A Matter of Loyalty

by Anselm Audley

  She paused, with a frown.

  ‘Roddy told me once that he’d interrogated and hanged more German agents during the war than anyone else. As if it were important that he’d dealt with them properly.’

  Hugo well knew that most of the agents the Germans had landed had never stood a chance, put ashore on alien soil with no backup and no real idea of where they were going. It was war, and a vicious war at that, you couldn’t be sad that they’d failed, but to count them up like trophies was wrong nonetheless.

  ‘I shall be glad to be spared more interviews with him, at any rate,’ said Hugo. ‘It’s back to Thorn Hall for me, combing through the files. While Jarrett is throwing his weight around at widows and boffins, there’s someone loose in Selchester with the training and disposition to shoot a man in the back of the neck, and I’d very much like to know who it is.’

  Scene 14

  True to the slapdash nature of the whole operation, it was a quarter to eleven before an engine finally sounded on the drive. Polly and Georgia were long since in bed, Hugo looking weary, and Gus casting irritable glances at the clock.

  ‘Poor Mrs Partridge,’ said Freya, as they made their way down to the door. ‘She gets up earlier than any of us.’

  ‘Poor Mrs Partridge, my hat. She wouldn’t miss this for anything,’ said Hugo.

  The low clouds had cleared, the sky was bright with stars and the air bitterly cold. Freya paused in the corridor to pull on a coat, came out to see Hugo talking to the driver and Gus greeting a dapper, dark-haired man with a lively face. Another man retrieved a valise from the boot.

  ‘Welcome to Selchester, Dr Bárándy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said their guest. ‘They said they were taking me to a castle. I thought perhaps this was a euphemism – one of those English stately homes which is only called a castle – now I see they were quite correct.’

  ‘I hope they didn’t lead you to expect butlers and armies of servants. We’re a small and select establishment.’

  ‘Yes, I see, there is no butler with a disapproving expression, or footmen like statues, and perhaps also no long grim corridors full of armour and the heads of deer?’

  ‘There’s the Long Gallery,’ Freya said cheerfully, ‘but the girls use it for a bowling alley.’

  ‘My cousin, Miss Wryton,’ said Gus.

  ‘Ah, the writer,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye. She extended a hand, which he kissed with great courtliness. ‘Enchanted.’

  ‘We should let these gentlemen get on their way,’ said Hugo, who clearly wasn’t having much luck getting information out of the driver.

  They exchanged polite courtesies, ushered their guest through into the kitchen as the two men drove off. Mrs Partridge was waiting by the stove, kettle to hand if needed, while Magnus watched, sphinx-like, from the end of the bench. ‘No point putting him out at night,’ she was wont to say, ‘when there’s enough mice in the Castle to keep a legion of cats busy.’

  Their guest wondered at the kitchen and charmed Mrs Partridge before turning his attention to Magnus, who deigned to have his chin scratched.

  ‘He likes you,’ said Freya. ‘Just don’t try to ruffle his stomach, or he’ll sink his teeth in your hand soon as look at you.’

  ‘He has pride, as a cat should. Or a horse.’

  ‘You ride?’ she asked, interested.

  ‘I grew up on the Great Hungarian Plain, the steppe as you call it. Before I could walk, I could ride. But not for many years now. No more horses.’

  In the light, she could see too many lines on his face, dark shadows under his eyes. He was an exile in a strange land, moved from pillar to post by a foreign intelligence service. No wonder he was exhausted.

  ‘Would you like tea, or shall we show you to your room?’ Gus asked.

  ‘If you please, I should like to sleep, and you have all been up waiting, because the car was late. This Service of yours, Mr Hawksworth, it is not punctual, no? Always muddling things up. Locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, is that how you say it? I have been picking up these things from your colleagues.’

  There was a twinkle of mischief in his eye.

  He was less sanguine when they showed him his room, its thin veneer of Georgian panelling and Victorian wallpaper hardly sufficient to conceal the thickness of its walls. It was a comfortable room, no vast mausoleum, with a fire crackling in the grate and a hot-water bottle in the bed, but it was still very much of its place.

  ‘There must be some mistake – these are your rooms, surely?’ he said to Gus.

