by Jessica Mann
‘Which keeping me on the run has prevented me from getting.’
In the afternoon, Rosamund and Tamara made their way to a telephone. At Wootton, Hardman and Co, the telephonist was surprised that the caller had not heard of Kenneth Hardman’s death. ‘Didn’t you see about it? The New Standard had it on the front page. A hit and run. I’ll put you onto Mr Dover. He’s dealing with Sir Kenneth’s work.’
Mr Dover’s secretary eventually consented to allow Rosamund to speak to her boss, but he was of no help. ‘I am snowed under. I’m sure you can understand that. Yes, well naturally, it’s always very urgent. I’ll have a quick look for you.’ There was a long wait. Tamara guessed that he was punishing this importunate client by dictating a few letters while she hung on. When he came back to the telephone, he was in a position to tell Miss Sholto, quite categorically, without any question of doubt, that the only document was the Will itself. No, nothing else. No, of course he would not tell her its provisions on the telephone. ‘You might be a reporter for all I know.’
The two women agreed that the will was probably no more than an uncomplicated legacy of everything Phoebe had to leave. ‘I can’t imagine Kenneth Hardman letting her include cryptic messages anyway,’ Rosamund said. ‘But if she had left the Czernin papers out of Aidan’s reach, where are they? Certainly neither in the bank nor in the apartment; Aidan would have time to search those places.’
‘Didn’t you have a secret hiding place when you were children?’ Tamara asked. ‘Like a bedknob that unscrewed, or a hollow tree?’
‘We used to hide things in our mother’s old bureau. It had rows of drawers and cupboards and cubby holes. My father let us use it. He called it ‘Your poor mother’s Wootton desk.’ It was an American antique, probably very valuable by now. I daresay it’s still at Middlewood.’
‘Didn’t you use that name when you were telling me about Phoebe’s message? I’ve heard it somewhere today.’
‘That’s because the solicitors are called Wootton, Hardman. Not that there’s been a Wootton for years. You don’t suppose –?’
‘It sounds exactly like the equivalent of a hollow tree to me.’
Chapter Nineteen
The two men, who were known to the world by more magniloquent names and titles, called each other Tom and Dick. Harry had been killed at Arnhem. They were meeting in Tom’s office, as they often did. The plate on his door said that he was the Director of Security, but in private he deferred to Mr Black of Department E. Their idea of security was not precisely that which their masters expected them to hold.
‘Have you told your chap Barnes what this is all about yet?’ the Director of Security asked.
‘Not yet,’ Dick replied. ‘I shall have to soon. He’s getting restive.’
‘Too intelligent.’
‘Exactly.’
The Director said drily, ‘No doubt he has seen enough by now to be relieved when he discovers that he has been spying on Britton for you, rather than spying on others for Britton.’
‘He has certainly managed to confirm our misgivings.’
The two men sat in silence for a while. Their thoughts ran on similar lines. Each had attained a powerful position in the secret services in recent years, and they had been lifelong friends. They mourned that democracy, to which each had committed his lifework, and which each had sworn to maintain, could only survive if men like themselves sometimes ignored the commands it seemed to express through an illogical electoral system. But even Hitler, as they frequently reminded each other, had been elected by a duped populace.
Tom said, ‘It’s a pity that Phoebe Britton did not listen to her conscience a bit sooner. She must have known.’
‘Not for certain. After all, we knew too; but not for certain.’
‘Britton has gone over the top. But at the same time he’s too near the top. The Queen will send for him, you know. And once he’s ensconced in Number Ten …’
‘Actually, I have a scheme,’ Dick Black said, and his friend answered, at once mocking and affectionate, ‘You always have.’
