Farthing (23 page)

“Shall I have Youd bring the car around?” Daddy asked.

“Well I’m certainly ready,” Mummy said, getting up out of her chair. “I’ll leave the house to the barbarians—do try not to break anything, Lucy dear.”

I hadn’t broken anything important since I was ten years old when I broke the ear off the bust of Hadrian in the library, but that had been an occasion when I’d been left in the house without Mummy. I smiled as sweetly as I could.

“Thank you again for letting us use the house in your absence,” David said.

“It’s a pity there was all this unpleasantness during your visit,” Daddy said, shaking hands with
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David.

“You’ll have to come down again in the autumn when we can get a bit of partridge shooting in.

You’d enjoy that.”

“Certainly, sir. Thank you.”

By the autumn, I thought, kissing Daddy and pressing cheeks with Mummy, even if we did come down for a few days, I’d be halfway through the pregnancy. He or she would be born at the end of January or the beginning of February, at lambing time, born with the snowdrops at the very beginning of spring.

20

Mrs. Normanby came into the room jerkily, like a puppet, Carmichael thought, or a piece of badly spliced film. Nevertheless, she looked much better than she had the last time he had spoken to her.

“I can’t imagine I’ll be any use to you, Inspector,” she said. She was wearing a plum red suit with a dark blue blouse. Her dark hair, previously disordered, was neatly brushed into its fashionable shingle. She was smartly made up, but Carmichael, who had lipstick on his mind, noticed that the shade of lipstick she wore was too light for her suit. The dark Dior shade he’d seen in her sister’s room would have been just right.

“I’m just making some inquiries,” he said. “Do you and your husband share a bedroom, Mrs.

Normanby?”

She looked startled. “That’s a very personal question, Inspector.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like you to answer it, Mrs. Normanby. Policemen are unshockable, you know, like doctors.” He smiled at her. She returned his gaze without changing her expression at all.

“We don’t share a bedroom at home,” she said, after a moment. “Here, we have connecting rooms.”

That was exactly what Carmichael had expected to hear. He couldn’t, even under policeman’s privilege, ask her what had possessed a smart woman like herself to tie herself for life to a bastard like Normanby.

“So, do you know what time your husband got up on Sunday? It might be relevant, because of the time he found the body.”

“Oh, I see,” she said. She fiddled with the clasp of her handbag, then looked out of the window at the hydrangea. “Yes, Mark got up at about eight-thirty. He came into my room as I was dressing, to borrow a comb. We talked for a little while, then he said he’d meet me at breakfast, he wanted to check that

James was—” She bit her lip as her voice wavered. Had there been the slightest hesitation before the word “comb”? Carmichael rather thought there was.

“He told you he was going to wake Sir James, yes, I understand,” Carmichael said. Either she was lying, or Normanby had really done what he said he had done.

“Yes,” she said, looking back at Carmichael, blinking away tears.

“Were you very fond of Sir James,” Carmichael asked, gently.

“Yes, very,” she said. “He was a lovely man, very honest and decent, the best brother-in-law any woman could hope to have.” She had regained her equilibrium by the end of the sentence. “I’ll miss him,” she added.

“The whole country will miss him,” Carmichael said.

She nodded, again close to tears.

“You wouldn’t know what time your husband went to bed the night before?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t know when Mark came up.”

“And what time did you go to bed yourself?”

She hesitated. “I was playing cards with Kitty Manningham and Eddie Cheriton and Lily Palgrave. I went up when Lily and Oswald left, just before midnight I think.”

“Had you seen Sir James that evening?”

She started and almost dropped her handbag. “At dinner,” she said after a moment. “I don’t think I saw him anywhere later.”

She hadn’t been one of those who went to the billiard room, then.

“Thank you for talking to me and clearing that up, Mrs. Normanby,” he said, standing to show her out.

“Have a good trip back to London. Are you driving?”

“No, we’re going on the ten-thirty from Farthing Junction,” she said.

There was a knock on the door, and it opened to reveal Normanby. “There you are, Daphne,”

he said.

“Have you finished with her, Inspector? We’ve a train to catch.”