  ‘These were my father’s rooms, in his time. My daughters and I live in another wing. This part of the Castle is a little too archaic for American tastes.’

  Dr Bárándy regarded the bell pull beside the bed with a wary expression. ‘I have never stayed in a house with such a thing, but in Sherlock Holmes . . .’

  ‘Quite safe, I assure you, not a snake in sight,’ said Freya. ‘Magnus would have caught them long ago.’

  ‘Magnus? Ah, the cat.’ He paused, his eyes on Gus. ‘Your lordship, I thank you for your hospitality, for putting a stranger up in your house at such notice. It is a kindness, no matter how many such rooms you have to spare, and I am grateful.’

  Tuesday

  Scene 1

  Georgia came down for breakfast to an appetising smell of bacon, and a strange man sitting at the table. She’d dragged herself out of bed early on purpose, to beat Polly down. Polly never had any problems waking up for school; it was unnatural.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘You must be Dr Bárándy.’

  ‘Good morning. You are one of the Earl’s daughters, perhaps?’

  ‘I’m Hugo’s sister. Mr Hawksworth, that is. Georgia.’

  He looked surprised. She stuck out a hand, which he shook gravely.

  ‘That’s Polly on her way now. She’s the Earl’s younger daughter. Babs is the elder – she’s away at art school in London.’

  Polly came running through from the other passage. Georgia gave her a triumphant look and quickly snaffled the next plate.

  ‘Two rashers, Miss Georgia, no more,’ came Mrs Partridge’s voice from the pantry.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Partridge,’ said Georgia, making sure she took the two crispiest, and extra egg. Polly gave her a dirty look as she sat herself down at the table opposite the Hungarian.

  ‘A healthy appetite, I see,’ he said. He’d cleared his own plate.

  ‘You’re up very early. You didn’t get here till late, either.’

  ‘And how would you know that?’ Mrs Partridge asked.

  ‘Not likely I can sleep through a car driving up, and all that tramping along the corridors, now could I?’

  ‘I did,’ said Polly.

  ‘You were in another wing. Miles away.’

  ‘Sleeping the sleep of the just and righteous,’ Polly said. ‘I expect you were haunted by visions of hellfire, all that heretical nonsense you were saying yesterday.’

  Dr Bárándy looked from one to the other of them in interested confusion.

  ‘School history,’ said Polly scornfully. ‘Henry VIII.’

  ‘Ah, the Reformation.’

  ‘Did you have one in Hungary, Dr Bárándy?’ Georgia asked.

  ‘Only in Transylvania, in the mountains. And please, call me Árpád bácsi, as I once called my father’s friends. We cannot be forever standing on formality.’

  ‘Where Dracula comes from,’ Georgia said, intrigued. ‘I thought that was in Romania.’

  ‘It was Hungarian land once, but it was taken from us. Like many other things.’

  ‘Árpád bácsi,’ Polly was repeating, ‘Árpád bácsi. I like that. What does that mean?’

  ‘Bácsi is what Hungarian children call friends of the family. Strictly it means uncle, but we do not use it only for real uncles. And Árpád is my name, after the first chief of the Hungarians, long before we had kings.’

  Polly’s eyes narrowed. ‘A pagan?’

  ‘Oh yes. The old gods last
ed a long time in Hungary before we became Catholic. Now, of course, we have a different sort of heathen in charge.’

  ‘Is that why you left your home?’ Polly asked, with one of her thoughtful, inquisitive looks. Georgia knew perfectly well that, if they’d had more notice, she’d have been down to the town library looking for a serious book about Hungary, the better to know what she was dealing with.

  ‘In part. Now is not a good time to be a Catholic in Hungary. Many priests, even our Cardinal, were arrested and tortured, many churches destroyed. It is hard to see such things happen – places you love destroyed by vandals, people dragged into black police cars by thugs – and then to hear those same thugs and vandals declare how they are making a better world.’

  Mrs Partridge came back into the kitchen with a stern look on her face. ‘Now, Miss Polly, Miss Georgia, I doubt our guest wants to talk of war and destruction. Can I get you anything more, Dr Bárándy? And just say if they’re bothering you with their questions.’

