Farthing Read online

  "Is Mr. Kahn here?" he asked.

  "Mr. Kahn is in the library," the footman said.

  Carmichael filed the fact for consideration. Certainly any Jew would have reason enough to hate old Thirkie. He ran his hand along the wooden wall as they went up the stairs. It was as smooth as silk; it must be polished regularly. The stairs were carpeted with a strip of dark blue drugget held down by irons.

  "How many are there on staff?" he asked.

  "I can't rightly say, sir," the footman replied. They came to the top of the stairs, the bannister terminating in a carved acorn. "There are those of us who belong to the house and those his lordship and her ladyship bring down with them from London, and just at the moment there are also the visiting staff."

  "How many on the permanent staff?" Royston asked.

  "Twelve," the footman said without hesitation, leading the way up a second flight of stairs. "Mrs. Simons the housekeeper, seven housemaids, Mrs. Smollett the cook—undercook presently, of course, being as Mrs. Richardson is here—two kitchenmaids, and myself."

  "So the butler and the cook come down from London?" Carmichael asked, intrigued by this glimpse of upper-class life.

  "Yes, sir, they travel in advance of the family. And some of the kitchen staff too, as well as the family's personal attendants."

  "Another dozen then?" Royston asked.

  "I'm not rightly sure who exactly is here this time," the footman said, more confidingly. "That's about the right figure, but it's been proper chaos downstairs the last two days. I haven't known if I've been coming or going myself."

  "Worse than a normal houseparty?" Carmichael asked.

  "Much worse—well, normally we have more notice."

  Interesting, Carmichael thought, and possibly worth following up later.

  "I'd have thought it would have taken more than seven maids with seven mops to keep a place like this in this condition," Royston said as they reached another landing. This time they did not continue up; the footman led them down the corridor.

  "They work very hard, sir, and of course we have girls from the village who come in to do the rough work as needed. I suppose I should also mention the stable staff and the garden staff, who do not live in. You don't think—I mean you don't suspect any of the staff, do you, sir?"

  "We've only just got here, we don't suspect anyone yet," said Carmichael, amused at the supernatural powers of detection attributed to Scotland Yard. "We just want to get a feel for the situation."

  "I see, sir," the footman said, as he paused before one of the doors.

  "And your name?" Royston asked, taking out his notebook.

  "Jeffrey, sir," he replied.

  Royston rolled his hand in the air. Jeffrey frowned, unsure of what was wanted. "Would that be Something Jeffrey, like Judge Jeffrey, or would it be Jeffrey Someone?" he asked.

  Carmichael almost laughed. Royston was constantly surprising him. Fancy him knowing anything at all about Judge Jeffreys, even the name!

  "Jeffrey Bartholemew Pickens," Jeffrey said, with a faint air of being put upon.

  Royston wrote it down carefully. "I'll remember that if I need you," he said.

  "Yes, sir," Jeffrey said, and tapped gently on the door.

  It was opened abruptly by a uniformed bobby. "Two gentlemen from Scotland Yard," Jeffrey announced, his voice now a clear imitation of the haughty butler below.

  "Good, good, come in," came a voice from inside the room. The footman and the bobby stepped out of the way and Carmichael and Royston stepped inside.

  The corpse lay sprawled across a narrow bed at the far side of the little room. He had apparently been stabbed, for there was bright red blood all over his chest and the handle of a knife sticking out. Something didn't look right about him. Carmichael frowned, took a step towards him, and was intercepted by Yately, a tubby little Inspector from Winchester. He insisted on introducing the bobby, who rejoiced in the name of Izzard, and a thin police doctor called Green.

  "This is a bad business," Yately said. "I haven't moved him or done anything, though they moved him a little before we got here, trying to determine whether he was dead, that sort of thing. I could see at once that it was a case for Scotland Yard and had you called right away. You've made very good time down from London. I'm glad you're here—once you've had a good look we can get on with things."

  "When did you get here?" Carmichael asked.

  "The body was found just before nine," Yately said. "They telephoned for us immediately, and we arrived at nine-forty. I then telephoned Scotland Yard."

