A Coat of Varnish

by C. P. Snow

  ‘Found him a bed. Good way of putting it.’ Chortles of laughter, as shameless as Loseby’s own. Then, about midday on Monday, Loseby had called her at home, told her that Lady Ashbrook had been killed, said that he was obviously in a fix, and that afternoon they invented their story.

  What Susan had at last admitted seemed to Kate to be plausible. Some things had been left out, no doubt. And some tastefully decorated. It wasn’t clear how she had proposed to use her will on Loseby. What resources did she have? Yet he had married her. It would be foolish to think that Loseby was above mundane considerations, such as Tom Thirkill’s money. But it could also be, Kate thought, that he had discovered Susan was not only a randy little liar, but also had a strong and ruthless character, maybe that, lacking it himself, he was searching for. It could have been a sign that he had turned to her at once when he was in a crisis. Unlike Briers, and intermittently Humphrey, Kate paid no attention to the idea that Loseby and Susan had been acting in complicity.

  Susan had almost persuaded the police with her bedroom story, Kate was thinking. Maybe that had been the most realistic of her romances, or had she overdone it? The police heard enough bedroom stories, though one from this good-looking girl might have given them a certain amount of pleasure.

  By now Kate was indulging her curiosity.

  ‘Why ever did you spread yourself like that?’

  ‘Oh, it didn’t do any harm, did it?’ The concept of not melting butter was difficult for Kate to drive away.

  ‘Did it ever happen like that? Not that night, I know.’

  ‘Perhaps it did.’

  ‘When?’ Kate’s antennae were suddenly all alert.

  ‘The Sunday night. The day after.’

  ‘But you didn’t see Loseby that Sunday night. Not till the Monday, so you said.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t Loseby I was with that Sunday night.’

  Kate exploded into a laugh, a little astonished, even shocked, much more amused. ‘You little bitch. What you want–’ Curiosity was too pressing. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ Susan asked gently.

  ‘It might have been any male within miles.’ Kate wasn’t so gentle.

  ‘No, it was Paul. Paul Mason.’ Susan justified herself. ‘I always rather liked him; you may have noticed that.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that with quite a lot of men.’ Kate’s language was tarter than her grin.

  Meekly, Susan replied: ‘That’s not very kind, is it? You see, I was rather upset about Loseby. He is one hell of a rat, you know. So I wanted some comfort somewhere. So I thought I could push Paul into it. He doesn’t sleep around much actually. But he was on his own. That girl Celia had let him go. What an idiot she must be. Paul doesn’t much like me,’ she added, with factual composure. ‘Except for a spot of you know what. Still, it worked that night.’

  She went on with secret satisfaction: ‘He wasn’t pleased at being used as a consolation prize. He’s too proud altogether. And he’s furious if anyone gets inside his plans. He’s cagier than any man I’ve ever had.’ Then she let show an impudent defiant pout. ‘Still, I may have another go at him sometime. He’s very satisfactory when it comes to action. He can go wild. Rather exciting. He’s very satisfying when he gets to the point.’

  Kate was pleased with herself when surreptitiously they tiptoed back into the box. Susan’s actions might not be significant (she didn’t know what Humphrey would think when she told him), but it couldn’t do harm to clear them up. Kate thought she had done well. So did Humphrey when, before leaving for her hospital, she broke in on him at breakfast the following morning. ‘That’s good work, my girl. I don’t like unfinished business.’ He chuckled. He could still regress to the official life he had once lived. He gave her a hearty, and more than hearty, kiss.

  ‘No time,’ she said. She had done a little for him. Now she wanted him to do a little for them both. She would like to give a dinner for him in that house. She was feeling her way towards a pattern for the future. It would be pleasant to have people in, and explain nothing.

  ‘Very pleasant.’ Humphrey was touched, she had been making plans for his sake; as usual he was infected by her spirits. ‘Any night you like. Mrs Burbridge loves you anyhow.’

