A Coat of Varnish

by C. P. Snow

  Humphrey said no.

  Luria was eating vigorously, happy and benign. He said: ‘Christianity looks different, my boy, when you see it from that angle.’

  Suddenly Luria switched away from the semitic experience, and said: ‘Things are going well with Kate? I needn’t ask. I could see the other night.’

  ‘Wonderfully well.’

  Just for that moment, Humphrey had dropped his irony. In return, Luria dropped his pundithood. Acquaintances would have been astonished to find them talking, and even looking, like young men.

  ‘I remember I tried, with the very best intentions, to warn you off. I’d never thought she’d be able to cut away from that phoney.’ Alec Luria broke into the extraordinary mirth reserved for the times when he had made a mistake. ‘I was a hundred per cent wrong.’

  ‘Not a hundred per cent.’ Humphrey gave a simple confessional smile. ‘She still looks after him, you know. Otherwise I shouldn’t be here with you tonight.’

  ‘Never mind. Count your blessings. You’re very lucky.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know it?’

  Casually Luria said: ‘I didn’t get anywhere with Celia, as you probably guessed. I thought I might have been right for her. I fancy she thought so too, for a little while. Then she sheered off. Probably it’s just as well for both of us. She seems to have found what she really wants. I’ve nothing to complain about myself.’

  For an instant it seemed that he was ready to confide, then smiled – shamefaced? guilty? triumphant? – and went back to talking of Celia. ‘Yes, she’s found a schoolteacher. They’re going to live a commonplace life, she told me. Not even trying to do good in community relations or anything like that. No, they’re going to live in Woking. That’s petit bourgeois as they come, isn’t it?’

  Humphrey grinned. ‘Well, it wouldn’t do for you.’

  ‘It’s very odd. She has everything. She’s beautiful. Clever, sweet. Strong character. Born and bred in the Establishment, if that means anything. But all she wants is not to draw attention to herself. Just to look after her little boy and perhaps have another one. And do her best for the people round her. It’s all very kind and humble – but when characters like that just give up any kind of struggle, then I have an awful feeling that it’s a bad lookout for the world she comes from. It does seem like a sign that they will lose out, too.’

  ‘I’m very fond of Celia, though,’ Humphrey said. ‘If that’s what she wants for herself, she’d better have it.’

  ‘She’s a good girl,’ said Luria gravely, like an old-fashioned hostess receiving congratulations on her daughter’s looks. ‘She did say something that might interest you.’ Luria switched off again, his conversation losing its structure, either because he was jubilant or because he had drunk more than usual, or maybe both. Soon he was saying: ‘The police have decided that that doctor got rid of the old lady, haven’t they? That seems to be common knowledge. They can’t tie it up, but they know. You’re close to that bright detective. Do you agree?’

  ‘Entirely.’

  ‘Celia doesn’t.’

  ‘She can’t possibly know the score.’

  ‘Nor does Paul. I had a drink with him in Washington. He and Celia have a theory of their own. They think it was a couple–’

  ‘What couple?’

  ‘Susan and her father. She did it, and he went along and did the clearing-up.’

  ‘Paul was certain that Susan didn’t even know the old lady had been killed–’

  ‘Then he must have thought again.’

  For an instant, Humphrey was seeing the kaleidoscope of suspicion. There would have been time, just, for Tom Thirkill to do the clearing-up – a curious term for ransacking the room, faking a burglary. He might have used the hammer. He would have done most things to shelter his daughter. Then Humphrey’s mind cleared.

  ‘There’s nothing in that,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised at Paul. But intelligent people can believe anything.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ Luria gave a mischievous, lurching grin incongruous among those marmoreal features. ‘I even told Celia so. Probably the last masculine words I shall impress upon that lovely young woman.’