  "We left at ten and arrived at the gates at noon," Royston said. They heard the chime of the clock, made tolerable and even pleasant by distance. "It's quarter-past now."

  "What's the time of death?" Carmichael asked.

  "It'll be easier to say when Green's had a proper look at him," Yately said. "At the moment, with all that stuff on him, it's very hard to tell."

  "The blood?" Royston asked.

  "Ah, fooled you, did it? It almost fooled me as well. Look more closely. That's not blood, not real blood anyway."

  Carmichael strode across the room and stood over the corpse, not touching him at all but inspecting him closely. The deceased appeared to be a tall middle-aged man, clearly well cared for. He was clean-shaven and his face was very flushed. A choleric temperament, Carmichael would have said, if the man had been alive. His eyes were open, staring upwards and bulging with what appeared to be alarm. He was wearing an old-fashioned nightshirt made of heavy linen. His chest was smeared all over with the red substance, and in the center above his heart was a dagger, pinning a square of navy blue cloth on which was embroidered a six-pointed yellow star. The red substance smeared all over his chest was not blood, but it wasn't paint either. Carmichael sniffed at it, trying to separate the scent from the usual excretory smell of a recent corpse. He knew it was familiar but couldn't quite place it. There was no real blood around the wound, suggesting that it must have been made after he had been dead for some time. Interesting.

  "It's lipstick," Royston said in amazement. "Not the kind in a tube, the kind you paint on."

  "Any suggestion for cause of death, Inspector?" Yately asked.

  "Clearly strangulation," Carmichael said in a bored tone. He didn't want to play this kind of game.

  "Yes," Yately said, sounding disappointed. "Shall we let Green get on and do his thing?"

  "Here?" Carmichael asked, surprised.

  "No, not here. There's nothing really I can do. I'll take him back to Winchester for a proper workup," Green said.

  "Is this exactly how he was found?" Carmichael asked.

  "We've looked at him the way you just did, and Green tested his arms and legs for rigor, but we've not moved him at all," Yately said. "I can't answer for before we got here."

  "Who found the body anyway? His wife?"

  Yately turned pages in his notebook. "His wife was in church, apparently. The body was found by his brother-in-law coming in to see if he was getting up for breakfast."

  "Not his servant?" Carmichael was surprised.

  "It seems he didn't bring a personal servant down with him."

  "Every time, or just this time?" Carmichael asked.

  Yately shrugged. "I didn't ask. In any case, Mr. Normanby knew he didn't have a valet to wake him so he popped in on his way past."

  "The wife didn't sleep in here?" Carmichael asked. It was a formal question. There wasn't room. This was a dressing room, with only the one narrow bed. There was barely space for one man to sleep in here, and Carmichael was surprised that Thirkie had done so.

  "In the connecting room," Yately said. "Sir James apparently came to bed later than Lady Thirkie and considerately slept in here rather than disturb her."

  "Who do you have this information from?" Carmichael asked.

  "The brother-in-law, Normanby. He's the only one I've interviewed. He apparently accompanied Sir James upstairs and said good night at about one A.M. They had been playing billiards,
he said."

  "Do you think he did it?"

  "Did it?" Yately looked startled. "Mr. Normanby? He's an MP." There, Carmichael thought, in that attitude, lay the reason why the country needed Scotland Yard and could not rely on the local forces. They were good enough with ordinary criminals—with the criminal class if you like—but their ingrained and perfectly natural respect for those above them made them completely unimaginative in cases like this. "Why would he do it? It's obvious some anarchist did it."

  "This does look like evidence of the crime being political, sir," Royston said, touching the square with the yellow star.

  "It looks as if someone wants us to think it's political," Carmichael said. "That doesn't mean it isn't political, but it might not be the kind of political it looks, or it might be personal. This"— he touched the material at the edge of the star as Royston had done—"doesn't rule anything either in or out. It is evidence, but not in the way you mean. I wonder how easy these are to get hold of."

  "They're issued to Jews on the Continent, sir," the bobby said. "They have to wear them all the time to keep them in their place, so that anyone can tell at a glance who they are."

