Tyburn looked at Haldean. ‘Your uncle told me you’ve got a flair for working out the truth. Work out the truth of this business and it’ll be one of the best things you’ve ever done.’
Haldean avoided his eyes. Work out the truth? He’d done that and the reward was bitter indeed.
Sitting in the garden of the Lamb and Flag, Isabelle picked up her glass and swirled it round, seeing how the liquid danced a reflection on the underneath of the sycamore leaves spreading above her head. She sipped her gin-and-ginger thoughtfully, looking at her cousin. He seemed drawn and unhappy. Tired, as well, which wasn’t surprising after driving to London and back twice in two days.
It was Monday morning. Ernest Stafford, the richer by five pounds, had been taken back to Battersea the previous day. Her father, after refusing to believe Lawrence was Tyburn until he heard it from his own lips, had first sulked, then badgered Jack to prove that Tyburn was an innocent man. Marguerite wouldn’t consider any other possibility and was only stopped from having a blazing row with Haldean by the presence of Lady Rivers. Isabelle found herself allied with her mother as the keeper of an uneasy peace. She felt distinctly sorry for Jack.
She had gladly fallen in with his plea for company in the car that morning. ‘I need some time off,’ he explained. ‘I’ve always loved Hesperus but the atmosphere is pretty poisonous at the moment . . .’ He let the sentence trail off expressively. ‘I wish Greg was here. I’d like to chew things over with him.’ He’d not wanted to go back to Hesperus but instead had taken her for lunch in the pub. Sitting by the noisy stream which gave Breedenbrook its name, she noticed the lines around his mouth and the shadows under his eyes. ‘It’s been rough, hasn’t it?’ she asked gently.
He didn’t pretend not to understand but gave her a quick, grateful glance. ‘It’s been putrid. Ashley’s full of praise for my having completed the case, and can’t understand why I’ve got any reservations at all. To him, my producing Stafford was like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, but there wasn’t anything magic about it. I was thinking about Boscombe and it suddenly struck me what he’d said at the fête. Give a man enough rope.’
Isabelle looked puzzled. ‘And he’ll hang himself,’ she completed. ‘I don’t get it, Jack. How did that lead you to Mr Lawrence? Tyburn, I mean.’
He half-smiled. ‘Don’t you see? Where did they use to hang people, Belle? Think about London. Oxford Street, you know, where Marble Arch is now.’
‘Tyburn,’ said Isabelle slowly. ‘Jack! Tyburn.’
Haldean nodded. ‘That’s what Boscombe was going on about. He must have seen Mr Tyburn at the fête and been over the moon. Blackmail with a capital B. No wonder he was so full of himself. He was so up in the air about it he couldn’t help boasting and it made it all the more fun for him that neither Greg nor I had a clue what he was talking about. When the penny finally did drop, it made so much sense. If Mr Lawrence really was Tyburn it explained why he had been so protective of Marguerite. We all sensed his feelings ran deeper than those of a trustee to his ward. We guessed the wrong motive, that’s all.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Once I had the idea I had to prove it. It didn’t take me long to work out that if there was a war pensioner who’d served with Tyburn before the Augier Ridge tunnels, the War Office would have a note of his current name and address. I hadn’t got the mechanics of it, but guessed there was some sort of substitution going on. Hence Ernest Stafford’s visit to Breedenbrook and Mr Tyburn’s number was well and truly up.’
‘Wasn’t it a bit chancy? I mean, Stafford might not have recognized Mr Lawrence – Tyburn, I mean – anyway.’
‘I’d talked to Stafford so much about the war that he must have thought I had an idée fixe on the subject. I didn’t put the notion into his head, just made sure he was thinking along the right lines. And that’s magic. The quickness of the ‘and deceives the h’eye. Brilliant, wasn’t it?’ he added bitterly.
Isabelle shook her head. ‘Don’t be like that, Jack. It was really clever of you to work out what Boscombe was going on about.’
He half-smiled once more. ‘You think so? That puts you in a minority consisting of you and Ashley. He thinks I’m wonderful. He should talk to Marguerite and Uncle Philip. Aunt Alice has been a bit frozen, too. My God!’
