Sweet Poison (35 page)

17

Thursday Evening and Friday

Dinner was over and the servants had left the Duke and his guests to their coffee and brandy. Everyone was relieved that the Duke refrained from offering port. Connie and Verity were not asked to leave the table, which they would certainly have refused to do. Lord Weaver raised the topic which had been studiously avoided while they ate dinner: ‘Edward, what have you discovered about General Craig’s death? I know you have been sleuthing. You obviously don’t have much faith in our good Inspector Pride.’

‘I have spoken to Pride,’ the Duke interjected, ‘and I can tell you that, short of Ned or someone else coming up with new information, the verdict will be accidental death.’

Lord Weaver dragged on his cigar and growled, ‘He took the cyanide mistaking it for one of his morphine pills?’

‘Yes,’ said the Duke. ‘Do you have any evidence that might persuade a jury to a different verdict, Ned?’

‘No, no evidence, but Verity and I have a few ideas about what might have happened.’

‘I know what you are going to say,’ said the Bishop unexpectedly. ‘You think I killed the General, and you would be right: I did.’

There was an audible gasp from Connie, and the Duke said, ‘Oh look, I say –’ before he was cut off by the Bishop.

‘I don’t say I meant to kill him – as a Christian and a pacifist, I could never knowingly kill someone however much I disapproved of them and I certainly disapproved of the General. He was a warmonger of the old school. He spent his life fighting. He hated Germans and he told us he did not believe talking to them would do any good. He told me that the only thing a German understood was a bayonet. I have to say, I was horrified. If we don’t believe that discussion can replace war as a way of settling disputes then we are all doomed.’

‘How do you mean, Bishop, that you killed the General accidentally?’ said Edward coolly.

‘It’s simple! When we returned from having greeted you in the hall and settled ourselves down again, I noticed that the General’s port glass was standing in front of Weaver’s place. So, without thinking, I pushed it back to where the General was seated. A few moments later he lifted the glass and drank from it and was immediately convulsed. I was struck dumb, but I assumed that the General must have decided to commit suicide and by some accident Lord Weaver had almost drunk the wine he had poisoned.’

‘I’m most grateful, Cecil,’ said Weaver calmly, taking the cigar out of his mouth and bowing his head in the Bishop’s direction. ‘I have to confess, I don’t feel like dying yet. I have a wife whom I love very much. I have just found a daughter I had lost and I believe I have a lot to offer this country – which I am now proud to call my own – in the dangerous years ahead.’

Edward said, ‘Two people I talked to told me they had seen you pass the poisoned glass over to the General, so I thought it unlikely you knew what you were doing.’

‘Otherwise I would have been more surreptitious?’

‘Yes . . . by the way, how did you know it was the General’s glass?’

‘Because it was not quite one of the set. It was larger than any of the others,’ said the Bishop.

‘How very observant of you. I noticed that too and for a moment I wondered if someone had introduced a special glass on to the table but my sister-in-law tells me it is one of hers. I wondered also, Bishop – purely as an academic exercise, you understand – what possible motive you might have for killing the old soldier.’

‘I have told you that I did have a motive,’ the Bishop said: ‘my dislike, no, my abhorrence of the General’s bloodthirstiness. He had still some influence in high places, I understand, and it would have been a tragedy in my view if his aggressive Germanophobic views had been listened to where decisions on policy are made.’

‘Ironically,’ said Edward, ‘the General had the same motive for wanting to get rid of you, Bishop.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well, it occurred to me that just as each of the men drinking port round my brother’s table had a motive for murdering the General –’

‘For God’s sake, Ned, what nonsense is this?’ broke in the Duke.

‘Let him finish, Duke,’ drawled Weaver, ‘he’s just getting interesting.’

‘I was saying, just as you all had a motive for killing General Craig, he had the same motives, in reverse one might say, for killing any of you. For instance, he believed the Bishop’s pacifism would lead to war by giving the Germans the idea that Britain would not fight for its own or its allies’ rights.’

‘He was right. I hope that we will never go to war so that France can continue to extort Germany’s wealth in the name of reparations,’ said the Bishop firmly.

