A Coat of Varnish (24 page)

‘That doesn’t distinguish him from others. As you’ve no doubt discovered.’

‘We haven’t discovered any other boys. Several women. All prepared to perjure themselves for him. One of them a dazzler, out of this earth. I did ask him – letting him think that I bought the story of the boyfriend – why he picked up a young man when he had women galore. Women he’d slept with. Most men would give their eyes for a couple of them. Do you know what he said?’

‘Not quite my world.’

‘He said: “Oh, Chief Superintendent, you can imagine, can’t you now? I just thought I would like a change.”’

Briers had given a creditable imitation of Lancelot Loseby’s unaffected voice, his sweet and ingratiating manner.

‘He’s a cool customer, that one is,’ said Briers.

Humphrey was not physically co-ordinated as Briers was, but both were disciplined. They were still sitting on the window-seat, neither of them constrained, but neither shifting, men who had been trained to conduct interviews and, except deliberately, give nothing away. Briers said: ‘But I can’t for the life of me see why he should want to murder the old lady. Or why anyone else should want to. Have you any ideas?’

Humphrey shook his head.

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ Briers went on, ‘I’m getting lost. We can’t track anyone’s movements down that give a lead, and we can’t put a finger on anyone going into the house that night. Someone must be holding back. Or more than one is holding back. It’s like seeing someone playing the old three-card trick, having to spot the lady.’

‘Three cards? You’re only thinking of three, are you?’

Sharply Briers interrupted: ‘You believe I’m leaving someone out?’

‘You haven’t told me who you’re leaving in.’

They looked at each other, expressions hard to read. Briers spoke without inflection: ‘I’ll tell you all right if you can give me a motive. We might be able to start from that angle. But I’m damned if I can get one. You know as well as I do, motives are nearly always simple. Thoughts aren’t, feelings aren’t, excuses aren’t. Motives are. It’s a great mistake to make them more rarified than they can possibly be. I’ve never had a murder where they’re not simple when you get down to it. Sex. No sex here. We didn’t rule that out. Old women have been raped before now. Not a vestige of a sign. Money. Blind alley again. None of the possibles would kill for a few hundred pounds in notes. We thought she might have a bit more stashed away, but there’s no sign of that, either. No one benefits under her will. We’re going into her past doings. No change. Murders are sometimes done because of fear. What could anyone be afraid of here? I haven’t anything to stand on. You – any ideas?’

‘Nothing worth while.’

‘If you have, I trust you to let me know.’

For the first time in their conversation Humphrey indulged in a sarcastic grin. He said: ‘Trust can’t be entirely one-sided, my lad. Can I trust you to tell me what you know?’

‘Come on,’ said Briers. ‘I’m a police officer. There are things I can’t tell you. Or anyone else outside the force. Not so long ago there were things you didn’t tell me. But I’ll tell you everything I can. Which I wouldn’t do to anyone else.’

‘This is a curious bargain,’ Humphrey said. ‘I know nothing and tell you everything, you know everything and tell me nothing.’

‘That’s what I call a bargain.’ Briers’ smile was wide open.

‘Well,’ Humphrey said, ‘if we have to, we’ll try it that way.’

‘Well,’ Briers said, ‘now we know where we stand. I call this a useful morning.’ He didn’t stir. Muscular thighs remained firm on the window-seat, feet didn’t fidget.

It began to rain. This was at the end of the last week in August. The summer weather, unbroken, without so much as a drizzle, hadn’t deviated for four months. Then it began to rain. It continued to rain, not with the gentle patter of a London autumn, wistful, consolatory, as a leaf or two spiralled down to the spotted pavements, but real rain which, in spite of the steady cloud cover, the town didn’t often know.

People who had grumbled at the heat now, within days, began grumbling at the rain. The earth in the Square gardens was still parched, but gutters were swirling. The sky was low, dark, unchanging, not the sky of ordinary Atlantic showery weather. One morning, all lights switched on in his sitting-room, Humphrey had a thought intruding. During the past five weeks, since the murder, the weather had been hot and brilliant. There had been someone who must be milling about, going through the workaday routine which one takes as unthinkingly as breathing, in a state where anxiety was not far away – probably not continually present, from what Humphrey had observed of other suspects, but sometimes laden with something darker than anxiety, more like dread.

