by Ruth Edwards
‘I was thinking more of some of your colleagues.’
‘Ah, now you’re talking. Let me tell you about the fax we got from London yesterday…’
***
He had great difficulty in getting through to the club. The lines seemed permanently engaged. And when at last he got a ringing tone, it was several minutes before it was answered.
‘What d’you want?’ said Ramsbum’s voice, his normal veneer of deference a thing of the past.
‘Good morning, Mr. Ramsbum. This is Robert Amiss. May I speak to the Commander, please?’
‘Well, fuck me, Robert. I thought you was dead. ’Oo’s a lucky lad then? Not like ’is nibs.’
‘Indeed,’ said Amiss faintly. ‘Is the Commander about?’
‘I’ll see.’
It took a further five minutes before Blenkinsop made it to the phone, but to Amiss’s relief, he appeared to be both sober and reasonable: indeed he was giving a rather creditable imitation of a normal club secretary. He exuded sympathy and concern, urged Amiss to take as much time off as he felt necessary, assured him he would be given sick pay and that his job would be secure, and only after a long argument agreed very reluctantly that he could come back on duty the following day.
‘Very well then,’ he said, ‘if you insist. I must say, I’m very impressed by your grit. Not the sort of thing one expects of this generation, so all the more pleasing when one comes across it. What?’
Amiss mumbled a banality.
‘Good. Right. I’ll see you then. Got to be off now. Lot of work on my plate.’
It sounded to Amiss as if he might even be speaking the truth.
***
It was a long day. Amiss felt a mixture of lassitude and restlessness. He wandered aimlessly around Pooley’s flat, glancing at magazines, pulling books out of the huge collection of crime fiction, reading a page or two and replacing them. At lunch-time he addressed himself to the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator and was touched, though not surprised, at how spartan was the fare that Pooley allowed himself. Stores were ample but plain: cans of soup in abundance; simple, frozen meals for one; large stocks of beefburgers and frozen peas; and of course—Pooley being Pooley—a great deal of muesli, yoghurt and fresh fruit. Feeling a strong need for nursery food, Amiss shoved a shepherd’s pie in the microwave, cooked himself some peas and washed the lot down with a pint of milk.
His spirits were raised by a phone call from his absent host, promising that he and Milton would be along mid-evening with a take-away.
‘Now go and lie down, Robert,’ Pooley said solicitously.
‘I don’t really feel sleepy.’
‘Then have a large whisky and collapse.’
Amiss was so amazed at being urged to drink by Pooley that he obeyed orders and then repaired to the spare bedroom. He lay there for several hours, sleeping fitfully, having occasional nightmares, trying to galvanise himself into getting up, and failing because of the absolute exhaustion that appeared to have gripped his limbs. He woke up finally from a nightmare of dismembered bodies and prison guards to find himself bathed in sweat and sobbing uncontrollably. When he pulled himself together he rang Rachel, in search of that mixture of common sense and warmth that she applied to all emotional crises.
She listened sympathetically, murmured the right endearments and then said, ‘The only thing to do now is to get up, have a shower, go out for a brisk walk and come back and have a nice soothing gin and tonic.’
‘This has got to be a first. A day in which both you and Pooley are urging me to drink. D’you know who you remind me of?’
‘That sister who annoyed you so much this morning?’
‘No. Mr. Dick. You remember when David Copperfield turned up on his Aunt Betsy Trotwood’s doorstep ragged and starved and she asked Mr. Dick what to do? He said, “Why, wash him.” And when she asked, “But then, what?” he said, “Why, feed him, of course.”’
‘Well, I hope he didn’t advocate gin,’ said Rachel. ‘Now get to it. You’ll be fine by the time Jim and Ellis turn up and you’ll have a nice evening poring over clues. I wish I were with you.’
‘What’s ahead of you?’
‘Sleep, it being eleven o’clock. The next few days are going to be a mad whirl of a lot of strained socialising. We’ve got a junior minister from Trade and Industry arriving on a goodwill mission in the interests of better Anglo-Indian business cooperation.’
