Carver's Truth

by Nick Rennison

  ‘Unless he was her fellow blackmailer.’

  ‘As I say, I doubt very much that he was. He may have needed money but the man cares only for his pipes and an audience’s applause.’

  There was a pause. Waterton had ceased stroking the table and was now staring intently at an elaborately carved wooden inkstand which was sitting on it. Sunman, too, had fallen silent, returning to his contemplation of the bewigged gentleman in the portrait.

  ‘There is one suspect we have not mentioned,’ Adam remarked.

  Waterton looked up and raised his eyebrows in enquiry.

  ‘In any case where blackmail ends with the murder of the blackmailer, the person who most directly benefits from the death is the one being blackmailed.’

  ‘Harry?’ Waterton sounded incredulous. ‘A murderer? Impossible!’

  ‘You forget,’ Adam said, ‘that only a few months ago you would have been equally surprised if someone had told you he was conducting an illicit affair with a danseuse.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I refuse to believe that Harry is the killer!’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’

  ‘Would a murderer look anything like Harry Vernon?’ Sunman asked, suddenly returning to the conversation.

  ‘I do not know. How would a murderer look?’

  ‘His depravity would surely be written on his face.’

  Adam caught his friend’s eye and shook his head slightly. ‘I would recommend a trip to Madame Tussauds and its Chamber of Horrors, old man,’ he said. ‘Go down to the Baker Street Bazaar and gaze upon those wax models of murderers and torturers. The greatest horror is that the majority of them look little different to you and me.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Adam sat in a chop house in a street near Trafalgar Square and toyed idly with the rump-steak pudding he had ordered. It was delicious but he was not, he decided, as hungry as he had thought. Taking a few last mouthfuls, he laid down his knife and fork and leaned back onto the wooden panelling of the booth in which he was sitting. The panels of each booth came up to a point just below the neck of the averagely sized man. Looking across the room, he could see the apparently disembodied heads of his fellow diners arranged in rows. It was just after noon and the chop house was full. The noise of several dozen conversations swirled around the room. Harried waiters scurried back and forth between the kitchens and the booths. One materialized by Adam’s side and looked enquiringly at the half-eaten rump-steak pudding.

  ‘Leave it,’ the young man said. ‘I may gain a gastronomical second wind.’

  The waiter, touching his forefinger to his head, retreated and left Adam to his thoughts. What was the truth, he wondered, about the letters? The very indiscreet letters? Adam had assumed that the Foreign Office was concerned because Harry Vernon had given hostages to fortune by addressing Dolly in overly affectionate terms, thereby making himself vulnerable to blackmail. It was a commonplace enough story. Most of the blackmailers in London would be out of business if all married men and women paid strict attention to their wedding vows. Other versions of events had occurred to Adam, including the possibility that Vernon had told Dolly secrets he shouldn’t have told her; but he had been imagining minor snippets of gossip or small hints of government policy that another European power might have found interesting – might even have paid money to receive. Nothing on the scale which Sunman and Waterton were suggesting, however. Could it be true? Surely no man in a position of high responsibility would divulge such important information to a dancer in a Drury Lane chorus line?

  It was unlikely, Adam decided, but not impossible. As Ovid had remarked so long ago, Credula res amor est. Men in love are likely to believe anything. Vernon might have thought that Dolly was so enamoured of him that she could be safely told whatever he chose. He could not have imagined that she would betray him, as she appeared to have done. All he had probably wanted, Adam thought, was to show how powerful and important a man he was, how far he was trusted with the nation’s secrets.

  Adam looked down at the gravy oozing from his pudding and congealing on the plate. His food seemed less and less appealing by the minute. What, he wondered, was he to do next? Could he just walk away from this whole business? He decided he could not. The men at the Foreign Office were expecting him to help them and he had a responsibility to do so. In a strange way, he felt that he owed it to the girl – to poor, dead Dolly – to find out what had happened to her.