Had that person – Humphrey found that his suspicions were unstable, they flickered among three or possibly four – been taunted by the serene sunlight, benign but without pity? Alternatively, was that person, or maybe a couple of them, becoming more anxious in this pelting dark? It was depressing enough for one comparatively indifferent to climatic oddities. Humphrey was recalling the old thought about the pathetic fallacy. The external weather ought to match what was going on within. Either way the sky outside didn’t seem especially appropriate. Looking out of his window, Humphrey thought that, if he had been a suspect, he would have felt deranged.

Certainly the pathetic fallacy seemed to be under attack. On a sepulchral morning, clouds at their standard thousand feet, rain steady, Kate telephoned. Humphrey had seen little of her since they had exchanged their half-resolve. It would have been valueless to press her, he thought. She had said, to ease his mind, that she was occupied night and day with her hospital porters. He accepted that that was true. Yes, it was her duty, and she was obsessively dutiful. But Humphrey felt that it gave her an excuse for delaying their own decision. Perhaps he didn’t accept that she was as devoted to her job as he would have been himself.

Without any doubt, he didn’t accept, or like, her need to take advice from Ralph Perryman. It was sensible, Perryman was a doctor, he had contacts in the hospital, was more sympathetic to the disaffected, perhaps, than Humphrey could have made himself. He didn’t often feel old, but he tried to absolve his jealous pangs by thinking that his lifespan was dwindling away.

However, on the telephone that morning, very early, before he had gone down to breakfast, she was elated, astonished, disquieted.

‘Good news!’ Her voice was very warm. ‘At least I hope it’s good news. I can hardly believe it. Susan!’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s getting married!’

‘Whoever to?’

‘You’d never guess. Loseby’s marrying her.’

Humphrey gave an incredulous grunt.

‘Who’s told you?’

Chuckle over the line. ‘She did. Half an hour ago. She’d been up all night, she said. No, she wasn’t drunk. Or was she? She sounded more triumphant than anything else. She sounded rational. Of course, she was wild with joy. But she was rational.’

‘I shall believe it when I see it.’ Humphrey’s tone was bleak, reminding Kate of thoughts they hadn’t so far communicated or shared.

‘I’m certain she believes it.’

‘I dare say. They might have their reasons for getting married. Not the obvious ones.’

‘They might.’ Kate was making herself become realistic, suspicious, once more.

She knew that Susan had covered for Loseby, swearing to his movements, both inside and outside her bedroom, on the night of the murder; and Kate knew that the cover was a lie. She didn’t know, as Humphrey was too punctilious to break a confidence, precisely where Loseby had in his present version reported himself as being; but she knew enough. Those two had been in some sort of complicity.

Kate suspected, together with Humphrey, that Briers and his colleagues might be searching for deeper complicity than that. But, then, suspicions were in the air. Amorphous, whenever she talked to Humphrey. One was reasoned away, another surfaced: it was like any kind of anxiety or jealousy. Now that Susan’s cover for Loseby was broken, so was hers. Her movements that night had become unaccounted for. Humphrey had been considering Kate’s feeling for the girl, and had been silent, but that hadn’t been enough to hide what he was thinking.

‘I shall believe it when I see it,’ Humphrey repeated himself over the telephone. That day he was certain that this talk of marriage was an elaborate charade, though he couldn’t imagine the purpose. Nevertheless, two mornings later, he did have to believe what he saw. Over his breakfast, coming to the page of official announcements in
The Times
, glancing first at the obituaries, he saw, at the top of the column of Forthcoming Marriages – Lord Loseby and Miss Susan Thirkill. The engagement is announced, and the marriage will take place shortly, between Lancelot Perceval Livingstone Richeson, Viscount Loseby, Captain The Rifle Brigade, son of the Marquess of Pevensey, Marrakesh, and Mrs Grace Hoyt Reitlinger, Oyster Bay, Long Island, USA, to Susan Thirkill, daughter of Mr Thomas Thirkill, MP, and Mrs Thirkill, of 26 Eaton Square, London, SW2.

