by Jo Walton
“Can the other servants confirm it?” Lord Timothy asked, leaning forward a little.
“She only had the Greens and a Spanish lady’s maid. Miss Carl, the maid, had already left the house before the guests arrived. Probably Lord Scott’s servants could confirm it, and no doubt Mrs. Green can.”
“You haven’t spoken to Mrs. Green?” Normanby pounced on this as if catching Carmichael out.
“She’s lost in administrative limbo,” Carmichael confessed. “She was arrested on Friday and charged at Hampstead. They didn’t have room to keep her in their cells, and she was sent off somewhere we haven’t yet been able to trace.”
“She’s no use as a credible witness anyway; whatever she says she’s another Jewish servant with a grudge. Probably in the plot too, whatever her husband says.” Lord Timothy leaned back with a sigh.
“Whether other sources confirm it or not, Green says Sir Aloysius Farrell was at the dinner too. Farrell has an IRA past, and bombing convictions.”
“I’ve certainly no objection to giving you a warrant to pull him in,” Normanby said.
“If I can find him,” Carmichael said. “It seems he’s a professional. The only address he’s ever given anyone is his house in Ireland.”
“Have you tried his club?” Lord Timothy asked. “I think I’ve seen him around at White’s. And he’s definitely a member of the Jockey Club. He used to race.”
“Thank you, sir,” Carmichael said. He took out a notebook and scribbled rapidly, “Whites, Jockey Club, these people all know each other,” and put it back in his inside pocket. “Also present were Lord Scott’s secretary Malcolm Nesbitt, a girl called Siddy who we know nothing about, and the two naval lieutenants, Marshall and Nash. According to Green, they talked about bombs and revolution. The next day, Gilmore and Marshall killed themselves making a bomb. If Lord Scott isn’t to be apprehended, I think you should cancel your attendance at the play.”
“Without Gilmore?” Normanby asked. “They might try something else, but they’re unlikely to try that. We’ll tighten security at the theater, and at Covent Garden and Wimbledon too.”
“Wimbledon?” Carmichael echoed, astonished.
Normanby’s lips tightened. “We’re taking the Fuhrer to see the tennis on Saturday afternoon.”
“I wouldn’t have thought it was his sort of thing,” Carmichael said.
“That’s what I said!” Lord Timothy exclaimed. “It doesn’t seem like his style, tennis, I said.”
“Combined with the private dinner with the king and queen, these three public appearances, at a German opera, an English play, and to see a German and an Englishman compete at tennis, are the perfect set of events to demonstrate our friendship with the Reich,” Normanby said, to Lord Timothy. He turned back to Carmichael. “If we cancel any of them it is tantamount to admitting that we can’t handle security and our own terrorists. It wouldn’t necessarily be a public admission, but it would be an admission of weakness in front of the Fuhrer, which I don’t want to make.”
“I understand,” Carmichael said, feeling a little dizzy. “You asked how sure I was about Lord Scott’s involvement. I think we have quite enough evidence to arrest him on suspicion of involvement, certainly under the new Defence of the Realm Act. I don’t know if that’s sufficient to hold up under intensive political scrutiny.”
“Frankly, arresting him and letting him go again if we couldn’t pin it on him would be a disaster,” Normanby said, with a disarming smile. “Nor can he disappear. If we arrest him, he has to be tried in public—would that mean in the Lords, Tibs? And he has to hang.”
“I think it does mean the Lords,” Lord Timothy said. He was frowning. “But he might well admit it if it comes to that. He’s just the kind who would, you know, if it’s true. He’d stand up and call you a tyrant and admit he was going to blow you to bits and it would be a good thing if he did.”
“That wouldn’t do us any harm at all,” Normanby said, jovially. “It might even be a help, played right. Pity there isn’t more of a Jewish communist connection though. Only the Greens. What did you have to offer Green to get him to talk, Inspector?”