No, Carmichael thought, seeing them together, they wouldn’t share a bedroom, those two. It must be a white marriage, probably always and certainly for years. They looked as if they were on better speaking terms in public than in private.

“I’ve finished with Mrs. Normanby—she’s been very helpful,” he said, and was not surprised to see a brief frown pass over Normanby’s face. No, he wouldn’t want his wife talking to the police. But was it just his sexual habits, or was it something more?

“Goodbye, then, Inspector,” Normanby said. “Come on, Daphne, Eddie’s running us to the station, we don’t want to keep her waiting.” He took her arm, and his grip seemed to Carmichael to be tighter than was necessary.

“Goodbye, have a good trip back to London,” Carmichael said, and closed the door behind them.

There was nothing more to do here; he might as well get ready to go himself. He gathered together all the papers from the desk, sorted them into a neat pile, and slid it into his case. He crumpled up the sheet with his doodle on it and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Then, on second thought, he leaned down to pick it out again. He was just retrieving it when Royston came in.

“Nobody,” he said, with an air of satisfaction.

“Nobody?” Carmichael asked blankly, then catching the sergeant’s meaning again, significantly:

“Nobody?”

“Absolutely nobody. I asked everyone, starting with the most likely, Lord Timothy and Mr.

Francis and

Mr. Kahn, and working my way through. It seems Lord Timothy and Mr. Kahn had a game last night, and Mr. Normanby and Lord Timothy had a game afterwards, but apart from that nobody will admit to having been near the billiard room all weekend.”

“Mrs. Normanby hadn’t been there either,” Carmichael said. “So Normanby’s lying.”

Carmichael pushed his scrumpled doodle into his trouser pocket.

“Lying or mistaken,” Royston said, with the air of one bending over backwards to be fair. “Or he could be telling the truth that they played billiards and lying about other people coming in, or lying about the billiards but telling the truth about being together.”

“We can’t trust that one a.m. time any longer,” Carmichael said. “The doctor’s report said he’d have put the time of death as earlier, without that, perhaps eleven. We need to check where everyone was at eleven.”

“But they’re all leaving, sir,” Royston pointed out. “Most of them have left already. Besides, eleven was before Hatchard locked the door, and while there were still other guests in the house.

Anyone could have done it.”

“Anyone leaving could have noticed his car, with him in it,” Carmichael said. “If it was here. It might have been somewhere else, and then brought back. Did we check it for fingerprints?”

“None, not even Thirkie’s or Lady Thirkie’s. It had been wiped clean.” Royston sighed.

“Fingerprints aren’t what they used to be before people got used to them. Now, we might as well not bother doing them; if there’s anyone up to anything suspicious, they’ll have wiped it.”

“Cheer up, sergeant, it does prove someone was up to something suspicious in the car,”

Carmichael said.

“That’s true,” Royston said. “It could still be cover up after a suicide though, the way we were saying last night.”

“Do they have a chauffeur?” Carmichael asked.

Royston frowned. “Apparently they do, or rather, one who doubled as chauffeur and valet for Sir James, but they didn’t bring him down with them. They usually do. Lord Eversley’s valet had to dress Sir James, and didn’t think much of it.”

“How very peculiar,” Carmichael said. “I wonder if that might be proof for the suicide theory, because if he’d been thinking about killing himself in the car he might not have wanted someone here whose job it was to look after the car. Also, Normanby knew Sir James didn’t have his valet here. That was his excuse for going in to wake him.”

“The valet who wasn’t there, like the dog that didn’t bark in the night,” Royston said.

“Penn-Barkis will sack you if he catches you quoting Sherlock Holmes, sergeant,” Carmichael said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that there are any number of interpretations for his absence, if you see what I mean,”

Royston said.

“You can go around to Thirkie’s house in London and speak to him tomorrow,” Carmichael said. “Find out from him why he wasn’t taken, what was said to him, and how unusual it was.”

“Yes, sir,” Royston said, making a note.

“And while you’ve got your notebook out, did we ever find out when this party was arranged?

Jeffrey told us it happened in a hurry and that wasn’t usual, but I don’t remember any more about it.”

