by Gavin Lyall
“Ranklin?”
“Sir.” He called the Commander “sir” the first time they met each day, but otherwise only when he was tired and instincts for rank took over. There was a solitary green-glass-shaded lamp alight on the Commander’s writing-table; Ranklin flopped into the most comfortable chair and fumbled for his pipe.
“Was it the meat porter?” the Commander asked.
“Probably. But badly cut up by barges and tugs and things.”
“Was he pushed?”
“Again probably, but they may never find evidence.” They spoke softly and without hurry.
“Hm. It would be nice if it were a proper murder. It would be a fact and excuse all sorts of interest. Unless, of course, you did it yourself.”
“Bloody hell.”
“It would be quite understandable. The chap wouldn’t talk, you lost your temper, one shove—”
“The river’s half a mile away from—”
“The Bureau will have to stand by you – in spirit, anyway. I can easily find a couple of chaps to say you were dining with them at a club at the time. Absolutely honest, unimpeachable men, convince any court in the land. You haven’t got a thing to worry about.”
“The man was younger, heavier . . . a meat porter, for God’s sake.”
“Ah, but you’re cleverer. Well, remember you’ve got witnesses if you need them.”
Ranklin glowered. “And the police have got the Collomb girl for questioning about it.”
“Have they?” The Commander thought about this. “You don’t find that embarrassing? Good man. What will she tell them?”
“At a guess, nothing. Police are just the sheepdogs of capitalism to her.” He had a feeling he’d improved that phrase somehow. “And she doesn’t speak any English; that should help.”
“Could she get round to her lover’s alleged parentage?”
Ranklin shrugged. How could he know?
The Commander was fretting. “But if you didn’t do it, could she have done?”
Ranklin rested his head back and closed his eyes. “Same objections as for me. She’s just a slip of a girl. Tough as nails, I’m sure, but no match for Guillet. And the river’s just as far for her as for me – if she knew where it is.”
The Commander would be glaring at him, but he couldn’t be bothered to open his eyes and confirm this.
But there was a glare in the Commander’s voice. “But you know where it is.”
“Yes. Too bloody far.”
The Commander switched back to Berenice. “I suppose there’s no reason for her to mention the other thing.”
“I don’t see why the police should ask her. From their point of view the story’s complete without it. She loves Langhorn, Guillet was bearing witness against him, she killed Guillet. Simplicity begets convictions. You should hear O’Gilroy on the subject.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure . . . I just hate doing nothing.”
That made Ranklin, who felt he had actually done a day’s work, open his eyes. “D’you really want to save her from the jaws of the capitalist sheepdogs?”
“Can you do it?”
“I can try, if I can involve an outsider.”
“Involve anybody except us.”
“Are any of your telephones switched on?”
The Commander had four on his table; the agents had one between them all. “This one’s still alive.”
Ranklin called Corinna’s number. She took a long time to answer and then said a sleepy: “Hello?”
“Is that the beautiful Corinna Finn?” Ranklin asked.
“God Almighty, you.”
“Me. How’s your fund?”
“Jesus . . . Not a word for days, then you ring up in the middle of the night to ask How’s my fund. D’you mean of goodwill? At zero and falling, is what.”
“Sorry, I’ve been busy and it’s all your fault really. I mean the fund for hauling destitute Americans out of trouble. Does it apply to their girl-friends too?”
“What? What girl-friend?”
“A French lass called Berenice Collomb. She’s a bit of a guttersnipe, but Grover Langhorn loves her. At least she does him. And the police are questioning her about a missing witness who was hauled out of the Thames this afternoon, very deceased.”
There was a long silence. “This witness . . . was he testifying against young Grover?”
“That’s right. Not very well, I’d say, but Noah Quinton should tell it better.”
“Quinton? Who said anything about Quinton?”
“Sorry.”
Another long silence. Then she said “All right. Get off the damn line so I can call him—Oh, where’ve they got her?”
“Scotland Yard, or the little police station next to it, probably. I’ll call you tomorrow. And thanks.” Ranklin hooked the earpiece on again. “That’s the best I can do.”
The Commander, who had been unashamedly eavesdropping, grinned with satisfaction. “I don’t think we could have done better. You can sleep with a clear conscience, even if you did kill that porter.”
Ranklin ignored that but, as he turned to go, hesitated. And after a time, he said: “Just suppose, by the grace of God, that we bring all this off. Suppose we stuff the skeletons back into the cupboards; that’s going to leave us knowing what skeletons and which cupboards.”
“You know, that thought never occurred to me,” the Commander said, looking as if that were true.
7
Ranklin was waiting in Noah Quinton’s outer office when the solicitor bustled in at a quarter past nine the next morning. He stopped abruptly when he saw Ranklin, then said: “Yes, you’d better come in,” and bustled on through.
As Ranklin had half expected, Quinton’s office was not just grand, but self-consciously so. There was nothing in it that a long-established and successful solicitor might not have in the way of antique desk, Turkish carpet, silver ashtrays and client chairs covered in dark green plush, but they should have been stained and worn, as if the owner didn’t think or care about them. Quinton obviously cared, and you didn’t want to be the first to spill coffee or drop cigar-ash.
