A Grave Man

by David Roberts

  ‘I really can’t see what you are making such a fuss about. Most journalists would give their eye teeth for such a chance.’

  ‘I’m grateful . . . of course I am,’ Verity spluttered, ‘but he’ll never see me. Why should he?’

  ‘Because I have asked him to and . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And you will be accompanied by Edward . . .’ He held up his hand to stop her interrupting. ‘As you know, Edward is a friend of Wallis. He did her a favour and she is very good about returning favours.’ He was referring to Edward’s success in retrieving some love letters the Duke had sent Mrs Simpson and which had been stolen by one of his former mistresses.

  ‘I see,’ Verity said coldly. ‘And Edward has agreed to this?’

  ‘He has,’ Weaver said firmly. ‘He can’t write the story but you can. It’s another scoop! You ought to be overjoyed.’

  ‘I get it! The Duke will talk to Edward and he will repeat it all to me and I can pretend . . .’

  ‘Got it at last! Now, are you going to do what I say or is our relationship going to end here?’

  Verity was very fond of her employer and he had been very good to her but she knew he was not a man to cross. He would never forgive her if she refused this assignment and, if he wanted to, could not only fire her but prevent her being employed by any of his rivals.

  ‘Sorry, Joe,’ she capitulated, ‘I’m an idiot. It’s good of you to give me this. I promise I‘ll come up with the goods.’

  After two more days of intensive interviews, Jebb was forced to admit to himself that he was no further forward. He shut himself away in his office at the police station, told his sergeant that he did not want to be disturbed and filled the fountain pen he had been given to celebrate twenty years with the force. He took a blank sheet of paper out of his desk drawer, shifted in his seat, sucked at his pen and sighed noisily. What did he know? He knew – or thought he knew – that Maud had been killed when everyone was distracted chasing after Mah-Jongg. Several people had seen her walking alone by the stream, not watching the cricket but brooding. One or two – including Sir Simon, Lady Castlewood and Isolde Swann – had tried to talk to her but she had asked to be left alone. She had not been seen alive after the incident with the lemur. That would seem to let out those who had been actively involved in the chase or on the cricket pitch.

  No one had admitted to having seen who had released the lemur – ‘that bloody mongoose’, as Jebb insisted on thinking of the animal – but he had an idea that Mrs Cardew knew more than she was telling. Mah-Jongg – what a silly name! He gathered it was some kind of parlour game – a favourite of Lady Castlewood’s. Anyway, it had been left with water and food in the pavilion, tied up to a chair on a long leash. Someone had helped Mah-Jongg slip his collar – he couldn’t have done it on his own – and that person might well have been wearing gloves because it would have been rash of anyone, other than the Castlewoods, to go near the animal.

  Jebb had arranged for all the batting gloves and wicket-keepers’ gloves in the pavilion to be sent up to London for Chief Inspector Pride’s people to look at. Nothing had been found to indicate that they had been in contact with anything more sinister than a cricket ball – except for the pair Roddy had worn to catch the lemur. Not that this had dismayed Jebb. He knew, if there had been ‘lemur’ on any of the gloves, it would prove nothing. Most of the kit in the pavilion was used by anyone in either team who needed it. None of the village eleven had their own gloves and neither did most of the Castlewood eleven.

  Jebb had not yet sullied his sheet of paper with a single word. Now he wrote down: ‘Suspects’ and drew a line under the word. He thought for another two minutes and then added alongside, ‘Murder Weapon’. He looked thoughtfully at what he had written. He had been called to Swifts Hill on the Friday night of the previous weekend when Sir Simon had reported the dagger missing. He was glad now that he had insisted on going up to the house immediately, even though it had meant getting out of bed. True, he had not discovered anything of any importance – there were no fingerprints on the glass cabinet except for Sir Simon’s and a maid’s – a girl called Hannah Warren – who had dusted the cabinet the previous day. She said that she always dusted the cabinets before Sir Simon had guests as he often took some of them to view the antiquities. Hannah seemed a sensible girl and he had no reason to disbelieve her.

  ‘It was so beautiful and so . . . evil. I think it had killed people before,’ she had said, surprising Jebb with her powers of imagination.