‘These guys certainly like marching over well-trodden ground, don’t they?’
‘Well, they like going on junkets to exotic places.’
‘Don’t we all? Chance would indeed be a fine thing,’ said Amiss. ‘Maybe next time Ellis will find me an undercover job that takes me to opium dens in Hong Kong, dusky maidens in Peru and shark-fishing amongst the coral reefs, or whatever it is they do there.’
‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ said Rachel. ‘He’s more likely to set you up as a courier on an over-sixties package holiday to Majorca.’
Chapter Fifteen
Amiss was feeling fully human again by the time his friends arrived. They looked at him anxiously.
‘You’re too cheerful,’ said Milton. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘In that case you should have been here a few hours ago,’ said Amiss. ‘You’d have liked that very much.’ Milton looked puzzled. ‘It’s OK, Jim. I’ve done all the New Man stuff. I have wept copiously and shared my feelings with a woman, that is, my intended. Sorry about the telephone bill, Ellis.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ mumbled Pooley in deep embarrassment. ‘You’re sure you’re all right now?’
‘In the pink, tickety-boo, right as rain and ready for action. I don’t think I’ll be going in for one of those prolonged periods of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or whatever it’s called. Spare me the bevy of counsellors. When you come right down to it, I didn’t actually see anything unpleasant. And physically it wasn’t any worse than when I fell off my bike as a kid and was concussed for an hour or two. Also, fortunately, I barely knew the Admiral. So horrid as it all is, it’s not that much worse than reading about it in the newspapers. Now, what goodies have you brought? Edible, I mean. I’ll wait for the dirt-digging till we’re eating. I’m absolutely starving. More post-trauma symptoms, no doubt. What are we eating?’
‘Indian,’ said Pooley.
‘I can’t get away from it these days,’ said Amiss cheerfully. ‘Right! Let’s go for it.’
They retired to the kitchen and unpacked the food, opened the cans of lager and carried the lot into the dining-room. When he had wolfed down a few chapattis and an onion bhaji, Amiss took a slurp of lager and then leaned back.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Shoot. How have you been justifying your existence in the last twenty-four hours and can you name the guilty man?’
‘D’you want to, Ellis?’ Milton sounded tired.
‘Oh, yes please, sir. Sorry—Jim. Sometimes I get confused between work and socialising, especially when we spend our off-duty time discussing what we did on duty. Right, Robert. Now according to forensic it looks as if the explosion was set off by two sticks of gelignite and a couple of detonators trapped under the table and wired into the lamp that stood, as it were, beside the chairman’s right hand. It’s a dark room, so at any time of the day that light would be switched on by anyone wanting to read.’
‘So it was set off by the simple act of turning on the lamp?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, how did they know they’d get the Admiral? Surely they might have got a cleaner, or a waiter, or even some other member of the committee.’
‘Unlikely. It wasn’t set up until the afternoon. That we know because the room was cleaned at lunch-time and the cleaner actually switched on the light to help her see the condition of the table she was polishing.’
‘It took hours to sort that out,’ said Milton wearily. ‘She was a new, temporary cleaner.’
‘They all are,’ said Amiss. ‘They never seem to last more than
about a week.’
‘She’d come from an agency. By the time we got her address and tracked her down to some miserable tower block in Hackney, discovered she didn’t know any English and found someone who could speak Gujarati, it was late afternoon.’
‘How does she manage a job if she can’t speak any English?’ asked Amiss.
‘She works with someone else who has a basic knowledge and translates for her,’ said Pooley. ‘It’s incredible really. She’s been in the country for about fifteen years.’
‘Her husband probably discourages her from learning English in case it gives her ideas beyond what he perceives to be her station,’ said Amiss. ‘Sunil waxes eloquent on the desire of a lot of men in his community to keep their wives in perfect ignorance.’
‘Anyway,’ said Pooley, ‘if her evidence is to be believed, and I can’t think of any reason why it shouldn’t be, the lamp was quite safe at two-thirty that afternoon. So the mischief occurred some time between then and five-fifteen.’
