Chapter 17
So the candles weren’t the kind you go to bed with, Grant thought, as the car sped along the embankment that Monday afternoon en route for the Temple; they were the kind you put on altars. The Brother of God’s tabernacle had been none of your bare mission tents. It had been hung with purple and fine linen and furnished with a shrine of great magnificence. And what had been merely an expression of Herbert’s own love of the theatrical had in most cases (Kentucky was an exception) proved good business. A beauty-starved and theatrically-minded people had fallen hard—in hard cash.
Christine’s shilling was the measure of her contempt. Her return, perhaps, for all those occasions when Herbert’s Lord had seen fit to deny her the small things her soul needed.
In the green subaqueous light of Mr. Erskine’s small room beside the plane tree, Grant put his proposition to the lawyer. They wanted to bring Herbert Gotobed to the surface, and this was the way to do it. It was quite orthodox, so the lawyer needn’t mind doing it. Lord Edward had approved.
The lawyer hummed and hawed, not because he had any real objections but because it is a lawyer’s business to consider remote contingencies, and a straightforward agreement to anything would be wildly unprofessional. In the end he agreed that it might be done.
Grant said: “Very well, I leave it to you. In tomorrow’s papers, please,” and went out wondering why the legal mind delighted in manufacturing trouble when there was so much ready-made in the world. There was plenty in poor Grant’s mind at the moment. “Surrounded by trouble,” as the spaewives said when they told your cards: that’s what he was. Monday would soon be over and there was no sign that Robert Tisdall was in the world of men. The first low howl had come from the Clarion that morning, and by tomorrow the whole wolf pack would be on him. Where was Robert Tisdall? What were the police doing to find him? To do Grant justice the discomfort in his mind was less for the outcry that was imminent than for the welfare of Tisdall. He had genuinely believed for the last two days that Tisdall’s nonappearance was due to lack of knowledge on Tisdall’s part. It is not easy to see newspapers when one is on the run. But now doubt like a chill wind played through his thoughts. There was something wrong. Every newspaper poster in every village in England had read: TISDALL INNOCENT. HUNTED MAN INNOCENT. How could he have missed it? In every pub, railway carriage, bus, and house in the country the news had been the favorite subject of conversation. And yet Tisdall was silent. No one had seen him since Erica drove away from him last Wednesday. On Thursday night the whole of England had been swamped by the worst storm for years, and it had rained and blown for two days afterwards. Tisdall had picked up the food left by Erica on Thursday, but not afterwards. The food she left on Friday was still there, a sodden pulp, on Saturday. Grant knew that Erica had spent all that Saturday scouring the countryside; she had quartered the country with the efficiency and persistence of a game dog, every barn, every shelter of any description, being subjected to search. Her very sound theory was that shelter he must have had on Thursday night—no human being could have survived such a storm—and since he had been in that chalky lane on Thursday morning to pick up the food she left, then he could not have gone far afield.
But her efforts had come to nothing. Today an organized gang of amateur searchers had undertaken the work—the police had no men to spare—but so far no news had come. And in Grant’s mind was growing a slow fear that he tried with all his self-awareness to beat down. But it was like a moor fire. You whipped it to cinder only to see it run under the surface and break out ahead of you.
News from Dover was slow, too. The investigation was hampered beyond any but police patience by the necessity of (a) not offending the peerage, and (b) not frightening the bird: the first applying to a possibly innocent, the second to a possibly guilty. It was all very complicated. Watching Edward Champneis’s calm face—he had eyebrows which gave a peculiar expression of repose—while he discussed with him the trapping of Herbert, Grant had several times forcibly to restrain himself from saying: “Where were you on Wednesday night?” What would Champneis do? Look a little puzzled, think a moment, and then say: “The night I arrived in Dover? I spent it with the So-and-sos at Such-and-such.” And then realization of what the question entailed would dawn, and he would look incredulously at Grant, and Grant would feel the world’s prize fool. More! In Edward Champneis’s presence he felt that it was sheer insult to suggest that he might have been responsible for his wife’s death. Away from him, that picture of the man in the garden, watching the lighted house with the open windows, might swim up in his mind more often than he cared to admit. But in his presence, any such thought was fantastic. Until his men had accounted—or failed to account—for Champneis’s movements that night, any direct inquiry must be shelved.
