The Age of Treachery

by Gavin Scott

  “What’s happened?” said a man in carpet slippers, the evening paper still in his hand.

  “Looks as if one of them girls tried to kill herself,” said a woman in curlers.

  “Oh, one of them,” said a man in a singlet.

  Forrester looked from one spectator to another, and wanted to knock the lot of them back to their frowsty little lives, but as the red tide of anger welled up in him, he felt a movement against his forearm, where it was hard against Alice Hayley’s diaphragm.

  A spasm.

  Without thinking he grabbed a handful of snow and slathered it over her face, and as the shock of the cold hit her she drew in a torn, ragged breath, and suddenly she was retching, and the spectators were stepping back as she vomited into the snow.

  And then the ambulance was coming, and the ambulance men were taking her off his hands, and in the distance he could hear the clanging of the police bells. Before they could get there Forrester darted up the stairs and back into Alice Hayley’s grim little room, turned off the gas tap on the fire, flung up the window and stood there, gulping in fresh evening air, before he looked at her desk.

  On which lay the note. A beat, and then he picked it up.

  To Whom it May Concern,

  I, Alice Hayley, wish to confess to the murder of Dr. David Lyall on 13th January this year. He had been my lover; he left me for Margaret Clark. I stabbed him in a jealous rage. I know it was wrong, and that I must atone. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for what I did, and I hope you will forgive me.

  Alice Hayley

  Forrester gasped. He had been on the wrong track all along. It had not been Dorfmann, or anyone he had sent who had killed David Lyall. It had had nothing to do with Norse manuscripts, or wartime treachery.

  Or Gordon Clark.

  Suddenly he was exuberant, as if a current of air had caught him and wafted him upwards out of the void. His friend was innocent! Gordon was going to be released – and Forrester was going to be able to fulfil his promise to him. He was still holding the note when Barber came into the room.

  “Well,” he said. “What an interesting surprise.”

  Forrester stared at him.

  “Normally I wouldn’t come out for something like this,” said Barber, “but I happened to be finishing up some paperwork when the call came in. And of course I recognised the young lady’s name.” A beat. “What’s your excuse, Dr. Forrester?”

  “Miss Hayley sent me a note, asking me to come.”

  “Is that the note?”

  “No, I’ve just found this, on her desk. It’s a confession.” And he offered it to the inspector.

  Barber raised a hand to stop him, and gestured for Forrester to put the note back down on the desk. “There are rules for dealing with evidence, Dr. Forrester,” he said, “and you’ve just broken several of them. Which is why it’s best to leave detective work to the professionals.”

  Only then did he step over to the desk and peer down at the note.

  “Ah,” he said. “Interesting.”

  “So Gordon Clark is innocent after all,” said Forrester.

  Barber turned and regarded him steadily. “Provided it’s genuine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean provided that Alice Hayley wrote it. Provided that she was the person who left it here.”

  “You know she did!”

  “All I know, Dr. Forrester, is that I came into the room and found you holding it.”

  “Because I found it here!”

  “So you say.”

  “This is ridiculous! The landlady was with me when we broke into the room. If I hadn’t been here Alice Hayley might be dead.”

  “May already be dead,” said Barber. “People have been known to die on the way to the hospital.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Well, look at it from my point of view, sir. You have been making valiant – not to say desperate – efforts to prove your friend’s innocence. Now a young lady, previously not a suspect, is found unconscious with her head over an unlit gas fire and a note beside her admitting to the crime – and there you are, in the room. How do I know you didn’t make her write the note and force her head over the gas yourself?”

  Forrester gaped at him, hardly able to comprehend what he was being accused of, and then gathered his wits.

  “Because five minutes ago I was outside the front door with the landlady,” he said, “asking her for permission to come in.”

  “There is a window,” said Barber. “And I see it’s open.”

  “I opened it to let air in.”