  "I am aware of that," Carmichael said. Yately spread his hands as if to say that he couldn't answer for the idiocy of his subordinates. "But the Jews there need the ones they have, and we don't issue them in England, so I wonder how easy they are to come by here. Should we be looking for someone who's been to the Continent and come by one there, or are they in fact available for sale here? Is this in fact a genuine Continental star, or a copy? It's good material and professional looking, not like the lipstick, so my guess would be that it's genuine. If it's genuine it might be traceable. Royston, look into it."

  "Yes, sir," Royston said, making a note.

  "The dagger too. It's unusual and oriental. It should be fingerprinted, and identified if possible."

  "It's already been identified," Yately said. "It belongs to the deceased, Normanby said. He apparently used it as a kind of ornamental pocket knife. It had a kind of sheath, a scabbard I suppose."

  "And he brought it away with him?" Royston asked.

  "He must have done," Yately said, spreading his hands again, this time at people's unaccountable ways.

  It was time to take charge. Carmichael girded his mental loins and set to it. "Green, get on with it. Take him to Winchester, and send a bobby back with the car. You, Izzard, take this key and go down to the gate—it's your job to let police in and out, note all comings and goings, and prevent all goings at present that aren't police."

  "Yes, sir," Izzard said, stolidly, and stumped off.

  "You only brought the one bobby?" Carmichael asked Yately.

  "It was Sunday, sir," Yately said.

  Carmichael looked down his nose at him for a moment, then sighed. Sunday in the country did tend to mean that everything ground to a halt, and he didn't want to make Yately impossible to work with. "Good thing you were able to bring a doctor, then," he said. "Good thinking."

  Yately smiled.

  "But without more men, I'm afraid you'll have to do a little leg-work yourself, Inspector. I want you to get me a floor plan of the house. They may have one; if not, get the footman, Jeffrey, to take you around until you can draw me one. I also want a list of the guests and of the servants."

  "Just the overnight guests or everyone who was here yesterday?" Yately asked.

  Carmichael thought of what Betty had said about all the cars coming and going. "That will depend very much on the time of death," he said. "Get the overnight guests for now. We know Thirkie stayed up late; maybe he outstayed the others. Don't interview them, just get me a list, I'll interview them later. For now, Royston and I are going to go over this room, and the connecting room, to see what we can find."

  "Yes, sir," Yately said, and rang the bell to summon Jeffrey.

  Carmichael looked down at the flushed and furious face of the corpse. "I'll need his will, if any, to see who benefits. The Yard will be able to get a copy from his solicitor. I also need to know about his enemies," he said.

  "Political enemies, sir?" Royston asked, making a note.

  "Those too," Carmichael said. "When I talk to the Yard, I'll ask them to send me a summary of his political career, with especial note of enemies. I'll also ask what Thirkie was doing at the moment, what legislation he was sponsoring and promoting, what might suffer from his absence. If it is political, there may be a reason why he was killed now, at this moment, rather than last year or next year."

  "I thought you didn't think it was political?" Yately interrupted, confusion plain on his face.

  "That doesn't mean I intend to neglect the political angle," Carmichael said. "I also said it might not be the kind of political it was made to look and it might be some other kind of political."

  Yately's broad country face looked confused. Carmichael looked back to the corpse and wished, as he almost always wished in murder cases, that he could get the dead man to answer some of the most burning questions. "In the midst of life we are in death," the prayer book says, and lying here, in the heart of the country house which must have been as familiar to him as his own home, surrounded by friends and presumably, enemies, Thirkie had gone from what was by all accounts a dynamic and voluble life into the stricken, sullen, silence of death. Thirkie would never again answer a question, either in Parliament or in his bedroom, and any questions Carmichael had to ask him would have to be answered by others or go unanswered. Death, Carmichael thought, as he always thought at some point in surveying a corpse, was God's most egregious mistake.

  5

  Daddy carried Angela to Sukey's room. It was the obvious place, with her own room being out of commission, and easy to carry her to because there was only the one step down. I trailed in there behind him, though we lost Mummy and Mark and the Manning-hams along the way.

