A Murder of Quality

by John le Carré

  There were about twenty in the two rooms, but Smiley, who had arrived a little late, found himself attached to a group of about eight who stood nearest the door: D’Arcy and his sister; Charles and Shane Hecht; a young mathematician called Snow and his wife; a curate from the Abbey and Smiley himself, bewildered and mole-like behind his spectacles. Smiley looked quickly round the room, but could see no sign of Fielding.

  ‘… Yes,’ Dorothy D’Arcy continued, ‘she was a good little worker, very … right to the end. I went over there on Friday with that parson man from the tin tabernacle – Cardew – to see if there was any refugee stuff to tidy up. There wasn’t a thing out of place – every bit of clothing she had was all packed up and addressed; we just had to send it off. She was a damn good little worker, I will say. Did a splendid job at the bazaar, you know.’

  ‘Yes, darling,’ said Shane Hecht sweetly. ‘I remember it well. It was the day I presented her to Lady Sawley. She wore such a nice little hat – the one she wore on Sundays, you know. And so respectful. She called her “my lady”.’ She turned to Smiley and breathed: ‘Rather feudal, don’t you think, dear? I always like that: so few of us left.’

  The mathematician and his wife were talking to Charles Hecht in a corner and a few minutes later Smiley managed to extricate himself from the group and join them.

  Ann Snow was a pretty girl with a rather square face and a turned-up nose. Her husband was tall and thin, with an agreeable stoop. He held his sherry glass between straight, slender fingers as if it were a chemical retort and when he spoke he seemed to address the sherry rather than his listener; Smiley remembered them from the funeral. Hecht was looking pink and rather cross, sucking at his pipe. They talked in a desultory way, their conversation dwarfed by the exchanges of the adjoining group. Hecht eventually drifted away from them, still frowning and withdrawn, and stood ostentatiously alone near the door.

  ‘Poor Stella,’ said Ann Snow after a moment’s silence. ‘Sorry,’ she added. ‘I can’t get her out of my mind yet. It seems mad, just mad. I mean why should she do it, that Janie woman?’

  ‘Did you like Stella?’ Smiley asked.

  ‘Of course we did. She was sweet. We’ve been here four Halves now, but she was the only person here who’s ever been kind to us.’ Her husband said nothing, just nodded at his sherry. ‘Simon wasn’t a boy at Carne, you see – most of the staff were – so we didn’t know anyone and no one was really interested. They all pretended to be terribly pleased with us, of course, but it was Stella who really …’

  Dorothy D’Arcy was descending on them. ‘Mrs Snow,’ she said crisply, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I want you to take over Stella Rode’s job on the refugees.’ She cast an appraising look in Simon’s direction: ‘The Master’s very keen on refugees.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ Ann Snow replied, aghast. ‘I couldn’t possibly, Miss D’Arcy, I …’

  ‘Couldn’t? Why couldn’t you? You helped Mrs Rode with her stall at the bazaar, didn’t you?’

  ‘So that’s where she got her clothes from,’ breathed Shane Hecht behind them. Ann was fumbling on:

  ‘But … well, I haven’t quite got Stella’s nerve, if you understand what I mean; and besides, she was a Baptist: all the locals helped her and gave her things, and they all liked her. With me it would be different.’

  ‘Lot of damn’ nonsense,’ declared Miss D’Arcy, who spoke to all her juniors as if they were grooms or erring children; and Shane Hecht beside her said: ‘Baptists are the people who don’t like private pews, aren’t they? I do so agree – one feels that if one’s paid one simply has to go.’

  The curate, who had been talking cricket in a corner, was startled into mild protest: ‘Oh, come, Mrs Hecht, the private pew had many advantages …’ and embarked on a diffuse apologia for ancient custom, to which Shane listened with every sign of the most assiduous interest. When at last he finished she said: ‘Thank you, William dear, so sweet,’ turned her back on him and added to Smiley in a stage whisper: ‘William Trumper – one of Charles’s old pupils – such a triumph when he passed his Certificate.’