  They relaxed into their long and restful evening. That report about Celia had brought back the gnaw of frustration. Humphrey hadn’t been a principal in the case, but in anticipation he felt aggrieved. Afterwards, by himself, he felt that niggle of disquiet growing. Those thoughts of Celia’s wouldn’t quite leave him. The murder would join those which outsiders thought mysterious and on which they speculated with pleasure. They would believe that they were cleverer than the persons actually involved. It would be a nice topic for the ingenious to play with. All he had witnessed would become a piece of unfinished business.

  44

  Humphrey had no intention of passing those Christmas Day vexations on to Frank Briers. Briers would expect them. He would know, as well as any man, that plenty of persons, acquaintances and strangers, would bask in thoughts of agreeable superiority. They would be certain that they could see the truth which he had missed. There was no point in adding to displeasing realisations. Humphrey still had no contact with Briers. The days passed, and it was getting on for six weeks since they had met.

  In the middle of January, Briers called on the telephone. His voice was firm as usual, more resonant than it sounded face to face, not over-cordial.

  ‘I want to raise a small matter with you. It won’t take long.’

  ‘Any time you like.’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. I’ll come round. It’s nothing to do with the Ashbrook thing, of course.’

  Briers arrived early, just after half-past nine. Though he looked smart, hair freshly cut, face freshly shaved, he didn’t look bright. There was, from the first moment, another constraint between them. Humphrey didn’t need any searching to recognise it for what it was. He had seen it often enough in the official life. It was the constraint of allies in defeat. Defeat could bite into alliances, or into friendships, as deeply as enmity could. He would have liked to cheer Briers up: he was as constrained himself.

  ‘Do you mind walking up to the house?’ Briers said, in his briskest tone.

  Humphrey was blank, then caught the reference. The house was Lady Ashbrook’s house.

  ‘You’ll need your overcoat,’ said Briers, as though hygienic comfort was the only concern. ‘It’s a bit raw outside.’

  They walked up the Square. On the wind, there was a faint sharp winter smell from the gardens. Neither of them had spoken till Humphrey asked: ‘How is Betty now?’

  ‘Like last time. It’s gaining on her.’

  Humphrey cursed and said: ‘How long do these phases go on?’

  ‘No one knows. She can’t move as well as when you saw her.’ Briers added: ‘She’s very good.’

  ‘More than that.’

  Briers said: ‘She sends you her love. She knew I was going to see you today.’

  Humphrey had a sense that it was she who had made Frank do it.

  Humphrey returned the greeting, sending his love back. Then they were quiet until they were outside the house.

  ‘You don’t mind coming in?’ Frank said. ‘We can talk here as well as anywhere.’

  Humphrey saw a young man in a mackintosh standing on the pavement. Briers, watchful, detected the glance.

  ‘Yes, he’s one of my lads,’ he said. ‘I’m taking him off that job. This week. The executors want to sell the place. We’ve no call to hang on. There’s nothing to be got out of it.’

  Briers brought out a key ring, and turned two locks. These had been installed the day after the murder. Humphrey remembered when Briers told him that Perryman had had his own key. That must have been a convenience, Briers had said.

  ‘You’d better keep your coat on,’ Briers said, as they went into the hall, showing the preoccupation with Humphrey’s physical state which seemed like a substitute for good nature. ‘It’ll strike cold in here.’

  It did strike cold, a
nd damp. It also smelt musty. Flakes of paint were coming off the walls, and there were patches at the end of the hall which looked as though they would be moist to the touch. They went upstairs, and Briers with another key opened the door of Lady Ashbrook’s drawing-room.

  The last time Humphrey had been in the room, which he had once known so well, was the morning when he was taken to see the body. Briers had kept each piece of furniture as it was that day. The only difference, that the body was no longer propped up against her habitual chair, and the carpet beneath had been taken away. The pieces of debris, pottery, bric-à-brac, lay scattered. All had been photographed and rephotographed, but still the scene had been preserved intact. The peardrops of blood on the wall had gone black by now, and to one who didn’t know the history might have been taken for an eccentric piece of mural decoration.

