Half a Crown (8 page)

“Do you know where she is?” Betsy Maynard asked urgently, with no preliminaries. Carmichael’s heart sank.

“When did you last see Elvira?” he asked.

“Last night, at Marble Arch. I got swept away from her in the crowd, and then I got my arm broken. They’ve been fussing over me and operating and it wasn’t until just now that we found out that Elvira was missing. Mummy thought she’d have come safely home, but of course she hasn’t, and we’re frantic.”

“I believe she’s been arrested with the rioters,” Carmichael said. “I’m going to Paddington now. I’ll need to speak to your mother about this. She should have told me Elvira was missing.”

“Mummy was at the Charing Cross Hospital with me all night,” Betsy said. “Not that it’s any excuse, really.”

Carmichael was inclined to agree. “If you have a broken arm you’ll need to rest,” he said. “I’ll speak to your mother after I’m sure Elvira is safe.”

“Yes, do go and get her,” Betsy said. “And if you wouldn’t mind, could you let me know when she’s safely with you? I’m terribly worried about her.”

“I’ll do that, Betsy,” Carmichael said, and rang off.

“So she’s really missing?” Miss Duthie asked.

Carmichael nodded. “I must get up to Paddington. Sergeant Evans is probably getting soaked to the skin waiting for me.” He hurried off down the corridor again.

The guard raised his eyebrows when he saw Carmichael come out again so soon, but said nothing. Sergeant Evans was waiting under the portico, a capacious black umbrella under his arm.

There was a black police Bentley waiting outside, as there always was. This was another of Carmichael’s improvements over the Yard, where getting a car was almost as bad an ordeal as being put up for a club. Carmichael nodded to the driver and then to Evans. “Is there room for us both under that thing?” he asked.

“Should be, sir,” Evans said, putting it up and holding it more over Carmichael than himself. “Nasty day, isn’t it. April showers!”

They hurried down the steps and into the waiting car.

“Paddington Police Station,” Carmichael said to the driver. Then he looked at Evans, who was one of his favorite subordinates, being steady, intelligent, and with a sense of humor. He was also Welsh, and Jack had said once that he had the typical look of the British before the Romans came—small-boned, dark-haired, and clear-skinned.

“What’s up, sir?” he asked.

“It seems my ward, Elvira Royston, Sergeant Royston’s daughter, you remember, somehow got mixed up in the Marble Arch riot, and I need to bail her out. I’m just bringing you along for company, and in case we want to overawe the Mets with a uniformed presence.”

“You should have brought Sergeant Richards for that,” Evans said.

Carmichael laughed, despite his worries about Elvira. Sergeant Richards was six foot two. “You’ll do.”

Paddington Police Station, when they reached it, seemed a grim place in the rain. Carmichael gave his name to a stern-faced constable at the desk who checked his papers thoroughly, squinting conscientiously from the identity photograph to Carmichael’s face. “Inspector Bannister wanted to see you, sir,” he said, when he was confident of Carmichael’s identity.

“I’m here to collect Elvira Royston,” Carmichael said. He didn’t want to waste his time talking to the Met. Bannister, he remembered from his reports, was one of Penn-Barkis’s creatures, and Penn-Barkis’s continued supervision over the Watch was one of Carmichael’s constant irritations.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Bannister would just like a word first.”

Carmichael frowned, and the officer quailed a little.

“Just in here, sir,” he said.

Evans followed Carmichael into a little office as directed, where they waited for a few moments.

Bannister proved to be a redhead in his late twenties, and a middle-class southerner, as Carmichael learned the moment he opened his mouth. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said, coming in, followed by a uniformed bobby. “This is extraordinary.”

“Good afternoon, Inspector. I’d like to take Elvira home without wasting too much time,” Carmichael said.

“Yes, certainly, but this is a very unusual situation. We’re anxious to cooperate with you, of course, but there are certain formalities in
the case of any arrest. And in this case, we’re supposed to keep all the rioters and check on them thoroughly.”

“Those are my orders,” Carmichael said. “I hardly think they apply in this case. My ward was caught up in the riot by mistake.”

“It doesn’t look that way to me. Why did Elvira—”

“Miss Royston.” Carmichael stressed her formal name. He didn’t like hearing “Elvira” on Bannister’s lips.

