“That’s the central question. I’m sure the rest turns on that. But just asking her won’t help – as your uncle found.”
“Then what?”
“It seems logical to suppose that, in some way, he was discredited in her eyes. There were several people who stood to gain from that.”
“Who?”
“A list of suspects isn’t difficult. He knew Gerald Couchman to be a cheat and a coward – enemy number one. He defied Lloyd George over his plans to oust Asquith – enemy number two. He was the reason Elizabeth Latimer withdrew from Suffragette circles – they were therefore enemy number three. Your own mother disliked him enough to snoop into his fiancée’s background – enemy number four.”
“Poor old Mother,” he mused. “I couldn’t bear to have any of her pictures down here, you know. Left ’em all up at the house. Can’t see her blackening her brother-in-law’s name, though.”
“She wanted to split them up.”
“Granted, but by blackening Elizabeth, not my uncle. No, that’s too devious. Besides, she’s dead and gone.”
“So?”
“So what about his death? Strangers sniffing round, breaking in, rowing with him. Then an accident that stinks of murder. What the hell’s that got to do with my poor old mother?”
“Nothing, I suppose.” I hadn’t believed it myself. “But nothing with Lloyd George either – he died in 1945 – or the Suffragettes.”
“Then this blighter Couchman?”
“Again, unlikely. I was stretching a point to say he might have had it in for your uncle. He wasn’t in touch at all at the time of the engagement – not even in the country.” We’d talked in a circle and got nowhere.
And that’s how we went on. Ambrose was subdued and soulful away from the cider, puffing at his pipe with the look of a bemused, slightly pained, old man. I was holding out on him, not telling him about my connexion with the Couchmans or my encounter with Henry. I was afraid he might insist on seeing Henry and blow any chances I hadn’t already blown myself. Beyond that, I still wanted Strafford and this mystery to myself. I was happy to pump good old Ambrose for all he was worth, but keeping him in the dark suited my purpose. I saw a link between Henry’s panicky denials of knowing Strafford and heavy-footed intruders at Lodge Cottage in 1951. But I wanted more to go on before trying to prove it. Historical instinct – plus the fact that Henry was himself a politician – prompted me to suspect a political conspiracy against Strafford, but I wanted to test that idea in scholastic circles in Cambridge before going any further. Ambrose had told me all I expected to get out of him. So I began to regret even showing him the Memoir and decided to tell him no more. It was another mistake, of course – more culpable than any before. I should have trusted Ambrose – as he trusted me. But I was incapable of that.
After breakfast, we took Jess out for a stroll round the grounds. Barrowteign was just opening for business, the first visitors trickling in. But it was still quiet and peaceful as we ambled among the horse chestnuts and looked up the sloping ground to the broad frontage of the house. There was still dew on the grass and mist lifting only slowly from the trees. Ambrose stirred last year’s conker cases with his stick and contemplated what had once been his home.
“I never go up there now,” he said. “Too many bloody memories, I suppose.”
“Did your uncle, when he stayed with you?”
“Not that I can recall.” He sucked his pipe. “’Course, there were workmen swarming all over it that year – restoration they called it. Tarting up I’d say, from what I’ve seen.” He shook his head dolefully. “He asked me a lot about what they’d done, though, where they’d put all the stuff they moved.”
“And what had they done?”
“Chucked a lot. Stowed the rest in the attics. A lot of stuff I’ve forgotten is probably still up there under the dustsheets.” He sighed. “Best place for it, I suppose.”
We turned away from Barrowteign, left the grounds by a stile Ambrose knew and walked down across the river. It was getting warmer all the time and we seemed to be making for The Greengage.
“Hair of the dog, Martin,” Ambrose said. “That’s what you need. I just need a bloody drink. My uncle came here with me at midday after that break-in, the day before he died. It was a scorcher – early June – and we sat outside and drank beer to calm our nerves. Mine needed it after that, God knows, and though my uncle didn’t show it, I reckon his did too.” We turned in at the door of the pub and he looked across to the small garden behind it, with chairs stacked on tables and an early season look about it. “The drink must have made him sentimental. I remember him talking about that toy castle he made for me when he came home from the Great War. What had I done with it?” Then, almost as an afterthought: “It was a bloody good castle, though.”
