Farthing (33 page)

Victory is, and the huge bay that is always full of Navy ships painted battleship gray. There were two young policemen, fresh-faced and with a country look to them, standing at the station entrance. They were scanning the crowd but they took no notice of us, whether because they weren’t yet looking for us or because there were three of us I don’t know. The train had taken what felt like hours to get to Portsmouth, though nothing like as long as it would have taken to get to London, but I had absolutely no idea how long it would take the police to start seriously looking for us.

“We can’t go home just yet, unfortunately,” Abby said, leading the way down the harbor, away from the docks. “I don’t know if you know, David, but my husband and I run a day school. The girls go home at five, and after that we can smuggle you in. What a pity it’s summer and light so late!”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It’s a quarter past three,” Abby said. “I think the best thing to do would be to have tea in one of the hotels. Again, nobody will be looking for the three of us. It’s possible that later they’ll start to check your friends, but I doubt they’d do it yet.”

David was looking at Abby with undisguised admiration. “Have you ever been a spy?” he asked.

Abby laughed. “Hasn’t Lucy told you?” she asked.

David looked at me. “Told me what?”

I looked at Abby. “You told me not to tell anyone!” I protested. I looked around. There was nobody on the seafront in the rain but us and a few black-backed herring gulls, skimming along
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the rails like figure skaters. “Abby’s one of the stations for getting people out of the Reich,” I said.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” David said. “I told you about Chaim!”

“And I’d have told you if I’d been doing anything. I wasn’t. It’s just Abby.”

“You helped with money from time to time,” Abby said.

“Who do you work with?” David asked.

“Children, mostly,” Abby said. “That means people who have just been discovered to be Jewish, or people from newly conquered parts of the Reich. I hide them at the school, where one child more or less doesn’t cause much comment. Then we send them to Canada, or Brazil. Sometimes it’s easier to get papers for one, sometimes for the other. But doing any of this at all makes you think about security. I’m not in the danger the stations in France and Germany are. But I’d be in trouble if I got caught, and I’d stop being able to help people.”

“Are you Jewish?” David asked.

“I’m a Quaker,” Abby said. “Now, here we are—the Queen Anne’s Head is a very superior sort of hotel to take tea.”

The hotel was very grand, in a faded way. It had dusty potted palms and Edwardian gilded scrollwork chairs. It had a huge white piano. It looked as if it had been designed before the Great War for good times that had never come. It should have been inhabited by men in spats and women with enormous ostrich feathers reaching up from their hair. A faded waiter came out of some recess and looked at us as if we were rather poor replacements for the ghosts of grandeur that haunted the place.

“Tea,” Abby said, crisply. “Earl Grey tea for three, and your afternoon tea.”

“Yes, Mrs. Talbot,” the waiter said.

“They know you?” I asked, as we sat down among the fronds.

“I take tea here regularly with parents of pupils, and prospective pupils,” she said. “He’ll take you for some of those. He’s also extremely unlikely to come back after he’s brought our tea. I rather like the place, I know it’s dowdy, but it’s dowdy in such a grand way you feel honored to be allowed to see it.

So much of Portsmouth is pure eighteenth-century squalor. Now, make yourselves comfortable, because we need to stay at least an hour.”

We took off our coats, though I kept on my jacket. The waiter came back with a big silver tray, which he

put down on the table.

There was a huge teapot and everything you need for a really good cup of tea, and a plate of little cucumber sandwiches cut into triangles with the crusts cut off, and two plates of buns. “The amazing thing is that it’s no more expensive than the Kardomah cafe,” Abby said. “I don’t know why more people don’t come in here.” The waiter left, smiling a secret smile, as if he knew why people didn’t come in, but he would never tell.

“Now, tell me why you’re here,” Abby said, pouring the tea. “I assume it has to do with the murder of

Sir James Thirkie? You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“Of course not,” I said.

David looked rather awed at the matter-of-fact way she was taking it. “Would you be sitting here eating buns with us if we had?” he asked.

“I’m sure Lucy wouldn’t kill anyone without a very good reason,” she said. She handed David his tea.

