Carver's Truth

by Nick Rennison

  As Adam explained some of his reasoning to his servant, Quint poured them both further generous measures of brandy.

  ‘The important question is who else was in the theatre.’

  ‘Must have been Timble,’ Quint said. ‘Maybe he was taking longer to shut up the place than usual.’

  ‘I doubt it. Timble is a man of habit and routine.’ Adam put down his drink. He leaned back in his chair, stretching the muscles in his arms. What, he wondered, was his own best course of action now? He could stay in York and try to identify the fourth person who had been in the theatre – perhaps that person had even been a witness to Dolly’s demise and could point an accusing finger at her killer. But the real question, he began to think, was why Dolly had been done to death. Find the motive and find the murderer. In order to do that, he decided, he had to know more of the girl and her involvement with Vernon. There was too much about that affair which he had not been told. Sunman, Adam now realized, had entrusted him with only a little of the story. He must confront his devious friend and demand to know more of what was going on.

  ‘Our northern adventure is finished, Quint,’ he said with sudden decisiveness. ‘We must return to town.’

  ‘About bleedin’ time,’ Quint said.

  PART THREE

  LONDON

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘This Delaney chit has been nothing but a nuisance from the first moment Harry Vernon set eyes upon her.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Sunman, the girl is dead! She was murdered. Conveniently for Vernon – and for yourselves, some might say.’

  ‘You cannot believe that we were responsible for her unfortunate end.’ The young aristocrat sounded genuinely shocked at Adam’s words. Sunman turned to Gilbert Waterton as if to appeal for his moral support as the two men and Adam stood in one of the smaller rooms on the second floor of the new Foreign Office, which had been completed only a few years earlier. Despite its modernity, the weight of centuries of power and grandeur already seemed to permeate the building.

  Two days had passed since Adam and his servant had spent their uncomfortable night in York Gaol. On the afternoon following their release, the young man had gone to the Grand to inform Skeffington that urgent business demanded his immediate return to London. The Spectre Bridegroom would once again be missing its bridegroom.

  The old actor had taken the news with surprising equanimity. True, he had ranted briefly about ingratitude and the inconstancy of modern youth, yet he had been swiftly reconciled to the idea of Adam’s departure. At their final parting, he had even embraced him, his heavy head resting briefly and uncomfortably on Adam’s chest as he had told him that there would always be a place for him in Alfred Skeffington’s company: ‘If you ever return to this fair city, look us up, and we shall “carouse together like friends long lost”. Antony and Cleopatra, Act 4 Scene 12.’

  The actor’s relative calm had been explained when Adam had spoken to Timble.

  ‘We had a visitor,’ the theatre manager had said. ‘Just this morning. An old pal of Skeffington’s, name of Brass. They did the Moor together in Portsmouth in ’63. Brass is looking for a job.’

  ‘And Skeffington told him he could take the role of the bridegroom,’ Adam had guessed.

  Timble had nodded.

  ‘He had another part lined up for you. He wasn’t looking forward to breaking the news.’

  ‘Not a role in which I might have shone, then?’

  ‘It’s what you might call a thinking part,’ Timble had said. ‘It would have given you plenty of time to think.’

  ‘So, not very much in the way of lines?’

  ‘Not a single one, in point of fact.’

  Adam had laughed. ‘It seems I have saved Skeffington the trouble of an awkward conversation. And still he berates me for my disloyalty.’

  ‘He doesn’t mean it, Mr Carver.’ Timble had held out his hand. ‘You going on the last few nights saved our bacon.’

  Adam had shaken the hand that was offered him. On the next day, he and Quint had taken the train to London. By early evening, they were back in Doughty Street.

  Now Adam was bringing the men in the Foreign Office up to date with what had happened. ‘The police in York assumed that I had killed Miss Delaney,’ he said. ‘They may yet be of that opinion.’

  Sunman waved his hand dismissively. The opinions of the police, or indeed anyone in York, he managed to suggest, were of no interest to him. ‘My dear chap, there is no possibility that you will be arraigned on a charge of murder,’ he said. ‘Put that contingency far from your mind.’

  ‘I shall endeavour to do so,’ Adam said drily. ‘But the fact remains that Quint and I were committed to a police cell, however briefly. You will forgive me if I continue to worry that we may be returned there.’

  ‘You will not be.’

  ‘So you say, but I cannot help but believe that the best way to ensure that is to find the person who did kill the poor girl. And my only chance of doing that lies in your telling me more about how a dancer in a Drury Lane theatre came to the attention of the Foreign Office in the first instance.’

  Sunman pulled one of the high-backed chairs in the room away from the table, as if to sit down, and then, apparently changing his mind, stayed on his feet. ‘As I have said to you from the beginning, Adam,’ he said, ‘from the time of our meeting at Kensal Green when poor Moorhouse was interred, it is not possible for me to tell you everything about the girl. I can only reiterate that it was of vital import that she should be traced. Now that she is dead, we must reassess the circumstances. She was a danger to herself and others. We must decide whether or not the danger still exists.’

