I nearly didn’t go to see Martin Coxon, but there was nothing better to do with the afternoon, so I drove down.
He lived on the coast about a mile east of Rye in a biggish modem bungalow, one of the sort put up in the thirties without benefit of architect. You went along crazy-paving flanked by big white stones, and climbed five steps set in a rockery to a key-shaped front door, and the bell you pulled went ding-dong.
The door was opened by a tall dark woman of about sixty. She looked as if she’d seen me coming. I asked if Commander Coxon was in and she said no, but she expected him back any time, and when I mentioned Powell’s name she invited me into a living-room full of twentieth-century furniture. It was also littered with books, which made it look a lot better.
‘‘I don’t think my son will be long,’’ she said in a genteel voice. ‘‘He’s only shopping for me in Rye. I expected him before this.’’
I thanked her but she still hung about the door, neither in the room nor out. She’d been a handsome woman but her looks had grown scrawny and angular. I said I didn’t want to disturb her if she was busy, and she coughed behind her hand.
‘‘Forgive me, Mr.—er—Turner, but I do hope you’re not going to ask my son to take something else on. He really hasn’t been well, and he’ll never learn to relax or letup. He drives himself.’’
‘‘No,’’ I said. ‘‘I came only to make some inquiries.’’
Her handsome dark eyes travelled over me. She still looked anxious. ‘‘I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have said that. But it’s years since Colonel Powell sent, and the last time …’’
I said: ‘‘ I’m not one of Colonel Powell’s staff.’’
She left me then, but I’d only time to move to the window before a small car came along the road to the bungalow and swung round the front with a scrape of tyres to disappear into the garage at the back. The door of the car slammed and a door of the house opened and shut, and after that there was the murmur of voices. On a table by the window was a letter addressed to Commander Martin Coxon, D.S.O., M.A., and a pretty good and business-like sketch of a racing yacht with all dimensions marked. Beside these was a tin of El Toro cigars and a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos.
The door opened and a man came in. ‘‘Mr. Turner? I’m Coxon. You wanted me?’’
‘‘Colonel Powell gave me your name. He said he thought you might be able to help me.’’
‘‘Powell? Well, it’s a long time since I heard from him. What does he want?’’
I told him. He was a handsome-looking chap of medium height. For the lean strong lines of his body his face had a delicate look because of its pallor under the thick dark hair, and also perhaps because of its expression, which, was sensitive and introspective and mobile. I don’t know what I’d expected but I hadn’t expected this—certainly not anyone so young looking; someone perhaps with a more obvious tang of the sea. There really wasn’t much of the seaman about him at first sight in spite of his clothes, which were a sort of freehand adaptation of the old Navy battle-dress carried into civilian life. And with it went a very fine-tooled leather belt with a broad silver buckle. While I was explaining I took a cigarette he offered me, and he pushed some books aside and sat on the window-seat, tapping a cigarette sharply on the side of his case but not lighting it. Only once he lifted his head and stared at me. When it was finished he said:
‘‘I remember reading something about your brother’s death in the paper … But I haven’t even seen Buckingham since nineteen forty-eight. How does Powell suppose I can help you?’’
His voice wasn’t a bit like his mother’s; it was cultured and easy on the ear. I said: ‘‘ I’m going to Holland tomorrow and I want all the information I can get before I start.’’
‘‘I’ll give you what I can about Buckingham, of course; but it’s precious little. And why the emphasis on Buckingham? I should have thought the girl who wrote the letter would be able to tell you more.’’
‘‘She might if we could find her; but we don’t even know her surname. And I’ve a feeling that if I trace Buckingham I shall find the girl too.’’
Coxon put the unlighted cigarette between his lips. There were rings under his eyes, and at times his mouth had a wry disappointed twist that somehow made you personally concerned for the cause of the disappointment. It was easy to understand his mother being worried over his health yet there was far too much vitality in him for real illness.
‘‘Have you been in the Navy?’’ he asked.
‘‘Yes. Why?’’