  Standing in the room, Humphrey didn’t feel himself moved. That didn’t come to order. This was bleak, untidy, a bit of desolation, no more. But there was one attack from the senses. In the past, there had always been the scent of potpourri bowls, which had been a pleasure to Lady Ashbrook. Now that had gone without trace. Instead there was a smell which irked the nose and the back of the throat. It was the smell of dust. The room was filled with dust.

  Briers drew attention to it. He went over to the windows which overlooked the Square, and on one pane he drew lines with a fingertip. ‘It collects before you can look round.’

  Then, in a tone brisk and at the same time awkward, he said: ‘I have a proposition to make. We may as well sit down.’ He added: ‘It doesn’t matter about disturbing things. I’ve finished with this room.’

  He brought two high-backed chairs close to the far window, dusted each seat carefully with his handkerchief. When Humphrey was settled, Briers said: ‘I have been told to get ready for a move. Round about the summer.’

  At the first impact, that sounded as though he had had bad news. Humphrey was disconcerted, angry, and showed it. Frank, quick as ever, smiled as he hadn’t done that morning.

  ‘No, it’s a move up. They want me to take over the anti-terrorism game.’

  So it was a promotion. Perhaps the Yard bosses were looking after him, Humphrey thought, not allowing a highly charged man to stay discouraged. Or perhaps it had been planned before the cul-de-sac with Perryman, and they were just using a flyer where he was needed. It meant a step up the hierarchy. That had its disadvantages, Briers said: he would be behind a desk most of his time, he wouldn’t be so near to the real operations. But, still, he had been prepared for that – it was going to be a rough assignment. Any disaster would be right in the public eye. ‘I’d guess,’ Briers said, ‘that there will be a hell of a lot more terrorism in the next few years.’

  ‘My guess, too.’

  ‘It’s altogether too easy. The odds are all in their favour. We have the wrong end of the stick.’

  They were both thinking of modern weapons.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Briers spoke with awkwardness again, with something like assertion, ‘whether you’d come in and lend a hand. You’d have your uses.’

  ‘Too old.’

  ‘You’re too young. Too young to fritter your time away. I know we didn’t make much of a fist of it this time. But you’d have your uses in the new job. You’ve been around. You’re not altogether a fool about people. I’d feel better if you were somewhere on call.’

  Humphrey knew what the other man was doing. Humphrey had been prepared to try to hearten him. It was Briers who was doing the heartening. This was an act of friendship. But it wasn’t spontaneous; it was the friendship of the will. Briers still felt the resentment of an alliance gone wrong: you blamed your collaborator for your mistakes as well as his, or even for bad luck. You wanted him out of your sight. It took a strong nature to act as though those feelings didn’t exist. Just as, Humphrey had a flickering reminder of young Shingler, it took a strong nature to forgive a benefactor. Humphrey was touched: not so much by a return of affection, for he, too, had his pride, though not so prickly as Frank’s, but by respect. They mightn’t be easy together for some time to come – but not many, beset as Frank was, would have forced themselves to act like this.

  Humphrey said: ‘It’s very thoughtful of you. I’m extremely gratified.’ Humphrey had his own kind of spontaneity and he let it show. With a lurking grin, he went on: ‘It must be about twenty years since I was offered a job.’

  ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘I think I’d like to.’ Humphrey went on. ‘But could you possibly work it with your people?’

  ‘Simple. There are a couple of non-policemen already. Called consultants. Fair game for the terror squads like the rest of us. We try to keep their identities secret, but that won’t last long. You’re all reasonably likely to have bombs going off when you don’t expect them.’

  It was some time since Humphrey had heard one of Briers’ gallows jokes. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Briers said, ‘I’ve mentioned your name already. Great enthusiasm. Of course, your previous experience wasn’t exactly a hindrance.’

  ‘You took it for granted that I’d say yes?’ Humphrey had dropped back into the former matey terms.

  ‘I took it for granted that Kate would make you. She’d be more useful on this team than any of us.’

  There was a pause, and they gazed out across the derelict room, preserved as though it were a relic in a museum. Briers said: ‘Well, that was what we came for.’

