The Key (2 page)

SIR GEORGE RENDAL leaned forward.

‘Your part of the world, isn’t it?’

Major Garth Albany said, ‘Yes, sir – I used to spend my holidays there. My grandfather was the Rector. He’s dead now – he was pretty old then.’

Sir George nodded.

‘One of the daughters still lives in Bourne, doesn’t she? She’d be your aunt?’

‘Well, a kind of step. The old man got married three times, and two of them were widows. My Aunt Sophy isn’t really any relation, because she’s the first widow’s daughter by her first marriage. Her name’s Fell – Sophy Fell. My father was the youngest of the family—’ He broke off, laughed, and said, ‘I’m not awfully firm on the family history really, but I did spend my holidays at Bourne until my grandfather died.’

Sir George nodded again.

‘You’d know pretty well everyone in the village and round about.’

‘I used to. I expect there are a good many changes.’

‘How long is it since you were there?’

‘My grandfather died when I was twenty-two. I’m twenty-seven. I’ve been down two or three times to see Aunt Sophy – only once since the war.’

‘Villages don’t change very much,’ said Sir George. ‘The boys and girls will be off in the Services and the factories, but it’s the old people who are the village. They’ll remember you, and they’ll talk because they remember you. They won’t talk to a stranger.’

He sat back a little in his writing-chair and sent a very direct glance across the plain, solid table – a man in his fifties, smart and well set-up, with dark hair grey on the temples. He held a pencil between the second and third fingers of his right hand and set it twirling.

Garth Albany said quickly, ‘What do you want them to talk about?’

The direct glance dwelt on him. ‘Ever hear of a man called Michael Harsch?’

‘I don’t think so—’ Then, with a quick frown, ‘I don’t know – I seem to have seen the name somewhere—’

Sir George’s pencil twirled. ‘There’s going to be an inquest on him at Bourne tomorrow.’

‘Yes – I remember. I saw the name in the papers, but I didn’t connect it with Bourne. I’d have taken more notice if I had. Who was he?’

‘The inventor of harschite.’

‘Harschite – that’s why I didn’t connect him with Bourne. I didn’t know he was dead. There was a paragraph about this stuff harschite – about a fortnight ago. Yes, that was it – harschite – some sort of explosive.’

Sir George nodded. ‘If we’d any sense or logic we’d take the man who wrote that paragraph and the editor who passed it and shoot them out of hand. Here we’ve been going on like cats on hot bricks about the damned stuff, and out comes a footling penny-a-lining paragraph and gives the show away.’

‘It was pretty vague, sir – I can’t say I got much out of it.’

‘Because you didn’t know enough to put two and two together. But someone did, and so there’s an inquest on Michael Harsch. You see, we had been in touch with him for some time. He was a refugee – Austrian-Jewish extraction. I don’t know how much Jew, but enough to queer his pitch in Germany. He got away about five years ago. His wife and daughter weren’t so lucky. The daughter was sent to a concentration camp, where she died. The wife was turned out of her house in the middle of a winter’s night and never got over it. He got away with his brains and practically nothing else. I saw him because he had an introduction from old Baer. He talked to me about this stuff of his. He swore it would knock spots out of anything we’d got. Frankly, I thought it was a fairy tale, but I liked the man, and I wanted to oblige old Baer, so I told him to come back. That was four years ago. He used to come back once a year and report progress. I began to believe in the stuff. I went down, and he showed me what it could do. It was terrific. But there was a snag. The stuff was unstable – too easily affected by weather conditions – impossible to store or transport in any quantity. Then he turned up again. He said he had overcome the instability. He walked up and down this very room in a tremendous state of excitement, waving his arms and saying, “Harschite – that is what I have called it! It is my message that I send back to those who have let the devil loose to serve him, and it is such a message that he will hear it and go back to the hell where he belongs!” Then he calmed down a little and said, “There is only one more step – one small, small step – and I will take it any day now. It is the last experiment, and it will not fail. I am so sure of it that I can give you my word. In a week I shall ring you up and tell you that all is well – that the experiment has succeeded.” Well, he did ring me up to say just that. That was on the Tuesday. I was to go down the next day, but on Wednesday morning I was rung up to be told that Harsch was dead.’

‘How?’

‘Found shot – in the church of all places in the world. It seems he used to go down and play the organ – had a key, and used to go in just when he liked. He was living out at a house called Prior’s End with Madoc, the concentrated food man. It was he who rang me up. He said Harsch had supper with them – there’s a sister, Miss Madoc, and a girl secretary – and after that he went out. Madoc said he always did unless the weather was too bad – he liked walking at night. Odd taste, but I daresay it helped him to sleep, poor chap. When he wasn’t back by half-past ten, they didn’t do anything. Of course, it’s easy to say that they should have, but – well, they didn’t. Madoc and his sister went to bed. They said Harsch had a key, and they never thought that anything could have happened to him.’

