A Shilling for Candles

by Josephine Tey

  It was the busy time of the morning and all the chairs were full.

  “Won’t be a minute, sir,” an anxious supervisor said. “Not a minute if you will wait.”

  Grant sat down by the wall and reached for a magazine from the pile on a shelf. The pile fell over; a well-thumbed collection, most of them far from new. Because it had a frontispiece of Christine Clay, he picked up a copy of the Silver Sheet, an American cinema magazine, and idly turned over the pages. It was the usual bouquet. The “real truth” was told about someone for the fifty-second time, being a completely different real truth from all the other fifty-one real truths. A nitwit blonde explained how she read new meaning into Shakespeare. Another told how she kept her figure. An actress who didn’t know one end of a frying pan from the other was photographed in her kitchen making griddle cakes. A he-man star said how grand he thought all the other he-man stars. Grant turned the pages more impatiently. He was on the point of exchanging the magazine for another when his attention was suddenly caught. He read through an article with growing interest. At the last paragraph he got to his feet, still holding the paper and staring at the page.

  “Your turn now, sir,” the barber said. “This chair, please.”

  But Grant took no notice.

  “We’re quite ready for you now, sir. Sorry you’ve been kept waiting.”

  Grant looked up at them, only half-conscious of them.

  “Can I have this?” he asked, indicating the magazine. “It’s six months old. Thank you,” and rushed out of the room.

  They stared after him, and laughed a little, speculating as to what had taken his fancy.

  “Found his affinity,” someone suggested.

  “Thought they were extinct, affinities,” another countered.

  “Found something to cure his corns.”

  “No, gone to consult his best friend.”

  And they laughed and forgot him.

  Grant was in the telephone booth, and the impatient gentleman in the patent leather shoes was beginning to wonder if he was ever coming out of it. He was talking to Owen Hughes, the cinema star. That was why the patent leather gentleman didn’t go upstairs to the numerous booths on the ground floor. He was hoping to hear some of the conversation. It was about whether someone had mentioned something in a letter to someone.

  “You did!” Grant said. “Thanks! That’s all I wanted to know. Keep it under your hat. That I asked, I mean.”

  Then he had asked for the Thames police, pulling the door tighter and so exasperating the waiting gentleman.

  “Has 276 River Walk a motorboat, do you know?”

  There was a consultation at the other end.

  Yes, 276 had a boat. Yes, very fast. Seagoing? Oh, yes, if necessary. Used it for fowling along the Essex flats, they thought. Used for navigation of the lower river, anyhow? Oh, yes.

  Grant asked if they would have a boat ready for him in about an hour and a half, by which time he’d be in town, he hoped. He’d take it as a great favor.

  Certainly, they would.

  Grant telephoned to Barker—at which point the patent leather gentleman gave it up—and asked that if Williams was back in town within the next ninety minutes he should meet Grant at Westminster Pier. If Williams was not back in time, then Sanger.

  Grant took full advantage of the lunchtime lull in traffic, and in unrestricted areas excelled himself in the gentle art of speed with safety. He found Williams waiting for him, a little breathless, since he had that moment arrived from the Yard and sent the disappointed Sanger back. Williams had no intention of being out of anything, if he could help it. And the Superintendent had said that something exciting was due to break.

  “Well, was the Reverend Father shocked?” Grant asked.

  “Not as shocked as Brother Aloysius. He didn’t for a moment imagine we’d got anything on him. By the way he behaved, I should think some other police forces must be anxious to catch up with him.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Where are we going, sir?”

  “Chelsea Reach. Beloved of painters and folk dancers.”

  Williams looked benignly at his superior and noticed how much better he was looking now that the Tisdall boy had turned up.

  The police boat drew in to the bank at 276 River Walk where a large grayish motorboat was moored. The police boat edged gingerly nearer until only a foot separated the gunwales.

  Grant stepped across. “Come with me, Williams. I want witnesses.”

