Ha'penny (32 page)

“That’s what they were using, sir, shotguns and quite heavy pellets, like you’d use for hare, maybe, not light birdshot. I saw you go down and thought they’d got a direct hit.”

“No, I was lucky,” Carmichael said, automatically. “How many of them were there?”

“Four,” Ogilvie said. “My marksmen shot two of them, and then the other two surrendered. I’ve sent an armed search party into the house to check we have absolutely everyone.”

“That’s right, good,” Carmichael said. He felt quite distant from the whole affair. He couldn’t even feel any pain from his wound.

“I think you should sit down in the van, sir,” Ogilvie said.

Carmichael nodded. Ogilvie supported his elbow and guided him around the side of the vehicles. The bobbies were putting handcuffs on everyone who had left the house and herding them into the Maria.

“Make sure you get their names and papers,” Carmichael said as they passed them.

“Yes, sir, they’re doing that, sir, as a matter of procedure. But I don’t think there’s going to be any problem putting this one under the Defence of the Realm Act, considering they shot at us.”

They walked down the far side of the van. The back doors were open. Carmichael did not want to climb inside, but he settled himself there on the high floor. It was a relief to get the weight off his leg. Ogilvie stood beside him, looking worried.

“There might be a bomb,” Carmichael remembered.

“Yes, sir, I have apprised the men of that possibility,” Ogilvie said. “I think you need a doctor sir, to dig the pellet out of your leg. I can carry on here if—”

“You’ve done very well, Deputy Inspector, and I entirely endorse all the decisions you made when you thought you were in charge,” Carmichael said. “But I need to know who has been arrested and if there’s any more resistance in the house. I’ll stay here.”

“Yes, sir,” Ogilvie said. One of the bobbies came up with a list, which Ogilvie took and handed to Carmichael. “This is the list of detainees, all matched to identity papers.”

Carmichael looked at it. Lord Philip John Scott headed the list. None of his other names were on it, nor were any of the women’s names anything like Siddy. “Do we know who we shot?” he asked.

“Just give me a minute,” Ogilvie said.

Carmichael sat back, out of the sunshine. He could smell blood, and over that the scent of the roses in front of the house. The lazy peace of a June afternoon was stealing back over what had been the scene of a battle. Somewhere out of sight, high above, a skylark started to sing. Royston must have gone with the inside party, Carmichael thought, because he couldn’t see him anywhere. He hoped they didn’t run into more trouble. He was glad Royston was with them. These men were all very keen, but Royston had common sense.

Ogilvie came back. “Malcolm Nesbitt and Robert Nash, according to their papers,” he said.

“Damn,” Carmichael said. He had wanted to speak to Nash for so long now that it seemed a terrible disappointment to know he never would. Death was the end of all possible answers.

“The other man with a shotgun, besides Lord Scott, was his butler, Goldfarb.”

“No women arrested, apart from servants?”

“None, sir.”

Well, it would be easy enough to get Green to identify the mysterious Siddy if she were hidden among them. The same went for Sir Aloysius, if he were disguising himself as a Jewish butler or anything else. They had them all. He was disappointed that Nash was beyond questioning, but they would probably get all they needed from Lord Scott.

“We mustn’t lose any of them in processing,” Carmichael said. “Make sure they’re all taken to the same place and kept together. I know there’s a lot of overcrowding at present, but this is really important. Probably most of the servants will be released soon, but I need to question them all.”

“Most of them seem terrified,” Ogilvie said. “All the shooting coming out of nowhere. As best I can tell from what they’ve said so far, Mr. Nesbitt saw us coming up the drive and came downstairs in a panic, at which Lieutenant Nash and Lord Scott snatched up shotguns from the gun room and prepared a defense.”

“I can’t think what they hoped to gain from it. It was impossible odds for them. They weren’t covering the escape of anyone else by the back?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but not from anything anyone has said. Shall I send out a patrol under a sergeant, sir? Or lead one myself?”

“How many men do you have in your command now?” Carmichael asked.

“Twenty-one active, sir. One was shot dead, and another three are wounded.”

