A Matter of Loyalty

by Anselm Audley

  The constables fanned out, heavy-handed and industrious. Jarrett looked around, appraising the cottage at a glance. Plainly furnished, almost spartan. The bare minimum.

  ‘So what’s this about?’ Saul demanded.

  ‘The murder of Dr Bruno Rothesay, Mr Ingham,’ said Jarrett, having troubled to introduce himself this time. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘We were distant acquaintances,’ said Saul, ‘but in case you haven’t noticed, I only moved to Selchester this week.’

  ‘Let us be the judges of what’s relevant, sir,’ said MacLeod. ‘What was the nature of your relationship with Dr Rothesay?’

  ‘What is there to tell? I met him a few times when I lived in Oxford, and I moved here the day he turned up missing.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Saul shortly. ‘We moved in different worlds. He was gown, I was town. I didn’t have much to do with him.’

  ‘Found something here, sir. Out in plain sight, by the bed.’

  Constable Camford came downstairs with a pistol and holster in one meaty hand, a box of ammunition in the other.

  ‘That’s my service revolver,’ said Saul.

  ‘Let me have a look at that,’ said Jarrett. He flipped the gun over once in his hand, looked at the ammunition, and shook his head. ‘Wrong calibre. That’s a Webley, one of ours. Keep going. Pay attention to loose floorboards, the backs of cupboards, drawers, places like that.’

  ‘I’d like to know what makes you think I had anything to do with this,’ Saul said.

  ‘We’ll be the judges of that, Mr Ingham. If there’s nothing suspicious on the premises, you’ve nothing to worry about.’

  ‘This isn’t my house, Inspector, and I’ve better things to do than go burrowing in somebody else’s drawers. It’s a temporary base for me, nothing more.’

  The search continued, heavy footsteps on the ceiling, Saul’s belongings turned inside out with a clumsy show of efficiency.

  ‘Don’t like doing this with him watching,’ said Gibbert to Tarrant, as they went into the bathroom. Him was Jarrett, the station’s current bête noire.

  ‘That’s why you’re up here and he’s down there. Sarge knows his business. You just keep out of trouble now. There won’t be a gun in his shaving things, neither.’

  Gibbert picked up the container of shaving cream. ‘They’s all French.’

  ‘Stands to reason. He was in the Foreign Legion, Sarge says. Been out in Indochina or whatnot, fighting the Commies.’

  Gibbert’s eyes went wide. ‘The Foreign Legion? Well, I never. Did he murder someone?’

  ‘Way I heard it, he was framed for something, fled the country. Hullo, what’s this?’ He rattled the panel on the side of the bath. ‘Give me a hand here, will you? No, wait, comes off easy like. There’s something in here, too.’

  ‘Aren’t we supposed to use gloves, so they don’t get our fingerprints confused?’

  ‘When it’s time to pick anything up, I’ll tell you. What have we here? That’s one of they German pistols, that is, like they have in the movies. Now what would an honest man be wanting with something like that, I ask myself? Run and fetch the Super now, and don’t trip on your way down.’

  Fetching the Super inevitably brought their unwanted guest upstairs, his eyes alight. Saul stood waiting under Constable Camford’s watchful eye, unable to make out a word of the conversation upstairs.

  Jarrett thundered down the stairs, full of hard triumph. ‘Would you care to explain this, Mr Ingham?’

  His gloved hands held a German Luger and a stack of ammunition.

  ‘That’s a Luger,’ said Saul, puzzled. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Germany, Mr Ingham. By way of France, if the markings are anything to go by.’

  ‘I’ve never seen that gun before.’

  ‘It was in your bathroom, Mr Ingham, carefully hidden away.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should ask the house’s owner.’

  ‘That won’t do. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us to the police station, Mr Ingham. You have some questions to answer.’

  Scene 8

  It was Gus’s first meeting of the anniversary committee. Stanley Dillon had roped him in soon after New Year, ignoring all his protests about not knowing the town well.

  ‘Of course you must be on it,’ he’d said briskly. ‘Do you no end of good, and help people get to know you. Besides, it’ll give the committee some heft to have an earl on it. Next meeting’s two weeks on Tuesday. Get Freya to fill you in – she knows all about it.’

