Ha'penny by Jo Walton
There’s a bomber if you like, Carmichael thought, stunned. The only wonder was that they’d made such an amateur bomb and blown themselves up. The IRA usually knew what they were doing. But Green had said that Sir Aloysius had wanted them to wait until he could get hold of a friend who could help.
The phone rang. “Nine o’clock,” Stebbings said. “The Chief’s expecting you.”
Carmichael rose, clutching the papers, and made his way to the lift.
“What’s all this about?” Penn-Barkis asked as soon as Carmichael stepped into his room.
“Green has fingered the other conspirators in the Gilmore case,” Carmichael said.
“Who is Green?” Penn-Barkis gestured impatiently to a chair; Carmichael sat.
“Green is Gilmore’s servant. I wanted to see you, sir, because this is potentially sensitive; some of the people he fingered are titled. We’ll need proper warrants.”
“Are you sure the servant isn’t just spinning you a tarrydiddle? It could be a lot of trouble if we wrongfully arrest prominent people.” Penn-Barkis frowned.
“Yes, sir, I know, sir,” Carmichael said. “But Green’s very anxious to ensure his wife’s safety. He says she’s quite innocent, and he’s terrified that she’ll be sent to the Continent and to a camp. I don’t believe he was lying when the only hope of her safety is through us.”
“Where is she?”
Carmichael realized he still didn’t know. “She’s in custody, but I’m not sure where. I asked Stebbings yesterday to find out, but the information wasn’t on my desk this morning. Green’s in the Scrubs, and she’ll be in one of the women’s prisons.”
“Oh very well, go on.” Penn-Barkis steepled his fingers and looked at Carmichael over them.
“One of the fellow conspirators is Nash, who we knew about, if you remember, sir, Marshall’s friend. It seems likely he was in the house at the time of the explosion. We already knew about him, though we still don’t know where he is. The others are Lord Scott—”
“Lord Scott!” Penn-Barkis interrupted. “You want to arrest Lord Scott?”
“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, doing his best to keep his voice calm. “You have to remember this is a case where the conspiracy was attempting to blow up the Prime Minister.”
“I suppose Lord Scott would have something to gain from that,” Penn-Barkis conceded. “Go on.”
“The other major figure is Sir Aloysius Farrell. Green didn’t know his full name, just Sir Aloysius and that he was Irish, but there don’t seem to be any other candidates, especially when you consider that Farrell has IRA connections going back fifteen years. He’s a bomber, sir, he was caught with an IRA bomb in 1939. We need to find him and pull him in.” Carmichael offered the report, which Penn-Barkis took and glanced at.
“Anyone else?” he asked.
“A girlfriend of Farrell’s called Siddy; we don’t know anything at all about her.”
Penn-Barkis dismissed her with a wave of his hand.
“Lord Scott’s secretary, Mr. Nesbitt. We can pull him in with Scott, if we can get Scott.”
“We can get a warrant for Lord Scott’s arrest,” Penn-Barkis said. “The difficulty is that he’s the kind of man who has friends in high places, within the system. If we applied for a warrant, it’s possible that someone would tip him off. Yet if we arrest him without one he might contrive to get a magistrate to release him.” He sat in silence for a moment, staring out of the window at London spread out below him, then he picked up the telephone. “Put me through to the Home Office,” he barked into the instrument. There was a pause. “Yes, Penn-Barkis here, I need to speak to Lord Timothy. Yes. Yes. Yes, it is urgent. Well, could you ask her to ask him to call me? Certainly, yes, thank you.” He put the receiver down again and smiled at Carmichael. “I’ll be in touch when I’ve had a word with the Home Secretary,” he said.
Carmichael stayed where he was, despite the clear dismissal. “And Sir Aloysius?”
“Get a warrant right away and bring him in,” Penn-Barkis said.
“The problem is that we don’t have the faintest idea where he is. He has a house in Ireland, but—”
“No, he won’t be likely to be there,” the Chief agreed. “Well, this is where the new identification cards really come into their own. For one thing, when he applied for them he must have given an address, though he could have given his Irish one. But beyond that anyone who stays at a hotel, or who rents any kind of accommodation has to show them, and the hotel keepers and landlords have to keep records, and send them to us. If he’s in London, which I think is a reasonable assumption, we should be able to find him by a search through our own papers. Put somebody on that right away. I said all along that this system would make our lives easier.”
“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, and stood.
“Let me know if you’re leaving the building,” Penn-Barkis said.
“Yes, sir.” Carmichael walked over to the lift. As he stepped in, he heard the telephone ring.
Royston was waiting in his office. “Sir Aloysius is an IRA bomber,” Carmichael said.
Royston blinked. “I thought he was a war hero?”
“He’s both,” Carmichael said. “And I’ve got a lovely job for you. Check the address Sir Aloysius gave when he got his new papers. Also, go through all the files on hotels and rentals for the last month and see if you can find out where he is. Check under A as well as F, sometimes clerks get confused by a title.”
