Assassins

by Jim Eldridge

  Saunders said nothing. Instead, he smiled at Stark.

  ‘Your silence can be taken as an admission of guilt,’ continued Danvers calmly. ‘Which may be mitigated if you would advise us of your whereabouts on that evening.’

  Stark could see that Danvers’ calm manner, the long words, his way of speaking in quasi-legal language unsettled Saunders slightly. This wasn’t what the man had been expecting.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ he demanded. ‘Mitigated?’

  ‘To tend towards vindication,’ said Danvers. ‘Extenuation.’

  The wonders of a good education, Stark smiled inwardly to himself.

  Saunders looked bewildered, none the wiser, exactly as Danvers had intended. He shot a look at Stark, who remained silent. In fact, Stark turned away from Saunders’ look and gazed absently at a stain on the wall.

  ‘The question is,’ continued Danvers, ‘was the attack by you and Joseph West on Detective Chief Inspector Stark simply an assault, or was it attempted murder?’

  Saunders shot a look of hate at Stark, who remained impassive, ignoring him, looking around the interview room, seemingly studying it in some detail.

  ‘Why doesn’t he talk?’ hissed Saunders.

  ‘Was the idea of informing the police that the men who attacked DCI Stark were Irish yours or Peter Stamp’s idea?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing!’ snapped Saunders; and again he glowered at Stark.

  Stark remained silent, his manner deliberately casual, almost indifferent. He looked casually around the room, seemingly bored by the questions Danvers was putting to Saunders. Saunders’ angry glare was fixed on Stark, and he kept it on the DCI as Danvers asked, ‘What was the motive for your attack?’

  At that, Stark turned his attention to Saunders and smiled, a smug smirk of triumph.

  It was the smile that did it.

  ‘He knows why!’ shouted Saunders, and he leapt to his feet, his chair falling back and tumbling to the floor. He was shaking with anger, his finger pointing at Stark. ‘He killed my brother!’

  The sound of the shout and the chair falling over had brought a uniformed constable into the room. Danvers held up a hand to tell the constable to return outside. When the door had closed again, he looked at Saunders. ‘So the motive for your attack was revenge for the death of your brother,’ he said.

  ‘He killed him!’ hissed Saunders. ‘Murdered him! And he thought he’d got away with it!’

  Still Stark didn’t speak, but now the smile had gone and been replaced by a cold implacable stare at Saunders. Danvers shot a questioning look at Stark, asking, Shall I continue? Stark nodded.

  ‘Edward Saunders, you have admitted the attack on Detective Chief Inspector Stark, along with your accomplice, Joseph West. As you were armed with a knife, the charge will be attempted murder.’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to kill the bastard!’ hissed Saunders. ‘If his old man hadn’t come out, I’d have done it as well.’

  ‘Did Joseph West know that you intended to kill DCI Stark?’

  Saunders hesitated, then shook his head. ‘No. Joe just thought we was going to teach him a lesson.’

  ‘And Pete Stamp?’

  Again, Saunders shook his head. ‘He was just to tell a story to put you lot off the scent.’

  ‘Why Irishmen?’ asked Danvers.

  Saunders shrugged. ‘Cos there’s a lot of ’em in Camden Town.’

  Later, when Saunders had been returned to his cell, Stark gave Danvers an approving nod.

  ‘That was an excellent touch,’ he said. ‘The pseudo-lawyer approach, with a mouthful of words calculated to confuse.’

  ‘But all accurate,’ said Danvers. ‘I always enjoyed reading dictionaries at school.’

  ‘No wonder you and your father have difficulties,’ murmured Stark.

  Danvers looked as if he was about to make a retort of indignation about this comment on his family life, but then, instead, he smiled. ‘There may be something in what you say, sir,’ he admitted. He gestured at the door. ‘What about Saunders? Do you think he was telling the truth about Joe West? That West didn’t know Saunders was planning to kill you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Stark. ‘He could well be protecting West from a charge of attempted murder, which shows some kind of loyalty. The main thing is, we’ve got them. And they’ll be off the street.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  Stephen and Sarah were sitting at the kitchen table eating supper when Stark arrived home.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ asked Stark.