Bannister looked surprised, but corrected himself at once. “Why did Miss Royston go to the rally?”

“She no doubt went to the rally for the fun of it, probably never having heard of British Power until the fighting started.” It would have helped, Carmichael thought, if he’d had any real idea why Elvira did go to the rally. He should have asked Betsy Maynard.

“Probably,” Bannister said. “She said she was your niece. Now you say she’s your ward?”

“She calls me Uncle, but she’s my ward,” Carmichael said, trying to be calm but knowing that the Lancashire was coming into his vowels as it always did when he was agitated. Bannister was trying to get him on the defensive, and he wasn’t having it. He took a deep breath. “Bring Miss Royston in here immediately. We’re leaving.”

Bannister nodded to the bobby, who left the room. “He’s just fetching her now,” he said. “What are Miss Royston’s political convictions?”

“She’s an eighteen-year-old girl, she’s about to come out, she doesn’t have two political thoughts a year,” Carmichael said. “She won’t be old enough to vote for seven or eight years.”

“A lot of the people we pulled in last night were young, the men especially,” Bannister said. “And some of the British Power ringleaders move in debutante circles. The connections seem to go very high.”

He was drawing breath to go on, but Carmichael interrupted, tired of all this. “No doubt there’s a detailed report on all this on my desk at the Watch.”

The bobby came back into the room with Elvira following him. She was limping and looked filthy and exhausted.

“Uncle Carmichael,” she said, her voice wavering but determined not to cry, reminding Carmichael a great deal of how she had been when she was seven years old and had fallen down in the street outside her father’s house in Camden Town. She looked at Bannister with loathing, and stood beside Carmichael, as far from Bannister as she could be in the small room.

“Soon get you away from this, Elvira,” he said. “Do you have the papers, Bannister?”

Bannister hesitated. “I wanted to ask a few more questions,” he said.

“Most Metropolitan officers find it to their advantage to cooperate with us,” Carmichael said, silkily. “Or you might find the price of noncooperation is rather high. If you get on the wrong side of me you might end up spending the rest of your career directing traffic in John O’Groats, or something considerably worse.” It would have given Carmichael no pleasure to ruin the man’s career, but he had done a lot worse.

“Yes, sir,” Bannister said, his face wooden. “But this isn’t a Watch matter, is it? It’s a personal matter. You’re asking us to free Miss Royston unconditionally, not to transfer her into Watch custody. She looks to me like a crucial piece in the investigation. She and …” He peered at his notes. “Sir Alan Bellingham.”

“I’ll take her into Watch custody if it’ll speed this up,” Carmichael said. Once in Watch custody the bureaucratic procedures were under his own control.

“That’s hardly proper procedure,” Bannister said.

Carmichael loathed the layers of red tape and “proper procedure” that surrounded everything these days. “Transfer her to Sergeant Evans’s Watch custody then. I assume that’s all right with you, Evans?”

“Perfectly, sir,” Evans said. He leaned forward and took the papers from Bannister’s hand. “Where do I sign?”

“Give those back at once!” Bannister demanded.

Sergeant Evans held on to the papers for a moment, deliberately, then smoothed them between his fingers, scanned them, and signed at the bottom. “We’ve had about enough of your lip,” he said, handing them back. “We’re leaving.”

Bannister handed Elvira’s identity card to Sergeant Evans.

“Come on, sir, let’s get out of here,” Evans said, taking it.

Carmichael glowered at Bannister, who looked back impassively. “Come on, Elvira.” He offered her his arm, which she took hesitantly.

“Tuppenny ha’penny Hitler,” Evans said, as they left. “You were too soft on him, sir. Making himself important for the sake of it, trying to humiliate you because for once he had a bit of power. That’s what’s wrong with the country these days, too many men like him, sucking up when they have to and putting the boot in when they don’t. Now the Watch may have its dirty jobs to do from time to time—”

“The Watch can be just as bad,” Carmichael said, cutting him off.

“No, sir, there you’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because we’re armed, and that means we don’t need to push people around to show we can. Like the army. We know we can, and so we don’t need to.”

“That’s an extraordinary theory, sergeant,” Carmichael said. He knew Evans had rounded up Jews, and shot them too, when they’d tried to escape. It was impossible to escape brutality, in the Watch, but perhaps it really did seem to Sergeant Evans that brutality was better than petty humiliation.