‘Well, sir, you don’t do you?’

‘I suppose not. Anyhow they went to bed. But the girl sat up. By half-past eleven she was really frightened. She took a torch and walked down into the village. No sign of Harsch. She knocked up the verger and made him come along to the church with her. She said she thought Harsch might have been taken ill. Well, they found him fallen down by the organ, shot through the head – pistol just where it might have fallen from his hand. I went down and found everyone quite sure he’d shot himself. I am quite sure he didn’t.’

Garth Albany said, ‘Why?’

Sir George stopped twirling the pencil and put it down. ‘Because I don’t think he would. He’d made an appointment with me, and he was always very punctilious about keeping his appointments. He was going to hand over the formula and his notes. I wasn’t going down alone either – I was taking Burlton and Wing. He wouldn’t have walked out on us like that.’

Garth Albany nodded. ‘He might have had a comeover. You know how it is – people do.’

‘ “Suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed”!’ Sir George quoted the words with irony. ‘That’s what the verdict at the inquest will be.’ He brought his fist down suddenly on the table. ‘It’s damnably probable, quite irrefutable, and damnably untrue. Harsch was murdered. I want to find out who murdered him and see that he doesn’t get away with it. And that’s not just the natural reaction to murder. It goes a lot deeper. If Harsch was murdered, it was because someone had a motive for getting him out of the way at just this time. Not six months ago when harschite was still in the unstable stage, not a month ago when he was in good hope that he had overcome the instability and still had to put his hopes to the proof, but a few hours after the proof had been achieved, and within a few hours of his demonstrating it to me. Is that a likely time for a man to commit suicide? Isn’t it a likely time for a man to be murdered? Some strong interest was engaged to prevent the transfer of harschite.’

Major Albany looked up. ‘I don’t know. He’d been working on the stuff for a long time, you know. I expect it kept him going. Then when he’d finished he might have felt there was nothing to go on for. And as to his being murdered to stop your getting the formula – well, it doesn’t stop it, does it?’

Sir George picked up the pencil again.

‘That, my dear Garth, is exactly what it does do. Because three years ago Michael Harsch made a will which named Madoc his sole executor and sole legatee. He hadn’t anything to leave except his notes, his papers, the results of any discoveries or inventions he might make. It’s a pretty big exception, you see.’

‘But surely Madoc—’

Sir George laughed without amusement.

‘It’s evident that you don’t know Madoc. He’s a crank with an infinite capacity for going to the stake for his opinions – he asks for nothing better. If no one will oblige him with a stake, he will find one for himself, pile up the faggots, and hold his right hand in the fire in the best traditions of martyrdom. He is one of the most belligerent pacifists in England. I wouldn’t mind backing him for the world’s championship myself. He naturally won’t have anything to do with the war effort, and only pursues his very valuable researches into Food Concentrates because he feels it is a duty to be prepared for a period of post-war starvation on the Continent. Now do you see him handing over the formula of harschite?’

‘Do you mean he won’t?’

‘I mean he’ll see us all at Jericho first.’

GARTH ALBANY WENT back to his hotel and rang up Miss Sophy Fell. That is to say, he asked for her number, but the voice which answered him was a deep contralto.

‘Miss Brown speaking – Miss Fell’s companion.’ This wasn’t the companion he remembered. Her name wasn’t Brown, and she twittered. Miss Brown and her voice suggested a marble hall with a catafalque and wreaths. Sombre music off. Not awfully cheerful for Aunt Sophy. He said, ‘Can I speak to Miss Fell?’

‘She is resting. Can I take a message?’

‘Well, if she isn’t asleep perhaps you could switch me through. I am her nephew Garth Albany, and I want to come down and see her.’

There was a pause which he felt to be a disapproving one, and then a little click, and Aunt Sophy saying, ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Garth. How are you? I’ve got some leave, and I thought I might run down. Can you put me up?’

‘My dear boy, of course! But when?’

‘Well, leave doesn’t last for ever, so the sooner the better. I could get down in time for dinner – or do you sup?’

‘Well, we call it dinner, but it’s only soup and an economy dish like buttered eggs without the eggs, or mock fish—’

‘What’s on earth’s mock fish?’

‘Well, I believe it’s rice with a little anchovy sauce. Florence is really very clever.’

