Mr. Campion's Abdication

by Mike Ripley

  By the time he arrived, Sam had laid out half-a-dozen pictures on the bar, pictures he’d taken the day before at the Barrow. He kept pointing to two which showed the crowd of onlookers and he kept jabbing a grubby finger at one face in particular. ‘Do you recognize this woman?’ he said, and he said it over and over again, just wouldn’t stop. He was like a dog with a rat.

  I said I didn’t, though of course I did, and Arthur warned him to watch his mouth and not use that tone of voice with me, but that just got him more agitated. ‘You should!’ he said. ‘She spent the night under your roof and not alone, if you get my meaning.’

  Well, of course we got his meaning, stupid man, but Arthur said he had no idea what Salt was talking about and if he didn’t change his tone he’d have to leave as the pub was now closed.

  Salt wouldn’t be moved. He kept stabbing a finger at the woman in the photograph and said he had seen her leaving by the side door at ten minutes past five that morning. He’d made a note of the time in his notebook for accuracy, he said. Turns out he’d spent most of the night in the hedgerow across the road spying on us and would have taken more pictures but it was too dark.

  I tried to calm him by saying yes, we’d had residents last night and they had left early before breakfast, and he demanded to see the visitors’ book. Arthur said that was confidential and none of his so-and-so business, but I said he could see it if it meant Salt would shut up and leave.

  When I showed him, he just laughed when he read ‘Mr and Mrs Boyle, London SW1’, said that wouldn’t fool anyone and it looked as if it was in my handwriting – which it was – but he’d make a note of it anyway.

  While he was doing that, leaning on the bar, he was saying how this was his scoop, his big story; a story he would sell to the national newspapers and that would make his name. It would, he said ‘be a bombshell’.

  Arthur looked at me and I looked at Arthur and I knew we couldn’t let that happen; it just wouldn’t be loyal, would it?

  When he’d come up from the cellar, Arthur had brought the wooden mallet we use for tapping casks with him and had put it on the bar. It only took a couple of whacks on the back of the head to shut Sam Salt up for good – and there was very little blood.

  We hid the body in the cellar until the pub closed that night, then, after midnight, we loaded it into the sidecar of his motorbike and I rode pillion behind Arthur. Sam often left his bike in the car park when he did his rounds collecting village news, so nobody thought it odd to see it there for a few hours – if anybody did.

  Arthur drove us through the village to the Barrow dig, which they’d already started to fill in. We put Sam in one end of the trench and shovelled a load of soil over him so he couldn’t be seen. Arthur said the diggers would finish the job for us the next day and he was right.

  The tide was out in the estuary but would come in before it got light, so we went to a place Arthur knew and ran the motorbike into the river. As far as I know, it has never surfaced, even though Sam Salt did.

  We walked back to the pub, not seeing a soul, and burned Sam’s notebook and those pictures in the fireplace. We burned the cask mallet, too.

  Nobody ever asked us about Sam Salt. I don’t think he was much missed.

  ‘Arthur died serving king and country in 1939, not having said a word to anyone and until now, and neither have I. There’s an end to it.’

  ‘Not quite, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Campion. ‘I have to ask when you received that thank-you bottle of Prince’s Ale.’

  One moment Sonia Brunt had appeared exhausted; the next she was a tigress with glowing eyes and claws out.

  ‘I know what you’re suggesting, Mister Clever Clogs, but you’re wrong. Nobody was buying our silence, not that a bottle of ale would be much of a price to pay. What was done was done. We never saw Mr and Mrs Boyle again, but they never knew anything about Samuel Salt. That Prince’s Ale lying in pieces in the kitchen was my personal treasure, a private thank you sent by the king himself over a year later, during the Abdication. It was personal, addressed by the king himself, because we had kept his secret. He never knew our secret.’

  A blanket of silence fell over the room, disturbed only by the ticking of a clock somewhere until Perdita cleared her throat and said, ‘Well, Albert, what happens now?’

  Mr Campion removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb.

  ‘I’m not terribly sure, but I fear much of it will be out of our hands. The police have a body on their hands and they tend to take things like that very seriously.’