  But he didn’t move. There was another pause, one which became edged. He said: ‘I used to think it would be fun to have my own command. And have it young. But I don’t mind telling you, if I’d have had the chance of getting that man Perryman clean and cold, but no new command, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a single blasted instant. My God, I can’t get it out of my mind. The first thing a detective has to learn is to cut his losses. This shows I’m not fit to be a detective.’

  ‘No, it shows why you’re first-rate. Of course you have your obsessions. It’s only the obsessive who do the first-rate things.’ Humphrey was speaking as when they first met, when Frank was taking advice from a man twenty years older. ‘You’ll have to forget all this.’ He made a gesture towards where Lady Ashbrook used to sit.

  ‘That’s easier said than done.’ Briers had now broken out with passion, sounding as though he had gravel in his mouth. ‘I tell you, it’s maddening. I know it all. I know it all except how to nail the man. I know how he did it. I know why he did it. Or part of that – no one is ever going to be sure. But it’s all no use. I’ve come into this room time and time again. I’ve been hoping something would hit me which we’ve missed. Now I don’t believe there is anything. Owen Morgan keeps telling me that just for once we ran across a man who didn’t make mistakes. We’ll never get him unless we have a streak of luck right out of the blue. They may make him pay for that finagling over the money. But that’s bloody poor comfort. The only thing we’ve had to wait for is a stroke of luck. And the luck has all gone to the wrong people.’

  His voice, still gritty, went quieter. ‘He had all the luck in the world. He thinks he worked out everything. But there were three points, at least three, where the odds ought to have been against him. They all went his way.’

  Another pause. Briers said: ‘Tell me. I ought to have got him. What did I do wrong?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it, naturally I have. With hindsight. But I still haven’t got anywhere. You hadn’t enough to play with. Your team couldn’t find much for you. It looks as though there wasn’t much to find.’

  ‘Ought I to have waited longer before I showed our hand?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have picked up any more, would you?’

  ‘Did I handle those question sessions wrong?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘Would you have been cleverer than I was?’ Briers didn’t say that as a challenge, but asking for the truth.

  ‘Not cleverer. I might have done it a bit differently.’

  ‘Tell me what y
ou’d have done.’

  Humphrey said, firmly, protectively: ‘Look, Frank, it’s no good jobbing back. It’s over and done with and you’ll have to forget it.’

  It was in a curiously boyish fashion that Briers nodded, stiff-necked, like a teutonic student.

  ‘Of course I have to. Of course. The trouble is, I can’t help thinking that something else will turn up. I can’t help thinking that it might come by a telephone call or any means of communication open to man. It might be in the morning post. It interferes with anything I have to do during the day. It’s nonsense, but there are times when it’s poisoning my life. I’m putting a stop to it. I’m putting it out of mind. The file is still open, but that’s all that’s left.’

  They were sitting in their stiff-backed chairs, heads high, as though they were guests on the fringe of one of Lady Ashbrook’s tea parties.

  ‘You’ll get going on another case, of course.’

  ‘I’m on one now. That’s all right. But it is maddening, you understand. I know all about Perryman. I know he’s guilty. I know he’s as cold-hearted a brute as it’s given to a man to be. But I can’t do anything. Do you wonder that policemen have been known to invent convenient pieces of evidence? To fix a man like that, who if there’s any justice under heaven deserves to be fixed.’

  ‘Have you ever done that?’ Humphrey asked the simple question in a matter-of-fact tone.

  In the same tone Briers replied: ‘Yes. Once.’ He went on; ‘It was a squalid case. A woman had killed her stepson. She’d covered up. We couldn’t provide it. Yes, I invented a bit of evidence. She was put down all right.’

  ‘Would you do it now?’

  Briers considered. He said: ‘No. I don’t think so. I’m not so certain of where I stand as I was a dozen years ago. Now I don’t feel I’m so qualified to put everything in order. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel an atom of guilt for what I did then and I shouldn’t if I’d done the same about Perryman.’