“Confirmed by all the servants,” Royston said, without looking. “Lady Eversley said she’d decided to have the party on the spur of the moment because the weather was too good for London. Spur of the moment seems to have been the Tuesday before, the third, sir.”

“What else happened on the third?” Carmichael asked.

Royston looked blank.

“Kahn received a letter from an anarchist of the bomb-throwing variety. Anything else?”

“Kursk changed hands again?” Royston ventured. “I mean, are you still looking for external events?”

“Yes, sergeant. Do you have any?”

“They decided to have this vote, the one they’re holding tonight, the confidence vote in Mr.

Eden, which the papers seem to think will very likely give us a new Prime Minister, though not a General Election.”

“And you think that might have prompted Lady Eversley to hold a houseparty?”

“Gather the faithful and feed them crumpets, that kind of thing,” Royston said.

It fit, it made sense. Carmichael sighed. “Come on, sergeant, we’ve been given our marching orders.

Let’s hie us to the metropolis where information can be gathered, via the Station Hotel where our bags can be gathered, and possibly a spot of lunch.”

On the way back through the seemingly endless countryside, Carmichael tried to consider what it was he found so oppressive about it. Was it the lushness of the greens? Was it the size and age of the trees?

Was it the hedgerows that prevented you from ever getting a long view? Or was it the pure contrast with the stark landscape of the Lancashire moors, where the land stretched out before you, sloping up to the mountains and down to the sea?

He let Royston drive and tried not to think about the case or the countryside. The car purred along past majestic trees, thick hedgerows of hazel and thorn, white with may-blossom and heavy with its scent.

After half an hour or so, Royston interrupted his thoughts.

“Is there any special reason why they called us back to London now, sir?” he asked.

“Lord Eversley and his friends were tired of waiting at Farthing,” Carmichael said. “And Penn-Barkis seems quite sure the Bolsheviks did it.”

“But they really could have,” Royston said.

“Not without inside help,” Carmichael said. “We established that.”

“But that was before the billiards, sir,” Royston insisted.

“It was, too, you’re absolutely right, sergeant,” Carmichael said, chastened. “So now it could have happened anytime—I don’t suppose we asked when people saw him last before Normanby?”

“No, sir.”

“No, because we’re as bad as Yately with his ‘Mr. Normanby wouldn’t do it, he’s an MP,”“

Carmichael said, mocking Yately’s accent viciously. ”Why the devil would a fellow like that lie?“

“To shield someone?” Royston ventured. “But if so, who?”

“Or to get something, but if so, what?” Carmichael could feel the crumpled ball of paper in his trousers pocket. There is one law for rich and poor alike…

“Or to cover something up,” Royston went on. “Again, what?”

“The Bolsheviks could have done the whole thing,” Carmichael said. “Killed him, around eleven, gone straight into the house in the confusion of the big party, arranged him in his dressing room, and walked out again.”

“Carrying a dead body up two nights of stairs in the middle of a party?

“They could have gone up the back stairs, the servants’ stairs.” Carmichael knew he was reaching. “No, just as likely if not more likely that the servants would see them. Unless they had help from the servants, which puts as back where we were before.”

“Say he killed himself or the Bolsheviks killed him and made it look like suicide, at eleven, and Normanby found the body shortly after,” Royston said. “He could have waited until the house was quiet and then carried him in and arranged him.”

“But they were friends, allies, brothers-in-law,” Carmichael protested. “What had Normanby to gain from the masquerade?”

“Maybe it’s not that. Maybe he’d have lost from him being found dead in the car, and the masquerade wasn’t to scare anyone but to get sympathy, for Thirkie, for the Farthing Set, for Normanby himself. He

could then make sure to find the body himself later.”

“Much better to leave it to someone else to find,” Carmichael said, “But maybe he wouldn’t have thought of that. That makes sense—that’s the first explanation that does. If Thirkie had committed suicide, or if it appeared he had, there would have been investigations and rumors, and maybe the Farthing Set wouldn’t do too well out of the vote tonight. And that would go double if it was suicide and if there was a note saying ‘Normanby made me do it’ or anything like that.”

“Normanby drove me to it,” Royston suggested. “Car, drive, oh never mind.”