A Coat of Varnish (34 page)

Back in the police station, Briers and Bale waited, Shingler now in attendance. The others weren’t used to seeing Briers appear as tired as he did that night. He dropped out of the conversation. Bale sent for sandwiches and another bottle of whisky. The others ate. Briers smoked more cigarettes, took stiff drinks. It was two and a half hours before Flamson and the Fraud Squad detective returned. As soon as they got into the room, Briers said: ‘Well?’

The fraud man, whose name was Steen, was senior to Flamson and, what counted more, considerably more articulate. He did most of the talking.

‘I think it’s OK. It looks as though you got it right.’

Susan’s story had in substance been confirmed. Loseby had been as easy-mannered as ever. He hadn’t concealed that he received presents of money, yes, presents in banknotes. No one had asked simple questions about them, or he would have given simple answers. While Lady Ashbrook was alive, similar presents came from her. He thought he remembered mentioning that she gave him a little help. He was inclined to think that this posthumous present was another arrangement of hers, instead of making him a bequest in her will.

‘I’ll bet my bottom dollar he knew,’ said Steen. ‘But it would take third degree to make him tell us.’

It was true that the money arrived in pounds, from an anonymous source. That was when they began to talk of a Comptroller. Was there such a person? Loseby was inclined to think there was.

‘Inclined to think, my blasted arse,’ said Flamson. ‘He bloody well knew.’

‘I’m inclined to think,’ Steen mimicked, cheerful, a man with a job polished off, ‘that he knows who it is. He wasn’t in the scheme himself; that wouldn’t work. But he knows who’s been handling the business this side. Likely as not, he wouldn’t be able to prove it in a law court. And, anyway, that’s the last thing he’d ever want to do.’

Steen swigged at his glass of whisky.

‘He did indicate that he’d had a tip-off from someone whom he wouldn’t mention by name or else couldn’t remember. Who knew that some money would arrive in due course. Someone whom Lady Ashbrook trusted with money. That’s the most that we got out of Captain Loseby. But it sounded like your man.’

‘It fits the bill,’ Shingler said.

‘I don’t see that it can be anyone else,’ Bale said. Briers stirred himself, vigour pouring back, as though he had had a blood transfusion.

‘God love me,’ he cried, ‘we were all fools. We ought to have seen it the minute we got a whisper about the money. We haven’t been clever, have we?’

‘You can’t be clever all the time.’ That was from Shingler, possibly trying to please.

‘I don’t know about you lads, but I still don’t know the reason why. Why did he do it? I don’t need an answer on a postcard.’ He loomed over the table, though physically he was one of the smaller men there. He broke off: ‘Forget that. We’ve got it. We don’t deserve to, but we’ve got it.’

Steen said, from outside their charmed circle: ‘I don’t mind telling you, you’re going to find it hellish difficult to clinch.’

‘I agree that,’ said Bale.

‘Could be,’ said Flamson.

Reserves fell away. The bottle went round. Briers didn’t drink more, but he was filling them with energy.

‘We’ll do it,’ he said. ‘We’re over the hump. Of course we’ll do it.’

The next morning, Briers came into Humphrey’s sitting-room and, with a curious formality, enquired about the other’s health. Humphrey, smiling because he couldn’t remember this happening before, said that it was much as usual. Briers smiled back, like one who had been caught in a bit of a solemn silliness. He said: ‘I’ve something to tell you.’

‘Important?’

‘It depends who to. I think you’d like to hear. It won’t come as a surprise.’

‘You’re certain, are you?’

‘I’d better tell you.’

Drilled by old habit, Humphrey suggested that they should take a walk. He was more comfortable listening to secrets in the open air. It was a blowy autumn morning, Atlantic weather, a strong west wind, and in the gusts, as they walked towards Pimlico, words were getting lost. In a more undisciplined mood, Humphrey might have reflected that excessive security had a knack of being neither comfortable nor efficient.

‘It all adds up,’ Briers was saying.

Humphrey shouted back: ‘What adds up?’

‘Everything I’ve told you, and a bit more.’

In a patch of calm, he said, quietly, flatly: ‘It’s the doctor, of course.’ Then: ‘You’d got there yourself, hadn’t you?’

Humphrey replied: ‘I knew you were getting there.’

‘Don’t you buy it?’

‘It’s very hard to take.’

