A Murder of Quality

by John le Carré

  3 The Night of the Murder

  The seven-five from Waterloo to Yeovil is not a popular train, though it provides an excellent breakfast. Smiley had no difficulty in finding a first-class compartment to himself. It was a bitterly cold day, dark and the sky heavy with snow. He sat huddled in a voluminous travelling coat of Continental origin, holding in his gloved hands a bundle of the day’s papers. Because he was a precise man and did not care to be hurried, he had arrived thirty minutes before the train was due to depart. Still tired after the stresses of the previous night, when he had sat up talking with Ailsa Brimley until Heaven knew what hour, he was disinclined to read. Looking out of the window on to an almost empty station, he caught sight, to his great surprise, of Miss Brimley making her way along the platform, peering in at the windows, a carrier bag in her hand. He lowered the window and called to her.

  ‘My dear Brim, what are you doing here at this dreadful hour? You should be in bed.’

  She sat down opposite him and began unpacking her bag and handing him its contents: thermos, sandwiches, and chocolate.

  ‘I didn’t know whether there was a breakfast car,’ she explained; ‘and besides, I wanted to come and see you off. You’re such a dear, George, and I wish I could come with you, but Unipress would go mad if I did. The only time they notice you is when you’re not there.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the papers?’ he asked.

  ‘Just briefly, on the way here. They seem to think it wasn’t him, but some madman …’

  ‘I know, Brim. That’s what Fielding said, wasn’t it?’ There was a moment’s awkward silence.

  ‘George, am I being an awful ass, letting you go off like this? I was sure last night, but now I wonder …’

  ‘After you left I rang Ben Sparrow of Special Branch. You remember him, don’t you? He was with us in the war. I told him the whole story.’

  ‘George! At three in the morning?’

  ‘Yes. He’s ringing the Divisional Superintendent at Carne. He’ll tell him about the letter, and that I’m coming down. Ben had an idea that a man named Rigby would be handling the case. Rigby and Ben were at police college together.’ He looked at her kindly for a moment. ‘Besides, I’m a man of leisure, Brim. I shall enjoy the change.’

  ‘Bless you, George,’ said Miss Brimley, woman enough to believe him. She got up to go, and Smiley said to her:

  ‘Brim, if you should need any more help or anything, and can’t get hold of me, there’s a man called Mendel who lives in Mitcham, a retired police inspector. He’s in the book. If you get hold of him and mention me, he’ll do what he can for you. I’ve booked a room at the Sawley Arms.’

  Alone again, Smiley surveyed uneasily the assortment of food and drink which Miss Brimley had provided. He had promised himself the luxury of breakfast in the restaurant car. He would keep the sandwiches and coffee for later, that would be the best thing; for lunch, perhaps. And he would breakfast properly.

  In the restaurant car Smiley read first the less sensational reports on the death of Stella Rode. It appeared that on Wednesday evening Mr and Mrs Rode had been guests at dinner of Mr Terence Fielding, the senior housemaster at Carne and brother of the late Adrian Fielding, the celebrated French scholar who had vanished during the war while specially employed by the War Office. They had left Mr Fielding’s house together at about ten to eleven and walked the half mile from the centre of Carne to their house, which stood alone at the edge of the famous Carne playing fields. As they reached their house Mr Rode remembered that he had left at Mr Fielding’s house some examination papers which urgently required correction that night. (At this point Smiley remembered that he had failed to pack his dinner-jacket, and that Fielding would almost certainly ask him to dine.) Rode determined to walk back to Fielding’s house and collect the papers, therefore, starting back at about five past eleven. It appears that Mrs Rode made herself a cup of tea and sat down in the drawing-room to await his return.

