The Firebird's Feather

by Marjorie Eccles

  Though still haggard and dejected, Challoner, at home in these familiar surroundings, seemed slightly more pulled together than the man they had last interviewed and was more prepared, it seemed to Gaines, to be co-operative. The initial shock appeared to have worn off. He had pushed aside the papers he was working on to make room for the tray of coffee when it arrived, and said as he poured, ‘I hope it’s good news you have for me, gentlemen.’ His sad-looking eyes looked even sadder when Gaines shook his head. ‘So, how can I help you, then?’

  ‘It’s just that a few other questions have occurred to us, Mr Challoner, which need a little clarification.’

  ‘More questions?’ A frown of displeasure now. ‘You kept me at the police station when I was in a distressed state and questioned me. For several hours. I don’t have any more time to waste. I have a client to see in half an hour and papers to prepare before then.’

  ‘I understand your time is valuable but we need more information if we are going to find out who killed your wife.’

  ‘Then please be as quick as you can.’ His fingers began tapping the leather desktop.

  ‘I’ll get straight to the point, sir. You will recall that Detective Sergeant Inskip and I were both present at your home when you opened your safe and discovered your pistol was missing.’

  ‘Of course I recall. It was a shock not to find it there.’

  ‘The pistol and what else?’

  His foot jerked. ‘I’m sorry? I don’t believe I’m following you very well.’

  ‘I’ll try to be clearer. To be blunt, what I’m saying is, we don’t believe you’ve been telling us the truth.’

  For a moment, there was silence. ‘I’ll forget you said that, Inspector. I repeat – the pistol wasn’t there. As you saw for yourselves.’

  ‘When I said the truth, Mr Challoner, I meant the whole truth.’ Challoner frowned again, reaching out for the loose pile of papers on his desk and making a show of squaring them together. ‘On your own admission, no one else but yourself had access to the keys for the safe. No one except your wife, that is. You knew she could have taken your keys while you were asleep and opened the safe.’

  ‘Why should she do that? You’re assuming she needed a gun for some reason. But I had offered to buy her one. I thought she should carry one as a means of self-protection, and she flatly refused. I’ve told you this before. She was opposed to the use of firearms – for whatever reason.’

  ‘All right. Leaving the gun aside, what else did you keep in the safe?’

  He added more sugar to his coffee, stirred it round and round. ‘As I said then, papers, deeds, insurance certificates and so on. And my wife’s jewellery … not her everyday stuff, her trinkets, she kept all those in her bedroom. The sapphire necklace I gave her when Kitty was born, her pearls, the diamonds inherited from my mother, they were kept in the safe – where they still are, as far as I am aware.’

  ‘And when you opened the safe in our presence, you didn’t expect to see anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mr Challoner, I still don’t believe you are telling the truth.’

  Challoner was a soft-living man. His life hitherto hadn’t prepared him for this sort of situation and he was all too evidently uneasy in it, unable to deal with it without discomfort. He had blustered his way through when they had previously questioned him, perhaps even lied barefacedly, but he seemed to have exhausted his capability to do either. He was avoiding looking at them, and had fixed his gaze on the black and white etchings on the wall opposite, evidently finding Wapping Wharf, the warehouses and tumbledown tenement buildings of consuming interest. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘You could start by telling us what else was in the safe.’

  A heavy, black marble clock on the mantelpiece measured the seconds. Gaines leaned back, arms folded, prepared to wait. The room was stifling in the summer heat but the window was open only a crack at the top, through which came the sounds of everyday life being carried on outside: distant traffic, the shouts of a street hawker, the trundling of a barrow on cobbles. Challoner pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow but still didn’t speak.

  ‘Don’t you want us to find out who killed your wife, Mr Challoner?’

  At least that got home. ‘What sort of question is that? What exactly do you mean by it?’

  ‘I mean you can tell us whatever it is you are keeping from us, and we can remain friends, or we can take the other way. What else was in the safe?’

