Mornings in London

by Janice Law

  The party turned out to be gents only. The formidable Lady Larkin was shopping in London for her daughter, Victoria, who was sampling the delights of Il Duce’s Rome. Was that a spur-of-the-moment trip if her wardrobe needed topping up so soon? And if it was, had Victoria gone to breathe the air of the Modern State or for other, more sinister, reasons? I began to understand how suspicion and paranoia spread like ripples on a pond.

  In any case, we were four at table, attended by Jenkins, who was dressed, to my disappointment, in plain black instead of his ornamental knee breeches. We had soup and fish, followed by a roast, and lots of good port. Despite this lubricant, it was an awkward, wary party. We were all eager to get down to business, but no one wanted to broach the crucial topics. I think even that battle-ax Lady Larkin might have lightened the atmosphere.

  Such general conversation as there was mostly concerned the excellent food, while the major filled in the longer silences with updates on his various architectural projects and on the dig. At various times, I was called upon to express admiration for the finds and delight at my participation. I managed with such a straight face that Nan would have been proud of me.

  Mostly, though, I studied Grove and Tollman. On first acquaintance, they had struck me as being much of a muchness, although with probably fifteen or twenty years between them. Now I took a closer look and realized that Tollman was not as old as I had figured. Confidence had lent him maturity at our last meeting. Now, with strain and preoccupation making him look less impressive, I realized that his fetching silver hair was probably premature. He wore it so long that it flopped over his forehead, and he had a habit of running a hand through his locks and flipping them back from his brow. He was luxuriously attired, too; finance, inherited money, or government service had been good to him.

  Grove, Muriel and Ben’s enemy, was not as smart looking but more talkative. As the port bottles emptied, he gave us his wisdom on trade, immigrants, Mussolini, preparedness, and taxes before venturing into the airy realms of what must be done. Nothing he said was original, and I was beginning to doze with my eyes open when I caught an echo of Signor Rinaldi: “One supports Mussolini in order to awaken England. Il Duce’s Italy provides the model for the Modern State, militarized by a strong leader with the capacity to enforce change.”

  He sounded like a propaganda pamphlet and I looked at him: bluff, red faced, well fed, serious, and absolutely, smugly confident about everything, including, if we were correct, selling national secrets. No wonder the Mendelssohns, already acquainted with a so-called Modern State, feared and disliked him.

  Tollman, I have to say, did not look so certain about anything. He must have realized that he’d been compromised, and I guessed that saving his reputation had gone to the top of the list, ahead of leading England to greatness with a lot of black uniforms and gold braid. Had either he or Grove killed Freddie and then lied to protect his secrets? Maybe, but unless they turned on each other, such a case would be hard to prove, especially since Rinaldi would have his own reasons for keeping quiet.

  Up at the head of the table, the major began a long and circuitous story that appeared to be about leadership in the trenches and concluded with the suggestion that we retire to the smoking room. “Or,” he added, as if an afterthought, “the billiard room. I know you younger fellows like a game.” Jenkins was commanded to bring brandy, and we retired to smoke and drink until the major decided, on the slimmest evidence, that I could play snooker and proposed a match between me and Tollman. “All right with you, Basil?” he asked Grove. “Too dark to look at the dig, but Francis here washed up a lot of the recent finds. Let me show you some little bits of ancestral history!”

  He put his hand on Grove’s shoulder and they went out. Tollman handed me a cue and racked the balls.

  I put down my cue. “Let’s get to business,” I said. “You’d wanted to buy something from Freddie?”

  Tollman looked acutely uncomfortable. “Freddie was blackmailing me.”

  “Freddie had bad habits.”

  “There’s a certain picture. Wouldn’t do for public consumption.”

  Nor for the home front, either, I thought and nodded.

  “What do you want for it?”

  “One hundred pounds.”

  “A hundred pounds!”

  Interesting reaction. A hundred quid was a substantial sum, but he certainly looked flush. I shrugged. “I have another buyer. It’s all the same to me.” I really thought that he would break down and pull out the cash or make some arrangement, but he began to plead poverty.

  “Besides,” he said after a minute, “how can I be sure it’s the only photo?”

  “It’s a negative. And I only found a couple.”

  Tollman was not reassured. He picked up a ball and began tossing it up and down nervously.

  “Of course, we might do a swap,” I said after a minute.

  He stopped. “A swap?”

  “What was Freddie after? Besides cash in hand.”

  “Information.”

  “Care to be more precise?”

  He sniffed and ran a hand through his remarkable hair. “Freddie, you know, was something of a tactician. He had connections with a variety of people, and he was always trying to gain leverage with someone.”

  I waited.

  “Lately, I got the impression that he was working for the Italians, that he had some big deal afoot with that slimy Rinaldi. I wish I had never met either one of them!”

  I could believe that.

  Tollman paced back and forth beside the billiard table before he said, “It was Grove who introduced me. Freddie was with Mosley’s outfit then. Not the BUF, not the riffraff—the New Party people, some of them good men with good ideas. At the time, Freddie seemed like an all-right chap.”

  “With interesting friends?”