I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life as I was to see Uncle Carmichael in that little office. I felt my eyes positively filling up with tears at the familiar sight of him. Not that he looked pleased to see me; quite the opposite. He had his official face on, but he was quite clearly furious. I didn’t know if that was directed at my idiocy in getting myself arrested or at the red-haired Paddington officer who was clearly enjoying having the advantage on Uncle Carmichael for once. But controlled fury was a familiar mood of Uncle Carmichael’s. It made me feel as if this was only a scrape and that I could smile and apologize and get out of it unscathed. Most things were like that. Indeed, there had only been three things in my life so far where I couldn’t do that. The first was my mother walking out when I was six. The second was my father being killed when I was eight. And the third was Betsy getting herself into a mess in Zurich the year before, when we were both seventeen. Since my interview with the redheaded policeman I’d been starting to feel intimations that this arrest might be a fourth.

I went to stand in the corner of the office, out of the way. As well as the horrible policeman and Uncle Carmichael and a bobby, there was solid old Sergeant Evans, who was Welsh, and who loved horses almost as much as I had when I was fourteen. His wife, Jean, had
taken a kind interest in me ever since my father died. Only the week before, Betsy and I had taken her for tea in the Ritz.

None of them looked at me while they squabbled over the papers. For a moment as he and the redhead bullied each other, Uncle Carmichael seemed his mirror image. I looked at him sideways as he made threats, wondering if I knew him at all. Then we left, the three of us stalking out with our heads held high, like a trio of affronted duchesses in a fish market. There was a police car outside, a plain black Bentley, the 1958 model with the silver grille. The driver didn’t get out, and Sergeant Evans opened the back door for me. Uncle Carmichael sat in the back next to me, and Sergeant Evans in the front next to the driver.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

There was a pause. “Mrs. Maynard’s?” I suggested.

“No,” Uncle Carmichael said, abruptly. “Not yet, anyway. Betsy Maynard has broken her arm, and I need to have words with her mother. Severe words. Certainly not today. I need to talk to you.”

“Is Betsy all right?” I asked. I could imagine all too easily how a bone could have cracked in that riot, and began to worry about how bad it was.

Uncle Carmichael looked perhaps a shade less annoyed as he turned his head to look at me, and his voice was certainly softer. Thinking of Betsy can have that effect on people. “I spoke to her on the telephone, and she was mostly worried about you. I expect she’ll recover all right.”

“How about going back to the Watchtower?” Sergeant Evans ventured.

Uncle Carmichael looked at his watch, and frowned. I glanced at my own watch reflexively. It was ten to four, which seemed preposterous, even though I knew about all the hours of waiting. I should have been with Betsy having our fittings for our Court dresses. “I noticed you were limping. Do you need a doctor, Elvira?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I lost a shoe, and then I banged my knee when that vile policeman pushed me. It’ll be all right.”

“Then home, I think,” Uncle Carmichael said.

The driver pulled out into the traffic as if he and the car were one machine. I had plenty of opportunity to watch the excellence of his driving, as nobody said a word for the fifteen minutes it took us to make our way to Uncle Carmichael’s flat. I was fretting about Betsy. An arm in plaster would put a damper on her coming out, and there wasn’t really anything else for her. She could talk about being a secretary, but it wouldn’t do, really. Her parents would never let her get away except in the approved fashion. I was so glad I’d decided to go to Oxford, and so lucky Uncle Carmichael and the Dean had let me.

When I was a little girl I used to think Uncle Carmichael was a rich man. He talked like a toff, or enough like one to fool my Cockney ear. I didn’t know enough then to recognize the Lancashire that sometimes comes out in his speech. He was my father’s superior, and as they often worked together, his boss. He was his friend as well, but Dad used to tell me to mind myself in front of Inspector Carmichael, not to take advantage even though he let me call him Uncle. Then, after my father was killed and Uncle Carmichael as good as adopted me and sent me to Arlinghurst, I came to think he was quite poor. After all, he lived in a flat with only one manservant, who did the cooking as well as valeting. A woman came in a few mornings a week to clean and do the rough, but otherwise poor Jack did everything. Since I’d grown up—for now, after my year in Switzerland, I felt myself quite grown-up—I’d come to realize that Uncle Carmichael’s finances, relative power, and social position were far more complex than I had ever imagined.