A Grave Man

by David Roberts

  He chewed his moustache and harrumphed. It was his opportunity to prove himself and he was determined to solve this crime before the Chief Constable insisted on bringing in Scotland Yard. All eyes would be on him. There would be a lot of interest in the press because, apart from Sir Simon, other well-known figures were involved. He gathered that Lord Edward and Verity Browne were celebrities of a sort. Well, he would not be put down by any of these London folk, he assured himself. There was one obvious suspect – the doctor fellow with the foreign-sounding name, Dominic Montillo. He would interview him first. He had been in London but had returned to Swifts Hill shortly after the body was found. What if he had been lingering in the bushes, stabbed the woman and then calmly got back into his car and arrived at the house when he said he did? The road was only a field away from the stream at the point where the body was found. He suspected all foreigners on principle. There was that German – Adam von Trott. He was both a foreigner and an aristocrat – probably a Nazi spy. He checked himself. He must not jump to conclusions. He knew himself to be a capable detective and a good judge of character. He had a job to do and he would do it.

  He walked up to the house and met a worried-looking Sir Simon on the steps. On cue, he said, ‘Would you like me to telephone the Chief Constable, Inspector? This is a terrible business. I imagine you will want to call in Scotland Yard . . .’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary but thank you all the same, Sir Simon,’ Jebb said firmly. ‘I will, of course, be making a report to Chief Inspector Pride. If Miss Pitt-Messanger’s confession to Lord Edward was true – and there is no reason to think it was not – then that case is closed. The Chief Inspector can wind up his investigation into the Professor’s death. What would be helpful, sir, is if I could use a room in the house to interview everyone who was watching or taking part in the cricket match.’

  Sir Simon looked dubious but nodded his assent.

  ‘Sergeant,’ Jebb spoke sharply, ‘start making a list of everyone who was in the house and the grounds today. You have the names and addresses of the boys who found the body? Very good. Let’s get down to work. I am afraid the scorer must write “game abandoned”, eh, Sir Simon?’

  After the corpse had been removed in the ambulance, Verity walked back to the house with von Trott. She was so obviously deep in thought, the young man asked her what was ‘biting’ her. ‘That is the expression, is it not? I am always trying to improve my colloquial English.’

  ‘That is what we say,’ Verity agreed with a wry smile. ‘What’s biting me is that I came down to Swifts Hill to solve Professor Pitt-Messanger’s murder. Instead of solving anything, I allowed his daughter to be killed more or less in front of me. To cap it all, I failed to see what was staring me in the face: that it was Maud who had killed her father. At least Edward got that bit right.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t consider it,’ he said. ‘People don’t kill their fathers. I think it’s much more likely she convinced herself she had killed him. From what you say, there were hundreds of people in Westminster Abbey when the old man was killed. How can you possibly know if one of his deadly enemies was not lying in wait for him?’

  ‘The police have interviewed everyone . . .’

  ‘Leave it to the police. It’s not your responsibility, Verity. You are a journalist not a detective. Am I right?’

  Verity grimaced. He was right, of course. She was being put in her place. In her own defence she said, ‘They’re not so different. I am a journalist. I search for the truth. We – Lord Edward and I – have stumbled across one or two violent deaths and investigated them.’

  His brow clearing, Adam said, ‘Of course, I remember hearing about it. “Partners in crime” – is that what you call yourselves?’

  ‘No, Adam,’ and he flushed with pleasure that she used his first name so naturally, ‘that is not what we call ourselves.’

  ‘You are more than partners?’ he inquired mildly.

  She hesitated and he saw the look in her eye with which Edward was well acquainted. ‘I am sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘I do not wish to be . . . Love has its own rules. L’amour ne se commande pas. I understand. As they say in my country, “Von Herz zu Herz geht ein weg” – there’s a path that leads from heart to heart.’

  ‘You do not understand and ”nosy” is the idiom you are looking for,’ Verity said sharply but with a smile. ‘Anyway, I am going to investigate this murder even if you think it’s not my business.’