  A copy of the Daily News was lying on the table in the next booth. Adam left his seat and went to pick it up before returning to his meal. He opened the pages and began idly to scan them. The marriage of the Queen’s daughter Louise to the son of the Duke of Argyll seemed still to be holding the nation’s attention. A new concert hall named after the late Prince Consort had just opened. Otto von Bismarck had been appointed chancellor of the new German Reich. The headline to a small story at the bottom of the newspaper’s fifth page jumped out at him: ‘The People’s Roscius Returns in Triumph from the Provinces.’ Here was coincidence indeed, he thought, as he read the paragraph. He had just been talking of Cyril Montague to the men in the Foreign Office and here was news that the actor was forsaking his old friend Skeffington and coming back to London to play Romeo at a theatre in Holborn.

  The waiter returned, and this time Adam signed to him to remove his plate. The man retreated with the remains of the pudding, but Adam made no move to leave the booth, continuing to sit on the poorly padded wooden bench and stare across the chop house. He would go and see Cyril Montague now that he had returned to the city, he decided. But something else was nagging in the back of his mind, something about Dolly and the letters. What was it? Something somebody had said to him. Was it Cyril? No, Montague had steadfastly denied knowing her. Somebody had said something, however. Who had it been . . .?

  Suddenly, Adam snapped his fingers. A waiter stopped at his booth. Adam irritatedly waved the man away. He needed no more service. He had recalled what had been lurking in his memory. When he had been at the theatre only a day or two after his meeting with Sunman at Kensal Green, he had asked whether or not it was possible to deliver a note to the young dancer. And how had the dancing master McIlwraith replied? Of course. ‘Dolly can’t read letters, sir,’ he had said. ‘She can’t read anything at all.’

  If Dolly had been illiterate, her lover would surely not have been sending her letters of any kind, indiscreet or otherwise. Why send missives that someone else would have to read to her?

  Either Sunman and Waterton were lying to him, or they knew even less about her than Adam did.

  Adam sighed. As ever, thoughts of Dolly led inevitably to thoughts of Hetty Gallant. He had seen nothing of her since his return to London; indeed, he had seen nothing of her since the one night they had spent together before he had travelled to York. He was obliged to admit to himself that the pleasures he had enjoyed then seemed unlikely to be repeated, and he was not certain how he felt about that. Hetty was a lovely, lively girl but it was perhaps best that they should not meet again. Yet he could not so easily forget her. Her face and figure haunted him. And besides, had he not seen her in company with Harry Vernon?

  He could not quite rid himself of the thought that she was in some way intimately connected to the mystery of Dolly Delaney and her murder.

  * * * * *

  In the event, Adam had no need to visit Holborn to see the ‘People’s Roscius’. The following day, he was reading in his rooms in Doughty Street when there was a knock on the door. A long knock, which began as a series of timid taps and then developed quickly into a succession of noisier and more determined thumps on the woodwork.

  ‘I’m coming,’ Adam called. ‘No need to break down the door,’ he muttered beneath his breath as he replaced the book on the shelf and walked through his sitting room and into the hall. Who could this be? he wondered. Surely there was no r
eason why Mrs Gaffery should be calling upon him, was there?

  He reached the door and pulled it open. Standing on the threshold, his hand raised to deliver another blow, was Cyril Montague. ‘Ah, there you are, you wretch,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to think you were out on the town. I swear I have been knocking and knocking these five minutes past.’

  ‘So I heard, Mr Montague. How can I help you?’

  ‘Are you not going to ask me in, my dear? So vulgar to hold important conversations in a stairwell.’

  Adam stepped to one side and, with a gesture of half-hearted welcome, invited his visitor to enter. Montague walked through the door as if he was expecting an audience to applaud him for doing so.

  Adam followed and pointed him in the direction of the sitting room. ‘Please sit down, Mr Montague. This is an unanticipated pleasure. I have only just heard that you were in town.’

  The actor looked at the two wing chairs in the room and chose to seat himself in the one nearest the fire. Adam took the other.

