by Janet Roger
Two days’ growth on my chin said I’d lost thirty-six hours; making five days since Jarrett was murdered, three weeks or more since he began following Michael Garfield around the fruit bars on Willard’s orders. Yet on Christmas Day, when Willard already knew Garfield was likely dead, he’d been interested enough in the professor’s diary to meet Reilly at the Raglan himself. The dead don’t blackmail. It followed that whatever Willard had in view, Michael Garfield wasn’t the target. I drained the can. A halting dawn was bleaching out the heavens. “It’s getting light, soldier. Better show me where we are.” The soldier looked up from writing on his cuff, crossed the blanket tighter across his chest and got up from the mattress. He stooped to pull the coat off me, put it over his arm, slid his free hand under my elbow and lifted me up in one clean, unfussed move that knocked the breath out of me. I leaned hard against him, let him set the coat around my shoulders and feed my good arm in a sleeve and button me in. The other he let hang loose at my side. When it was done, I nodded at the twisted metal frame of a window sixty feet away. “Over there. Let’s take a look.” The dog stretched and yawned and uncrossed his paws, decided I was too sorry to worry about, then heaved on his feet and followed over anyway.
The window was a pallid square of dawn looking out to the river from the north shore, six floors up and a few hundred feet downstream from the Tower. Derricks moved over the wharves across the water. The malt taint of a brewery carried on the breeze. In the middle of the river, a tugboat worked at keeping a freighter steady while the bridge raised, and on the bridge approach a line of vehicles waited and cut their motors to save gas. It could have been any grudging daybreak between Christmas and New Year, and not more than a couple of miles south and east of the Pelican Club. I sank into the soldier’s grip under my arm. A hundred feet below, uncovered by the tide, a small bay of gravel sand ran wet along the river wall. I asked, “That’s where they left me?” The hand tightened around my arm, pulled away from the view and manhandled me across the angle of the building. We skirted rubble from the wrecked end wall, moved along a line of iron supports, got to the last window on the east side of the warehouse and stopped there, scuffing splintered glass across the floor. Below us stretched the three connecting basins of St. Katherine’s Dock, its lock gates spilling tidewater back into the river. And round about the dock, twenty more acres of burned-out warehouses like the one the soldier called home. On the December night the Luftwaffe put a match to them they’d been filled with raw rubber. The fires had set a low, stinking pall across the City, blotting out daylight for a week. Every brick in every warehouse and rubble heap around the dock still oozed the smell of it. A dozen ragged shadows had arrived with the dawn, circled the bonfire behind us and set a pan to boil. They looked over without interest or surprise. I followed the soldier’s gaze across the view and shook my head. “Not here, soldier. You didn’t pull me out of the water. There was shingle. I remember a beach.”
The soldier stared out across the desolation with me and lurched his free hand toward the window frame, his index finger crooked to point at what I was missing. I peered out over the sill and down. Right there beneath the window, sitting low in the water, an abandoned river lighter was tied up in the lock, its deck level with the foot of an iron ladder climbing down from the dockside. A low ridge of gravel ballast filled the open hold. I tasted grit in my mouth again, smelled tidewater slopping in the dock, heard sluices spraying inside the lock gates and saw my shingle beach. No lights down there. The dock would be invisible from that window after dark. But no vehicle could get anyplace close, and they’d been dumping a deadweight. The soldier wouldn’t see, but he might hear them hauling me, get curious and go looking. I turned around. He had his teeth clenched, his throat strained taut as piano wire, chin jutting at the shadow figures in the firelight. The wild labor of finding a voice shook his whole frame. “Strairr-rrr. Strairrr-tch. N-N-Nggggh. Strairrrr-tch-tcher.” The effort left the soldier quivering like a watch spring. His dog fidgeted and whimpered.
I put a hand over the hand steadying me. “Easy. Take it easy. I know what you did.” From where I was dumped on the ballast in the lighter, there wasn’t a chance he could get me up six floors. Not unless he organized the shuffling ghosts from the campfire into a stretcher party before they left him for the night. They would oblige. There wouldn’t be a way to tell him no. And while we looked out the window and let the soldier settle, I gave some thought to Voigt. Not Voigt in his own house and on his own time, averse to company and shy of social graces, but Voigt who could take instructions, stay sober and dress for work, so sure he was untouchable he couldn’t help but introduce himself. Red Sky.