  ‘But it was so long ago.’

  Campion replaced his glasses and focused not on Perdita but on Sonia Brunt, who was staring fixedly at her hands clasped in her lap.

  ‘How long does it take to forget a murder? It’s a very good question and one which has troubled me of late.’

  ‘You don’t forget,’ said Sonia Brunt quietly. ‘Sometimes you can forgive, or even be forgiven, but you never forget.’ She raised her face to look at Campion. ‘But at the time I didn’t regret what we did. We were protecting the reputation of our lovely king.’

  ‘And yet he didn’t seem to care much about his own reputation.’ Perdita extended a hand towards the old woman, but whether to comfort her or shake her Campion was not sure. ‘He gave up the throne a year later without a thought for his loyal subjects.’

  ‘That’s not fair! He was in love. People said he was weak, but his only weakness was that he loved too much.’ Sonia was becoming agitated, almost squirming in her chair. ‘He proved it by marrying Mrs Simpson, and after all this time they’re still together.’

  ‘And therein lies another problem,’ said Mr Campion. He spoke softly but his tone ensured he had their complete attention. ‘The Duke and Duchess of Windsor are indeed still married, very much still with us and, as we know from recent experience, still of interest to newspapers and television companies, especially on the Continent.

  ‘The police have a body and will soon confirm its identity. I’m afraid I have already given them a head start in that. They will soon make the connection – possibly they already have – between Samuel Salt’s death and the royal visit to the Sweethearting Barrow dig, as it was the last time and place anyone saw him alive. How long before they start to sniff around the King’s Head?

  ‘It is unlikely they will follow the rather convoluted trail I have, but they are jolly thorough and will get there in the end. The one thing you might have going for you, Sonia, is that the Sweethearting Treasure no longer exists, except in pieces in your kitchen.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Pa?’ asked Rupert, leaning forward in his seat.

  ‘He’s saying that we should keep the king out of things,’ said Sonia.

  ‘The duke,’ corrected Campion, ‘and to do that would mean getting rid of anything solid which could link him to the King’s Head.’

  ‘I’ll put the bottle bits in the dustbin,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s what I told Josh Yallop I was going to do anyway.’

  Mr Campion nodded approval. ‘You mentioned a visitors’ book from when you ran the pub.’

  ‘That got chucked out when I left the trade. It didn’t have any real names in it that mattered or autographs of anyone important.’

  ‘You’re sure of that? Not even Mr and Mrs Boyle?’

  ‘They were made-up names.’

  ‘There was a David Boyle who was on the personal staff of the prince back in the Twenties. It might have rung a bell with an especially nosey nosey-parker.’

  ‘I did not know that; I thought it was just an alias. But don’t worry – the book went on a garden bonfire ten years ago. I saw it burn. I remember thinking that all I had left of them days was my bottle of Prince’s Ale and now I don’t even have that.’

  ‘You are absolutely sure,’ Campion pressed, ‘there is nothing else which could link you to the prince? No souvenirs, mementoes, keepsakes? Your royal connection seemed to have meant a lot to you.’

  So
nia Brunt stood up out of her chair and straightened her spine, but even then was only just taller than the seated Campion.

  ‘You’ll call me a sentimental old woman, I know, but when that bottle came in the post I kept the wrapping paper with all the stamps on. They had his portrait on them, you see. He was ever so handsome, even on a postage stamp.’

  ‘May I see them?’ asked Mr Campion.

  Sonia shuffled across the room to a small chest of drawers guarded by a pack of china dogs. The top draw was clearly used as Sonia’s domestic filing cabinet and, after sifting through a selection of parish magazines, bills and official-looking circulars, she pulled out a square of brown paper perhaps six inches square, looked at it and smiled, then handed it to Campion.

  The paper was heavy duty brown parcel paper and had clearly been torn or roughly cut from a much larger piece. In the bottom corner there was a fragment of an address, handwritten in fountain pen black ink. Only the ends of the address lines were distinguishable and only someone who knew the context would recognize that ‘Head’ meant King’s Head and that ‘… ting’ referred to Sweethearting and ‘… olk’ was Suffolk.

