly in bed.”

“Nowadays people don’t bother to wait until they’re married. That’s old-fashioned.”

“I’m an old-fashioned girl,” said Amanda. “By the way, did you notice, when we were in the court – I thought I saw a face looking down at us.”

“Imagination,” said James.

As they were approaching Brookes’ gate, he said, “Oughtn’t we to tell your father?”

“Of course. But not right now. He’s been in rather an odd mood since the inquest.”

“I should have thought he was deeply relieved.”

“You can never tell with Daddy. He was a bit—I don’t know—a bit like he was after that business with the Gangas.”

James thought about this, but could make nothing of it. His mind was on the future, not the past. When, after a prolonged goodbye, he got into the drawing room, he sank back into one of the Chapter Clerk’s old armchairs and allowed his eye to wander around the comfortable well-lived-in room. He and Amanda would put together such a room. There would be old furniture and pictures in heavy gold frames on the walls and china in cabinets. It would be some time before he could afford anything as fine as the
famille rose
bowls on the mantelshelf.

He remembered admiring them before and got up to examine them. They were the same pattern as Julia Consett’s cups and saucers. Almost certainly they had once been part of the same set. No wonder she had wanted the bowls. A true collector’s instinct.

James found his mind wandering down strange tracks. He remembered what he had said to Tom Lister in that conversation in the garden on the night the Canon had died. It was the analogy of the scientist moving down obscure weed-encumbered paths in his unending search for the truth.

When Dora Brookes came in and switched on the light, she said, “Goodness. I’d no idea you were here. You must have gone to sleep.”

“I think I did doze off.”

“Supper will be ready in ten minutes.”

“Not for me, I’m afraid,” said James. “I’ve got to go out.”

This was literally true. He had got to go out. The thought of sitting still and making conversation was suddenly intolerable. He needed to think. He had got to be alone and he had got to be on the move.

If he had been asked afterward, he could not have said where his walk took him. Certainly he went a good way out of the town. At one moment he found himself on a bridge over the railway and sat on the stone coping, swinging his legs. Far away down the line he could hear the noise of trucks shunting, and he guessed from this that the fine weather was ending and that rain was on its way.

Some time later he walked back into the town. As he was crossing one of the streets in the business section, a car slid up behind him and a spotlight turned on. The voice of Superintendent Bracher said, “It’s Dr Scotland.”

“Certainly it’s me,” said James irritably. “Am I breaking the law or something?”

“Not that I know of,” said Bracher.

“Then stop shining that bloody light on me.”

After a moment the light flicked off. He now saw that there was another police car at the far end of the street and there were two uniformed policemen farther up the pavement. He wondered what the trouble had been. He concluded that it was nothing to do with him. As it happened, he was wrong about this.

Earlier that evening Philip Rosewarn had let himself into the offices of his employers, Maxwell Gloag and Partners, by a side door. It was his first essay in crime. His mouth was dry and his heart was thumping. Gerald Gloag’s room was the largest in the building and fronted the street. He opened the door with the key Lucy had given him. He had brought a torch with him, but there was no need to use it. There was a street lamp almost immediately outside the window which filled the room with diffused light.

He turned to the desk. This was the critical moment. Just give the front a good tug and it will come open, Lucy had said. He tried it, and at the second attempt the front swung up, revealing a clutter of papers and books and two sections of drawers, one on each side of a space in the middle, which housed account books and was flanked by two pillars, each topped by an ornamental wooden rose.

“All according to the book,” said Philip. He grabbed the right-hand rose, which turned with a satisfactory click, and pulled. The pillar slid out, bringing with it a narrow vertical drawer. In the drawer was a ring with two keys on it. One was large and was clearly a safe key. The other looked as though it might be the key to a drawer or a small cupboard.

At this moment Philip heard footsteps coming along the pavement outside. The street, being in the business quarter, was little used at that time of night. Philip sank down into the desk chair. It was an unnecessary precaution, since the lower half of the window was covered with the fine wire mesh much favoured by old-fashioned professional firms. However, he sat tight until the footsteps had died away. Then he got up, went over to the safe, put in the big key, turned it and pulled open the heavy door.

The front of the safe had another pile of account books in it. More interesting was a steel drawer at the back. Philip tried the smaller key on it, without success. He then reflected that since the drawer was inside the safe, there would have been no point in locking it. He tugged it and, sure enough, it was unlocked. He lifted it clear of the safe and laid it down on Gloag’s desk to examine the contents at leisure.

He remembered that Bill had particularly wanted bank documents, paying-in books and cheque stubs. There were one or two envelopes with the name Barclays Bank on them, which struck him as odd, since the firm kept all its accounts with National Westminster. Then it occurred to him that this must be Gloag’s private account. There were also two clips of used chequebooks, held together by a rubber band.

He had got as far as this when he heard the car coming. It was coming fast. And it sounded like trouble.

He had very little time to think. He crammed the old chequebooks into his coat pocket, jumped for the door and raced along the passage. As he arrived at the top of the stairs, he could hear someone hammering on the front door.

He had reached the bottom of the stairs and was on the point of making for the side door he had come in by, when his mind started to work. Why should that policeman be
hammering
at the front door? He could hardly be expecting anyone to open it and, anyway, he was no doubt equipped with a key. Philip had done enough rabbiting in his youth to understand the technique. You put a ferret down the entrance to the warren and a net over the exit.