  The meeting was in the Masonic Hall, which had earned him a glare from Polly, and some muttering about secret societies. ‘What would the Pope say?’

  ‘Where does she pick this up from?’ he asked as he drove Freya and Hugo to the meeting. ‘Back in the States, the Masons are just like the Rotary Club, they meet and they do good works. From the way she goes on, you’d think they were something out of a John Buchan novel.’

  Gus had discovered a complete collection of Buchan novels in the library, and had been reading his way through them. Freya wasn’t entirely sure where they had come from, since her uncle had never been a great reader.

  ‘They’re a little more influential than that here,’ said Hugo. ‘She must be thinking of the European Freemasons – they’re a much more anti-clerical bunch.’

  ‘She’s got quite firm about things like that all of a sudden,’ said Gus. ‘I mean, I’ve brought her up as a good Catholic, with a proper sense of right and wrong, but since we’ve been here, she’s taking it all more seriously. I don’t want her to grow up one of these people who won’t have anything to do with the world outside the Church. It’s not good for a young woman to think like that.’

  ‘She’s just hanging on to the things she knows,’ said Freya from the back seat. ‘She’s been uprooted from her home, her country, everything she’s used to. The Church is the one thing which hasn’t changed, so of course she’ll hang on to that. Give her time and she’ll reach her own balance. No need to worry about her taking holy orders or the like.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Gus. ‘Of course, if she wants to become a nun . . .’

  Freya knew perfectly well Polly had no intention of becoming a nun.

  ‘She likes baiting Georgia. It’s part of the game they play.’

  And, perhaps, her father, too, but Freya wasn’t about to say that.

  The anniversary meeting was open to the public, and rather fuller today than was usually the case. With the damage to the Feoffees’ Hall and the sensational news about Saul Ingham, the meeting was a perfect excuse for gossip. Freya and Hugo took their seats with the hoi polloi in the hall, while Gus was ushered solicitously towards a chair on the dais.

  Sir Bernard intercepted him, with – rather to Hugo’s surprise – Dr Oldcastle at his side. Gus greeted Sir Bernard courteously, but perhaps a trifle stiffly.

  ‘He’ll have to learn a bit more sangfroid,’ Freya whispered to Hugo.

  Dinah had slipped in beside her. ‘What was that?’

  ‘You’ll find out,’ Freya replied, as Stanley called the meeting to order and introduced the new Earl.

  ‘Before we get down to our scheduled business,’ he said, ‘there’s the urgent matter of finding rehearsal space for our flagship event, the production of Murder in the Cathedral. As you’ve all doubtless heard, the Feoffees’ Hall suffered severe ceiling damage as a result of Sunday’s storm, and will be closed for several months. There are four days of rehearsals scheduled this weekend and next, with several of the professional actors in attendance, so it’s very important that we find Miss Witt a venue. Ideally the same venue.’

  ‘I can help you with a venue on the Saturdays,’ said Father Maloney of St Aloysius’s, ‘but not on Sundays, I’m afraid.’

  Nor, it seems, could the Presbyterians, who had sent their jolliest elder to the meeting, nor the Methodists, whose Miss Shaw seemed rather relieved to be let off the hook for Saturday
s, too.

  ‘She should never have scheduled rehearsals on Sundays,’ Dinah whispered to Freya. ‘It must be quite normal in London, but she’s forgotten what a bunch of stick-in-the-muds we are down here.’

  There followed a round of rather fruitless discussions – could the Masons help out? The schools? The YMCA? – before Gus intervened.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The hall fell silent, perhaps rather more quickly than he’d expected. He did have rather the look of the previous Lord Selchester in a certain light, tall and commanding, and most people here were used to a man in the Castle you didn’t want to cross.

  ‘If I understand this rightly, Miss Witt, your immediate problem concerns the next two weekends, particularly the Sundays?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Then why don’t you use the ballroom at the Castle on all four days? It seems you’re in a bind, and I’d be more than happy to help you out.’

  Vivian had been hoping that wouldn’t happen, thought Freya, catching the tiniest flash of discomfort as she turned to look at the Earl. Freya couldn’t blame her, after the treatment she’d had at the late Earl’s hands. Of course, no one knew about that.

