Farthing (16 page)

“And he shot Daddy too. I can’t imagine anyone would question it was self-defense.”

“Yes, that’s the right line to take,” Mummy said. “I think Mr. Carmichael will want to see you soon;

Doctor Chivers is still digging the bullet out of your father’s arm.”

She smiled at me with a wintry approval that was still the most I had won from her for several years, and

swept out of the library again.

I thought about what Daddy had been saying earlier about perverting the course of justice. It really was self-defense, but Mummy didn’t care about that at all. She wouldn’t even care if Daddy had just murdered some innocent farm worker; she just cared that there wasn’t a messy trial just at a time when there was a chance of Daddy getting a better government position.

“A Bolshevik assassin,” David said, looking almost pleased. “That should stop the police from being so suspicious of me. And see, your mother is starting to find it useful to have a banker in the family. I knew she would.”

Before I could say anything the door opened, revealing Jeffrey. “Inspector Carmichael would like to see you in the little office now, if you have time, Mrs. Kahn,” he said.

I hugged David and went off to give my evidence, much less happily than if Mummy hadn’t come to make sure I was going to tell them the right thing.

14

The whole incident of the rifleman infuriated Carmichael. It didn’t make sense; it didn’t form
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part of the picture he’d been carefully constructing at all. If he had a rifle, why gas Thirkie? And how could he have had access to the house—did he have an accomplice inside? None of it made sense. It was as if the jigsaw pieces he had been assembling had been shaken up so that what he had thought was a piece of sky turned out to be part of the eye of a whale. This always happened in a complex case, but there was something wrong about this, Carmichael felt, something he couldn’t put his finger on, that made him feel the whole business was a clever conjuring trick.

Lord Eversley sat on his horse, looking down over the hedge at the dead man. Yately bent over the body, examining it. Carmichael stood to the side, where he could watch Yately and spot anything he missed. Izzard leaned over, breathing heavily from the uphill run, blocking everyone else’s vision.

Royston came up just as Yately drew out the bloodstained card from the corpse’s pocket. A hammer and sickle leered up at them and the name Michael Patrick Guerin, 1769830. “Looks like you got it wrong this time,” Royston murmured in Carmichael’s ear.

Carmichael looked sideways at him and he subsided. He didn’t mind being chafed. It did look as if he’d had it wrong. It just didn’t feel as if this was right either.

“A Bolshevik, by God,” Lord Eversley said, craning forward to look at the card. “Haven’t potted one of them before.”

The word “potted” grated on Carmichael. It put the dead man in the class of game shot for sport.

Carmichael had often dealt with policemen and householders who had shot miscreants in self-defense.

He had noted that they usually had a sense of being appalled by what they had done, which sometimes they demonstrated by shocked silence, but more often led them to put up a defensive bluster about it.

Lord Eversley, despite being slightly wounded, sat imperturbably on his horse seeming merely pleased and curious.

The dead man was young, in his early twenties insofar as Carmichael could judge when most of his head was missing. He was splayed across the dark earth and the green sprouting wheat, where he had fallen back when the blast hit him. It had taken him in the side of the head, so he must have been running sideways, under the cover of the hedge. His rifle lay where it had fallen near his outstretched hand. Dead, whatever he was, and all his secrets dead with him.

“Izzard,” Carmichael said. “Follow the hedge for ten minutes and see what you find.”

“Yes, sir,” Izzard said, and set off downhill.

“It runs down between my land and Adams’s farm until it comes to the road,” Lord Eversley said.

“Thank you,” Carmichael said curtly.

Lord Eversley looked down at Royston. “How’s my daughter?”

“Mrs. Kahn’s safely in the house,” he said.

“Good. Not badly hurt?” Lord Eversley asked.

“It’s just a scrape,” Royston said, smiling about something. “They’re going to call the doctor to look at it, and at you too, sir.”

Lord Eversley merely grunted again. Carmichael had to admire his physical courage. He wasn’t sure he’d have sat calmly on a horse chatting about a corpse with a rifle wound in him. The newspapers used to characterize the British as “the bulldog race,” and there was something very like a bulldog about Lord

Eversley, ugly and unappealing, but unquestionably brave and tenacious.

