‘No danger of that. I told him he’d be run out of town in a hail of rotten vegetables if he tried.’
‘Quite right, too. Can he fix it?’
‘He thinks he can do away with the whole Georgian ceiling, fix the tiles and take us back to the mediaeval beams, but it’ll be most of the year before he’s done. Grand opening in November or some such. Until he’s done, we’re short one town hall. I thought I’d ring you first, give you a chance to lock in another performance space before anyone else does.’
‘How extremely tiresome. Thank you, Stanley.’
A series of muffled thumps came from the corridor outside his office, probably Brodrick making his way up into the roof space. They’d most likely have to move out lock, stock and barrel while the work was done.
‘There’s the Methodist Hall.’
She sighed. ‘They’re booked up until April, the Dramatic Society has a long-standing arrangement. Besides, no Sunday rehearsals.’
‘You could try the Chapter House. The Dean has no hang-ups about the Sabbath, and he’s as keen on this as anyone.’
‘Darling, my cast would resign in a body. It’s colder than Siberia in there, and too small besides. I shall ring that temporary headmaster at the Cathedral School, what’s his name? Dr Pilchard or something. Looks like a throwback to the nineteenth century. Shouldn’t like to be one of his boys.’
‘Dr Pilton,’ said Stanley, who as one of the board of governors was obliged to refrain from airing his thoughts on the subject, at least where anyone might overhear. ‘Let me know if I can do anything else, word in someone’s ear or the like. Good thing we’ve a meeting of the anniversary committee this evening, make sure we can get it all wrapped up as soon as possible.’
More steps in the passageway, another thump. This time the chandelier in Stanley’s office shook.
‘Darling, what on earth is that noise? Is the rest of the building falling down about your ears? If a moulding falls on your head I’ll have to deal with that tiresome deputy of yours, and he’s as deaf as a post. So please do get out in time, if it’s all the same to you.’
Crash. A bellow in the corridor. ‘How’re they beams bearing, John?’ It was one of Brodrick’s men, the one built like the side of a barn. Surely Brodrick wasn’t about to let him loose in the roof space? They’d have a hole in the floor, too, if he came through, never mind another body on their hands.
‘Must go,’ said Vivian. ‘Good luck. I rather think you’ll need it.’
Scene 5
‘I’m afraid I can’t sanction the use of our hall for any outside use. The school’s charter is quite clear on the matter. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a scholarship class to teach. Good day, Miss Witt.’
Vivian slammed the phone down, giving it – and, by proxy, Dr Pilton – a look of pure venom. He knew perfectly well the previous Head had allowed all sorts of people to use the school’s hall. She wondered if the problem was more that she was a woman doing a man’s job, in this case directing a play, or that he was intent on reversing every single one of his predecessor’s policies.
After trying, and failing, to persuade the Methodists that hosting a rehearsal on Sunday would be an act of charity rather than a breach of the Fourth Commandment, she took herself off to the Daffs for coffee and inspiration. It was a quiet time of day, so she had no problem snagging herself a table. The windows were blessedly misted, no one could see in.
Jamie had nothing good to say about the Head.
‘Such a frightful man. I do hope they don’t make him permanent. To think of a school like Selchester being run by someone like him in this day and age, it makes me shiver.’
‘Any dreadful stories? We could give all those reporters something to do.’
‘I won’t have them in here,’ said Jamie. ‘They take up all the tables, order one cup of tea and don’t eat a thing, just sit there with their ears cocked. I hear one of them cornered Miss Georgia yesterday, asked her all sorts of nasty questions about how she found the body. Unpleasant type. I hear he’s been sniffing around here before, back when there was that to-do over the late Earl.’
Vivian was only too familiar with that sort of reporter from her life in London, where the gutter press was always ready to jump on the slightest hint of scandal and blow it out of all proportion.
‘Have they caught anyone yet?’ she asked, although she could be fairly sure she’d have heard by now.
‘No, although I hear that Special Branch fellow has been turning things inside out up at the Atomic. He was downright rude to Mrs Rothesay when he interviewed her. Taught him a good lesson, though, she did.’
