Corpus

by Rory Clements

  ‘So,’ said Wilde. ‘The revolution starts here in Cambridgeshire. If we take these murders at face value.’

  ‘It’s all a great deal too pat.’

  ‘Exactly my thinking. And yet, we can’t just dismiss it. The Reds aren’t known for their subtlety, for God’s sake.’ Wilde was silent a moment, then met Eaton’s eyes. ‘And Nancy Hereward?’

  ‘I really don’t know. But that family connection is a hell of a coincidence.’ Eaton took a deep draught of his stout. ‘Come on, drink up. Let’s get in among them, see what they’ve got to say for themselves.’

  CHAPTER 12

  Hartmut Dorfen pulled up outside the broad entrance of the Dorchester Hotel, handed his small leather bag to the porter and told him to take it to the apartment of Sophie Gräfin von Isarbeck. ‘Park the car,’ he told the commissionaire, then rode the lift to the sixth floor where he was met by a butler, who bowed low, opened the door and stood back to admit Dorfen to the lushly carpeted lobby of the Gräfin’s apartment.

  She was waiting for him, her arms wide in welcome. ‘Darling.’ She stepped towards him. ‘Come to Sophie. Welcome to my humble pied-à-terre.’

  The apartment, the Gräfin’s permanent London residence, was enormous, with four bedrooms, a dining room, a study and a capacious drawing room facing out across Park Lane to Hyde Park. The Gräfin, by contrast, was tiny, no more than four feet ten inches. Dorfen scooped her up into his arms as though she were a small child. He kissed her on the lips. ‘Now, where is the best bedroom?’

  ‘Hartmut, you are as naughty as ever! Put me down.’

  ‘And I thought you loved me.’

  ‘Of course, I love you. All women love you. You are the handsomest man in all of Germany, as you well know.’

  Outside, the day was grey, overcast and gusty. The bare limbs of the trees in the park across the road shivered and bent in the wind. The weather was changing. It was beginning to feel like winter, not autumn. Dorfen realised he was exhausted.

  ‘Food? Drink?’ The Gräfin snapped her fingers and the butler appeared. ‘Eggs Benedict and a good Krug,’ she ordered.

  At the window, Dorfen shook his head in disgust. ‘God, this city with its red buses and its smoke. It’s so dirty. I never liked it.’

  The Gräfin wagged her finger. ‘This city is the heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known, Hartmut, and the King is at its very core. You Müncheners are so provincial. London is important to us, as is Edward. We need them on our side.’ She saw the weariness in his blue eyes. ‘You are tired, Hartmut, you have not stopped these past days.’

  He patted her cheek. ‘There has been much to do, many men to see. Our friends in Nordsee . . .’

  ‘I am sure you charmed them all.’

  Sophie von Isarbeck wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t ugly. Her body was neither slim nor fat, but pale and soft with a rounded womanly belly and no hint of muscle. A little pudding, or tönnchen, she had been called, and yet she captured all eyes in any room she entered. Her magnetism drew in monarchs and magnates, dictators and Hollywood stars.

  ‘And what is the news of the King?’

  ‘He is a mess.’ The Gräfin’s voice turned confidential. ‘Wally was here for over an hour yesterday, in a dreadful state. It is all she can do to console the poor man, and I had to do likewise with her. Soon she’ll be on a boat to France and Edward will be left to deal with this crisis alone.’ Sadness swept across Sophie von Isarbeck’s face: like an actress, she knew how to connect with an audience, whatever its class or gender. She was loved and hated in equal measure, but never ignored.

  ‘Will he abdicate? Is it certain yet?’

  ‘She says he is alternately defiant and meek in the face of Baldwin’s bullying. She begs him to stand firm, she reminds him that he is king and emperor, but in her heart she knows he will capitulate, throw it all in. It’s out of her hands now, so it is up to us. If we allow the King to follow her to Cannes, the game will most certainly be up.’

  ‘And this is all Baldwin’s doing?’

  ‘Not just Baldwin. The whole Cabinet wants him out, as does the Privy Council. But Baldwin is the prime mover.’ She smiled. ‘You know there are those who say the King should dismiss him and rule alone.’