  Tollman nodded miserably. I must confess I wasn’t terribly happy with the situation, either, because for a minute, I understood him all too well. He hadn’t left his version of Ireland; he hadn’t had someone like Nan who loved him just as he was; he’d tried to fit in. That had worked for a while. Good job, nice clothes, fancy wife. And then he’d met Freddie’s interesting friends and all the compromises came apart and he wound up caught on camera without his pants. Naturally, Freddie had started to blackmail him. For money first, I’d guess. And then with the current political situation, for influence, information, contacts. “You’d been something in the government, I believe.”

  “Nothing terribly important. Undersecretary-to-the-undersecretary type of post. But as an investor, I’d been watching the electrical industry, electronic equipment, coming things, you understand.”

  I did. “So you knew some interesting people, too?”

  He nodded.

  “I need a name,” I said.

  “George. George Armitage, genius engineer. I saw him at some parties. With Freddie. I was able to find out what he was working on.”

  “And you mentioned that to Freddie?”

  “He already had his claws in George, but yes. I was able to confirm his importance. Nothing more.”

  “Do you know any of George’s friends? Or any favorite places of his?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about Basil Grove? Did Grove know him, too?”

  Tollman hesitated. “No, he didn’t know him. But he knew about him, I think.” He stopped and looked troubled. “I’d forgotten. Basil said something about Freddie’s wanting a favor. I gather it involved meeting with George sometime that weekend.”

  “But you don’t know what it was about?”

  Tollman shook his head. “All moot, of course, after Freddie stormed out. He liked drama.” “And he liked to involve people. He would have said that the Reds or some antifascist outfit was following him, but probably there was no more to it than that he wanted Basil to look complicit. That was
very much his style.”

  “I tell you what,” I said. “Give me fifty quid and we’ll call it even.”

  Tollman argued this, but his protests were all for show. A few minutes later, he had the duplicate negative of himself in flagrante delicto and I had his pound notes. He almost immediately relaxed, the expression of strain vanished, and he was once again a member of the top nation and completely respectable. A man I now liked less.

  “Lucky for you in a way,” I remarked.

  “Lucky? You’ve just picked my pocket for fifty quid.”

  “I meant Freddie getting himself killed. Though I guess you’d be a prime suspect without that alibi from Grove and Rinaldi.”

  He was confident enough now to laugh. “You see me as likely to push a man off a tower and cut his throat? Let me tell you something. I don’t know about you, but everyone else that weekend had a motive to kill him.” He saw my doubt and added, “Our hosts included. If you’re going into Freddie’s line of work, I suggest you remember that.”

  Chapter 14

  Tollman didn’t hang about. He freshened his brandy and disappeared, glass in hand. I wished for London or, failing that, for a rail connection offering immediate French leave. But no. Even if I slogged the mile or so to the station, there would be no service until morning. And if I did manage to catch the earliest morning train, I didn’t doubt for a minute that Inspector Davis would set about making trouble for the Mendelssohns.

  Even though he must have gotten an earful! My best hope was that he’d been listening in directly. My fear was that the major would instead retrieve a recording and find out that Tollman not only suspected his entire household but had passed his suspicions on to me. That would not be good.

  My only inspiration was to empty the decanter before canvassing the room. I hardly knew what to look for—wires, I supposed, and some type of microphone and maybe a wireless-like box, a sort of receiver in reverse. I looked under the billiard table and behind the curtains and lifted one of the omnipresent canine portraits, for, as if real hounds weren’t enough, the manor featured a kennel’s worth of painted dogs. I was examining a massive radiator when someone coughed.

  I was startled, I admit. I turned to see Grove standing in the doorway. “Basil!”

  “Game over?” There was something distinctly unpleasant in his tone.

  “Before it began. Peter’s too skillful for me.”

  He moved to the table and began toying with the cue ball. “Surprising, that. Peter doesn’t really think strategically.”

  I shrugged. “What about you, Basil? Do you think strategically?”

  “I like to think so. I always take the long view.” He leaned his elbows on the table, and I wondered if he was a bit drunk. That could be to my advantage.

  “You knew Freddie,” he said after a moment.

  “Not well.”

  He nodded complacently. “A complicated character. I probably knew him as well as anyone, given that I saw to his political education.”

  That raised my eyebrows. As far as I could see, “political education” had simply enabled Freddie to expand his dodgy operation.

  “You are skeptical,” Grove remarked.

  “I knew him just well enough to be skeptical.”

  “Nonetheless, he was killed for his beliefs. A martyr for the future.”

  That was one way of putting it. “I’d have said he was killed for his blackmail habit.”

  “The one supported the other,” Grove admitted. “The revolution sometimes has to use unattractive tools.”

  “That certainly describes Freddie.”

  There was a pause, suggesting that Grove was ready to get down to business. “And you, Francis?” he asked finally. “Are you interested our country’s future?”

  “I could do with fewer twits and more intelligence,” I said. “Or are you asking if I’ve taken over Freddie’s line of goods? Minus his political airs and graces, naturally.”

  “Freddie,” Grove said carefully, “sometimes acquired useful material.”

  “Useful here? Or elsewhere?”