Humphrey was still either incredulous or plain baffled. More news came from Kate, high-spirited because Humphrey had been wrong. Kate’s news arrived from an unexpected source. After the dinner at Tom Thirkill’s, Kate had renewed acquaintance with her old classmate, Stella Armstrong. To an outsider, they seemed to have nothing in common: Stella Armstrong, the left-wing party political manager, Kate as Tory as a sane woman could be; Stella influential in Westminster and more so in Transport House, Kate doing her anonymous hospital job. But there was a kind of subterranean link, such as you could find in other inexplicable alliances. Each was caught in a similar emotional, moral, sexual trap, Stella through Tom Thirkill’s marriage, Kate through her own. They had recognised it at sight, across the dinner table, not having met for twenty years.

Tom Thirkill, so Stella reported, was worried, not so much about Susan’s marriage, but about the wedding. It seemed to Kate ludicrously comic at a time when he had other things to worry about. He must have known that the detectives hadn’t finished their enquiries about Susan, or himself, and, though Kate might not have realised this, the financial crisis might give him his great political chance, make or break.

That was the nub of it. Thirkill had a man of action’s capacity to concentrate on one trouble at a time. The blinkers had come on. He saw nothing but politics, that is, his own political chance. With the pound dithering on the edge, there was going to be a crisis soon, that autumn, maybe worse than a crisis. That didn’t depress him; it ought to mean his chance of office. He had spent the summer making speeches about sound money. He believed what he said. It was the only way. It was also his only way to the front bench. They would have to use him, if they wanted to borrow more. He was trusted in America, rich, orthodox, speaking the same financial language as the American Treasury. That was why the Tribune group loathed him. Probably being loathed by them was more gain than loss, Stella’s intelligence service was certain. He had been doing other tacks besides making speeches, Stella knowing of them but no one else outside the Chancellor’s confidants.

Hence the worry about the wedding. ‘It goes without saying, I mustn’t drop a brick. Not at this point. I mustn’t drop a brick.’ Stella performed a vigorous miming impersonation of someone actually dropping bricks, which she insisted that he had really done. When she was working out party intrigues, she had a professional politician’s antennae, on top of a politician’s rhinoceros hide; but off duty she made Kate forget her stately opulent presence, like an Edwardian postcard beauty, and could become mischievously disrespectful as Kate herself.

So Tom Thirkill was worried about the wedding. If they got married quietly, he could pass that off. Loseby wasn’t prepared to get married quietly. If he was to marry at all (that might have been said gently, with a gentle threat behind it), it had to be in public. He demanded what Tom Thirkill, indignantly regressing to his provincial youth, called a society wedding. That would give enemies in the party something to pick on. Tom, hag-ridden by his own phrase, talked again about dropping bricks.

To Kate, and to Humphrey hearing this at two removes, it seemed the silliest argument they had heard for a long time. In the situation in which some of them stood, it seemed gruesomely silly. It went on. Loseby wouldn’t budge. Just why he had this passion for public ceremonial, Humphrey couldn’t imagine. Was it, in fact, another kind of evasion, connected with the situation in which they stood? Or was it simply that, as Humphrey had observed in his own children and in Loseby’s milieu, forms lasted longer than substance? Loseby didn’t believe either in God or in family proprieties, but he might find it suitable or even comforting to go through the old motions.

He wouldn’t budge. Tom Thirkill, not certain about the exact relation of his daughter and Loseby, but quite certain that she was avid for the marriage, and wouldn’t forgive him if Loseby got away, had to submit. What church? St Peter’s, Eaton Square, Loseby thought would be agreeable. No, Tom Thirkill protested, it would draw attention to the glossy neighbourhood and his own fortune. The Crypt Chapel in the Palace of Westminster? Too dim, too obscure, no one about at this time of year, Loseby said. Finally, they compromised on St Margaret’s, Westminster, the Parliament church, often used for the weddings of MPs and their children, but too smart for egalitarian tastes.

‘There’ll be criticism,’ Tom Thirkill said, grit and grating in his voice.

‘I am so very sorry,’ Loseby said.

One more concession, and another compromise. Tom would have liked the wedding not to take place until the New Year, which really meant when his political future would be decided. No, Loseby must have it at once. Within weeks. If so, and here Tom Thirkill prevailed, it had to be on a Saturday. That would keep it out of the evening papers, and the Sundays next day.

The argument concluded. The wedding was fixed for three weeks ahead, the afternoon of the first Saturday in October.