Dunster (25 page)

‘Of course. You must tell Crispin Bellhanger's lawyers.'

And then Fiona called out from the kitchen. The girl groom came in with Charlie Riggs and after that I got little further information from Major Jaunty Blair.

I am an accountant and not a lawyer. If I had had any proper legal training, or perhaps if I had not been so elated by a story which exculpated Cris, I should not have left Blair Cottage without a signed statement from Jaunty. Instead of getting that, I wasted the rest of my time there in looking after the old rascal and allowed the most precious evidence – for this is what it seemed to be at the time – to slip through my fingers. ‘Don't blame yourself for a moment,' Cris said afterwards. ‘You did absolutely all you could and I shall be forever grateful.' Of course he would say that, out of pure kindness, but I went on blaming myself even after the trial was over.

I did ring Justin Glover. I drove into Dulverton as I'd offered to replenish the stock of whisky, and I telephoned from the post office. I recounted the whole story and Justin said he was a little disorganized at the moment as Theodora, the six-year-old, was having ‘the old ear trouble, only worse' and his wife, Jenny, was getting into a bit of a lather about it and he'd probably have to slip off home early. He'd fix up for someone to come down in the next day or two and he hoped to get Jaunty to swear an affidavit, or at least sign a proof of evidence. He congratulated me and then asked who the hell I thought had banged Jaunty up in the luton.

‘God knows.'

‘I suppose someone might've played a practical joke?'

‘I don't think it was the girl groom. Or her boyfriend. They seemed genuinely upset. I don't know about Jaunty's other acquaintances. Some of them might be rather dubious.'

There was a silence and then Justin Glover said, ‘I hope it isn't going to be one of those sort of cases.'

‘Which sort of cases?'

‘Witnesses being got at. Anyway, thanks, Philip. I'll get someone down to him as soon as possible.' As it turned out, as soon as possible was far too late.

When I got back to Blair Cottage, Fiona and Charlie Riggs went off with Montgomery to the show and I managed to call Mike at her mother's house in Chester. Jaunty, I told her, had had an accident, the lorry door had jammed and he'd been shut in, which upset him rather. He was a good deal better now. ‘Don't want to speak to her.' Jaunty waved a dismissive hand from the sofa and said in a harsh and penetrating whisper, ‘The woman'll only fuss. Just tell her to get herself back down here tooty sweet. Plenty for her to do, what with the mess she's allowed the place to get into.' As a result of constant recourse to the medicinal whisky bottle Jaunty was not in a very good condition to receive Mike, so I told her there was no desperate hurry. She said she'd get up to London that evening and stay the night with Beth, which of course meant spending the evening with Dunster. She could get to Taunton quite early the next morning and Fiona would drive over and meet her train.

‘Bloody women!' Jaunty said. ‘There're never anywhere when you need them. You're not going to leave me alone here tonight, are you, Progmire?'

‘Well, I had thought of driving back quite soon.'

‘I'd honestly rather you didn't. For God's sake, wait until Mike gets herself down here.' He looked up at me and once more I thought of an animal at bay, which he had hunted. ‘Do that for me, won't you, Progmire? After all, you can't say I haven't done my bit for your boss.' That was true, so I agreed with reluctance.

Around six o'clock Fiona and Charlie came back with Montgomery in the lorry. She told Jaunty that his horse had performed magnificently with the hounds. Later she helped me get his supper. He ordered baked beans on toast, now with two eggs and two rashers of bacon. This meal was over-ambitious. He pushed it away half-eaten and told us, ‘Get me up to bloody Bedfordshire!' Charlie Riggs and I supported him up the stairs and into a room where the bed hadn't been made during Mike's absence, clothes were on the floor and the ashtray on the bedside table was overflowing with small cigar butts. We got him undressed with difficulty and left him with relief.

So I slept that night, as I had once done so happily, in Beth's small bedroom, among the rosettes and books on the care of ponies, and the photographs of the child and teenage Bethany clearing jumps or receiving cups at gymkhanas. I felt tired and slept well, confident that Dunster was defeated and Cris out of trouble. In the morning I took Jaunty a cup of tea. He lay awkwardly in bed, one arm thrown up across his forehead as though to ward off a blow. When I put the tea beside him, he opened one suspicious eye and said, ‘The bloody woman not back yet, I suppose?'