  ‘The Royal Führer . . .’

  ‘Precisely. But of course he will not do it. He is too timid – so we must be his backbone, Hart, or Baldwin will have his coup d’état.’

  Dorfen nodded his agreement. ‘And the Möhlau man?’

  ‘He is ready. I will have the information you need very soon. If not today, then in the next two days.’ She paused and smiled reassuringly. ‘It is very simple and daring and it will work.’

  Dorfen spotted a photograph on an occasional table beneath a standard lamp. It was Heinrich Hoffman’s picture of Hitler. Hoffmann had made the Führer looked like a movie idol, a Clark Gable or Willy Birgel. The photograph was framed in solid eighteen-carat gold, etched with the words Hochverehrte Gräfin – revered countess – beside a small enamelled swastika, embedded in the gold. A special gift from Hitler.

  She touched his face. ‘There is a speck of blood on your collar, Hartmut.’

  ‘I cut myself shaving.’

  ‘Careless boy.’

  ‘Cancel the food, Sophie. I want to sleep.’

  ‘Of course you do, liebling. I’ll tuck you in.’

  *

  The reporters were arriving. ‘They might as well have hired a charabanc,’ Eaton said as he watched the cars screeching to a halt along the length of the village main street. He pointed them out to Wilde, by newspaper not name. ‘Herald, Mail, Telegraph, Mirror, Observer, Express, News Chronicle. Don’t know the other ones – probably locals from Cambridge.’

  The newsmen began swarming around the village with the aggression and singularity of purpose of a foraging army, all of them accompanied by photographers. Detective Superintendent Bower was happy to brief them, but he would not show them the scene of the killings, which meant that the reporters would have to rely on local gossip and the flashing of nice white five-pound notes. But they were too late: the village and the police had become wary.

  Before the arrival of the invasion force, however, Wilde and Eaton had learnt quite a lot about the Langleys from the drinkers in the pub. They had learnt that there had been a succession of visitors to the couple’s remote house in the past year, many driving Rolls Royces, Daimlers and other expensive cars with chauffeurs and valets. They learnt, too, that their newly married daughter Margot had not been seen for more than eighteen months. In a small English village, people noticed what wasn’t there as much as what was. And they gossiped about everything.

  ‘What about their maid?’

  ‘Aspinall? She wasn’t local,’ said the landlord, a mutton-chop whiskered old soldier, who had taken more money in an hour than he usually took in a week. He’d have even more when the Fleet Street horde came in. ‘She came from Ipswich, I believe.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘No one knows. I heard Dr Barrow had to give her a sedative before she was taken away.’

  ‘And you haven’t heard of anyone seeing or hearing a car late at night?’

  ‘Few enough cars come here in daytime, so a car driving through the village at midnight would most likely have been heard. But if it approached from the west, we wouldn’t have heard anything.’

  ‘Didn’t the Langleys have a dog?’ Wilde had asked. Surely everyone in the countryside had a dog.

  ‘Their Springer died a couple of months ago. I don’t think they had the heart to replace her . . .’

  ‘How would you describe Mr Langley?’ Eaton put in.

  ‘Oh, he was a proper gentleman with all the old virtues: honour, duty, loyalty. He didn’t care much for these modern times. And as a military man, I’d say he was right.’

  ‘Tell me about his politics.’

  ‘They were his own business, as are mine.’ The landlord went back to polishing the glasses. ‘
I was brought up a Liberal, but I don’t mind telling you I can see the attraction in some of these new parties. That Mr Mussolini is getting things right in Italy.’

  They took a last stroll through Kilmington. It was an almost exclusively farming community of labourers, ploughmen and herders. The middle classes were represented by Dr Barrow and the vicar, with the Langleys at the top of the tree. The only other person who might have had pretensions was the schoolmaster at the little elementary school. Wilde estimated that the population could not have come to more than two hundred. The church, St Edmund’s, was medieval, thatched, and built of flint on higher ground. There was, too, a modest little brick-built Methodist chapel that had seen better days.