‘Why?’

‘Why should he?’

‘We may find out sometime.’

Just as one could believe anything in a suspicious state, so one could disbelieve. Judgment didn’t hold one steady. Frank was arguing them back to the plane of reason. With one of his lucid expositions, he recapitulated all they now knew of the O’Brien arrangements.

‘Mind you,’ Frank said, who had been bred with dark Protestant prejudices, ‘that mick lawyer didn’t make a penny out of it. But he was a cunning old bastard. It’s a beautiful thought, those establishment characters trusting each other. Just to save a dollop of tax over here.’ He went on equably, reasonably: ‘Doing it on a basis of trust was the only way. O’Brien had shown foresight. As they grew old, he and Lady Ashbrook had to let one other person into the operation. She wouldn’t have accepted Loseby. She might have been too anxious to protect him maybe, or else she thought him too unreliable. There was someone else whom she had trusted with other fiddles. Her doctor. Perryman.

‘He’d touted round her pound notes already. You know. You remember. She knew he didn’t like paying his taxes, either. She knew he was as silent as the grave. He was the only person around whom she had talked to about money.’

‘That’s the strongest point you have.’

‘It ought to have given us a lead weeks ago. But when we got on to O’Brien and the Comptroller, then it all made sense.’ Briers went on: ‘We happen to know that he met O’Brien once before at least. When the old man could still come to London. And the doctor had done a little commission for him.’

They walked along Belgrave Road, down to the river. For a while they didn’t try to talk, the gale flapping, whistling, thumping, tree boughs bending and straining, the last leaves seething. Briers was organising his argument. Humphrey was attempting to be fair.

‘Yes,’ Briers said. ‘We don’t know why he did it. But all the rest of it makes sense. He had access, freer than any of them. He’s an unusual man. You’ve said so yourself. It’s a good old maxim – don’t you remember we agreed on this before? – in this sort of business keep your eye open for an unusual man. He’s kept astonishingly cool. You’re not used to villains. When we’ve talked to him, he’s been cooler than anyone I’ve seen.’

Along the Embankment they walked, the wind pressing and pushing behind them, towards Millbank. Briers said, friendly, cajoling: ‘Come on, Humphrey. You’ll have to admit it. We’ve got it right.’

‘Have it your own way.’ That was almost friendly, but it wasn’t quite an admission.

Shortly afterwards, Humphrey said, as though they were officials again, working together: ‘The evidence is going to be thin, isn’t it?’

‘Unless we can break him down.’

‘Can you?’

To that, Briers replied that there the other’s judgment was as good as his, or better.

Within minutes of getting home from that walk along the Embankment, Humphrey received a telephone call. It was from Briers. The words were cautious, code-like, the meaning clear. All that he had said was to go no farther. The position was critical. Nothing must be said to anyone else, not to anyone else at all.

For a time Humphrey was irritated. Did Briers think one had lived one’s life for nothing? Humphrey was the more irritated, hurt rather than irritated, because he knew that he was being told to say nothing to Kate. As Briers had made apparent when Humphrey visited him, he had no secrets from his wife. Was this warning nothing but professional mistrust? Humphrey was half-angry, half in conflict. He was being put in a false position for no cause. Kate was as safe a security risk as he was. She was one of his loyalties. He didn’t like two loyalties contradicting each other.

Meanwhile, when Kate had invited her guests to that dinner, she worried about Humphrey. In the midst of her buoyant spirits, she was both suspicious and acute. She wasn’t ready to pity herself, but alone on those evenings she found herself thinking, with tart realism, that she hadn’t had a lucky life. Now that she had had a piece of luck in Humphrey, she couldn’t trust it. What had gone wrong?

She thought she understood him, but she had scarcely seen him since he had been so reluctant about letting her entertain for him. She searched for explanations, and found none. Was he getting tired of her already? Once or twice she got near the right explanation but dismissed it. She remembered a time only a few weeks before when, happy in bed, she had said, relaxed and confident: ‘There’s no love without trust, is there?’

Humphrey, also happy, gave a sarcastic loving smile. ‘Oh yes, there is. I’ve had it. I don’t recommend it. It wouldn’t do for us, thank the Lord. We’ve been lucky, bless you.’