  ‘There is no bother,’ said Árpád. ‘They are terrible things I would not wish on any people, not even Russians. But they have happened, and so I must face them. Just as I must face that I will never see my country again. But now, tell me, for I am confused. You, Miss Polly, are the daughter of the Earl, who is called Gus?’

  ‘Yes. And Babs is my sister, and we live through there.’ She pointed in the direction of Grace Hall.

  ‘Actually, it’s that way,’ said Georgia. ‘You’ve forgotten there’s a turn in the passageway.’

  ‘And you, Miss Georgia,’ Árpád said, ‘are the sister of Mr Hawksworth.’

  ‘He’s much older,’ Georgia said. ‘Our parents died in the war, so he has to look after me. He’s not too bad at it. I like being in Selchester.’

  ‘It is an interesting place to live, I can see. Never did I imagine I would end up in the room of an English earl. But there is no, what would you say, earl-ess? This does not seem right.’

  ‘Countess,’ Polly and Georgia said, at the same moment. It was Polly who went on. ‘An earl’s wife is a countess, but my mother was never a countess. She died during the war, of tuberculosis.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear this, it is a hard thing to lose a mother so young. And then there is Miss Wryton, who is engaged to Mr Hawksworth?’

  Polly and Georgia gave one another a look. Mrs Partridge stirred the pot of scrambled eggs quite unnecessarily, and said nothing.

  ‘No,’ said Georgia. ‘I think he ought to be, but he isn’t. He has a girlfriend in London, she’s called Valerie and she’s useless. Wants Hugo to work in some dull bank with dull people in dull suits, and me to go off to some Proper Boarding School where all the mistresses are sadists.’

  ‘You said Miss Harrison was a sadist,’ Polly whispered.

  ‘All games mistresses are sadists,’ Georgia whispered back.

  ‘And your father,’ Árpád said to Polly, ‘he is an American, but also an English earl. How can this be?’

  They were still halfway through the story of Gus’s unorthodox parentage when Freya came in, looked at the clock, and with an exclamation packed them off to get ready for school. ‘Ben will run you down, since your bikes are still there, but you’d better hurry. Hugo needs the car to take Dr Bárándy to Thorn Hall.’

  ‘To look at classical statistics, I suppose,’ said Georgia as she vanished.

  ‘I hope they didn’t bother you, Dr Bárándy,’ said Freya. ‘They can be quite a force of nature.’

  ‘As I said to Mrs Partridge here, no, not at all. They remind me of my own sister when she was that age. Now, perhaps you can finish for me this story of Gus’s father and the French craftsman’s daughter. Such wickedness, to marry in secret and then deny it. I was told English aristocrats only have time for dogs and horses. This is clearly not true.’

  Scene 2

  The call came in just as Jarrett was leaving for the Atomic, MacLeod counting down the minutes. Constable Tarrant answered from the dispatch desk, pen at the ready. A male voice, rough and indistinct.

  ‘Selchester Police Station . . . Could you repeat that, sir?’

  He made an urgent motion towards MacLeod’s office. Phyllis, the quickest-witted of the secretaries, sprang up to fetch the Superintendent. Tarrant’s pen raced across the paper. ‘I see. The Selchester Gallery, you say. Could you hang on for a moment, sir, I’d like to put you through to someone more senior.’

  Click. The line went dead.

  ‘What is it?’ MacLeod asked, appearing in the doorway. There was always the chance of another big case, something the Chief Constable would want him to take a personal look at.

  ‘Anonymous tip-off, sir. Says we might want to take a look at the Selchester Gallery’s new tenant in connection with Dr Rothesay’s murder, particularly the cottage he’s staying in.’

  MacLeod looked puzzled. ‘What new tenant?’

  ‘Mr Ingham,’ said Phyllis. ‘The man who was staying in Nightingale Cottage when there was that to-do at the Castle. Just took the Gallery this week.’

  ‘Ah,’ said MacLeod.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Jarrett from behind him. The man had the ears of a fox.

  MacLeod explained.

  Jarrett frowned. ‘Saul Ingham. I know that name.’

  ‘Convicted of fraud in ’46, skipped the country. To join the Foreign Legion, as it turned out. Cleared in his absence. Turned up here at Christmas making death threats against Lord Selchester.’

  ‘The American?’

  ‘No, the previous one. Hadn’t heard he’d died.’

