A Mansion and its Murder (16 page)

‘You don’t give me a very pleasant impression of your father.’

‘I guess I don’t. I guess I can’t. He’s more … pathetic than pleasant. I’m his favourite, but he can be a real pain a lot of the time.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose I’ll ever meet him, and
it’s a good thing we two can jog along without any mutual suspicions.’

‘That’s right. I’m not a bludger. I wanted to clear this up, because there’s something I want to ask you, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way, get all suspicious.’

‘Oh?’

‘You see, there is something else I’d like to get to see, while I’m staying with you.’

I anticipated him, to cover his embarrassment.

‘The Bank, of course. You’d like to see the Bank.’

He let out a long breath of relief. ‘You realised? You’re very sharp.’

‘I’m a banker and a politician. One develops a nose for what people want.’

‘You’re right, of course. I would very much like to see the Bank.’

‘Well, I don’t see why that shouldn’t be arranged.’

It was a great pleasure, nearly a week later, to go up to London by train with Ed. We parked the car in the tiny forecourt of the station, and waited for the early train that deigned to stop at so unpretentious a stop on the LMS network. That it stopped at all was probably a relic of Blakemere houseparty days, when on Monday mornings guests without cars would cluster on Melbury station, often with their servants, everyone pleased to escape from the gargantuan excesses of Blakemere to a world more adapted to an ordinary human scale.

‘I go first class as a government minister, even such a very junior one,’ I said to Ed. ‘You can
come with me. We might as well make the most of it while we can. First class will probably be abolished after nationalisation.’

‘I can’t see that it makes much difference,’ said Ed disparagingly, after the train had steamed ponderously in and we had gone through a filthy door into a distinctly tatty carriage.

‘It’s really just a question of the number of people around you,’ I said. ‘Though that’s a matter of temperament, of course. I’ve been used to solitude from childhood, and I’ve come to like it. And I’ve always got government papers to go over, which I can’t do with people looking over my shoulder.’

However, I did very little of going through black boxes on that journey. Fortunately I only had routine meetings in my diary when I got to the Foreign Office later in the day. It was a delight to point out all the places of interest on our short but very slow journey to London. And the first point of interest was the view of Blakemere from the distance.

‘Magic!’ said Ed, with wonder in his eyes.

‘You’ve no idea how many thousands of cartloads of earth went into the making of that setting,’ I said dampingly. ‘There’s that character in one of those awful Hemingway novels who
keeps asking his woman whether the earth moved for her after they’ve made love. Well, it certainly moved for my great-grandfather.’

‘You mean it’s not – not
natural
?’ Ed asked.

‘Very un. Like much of what has gone on there.’

Ten minutes later, we saw Tillyards, also in the distant mist.

‘That’s where Gabriel South, whom you met last week, was brought up,’ I said. ‘In the coachman’s house, which you can’t see from here. His mother was the best friend I ever had, but his father was an unpleasant man.’

Ed took the opportunity to shoot at me a question he had obviously been wanting to ask.

‘Why didn’t you ever get married?’

‘Nobody asked me, sir,’ she said. That wasn’t an honest answer, and I amended it. ‘Oh, I expect they would have done, if I’d ever shown the slightest interest. For my money, if for nothing else. But I never developed a sense that would have told me when it was my money they were after, or when it was me – and, all things being equal, I assumed it was generally my money … That’s a fine Saxon church – one of very few in the country. Are you interested in churches?’

‘I’m willing to give them a go. In Australia a
nineteenth-century church is considered ancient.’

‘Nineteenth-century churches could come back into vogue,’ I said judiciously. ‘There are some decidedly attractive neo-Gothic ones.’

‘As opposed to houses, mansions, things like that,’ said Ed, with a wicked grin.

‘Domestic architecture? Never!’ I said magisterially, conscious that I might be proved wrong in Ed’s lifetime, but certainly not in mine.

‘The day war broke out’ – one can’t say that without thinking of the not very funny comedian on the wireless whose catchphrase it is. But there aren’t any convincing other ways of saying it. The day war broke out was a Sunday, and Blakemere was open to the public for the last time that summer. There was no member of the public in the house. Everybody was expecting the announcement that Chamberlain made on the BBC at eleven o’clock (and most people were half expecting the air to be immediately thick with enemy aircraft). I listened in the kitchens with the skeleton staff that was all the house boasted in 1939.