“Irish.” Yately tapped the card.

Maybe, Carmichael thought, looking back to the body, but more likely London or Liverpool Irish than bog Irish. His clothes, clean but scruffy, were town clothes, and his shoes were
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definitely English. While you found individual Irishmen anywhere in the world when there was a scrap going, the Comintern got short shrift in the Republic these days.

Yately checked another pocket and drew out an identity card. “This is made out in the name of Alan

Brown,” he said.

“So, he operated under a pseudonym!” Lord Eversley said.

“If he was Irish, and a Communist, he’d have had trouble doing much in this country without good false papers,” Yately said.

“Is that a good false paper?” Carmichael asked. He took the card and turned it to the light.

Brown’s year of birth was given as 1925, which would have made him twenty-four. His place of birth was Runcorn, which Carmichael knew to be a hellhole of an industrial town very near Liverpool. It might be worth inquiring with the police there. It gave a current address in Bethnal Green, one of London’s East End slums. He would have judged the card genuine, which might mean it had been officially issued to someone who already had his false identity established. The address would certainly be worth checking in any case.

“Photograph with it,” Yately said, handing that up. Lord Eversley craned to see, so Carmichael glanced at it once and handed it over. It was an ordinary snap by a seaside photographer of a young woman, tolerably pretty, a servant or perhaps a shopworker, Carmichael would have guessed from her clothes and hair. Lord Eversley handed it back with a grunt and Carmichael turned it over to read the name of the photographer’s studio, which was printed in florid typescript: Burton and Sons, The Promenade, Leigh-on-Sea. Leigh was the smart part of Southend, near enough to London to do in a day on the railway.

“What’s this?” Yately said, in sudden excitement, pulling something from the outside pocket of the

corpse’s coat. Carmichael almost laughed when it proved to be a handful of shells for the rifle and half a bar of Fry’s chocolate. The other pocket contained a piece of string, two pound notes, and about five shillings in change, much more than Carmichael would have thought a man dressed like that would be carrying around. Carmichael took one of the coins, a bright copper farthing, and turned it in his hand, looking at the robin on the obverse. That was the other side of the British character: if die aristocracy were bulldogs, the poor were robins, hopping about cheerfully in hope of finding something good, never fleeing the winter but putting a good face on it, dowdy brown with one flash of bright color. Yet it was used as the symbol of this group of upper-class politicians—from the house, of course.

“Did this house give its name to the coin or the other way around?” he asked Lord Eversley, putting the coin into his pocket.

“Eh? The other way,” he said, taking the unexpected question in his stride. “One of my ancestors lent a devil of a lot of money to Henry VII, and in return he handed out this manor—this whole area they call the Farthings—for a farthing rent a year to the crown. We still keep up the payment. Wouldn’t like to get behind on a thing like that!” He wheezed with laughter. “A farthing wasn’t worth very much more then than it is now. It was still only a quarter of a penny.

Maybe Henry VII could have bought a loaf of bread with it, while I doubt George VI can get more than a slice!”

Izzard came back, red-faced and gesticulating. “I’ve found a motorcycle!” he said, when he was near enough to hail them. “Under the hedge down there, by the road!”

Guerin/Brown could have run back to it in a couple of minutes, and been off and away before any search for him could have begun.

“The press are down there too, sir,” Izzard finished. “On the road, like.”

“It’s a public road,” Lord Eversley said, in evident annoyance.

Carmichael turned and saw a black closed Bentley that had to belong to a doctor crawling up the
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drive, following the same police van that had taken Thirkie’s body away. He picked up the rifle, carefully, checking it was unloaded.

“Royston, you take care of the bike, and tell the assembled gentlemen of the press that we’ll be making a statement—-Scotland Yard, tell them, in two hours, at the front gate. Izzard, help Inspector Yately with the corpse. When you’ve finished checking it here, it wants to go back to Winchester for an autopsy.

Lord Eversley, the doctor’s here, we should go back to the house. I’ll want to talk to you when he’s had a chance to patch you up a bit.”

“He fired at me, I fired at him, I was lucky, he wasn’t, that’s all there is to it,” Lord Eversley said.