We were Ted’s only customers at that hour. He stood polishing glasses and holding them up to the light, while I winced through my first drink and Ambrose made smoke. His eyes sparkled through the haze and altogether he looked remarkably unlike a man who’d just had a sleepless night. He was busy recollecting the mysterious past, to him more refreshing than any rest.
But not to Ted. “You still blatherin’ on ’bout that, Ambrose?”
“I’m not complaining,” I put in.
“Maybe you would if you’d ’eard it many times as I ’as.”
“Facts are facts,” Ambrose snapped. “I didn’t imagine that housebreaker. Have you forgotten that?”
“I remember right ’nough. I remember Constable Sprague comin’ in and askin’ my old dad and me if any strangers ’ad been askin’ after your uncle ’afore that blessed break-in. ’Course they ’adn’t – not ’afore like.”
“Wait for it, Martin,” Ambrose said with a grimace. “Ted will now torment me with what he failed to tell the Coroner.” In a tone of mock enthusiasm: “Well, Ted, did anyone ask about my uncle after the break-in?”
“Somebody did.”
“But you didn’t think to mention it to Sprague?”
“Well, it weren’t ’afore the break-in were it, like ’e asked. It were after.”
“But it was before he died, wasn’t it? The afternoon before, to be bloody precise.”
Ted nodded slowly. “Might’ve been.”
“It was when you first told me, Ted, far too late for the inquest of course.”
“Dain’t prove nothin’, do it?”
“No,” Ambrose said with a sigh.
And nor did it. What did we have? Strafford lying low in Devon while a person or persons unknown tried to find him. Why? Strafford dead in a bizarre accident. Just that or something more sinister? A cidery old nephew cultivating conspiracies at the fag end of his family fortunes. Or was he really onto something? I had to believe the latter if only out of respect for Strafford. But I badly needed substance rather than suspicion and that’s what Ambrose couldn’t give me.
I phoned Hester from The Greengage, assured her I was all right and said I’d be back with them by evening. Ambrose volunteered – which was good of him – to drive me to Exeter, so we walked back to the cottage, collected the Memoir and climbed into his ancient, rusting Morris Minor. Jess hopped into the back and we took off up through the valley at a mad speed. Ambrose talked as he drove, and smoked, and kept turning to me to emphasize points, none of which made for a restful journey. He had no difficulty extracting from me a promise to send him a copy of the Memoir or keep him posted on my research, but I was, at the time, more concerned about the horse-box we were overtaking.
As we approached Exeter, he quizzed me about Sellick and I found myself being evasive. “It’s just that he has the money to indulge his interest in an historical mystery.” Ambrose signalled his doubts about that but I didn’t share them. He didn’t know Sellick and I was in no mood to indulge him.
“What’s next on your bloody agenda then?” Ambrose asked as we pulled up in the Bennetts’ cul-de-sac, the prim little properties looking a thousand miles from Barrowteign.
“Camb
ridge: to find out what the historians make of it all.”
“Just go on digging, lad. Believe me, there’s something buried.”
“That’s what I think, too.” I picked up my bag. “Well, thanks for all your help.”
“Don’t mention it.” He smiled and shook my hand firmly. Then he gave me one of his endearing winks. “I’ll go on digging too, remember that. Together, I reckon we could come up with something – one hell of a something.”
“I’ll keep in touch.”
Hester and Nick were good enough not to be annoyed by my failure to turn up the night before and I entertained them with an account of my lost 24 hours with Ambrose. I spent the next day in the City Library looking up old local papers for mentions of the fatal accident.
