by Blake Banner
She had her narrow eyes on. “I thought this was just in the movies,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody lived like this anymore.”
The great beast eased to a stop outside a door that was older than my country, and a butler of about the same age stepped out to receive us. He gave a small bow and said, “My Lord Chiddester is in his study, if you would care to follow me...”
He led us across heavy oak floors through an oak paneled drawing room with a fireplace as big as my house, and tapped on another ancient oak door. A muted voice called, “Come!” and he stepped in.
“Detectives Stone and Dehan, M’Lord.”
Chiddester’s disembodied voice said, “Good. Show them in, Trout!”
Trout stepped aside and held the door for us. I followed Dehan in. The study wasn’t huge. It was no more than twenty feet square, with a leaded window at either end and a large fireplace in the middle, to the right of his desk. The window frames were heavy, solid beams of wood. The floors were bare boards, darkened and smoothed by the passage of centuries, and the ceiling was supported by massive wooden rafters. A low dresser held the obligatory decanters, and two bookcases held the necessary books. The room smelled of pipe tobacco and the chairs he indicated as we came in were ancient, cracked, extremely comfortable chesterfields. His face was drawn and colorless, but he attempted to smile.
“Dehan, Stone, please come in and sit. Can I offer you a drink? Perhaps a whiskey…?”
We told him that would do fine. He splashed a couple of inches into a couple of cut crystal tumblers that weighed about half a pound each and returned to his chair, behind the desk.
I began to speak, “Lord Chiddester…”
“Just Chiddester, please, I think we can dispense with the formalities.”
I nodded and smiled, and tried to get my mouth around it like it was a name. “Chiddester, I think we are going to be given our marching orders by DI Green before very long. I am not sure how helpful we can be to you.”
He waved my comment aside. “You don’t need his permission to stay in the country. And if you’re acting for me, you can stay as long as you like.”
“I appreciate the offer. But we do need to get back to work. Unfortunately, we answer to our chief…”
He smiled and there was a wicked edge to it that said he was used to getting what he wanted, and he liked it that way.
“Inspector John Newman, of the 43rd Precinct, isn’t it?” He laughed at my expression. “Don’t worry, Stone, all I ask is that you hear me out, and Fi, my wife.” The laughter drained from his face. “I’m very much afraid Green is galloping off on the wrong track on this thing.” He turned his eyes on Dehan and I noticed for the first time how blue they were, and how intense his stare was. “I want my daughter avenged, Dehan. You understand that, don’t you? She was everything to us. We’re a close family. Not given to public exhibitions, wailing and thrashing. But we were close. Are close. And this killer, whoever he is, has taken my daughter from me. I want him caught. And I don’t trust Green to do the job.”
“OK.” I sighed. “So what didn’t you tell us at your office this morning?”
He turned his eyes on me and for a moment, his face reminded me of a hawk, or an eagle. “I am conservative, right wing. I don’t give a damn what your politics are. That’s your business. But I am right wing. I believe, passionately, in democracy, small government and our ancient liberties. They are the same as your ancient liberties. You inherited them from us.” He paused, staring into his glass. “I despise Fascism, Socialism, Communism and Islam: any doctrine that robs an individual of his freedom. I may seem to be going ’round the houses.” He raised his eyes to look at me under his brows. “But these are facts you need to know and understand.”
He sipped his whiskey and seemed to organize his next thoughts while he savored it.
“I don’t hate these ideologies in an arbitrary fashion. I hate them because I have studied them in depth and I believe them to be evil and inhuman. I am nominally an Anglican, a Protestant, but I am probably an atheist and don’t actually give a damn about religion. I am not pro-Jewish.” He turned to gaze at Dehan. “I am pro-Israel, because I believe that in a world that is going steadily insane, Israel is a small bastion of sanity and civilization. I am not a racist. I despise German Nazism as much as I despise Arab Islam. There’s bugger all to tell between them, frankly. Is all that clear?”
“Abundantly.”
He looked at Dehan. She had her eyebrows raised, but she nodded.
He asked, “Can you live with it?”
She said, “It depends what you mean by ‘live’. What do you want us to do with it, beside understand it?”
“Nothing. Just understand it. Understand that and you start to understand Katie. Katie was the same. She and I had very much the same views. She was sound, immensely patriotic, not nationalistic in the European sense. Damned Europeans never could get anything right. It has nothing to do with being racially superior or any of that bloody nonsense. She just believed in England, and loved it.
“Like me, she deplored what the Communists and the Socialists have done to it, she deplored what the European Union has done to it, and she deplored the way one damned government after another has sold our country to Islam in exchange for oil. She was very outspoken, courageous, and I was very proud of her for that.”
I was listening hard, trying to sift through his barely controlled passions to find what he was actually driving at. I said, “Are you saying that you think she was killed because of her views?"
He shook his head. “Not directly.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
He stood and walked to the ancient, leaded window and stood looking out at the lawns and rosebushes outside. “There are people, on both sides of the House, socialists and conservatives, who will go to any lengths to bow to pressure from Islamic countries, who accommodate any number of immigrants and refugees, build any number of mosques and justify any number of atrocities, simply because they control most of the world’s oil reserves.” He paused and sipped his drink. “You’ve had scandals in your own country, as we have here, where political figures have been caught making arms deals in which British or American weapons have ended up in the hands of ISIS or the Taliban or Al Qaeda.”
