A Coat of Varnish (26 page)

Humphrey moved among the crowd. There was no chance of talking to Kate, who was with a group of young officers, such as she might have met in her girlhood. He did encounter Loseby in the throng, who said, open-faced, as though appealing for reassurance which he didn’t need: ‘All going according to protocol, isn’t it, Humphrey?’

Just afterwards, Celia touched Humphrey’s sleeve. No trouble showed in her expression; she looked beautiful and tranquil. She asked: ‘Have you heard anything of Alec Luria recently?’

Humphrey said no, he assumed Luria was back at New Haven. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, nothing. He called me a week or two ago. I was just curious.’

Humphrey allowed himself a surreptitious twitch of the mouth. Alec was prospecting for another wife. Celia was responding to his flicker of amusement.

‘Paul used to say that with Alec one had to forget the verbiage. Underneath he was one of the wiser men.’

‘Paul is a good judge,’ Humphrey said. On his own, he imagined what Celia and Alec Luria would be like together.

It was Tom Thirkill who dominated the reception. He was preyed on by many kinds of anxiety: not only Humphrey but others there must have known. His political future was on the quiver. Police enquiries, even tentative ones, were not calculated to help. Prime ministers had their own channels of information, with which Humphrey was much more familiar than anyone in that drawing-room. Nevertheless, Thirkill, driven in private by worries, private phantoms, hopes, dreads less articulated than those, in public could behave like a film star coming down the aircraft steps, greeted by admiring faces, radiating his own energy and goodwill. Some temperaments one could enter into just a little, one had an element of them oneself, Humphrey thought again, but he couldn’t enter into this.

The best man proposed the health of bride and husband, making a limp little speech. Loseby made another little speech, not so limp but for once self-conscious, not fluent on his feet. Thirkill made a speaker’s speech, easy, sometimes funny, not afraid to be sentimental.

‘I’m losing a daughter, of course. If Lancelot Loseby is what I believe him to be, of course I am. And I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But it is a loss to lose an only daughter. Any marriage is a loss to someone. Never mind. It is a marvellous loss. And they will make up for it for the rest of my life by their own happiness.’

Kate was touched. Humphrey, who didn’t like wedding cake any more than champagne, patiently ate a scrap of almond paste. Then he could, unnoticed, get out of the crowd, down on to the pavement, on his way home. The rain didn’t clear his head. He was nothing but confused.

After their first aquaintance, when Frank Briers had returned to duty at the Yard, Humphrey had once or twice enjoyed an evening at his house – professional talks with him might be acerbic, but they were usually refreshing. And, much more, it was good to see a couple as happy as Briers and his wife. On the way in the police car out to Sheen, Humphrey was now getting ready for a sight which wouldn’t be so happy.

True, he had been told that Betty was going through a remission, and a long one. It might go on for months, or even years. But those two, happy, zestful, guiltless, had been hit by a fatality. Humphrey had something like total recall of the night when Briers had told him. Briers had had to find someone to confide in. He was deadened, he didn’t sound angry or raging with protest, he couldn’t get his energies free. All he could say, in a tired tone, was ‘I never thought this could happen to us.’

That had been two years before, when Betty was thirty. They had been married six years. They were satisfied with each other, beyond the normal run, except that she hadn’t yet had a child. Humphrey remembered her as quick-witted, fine-featured, looking much younger than her age, anxious to make others round her as happy as she was. He had sometimes thought that she was unusually given to tears, rather like a sensitive Victorian girl. He had seen her cry at a sad story in one of Frank’s enquiries, and, distinctly out of her century, at a magnificent cloud-strewn sunset. She was active, and in those years she and Frank went off mountain-climbing. She believed she was utterly healthy, and so did he. She was the opposite of hypochondriac. Maybe there might have been vestigial warnings, but not to her.

Suddenly, she noticed that she was seeing double. She looked across the room, and Frank was smoking two cigarettes, not one. Soon she was walking like a spastic. The diagnosis didn’t take long. Frank was told that she had multiple sclerosis. It was then that he had needed to tell someone, and went to Humphrey. It had been left to his own judgment to break the news to her.

