Small Change 03: Half A Crown

by Jo Walton

  “I’d much rather have Elvira back right now,” Carmichael said. “That’s much more important to me. I don’t give two pins about a knighthood.” For the first time ever, now that he was reduced to offering him a bribe, he saw Normanby as pathetic.

  “I can’t do that,” Normanby said. “They think she knows something and she’s holding out on them.”

  “For God’s sake, she doesn’t know anything!” Carmichael shouted. “There’s nothing for her to know. Probably she doesn’t want to tell them Bellingham kissed her at a ball, or some other childish secret. What are they doing to her?”

  The dog erupted off the rug, snarling, and went for Carmichael. The attack was so unexpected that he couldn’t do anything to stop it. “Stop, Fang!” Normanby said, just as its jaws were about to close on his throat. It stayed where it was, but did not bite.

  The door opened and a guard looked in. “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine, thanks, Clement,” Normanby said. The door closed again. “Down, Fang.” The dog obediently slipped down from Carmichael’s chest and slunk back to the rug. “Isn’t he well trained?”

  “Yes,” Carmichael said, shaking a little. “Does he always do that if someone raises their voice?”

  “If he perceives a threat to me,” Normanby said. “Much like you and Penn-Barkis really, and much like Penn-Barkis he sometimes perceives a threat when there isn’t really one there. But when my dogs overreact, I can call them off and apologize, and there’s no harm done.”

  “What are they doing to Elvira?” Carmichael asked, quietly.

  “Nothing that will do her any harm as long as she cooperates. She’s in the Yard, and they’ll be taking her to Finsbury today. As soon as she’s told them whatever it is they think she’s holding out on, she’ll be back with you. And it isn’t about Sir Alan, it’s about you, whatever it is. She’ll tell them soon. You’ve approved the methods at Finsbury yourself.”

  Carmichael wanted to say that he hadn’t approved them for Elvira, for an innocent girl, but the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth. He had approved them, and if he had approved them he had approved them for her, for anyone, for everyone. “She’s probably guessed about me and Jack,” he said, through the lump in his throat. “That’s probably her secret that she doesn’t want to tell them.”

  “No, it isn’t that. She didn’t know that. I’m afraid she does know now, which is a pity considering that you seem to have been able to keep it from her. You must have been very discreet. I can’t imagine how you managed it all these years. Though of course she was away at school, wasn’t she, and in Switzerland?”

  Carmichael felt his hands tensing. The pleasure of strangling Normanby would be almost worth being hung, if it wasn’t for what they’d do to Elvira. The dog growled menacingly. “Let me have her back, now,” Carmichael said. “There is no secret she knows, I assure you. I’ve always been loyal, and I always will be. I’ll deal with the Duke of Windsor, with the riots, whatever you want. I don’t need any recognition. I won’t even object to being on television to be vilified. Just let me have her back.”

  “You’ll do all that anyway,” Normanby said. “I’m not going to interfere with my subordinates doing their job. If there is any secret, they’ll get it out of her. And then, if it’s trivial, you’ll have her back, probably even in time for her to make her curtsey to the Queen on Tuesday. Now go and get on with your job. Fang, show him out.”

  Fang rose, took hold of Carmichael’s trouser leg between his teeth, and began to move towards the door.

  21

  I combed my hair with my fingers, as best I could. I did some more calisthenics. Eventually I gave in and tried to sleep again, and I think I did sleep, but not for long, it was too cold.

  I don’t know how long it was before they came for me. It wasn’t Bannister or Sergeant Matlock, it was two strange constables. One of them told me to stand up and the other unlocked the cell. Then the first one told me to walk forward, and when I did he handcuffed my wrists behind my back. Then they made me walk down the corridor, not as far as the desk and the tiled room, and into a different cell. This one was painted green and had two chairs in the middle and a little desk and chair at the side. It wasn’t as cold as my cell. Then a different man, a dark-haired one with bushy eyebrows and a big jaw, came in. He made me stand there in handcuffs, which is terribly awkward and uncomfortable, and he asked me all the same questions, and a few more, about things I knew nothing about, like Sir Alan’s investments and Uncle Carmichael’s education. The two bobbies stood behind us, leaning on the wall, and another man, a clerkly type, came in and sat at the desk and made notes of what I was saying.