‘Jack,’ said Isabelle cautiously, aware she was treading on delicate ground. ‘You said something about reservations. Have you really got any?’
‘Oh Lord, yes. Him, mainly. Tyburn, I mean. He was so utterly convincing about his innocence that it was damned hard not to believe him. I stood in that cell, watching him being so sincere and so ruddy brave that I could feel myself really wanting him to be innocent. It worked, you know? I did wonder afterwards if he’d been too convincing. I could feel myself being swayed and I didn’t like it, Belle. Do you know what I mean? Someone, someone powerful, tells you what to feel and you do feel it. Later on, when you’ve come out from under the ether and the effect’s worn off you begin to think that you might have been led up the garden path. He finished off with a direct appeal to me, Belle, to the man who’d just landed him in it. He knew I’d brought Stafford along. So why ask me?’
‘Because he wanted you to help?’
‘By doing what?’ Haldean stopped just short of banging the table. ‘Look, I like him. It’d be hard not to like him but he has a real ruthless streak. That’s there, too. By his own showing he’s a tough and successful copper miner. Anyone, I suppose, can have a lucky strike in somewhere as God-forsaken as the Rockies, but you don’t develop it and turn it into a wealthy business without making some hard choices. I sensed how powerful a personality he has that day I helped him out of the barn, the day Whitfield was killed. You know you said you wouldn’t like to stand between Marguerite and her getting what she wanted? Well, she inherited that trait from her father and no mistake. The evidence is there too, Belle. Wonderful, scientific, fingerprint evidence. Get round that. Just because his wife died under tragic circumstances doesn’t mean he’s an innocent man.’
‘I can see that, but . . .’
‘But what? He’s dippy about Marguerite. Admittedly, not for the reasons we thought, but he’s crackers about the girl. Boscombe, Morton and most of all Whitfield all threatened her well-being and he’s not the sort of man to take that lying down. Not only that, but Boscombe recognized him at the fête. What’s to say the recognition wasn’t mutual? Just think what that’d mean to Tyburn. I know he said he’d be all right once he was back in Canada, but he wouldn’t, not really. The best he could look forward to was a lifetime of blackmail, the worst, and this would have seemed much more likely, was exposure, arrest and the rope. Not only that, but the whole scandal would have been dug up again and Marguerite’s future would have been utterly blighted. My God, no. Tyburn fits, Belle, he fits. It’s a bit like doing a jigsaw, you know. You put in all the pieces round the edge, then pick up the final piece – the murderer – and carefully lay that down. I’ve put Tyburn into the gap marked “Murderer” and there aren’t any chinks showing.’
Isabelle pushed her plate away and, taking a cigarette from her case, leaned forward for him to light it. ‘I can see a chink,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’
Haldean struck a match. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘If you believed he really fitted into your jigsaw then you’d be . . . happy’s the wrong word. Satisfied. You’re not. And I don’t understand why Colonel Whitfield tried to murder you on that horrible horse. I know you said Mr Law . . . Tyburn might have recognized Boscombe and that’s fair enough, but you also said he would have killed him if he’d known what he was doing to Marguerite and I don’t believe he did know. She was so secretive about it that she wouldn’t tell anyone. I think you were right to begin with and Boscombe and Morton were killed because they were blackmailers, but who they were blackmailing, except for Marguerite, I don’t know.’
He started to laugh. ‘I think I followed all that.’
‘I should hope you did,’ she said, ret
urning the smile. ‘So was Boscombe blackmailing anyone apart from Maggie?’
‘Oh yes. He was blackmailing Whitfield.’
Isabelle breathed deeply. ‘Jack, will you please explain?’
‘Okay.’ He took a long drink of beer. ‘Think about Whitfield, Belle, think how he acted. The man was scared stiff by the mention of blackmail. That’s what made him attempt to murder me. That and my telling him I wasn’t a complete dud, that I’d done this sort of thing before. He’d got me on the raw and I said more than I should. Something you don’t know – this is in confidence, of course – is that his bank account shows that, whereas before October he was making fairly hefty payments to cash, after October it sky-rocketed. Another seventy-five pounds a month started going out regularly. If he’d carried on at that rate he’d have been ruined by the end of the year.’