  The suggestion made, it was received with general relief. Freya didn’t think Stanley had set it up – how could he have known the ceiling would fall down? – but he was a man who liked getting things done, and here was something very definitely done.

  ‘He’ll end up hosting school fetes in the ballroom if he’s too obliging,’ Freya said to Dinah, in the general round of congratulations which followed.

  ‘He won’t,’ she said firmly. ‘He may be new to this, but he has far too much good sense to let himself be used. At least, more than once.’

  So Dinah already knew something of the Árpád story. No surprise there. Gus wouldn’t have let anything important slip, he was much too honourable, but Freya was ready to bet he’d consulted his friend on how to deal with the British Establishment in future.

  ‘Where’s your guest?’ Dinah asked, confirming Freya’s hunch.

  ‘Back at the Castle, putting his feet up. Wouldn’t be fair to drag him out where he can see us all gossiping about him.’

  ‘Gus thought he might be interested in Miranda Pearson’s talk on Friday. She’s been all over the place, apparently, there might be some Hungarian folklore.’

  ‘I shall be going, I’m dying to know what she makes of all those ridiculous stories the farmers tell her.’

  ‘So will half the town.’

  Stanley was speaking again. ‘While Lord Selchester’s kind offer has put a roof over the actors’ heads, it sounds as if we’ll still be short of chairs and refreshments. Can anyone who can help transport those please talk to Mr Frankland at the end of the meeting?’

  Edgar Frankland was the producer, an old theatrical friend of Vivian’s who’d retired to Selchester and had been itching to get his fingers into a really big show again.

  ‘Now, on to item one . . .’

  The rest of the meeting passed less eventfully and with relatively few interruptions, since most of those present were really here for the Dean’s free refreshments and the gossip.

  Hugo’s attention wandered. His leg had been aching after half an hour, even on the comfortable chairs the Masons had outfitted themselves with. He needed to get up and move at regular intervals, the physiotherapist kept telling him. Time was, he’d have been able to stay stock-still for hours at a time.

  It was almost a year since a fake message had lured him to a trap in an East Berlin backstreet, putting an end to his field career and very nearly to his life. It was intruding on his thoughts again, a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Something had been out of kilter, but neither Hugo nor the officers who’d debriefed him had been able to pin it down. His instinct for trouble had surfaced at the last minute, so a bullet intended to kill had only lamed.

  He’d seen it when they’d extracted it from his leg, to be filed in the Service archives.

  ‘Wool-gathering?’ said Freya. Hugo realised the meeting had broken up. He stood with a grimace, pushing his chair back too quickly and earning a basilisk stare from the biddy behind him.

  ‘Very sorry, ma’am,’ he said, receiving only a beady look over her shoulder as she headed along the row.

  ‘Don’t take any notice of her, she’s got the sharpest elbows in Selchester,’ said Freya. ‘She’s just cross because you blocked her exit, now Mrs Seathwaite will get to the cakes first.’

  Another equally snowy-headed old lady had indeed contrived to be the first at the refreshment table, even though half the hall hadn’t so much as got to their feet.

  ‘She usually parks herself on the end of a row,’ Dinah remarked. ‘Sloppy of her not to be here early enough.’

  It sounded as though men in flat caps ought to have been taking bets.

  ‘Did you notice the couple from Nightingale Cottage are here?’ Freya said.

  Jeremy and Miranda Pearson were indeed present, making their way over to talk to Edgar Frankland.

  ‘I didn’t know they were involved in town things,’ said Hugo. Nightingale Cottage had been mooted as a potential home for him and Georgia before Gus invited them to stay on at the Castle, so it was a small slice of Selchester gossip he knew something about. Opinion had tipped the couple for a speedy departure, but here they still were.

  ‘Oh, they are now,’ said Jamie, appearing from behind them. ‘Forgive me, I’m a terrible eavesdropper, but I couldn’t help overhearing. They’re at that stage where they make a big effort to keep everything together, as if that’ll save things. It won’t last.’

  ‘Is that why no one thinks they’ll stay?’ Hugo had never got to the bottom of those rumours.