  Smiley, anxious to dissociate himself from Shane Hecht’s vengeance on the curate, turned to Ann Snow, but she was still at the mercy of Miss D’Arcy’s charitable intentions, and Shane was still talking to him:

  ‘The only Smiley I ever heard of married Lady Ann Sercombe at the end of the war. She left him soon afterwards, of course. A very curious match. I understand he was quite unsuitable. She was Lord Sawley’s cousin, you know. The Sawleys have been connected with Carne for four hundred years. The present heir is a pupil of Charles; we often dine at the Castle. I never did hear what became of Ann Sercombe … she went to Africa, you know … or was it India? No, it was America. So tragic. One doesn’t talk about it at the Castle.’ For a moment the noise in the room stopped. For a moment, no more, he could discern nothing but the steady gaze of Shane Hecht upon him, and knew she was waiting for an answer. And then she released him as if to say: ‘I could crush you, you see. But I won’t, I’ll let you live,’ and she turned and walked away.

  He contrived to take his leave at the same time as Ann and Simon Snow. They had an old car and insisted on running Smiley back to his hotel. On the way there, he said:

  ‘If you have nothing better to do, I would be happy to give you both dinner at my hotel. I imagine the food is dreadful.’

  The Snows protested and accepted, and a quarter of an hour later they were all three seated in a corner of the enormous dining-room of the Sawley Arms, to the great despondency of three waiters and a dozen generations of Lord Sawley’s forebears, puffy men in crumbling pigment.

  ‘We really got to know her our second Half,’ Ann Snow ran on. ‘Stella didn’t do much mixing with the other wives – she’d learnt her lesson by then. She didn’t go to coffee parties and things, so it was really luck that we did meet. When we first came there wasn’t a staff house available for us: we had to spend the first Half in a hotel. We moved in to a little house in Bread Street at the end of our second Half. Moving was chaos – Simon was examining for the scholarships and we were terribly broke, so we had to do everything we possibly could for ourselves. It was a wet Thursday morning when we moved. The rain was simply teeming down; but none of our good pieces would get in through the front door, and in the end Mulligan’s just dumped me on the doorstep and let me sort it out.’ She laughed, and Smiley thought what an agreeable child she was. ‘They were absolutely foul. They would have just driven off, I think, but they wanted a cheque as soon as they’d done the delivery, and the bill was pounds more than the estimate. I hadn’t got the cheque-book, of course. Simon had gone off with it. Mulligan’s even threatened to take all the stuff away again. It was monstrous. I think I was nearly in tears.’ She nearly is now, thought Smiley. ‘Then out of the blue Stella turned up. I can’t think how she even knew we were moving – I’m sure no one else did. She’d brought an overall and an old pair of shoes and she’d come to help. When she saw what was going on she didn’t bother with the men at all, just went to a phone and rang Mr Mulligan himself. I don’t know what she said to him, but she made the foreman talk to him afterwards and there was no more trouble after that. She was terribly happy – happy to help. She was that sort of person. They took the door right out and managed to get everything in. She was marvellous at helping without managing. The rest of the wives,’ she added bitterly, ‘are awfully good at managing, but don’t help at all.’

  Smiley nodded, and discreetly filled their glasses.

  ‘Simon’s leaving,’ Ann said, suddenly confidential. ‘He’s got a grant and we’re going back to Oxford. He’s going to do a DPhil and get a University job.’

  They drank to his success, and the conversation turned to other things until Smiley asked: ‘What’s Rode himself like to work with?’

  ‘He’s a good schoolmaster,’ said Simon, slowly, ‘but tiring as a colleague.’

  ‘Oh, he was quite different from Stella,’ said An
n; ‘terribly Carne-minded. D’Arcy adopted him and he got the bug. Simon says all the grammar school people go that way – it’s the fury of the convert. It’s sickening. He even changed his religion when he got to Carne. Stella didn’t, though; she wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘The Established Church has much to offer Carne,’ Simon observed, and Smiley enjoyed the dry precision of his delivery.

  ‘Stella can’t exactly have hit it off with Shane Hecht,’ Smiley probed gently.

  ‘Of course she didn’t!’ Ann declared angrily. ‘Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella – I think it was because Stella didn’t want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That’s what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them.’