  That seemed to narrow the list of suspects considerably. Maud Pitt-Messanger’s murderer had to be someone who knew about the dagger, had access to it and had not been chasing the lemur when it was likely the murder was committed. This let out that journalist woman, Miss Browne, who might have had access to the dagger but did not know of its existence until Sir Simon had told her it was missing. She seemed very thick with Lord Edward Corinth for whom Chief Inspector Pride appeared to have some respect. This was odd because Jebb knew Pride disliked the aristocracy almost as much as he disliked politicians and journalists. It also let out Edward and his nephew, who had been on the cricket pitch chasing the lemur when the murder took place.

  Roddy Maitland had chased the lemur although he could have stolen the dagger. His fiancée, Isolde Swann, did not pass either test. No one could swear to having seen her chasing the lemur and she certainly had access to the dagger. She was the only woman at Swifts Hill who was strong enough to kill Maud and drag her body into the stream. Dr Morris had said that the strength needed to stab Maud suggested that the killer was a man or a very strong woman. Jebb put her in the column headed ‘Suspects’, misspelling her name as he did so.

  He consulted his notes. The morning after the dagger disappeared he had interviewed all the servants and failed to find one with any motive to steal it. Most of them had been in the Castlewoods’ employ for many years and all had good references. If a servant had wanted to steal anything, he or she would hardly have stolen one of Sir Simon’s antiquities because they all knew that they had been photographed and catalogued and no servant could have easily disposed of such an object. There were many other things in the house which could more readily be turned into cash, if that was what was wanted.

  Of the guests in the house from the Thursday when Hannah dusted the display case and saw the dagger, to the Friday evening when Sir Simon discovered that it was missing, there was only the doctor fellow, Dominic Montillo, and the Communist writer chap Graham Harvey to consider. It was difficult to see Mrs Cardew as a serious suspect. No, he put his money on either Montillo or Harvey. Montillo could well have returned to Swifts Hill on the day of the cricket match in time to leap out of the bushes and stab Maud. On the other hand, would he have had the dagger with him? And he could not have arranged the lemur’s escape.

  As for Harvey, Lord Edward had some idea that he might have been Maud’s lover but the idea of a lovers’ quarrel didn’t ring true. Harvey had admitted that Maud had told him she had killed her father. He said he thought her overwrought imagination had given her delusions. She was not sleeping. She was depressed and taking Benzedrine. According to Dr Morris, that might well have given her hallucinations. Harvey said he had told Maud not to repeat her ‘confession’ to anyone. He said he had hoped someone would soon be arrested for the old man’s murder and then Maud would understand she had been imagining she had killed him. However, Jebb solemnly added Harvey’s name under the heading ‘Suspects’ and that of Dominic Montillo.

  What about motive? Jebb started another column and headed it ‘Motive’. Neither Isolde Swann nor Montillo had a motive unless, as Pride suggested when they had spoken on the telephone, Montillo had wanted to silence her before she said something which might damage him or his reputation. Perhaps, as Lord Edward seemed to believe, Maud had said something to Montillo when he and Dr Morris found her after her suicide attempt – something so damaging that he had to stop her talking. Harvey, too, might have a motive bu
t he hadn’t uncovered it yet.

  Who else? Mrs Cardew’s two children, of course, the girl – what was her name? He scratched his head with his fountain pen and that did the trick. Margaret! They called her Maggie – with the horrible burn scar – and her brother, the MP, Edmund – Teddy. Jebb did not like politicians and would be happy to suspect any one of them of murder but neither Cardew nor his sister could have stolen the dagger . . . They weren’t in the house when it disappeared. And, anyway, he could not find that they had the shadow of a motive. Wait a minute though! They had been at the Abbey when the Professor was murdered. Had they seen Maud stab her father and were they blackmailing her? But then why kill her? What if someone else had stolen the dagger for them . . .? He made a note and then scrubbed it out. It was too far-fetched. In any case, Maggie Cardew was such a nice girl and she wasn’t strong enough to commit the murder. The brother then – he was a suspect so Jebb added his name to the list.

