by Muriel Spark
Lacey listened intently. Before Dr. Joseph Murray, as his name was, had finished his meditative discourse, she had started, with hope in her heart, to form a plan.
“You say if you had your time again . . .” said Lacey.
“Yes, I would have plunged right in. I think I could have nabbed him. The police were slow. The friends who aided and abetted Lucan ran rings around the police. Those police were used to lowlife criminals from the streets and from the rooming houses of Mayfair and Soho. Clever sharpsters, they were unnerved by the stonewalling toffs; they were not exactly abject, not at all. But they were hesitant, out of their depth. When one of the friends of Lucan exclaimed when approached, ‘Oh dear, and good nannies are so scarce!’ the police took this for heartless reality instead of a quip in poor taste. That sort of thing. I would have known how to deal with the situation the very night of the murder. I wouldn’t, believe me, Lacey, have been overwhelmed.”
“It’s not too late,” said Lacey.
“What?”
“Hopefully, you could still find him,” said Lacey with the utmost enthusiasm. “I want to interview him, only. I wouldn’t want necessarily to hand him over. I think he must be alive.”
“Perhaps. Personally, I believe in justice, but . . .”
“How could there be justice in such a case?” said Lacey.
Joseph Murray smiled at her. “You’re quite right, of course. Human justice could never equal the crime. All the books and articles—such piles of them—that have been written on the subject, appear to agree that Lucan, if guilty, was very guilty. Indeed I incline to agree with the theory—you’ll find it in Marnham’s book—that there was an accomplice, a hit man. If so, that hit man is somewhere on the loose. I must say that the theory is highly tenable. If sound, it would explain a number of loose factors, small as that number is.”
“Will you help me to launch a new search?”
“Oh, no. Not now.”
“Oh, yes. Now, Dr. Murray,” said pretty Lacey. “Now,” she repeated.
“Call me Joe,” he said.
“Joe,” she said, “now,” she said.
Joe was the youngest son of a prosperous family. He was now in his sixties, not too tall, fairly slim. He had never married again after his young wife had died while he was teaching at Cambridge. He was a virtual and ardent zoologist and in fact took up a zoologist’s interest in many human affairs outside of his personal life. About Lucan he appeared to feel as he spoke, almost zoologically. What species was Lucan? Joe was all the more curious on this score, in that he had been a friend of Lucan’s. How he regretted not having had long conversations with Lucan outside of topics such as baccarat, craps, poker, vingt-et-un, and the possible winner of the three-thirty. Now that he came to think of it, he had never thought of Lucan, so that when the scandal broke and Lucan did not step forward to clear himself it did seem to Joe as if Lucan could possibly be, in a way hitherto partly concealed from his acquaintances, bad-tempered to a degree that was outside of human, and was something else. Well, he reflected, that’s perhaps another way of saying that poor Lucan was mad. Lucan besides was a silk purse, and it was useless to expect such an object to turn into something so good, so true, as a sow’s ear.
“You know,” Joe said then to Lacey, “I think there must have been an accomplice, a hit man.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I knew Lucan. Not closely, but enough. When we were undergraduates. He had no imagination, or at least very little. Now, think of what he claimed in his letters and statements to his friends and on the phone to his mother the night of the murder. He said he was passing the house in Lower Belgrave Street where his wife and children were staying, when he saw from the pavement a man in the basement attacking his wife, and went to the rescue, and got all bloodied. It is the question of his seeing a man. To someone of limited imagination it would be a natural excuse—a man. The man was most probably, in fact, the man prominent in his mind and memory, the hit man, the accomplice.”
“The police network failed,” said Lacey, “to produce any man on the run that night. They found no accomplice. There was no light in the basement, and nothing could be seen, from the street, anyway.”
“The police didn’t find Lucan, either. They were slow throughout. If you’d like to leave your notes with me, and any cuttings that are contemporaneous with the crime, I’ll give a bit of thought to the subject. Now, my dear, you’ll stay for a bite, won’t you? My helper puts it ready in the microwave, and there’s always more than enough for two.”
Lacey accepted the invitation and made herself at home at the kitchen table. She told Joe how she was separated from her husband, awaiting a divorce; there was no real fault on either side but that was how it was. Joe told her she was good-looking, perhaps even prettier than her mother had been at her age. He remembered Maria Twickenham quite well, she had been around and knew Lucan, “though not intimately.” But who had known Lucan intimately?
“Lucan—who knew him really?” Joe said.
“His wife? His parents?”
“Only partially—none of them could have known him, fully.”
“He talked previous to the murder about murdering his wife.”
“Yes, well, talk . . . People often talk that way. It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily; in fact, quite the opposite. It could be argued that if he intended the murder he wouldn’t have talked about it.”
“I want you to come with me and see that priest I mentioned in my letter. Is he still at the same parish?”
“Father Ambrose? I got a Christmas card. Yes.”
“You’ll come with me?”
“I don’t know about that. And there’s Benny Rolfe.”
“Who’s he?”