  ‘Who shall we have?’

  ‘Alec Luria’s flying in next week. What about Celia? It’s a pity she’s dropped out of things.’

  Humphrey thought it would be diverting to see Luria in search of another wife.

  ‘And really,’ Kate went on, happy with her project, ‘what put it into my head, I ran into Ralph Perryman in the street the other day. We ought to have those two. We owe them a meal, remember?’

  ‘Oh.’ To her astonishment, she had seen Humphrey’s face go, not so much cloudy, as washed blank of any expression.

  She jumped to a conclusion. Lively, scolding, affectionate, she said: ‘Come on, my love, you’re not still worried because I enjoy talking to him now and then, are you? You don’t think I give a rap for anyone else? I don’t know what else I can do to prove it.’

  She forced him into the habit of a smile.

  ‘Well, then,’ she challenged him.

  He was at a loss. He said: ‘You’d better have them if you want. I’ll try to cope.’ He said it without inflection, and without his normal tenderness. She was upset. They hadn’t had a quarrel before. Even when they disagreed he was more articulate than she was and more considerate. Once or twice she had seen him in a dark mood, but she had been able to read it, as then she had liked letting him have his way. But now she was so much upset that this time she was going to insist on her own.

  32

  Humphrey and Frank Briers were sitting by themselves in the Murder Room. Humphrey repeated not only the substance of the Opera House conversation, but also as much of Kate’s detail as he could recall. Briers listened with his acute attention.

  ‘This may be more likely,’ he said. He added, once more back in active policeman’s form: ‘Your Kate is a hell of a sight better interrogator than you are, my lad. You’re too much of a gentleman, that’s the trouble with you.’

  For once Humphrey defended himself. He had done more interrogations than Briers. Some of them secret for the next thirty years. Briers gave his matiest smile.

  ‘Oh, I dare say you were OK with the delicate stuff. But you didn’t get far with the young man Mason, now did you? Kate would have gone right through him. I bet she’s got the truth about that Sunday night. Whether she’s got the truth about anything else–’

  He paused. ‘If she has,’ he said, ‘we’re getting close. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I suppose I know what you mean.’

  ‘No alternative,’ said Briers. Humphrey did not respond.

  ‘Of course,’ Briers said, ‘that wretched girl may be tying us up again. Anyway, it will be worthwhile having her in. Nothing like holding a few surprises up your sleeve.’

  Susan was called (invited, they said) to the police station. Not just for one spell of questioning, but two. Briers took on the work himself, Leonard Bale sitting in with him. It might help, they had decided, to impress her with seniority. Kate would have told them that Susan regarded men as much the same, regardless of age or any other discriminant.

  At the first session, the questioning went on for many hours. This was mainly because Susan talked so fluently. Briers hadn’t questioned anyone to whom the words came with less hesitation, or, so it seemed, with less thought. She was nice and helpful, Briers said tersely to Humphrey afterwards. She didn’t complain at being kept, she didn’t want a lawyer.

  She didn’t want a lawyer, Frank said, because she could always invent a new story. She admitted cheerfully that earlier stories must have applied to different dates. No, she hadn’t spent that night with Lord Loseby, her present husband. She might very well have been wandering round the mews, however. As a matter of fact, she rather thought she had been. Reason: there was an apartment there occupied by an ex-bo
yfriend, who often lent it to her for weekends. She had even spent an occasional weekend there with Loseby. Of course, it wasn’t convenient to take a man back home to Eaton Square. There were too many journalists around. So the friend’s apartment had sometimes been a great help. Oh yes, she had borrowed it since, that is, before she got married. Why was she waiting about outside? There was a chance that the ex-boyfriend would be returning there himself. She hadn’t seen him for quite a while. She had suddenly had a fancy to meet him again. Asked whether she often took up again with former boyfriends, she had said, with innocent surprise, of course she did. She was nearly always friendly with them. She liked love to be a friendly business. When it was over, it was cosy to have a nice time together again.