There was no known cure. She might have long remissions, or she might become paralysed quite soon. Frank was cowardly enough, he confessed, to think that it might be better not to tell her himself, but leave it to the doctor.

At last Frank did tell her, and found that she had known for weeks. He also found, what Humphrey found on one visit after he heard the news, the most unnerving aspect of all, that she was existing in an extravagant degree of euphoria. Frank was a man of stoical and vigorous spirit, but hers had always been higher. Now they mounted to something near to joy. When a friend such as Humphrey arrived, trying lamely to cheer her up, that was the last thing she needed. Unaffectedly, with love, it was she who did the cheering up.

As the car drew up outside the Briers’ house, semi-detached in a neat chestnut-lined avenue, Humphrey was prepared for something similar that night.

He didn’t get it. So far as Betty’s condition went, the evening was soothing, like a remembrance of the past, but not a perfect remembrance, since the future was never quite asleep. It was Betty herself who opened the door, kissed him, and, in the light of the hall, said it was a long time since she had seen him. Her cheekbones looked a little higher. When he had last visited her, her legs had been thinning. Now she was wearing a long dress, maybe as a cover. Otherwise, apart from a just perceptible limp as she led him into the sitting-room, there was little change from what Humphrey first remembered; but great change from what he had witnessed when she was in one of the worst, and also most euphoric, phases.

‘She’s looking after you, is she?’ Frank greeted him, already pouring a whisky. Was Frank a shade over-hearty, as though all was smooth and wouldn’t alter? Yet it was peaceful to be with them, in that sitting-room. The Briers were living on an official salary, about £8,000 a year, much less than the income of most of the inhabitants of Aylestone Square; but they managed to live at least as comfortably. The pictures were timid watercolours: Betty was educated, she had taught in a grammar school before her marriage, but she hadn’t much visual taste. But, then, most of Humphrey’s acquaintances in Aylestone Square hadn’t much visual taste, either. A foreigner wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between the decoration of this house and of those of Humphrey’s neighbours. Unless he understood the delicate difference in the postal address.

If there was a difference, it was because Betty was an admirable cook. She hadn’t forgotten meals that Humphrey seemed to like. It occurred to him as odd that he, to whom food didn’t matter much, take it or leave it, should be presented with meals he enjoyed twice in the last few nights, at White’s and here. There wasn’t much to be said for the English cuisine, but a few dishes were good, and he seemed to be having them all. Betty had made a steak and kidney pudding and a lavish trifle. Too much trouble for anyone in her state. But when she had been half-paralysed she had got round on her knees to make meals for Frank.

Over the meal, Betty asked about Humphrey’s children, calling them by their names affectionately, though she knew them only slightly. She was made to be a mother, Humphrey thought, and as a result his reply was unaccountably brusque.

‘Nothing much to report. I’m not much in contact with them. They’re still trying to do good.’

She smiled at him, still affectionate. ‘You oughtn’t to say that now, ought you?’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he replied.

‘Why do you pretend to be harder than you are? You wouldn’t really prefer it if they were trying to do bad, would you?’

‘Sometimes I’m not so sure,’ Humphrey said, with a throw-away sarcastic smile.

‘Now, now. You’re a good man, we all know you are.’

‘My dear girl, I wish you knew–’

‘Good people are very wrong to be superior about do-gooders. We need all the do-gooders we can get.’

Frank was wearing a tough husbandly grin. Maybe he had met some such outburst himself. At the moment, he was smiling because, though he was used to hearing younger women get spirited with Humphrey, he had never noticed one of them lecture him so naturally.

When the steak pudding was finished, Frank remarked: ‘It’s time we did some talking. You have to sing for your supper, of course. Fill your glass up. First of all, you say anything you want, anything about anyone on earth, in front of Betty. You know that. She’s much more discreet than I am. To tell you the honest truth, I had to learn to be discreet. When I started my tongue was ready to run away with me. I wanted to impress. I had to learn the hard way.’

‘I think that was the case with me.’

‘It wasn’t with Betty.’ Frank gazed at his wife with an expression protective, admiring, desirous, teasing, anxious. ‘She’s never given away a secret in her life. I sometimes think intelligent women are much better at keeping their mouths shut than intelligent men. Perhaps they don’t seem to have so many temptations.’