  Adam turned away in exasperation, looking at Waterton, who said nothing. He took several paces around the room before returning to face his friend. ‘I am sorry, Sunman, but I cannot be stonewalled like this. You must answer some of my questions.’

  The young man from the Foreign Office stared blankly at the wall behind Adam, as if mesmerized by the portrait of a huge man in eighteenth-century wig and breeches that hung there. He sighed once or twice and, in turn, glanced at Waterton.

  ‘It is only fair that Carver should know more than we have hitherto told him,’ the older man said.

  ‘Very well.’ Sunman turned to Adam with the air of a man who had made an unpleasant decision and felt the better for it. ‘What do you wish to ask me? As far as it is within my powers to do so, I will endeavour to answer your questions.’

  ‘This poor girl Dolly,’ Adam said. ‘I think the phrase you used of her was that she was “in possession of information”.’

  Sunman inclined his head slightly to acknowledge that this could, indeed, have been the way he had expressed it.

  ‘What information did she possess?’

  ‘The gentleman who became so enamoured of the young lady . . . ’

  ‘Yes, Harry Vernon,’ Adam interrupted. ‘There is no need for such periphrasis. You forget I have met the man. You mentioned his name not two minutes ago. You must tell me more of the relations between them.’

  Sunman looked sharply at his friend, as if he were about to tick him off for impertinence. Instead, he frowned and continued. ‘Vernon wrote Miss Delaney a series of letters. Indiscreet letters. Very indiscreet letters. It is of paramount importance that we have them. I cannot emphasize too strongly the need to locate these letters and destroy them.’ The Foreign Office man paused to weigh his words. ‘In fact, I do not think it is too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the future direction of our foreign policy rests on the recovery of those letters.’

  Adam looked at his friend in surprise. Sunman’s face was now fixed in so self-conscious an expression of seriousness that he felt horribly tempted to laugh. He looked across at Waterton, but his demeanour was also that of a man attending
the funeral of a deeply loved parent.

  ‘This is the stuff of melodrama, old man,’ Adam said after a brief pause. ‘Compromising letters? A nation’s fate in the hands of a dancing girl?’

  ‘None the less, it happens to be true. Vernon knew a great deal about our intentions towards the new German Reich. And the fool’ – Sunman spat out the word with unexpected venom – ‘the fool entrusted vital details of them to paper. And, what is worse, in an epistle addressed to some wretched trollop from Drury Lane. If that information reached the ears of people in Berlin, or even people in the other capitals of Europe, it is difficult to predict the consequences. Suffice it to say, they would be enormous.’

  ‘Surely, if so much is at stake, you can call upon the services of the police . . . the army.’ Adam was puzzled. ‘Why on earth did you approach me? Why did I end up travelling north in pursuit of the girl?’ There was silence in the room. Adam could hear the ticking of the large brass clock on the mantelpiece behind him. And he realized suddenly why Sunman had commissioned him to find Dolly. ‘Your superiors haven’t been told about this, have they? Only you and Vernon know about it.’

  ‘And Waterton here.’ The young aristocrat, usually so self-possessed, looked acutely uncomfortable. ‘Harry had already told him about it.’

  ‘Harry is a distant cousin of mine,’ the older man said. ‘He trusts me. We have few secrets between one another.’

  ‘But why have you kept so important a matter to yourselves?’

  ‘Harry may have behaved irresponsibly but he is a good friend. His career would be finished, ruined, if it emerged that he had been so . . .’ Sunman searched for the exact word he wanted.

  ‘Stupid?’ Adam suggested.

  ‘Imprudent. We – that is, Waterton and I – believed that the entire imbroglio could be resolved without the need for others to know of his imprudence. We believe that still.’

  Sunman fell silent. Carriages passed in the street below. Somewhere, further along the corridor outside, a door slammed.

  Adam took his silver cigar case from his jacket pocket. He offered it to Sunman and Waterton who both shook their heads. Adam extracted one of the small cigars he kept in it and, after preparation, lit the end. He blew a plume of smoke in the direction of the window. Waterton watched it drift in the air as if he was following the movements of a fly he intended to kill.

  ‘The Delaney girl must have kept the letters,’ the older man said eventually.

  ‘Why should she not?’ Adam asked. ‘To her they would be love letters, not state secrets.’

  ‘If she had thought of them only as billets-doux, we would not face the potential disaster we do. Or not as great a disaster.’ Waterton sighed. ‘The girl,’ he continued, ‘must have realized something of the importance of what Vernon had written. On one of their trysts, she suggested that he might like to buy back the letters in question.’

  ‘She was blackmailing him?’ Adam asked.

  Sunman turned from the window. ‘In effect.’

