Authors: David Roberts
‘Oh God!’ Verity exclaimed. ‘Don’t tell me Pride is back in our lives?’
‘I fear so though, to tell you the truth, he has been quite reasonable so far.’
‘So, why is Pride allowing you to sit in on his investigation into James’s father’s death?’
‘I’ll explain it all when I get back.’
‘No, tell me now. We’re a team, aren’t we?’
Edward was touched. Verity might be a tough war correspondent who had just survived a bullet in the back but she was also a vulnerable, lonely woman. The life she led did not make it easy to develop friendships and the friends she did make tended to be either déraciné gypsies like Gerda and André Kavan or Party members. Edward sometimes thought he and the Hassels were the only friends she had from the ‘normal’ world she had turned her back on when she decided to become a journalist. If it helped her get over the trauma of Guernica, he would involve her in the investigation, even if it meant bending a few rules.
‘I hope you are right about Pride,’ she was saying. ‘I won’t believe it until I see it. By the sound of it, he’s barking up the wrong tree as per usual. James is now one of my heroes and I can’t believe anything bad about him. He found a doctor in Guernica and saved my life and you say he found the car that got us out. What can we do to help? Does he need a lawyer? I could telephone my father.’
Verity’s father was the well-known barrister, D.F. Browne. He spent his life supporting left-wing causes which left him little time to be a good father. It was typical that he was now in New York and had spoken to Verity only once, very briefly, on a crackly line shortly after she had arrived back in London. When she would get to see him was anyone’s guess.
‘Tell me what this is all about, will you, Edward? I get the feeling I have missed something.’
‘I don’t think Pride’s going to accuse James of anything – at least I hope not – but he does need to question the boy. He may have been the last person to see his father alive. Actually, Pride’s been quite good and allowed him time to recover from his ordeal before asking him to come into the Yard.’
‘So James’s father was poisoned – is that it? And wasn’t someone else killed? You told me about it on the boat but . . . I wasn’t really concentrating.’
‘You really want to hear this, V?’
‘It’ll take my mind off other things.’
‘In a nutshell then – and this is not for repetition – there is a department in the Foreign Office whose job it is to monitor arms sales, here and abroad, with a view to making accurate estimates of the military strength of our potential enemies. One of the junior members of the department, Charles Westmacott, took secret files out of the office – presumably to give someone – and ended up hanging from Chelsea Bridge.’
‘And that was definitely murder not suicide?’
‘He wasn’t the suicidal type. He was a family man. He was left hanging from the bridge, his hat on his head and his umbrella made to look as though it was on his arm. Only his briefcase was missing. Anyway, who would commit suicide by hanging them selves from a bridge? Why not just jump off a tall building? That’s what stockbrokers did in ’29 after the Crash.’
‘Right, so it’s murder,’ Verity said decisively. ‘What next?’
‘Subsequently, Westmacott’s boss – Desmond Lyall – was found dead by his secretary. He had died from nicotine poisoning. He was a chain smoker and someone had left him with cigarettes laced with enough of the stuff to finish him off.’
‘How easy is it to get nicotine . . . as a poison, I mean?’
‘Not difficult at all. You simply soak cigarette butts in water and evaporate the extract. You get a yellow liquid which becomes a brown sticky mess. If you want to poison someone, you can either put it in the victim’s drink or, as in this case, inject it into cigarettes.’
‘And they wouldn’t notice?’
‘Not if you were a chain smoker like Lyall. He put one cigarette after another in his mouth – probably without being conscious of what he was doing.’
‘And it’s a killer?’
‘As quick as cyanide. It stimulates and then depresses your nervous system. The muscles in your diaphragm are paralysed and you die of respiratory failure.’
‘What’s the lethal dose?’
‘About fifty milligrams.’
‘You’ve boned up on this?’
‘Yes. And Pride showed me the preliminary medical report.’
Verity meditated. ‘So James was the last person to see his father alive?’
‘Probably, but that’s not so important as anyone could have left the poisoned cigarettes in the box on Lyall’s desk. We can only guess how long it would have taken him to reach them. If they had been put at the bottom of the box – it held about a hundred – it might have been a couple of days even at the rate he smoked. There were just two cigarettes left in the box when he was found dead, only one of which was posioned.’