‘It sounds marvellous. I’ll bring my bacon ration and the other doings, and you can cash in on my meat ration when I get down – I draw the line at steak in the pocket. So long, Aunt Sophy.’

Bourne has no station of its own. You get out at Perry’s Halt and walk two and a half miles by the road if you don’t know the short cut, and a mile and a quarter across the fields if you do. The only thing that had changed since he was a boy was that, step for step with him across the fields, there ran the tall pylons and stretched cables of the Electric Grid, hideous but undeniably useful. Bourne itself had not changed at all. The stream still ran down one side of the village street, bridged at each gateway by a flat stone lifted from the Priory ruins. The cottages, low-roofed, small-windowed, were inconvenient and picturesque, as they had always been – front gardens ablaze with dahlia, nasturtium, phlox, sunflower, and hollyhock; back gardens neatly stocked with carrot, onion, turnip, beet, and all the cabbage family, and guarded by ancient fruit trees heavy with apples, pears, and plums. A good fruit year, he noted.

There were not many people about – one or two who looked and smiled, one or two who nodded and spoke, and old Ezra Pincott, the disgrace of the large Pincott clan, sidling out of the Church Cut on his way to the Black Bull, where he would spend the rest of the evening. Garth reflected that Ezra at least hadn’t changed by a hair. There was, of course, not a great deal of room for change, except in the direction of reform, a direction in which he had never been known to cast even a fleeting glance. Dirtier and more disreputable he could hardly become – but a genial rascal and tolerably well pleased with life and his own reputation as the leeriest poacher in the county. No one had ever caught Ezra poaching, but he had been heard to say that their old meat ration didn’t bother him, and Lord Marfield, the Chairman of the Bench, once gave it as his opinion that Ezra had pheasant for dinner a good deal more often than he did himself.

Garth called out, ‘Hullo, Ezra!’ and received a roll of the eye and a wink in reply. After which Ezra came shuffling over and accosted him.

‘Bad times, Mr Garth.’

Garth said, ‘Oh, I don’t know—’

‘Bad beer,’ said Ezra bitterly. ‘Costs twice as much, and takes three times as long to get drunk on. That’s what I call bad times. I give you my word I can’t get properly drunk nohow these days.’ He went sidling on as Garth prepared to cross over, but turned his head to wink again and say, ‘It’s same like the old Rector used to say, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” But it takes a deal of doing.’

The church was on the opposite side of the street facing the cottages, with its square grey tower and the old slanting tombstones in the churchyard. Just beyond opened the village green, with the cottages continuing on one side of it, while on the other there stood, in its own walled grounds, first the Rectory, and then, lesser in size and in consequence, two or three more houses, inhabited in his time by Dr Meade and a selection of old ladies. Dr Meade was dead. Somebody else would be in Meadowcroft. He wondered what Janice was doing. Funny little kid – used to tag after him and sit as still as a mouse while he fished—

He struck away to the right by the church and went in through the Rectory gate, thinking how horrified his grandfather would have been to see weed and moss in the gravel, and an unpruned growth of years narrowing the drive. Ridiculous of Aunt Sophy to stay on. If the place was too big for the new rector it was certainly too big for her, only he couldn’t imagine her anywhere else.

He walked in at the front door as he had always done, and set down his suitcase, calling cheerfully, ‘Aunt Sophy – I’ve arrived!’

Miss Sophy Fell came waddling out of the drawing-room – a billowy old lady in a grey dress flowered with white and lavender. In spite of the size of her figure her head appeared to be disproportionately large. A round face like a full moon was surmounted by a mass of white curls which looked as if they were made of cotton wool. She had round pink cheeks, round blue eyes, a ridiculous rosebud mouth, and at least three chins. As he bent to embrace her Garth felt as if he was coming home from school again. The holidays always started like this – you kissed Aunt Sophy in the hall, and it was exactly like kissing a featherbed which smelled of lavender.

And then, instead of his grandfather’s voice from the study, there came through the open drawing-room door the quite alien presence of Miss Brown, whom he felt he would have recognised anywhere. He remembered her voice to a most improbable extent – a kind of female Spanish Inquisitor with hollow cheeks and hollow eyes, and a fine commanding figure gone away to bone. She wore a plain black dress, but it was admirably cut. She had beautiful hands and feet, and under the sallow skin her features were undeniable. He thought, ‘Medusa in her forties,’ and wondered where on earth Aunt Sophy had picked her up.

Miss Fell supplied the answer without delay.