‘‘I don’t know. Something about a man’s trim. I can usually tell. What were you in?’’
‘‘Destroyers. Only two years.’’
‘‘I was R.N.V.R.,’’ he said. ‘‘No right to the rank now, but it clings. I had a minesweeper at the beginning of the war, but the bloody little tub sank under me. A corvette after that. What were you, a lieutenant?’’
‘‘Eventually. By painful stages.’’
He finally lit his cigarette. For a few seconds while he as talking about it you could catch the authority in his voice that a man gets after a command at sea. ‘‘I suppose you were barely fledged when it was all over. One can hardly believe it was so long ago.’’ He might have been remembering an old love affair, part pleasure, part conflict.
I said: ‘‘Well, you can have been barely fledged when it all began.’’
‘‘Oh yes, I was. I’m thirty-nine, though you might not think so … What did you want to know about Buckingham?’’
‘‘Anything you can tell me. What does he look like?’’
‘‘He’s about five foot eight or nine with a short beard and brown eyes rather narrow; and a strong aquiline nose. Dark graying a bit. If you still believe in things like good and bad then maybe you’d call him a bad man, because he doesn’t conform to any recognisable code of ethics. But he’s a thoroughly clever fellow, intelligent and subtle, and that’s precisely why no one knows much about him. He lives his own life and makes his own terms, and when he does anything on the shady side of the law he’s done it and gone long before anyone can touch him.’’
‘‘Did you like him?’’
‘‘Like him? No.’’
‘‘Why not?’’
Martin Coxon pushed back his hair with two parted fingers. ‘‘Why does one like or dislike a man? Glandular secretions? Planets in opposition? For one thing I prefer my fun a bit cleaner.’’
‘‘If you can tell me, how did you meet him?’’
‘‘Oh yes, I can tell you. He was running Jews into Palestine, and I navigated his ship for one voyage.’’
‘‘Were there any women with him then?’’
‘‘Not belonging to him. There was a little Rumanian Jewess of about nineteen that he invited into his cabin one evening. He tried to board her but she cleared decks and fought it out. There was a hell of a fuss when her family got to know. But of course that was all six years ago. Will you have a whisky?’’
‘‘Thanks.’’
He got up and went to a cupboard, brought out a bottle and two glasses. ‘‘Tell me more about your brother. What was he doing in Java? How did he actually come to meet Buckingham?’’
I told him, and he nodded and listened carefully. Once he smiled, and it was queer the way the dark look left his face. While I was speaking I was sizing him up, trying to decide whether to follow up a sudden impulse. He asked me quite a lot about Grevil’s death, and when I couldn’t answer his questions I said that that was what I was going to Amsterdam to find out. His attitude was entirely different from Powell’s this morning. He seemed interested, his mind ready for new impressions. It was a tremendously refreshing change. There were no closed doors here.
At length I decided to risk it. ‘‘You tell me you don’t like Buckingham?’’
‘‘I didn’t when I met him. He got up my nose more than once. Why?’’
‘‘You wouldn’t, I suppose, care to help me find him?’’
&
nbsp; He was pouring whisky into a glass. When he finished he held it up to the light. ‘‘I’ll swear some of this modern stuff’s been taken out of bond too soon. Very different from what we got in Scotland before the war … What use would I be to you?’’
‘‘You’d at least know Buckingham if you saw him.’’
‘‘He’s probably hundreds of miles away by now.’’
‘‘Perhaps. But it’s slightly less unhopeful with you than without you. Actually Powell rather hinted at the idea; but at first I thought he was trying to attach some detective to me to see I didn’t get into mischief. In any case I’d no thought of suggesting it when I came down. It’s simply that I—like your approach.’’
‘‘Thanks.’’ Martin Coxon hesitated, then he shook his head suddenly, with nervous emphasis. ‘‘Sorry, but I can’t see it as a reasonable proposition.’’
‘‘I didn’t suppose you would, but I put it to you. Naturally the expenses would have come on me.’’
The door opened and his mother; came half in. She began to speak but then stopped and flushed. ‘‘I was going to ask if Mr. Turner would like a cup of tea … I see I’m too late.’’