  ‘It occurs to me,’ said Wilde, ‘that the killer is likely to have known the Langleys’ house. There’s no sign on the gatepost and it’s set well back from the road behind a screen of trees. I doubt whether anyone would have stumbled upon it. We wouldn’t have spotted it if we hadn’t seen the police cars parked on the road outside.’

  ‘So family, friend? Former domestic with a grudge?’

  ‘I wouldn’t rule anyone out.’

  ‘I agree – but I think I’ve got just about everything I’m going to get today,’ Eaton said. ‘I’m pretty sure the answer to this murder does not lie in the village. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to bag the telephone box to file my story before the rats dive in.’

  *

  Later, as they were about to drive out of the village, they were flagged down by Bower.

  Wilde wound down the passenger window. ‘Superintendent?’

  ‘There was one thing I thought worth mentioning to you, in confidence of course, gentlemen. It’s the photographs. We pieced together five – Hitler, the King and the other three.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t help noticing that there were six empty frames. Of course it might mean nothing, but it set me thinking. Was the sixth one already empty – or did the killer remove the picture and take it away?’

  ‘You’re suggesting it might have meant something to the killer?’

  ‘I have to consider the possibility.’

  ‘Any other leads yet?’

  ‘Nothing substantial, I’m afraid. We’re talking to various known troublemakers and rabble-rousers. But I don’t hold out much hope. This is very different.’

  ‘A communist plot?’ Wilde asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m much too long in the tooth to jump to conclusions, Mr Wilde.’

  *

  Although he had not seen service in the Great War, Stanley Baldwin was quite adept at keeping his head down when necessary. But still, there was something fairly ridiculous about the events of this Thursday.

  The King had summoned him to Buckingham Palace yet again, but this time he wanted the prime minister to arrive in secret, unseen by the hordes of press reporters waiting outside the gates. Now that the story was in the British papers, the palace was under siege.

  And so Baldwin had had to hide himself on the back seat of his Rolls Royce and instruct his chauffeur to drive in through a back entrance. Baldwin, almost seventy years old and not in the best of health, was then required to clamber into the building through a ground-floor window. When, finally, he had dusted himself down he had been confronted by an emotional Edward pleading with him to be allowed to make a radio broadcast to his people, to explain why he must marry the woman he loved.

  Baldwin listened with concerned eyes, but gave nothing away. Guile and charm were attributes that he possessed in abundance. With his pipe and homely manner, he liked the world to think he was one of them: an ordinary man, a favourite uncle, the heart of everyone’s family. He understood the way they lived. He shared their worries and fears and wanted the best for his people, his country. But in fact the Harrow and Cambridge-educated Baldwin was not like them – and nor was he as affable as he liked to make out. His public face hid the truth: he was the bastard son of Machiavelli’s prince, a man who would kill you with soothing words and a blade so sharp you wouldn’t feel it slide into your flesh.

  He looked at the pathetic creature standing before him, frantically smoking one cigarette after the other, and agreed that he would consult his Cabinet colleagues on the matter of a possible broadcast but that he held out little hope.

  Edward turned on him like a petulant child. ‘You want me to go, don’t you?’

  Baldwin spoke calmly but firmly. A father insisting that his son should do the right thing. ‘What I want, sir,’ he said, ‘is what you told me you wanted: to go with dignity, without dividing the country, in a way that makes things as smooth as possible for your successor.’

  *

  The wind was picking up as Eaton drove Wilde back to Cambridge. On the less alarming stretches of the road, they discussed the possible meaning of the empty sixth frame.

  ‘Their daughter might know which picture was missing,’ Wilde suggested.

  ‘Then we’d better talk to her, hadn’t we? I’d also like to know why she hasn’t been home in over a year.’ Eaton fished inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a slim notebook with a velvet cover. ‘Take a look in there. Bound to find her.’

  Wilde skimmed the pages and glanced at Eaton. ‘This is Mrs Langley’s address book. You stole it from their house.’

  ‘Stole is a strong word, old boy. Just borrowing it to take a quick peek. Reporter’s trick.’

  Wilde kept his gaze on Eaton’s well-bred profile. ‘Is this really the sort of training you get in Fleet Street these days?’