‘How incredibly feeble!’ I said, as he finished. I was not then a member of the Labour Party, but I quite soon became one.

‘But he’s done his best, poor man,’ protested the cook.

‘He sounds as if he’s taking it as a personal insult,’ I explained. ‘He’ll never rise to the occasion. Come along: the first thing to do is start shutting the house.’

I set them on to draping the furniture in dust sheets. We had collected them in readiness several days before, a whole roomful of them. I myself made a big, and unnecessary,
HOUSE
CLOSED
notice, and drove down to stick it on the gates. Then I went back up to the house and did the rounds of the principal rooms, picking out the pictures and objects which were of artistic value – the early Gainsborough, the Guardi, the School of Van Dyke – with a view to having them collected and put into store. I had got some way with the task when I realised that my secretary, Joyce Oldham, was showing signs of going to pieces, so I set her on to phoning round and sending messages via the postmistress at Melbury to men whom we would need in the next few days to board up the place. Some calls in I noted there was still a note of hysteria in her voice that would give a very bad impression, so I took over myself (she later went entirely to pieces, and I sent her out
of the way to the Shetlands, where she married a Norwegian sailor).

By mid afternoon there were nearly twenty men up at the house, most of them boarding up the windows, though I commandeered some of them to help me to move some basic items of furniture to the gatehouse, which had been disused for nearly fifteen years. One of the men who helped bring bed, tables, chairs, sideboard, and smaller essentials was Fred Burke, son of one of the Blakemere pensioners I was interested in. He had a small farm now, but he knew me quite well.

‘Reckon you’re right glad to be moving in here, Miss Sarah,’ he said, as we surveyed the little living room.

‘I am. It’s liberation. I should have done it years and years ago. I shall feel like a giant in a house like this, and it’ll be a good feeling.’

‘Was that why you disliked the old house?’

‘One of the many reasons. Of course I know that your father was one of the old, faithful servants up there, Fred.’

He grinned slowly. ‘Oh, he never liked the place, miss. Loved the grounds, they were
his
in his estimation, his territory, like, but he never felt comf’table in the house.’

‘Was there any particular reason for that?’

He looked suddenly down at the floor. ‘Same as you, I expect, miss. Made him feel small.’

‘Your father enjoyed a very generous pension from the Fearing family.’

‘Oh, my father was very grateful for that. He’d worked here since the house was barely begun, moved a lot of the earth for the site, and he was grateful for all the consideration shown, and the good wage.’ He looked at me meaningfully. ‘My father would do anything for the Fearings, Miss Sarah.’

‘Fred, what
exactly
do you mean by that?’

‘Oh, just generally, Miss Sarah. Like he felt grateful for a lifetime of work.’

We were interrupted by a ring on the telephone I’d had installed in the gatehouse earlier that week. There had been an air raid alert over London. When I finished the call, Fred had taken himself off. Once upon a time, a local who was talking to a Fearing would wait until he was dismissed by a word or a nod. Times had changed. I had helped to change them, and I was glad.

I had no fears that the Führer had put Blakemere at the top of his list of war targets. He was not that discriminating. I extinguished
all the lights, and in the gathering dark I walked toward my old home. The boarding-up had only just started, and would take days yet, but a significant number of windows around the Grand Entrance had plywood panels nailed over them, giving them a painful, blinded appearance. The house was closed down, just as the country was cut off.

You won’t be opened up for a while
, I thought. Then I amended that:
I have just had you closed down for good
.

When we got to Marylebone we took the Underground to the Bank. Ed was obviously surprised: he must have expected I would be met by an official car – either one from the Foreign Office, or one from Fearing’s.

‘We don’t do things that way any more,’ I said, speaking for both institutions. ‘It may come back, but at the moment it’s Shanks’s pony.’

Once down in the bowels of the earth, as he put it, Ed was enchanted with the new experience. He had used buses on his previous trips to London, and I suspected he had been more nervous of going underground than he would have admitted, and was glad of a companion. Once down the escalator he took to it
immediately, and felt the speed and convenience of the ride more than he felt the loss of anything to see.

‘Mostly it’s just tall buildings, and you don’t know what they are,’ he said, with his naive honesty. ‘With now and then something popping up that you think you should recognise, only you don’t.’