  Further seconds passed. ‘I saw no need to mention it,’ he admitted at last. ‘It was something which could only have been of interest to my wife.’

  ‘So there was something taken, then. Without your knowledge? Secretly, by your wife? Appropriating your keys to do so?’

  ‘The icon belonged to her and she had a perfect right to remove it if she wished.’

  ‘An icon?’ Gaines looked as baffled as Inskip, who had only the vaguest idea what an icon was. ‘A holy picture, like the one upstairs in Mrs Challoner’s bedroom?’

  ‘Just like it. The one you’re referring to is only a copy. We kept the original locked up and had it copied, for safety’s sake.’ He leaned over the desk, looking down, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘The original was brought from Russia,’ he said at last, ‘and given to Lydia by her father. It was of great sentimental value to her.’

  Gaines wondered how many people would have known the difference, copy or original, and why it had mattered. Few people could have seen the icon, since it hadn’t been publicly displayed but tucked away in Lydia’s bedroom. But after a moment he said, ‘Can you think of why she should have taken it from the safe without telling you?’

  ‘To sell, of course. She had – certain expenses, my wife. Clothes she’d paid a bit too much for, perhaps. Bridge debts.’ He hesitated. ‘Not that she was a gambler, not in that sense of the word. She liked a flutter on the cards, that was all. But she probably owed more money for other things than she wanted me to know about.’

  ‘How valuable was this icon?’

  ‘I don’t know, precisely. These things are … it meant more to her than money.’

  ‘Yet you believe she would have sold it?’

  Challoner shrugged helplessly.

  Unless she owed more than she had noted in those weekly personal accounts of hers in her diary, this didn’t add up. ‘All right, she took the icon without your knowing, even though you were bound to notice its absence sooner or later – but why take the pistol?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know why she took either. The icon was a family heirloom, from Russia. And the gun – I’ve told you, she hated them. If she was the one who took either …’ His voice trailed off. Even he was finding it hard to maintain the pretence that anyone else could have opened the safe without his knowledge. He looked desperate, and there was something more behind it. Fear? ‘Do you think I’ve slept since I found out, wondering why?’

  ‘Where would she go to sell a valuable thing like that?’

  ‘I have no idea. I’m an absolute philistine on art matters,’ he admitted with a deprecating shrug, though the slight edge to his tone made him sound defensive about it. ‘Why don’t you ask my partner, Mr Estrabon? He’s the one who knows about that sort of thing. He used to give my wife advice. I believe he was the one who advised us where to have it copied.’

  ‘Your acquaintance with him goes back a long way, he tells us.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to him? And his wife?’ Gaines nodded. ‘Yes, since schooldays.’

  Could Estrabon have sold the icon for Lydia Challoner? Or even simply advised her where to sell it, in what must be a fairly specialised market? If so, he might possibly know why she’d been anxious to part with it.

  Inskip was looking as though he wanted to ask a question. Gaines nodded. ‘Did your wife happen to leave a will, sir?’

  ‘A will?’ Challoner was taken aback. ‘She was a young woman, she didn’t expect to die! I don’t suppose making a will entered her hea
d for one moment. More to the point, she had nothing to leave, except her jewellery, which of course is now Kitty’s. As far as money went, she only had her monthly allowance. Anything more that she needed, I was happy to give her.’ Seeming to have forgotten what he’d said a minute before about her not wanting him to know how much she had spent, he added, ‘I gave her everything she ever wanted.’

  ‘Including money for works of art that Mr Estrabon advised her about?’ Gaines asked.

  ‘Including that, naturally. I was pleased to do it.’

  ‘What about the income from her writing?’

  Challoner managed a wry smile. ‘Pin money, Inspector. You’d be surprised.’

  Gaines stood up. ‘All right, Mr Challoner, we’ll leave you, for now. Thank you for being honest with us. At least this is getting us somewhere.’

  ‘It is?’ He looked baffled. ‘It seems to me things are getting more complicated than ever.’

  ‘That’s often the case when they start to unravel. That’s when you have to start sorting the wheat from the chaff.’