“I suppose,” Quinton said, unpacking papers from a briefcase on to his desk, “that I have you to thank for a new client. I’m getting a little too old to be hauled from my bed in the early hours, but the Mrs Finn connection is . . . welcome, shall we say?”
Ranklin, sitting uneasily in an easy chair, just smiled.
“I suppose you want to know what happened.” Quinton sat down and automatically shifted his chair by fractions of an inch to just how he liked it. “Well, it’s not privileged . . . The police haven’t charged Ma’mselle Collomb with anything, they’d only detained her but were clearly going to hang on to her for as long as they could. I got her released on bail, put up by Mrs Finn, who’s now looking after her.”
Ranklin frowned; he hadn’t expected that, and Corinna wouldn’t have, either. He was going to hear more about it. Considerably more.
“The police objected to Ma’mselle Collomb going back to her Bloomsbury address. They made it out to be a community –” a very suspect word, that, “– of intellectual depravity. My own brief impression of Ma’mselle Collomb is that she could teach any Bloomsbury intellectual more about depravity than he could stomach – but that’s neither here nor there. So she’s now officially in the care of Mrs Finn.”
“Did Ma’mselle Collomb say anything interesting?” Ranklin asked casually. “Or tell the police anything?”
Quinton looked at him warily, but Ranklin was all boyish innocence. So Quinton said: “I wouldn’t say so . . . The police didn’t even seem certain that Guillet’s death was murder.”
“They can’t be,” Ranklin said. “Death was due to a mixture of asphyxia and shock. Not enough water in the lungs and stomach for drowning. There had been a heavy blow to the head, above the right ear, some time before death, but it’ll take more time to work out if it was long enough to suggest he’d been deliberately whacked. It might have been
him hitting a moored boat or river steps – they don’t even know where he went into the water. He hadn’t got enough alcohol in him to have been drunk.”
After a time, Quinton said: “I suppose I hadn’t better ask you where you got such remarkably exact information.”
“Take it as some small recompense for having to get up so early.” And for what was to come.
Quinton nodded, quickly, birdlike. “So it may be that the police can persuade the coroner to write it off as an accident if they can’t induce anyone to confess to it. Or does your behind-the-scenes knowledge give you a different opinion?”
“We have professionally suspicious minds,” Ranklin said, “so naturally we incline to murder. But I suppose accidents do happen, even to important witnesses in the middle of a case. And concerning that, what’s going to happen now Guillet’s dead?”
Mention of the case made Quinton look at his watch; there was a clock on the wall, but it looked too expensively antique to be trusted. “That’s up to the magistrate. The French will fight tooth and nail to keep Langhorn in custody until they can come up with something, and I shall fight just as hard to have the matter wound up. Knowing this magistrate, I think he’ll adjourn until Monday now, and hope for divine guidance over the sabbath.
“But remember, even if Langhorn’s freed, he won’t have been declared innocent. Extradition isn’t about guilt or innocence, so there’s no double jeopardy involved. The French could ask for him to be re-arrested on new evidence – if they can find it.”
“And if they can find him,” Ranklin mused. “I’d think he’d be off home to America like a shot from a gun.”
Quinton nodded. “And America won’t extradite one of its own citizens.”
But did the Bureau want young Grover – and presumably his mother – landing in America stony-broke and looking to raise cash from the American scandal sheets? Incautiously, he said: “I’m not sure we’d like that, either.”
“I’m sorry if that displeases you,” Quinton said, dryly sarcastic. “Does that mean that you’ve been investigating further, and found there was something to investigate?”
But it had to come to this anyway, and this was one of the reasons Ranklin had come, though it still wasn’t going to be easy. “I was down in Portsmouth yesterday looking for traces of Mrs Langhorn, the boy’s mother. There was a Portsmouth address on the marriage certificate. I had to have some sort of excuse so I, er, said I was working for you.”
“Did you?” Quinton considered this. “And did you learn anything?”
“Nothing of relevance to Grover Langhorn’s case.”
“Oh? I think I might be the better judge of that.”
Ranklin said nothing. Quinton leant forward, chin on hands, elbows on desk, expression stern. “Let me see if I’ve got this right: without my permission, you posed as an investigator working for me, but you won’t tell me what you found out – is that correct?”
No, it was not going to be easy. Ranklin did his best at a disarming smile; at least his features ran to that. “Well, more or less, but—”
“Captain Ranklin –” Quinton threw himself back in his chair “– when we first met, I assumed you must be Palace officials or liaison between them and the Prime Minister. I’m sure such people exist, and it seemed quite reasonable that, moving in the circles she does, Mrs Finn should know them. It seems I underestimated the width of her acquaintance; judging from your behaviour, I do believe that you and your precious Commander are from the Secret Service.”
It was said with such contempt that Ranklin recoiled. He knew that the Bureau and spying generally weren’t held in high regard, but what right had a Jew lawyer to sneer at him? Then he recoiled again, only inwardly this time, and took a hasty glance at his own prejudices. He hadn’t (he told himself) been despising Quinton for being . . . well, what he was. But perhaps he had been secretly hoping the man would do or say something so that he could despise him anyway.