  Adjoining the back of the house is a conservatory, the inner door of which leads to the drawing-room. It was there that Rode eventually found his wife when he returned. There were signs of a struggle, and certain inexpensive articles of jewellery were missing from the body. The confusion in the conservatory was terrible. Fortunately there had been a fresh fall of snow on Wednesday afternoon, and detectives from Dorchester were examining the footprints and other traces early on Thursday morning. Mr Rode had been treated for shock at Dorchester Central Hospital. The police wished to interview a woman from the adjacent village of Pylle who was locally known as ‘Mad Janie’ on account of her eccentric and solitary habits. Mrs Rode, who was well known in Carne for her energetic work on behalf of the International Refugee Year, had apparently shown a charitable interest in her welfare, and she had vanished without trace since the night of the murder. The police were currently of the opinion that the murderer had caught sight of Mrs Rode through the drawing-room window (she had not drawn the curtains) and that Mrs Rode had admitted the murderer at the front door in the belief that it was her husband returning from Mr Fielding’s house. The Home Office pathologist had been asked to conduct a post-mortem examination.

  The other reports were not so restrained: ‘Murder most foul has desecrated the hallowed playing fields of Carne’ one article began, and another, ‘Science teacher discovers murdered wife in blood-spattered conservatory’. A third screamed, ‘Mad woman sought in Carne murder’. With an expression of distaste, Smiley screwed up all the newspapers except the Guardian and The Times and tossed them on to the luggage rack.

  He changed at Yeovil for a local line to Sturminster, Okeford and Carne. It was something after eleven o’clock when he finally arrived at Carne station.

  He telephoned the hotel from the station and sent his luggage ahead by taxi. The Sawley Arms was only full at Commemoration and on St Andrew’s Day. Most of the year it was empty; sitting like a prim Victorian lady, its slate roof in the mauve of half-mourning, on ill-tended lawns midway between the station and Carne Abbey.

  Snow still lay on the ground, but the day was fine and dry, and Smiley decided to walk into the town and arrange to meet the police officer conducting the investigation of the murder. He left the station, with its foretaste of Victorian austerity, and walked along the avenue of bare trees which led towards the great Abbey tower, flat and black against the colourless winter sky. He crossed the Abbey Close, a serene and beautiful square of medieval houses, the roofs snow-covered, the white lawns shaded with pin strokes of grass. As he passed the west door of the Abbey, the soft snow creaking where he trod, the clock high above him struck the half-hour, and two knights on horseback rode out from their little castle over the door, and slowly raised their lances to each other in salute. Then, as if they were all part of the same clockwork mechanism, other doors all round the Close opened too, releasing swarms of black-coated boys who stampeded across the snow towards the Abbey. One boy passed so close that his gown brushed against Smiley’s sleeve. Smiley called to him as he ran past:

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Sext,’ shouted the boy in reply, and was gone.

  He passed the main entrance to the school and came at once upon the municipal part of the town, a lugubrious nineteenth-century fairyland in local stone, stitched together by a complexity of Gothic chimneys and crenel windows. Here was the town hall, and beside it, with the flag of St George floating at its masthead, the Carne Constabulary Headquarters, built ninety years ago to withstand the onslaughts of archery and battering rams.

  He gave his name to the Duty Sergeant, and asked to see the officer investigating the death of Mrs Rode. The Sergeant, an elderly, inscrutable man, addressed himself to the telephone with a certain formality, as if he were about to perform a difficult conjuring trick. To Smiley’s surprise, he was told that Inspector Rigby would be pleased to see him at once, and a police cadet was summoned to show him the way. He was led at a spanking pace up the wide staircase in the centre of the hall, and in a matter of moments fou
nd himself before the Inspector.

  He was a very short man, and very broad. He could have been a Celt from the tin-mines of Cornwall or the collieries of Wales. His dark grey hair was cut very close; it came to a point in the centre of his brow like a devil’s cap. His hands were large and powerful, he had the trunk and stance of a wrestler, but he spoke slowly, with a Dorset burr to his soft voice. Smiley quickly noticed that he had one quality rare among small men: the quality of openness. Though his eyes were dark and bright and the movements of his body swift, he imparted a feeling of honesty and straight-dealing.

  ‘Ben Sparrow rang me this morning, sir. I’m very pleased you’ve come. I believe you’ve got a letter for me.’

  Rigby looked at Smiley thoughtfully over his desk, and decided that he liked what he saw. He had got around in the war and had heard a little, just a very little, of the work of George Smiley’s Service. If Ben said Smiley was all right, that was good enough for him – or almost. But Ben had said more than that.

  ‘Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I’d give my eyes for. Had a very nasty war. Very nasty indeed.’