  ‘Such a rush, my dear. One minute I was treading the provincial boards with darling old Skeffington; the next, I’m summoned to the Royal Pantheon to give my Romeo to the eager multitudes of the great metropolis. I do declare I haven’t had a moment’s rest in days. If I’m not careful, I shall be falling asleep before your humble hearth.’

  Montague, Adam could not help but notice, did not look well: his eyes were bloodshot, and the make-up which he seemed to wear both on-and off-stage was streaked with dirt. His body slumped in the chair like a puppet which had just had its strings cut. Only his voice, which remained determinedly jaunty, suggested a man who was anything other than at the end of his tether.

  ‘Who is that ogress downstairs?’ Montague continued. ‘She came roaring out of her den like a lion in search of its prey. I had the utmost difficulty in persuading her that we were old friends and that you would be simply overjoyed to see me.’

  ‘Mrs Gaffery can come as a shock to those who have not encountered her before,’ Adam acknowledged. ‘She owns the house. She is, I suppose, my landlady.’

  ‘She must feast upon raw meat in that lair on the ground floor! I do declare I am trembling at the very prospect of passing her door again. Are there no other means of departing your rooms?’

  Adam shook his head and the actor sighed. He was indeed trembling, although Adam doubted it was through fear of meeting Mrs Gaffery again. Montague looked in immediate need of his drug of choice. In its absence, Adam suggested a drink, which his visitor accepted eagerly. He then sat, hunched in the chair, sipping the brandy Adam provided. He looked thoroughly miserable. Silence descended on the room.

  ‘I am pleased to renew our acquaintance, Mr Montague,’ Adam said eventually, ‘but I have an appointment in town in a short while.’ This was not entirely true, but the young man wondered if saying so might nudge his visitor into speech. ‘Can I help you in any way, or is this merely a social call?’

  ‘Ah, forgive me, my dear.’ The actor made a visible effort to recover his vitality. ‘Transported by delight as I am to see you once again, I am entirely forgetting the other reason for my visit.’ He wiped his hand across his brow, sending tiny clouds of face powder floating into the air. ‘I was mortified, simply mortified, to discover that I might have led you astray in York.’

  ‘Astray, Mr Montague?’

  ‘On the question of Dolly Delaney.’

  ‘The girl you had never met?’

  Montague laughed nervously. ‘The girl in the photograph you showed me,’ he said. ‘I may have been hasty in saying that she was unknown to me.’

  ‘So Dolly was in the chorus at the Gaiety.’ Adam had seen the hidden playbill. He knew this to be the case but he wanted Montague to acknowledge it.

  The actor nodded.

  ‘And she came to see you in York?’

  There was a pause and then Montague nodded again. ‘A girl calling herself Dolly Delaney turned up in my dressing room at the Grand one night. What a state the poor little thing was in! All of a quiver from the moment she arrived to the moment she left.’

  ‘What had happened to distress her?’

  ‘My dear, she was in fear for her life. She was convinced that some gentleman she knew here in town wished her dead. It was the reason she had fled to York.’

  ‘And you were able to offer her assistance?’

  The actor looked shame-faced. ‘To be brutally frank, my dear, I didn’t believe her. Chorus girls often have the most florid imaginations. I thought she was telling me a story to encourage me to give her money.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘A little. But it was clearly not enough. She was back at the stage door a couple of days later.’

  ‘And you gave her more money.’

  ‘I had none to give, my dear. I was absolutely stony myself.’

  ‘And you never saw her again?’

  Montague took a long sip of his brandy. He said nothing.

  ‘You did see her again,’ Adam persisted.

  ‘Not exactly, my dear. I arranged to see her again.’

  ‘Ah, I think I see.’ Light was beginning to dawn. ‘You agreed to meet in the Grand after the show was finished.’

  ‘I didn’t want her to know where my lodgings were. So I said that she should come to my dressing room at one in the morning. I knew I would be the only person left in the theatre at that hour. I told her I would leave a side door open.’