‘The train gets in at eleven. Fiona's going to meet her.'

‘I think I'll stay in bed. Tell you the truth. Don't feel quite the ticket.'

‘Rest,' I said, and sat down beside him. ‘You probably need it.' I also thought he'd got the most prodigious hangover. ‘Only I just meant to ask you. When you wrote to me ...'

‘Got you down because you can see a bit far through a bloody brick wall.'

‘Well, were you going to ask my advice about whether you should tell our solicitor about the German captain?'

"Course I was. I was going to give them the whole story. If you advised me to do so, Progmire. I honestly wanted to help old Cris. No need for that. Bloody uncalled for and out of order.'

‘No need for what, Jaunty?' His voice had become faint. I sat nearer to him, eager to learn the truth.

‘No need for what happened. No need for that at all. I wasn't about to let down Captain Cris.' Then his one open eye closed and he told me no more about his imprisonment in the luton.

I went downstairs and read back numbers of
Country Life
and was bored to death with stately homes and Stubbs paintings. Royal Worcester and breeding Palominos, when Fiona drove up with Mike.

‘It came as an awful shock to him,' I told her.

‘It would do. Jaunty wouldn't like to be shut up in anything. It was the tanks, you know.'

‘Yes.'

‘The tanks in the desert. That war! It's amazing how long it takes some people to get over it.'

‘Amazing.'

‘How on earth did it happen? Has he told you?'

‘No,' I said truthfully. ‘He hasn't told me that at all.'

‘Beth and I were wondering why on earth did he ask you down?'

‘He wanted to ask my advice about something.'

‘About this wretched law case?'

‘Yes. About that.' Mike was growing old. She was vague and probably quite innocent of all knowledge of Jaunty's affairs. But she had been with Dunster and I thought it better not to tell her anything more. So, for the last time in my life, I said goodbye to Blair Cottage.

Justin Glover's representative didn't go down for two days. When he telephoned from the station, Mike told him that the doctor was with them. Jaunty had had a stroke in the night. He couldn't move his right arm and had totally lost the power of speech.

I wrote a long letter to Beth saying how sorry I was and explaining most of what had happened and how I had done my best to look after her father. I got no answer; the lines of communication between us had virtually broken down.

The
Informer
is a weekly magazine which was started long before the last war and even before people like Cris and Jaunty were born. Its circulation has been falling steadily over the last decade and its brand of earnest, puritanical and self-righteous socialism has made it acceptable only to a dwindling number of lecturers, social workers and school teachers. The book reviews are still pretty good, however, and the theatre criticism excellent. For that reason a copy was usually to be found in the Mummery bar and I was on my way through a lot of statistics on glue-sniffing, and a lengthy denunciation of the government's policy on food additives, towards an assessment of the latest
Hamlet
at Stratford, when I came upon a piece headed
THE BATTLE OF POMERIGGIO: THE ESTABLISHMENT CLOSES RANKS.

The facts of the libel were set out and the progress of the action reported. Cris was depicted as one of the much-favoured ‘great and good', a liberal millionaire who had a large country house, belonged to the best clubs and knew all the ‘best' people. Dick Dunster, ‘no stranger to
Informer
readers', was the first investigative journalist to expose this hollow man who, ‘through his sway over Megapolis TV, exercises considerably more power over the nation than his close friend the Prime Minister'

‘Sir Crispin Bellhanger,' the article continued, ‘is nothing more nor less than a war criminal who, after half a century on the run, has at last had his collar fingered.