  Well, he looked like a frog, right enough. Short and stubby, round spectacles with thick lenses that made his eyes big. And his clothes were odd. Expensive, mind, you could see that. But his jacket seemed to drape where there wasn’t any room for drape. What did surprise Rigby was his shyness. Rigby had expected someone a little brash, a little too smooth for Carne, whereas Smiley had an earnest formality of manner which appealed to Rigby’s conservative taste.

  Smiley took the letter from his wallet and put it on the desk, while Rigby extracted an old pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from a battered metal case and adjusted the ends carefully over his ears.

  ‘I don’t know if Ben explained,’ said Smiley, ‘but this letter was sent to the correspondence section of a small Nonconformist journal to which Mrs Rode subscribed.’

  ‘And Miss “Fellowship” is the lady who brought you the letter?’

  ‘No; her name is Brimley. She is the editor of the magazine. “Fellowship” is just a pen-name for the correspondence column.’

  The brown eyes rested on him for a moment.

  ‘When did she receive this letter?’

  ‘Yesterday, the seventeenth. Thursday’s the day they go to press, their busy day. The afternoon mail doesn’t get opened till the evening, usually. This was opened about six o’clock, I suppose.’

  ‘And she brought it straight to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She worked for me during the war, in my department. She was reluctant to go straight to the police – I was the only person she could think of who wasn’t a policeman,’ he added stupidly. ‘Who could help, I mean.’

  ‘May I ask what you yourself, sir, do for a living?’

  ‘Nothing much. A little private research on seventeenth-century Germany.’ It seemed a very silly answer.

  Rigby didn’t seem bothered.

  ‘What’s this earlier letter she talks about?’

  Smiley offered him the second envelope, and again the big, square hand received it.

  ‘It appears she won this competition,’ Smiley explained. ‘That was her winning entry. I gather she comes from a family which has subscribed to the magazine since its foundation. That’s why Miss Brimley was less inclined to regard the letter as nonsense. Not that it follows.’

  ‘Not that what follows?’

  ‘I meant that the fact that her family had subscribed to a journal for fifty years does not logically affect the possibility that she was unbalanced.’

  Rigby nodded, as if he saw the point, but Smiley had an uncomfortable feeling that he did not.

  ‘Ah,’ said Rigby, with a slow smile. ‘Women, eh?’

  Smiley, completely bewildered, gave a little laugh. Rigby was looking at him thoughtfully.

  ‘Know any of the staff, do you, sir?’

  ‘Only Mr Terence Fielding. We met at an Oxford dinner some time ago. I thought I’d call round and see him. I knew his brother pretty well.’

  Rigby appeared to stiffen slightly at the mention of Fielding, but he said nothing, and Smiley went on:

  ‘It was Fielding I rang when Miss Brimley brought me the letter. He told me the news. That was last night.’

  ‘I see.’

  They looked at one another again in silence, Smiley discomfited and slightly comic, Rigby appraising him, wondering how much to say.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ he said at last.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Smiley replied. ‘Miss Brimley wanted to come herself, but she has her paper to run. She attached great importance, you see, to doing all she could for Mrs Rode, even though she was dead. Because she was a subscriber, I mean. I promised to see that the letter arrived quickly in the right hands. I don’t imagine there’s much else I can do. I shall probably stay on for a day or two just to have a word with Fielding … go to the funeral, I suppose. I’ve booked in at the Sawley Arms.’

  ‘Fine hotel, that.’

  Rigby put his spectacles carefully back into their case and dropped the case into a drawer.

  ‘Funny place, Carne. There’s a big gap between the Town and Gown, as we say; neither side knows nor likes the other. It’s fear that does it, fear and ignorance. It makes it hard in a case like this. Oh, I can call on Mr Fielding and Mr D’Arcy and they say, “Good day, Sergeant,” and give me a cup of tea in the kitchen, but I can’t get among them. They’ve got their own community, see, and no one outside it can get in. No gossip in the pubs, no contacts, nothing … just cups of tea and bits of seed cake, and being called Sergeant.’ Rigby laughed suddenly, and Smiley laughed with him in relief. ‘There’s a lot I’d like to ask them, a lot of things; who liked the Rodes and who didn’t, whether Mr Rode’s a good teacher and whether his wife fitted in with the others. I’ve got all the facts I want, but I’ve got no clothes to hang on them.’ He looked at Smiley expectantly. There was a very long silence.