  The bulk of the fragment held the stamps, two blocks of four 1½d, or ‘three halfpence’ as Campion knew them – red-brown stamps bearing the royal crown, the royal head in profile facing right and the word POSTAGE in capital letters. A distinct postmark identified that the stamps had been franked on the 11 December, 1936.

  ‘That’s it,’ Sonia said, bitterness creeping into her voice. ‘That’s my last memory. Happy now?’

  ‘I was worried that the address might prove incriminating, and to be honest it wouldn’t take a genius to work it out. It has to be somewhere in Norfolk or Suffolk and I can’t think of any place which ends in “ting” in Norfolk. It could, of course, have been destined for a Mr or a Mrs Head, but when looking at the king’s head on those stamps, most people would make the subconscious connection to a pub called the King’s Head.’

  ‘Well, you take it and take what’s left of the bottle as well. That way you’ll be sure. The only connection left will be me and I won’t say a word. Whatever happens to me, I’ll take what I know to the grave.’

  ‘I believe you will, Sonia. I believe you will.’

  Campion folded the parcel paper carefully and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, while in an old newspaper provided by Sonia, Rupert wrapped the fragments of glass that had once been the bottle of Prince’s Ale. It was now dark outside and Campion asked his son if he and Perdita would mind fetching the car from the King’s Head as he was sure their presence back at Heronhoe Hall was required. Even an accomplished raconteur such as Lugg could only keep the police baffled for so long.

  The younger Campions, still unsure of the import and outcome of what they had heard, said an uncomfortable goodbye to Sonia Brunt and left Mr Campion at the door of the cottage.

  When Rupert and Perdita were safely out of range, Campion closed the cottage door and turned back to face Sonia Brunt.

  ‘Now we’re alone, Sonia, please tell me. The wooden mallet which I suspect did for the late Samuel Salt – who actually picked it up off the bar and swung it, you or Arthur?’

  Once again, Perdita drove and Rupert crouched in the back seat of the Mini, clutching the newspaper-wrapped parcel of broken glass to his chest as the car’s headlights reflected from the incoming tide in the estuary on the short journey back to the hall. They passed the Barrow site where more police cars and vans were now parked and shadowy figures were setting up generator-powered floodlights.

  ‘Would it be awfully boorish,’ said Rupert, ‘if I said that if I am now holding the treasure everybody’s been after, then it’s been a lot of wasted effort for not very much.’

  ‘Possibly boorish,’ said Mr Campion, ‘but more importantly inaccurate.’

  ‘Albert …’ Perdita said threateningly. ‘I’m quite willing to stop the car this very minute and we won’t move an inch until you spill the beans. What did we miss?’

  Even in the dark interior of the car, Perdita could sense that her father-in-law was smiling.

  ‘You’re not holding the Sweethearting Treasure, dear boy, I am.’

  ‘The stamps,’ said Perdita.

  ‘Clever girl. Whether he meant to or not, the king sent Sonia something valuable when he stuck those stamps on that bottle of ale.’

  ‘Of course!’ Rupert enthused from the back seat. ‘He was only king for a few months so the stamps with his head on them must be valuable.’

  ‘Well, actually, no,’ said his father. ‘Didn’t I encourage your stamp collecting when you were a lad? I’m sure I told you that philately will get you anywhere; I should have, it’s a way of learning geography without the pain. Edward VIII stamps are not especially rare, except when the king is facing the wrong way.’

  ‘Crikey O’Riley!’ exclaimed Rupert. ‘They’re misprints? Mistakes?’

  ‘I’m presuming so. It was common practice for a new monarch to approve the designs for new stamps and perhaps these were some early designs which didn’t pass muster when someone spotted that the king should be facing left and not right. If the bottle was actually sent by the king, he could just have grabbed whatever was to hand. The postmark is significant as it shows the parcel was sent at the height of the Abdication Crisis – not that I’m suggesting that the king toddled down to the post office himself, but I can picture the scene. I think the bottle was sent on a whim and in great haste.’