  ‘Foreign Legion,’ said Jarrett thoughtfully. ‘A man who knows how to kill. Get me a judge.’

  Scene 3

  Stanley Dillon had been at his desk bright and early, wrestling with the latest absurd directive from the Ministry of Supply. Rationing might be on the way out, but it seemed the Ministry would make itself a nuisance to the last.

  His secretary, an ample and capable Welshwoman named Miss Rhys, popped her head around the door.

  ‘Call from the Town Clerk, Mr Dillon. Problem at the Feoffees’ Hall. They need you there at once.’

  Stanley picked up the phone, listened, asked a few short questions. Two minutes later, he was in his car.

  ‘I hope the Super doesn’t catch him driving like that,’ Miss Rhys said, hearing the roar of the engine as he drove off. She liked to call MacLeod the Super, the way people did in detective novels. Working for Mr Dillon was a good job, an interesting job, but there was a part of her which longed to be a senior policeman’s secretary, a fly on the wall as they did all their detection.

  ‘The Super has other things on his mind,’ said her office-mate Martha Radley, Mrs Partridge’s crony. ‘What’s up at the Hall? Do tell.’

  ‘Such a to-do. He’ll be in quite the temper when he gets back, let me tell you . . .’

  As it happened, Constable Tarrant did spot Stanley’s car going rather too fast down Station Road, but he wisely chose to turn a blind eye. With that Special Branch man making a pest of himself, now was most definitely not the time to muddy the waters by hauling the chief Feoffee in for speeding. That was the sort of thing Fred Camford would do, and Constable Tarrant prided himself on being several notches above Fred Camford where intellect was concerned. Superintendent MacLeod shared this estimation of Tarrant’s merit, which was why he’d been sent to keep an eye on the suspect’s movements while Camford took his place at the dispatch desk.

  Stanley pulled his car into one of the spaces outside the Feoffees’ Hall and leapt out, taking the steps two at a time. Handsomely classical it might look on the outside, but it was a real hodgepodge under all those mouldings, with a Tudor council chamber and a mediaeval roof.

  A roof which had decided, sometime during the storm, to abandon its centuries-long struggle against the elements.

  Upstairs in the Hall, the Town Clerk, Mr Simmonds, looked like a particularly lugubrious sheepdog as he stared up at the ruined ceiling. John Brodrick, whose firm looked afte
r the fabric, picked up a piece of fallen plaster and sucked in his breath.

  ‘How bad is it?’ Stanley demanded.

  It looked bad enough. There was a great brown stain on the painted ceiling, centred around a small, dark, dripping hole. As he watched, a shower of fragments tumbled down on to the parquet.

  ‘Disaster waiting to happen,’ said Brodrick with relish. ‘A wonder it lasted as long as it did, false ceiling like that. They should have taken the whole thing down, put in a proper roof. Knew what they were doing, those Georgian builders – look at the Royal, two hundred years old and good as new.’

  The Royal was the Royal Selchester Hotel, up by the station.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Tiles worked loose in the wind, by the chimney. All that rain poured in, spent yesterday seeping down into the false ceiling. Plaster’s sodden. Beams’ll be all right, but you can kiss goodbye to they mouldings and curlicues.’

  Good riddance, thought Stanley, who had always loathed the blue-and-white roof with its mouldings of Arcadian shepherdesses. If only it could have held off for another six months.

  ‘How long to make it safe?’

  ‘Can’t. Water’s spread right through. Could come down any moment.’

  ‘What a thing to happen, with the anniversary celebrations coming up,’ said Simmonds, quite unnecessarily. ‘All those dinners and ceremonies, and what’ll Miss Witt say?’

  Scene 4

  Miss Witt’s first response, when Stanley rang her, did not bear repeating. They had known one another for years. Stanley was one of the very few people outside the theatrical world with whom she could be quite honest.

  ‘Can’t that builder of yours do anything?’

  ‘He wants to knock the whole thing down, build something new. Less trouble.’

  ‘Oh, how ghastly. Don’t let him.’

  Stanley had a certain sympathy for Brodrick’s point of view – the whole place was one huge sink of money – but he knew Selchester too well to imagine there’d be any support for it. The whole city would be up in arms.