Farthing (7 page)

If the rooms had ever been blue, they were so no longer, except in the imagination of the household. The main bedroom was papered with lavender roses, and the dressing room painted cream.

Sir James and Lady Thirkie had apparently brought a selection of clothes, toiletries, and knickknacks appropriate for a country-house weekend and nothing more. After half an hour Royston raised his eyebrows at Carmichael and shook his head.

“Nothing significant,” he said.

“Did you think there would be?” Royston asked.

“Well, it’s something to know that the separate bed business wasn’t any matter of coming late to bed.

His articles are laid out in here and hers in there. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they had separate bedrooms at home as well.”

“You’d hardly expect people of their class to share a hairbrush,” Royston said, putting down a splendid silver-backed instance of the same, monogrammed at.

“No,” Carmichael said. “I think I want to see Lady Thirkie first. Half the time in a murder it’s the spouse who did it.”

“Enough to make you afraid of your nearest and dearest, isn’t it?” Royston said, with a grin. “I think you’ll find that while that may be true in the East End, or in Lancashire, this one is the exception to all your rules, sir. It looks and smells political to me.”

“Lipstick smells political now?” Carmichael asked.

“I sniffed at three on Lady Thirkie’s dressing table,” Royston said. “They’re all the stick kind, not the paint kind—one reddish, one pinkish, and one a very dark red. They didn’t smell at all like the stuff on the corpse.”

“No, you recognized it at once, didn’t you, meaning that it was a much more familiar smell,”

Carmichael said, walking over to the dressing table and examining the lipsticks for himself. Two matched, monogrammed at in gold and silver, and the third was dark blue with a gold line around it. “Cheap lip paint, not expensive. Woolworths, rather than these, which are two Chanels and a Dior.”

“Bought especially, do you think?” Royston asked. “By a man, who wouldn’t know any better?”

“Or who wouldn’t need any better for a gag. It wasn’t meant to fool anyone it was blood; it was meant to suggest the red breast of the Farthing robin,” Carmichael said. “I’m a bit surprised at that. It shows both some planning ahead and some improvisation, and usually you see one or the other. They must have planned ahead to get the idea and the star, and the lipstick. But they didn’t bring anything to attach the star with. They attached it with the dead man’s own pocketknife.”

“Maybe they brought something and then saw the knife and thought that would be better and took their something away with them again?” Royston suggested.

“That would fit the facts. So would the idea that they already had the things. Lip paint might be bought by anyone, but it also might already be owned by a lower-class woman. The star is more difficult—but I

suppose any Jews who left the Continent might already have one. We’ll have to check if any guests or staff are Jews.”

“Mr. Kahn,” Royston reminded him.

“We’ll have to check him very thoroughly,” Carmichael agreed. “But it almost seems too deliberately intended to point at him, unless he’s a fool to do it and lay such a clear trail.”

“Who can say what Jews might do?” Royston said. “He might have been overcome with hate all of a sudden.”

“Anyone can lose their temper, but commit an elaborate and premeditated murder between one in the morning and breakfast time?” Carmichael rolled his eyes. He pulled off the dark blue cap and turned the bottom of the Dior tube and looked at the near-pristine finger of lipstick that extended. “She doesn’t use this one much. Odd shade, maybe it matched something in particular.” He examined the other two, which were older and much better used.

“The shade of the lipstick on the corpse was very close to blood red,” Royston said. “That makes it seem more likely it was bought specially. We could try inquiring in chemists’ shops.”

“And every Woolworths in the country,” Carmichael said, gloomily. “It isn’t an unusual shade like this

Dior one. Half the women one sees have painted their lips blood red.”

“Do you think a woman could have done it?” Royston asked. “I mean physically? Strangling isn’t a woman’s normal way to murder.”

“We’ll know more after the autopsy,” Carmichael said. “I’d say, maybe. If he was asleep, or if he trusted her to come up close. And in some ways it’s more likely for a woman to walk into his bedroom than a man—whether his wife or any other woman. He was a big man, but he wasn’t young, and he doesn’t look as if he was very active or strong. There are plenty of women who could have got their hands around his neck. Whether it’s psychologically something a woman could have done, I’m not so sure. It certainly isn’t common.”