  “Perhaps you did. Perhaps you opened it earlier to gain admittance to the room, attack Alice Hayley and plant your note before going back outside and knocking at the front door to speak to the landlady.”

  “This is pure fantasy. I saved Alice Hayley’s life.”

  “As I say, that remains to be seen. In the meantime, Dr. Forrester, I’d like you to return to your college and remain there until I have time to interview you again.”

  “You are completely wrong about this,” said Forrester.

  “So you have been telling me, sir,” said Barber, “since this whole affair began. But perhaps this time I am right.”

  And he turned back to the note. As he did so, a burly constable appeared in the doorway. Forrester pushed past him and went out into the darkness.

  27

  QUESTIONS RAISED BY A SUICIDE

  Forrester was in a state of shock when he got back to his rooms. He had been within an ace of getting Gordon Clark out of prison, and by his very presence in Alice Hayley’s room, now risked destroying the very exoneration the girl had been trying to provide. Damnation! Then he tried to reassure himself: as soon as Alice Hayley could speak, she’d say he had nothing to do either with her trying to commit suicide, or writing the note. Things would be back on track.

  But what if she didn’t regain consciousness? What if, as Barber had darkly hinted, she relapsed and died? Not only would Gordon remain in prison but he himself might well become a murder suspect.

  And yet – what else could he have done?

  Except, perhaps, read her first note straight away, and gone round to see her immediately, before any of this could have happened.

  And then, he thought, if Sitwell hadn’t failed to turn up for his tutorial, he would not have gone round there at all, and Alice Hayley would be dead. And her note admitting her guilt found by someone else, and thus exactly the piece of evidence needed to save Gordon Clark.

  Forrester swore softly. In the last twenty-four hours, ever since the college lights had gone out, everything had gone wrong. He and Harrison had made themselves look like fools, he had alienated the Master and utterly destroyed his credibility with Barber.

  Damn, damn, damn!

  He took off his coat and flung it on the sofa, and as he did so he saw the envelope that contained Alice Hayley’s first note, the one asking him to come and see her, lying where he had dropped it. He picked it up and was about to open it when there was a knock at the door and Harrison appeared.

  Forrester looked at him without enthusiasm. “Hello, Harrison,” he said. Harrison took his ammunition bag off his shoulder, fished inside and brought out something shrouded in brown paper.

  “I thought you might need this,” he said, and unwrapped a bottle of Chianti.

  “I’m not sure I’m in the mood, old chap,” said Forrester.

  “That’s why I thought you’d need it,” said Harrison implacably, taking out a corkscrew. Forrester watched expressionlessly as Harrison filled two glasses and pressed one of them into his hand.

  To his surprise, the wine wasn’t actually too bad. In fact, as he rolled it around in his mouth, he felt as if he was tasting the warmth of the long-gone Italian summers.

  “Here’s to better days,” said Harrison.

  “Yes,” said Forrester, wryly. “There have to be some, at some point.”

  And he told Harrison what had hap
pened on Chalfont Road, and of Barber’s accusation when he had found him there.

  “That man is the biggest fool on God’s earth,” said Harrison, and it did Forrester’s heart good to hear.

  “Thank you for that,” he said. “I was beginning to think I might have done it.”

  “No,” said Harrison, grinning. “Not your style. But tell me this, do you think the confession was genuine?”

  “I have no idea,” said Forrester. “I’d just assumed it was.”

  “Well Barber may be only half wrong,” said Harrison.

  “What do you mean?” said Forrester.

  “Well, you may not have faked the confession,” he said, “but somebody might have. For example, what about the handwriting? Was that the same as on the note you got?”

  “I don’t know. Actually I was just about to have a look at it.” And he turned back to the envelope.

  But when he opened the envelope again the letter was gone. “Perhaps I put it down,” he said. So he and Harrison searched the room, and all his pockets, but there was still no sign of it. “I might have dropped it,” said Forrester. “On the way to Chalfont Road or when I was carrying her down the stairs or something.”