  ‘So does Carne,’ said Simon, quietly.

  ‘She was awfully good at helping out with the refugees. That was how she got into real trouble.’ Ann Snow’s slim hands gently rocked her brandy glass.

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Just before she died. Hasn’t anyone told you? About her frightful row with D’Arcy’s sister?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course, they wouldn’t have done. Stella never gossiped.’

  ‘Let me tell you,’ said Simon. ‘It’s a good story. When the Refugee Year business started, Dorothy D’Arcy was fired with charitable enthusiasm. So was the Master. Dorothy’s enthusiasms always seem to correspond with his. She started collecting clothes and money and packing them off to London. All very laudable, but there was a perfectly good town appeal going, launched by the Mayor. That wasn’t good enough for Dorothy, though: the school must have its own appeal; you can’t mix your charity. I think Felix was largely behind it. Anyway, after the thing had been going for a few months the refugee centre in London apparently wrote to Dorothy and asked whether anyone would be prepared to accommodate a refugee couple. Instead of publicising the letter, Dorothy wrote straight back and said she would put them up herself. So far so good. The couple turned up, Dorothy and Felix pointed a proud finger at them and the local press wrote it all up as an example of British humanity.

  ‘About six weeks later, one afternoon, these two turned up on Stella’s doorstep. The Rodes and the D’Arcys are neighbours, you see, and anyway Stella had tried to take an interest in Dorothy’s refugees. The woman was in floods of tears and the husband was shouting blue murder, but that didn’t worry Stella. She had them straight into the drawing-room and gave them a cup of tea. Finally, they managed to explain in basic English that they had run away from the D’Arcys because of the treatment they received. The girl was expected to work from morning till night in the kitchen, and the husband was acting as unpaid kennel-boy for those beastly spaniels that Dorothy breeds. The ones without noses.’

  ‘King Charles,’ Ann prompted.

  ‘It was about as awful as it could be. The girl was pregnant and he was a fully qualified engineer, so neither of them were exactly suited to domestic service. They told Stella that Dorothy was away till the evening – she’d gone to a dog show. Stella advised them to stay with her for the time being, and that evening she went round and told Dorothy what had happened. She had quite a nerve, you see. Although it wasn’t nerve really. She just did the simple thing. Dorothy was furious, and demanded that Stella should return “her refugees” immediately. Stella replied that she was sure that they wouldn’t come, and went home. When Stella got home she rang up the refugee people in London and asked their advice. They sent a woman down to see Dorothy and the couple, and the result was that they returned to London the following day … You can imagine what Shane Hecht would have made of that story.’

  ‘Didn’t she ever find out?’

  ‘Stella never told anyone except us, and we didn’t pass it on. Dorothy just let it be known that the refugees had gone to some job in London, and that was that.’

  ‘How long ago did this happen?’

  ‘They left exactly three weeks ago,’ said Ann to her husband. ‘Stella told me about it when she came to supper the night you were in Oxford for your interview. That was three weeks ago tonight.’ She turned to Smiley:

  ‘Poor Simon’s been having an awful time. Felix D’Arcy unloaded all Rode’s exam. correcting on to him. It’s bad enough doing one person’s correction – two is frantic.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Simon reflectively. ‘It’s been a bad week. And rather humiliating in a way. Several of the boys who were up to me for science last Half are now in Rode’s forms. I’d regarded one or two of them as practically unteachable, but Rode seems to have brought them on marvellously. I corrected one boy’s paper – Perkins – sixty-one per cent for elementary science. Last Half he got fifteen per cent in a much easier paper. He only got his remove because Fielding raised hell. He was in Fielding’s house.’

  ‘Oh, I know – a red-haired boy, a prefect.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ cried Simon. ‘Don’t say you know him?’

  ‘Oh, Fielding introduced us,’ said Smiley vaguely. ‘Incidentally – no one else ever mentioned that incident to you about Miss D’Arcy’s refugees, did they? Confirmed it, as it were?’

  Ann Snow looked at him oddly. ‘No. Stella told us about it, but of course Dorothy D’Arcy never referred to it at all. She must have hated Stella, though.’