“I already did that for Nash,” he objected.
“That reminds me, you can do it for Marshall too. Marshall and Nash had a place in London, remember?”
“But don’t we have the telephone number for it?” Royston asked.
“You’re absolutely right, sergeant, and I’d entirely forgotten. I called it that first morning, and then gave up on it and called Portsmouth and never thought of it again. You go and get on with Sir Aloysius the Bomber and I’ll find out from the Post Office where the place is that the telephone number belongs to.”
The Post Office were obliging, and gave him an address in Chalk Farm. He itched to be off there at once, but waited for Royston and Penn-Barkis. Royston came back first. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a sausage, under A or F. Probably staying with friends, or the room is in the name of that Siddy girl.”
“And what address did he give when he got his papers?”
“Arranish House, Ulster. But he got the papers issued in London.”
“No help at all. He must be trying to hide. But the man must have friends, relations, who know where he is.” Carmichael glared at the report.
“Maybe one of them will turn him in, like the Greens,” Royston said. “There is another possibility. I had a word with Jenkinson, who knows about the Irish side of things, and he said that if he’s Irish he might have an Irish passport, which would do for checking in at a hotel. No different from using his card, you might say, but it seems that in the Republic they’re not sufficiently careful about handing out passports, and if he’s an IRA man he might have more than one, in different names.”
Carmichael groaned. “Wonderful,” he said. His telephone rang. He picked it up. “Carmichael.”
“Penn-Barkis here, Inspector, and the Home Secretary wants to see you, to go through the evidence. You have an appointment with him at ten tomorrow morning, in the Home Office. Don’t take any action in the matter of Lord Scott until after you’ve spoken to Lord Timothy.”
“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said.
“Have you made any progress in finding Sir Aloysius?”
“No, quite the opposite. He doesn’t have a hotel or a lodging. He must be deliberately hiding. Can we get a warrant in any case, sir, so I can arrest him if he turns up? Or I could just pull him in. I don’t think he has the connections Lord Scott does. The good news is that I have found a possible place Nash might be. I’ll check that now, sir.”
“Very good, but keep working on Sir Aloysius,” Penn-Barkis said, and the line went dead.
<
“Let’s hope so, sergeant.”
They set off for Chalk Farm with high hopes. The address proved to be on the top floor of a purpose-built 1930s building of six flats. The entrance hall was painted cream and had a set of six mailboxes and six bells. There was no name on the bell of 6, nor any answer when they rang the bell downstairs. They climbed two flights of pale green stairs, and arrived at a little landing, with two doors facing each other. Royston shrugged and knocked on the one marked 6. There was no reply.
“May as well try the other and see if they know anything,” he said, and knocked across the hallway at 5.
The door to 5 was opened at once by a fat woman with her hair in curlers and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Whatever it is, I don’t want any,” she said.
“We’re not selling anything, we’re looking for the occupants of number six,” Carmichael said.
“They’re not there,” she said.
“Do you know where they are?” Royston asked.
“Down to Portsmouth I expect. They’re only coming and going here, you know.” She blew out smoke.
“When did you last see them?” Royston asked.
She squinted suspiciously. “Why are you asking so many questions?”
“We’re police,” Carmichael said, wearily, deciding it was probably most productive to gratify her curiosity a little. “There’s a possibility they’re mixed up in something criminal. Do you remember the last time you saw them?”
“There’s never been nothing like that,” she protested. “Couple of nice polite young men they are, and only sharing the flat because of the expense. They’re hardly ever even here together, the way they get their leave, see. No, you don’t want to think that about them.”
Carmichael wondered if his own neighbors would be prepared to go to such lengths lying for him if it came to it.
“It’s nothing like that,” Royston said. “Matter of murder.”
She took a last drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out on the wall. “Murder?” she asked, as if it were an entry on a menu she didn’t think she’d choose. “Well I never.”
“When did you last see them?” Carmichael repeated patiently.
“Not this weekend, the weekend before,” she said. “One of them was here, the dark one, and the fair one came down and joined him on the Friday.”
“And when did they leave?” Royston asked.
“I saw the fair one leave on the Sunday morning when we were all on our way out to church. He said good-bye very politely, like always. I don’t know when the dark one left, either when we were in church or before sometime. I haven’t seen either of them since, but it isn’t unusual, sometimes they won’t come down here for weeks at a time. They’re sailors, and they have to wait till they have leave, but when they do, they want to be in London, only natural isn’t it?”
“Do you have a key to six?”
“No, why would I?” She bristled.
“You’re obviously a friend of theirs, and they were away a lot, they might have left you their key so you could let meter men in and that kind of thing,” Royston said.
“All the meters for the building are together downstairs,” she said. “There isn’t any need for anything like that. I haven’t got a key, not that I would have minded if they had ever asked me. Very nice polite gentlemen, never no noise, and they keep to themselves.”
“You’re sure neither of them have been hiding in the flat?” Carmichael asked, losing hope but not prepared yet to surrender it entirely.