  ‘May I help?’ he asked shyly.

  She glanced at him in surprise. ‘You may,’ she said graciously.

  Edward saw her walking back to the house in earnest conversation with the young German. He knew a certain amount about von Trott and what he knew made him disposed to like him – but what if he and Verity . . .? He was wise enough to know that the worst thing he could do would be to look as if he cared whom she chose to flirt with.

  Back at the house, still in his whites and with a heavy heart, he went to the public telephone which Sir Simon had installed so bizarrely but so usefully in the hall and put in a trunk call to Scotland Yard. He knew Inspector Jebb would report to Chief Inspector Pride that, just before she had been killed, Maud Pitt-Messanger had confessed to having murdered her father but he wanted to make his own confession, if only to ease his conscience. He had not only failed to prevent another murder – that was bad enough – but might actually have precipitated it, when he could so easily have prevented it. He would never forgive himself.

  Pride listened to what Edward had to say and told him he had been right to let him know immediately what had happened and that he would telephone Jebb without mentioning who had apprised him of Miss Pitt-Messanger’s killing. He made no judgement and offered no absolution.

  ‘Jebb’s a good man but he’ll need help sooner or later. If he turns me down now, as he probably will, I’ll tell him he’s a fool if he doesn’t take you into his confidence.’

  Edward was pleased and surprised. ‘Good of you, Chief Inspector. By the way,’ he added casually, ‘are you allowed to tell me what you discovered when you interviewed Montillo?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Pride said after a pause. ‘Precisely nothing, is the answer. He denied ever being asked to operate on Pitt-Messanger’s son. He said he had never even heard about a son and suggested it might be a figment of Maud’s tortured imagination. Maud, he told me, is – I should say was – a highly strung woman, unstable at the best of times, and her father’s death had preyed on her mind. He said her attempted suicide showed this and we should not believe a word she said.’

  ‘Preyed on her mind? He wasn’t hinting that he knew she had killed her father?’

  ‘No. We were assuming he was murdered by person or persons unknown, as they say.’

  ‘But if, when he and Dr Morris found Maud after her suicide attempt, Montillo had managed to talk to her without the doctor being present, she might have told him what she told me. She implied that she had confessed to Graham Harvey and one other person, who could have been Montillo. What occurs to me, Chief Inspector, is that Montillo may have hurried back to Swifts Hill and shut her mouth for good. He may have thought that being with you at Scotland Yard gave him a perfect alibi.’

  ‘Your three minutes are up,’ the operator interrupted.

  ‘Not a theory I want to discuss on the telephone, Lord Edward,’ Pride reprimanded him and put down the receiver.

  It was almost eleven and they were all tired. Jebb had interviewed everyone at Swifts Hill. He would talk to the villagers and tenants in the morning. As Pride had forecast, Jebb turned down his offer of immediate assistance but agreed they should meet at the end of the week to discuss the progress of the investigation. Jebb rather hoped that by then he would have made an arrest.

  While Jebb was carrying out his interviews, Virginia did her best to act normally but, inevitably, the conversation would return to the murder. There was an air of suppressed excitement among her guests which she knew was ‘bad for
m’. They should all have been deeply upset but the truth was that none of them counted themselves a friend of Maud’s. Virginia alone genuinely mourned her and, as Maud had been killed while her guest – ‘under her protection’, as she put it – she felt guilty and shocked at the disaster that had come upon them. Her plan had been to keep a close eye on Maud until she got over her grief for her father. Instead, she had attempted suicide and had then been killed – probably by someone who ate at her table. Virginia wondered if the dead girl had any friends she ought to get in touch with. She knew she had no living relatives. It was all too sad.

  The following morning – Sunday – they all, with the exception of Verity and Graham Harvey – went to church and prayed for Maud’s soul. After lunch, Jebb reinterviewed everyone, finally announcing that any of the guests who wished to leave Swifts Hill could do so provided, of course, they left addresses and telephone numbers where they could be contacted.