  ‘It was at this point,’ Waterton said, ‘that poor Harry, realising the trouble he was in, approached me.’

  The room was silent as Adam absorbed what he had been told.

  ‘Am I to look for these letters?’

  ‘Of course. With the girl dead, their importance only increases.’

  ‘How am I to know them if I do find them?’

  Waterton looked at Sunman, who made his way to a desk in a corner of the room and opened a drawer. He pulled out a sheet of paper, which he handed to Adam. ‘That is in Harry’s handwriting. You may keep it.’

  Adam looked briefly at the document, which seemed to be the agenda for some Foreign Office meeting, and then folded it in two and slipped it inside his jacket pocket.

  Sunman now walked over to a rosewood chiffonier on which stood a decanter of whisky and glasses. He raised the decanter enquiringly. Adam shook his head. The young aristocrat poured two drinks. He gave one to Waterton and moved to the windows with his own. He stood there, taking sips from his tumbler and looking down into King Charles Street.

  Adam looked at Waterton. ‘And you went to Sunman, after Vernon approached you?’

  Waterton made no reply. It was Sunman himself who answered Adam’s question. ‘No, Harry also spoke to me. The day after he had spoken to Waterton here.’ He set his whisky glass down on the desk in the centre of the room. ‘In truth, I did not think that you were best pleased, Gilbert, when I became involved.’

  Waterton waved his hand to indicate that no such thoughts had ever passed through his mind.

  ‘However, Harry must have been in the mood for confession,’ Sunman went on, ‘and I was an obvious person in whom to confide.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘I am a friend. And I know something of our relations with the Germans without being too closely connected to them.’

  ‘Surely,’ Adam asked, ‘from Vernon’s point of view, there was a danger that you would simply tell your superiors what he had told you?’

  Sunman looked offended. ‘Harry spoke to me in the strictest confidence. It would not have been the act of a gentleman to betray that confidence. In any case, it seemed clear to me, and to Waterton, that the whole unfortunate affair could be resolved without anyone else knowing of it. The girl merely had to be found and the letters taken from her. That is why I spoke to you.’

  ‘But the problem has not resolved itself quite as easily as you anticipated.’

  ‘No, it most certainly has not. The murder of the girl has added complications we could not have foreseen.’

  The three men glumly contemplated those same complications.

  ‘I suppose she might have attempted to blackmail Vernon earlier in their association?’ Adam said after a moment.

  Sunman looked puzzled. ‘Earlier?’

  ‘I take it he had been playing the libertine with the young lady for some time?’

  ‘A year, I believe.’

  ‘She could have threatened to write to his wife at any time then. He is married, I assume?’

  ‘He is, although he is not happy in the marriage. In his case, the angel in the house has long been more of a devil.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘The woman drinks.’ Sunman spoke as if he could scarcely credit that a female should have any taste for alcohol at all, let alone an immoderate one. ‘Although she comes from one of the best families in Buckinghamshire. Harry was thought to have landed quite a catch when first he wed her. Experience has taught him that the day he joined his fortune to hers was one of the worst of his life.’

  ‘None the less, Dolly could have seriously upset Vernon’s apple cart by revealing their affair to his wife months ago.’ Sunman nodded.

  ‘And she had made no attempt to extort money from him previously?’

  ‘No,’ Sunman said. ‘And yet I fail to see the relevance of that.’

  ‘It suggests to me one of two things. Either there was a quarrel between the lovers, which prompted her to take advantage of the information that had come her way. Or she had a confederate who urged her to do so.’

  Sunman nodded thoughtfully. ‘That is true,’ he said. ‘It is unlikely that the girl could have appreciated the significance of what she had been told herself. She must have shown the letters to a third person.’

  ‘Another dancer?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Yet why would that other dancer be any more likely to understand the importance of the information in the letters than Dolly?’

  ‘That too is true,’ Adam admitted.

  ‘What of this man McIlwraith whose name you mentioned?’ Sunman asked abruptly.

  Adam waved his hand dismissively. ‘If I am any judge of character, he is not the kind of man to involve himself in blackmail,’ he said.
‘Persuading a lovelorn stage-door Johnny to cross his palm with silver, perhaps. But not blackmail.’

  Waterton moved to the centre of the room. He began to run his fingers across the surface of the desk, as if testing to see how much dust had accumulated there. ‘And the actor Montague?’ he asked finally. ‘You say he lied to you about not knowing the girl—?’

  ‘His name and hers were on the same playbill. Which he was hiding beneath the carpet in his lodgings. He must have known her.’

  ‘Might he be her confederate?’

  ‘He might have been, but I doubt it.’

  Waterton continued to brush his fingers along the grain of the wood on the table. ‘He is not likely to be the killer, is he?’ he said eventually. ‘A man so in thrall to opium that he cannot live his life without regular recourse to it?’

  ‘Cyril has no obvious motive for the murder,’ Adam said.