  “The New Order does not necessarily respect traditional borders.”

  That sounded ominous. “Freddie’s stock in trade was compromising photos.”

  “Not my interest. I don’t share the public school weakness for pretty boys or flogging—or is it flogging pretty boys?” His grating laugh suggested he was not as calm as he seemed.

  “Well, then, I’m afraid we can’t do business. Freddie’s specialty—” I didn’t get any further before Grove grabbed the front of my jacket. Though only a couple inches taller, he outweighed me by fifty pounds or more. I backed into the billiard table and groped for a cue, thinking to crack him in the throat.

  “He had promised Rinaldi something, something he insisted was good, very valuable. Not dirty pictures, understand?”

  “I do speak English. Let me go and tell me what you have in mind.” To make the point, I slid the tip of the cue into his groin. He released me and stepped back a pace.

  “He’d gotten onto some scientific thing,” Grove said. “Formulas or a diagram or maybe some new electrical system.”

  “Sounds pretty vague. You’re sure this was a useful item?”

  “Freddie was convinced it was. He said he wouldn’t let it go for less than five hundred quid.”

  “What’s your best offer?”

  “Then you have it?” he asked in an eager way that set off alarm bells.

  “Freddie’s compromising stash included negatives of a document. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it, myself, but I’ve kept it safe. For a price,” I added.

  Grove smiled and reached into his pocket for a stubby pistol. “Here’s my best offer. Give me the negatives and you go home intact.”

  At this point in the flicks that Maurice and I so enjoy, the proper line is “you will never get away with it.” The fact this popped into my mind indicated I was in danger of losing focus. Blame that last brandy. I swallowed the cliché and instead asked Grove if he’d killed Freddie. In response, he swore and waved the gun around and threatened me with everything from a slander prosecution to a bullet. I hoped that the inspector and my uncle had dropped their headphones and were racing to my relief. With that in mind, delay seemed the strategy. “It will look bad,” I said. “Shots fired and all that. Every visit a murder—that’s not going to look good for you.”

  He leveled the pistol at me and pointed out that even a nonfatal bullet wound could be painful or permanently disabling.

  “Just to be clear, Grove, you intend to give possible scientific or military secrets to the Italians.” Let them record that!

  “To the future,” said Basil Grove, and his ringing tone made me think he might really believe all that rot about new politics making new men and a shiny new future. I thought I’d been dealing with a rich entrepreneur with an eye for the main chance. Someone I could understand. But if I was dealing with a fanatic, that changed the equation.

  “How do you know they don’t already have them? Ri­naldi’s been looking since the morning Freddie died. For all you know—”

  He gestured with the pistol. “Enough,” he said. “You’re a rum character, Francis. Your death could wrap up the Bosworth case very nicely. I can tell you that no one’s happy to have the investigation hanging on. You’d do for it and who would complain?”

  Only Nan, I thought. And maybe Poppy and Maurice.

  “The negatives,” he said now and held out his hand.

  “I don’t have them on me, having foreseen—”

  “Get them. And drop the cue.”

  Did I have an alternative? Could I see myself to some bit of Sexton Blake derring-do? I could not. “All right,” I said. “Follow me.” Down the hall, into the foyer with the major’s historic WC, a quiet and private place. Not the time, Francis, to remember
snatches of poetry! But relevant in this case, the quiet and private place being the grave. Wasn’t that a little warning from the subconscious that the tiled WC was a trap? My heart jumped the way it had when Grove appeared at the door of the billiard room: Think, Francis! Quick! My room? Servants’ hall? The elegant stair where a foot might slip? Suddenly, I had a better idea. “We have to go outside. I thought anywhere in the house too obvious.”

  “The place is a great bloody mausoleum,” Grove complained.

  “Well, I chose the dig. I was working there this afternoon, as you know.”

  He gestured toward the front door and I turned the latch, hoping for a clatter to alert the staff. But no, all was oiled and nearly soundless. Let it be dark, I thought, pitch-dark, and opened the door. Wind slapped our faces with rain. The manor grounds were robed in murk rather than the velvet blackness that would have been ideal. Grove was angry just the same. “We need a bloody torch,” he said. “And it’s wet. Everything will be ruined.”

  “They’re wrapped in oilcloth,” I said. “Freddie was a pro. And I wouldn’t risk a light, if I were you. Too obvious at this hour.” When he hesitated, I added, “I know the way. I was running between the damned dig and the stable pump half the afternoon.”

  Grove stuck the pistol in my back. “Hurry up then.”

  I took a breath. My eyes had adjusted enough for me to see the irregular outline of the tower and the long roofs of the barns and stables. Now I must concentrate. Visualize the dig, Francis! According to Maurice, the great Degas wanted pupils to study the model upstairs but paint or draw in a room below. So, it could be done, the maze of trenches being nowhere near as complex as a nude figure. Was that a stake? One of the major’s markers? Yes, it was, and with that I had an image of the geometric patterns of grass, topsoil, and chalk, of stakes and sticks and occasional piles of debris: a green, buff, and brown Mondrian plus clutter. I had it in my mind’s eye and I started forward briskly, causing Grove to protest.