‘My friend Miss Brown. We met in that delightful hydropathic where I stayed last year. You know, I did not mean to go away at all, but my dear friend Mrs Holford was so pressing, and I had not seen her for so long, that I made the effort. And I was rewarded, for besides having a delightful time, I met Miss Brown and was able to persuade her to come back and keep me company here.’

In her deep, mournful contralto, Miss Brown said, ‘Miss Fell is far too kind.’ Then, still in the same tone, she observed that dinner was at half-past seven, and that perhaps he would like to go to his room.

He was surprised at his own strong resentment at being shepherded by a stranger. Aunt Sophy said in her fooffly voice, ‘You have your old room,’ but the irritation persisted long enough to make him feel ashamed of it.

Miss Fell had maligned the dinner, or else he was being treated as the prodigal son, for they had a very good soup, an excellent mixed stew, green peas from the garden, and a coffee ice. Afterwards she walked him down the herbaceous border to admire late phloxes and early Michaelmas daisies. He was glad to get her to himself.

‘I didn’t know Miss Johnson had gone. How long have you had Miss Brown?’

She beamed.

‘Oh, my dear – it was last year. I thought I had told you – I feel sure I wrote. I really was quite distracted at the time, but it has all turned out for the best – things so often do. Though of course it was all very sad, because Miss Johnson’s sister died and she had to go and keep house for her brother-in-law – three children in their teens, and he was quite inconsolable. But now she has married him, so it has all turned out for the best.’ She beamed again.

‘And Miss Brown?’

‘My dear boy, I told you about that – the hydropathic and Mrs Holford – I met her there. She had a temporary post, and I was able to persuade her to return with me.’ She laid a hand upon his arm and looked up at him in a confiding manner, her eyes quite round and blue. ‘You know, my dear, it really was a leading. I was missing Miss Johnson so much, and wondering who I could get to live with me. I asked Janice Meade, but of course it would be very dull for a young girl, and I quite understood her preferring to go to Mr Madoc, although he is an exceptionally disagreeable man.’

So it was Janice who was the girl secretary. That was a stroke of luck. He wondered vaguely how she had turned out, but before the vagueness had time to clear Aunt Sophy was off again about Miss Brown.

‘It really was rather wonderful, you know. Mrs Holford had a friend – well, perhaps not exactly a friend, but they had become very friendly – they had been a month at the hydro before I got there. Miss Perry, her name was, and she could do all sorts of entertaining things – telling fortunes from cards, and writing with planchette. All great nonsense of course, or I used to think it was, but really very entertaining. You know, you do get tired of knitting, and the libraries always seem to have so many books that no one can possibly want to read. So it made a change.’

Garth gave an inward groan. What had the old dear been up to, and what had she let herself in for?

Miss Sophy patted his arm.

‘Dear boy, you looked so like your grandfather then. And I don’t suppose he would have approved, but it has all turned out so well. The very first time I met Miss Perry she was telling all our fortunes with coffee grounds, and she said I had just had a great break in my life. Not that there was anything very surprising about that, because of course Mrs Holford knew all about Miss Johnson having to leave me, and I daresay she had mentioned it.’

Garth burst out laughing. Aunt Sophy had a shrewd streak which sometimes showed quite unexpectedly. He said, ‘I daresay she had. Well, what happened next?’

‘The next evening she had the cards out. She told Mrs Holford that she would be in some anxiety about a relation before long. And that came true, because a cousin’s son was missing for three weeks – but he turned up again all right, I am glad to say.’

‘And what did she tell you?’

‘That is the marvellous part. She told me I was going to meet someone who would make the greatest difference in my life, and within twenty-four hours I had met Miss Brown.’

‘How?’ said Garth.

‘How?

‘How did you meet her?’

‘I think Miss Perry introduced us,’ said Miss Fell. ‘And oh, my dear boy, you can’t think what a difference she has made! She is so efficient – such a wonderful manager. And so musical. You know how devoted I am to music. She plays the church organ for us, and she is a very fine pianist. She sings delightfully too.’

‘You don’t find her gloomy?’

Miss Fell had a startled look.

‘Oh, no. Oh, I know what you mean, but we have all had a very severe shock. You may have seen something about it in the papers. Mr Harsch – such a nice man, and very musical too – was found dead in the church only the day before yesterday. I am afraid – well, I am afraid that he shot himself. It has upset and distressed us all very much.’ She slipped a hand inside his arm and kept it there. ‘If anything could make me more glad to see you than I always am, it would be this distressing affair, because the inquest is tomorrow and it would be a great support to have you with me.’

‘Do you mean that you are obliged to go?’

The blue eyes were round and troubled.

‘Oh, yes, my dear. You see, I heard the shot.’