“Don’t indulge in fantasy. I’m not in any danger except of nausea. See you tomorrow.”
Felicity’s part in the Murder of the Unknown Woman case (the description of the Times) had been hatched up between Charlie and her the day before. She was not even to mention the police, but she was to emphasize her place on the Walbrook Trust, her feelings of worry, and so on. She and Charlie had talked things over (“But you’re absolutely alone on this one,” said Charlie) and decided it would be best to meet Matlock casually and not to pressure the encounter into interview shape or atmosphere. So here she was sitting flipping through vacuous Sunday color supplements in the hotel foyer with the door of the dining room kept well in sight. “Saves him trouble if he eats here,” the receptionist said, scarcely bothering to disguise her scorn. At 8:40 he came down, and at 8:45 Felicity was seated at a table two rows away from her prey, awaiting an order of lamb chops (Lord Lucan’s favorite meal, she seemed to remember).
Half an hour later, with a sorbet ordered to counter charges of dallying, she was looking at Matlock slurping down coffee after a meal served at double-quick by scowling waiters, keen to get rid of him. Felicity determined to disappoint them and went over to his table.
“If I bought you the most expensive brandy the hotel sells, would you let me talk business to you for a little while?” she asked, trying by her demeanor to make it clear that this was not an indecent offer.
Marty Matlock, inevitably, leered. “And what makes you think your purse, young lady, can buy me anything that my expense account can’t match?”
To illustrate her point, one of the resentful waiters, with a particularly scornful glare at Felicity, came breezing over and slapped down a brandy balloon on the table. Marty Matlock sipped, assumed a satisfied expression, and signaled to the waiter to bring a second one at Felicity’s expense.
“And what, my dear young lady, are we going to talk about?”
“Stately houses, and the trusts that look after them,” said Felicity.
“Ha!” said Marty, apparently delighted. “You are on such a trust, elected to take care of the youth aspect. How to attract families, how to get more school parties, that kind of thing. But where is the crime suspect?”
“Possibly nowhere. If I’m there to represent youth nobody has told me I shouldn’t dirty my hands with other matters as well. The house in question has been transferred from a private person into the hands of a trust. It is now open to the public. The trust has been recognized as a charity.”
“And you think there is hanky-panky going on?”
“I wonder. We get in our meetings bare mentions of items from the collection that are away for cleaning or other treatment.”
“Paintings?”
“Yes. Ramsays. Not all that valuable, but still . . .”
“You’d regret it if it came back as a forgery.”
“Exactly. And the collection is nearly untouched by reliable research. There was work done under a previous director, but so badly as to be almost useless. We had a concert recently . . .”
“Oh, yes?”
“A collection of poems written specially for a project to cover the horrors of the First World War, organized in the late twenties, and still going by the time the Second World War broke out.”
“Ah, yes. Now I see the relevance of the name Matlock.”
“I’m not wishing to pry—”
“You wouldn’t get anywhere if you were. I shall tell you nothing about my family background. But I am interested.” And he did look it.
“You’ve heard of the project before, then?”
“Heard of it—and a bit more than that. We have come, I think, to the Manor of Walbrook in the County of West Yorkshire.” He leered again. “Let’s bare all, my dear. You know the place; I know it, though not well. And I know the chairman of your trust, Sir Stafford Quarles. I have to say I’ve always thought of him as an impeccable museum person—to coin a phrase. I mean I think of words like cautious, scholarly, impeccable—all those dull words that I encourage the reader of the Daily Break to laugh at, or at least snigger at. To think of being scholarly about tables and chairs, writing desks and toilet dressers. But about someone like Sir Stafford I would try to be admiring and polite. He’s been involved with fine furniture and pictures for nearly fifty years, and he’s never been caught out in any jiggery-pokery yet. He’s got one of the best records in the country.”
“I see,” said Felicity.