I reached for the soldier’s free hand, took his wrist and slid back his jacket sleeve. There were no words written there. No numbers or letters. Only pencil marks from a Rosetta stone, pressed deep in the flannel of his shirt cuff. We looked each other in the eyes. “I’ll be back, soldier. Write it down.” I patted the hand he still had on my arm, prized out of his grip and moved in the direction the ghosts around the fire had appeared from.
THIRTY-THREE
I pulled a clean shirt and necktie from the chest of drawers at the foot of my bed, slid the drawer shut with my knee and nudged the light off with an elbow. In the bathroom I peeled down to the waist by degrees, ran water on a hand towel and dabbed around the dark hatching covering my left side. Then I shaved and buttoned into the shirt, knotted the tie in a noose and looped it over my head, pulled up the loop one-handed and folded down the soft collar. I stepped back from the mirror to take the effect. Not bad. My jaw was advertising its brush with the Pelican’s porch, the ripe plum behind my ear was toughening into a prune, and if I kept my left hand propped in my jacket pocket I could pass for Dickie Mountbatten. I turned away from the glass, walked to the sitting room, picked up the telephone and dialed. “Good afternoon, Doctor.”
A small catch of surprise came like static down the wire. Kathryn Swinford said brightly, “My goodness, we haven’t spoken in ages! There is such a lot to tell you I hardly know where to begin.”
“Then listen. I heard Blanche’s boy ran into McAlester. Does he still walk?
“What? Oh no, no he doesn’t. But would you mind awfully holding the line?” I dropped the receiver on the sofa and went to the kitchen, found Louis’ aspirin bottle and carried it back. I had the telephone clamped under my chin when a low, fierce whisper broke in. “Newman? Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“Here. Company gone?”
“Yes.”
“And Henry?”
She hesitated. “I was called in late on Sunday afternoon to make an examination. There are fractures, all sorts of bruising, possibly internal hemorrhage. He’ll survive, but McAlester is an animal and what he did frightened even Littomy. So I did some frightening of my own. I told Littomy Henry needed immediate hospital attention and he had him sent to Bart’s within the hour, with a police guard at the door. It’s an outrage. Where on earth have you been?”
You were always searching for English she would understand. “A pressing engagement came up. I need to talk to Guy Beaufort.” I chewed aspirin while she took it in.
“What good would it do? Guy is so appalled he’s ready to believe you set up the whole thing for McAlester. I’ve told him it’s ridiculous, but I doubt he’ll listen to you or anyone now without his lawyer present. I imagine that’s not what you had in mind.”
I had a picture of her seated on the edge of Templeton’s chair, forehead knitted, serious in patent shoes, the telephone cord wrapped around a little finger and her shoulder parting her hair where it fell. On the desk in front of her a crystal paperweight with two crossed hockey sticks, Truth engraved on one of them, Beauty on the other. I said “Doctor, Henry’s about to go down for a killing spree. If you’re there, Guy Beaufort will listen.”
I saw her finger the paperweight, chewing the corner of her lip. “Guy hasn’t been going into the office. Wh
en do you want to see him?”
Early afternoon. The room already in twilight. I switched on a lamp beside the sofa. “I can be at his home in an hour. There’s something I need you to do first.”
What the Beauforts called home was a picture out of a nursery tale, the one about the lady hedgehog who put on her bonnet and mittens to go visiting, then left her basket behind and just knew it was going to be that sort of day. Sharp-pitched gables and shingle roofs, tall chimneys and creeper, spread wide against a framing acre of box hedge and beech wood. Rhododendron-edged lawns dropped to a high brick wall at the roadside, and across a one-car lane it overlooked a part of the heath rolling toward Hampstead, deep in snow.
