by Gavin Lyall
“I could do with a drink.”
“In the drawing-room. And I’ve telephoned the Ritz and they’re sending round something to eat.”
Ranklin couldn’t remember eating in days. He followed her into the drawing-room and O’Gilroy, who had taken charge of the drinks (had he ever been a barman? Probably; he’d been most other things at some time) gave him a whisky and soda.
Quinton allowed Ranklin one mouthful before looking very obviously at his watch and saying: “I’d like to get on . . .”
Ranklin took another gulp. “Let me try and put the position to Berenice first. It may help.”
So O’Gilroy took Mockford into the kitchen and the other four settled in the drawing-room. Ranklin paused to change mental gear into French, then began: “Probably now you understand that all this is more complicated than any of us thought.”
Berenice nodded cautiously.
“May I first ask you one thing? – was coming to London all your own idea?”
“Naturally. I used my own savings and did not tell anyone. Who should I tell?”
“How did you come to stay at the house in Bloomsbury Gardens?”
“I went to the court of Bow Street to ask about the trial and there I met Dr Gorkin who saw I did not speak English, so he helped me. Then he took me to his friends at Bloomsbury Gardens. But,” she frowned, “I do not understand. Why did Ma’mselle Sackfield help to have those men take me?”
“I don’t think that some of the people you thought were friends really were.” But Berenice wouldn’t believe him if he started denouncing Gorkin. She’d have to work that out for herself.
In English, Quinton asked: “Are you trying to establish that she wasn’t part of anything that’s been going on?”
“Parlez Français!” Ranklin snapped. Already Berenice’s suspicious look had returned. “Ma’mselle Collomb was no part of any plan. So her being in London was a danger to the plan, but not much until she came away from Bloomsbury Gardens and they didn’t know who she might talk to and what she might say. Then they decided she’d have to be killed.”
Corinna interrupted: “But what might she say?”
Ranklin shrugged and looked at Berenice. “I don’t know. Perhaps you’d care to think about that. And who might have wanted to blame Grover Langhorn for the fire and who forced Guillet to go to the police and offer false testimony against him. However, what happened in Paris isn’t a matter for the British police. If you just tell the Superintendent about the kidnapping, we can get rid of him and then think about Paris.”
Berenice frowned over this, then looked to Corinna, who nodded and said gravely: “I think that is best.” She jerked her head at Ranklin. “I trust this man. He may not look much, but he’s good at these things. And of course his intentions are as honourable as hell.”
A compliment is where you find it. Ranklin went along to the kitchen and told Mockford: “She’s all yours.”
12
A couple of men from the Ritz turned up with trays and baskets of, among other things, a mousse de foie gras, ham in aspic and a chicken mayonnaise. Ranklin and O’Gilroy filled plates and backed off to the drawing-room, leaving the other five (now including the police sergeant-chauffeur as note-taker) seated around the kitchen table. Berenice seemed more at ease there, and probably Corinna was happy to confine the smell of absinthe to one room.
There was apparently no question of anybody using Reynard Sherring’s rooms, so no absinthe bottles under Reynard’s bed.
For a fair while, Ranklin concentrated on simply eating. Then he put his plate aside, found a cupful of warmish coffee still left in the pot, and lit a cigarette.
“What are we doing now, then?” O’Gilroy asked.
“I just don’t know.” There seemed no obvious step he could take. “Do you know anyone in the consulate in Paris?”
“Coupla fellers.”
“Do they know who you are?”
“They’ve mebbe got an idea; I’ve told ’em one or two things, jest so’s they owe me something. I reckoned—”
Ranklin waved aside explanations: it was the sensible thing to have do n e. “Then when we get back to the office, I want you to try and raise one of them on the telephone. You know about the Palace advertising for Mrs Langhorn? I’d like to know if there’s been any response.”
“She’d never turn up for that. Aren’t ye thinking same as me? – that someone’s organising this whole thing and’s got her pretty much locked up?”
“Nevertheless, I think it’s worth asking.”