  Twenty

  Marcus hadn’t expected he would have to talk to the police yet again.

  This morning, when they arrived at his sister’s flat, two of them this time, the nattily dressed sergeant accompanied by the more soberly attired DCI Gaines, they arrived just as he was finishing his breakfast. They refused coffee and were taken into the drawing room. Marcus was bracing himself for more questions about the shooting but it wasn’t about that Gaines began to speak, or not directly. ‘Certain facts about this case have come to our notice, Mr Villiers, and it seems we shall have to talk further.’

  Marcus was instantly on the alert. When he had asked to be relieved of that much-regretted commission laid upon him by the Home Secretary, letting it be known he had personal reasons for no longer being able to carry out such an assignment, no one had tried to persuade him otherwise and he’d assumed his involvement in the matter would be, if not entirely forgotten, then discreetly put aside. Then the unthinkable had happened: Lydia had been shot dead – while he was accompanying her. After that he had braced himself to face questions. There was, he realised, no use fooling himself that any suspicions hanging over Lydia and her possible connections with Russian anarchists would have been dropped simply because he, Marcus, had declined to follow them through. The Home Office would have continued to keep tabs on her one way or another. Communication between them and the Special Branch regarding any anarchist activities was no doubt immediate and therefore his own involvement would have been known to the police and even monitored almost from the start. They’d probably known about the man she had met at the Royal Academy, too, which meant these two Scotland Yard men also did, now.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘have you come to tell me you know who shot Mrs Challoner?’

  Gaines gave him a level glance, then shook his head. ‘These matters are rarely solved so quickly, I’m afraid. But we do have reason to believe Mrs Challoner might possibly have connections – however indirectly – with these Russian gangs that have been causing us so much bother lately. We’re here because we now understand you can help us more than we first thought.’ He sounded patient but prepared to be implacable.

  ‘Help us’ … ‘patriotism’ … ‘duty’ … where have I heard that before? Marcus asked himself. He was right, of course they must know about Lydia’s mysterious admirer. His own suspicions surfaced. Was that how she had got herself murdered – by falling in love with one who had persuaded her to get involved in matters beyond her control? He had brought into the drawing room with him the coffee he had been drinking when they arrived, and he stretched a hand out for the cup, but it had already grown a disgusting grey skin. He pushed it away. He was torn between a strong desire to be open and help the police and his loyalty to Kitty – besides a loyalty to Lydia’s memory, not wanting to smirch her name, for her own sake as well as Kitty’s. ‘How do you think I can help? I’m as much at sea as you over the shooting.’

  ‘Maybe we should leave that aside for the moment,’ Gaines said. ‘The matter is growing more complicated. We’ve learnt that a valuable item is missing from the Challoner home, which could have some bearing. In any case, it rather alters the investigation from when we first began it.’

  Did that mean they didn’t know, then, about her supposed connection with subversive activities? Or just that they were not pursuing that line for the moment? Marcus waited, feeling that whatever he said was going to be the wrong thing. The valuable item Gaines was referring to was unlikely to be anything else but the missing icon Kitty had told him about and he was relieved its disappearance had come to light: she’d now be absolved from the need to disobey her father and tell the police – unless the reason they knew was because she’d already done so, he thought, his stomach lurching uneasily at the idea she might have been bamboozled into it by these two. He didn’t think she would have gone to them voluntarily, after promising Louis she would keep to herself what he had told her. They must have found out about it some other way.

  ‘What do you know about icons, Mr Villiers?’ Gaines asked.

  ‘Icons? Less than nothing,’ Marcus answered guardedly. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s an icon we’re talking about. A valuable item that should have been in Mr Challoner’s safe, but like the gun that was also kept there, it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Some of these icons aren’t much to look at – to people like me, with an uneducated eye, that is – but apparently they can be much sought after. They can change hands for considerable sums, and this one was no exception.’ He kept his eyes on Marcus.