We got out at Monument, and walked to Lombard Street, with me pointing out a few of the more notable institutions, as well as what had been destroyed on the terrible bombed sites. He had seen plenty of these on previous visits, but found the destruction in the City itself sobering.

‘They really had it in for you guys,’ he said, before he went silent.

Fearing’s Bank survived, however, as did Blakemere, proof that the protecting gods were blind. The Bank is a dirty, heavy, but confidence-inducing block of stone from the 1840’s, but once inside the working habits have changed a great deal from the Dickensian-style counting house it must have been then. Many of the modern practices were brought in by me. I was greeted with great respect by newer employees, mostly returned from the war, and with respectful friendliness by the older ones.
Ed was quiet and watchful, eager to know how things were done, anxious to catch the tone. I took him straight to Digby’s office – my old one, on the third floor – and introduced the pair to each other.

‘Our Australian relative,’ I said ambiguously. ‘Do you have anyone spare who could show him round, tell him what we do, for an hour or so?’

A young man was found, someone who has been invalided out of the forces after D-day, and was sufficiently up in the Firm’s affairs by now to make a good guide of around Ed’s age. I sat in the seat of the suppliant customer or client. Digby could never persuade me to resume my old seat, which was now, and maybe would be forever, his. Fearing’s Bank, like Blakemere, was part of my past.

‘Seems a nice enough lad,’ he said in his dry, cool way.

‘Seems so,’ I agreed. ‘Can’t say I really know him yet.’

‘And … what are his plans?’

‘You mean what is his interest in the Bank?’

He gestured that I guessed right.

‘Can’t say I know that yet, either. And I don’t know what I’d do if he did show an
interest … I do realise that you and your children are concerned in the whole business of what happens to the Bank, Digby.’

He shifted in his seat. ‘I rely on your fairness, Sarah. It’s something I’ve never doubted. You’ve always been completely open, and completely even-handed. Being your deputy here has been one of the great satisfactions of my life, and I hope I haven’t been a disappointment.’

‘You haven’t.’

‘Anything else is a bonus. Unlike you I’m a natural conservative, small and large c, and I’d like to see the Bank remain in family hands. Beyond that, I know that it’s all up to you.’

‘You’re too good for this world,’ I commented drily.

He smiled his tiny smile. ‘Are you quite sure who this lad is now?’ he asked. He was a man who liked his world ordered, his facts certainties.

‘Not quite. In fact not at all. He says he’s the grandson of Frank Fearing.’

Digby betrayed no emotion.

‘That fits in, doesn’t it? Or at least it’s perfectly possible. I never heard that anyone knew anything about him, other than that he went to Australia.’

I watched Digby’s face as I brought my
suspicions out into the open with him for the first time.

‘I have always been of the opinion that he never left Blakemere. That he died on the night of the big family conference about his marriage.’

His was a banker’s face. It didn’t flabbergast easily. He frowned, but a mere suspicion of a frown.

‘Have you any reason to think that?’

‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘Did no rumours of the kind ever come to you? From your father, for instance? He was there.’

‘Nothing at all. He was a wily old bird. He could keep his counsel. Especially if it was made worth his while.’

‘It would have been. His later years were more prosperous than his earlier ones, weren’t they?’

‘Oh, yes. That was because of work he was doing for the Bank, he always said.’

‘Hmmm. Could be true. But then
that
could have been part of the bribe. Of course Aunt Clare’s son Leopold could have changed his name when he went to Australia. He had the sort of career where name changes might be advisable from time to time. And Frank was a family name.’

He considered this. ‘Would he have changed it to the name of someone who was presumed himself to have gone to Australia?’

‘He might. The name Fearing would have given more confidence than his own, and Frank was one of the senior branch. Perhaps he
wanted
to create confusion, and profit by it.’

‘What do we know about this boy Ed’s grandfather?’

‘Not much. He died when Ed was about five. A bit of a joker, Ed says, which I suspect would apply to both. Ed just remembers that, and a long, grey beard. But he said that he was married to a much younger, strong-minded lady, who was doing most of the running of what he calls the “property” by then, and took it over after he died.’

‘Which would be about … 1930?’

‘Roughly. That’s what I thought.’

Digby was good at quick sums.

‘That fits in well with your uncle Frank.’

‘Fits in well enough with either of them.’