‘She always could look after herself.’ Except perhaps in her marriage, which had been a disaster.
‘I didn’t realise you knew her.’
‘Only distantly. We were at the same school for a year; they wouldn’t have me any longer. I lowered the tone of the establishment, they said.’
Jamie’s eyes glinted. ‘Do they claim you as one of their alumnae now?’
‘Oh no. Their girls go on to finishing schools in Switzerland, not to RADA and the stage. But tell me,’ she said, returning to the immediate problem, ‘where else in Selchester there might be a hall big enough to use for the rehearsals.’
‘Well, I’d have said the Methodists, you know, they host the Selchester Players.’
‘Tried them. Too much on, and they definitely won’t do Sundays.’
‘Such a shame about the Town Hall. Have you tried the Castle?’
‘I hardly think the new Earl wants half the town trooping through his sitting room. He has enough to deal with already.’
‘Of course not. It’s his ballroom I was thinking of. I used to help out there, before the war, when the late Earl held his occasions. Such an experience they were! All the bigwigs down from London, everything immaculate for the evening, and his lordship quite splendid in tails.’
Vivian had never seen the ballroom, and had no particular desire to be reminded of the late Lord Selchester. The Castle was a place she’d rather avoid, thank you very much.
‘Is it habitable still?’ In the Castle’s current state, she could very well imagine bats flitting around the ceiling. The more the better, as far as she was concerned.
‘So Mrs Partridge tells me, and with Lady Matilda’s wing being opened up, the pipes are in working order and everything. Oh, do ask him, it would be ever so good to see it used again.’
She scribbled it down in her notebook. ‘Now, where else? We can’t be out of church halls, surely. The one at St Aloysius’s? I’d think that Irish padre would be up for it, he’s a merry soul . . .’
Scene 6
At lunchtime, Hugo dropped in on Harriet Godwin. She was Thorn Hall’s new interrogator, a youthful and breezy Yorkshirewoman who’d blotted her copybook in London and been sent here for her pains.
She was also, as he’d suspected, in charge of debriefing Dr Bárándy. She’d come to the Service from a physics degree at Manchester. Not a normal background, but she was far more useful in this day and age than the likes of Hugo. Most of the scientific defections had been the other way, naïve idealists passing the Manhattan Project’s secrets to Russia, but there had been the occasional foreign defector, too.
Like Dr Bárándy.
Harriet was sitting at her desk in a refreshingly unladylike way, legs up on a chair, eating a sandwich and flicking through a stack of papers. ‘Thought you’d be along,’ she said.
‘Splendid work in Washington.’
‘And other places,’ she said, with a sidelong look.
He inclined his head. She’d gone to interrogate a British scientist picked up by the FBI, landed herself in quite a tangle of traitors’ secrets.
‘How was it?’ he asked. ‘Washington, I mean?’
‘Cold. Foggy. Paranoid.’
‘Just like London, then.’
‘Not as lively. Give me New York for city lights. Billboards, theatres, people know how to enjoy themselves. Eve
ryone in Washington lives in a perpetual stew of intrigue.’
‘That’s why we have jobs,’ he said, sitting down on the other empty chair. Her office was small, poky, and chilly, as opposed to his, which was large, gloomy, and chilly. Her regulation square of carpet was barely big enough to fit her desk. ‘Rather that than the sticks?’
Further acquaintance with Selchester had done little to undermine Harriet’s initial conviction that she didn’t belong.
‘Any day.’
‘Where’s Dr Bárándy?’
‘Woolhope whisked him off for lunch. Hungarian is his latest language.’
Peter Woolhope was the Hall’s most interesting resident, a lean and wild-haired figure in rumpled tweeds. Much the most imaginative man in the outfit, prone to odd hunches and flights of fancy. And practical jokes, which was what had landed him down here. ‘How many will that be, eight?’
‘Nine. He speaks Slovak as well as Czech.’
‘I’d say Hungarian would be more of a challenge, but I doubt it’ll slow him down for long.’
‘So,’ Harriet said, putting her sandwich down, ‘you’re here to ask what’s afoot.’