‘‘See what you’ve escaped, Turner. Or perhaps you’d have preferred it?’’
Mrs. Coxon said: ‘‘I really do feel it’s too early to be drinking, Martin. Mr. Turner will think——’’
‘‘I used to know a man who always had a tumbler of whisky sent up with his shaving water. He said it gave the razor a finer edge.’’ Coxon squirted a dash of soda into my glass. ‘‘Join us, my dear. It’ll do your nerves less harm.’’
‘‘Thank you, no,’’ she said distastefully. ‘‘You know I wouldn’t consider it.’’
When she had gone he wrinkled his forehead at me apologetically. ‘‘My mother has never quite grown up. Forty years ago she laid a duck-egg by mistake, and ever since she’s been worried about me being in the water. Psychologists would have a name for it, if one bothered to look it up.’’
I said: ‘‘ I’ve never been to Amsterdam. Do you know it?’’
‘‘Yes, it’s a good city. The Dutch aren’t stolid in their enjoyments. That’s just a popular misconception. On the wall behind you there’s a photograph of the Winterhude. I first saw Amsterdam when I was eighteen. I landed there off that old windjammer—a hundred and twelve days from Melbourne. Sixteen weeks of celibacy and then one glorious burst. I couldn’t stick it now. I don’t mean the profligacy, I mean the celibacy.’’
‘‘I shall be flying tomorrow afternoon if you change your mind and decide to come.’’
He had got up, and he thoughtfully tilted the amber-coloured whisky in his glass. I might not have spoken. In profile he had a distinguished head—the small hollows in his temples gave him a sensitive look.
‘‘The last time I was over there was just after the war on a piece of cloak-and-dagger nonsense for Naval Intelligence. I was in Holland for three weeks, mainly in Amsterdam and Rotterdam …’’
‘‘All of which would make you of more use to me than you think. It’s an enormous advantage when someone knows the ropes. But of course I understand how you feel. Even if you had the time, why should you waste it on a complete stranger?’’
He said pleasantly: ‘‘It isn’t that I mind helping a stranger. But I’m recently home from Ireland and have work to do. And I’ve a series of three articles to finish for The Yachtsman. If I go with you for even a week, that’s twenty guineas down the drain.’’
‘‘Naturally I could make that up.’’
‘‘A lot of things seem to come naturally to you.’’ He pushed back his hair with a sharp irritable gesture. ‘‘I don’t see what you’re driving at. Supposing you found Buckingham—and this girl. The utmost that can happen is that you find both of them. Then what? What does it lead to?’’
I stared at him. ‘‘I knew Grevil, and simply don’t believe that he committed suicide.’’
He was a long time before speaking. ‘‘Ye-es. I see some point in that. But there are only two alternatives, aren’t there?’’
‘‘That he fell in or … yes, I know.’’
‘‘Could he swim?’’
‘‘Very well.’’
Coxon said: ‘‘Then you think he was murdered.’’
I said: ‘‘I want to find out.’’
Chapter Three
I could tell he was more interested then, but I wasn’t at all sure how far it would go. He was obviously a man with a liking for anything out of the common run, and I guessed by his expression that the temptation was there. But I also guessed that he was the sort of man who by nature gives his whole attention to whatever is in front of him, whether it’s an uncharted channel or a chess problem or a girl; and it just depended in this case whether the thing was big enough to keep his interest after I was gone.
So when he phoned early next morning to say he would come with me, I felt I’d done something worth-while. Going at all was a pretty wild throw in the dark; the only thing you could say was that it was slightly less so with him than without him.
We left London Airport at three and landed at Schiphol at twenty-past four. I expected to stay three days. To say the least, my firm didn’t look with a lot of favour on what I was doing. To drop an important assignment and fly home seven thousand miles because of a brother’s death was in itself quite a pill. A couple of sympathetic letters would have paid off most such relationships. Neither Hamilton in San Francisco nor Withycombe in London saw eye to eye with me, though I tried to explain. Now to ask for more time to go to Holland on; business hardly clear to myself was stretching their patience past the safety-point.
