“Precisely. No doubt they’re well chaperoned while they’re on Wimbledon premises, as it were, but they come and go pretty casually most of the time. Well, no point in my going on beating about the bush. Fact is, we might have a specific problem on our hands this year. Does the name Trish Thumper mean anything to you?”
“Yes indeed. My wife tells me she’s a young lady to watch. And she’s the daughter of the judge, of course.”
“Yes. I’ve met him now and then, and entre nous, I cordially dislike the man. Known among barristers as Thump the Grump, I’m told. Seems to model himself on Judge Jeffreys of infamous memory. D’you know he was blackballed when he was up for election to the Garrick?” The assistant commissioner cast a smug glance down at the pale green and pink stripes of his club necktie, and Delphick toyed with the idea that it might have been Sir Hubert himself who had given the thumbs down. “Anyway, it seems he’s been getting threatening letters.”
“I’m not a bit surprised, sir. There must be any number of people he’s sent down who’d cheerfully murder him if they thought they could get away with it. I infer from what you say that the threats are directed at his daughter, though.”
“Precisely. Us coppers have to get used to threats from disgruntled villains or their friends and relatives, and so do judges. Even judges who don’t browbeat and throw the book at the people they put away with such obvious relish as Wilfred Thumper.” Sir Hubert got up, crossed to the window of his office, and peered out for a while before wheeling round and marching back to his chair again. “So in the ordinary way we wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over Thumper’s hate mail, but this is something different. You’re not the only one who remembers bits from the Bible, you know. There’s something about visiting the sins of the fathers on the child unto the . . . how many generations is it, Delphick?”
“Seven, I fancy.”
“Probably. However many it is, it’s a jolly unfair principle, and not one supported by the commissioner or myself. With a father like that, Miss Patricia Thumper probably has quite enough to put up with as it is. If somebody out there’s harboring evil designs on her, we’ve got to look into it. What I mean by that, of course, is that you’ve got to look into it.” Sir Hubert pushed a slender file across his desk toward Delphick.
“This is all the paper work there is so far. Thumper raised the matter personally with the commissioner, at the suggestion of your old acquaintance Sir George Colveden.”
“Colveden, sir?”
“The same. Apparently they’ve kept in touch since they were at school together, and Colveden, it seems, though a mere justice of the peace, is the only man on earth whose opinions Mr. Justice Thumper respects.”
“Good lord!”
“My sentiments entirely. Now the commissioner isn’t any fonder of the odious man than I am. Nevertheless he tells me that although you’d have to squeeze long and hard to extract so much as a drop of the milk of human kindness from him, it’s there. It seems that Mr. Justice Thumper loves his daughter with all of what passes for his heart, and would probably go out of his mind if anything were to happen to her.”
In his ecstasy Nigel Colveden seized a hand conveniently near his and clasped it tightly. It belonged to Miss Treeves, who was startled and gratified in about equal measure. Trish Thumper had lost the first set to the American girl two-six, but succeeded in taking the second, six-four. “Isn’t she fantastic?” he demanded.
Miss Treeves gazed down to where the two young women sat below the umpire’s elevated chair, mopping their faces with towels and drinking Coca-Cola. “They are well matched,” she said, decisively disengaging her hand, “but if, as I imagine, you are referring to Trish Thumper, then Arthur and I agree that she seems to have the greater stamina and will probably win.”
“Oh, rather!” The vicar had long ago learned not to challenge the opinions his sister attributed to him. He turned to Miss Seeton with the idea of inviting her to make the decision unanimous, but she was obviously lost in thought, so he left her undisturbed.
The Thumper parents were both gazing at their daughter, their heads turned in such a way that Miss Seeton had a clear view of Sir Wilfred in profile. Lady Thumper was on his far side and largely obscured by her husband. She was in any case wearing a huge and elaborate hat that for some reason put Miss Seeton in mind of the Taj Mahal and would in any case have largely concealed her expression from anyone behind and above her.