  After a while, I don’t know how long, they let me go to the toilet. They uncuffed me for that, and to drink a cup of tea. It was awful tea, strong and sweet and milky. I’d have turned my nose up at it at any other time. Right then it was like nectar. They all drank tea. I wanted to laugh, because there we were in a torture chamber, or the next thing to it, and they were interrogating me, and we were having a tea break, just like anyone doing their job. Of course, they were just doing their job. There was no animosity in it. I could tell that. But as soon as we’d all finished our tea and one of the bobbies had collected the cups, they were at it again, Bushy Eyebrows asking questions and me answering and the clerk writing it all down, over and over.

  I think it’s true that everyone breaks in the end and tells everything they know. I was very close to it several times. I kept thinking about Mrs. Talbot and what I’d overheard, and how if I told them they’d leave me alone and let me sleep, and maybe even let me go. “We’ve let Mr. Maynard go home,” Bushy Eyebrows told me. “He cooperated. He told us what he knew, and now he’s safely back with his family. You’re supposed to be a clever girl, Elvira, down for Oxford they tell me. The clever thing to do would be to tell me, and then you could go home too.” He’d alternate that kind of thing with bullying me, shouting, making me stand up and sit down senselessly.

  He cuffed me again for a while, then took them off for another tea break and toilet break. I was getting hungry and wondering if we’d have a lunch break. The bobbies went off shift, or something, during the second tea break, and were replaced by two different bobbies. The same clerk stayed though. He had his sleeves rolled up and he never looked at me. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, writing away, looking bored to death, from time to time pushing his hair out of his eyes. I was bored, myself. I was starting to think that as I was bound to give in eventually I might as well tell them now.

  Then, after an interminable amount of time—I hadn’t seen daylight since the day before—Bannister came back. “Any progress?” he asked.

  “Not a sausage,” Bushy Eyebrows said. “Elvira isn’t cooperating, are you, dearie?”

  “I’m doing my best,” I said.

  Bushy Eyebrows raised his eyebrows, and Bannister snorted. “All right,” he said to Bushy Eyebrows. “I’m going to take her over to Finsbury, where they really know how to make people talk.”

  I felt sick—I was hungry really, because it had been a long time since that porridge, but my stomach turned over at the thought of Finsbury, and what they might do to me there. I’d been congratulating myself on holding out, and at the same time knowing I couldn’t keep it up forever, not when I was so tired and hungry, and now I knew I couldn’t hold out against something worse. The fact that I had no idea what they did at Finsbury or how much worse it was didn’t help at all, in fact the opposite; because it was unknown it was much more terrifying.

  “Finsbury it is. Unless you’re ready to tell us what you know about Commander Carmichael’s disloyalty,” Bushy Eyebrows said. “Come on, Elvira, you’ve held out all this time, you’ve been very brave, but you know, everyone tells everything in Finsbury. They’ll make you glad to tell them over there. You might as well save yourself a lot of time and trouble and tell us now.”

  “All right,” I said, and sat down without h
im having said I could, but he didn’t shout at me. My legs were shaking, and so were my hands, so I wrapped my arms around myself. I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself, and not at all as if I was doing the right thing, but also so terribly frightened. “It isn’t anything much. You might not think it’s anything at all. The day after I was arrested the last time, I was in the flat, and a woman came to see him, a Mrs. Talbot. I was walking down the corridor, and I heard him say that he could put her on the payroll as an informer. Then he said she’d given him some good information, and he could use that to explain her visit. He said what she did with the money was her business, and that she could use it to pay forgers or buy ships for Jews. Then he said his budget for information was high. That’s all, honestly it is.”