‘The vital witnesses in the forthcoming trial,' the writer went on, are old soldiers and no doubt the powers that be will try every possible means of silencing them or persuading them not to grass on such a prominent member of the old boy net. The pressure on witnesses, so the word goes in legal circles, is being applied by Sir Crispin's confidential assistant, a shadowy accountant named Philip Progmire, who, although an enthusiastic amateur actor in his spare time, shuns the limelight in his professional life. His personality is said to be so negative that one Megapolis executive mentioned that his colleagues often start confidential conversations before they have noticed that Progmire has, in his unobtrusive fashion, “slithered into the room”. He recently visited a retired army officer who was to be an important witness for Dunster's defence, travelling all the way down to the West Country to do so. Speculation is rife as to what was said on this occasion, but the hard fact is that this tough old campaigner, ex-desert rat and hero of the SAS, was so alarmed by what the devious Progmire had to tell him that he suffered a stroke and may now be incapable of giving evidence for either party. All of which only goes to show that when it comes to behind-the-scenes manipulation, the “great and good” have fewer holds barred than any of us.'

Lucy, sitting beside me and holding a pint of beer that seemed too heavy for her thin arm, said, ‘You're jolly lucky.'

‘Why?'

‘You've been libelled too. You ought to be able to collect some wonderful tax-free damages from the
Informer
Who wrote it? – Laurence Anderson Ertes. What an extraordinary name. Do you know him?'

‘Well, I think I might.'

‘Who is he?'

‘Usually known by his first two initials. L. A. Ertes.'

She shook her head slowly, not understanding, and took a gulp of beer.

‘Laertes,' I told her ‘Although he never played the part. There was talk of offering it to him.'

‘A friend of yours?'

‘Of course. It takes a close friend to write stuff like that about a person.'

Curiously enough I didn't feel hurt or worried or even particularly angry. Being angry with Dunster, in any event, seemed as futile as raging at the rain that fell each day when it was meant to be summer, or yelling curses at the traffic in the Commercial Road all the way to work, or railing at the fact of death. In a way I was proud of being identified with Cris, and coming in for this attack made me feel that I had atoned, to some extent, for my negligence in not taking a signed statement from Jaunty Blair before the great silence descended on him.

We had a calm conference in Justin Glover's office. Robbie Skeffington had written an opinion saying that we should issue another writ against the
Informer.
Cris, of course, was all for moderation. He said the
Informer
had a very small circulation and was hardly worth powder and shot. I had absolutely no desire to sue anyone or be involved personally in what seemed to me the horrors of litigation. In the end we decided that Justin would write a letter to the
Informer
denying any interference with witnesses and threatening immediate proceedings if any repetition of such a suggestion were to take place. I left the conference glad that Cris felt in a strong enough position to exercise such restraint. It was true that our principal witness, the one who might well have won the case, was now lost to us, such was the unsuccessful result of my so-called interference. But as Theodora's ear had cleared up nicely, Justin promised to devote all his energy and resources to the search for an Austrian refugee who was now a Mr Llewellyn, running a garage outside Cardiff. This was the war criminal who, as I now knew, had ordered the massacre at Pomeriggio. As for Dunster, it seemed that he had fired yet another random volley into the air and had wounded no one

Then I got a handsomely embossed card telling me that Marguerite Oakshott would be At Home from 6.30 p.m. onwards on Thursday week. On the back was scrawled in green ink: ‘Do try to come, and bring a friend. It's been
centuries
. M.'

I don't know how most men feel about their first experience of sex. I can imagine one of those articles in the Mr Chatterbox column of the
Sunday Fortress
in which various famous persons are rung up and asked to describe this particular incident in their lives. There would be little photographs of footballers, novelists and, probably by now, cabinet ministers (it'll soon be bishops) who would say: ‘How can I ever forget that time in the bicycle sheds, or in the long grass, or when we broke into the cricket pavilion, or in the front room by the Christmas tree when her parents were asleep upstairs – when I felt terrified, or liberated, or completely inadequate, and when Red Annie from the check-out, or whoever it might have been, was so wonderfully understanding?' Such people would no doubt leave us to think that so modest and wryly described an initiation had led to a long line of successes which had helped them in their ambition to become stars of the Mr Chatterbox column. One thing I'm sure about is that none of these famous persons, however distinguished, thinks of the first woman who ever made him completely welcome without some degree of gratitude and she will never be forgotten.