All he knew so far was that Champneis had stayed in none of the obvious places. The hotels and the family friends had both been drawn blank. The radius was now being extended. At any moment news might come that my lord had slept in a blameless four-poster and the county’s best linen sheets, and Grant would be forced to admit that he had been mistaken when he imagined that Lord Edward was deliberately misleading him.
Chapter 18
On Tuesday morning word came from Collins, the man who was investigating Champneis’s wardrobe. Bywood, the valet, had proved “very sticky going,” he reported. He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and there seemed to be no plane on which Collins could establish a mutual regard. But every man has his price, and Bywood’s proved to be snuff. A very secret vice, it was. Lord Edward would dismiss him on the spot if he suspected such indulgence. (Lord Edward would probably have been highly pleased by anything so eighteenth century.) Collins had procured him “very special snuff,” and had at last got within inspecting distance of the wardrobe. On his arrival in England—or rather, in London—Champneis had weeded out his wardrobe. The weeding out had included two coats, one dark and one camel hair. Bywood had given the camel hair one to his brother-in-law, a chorus boy; the other he had sold to a dealer in London. Collins gave the name and address of the dealer.
Grant sent an officer down to the dealer, and as the officer went through the stock the dealer said: “That coat came from Lord Edward Champneis, the Duke of Bude’s son. Nice bit of stuff.”
It was a nice bit of stuff. And it had all its buttons; with no sign of replacements.
Grant sighed when the news came, not sure whether he was glad or sorry. But he still wanted to know where Champneis had spent the night.
And what the Press wanted to know was where Tisdall was. Every newspaper in Britain wanted to know. The C.I.D. were in worse trouble than they had been for many years. The Clarion openly called them murderers, and Grant, trying to get a line on a baffling case, was harassed by the fury of colleagues, the condolences of his friends, a worried Commissioner, and his own growing anxiety. In the middle of the morning Jammy Hopkins rang up to explain away his “middle” in the Clarion. It was “all in the way of business,” and he knew his good friends at the Yard would understand. Grant was out, and it was Williams at the other end of the telephone. Williams was not in the mood for butter. He relieved his overburdened soul with a gusto which left Hopkins hoping that he had not irretrievably put himself in the wrong with the Yard. “As for hounding people to death,” Williams finished, “you know very well that the Press do more hounding in a week than the Yard has since it was founded. And all your victims are innocent!”
“Oh, have a heart, Sergeant! You know we’ve got to deliver the goods. If we don’t make it hot and strong, we’ll be out on our ear. St. Martin’s Crypt, or the Embankment. And you pushing people off the seats. We’ve got our jobs to keep just as much as—”
The sound of Williams’s hang-up was eloquent. It was action and comment compressed into one little monosyllable. Jammy felt hardly used. He had enjoyed writing that article. He had in fact been full of righteous indignation as the scarifying phrases poured forth. When Jammy was writing his tongue
came out of its habitual position in his cheek, and emotion flooded him. That the tongue went back when he had finished did not matter; the popular appeal of his article was secure; it was “from the heart”; and his salary went up by leaps and bounds.
But he was a little hurt that all his enemies-on-paper couldn’t see just what a jape it was. He flung his hat with a disgusted gesture onto his right eyebrow and went out to lunch.
And less than five minutes away Grant was sitting in a dark corner, a huge cup of black coffee before him, his head propped in his hands. He was “telling it to himself in words of one syllable.”
Christine Clay was living in secret. But the murderer knew where she was. That eliminated a lot of people.
Champneis knew.
Jason Harmer knew.
Herbert Gotobed almost certainly knew.
The murderer had worn a coat dark enough to be furnished with a black button and black sewing thread.