“If he’d been asleep, suffocating him would have been just as easy, or easier,” Royston said.

“There was a pillow.”

“I want to take a look at Lady Thirkie, see how big she is for one thing, and see what her attitude to her husband was for another.”

“The footman described her as having hysterics,” Royston reminded him.

“In Miss Dorset’s room,” Carmichael remembered. “I think I’ll have Jeffrey take me along there to have a word with her while she’s off her guard.”

“Shall I come too, sir?” Royston asked, with a hesitation that made Carmichael laugh.

“No, I’ll let you off questioning the screaming woman this time. You get on the blower to the Yard and ask about those things you wrote down earlier. Then round up Yately and see where my list of guests has got to. Then, probably, you can start interviewing the servants, but get back to me before that in case

I’ve thought of something else for you.”

“Yes, sir,” Royston said.

Miss Dorset’s room turned out to be at the back of the house on the ground floor. Jeffrey announced

him. “Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard.”

Carmichael swept in hard on the heels of this, anxious to see the effect on the inhabitants of the room.

There were three of them, all women, in an airless space that at first glance seemed to be composed entirely of lace and ribbons. He wondered if this was what was described as a boudoir, or if the absent

Miss Dorset were merely very fond of embroidering frills. Two of the women were dark and one very fair. One of the dark ones was sitting on the frilled and ruffled bed and the other on a broad cushioned lace-edged window seat surrounded by lacy ruffled curtains. She was engaged in staring out of the window and smoking. Either of them could have been the widow or the sister. Both of them seemed to be sitting in indifference; neither of them appeared to be in hysterics at this moment. The one on the bed was wearing green, with lace, and the other something gray.

The fair woman was sitting in a little pink frilled basket chair. She was the one who reacted most immediately to the announcement. She jumped to her feet and spun to face Carmichael. She had very blue eyes, pink cheeks, pink lipstick, and an expression that said she welcomed any distraction. She was wearing rather plain clothing that implicitly rejected all attempts at lace and ruffles and which stood out in that room as almost masculine. Carmichael recognized her from newspaper photographs as Lucy Kahn but wondered, now he saw her in person, what could have led her to throw herself away on a Jew? A

possibly murderous Jew, at that? Oh well, they said love was inexplicable.

“Mrs. Kahn?” he said. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I was hoping to have a few words with Lady Thirkie.”

“Oh that’s quite all right,” Mrs. Kahn said. “This is Lady Thirkie, and this is Mrs. Normanby.”

She indicated first the woman on the bed, and then the woman at the window. Then she went over to the bed and touched the shoulder of the woman there. “Angela? Here’s a policeman to speak to you.” To

Carmichael’s surprise, he saw that Angela Thirkie was crying. How could his first glance have failed to notice the tears leaking out of her eyes and streaming down her cheeks? Or had she just begun to cry?

“Have you come to take me to my husband?” the weeping woman asked. “I haven’t seen him yet, you know.”

Carmichael swallowed hard. The corpse had never been a pretty sight, and it would be worse now that

Green would have been poking about at it. Besides, it would be in Winchester by now. “I don’t think—”

he began.

Mrs. Kahn deftly intercepted the conversational ball. “Are you sure it would be a good idea in your condition, Angela?” she asked. “I have heard of children being marked when their mothers saw horrors when they were in the womb. You wouldn’t want that to happen.”

“No.” Lady Thirkie seemed struck by this. “No, you’re right. But how will you identify him if I don’t see him?”

“There’s no question of the identity of the dead man,” Carmichael said, quietly filing the information that

Lady Thirkie was expecting. “His face has been known to the nation ever since 1941.”

“Of course,” Lady Thirkie said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“There’s only a question of identifying a body if it turns up somewhere unusual surely,” Mrs.

Kahn said, unexpectedly, with a little laugh. “I mean Sir James was in his own bed, there isn’t any question…” She trailed off, her hand over her mouth.

The woman by the window, the sister-in-law, turned to them for the first time. She was wearing some kind of red shirt with a flounce down the front. “I shouldn’t think there could be any doubt that it was

James,” she said in a doleful tone.