  He looked at the table, at the third plate, almost empty, and realized that his father must have got up and left the table when he heard his son’s key in the lock.

  ‘He’s out in the yard,’ said his mother. ‘He’s measuring.’

  ‘Measuring for what?’

  ‘He’s thinking of keeping chickens,’ said Stephen. ‘He’s going to build a run for them, and he said I can help him.’

  ‘Fresh eggs,’ nodded Stark approvingly. ‘And a chicken for the table now and then. It’s a good idea.’ He turned to Stephen. ‘How was school?’

  ‘All right,’ said Stephen. ‘We did the seven times tables today. I remembered it all. I got a gold star in my book.’ He looked hopefully at Stark. ‘Will you take me to school tomorrow?’

  ‘Your dad’s going out tonight,’ said Sarah. ‘He might not be back.’

  ‘I’ll be back,’ Stark promised. ‘Yes, of course, Stephen.’ He looked at his mother. ‘I might be back late tonight, but I’ll definitely be back.’ He gestured at the back door to the yard. ‘I’ll just go and see Dad.’

  ‘He … he might be busy,’ said his mother awkwardly. ‘With the measuring.’

  ‘I want to tell him we caught the men who attacked me the other night.’

  ‘Who was it?’ asked Sarah, suddenly alert, as was Stephen.

  ‘A couple of local men,’ replied Stark. ‘They felt they had a grievance for something that happened a long time ago. It’s nothing to do with the case I’m working on.’

  ‘Did you lock them up?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘We did,’ nodded Stark. ‘They’re safely under lock and key. They won’t be bothering me again.’ He headed for the back door. ‘I’ll see you in a minute.’

  Henry was standing outside in the yard. If he was doing any measuring, he was doing it by eye because there was no sign of a ruler. But then, when Stark had watched his father at work at his carpentry, much of the measuring appeared to have been done by eye.

  Henry scowled as he saw his son. ‘I’m not talking to you,’ said his father.

  ‘No, I got that impression,’ said Stark. ‘And that’s fine. I just wanted to let you know we caught the men who attacked me. That’s all.’

  He turned and headed back towards the house, but a shout from his father stopped him. ‘Wait! Who were they? And why?’

  Stark retraced his steps towards Henry. ‘Joe West and Eddie Saunders.’

  ‘Saunders? A relation of Wilf Saunders?’

  Stark nodded. ‘His younger brother.’

  Henry stood, silent, letting this sink in. ‘After all this time.’

  ‘He didn’t believe what happened was an accident.’

  ‘It was, though, wasn’t it?’

  Stark felt a sense of anger rising in him as he observed the questioning look on his father’s face. ‘You have to ask me that?’ he demanded.

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ began Henry, equally angry, but defensively so.

  Stark shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s a good thing we’re not talking,’ he said.

  He turned on his heel and walked off, fuming with silent rage. Of all people to think he had deliberately killed Wilf Saunders, he hadn’t expected it from his own father.

  Stark took a taxi to Cadogan Square and Lady Amelia Fairfax’s house. As he stood at the imposing front door, beneath the stately portico arch of the porch, he looked down at himself, at his suit. His best suit. Yet here, in these surroundings, it looked somehow very s
econd best. The previous night, dinner at Danvers’ Uncle Edwin’s, it hadn’t bothered him. He hadn’t been there to impress Sir Edwin. But he suddenly became aware that he wanted to impress Lady Amelia. Here he was, standing there looking like someone’s poor relation.

  It was too late to flee now and telephone with some excuse. He’d already rung the bell.

  The door was opened by a stoutish woman in her fifties.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I’m Chief Inspector Stark. I believe Lady Amelia is expecting me.’

  ‘Yes indeed, sir,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Mrs Walker, the housekeeper.’ She opened the door wider for him to step into the hallway. ‘May I take your coat?’ She took his coat and hung it on an ornamental coat stand. ‘If you’ll follow me, Lady Amelia is in the drawing room.’