  “You might have,” said Harrison, “but consider this possibility: somebody came into your rooms today, took the note, and used it to imitate Alice Hayley’s handwriting when they concocted her confession.”

  Forrester stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “You’re saying somebody tried to murder her and make it look as if she’d committed suicide?”

  “I’m saying it’s a possibility. After all, if you were the murderer of David Lyall and felt that the net was closing in on you, what better move than to have someone else confess to it and then conveniently kill themselves so they couldn’t retract their confession?”

  “You’d have to be a pretty devious sort of bastard to come up with something like that.”

  “Well, Dr. Forrester,” said Harrison mildly, refilling their glasses, “don’t all the facts suggest that we are dealing with a pretty devious bastard?”

  “But why?” Forrester said at last. “If we assume that whoever murdered Lyall also tried to pin it on Alice Hayley – why did he do it?”

  “Or she.”

  “Yes, alright, or she. But what had they to gain? Gordon Clark is already in prison; the case against him is, as far as we know, as solid as ever. Why would the murderer want another suspect?” He noticed a change in Harrison’s expression. “Why are you looking like that?”

  “That pronoun started me thinking,” said Harrison.

  “She?”

  “What other suspect might that apply to?”

  “Well, the only other woman… no, that’s ridiculous. It was Margaret Clark who begged me to save Gordon.”

  “If Alice Hayley had died and the note had been found by someone else, that would have saved Dr. Clark. And ensured nobody blamed his wife.”

  Forrester looked at him narrowly.

  “For killing Lyall?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What motive did Margaret Clark have to kill David Lyall?” asked Forrester – but he already knew the answer.

  “Perhaps he was going to ditch her,” said Harrison.

  “Do we have any evidence that was the case?”

  “No, but it’s a possibility, isn’t it? You know what put it in my mind? Perhaps he’d got tired of Margaret Clark and wanted to move on. And I think it shouldn’t be too difficult to find out if she visited your rooms today.”

  At which point the porter knocked on the door. “Telephone call for you, Dr. Forrester,” he said, with a dark look at Harrison. He had clearly not yet forgiven him for blacking out the college the night before.

  “Who is it?” said Forrester.

  “A Major MacLean, sir,” said Piggot, and Forrester got up.

  “I’ll come down,” he said.

  There was a small fire burning in Piggot’s grate, and a half-drunk cup of tea beside a late edition of the Oxford Mail, open at the sporting pages. The receiver lay beside the visitors’ book on the scarred wooden counter. Forrester picked it up.

  “Forrester here,” he said.

  “Got something for you,” said MacLean. “From that photograph.”

  “Excellent,” said Forrester. “What is it?”

  “Rather not say over the phone. Can you come up to town tomorrow?” Forrester tried to bring his academic calendar to the forefront of his mind.

  “I think so,” he said. “Late morning?”

  “Eleven-thirty a.m. would suit me perfectly,” said MacLean. “Come to the War Office and ask for me at the front desk,” and hung up.

  * * *

  Harrison, needless to say, was fascinated to hear the details of MacLean’s telephone call, and Forrester knew he would have gone to London with him at the slightest excuse; but he also knew MacLean would be much less forthcoming if an outsider was present. “I’ll tell you what I’ve found out as soon as I get back,” he said. “And perhaps in the meantime you can check on Margaret Clark’s movements yesterday.”

  He was relieved to find the Master was not at High Table that night, and though in other circumstances he would have found it tedious to sit beside Alan Norton and hear him wax lyrical about the shortcomings of the British builder and the problems of getting the Lady Tower back to its pre-war condition when no-one seemed to feel any sense of urgency about it but himself, tonight it was vaguely soothing: the clatter of a mountain stream over rocks, monotonous and meaningless.

  “You know how often the Master has bothered to come and inspect the works?” asked Norton, rhetorically. “Once. Just once have I been able to get him up that tower to look at the state of it, and since then I have had no help from him whatever.”