Hugo tried to lean back a little in his chair, to spare his leg, but it was unyieldingly uncomfortable. At least Harriet didn’t do her interviews in here. ‘Yes.’
‘I wondered that myself.’
‘When did you find out?’
‘Yesterday morning. No mention of them landing him on you, or I’d have slipped you a note. They hauled me back to quiz Dr Rothesay’s colleagues when it looked as if he’d done a bunk. Now it turns out he’s dead, they’ve put me on to this instead.’
‘Interrogating someone who came over six months ago. Not exactly urgent.’
‘Did you know it was Dr Bárándy who put us on to the leak at the Atomic?’
‘Sir Bernard neglected to mention that.’
Harriet made a dismissive noise. ‘For a man who loves the sound of his own voice that much, he’s been remarkably close-mouthed about this. It was Bárándy all right. They stuck him with regular interrogators, peppered him with questions about Soviet bombs and missiles and so on. Wasn’t until someone who knew their business took over that we discovered he’d known as long ago as February about the accident at Ulfsgill, not long after it happened. Once we started probing, it turned out that was simply the earliest detail the Russians knew about, and you know the rest.’
Hugo did – there had been a trickle of information from Foxley to the far side of the Iron Curtain. They’d had their suspicions back in October, confirmed it in December. ‘Wind back a moment. No one has told me the first thing about Dr Bárándy.’
‘Old Hungarian family, not that distinguished. His uncle once held a minor post in Admiral Horthy’s government, and his sister had married a major in the Hungarian army, for which unspeakable crimes the whole family was shipped off to Siberia in ’48. Once the Soviets found out he was a physicist, they offered him better conditions for his family if he’d work on one of their projects, so he spent four years in some closed city in Siberia, helping Uncle Joe build his Bomb. They let him go after Stalin died, upon which he found out that his parents and sister had died in their first two months in the gulag.’
‘How did he get over?’
‘There are ways across the Yugoslav border.’
‘You’re the expert.’ She’d ended up in the field, so he heard, pursued by the Hungarian secret police. A nasty outfit, even by Eastern Bloc standards.
She grinned. ‘He had rather an easier time crossing than I did. Walked into our embassy in Belgrade, asked for asylum. I suspect he might have preferred the Americans, but there were some dubious characters watching their place. We’ll have to get used to being the second choice.’
‘I can see why you’re so popular in London,’ he remarked. ‘It’ll be Ulan Bator for you next.’
‘There’s a queue. You might even be ahead of me. Roger Bailey is out for your blood, and you’re none too popular in London after you spoked their wheel over the late Lord Selchester’s murder.’
‘That was mostly Freya Wryton’s doing.’ Credit where credit was due.
‘Miss Wryton isn’t in a position to be blamed. Though she’s attractive. I can see why you’re standing up for her.’
‘I’m otherwise engaged, thank you very much,’ said Hugo curtly.
‘Yes, that Valerie Grisewood, whom you’ve left to languish in London.’ Mischief glinted in Harriet’s eyes.
This wasn’t at all what Hugo had come to talk about. ‘She does not languish, thank you very much, and if she did, it would be my business, not that of the Thorn Hall gossips.’
‘Her business, too, I rather think. She cornered Roger Bailey at a party on Saturday, quizzed him on your life down here.’
Hugo winced. Their colleague Bailey disliked him intensely, for reasons he’d never quite fathomed. There wasn’t a worse person Valerie could have seized on. No doubt Hugo would be hearing about it all too soon.
‘I have no doubt you’ll do the decent thing in the end, Hawksworth, but take it from me, sooner is better.’
He gave her a cold look. ‘Can we return to Dr Bárándy?’
Harriet held up her hands. ‘I’ve said my piece.’
‘More than.’
She was quite unruffled. ‘As I said, it turned out the Soviets knew what we were doing almost as soon as we did. Hence your work these past few weeks.’
‘So Bárándy blew the whistle on a traitor at the Atomic.’
She tapped the desk. ‘Once we knew what questions to ask him.’
‘What was he working on?’
‘Improving the yield of the A-bomb. We know they have an H-bomb project going, too, like the Americans, but he wasn’t working on that. Worse luck.’