‘It seems to me that we can make good use of all this.’ He gestured towards the letter that lay alone on Tom’s leather desk, isolated like a bombshell, or, equally, like a unique jewel. It had been delivered that morning to the headquarters of Hunger, addressed to Stefan Czernin, having taken more than a week in the post. The paper was the type cheaply available in European supermarkets, and if the round stains were a guide, had been written at a cafe table. It was pathetic in its urgent incoherence. The writer, presumably not drunk, had been agitated, perhaps simply from embarrassment. For, as Dick Black commented, it would not be easy to phrase a warning to a man whom the writer had not seen for years, that she intended to revive the sad story of his sister’s death. There was no address at the top of the letter, but the postmark was Sierre, Valais; and she said that the papers had been deposited in the bank there. In re-iterating her proleptic apologies, Phoebe had mentioned that she was also writing to Gerald Greenfield.
‘You had Greenfield in, did you?’ Dick Black asked.
‘Yes I did. Wretched man. The type who gives us civil servants a bad name. Sat on the fence so long it’s emasculated him. “Nothing to do with me,” he whined. “I am not political. I only do what my masters tell me.”’
‘Pathetic fellow.’
‘He had already sent his own letter from Phoebe Britton to the Minister. To protect himself, he said. He’s the kind of man who’d turn on the taps in a gas chamber if legitimate authority told him to.’
‘We knew from Barnes that he had passed the information on to Britton,’ Dick Black said.
‘He’d seen Rosamund Sholto and thought the balance of her mind was disturbed – he claims. Of course it was his duty to warn her family, or so he tried to convince me. The man was afraid. He wants to keep on the right side of the right people.’
‘He is a bad picker, then,’ Dick Black said grimly. He ran his finger down Aidan Britton’s curriculum vitae. ‘This Czernin business was all in ’57, the year after he went into Hungary. What I thought we might do was this …’
Chapter Twenty
The old voice trembled on the telephone. ‘I can’t help you. I don’t know where my niece is. I must have some protection from this persecution.’
‘I’m not a reporter, Lady Anne,’ Tamara said for the third time. ‘As I told you, I have a letter from the Marchioness. She said I should get in touch with you. It’s about a book I’m writing on seventeenth century architecture. She said you would let me come.’
‘Read me the letter.’
‘It is sealed.’
‘Open it.’
Rosamund had found the pale blue foolscap paper her cousin always used at an office suppliers’ in Cromer. With brown ink and an italic nib she produced what she said was an adequate imitation of the Marchioness’s gothic handwriting. Tamara held the envelope near the telephone receiver to tear it. ‘It’s dated the day before yesterday, and written in the London Library. It says Dearest Nancy, please be nice to this child and put her up for the night. She wants to see the parts of Middlewood you don’t show the public. Blessings, Harriet. What she meant, Lady Anne, is that I’m interested in kitchens and closets.’
‘That’s all right then, she’s the only person who still calls me Nancy. I can’t think why.’
It had not been easy to get through to Lady Anne Sholto on the telephone, for she was protected by the barricade of an au pair girl, a housekeeper, a male cousin and her own timidity. Now the cousin, transformed into cordiality, came to the telephone again. ‘I am sorry we had to put you through the inquisition. If you are near by, why not come tonight? Though you may have to run a press gauntlet.’
But when Tamara arrived, the cousin, John Dawson, who, Rosamund had warned, saw himself as the Cerberus of Middlewood, told her that the press siege was nothing like what it had often been in Sholto’s day. ‘We are quite used to coping with it,’ he said firmly. ‘They know better than to m
isbehave here.’
Tamara was gazing at the house. She knew the technical words, but its graceful symmetry made them inadequate. Middlewood was a medium-sized, unimproved and consequently perfect, Queen Anne house. The brick was pink, the architrave and copings white stone, and a double curve of steps led sweetly to the front door.
‘Delicious, isn’t it? One never tires,’ John Dawson said.
The interior decoration had changed since Rosamund lived there. Sholto would never have tolerated this shrine to his achievement. The crimson paper of the hall was lined with photographs of him at all stages of his career, and the Hitchens portrait was over the drawing room mantlepiece. Numerous display cases contained his medals and decorations. Tamara wondered whether the attics were crammed with the relegated bibelots and paintings that must once have filled the living rooms.
‘I have already forgotten what you said you are called,’ her hostess complained. Lady Anne Sholto was very tall and thin, dressed in black, with her thick white hair rolled into a ribbon, in the style she might have adopted as an unconventional young woman before the First World War.