  “I daresay he has other things on his mind,” said Forrester.

  “If this was Russia,” said Norton darkly, “those repairs would have been finished in a week.”

  “If this was Russia,” said Forrester, “those builders would have been shot.”

  “Yes,” said Norton, “and they would have bloody well deserved it.”

  And as he said these words Forrester suddenly looked at the man as if for the first time, and saw him not as a victim, not as a figure of fun, but as a coiled spring of resentment and anger. A coiled spring that could be released at any time.

  And might, perhaps, despite his carefully constructed alibi, have been unleashed on the night David Lyall had met his death.

  In fact, thought Forrester, if David Lyall had been killed on Alan Norton’s beloved Lady Tower and not in Gordon Clark’s rooms, he would have been certain the murderer was this man sitting beside him, spitting venom at the inefficiency of the British working class whose interests he so assiduously championed.

  28

  LUNCH AT THE CAFÉ ROYALE

  The fog had returned to London as Forrester arrived at Paddington, and the bus that took him to Whitehall moved so slowly and uncertainly through the murk, its fog lights casting a sickly yellow sheen into the grey vapour, that all it seemed to want to do was curl up and go to sleep. Even the vast bulk of the War Ministry was almost invisible beneath the shroud of filthy air, and the sergeant at the front desk was coughing painfully as he wrote Forrester’s name in a ledger so large it might have been used by St. Peter to list the souls entering the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not have Forrester escorted to MacLean’s office, as he had expected, but asked him to wait, and when MacLean came down the stairs, moving with his usual brisk efficiency, he beckoned Forrester to follow him down a further set of steps, leading into the bowels of the building.

  “They’ve got everything set up down here,” said MacLean, as he guided his guest along concrete corridors devoid even of the War Ministry’s beloved brown paint. Forrester remembered his sergeant’s advice when he had first joined up. “The rule for surviving in this army, sonny boy, is if it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t, pai
nt it.”

  The corridor turned and turned again and the ceiling became lower and lower until finally MacLean opened an unmarked door and Forrester found himself in a long room with very little overhead illumination and small, concentrated pools of light over every desk, at which sat analysts peering into curious pieces of wooden apparatus incorporating thick chunks of magnifying glass. With Forrester in his wake MacLean strode past desk after desk until he stopped beside a prematurely balding young man whose spectacles were almost as thick as the magnifier through which he was peering. “Bannister, this is Dr. Forrester, from Barnard College. I’d like you to show him the Bjornsfjord material.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bannister and began shuffling myopically through the piles of photos on his desk.

  “It was Bannister who spotted the 9th SS Panzer Division at Arnhem,” said MacLean conversationally. “Unfortunately no-one believed him. If they had, the war might have been shorter by six months.” Bannister’s ears went red, but he said nothing and finally came up with the photo album print Forrester had allowed MacLean to copy.

  “Not much to be learnt from this as it stood, sir.” Bannister glanced up at him sideways, and Forrester felt vaguely offended, until he realised this was just the theatrical preamble. Stuck down here in this windowless cave, Bannister probably seized on any opportunity for theatre that came his way. “But this is what we got when we blew it up by a factor of five.” And Bannister brought out a foolscap-sized sheet of photographic paper and slid it under the magnifier.

  As Forrester leaned into the lenses it was as if he was inside that day in 1937, on the cliff path leading down to the water, looking across the fjord at the two men rowing towards the shore. He could almost feel the heat of the summer sun, and the coolness of the water as the dinghy cut through it, almost hear the flap of the sails of the big yacht from which the men were rowing.

  A shiver ran through him as he realised Sophie might have stood on that very spot, might indeed have taken the photograph, as she waited for her husband’s guests to arrive. Sophie. Suddenly he could feel the touch of her fingers on his cheek, the softness of her flesh under his. The expression in her eyes when they had parted. And then he was concentrating again, and realising that the face of the man in the prow was now perfectly identifiable.