  ‘If you want me to help, I’d be delighted,’ said Smiley at last. ‘But give me the facts first.’

  ‘Stella Rode was murdered between about ten past eleven and quarter to twelve on the night of Wednesday the sixteenth. She must have been struck fifteen to twenty times with a cosh or bit of piping or something. It was a terrible murder … terrible. There are marks all over her body. At a guess I would say she came from the drawing-room to the front door to answer the bell or something, when she opened the door she was struck down and dragged to the conservatory. The conservatory door was unlocked, see?’

  ‘I see … It’s odd that he should have known that, isn’t it?’

  ‘The murderer may have been hiding there already: we can’t tell from the prints just there. He was wearing boots – Wellington boots, size 10½. We would guess from the spacing of the footprints in the garden that he was about six foot tall. When he had got her to the conservatory he must have hit her again and again – mainly on the head. There’s a lot of what we call travelled blood in the conservatory, that’s to say, blood spurted from an open artery. There’s no sign of that anywhere else.’

  ‘And no sign of it on her husband?’

  ‘I’ll come to that later, but the short answer is, no.’ He paused a moment and continued:

  ‘Now, I said there were footprints, and so there were. The murderer came through the back garden. Where he came from and went to, Heaven alone knows. You see, there are no tracks leading away – not Wellingtons. None at all. Of course, it’s possible the outgoing tracks followed the path to the front gate and got lost in all the to-ing and fro-ing later that night. But I don’t think we’d have lost them even then.’ He glanced at Smiley, then went on:

  ‘He left one thing behind him in the conservatory – an old cloth belt, navy blue, from a cheap overcoat by the look of it. We’re working on that now.’

  ‘Was she … robbed or anything?’

  ‘No sign of interference. She was wearing a string of
green beads round her neck, and they’ve gone, and it looks as though he tried to get the rings off her finger, but they were too tight.’ He paused.

  ‘I need hardly tell you that we’ve had reports from every corner of the country about tall men in blue overcoats and gumboots. But none of them had wings as far as I know. Or seven-league boots for jumping from the conservatory to the road.’

  They paused, while a police cadet brought in tea on a tray. He put it on the desk, looked at Smiley out of the corner of his eye and decided to let the Inspector pour out. He guided the teapot round so that the handle was towards Rigby and withdrew. Smiley was amused by the immaculate condition of the tray cloth, by the matching china and tea-strainer, laid before them by the enormous hands of the cadet. Rigby poured out the tea and they drank for a moment in silence. There was, Smiley reflected, something devastatingly competent about Rigby. The very ordinariness of the man and his room identified him with the society he protected. The nondescript furniture, the wooden filing cupboards, the bare walls, the archaic telephone with its separate earpiece, the brown frieze round the wall and the brown paint on the door, the glistening linoleum and the faint smell of carbolic, the burbling gas-fire, and the calendar from the Prudential – these were the evidence of rectitude and moderation; their austerity gave comfort and reassurance. Rigby continued:

  ‘Rode went back to Fielding’s house for the examination papers. Fielding confirms that, of course. He arrived at Fielding’s house at about 11.35, near as Fielding can say. He hardly spent any time there at all – just collected his papers at the door – they were in a small writing-case he uses for carrying exercise books. He doesn’t remember whether he saw anyone on the road. He thinks a bicycle overtook him, but he can’t be sure. If we take Rode’s word for it, he walked straight home. When he got there he rang the bell. He was wearing a dinner-jacket and so he hadn’t got his key with him. His wife was expecting him to ring the bell, you see. That’s the devil of it. It was a moonlit night, mind, and snow on the ground, so you could see a mighty long way. He called her, but she didn’t answer. Then he saw footprints going round to the side of the house. Not just footprints, but blood marks and the snow all churned up where the body had been dragged to the conservatory. But he didn’t know it was blood in the moonlight, it just showed up dark, and Rode said afterwards he thought it was the dirty water from the gutters running over on to the path.