  The cabin was locked. Grant glanced up at the house opposite and shook his head. “I’ll have to risk it. I’m sure I’m right, anyhow.”

  While the river police stood by, he forced the lock and went in. It was a tidy, seamanlike cabin; everything was neat and shipshape. Grant began to go through the lockers. In the one under the starboard bunk he found what he was looking for. An oilskin coat. Black. Bought in Cannes. With the button missing from the right cuff.

  “You take that, Williams, and come up to the house with me.”

  The maid said that Miss Keats was in, and left them in a dining room on the ground floor; a very austere and up-to-the-minute apartment.

  “Looks more like a place to have your appendix out than to put roast beef into you,” Williams observed.

  But Grant said nothing.

  Lydia came in, smiling, her bracelets jangling and her beads clashing.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t take you upstairs, my dear Leo person, but I have some clients who mightn’t understand that this is just a friendly visit.”

  “So you knew who I was, at Marta’s?”

  “Of course. You don’t flatter my powers of divination, my dear Mr. Grant. Won’t you present your friend?”

  “This is Sergeant Williams.”

  She looked faintly disconcerted, Grant thought, but managed to be gracious to the sergeant. Then she saw what was under Williams’s arm.

  “What are you doing with my coat?” she asked sharply.

  “Then it is your coat? The one in the locker of the boat?”

  “Of course it is my coat! How dare you force my cabin! It is always kept locked.”

  “The lock will be repaired, Miss Keats. Meanwhile I regret to tell you that I must arrest you for the murder of Christine Clay at the Gap at Westover on Thursday morning, the 15th, and warn you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you.”

  Her face changed from her habitual expression of satisfaction to the convulsed fury he had seen when Judy Sellers had made light of her powers. “You can’t arrest me,” she said. “It is not in my stars. Who should know if not I? The stars have no secrets from me. The stars have predicted a glorious destiny for me. It is you, poor mistaken fool, who will go on stumbling and making mistakes. My sign is achievement. Whatever I will I can do. It is set there in the sky that it shall be so. Destiny. ’Some are born great’—that is true and the rest is lies. One is born great or is not great at all. I was born to achieve. To be a leader. To be looked up to by mankind—”

  “Miss Keats, I should be grateful if you would prepare to come with us at once. Any clothes you want can be sent after you.”

  “Clothes? What for?”

  “For use in prison.”

  “I don’t understand. You can’t put me in prison. It isn’t in my stars. They said that what I wanted I could do.”

  “Everyone can do what they want if they want it enough. But no one with impunity. Will you send for your maid and explain to her? She will fetch your hat if you want it.”

  “I don’t want it. I am not going with you. I am going to a party this afternoon at Marta’s. She’s got Christine’s part, you know. In the new film. That’s one good turn I did. It was all written a long time ago what we should do. It falls into place, like the cog things in a musical box, you know. Or perhaps you don’t know. Are you musical? And from Marta’s I’m going to Owen Hughes. After that we shall see. If you come back in the evening we can talk about it. Do you know Owen? A charming person. He had
his appointed place, too. If it hadn’t been for Owen it would never have come into my head. No, I don’t mean that. Great enterprises belong to great minds. They would happen in any case. But the releasing agent is often very small. Like electric light and the switch. I used that simile in a lecture in Scotland the other week. It went very well. Neat, don’t you think? Will you have some sherry? I’m afraid I’m very remiss. It’s the consciousness of these people upstairs waiting to be told.”

  “Told what?”

  “About me, of course. No, about themselves. That is what they came for. I’m a little muddled. They want to know what destiny has in store for them. And only I can tell them. Only I, Lydia Keats—”

  “May I use your telephone, Miss Keats?”

  “Certainly. It is in the cupboard place in the hall. One of the new colored kind. The telephone, not the cupboard. What was I saying?”

  Grant said to Williams, “Ask them to send Reynolds around at once.”