Champneis had such a coat, but there was no missing button.
Jason Harmer had no such coat; and had not lately worn any such coat.
No one knew what Herbert Gotobed wore.
The murderer had a motive so strong and of such duration that he could wait for his victim at six of a morning and deliberately drown her.
Champneis had a possible motive.
Jason Harmer had a possible motive if they had been lovers, but there was no proof of that.
Herbert Gotobed had no known motive but had almost certainly hated her.
On points Gotobed won. He knew where his sister was; he had the kind of record that was “headed for murder”; and he had been on bad terms with the victim.
Oh, well! By tomorrow Gotobed might have declared himself. Meanwhile he would drug himself with black coffee and try to keep his mind off the Press.
As he raised the cup to his lips, his eyes lighted on a man in the opposite corner. The man’s cup was half-empty, and he was watching Grant with amused and friendly eyes.
Grant smiled, and hit first. “Hiding that famous profile from the public gaze? Why don’t you give your fans a break?”
“It’s all break for them. A fan can’t be wrong. You’re being given a hell of a time, aren’t you? What do they think the police are? Clairvoyants?”
Grant rolled the honey on his tongue and swallowed it.
“Someday,” Owen Hughes said, “someone is going to screw Jammy Hopkins’s head off his blasted shoulders. If my face wasn’t insured for the sum total of the world’s gold, I’d do it myself. He once said I was ’every girl’s dream’!”
“And aren’t you?”
“Have you seen my cottage lately?”
“No. I saw the photograph of the wreck in the paper one day.”
“I don’t mind telling you I wept when I got out of the car and saw it. I’d like to broadcast that photograph to the ends of the earth as a sample of what publicity can do. Fifty years ago a few people might have come a few miles to look at the place, and then gone home satisfied. They came in charabanc loads to see Briars. My lawyer tried to stop the running of the ’trips,’ but there was nothing he could do. The County Police refused to keep a man there after the first few days. About ten thousand people have come in the last fortnight, and every one of the ten thousand has peered through the windows, stood on the plants, and taken away a souvenir. There is hardly a scrap of hedge left—it used to be twelve feet high, a mass of roses—and the garden is a wilderness of trampled mud. I was rather attached to that garden. I didn’t croon to the pansies, exactly, but I got a lot of kick out of planting things people gave me, and seeing them come up. Not a vestige left.”
“Rotten luck! And no redress. Maddening for you. Perhaps by next year the plants will have taken heart again.”
“Oh, I’m selling the place. It’s haunted. Had you ever met Clay? No? She was grand. They don’t make that kind in pairs.”
“Do you know of anyone who would be likely to want to murder her, by any chance?”
Hughes smiled one of the smiles which made his fans grip the arms of their cinema seats. “I know lots who would gladly have murdered her on the spot. But only on the spot. The minute you cooled off, you’d cheerfully die for her. It’s most unlikely death for Chris—the one that happened to her. Did you know that Lydia Keats prophesied it from her horoscope? She’s a marvel, Lydia. She should have been drowned when she was a pup, but she really is a marvel. I sent her Marie Dacre’s year, day, and minute of birth from Hollywood. Marie made me swear an oath before she divulged the awful truth of the year. Lydia hadn’t the faintest notion whose horoscope she was doing, and it was marvelously accurate. She’d be a wow in Hollywood.”
“She seems to be heading that way,” Grant said dryly. “Do you like the place?”
“Oh, yes. It’s restful.” As Grant raised his eyebrows: “There are so many pebbles on the beach that you’re practically anonymous.”
“I thought they ran rubbernecking tours for Midwest fans.”
“Oh, yes, they run motor coaches down your street, but they don’t tramp your flowers into the ground.”
“If you were murdered they might.”
“Not they. Murders are ten cents the dozen. Well, I must get along. Good luck. And God bless you. You’ve done me a power of good, so help me you have.”
“I?”