He swung away from the side door and raced back into the hall. There was a cupboard just inside the front door, used for coats and hats. It was shallow and the space at the back was full of old files, but he managed to insert his slender body into it and pull the door shut. As he did so, the hammering on the front door stopped. He heard the click of a key as the door opened and heavy footsteps, two men at least, coming down the hall and passing within a few inches of him. He waited until he was certain they were on their way upstairs, then opened the cupboard door and slipped out into the hall.

The front door had been left ajar. No time for finesse. He jumped down the three shallow steps outside and belted off up the pavement. The driver in the police car saw him and shouted. Then he started up the car and came after him. This was a mistake. There was a passage on the right of the road which was too narrow for motor traffic.

Philip dived down it and pursued a zigzag path through the side roads and passages which lay behind the business quarter. When he stopped to listen, he could hear nothing but the drumming of his own heart. His breathing steadied gradually. There was no sound of pursuit.

He thought that, with luck, he had not been recognised. He had disguised himself to the extent of wearing a pair of dark glasses and an old cap to cover his noticeable shock of light hair. The driver of the police car could hardly have seen more than his back as he ran up the street.

He removed the glasses, rolled up the cap and put it into his pocket and made tracks for the Black Lion, where he found Bill Williams alone in the private bar. Bill said, “Hello, Phil,” and then, “What have you been up to?”

“Do I look as though I’ve been up to something?”

“You look as though you’ve had the fright of your young life. Put a comb through your hair, straighten your tie and have a drink. Not beer. What you want is a stiff whiskey. Right? Now—tell me all about it.”

When Philip had told him, Bill said, “We might have thought of that. The cunning old bastard must have had his safe fixed with an alarm which went off in the police station. Do you think they recognised you?”

“I don’t think they can have done.”

“All’s well that ends well, then. Let’s have a look at what you’ve got. Not here, though. Better come round to my place.”

Back in Bill’s sitting room, Philip spread the loot on the table. He said, “I’m afraid these two lots of old chequebooks were all I could grab.”

“Don’t apologise,” said Bill. “You did very well.”

He was examining the cheque stubs, paying particular attention to their dates. He said, “The supermarket opened in Easter week the year before last. That’s about eighteen months ago. But the site must have been bought at least six months earlier. Maybe even a year before. If it’s here at all, it must be in one of these books.”

“What exactly are we looking for?”

“What we’re looking for is the payout. Gloag was fronting the deal, so the money would have been paid to him in the first place. Right? But the people who were behind him weren’t the sort who’d want their share in grubby banknotes. They’d want a cheque. So—”

Bill’s fingers had stopped moving through the cheque stubs.

“So?” said Philip.

“So . . .” said Bill softly. “Didn’t I once tell you that the spilling of blood and the passage of money were two things that could never be entirely hidden?”

“I can’t see much,” said Philip, who was peering over his shoulder. “What are they? Four cheques for twenty thousand pounds.”

“Four cheques, drawn on the same day, almost exactly two years ago. And four sets of initials. G.A. That would be Grant Adey, I imagine. L.D.S. Who other than Leo Derek Sandeman? A.B.D. That’s Arthur Balfour Driffield and, finally, a gorgeous bonus. H.C.B. None other than Herbert Charles Bracher. The Council, the press
and
the police. What a gang. What a lovely little thieves’ kitchen.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to blow them up. There’s the powder and the detonator.” He patted the chequebook fondly.

“You won’t be able to say how you got hold of them.”

“You don’t understand the workings of the press, my lad. A fact is a wedge. The press is the hammer that drives it in. Suppose we suggest that these four men and Gloag used their position and official information to make themselves a hundred thousand pounds for a paltry ten-thousand-pound stake, what can they do? They can fluff and bluster, but if they took us to court, they’d have to stand up and deny, on oath, that they were paid twenty thousand pounds each on a certain day by their fellow conspirator, Gloag. Well, they can’t do it. Because it’s now a cold, provable
fact
.”

“How are you going to work it?”

“I’ll have to think about it. We’ll start with the easy bit. Show how little the gang had to pay for the site. Dr Scotland’s our main witness there. I’ll have a word with him first.”

A telephone call to the Chapter Clerk’s house produced the information that Dr Scotland was not there.

“He walked out, just before supper,” said Dora Brookes. “I don’t know where he went. Someone from London has been trying to get hold of him, too.”

She sounded worried.

“It’s quite all right,” said Williams. “This is nothing urgent. Tell him I’ll look him up tomorrow.”

Mrs Brookes promised to do this. She said to her husband, who had been listening to the conversation, “Why don’t you go to bed? You look all in.”

“It’s the weather,” said Brookes. “I always feel like this when it’s building up for a storm.”

“I’ll wait up for him,” said his wife. “You go on up.”

She had not long to wait. It was about half past ten when James came back. He said, “I felt the first drops of rain as I came up the path. I think the weather’s broken at last.”

Dora gave him the telephone messages. She said, “Williams didn’t sound too urgent. But the other message was from Dr Leigh. He wondered if you could come up to London as soon as possible.”

“Dr Leigh from the Poisons Unit?”

“That’s right. The man who was at the inquest. Not the one who gave evidence. The tall doctor who was with him. He said he’d found something that would interest you.”

“Did he say what it was?”

“No. He just said it was something interesting. I expect he didn’t try to explain it to me because he knew I wouldn’t understand it. You
will
go, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said James. Curiously, the possibility of saying “no” never crossed his mind.

When James got to bed, he was very tired, but sleep evaded him. Every time he approached the verge, some cut-out mechanism seemed to operate. It was as though he was unwilling to trust his subconscious, being afraid of where it might lead him when he could no longer control it.