“Far from it,” said Bohun. “Tell me, are you familiar with the works of Scott?”
Mr. Tucker’s face lighted up. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I think I have them all. His book on Contingent Remainders is the one I have found most useful.”
“Not that Scott,” said Bohun. “Another one.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Tucker. “Yes. You mean the novelist. I’m afraid that I’ve never found much time for that sort of reading.”
“Then that,” said Bohun, “makes it even more interesting. Can you recall anything that was said in the play? What form was it in? Some sort of verse?”
“Well, it didn’t rhyme. Most of it was in – what would you call it? – blank verse. That’s right. One line sticks in my memory. When Euthio was talking to the boy, trying to comfort him, you see. He said: ‘What Time has swallowed comes not forth again.’ I thought that rather neat. In fact, it was all a good readable yarn and a lot of it was very nicely expressed. I got quite engrossed.
“I never heard the door open. And when I suddenly saw that woman’s face behind me, I thought for a second it was Megira! She had some heavy thing in her hand and she slashed at my head with it. It was the woodworm that saved me. I had noticed that the chair was rickety, and as I twisted round sharply one of the chair-legs snapped right off, so I was already falling sideways when the thing hit my head, and instead of breaking my skull, it only dazed me. I had the sense to lie still. I could see Mrs. Sherman’s face from where I lay. There was no room for doubt. She was quite mad. She must have been going that way for some time and the shock of what I had told her at dinner had toppled her over.
“I don’t think she had much idea of what she was doing. She stood for a few minutes peering round the bookshelves, then she picked up the lighted lamp and tossed it on to the floor. It went plop and there was a woof of flame and the paraffin ran all over the carpet with the fire chasing after it. I scrambled up on to my knees. If she saw me, she took no notice. She picked up the other two lamps, and tossed them down too. Then she went out and I heard her shut and lock the door. It was awkward for a moment because the windows up my end of the room were all the thin sort which you open at the top with a rope. Then I remembered there was another door in the corner beside the fireplace. I ran through and found myself in an annexe. It had larger windows, of plain glass, and I stood on the sill, kicked a hole and climbed out. I rolled down the grass bank into a flower bed, and then fainted off properly.”
“Good gracious me, yes,” said Bohun. “Of course, I remember now. The house was burned to a shell. And the Shermans with it.”
“He was in bed. They doubt if he ever woke up. She was in the dining room, what was left of her, when they got the fire out. At some stage in the proceedings I must have been found by the firemen, or the police, and packed off to hospital. Anyway, I had plenty of time to think things out, and I said that I had been in my bedroom, but not undressed, when the fire caught me. It was too late for the stairs, so I dropped from my bedroom window. Which happened to be just above where they found me. Nobody questioned my story. The fire had obviously started in the library and, as Mrs. Sherman was the only one downstairs, it was assumed that she had started it, by accident, when putting the lamps out. The insurance company paid up, and the cousins got what was left after the mortgages had been paid off.”
“But,” said Bohun, in a rather desperate voice, “didn’t you—did you—did anyone—I mean, was there nothing left of the library?”
“Not a scrap,” said Mr. Tucker cheerfully. “The brigade said it was one of the fiercest fires they had seen. An absolute furnace. The old woodwork burned like tinder.”
“‘Not a wrack’,” said Bohun. “‘Leave not a wrack behind.’ ‘Such stuff as dreams are made of.’”
He said all this to himself, as he walked slowly along the north side of the Common. He was trying to believe something.
To believe that it was possible that the one, complete, lost play of William Shakespeare, the one that all scholars know about but none had been able to find, the one that fear of the queen had confined to a single version in the poet’s own hand, that even after the queen’s death could not be put on any stage while the Leicester faction had power to stop it, the original of Kenilworth and a dozen stories and legends beside, the tragedy of Amy Robsart; lost to sight after Shakespeare’s death, lighted on and transcribed by that eccentric but knowledgeable bibliophile, ‘Mercy’ Martensen, standing unremarked on the Wapentake library shelves through five generations of port-drinking, pheasant-shooting Martensens; that this unimaginable treasure, as rich as Antony, more lurid than Hamlet, part of the birthright of the civilised world, had been revealed at the last to Mr. Tucker, who had read it carefully, through one long autumn evening, and had found it a good yarn, and nicely expressed.
Bohun looked back at the front of Mr. Tucker’s house, winking in the sun; at the neat lawn and at the plaster dwarf beside the plaster mushroom.
“What Time has swallowed comes not forth again.”
He shook his head angrily and jumped on the bus that would take him back to Lincoln’s Inn.
The System
“Businessmen don’t do it,” said Bohun. “Doctors don’t. Accountants don’t. Even Government Departments have had to give it up. Why are solicitors the only people who hang on to their papers for ever and ever?”
“It can be extremely helpful,” said old Mr. Craine.
“Does being able to settle occasional minor points justify the expense of three strong-rooms in Bell Yard, a Nissen hut in Crawley, a warehouse in Slough, and an old wine cellar at Ware? To say nothing of the services of a highly paid muniments’ clerk.”
“Come, come. You’re not suggesting we get rid of Sergeant Cockerill?”