Humphrey nodded. He had made the same discovery.

‘Well, you can say anything you like. I’m going to ask you something. You’ll have to come clean. I can’t talk – we’ve been trying to be too bloody clever with each other. To hell with that. I want to ask you what your old office can tell us about Tom Thirkill. I know they keep tabs on him and more politicians than one would like to mention–’

‘They have to look as though they’re earning their money, don’t they?’

Humphrey knew that, out of the ingrown habit, now almost an instinct, he was being evasive. Frank knew it. Soon he began to speak.

‘Not good enough. Come clean. They’ve been watching Thirkill, as you might expect. Then I found they’d taken off our Special Branch people in favour of your old lot. You tell me why. I don’t need telling that Tom Thirkill is about as likely to defect as the Chairman of the Midland Bank. I do need telling what they have on Tom Thirkill’s movements. Nothing fancy. I very strongly suspect that they can tell us where Tom Thirkill was that Saturday night. We haven’t picked up any sightings. I believe your people could tell us. What do you think?’

Humphrey regarded him without expression, still in the old mode of duty, and then a smile twitched.

‘I should think that is distinctly likely.’

‘Well, then. Can you find out?’

‘I don’t much like to. I suppose I could.’

‘What the hell’s the use of having all the contacts in London unless you come to the rescue now and then?’

Betty said: ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? He hates pulling rank, don’t you, Humphrey?’

Humphrey said: ‘I must say, I don’t see the point. Why in God’s name are you thinking of Thirkill? Yes, I’ve given him some thought myself, but it doesn’t make sense.’

‘No, it doesn’t make sense.’ Frank was in his most active mood. ‘Nothing makes much sense. I’ve told you before, this is a policeman’s nightmare. Non-co-operative upper classes. No motive that anyone can see. If you want to get away with murder, Humphrey, kill someone amongst your smartest friends and, just to be on the safe side, kill someone you don’t know. And don’t have any motive at all. Then I promise you that we shan’t catch you.’

Betty smiled. Humphrey wondered how long it had taken her to get acclimatised to Frank’s gallows jokes.

‘Well,’ Frank said, ‘we can tot up our own score. Getting down to cases. Burglars, minor villains, professionals – drawn blank. But that was never really on, you know that as well as I do. Odd stranger, madman, hooligan – “impossible” is a big word, but as near impossible as makes no matter. So we’re left with the old three-card trick – pick someone among those who knew the old lady. You said, more than three to pick on. We’re still casting round. But that’s just for the sake of thoroughness. Unless I’ve gone off my head, it must be someone I’ve thought of already. And the same with you. I can’t dream up a conceivable motive for Tom Thirkill. But when one’s really up against it it’s an old tip: Don’t forget the oddest man around. Even if you can’t see the faintest reasons. Tom Thirkill is odd enough for anyone’s money. So I want to know about him. By the way, he keeps some of his movements remarkably dark.’

That night, both he and Humphrey were missing an explanation which later appeared obvious enough. Humphrey asked: ‘Is he worth all this trouble, as far as you’re concerned?’

Briers said: ‘As a matter of fact, there’s a different reason for being interested. You can guess, it’s a better one. He must know something about his daughter. She’s been on the list all along – you took that for granted, too. Wild as they come. Not exactly nice. The old lady was pretty effectively stopping her grabbing our friend Loseby. I don’t believe anyone half-way sane is going to kill for that reason. But, still, I’m not going to rule her out. There may be something simpler that we haven’t latched on to. With her and Loseby. Why in Christ’s name did he marry her? I want to know anything her father knows.’

Humphrey nodded and said: ‘I don’t think you’re surprising me.’

‘Of course I’m not. It’s all commonplace. Loseby’s in the picture, but I still can’t see why. Anyway, the boys are on the job. They’re working on how he lived, money-wise. And that night was he shacked up with the young man Douglas Gimson, or was he not? You’ve come a lot cleaner with me about your sources; I’ll do the same about ours.’ He looked at his wife with consideration, or respect, or a kind of apology. ‘You’ve been through it before, dear, haven’t you? You know in this game you don’t trust your best friend. Humphrey’s one of our best friends, isn’t he?’