Then somehow she had spoiled it. She cursed her idea of this dinner party, but it had been well meant. She was wanting to show, without making a fuss about it, that she was his, or that they were in some fashion together. She couldn’t and didn’t blame herself. In fact, having as well as love a streak of fighting temperament, she blamed him. Not all the time, not when she was most worried, but often she thought that he was behaving like a child. It was his fault.

Nevertheless, as the day of the dinner party came round, she was dreading it. She forced herself to go early across to Humphrey’s house. There, to her relief, she found him in the dining-room, affectionate and to all appearances composed. He was methodically sniffing at a couple of bottles of wine. ‘None of them has any idea of what they’re drinking, of course, except us,’ he said, as if this were the most ordinary of parties. ‘But we may as well consider ourselves.’

After they had gone upstairs to the drawing-room, Luria arrived first, then the Perrymans, then Celia. To Kate’s further relief, Humphrey became impeccably welcoming, his manner easy and outgoing. Whatever was the matter, none of them would have detected any sign. If she hadn’t known, she wasn’t sure, though she responded to each flicker of his nerves, that she would have done so herself. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so surprised or so relieved. She hadn’t seen him when he was leading a disciplined existence, where the objective mattered, not how one felt. Expressions of feeling couldn’t enter. You couldn’t be concerned with your own ego if you were occupied with others. Humphrey had become practised at that kind of self-neglect.

At the dinner table, Kate, not free from her anxieties, still enjoyed sitting at one end of the table, Humphrey at the other. It was the first time they had given a dinner, and quite as much as the simplest of women she didn’t deny the simple pleasure. She had seen to the food. With protective attention, she watched Humphrey drinking more than usual, but she trusted him to stay in control. In fact, there seemed less strain round the table than at that other dinner which she remembered at Tom Thirkill’s three months before. As she remembered it, there was a tightness in the circle of anxiety round her head.

Humphrey was alert, professionally competent, at showing interest in each of them. To Ralph Perryman, there was career talk. Humphrey hadn’t forgotten the conversation at the Perrymans’ house. Humphrey had been wondering, he said, how many people chose not to compete, not to stretch themselves.

‘More than we think, I fancy,’ Perryman replied with an air of comforting certainty.

‘If they have any capacity for coming to terms at all,’ Luria put in, ‘then plenty of men and women can make do on very little.’

‘Fortunately,’ Kate said. She couldn’t prevent herself glancing at Humphrey with a flash of happiness, which didn’t pass unnoticed.

‘No, I asked you before, how much effort is justified if one can’t do something of the first importance.’ Perryman was once more firm and certain. ‘Most of us can do little things, can’t we? How many of us can do the great things? If we can’t, what’s the use of making ourselves miserable, trying and not getting there? Any of us round this table could have done something if we’d spent our lives at it. And we should have been forgotten in ten years.’

‘Every human being who has ever lived will be forgotten in finite time,’ Luria said.

‘No, look, Professor Luria. You’re famous in your line, we all know that. No one else is. But you’re not Freud, are you? You’re not Marx, are you? When you look back, will it really seem worthwhile?’

None of them had heard Alec Luria treated quite like that. He took it with magisterial calm.

‘No man in his senses thinks he has done much,’ he said. ‘You just have to do what you can in your own place and time. In that sense, I agree with you, Doctor. But I don’t think it’s much excuse for relaxing into quietism, you know.’

After a time, Humphrey diverted these exchanges. Alec Luria wished to devote himself across the table to Celia. She was so quiet, it was impossible to feel how she was responding – except that she was pleased to be in company and, Kate thought, with good-natured malice, not disinclined to be courted.

To the unperturbed, the evening continued in peace. They might have observed that once, deliberately, but without exhibition, Humphrey made it clear that his and Kate’s was a serious affair and that he loved her. This wasn’t news to most of them. A few hours before, Luria had told Humphrey cheerfully, with a snorting volcanic laugh, that, among the many occasions when he had been wrong, this was the one he was the most glad of. It did seem to be news to Alice Perryman. It also seemed to be news to which she reacted with disapproval and regret. Otherwise, nothing in the way of incident or argument.

They stayed a long time at the dinner table, Humphrey finding another bottle of claret. They moved upstairs, and, in the English fashion, went on drinking. At about half-past eleven, Alec Luria was asking Celia if he could take her home, and at the same time the Perrymans said goodnight.