‘So,’ Hugo said carefully, ‘we have a defector who blows the whistle on a leak at Foxley. We have a dead scientist at Foxley . . .’
‘Not the leak?’
‘Nothing in his background to suggest it.’
‘Sir Bernard likes the idea that Rothesay was the leak, tried to get out, and was shot by his handler.’
‘Not the most plausible.’
‘But so convenient.’
‘Finally,’ Hugo went on, staring out of the window at a slope full of gloomy conifer trees, ‘we have the defector foisted on Gus – Lord Selchester – the very day Dr Rothesay turns up with a bullet in the back of his neck. All of which is done very carefully behind my back.’
‘They can’t have known about the body when they sent him down here. I found out first thing yesterday, which is about when it turned up.’
‘They could have changed their minds, sent him somewhere else.’
‘Pigs might fly. I think you’re reading too much into this. Far be it from me to read the minds of our illustrious superiors, but what we have here is on the one hand a good old-fashioned bureaucratic bodge-up, and on the other someone in London who wants to teach you a lesson. See, the queue for Ulan Bator.
‘In fact,’ Harriet continued, ‘I’d hazard that someone, whoever they may be, reckons a couple such nudges might push you out of the Service altogether, into some line of work where you’ll stop being such a nuisance. We all know a desk job isn’t the same as fieldwork. What could be more natural than to throw the whole thing in, start something new?’
‘You’d move up the queue,’ Hugo murmured.
‘They’d like to get rid of me, but they can’t. Not as long as men like Bárándy are important.’
He turned his attention back to their guest. ‘Is he important?’
‘He’s blown the lid on the mole here. If he does nothing else, he’s made his contribution. He’ll do well in America. He’s a born survivor. The more important question right now is, are you?’
Scene 7
MacLeod led a team of four constables and a sergeant to search Ingham’s place. Jarrett, of course, came too.
‘It’s in Long Combe,’ MacLeod said. ‘Fisher
Walk. Woods on two sides, path to the river. Make sure you cover the exits, and search the outbuildings. I took the precaution of getting a warrant for the Gallery too. We’ll move on there if necessary.’
‘He wasn’t in occupation there when Dr Rothesay disappeared,’ said Constable Tarrant helpfully.
‘Indeed he wasn’t,’ said Jarrett. ‘But there’s a great deal of junk in there. It’s an ideal place to dispose of evidence.’
The constables eyed one another unenthusiastically. Fred Camford had looked in on the Gallery a few months back, when some of the junk stored in the flat had fallen over during the night, alerting a zealous neighbour.
‘A right dog’s breakfast, it was,’ he’d said. ‘Falling to bits, it were. Wonder it hadn’t all toppled over before.’
They parked their van a little way along, and trooped down through the woods. Number 3, Fisher Walk was a small, neatly appointed cottage, with roses trained up the front and a wisp of smoke coming from the roof.
‘Bit nice for the likes of him, isn’t it?’ whispered Constable Gibbert, a raw youth with big feet who’d joined the month before.
‘Belongs to a gentleman as . . .’ Constable Tarrant began.
Sergeant Barkwith wasn’t having any of this. ‘Quiet there! You’re policemen, not gossiping fishwives. Gibbert, how about you don’t trip over anything this time?’
After a long pause, Saul opened the door. He was covered in dust and grease, with the look of a man doing a hard day’s work and enjoying himself. The satisfaction vanished at once, replaced by a suspicious wariness. ‘Superintendent MacLeod,’ he said, tight-lipped. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘We have a warrant to search the premises, Mr Ingham. Please stand aside and don’t touch anything.’
‘Search it for what?’ Saul said bitterly. ‘I thought we were done with this, and you were ready to bring charges against that—’
‘This is a different matter, sir.’
‘Let me see your warrant.’
Saul examined the warrant, then with a sigh stepped back to let them in. He could see one of his neighbours, the nosy one, peering through her window. This would be all over Selchester by the end of the day. ‘That Saul Ingham in trouble again. Always knew he was no good . . .’
A Matter of Loyalty Page 8