‘And you, Lord Weaver,’ Edward went on as if the Bishop had not spoken, ‘he knew you had a damaging story about his having killed, in the last war, German soldiers after they had surrendered and been disarmed. That was a tale he did not want airing. To be branded a murderer in public when he knew he had only been doing his duty . . . well, you can imagine what he might have done to avoid it. His reputation would have been tarnished whatever was said in his defence, and therefore his influence at what he regarded as a crucial moment in the history of Britain and her Empire would have been weakened or destroyed. Added to which, he thought the political viewpoint of your paper would, like the Bishop’s views, hasten war because it would send Hitler a message that we would not stand up to him.’

‘But people don’t murder for such impersonal reasons, do they?’ said Connie. ‘I thought murders were done for greed, jealousy, revenge – that sort of thing – not for politics.’

‘I wish murders weren’t committed for political reasons but I am afraid they are, at least in the shabby age we live in. Besides, Craig was seeking revenge. Don’t forget the General was a man in a hurry. He knew he was dying of cancer. At best he had only a few months to live, and what was his motive force throughout his life? Duty. He might have regarded it as his last duty to do what he could to prevent his country, as he would see it, going along the path to perdition.’

‘And what might my motive have been for killing the General?’ asked Weaver in an interested, uninvolved tone of voice.

‘I’m only guessing here,’ said Edward, ‘from something Gerald mentioned in passing. I think the General might have come to know about the daughter by your first wife whom you had abandoned in Canada. You might not have cared to have had that revealed in a rival newspaper.’

‘You’re quite right, of course,’ said Weaver. ‘Craig had a friend back in New Brunswick where I lived as a young man – a man named Packer, a nasty piece of work – dead now, I’m glad to say. He and I crossed swords once or twice when I was making my first fortune. He always seemed to get the worst of it and, of course, didn’t like me much. Matter of fact he tried to shoot me but he missed, which was typical of the man. Anyway, he told Craig about my first wife and the baby – how I had left her to be brought up by . . . well, I had nothing to be proud of. Thanks to Packer, Craig had the whole story. He kept quiet about it until . . . the long and short of it is, he thought I would not want the story to get into the press – I mean, of course, the yellow press, not my own fine, upstanding publications.’ He drew on his cigar and puffed out a cloud of smoke which he examined closely before going on. ‘Craig believed I would agree to publish anti-German stories in my newspapers if he kept silent.’

‘Blackmail!’ exclaimed Haycraft.

‘Hardly that, but I don’t pretend I wasn’t a little put out. However, it had the happy result of hastening my decision to tell Blanche of Amy’s existence and that I intended to do what I should have done years ago and bring her over to England. I consulted the Duke here, as about the wisest man I knew, and it was he who urged me to do what I thought was right regardless of how it might hurt Blanche and Hermione. So you can see, I have a lot to be grateful to the General for.’ His cigar now reduced to ash, he took another from the box on the table, nodding to his host for permission.

‘Yes,’ said the Duke, ‘and when we talked just before the dinner I was delighted to hear that you had decided to make a clean breast of it all. It was one of the reasons I wanted to bring you and Craig together at Mersham so you could resolve your differences on neutral ground. I was horrified that my old friend could have brought himself to attempt . . . to try – well, you used the word, Cecil – blackmail – even if he considered his motives to be honourable. Did you say anything to him, Joe, about what you proposed to do?’

‘I intended to but I never got the chance.’

This was the first time anyone had heard the Duke call Lord Weaver by his Christian name, and Connie and Edward both looked at him curiously. The Duke was not one to make any man an intimate he had not known in childhood, but clearly Lord Weaver was an exception.

‘Yes, I decided, whatever the pain might be for Blanche or Hermione, I should do what I ought to have done years before and bring Amy to live with me. Amy joining the family where she belongs has been a great joy to me. She has never said one word of complaint about the way I abandoned her though, before God, she had every right to do so.’

‘And Blanche, Hermione? Were they as pleased?’

‘Blanche was angry with me for not telling her before about Amy and welcomed her as warmly as –’

‘But Hermione was less pleased?’

‘It’s a private matter, Lord Edward, but if you must know, Hermione was not pleased. She used some harsh words to me, but then she is an ill person.’

‘So,’ said Edward, ‘you had no motive to kill the General, but I still believe he might have wanted to kill you. Did that poisoned glass of port end up in front of you, Weaver, by accident or on purpose? We may never know for sure.’

‘But,’ said Connie, very shocked, ‘how could he – the General, I mean – have been sure that we would all sit down where we had been sitting before?’

‘He could not,’ Verity said, ‘but he might not have minded if anyone else had taken the poison by mistake – after all, Friedberg and poor Mr Larmore were in his eyes tarred with the same brush. He suspected Larmore was passing secrets to the Nazis – as indeed he was – and, of course, Friedberg was the devil incarnate.’