  Stark followed her along the hallway to the drawing room, where Lady Amelia was standing waiting for him. She looked stunning. She wore a long dress of pale blue, a necklace made of small pieces of amber. Her reddish hair was pulled back and curled atop her head, making the beauty of her face even more devastating.

  Stark felt even shabbier in his so-called best suit.

  ‘Lady Amelia,’ he said.

  She held out her hand to him, and he took it gently in his. ‘Good evening, Chief Inspector.’ She smiled. ‘Look, I can’t keep calling you Chief Inspector all evening. Can I call you Paul?’

  ‘Far better. And … Amelia?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Will it be all right for me to serve the first course in fifteen minutes, m’lady,’ said Mrs Walker.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Walker. That will be fine.’ Lady Amelia released Stark’s hand and went to a sideboard where drinks were set out. ‘Sherry?’ she asked.

  ‘Sherry will be perfect,’ replied Stark.

  This was a different woman from the one he’d encountered at the Communist Party offices. There, she’d been challenging, defensive, tigerish almost. Here, on her own territory, she was … She was simply gorgeous, thought Stark. But the tiger in her could still be seen in the way she moved, as she returned from the sideboard with their glasses of sherry. She handed him one, then gestured at the chairs. Just as at Sir Edwin Drake’s: large, opulent leather. Do the upper classes all go to the same furnishers? Stark wondered.

  He sat down and they raised their glasses to one another in a polite toast before sipping.

  The sherry was delicious. A different drink altogether to the sherry his family sometimes had at Christmas.

  ‘I was worried that you might have to cancel again, when I read the news,’ she said. ‘This Hand of Justice, claiming they killed Lord Amersham and Tobias Smith. Are they responsible?’

  ‘We’re looking into it,’ said Stark. ‘Have you ever heard of them before?’

  ‘In my role as a radical Bolshevik?’ she asked, amused.

  ‘If you like,’ said Stark. ‘Although I was thinking more in your role as an organizer of the British Communist Party.’

  ‘You don’t consider them to be one and the same?’

  ‘When it comes to politics, I’ve noticed that there are more divisions among those who should be on the same side than there are between those they are supposed to be opposing. The Russian Revolution is a case in point: Leninists against Trotskyites, with Mensheviks against both of them. Like Ireland, with the talks going on at the moment. The home rule Republicans split between the pro-treatyites and the anti-treaty faction.’

  ‘You’re very politically aware.’

  ‘Aware enough to know to keep my distance.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not an organizer of the BCP. As I told Bobby Danvers that first time he came to interrogate us …’

  ‘Interrogate?’

  She laughed. ‘All right, talk to us. As I told him, I was just in the office doing a favour for Sylvia Pankhurst.’

  ‘But you believe in the cause?’

  ‘Of course I do! Otherwise I wouldn’t be there!’

  ‘Back to my original question: have you ever heard of the Hand of Justice?’

  ‘Am I being interrogated?’

  ‘We can talk about the weather, if you’d prefer. Or the latest fashions.’

  ‘Do you know much about fashion?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard of them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are lots of organizations that have sprung up, especially since the war, to try to make this a fairer society.’

  ‘There’s the Labour Party.’

  She scoffed. ‘Fine for people who belong to a trade union, but what about the others who live at the bottom of the social heap? Women. The unemployed. The disabled who can’t work. Former soldiers who’ve come back blind, or their bodies wrecked.’

  ‘The Labour Party held seats in the War Cabinet. There is talk of it winning a majority at the next election, especially since women have been given the vote.’

  ‘Women over the age of thirty who are property owners. Men can vote at twenty-one Where’s the fairness in that? Are you a Labour Party man?’

  Stark shook his head. ‘As I said, I keep my distance. If pressed, I’d describe myself as non-political.’

  She laughed. ‘And as I said, on the contrary, you are one of the most politically aware people I’ve met.’