There was a brief paragraph in an issue of 5 June 1951, a fuller report of the inquest two weeks later. As Ambrose had said, there was much talk of the safety record of the Barrowteign crossing, none of the death being anything other than accidental. As for the driver’s recollection of a figure running away from the scene at the time, the Coroner asked the jury to bear in mind how upset the driver had been by the collision. This was tantamount to inviting them to ignore that piece of evidence, which they duly did. The Coroner conjectured that an elderly man alarmed on the crossing by the approach of a train might easily have stumbled or trapped his foot between the rails in trying to hurry away. The jury went along with that and brought in a verdict of accidental death. One short sentence describing Ambrose’s evidence showed how little attention he’d been given. And it had rankled ever since. On Friday, I returned to London for a weekend in limbo. I was keen to go up to Cambridge straight away, but the college couldn’t offer me a guest room till Monday. I knuckled down to writing another report for Sellick, making as much as I dared of Ambrose’s allegations of foul play. As far as it went, it was accurate and honest. I felt more confident now, more in control. Little did I know that my peace of mind was merely self-delusion.
Four
I peered through the grime on the window of a grubby, jolting old Eastern Region train at that sprawl of derelict sidings you pass through just outside Liverpool Street station. Sunlight on that sea of rust only added to its bleakness. Yet it was familiar as well as bleak: a starting point on my once regular journeys to Cambridge. I remembered – as I always remembered – shivering at the first sight of those hostile stretches of Essex on my first journey twelve years before. At first intimidated, later seduced and lastly appalled by the alien pleasures of that city in the Fens, I was nevertheless still drawn to it and secretly welcomed the opportunity Sellick had given me to go back again. After all, despite my carpings, for all my reservations, Cambridge had given me three years a good deal nearer the top than the seven years since. Pampered, narcissistic, overweening – all of those things it was, and more. But was that so much worse than what I’d become?
Princes’ Hall, the grey eminence sandwiched between Corpus Christi and Pembroke Colleges, had always been a world unto itself. It was no different that cool evening, with a sheet of mottled cloud slung across the sun, as I paid off the taxi and eyed the place, through the black and gold arrow-topped railings on its front wall, with the same suspicion it had always seemed to reserve for me: a grass and cobble court, Tudor cloisters down one side, a Victorian hall on the other, a Gothic chapel at the far end. “Good for history,” those who’d advised me to apply to it had said, and they’d been right – for a certain kind of history: long on knowledge and memory, short on imagination and humanity.
Next morning, I went early to the University Library, that towering structure on the left bank of the Cam with a spire to rival Salisbury, but dedicated to a different kind of god: learning of the dessicated, bibliomanic variety. The writings of all the leading politicians of Strafford’s day were there. I waited for them to be fetched from the archives in the huge reading room – silently aswarm with students cramming for finals – and felt a secret pride at my more subtle errand. In fact, this part of it told me next to nothing. Virtually every Cabinet colleague of Strafford’s had left some testament to posterity – memoirs, letters, diaries, autobiography – but after a day sifting through them I’d gleaned nothing, except added respect for Strafford as a writer and a man.
The scantiness of the references was, like the dog that didn’t bark, suspicious in itself. And nowhere was there any substantiation of Baxter’s surmise that Strafford had resigned in order to panic Asquith into an early election. That, I consoled myself over a currant bun in the Library tea room, was the weak point where I could open my attack on the well-armoured historical hide of Marcus Baxter.
I chose the hour before dinner to call on his room – a spacious, three-windowed apartment over an arch to the left of the chapel – and was in luck. When I knocked, his hoarse, bellowed “Come” was at once familiar.