  He saw them to their car, and waited despite their protests while Simon cranked it. At last they drove off, the car bellowing down the silent street. Smiley stood for a moment on the pavement, an odd, lonely figure peering down the empty road.

  11 A Coat For to Keep Her Warm

  A dog that had not bitten the postman; a devil that rode upon the wind; a woman who knew that she would die; a little, worried man in an overcoat standing in the snow outside his hotel, and the laborious chime of the Abbey clock telling him to go to bed.

  Smiley hesitated, then with a shrug crossed the road to the hotel entrance, mounted the step and entered the cheap, yellow light of the residents’ hall. He walked slowly up the stairs.

  He detested the Sawley Arms. That muted light in the hall was typical: inefficient, antiquated and smug. Like the waiters in the dining-room and the lowered voices in the residents’ lounge, like his own hateful bedroom with its blue and gilt urns, and the framed tapestry of a Buckinghamshire garden.

  His room was bitterly cold; the maid must have opened the window. He put a shilling in the meter and lit the gas. The fire bubbled grumpily and went out. Muttering, Smiley looked around for some paper to write on, and discovered some, much to his surprise, in the drawer of the writing desk. He changed into his pyjamas and dressing-gown and crawled miserably into bed. After sitting there uncomfortably for some minutes he got up, fetched his overcoat and spread it over the eiderdown. A coat for to keep her warm …

  How did her statement read? ‘There’s one will thank me, that’s my darling and I took her jewels for the saints I did, and a coat for to keep me warm …’ The coat had been given to Stella last Wednesday for the refugees. It seemed reasonable to assume from the way the statement read that Janie had taken the coat from the outhouse at the same time as she took the beads from Stella’s body. But Dorothy D’Arcy had been round there on Friday morning – of course she had, with Mr Cardew – she was talking about it at her party that very evening: ‘There wasn’t a thing out of place – every bit of clothing she had was all packed up and addressed – a damn’ good little worker, I will say …’ Then why hadn’t Stella packed the overcoat? If she packed everything else, why not the overcoat too?

  Or had Janie stolen the coat earlier in the day, before Stella made her parcel? If that was so, it went some way to weakening the case against her. But it was not so. It was not so because it was utterly improbable that Janie should steal a coat in the afternoon and return to the house the same evening.

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ Smiley muttered, a little sententiously, to the crested paper on his lap. ‘Janie stole the coat a
t the same time as she stole the beads – that is, after Stella was dead. Therefore either the coat was not packed with the other clothes, or …’

  Or what? Or somebody else, somebody who was not Stella Rode, packed up the clothes after Stella had died and before Dorothy D’Arcy and Mr Cardew went round to North Fields on Friday morning. And why the devil, thought Smiley, should anyone do that?

  It had been one of Smiley’s cardinal principles in research, whether among the incunabula of an obscure poet or the laboriously gathered fragments of intelligence, not to proceed beyond the evidence. A fact, once logically arrived at, should not be extended beyond its natural significance. Accordingly he did not speculate with the remarkable discovery he had made, but turned his mind to the most obscure problem of all: motive for murder.

  He began writing:

  ‘Dorothy D’Arcy – resentment after refugee fiasco. As a motive for murder – definitely thin.’ Yet why did she seem to go out of her way to sing Stella’s praises?

  ‘Felix D’Arcy – resented Stella Rode for not observing Carne’s standards. As a motive for murder – ludicrous.’

  ‘Shane Hecht – hatred.’

  ‘Terence Fielding – in a sane world, no conceivable motive.’

  Yet was it a sane world? Year in year out they must share the same life, say the same things to the same people, sing the same hymns. They had no money, no hope. The world changed, fashion changed; the women saw it second-hand in the glossy papers, took in their dresses and pinned up their hair, and hated their husbands a little more. Shane Hecht – did she kill Stella Rode? Did she conceal in the sterile omniscience of her huge body not only hatred and jealousy, but the courage to kill? Was she frightened for her stupid husband, frightened of Rode’s promotion, of his cleverness? Was she really so angry when Stella refused to take part in the rat race of gentility?