For all his awareness of how flimsy the evidence would appear in court, Baverstock could not deny that it did indeed make sense. He remembered the occasion, three years before, when he had confronted Quinn in his room at Cleave Court to tell him that he had to go. It was early December 1879, with Sir Gervase but lately removed to his nursing home and Baverstock still flushed with gratitude at Lady Davenall’s decision to use his services. It was an occasion, which, until now, had seemed merely a clinical disposal of disagreeable business, an occasion which, he now reflected, might not have been as inconsequential as he had supposed.
‘Lady Davenall wants you gone by the morning,’ said Baverstock peremptorily.
Quinn turned from the window, where he had been gazing down at the garden, and looked straight at him. It was the first time Baverstock had seen him out of uniform: he was surprised by how muscular the man was, rising fifty but with only flecks of grey in his short-cropped hair to suggest it. Quinn’s face was lean and sternly set, the brow somewhat hooded, the eyes darting and penetrative. He had the flattened nose and gnarled hands of a prizefighter, or the old soldier he was known to be. Beneath his respectful manner and featureless accent there had always seemed to be something watchful and threatening, something not quite suppressed. Baverstock shivered: the room was icy cold.
‘It’s assumed you’ll make no trouble.’
Quinn still said nothing.
‘Candidly, I think you’ve got off lightly. Lady Davenall has given you the benefit of very little doubt.’
Quinn put his hands on his hips and stared at Baverstock. Then he cocked one eyebrow and finally spoke. ‘Where did she find you?’
‘I hardly—’
‘Twenty-four years I served her husband. I know more of his secrets than she ever will. Does she really think she can afford to make an enemy of me?’
‘That’s not the issue, Quinn.’
‘Is it not? Be warned, Mr Lawyer. She hounded her son into suicide. She packed her husband off to a nursing home. She hired you to replace her cousin. Now she’s easing me off the premises. She’s a hard woman. Never forget it.’ He turned aside and pulled a carpet-bag from behind a chair; it was already full. ‘Tell her I’ll be gone by tonight. Bag and baggage.’
‘Good. There remains only the question of your outstanding wages. I’ve brought them with me.’ Baverstock drew the prepared envelope from his pocket – and held it out. ‘Correct to the end of the month.’
Quinn took the packet and tossed it into his bag. ‘I’m obliged.’
‘In the circumstances, it’s extremely generous.’
‘In the circumstances, it’s a bloody insult. But don’t worry. What this family owes me I’ll take – in my own good time.’
The slamming of the office door jolted Baverstock back from his recollections. He looked up, to find himself alone. Trenchard had gone.
VI
Nanny Pursglove, in her spick and span cottage by the swollen River Avon, was by some way the most welcoming of my hosts that day. Her only hint of disappointment was when I told her I was alone.
‘Mrs Trenchard not with you?’ she said, with a downcast look back at me as she led the way into her tiny sitting-room.
‘No,’ I replied. Then, to forestall further enquiry: ‘I was hoping you could tell me something about Alfred Quinn.’
‘Bless me, what would you be wanting to know about him?’
‘Mr Baverstock tells me he was dismissed.’
‘He would know, I’m sure.’
‘For thieving.’
‘So it was said. Will you take some tea?’
‘Was there any other reason suggested?’
‘Do sit down, Mr Trenchard. Lupin and I are forgetting ourselves.’ She filled a cup from the ever-ready pot and handed it to me. ‘I worked with Mr Quinn for more than twenty years. Long enough to judge whether he was a scoundrel, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, I would. That’s why I came to see you.’
‘He never fitted in with the rest of the staff. He never seemed suited to a life of service. A scoundrel? Well, so we always thought. But a cunning artful fox of a man. I could have believed he’d steal from his master. He had that in him. But be caught doing it? Not Mr Quinn.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘He had Sir Gervase on a string. He had no need to steal from him. Lady Davenall knew that.’
‘So she wanted rid of him and any excuse would have done?’