“Or, at the very least,” Quinton added, “take it that your conduct leads me to that conclusion.”
Ranklin squeezed out a smile. “If we were what you suggest, then obviously we’d deny it. But whoever we are, you must have known we’d have to follow this up in a rather surreptitious manner. And I thought you were happy to remain ignorant of that and concentrate on the legal end.”
“True. But I then believed, rashly it seems, that you could do such following without pretending that I was behind it. So in effect, you’ve been spreading the idea that I sought and have now got knowledge that I didn’t seek and haven’t, in fact, got. What sort of position does that leave me in?”
“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
“I wish I had a penny for every time someone has told me, in this very office, that there was ‘nothing to worry about’ or so-and-so ‘wouldn’t do that’ and so on. My whole professional life is worrying about such things. Trying to make legally sure of things my clients are certain about already. Believe me, they shriek loud enough when I fail. So unless you tell me exactly what you’ve learnt, I’m sure you’ll understand that I reserve my position on this.”
Sounding pained and almost offended, Ranklin said: “I am working for the government.”
“And I’m working for my client, Grover Langhorn.”
After that, Ranklin decided not to ask for a lift to Bow Street in Quinton’s motor-car.
* * *
When Ranklin arrived by taxi at Bow Street’s wide pavement, it looked like old home week. Quinton’s Lanchester was parked at the kerb again and he had presumably already gone in. Corinna’s father’s Daimler, similarly Pullman-bodied, was parked just behind and Corinna herself was chatting to Lieutenant Jay. In the background, wearing a shabby tweed suit and cap, O’Gilroy was leaning against a wall.
You had to admire how he did that. He wasn’t skulking or trying to look invisible. He just leant there, smoking an interminable stub of a hand-rolled cigarette, half-wrapped in his own concerns, half conscious of the world around, and wholly ready to tell it to bugger off and mind its own business.
It was a good day for leaning on walls: fine and bright and perhaps a shade warmer than the day before.
Jay asked: “D’you want me to go in or are you?”
“You go.” And Jay darted inside.
Corinna said: “Good morning,” in a tone that suggested Ranklin was to do the rest of the talking and had better make it good.
“I’m most frightfully sorry that you had to take over Berenice. I had no idea . . . But I’m very grateful. Er – where is she, by the way?”
Corinna jerked her head, almost dislodging her matador hat. “In there, watching the boy-friend come up – or go down – for the umpteenth time. Is anything going to happen?”
“Quinton doubts it. Umm . . . I imagine you had a rather busy night?”
“I imagine I had a totally loused-up night. Getting up and flogging down to Scotland Yard just to be ignored by pompous policemen and given cups of what they think is tea . . . I’ll say this for Noah Quinton, he knows how to handle those bastards. They don’t like him, but they run scared of him . . . And then having to speak French to that . . . that—God Almighty, the girl is a complete slut. And d’you think she has a word of thanks for it all? She despises me! Thinks I’m the ‘idle rich’ – idle! After a night of running around promising God-knows-what for her on top of a busy day . . .
“It’ll take more than Professor Higgins to make a duchess out of that squashed cabbage leaf.” Shaw’s Pygmalion had just opened at His Majesty’s and its characters had already passed into the language.
“Well,” Ranklin said, “I can’t say how grateful—”
“You can try!”
“Er – are you stuck with her indefinitely?”
“It seems like it – until your wonderful police say different. We’re going round to Bloomsbury when this is over to collect her things.”
Ranklin was a bit surprised to hear that Berenice actually had
any “things”. But perhaps even the inhabitants of La Villette might own more than they could wear at one time.
“D’you want to take O’Gilroy with you?” he offered. “Just on general grounds.”
“No, Bloomsbury isn’t the East End. It sounds like a bunch of half-assed artists being anarchists on money from home.” It was the wrong morning for anyone to expect the benefit of the doubt from Corinna.
Then there was an eruption at the court door and several obvious journalists rushed off towards Fleet Street. It hadn’t taken long, but clearly something had happened. Ranklin had already guessed what when Jay came out to report: “Adjourned. The police say they’re treating the meat porter’s death as murder.”
Ranklin had instinctively stepped away from Corinna to listen to him; now, they both watched as Berenice Collomb shuffled up to Corinna. Her very pace was sullen, as if she were going from one funeral to another. Ranklin saw Corinna’s face set into a wide, false smile.
“So that’s Paris’s answer to Eliza Dolittle?” Jay observed. Trust him to have seen the latest play. “I saw her around yesterday.”
“You didn’t see—” Ranklin began, then saw him for himself. Gorkin, wearing the same check suit and foreign-looking hat, came out, smiled at Ranklin, then vanished round the corner into Broad Court. Ranklin thought about nodding O’Gilroy to follow, but that would just be make-work; he had Gorkin’s address anyway.
Corinna was ushering Berenice into the car, relaying instructions to the chauffeur, driving off.
“What d’you want me to do now?” Jay asked.
“Did the police say anything more about Guillet than just murder?”
“Pursuing various lines of enquiry, that’s all.”
“See what else you can dig up. Here or through the Yard. Try and be in the office around lunchtime.”