It was of little consequence, Miss Seeton thought to herself, remembering tea at the Colvedens. Poor Lady Thumper must presumably in her youth have made an impression on the man who was to become her husband, but in late middle age seemed to have no personality whatever of her own. One would be hard put to it indeed to catch any kind of likeness on paper.
Sir Wilfred’s face on the other hand was both memorable and expressive of oddly contradictory traits of character. In fact, now that one thought about it, he looked very like Leonardo Loredan, the doge of Venice in Bellini’s wonderful portrait. He had the same ascetic air of authority, a similarly proud, prominent nose, and thin lips pressed together just as censoriously. Hundreds of years ago this doge too must surely have struck many of his acquaintances as being a querulous, opinionated, and self-righteous person. And the doges were elected from men who had earlier in their careers sat in judgment in the Venetian court of law, of course. So it was not at all fanciful to suppose that Leonardo, like Sir Wilfred, had earned a reputation for severity. Yet Bellini’s portrait showed a man whose eyes betrayed vulnerability and even pain; and there had been a kindred look in Sir Wilfred’s whenever his face had been turned toward his only child while they had all been sitting there on the terrace at Rytham Hall having tea. Quite different from when he had been talking to Sir George, for whom he clearly had much respect, but that was perhaps only to be expected if their relationship as boys had been as the vicar had explained.
“I wonder if they had lemon curd at school?”
“Did you say lemon curd, Miss Seeton?” His attention being on the players who were on the point of beginning the third set, the vicar was not sure if he had heard aright.
“Yes. It was a great treat to have it at the Colvedens last week, I can’t imagine why it seems to have gone so much out of fashion in recent years. Perhaps Sir George asked specially for it because he remembered it was a favorite of Sir Wilfred’s all those years ago. He’s very like Bellini’s doge, don’t you think?”
Arthur Treeves looked at her uneasily but was spared the necessity to make an immediate reply as a hush fell and Trish Thumper prepared to serve. Nigel Colveden barely managed to suppress a moan of yearning when she swung her racket, the material of her dress taut across her considerable bosom and the scalloped skirt rising up her well-muscled thighs. It was a good service, but Nancy Wiesendonck returned it deftly. The rally ran to several exchanges, but the Thumper backhand eventually prevailed. Fifteen-love.
“Bellini’s dogs?” The vicar turned to inquire during the burst of applause. “I don’t think I know anyone of that name. Not who keeps dogs, that is,” he added, as though he had any number of other Bellini acquaintances. He was immediately shushed by his sister, smiled apologetically at Miss Seeton, and remained silent until the end of the first game, which Trish Thumper won. By then, he could see that Miss Seeton had in any case fallen into another reverie, so he beamed across at Nigel. “How well she is playing!”
Miss Seeton blinked, rubbed her eyes, and blinked again. Most of the heads of the spectators turned from left to right to follow the ball, but the doge of Venice’s gaze never left his daughter. While, how very interesting, somebody was staring equally fixedly at the doge. No less a person than Tintoretto, who was in St. John’s Ambulance Brigade uniform and standing by the fence behind the base line at the end currently occupied by Trish Thumper. Come now, one really must not carry fantasy to the point of self-indulgence: It was merely that Sir Wilfred looked like the doge, and the first-aid man looked like Tintoretto in his self-portrait, hi
s cadaverous, tragic face given a false appearance of fullness by the huge, untidy gray beard.
It was the first time that William Parsons had worn his old uniform in public for nearly six years. He had lost weight in prison and it felt loose and heavy on him; but he was confident that it would pass muster. In the old days he had more than once joked that the Red Cross and St. John’s volunteers at concerts and sporting occasions were Invisible People, like the postman in the detective story. Seen by everybody, noticed by nobody. And even if they had heard it before, Audrey and Vicky had laughed, affectionately he believed.
For they had been a better-than-averagely contented, united little family in those days. To have risen to be the manager of the busy branch of the Reliable Building Society in Streatham High Street might not amount to the career success William had once daydreamed about, but it was nothing to be ashamed of. The salary was adequate if hardly generous, and as a member of the managerial staff he was charged an exceptionally low rate of interest on the mortgage repayments for their own house. On the whole he enjoyed interviewing young couples wanting loans to enable them to set up their own homes, and the staff of the branch worked together pretty well as a team. So he hardly ever went home having had a “bad day at the office.”