Miss Pursglove looked at me sharply. ‘Why do you want to know about Mr Quinn? You never mentioned him when you called before.’
‘Something you said then set me thinking. You said that Norton—’
‘Mr James, you mean,’ she put in.
‘You said that he didn’t seem surprised when you mentioned that Quinn had left. You said it was as if he already knew.’
‘Did I?’
‘How could he have known?’
She had grown suddenly defensive. ‘Perhaps I had already told him. You know how we old ladies can get confused, Mr Trenchard. I’m being told as much often enough.’
‘“Not suited to a life of service,” I think you said. What do you suppose led him into it?’
‘He was Sir Gervase’s batman in the Crimea. Sir Gervase came to rely on him out there and didn’t want to lose him when the war ended. It was very generous of him to offer Mr Quinn such a position. Valet to a baronet would be a vast improvement on a common soldier’s wages and conditions, I should think.’
‘As you say: very generous.’
‘I once said as much to Mr Quinn, you know.’ She was warming to her theme. ‘“You fell on your feet with Sir Gervase,” I said. And do you know what he replied? “No more than my due.” Those were his words and those were all his words. What do you make of that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No more do I. He wasn’t to be drawn on what happened out there. Sir Gervase fell ill: that we did know. Perhaps Mr Quinn nursed him back to health. Either way, there was something between them.’
‘But you’ve no idea what?’
‘What Mr Quinn didn’t want to tell you, you didn’t get told. A man’s entitled to his privacy, of course, but he took it further than that. No. He was never one of us. You could see it in his face.’
‘I wish I could. Any idea where he is now?’
‘Not a one, Mr Trenchard. Not a one where that man is concerned. But as to his face – I can show you that right enough.’
‘You intrigue me.’
She needed no encouragement. Already, she was bustling towards a glass-fronted cabinet in the corner of the room. She opened the door, setting the contents quivering, and plucked a silver-framed photograph from behind a porcelain shepherdess. ‘Some of we senior staff had our pictures taken … oh, it must be twelve years ago. You’ll recognize me, no doubt.’
I took the picture from her and held it up to the light. It had evidently been taken in the garden of Cleave Court, with the rear windows of the house in the background. Seated on a bench were two stolid aproned women with a look of the kitchen about them. To one side, Miss Pursglove, indistinguishable from her present self, alert and upright on a chair. Behind the bench, three rigidly posed and uniformed male servants. In the space between the bench and the chair, a waistcoated grizzled man, leaning on a rake, whom I took for Crowcroft the head gardener. Behind the chair, one hand resting on its back, a short, squarely built man in bowler hat and high-buttoned tweed jacket. Towards this last figure Miss Pursglove’s wavering finger moved.
‘That’s Mr Quinn for you. Though it’ll not tell you much.’
I peered closer. Was this, I wondered, with a sudden chill in Miss Pursglove’s sun-warmed sitting-room, the face of my true enemy? Was this the conspirator for whom Norton was merely acting a part? It scarcely seemed possible. Alfred Quinn, batman, valet and butler to Sir Gervase Davenall, stood, it was true, neither in frozen awe nor in grinning worship of the camera lens. Yet he revealed nothing, by pose or expression, that could hint at his
character. A lean, strongly built man whose look was perhaps too proud and piercing for natural servility: that was all.
‘When did you say this was taken?’ I said at length.
‘If my memory serves, as it usually does, it was the summer before Mr James disappeared. 1870, that would have been.’
‘How old would Quinn have been then?’
‘He came to us as a young man in his twenties. He’d have been about forty when that picture was taken.’
‘Any idea where he was born? What he did before joining the Army?’
‘Not a one. He seemed to know London, but not so well that I could say that’s where he came from. He wasn’t a man to reminisce – or even answer a civil question about himself if he could avoid it. What I know about him is much what you see there.’
A thought occurred to me. ‘Might I borrow this picture, Nanny?’
She frowned. ‘Well …’
‘I promise to return it.’
A lifetime of obedience overcame her reservations. ‘Well, be sure you do.’