“Certainly not. But he’ll soon be wanting to retire. If only we could harden our hearts and send every blessed scrap of paper which is more than ten years old to the incinerator—”
“Ten years?”
“Well, twelve at a pinch. We’ve got stuff going right back to Abel Horniman’s youth.”
Abel Horniman, a legendary figure in Lincoln’s Inn, had founded the firm of Horniman, Brewer and Coates in the nineteen-eighties.
“It was all very well for him,” Bohun went on. “In his day you could get a legal assistant for a hundred pounds a year and articled clerks worked for nothing.”
These were Bohun’s feelings on the matter. And that was how he continued to feel – until the day that Herbert Bellinger had made an appointment to see him.
Herbert was preceded by a letter in the morning post, handwritten in greenish-purple ink, on thick paper. The signature at the end was indecipherable. Bohun went in search of his senior partner. Mr. Craine looked at the signature, tut-tutted, turned back to the address, and said, “That’s Miss Louise Bellinger.”
“Herbert’s Aunt Louie?”
“That’s right. Herbert’s her brother Arthur’s only son. Arthur and his wife – what was her name? Millicent, that’s right – they were both killed in a motor accident in the late Thirties. She took the boy over. A nice old lady, but practically ga-ga.”
“But Aunt Louie’s your client. I’ve only met her once.”
“We had a difference of opinion. It was about her cats. I agreed with her that Siamese are exceptionally intelligent animals, and I had no real objection to her leaving all her money to them, but when she wanted to make one of them her executor I had to draw the line. That was ten years ago, and I imagined she’d gone to other solicitors. This sounds like an olive branch. What does she want you to do?”
Bohun cast his eye down the long scrawl.
“Nothing much,” he said. “It’s mostly gossip. She says Herbert’s in town today and can I see him? I wonder what he’s turned out like? I haven’t seen him since he was in short trousers. His aunt brought him up here on his way to school. He sat in the corner and cried.”
“A lot of boys cry when they go back to school.”
“I expect he’ll have improved,” said Mr. Craine soothingly. “What does he want us to do?”
“He wants me to sign his passport application.”
Bohun’s visitor turned out to be an agreeable man in his middle thirties, with a nondescript face, an engaging smile and a pair of very wide-awake, dark brown eyes. He said, “I can still remember that exact spot in the passage where I was sick. And the man who appeared with a pail and mop.”
“That’d be Sergeant Cockerill,” said Bohun. “He’s still with us.”
“You don’t change much, do you?”
“A firm of family solicitors,” said Bohun, “is one of the few unchanging things in a changing world. How is your Aunt Louie these days?”
“It’d be an exaggeration to say she’s improving. I’m afraid the time is coming when you’ll have to do – whatever it is you do when someone can’t cope.”
“If she’s really becoming incapable of managing her own affairs,” said Bohun, “we might have to apply to the Court of Protection, and appoint a receiver.”
After his visitor had gone, he reported all this to Mr. Craine who rubbed his hands together, and said, “Splendid, splendid. It looks as though we should get the family business back. I hate losing clients. If you’re going to take them on, Henry, you’d better do some background reading.”
Accordingly Bohun descended, two evenings later, to the cellarage below the office which was the kingdom of Sergeant Cockerill, the muniments’ clerk. The sergeant was small and brown, and looked more like an old mole than an old soldier. His black button eyes brightened at Bohun’s request.
“You want everything I’ve got on the Bellinger family?”
“Is there much of it?”
“I’ve got two boxes here, and several more down at Crawley.”
“I’d forgotten they were such active clients.”
“They’re quieter now. Nothing in the last years but a house purchase for young Dr. Vaisey and a will for the Marlins.”
“What have the Vaiseys and Marlins got to do with the Bellingers?”
“They’re Henry Bellinger’s grandchildren.”
“Henry?”
“The one who went wrong on the Stock Exchange.”
Bohun thought back, and placed Henry Bellinger with an effort. The dying echoes of that particular scandal had still been rumbling round the office when he first joined the firm.
“Then there was Alfred. He was the younger son.”
“He was the one who married the Bishop of Putney’s daughter. It broke up, didn’t it?”
“That’s right,” said Cockerill. “And the Bishop preached a sermon about him, names and all, and we had that big slander action.”
“I think I’ll start with the immediate family. Let me have anything you’ve got about Aunt Louie, and Cousin Herbert.” “I’m not sure we’ve got anything much on Herbert.” Bohun thought about his visitor of that morning, businesslike and self-possessed. Not the sort of person who would trouble his lawyers much.
“We’ve got a few files about his father and mother.” Cockerill thumbed through his card index. “Arthur and Millicent Bellinger. You remember that accident? A shocking tragedy.”
After dinner in his flat that evening Bohun settled down to enjoy himself. He had suffered, for thirty years, from parainsomnia, and very rarely got more than ninety minutes sleep in a night. The pile of orange and green files and folders, heaped on the table, overflowing on to a sofa and the floor, promised hours of stimulating reading . . .