‘But what were they blackmailing him for, Jack?’
A wry smile lifted the corners of his mouth. ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? He was the Augier Ridge traitor.’
Isabelle stared at him. ‘But he can’t be. He just can’t. If he’s the traitor then Mr Lawrence – oh, bother it, you know who I mean – Tyburn – is telling the truth and he’s innocent.’
‘Innocent of what?’
‘Well, everything. The spying, the murders – everything.’
‘It doesn’t prove anything of the sort.’ Haldean pulled deeply at his cigarette. ‘Ashley doesn’t believe a word of this, by the way. He thinks I’m clutching at straws. He argues that if Whitfield’s the traitor then presumably he put the incriminating documents in Tyburn’s kit. Now when could Whitfield have got at Tyburn’s things? As Ashley says, Whitfield might have gone into the mess-room of the farmhouse but he’d have been lucky to get into Tyburn’s quarters undisturbed. It was their rest day, you see, when you’d expect the farmhouse to be full.’
He frowned. ‘Ashley – and I have the deepest respect for Ashley – thinks I’m making complications for the fun of it. He rightly points out that the simplest explanation is that Tyburn put the papers in his own kit because Tyburn was the traitor. Oddly enough, in a way it doesn’t matter.’
‘How on earth do you work that out?’
‘Easy. Say Boscombe was blackmailing Whitfield. He comes down to the fête to screw some more money out of him, runs into Marguerite Vayle, and just to make his cup of happiness complete, spots Tyburn. So far so good?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘Now Whitfield, who, by my reckoning, had every reason to murder him, didn’t. Unfortunately that’s a sheer physical impossibility, worse luck. But Tyburn, the resolute, determined Mr Tyburn, is waiting in the wings. He might not have been a traitor; I don’t believe he was. That’s not the point. Everyone believes him to have been a traitor and one word from Boscombe spelt ruin.’
She moved impatiently. ‘Don’t tell me you believe all that, Jack. This is Mr Lawrence we’re talking about. I haven’t known him very long, I agree, but I like him and trust him.’
‘His name isn’t Lawrence. Trust him in what way?’
‘The usual way, I suppose. You know, truthful, reliable, all that sort of thing.’
‘But can’t you see, Belle, that’s exactly what he isn’t? He didn’t tell us the truth. He came here pretending to be another man.’
‘He had a pretty good reason.’
‘I know that, old thing, but he was terribly convincing as Lawrence. He made us all believe him. He’s a brilliant liar. Now I think Whitfield is much more likely to have been the traitor, because it fits in with everything that happened afterwards. But don’t you see that because Whitfield was the traitor Tyburn had a compelling motive to murder him? When you think of what Whitfield had done to both him and his men, sheer revenge would make Whitfield’s death seem more like a justifiable execution than a murder. And as for saying he didn’t do it – well, I repeat, he’s a brilliant liar.’
Isabelle finished her drink in silence. ‘I still trust him,’ she said in a small voice.
‘I’m afraid that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.’ Haldean picked his glass up and stared at his beer. ‘Why beans, I wonder? Jolly useful things in their way, legumes. Broad beans, butter beans, runner beans, french beans, kidney beans, haricot beans . . . Don’t pay any attention, Belle, I’m rambling.’
‘You always do talk nonsense when you’re worried.’
‘Do I? Windsor beans . . .’
‘They’re the same as broad beans,’ put in Isabelle, starting to smile.
‘Are they? Yes, I suppose they are.’ He finished his drink and put the glass down firmly on the table. ‘But whether they’re undisguised or operating under an alias, they amount to the same thing; nothing. And that, old scream, is what trust is in a case like this; nothing. Have you finished your Mother’s Ruin, by the way? Fancy another? No? Let’s go, then. I don’t mind telling you,’ he added, picking up his hat and giving her his arm, ‘that I wish I’d never started all this. I was so damned keen to get involved. I’ll know better next time. Shall we walk along by the brook to the car? I think the path should bring us out in more or less the right place.’
