The Last Houseparty (19 page)

“Your mother had been watching the fire (she had an obsession with the clock) and so not noticed our approach. She now snatched you up, still screaming, and told the nurse to take you away. As soon as you were out of earshot she blurted out what had happened and accused Vince of being your attacker. It is important to me that she did not then claim that you had named Vince. Her only evidence was that you had previously seen Vince with a dirty face, that you had screamed the words ‘dirty face' when she had first questioned you, and that you had screamed in the same manner on seeing Vince with his face blackened by fire.

“I can honestly say that I did not for one moment believe her to be right. I have never believed it. I have actually forced myself to try and imagine Vince standing in that dark little passage that leads to the nursery, his hand on the door handle, the gentle turning and opening, Vince standing a moment looking from the darkness into the dim-lit room, and then walking towards your cot. The picture will not form. I simply cannot make it come.

“But putting that aside, the evidence was from the very first so obviously inadequate, though at the same time I had no doubt your mother believed it. Of course I pointed out that your screams could be interpreted in many other ways, and it was clear that Anderson thought so too. It was then that she produced her further evidence that you had actually told her Vince was your attacker.

“Before we could question her further about this my uncle joined us and insisted on knowing what the trouble was. Your mother made her accusation again. My uncle told her it was nonsense, and in any case Vince and I were sleeping in the same room. I said that as far as I knew Vince had not left our room all night. Your mother of course knew that this alibi was worthless, and knew too that both Vince and I knew, but she could not bring herself to say so. All this while Vince had not uttered a word. He had a baddish stammer, especially when disturbed, and it was natural for him to keep quiet. My uncle, of course, treated the whole business as trivial compared to the fire in the clock tower, and insisted on talking to Anderson about his suspicions of McGrigor, the dismissed employee. He, poor chap, was in any case dead and could not answer. Anderson was overawed by my uncle and the circumstances. All he could say was he would send for his inspector, and nobody was to leave until after luncheon, at least.

“I went up with Vince to our room. I at once asked him whether he had done what your mother said. He seemed to be in a state of shock, but apparently more at McGrigor's death than at your mother's accusation. He just said, ‘No, of course not.' He refused to talk about what I should say about my movements the previous night. I said I was prepared to swear that neither of us had left the room. He told me not to be an ass. He clearly realised that my taking this line would mean my losing your mother, which I was prepared to do, although already profoundly in love with her. This is very important to my case, as it explains something which seemed to everyone else to be an admission of guilt on Vince's part. He ran away. Nobody ever saw him again. I am convinced he did this because he was not prepared to let me make the sacrifice. If I am right you will see that in my own mind I owe him a very great deal.

“He had almost two hours' start. The house was full of guests. Sunday luncheon was a big occasion, but Zena found time for a family conference in her little sitting room. Vince refused to attend. He told me to go and tell the truth. But he was so upset that it didn't seem strange to me when he failed to put in an appearance at luncheon. His car was still in the garage and Anderson was watching the drive. Vince must have simply walked down our old secret path, climbed the boundary wall at Far Look-out and trotted along the footpath to Marlow. He was unlikely to be seen, that time on a Sunday (though it turned out that some hikers spotted him but did not report it till some days later). He caught the bus to Slough and disappeared. Not as difficult as it might sound; his TA work in Hackney will have meant that he knew that part of London pretty intimately, though his watch turned up in a pawn-shop in Ealing. He could, incidentally, do a surprisingly convincing oickish accent, without any trace of his stammer. My guess is that he would have lain low for a while and then enlisted in the ranks. He might very well be a REME sergeant by now. But his watch is the last known trace of him.

“Now, my darling, my purpose in telling you all this is to try to persuade you to share my firm conviction that my cousin was not the man who attacked you. The evidence against him is fourfold: (1) his disappearance; (2) your mother's assertion, later to some extent confirmed by yourself, that you had named Vince; (3) your screams and cries of ‘dirty face'; (4) the lack of evidence against anybody else.