Kathryn Swinford’s car swung in through the entrance and climbed the drive to the front porch. I stepped out from behind the gate post to trail it uphill, and by the time she cut the motor I was level and had the door open, breathing hard. Her calf stretched across the running board. She got out and tucked a purse under her arm, looked along the house frontage while I slammed the Austin’s door. “I telephoned Guy. He’s not ecstatic but he’s expecting us.” Her glance took in the side of my face. “Do you know, every time I feel like socking you on the jaw, I have to remind myself there’s a queue.”
A manservant wearing a black necktie and a long dustcoat opened the door, saw the doctor standing there and brightened his smile. She called him Ernest and walked ahead with him to the end of a beamed hall, where a frowning retriever filled a rug in front of a log fire. Ernest turned and waited to take our coats. He was attentive, answered her as if she still wore ribbons in her plaits and braces on her teeth, and when she told him she would announce herself to Mr. Beaufort he said he would show me in the study and bring some tea. “With lemon and sugar, Miss Kathryn?”
“Thank you, Ernest. Mr. Beaufort and Mr. Newman will both take a straight whisky.”
He said, “Of course, Miss Kathryn,” and the retriever sneezed and beat dust out of the rug with its tail.
Beaufort’s study had the English look of being put together by a color-blind eccentric; broad and long, accommodated with faded chairs, scattered with old magazines and musty with the smell of beeswax and pipe tobacco. Set against the wall by the door was a workbench with chests for storing plans at either side, a drawing board angled in the center of the bench and a high chair turned aside from it. The shade of a desk lamp was pushed flat against a drawing on the board. In the wall opposite, a brick hearth hissed with wet logs and kept the room warmed over. I walked to a pair of French doors at the long end of the study and parted the slats of a blind. Out beyond a glass conservatory, a stand of beech cut the failing daylight from the room. A tall clock ticked off seconds in the gloom behind me, weary for the excitement of the quarter-hour.
Henry Beaufort had gotten his build and his looks from his mother. Her portrait hung full-length in a recess beside the hearth. It showed a fashionably dazed young beauty from the roaring years, sparking jewelry everyplace she could find a pulse, languid in a shimmering red ball gown and up-tilting a wishbone chin. Two vertical rows of photographs at left and right of the picture frame only helped make her look more ethereal. They were group pictures taken at around the same time, of pale company men and ascetic bankers rigid in black-tie, keeping a yard of daylight between them in case easy fellowship might be contagious. A younger, brasher Guy Beaufort was in every one, gazing directly at the camera, looking so cocksure of himself he was risking being blackballed.
“Guy will be down in a moment.” Kathryn Swinford shut the door behind her, looking uneasy and fingering a brooch on the collar of an olive-green tailor-made.
I nodded at the portrait on the wall. “Blanche is the real McCoy.”
She glanced at the painting and gave it a faint smile. “Blanche is the real Delaware. They’re a soldiering family. There was a Delaware with Marlborough at Blenheim, another with Wolfe at Quebec; they charged at Balaclava and were chums with General Gordon in China. Not to mention excelling in two first-rate world wars.”
She settled in an armchair at a cartwheel table in the recess. I moved to the workbench and pushed the desk lamp aside from the drawing taped on the board. It showed a clean, wide cityscape where tall blocks of residences stood weightless in acres enough for a deer park, and where whoever toiled with their hands or sweated over a machine was making sure to do it someplace else, because at the foot of the residences, down among the ornamental lakes, there were only passersby strolling in eternal springtime and old men sitting under shade trees patting small children on the head. A box stenciled in the bottom right corner read, Cripplegate Area Development, E.W. Levin for Beaufort Partners. I said, “Blanche married an architect. Where did it all go wrong?”
From where I stood, she was invisible, wrapped in the wings of the armchair. “You really shouldn’t underestimate Guy. He’s very well respected. Those may be Edgar Levin’s designs, but even before the rubble was cleared it was Guy who persuaded Corporation bigwigs they had to modernize. I think the whole idea still rather petrifies them.”
I went back over to the French doors, looked out past the beech trees swaying in late afternoon light and wondered aloud, “Why would they worry? They don’t expect to be moving in there any more than the Beauforts do. From here they’ll walk out on Hampstead Heath and those towers won’t even be a cloud on the horizon.”