* * *
In the kitchen, the police sergeant-chauffeur was stacking dirty plates half-heartedly, and Corinna was, as he had obviously hoped, telling him not to bother. Quinton was feeding papers back into his briefcase, and Berenice was slumped in a chair, sucking on a cigarette and not even bothering to seem interested in the buzz of English going on round her.
And Mockford was saying: “We may make a charge of kidnapping work out. I’ve no doubt she was kidnapped but – thanks to you – things may get very delicate when the question of how she was rescued comes up. So I’d prefer to concentrate on the murder of Guillet: at least that was over and done with before you decided to lend a hand. But it all depends on what evidence we find in the motor.”
Ranklin asked: “Are you satisfied that Berenice Collomb is innocent?”
Corinna began: “ ‘Innocent’ is not a word I’d apply to that young . . .” then had to smile hastily at Berenice, who had looked half-interested at the sound of her own name. “Not guilty of a particular act, perhaps.”
Despite himself, Mockford smiled. “I do see what you mean, madam. I think you and Mr Quinton may take it that she is no longer under suspicion. But we’d obviously need her as a witness at any trial on the kidnapping charge.”
There was a thoughtful silence before Mockford added: “Yes, that’s another reason why we’d prefer to stick to the murder charge.” He picked up his overcoat and wriggled ponderously into it, took his bowler hat, and went out into the hall. All except Quinton and Berenice followed.
“Does this mean,” Corinna asked in a low but clear voice, “that I’m no longer responsible for Berenice? And if so, may I say ‘Yippee’?”
“You can certainly regard her as no longer on bail,” Mockford said, straightfaced.
“But what about tonight?” Ranklin asked. “She can hardly go back to Bloomsbury Gardens, and I don’t fancy hawking her round the hotels until I find one that’ll take her in. I suppose I might put her up at the flat—”
“Ye could not!” O’Gilroy said, his propriety outraged.
Corinna looked dubious about that, too. She turned inquiringly to Mockford.
He shrugged his big shoulders. “We might get her taken in for a night by one of the Protection Societies or the Young Women’s Christian Association . . .”
“And I suppose,” Corinna said bitterly, “you’ll explain the absinthe as a sentimental childhood toy. All right, she can spend one more night here. But only one. Tomorrow she’s on a boat or on the street and I don’t mind which.”
And Mockford went his way. The rest of them drifted back into the kitchen.
“Well,” Corinna said, “it seems like you’ve got your international conspiracy after all. Certainly it sounds as if you’ve shed your inhibitions about the use of firearms.”
“They’d murdered one man and were planning to do the same to Berenice: we stopped them. It’s only the Super who’d rather we’d had a grand siege with more dead and damage because that’s what the law allows for.”
“And quite right, too,” Quinton suddenly burst out.
Startled, Corinna instinctively switched her stance to defend Ranklin. “And what else should they have done? – they saved Berenice’s life, didn’t they?”
“And me own, like enough,” O’Gilroy said mildly. “The bastard was popping off at me with one of them damn great ten-shot Mausers.”
“You being illegally on enclosed premises at th
e time,” Quinton pointed out. “As indeed you all were. I wouldn’t say this in front of Superintendent Mockford, but I’ll say it now: I’ve stood by and watched you over the past few days – and been dragged into your deliberations, too, just to flatter me – and your whole attitude that you and your Bureau are above the law is far more destructive of the law than any burglar or murderer who commits his offence and runs away. And mark you, I’m not talking about justice, about crusades and big earthshaking decisions: that’s for eminent judges and KCs to babble about in after-dinner speeches. Probably I get involved in justice for a tenth of my time, if that much. No. I’ve given my life to the law. Simply a code of behaviour that lets men sleep soundly in their beds and eat breakfasts that don’t poison them and go to work without being run down in the street and know they’ll be paid for the day’s work. And shall I tell you why? Because people are obeying the law without even thinking about it. That’s civilisation, far more than motor-cars and telephones and aeroplanes and rubbish like that and I hate – yes, I hate – to see it trampled underfoot by you and your kind.”