  ‘How many stamps are there?’

  ‘Eight in total. I suspect someone had a rough guess at the postage and somebody thought that a shilling’s worth of stamps would cover it; that sounds about right for those days.’

  ‘So they will be rare?’

  ‘I have no idea, but I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this. There was a famous American stamp from 1918 celebrating the wonders of flight called “the inverted Jenny” which showed a biplane but a batch had been printed with it upside down. They are supposed to be much sought-after by collectors.’

  ‘So are they valuable?’ Perdita asked as she steered the Mini into the drive of Heronhoe Hall.

  ‘They may well be. When we get back to London I’ll go and see that nice Mr Stanley Gibbons, who is wise beyond measure in all things to do with stamps, and he will advise us. We might be talking several thousand pounds.’

  ‘So there was real treasure after all. That will be a nice surprise for Sonia.’

  ‘No, it won’t,’ said Campion firmly and in the shadowy interior of the car his voice sounded positively menacing. ‘My standards may have slipped with age and my moral compass is now decidedly skew-wiff, but I’ve never believed one should profit from a crime.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Perdita.

  ‘Do you mean to say …?’ Rupert started but Campion turned his head and put his forefinger to his lips.

  ‘Now listen, you two, I would like you to forget everything you heard this afternoon. Could you do that for me? It would be purely for my own selfish reasons and naturally I would be fully responsible should there be consequences.’

  ‘What are you saying, Pa?’

  ‘I am saying that fifteen years ago I abdicated any responsibility for an innocent young Italian girl and have felt very bad about it ever since. Now I think I am going to abdicate from the question of the death of Samuel Salt and it will not trouble me, for I do not see how justice can be well-served at this distance in time. I will not hinder the wheels of law enforcement if they start turning, but will not oil them to help them crush a frail old woman. If either of you feel different, I will quite understand.’

  Rupert and Perdita exchanged the briefest of glances and Perdita nodded in silent agreement.

  ‘We’ll follow your lead, Pa,’ said Rupert, ‘if you’re sure in your own mind.’

  ‘My mind is the one thing I’m never sure of,’ said Mr Campion. ‘So let us be as vague as possible – I’m told I’m rather good at that – when we get inside. There wi
ll be too many people floating round the hall, and anyway, we’ve had enough surprises for one day.’

  ‘No, we haven’t.’

  As Perdita braked and the Mini slowed, she flicked on the main headlight beams, which illuminated a familiar grey Jaguar saloon neatly parked between two police cars outside the front door of the hall.

  TWENTY

  The Sermon Opposite the Mount

  ‘Amanda! You come with a chariot for which to carry me home!’

  ‘Not before time, judging by the state you’ve put poor Lavinia’s house in. There are policemen tramping everywhere, archaeologists in the Orangery and Lugg appears to have bought up half of Harrods’ Food Hall. He’s in the kitchen, by the way, and has put himself in charge of feeding the five thousand this evening, so I hope you remembered to pack your antacids. That’s a lovely outfit, by the way, Perdita.’

  In the doorway, Mr Campion leaned in to his son’s shoulder. ‘Have you noticed how your mother’s hair glows even redder, just as coals glow when blown on, whenever she’s annoyed? Now do the manly thing and go and give her a kiss. That may take some of the flak off me.’

  Rupert did his dutiful son act with a kiss on each cheek and then Perdita greeted her mother-in-law in the traditional female manner, the two women joining hands then both leaning back just enough to admire each other’s outfits and discovering that Perdita was warming to the longer skirt and pinched-waist look of Thirties’ chic, although she was naturally jealous of Amanda’s purple suede Jean Muir number with matching boots by Barbara Hulanicki, which must have knocked them dead at her business meeting in Birmingham.

  ‘Birmingham …’ Campion muttered to himself, ‘… it was Birmingham.’

  When it was finally his turn to embrace his wife, he said, ‘It is wonderful to see you, darling, though you’ve caught us on rather an unusual day. I assure you, it’s not like this normally.’