  ‘The two are not the same,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Have you read Karl Marx?’ she asked.

  ‘No, nor Lenin or Trotsky. My reading of late has been the Police Manual.’

  ‘I can lend you a copy of Das Kapital.’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘Thank you, but I’d rather stick to the Police Manual.’

  There was a discreet cough from the doorway. Mrs Walker was standing there, now wearing an apron. ‘Dinner is served, m’lady,’ she announced.

  The meal was excellent. It was hard to choose between the food served here and the dishes he’d eaten the previous night at Sir Edwin Drake’s. Soup again as the starter, a mushroom soup this time, followed by small pieces of fried cod, then roast lamb with mint sauce and roasted vegetables, and rounded off with a delicious apple tart. I mustn’t allow myself to get used to this quality of food and cooking, Stark warned himself. These two meals are it for the year, possibly for longer. Even the annual meal for senior officers at Scotland Yard didn’t taste as good as this.

  For Stark, tonight’s meal was the preferred one. The food may not have been any better than that served at Sir Edwin’s, but Lady Amelia was far more desirable as company. She was amusing, offering anecdotes that pricked the pretentions of many of her social class, encouraging Stark to be scurrilous about the top brass at Scotland Yard, something he tactfully avoided. However, he told her tales of criminals he’d caught where their excuses or the situations in which they’d been apprehended had a humorous aspect, like the unfortunate burglar who’d trapped himself when a sash window had fallen down on him while he was exiting a house, and had been left dangling upside down, his trousers caught in a window catch, until the young Stark, then a beat constable, had come along and found him.

  ‘He claimed he’d been hired to remove the valuables we found in his sack by the owner of the house, but hadn’t been able to do the work until two o’clock in the morning because he’d been held up. He then expressed great surprise when the owners of the house woke up and came to the window, and declared they’d never seen him before in their lives. He told me he had obviously got the wrong house.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘Of course,’ smiled Stark. ‘My sergeant, however, didn’t, and he got six months.’

  Their talk flowed easily as they ate and took sips of a delicious wine, although they both avoided topics that might be too personal. There was no talk from her about her former husband. There was none from him about Susan, and neither questioned the other about their private lives.

  There was talk of politics, including the Irish situation, but not in any depth – more anecdotes about their respective encounters wi
th Michael Collins and Ned Broy and Erskine Childers.

  ‘Such a fine novelist,’ said Amelia of Childers. ‘Have you read The Riddle of the Sands?’

  ‘I have indeed,’ said Stark. ‘I thought it was excellent, and it gave me great pleasure to tell Mr Childers so.’

  It wasn’t until the last mouthful of the delicious apple tart had been finished and their plates pushed to one side that she posed a personal question, when she asked him, ‘Aren’t you rather young to be a chief inspector?’

  ‘Dead men’s shoes, I’m afraid,’ replied Stark.

  ‘The war?’

  ‘Just so. When I came home, there was a marked shortage of officers in the detective division. Plenty of them were killed in Flanders. And so I took the opportunities that were offered.’

  ‘Did you have a bad war?’

  ‘Despite people bandying that phrase about, no one had a good war. The best you could hope for was to survive intact. Only a few of us managed that.’

  Mrs Walker appeared. ‘Will there be anything else, m’lady?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mrs Walker. The meal was excellent. I hope it was to your satisfaction, Paul?’

  ‘Very much so.’ He smiled at the housekeeper. ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Walker. You are a creator of culinary marvels.’

  He saw the housekeeper blush.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘Well, if there’s nothing else, m’lady, I shall be away to my bed. I shall clear up in the morning.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Amelia. After the housekeeper had left the room, she said to Stark, ‘And you are a terrible flatterer.’

  ‘Good work deserves appreciation.’

  Amelia looked at the used dishes and glasses left on the table.

  ‘Mrs Walker is being very discreet,’ she said. ‘Usually, she would clear everything away and wash everything spotless, rather than let things congeal, as she says.’ When Stark didn’t respond, she asked, ‘Are we going to bed?’