“That we’d hang him here and not send him back to the Reich, and not to send Mrs. Green there either.”
“I think we can manage that,” Normanby said. “I think you’re right, Tibs, Scotty would admit it on the stand. Well then. Sign the warrants, and give them to Inspector Carmichael.”
Lord Timothy took up his pen and signed. “You’d better take some backup,” he said. “Confronting a lord in his manor and all that. I’ve arranged it.”
“Thank you, sir.” Carmichael put down his untouched tea and started to rise.
“No, wait, Inspector, there’s something else I wanted to discuss with you.” Normanby pulled the safe door fully open, took out a file, then pushed it mostly closed again and sat down.
Carmichael settled himself again, nervously. “Yes, sir?”
“It seems to me that all this business of terrorists and anarchists is rather overloading our traditional police forces. Look at your Mrs. Green getting lost in the shuffle. We’re building new prisons, of course, and trying to get rid of some of our worst cases to the Continent, but it seems to me we could also do with a special police force to work on this kind of thing. You’re a man we know, a man we have reason to trust, a man with experience in these areas, the man who solved the Farthing case, and now you’ve done so well at investigating this one. You’d be our first choice as head of the new agency.”
“A Gestapo?” Carmichael asked. His stomach clenched. He understood what Normanby was saying. He was a man they knew they had a hold over if they needed one, a man they knew would do what he was told if necessary. He wondered if it was his own file Normanby was holding. He wanted to resign, to get away from all of this, not to be drawn further in. Too late, he thought.
“No. Well, yes. We wouldn’t call it that of course,” Lord Timothy said. “We thought of calling you the Watch. It’s a good solid old-fashioned name. It’s what they used to call the police in Nelson’s day. We thought it had the right ring to it.”
“What do you think, Inspector? Or should I say, Chief Inspector?” Normanby asked.
Carmichael looked at Normanby and saw that the Prime Minister saw his torment and was pleased by it. “About the name?” he asked. “I think it seems a good choice.”
“About taking the job,” Normanby said, impatiently. “Do you think you could handle it?”
“I don’t know if I have the qualifications,” Carmichael said, woodenly. He knew he had no choice, that if he didn’t take it, if he tried to retire now or emigrate he would end up in some hellhole of a camp, and so would Jack. If he took it at least he would have enough power to protect himself from everyone except Normanby, and perhaps in time from Normanby too. He could turn a blind eye sometimes, perhaps avoid the worst injustices. But whatever they called it, his would be the responsibility for the boots on the stair at midnight, the deliberate blurring of lines between guilt and innocence in the service of expediency. He had known it could come to this, or something like this, when he had agreed to Penn-Barkis’s deal. He was a fool to have any scruples left. He had already sold his soul, after all.
“Let us be the best judge of that,” Lord Timothy said. “I’m sure you’ll do a splendid job.”
27
The next day, Wednesday, was all rehearsal. We had the Players there, and I must say Antony had done a very good job with their masque. He’d decided to keep the Player King as a king, to echo Claudius. He was dressed in black, head to toe, and there was one other man, Hamlet’s father, echoing his outfit but in white. The really clever thing was that he was dark-skinned—he was an Indian law student actually who Antony knew from somewhere. He didn’t have to speak at all, so he could get away with it. He was the same height as the Player King, and it really did give the effect of a negative. All the rest of the Players were women, a kind of dancing chorus all in blood red from thei
r tights to the scarves in their hair. It was rather striking.
Antony had arranged it so that the court audience for the play sat at the back on a raised dais. It was a sort of step that for most of the play had a curtain in front of it and was used for exits and entrances, but for this the curtain went up and we sat there exchanging our few words of dialogue and looking down at the masque and beyond it to the audience. Mollie leaned forward too much at one point and her chair fell off the edge, and we went back to the beginning. So I was sitting staring out into the auditorium as the security people went up to the Royal Box and practically took it apart. They examined it inside and out, they banged on things, they measured, they compared the number of struts, loudly, with the other boxes. I was ever so glad we hadn’t hidden a bomb in there the week before, because they’d certainly have found it. What worried me was that they were clearly looking for one, and I couldn’t think how they knew.