Carmichael was horribly sure that he’d stick to just that, without detail. Yet bluff and bulldog-like as he seemed, he wasn’t a fool. No fool could run several companies and help run the country the way

Eversley did. Carmichael watched him riding down towards the stables as he followed him down towards the house. Not a fool, though his exterior made you think he was. What a pity he’d killed the rifleman.

A motorcycle, he thought, was the perfect escape vehicle for these little country roads; it could go much faster than any car. Guerin/Brown had been intending to shoot and get away fast. How would he have hidden the rifle? How did he, when he came here in the first place? Better ask for anybody who might have seen him. That would be something concrete to ask the press to do, and it might lead to something.

“What kind of rifle is it?” Stebbings asked.

“Perfectly ordinary Lee-Enfield,” Carmichael said, glancing at it where he had leaned it in the corner behind the desk. He noticed something anomalous and picked it up to check. “Hold on—no it isn’t, by

God, it looks like one, but actually it’s a .22.”

“A popgun?” Stebbings sounded a little taken aback. “You can kill someone with a .22, I suppose, but you don’t need a license for one.

“No,” Carmichael said, putting the rifle down again. “It’s still self-defense—when someone’s shooting at you, you don’t stop to ask the caliber of the weapon. But it’s a funny thing to choose.”

“Perhaps it’s all he could get hold of,” Stebbings suggested. “You can buy one of those anywhere. Kids use them.”

“Ones that look like a real rifle?”

“Anywhere. They’re rather popular with villains, actually, people who want to intimidate with a gun but don’t want the extra time they’ll serve for having one. But mostly it’s kids who want a rifle just like a real one.”

“It still seems like a funny choice for an assassin. Not much stopping power. You can buy a shotgun anywhere as well,” Carmichael said, and sighed. “Well, check into all of that. They’ll be sending you down the corpse’s fingerprints from Winchester.” He made a note to remind Yately about that. “Have you got anything else for me while I’m on?”

“We’re still working on things. We’re not going to be able to do Kahn’s flat before tonight.”

“Probably not important now anyway,” Carmichael said.

“You think the Bolshie gunman killed Thirkie too?”

Carmichael hesitated, and the line to London hummed in his ear as the wind blew through the wires connecting them. “No,” he said. “Maybe, though if he did I don’t know how, or why he used the method he did. It doesn’t fit. There’s something that isn’t right about all of this.”

“Well, one other thing,” Stebbings said. “It’s very small, but you never know. You asked if any of the people on your list had criminal records, and we said they don’t. That’s true as far as it goes, but one of them would have, except that he got it erased. I happen to remember it because
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I was involved. Mark

Normanby, MP—he was one of those arrested and brought in when the Metropolitan force did that big sweep in Charing Cross Underground that time, remember?”

“Oh yes.” Carmichael did remember. Charing Cross Underground station was a notorious haunt of men looking for youths, and of youths from the slums who were prepared to go with a man for money, or perhaps beat him up and steal his valuables if they saw their way clear to doing that. The victims in those cases would not complain. They could not afford to say why they had invited someone of that nature into their home. The police raided the Underground station frequently, without making much of a dent in the traffic that went on. Then, two years ago, the Mets had gone in in force, at all entrances, and arrested hundreds of people. For several weeks, the station returned to respectability. Then of course, they started to come back, those desperate enough to risk it at first, and then more and more as they started to feel safe again.

He especially remembered the raid because it had led to a quarrel with Jack, who had seen it as a sign the laws against homosexuality were about to be enforced. Carmichael had argued that these men who preyed on youths were no brothers of his. The youths might not even be queer.

Some of the men, he had

heard, preferred it if they were not, if they hated what they were doing. He said it was more in the way of a crackdown on prostitution. He said there was no purpose in feeling solidarity with men who exploited others that way. They had made it up at last, but not before Jack had called him a policeman, which of course he was.

“Normanby was one of those caught in flagrante, in the bathroom, with his pecker in the mouth of a boy no more than fifteen. The boy’s in prison now, but Normanby pulled strings and insisted the evidence against him disappear—he’s down in the records as an innocent bystander.