  He suspects that I know about it being missing, Marcus thought, but he’s keeping his suspicion to himself, for some reason. Could it be that Kitty had told these detectives she’d discussed its disappearance with him? He didn’t think so – much less that she’d told them about the other things she was worried over – the cross and that damned drawing. It hadn’t been until she told him about the other half of the wolf being in that box of her mother’s that he’d started to feel any unease about the half that had been sent to him. Sent to him. He had been thinking about that a lot and the more he thought about what it might mean, the less he liked it. ‘Do you really think it was connected with Mrs Challoner being killed – the icon, I mean?’

  ‘Who knows? It was her own property and her husband seems to think she took it from the safe herself.’

  So that was it – Louis Challoner had decided to come clean. ‘If it belonged to her then surely she was entitled to remove it – if that’s what she did.’

  ‘It certainly looks like that’s what must have happened – there’s nothing to suggest the safe was broken into, and only she had access to Mr Challoner’s key. It might have made things easier for us if he’d seen fit to tell us this right at the first, but people don’t, I’m afraid.’ He looked Marcus straight in the eye. ‘Understandable, perhaps, that he wouldn’t want it to be thought he didn’t trust his wife. But what did she do with it? The thing is, you see, we haven’t been able to find it – and so far, we’ve come across no trace of it being sold.’

  Did they think he, Marcus, had anything to do with it? That was so far-fetched he didn’t feel a reply was called for. Gaines let the silence continue then he said, ‘Look, Mr Villiers, let’s not beat about the bush. We’re fully aware that some time ago you were detailed by certain people to keep an eye on Mrs Challoner.’

  Keep an eye on her! That was rich. ‘Then you must also know I failed in my duty.’

  ‘That’s as maybe. In all the time you knew her, you never saw anything which led you to believe she was in touch with the radical politics emanating from Russia?’

  ‘Mrs Challoner was not a political animal. She was a woman very much concerned with the rights of the individual, particularly those exiled from what she considered her homeland. But she was not actively involved with any of them.’ He hoped they believed him. He hoped fervently it was true.

  Inskip slid his
hand into his inside breast pocket and withdrew a folded newspaper – so slim it hadn’t marred the contours of his tightly tailored jacket – and opened it. Britannia Voice. Merely a four-page spread. ‘Ever seen this publication before, Mr Villiers?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, but never read it.’

  ‘A left-wing paper, edited by Jonathan Devenish, Mrs Challoner’s nephew.’

  ‘Yes, I’m aware of that.’

  ‘During the course of your acquaintance with Mrs Challoner, did she ever say anything about contributing to the paper?’

  ‘No. And I have to say I find the suggestion rather offensive. Your investigations into Mrs Challoner must be a long way off the mark if you think she’d anything to do with this sort of stuff.’

  ‘No offence meant, Mr Villiers. But we’ll leave you to think it over.’

  ‘You can keep the paper and have a read of it,’ the sergeant said as Gaines stood up. ‘You might find the contents interesting.’

  When they’d gone, Marcus sat and thought. What had they really wanted, or expected from him? He thought perhaps they hadn’t known themselves, that it had just been a fishing trip. They certainly didn’t seem to be progressing very far towards the nub of the problem – finding out who had killed Lydia.

  He opened the newspaper they’d left with him and read all of it, all four pages, everything written on the fuzzily printed, poor quality paper. He read the advertisements as well as the articles with blaring headlines: one urging a support of the dockers’ strike by other workers; one reporting on talks about another proposed strike by railway workers; an article about the redistribution of wealth; details of a soup kitchen which had been set up in a chapel to feed children, the elderly and the destitute. A good deal of space had also been given to an obituary of the great writer Leo Tolstoy. He had died last November to universal sorrow from those who had revered and admired him for his pacifist and anarchist beliefs, the renunciation of his wealth and position, and his support of the movement to free the peasants in Russia. There was a grainy memorial photograph of the bearded writer, copies of which were for sale. Running alongside were articles on the several experimental communities which had sprung up in Britain, founded on the same principles of simple communal living he had expounded.