I told Devlin when I got out that evening. He was still picking me up at the theater after rehearsals, despite the armed guard at the stage door. He said changing the pattern would be worse than being recognized, and he was burned anyway when this job was over. “Taking it apart?” he echoed me, putting the car into gear and pulling away between two black taxis. “But they didn’t pay any special attention to you, darling?”
“None at all,” I said. “Not to any of us. They wouldn’t even stop banging when Antony asked them.”
“Then it’s a question of what they know,” he said, frowning. “I’d better make a call.”
He parked at the gates of Green Park, where there were two telephone boxes together, looking very red and solid in the dusk. He went into the first one and I could see him dialing and waiting, his pennies ready. After a moment he tried another number, listened, and hung up without putting his coins in. Then he came out of that box and went into the other, and I could only see his back, hunched a little over the receiver. I could see that he was talking.
He looked grim when he came back. “Get out,” he said. “We’re going to take a little walk.”
“They’ll be locking the park soon,” I objected.
“Come on, love,” he said, holding my door open. I got out. He put an arm around me and walked me into the park. “Parliament is that way, and Buckingham Palace is that way,” he said, like a tour guide. London rose all around us, but all I could see in the directions he indicated was trees and grass, and one man walking a dog in the distance.
“Are we burned?” I asked, quietly.
He looked down at me, then gave my shoulders a squeeze. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t spot anybody following us. But there’s no reply on the private line at Coltham and the person answering the public line sounded to me like a ploddie. So it looks as if they’re on to Lord Scott. But it doesn’t quite make sense, because if they have Lord Scott and he’s told them about the box, they’d have come for you first thing, you were right there.”
“Uncle Phil would never tell them!”
He looked skeptical. “You can’t say that about anyone,” he said, quite gently. “Enough pain and a little time and you start telling them everything you know, and everything you think they want to know, making it up if you don’t know it because you’re so desperate to tell. Your uncle Phil didn’t think they’d go so far as to use ways like that on a lord, and Loy thought he was right. I wouldn’t trust it.”
I hated to think of Uncle Phil being tortured, and at the same time I couldn’t quite believe it. I suppose it was like the stone soap that I’d known about but not accepted for all that time. There are things one can’t take in. I didn’t want to think of our police—who I’d always thought of as a special kind of servants, protection, unquestionably on my side—doing terrible things to anyone. I suppose I knew they might do them to terrorists, but I’d classed terrorists as people who deserved it. That emphatically didn’t include Uncle Phil.
We walked up and down. “What are we doing?” I asked. It had been a hot day, but now the sun was down and I was wishing for a coat.
“We’re waiting for Loy,” he said.
“Loy’s all right then?”
“Loy wasn’t at Coltham,” was all he said. Then, after another few turns on the grass, in view of the gates and the car and the telephone boxes, “If we make it through this still alive, darling, if they die and we don’t, then run. Take a train to Holyhead, they shouldn’t be looking so hard in that direction. In Dublin go to—”
“They wouldn’t take me, and anyway that would be no kind of life for me,” I interrupted, crossly.
“They could fix you up with papers and get you into America, love,” Devlin said. “My people have got contacts across the water. You could go to Hollywood maybe.”
“They’re hand in glove with Hitler.”
“If Hitler was dead they wouldn’t be.” But he didn’t offer again to give me the address in Dublin, and I didn’t ask.
The man with the dog walked past us and gave us one incurious look. I suppose lovers cuddling are as common a sight in London parks as men with dogs, and I suppose Devlin knew that. It was a lovely dog, a golden Labrador in beautiful condition. I wished I could have a dog, or better yet two, but it simply wasn’t fair in London.