“You sound disappointed.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that . . . well, if it’s not him then—”
“Who is it? Well, for a start, the collection was in the hands of two of the Fienneses for six decades before the Trust came into being. They did let scholars and historians, amateur and professional, come and work in their library with very little supervision. Local people—cleaners for example—could be trained to look out for anything with a monetary value.”
“Yes . . . I see,” said Felicity.
“You are disappointed because you’ve got a theory and you’re not willing to jettison it. But the most likely thing is that the missing things—the song, for an example—is somewhere in the collection in the attic, waiting to be found, filed under a quite ridiculous heading.”
Felicity shot him a quick glance. “You know more than you’ve let on to. You’re thinking that sometime in the future you’ll be able to make a story of this.”
“Sometime in the future?” His face took on its least attractive expression, that of leering self-approval. “Not so far in the future.” He scrabbled in the briefcase that sat on the chair beside him. “Look—it’s ready to be used when the time comes.”
Keeping it as far from Felicity as he could, holding it delicately by its top corner, a rough print with the headline “The ‘Patriots’ with the Hotline to Hitler.” It was illustrated by a picture of a man impeccably dressed and holding a champagne glass, standing by a boy/man whom Felicity thought she recognized as Benjamin Britten.
“I suppose that’s Timothy Quarles, is it? I’ve never seen a picture.”
“That’s poor old Timmy, yes.”
“And that’s Benjamin Britten. I think you’d be hard put to justify the idea that Britten had a hotline to Hitler.
Marty Matlock sighed. “My dear, your ignorance of Fleet Street is appalling. I don’t have to justify anything I say. I just have to present one or two facts or near facts—let’s see, the fact that Britten was a pacifist throughout his life, and especially in World War Two, when he fought fires, after his return from America. He was also an attender of the peace-seminar weekends at Walbrook. Hey, presto! Britten was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and associated with all the least patriotic members of the art and music worlds. And then of course there’s Peter Pears . . .”
“Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”
“Go ahead.”
“He and Britten are like love and marriage, they went together like apples and pears. All the Britten operas have parts for children in them, in particular boys, and with a brief survey of the relationship with David Hemmings, the case is made. Oh, maybe there could be a sneer at Britten’s surname—how inappropriate that he was Mr. Britten because he was no Chippendale . . .”
Marty Matlock regarded her benevolently. “You don’t like me very much, do you, my dear?”
Felicity pulled herself together. “It’s not for me to like or dislike.”
“I wouldn’t know that. I can only guess what you’re doing this for, can’t I? But I’ve always preferred being disliked to being liked. Prevents any emotional delusions on either side. Now you have had quite a large slice of my time for the price of a glass of brandy.”
“A very good brandy.”
“Admittedly, and horribly overpriced. So if you have no more questions . . .”
“Just one. What do you think the missing song in the Trenches song cycle consists of? Who wrote it, who wrote the words? Why is it apparently important eighty or ninety years after it was written?”
“Hmm. Difficult one. If you made the composer a highly desirable one, the best-known composer in the world, it still wouldn’t amount to much in the twenties or thirties. There were no Beethovens or Schuberts then. Let’s put it as high as seems likely: say the composer was Elgar, the song a powerful one, a plea for perpetual peace. It might just amount to Lady Quarles’s dress bills for a year. It’s easier to see the desirability of the manuscript in propaganda terms: it’s not worth much, except emotionally. Elgar now, as then, would give respectability to Walbrook, respectability to the Quarles branch, and to all Timmy was hoping to do by spreading a pacifist message.”
“Isn’t Elgar much more popular now than he was after the First World War?”
“Oh, immeasurably. It’s like Mahler: after the Second War nobody had heard of him, and he was good only for a brief sneer from the music critics. Now he’s the greatest bar only Beethoven, and many would doubt whether he shouldn’t be put down to second place. Same has happened more slowly with Elgar. Today every conductor worth his salt wants to record the symphonies, every cellist and violinist wants to record his concertos. What difference does that make, do you think?”