He turned to face us. “But what Katie was worried about went a lot further. What had Katie terrified was that there are Al Qaeda cells in this country with close ties to Communist and Marxist parties that have, in turn, ties to the Labour Party, to the very establishment itself. Her project, as she called it, was to expose those ties, through a series of articles in a major, national paper, and wake the country up to what was happening in Parliament, in the Commons and the Lords.”
He paused, staring down at his feet. “Her theory was more radical than that. She claimed this sickness had spread all across Europe and the U.S.A. She may well be right, but her focus was England. And so is mine.”
Dehan winced. “That sounds pretty paranoid.”
He smiled at her without much humor. “If it were paranoia, Dehan, she would have committed suicide. But she didn’t. She was murdered.”
She stared at him, taking in what he’d said, then asked, “This was what she phoned you about the other night?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to discuss this in front of Green. He’d’ve thought I’d taken leave of my senses. I have no love of Islam, as you know, but at first, even I thought Katie was indulging in conspiracy theory nonsense. However, when she started showing me the evidence…”
I frowned. “What evidence?”
He paced over to the fireplace and stood with one hand resting on the massive beam that constituted the mantelpiece, the other holding his glass. He gazed down into the cold soot and said, “You’ve probably never heard of Justin Caulfield. He’s a shadow cabinet minister, dyed in the wool communist, all for disarmament, giving up our nuclear weapons, getting out of NATO, give the Falklands to the ruddy Argies. Unspeakable man. Managed to
get into the shadow cabinet and could conceivably become Prime Minister.
“Well, Katie gathered evidence…” He turned his head to look at me, “And I mean photographs, films, recordings, emails… the works, showing that Caulfield has close ties not just with the International Communist Party, but with local Marxist parties in the U.K. and with active commanders in Al Qaeda, and with an organization known as the ICP…”
Dehan said, “The Islamic Communist Party.”
He nodded at her. “ Exactly. Was there ever a more absurd or dangerous notion?”
I grunted. “I’m a little confused. We spoke to Sadiq Hassan today, just before coming here. He said your daughter was having an affair with someone he simply referred to as ‘a Jew’.” I shrugged. “But according to Sarah, Katie wasn’t seeing anybody, she was too involved with her work. On the other hand, according to you, she was seeing Sadiq as part of her investigation.” I spread my hands. “Can you clarify that? Have you any idea who Sadiq might be referring to?”
He made a face that suggested he wasn’t very interested in the question. Then he returned to his chair.
“You know the tragedy of this whole thing? I have a reputation around this country for being ‘pro-Jewish’ and ‘anti-Arab’. The fact is I have no idea, and even less interest, in what religions, faiths and ideologies the people I know adhere to. I know my wife is an Anglican because her father insisted we marry in an Anglican church. But ask me about any of my closest friends or family, I don’t know and I don’t care.
“On the rare occasions my daughter brought a chap home, all I wanted to know was, was he kind to her? Would he make her happy, and could he afford her? In that order.” He took a deep breath, held it and then blew out noisily. “But that hardly answers your question, does it? As far as I was aware, she was not seeing anyone in any serious way. All her focus was on her project, and within that, her target was Justin Caulfield. If I had to hazard a guess, I would have to say she was seeing somebody in Caulfield’s employ. But it is very unlikely that anyone in the Labour Party shadow cabinet would employ a Jew. They are deeply and endemically anti-Semitic.”
Dehan was chewing her lip. She said unexpectedly, “The Third Reich was about as anti-Semitic as you can get, but Hitler was part Jewish. He just kept it off his résumé.”
I smiled. “Fair point.”
There was a tap at the door. It opened and Trout stepped in.
“M’Lord, M’Lady has risen and intends to come down to the drawing room for a cocktail before dinner. She asked me to inform you she will be down in approximately ten minutes.”
Chiddester nodded. “Thank you, Trout.” Trout withdrew and Chiddester almost managed a smile. “Shall we take our drinks to the drawing room, then? My wife might be able to give you a different perspective from my own. Sometimes she tells me I only knew one side of Katie.” He paused, and just for a moment, there was a glimpse of the intolerable pain he was living through. “If that is so,” he said, “It is something to be regretted. We should know everything about our children, and we should never outlive them.”
He stood abruptly, went and opened the door, and he and I followed Dehan out into the drawing room. The drapes were still open, as were the leaded windows, and a pleasant breeze was coming in, scented with roses and freshly mowed grass. Outside, you could hear the long, complicated song of a blackbird trailing out into the fading evening light.
Chiddester stood in front of the cold fireplace. It was huge, large enough for him to stand inside, and suddenly, despite his strong, vigorous frame, I had the odd feeling that he had somehow aged and shrunk, even since the morning. He gazed down at the large, cast iron grate and said, suddenly, “I should have stopped her. I should have told her it was too dangerous. I should have refused to help.”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew his feelings only too intimately, but I had nothing to offer him as a remedy. I had never found one. I had never found redemption for Hattie’s death. I found instead my attention riveted to the endless song of the blackbird, calling into the encroaching dark.