“Are we still going to go through with it?” I asked, after another cold while.
“Don’t you just wish we’d cancel? It depends what Loy finds out.”
I hadn’t told Devlin about changing my mind at the reception, partly because he was supposed to think I’d agreed already, and partly because it was so difficult to say. “I don’t want to cancel,” I said, feebly. “I want to go through with it now.”
It was getting too dark to see Devlin’s expression. “I haven’t told you the new plan,” he said. “It all depends on you, my dear.”
“You don’t want me to set it off from the stage?” I asked.
“No, you’re all right on that one,” he said. “Loy’s going to be in the ha’pennies and I’m going to be in the front row, as backup. We have our tickets already. The bomb will be hidden in a floral arrangement. It’ll be in the base. The flowers will be for the Royal Box, but they’ll be delivered to you by mistake, and you’ll take them round through the pass door and up to the box.”
It was completely mad, of course, but I could see that it could actually work. The security on the stage door would give far less scrutiny to flowers for me than the security at the front-of-house would give to flowers for the box, and if I took the flowers around they’d probably just accept them, especially if they fit in a gap. It made much more sense than any of the other suggestions. “Have you made the bomb?”
“This afternoon. And it’s in the base, we just need to have the flowers put in on Friday morning and have it sent round. Everything was moving smoothly until now.”
Devlin shifted his grip on my arm, and that reminded me of Daphne and Mark at the reception. “Put your hand on my elbow,” I said. He did. I arranged it so it was the way Mark’s had been. It wasn’t at all comfortable, even with his hand quite loose. “Now squeeze just the tiniest bit.” It was excruciating.
“What was that in aid of?” he asked. “Something for the play?”
“No, it’s how beastly Mark Normanby was holding his wife’s arm at the reception last night. I knew it had to hurt, I just wanted to be sure of it. I think he must be some kind of sadist.”
“From what I hear he doesn’t have much use for women at all.”
I was starting to feel seriously worried about where Loy was. A park keeper came past us, strolling towards the gates. “About to lock up now, mate,” he said.
We walked out of the gates and towards the car. “I don’t know—,” Devlin started, when we both caught sight of Siddy, her camel hair coat swinging around her, walking fast down Piccadilly towards us.
“Let’s get into the car and go somewhere,” she said.
“Where’s Loy?” Devlin asked.
“Keeping a low profile,” Siddy said, opening the c
ar door. She sat in the front next to Devlin and I sat in the back and leaned forward, so I could hear them talk. “Nobody’s following me.”
“Nobody’s following us either; hanging around in the park for all that time waiting for you pretty much confirmed that,” Devlin said. “Now what’s happened?”
“Uncle Phil has been arrested, and they’ve taken in practically everyone who was at Coltham, servants included,” she said, as Devlin started up. “It was very hard for my sources to find out, it was done quite secretly and on orders directly from the Home Secretary. Usually anything like this someone would have warned me, or warned Uncle Phil directly, but they must have guessed that. There was some kind of trouble down there, that’s the only reason I know anything at all.”
“So how did they get onto him? They knew about him and they knew about the box, but they didn’t come after Viola,” Devlin said. Siddy was lighting a cigarette, and I saw the side of his face clearly in the flare of the match; he looked fierce and intent, the way he did when he was making love.
Siddy blew out smoke. “We think it must have been through Lauria’s servants. The Greens knew. They were in hiding, such good hiding we couldn’t find them either, but they were caught last Friday. We managed to get Mrs. Green away, she’s safely in, well, safety, but Mr. Green must have talked.”
“What did they know?” Devlin asked.
“They knew about the original plan. Nothing about the later developments. Nothing about you, or Viola. And they’d have heard Loy’s name, probably only as Loy, but maybe as Sir Aloysius.”
“That’s as distinctive as a bloody fingerprint,” Devlin muttered, stopping at red lights.