  Before the second questioning, detectives had been making enquiries. It turned out that her story of the mews flat was entirely true. In the midst of her lying, that wasn’t the first time she had deviated into the truth. Briers had said before, it didn’t make things easier. The occupant of the flat had been traced, a rich casual young man, who sometimes played in a band. Yes, he had often lent the place to Susan. Yes, she had been a girlfriend two or three years before. Yes, he sometimes saw her, and they had a good time. No, he hadn’t been in London that weekend, but now and then Susan came round on the offchance.

  They let a week go by before the second session. Then Briers without any preliminary took the offensive straight away.

  ‘We don’t believe that you were looking for Angus that night. We know that you were expecting to meet Lord Loseby.’

  ‘I couldn’t have been, you know. We’d had a little misunderstanding, if you want to know the honest truth.’

  She used the prim word demurely. Kate, who was familiar with Susan’s real language, would have jeered.

  ‘We know that you were looking out for him. You’d rung up his regiment and you thought he might be in his grandmother’s house. Now, then. You’ve told us enough stories.’

  She gazed at him with innocent eyes.

  ‘Oh, I suppose I had a vague idea I might run into him, just a vague idea that I might. It would have been nice to make it up. You know how it is.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do. We also know where you were the following night.’

  ‘Do you?’ She dropped her eyes modestly. ‘Oh, I wanted a friend to talk to; you can understand that. I was very unhappy about Loseby. I was afraid he’d stopped loving me. I wanted to talk it out with someone kind.’

  ‘Talk it out?’

  ‘Talk it out,’ she repeated firmly.

  Briers considered pressing the point, and then left it. He knew. She knew he knew. That was all that mattered. Both he and Bale put sharp questions. Hadn’t she been in Lady Ashbrook’s house that night? All that time in the mews – she had been in the house, hadn’t she? She could have gone enquiring for Loseby, couldn’t she?

  Those questions she had been asked before, time after time, in the early interrogations. The detectives hadn’t any answers, and had no more information now. They had produced enough concrete facts, where they really knew, to shake her. She behaved exactly as she had done in the other questionings. She didn’t invent a story this time. She said little. She just said that she hadn’t been inside the house. She was ready to go on saying it. She was quite unshaken. Briers was ready to accept – as in fact he had been after the report from Kate – that there was nothing to shake.

  In any questioning, those two men could have told her, so could Humphrey, it was wise not to talk more than one needed. That applied to the most collected and experienced talker extant. In those last replies, she had given a textbook example of how to do it right. Then she began to talk fluently again.

  Briers was almost ready to finish. He didn’t expect to get any more out of her. It hadn’t been unsatisfactory as far as it went. Just as a formal end, not specially interested, he asked where and how she and her husband were living. He was not specially interested, since the detectives had already obtained statements from Loseby in several interrogations. He had been secretly seconded to the Ministry of Defence. They had rented a comfortable house in Radnor Walk, not so far away from the police station. They couldn’t have supported themselves there on his pay, and he had admitted, businesslike and candid, that there was an allowance from Tom Thirkill.

  Briers said, without intention, half-affably: ‘You’re managing very nicely, aren’t you? It’s nice to have a rich father, isn’t it?’

  Susan looked all girlish devotion, and was prepared to emit expressions of gratitude.

  ‘Oh, Daddy always has been generous; he’s given me everything I wanted, ever since I can remember.’ She added, with reproachful seriousness: ‘I’m not sure that it was good for me sometimes.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ Bale was a paternal man.

  ‘He always said he would look after me when I got married. He was very anxious for me to get married; he worried about me, I think. He impressed on me that it didn’t matter if the man had money or not, so long as I was going to be happy. There was plenty of money on our side. Of course, Daddy didn’t want someone who’d marry me for that. He hoped that I would just choose someone decent.’

  ‘Very natural.’