“I have told you my ideas about (1). I can only add that I knew Vince as well as it is possible to know so private a person, and that I believe my explanation to be correct.

“(2) Your mother, as you have no doubt by now discovered, is a remarkably straightforward person. She can be devious and deceitful, but her lies have a curious directness about them: what she wants, she wants, and therefore has a right to have; what she wishes to be true is for that reason as good as true. It took me a while to grasp this aspect of her character, perhaps because it was too obvious to be seen. Perhaps if I had understood it when we first met my feelings for her might have been rather different from what they are. I have told you that I was then in my own mind ready to sacrifice my love for her to my friendship for Vince, though I now find it hard to recall the state of mind in which I could have come to such a decision. Anyway, all that is so much water under the bridge.

“What your mother wanted was for me to inherit Snailwood. She wanted this as simply as a child wants a toy in a window, a present for her lover. She may already have decided that she was going to marry me; like many highly impulsive people she combines this trait with a decided yearning for stability and security, and had recently been left financially in the lurch by your father. My job was poorly paid and I had very little money of my own, but if Vince were ruled out my uncle would have less excuse for not making me a useful allowance.

“I doubt if her mind worked as schemingly or schematically as the above implies. I believe something had happened between you and Vince in the Coach House the day before, which had frightened you; she had already told me she didn't ‘understand' Vince; she may have been jealous of my obvious affection for him; there were in fact all sorts of contributory reasons for her accusation including the natural human urge to blame someone (a factor too often discounted after a crisis). She is, as you know, an intelligent and perceptive woman but there is some failure, as it were, to mesh between her emotional and intellectual gearing. Be that as it may, I quite soon decided that either you had never told her your attacker was Vince, or that if you had it was because she had put pressure on you to name someone and you not actually knowing who the man had been, had in desperation chosen one of the few names you knew.

“Your two subsequent confirmations of the naming were made with increasing distress. It was clear to me that you were torn between a longing to earn your mother's affection and approval and a child's horror of being asked to perform a task beyond its powers, in this case to remember what had happened. You were not I think ashamed of lying, but of failing the mysterious task. You solved the dilemma by forgetting even those shreds of memory you had retained in the first instance. All you are left with now is your recurrent nightmare about the bear, which may not even refer to this incident, though it is significant that on waking you cannot remember that either.

“(3) The screams and cries of ‘dirty face': these were genuine. I mean not only were there witnesses to them, myself one; but they reflected genuine terror. Indeed I have seen you react with more than disgust to an old tramp who came down the drive to beg, and only three months ago to poor Purser when he had been attempting to sweep the chimneys.
^***
Your mother's reason for associating this reaction with Vince is that after the episode in the Coach House just referred to he had appeared with oil streaked down the side of his face, and you had commented on it. Thus in your mind (she says) Vince became ‘dirty face'. The nature of the episode is not at all clear to me, especially since, almost from the first, your mother has refused to let me question her about anything to do with the attack. She knows, I am sure, how flimsy this strand of evidence is. I believe it possible that she is aware that I was at that time prepared to make the sacrifice of which I have spoken, and by the line she has taken she has, in effect, contrived that I should make it the other way round. I have had to abandon Vince for her. If Vince were still about, still accessible, this would be a very difficult dilemma for me. As he is not, I seldom think about it.

“Be that as it may, there are alternative readings of your cry of ‘dirty face', one of which brings me on to (4), i.e., who else, besides Vince? I believe there is a much stronger candidate. We had staying in the house that week-end Sir Charles Archer. By the time you read this he may be forgotten, or a member of the War Cabinet, or Hitler's Gauleiter of England. A very strange and striking man. There are two points about him worth consideration: first, he had a permanently ‘dirty' face, in the form of a great blotch (a birthmark, in fact, exacerbated by a war wound) running all down his right cheek; second, the persistent rumour that his own sexual preference was for small girls.