  ‘Why so late? Why not meet her in York during the day?’

  ‘My dear, I was embarrassed to be seen with her. She was positively hysterical at the stage door. I attract quite enough attention amongst hoi polloi without the companionship of a screaming woman. And, as I say, I didn’t want her at my rooms.’

  ‘Why see her at all? Why not send her away?’

  ‘I felt sorry for the poor mite. I thought I could borrow a sovereign or two from Timble to give her and then she would disappear from York entirely. My conscience would be clear, and I could forget about her.’

  ‘What happened on the night she was to come to your dressing room?’

  ‘I fell asleep.’

  ‘Asleep?’

  ‘My dear, you can have no idea how exhausting it can be, giving oneself to the crowd.’ Still crumpled in the chair, his make-up disintegrating and running down his cheeks, Cyril Montague was a picture of exhaustion. Adam filled the actor’s glass with another shot of brandy.

  ‘If I understand you correctly then, Mr Montague, you were still asleep when Dolly entered the Grand. Did you awake at any time? Did you see her before she was killed?’

  The actor shook his head. ‘My dear, I had no idea she had been killed. Not until the following afternoon. I awoke in the early hours in my chair in my dressing room. I had the most blisteringly bad headache. There was no sign of Dolly so I let myself out of the stage door and went back to my lodgings. It was only when I dragged my poor, suffering carcase to the theatre at about five the next day that Timble told me the girl was dead.’

  ‘But, if that is so, you must have been in the theatre at the same time as the murderer! The same time as myself and the police! Did you not hear or see anything of anyone else when you left?’

  Montague gave a half-embarrassed shrug. ‘I was not at my most observant, Mr Carver.’

  ‘And we all failed to see you.’ Adam spoke almost to himself. He had another thought. ‘Do you have the habit of calling out in your sleep, Mr Montague?’

  ‘Calling out, my dear?’

  ‘Some people do, you know. Involuntary cries when they are comfortably resting in the arms of Morpheus.’

  ‘Well, since you mention it, and I think it most impolite that you should, dear boy, one or two of my closest friends have told me that I can be quite the
little chatterbox in the early hours. Awake or asleep. But it is very rude of you to speak of it. What possible interest can you have in my bedroom habits?’

  ‘It is of no consequence, Mr Montague. Forget I said it.’

  So that, Adam thought, was the explanation of the cry in the theatre that had disturbed both him and Dolly’s murderer. The actor, he assumed, must have smoked a pipe or two more that evening than he usually did. Overcome by exhaustion and his drug, he had slept. And he had called out in his sleep. When he had awoken, he had still been half-befuddled and had thought only of getting to his bed. But how had he evaded the attention of Moughton and his men? He must have left during the short period, immediately after Quint had been apprehended, when all of them were in the auditorium.

  Adam looked at Montague directly. ‘But you must tell all this to the police.’

  ‘My dear!’ Montague squealed with horror at the idea. ‘How can I? They will think that I murdered the girl myself! I will be flung into some dark dungeon and left to rot.’

  ‘I am sure that Inspector Moughton will do no such thing, but he must be told that you were there.’

  ‘No, it is out of the question.’ The actor had folded his arms and twisted his body so that he was half turned away from Adam. He looked and sounded like a sulky child. ‘I will not go back to York.’ As he spoke, there was a sudden noise from the hall. ‘What is that?’ Montague asked in alarm, rising from the chair and spilling some of the brandy from his glass.

  ‘There is no cause for concern. It will only be Quint, returning from whatever den of vice he has been haunting this afternoon.’

  Montague was not to be soothed. He had already emptied the last of the brandy down his throat and was ready to depart. ‘I must love you and leave you, my dear. Thank you for listening to my tale. Here I have been positively pouring my heart out to you, and the time has simply raced away. But I owe the audience in Holborn a Romeo tonight, and I must fly.’

  ‘You cannot go without promising me you will speak to someone else about this, Montague.’ Adam had risen to his feet himself.