  “Mrs. Talbot?” said Bushy Eyebrows to Bannister.

  Bannister shrugged. “What was she like?” he asked.

  “She was like a pigeon,” I said. “All in gray. Middle-aged, plump, with a chest like a pigeon.”

  “How tall?” he asked, sounding very unimpressed with my description.

  “Not as tall as me,” I said. “Average height?”

  “Hair?”

  “Gray, and pulled up in a bun.”

  “Gray hair. Eyes?”

  “I didn’t notice,” I confessed.

  “Age?”

  “About sixty, I should think. Maybe less.”

  The clerk’s pen kept scratching. The two men looked at each other. “Clothes?” Bushy Eyebrows asked.

  I tried to picture her in my mind and found it all came back clearly. “Gray coat, with a white collar, and black buttons all the way down, and a very plain gray hat, the kind widows wear to church. I don’t know what she had on under that, I didn’t see her after she’d come in and taken it off. She had flat black boots, practical, not chic.” I looked back to Bannister, hoping that was enough. It was such a relief to be talking about it at last, not to keep holding it back.

  “Town or Country?” he asked.

  “Town, but not London,” I said. “I don’t know what gives me that impression.”

  “A clever girl like you can pick up a lot about someone by how they look,” Bushy Eyebrows said. “And what profession would you say her husband was?”

  “I have no idea!” It seemed a ridiculous unfair question. “I don’t even know if she was married. She might have been a widow.”

  “Well, what was he then, if he was dead. A builder, say, or a clergyman?”

  “Oh, a clergyman.” Too late I realized that this was a question about class. “I’d say she was respectable but not well-off, certainly not from the laboring classes. She didn’t talk like that either, she talked like an educated person.”

  “What did you hear her say?” Bushy Eyebrows asked. “You’ve only said what you heard your uncle say.”

  “I couldn’t catch what she said,” I admitted. “She was talking too low. But that in itself gives the tone of a voice. And I heard her say good evening before, when she went in.”

  “Did Carmichael send you out of the room when she arrived?” Bannister asked.

  “I was going to have a bath,” I said. “He did send me out, though. He didn’t know who she was, and he was worried she might be an assassin. I went to have my bath, and then to go to bed, and he must have thought I was in bed, but I went to the kitchen to have some cocoa. That’s when I overheard. The passage from the bathroom to the kitchen goes past the swing doors to the sitting room. It isn’t a large flat.”

  “Why did he let her in at all if he thought she was an assassin?” Bannister sounded very dubious.

  “She was a woman, and alone, and she let the guard search her and she had no weapons. Also she used Lady Eversley’s name.”

  “Lady Eversley?” Bannister sounded really surprised. “What did she have to do with Lady Eversley?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I have no idea.”

  “The Eversleys are all right,” Bushy Eyebrows said.

  “As far as we know,” Bannister confirmed. “But I’d better speak to the Chief about that.”

  “Talbot’s a common enough name,” Bushy Eyebrows went on. “What’s to prove you’re telling the truth?”

  “Nothing, except that I am,” I said, indignantly.

  “So what did you think when you heard this?” Bannister asked.

  “I thought maybe I should tell someone, but then I thought it was Watch business, and he must have been saying it to deceive her,” I said.

  “When did you start thinking it might really be treason?” he asked.

  “When you started asking me five million questions about his seditious activities,” I said.

  “Forgers? Jews? You thought that was Watch business?” He sounded terribly skeptical.

  “I thought he might have been leading her on to entrap her.”

  “Did he sound as if he was?”

  “No, he didn’t,” I admitted. “He was laughing. He sounded relaxed and happy about it. That’s what was so strange. She was laughing too.”

  “And is that all?” Bannister asked.

  “Yes, that’s really all! Can I go now?”

  “Your uncle didn’t discuss her with you the next day or anything like that?”

  “No, he never mentioned her again.”

  “Did you think that was strange?” Bushy Eyebrows asked.