“You’ve brought to my notice one profession that is worse than my own.” He dropped some money on the table and picked up his hat. “They pray for judges on Sundays, but never a word for the police!”
He adjusted the hat at the angle which after much testing had been found by cameramen to be the most becoming, and strolled out, leaving Grant vaguely comforted.
Chapter 19
The person who wasn’t comforted was Jammy. The buoyant, the resilient, the hard-boiled but bouncing Jammy. He had eaten at his favorite pub (black coffee might be all very well for worried police officials and actors who had to think of their figure, but Jammy dealt only in other people’s worries and remembered his figure only when his tailor measured him) and nothing during lunch had been right. The beef had been a shade too “done,” the beer had been a shade too warm, the waiter had had hiccoughs, the potatoes were soapy, the cabinet pudding had tasted of baking soda, and they were out of his usual cigarettes. And so his feeling of being ill-used and misunderstood, instead of being charmed away by food and drink, had grown into an exasperation with the world in general. He looked sourly over his glass at his colleagues and contemporaries, laughing and talking over the coarse white cloths, and they, unused to a glower on his brow, paused in their traffic to tease him.
“What is it, Jammy? Pyorrhea?”
“No. He’s practicing to be a dictator. You begin with the expression.”
“No you don’t,” said a third. “You begin with the hair.”
“And an arm movement. Arms are very important. Look at Napoleon. Never been more than a corporal if he hadn’t thought up that arm-on-chest business. Pregnant, you know.”
“If it’s pregnant Jammy is, he’d better have the idea in the office, not here. I don’t think the child’s going to be a pleasant sight.”
Jammy consigned them all to perdition, and went out to find a tobacconist who kept his brand of cigarettes. What did the Yard want to take it like that for? Everyone knew that what you wrote in a paper was just eyewash. When it wasn’t bilgewater. If you stopped being dramatic over little tuppenny no-account things, people might begin to suspect that they were no-account, and then they’d stop buying papers. And where would the Press barons, and Jammy, and a lot of innocent shareholders be then? You’d got to provide emotions for all those moribund wage-earners who were too tired or too dumb to feel anything on their own behalf. If you couldn’t freeze their blood, then you could sell them a good sob or two. That story about Clay’s early days in the factory had been pure jam—even if that horse-faced dame had led him up the garden about knowing Chris, blast her. But you couldn’t always rise to thrills or sobs, and i
f there was one emotion that the British public loved to wallow in it was being righteously indignant. So he, Jammy, had provided a wallow for them. The Yard knew quite well that tomorrow all these indignant people wouldn’t remember a thing about it, so what the hell! What was there to get sore about? That “hounding innocents to death” was just a phrase. Practically a cliché it was. Nothing in that to make a sensible person touchy. The Yard were feeling a bit thin in the skin, that was what. They knew quite well that this shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Far be it from him to crab another fellow’s work, but some of that article had been practically true, now he came to think of it. Not the “hounding to death,” of course. But some of the other bits. It really was something amounting to a disgrace—oh, well, disgrace was a bit strong; but regrettable, anyhow, that such a thing should occur in a force that thought it was efficient. They were so very superior and keep-off-the-grass when times were good; they couldn’t expect sympathy when they made a bloomer. Now if they were to let the Press in on the inside, the way they did in America, things like that simply wouldn’t happen. He, Jammy Hopkins, might be only a crime reporter, but he knew just as much about crime and its detection as any police force. If the “old man” were to give him leave, and the police the use of their files, he would have the man who killed Clay inside prison walls—and on the front page, of course—inside a week. Imagination, that’s what the Yard needed. And he had plenty of it. All he needed was a chance.
He bought his cigarettes, emptied them gloomily into the gold case his provincial colleagues had given him when he left for London (it was whispered that the munificence was more the expression of thankfulness than of devotion), and went gloomily back to the office. In the front entrance of that up-to-the-minute cathedral which is the headquarters of the Clarion, he encountered young Musker, one of the junior reporters, on his way out. He nodded briefly, and without stopping made the conventional greeting.