‘Tamara Hoyland, Lady Anne.’
The dark eyes searched her face. ‘Good gracious child, I should have guessed. You must be Olga’s girl. I knew Anastasia so well when we were girls.’
‘My grandmother?’
‘Of course. Though you would scarcely remember her, I suppose. Now, my dear, why didn’t you tell me properly who you were? I never seem to understand what people say on the telephone. Those hisses and crackles, so much worse recently. Have you noticed it, John?’
‘Perhaps the line is tapped,’ he suggested.
‘My brother used something called an omelette.’
‘A scrambler, Cousin Anne.’
‘Something culinary. Now, my dear Tamara, let me have a look at you. Not very like your dear grandmother I am afraid.’
‘She was thought to be a beauty,’ Tamara agreed gravely.
‘I expect you take after your father’s family,’ Lady Anne said in a consoling tone. ‘I never met him. I haven’t seen your dear mother for many years either.’
‘They live in Devonshire. My father’s a solicitor.’
‘I am sure she is happy. She had the gift of happiness. I hope you have inherited it,’ Lady Anne said, perhaps seeing discontent in Tamara’s features. The telephone bell rang, and footsteps tapped across the marble floor in the hall. They all listened to the voice of the girl who had answered when Tamara rang.
‘She is not here, she has not been here. I do not know … wait, please.’ She came into the drawing room. ‘Lady Anne, it is the newspapers again, from Australia. I leave them waiting, but it is very expensive, so far away.’
‘No doubt they can afford it,’ Lady Anne said.
‘I’ll cope,’ John Dawson said. He shouted, ‘No, she isn’t here. I don’t know where she is. No, I can’t help you.’ He banged the receiver down. ‘Intolerable. Just as well we don’t know where she is. They’d have it out of us at this rate.’
Tamara had prepared a story about a publisher, a commission and a deadline, but her grandmother turned out to be all the introduction necessary, so that her hosts were perfectly credulous, and their interest in her alleged work only perfunctory. ‘We have so many scholars and research workers at Middlewood,’ John Dawson explained. ‘Lots of architects, of course, but even more students of Sholto’s career; his archive is here. He was born at Middlewood, you know, and always regarded it as home. Even when he was obliged to be in London this was his base. He was like the giant who regained his strength by touching mother earth.’ Tamara found herself listening to a set seminar on Sholto, but it was no hardship, for she could not fail to find him interesting.
Sholto’s library, with the Latin and Greek texts read by him all his life in the original languages; Sholto’s dressing room, with all his ceremonial uniforms pristine in polythene; Sholto’s bedroom, designed like the great Duke of Wellington’s, as no more than a simple cell; the portraits of his ancestors, much prettier people, and much prettier paintings, than most of the memorabilia covering the walls in the other rooms, were together in a silk and satin drawing room that was evidently seldom used.
Dinner was formal, in that everyone changed into different, if no more elegant, clothes. The housekeeper and the au pair girl ate in the dining room too, and the conversation was about weather and gardens. There was not very much to eat, and when the decanter of port appeared, a film of dust on the wine’s surface implied that it was for show, not for consumption.
Tamara was relieved to find that early bed was the house rule. She went into her room, a chintzy cube, and looked at the photograph, above the mantlepiece, of Sholto uniformed for George VI’s coronation, and the volume of his collected speeches on the bedside table. John Dawson lived in the lodge and had gone back early, leaving the house through the basement – now used to serve teas to tourists – so as to avoid the persistent newspapermen camped outside. For some reason they were convinced that Rosamund was holed up inside the house.
‘Now if it had been my other niece,’ Lady Anne said. ‘Or their father. Sholto always thought of this house as his refuge. Of course poor Phoebe was never so relaxed here. After her mother died some fool of a woman told her she must become her father’s little helpmeet and it weighed on her mind.’
‘It didn’t take much to weigh on Phoebe’s mind,’ John Dawson said; but Lady Anne, brought up not to wash linen or even mention laundries in public, began to talk about what to lend to a Sholto Memorial Exhibition at the London Museum.