  ‘He came round about Loseby, all right. He knew Loseby had been rather extravagant. But he decided that Loseby would bring in another kind of dowry, that’s what he said. I don’t know whether he expected Loseby to collect anything on the side.’

  She was talking on. ‘As a matter of fact, he does, now and then. It isn’t Daddy who buys me clothes as a rule. Loseby does that. When he gets a little instalment from the Comptroller.’

  Bale had heard the word. Sharply, for him severely, he broke in: ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what I was talking about. Just nonsense.’

  ‘You were talking about the Comptroller.’

  ‘We’re interested,’ Briers said, exuding force once more. ‘We’re very interested. We’ve discovered quite a lot about that operation. You must tell us. Who do you mean by the Comptroller?’

  She was quick to recover herself. Poised, smiling placidly, she said: ‘Oh, that’s just a family joke. It’s a name for money coming out of the blue. I think it began with old Lady Ashbrook. That was what Loseby called her, when she gave him a big tip.’

  ‘We don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, that’s not nice to hear, is it?’

  ‘What do you mean by the Comptroller?’

  ‘I haven’t a notion.’

  Briers was getting rough with temper.

  ‘Can you ever tell the truth?’

  ‘I’m telling the truth now.’

  ‘You’re saying,’ Bale put in more gently, ‘that money sometimes reaches your husband. You don’t know where from. That’s what you mean by the Comptroller, isn’t it? You’d like us to believe that.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Of course you know,’ Briers said, ‘or you can make a very good guess.’

  ‘I wonder about it, that’s all,’ she said, gazing at him with limpid eyes.

  ‘You mean to say your husband doesn’t know?’

  ‘He’s wondered, too. Of course, it must have come somehow from the old lady. That’s all he knows for sure.’

  ‘If you can believe that, you can believe anything. You’re not a fool. Your husband receives large sums of money.’

  ‘Not very large,’ Susan softly intervened.

  ‘He receives sums of money, and you haven’t any idea under heaven where they come from?’

  She looked injured. ‘I don’t think a wife ought to be too inquisitive about her husband’s finances. I don’t think that is a wife’s place.’

  That was too much for both men. It made Briers more angry, Bale colder. It protracted the questioning. Unmoved, with resources of stamina, she produced more arabesques of explanation. She didn’t shift from her central position. She didn’t know for certain who the Comptroller was, nor precisely where the money came
from, nor did Loseby. Yes, they had theories, they had discussed it often enough. It was a family puzzle, rather a pleasant one so far as they were concerned. At last Briers said that that would have to do for the present.

  When a woman detective led Susan out – Briers’ courtesy had failed him – the two men stared at each other. Briers broke into another packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘it’s worse than having half a dozen teeth out.’

  ‘She’s a bit of a handful,’ Bale said temperately.

  ‘She doesn’t think it’s a wife’s place to enquire into her husband’s finances. God love us. That girl just thinks a wife’s place is in another man’s bed.’

  Bale, who had known more women than his chief, was more indulgent. ‘It’ll be interesting to see how she turns out,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever in your born days come across such a liar? She doesn’t even do it for any purpose, so far as I can see. Just for the sheer bloody beauty of it.’

  Soon Briers was cooling down.

  ‘The curious thing is,’ he reflected, ‘if she hadn’t gilded the lily so often – if she’d stuck to the core of what she was saying without the trimmings – should you have believed any of it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Briers said.

  Bale reflected: ‘But if those two are just a bit uncertain about the Comptroller, then that lets them both out, doesn’t it? Unless our present thinking is right off line. Right?’

  ‘Right. That little tart was too clever by half. If they don’t know, can you credit that? She could have told us the unvarnished truth, and we’d have given them both a pat on the head. I can’t think of any two who deserve it less.’

  Then, with maximum briskness, he asked Bale to send a couple of men round to question Loseby once more. Immediately, before those two had had time to confer. If they were in real complicity, they wouldn’t have talked over the telephone. Very sensibly, said Briers, with a hard grimace.