Past Caring - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  Sellick turned towards Elizabeth. “I ask you, Lady Couchman, hasn’t Martin done a highly effective job in creating this situation? You’ve met Miss Randall, another of my … employees. She’s a bonus payment I arranged for him along the way. You know how much he hates your family. I’ve only paid him to do what he’s always to do: get back at all of you.”

  My eyes followed this to Elizabeth, hunched in her chair, wizened and lost. What could she believe when I wasn’t certain any more what I believed? She looked up at me and, in her eyes, there was only a terrible doubt. Sellick was right. I couldn’t have brought her to this any better if he’d paid me. So what grounds were there for believing he hadn’t? I stood speechless, condemned by my own failure to be judged a tainted success.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” said Sellick, “I’ll just have something brought in with which to celebrate our agreement. It’s something I promised Martin a long time ago.” He walked slowly from the room. I heard his voice by the front door, addressing the chauffeur.

  In the brief silence of his absence, I stumbled through the rebuttals obvious even to me towards an unconvincing denial. “It’s not true, Elizabeth. I’m not working for Sellick any more. I didn’t know …” I stopped in mid-sentence.

  Elizabeth looked up at me. “How can I believe you, Martin? What is there left for me to hold onto? Is this the real reason you took the gun from me?”

  I sank into a chair opposite her. There was no answer to give.

  Sellick returned to the room. The chauffeur followed him, carrying a wooden box in his arms. He stood it on the table by the window, then withdrew. Sellick lifted from it a napkin-draped bottle in a wicker wine basket and three claret glasses, which he placed in a line on the table. He took the napkin from the bottle and polished each of the glasses in turn, holding them up to the light as he did so. We watched in a trance.

  “Today is my birthday,” he announced at last. “A date your family should never forget, Lady Couchman. To celebrate that – and your agreement to co-operate – I’ve brought this bottle: a very special bottle.” He lifted it from its basket. I recognized it at once: the 1792 madeira he’d promised as a prize for successful completion of my research into the Strafford mystery. “Originally, I’d intended that we should drink this with Alec at Quint do Porto Novo. But Alec cannot be with us and I don’t suppose we shall ever be going back to Madeira together again. So I’ve brought it here with me in honour of the occasion.” He took a penknife from his pocket and cut away the lead from the top of the bottle. “The flight may not have agreed with it and, after all, such vintages are always unpredictable.” He returned the bottle to its basket and applied a corkscrew to the neck.

  Elizabeth looked at me. “What is this, Martin?”

  “My prize for completing the assignment: probably the last bottle in the world in 1792 madeira, left by Strafford in his cellar.”

  I looked back at Sellick. He’d drilled the corkscrew in. Now he braced the bottle with his hand against the basket and began to pull the cork. I saw his face frown at the skilled and concentrated effort. “This should not be attempted by a novice,” he rasped. “You could say I have studied hard for this moment.” Slowly but smoothly, the cork emerged. “I think it may be all right, my friends. I think we may be in a unique position to sample a wine once offered to Napoleon.” He lifted the bottle from the basket with a reverential air.

  “I shan’t want any,” said Elizabeth.

  “Come, come, Lady Couchman. To refuse such an auspicious wine on such an auspicious occasion would be churlish. Surely the widow of a knight would not behave so? I insist you join me in a glass.”

  “I shall not.”

  “Lady Couchman,” he said, advancing towards her, the bottle in one hand, a glass in the other, “you should know that, when I insist upon something, I have the means to enforce my wish. In this small matter, as, henceforth, in large, you must obey me.”

  I looked at the salivating triumph in his face. Elizabeth had been right after all. Her forced hand in Eve’s book was to be only the start. Now that Sellick had gained the dominance which he deemed his right, he would stop at nothing. Strafford’s wine to celebrate Strafford’s defeat. Elizabeth to toast an anniversary of her husband’s treachery. Me to swallow the bitter vintage of serving him unwillingly but well.

  Sellick poured the dark fluid into the glass. It was thick and ruby red. “It is better than I had expected,” he said. “Drink, Lady Couchman. Or should I call you Miss Latimer?”