‘Maybe someone removed the other unsmoked cigarettes when they knew he was dead?’
‘It’s possible, V.’
‘So tell me about James. He and his father had quarrelled?’
‘They had been on bad terms but, unluckily as it turned out, I had persuaded him to go and see his father because I knew that Desmond really loved him. He had admitted as much when I interviewed him. James, at my urging, went to see his father. They met and possibly quarrelled. James left for Spain unaware that his father had died.’
‘When did he find out?’
‘That was one of my main reasons for going to Spain. I mean, apart from being worried sick about you. As it turned out, I didn’t have an opportunity to tell him until we were on the boat coming home.’
‘What was his reaction? I wasn’t taking much interest in anything at the time.’
‘He was very upset – genuinely, as far as I could tell. I tried to get him to talk but he clammed up. I thought it best to leave it. We were all pretty exhausted.’
‘And you have got involved because of Vansittart? I remember you told me he had asked you to investigate something for him.’
‘It wasn’t Westmacott’s murder he wanted me to investigate, only his disappearance. I’ll tell you the whole thing but don’t forget I was sworn to secrecy. It was thought he was one of the people leaking information to Mr Churchill so he could bring pressure on the government to rearm more quickly. Vansittart thought his disappearance was tied up with that in some way. When it turned into a murder case, I was asked to look after the political side – represent the FO, don’t y’know.’
Edward wasn’t being quite frank. He did not think Verity would approve of him being a policeman. He had never told her that he had worked for Major Ferguson of Special Branch in the past and had comforted himself with the idea that it wasn’t a formal relationship. Now it was formal but somehow it seemed too late to tell her. She hated Special Branch, considering them to be anti-Communist and pro-Fascist. He would have to tell her sometime, of course, but just for now it was his guilty secret. It wasn’t his secret to share anyway – at least not without Ferguson’s permission.
‘I have met Mrs Westmacott and her daughter, Alice, who’s a clever little ten-year-old. I promised I would find out the truth for them. You can imagine how distressed they are. Mrs Westmacott has a sister. She’s a well-known racing driver, of all things. Pride knew about her – Mrs Hay. Have you heard of her, V?’
She said she hadn’t .
‘Could the nicotine poisoning have been a mistake? Perhaps Lyall just smoked himself to death?’ she asked, reaching for her cigarettes.
‘It’s not possible, although I haven’t seen the autopsy report yet. I’ll know more later but, as I told you, one of the two cigarettes remaining in the box on his desk had been tampered with.’
‘You’ll never convince me James murdered his father,’ Verity said decisively.
‘No. I don’t think so either. There is one other complication though. When I found him in London – that was when I told him he should go and see his father – he was staying in Chester Square with David and Guy Baron. What’s more, I have reason to believe the house is owned by a rather – what shall I say? – dubious millionaire called Sir Vida Chandra who just happens to be one of Churchill’s main financial backers.’
Verity looked as if she were going to jump to David’s defence but, in the end, said nothing. Instead, she pondered what he had told her and Edward was pleased that at least she had stopped worrying about what the Fascists were saying about Guernica.
‘You said you met Churchill?’ she said at last. ‘What did you think of him? I don’t trust him. He’s an aristocratic windbag and he makes you look like a friend of the people.’
‘Yes, I thought that too but I’ve changed my mind. Having met him, I thoroughly approve of him. In fact, I think he’s the only politician to understand what we are really up against.’
‘I don’t like him,’ Verity reiterated. ‘He’s the enemy of socialism, of everything in which I believe. You know what he did in the the General Strike? He was ready to order in the army, even put tanks on the streets.’
‘He supported the miners in their claim for better wages,’ Edward said without much conviction.
‘He did his best to prevent women getting the vote. Sylvia Pankhurst was his sworn enemy.’
‘V! That was before the war.’
‘I don’t care. Do leopards change their spots? If he is so clear-sighted why didn’t he support us going in to help the Spanish Republic? David says he’s a reactionary of the worst kind.’
‘I think Churchill felt – forgive me, Verity – that entering the Civil War would be a distraction. It would drain us of what little we had in the way of armaments and leave us seriously weakened when war with Germany starts.’