“Then a patrol isn’t worth it. This country looks flat, but it rolls, and there are spinneys, so someone who knows it could easily hide from twenty men, especially with the start he’d have had, even if we could spare them all. We’ll find out from the servants who was here and when.”

“Yes, sir,” Ogilvie said.

A red-faced young constable with a snub nose came up to them. “House secured, sir,” he said to Ogilvie, in a manner much more military than Carmichael was used to.

“No bombs, no armed hideouts, nothing of note?” Carmichael asked.

“No, sir. One dead body, a woman, papers identify her as Muriel Nest, Jewish, parlor maid.” He hesitated, then added, “Shot through the window by a rifle, sir, pure bad luck.”

“These things happen, and they certainly started the shooting, knowing they had innocents on their side,” Carmichael said. “We may have killed her, but we were undoubtedly acting in self-defense.”

“Yes, sir. And they killed two of us, not to mention the wounded,” the red-faced constable said.

“Two?” Carmichael asked. “I thought you said you’d only lost one man, Ogilvie?”

“That’s right, sir,” Ogilvie said, looking embarrassed. “I thought you knew, sir. The other one was your driver. They took him out early on, quite close range, in the chest, just as he was getting out of the car. Made a mess of the car too, dinged it up badly. Sorry about that, sir.”

29

D
evlin’s idea of a hotel near Victoria was a beastly hole in Pimlico. Our room was actually underground, with a window at street level. It must have been a servant’s room when the so-called hotel was a proper house. The bathroom, which was down the hall, had a big old-fashioned bath with claw feet and a free-standing pipe that provided first warm and then lukewarm water. After checking us in, Devlin went off to hide the car. I had a good soak in the bath. When I came back to the room, wishing for talcum powder and face cream, not to mention my Dutch Cap, Devlin was fast asleep right in the middle of the bed. I had to poke him to make him move over.

I lay awake listening to the sound of people’s feet on the pavement above my head, afraid one of them would be a policeman come to get us. It was late, but people kept clattering by. It was much too hot to close the window. I kept thinking about Uncle Phil being arrested and maybe tortured, and Malcolm too, and nice thoughtful Bob Nash. How could Siddy be sure they wouldn’t tell everything about us right away? Devlin had said they have ways of making everyone talk. Why did I only believe people when they said things in a tone of breaking things to me gently? Did I really believe that Pip, my own sister Pip, was a monster? The terrible thing, lying awake in the dark, was that I did, and that I recognized the callous places in myself that could have made me like her. I don’t suppose Pip particularly wanted to be horrid to the Jews, but she was having a lovely time on the Continent and she just didn’t care.

I would take the bomb and hope that it blew her up, and her horrible Heinie with his sweaty hands, and sadistic Mark Normanby, and even old Hitler, who seemed nice enough but must have been as bad as any of them. I briefly entertained a fantasy that all the horrid details had been kept from him and he would stop the whole thing if I explained it to him. He was the only one of them I had liked. But no, I had heard him raving on the radio at the huge torchlit rallies at Nuremberg—splendid theater—and his way of blaming the Jews for whatever had gone wrong.

I slept eventually, and dreamed of childhood, of Pip pushing me into the duckpond and the weed catching and tugging at me and trying to pull me under, while Pip, transformed somehow into the adult Pip while I was still a child, stood on the bank and laughed.

The dress rehearsal went wonderfully. Everything that had been awkward before went smoothly. Mollie didn’t fall off the dais once. Everything came together as it should. It helped a very great deal that Antony was staying in character as Claudius and not leaping out of it to berate someone every two minutes. He was a terrific Claudius now that he had the feel of it, always certain he knew what was right for everyone. I threw myself into character, glad to be Hamlet and not myself for a few hours. Afterwards, he congratulated us all, told us to sleep well, and to make sure to be at the theater early for the first night.

Mollie and Pat and some of the others were going to Mimi’s, and I’d have liked to go with them, but Devlin was waiting in the car. “How are things?” I asked.

He didn’t answer until he’d driven away from the theater. “Nobody’s been near the flat, nobody’s following me, we’ll see now if anybody’s following you,” he said. “How did the dress rehearsal go?”

“Almost too well,” I said. “Mrs. Tring was practically in tears.”