  The fire in Elizabeth’s eyes outblazed the wine as she looked up. “You may do your worst, Mr Sellick, but I shall not drink.”

  “You shall.” I flinched with the shock and suddenness of his act. He swung the glass and pitched the measure of wine towards her. It drenched her face and neck and splashed down her blouse in a crimson douche. She blinked and coughed once, but didn’t move, merely looked, not at Sellick, but at me. Through the wash of madeira that could have been Strafford’s blood, her eyes spoke of anguish and accusation. They didn’t even flicker when Sellick tossed the glass between us. It smashed into the fireplace, scattering fragments across the hearth.

  I stood up. Sellick was walking back to the table, to collect another glass. “I’m sure you’ll drink, Martin. As an historian, albeit a hired one, you’ll relish a Napoleonic vintage.”

  Enough. A fractured moment. What had Alec once said? “It’s as simple as a worm turning.” What was an inadequate historian to do – for once in his sham of a life – but struggle towards an intangible concept concealed between all the words written in and about the past? Honour, loyalty, humanity? No, something much simpler: the right thing to do. “To be, for one fleeting moment, less than a fool.” Too hard, Strafford, too hard. Trained to study without conclusion, hired to act for another, never for myself. It was that: a fleeting moment. But for once, for one true, unmet, long-dead friend, for good and all, I turned the tide.

  Truth without action was knowledge without honour, was history without Strafford.

  It could have been Strafford’s hand – but in reality it was mine – that pulled Couch’s gun from my jacket pocket as Sellick turned from the table. It could have been a hundred better men – but it had to be me – who raised the gun between two trembling hands and trained it on Sellick in his moment of savoured victory. It could have been any one of a dozen ways he chose to unnerve me, but the one he chose was the only one certain to fail. Perhaps he knew that. Perhaps he couldn’t resist one last opportunity to remind me of all the evil I’d happily served – in him and in myself. He took a pace towards me and, as he did so, he smiled. And, as he did so, I pulled the trigger.

  I didn’t see Sellick fall, just dropped the gun from my jarred hand and stepped towards him. Supine on the carpet, a dark hole in his forehead, his mouth curved open in a frozen smile. Leo Sellick was dead in front of me, his right arm stretched out and hand curled towards the still rocking, felled bottle of 1792 madeira, its blood-red contents gouting onto the pale carpet. It was the last bottle, which nobody would ever drink.

  Ten

  Why did I do it? That’s all they wanted to know. How could I explain that life had stopped for me in that moment, just as it had for Sellick. I hardly remember what happened, in what sequence, at what time, but somebody phoned for the police, while Elizabeth sat talking to me in the lounge, which I wouldn’t leave so long as Sellick remained. She was pale, but regally calm.

  Later – much later – Elizabeth related snatches of what I’d said in that hushed interval between the act and its flood of consequences.

  “You know why I did it?”

  “Of course. Before they all come, let me say: it’s the finest thing you could ever have done.”

  “You believed him. When he said I was still working for him.”

  “God forgive me, yes. It was his gift: to make people think the worst of others. An evil gift.”

  I remember the police siren gashing the pervasive peace that had followed and fo
rgotten the sudden violence. I remember Elizabeth kissing me on the forehead in stranger and comforting benediction. “You remind me more and more of Edwin. This time, I shan’t forsake you.” I remember the sun going behind a cloud and the covered shape by the window falling into shadow.

  “Why did you do it?”

  A rumpled, gravel-voiced inspector sat opposite me, smoking cheap cigarettes. He reminded me – bizarrely – of Marcus Baxter and seemed to say, between his questions: “You bloody fool, Radford. Do you think this proves a damn thing?”

  Only what he actually said again and again was “Why did you do it?” I could see the puzzlement in his face. I wasn’t the usual sneak thief or drunkard, wasn’t even the average rapist or domestic murderer. He didn’t know me, or Sellick, or why I’d killed a man on his birthday with his father’s gun.