Ranklin dragged himself up towards the surface of his tiredness. “Your law isn’t God-given. It’s created by the same government that set up our Bureau, so—”
“Next you’ll be telling me you’re just doing your job, and you’re not employed to think,” Quinton said contemptuously. “I expect to hear that argument from the gun, not from the man wielding it.”
The accusation cut through Ranklin’s fog of weariness like a sword. This was a new Quinton – no, it was the real Quinton that Ranklin had been too careless to see. All he’d noticed had been the humble origins and nouveau riche knick-knacks, missing that the man had never been simply sailing with the tide of his profession, believing what it believed and saying what it said. He must have thought about every step of his life, because for most of the time the tide had been trying to strand him somewhere out of the way.
“We’re dealing with an accusation against the King—”
“Ah, the King. Yes, I wondered how soon we’d get around to that. Are you going to argue that the King needs you and your Bureau because he can’t answer back for himself? You know that’s nonsense. You just get on the wrong side of the monarchy in this country and you’ll very soon find yourself answered. You can say goodbye to promotion and your friends in your profession for a start. You’d be an outcast and you know it.”
And he stared at Ranklin until he nodded and said: “All right, I won’t argue that, then.”
“But don’t get me wrong, Captain. I’d take on the defence of the King myself, and guard his secrets with every law I know because he’s as much right to his secrets as any beggar in the streets. As much but no more.”
Ranklin nodded again. “But the trouble is that a beggar disgraced is just that, but the King brought low affects us all. The whole country. Like it or not, that’s what being a monarchy means. And whether it’s accidental or deliberate, if this country’s being put at risk, that’s where we come in. Not you, perhaps; you’re privileged.”
“Privileged?” Quinton both bridled and showed suspicion, getting a lot into a single word.
“Let me put to you a hypothetical question. Suppose you had a client who lied to you, lied about you, changed his story . . . in every way seemed likely to ruin you. What would you do?”
“I’d have to drop him.”
“In my profession,” Ranklin said mildly, “we call that desertion in the face of the enemy.”
After a silence, Ranklin went on: “Could we just take it that there are some problems you can’t touch? – but we have to? I’m not saying we’re the perfect solution. I’m Army and we’re never the perfect solution, only the last resort.”
Quinton looked at him for a long time, then nodded and sighed. “If we’d spent a hundredth – a thousandth – of our time and money trying to build international laws instead of guns and battleships . . . All right: I accept you – grudgingly – as a last resort, and thank God our civilisation isn’t a fragile thing. It can swallow a bit of law-breaking by men like you without it poisoning the whole system. But only so much, only so many, and God help us all if you ever become the first resort. Too many secret men doing secret things can pull a nation apart, as is happening in Russia. It could happen here. Anywhere,” he added, glancing pointedly at Corinna.
She bridled at having the United States suddenly bracketed with the other nations. “We don’t have a king and we certainly don’t have a bureau of . . . whatnot.”
“You have battleships,” Quinton pointed out.
“Anyhow,” she said, sweeping the US Navy a side, “have you found out whether this rumour’s true?”
She looked from Ranklin to O’Gilroy, who was looking at Ranklin, who was looking abstractedly at the floor. Did someone, he was wondering, really murder a man to disgrace a king? And kidnap and plan to murder a young girl for that? Then he half woke up and said absently: “What? Oh, that, yes. I met the woman’s sister when I was down in Portsmouth and she—”
“You did what?” Quinton asked.
“When I was looking for traces of Mrs Langhorn, I found her sister who was also looking.”
“Mrs Langhorn has no sister,” Quinton said flatly.
Ranklin woke up some more.
Quinton said: “When I took on Grover Langhorn as a client, I went rather carefully into what relatives he might have in this country – people who could visit him in jail, or give evidence as to his character. I’ve had his grandparents traced – they’re all dead – and his mother’s two brothers, who emigrated together to South Africa. She never had a sister.”
Ranklin said slowly: “This was a Mrs Simmons who seemed to know quite a bit about Mrs Langhorn’s life – when she was Enid Bowman – in Portsmouth. Personal things you’d only tell a sister.”