‘But,’ said Connie again, ‘was his hatred of Germany so . . . so deep?’

‘Edward discovered from Jeffries, General Craig’s valet, that it was very deep, didn’t you?’ Verity said solemnly.

‘Yes,’ Edward agreed, ‘and to top it all, I discovered that the surgeon who had operated on his wife – the only person I think he truly loved – and who failed to save her – the cancer was far too advanced – was a German: Hans Hollweg. He is naturalized British and one of the best surgeons in the country. I don’t doubt for a minute he did everything for the poor woman he could, but she died anyway.’

‘Oh God,’ said Connie, ‘that poor lonely old man.’

‘But you said we all had motives when it came to killing the General, Ned. I didn’t have a motive.’

‘Yes you did, Gerald. Had you forgotten that Craig was in command of Frank’s battalion at the beginning of the war? You might have held him responsible for his death,’ he said soberly.

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ spluttered the Duke.

‘I know it is,’ Edward said, putting his hand on Connie’s to reassure her. ‘In fact, I know the General respected you – he was one of your oldest friends. On the other hand – I’m only guessing – he thought you were wrong to hold these dinners. He respected you and what you stand for and he had no intention of harming you personally, but he might have thought it was his duty to disrupt your efforts to bring German and British top brass together.’

‘But how could he have been sure of not hurting Gerald?’ demanded Connie in a voice that trembled however hard she tried to control it.

‘He could be certain that when Gerald got back from greeting Verity and me, he if no other would sit in his former seat, at the head of the table, and would therefore be very unlikely to take the poisoned glass.’

‘Golly,’ said the Bishop, ‘you really think, Lord Edward, that the General was indulging in some mad Russian roulette?’

‘I can’t be sure but I think it is possible. He knew he was dying. He may have been depressed and lonely with his wife dead and a new war with Germany on the cards. By the way, Haycraft, I beg to disagree with you on one thing: I don’t think the General was a warmonger. I think he hated war and like all of us could not bear the idea of a new, even more terrible war coming to kill a new generation of young men, but he saw the way to avoid it as being resolute refusal to surrender to what he considered unjustifiable demands from the new Germany, and for what it is worth, which isn’t much, I agree with him.’

The Bishop gave a little moue of disapproval. ‘How does this affect the inquest?’ he said after a pause.

‘It doesn’t,’ said Lord Weaver firmly. ‘As Lord Edward has said, there is not an atom of proof for any of this, and even if there was, how would it help anyone to have it aired in the gutter press? If the General was a murderer he got his just reward – what more could any potential victim of his malice ask? Let him go to his rest in Westminster Abbey the revered soldier – no doubt he earned it on many a battlefield. In old age we may all end up embittered and disillusioned and in that light, if I were his intended victim, I forgive him.’

‘Well said, Joe,’ the Duke exclaimed. ‘Just what I would have expected you to say, though. You are a true gentleman.’

Lord Weaver sucked at his cigar with evident pleasure and embarrassment at the Duke’s encomium.

The following morning, after the inquest, Lord Weaver offered to take Verity back to London in his Phantom III, a new Rolls-Royce of which he was inordinately proud, but Edward said he would drive her back to town in the Lagonda. Verity might have found it useful to have had a couple of hours private conversation with the press lord but she knew Edward would be mortally offended if she said as much.

The inquest had gone smoothly enough. The little black-suited coroner, whom they all agreed resembled Dr Crippen, had conducted the proceedings quickly and efficiently. Dr Best gave his evidence of finding the General dead from cyanide poisoning and confirmed that the post-mortem had revealed that the cancer from which he was suffering would have killed him in a few weeks. Jeffries had been called next and confirmed that the General had a cyanide capsule from when he had been in France during the war and that he also had morphine tablets. He said he did not believe the General could have confused the two but this opinion was speedily put to one side by the General’s doctor, Dr Cradel, who confirmed that when he had had to tell the General that he was dying and there was nothing to be done about it, he had been depressed and bitter – as anyone else would have been in the circumstances. The doctor reminded the coroner that the General’s beloved wife had also died of cancer and this might have added to the General’s depression. He had no close relatives or friends to look after him as far as the doctor could discover, but when he had suggested the General take on nursing help he had refused grumpily, insisting that Jeffries could do everything necessary.