Benny Rolfe, Joe explained, was a prosperous businessman who was once a friend of Lucan’s. It was rumored that he financed Lucan’s sojourn abroad. “You must remember that if Lucan’s alive, he may have changed more radically in appearance than the mere passage of years can explain. He would have undergone perhaps extensive plastic surgery.”
“Then how would his friends recognize him?”
“That’s the point. They would expect to not quite recognize him immediately; they would expect him to have undergone facial surgery. Which leaves the way wide open for a crook, posing as Lucan, making an understandably rapid visit to a friend, to pass a few general remarks, collect his money and run. Lucan could be dead while the conspiracies to elude the law continue. All I want to say, really, my dear, is that your search for the real Lucan might be fruitless.”
“Could he get away with it?”
“Enough,” said Joe, “has been written about Lucan to prompt even an amateur actor of feeble intelligence. He would be in a position to know practically every detail of the past. A fake Lucan might be entirely convincing.”
“Obviously,” said Lacey, “you think Lucan’s dead.”
“I think nothing. I think nothing at all on the subject. His friends are divided fifty-fifty on the possibility that he killed himself soon after the murder. I should say fifty-fifty.”
“Would you know if you met him—”
“If he was real or fake? Yes, I think I should. Perhaps . . .”
“Then let’s find him,” said Lacey, with so much of the enthusiasm of the novice that Joe was lost for words; he simply smiled. “Am I talking a lot of nonsense?” she said.
“Yes and no. I must say that without trying, nobody gets anything, anywhere. And then, of course, the whole Lucan story is thoroughly surrealistic. The only real things about it are a girl’s battered body in a mail sack, his wife’s head wounds, her testimony that she had been attacked by him, and blood all over the place. Apart from those vital factors—and they are vital, to say the least, aren’t they?—the disappearance of Lucan partakes of the realistic-surrealistic. He was ready to disappear to avoid bankruptcy; on the other hand his friends were numerous. They seem to have been faithful in the class-conscious sense. I find very littl
e evidence that any of the friends, the aiders and abetters as they might be, cared a damn for Lucan the man.”
“Mummy found him quite amusing,” said Lacey. “But do you know, she told me that if she had that time over again—that moment when Lucan came to see her in a panic, talking about bloodshed in the basement of his home—she would simply ring the police. She wouldn’t try to cover up for him as she did. Something has happened to her conscience between then and now. Has this happened to other people who were involved at the time?”
“Oh, quite likely. We are not the same people as we were a quarter of a century ago. We are necessarily different in our ideas. In my view it is an economic phenomenon. We cannot afford to be snobs. Since Lucan’s day, snobs have been greatly emarginated. Not entirely. Benny Rolfe, who is reputed to be Lucan’s benefactor, is an old-fashioned snob. Few people today would take Lucan and his pretensions seriously, as they rather tended to do in the seventies. I daresay even Benny Rolfe is tiring of Lucan, if he’s still alive.”
9
On the road to Caithness Joe and Lacey respectively marveled how they seemed to have “known each other all our lives.”
“You make me feel young again,” he said.
She liked the sound of that. She was hardly expecting to track down the elusive, the perhaps nonexistent Earl; not really. It was the prospect of a chase that excited her, this promising and enjoyable beginning. They were on their way, now, to a house they had merely heard of, right in the far north of Scotland. It was assumed that Benny Rolfe, whose house it was, would very likely be away. He was in any case hardly ever there. It would be all the more convenient perhaps to question the housekeeper and the two old housemen whom Joe knew lived there in perpetuity. If someone like Lucan had been to see Benny, those people would know. Of course they wouldn’t talk. Not really talk. But there were ways of talking and talking, and something somehow might trickle through. “Of course we mustn’t ask direct questions,” said Joe.
“Oh, it would be fatal, I agree.”
The great lovely steep hills were all around them. The feeling of northern nature, a whole geography minding very much its own business, cautious, alien, cold and haughty, began here. The sky rolled darkly amid patches of white light. On they drove, north, north.
Yes, there was a light high up there in the turret. The bell, which was an old-fashioned pull-bell which pealed hysterically throughout the house, brought no response for the first ten minutes of their wait in the drive, in the dark.
Joe fetched a flashlight from his car and started prowling around, while Lacey stood hugging her coat around her, staring up at the light in the Gothic tower. Suddenly she heard a shuffle, and all of a sudden the door opened to a flood of light.
Joe reappeared very quickly.
“Yes?” said a man’s voice.
“This is the residence of Mr. Benny Rolfe, isn’t it?”
“This is Adanbrae Keep. It was you that rang up?” the speaker said. He was a middle-aged, red-haired and bearded man wearing a handyman’s apron. “I thought you’d come early, gave you up. Well, you know Benny isn’t here. Come in, if you will. Come in and sit yourselves down.”
The hall of Adanbrae Keep was welcoming enough, with new-looking chintzes. The man put a click-light to the fire, which started to blaze up obediently.
“Benny’s in France,” he said. “Sit yourselves down. Would you like a cup of tea? My name’s Gordon.”
“Yes,” said Joe.