Bohun was interested to note how history repeated itself. On 14th October, 1929, Herbert’s parents, Arthur and Millicent Bellinger, had presented themselves before Abel Horniman so that he might vouch their application for a passport. But whereas Bohun had scribbled a two-line note, Abel had left a forty-line memorandum, covering not only the application, but other topics, too. “Arthur was worried about the state of the American stock market. I told him not to upset himself. It would certainly recover.”
Bohun was still smiling over this remarkable prediction when he picked up the copies which Abel had made of the applications he had been asked to sign.
When he had read them through twice, he looked at his watch. It was one o’clock in the morning, but there was a government line which was manned night and day. Bohun called the number and spoke at some length. Then he rang off and returned to the files. The minutes ticked past.
At three o’clock, a car slid up to Bohun’s door and his bell rang. He went down.
His caller introduced himself, without prefix, as Shipman. He was a slightly built man, with a brown face and wiry grey hair, who might have been any age from forty to sixty. His voice, which was equally unrevealing, could have come from any class or region. He could even have been a foreigner who spoke exceptionally good English.
“I have come round to check up on one or two points,” he said. “Have you got the papers here – the ones you mentioned?”
Bohun produced the careful transcripts of the passport application forms which Abel Horniman had pinned into the file over forty years ago.
“You see,” he said. “Arthur Bellinger. Eyes, light blue. His wife, Millicent, the same. It would be excessively long odds for two parents with china-blue eyes to produce a son with dark brown eyes. Not impossible. There might be a regressive strain. You’d have to know about the grandparents to be certain. But I thought it needed checking. Was the man who turned up in my office Herbert Bellinger?”
“No,” said Shipman. “He wasn’t.”
“You’ve checked the application?”
“Yes,” said Shipman. “We’ve checked it.”
He opened his wallet and pulled out a photograph. It was the one Bohun had signed. Then he extracted another photograph, an enlarged snapshot of a man leaving an office building. They were clearly the same.
“Who is he?” asked Bohun.
Shipman appeared to consider the point. Then, instead of answering Bohun directly, he said, “How did you know what number to ring up just now?”
“I did a bit of work last year for Colonel Heseltine. Nothing complicated. Just a bit of cross-checking.”
Shipman said, “Ah. I wondered. Well, this chap is William Austin. Born in Roysfield, started as a barrister with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Did very well. Then he joined us. We’ve been worried about him for some time. If he’d tried to get out of England on his own passport, he’d have been stopped. That’s why he had to get a new one. As Herbert Bellinger, he’d a chance of getting through. It isn’t a very remarkable face.
“It was a risky way of doing it,” said Bohun. “I thought any crook with money could buy a new passport.”
Shipman smiled faintly. “Suppose you wanted one. How would you set about it?”
“Me? I haven’t the faintest idea. But then I’m not a crook.”
“Nor is Austin. And if he tried to contact a professional criminal, he really would have been in trouble.”
“He must have known Herbert well. Some of his background patter was terribly convincing. And, come to think of it, he must have known that Herbert hadn’t already got a passport.”
“Not necessarily. This application was made under expedited procedure. If you put up a convincing story – a dying relative whose bedside you’re hurrying to – your application goes to the top of the queue and you can get your passport in forty-eight hours. In a case like that there isn’t time to check against all existing applications. So it wouldn’t necessarily be noticed that there were two Herbert Bellingers. Neither name’s all that uncommon—”
Bohun was staring at his visitor in consternation. “Do you mean to say that he actually got his passport and is already out of the country?”
“He got his passport all right. He picked it up this evening – yesterday evening, I should say. But it hasn’t been presented at any e
xit point.”
“Would it be serious if he did get out?”
“It wouldn’t be serious,” said Shipman. “It’d be a disaster. He was high enough in D.I.6 to know the names and cover stories of every single one of our agents in Eastern Europe.”
Bohun thought again of the man with the nondescript face, the engaging smile and the wide-awake, brown eyes. He said, “You never can tell, can you?”
“When you counter-signed his application form,” said Shipman, “I’ve no doubt you were strictly correct in saying that you had known the applicant for twenty-five years. But you realise that it isn’t intended to cover a case where you haven’t seen him in the interval.”
“I do realise it,” said Bohun unhappily. “And it’s no excuse to say that I think most people would have been fooled. I’ll go down today and see Miss Bellinger. She might tell me something useful, though I doubt it. She’d be easy meat for a plausible man like Austin. And I could have a word with Herbert – if he’s available. If there’s anything else I can do to help locate Austin—”
Shipman smiled again, a faint glimmer of professional amusement. He said, “By acting so quickly, Mr. Bohun, you’ve gone a long way to atone for your original carelessness. Certainly have a word with both the Bellingers. But as for locating Austin, I doubt if that will be necessary. We shall pick him up now as soon as he tries to use his false passport. And even if we don’t, we shall have the whole of D.I.6, the Special Branch and the regular police mobilised to trace him—”
It was at that point that the telephone rang. Bohun answered it, and said, “They seem to know you’re here.”
Shipman picked up the receiver without haste, and listened without visible change of expression. At the end he said, “Very well. I’ll come back as quickly as I can.”
Stay of Execution Page 6