‘Earlier rather than later, I should have thought,’ said Amiss. ‘Latterly, the Admiral had a habit of working down there on papers and one might have expected him to have arrived earlier than indeed he did, in order to do his homework for the committee meeting.’ He helped himself to some more lamb tikka masala. ‘So who are the suspects? Definitely insiders?’
‘Well, we have pretty well absolutely ruled out any notion of terrorists,’ said Milton. ‘This is precisely the kind of job the IRA would have been falling over themselves to claim as their own, and it would be a ludicrous target for any other international loonies we can think of.’
‘So it’s a family affair?’
‘So it would seem,’ said Milton.
‘Of course,’ said Pooley, ‘it is conceivable that it was the work of some servant or ex-servant with a grudge against the committee, but it seems so unlikely as to be hardly worth considering. And the same goes for most of the members of the club.’
‘You’re focusing on the Angry Brigade, then?’ said Amiss.
‘Well, the motive at least seems clear in their case. Besides, very few others had the opportunity. We haven’t finished the process of elimination, but there was hardly anybody in the club in the afternoon except the residents and a few servants, and why the servants should try to blow up someone who was trying to improve their conditions is beyond me.’
‘Well, Ramsbum didn’t approve of change,’ remarked Amiss.
‘Yes, but all that “good old days” twaddle is hardly a sufficient reason to murder a man who’s trying to raise your wages and give you something decent to eat. Anyway, for the moment we have to make that assumption. There are five people with a pretty clear motive, all of whom had the opportunity. There’s a handful of other people with absolutely no motive who had the opportunity. We’re ignoring them for the moment.’
‘So I’m not a prime suspect?’ said Amiss.
‘Not yet,’ said Milton.
Pooley was looking impatient. ‘The first job, of course, was to try to find any traces of nitroglycerine on anybody in the club or in their rooms. Obviously, at the moment we’re not publicly pointing the finger at your five chums, so we went in for blanket forensic tests on everyone and examination of everyone’s quarters.’
‘And found nothing, no doubt,’ said Amiss.
‘Zilch.’
‘But surely no one would be mad enough to hide gelignite in his room?’ said Amiss. ‘Apart from the danger, there are all sorts of places in that mausoleum where you could hide a small elephant.’
‘We know that,’ said Pooley, ‘and we’ve been as thorough as we could be without much hope of finding anything.’
‘We have, of course, put out feelers to the usual quarters about where the supplies came from,’ said Milton, ‘but the chances of finding the source of such a small supply are very slim indeed.’
‘I thought forensic methods had become so refined that it would be impossible to touch gelignite without some traces lingering about one’s person. Indeed didn’t some of those unfortunate Micks you buggers kept framing get done for handling gelignite when they’d only played cards or struck matches or something?’
‘You can avoid being contaminated if you have the right protective cover and use protective gloves,’ said Pooley. ‘No. No leads there, I’m afraid.’
He got up and went into the kitchen and came back with three more cans.
‘What’s baffling me,’ said Amiss, ‘is the notion of any one of those five having the physical capacity to do this. I mean, look at them, for God’s sake. The ones that aren’t crippled are paralytic all the time. Ah! No! But of course. I have the answer. Glastonbury does it in his sleep under orders from Nanny.’
‘You’re reverting to your old assumptions about the elderly,’ said Milton. ‘Age doesn’t stop you being dangerous.’
‘Yes, but physical incapacity surely does. Trembling hands and booze stops you doing delicate manoeuvres with dynamite, for Christ’s sake,’ said Amiss. ‘Which reminds me, did you check to see if by any chance Chatterton has more stocks hidden in his zimmer?’
‘Oh, shut up, Robert,’ said Pooley. ‘This is serious.’ Milton grinned covertly at Amiss.
‘Sorry, Ellis,’ said Amiss meekly.
‘Apart from anything else,’ said Pooley, ‘none of them were drunk yesterday.’
‘Was drunk.’
‘Pedant.’
‘Just getting my own back. Of course you’re quite right. It comes back to me now. Individually or collectively, they must have made a decision to keep their wits about them for the committee meeting. Goodness, I must be in a state of trauma to have forgotten that none of them had drunk either at lunch-time or in the afternoon.’