‘I still like him,’ said Isabelle obstinately.
‘So do I. Why d’you think I feel such a complete heel?’
Isabelle looked at him and squeezed his arm. ‘Jack,’ she said slowly, stepping on to the narrow path and skirting round a clump of nettles, ‘couldn’t you try and believe him? You know, take that as your starting point. Imagine everything he said was the truth. How would that affect things?’
‘It makes them just about impossible, I would have said . . . Morton!’
‘What?’
‘Morton!’ He grasped her arms eagerly. ‘Don’t you see? I’ve assumed Boscombe and Morton came here to dig more money out of their victim. Now Morton was really ticked off with Boscombe and followed him down afterwards. If I’m right, then Morton wouldn’t have known anything about Tyburn. It was Whitfield he was after. Once Boscombe recognized Tyburn, he wouldn’t have told Morton anything about it, even if he could have done. He must have thought it was like finding money in the street. So why did Tyburn murder Morton? How could he have known the man existed at all? Unless, damn it, Boscombe told Tyburn as a sort of insurance. “Don’t try anything on me, I’ve got a pal who knows all about it.” Hell! I thought I had something there.’
‘But you have, Jack, haven’t you?’ asked Isabelle, looking up at his crestfallen expression. ‘Boscombe didn’t know Morton had come here. He might have talked about his friend in London, but he didn’t know his friend was on the spot.’
Haldean stopped and looked at her open-mouthed. ‘By God,’ he whispered. ‘By God, you’re right! Belle, I could kiss you. Damn it, I will kiss you.’ He put his arm around her and suited actions to words. ‘From now on I sit humbly at your feet. Of course! Tyburn couldn’t know Morton was at the Talbot Arms. What did you say, O Mentor? That I should start from believing everything he says is the truth? I’ll try it. I don’t know what the dickens I’m going to do about those fingerprints, but I’ll try it.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Isabelle, detaching herself with a giggle. ‘Stop, Jack.’ She pushed him away. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t grab me again. There’s a row of cottages along the path and people will be looking.’
‘Let ’em. Mind you,’ he added, sobering slightly and resuming their walk, ‘I still don’t see what happened. I can’t quite manage the mental gymnastics of the Red Queen and believe six impossible things before breakfast. It’ll take until dinner-time, at least. But it’s a start. Belle, a start. Believe he’s telling the truth, eh?’
‘That’s right. Just take what he says in good faith.’
Haldean clicked his tongue. ‘It’s not faith so much as a brainwave I need. Faith without works is dead, as St James says . . . Faith? We need evidence. Proof. I haven’t got the whole story yet and, by crikey, I want it.’
She squeezed his arm once more. ‘You’ll get there
.’
They had drawn level with the backs of the cottages and on the narrow strip of scrubby grass that separated the back walls of the houses from the path, a little girl sat playing with an old kettle and three mismatched cups, A doll was propped up beside her on a hummock of earth. She looked up as they approached then, with a squeak of joy, flung herself at Haldean.
‘It’s you! It’s you what gived me my dolly!’
‘It’s Sally, isn’t it?’ said Haldean, bending down with a smile. ‘You remember Sally from the fête, don’t you, Belle? Say hello to Miss Rivers, Sally.’
‘Hello, Miss Rivers,’ said Sally politely. Haldean felt a hot little hand tug at his. ‘Come and see my dolly’s tea party. I had to call her Mabel ’cos my other dolly was called Daisy but she’s being a good girl and eating up all her tea. Come and see.’
With utmost gravity, Haldean allowed himself to be conducted, to where Sally had arranged a meal of elderberry flowers, daisies, buttercups and laburnum pods on plates of leaves.
‘You won’t eat these, will you, sweetheart?’ said Isabelle, stooping down and picking up the laburnum seeds. ‘They’re poisonous, you know.’
A Fête Worse Than Death Page 25