  “No, he never discussed work. I know more about his work from his friends than from him.” I realized as I said this that I felt a little bitter about it. It was as if he thought I was a child.

  “And that’s the only time in all these years that you’ve ever come across him doing anything suspicious?” Bannister asked.

  “Yes, it was. The absolutely only time,” I said.

  “And when was it exactly?” he asked.

  “I said, the day after I was arrested. Wednesday evening last week.”

  “And you don’t believe he was expecting her?” Bushy Eyebrows asked.

  “He didn’t even know who she was. He only let her in because she used Lady Eversley’s name.”

  “Are you sure it was Lady Eversley?” he asked.

  I frowned, trying to remember exactly. “It was the Eversley family,” I said, triumphantly. “She said it was business connected with the Eversley family, and Uncle Carmichael said Lord Eversley would have telephoned or caught him in work, but sending someone round without any warning was just like Lady Eversley.”

  “How did you see her, if you were sent away?”

  “I hung around in the hall to see her, out of curiosity,” I said. “She didn’t look anything like the way I imagined an assassin, so I went to have my bath.”

  “What would you have done if she had been an assassin?” Bannister asked.

  “Screamed for the guard, I suppose,” I said. “But Uncle Carmichael was armed, so I wouldn’t have needed to.”

  “How did you see her hair if she was wearing a hat?” Bushy Eyebrows asked.

  “She was taking it off when I saw her,” I said.

  “You didn’t speak to her?”

  “No, I just saw her and went off to the bathroom. Then later I heard them talking.” I felt like a fool. “Can I go now? That’s everything.”

  “If that’s all, why didn’t you tell us before?” Bushy Eyebrows asked. “I’ve been at you for hours, and before that Bannister asked you last night. If that’s really it, why didn’t you let us know right away?”

  “I love my uncle,” I said, and to my disgust started to cry.

  “What do you think?” Bushy Eyebrows asked Bannister.

  Bannister shrugged again. “I think that’s probably it,” he said. “It’s hard to be sure, but it holds water, and she’s very naïve, no tricks at all.”

  I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hands. “You believe me? Then can I go? You said I could go home if I told you. Can I go?”

  “Go?” Bannister asked. He laughed. “Certainly you can go. But I’m surprised you’re in so much of a hurry. I’ll be
taking you to Finsbury right now.”

  22

  “Can’t you see it has to be a trap?” Jacobson asked. “They won’t hurt her. They want you to try to get her, because they’re suspicious. They want you to reveal the Inner Watch. That’s what this is about.” The office door was firmly closed. Jacobson was calmer than he had been earlier, but no less definite.

  “They’re going to take her to Finsbury,” Carmichael said. “For God’s sake, Jacobson!”

  “We have never done this kind of operation, and there’s a good reason why we haven’t. It’s just too dangerous. And if she vanishes on the way, they’re going to know you’ve got her.”

  “But at that point, I’ll have her. I can hide her—we have enough safe houses.” Carmichael was frantic. “They’ll know I took her, but they won’t be able to do anything about it.”

  “In that case, go and get her with the power of the Watch, go down sirens blazing and guns visible and tell them to stuff their law. That would send a message about not messing with you. I’m sure Normanby doesn’t want us to be at open war with the Mets and the Yard. What it wouldn’t do is give everything away and ruin everything we’ve been trying to do for the last ten years.” Jacobson started pacing again, though the office wasn’t big enough.

  Carmichael considered his suggestion. “There are enough Watchmen who know her and who’d come along on something like that. I needn’t use anyone from the Inner Watch. Though I have some of our people watching the streets already, to let us know if she moves.”

  “You could just order them to do it. And if they want to make you desperate enough to step outside the law, it’s better if you do it openly. Otherwise it’s a clear admission of guilt, and you’ll probably be lucky enough to swing for it while I’ll end up as a bar of soap.”

  “They think she knows something,” Carmichael said. “Normanby said so. He said she’s holding out on something, and it’s something about me.”