“If you look at the album of Zena's house parties you will see that Charles, not unnaturally, stood or sat so that the birthmark was concealed from the camera—and, as it happened, from you, when you were taken down to see whether you could recognise your attacker. But if a child was going to describe any member of that party whose name she did not know, does it not strike you as natural that she should call Charles ‘dirty face'?

“I have done my best to find out what truth there is in the rumours concerning Charles's sex life. The main source of these, it turns out is an episode …”

At this point Mr Mason turned a page, and found pinned to the next sheet a press-cutting. A manuscript note, in a hand other than that of the letter, said that it came from the
Daily Telegraph
of 9 April 1979. The cutting, only a couple of column inches, described the withdrawal by its publishers, Throckmorton Ltd., of a book on the pro-Nazi movements in France and England because of inferences about living persons concerning
l'affaire Panquelin
. At the bottom, in the same hand, were written the words, “C. A. still alive”.

Mr Mason merely glanced at the cutting, perhaps already familiar with it; but he took advantage of the pause—as if reading all these pages with attention had been an effort similar to climbing a hill—to stick out his lower lip and blow a cooling breath of air up his face before resuming the letter.

“… in Paris, a minor political scandal called the Panquelin affair after a deputy of that name. There was a house in Paris which provided for special tastes. There is very little doubt that M. Panquelin patronised it and introduced a number of friends and colleagues to it, who were subsequently victims of substantial attempts at blackmail by pro-German interests. In 1933 Charles made several trips to Paris on political and journalistic forays, and was frequently in the company of the leader of M. Panquelin's group, M. Simon Allardie. The scandal was used by newspapers supporting the left to attempt to discredit Allardie, a man of blameless personal life though a violent pro-German. Archer no doubt knew Panquelin, but if he was introduced to the house in question and made use of it he did so with great discretion. Sir John Dibbin was said to have a file of dubious material on Charles, and it seems to me just possible that he bought up the papers when they became available in Paris. We will not know the truth of this until Dibbin makes all his files available to scholars, which, if I know the man, will be long after it has ceased to matter even to you, my dear.

“There are two other pieces of evidence against Charles, the first trivial, the second very significant to me, but of a nature which I would find it hard to communicate in a court of law. We had staying at Snailwood that week-end a young Arab, a friend of Vince's, who was a member of the ruling family of the Emirate of Sorah. Twice to my knowledge Charles spoke to other members of the house party with distinct relish about an alleged trade in Persian child slaves through Sorah. That he should do so, even if the allegation was correct, was curious, in that the political purpose of the week-end was to build a bridge of confidence between a representative of Zionism (the now famous Professor Blech, in fact) and an influential Arab state outside Palestine. This was part of Charles's declared policy. That being so, what was the point of his poisoning the ears of fellow guests against one of the chief participants? Was the trade in question of such emotional interest to him that he was unable to keep quiet about it?

“The last piece of evidence is no more concrete. On the Sunday evening we held a further family conference: my uncle, Zena, myself. By then the week-end was at a decidedly awkward stage, some of the guests having planned to leave that night, but the police having insisted on their remaining till Monday morning; this despite the general assumption following Vince's disappearance that he was the culprit as far as you were concerned. (The police inspector had evidently been reading some manual on forensic psychology, and would have liked to prove that the attack on you and the fire in the tower were connected.) So everybody had to be looked after and where possible entertained. We were fortunate in having a superb cellist among the guests, who offered to give a recital, thus enabling the three of us to withdraw and talk things over.

“By this time I had begun to work out my reasons for believing Vince innocent; to my mind the chief purpose of the meeting was to persuade the other two to stand by him and assert that innocence, and if possible prove it, at whatever cost. Zena, I soon discovered, was equally convinced of his guilt and thought we were meeting to decide how best to hush the affair up and thus do least damage to her political aspirations. My uncle took the line that of course it couldn't be Vince because ‘he wasn't the sort', and that somehow it was all Zena's fault for inviting ‘People we know nothing about—all sorts of foreigners and riff-raff'—into the house.