“And although I don’t know you very well, I’m prepared to trust her judgment, at any rate for the time being. So, you didn’t kill him?” She handed me my tea, just as I like it, delicate and exquisitely perfumed.

“I didn’t kill him,” David said. “I had nothing to do with it. I was asleep in bed and knew nothing about it until the next morning. But it seems that someone has been going out of their way to make it look as if I

did it.”

“Jews and Bolsheviks. Did you see the papers this morning?” Abby asked.

“We did,” I said. “It’s awful.”

“It’s a terrible attack on liberty,” Abby said, and took a bun. “So, why did you run?”

“Somebody warned us that the police were coming to arrest David, with new trumped-up evidence,” I

said. There was no point telling Abby who it was.

She nodded. “Do you know who actually killed him?” she asked, practical as ever.

“I have ideas,” I said. “But not real proof, not police-station proof.”

“And without that their frame against David is likely to hold?” she asked.

“Who do you think did it?” David asked me.

“Mummy,” I said. “At least, not just Mummy. Mummy and Angela and Mark and maybe Daddy.”

“Reichstag fire,” Abby said, immediately.

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s what I said this morning when I saw the papers. The only thing that doesn’t fit is the Bolshevik. Can you imagine Mummy allying with a Bolshevik, or even speaking to one?

“Lady Eversley might feel she could touch pitch on this occasion,” Abby said. She took a bite of her bun and cream oozed out. She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “But why would she want to get rid of Sir

James?”

“Reichstag fire,” I said. “The sympathy vote. I’m not sure how much Daddy knew when. He knew about it yesterday, I think, but perhaps not on Sunday morning.”

“There’s no evidence,” David said. He had taken a cucumber sandwich and was playing with it, opening it and separating out the pieces, but not eating anything. He looked terribly fretful.

“What is the evidence, Lucy?” Abby asked.

“It’s all terribly circumstantial and inferential,” I said. “Things like Mummy being up at six in the morning and on our corridor, where she had no reason to be, and Angela behaving oddly, and the very strange conversation she was having with the others about whether she should go to Campion, where Mark and

Mummy were bullying her, and the way Mark was looking at Daphne, and a large dose of cui bono, of course.”

“They definitely benefit,” Abby said.

“Oh, and, this is important, Mummy absolutely insisted that we go down this weekend, and there was no real reason. I didn’t want to at all but David thought it might be an olive branch so we did.”

“Beware of Greeks bearing olive branches,” Abby said, which made me snort and almost choke on my eclair.

“She wanted to ask me to talk at a subscription dinner in London in June,” David put in. “I think in all of this you attribute too much to Lady Eversley, Lucy. It’s far more likely Mark Normanby is the driving force. He’s the one who has really benefited, and also the one who was in France and could have bought the star and given my name.”

“Well, it would have to be a very good case to take to a solicitor if you wanted to argue against them, and it seems you have a very feeble one,” Abby said. “We’re going to have to get you out of the country.”

David gave a little moan. I took his hand. “We’ll be together,” I said.

“Jews are supposed to be wanderers without a home of their own until they regain the Promised Land,”

Abby said, in a cheerful bucking-up tone of voice—though it was as bad a thing to say as the worst thing

I might have said, because of the way David felt about everything. I squeezed his hand hard.

“I know that’s the accepted view, but if that’s the case, I must be a very bad Jew,” David said.

“I’ve always loved England so much.”

“Do you have any money?” Abby asked.

“A few hundred pounds,” David said, which amazed me. I thought if he had twenty-five it would have been a lot. “Just what I carry around,” he added.

“I have less than ten pounds,” I said. “But I brought some things we could hock. Mummy’s Wedgewood bowl, and her gold mirror and set, and her jewel case. I don’t know what’s in it—whatever she was leaving in Farthing, I suppose. I have my own jewel case as well.”

“That might not have been a sensible idea,” Abby said. “That means you have broken the law.

Theft isn’t murder, but it’s still wrong.”

“In a Dachau emergency?” I asked.

Abby sighed. “No, perhaps not. Might as well have a look at what you’ve got. Money’s going to be necessary.”

“My father would help us,” David said.