  Verity and von Trott returned to London with Edward in the Lagonda. They discussed the murder for most of the journey and Edward was disconcerted that Adam took it for granted he was to help Verity in her unofficial investigation. He did not say anything but could not help feeling that, while two was company, three was a crowd. When he dropped them off together in the King’s Road, he asked Verity if she wanted him to help her move into her new flat. She had told him that she was moving her things from the Hassels’ to Cranmer Court on the Wednesday. Verity looked embarrassed and said he wasn’t to bother as Adam had offered to help. Edward was hurt and suspicious – as it turned out, quite justifiably.

  Verity had so few possessions that the move took less than an hour. Adrian Hassel ferried her clothes and books and tactfully left her and Adam to sort them out. Adam then accompanied her to Peter Jones where they bought a collection of kettles, pots, pans and other necessaries, ordered some chairs and a sofa, a couple of rugs and – rather extravagantly – a radiogram, even though she had as yet no records to play on it. They were finished by lunchtime and, feeling suddenly hungry, Adam suggested they go to the Blue Cockatoo in Cheyne Walk.

  Like naughty schoolchildren playing truant, they feasted on ‘bangers and mash’ washed down with beer which Adam said was truly disgusting. Hetty, the Blue Cockatoo’s famously rude waitress, treated them gently and, as they left, made them sign her autograph book. ‘I don’t know if you’re famous now, dears, but I sense you will be soon. Look, they’re all in my book. Sir William Orpen who does those paintings, Mark Hambourg who plays the violin, Douglas Byng the scientist and then there’s Ellen Wilkinson and the Houston Sisters and all that lot.’

  As they wandered back to Cranmer Court, slightly the worse for wear, Verity grabbed Adam’s hand and asked shyly, ‘Do you think she’s right – Hetty, I mean? Will we be famous, do you think?’

  ‘You’re famous already, Verity,’ he replied, ‘but I never will be.’

  ‘You don’t think you will be Chancellor or President – when the Nazis are gone, of course?’

  ‘I’ll be dead by then,’ he said coolly.

  ‘Please don’t say that,’ Verity begged him. ‘I wish we lived in some other century. This must be the worst.’

  ‘We cannot change the century we live in. What matters is what we do with our time here on earth.’

  ‘But, Adam, why did you say you will die?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered, not looking at her. ‘I just know it will happen. It is my Sonderweg – my special path. I have no choice. Ich habe genug. It is enough.’

  When they got back to the flat, Adam said he ought to go but Verity begged him to stay. ‘I feel so sad. I don’t know why.’

  ‘It must be the beer,’ he laughed.

  ‘Don’t tease. I’ve just remembered, I have got a bottle of Rioja under the bed. We must drink to my new life in my new flat.’

  ‘But there aren’t any chairs,’ he protested.

  ‘We could sit on the floor.’

  ‘On the bare boards? No, I’m too old. But you have at least got one piece of furniture.’

  ‘You mean the bed?’ she said seriously, looking up at him. ‘My father gave it to me. It came from Heals.’

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I was rather hoping you did,’ she said awkwardly. ‘It’s a very good bed.’

  Without another word, he leant over and kissed her and she kissed him back. He was so tall and she was so small that it was not easy. With a lop-sided smile, she suggested they try out the bed for comfort. She wanted this handsome, self-doomed German to make love to her. God alone knew if it was lust or love. She simply did not care. She knew she was betraying Edward and deserved to burn in hell – if it actually existed – but none of it seemed to matter a jot. Guilt and all the rest of it would follow as day follows night but, after so much death, she wanted only to feel his body on hers, his skin against her skin and his sweat mingle with her own.

  The following morning she went to the New Gazette and was given a message to go at once to Lord Weaver’s office. She had telephoned her story to the office from Swifts Hill. She had told Sir Simon she would have to do it. He was too well known not to make Maud’s death of interest to the general public and there were already reporters from other newspapers, local and national, in the village cobbling together accounts of what had happened. She argued, speciously perhaps, that it was better for the Castlewoods if she wrote an accurate, if necessarily incomplete, account for the New Gazette than allow rumour and scandal to damage the reputation of Sir Simon and his guests. The ancient dagger, the stream, the cricket match – it was a colourful story and Verity was pleased with it. She hoped as she knocked on his door that her friend and mentor, the proprietor of the paper, wanted to congratulate her on her scoop.