“I’d have seen them going in and out,” she insisted. “And the walls are that thin, if they’d been there I’d have heard something, I always do, moving about, and the water running.”
“Thank you, you’ve been very helpful,” Carmichael said.
They walked down the first set of stairs. Carmichael stopped on the first floor and knocked on 4.
“What are you doing, sir?” Royston asked.
“Checking her story, just in case she was being all too helpful to Nash, nice polite boy,” Carmichael said.
The woman in 4 was sharp-nosed and hostile. “What do you want?” she asked.
“Police, we’re inquiring about the occupants of number six,” Royston said. “When did you last see them?”
“Last heard them tramping about last Sunday morning,” she said. “Is that all?”
It was all. “We can get a warrant to break in and check the place,” Carmichael said as they got back into the car. “But I hardly have the heart for it. Nash isn’t there, and hasn’t been since last Sunday, though he could have been quite safely until today. I wish I knew how that man had contrived to vanish.”
“And Sir Aloysius too. But maybe we’ll find them together.”
“Maybe they’re both with Lord Scott. Maybe we’ll arrest them all together tomorrow after I meet with the Home Secretary. But I’m not counting on it.”
“No, sir,” Royston said, eyeing Carmichael with respect.
25
Dodo was claimed by Heinie for a dance. He offered to come back and dance with me next, which I found rather a daunting prospect. Unlike his Fuhrer, I didn’t find him attractive at all. I couldn’t imagine what Pip saw in him, unless his aura of authority lent him glamour in her eyes, or was a power grab pure and simple. I stood and watched the room for a moment. The lines of the architecture were softened by the evening clothes of the guests, except for those, mostly German, in uniform. The women’s clothes, the soft beiges, the layers of pastels and lace, seemed like a floating symbol of civilization against the stark brutality of the room. I wondered how anyone could have done such violence to a perfectly nice pair of Georgian houses. The music was ghastly, too. At any other bash of that sort, the band would have been playing old-fashioned jazz or just plain dance tunes. This band were playing Strauss waltzes, very correct I suppose, and horrible German dance tunes with a female singer whose voice made my head hurt.
“Isn’t that the Duchess of Kent?” a girl with a neck too long for her hairstyle asked me.
“I haven’t seen her,” I said, looking, but the girl had gone on without a word.
I danced with Captain Keiler, who was very polite and attentive, and seemed genuinely sorry to leave me and go on to his next obligation. He danced well, but I was glad to be alone again. I took a glass of white wine from a tray skillfully wielded by a waiter as he moved through the throng. I watched him move away from me. He was more graceful than the dancers, I thought, not to mention better looking, and wondered how to do that on stage. It could be jolly effective. Dignity of labor didn’t seem likely to be fashionable for a while, though.
“Isn’t Daphne knocking back a little more than she should be?” a voice brayed over my shoulder. I turned, but the bitch wasn’t addressing me but a companion, who replied in lower tones. The braying one was Lady Eversley, a political wife who liked to think she ran the country through her husband. I knew her because she had a son at Oxford at the time of my come-out—he was killed in the war, like all the nicest of our generation—and because she was an incorrigible manager she’d been buzzing around the edges of the debutante scene. Even then she’d never bothered to lower her voice, no matter how unkind she was being about anyone. I looked away from her before she noticed me.
There were plenty of girls called Daphne, but I thought she must mean Daphne Normanby, who had been Daphne Dittany when she was a deb the same year I was. There had been some frightful scandal about her then, which nobody would ever tell me. I don’t suppose it was truly any more shocking than half the things I did find out about. It wasn’t that she was having a baby, or if she was she must have lost it, poor thing, because although she did get married in rather a hurry she’d never had any children. She’d never been an especial chum of mine, but we had been to each other’s parties and once shared a taxi home in the rain and giggled all the way. I looked for her now in the c
She was standing by the buffet table, with a glass of wine in her hand. “Daphne,” I said. “You’re looking lovely. It’s been simply yonks.” The bit about looking lovely wasn’t much of an exaggeration. She had always been a pretty girl, and good at grooming, and now she had the money to buy clothes to really suit her. Her hair was perfect too, which made me a little self-conscious about my Mollie-matching cut.
Daphne took a moment to focus on me. “Viola Larkin,” she said. It was true that she was drunk, I saw, or at least not sober. “What an unusual dress.”
“It’s my act one costume, from Hamlet,” I said, wearily. “I thought—”
“Yes, I see, how frightfully clever of you,” she interrupted. “I’ll be very glad myself when the fashion changes. I do prefer definite colors. But are you sure about that bodice?”
I glanced down at it. “I don’t see high necks coming into fashion, no, but it’s for the play, it’s supposed to suggest purity.”
“Purity? Is the play absolutely deadly?” she asked, lowering her voice confidentially. “Shakespeare simply slays me. I’m supposed to be there, flying the flag beside Mark, but if it is, I might contrive to have a headache and miss it.”