  Eaton laughed. ‘You sound somewhat disapproving, Wilde. I do believe I’ve shocked you.’

  ‘Reporter be damned! Who are you, Eaton? Or should I say, what are you?’

  Eaton’s eyes stayed on the road. ‘Not sure I understand you.’

  ‘I mean who do you work for, really?’

  ‘The Times. Special Correspondent. You’ve got my card.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt you work for The Times, but who else?’

  ‘I’m paid well enough. I have no need to moonlight.’

  ‘Don’t be disingenuous, Eaton. I’m not an idiot. I think you work in Intelligence.’ In the gloomy interior of the Austin, Wilde thought he could just make out the sliver of a smile on Eaton’s unblemished face.

  ‘Stick to the history books, Professor Wilde. I think you’ve been reading too much John Buchan.’

  Wilde laughed. ‘You just happen to turn up in Cambridge when three people die. You hint at the possibility of links between the two cases. And you just happen to know about Nancy Hereward’s trip to Berlin.’

  ‘Sheer coincidence, old boy. Sheer coincidence.’

  CHAPTER 13

  When they arrived in Cambridge, Wilde suggested to Eaton that he should meet Lydia. The front door of her house was open and they found her in the kitchen, pots and pans everywhere.

  ‘Lydia, this is Philip Eaton. I mentioned him to you.’

  ‘Ah yes, you’re doing a story on Nancy. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘The pleasure is all mine. It would be good to talk.’

  ‘Well, as you can see, Mr Eaton, I’m up to my eyes cooking. Tell you what, maybe you’d care to join us for dinner? It’s only boring old beef stew and dumplings, I’m afraid, but you might find the company entertaining. Apple pie for pudding.’

  ‘Nothing boring about stew and apple pie, Miss Morris. I’d be delighted to take up your offer.’

  ‘About seven then?’

  *

  ‘Can I drive you back to college?’ Eaton asked as they stepped outside.

  Wilde looked at his watch. Five o’clock. He hadn’t realised they had spent so long at Kilmington. He very much wanted to talk to Lydia alone. ‘No, thank you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m told you have a very good brain, professor. Do you ever wonder whether it might be wasted drumming dates and battles into the heads of undergraduates?’

  Wilde laughed. ‘I’ll see you at seven.’

  *

  Wild
e went into his own house, splashed water over his face and changed his shirt and tie. He peered out of the window into the gloomy, sodium-yellow street to check that the Austin Ten had gone and made his way back to Lydia’s house.

  In her kitchen he saw that she had opened a bottle of red wine and poured herself a glass. ‘I’m sorry, I really felt I needed it.’

  ‘Don’t apologise.’

  ‘Would you like a glass?’

  ‘Actually, I think I probably need a Scotch. What do you think of Eaton?’

  ‘Privilege oozes out of him like sweat in a Turkish bath.’

  ‘I think there’s rather more to him than that. But we’ll see. It’ll be interesting to watch him with Comrade Kholtov and Horace Dill this evening. But, Lydia, I need to talk to you. Do you have any inkling where we’ve been today?’

  She was rolling pastry. ‘No. Should I have?’

  ‘The scene of a double murder.’ He paused and gritted his teeth. ‘I’m pretty sure you must know them.’

  Lydia turned to face him. ‘Tom, I don’t like this.’

  ‘Cecil and Penny Langley. The parents of your friend Margot, if I’m not mistaken.’

  She put her hand, all covered in flour, to her mouth. ‘Oh my God, not Mr and Mrs Langley. Please don’t tell me this. Tom, this is too awful. Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I went there with Eaton. He was reporting on it. It’s a big story.’

  ‘This is so, so horrible. I knew them well. I went to their house in Kilmington often – we all did. It’s not far from here.’

  ‘That’s where they were killed.’

  ‘How? How did it happen?’

  He couldn’t say the words their throats were slit. Those four words conjured up too much horror. ‘A knife attack,’ he said. ‘There were political overtones. Apparently Langley was a good friend of Sir Norman. Similar politics. Hasn’t it been on the wireless yet?’