“Oh, please,” said Lacey.
“Are you all alone here?” said Joe.
“No, no. There’s the stable man, Pat Reilly, there’s my garden boy, Jimmie—he’s gone off to lend a hand at the golf tavern and make himself a bit extra, there’s Mrs. Kerr, she is in her room, but she won’t be in bed yet, if you’d like to meet her I could get her. I’ll just put on the kettle.”
“I’d like to see Mrs. Kerr,” said Lacey when he had left the hall.
Joe said, “We’ve no right to trouble them. Benny wouldn’t like it. He’d think us awfully rude. It’s all right just to call in, but we mustn’t seem to snoop, or probe, or anything like that.”
“I’d like to probe,” said Lacey.
Just then, down the main staircase came a short dark woman of about forty with a wide lipsticked smile. “I’m Betty Kerr,” she said. “I heard you arrive. We just about gave you up. Are you staying anywhere around here?”
She had a pink roller, probably overlooked, still in her hair. She sat down on one of the chintz chairs. Joe told her the hotel they had booked for the night, of which she expressed approval.
“We thought we would just look in,” said Lacey, “as Mr. Rolfe isn’t available, we tried everywhere, but we only wanted to sort of trace someone who might have been here recently. An old friend of Dr. Murray’s—that’s my companion here—that we want to get in touch with.”
“What name?” said Betty Kerr.
In came Gordon the Red bearing a tray of teacups with the pot and jug.
“Lucan,” said Joe.
“No, I don’t know of a Lucan,” said Betty Kerr. She poured out the tea and handed it out to the couple. This was an event, plainly, and she liked it. “Did he play golf? There was a gentleman here playing golf. But no, he wasn’t a Lucan. A wee man with a bag of old clubs like forty years ago. Gordon had to clean his mashie with emery paper.”
“No, the old university friend I’m trying to contact is tall.”
Gordon was hovering around. “That could be the gentleman who was to dinner about three weeks ago. He spent the night here. He was ‘John’ to Benny, I seem to remember. Just a minute, I’ll look at the book.”
The visitors’ book on its lectern stood near a closed door which led to the drawing room. Joe went over to it with Gordon, and they looked at the open page. “Nobody here; he didn’t sign at all, the man I’m thinking of,” said Gordon. “There’s very few visitors, so it would be on this page.”
Joe, by way of curiosity, turned back a few pages, but although he recognized a few of the names, nothing corresponding to Lucan was there. “Anyway, Lucan’s second name was John and generally applied to him when he was a student. It means nothing, though, John by itself could be anybody.”
“A tall man with white hair, in his sixties, squarish face,” said Gordon helpfully. “In good form, I would say. I didn’t take much notice.”
They had returned to the fireplace. Joe realized that the description would fit Lucan as he might be today.
It was plain to both Joe and Lacey that they had probed enough. They had neither of them desired to go blatantly behind Benny’s back. Joe had already told Lacey he intended to drop Benny a line explaining his search for Lucan. “After all, it’s a legitimate search,” he had remarked to Lacey.
Now he said, “Well, thank you, Gordon, and you, too, Mrs. Kerr.”
“I hope,” said Lacey, “we haven’t disturbed you.”
“Mind how you go. Take your time,” said Betty Kerr. “You could have stayed for a meal, but we don’t have much in the house. Not like when that gentleman was here. Smoked salmon and lamb cutlets two days running.”
“Smoked salmon and lamb chops . . .”
“That’s right. Benny ordered them specially for him. His preference.”
Next morning on their way still further north Joe was truly optimistic. They had already celebrated the final words of the Adanbrae Keep domestics, but Joe could not keep off the subject. It was like winning a bet at long odds.
“ ‘Smoked salmon and lamb chops served two dinners running . . .’ Benny knows Lucan’s preferences. What a fool Lucan is to allow himself to be trapped by that characteristic of his; that eccentric taste for smoked salmon and cutlets day in, day out for years on end. It had to be Lucan.”
“Or someone like him, who has studied his ways from the press accounts,” said astute Lacey. “And Benny Rolfe would expect him to have had his face fixed.”
The landscape was bleak and flat, below a pearly
sky. They seemed to be driving into the sky. St. Columba’s Monastery, lately established, was some way out of a silent, almost deserted but well-kept stone village.
A young bespectacled lay brother bade them to wait a minute. Joe had telephoned in advance. Sure enough, Father Ambrose appeared as if by magic with his black habit floating wide around him. You could not see if he was thin or fat. He had the shape of a billowing pyramid with his small white-haired head at the apex as if some enemy had hoisted it there as a trophy of war. From under his habit protruded an enormous pair of dark-blue track shoes on which he lumbered towards them. As he careered along the cold cloister he read what was evidently his Office of the day; his lips moved; plainly, he didn’t believe in wasting time and did believe in letting the world know it. When he came abreast of Lacey and Joe he snapped shut his book and beamed at them.
“Joe,” he said.
“Ambrose, how are you? And how goes it in your new abode? This is Lacey, daughter of Maria Twickenham. Remember Maria?”