  Hang on though – going back to the women – there was that secretary of Sir Simon’s – what was her name? Miss Berners – Sylvia Berners – a Jew and a foreign Jew at that. He had nothing against Jews, he told himself. What they were doing in Germany was quite wrong but still . . . She had a flat at the back of the house. It had been very generous of Sir Simon, she had said, but it suited him too as he did not keep normal office hours and liked to have his secretary on call twenty-four hours a day. Jebb wondered idly if she were Sir Simon’s mistress but dismissed the idea. He might be a womanizer but he would hardly sleep with a woman under his own roof and under his wife’s nose. Miss Berners had seemed very nervous, he thought, when he interviewed her but that might be because – as a Jew – she had learned not to welcome police interest in her. She, too, had no alibi – she said she was alone in her flat, reading and listening to the wireless. As for motive . . . Jebb sighed. Something might materialize but then again, would she have the physical strength to kill Maud and lay her in the stream? He did not think so.

  He drew a caricature of a hook-nosed Jew. She was a refugee from Germany, Sir Simon had told him. In Jebb’s view, there were altogether too many of these refugees and they should go back where they belonged. He had agreed with something he had read at breakfast the other morning in the Daily Mail: ‘The influx of foreign Jews is overwhelming the country.’ Jews and Communists! They made all the trouble in the world in his opinion. Talking of Communists, perhaps Harvey had crept into the house, stolen the dagger and used it to kill Maud. Perhaps he was in league with the Communist journalist, Verity Browne. Certainly, Harvey had not been in evidence when the lemur escaped from the pavilion.

  He felt he ought to be able to see who had done the deed but, for the life of him, he could not. Maybe the way forward was to look more closely at Maud Pitt-Messanger and who had a previous connection with her. He would also have to reread Chief Inspector Pride’s report on her father’s killing. It had been good of Pride to send it him. There must be something he was missing.

  He looked again at his notes of the interviews he had carried out after the dagger had gone missing. He had been very stern with Sir Simon, and said, ‘Did you not think to have your exhibits better protected? A burglar could have taken the whole collection in a matter of minutes. There was no alarm . . .’

  ‘I have been intending to have new, secure cabinets made but I am afraid I never got round to it. But you see, Inspector,’ Sir Simon had said in mitigation, ‘these are well-known pieces to archaeologists. They have been much studied and photographed. No burglar would have been able to take them into Sotheby’s or Sonerschein’s – or anywhere respectable – and offer them for sale.’

  ‘They could have smuggled them over to the Continent and sold them there,’ Jebb had suggested.

  ‘Possibly, in Amsterdam . . .’ Sir Simon had agreed. ‘But, after all, the dagger wasn’t stolen, was it? Just borrowed.’

  ‘No sign of the keys to the cabinet, I suppose?’

  ‘No sign at all, I’m afraid, Inspector.’

  Perhaps he would have another word with Lord Edward Corinth. He had been helpful when he had interviewed him – not at all superior. He believed Maud had killed her father and that her confession had not been a drug-induced delusion. He thought the murderer must have seen her talking earnestly to him and acted quickly to shut her mouth. The urgent call he had received from the pavilion to pad up was premature. He could have heard Maud out and still been ready to go out and bat. So who had called him? He said he wasn’t sure and he wanted to be sure before he said anything which might incriminate an innocent person.

  Jebb looked gloomily at his sheet of paper. He had thought he was going to be able to solve this case in just a few hours but now he was beginning to think it might take longer. All his suspects had wanted to leave Swifts Hill and get on with their lives and he could not stop them. Even Sir Simon – he was going to the South of France ‘on business’, whatever that meant, and Jebb really could not ask him to cancel his trip. And the German lad . . . He had gone off to London with the Browne woman . . . Well, damn it, let them all go. He needed time to think. The Chief Constable had given him ten days and then he was to accept Chief Inspector Pride’s offer of assistance. It would be a blow to his self-esteem but he was beginning to think he might welcome a little help. He tore up his sheet of paper and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

  8

  Edward collected Verity from her flat – he wasn’t allowed in – at ten to catch the Golden Arrow from Victoria Station at eleven. At Dover, they boarded the Canterbury and an hour later were in Calais. Neither had felt much like eating even though the Channel had been oily smooth. Edward had bought a two-pound bar of Cadbury’s motoring chocolate and they nibbled on this. In Paris – which was uncomfortably full of visitors to the great Paris Exhibition – they split up, Edward to call in on the Embassy where some papers were waiting for him and Verity to visit a friend – a journalist called Alan Moorehead who worked at the New Gazette’s Paris office and whom she had met in Spain.