It was always said of Baxter that he didn’t so much enter a room as invade it. When it was his own, he didn’t inhabit it so much as infest it. There was about him a strange combination of the seedy and the glamorous, the louche and the honourable. An aroma distinctive of his proud perversity – or was it an odour? – hung around the room and transported me instantly back to my many previous visits, all of them more deferential than this one. There was still a mix of old books, fine whisky, stale onions and cheap cigarettes in the air, still the look of an old bull remembering spring about Baxter as he glared up at his visitor. He was seated on a utility chair, rasping into a pocket dictating machine, while the velvet-upholstered chaise-longue by the window, where he could have had a good view of the court, was piled instead with books and papers, and the wooden swivel chair behind the crowded desk stood empty. The room was given over completely to books and papers, the only decoration being a small bust of Cromwell on a pedestal in one corner and a drinks cabinet entirely stocked with malt whisky in another. Unless, that is, you counted Baxter himself – a short, stocky, weatherbeaten figure with the look of a prizefighter about him, blue towelling bathrobe wrapped over his day clothes, high tar cigarette in the corner of his mouth, grey and balding but still with that widow’s peak that lent a devilish air to the crumpled face.
“Who’s that?” he barked, peering through the fug of his own creation.
“Martin Radford – remember?”
Baxter may have meant to smile, but the effort of keeping his cigarette where it was converted the expression into a crooked leer. “Naturally, my boy. Class of ’67.” His memory was intact, as I might have known. “What stone have you crawled out from under?”
“Teaching, you might say.”
“Best thing – for you and it. Have a drink.” As ever, he made no move to fetch one for me, so I poured some myself. “What’s your excuse for creeping back here? You know I don’t encourage it.”
“Why is that?” I asked, topping up his own drink and trying not to be nettled.
“Because, my boy, the ones who come back to tell me how successful they’ve been tend to be those I thought the least of.” He consented to remove the cigarette from his mouth, but only to swallow some whisky.
“That’s all right then.” I cleared a space on the chaise longue and settled in it. “I’ve no successes to tell you about.”
“Then I’ll agree not to say what I thought of you.”
“What about you? How are the books going?”
“I’ve got a biography of Bonar Law coming along.”
Time for a dig of my own. “Wasn’t he rather a dull dog?”
“That’s the whole point. I don’t want gossip column stuff getting in the way of politics. Did he drink? Did he go with women – or young boys? Who cares? Did he create an Irish problem to dish the Liberals? – that’s more like it.”
“I’m doing a little bit of historical research myself at the moment.”
He snorted into his whisky. “Better late than never.”
“That’s why I dropped by. Noticed from the records that you’d been there before me.”
“Where?” Baxter made it sound as if I was insulting him.
“Edwin Strafford. Home Secretary under Asquith. You wrote his D.N.B. entry.”
Baxter grinned. “Radford, this must be the first time you’ve read anything I’ve written. I trust you were impressed.”
I ignored the sarcasm and threw in some of my own. “I found the length manageable but the conclusions questionable.” It could’ve been him commenting on an essay of mine.
“Ho, ho. Strong words indeed. As always, Radford, I must ask you: where’s your evidence?”
“It’s more a question of where’s yours? Do you remember how you explained Strafford’s sudden resignation from the Home Office in 1910?”
Baxter flapped his hand at an imaginary fly. “Of course I do. Strafford was just a busted flush. Wanted to be a politician with clean hands. When he found he couldn’t be, he tried to pressurize Asquith into calling an election and scrapping the Constitutional Conference. I think he regarded compromise as sordid. Too much of a gentleman to be involved in that. Too big a fool to see that his resignation was pointless. No power base, you see – no political nous.”
“But how do you know that’s why he resigned?”
“Why else? It fits the picture: an empty gesture by an irrelevant dilettante.”
“It sounds like pure prejudice to me.”
“Then what do you think?”
“I’ve got hard evidence that he resigned in order to marry a Suffragette.”
Baxter threw up his hands and guffawed. “And Bonar Law was Jack the Ripper. Thank God you quit teaching, Radford.”
I tried to stay cool. “I think you’ll find my evidence a good deal more convincing than yours.”
“I doubt it. What’ve you got?”
“A memoir left by Strafford – newly discovered among his papers in Madeira.”
A primary historical source was pure gold to Baxter, so, for all his sneering, a prospector’s glint came into his eye. “Could be interesting. But don’t make the old mistake of believing what a politician says about himself.”
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