  ‘Oh, such terrible fights they have.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have reckoned he had the spirit for it,’ Freya said, watching the two of them in conversation with Edgar.

  ‘Wears him quite out, so they say. But they put a good front on in public. It’s all these peculiar ideas of theirs. One needs a certain radicalism – there’s an awful lot of stuffy old baggage in society – but one can’t help feeling that sometimes people take it too far.’

  ‘Saul did mention they had separate bedrooms.’

  That, of course, brought the conversation around to Saul’s arrest, news of which had only reached Hugo just before he left the Hall. Selchester, it seemed, was split between those who thought there could be no smoke without fire, and those who thought Saul had simply become the police’s favourite suspect. Jamie was firmly in the latter camp.

  ‘It’s just too obvious,’ he declared. ‘That poor man, constantly being accused of things he hasn’t done, as if we don’t all have our guilty little secrets. What if he decides to take himself elsewhere after this? We need a gallery, some proper culture would do us no end of good.’

  ‘Does that mean you’d be singing a different tune if he weren’t opening a gallery?’ Dinah asked.

  ‘Dinah Linthrop, you’re a wicked woman to suggest such things.’

  ‘Don’t call her a wicked woman where his lordship will hear you,’ said Freya.

  It was Jamie’s turn to look sly. ‘My lips are sealed.’

  ‘Are they sealed on the subject of Foxley?’ Freya asked. Dinah gave her a quick, grateful smile.

  ‘What more would I know about that than our esteemed investigator from the hush-hush place? Although I did have Dr Oldcastle’s secretary in just now, Miss Fitzgibbon. She’s a great friend of Miss Rhys who works for Stanley Dillon, and by all accounts he’s quite relieved there’s a suspect. It’ll get that nasty man from Special Branch out of his hair.’

  ‘I thought he was quite pally with the Special Branch fellow,’ said Dinah.

  Freya shot a glance at Hugo, who was standing quietly, with an expression of polite interest and nothing more.

  Jamie knew all about that. ‘Oh, they’re both so Establishment it almost hurts. Probably glad to find kindred spirits down here in the sticks. See Old
castle with Sir Bernard over there, aren’t they two peas from the same pod? Metaphorically speaking, of course. I’m sure this Jarrett is on his way to great things, hopefully a long way from here, and I hear Dr Oldcastle has already been tipped to become a panjandrum. There’s a big position coming up in London, whoever gets it is almost guaranteed a knighthood. Miss Fitzgibbon is very excited. She says he’ll get her an invitation to anything really important, and she loves some good pomp and circumstance. Don’t we all?’

  Hugo thought of Harriet Godwin, who had no time at all for pomp and circumstance, nor indeed the whole apparatus of monarchy and peerage, but held his tongue.

  ‘He can’t have liked one of his subordinates turning up dead, now can he?’ said Dinah. ‘Worst possible thing for him at a time like this.’

  ‘Like a mad wife in the attic,’ said Freya. Although of course that was a Romantic trope, appropriate for its own time. In Rosina Wyndham’s era, there were more effective ways to get rid of inconvenient relatives than locking them in the attic. Unless a man like Thurloe found out, and then you were in the soup.

  ‘No wife, mad or otherwise,’ said Jamie, a little disappointingly. ‘Though I do gather he has his lady friends from time to time. Discreetly, of course, if anything in Selchester can be discreet.’

  Indeed they weren’t monks up at the Atomic, as Mrs Partridge had remarked, but why should they be? They were as human as anyone else, for all the cult of the cool and disinterested scientist.

  ‘I should catch Vivian,’ said Dinah, spotting her through the crowd. ‘I’m now officially assistant stage manager, and apparently she wants a meeting of the production team at the weekend.’

  Freya nudged Hugo. ‘That’ll be you, too. I hope you’ve been in touch with that friend of Vivian’s about the lighting.’

  ‘Perhaps Gus will end up hosting that at the Castle, too. There’ll be a lot of people on site.’

  ‘Mrs Partridge will be delighted,’ said Freya. ‘She’s dying to have more going on at the Castle.’

  Sir Bernard was bearing down on Hugo, Oldcastle in tow. ‘Ah, Hawksworth. Might I have a word?’