I pulled my bag out of the carpetbag and extracted Mummy’s jewel case. The case itself looked worth a bob or two, being gold, and although it was monogrammed, it was Mummy’s monogram, me, which anyone might use. I tapped the clasp to open it. Inside, among a cluster of earrings and bracelets and pearls nestled the greatest mother-daughter heirloom of all, the one she had refused to give me on my marriage, the Ringhili diamond.

“Good gracious,” Abby said. “You’d better put that away.”

I closed the case. “Well we certainly can’t sell that,” I said. “The rest of it’s probably worth another few hundred pounds. The Wedge-wood bowl’s worth more, but we wouldn’t get the full amount for it in a hurry.”

“Can you get in touch with your father?” Abby asked David.

“It’ll be dangerous,” David said. “It’ll be easier in a little while when everybody isn’t searching for me.

They’ll probably listen to his phone and read his mail.”

“Chaim,” I suggested.

“Chaim will be back in the Reich by now,” he said. “He won’t be in England again for months.

When he is, yes, he can contact my father.”

“Better to think of your father as an ongoing source of funds, then, rather than an immediate one. What you have is enough for the time being. Actually, I could get you to Canada almost immediately. I have some children going tomorrow. You could go as their parents. The papers would cost me five hundred pounds.”

David looked desolate.

“I think it’s the best choice at the moment,” I said.

“It may be there will be a lot of others following you,” Abby said. “This new government—well, that’s how Hitler came to power, you know, under democratic forms, but without being elected.

I didn’t like the tone of any of those changes. Religion to be put on the new picture ID cards.

Though I spoke to

Rabbi Schwimmer this morning and told him that the Friends Meeting House here will be happy to accept any Jew who visits us once, and thereafter they can quite truthfully say they are Quakers, and we’ll support them. Though how long it’ll be safe to be a Quaker I don’t know.”

She stood and stretched. “It’s half past four. There’s an antique shop down the quay that doesn’t
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close until five, where you might try the mirror and a bracelet, Lucy. Then tomorrow you might try to get rid of a little more of it in some of the others, and maybe I could try some in one over in Southsea where they don’t know me. You’ll be able to sell the rest in Canada.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Abby,” I said. “I don’t know what I’d ever have done without you. I don’t think I’d have grown up to be a human being without you, and now you’re saving my life, or at least David’s.”

“I don’t know how I can ever thank you,” David said, struggling into that ridiculous mac again.

“No need. What you can’t pay back you pay forward,” Abby said. “Come on now!”

30

They made him hang about at the Yard waiting, where he had nothing to do but try to clear his desk, and then they told him he couldn’t have Royston.

“You don’t need a sergeant for a job like that, sir,” Stebbings said. “A constable should be quite sufficient. What’s more, there’s a constable here who was sent up from Winchester yesterday who wants to go back. You can take him.”

“I’m not going to Farthing,” Carmichael growled. “I’m going in the opposite direction, to Campion in

Monmouthshire.”

The Times lay neatly folded on Stebbings’s desk. The headline read “Kahn did it,”

which didn’t help Carmichael’s temper.

“Well stick him on a train at the end of the day where he can get home,” Stebbings said, unsympathetically. “Salisbury can’t be far out of your way—he can get to Winchester from there.

And make sure you’re back here this evening. The Chief Inspector wants to see you, and no messing about.”

“I need Royston,” Carmichael protested. “He knows the case. He understands what’s going on.”

“You seem to be treating Royston like your private property since you got onto this job,”

Stebbings said.

“He’s needed here today. The Yard does have other cases than this one, hard as it might be for you to remember it.”

So Carmichael set off for Campion with Izzard at his side. The day was overcast and gloomy.

On the way out of London they passed hoardings for the Herald, which screamed “Kahn runs!” and “Manhunt!”

and for the

Telegraph, “Lady Eversley disowns daughter.” Carmichael grunted at them, and Izzard showed no indication of having seen them. The long drive was unenlivened by much conversation.

Carmichael had to navigate, the map open on his lap all the way. Izzard had never been so far from home, and said this every time he mistook left for right and took a wrong turning.