“No, no doubt at all,” Carmichael said. “In any case, formal identification has been done by Mr.

Normanby, so there’s no need to cause any of you ladies any anguish.”

“By Mark?” Mrs. Normanby snorted and turned again to the window.

“I believe Mr. Normanby found the body,” Carmichael said, feeling he was missing something in the crosscurrents of the room.

“But—” Mrs. Kahn began, and put her hand to her mouth again.

Carmichael waited patiently. “I didn’t know he’d found him,” she said, rather feebly, after a moment. “He told us that Sir James was dead. I didn’t realize he’d actually seen the body.”

“Seen and identified,” Mrs. Normanby said, grimly. “Good for Mark; how kind of him to spare the weaker sex this burden.”

“Oh do be quiet, Daphne,” Mrs. Kahn said, with real irritation in her voice.

“Who killed him?” Lady Thirkie asked. She was still crying, Carmichael noticed.

“We don’t know yet, but we intend to do our best to find out,” Carmichael said, as he had said many times before in similar circumstances.

“And then they’ll hang, won’t they, whoever they are?” she said, with a strange kind of relish.

Carmichael wondered if she was mad, not the kind of deranged people sometimes temporarily became through grief, but genuinely and long-term cuckoo. Possibly she and her sister were both mad, hereditary madness—though why would two rising politicians have married them if that were the case? They’d been heiresses, but a man wouldn’t want to taint his children. Could she have killed him, if she were mad? He looked at her hands, which were big and broad. If she had ever been wearing any lipstick it had worn off.

“Do calm down, Angela,” Mrs. Kahn said.

“Where were you at the time of the murder?” Carmichael asked.

Lady Thirkie gave a little squeak. “Me? But what was the time of the murder?”

“Sometime between one a.m. last night and nine this morning,” Carmichael said.

“Well, I was asleep… and then I got up and went to church, to Early Communion.”

“What time is Early Communion?” he asked.

“Eight-thirty,” Mrs. Kahn put in, seeing Lady Thirkie floundering.

“My maid woke me,” Lady Thirkie said. “She woke me and told me it was time, so I got dressed and went down, and I met Lord Eversley on the stairs.”

“That would have been at about eight-fifteen,” Mrs. Kahn said. “I was in the front hall with my mother when Lady Thirkie and my father came down.”

“Did all the guests go to church?” Carmichael asked.

“Very few of them went to the early service,” Mrs. Kahn said. “Most of them prefer Matins, at eleven-thirty.”

So the house hadn’t been almost empty for that hour as he’d been imagining it. What a pity.

He turned back to Lady Thirkie. “So from one a.m. until just before eight-fifteen, you were asleep in the blue room, and after that you were in church.”

“Yes…” she said.

“You didn’t hear anything unusual, either in the night or early this morning?”

It took a moment for the significance of this question to sink in. Carmichael could see her understanding it when, several moments after he finished speaking, she actually flinched. “You mean it was there? In the dressing room? That’s where it happened?” she asked, her voice rising.

Where, Carmichael wondered, had she expected her husband to be in the small hours of the morning? “You mean I was there when the murderer came in? I just lay there, sleeping, while the anarchist killed James? Why, he could have come in and murdered me too!” She began to sob noisily, almost wailing.

“I’m very sorry to have distressed you, Lady Thirkie, but please understand that any evidence I can find, anything at all, might make it easier for me to find out who killed your husband,” he said.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she sobbed.

Mrs. Kahn put her arms around her, wearily. Mrs. Normanby, still by the window, turned and looked at

Carmichael. “I think you’d better go,” she said. “You can ask any other questions another time.

My sister is too upset to be any more help to you now.”

“Very well.” Carmichael wasn’t sorry to leave the stifling atmosphere and the wails. He wanted to talk more to all three women, or he wanted to get more information from them, at least, but he didn’t need to do it immediately. He withdrew to the corridor and stood there for a moment taking deep breaths.

Where next? Two possibilities immediately suggested themselves: the stables, or the gunroom—male preserves both, where he could be reassuringly free of either feminine wails or feminine ruffles. Laughing at himself, Carmichael strode off in search of Royston.