  “Is that the painter? I shall be glad to meet him. He was born to greatness. It is not a matter of application, or mixing pigments, you know. It is having the matter in you. And that the stars arrange. You must let me do a horoscope for you. You are a Leo person. Very attractive people. Kingly born. I have been sorry sometimes that I was not August born. But Aries people are leaders. Talkative, too, I’m afraid.” She giggled. “I do talk a lot they tell me. Chatterbox, they called me as a child—”

  Chapter 26

  Half an hour later Reynolds, the police surgeon, gave the screaming, raving thing that had been Lydia Keats a morphine injection so that they might remove her to the station in some sort of decency.

  Grant and Williams, standing in the door, watching the disappearing ambulance, found no words.

  “Well,” Grant said at length, pulling himself together, “I suppose I’d better get along and see Champneis.”

  “The people that made the laws of this country ought to be shot,” Williams said with sudden venom.

  Grant looked startled. “Capital punishment, you mean?”

  “No! Closed hours.”

  “Oh, I see. There’s a flask in my cupboard. You can help yourself.”

  “Thank you, sir. Don’t take on, miss!” This to the sobbing maid in the background. “Things like that will happen.”

  “She was a very kind mistress to me,” she said. “It hurts me to see her like that.”

  “Take care of that coat, Williams,” Grant said as they went down the path to the car that had been sent for them, glad beyond speech to leave the house behind.

  “Tell me, sir, how did you find out it was that woman of all people?”

  Grant produced the pages he had torn from the magazine.

  “I found that in a magazine in the barbershop at the Marine. You can read it for yourself.”

  It was an article written by some Midwest sob sister, who had been in New York for a vacation. New York was full of film stars who had either run out on their studies or were on their way back to them, and in New York also was Miss Lydia Keats. And the thing that most impressed the sob sister was not shaking hands with Grace Marvel, but the success of Miss Keats’s prophecies. She had made three startling ones. She had prophesied that within three months Lyn Drake would have a serious accident; and everyone knew that Lyn Drake was still on his back. She had said that Millard Robinson would within a month lose a fortune by fire; and everyone knew how the reels of the new million-dollar film had been burned to a cinder. And her third statement prophesied the death by drowning of a woman star of the first magnitude, whose name, of course, she gave, but the sob sister equally of course could not reveal. “If this third prophecy, so circumstantial, so unequivocal, comes true, then Miss Keats is established as the possessor of one of the most uncanny talents in the world. All humanity will be besieging her. But don’t go swimming with Miss Keats, little blonde star! The temptation might be too much for her!”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Williams, and was silent until Grant dropped him at the Yard.

  “Tell the Superintendent I’ll be in as soon as I’ve seen Lord Edward,” Grant said, and was driven on to Regent’s Park.

  In an atmosphere of marble mantelpieces and sheepskin rugs he waited half an hour before Champneis arrived.

  “How are you, Inspector? I hear from Binns that you’ve been waiting. Sorry to subject you to the furnishings longer than is vitally necessary. I hope you drink tea? But if you don’t there are what my uncle called ’cordials.’ A much nicer word than ’drinks,’ don’t you think? Have you news?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry to break in with it when you’re just after a journey.”

  “It can’t be worse than the drawing-room lecture of my great-aunt’s yesterday. I only went for the old lady’s sake, but I found that she thought I should have canceled it. It would have been more ’fitting.’ So tell me the bad news.”

  Grant told him what had happened, and he listened gravely, the unusual defensive flippancy gone.

  “Is she insane?” he asked, when Grant had finished.

  “Yes. Reynolds thinks so. It may be hysteria, but he thinks it’s insanity. Delusions of greatness, you know.”

  “Poor wretch. But how did she know where my wife was?”

  “Owen Hughes told her in a letter from Hollywood. He forgot that it was a secret that she had taken his cottage. He even mentioned the early-morning swimming.”

  “So simple. I see. . . . Was she very expert with a motorboat, then?”