“By the sound of your voice, not much,” said Felicity.
“Exactly. If he’d murdered his wife, or if some American suggests he did, the price of memorabilia would go up sky-high. Mozart always has a certain pathos because of being buried in a pauper’s grave—which he actually wasn’t. When it was suggested that he was murdered by a rival composer—whoosh! It’s a mad world, my masters.”
“So there was never much to be made by anything in the Walbrook collection?”
“I wouldn’t say so. Luxury peanuts, but essentially still peanuts.”
“So who do you think it was whose skeleton was found in the car?”
“Ah. That discovery. There’s no reason to think there is any connection with Walbrook, let alone Walbrook in the thirties. The remains could be—just anyone! Someone’s mistress. A spy. An inconvenient wife perhaps. An expensive leftover from the age of the flapper. Talk is that it’s a woman. Reduces the suspect list by fifty percent. Big deal.”
“But Walbrook is the only mansion—”
Marty Matlock held up his hand. “Spare me. Who said she was going there? Nobody. She could have been going from Mayfair to the Shetlands to escape the bombs. She could have been one of J. Arthur Rank’s starlets on the way to Scotland to film a remake of Greenmantle. Anything is possible.”
“So you don’t even want to consider Walbrook a factor in that case?”
“Is there a case? . . . Oh, all right, young lady. Let’s just forget about evidence, proofs, rational arguments, and all those things that work against detective’s flair in the sillier sort of crime book. Let’s say the bones belong to someone who—I’m told—is the favorite candidate in Walbrook village for this upmarket corpse.”
“And who is that who’s told you?”
He played with her a little longer. “I am known for the excellence of my sources.”
“Maybe a rather unusual trade-union representative whom I call Pink Trousers?”
Matlock roared with laughter. “Okay. You’ve earned my little driblet of information, which is no more than a piece of guesswork. I’d agree with the villagers and guess that the victim in the water was the mother of Sir Stafford Quarles. She was—”
“Oh, yes, I heard what she was.”
“And if I was a policeman, and if I’d been given the hopeless job of investigating this crime, if there was one, I’d focus on that lady’s life, and perhaps the life of her car, in two periods of her life.”
“And they were?”
“The autumn of 1939 and the summer of 1947.”
“I understand the first, but not the second. What was happening of importance in 1947?”
“The month war broke out in 1939 was the month that Walbrook changed hands from the Quarles branch of the family to the Fiennes member of the family. As you probably know, they didn’t live in the house, but let it to the Defence Ministry for use as an asylum. It was handed back to the family in the autumn of 1947, but it had not been used as an asylum for some time, because there was not the same huge numbers of men with mental disturbance as there had been from trench warfare in the First War.”
“What you’re saying is that there were periods of interregnum when it would be easier than usual to get into the house and perhaps steal something that was known to be there?”
“Exactly. The intruder would probably have had an inside knowledge of the house. If she did, getting and taking whatever it was would have been comparatively easy.”
“If she got there in the first place.”
“If, indeed, she got there.” He heaved himself up from his chair, and relief showed on the faces of the few remaining waiters. “Thank you for your company, dear lady, but don’t try to inflict it on me again. I shall sleep tonight with interesting thoughts of the Quarleses and the Fienneses. Not many people can say that. Good night.”
CHAPTER 14
A Lady of Soho
The next day, early in the morning, Charlie had an unexpected call from Colin Winstanley. Consultations and operations had presumably not yet begun. The eminent surgeon sounded almost apologetic.
“Inspector Peace. Sorry to ring you at this unearthly hour.”
“Don’t worry about that, sir. I’m just collecting my wits and my papers so that the new day can start.”
“It’s something I forgot, or maybe it should be ‘something I didn’t dredge up,’ when we talked the other day.”
“I’m interested in any of your memories.”