‘Which makes it more difficult for us,’ said Pooley, ‘since they didn’t hang around for as long as usual, and therefore every single one of them was unobserved by the others for a minimum of half an hour.’
‘So where do you go from here?’ asked Amiss.
‘Interviews,’ said Milton. ‘I’ll be talking to them all individually and in some detail tomorrow. Initially just trying to get to know them.’ Pooley shot him an anxious look. ‘Yes, of course you’ll be coming too, Ellis. I am not a sadist.’
‘And where does this leave the Trueman investigation?’ asked Amiss.
‘Ellis’s case is strengthened, obviously, but we’ve no more evidence. Tomorrow’s going to be a long, hard day and God knows if it will yield anything.’
‘I’ll see you around. I’m going back to work.’
‘Should you?’ Pooley looked concerned.
‘Yes, of course. Come on, you can’t seriously expect me to keep my nose out of things at this stage, Ellis. Don’t worry. I’ve recovered. And as long as you keep producing the champagne and caviar, I won’t hold it against you that you nearly had me exterminated by an octogenarian.’
‘Right!’ said Milton. ‘Now we’d better have a formal interview with you, which I will allege took place in your flat.’
‘Good. So that means that tomorrow we’ll be able to acknowledge that we met. Goodness me, deceit is very wearing on the nerves. Still, I suppose it keeps the brain cells ticking over. OK. What d’you want to know? And don’t try to extract a confession: I’m as English as you are.’
Chapter Sixteen
As arranged with the Commander, Milton and Pooley arrived at ffeatherstonehaugh’s at ten o’clock the following morning. He was waiting for them, alert, smartly turned-out and radiating helpfulness.
‘You are welcome again, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘The circumstances are regrettable, but it is my pleasure to make you as comfortable as possible. Please follow me.’
He led them across the hall and through the dining-room, down a corridor and into what he explained was a private dining-room where members could entertain groups of friends or associates. ‘We call it the Rochester Room,’ said the Commander, without further explanation. ‘It’s not much used these days, but I think you’ll
find it comfortable for your purposes. I’ve had some armchairs brought in and put there at the window in case you want to talk to people more informally than around the table.’
He had done more than that. The room had several unexpected creature comforts: mineral water and glasses were on the table, along with a coffee tray, ashtrays and even a vase of fresh flowers.
‘Is there anything else you need, gentlemen?’
‘No, no,’ said Milton. ‘Thank you very much indeed, Commander Blenkinsop. You’ve been extremely hospitable.’
‘I’ll assign a waiter to you to make sure you have coffee when you need it and, of course, lunch. I’ve instructed all those you wish to see to be available today, but it would be helpful if I could give them some idea of the order in which you wish to see them.’
‘Alphabetical, I think,’ said Milton.
‘Very good. So you’ll want to see me first. Can you excuse me for a few minutes while I have a word with the others and then I’ll be straight back to you?’ Milton nodded and Blenkinsop left the room briskly.
‘Coffee, sir?’
‘Yes please, Ellis. Good grief! If we hadn’t heard so much about him from Robert, we’d find it impossible to imagine that this bloke was anything but the most upright of citizens.’
The paragon was back within five minutes. ‘Now where would you like me to sit, Detective Chief Superintendent?’
‘At the table, if you don’t mind, Commander. It makes it easier for us to take notes.’
‘Would you care for some coffee?’
‘Kind of you. Yes. Black please. No sugar.’
While Pooley poured the coffee, Milton waited for Blenkinsop to seat himself comfortably. Then he asked, ‘Would you be kind enough, Commander, to describe to us your relationship with the Admiral?’
‘We were old friends. Knew each other for more than forty years. Young shipmates together. He was a fine man, Con Meredith-Lee. A brave sailor and a good friend.’
Milton repressed a familiar urge to tell an interviewee to cut the crap and drop the platitudes. Instead he said, ‘Well, sir, this must all be very sad for you. You have my sympathy. Did you keep in touch with Sir Conrad over all those years when he was away?’