  Eventually, unsatisfied, he formally charged me, and invited me to make a statement. There was no pressure or coercion. What I wrote was neither denial nor confession. Even as an explanation it didn’t amount to much, because I wasn’t speaking to the police or the courts in it or even the public in whose name I was accused. “Leo Sellick was the illegitimate son of Lady Couchman’s late husband. I killed him to stop his campaign of harrassment against the Couchman family.” Really, it was addressed to Strafford: a dead letter to a dead man. An attempt to tell him his supposed failure had really been a glorious triumph if it could force me to make a stand alongside him. But he couldn’t hear.

  A sleepless night in a police cell. I was still stunned by the calm that had followed the act, still bathed in an absurd fulfilment.

  The mood lingered through the morning. June 22nd: the day after a killing. In Guildford, I knew, the inquest into Henry’s death was opening. In Chichester, I lay on my bunk and awaited whatever my action had made inevitable.

  In the afternoon, the inspector called for me again. I was taken back to the interrogation room. On the table, there was a thick sellophane bag. It contained the gun.

  “It’s what you said,” he began ruminatively. “An army revolver dating from the turn of the century. We’ve had it checked. It’s in good nick. Lady Couchman confirms it belonged to her husband.”

  “You’ve questioned her?”

  “Yes – and got more of the same: academic riddles. Only there’s nothing academic about murder.” He stared at me for a moment. “If that’s what it was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a weird one – that’s a fact. You’re no killer. Yet you’ve killed a man.”

  “So what happens now?” We were still in the vacuum, the hollow, waiting time.

  “You’ve been charged. Tomorrow, you’ll appear in court. Meanwhile, you’ve got a visitor – your lawyer.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer.”

  “Sort that out with him. Walter Tremlett: he’s known to us. I gather he’s Lady Couchman’s solicitor.” There was a knowing look in his eye that was really just a policeman guessing. “Maybe she’s put you on the strength.”

  “It’s not like that.” But what was it like? Who was this man, this emissary from Elizabeth? I had no need of a lawyer, no need of a defence – or so I thought.

  “Do you want to see him?” He asked, but he knew I would. What else could I do?

  They took me back to my cell. A few minutes later, Tremlett was shown in. Rotund, red-faced, half-moon spectacles, receding salt and pepper hair, a country solicitor, in a heavy tweed suit, sweating in the afternoon. He shook my hand clammily.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr Radford.”

  I sat down on my bunk and he perched on the single chair, cradling a scuffed and bulging briefcase in his lap. “Who sent you, Mr Tremlett?”

  “Lady Couchman – as I expect you surmised.”

  “But why?”

  “Young man, somebody in your position needs help.”

  “Do you really know what that position is?”

  “You’ve been charged with murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence.” He smiled disarmingly. “But I imagine you mean rather more than that. Well, as a matter of fact, I do know what your position is, because Lady Couchman has full briefed me. Have they told you what happened at the inquest this morning?”

  “No.”

  “The verdict was accidental death – as we’d hoped. Without Mr Sellick on hand, what else could it be?”

  “You tell me.” I resented this stranger’s assumption of so much knowledge and association.

  Once again, the broad, genuine smile. “Mr Radford, I’m here to help you. Do you want to be convicted of murder?”

  Since killing Sellick, I’d not stopped to consider more than just the relief it had given me and others. Now I was being forced to confront the actuality of legal retribution. “I’ve already made a statement admitting that I killed him. It’s too late for anything else.”

  “I’ve read your statement. It’s an admission of homicide, yes, but not murder. That’s more than just a fine legal point, as you must realize. Lady Couchman feels beholden to you. She’s instructed me to do my best for you. With a good barrister, I think there’s every chance of successfully pleading manslaughter and receiving a light sentence.”

  I looked at him quizzically. “Mr Tremlett, I shot a man in cold blood. How can you dress that up as anything other than murder?”

  He pulled off his glasses and sucked one of the arms. “Murder may be commuted to manslaughter on several grounds, one of them being provocation. I think we may be in a position to argue that the killing was provoked.”