  I opened the door and Daddy put Angela down on the bed. Sukey's room was impeccable, as always, all the lace edgings on her dressing table neat, her prayer book and little gold cross laid out ready for Matins. I can mess up a room in thirty minutes flat, but Sukey had been living in this one, on and off, for thirty years without leaving so much as a dusting of talc or a scarf out of place.

  Angela flopped onto the bed, about as unconscious as a person could be. There was no question of her faking it. Daddy looked down at her in irritation. "Find Daphne," he said to me.

  "Good idea," I said, and dashed off in search of her. I ran her to earth at last alone in the library, looking rather green about the gills and gulping tea with brandy in it. At least, the brandy bottle was open on the trolley beside her and she had a teacup in her hand. She had a cigarette in her other hand and was puffing on it between gulps.

  "Angela's fainted," I said. "Do you think you could look after her a bit?"

  "Me?" Daphne asked, as if I'd asked her to climb the Eiffel Tower single-handed, rather than look after her own sister.

  "You have heard about James?" I asked.

  "Heard about him?" Daphne said, with an odd little laugh. "My dear, I found him."

  "Where was he?" I asked. I took the teacup from Daphne, mainly because her hands were shaking so much I thought she was likely to drop it, and it was one of Mummy's precious Spode set that belonged to Great-grandmother Dorset and had been handed down mother to daughter ever since. Although Mummy had made it perfectly clear that I wasn't fit to inherit them, or the Ringhili, or any of her other mother-daughter stuff, I didn't want to go through the fuss that would ensue if I'd just stood by and seen one of them smashed on the library floor. I sniffed it as I set it down. I suppose there must have been some tea there at some point, or she'd never have got hold of a cup rather than a glass, but by now it seemed like almost pure brandy.

  Daphne blew out smoke. "In his dressing room. And he's been stabbed by some damned Jew and he's all over blood and cold and dead and you're telling me Angela's fainted and I ought to go and look after her because she's the grieving widow when she never
really gave two pins for James except that he could make her Lady Thirkie, and he never cared about her except that she was the nearest he could get to me."

  "She is the grieving widow and you'd better pull yourself together if you're not going to let the side down and embarrass everyone with a lot of stuff and nonsense that can't be put on display," I said. I might not have said it so rudely if she hadn't said "some damned Jew," but I'd have thought it and meant it just as much. It's funny, I despise a lot of things about Mummy and one of them is her hardness, but there I was in a crisis acting exactly like her, telling Daphne to pull herself together and cover what needed to be covered. "Letting the side down" is purest Mummy and not something I'd normally think of myself as saying, but I'm absolutely positive I said it then. I mean most of what I'm putting down here is what I think I said and other people said, my impression of it, except for some frightfully significant things that I remember word for word. I'm probably more accurate recording what other people said, because I listened to that, whereas for what I said, I just remember the general gist. But I know I said "letting the side down" to poor Daphne. I don't think I thought that at the time, that I was being like Mummy, I mean. I was so cross with Daphne for being such a fool. I also thought she was using "Jew" the way she might say "anarchist" or even "murderer" or "bastard"—I had no idea then about the star or anything.

  "You're right," she said, snatching up the cup again and swallowing all the brandy down in one go. "She's the grieving widow, I'm her devoted sister, Mark is my devoted husband, none of the rest of it matters or shows. Sorry. Thank you."

  The strange thing about that was that she obviously meant it— she really was thanking me for being such a bitch to her. I'd never known Daphne all that well. Angela was a few years older than me, but within my age cohort. Daphne was six or seven years older than her, probably ten years older than me, Hugh's age. She was old enough to have been one of "the big ones" when we were children. Then she came out and got married when I was still at school. Angela was one of "last year's debs" actually two years before, when I came out. The only thing I really knew about Daphne was that while both sisters looked very much alike, she was the one who Nature's lottery had handed all the brains meant for both girls, which meant that Angela looked like a student's copy of the masterpiece that was Daphne, because Daphne had the animation to go with her looks.