  “She had been practically brought up on one, it seems. Used the river constantly. No one would have thought of questioning her comings and goings. She may have made that night journey down the river more than once before the opportunity she was looking for turned up. Curious, but one never thinks of the river as a high road to anywhere. We had considered the possibility of a motorboat, naturally, but not a motorboat from London. Not that it would have helped us very much if it had. The man’s coat she wore was very misleading. Lots of women wear men’s oilskins yachting; but I don’t think it would have occurred to me.”

  There was a short silence.

  Each man watched in his mind that boat’s journey down the misty river, out to the many-lighted estuary, and along the many-lighted coast. One little town after another, from flaring dockyard lights among the flats to twinkling villa lights among the cliffs, must have lit that progress. But later, there must have been darkness; complete darkness and silence, as the summer fog pressed down on the water. What had her thoughts been, in that time of waiting? Alone, with time to reflect. And with no stars to remind her of her greatness. Or was her madness even then so sure that she had no doubts?

  And afterwards—each man watched that, too. The surprise. The friendly greeting. Chris’s green cap bobbing alongside the gray hull—the cap that had never been found. The woman leaning over to talk to her. And then—

  Grant remembered those broken nails on Christine’s hands. It had not been so easy, then.

  “That finishes the case, sir, but it was really something else that brought me to see you. Another case altogether.”

  “Yes? Here’s tea. You needn’t wait, Binns. Sugar, Inspector?”

  “I want to know where you took Rimnik.”

  Champneis paused with the sugar poised. He looked both surprised and amused and—somehow—admiring.

  “He is with friends of Harmer’s, near Tunbridge Wells.”

  “May I have the exact address?”

  Champneis gave it, and also gave Grant his tea. “Why do you want Rimnik?”

  “Because he is in this country without a passport—thanks to you!”

  “He was. The office issued him a landing permit this morning. It took a lot of eloquence—Britain the lover of justice, the defender of the persecuted, the home of the righteous homeless: all that stuff—but it worked. Chests still swell in Whitehall, do you know? They were like a collection of pouter pigeons when I finished.”

  He looked at the Inspector’s disapprov
ing face. “I didn’t know that that little business had been a worry to you.”

  “Worry!” Grant burst out. “It nearly ruined everything. You and Harmer both lying about what you had done that night—” He found that he was treading on delicate ground and pulled himself up.

  But Champneis had understood. “I really am sorry, Inspector. Are you going to arrest me? Can one be arrested retrospectively, so to speak?”

  “I don’t think so. I shall have to inquire about it. It would give me great pleasure.” Grant had recovered his temper.

  “All right. Let’s postpone the arrest. But tell me how you found out? I thought we’d been so clever.”

  “I might never have found out if it hadn’t been for a good bit of work by a young officer—Rimell—at Dover.”

  “I must meet Rimell.”

  “He found that you and Harmer had met that night and had been worried about the Customs.”

  “Yes. Rimnik was in a cupboard in my cabin. It was an exciting half hour. But the Customs and Harbor Masters are only human.”

  This Grant took to mean that they knocked off the Champneis pegs and lacked the nerve to knock on the bulkheads. “It was then I began to feel that if I could remember something you had said just before—you misled me about the time of your arrival in Dover, I would have the key to everything. And I remembered it! You said that Galeria’s only hope was Rimnik, and that Rimnik would turn up again when his party was ready. But the big stumbling block was in seeing the connection between you and Harmer. It was so simple and so obvious I couldn’t find it. You liked and admired one another immediately when your wife introduced you. I must say he did a beautiful job of throwing dust in my eyes, putting on that resentful—underprivileged classes act. I should have thought more about my recognition of your—”

  “My what?”

  “Unorthodoxy.” Both men smiled. “Once I groped my way through that difficulty, the rest was easy. The Special Branch knew all about Rimnik’s disappearance, his being refused a passport, and Britain’s refusal to have him here. They even knew that he was supposed to be in England, but had no confirmation of it. So the motorboat came ashore a second time?”