“This is more my father’s memories—or rather the documentation of things I told you the other day. It might give you a bit more idea of what was known at the time, what managed to creep out to the general public.”
“That could be valuable, sir.”
“I hope so. I’m anxious to give all I can, in spite of memories of what my father would have said. It’s a long time ago, and we might view my granddad slightly differently now. . . . You won’t remember the old Daily Telegram—no, of course you wouldn’t. They were a broadsheet paper, respectable like the Times and the Guardian, but they always made sure they got in all the salacious details—in divorce cases, of known and unknown people, rumors, royal scandals, political ones, and it didn’t matter what party the story concerned—they’d print all the details.”
“And your father aroused their attention, did he?”
“Yes. I think they’d been saving him up for a fair while. Naturally you break your story with the best—the most sensational I mean—aspects of the story. That’s what they did.”
“When was this, sir? Was it some time in 1947?”
“I’ve been trying to think. Sometime about then I’d guess. Was that when—”
“It’s when the Fiennes branch of the family took back Walbrook Manor from the government. We touched on that earlier. It may also have been about the time the accident—if it was one—occurred in Haroldswater.”
“I see. I understand your interest. Well, I would guess a week or two after the handover—that’s a guess—the Telegram started printing stories about gossip in the society world of a high-class brothel—they didn’t call it that though—in Soho, run by a woman of good repute in a setting—in spite of its being in Soho, just—of the utmost style and class, with educated and well-brought-up girls and women among the offerings, including a child reputed to be the madam’s own daughter.”
“Really? I’m not sure I’d heard that she had a daughter.”
“That figures. Isabel went in for fakes, false fronts. Anyway, after a few more titbits the newspapers shifted their focus. They were now linking the story with a well-known doctor, a surgeon, and of course he had to be a ‘society’ doctor, or surgeon as he in fact was. They finally got around to the point: he was, with Madam Crécy as she called herself, the joint proprietor of the establishment. He paid half the rent and took half the pr
ofits.”
“Surely a pretty suicidal thing for a doctor to do, wouldn’t it be?”
“I’d have thought so. Especially then, with the National Health Service coming into being. But I think I’ll stop my story there.”
“Oh? The shadow of your father looming?”
“No, not that. But I’ve never seen the newspaper coverage. What I’ve told you was pure gossip within the family. It could be spot-on, the newspaper stories could have been accurate, but I think you ought to go to the Telegram archives, wherever they may be, and see exactly what they said, and go on from there. I might mention, because the Telegram may not, that my grandfather lived to a fairly highly respected old age, with tributes from his fellow medics, full of praise for his professional brilliancy, and for his ‘lust for life.’ Yes, I was amused that phrase was used. Now I’ll leave it with you.”
And Charlie thought that that was a sensible line for him to take, and one he was grateful for: he wanted to get at least the bare bones of the story without family piety intervening. In seconds he got on to Pink Trousers.
“Mr. Wheeler? Will Wheeler? This is Inspector Peace. . . . There is something not very vital I thought you might remember your father talking about. . . . Yes. I realize you heard a lot of stories. Can we see if this is one of them? I want to know exactly—or as exactly as you can make it—when the Manor of Walbrook was handed back to its owner after the war. . . . to Montague Fiennes.”
He waited, tactfully saying sweet nothings when Pink Trousers said, “I’m working on it.” Eventually he came up with all he could remember hearing of the transfer.
“I was born just after the war—well, nine months or so after, not to be too coy about it. . . . Yes, a VE baby, born in February ’46. Now the manor was still being used—underused my father used to say—as an asylum as they persisted in calling it. The handover took place in the next year, toward the end of it. I remember my father said the winter of 1948 happened just after the Fienneses took over again, and the old man—Montague Fiennes—used to complain to high heaven about the incidental expenses like snow clearance, means of heating the place, and so on. It was really a bad time for everyone, and the large, wide-open spaces of parts of the manor didn’t help.”
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