All the way back to London on the train that afternoon, I thought of Alfred Quinn, the cautious guarded servant who had always been more than that. Where was he now? The question had become my talisman, my token of hope that nothing more sinister than a servant’s grudge lay at the heart of the mystery.
VII
Richard Davenall was a man of regular and moderate habits. His few servants, had they not already retired to bed, would have found it inconceivable that their master should still be in his study, the lamps blazing, the fire stoked, the whisky-decanter unstoppered on his desk, as the clock struck midnight and Sunday, 15th October 1882 announced its arrival with a buffet of rain at the uncurtained windows.
It had rained that day, too, Richard recalled. That day in January 1861, of his father’s burial at Highgate Cemetery, where half a dozen dutiful employees and grey, dank, bitter chill met to mourn an unloved man. Most members of the family had tendered unconvincing excuses, and the last-minute arrival of cousin Gervase, with the thirteen-year-old James in the carriage beside him, came therefore as a pleasant surprise.
Parsimonious in life, Wolseley Davenall had dismayed his son by his extravagance in death. The purchase of a family vault in the sombrely bowered and ornately wrought Egyptian Avenue, to where the late Mrs Davenall had been transferred from her more humble grave of seventeen years before to join her husband, seemed to Richard an unwarranted and unsuitable piece of ostentation for such a notably puritanical man, rendered all the more grotesque by the paltry turnout of mourners.
As the massive iron door of the vault was ceremonially sealed and the funeral party began to disperse, Gervase, who had turned several disapproving heads by his swaggering gait and lack of uniformly black attire, pulled a hip-flask from beneath his travelling-coat and offered it to Richard.
‘No thank you, Gervase.’
‘Please yourself.’ Gervase took a swig.
Richard winced as Gregory Chubb, his office overseer, glanced back from the knot of lawyers and clerks moving down the avenue ahead of them. ‘Glad you could come,’ he said to his cousin with an effort.
‘Don’t mention it, old man. Trust you didn’t mind my bringing the boy.’ He patted James, walking silently and blank-faced beside him, on the shoulder. ‘Felt he ought to pay his last respects to his great-uncle.’
Richard was disconcerted. He had not seen James since his abrupt departure from Cleave Court six years before. Nor, in view of the nature of that departure, had he expected to. Indeed, he had exchanged no more than a few words with the boy’s father during that time, banished as he was, at Wolseley’s silent bidding, from much of family society.
‘Is Catherine well?’ he said at last, happy to let his cousin attribute the quaver in his voice to the occasion of their meeting.
‘Oh, in the pink. But not much to be stirred from Cleave Court, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah, yes. Of course. Do give her my … regards.’
‘Happy to. Happy to.’
They turned out of the avenue and began to move slowly down the winding path towards the main gate of the cemetery. The rain had become little more than a mist now, a damp veil across the orderly expanse of graves, but the cold had intensified: their breath rose in clouds about them.
‘Perhaps I could call on you at the office in a few days,’ said Gervase after an interval. ‘Make sure everything’s in order.’
‘I’m not sure I quite follow you.’
Gervase smiled. ‘You will be able to take on my legal affairs now, won’t you?’
Richard was nonplussed. His father had not encouraged him to think that he would inherit his mantle. ‘Oh … well, of course. I’d be honoured. But I thought—’
‘That cretin Chubb? Not on, old man. Simply not on. Your father told me I was to look on him as his principal assistant – some nonsense about seniority. But I prefer to keep these things in the family. Tell me’ – he lowered his voice – ‘did you fall out with your father over something? He’s treated you pretty damn shabbily in recent years, I must say.’
‘I really couldn’t …’
‘I wouldn’t blame you. Prickly, I always found him – damned prickly. Still, mustn’t speak ill … Look round to dinner one night next week, why don’t you? I could put you in the picture then. All the ins and outs of my affairs, what?’
Richard found himself smiling. If only Gervase knew. If only his father knew. This meant emancipation from servitude to Chubb and the life of a legal errand-boy. This meant a new beginning, a long-awaited chance to forget the errors of the past.