“Newman!” She hissed the word. Then as if we were thumbing through a Corporation press announcement, “Cripplegate will have its own concert hall, art gallery, schools, a theater. It’s all going to be rather splendid.” I dropped the wood slats and turned around, to where Guy Beaufort was holding the study door open and Ernest was pushing past him with a trolley, his dustcoat swapped for a linen jacket. Beaufort looked short on sleep, rumpled in a high-buttoned suit and a bow tie. Kathryn Swinford patted an armchair to have him sit beside her. The retriever waddled in behind him and flopped at his feet. Ernest switched on lights around the room, set a tea tray on the cartwheel table and brought over two large whiskies from the trolley. The doctor squeezed lemon in her teacup and looked around the party as Ernest ghosted out the door.
I picked up my glass, raised it an inch to let the liquor catch the fire glow, and in the way of a toast said, “Twelve-year Buccleuch.” Kathryn Swinford sat slowly upright and turned in her chair. Beaufort’s chin came up off his chest. “Until four days ago, I never heard the name before I read it in one of Dr. Swinford’s files. I didn’t know it was this year’s Beaufort Christmas gift either, or who got sent a bottle and who didn’t. But it hardly matters. Only one bottle is a problem. The night Professor Garfield was murdered, he took a passing interest in a boy named Terry Reilly. The law about that being what it is, they drove down to the river in Garfield’s car to get to know each other better. From there on, everything that could go wrong, did. The professor was murdered, Reilly drove the car back to the City in a panic, and when he got there took Garfield’s briefcase off the back seat. One of the things the briefcase had in it was the professor’s diary. The other was a bottle of your twelve-year Buccleuch that Henry gave him for a Christmas present.” I put the glass down on the table. “Next morning, a sometime streetwalker named Dillys Valentine was murdered with a sheared-off bottle of Buccleuch whisky. Miss Valentine was a friend of Reilly’s. He’d visited her that morning and left the whisky as winter comfort, with no more idea of handling a murder weapon than Henry had when he took it to give to his boyfriend. But that won’t save your son, Mr. Beaufort. As of now, he’s not only under police guard, they’ve got his prints on the bottle. They don’t know that yet, but when they do, they’ll decide the whole story is a wrap: Henry caught his boyfriend cheating with Raymond Jarrett, put the whisky in his pocket for morale and went on a murder spree. Facts that don’t fit, evidence they don’t have, will be nothing but inconvenience.”
Guy Beaufort leaned forward in his armchair, hearing how it would sound to a jury. His dog hea
ved out from under the seat, put his chin on the squab and listened with him. “Mr. Beaufort, you took time out of your Christmas ball to warn me Henry was off-limits and how one call to the commissioner could put me out of business. Maybe it could have, but it started me wondering what made you so nervous. Then I learned Willard had been having the professor followed and photographed for weeks, and by the night of the ball he even had his diary. Henry featured in it all. I think Willard told you that and gave you the chance to keep a lid on the boy’s indiscretions. The question is what he wanted in return. You could tell me what, here and now, or we could all finish our drinks over small talk about this weather we’re having, forget about Henry’s prints being at the Valentine murder and count on forensics not noticing. Which is it to be?”
A green log spat in the hearth. No other sound than the lick of firelight. Kathryn Swinford’s voice, fainter than the light in the room, murmured, “Guy, I knew nothing of this. I’m really very sorry.”
Beaufort blinked as if she’d snapped her fingers at him, then sank the contents of his glass, dabbed a knuckle at his lip and said, “Mr. Willard wanted Edgar Levin to stay away from his wife. He advised me to speak to him about it at once. Nothing more.”
Put that way, it not only sounded uncomplicated, it sounded reasonable. Beaufort only had to take his star partner in hand and Willard would put the pictures and the diary on ice. With the boy’s name and future at stake, Edgar Levin would do the decent thing. He wouldn’t see he had a choice. And coming from Willard, the idea was a lot subtler than having Levin’s good arm broken. I shifted in my seat, raised an eyebrow at Kathryn Swinford and we both stood up. She stepped around the table and rested a hand on Beaufort’s shoulder. “Ernest will see us out. Remember me to Blanche when you see her next.” Ernest already had the study door open and two coats over his arm. You doubted his boss noticed anybody was leaving.