While we were over the North Sea Martin Coxon told me more about Buckingham. It didn’t help much in the way I wanted it to help, but it did begin to build up a picture of an active ruthless man who was ready to risk anything for the whim of the moment I got the impression too that perhaps Martin Coxon had some old score to pay off, that he wasn’t telling me about, because there was more in his voice today when he spoke of Buckingham. Perhaps since yesterday he had been remembering. Perhaps that was behind his decision to come.
Then he asked me about my family and myself, and I told him what I could, and about my job with British Turbo-Jets, and my ambition once to paint and my failure to make the grade and …
‘‘Are you married?’’ he asked abruptly.
‘‘No.’’
Just saying that must have conveyed more than I thought.
‘‘Going to be?’’
‘‘No. I was engaged a couple of years ago, but it came to nothing.’’ Not easy to explain about Pamela and the way things had gone adrift. Anyway, I didn’t want to. The conventional thing is to go off the rails when a love affair misfires. Mine had had the opposite effect. It was as if a cold blast of common sense had blown over me, removing illusions I had held too long.
‘‘And you?’’ I said to him.
‘‘Me?’’ He shook his head. ‘‘The German word for marriage, ehe, sums the thing up: two-vowels united in a sigh of boredom. As for the rest, well I had a good many years before the war that you didn’t have; and I suppose I made the most of them. Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang …’’ The stewardess brought him some cigarettes he had ordered and he smiled his thanks. I saw her face as she turned away. ‘‘Looking back it seems a little futile now—but perhaps nothing very much matters once you’ve done it. All that counts is the next step.’’ He offered me a cigarette.
I said: ‘‘If I thought that I shouldn’t be bothering to fly to Holland today.’’
‘‘After we’d lit up he was silent for a time, reading the thing he had brought with him. I saw it was Housman’s preface to Book One of Manilius. In the bright light the lines showed on his face for the first time—the sort of lines that come only to a man who has seen action in war.
I thought of my first aeroplane flight sixteen years ago, and that again brought me back to Grevil. It isn’t many young men of twenty-four,
flying to Paris for a scientific conference, who will go out of their way to take along a schoolboy of fourteen. I remembered that he’d asked special permission before the plane left the ground so that I could spend a few minutes of the fight in the cockpit—a terrific thrill at that age. I remembered too that he had; somehow managed to make time to show me things in Paris—the artists’ quarter and the house where Oscar Wilde died, the blood-stained sites of the French Revolution, the Ile de la Cité and the hill of Montmartre …
‘‘Tell me again,’’ Coxon said, putting down his book. ‘‘ What makes you so convinced your brother didn’t commit suicide?’’
‘‘Knowing him, that’s all. He was a clever man but a.; perfectly natural and normal one—full of good spirits and excessively generous. He wasn’t faultless and he was. certainly no prig; but he had pretty definite views about some things for these days. And if there was one thing I should say he believed in more than any other, it was in the value of the ordinary individual—very much the Christian outlook: the worth of one’s personal spirit, or whatever it’s fashionable to call it now. A man with those ideas doesn’t generally snuff out his own life. If he does, he’s ramming a hole through the beliefs he has always cared most about.’’
Nine thousand feet below, through a thin roof off mackerel cloud, the coast of Holland was coming into view.
‘‘The other thing,’’ I said, ‘‘is what happened to my father. It hasn’t been a thing ever talked of in the family as you’ll understand. Father died when I was seven. That’s the way it’s put. Well, so he did. How he died isn’t referred to. But of course you can’t live as a family without its coming up some time, and whenever Grevil has said anything about it to me I’ve always got me impression he felt the way I did. With that example before him, it would be the last thing he’d do himself.’’
Martin nodded sharply. ‘‘What persuaded me to come today was the hunch that when anyone feels anything as strongly as you do about this, he’s probably right’’
‘‘I’m glad.’’
The Little Walls Page 3