Audrey used to tease him about the amount of his spare time he devoted to the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade. “You’re a fanatic, that’s what you are, Albert Schweitzer,” she would say as he got ready to report for duty at a Saturday football match. “Why, you don’t even like football.” Then, when he thought he sensed real resentment underlying the breeziness and hesitated, “Go on, get along with you, you daft thing. Enjoy yourself. Hope you have something a bit more interesting than a sprained ankle this week.”
There was no such ambiguity about Vicky’s attitude. She idolized her father, and joined the brigade, too, as a cadet, as soon as she was old enough. From then on they were not only father and daughter, but colleagues and allies, too. William was proud of the bright, pretty teenager he had for a daughter, and Vicky confided in him in a way she could never bring herself to do with her mother.
So much so that it was to him she turned when, a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, she discovered that she was pregnant by Michael, her first and only proper boyfriend. Michael himself must not know, certainly not just before his exams. He was a sixth-former, too, brilliant and expected to get a State Scholarship to study medicine. Nothing must get in the way of his future. Dad would understand. Dad wouldn’t blow his top and shout and scream at her. Dad would help.
William was shattered, but he couldn’t think of letting Vicky down. There was a lot of talk about reforming the law against abortion, but it would be years before anything was done about it. He knew better than to believe old wives’ tales about hot baths and plenty of gin, and it was out of the question for his beloved Vicky to fall into the hands of some ghastly creature wielding a metal coat hanger in a sordid room on a back street. William had friends in the brigade, and one of them put him in touch with another friend who knew of a distinguished surgeon on Wimpole Street. His views were liberal and humane, and he could occasionally be persuaded to put his career in jeopardy by helping a girl in distress; but he was expensive.
William did not have the necessary five hundred pounds, and since he and Audrey had a joint bank account, he could not arrange a loan without involving her. It must have been when he realized this that he began to lose his mind, because any sane building society branch manager knew very well that the society’s procedures incorporated elaborate safeguards which insured that if he were to advance five hundred pounds to a fictitious mortgage applicant he would be found out within a matter of days. Those safeguards further made it certain that if, as William Parsons did, he took the money in cash during the course of a working day, he was asking for trouble within hours.
In William’s case a Miss Julie Withers suspected that her till was short at two-twenty, checked it again, and turned to her colleague Beverly Connolly who was really Mrs. Drew but preferred to use her maiden name at work. Beverly said no, Julie surely knew she wouldn’t raid her till for fivers without saying so, and well, blow me down, mine’s short, too. The assistant manager Mr. Wilson was thereupon consulted. Mr. Wilson was a bit on the officious side, but quick on the uptake, and he saw at once that this was a matter for Mr. Parsons. So at two thirty-five he rushed, without knocking, into the manager’s office to find its occupant putting a rubber band round a stack of five-pound notes.
There were any number of ways in which William Parsons could have talked himself out of what was admittedly an unorthodox situation, but he panicked, thrust the money into his pocket, and bolted out of the room and the building. At two forty-two he was apprehended by PC Godfrey Hislop, and by three-thirty he had been formally charged. So frenzied was his behavior that he was kept in custody, and further remanded in custody by the magistrates who committed him for trial.
When William Parsons eventually came before Mr. Justice Thumper, he was no longer in a state of agitation, but was lost in the dark night of the soul. For Vicky, bereft of her father’s help, had, on the basis of her pathetically elementary medical knowledge, tried to abort herself, been discovered in agony too late, and died in the hospital. His defense counsel persuaded William to plead not guilty, but after that he remained mute throughout the trial, while his barrister argued temporary insanity caused by anxiety about his daughter’s health. It was a tricky line to take, because had it emerged in court that Parsons had taken the money to pay for an illegal operation things would have been all the worse for him.