Tamara turned off her bedroom lights and drew aside the curtain to look out. Would any editor employ expensive staff to camp out in damp fields merely in the hope of catching the designer of a block of flats in which a gas main had exploded? No, an equation had been made between the grey-haired woman seen near Steven Courtney’s house, and Rosamund Sholto; and Tamara very much doubted that all the supposed newsmen were employed by the news media. Some worked for quite different bosses, and would use the most sophisticated methods of surveillance. Their electronic aides would have tracked John Dawson from basement to lodge, and would have seen the twitching of her curtain too. Like a well brought up girl, she drew it properly aside and opened the window onto the raw night. Then, keeping well below the level of the sill, she crouched her way out of the room and along the upstairs hall.
Tiny red lights set into plastic boxes, flashed and faded as she passed them, but John Dawson had told her that the alarms were only set when the house was empty. ‘Can’t have the bells pealing every time one goes to the loo.’
In the tiny light of her pencil torch, Tamara saw that the room John Dawson had pointed as Phoebe’s bedroom was swathed in dustsheets. She twitched one aside to reveal roses; a low armless chair, a chaise longue and a pouffe were all upholstered in the same flowery fabric, which matched the curtains and the bed hangings. The dressing table was draped with muslin, and some low, round tables had dangling felt covers under smaller lace cloths. In proper light, without dustsheets, and given the regular services of a cleaning woman who was prepared to launder lace, it would be very like a picture in a glossy magazine, but in present circumstances it was eerie, and not entirely attractive, like the set of a play on the night it closes, or like what it was, a dead person’s room.
The room had once been the bedroom of Rosamund and Phoebe’s mother. Beyond it was what had been Sholto’s dressing room, converted into Phoebe’s retreat when the ‘public rooms’ were opened to visitors. Aidan Britton used what had been the nursery suite.
‘You can’t mistake the Wootton desk,’ Rosamund had said. ‘Walnut, with carvings and decoration. I expect Phoebe kept the key in the same place, in the wardrobe drawer.’
The wardrobe door swung open easily. It had been cleared out, but the top one of what must have been a stack of glove or collar drawers contained a key, and the desk’s swing door opened sweetly. Inside were well-filled pigeon holes, individua
lly supplied with envelopes, and cards on which was printed From Mrs Aidan Britton, Middlewood, Kent, and From Mrs Aidan Britton, Britton House, London WC2. There was writing paper with an engraving of the house and a stack of engraved invitation cards with only the date and time left to fill in. Pens lay in the pen tray, ink in the glass bottle, stamps in a tiny drawer, and in a cupboard a row of dark green leather books with their functions stamped on their spines – addresses, engagements, Christmas presents, dinner guests, menus. Nothing personal there; and the miniature safe, which opened to the combination Rosamund had dredged from her memory, contained nothing but photograph albums and some money.
Tamara pulled out the pen tray and pressed in the two places Rosamund had described. A batten of wood slid out. The pieces of paper she had come to find were not there; but the compartment held a notebook which was Phoebe’s diary; not the innocuous document expensively bound and kept up to date with details of public engagements for a jealous husband’s benefit, but the scribbled thoughts of a frightened and unhappy woman. Tamara read only enough to be sure what it was before putting it into her pocket. She felt around the space again and found a jeweller’s box from a shop on the Ponte Vecchio, containing a silver bracelet with the initials P and M chased inside it.
Tamara closed the sliding panel and replaced the pen tray. She locked the desk and went to replace the key.
There were footsteps in the passage. Tamara switched off her torch.
The steps stopped. Tamara knelt and then lay, to slide herself under the four poster bed. Its draperies nearly touched the floor and would conceal her from anyone who did not actually bend to look under the bed. Like a burglar she thought; no wonder divans superseded bedsteads. The carpet was so thick as to be quite comfortable, and Tamara’s waiting agony was only in the mind.
‘Sorry to get here so late, my dear chap,’ a fruity voice said. ‘Affairs of State, don’t you know.’