  In fact, to her chagrin, he did not seem to be aware that she had written anything and assumed she had been on sick-leave. Weaver had other things on his mind and launched straightaway into an analysis of the political situation in Europe and how Spain was no longer important.

  ‘I’m not interested in Spain,’ he said bluntly, ‘and nor are my readers.’

  Verity felt an overwhelming sense of relief. She had dreaded he would order her back there and she could never admit to him that the prospect of returning to that war-torn country now frightened and depressed her. ‘That war is over and, as our star foreign correspondent,’ he smiled wolfishly to show he was doing his best to make her feel good, ‘it is time you moved on. You are quite recovered, aren’t you?’

  At once her shoulder began to ache but she said firmly that she was quite recovered.

  ‘Good. You don’t speak German, do you?’

  ‘I’m taking lessons from a friend,’ she said, thinking of the afternoon spent in the arms of Adam von Trott. She had made him promise to make love to her in German and, laughing, he had agreed. She was his Liebling, his little Blumenkohl, his Säugling and other nonsense, and she loved it.

  ‘Excellent, because I want you to go first to Vienna and then to Prague, depending on how the situation develops.’

  ‘Not Berlin?’ she asked, disappointed.

  ‘No, we have a very good man there, Mike Petersen, but Bill Harrison – who was in Vienna – has had a heart attack and is on his way home to recuperate. In any case, Vienna is where it will happen.’

  ‘I am sorry. I had no idea Bill was ill. But why do you say it’s Vienna where it will happen? What will happen?’

  ‘Hitler will do what he has promised, for once, and incorporate Austria into the German Reich. My sources say it’s just a question of when, not if.’

  ‘And Prague?’

  ‘Czechoslovakia will be next,’ Weaver said grimly, lighting a cigar. ‘We have never had anyone in Prague. It just seemed too far away to matter to our readers but I have a hunch all that’s going to change.’

  ‘So you think there might be war after all?’ The New Gazette’s official line, proclaimed every day at its masthead, was: There will be no war.

  ‘I’m stil
l hopeful it can be avoided. When I met Herr Hitler last month, he gave me his word . . .’ Weaver looked troubled. It had seemed such a coup to meet the German Chancellor and receive his promise in person that he had no intention of making any further territorial demands in Europe. Even in the short time which had elapsed since the meeting, he had begun to doubt Hitler’s good faith. Lloyd George, who had accompanied Weaver to Berlin and knew something about German aggression, had said to him only the other day – and Weaver had printed his comment in the paper – ‘I have never doubted the fundamental greatness of Hitler as a man. I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today. Mussolini is temperamentally an aggressor. I have never thought that Herr Hitler was, and I do not believe it now.’ He hoped his old friend was right but he was beginning to doubt it.

  ‘So when do I start?’ Verity asked eagerly.

  ‘Soon, but before you go, I have a little job for you. Enter-taining, I hope, and certainly instructive. I want you to go down to the South of France and interview the Duke of Windsor. He has let me know that he is intending to visit Hitler himself to discuss . . .’ Weaver picked up a letter from his desk and scanned it, ‘housing and working conditions of the poor in Germany and Britain.’

  Verity was aghast. ‘Why me? I don’t know anything about him and I despise what I do know. Joe, I’m a Communist. He won’t see me even if . . .’

  ‘Housing conditions, workers’ rights and so on . . .’ Weaver repeated. ‘I thought you would be interested.’ He was playing with her. ‘He is going on to the States immediately afterwards. I thought you might give him the names of some of your friends among the union leaders whom he could see. He is determined to be a man of the people.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, and you know it. What are you trying to do to me? Make me a laughing stock?’