  As he waited for her at the Gare de Lyon just before six, Edward could not help thinking ruefully of how, when he had last travelled on the Blue Train, he had fantasized about having Verity beside him – how they would enjoy a day, or even a night, in Paris – perhaps dining at the Ritz or Maxim’s, or maybe somewhere more intimate. How they would relish the hustle and bustle at the Gare de Lyon, the officious blue-and-gold-uniformed officials, the excitement of that moment early in the evening when the great train steams off on its long journey towards the sun. Verity, who he was always amused to find loved luxury, would indulge herself and surrender to the ministrations of an obsequious steward. He had imagined them flirting over the excellent meals and how they would spurn advances from other passengers, content with their own company. Then bed in the comfortable miniature cabins, soothed by the beat of the wheels against the shining metal track. To make love on a train! Could there be anything more romantic!

  Instead she was cool and perfectly friendly but repelled any gesture of intimacy. It seemed, for no apparent reason, that they were no longer lovers. Edward was bewildered and hurt. Had he done something to offend her? Had he got too close or was it that damn Communist, Graham Harvey, and his hatred of Churchill that had soured their relationship? He had made an effort to talk to Harvey at the cricket match, aware that he had established some influence over Verity which he suspected of being malign. Harvey had been surly and monosyllabic and Edward had to accept defeat. However, he thought he understood the man’s appeal. He was an outsider – hostile to conventional morality and seemingly uninterested in what people thought of him. In addition, he was utterly certain in his faith in Communism. Edward knew the type and considered them most dangerous because, as fanatics, they were not open to argument.

  Verity’s belief in Harvey’s austere creed had been undermined in Spain, he knew, and he wondered if, perhaps unconsciously, she was looking for someone to rebuild the foundations of her belief. What she had seen in Spain had shocke
d her – not just the atrocities carried out by the Fascists but those, equally cruel, which were the work of her friends and allies. And, what was worse, these brutalities had been directed very often not at the enemy but at political allies who had failed to toe the Stalinist line. In particular, she now had evidence that many so-called Trotskyists had been murdered or made to endure show trials in which the guilty verdicts and death sentences had been passed before the trial started. Some of the victims had been known to her. And yet she had invested everything in the Communist cause. Was she now to become an apostate? It did not bear thinking about. At all costs she must remain true.

  In Harvey, Edward reckoned, she had found a man who would – like a Jesuit in Elizabethan England – gladly go to the stake for his faith. His certainty massaged away her uncertainties. He was ugly, humourless, driven by his contempt for the society in which he had to live. Verity would like – at least sometimes – to be as he was but she loved life too much and was too intelligent to sacrifice her common sense at the altar of blind fanaticism for long. It was that which prevented Edward from despairing. For the moment Harvey was her Father Confessor and her conscience. She wanted to be a martyr to the cause. Edward told himself he must wait until her crisis of faith had been resolved.

  And the situation was complicated by the German – in many respects Harvey’s antithesis but, in his way, just as attractive. Edward had no idea if Verity had slept with Adam – he rather thought she had – and did not really care. He just knew that she worshipped him. He was her ideal, as Churchill was Edward’s. He was a heroic figure – a reincarnation of a medieval Teutonic Knight – a patriot but an enemy of Fascism. Edward saw much to admire in the young man but was afraid that the time would come when he would be fatally compromised by having to choose between his country and his hatred of Fascism. Adam was not a Communist but an aristocrat with strong views on how men should behave to one another. Edward could empathize. He had no difficulty in imagining his own position if a Fascist party had come to power in England as, for a brief moment, had seemed possible. He would have opposed it with all his might but, in his own eyes at least, remained a patriot. These were dangerous times when everyone had to make a stand for what they believed in.