Dehan watched him a moment, then said, “Could you have stopped her?”
He looked around, sharply, frowning, then seemed to think about what she’d asked him. “Probably not, but I should have tried.”
She shrugged. “Speaking as a daughter, who lost her father when I was only small, what kept me going, what still keeps me going, is the knowledge that he and I were on the same page.” She hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Maybe I’m impertinent, Chiddester, but we all die. We all have to die sooner or later. But we don’t have to have somebody who connects with us, who knows who we are in this world, and what we are about, and doesn’t try to stop you. You two were lucky. You had that, and she took that with her.”
He frowned at her for a long moment. He looked almost shocked, affronted, but not by Dehan or what she’d said; by life, by a world that could do this to him. He nodded a couple of times, then turned and marched to the door, opened it and strode out.
Dehan wiped her eye with her fingers. When she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. “I thought he didn’t care. He does, though.”
“That was nice, what you said.”
She came over and placed her fist gently on my chest. “No one gets out alive, Stone. We know that. So we have to make every moment count. You can’t save anybody, not really. But you can help make it worthwhile.”
“Are you going philosophical on me, Dehan?”
She didn’t smile. “That’s not philosophy, Stone. It’s just an attitude. It’s been a hell of a honeymoon. It makes you think. What is each moment worth? How do you measure its value? Katie, what was she? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? If she had finished her article and published it, and changed the face of British politics, would her life have been more valuable than it is now? Or would it have been more valuable if she had left her research, and lived to a ripe old age and made her parents, her husband and her children happy? How do you measure the value of a life, Stone?”
Outside, the blackbird went quiet, and inch by inch, the dark closed in. I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
TEN
The door opened and a woman stood framed in the ancient Tudor archway. She was in her early fifties, attractive, nicely curvaceous, dressed in a white satin evening gown with a single string of pearls at her throat. Her face was attractive too, but she was drawn and pale, and the makeup around her eyes could not quite conceal the redness or the swelling from where she had been crying. She stood with extraordinary dignity and smiled at us. Her voice, when she spoke, was husky, slightly nasal, as though she had a cold.
“Have you been left alone? That really is too bad of Chiddie. I shall scold him when he gets back.”
I stepped forward. “Lady Chiddester. How do you do? I am John Stone. May I present my wife, Carmen?”
She laughed and it was a surprisingly earthy sound, almost like a gurgle of pleasure. “Oh please, we are friends here, and at home. Call me Fiona, or better still, Fi. All that Downton Abbey stuff gets so tiresome, don’t you agree?” The question was directed at Carmen, who smiled and took her hand but didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
So she grinned and said, “Yes, very tiresome.” She turned her grin on me. “Isn’t that what I’m always telling Mo? ‘Enough with the Downton Abbey stuff, already!’”
Lady Chiddester, Fi, hooted and smacked Dehan’s arm. “I’m going to like you, you’re naughty! Now, do you think you can persuade your gorgeous husband to fix me a very strong martini, New York style?”
Dehan winked at me. “Make it happen, Stone. Two drinks for the naughty girls.”
I found the drinks tray and started mixing a dry martini with what I told myself was a Bronx kicker, but was simply an extra dash of vodka. I figured she needed it. Meanwhile, she linked her arm through Dehan’s and led her to the sofa.
“I suppose Chiddie has told you everything…” They sat and Fi made a noise that
was wistful. “People of our generation don’t really show our feelings much, you know. It’s not considered the done thing. At least in our circle. God alone knows what everybody else does. I know you Americans positively encourage it. Perhaps you’re right to, I don’t know, but it does make it awfully hard to cope if you’re blubbering all over the place, doesn’t it?”
I handed them their drinks and sat in a comfortable old chair opposite.
She smiled her thanks. “Life doesn’t get any easier, does it, just because we feel entitled to be upset?”
“I guess it doesn’t. Lord Chiddester suggested that you might have a perspective on Katie that he lacked. If you feel up to…”
“Oh, goodness, with a couple of your martinis inside me, I’ll be up to anything. For heaven’s sake, don’t be kind.” She gazed at the open window for a moment. The last of the light had finally gone beyond the horizon, leaving only an inch of pale glow behind the inky silhouettes of the trees. “Perspective?” she said, vaguely. “I know she would have done anything on Earth to please her father. She adored him.” She gave a small, distant smile. “Poor love, she never realized that he felt exactly the same way about her.” She blinked and seemed to return from a distant place, then turned her watery eyes on me. “No man was ever good enough, naturally, for either of them. He is…” She sighed. “He is a hard act to follow. There is an awful lot of him, and you tend to get it all at once, without let up. Most men sort of wilt in his presence.”
I thought of Harry and couldn’t help smiling. “You were aware of her project?”
“Yes.” Her face said she had found it distasteful. “She could have done so many things. But they were both obsessed with this national thing, England had to be saved. Not Britain, you understand, Scotland and Wales could sod off. England had to be saved… And I suppose they were right, to some extent. But we have paid such a heavy price, and what have we achieved?”