How long the bell had been jangling Richard had no way of knowing. The moment of its intrusion on his distant thoughts might have been the instant it began or any number of minutes thereafter. He listened: the servants, a sleepy lot even when on duty, had not stirred. The bell rang again. With a sigh, he rose from his desk, took up the lamp and left the room.
Wolseley Davenall, ever a cautious man, had had a spy-hole fitted to the broad front door of his Highgate home. When Richard slid back the cover and peered through, he saw that his late-night visitor was William Trenchard, a sodden and haggard figure in the fitful glow of the porch lamp. He slipped the bolts at once and opened the door.
‘Trenchard! What brings—?’
‘I got your message.’
‘Message? Oh – yes. Come in.’ He had, it was true, left word at The Limes that, should Trenchard return there, he would appreciate hearing from him. Now that seemed an age ago. ‘I didn’t mean to get you out in the middle of the night.’
‘Is it so late?’ said Trenchard, following him towards the study. ‘I’ve rather lost track of time.’
‘I called on you this morning. Constance explained that she is to stay with her family for a while.’
Trenchard did not reply. When they reached the study, Richard helped him off with his drenched coat and ran an appraising eye over him.
‘You look all in,’ he said, though what he thought was that fatigue and desperation had filled Trenchard with a restless, reckless energy.
‘What did you want to tell me?’
‘It can wait. Will you have a drink?’
Trenchard nodded and warmed himself by the fire whilst Richard poured him a glass.
‘I was sorry to hear that Constance felt the need to … go away.’
Trenchard took a gulp from the proffered glass and smiled grimly. ‘She’s left me.’
‘Surely it hasn’t—’
‘She believes in Norton. My only way to win her back is to prove he’s an impostor.’
‘I can’t believe—’
‘I don’t have time to waste on pretence and self-delusion any more. I mean to nail Norton’s lies, and you can help me.’
‘How?’
‘He told her that I’d offered him money on Sir Hugo’s behalf. That turned her against me. Then he volunteered to withdraw his claim – if she asked him to. He’s clever, you see. Damned clever.’ T
renchard glared into the fire, where the heat of his hatred seared back at him.
‘I’m sorry if my family’s troubles have come between you and Constance,’ Richard said. ‘Truly I am.’
Trenchard looked at him and drained his glass. ‘That doesn’t matter now. I’ve been to Bath today – and there I found his weakness. There I found the means to destroy him.’
Richard took the glass from Trenchard’s cradled hand and moved to the decanter to refill it. His companion, he realized, was no longer the self-centred well-intentioned husband who had wished only to protect his marriage from a fortune-hunting impostor. In outmanoeuvring him at every turn, Norton had driven Trenchard into the grip of an obsession. And Norton was that obsession.
‘What can you tell me about Alfred Quinn?’
‘Quinn? Why do you ask?’
As Trenchard explained, Richard grew perturbed. The crazy twisting path that linked Quinn with Norton could only be followed by those compelled to believe in its conclusion. All Trenchard’s fevered theorizing would count for nothing if Constance hailed Norton as James Davenall. If that occurred, Trenchard would become a liability to their cause: a jealous, irrational, railing husband. His pursuit of Quinn, however apparently justified, would seem unreasoning folly.
A silence fell after Trenchard had finished, a silence too profound to be ignored. Richard stoked the fire, recharged their glasses and said nothing.
‘Well?’ said Trenchard at last.
Richard smiled defensively. ‘It’s a beguiling theory.’
‘Is that all?’
‘For the moment, yes.’
‘But don’t you see?’
‘I see no connection with Norton – and that is what counts. A dismissed servant bearing a grudge is one thing, hatching a plot like this quite another. What you’ve found could be nothing more than a misleading mixture of coincidence and circumstance.’
‘That’s what Baverstock said.’
‘He’s a sensible man. Why don’t you sleep on all this? Stay here, if you like. You might see things differently if—’
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