Mr. Justice Thumper poured scorn on the temporary insanity idea, even though, under cross-examination, Mr. Wilson the assistant manager agreed that as an experienced official of the Reliable Building Society the accused must have known that his actions could only result in disaster for him. Here, the judge insisted in his summing-up to the jury, was a man in a position of trust and solemn financial responsibility who, they might well conclude, had betrayed that trust, and in a blatantly outrageous way.
It was only when the members of the jury had duly brought in their guilty verdict that Thumper really let himself go, in passing sentence following defense counsel’s plea for mitigation on the grounds that his client’s distress of mind had been immeasurably increased by the fact that his daughter had in fact died. That was unfortunate no doubt, His Lordship thundered, but justice must be done. His condemnation of the transgressions of the prisoner in the dock was exceptionally fiery and protracted even by his own exacting standards, and long before he had finished, counsel on both sides knew that the wretched, shambling man in the dock would be going down for a long time.
William Parsons heard the words through the mists of his misery, and dimly understood their import. It didn’t matter to him. Nothing did, until the sanctimonious old fool went too far, by seeming to imply—he was sure he had—that darling Vicky’s death was a judgment from Heaven. For almost the first time in the trial, he raised his head and looked directly at the judge. The fog of despair was dissipated, washed away by the bright hatred that was to give him back the will to live, and sustain him through the years of imprisonment.
The scoreboard read one set all, and five games to four in Nancy Wiesendonck’s favor in the third. However, Trish had been coming up fast, it was her service game and she had dropped only one point in it. Forty-fifteen. It was after all only an exhibition match, but Nancy Wiesendonck looked as grim as any top-class player facing three game points and the likelihood of a long battle to come was entitled to.
The English girl took a deep breath which deeply moved Nigel Colveden, swung . . . and the ball shot off at a tangent. Her second serve was in, but so feeble that her opponent was able to smash it back almost contemptuously. Forty-thirty. The next point also went to the American, following another poor service and another strong return. Deuce, and then a double fault. Advantage Miss Wiesendonck, and Miss Thumper blundering about the court like a hopele
ssly outclassed beginner.
“She’s ill,” Mel Forby said to Thrudd Banner.
“She’s lost,” he replied a few seconds later, when slightly puzzled applause broke out and Trish Thumper trailed listlessly to the net to shake hands with the victor, in whose face satisfaction vied with concern.
There was nothing but concern in that of Sir Wilfred Thumper, and nothing but satisfaction in that of William Parsons as the two young women thanked the umpire and left the court together, one of them in obvious distress.
chapter
~3~
“LET’S SEE, when is it you’re finally taking the plunge, Bob?”
Detective Sergeant Bob Ranger looked across the office to where his boss was sitting fiddling with his letter opener. Not that the Oracle ever seemed to use it for its proper purpose, very few documents reaching his desk were in envelopes anyway. It gave him something to play with, though, and a bit of exercise because he dropped it so often and had to bend down to retrieve it. “Saturday week, sir. You and Mrs. Delphick’re coming, you accepted. And, um . . . you did approve my application for two weeks leave, a couple of months back.”
No harm in reminding him of that crucial fact, putting it firmly on the table and dusting it off right away. Because the Oracle had that file in front of him, the one he’d brought back after going to see Sir Heavily the previous day and kept locked away since then. And he had that look about him, the look that said something new was in the wind. Typical, just as they were getting the backlog of paper work sorted out at last so that he’d be able to leave everything shipshape. Could even guess what the old devil was thinking—something along the lines of, here’s an interesting bucket of worms that’ll keep you occupied for a nice long time, my lad.
“There’s no need to look so apprehensive. I remember perfectly well, and am painfully reconciling myself to the prospect of doing without your services while you and Anne are off sunning yourselves in wherever it is you’re being so secretive about. Have no fear, my wife and I will report at Plummergen parish church in good time in our glad rags. I might be able to make myself useful when the vicar asks if anybody knows of any let or hindrance to the marriage. I could marshal the objectors into an orderly queue.”
Advantage Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 7) Page 2