  It had been, but not in any of the ways I expected a court to entertain. “You’re not convincing me, let alone judge and jury.”

  “Bear with me, young man. You’ve not heard me out. Such a plea would rely upon evidence of the late Mr Sellick’s vendetta against the Couchman family and his recent threats towards Lady Couchman. I see his killing as the drastic act of a good friend. I think a jury might see it that way too. Lady Couchman will certainly testify in support of you. I hope your ex-wife may be persuaded to do so also.”

  “You know a great deal.”

  “Lady Couchman has told me all that I need to know – which is only prudent.”

  “I’m grateful to her for trying to help, but I still don’t think it’ll work. Personal testimony’s one thing, but proving Sellick was an unpleasant character isn’t enough. You’d have to prove he had a genuine grievance against the Couchmans and was trying to blackmail them. But there is no proof, and without proof I’m sunk. The only document confirming Sellick’s connexion with the Couchmans was destroyed straight after Henry’s funeral. Didn’t Elizabeth tell you that?”

  “Oh yes. But Lady Couchman visited me at my office here in Chichester the day before the funeral – and deposited with me a copy of that document. I have it with me in my case.” I didn’t know what to say. Strafford’s Postscript – plucked back from the flames. Was it possible? Tremlett pulled a file from his case and handed it to me.

  It was – as he’d promised – a complete photocopy of the Postscript. So it was true. The agonized debate, the formal pyre, the dreadful act. And all the time, an anonymous clutch of papers had been waiting in Tremlett’s office to give us – whether we wanted it or not – a second chance. Even at desperate need, Elizabeth had remembered Strafford. “Why did she do it?” I said at last. “The whole point was to erase the evidence of Sir Gerald’s bigamy.”

  “And so you did. The copy would have been quite safe with me, unread – until I was instructed to read it, unknown – until it was needed.”

  “But what for? She couldn’t have …”

  “No.” He shook his head. “But from what I know – and from what I imagine you know – is it hard to infer why she would have wanted to keep a secret copy, why she would have saved this last word from Strafford: for her eyes only?”

  “No.” I’d misjudged her. Elizabeth had succeeded where failure had been inevitable, in standing by both of the men she’d loved. For Strafford’
s sake, she’d saved the Postscript. For Couch’s sake, she’d tried to kill Sellick. And now, for my sake, she’d disinterred the family secret. “But it is only a copy.”

  “True, but comparison with the original Memoir should verify its authorship. If necessary, I shall go to Madeira to find that.”

  I looked straight at him. “You’re going to great lengths.”

  He nodded soberly. “Those are my instructions, Mr Radford.”

  I stood up. “Not if you’re to act for me. I appreciate what you’re saying, but there’s something you don’t quite understand.”

  He blinked at me owlishly. “Which is?”

  “Sellick was threatening Elizabeth with public ruin and humiliation. If we bring all this out in court, we’ll be doing the same thing. If I killed him for anything, it was to stop that happening.”

  He smiled. “I know you think I’m just an ignorant conveyancer, Mr Radford, but, strangely, I had thought of that. It would all be bound to come out. Of course, it wouldn’t be slanted as Mr Sellick intended, but it would become public knowledge, which might be just as bad. I think most judges would agree to leave the political connotations strictly alone, which would greatly diminish the story’s appeal to the press, but it would inevitably attract the sensation-seekers.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I made the point to Lady Couchman in precisely those terms. Like you, I have her interests at heart. I found her response persuasive, so much so that for you to resist would seem ungrateful as well as foolish.”

  “So persuade me.”

  “I’ll content myself by quoting Lady Couchman’s own words. What she said was that Mr Sellick – whatever his background – had no right to demand such a thing of her, but that you – in her judgement – had every right, not least because, of course, you’ve demanded nothing.” A silence fell, warmed by Elizabeth’s generosity of spirit. Then Tremlett returned the Postscript to his case and gathered himself together. “Think it over, Mr Radford. I’ll attend the court tomorrow. You’ll need to have decided by then.”