“Nevertheless, I can assure you—”
“Ye met Mrs Langhorn herself,” O’Gilroy said.
In the back of the taxi, Ranklin was trying to recall all he could of “Mrs Simmons”. “She was talking of Enid Bowman as a young actress and she said she’d been ‘unlucky’. She didn’t say ‘untalented’ or ‘not much good’. You wouldn’t say that about yourself, would you? You’d say ‘unlucky’. Oh blast!”
O’Gilroy said: “I should’ve worried more, with her turning up like that to answer jest the questions we was looking to be answered. And leaving her hotel address everywhere we was looking so’s we’d be blind not to fall over her.”
“I should have taken you with me to meet her.”
“I’d never have seen a thing. ’Twas all there in jest the finding of her, and I should’ve thought of it then.”
Ranklin glanced suspiciously at him, but O’Gilroy wasn’t giving him an oblique lecture, he really did blame himself as much as Ranklin. It was a comfort, but a bleak one. He’d had Mrs Langhorn, probably the key to the whole thing, in his grasp and let her slip away.
Could she have planned the deception all by herself? How could he know? He’d come away feeling he knew something, however little, about the woman he’d met – but now he knew she’d fooled him, he obviously hadn’t understood a thing. So she could have done anything. Except, of course, pay for it all: the crossing to England, several nights at the Queen’s Hotel (she couldn’t be sure when she’d be found) plus a decent outfit and luggage. All that certainly hadn’t come from the purse of a woman living in La Villette.
It was a slightly less bleak comfort that he’d been duped by a conspiracy, not just one middle-aged woman.
“What’d ye have done if ye’d known ’twas her?”
Ranklin was still thinking back to Portsmouth. “Something else she was saying . . . not actually any one thing, more just the way she seemed to be thinking. As if Grover really had a right to the throne . . .” But had that, too, been part of the deception? Or the dream that made each new day in La Villette bearable? Aunt to the King hadn’t sounded like much, but mother . . . And mothers could certainly
assume glittering futures for their sons; his own had once been sure he was a future Field Marshal.
“I asked ye: what’d ye have done if ye’d known who she was?” O’Gilroy persisted.
Ranklin shook his head. “God knows . . .”
* * *
Back at the office, the Commander had got impatient with keeping a lonely vigil in his own sanctum and was slumped in the most comfortable chair in the agents’ room. Jay, who had bought the chair, was sitting on a hard one at the telephone. He called off hurriedly as Ranklin came in. O’Gilroy had stopped off at the switchboard to start his round of calls to Paris.
“Well?” the Commander demanded.
Ranklin said to Jay: “Get on to the Queen’s Hotel at Portsmouth and see if Mrs Simmons is still there – and anything they can tell us.” He flopped into a chair. “What’s the position at the Yard?”
“They’re fuming about the usual things,” the Commander said. “Have you got anything new?”
“The last straw – the last one I found out about – is that I was probably talking to Mrs Langhorn herself at Portsmouth. Pretending to be her non-existent sister. I had her – and I let her walk away.”
“Hmm.” The Commander thought about this. “Well, just having her wouldn’t have solved our problems in the long run.”
Ranklin said nothing.
“Then is that all?” the Commander asked.
“We’re definitely up against a conspiracy.”
The Commander snorted. “Even I can see that. Murder, kidnapping, motor-cars . . . All that isn’t the work of one retired loose woman and her son – who’s in jail anyway. But who is it the work of? – this Gorkin fellow?”
“I’m convinced he’s been running things in London, but I don’t think he’s been doing it all in Paris. Particularly when he wasn’t there. There’s a man Kaminsky, who runs their café, the Deux Chevaliers, and probably an anarchist, too . . . But have you heard anything of Gorkin?”
“No, but he could have got away on the afternoon boat. The alarm wasn’t sounded until after that had sailed, and the Yard doesn’t have enough to ask the French police to hold him, so . . .” He heaved his wide shoulders in a shrug.