‘And he doesn’t like Communists.’
‘No, he doesn’t but he hates Fascism more, if that makes it better.’
‘No, it does not. My view is, as you very well know, that if the democracies had stood up to Franco it would have sent the right message to Hitler. Oh well, it’s too late now. They have shown the dictators they can walk all over us.’
‘Getting back to Westmacott,’ Edward said, not wanting to get into a political row, ‘the question is, was he killed because he was giving secret information to Churchill?’
‘Churchill admitted he had been in touch with Westmacott?’
‘He did, yes.’
‘You’re not implying that Mr Churchill could have had anything to do with Westmacott’s death?’
‘No, of course not – not directly – but Westmacott may have been killed going to meet one of Churchill’s people – Marcus Fern, perhaps. And Churchill does have round him some characters like Chandra who may support him for the best of motives but who are ruthless when they think they have to be. Chandra is by no means whiter than white.’
‘Well, if he’s an Indian he wouldn’t be, would he?’
‘Don’t play the giddy goat, Verity. This is serious.’
‘I know it is. I’m sorry,’ she said humbly.
Edward was secretly surprised and delighted she could make even a bad joke.
‘What’s much more likely,’ he said, ‘is that someone did not want Westmacott to give certain information to Churchill and killed him.’
‘Yes, of course. Let me think about this while you take James to see Pride. I need something to get my teeth into. Lying here thinking of the lies being told about me in the press is going to drive me crazy.’
Edward opened the bedroom door and called to Adrian. ‘I’m going now. I’ll be back this evening, if that’s all right.’
‘Of course,’ Adrian said, appearing with a drying-up cloth in his hand. ‘Charlotte and I can’t keep her in bed if she gets too bored but the doc was adamant. Verity, you must rest.’
‘How can I ever thank you for taking me in?’ Verity said with transparent sincerity. ‘You are my only true friends.’
‘What about Edward here?’
She looked almost puzzled and then said, ‘Edward’s more than a friend, Adrian. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ he said seriously, ‘and I’m glad for the both of you.’
Edward felt his eyes prickle and, not wishing to make a fool of himself, said, ‘By the way, Adrian, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you know a chap called Angus McCloud? He was at the Slade – perhaps when you were there? Now he works in Desmond Lyall’s department at the Foreign Office. He was a bit too keen to tell me he was an artist and not a civil servant when I met him. A phoney, I thought, but I may be wronging the man.’
‘Angus! Oh, I remember Angus all right. I wondered what had happened to him. Fancy him ending up in the FO. He
was
a bit of a phoney, I always thought. Old Tonks couldn’t stand him. He had a beard.’
‘He’s lost that but he’s still rather shaggy. And he’s got a pipe.’
‘Yes, I remember his pipe. It was a horrid, smelly thing. In fact, he was a smelly man. Not much interested in personal hygene.’
‘Typical bachelor,’ Verity said. Edward gave her a look. ‘Not you, idiot!’ she corrected herself.
‘Would you mind asking around a bit, Adrian. See if there’s anything fishy there. For instance, I don’t even know if he’s married.’
‘Will do. You think he’s Lyall’s murderer?’
‘No! It’s just one lead to follow up. I didn’t tell you, V, I’ve got your pal Jack Spot doing some sleuthing for me in the underworld. Damn useful that he seems to fancy you. Mind you, I fancy you myself.’
Verity tried to throw a pillow at him but gasped as a stabbing pain hit her. Edward saw her wince and go pale. ‘Hey, steady on, old thing. Lie back and . . . you know, think of England. I’ll come by this evening and report.’
‘You don’t seem worried that James could be in any real danger?’ Adrian asked, to give Verity time to recover. ‘You were telling me the police want to interview him.’
‘I don’t think even Pride is going to make a case against the boy but I need to find out what evidence he does have. It seems an age since I talked to him. Maybe he has the case solved by now. As for James, he’s a good lad and he just needs someone to put him on the right path.’
‘That’ll be you, I suppose,’ Verity said sarcastically. ‘You’ll knock all that silly Communism stuff out of his head, no doubt.’
‘I would like to try.’
Edward left before Verity could throw something harder than a pillow at him.
‘Can we just run through it again?’