“Too well? They say a bad dress rehearsal means a good first night, but I never heard it the other way around.” Devlin was smiling as he drove, but looking in the mirror.

“I have,” I said. “Is anyone following?”

“I don’t think so.” He wasn’t doing anything to shake them off if they were, just driving a little slowly so that he’d see anything unusual.

“If we’re going ahead, when are you going to do it?” I asked.

“The flowers will arrive in the afternoon, and be taken to your dressing room, then about an hour before curtain you’ll spot them and take them around to plug the hole in the box.” Devlin’s eyes were still on the road. He signaled and waited to turn right, across traffic, onto Regent Street.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I mean when in the play will you set it off.”

“Why?” Devlin asked.

“Because I was wondering after that stupendous dress rehearsal how much of it the audience were going to get to see. If you could wait until my duel with Laertes—”

“I’m not going to tell you, love,” he said. “I don’t want you to know, you might do something on stage to give us all away. I want you to be as natural as possible when it happens. You passed up the chance to do it yourself, which gives me control of the timing. I’ll pick a moment when they’re all in the box. But let it surprise you.”

“I thought Loy was going to do it,” I said.

“No. I am. I told you I couldn’t trust him for it,” he said. “And we’re clear, nobody following, we can go home. No reason not to go back to the flat, and I take it you’d prefer that to the hotel?”

“Emphatically,” I said. “But Loy—”

“Loy will be up in the ha’pennies and he’ll try it from there, sitting down. I don’t think that will work, but if it does, good. If not, I’ll stand up in the front row, just for an instant. That’s line of sight, it will work.”

“If they get you they get me too, right away,” I said.

“True enough, darling. But you don’t want me to tell you how to get away. There’s a pub on O’Connell Street—”

“There won’t be any getting away,” I said, impatiently.

“They might not connect us up for a few hours. If you went straight to Paddington you’d have a chance.”

I let him tell me about the pub in O’Connell Street, Dublin, and what I was to say. Just in case it isn’t burned, I won’t say any more about it.

“What are you going to do tomorrow, before going to the theater?” he asked, as we got out of the car at his flat.

“I don’t know. I suppose you’ll be busy?”

He nodded. “I have my appointment with Siddy. I could meet you afterwards, for lunch if you like, love?”

“Oh, let’s go to Benetto’s by Camden Lock and eat ice cream!” I said. It was a treat Mollie had introduced me to, and one I often indulged in before first nights. Benetto’s is a real Italian ice-cream parlor and they make their own ice cream and often have as many as five or six flavors. I have to watch what I eat, of course, but as Mollie had said long ago, one ice cream per play can’t do any harm. “And if you’re going to the florist, can you send roses from me to the cast?”

“If you give me money and a list of what you want,” he agreed warily.

So Devlin agreed to come back after going with Siddy to the florist and meet me to take me to Benetto’s. Before that we had the evening, and the night. Devlin didn’t fall asleep like a lump that night, but instead we made love, and it was better than ever. He paid attention, that was what made him so different, he caught my rhythms instead of expecting me to catch on to his the way most men do. I slept much better that night. I didn’t even think about being near the bomb until the next morning when he took it out from under the kitchen sink and went off with it.

He was late coming back to pick me up. I’d had breakfast and I wasn’t starving—ice cream is hardly something you eat when you’re starving anyway—but I was impatient and ready to go. Then I stopped feeling impatient and started to worry. They had arrested Uncle Phil. They could have got Siddy, and she could have led them to Devlin. It might be police cars that came for me. I had an unpleasant half hour before I saw Devlin’s little car drawing up outside.

He was sitting very still. He was always very controlled in his movements, very graceful, but there was something about this that was different. He looked really shaken.

“Everything all right?” I asked, getting in.

“Well, the florist was Siddy’s boy, or rather Moscow’s boy, all right, but not all of the assistants were, so we had to do the work while nobody was looking. But it’s done and sent off, so you don’t need to worry.” He turned the car and set off.

“Siddy’s all right?” I asked.

“Siddy is always all right. Siddy is off, she said to tell you good-bye. She’ll be in Moscow, or anyway in Lisbon, before you go on stage.” He sounded quite savage.