Diana's Altar

by Barbara Cleverly

  It was Adelaide’s voice, calm and cool, that answered, “Well. Perhaps when you’ve finished your holy housework, Father, you’ll find time to say a prayer for the soul of the much-lamented Aidan Mountfitchet, who was taken from us last night. I’m quite certain that God is even now enjoying his company. They met as good friends, forgiveness for sins asked for and granted. Pity you couldn’t be there at the last to give him a leg up, Reverend. But he seemed to know the way.”

  Constable Risby, with impeccable sense of propriety, walked quietly away to take up a sentinel’s stance at the door, and Joe was left to put himself bodily between two instantly formed and implacable enemies. The church might have witnessed dog, cock or bare-knuckle fights in its day but they were insignificant compared with the potentially volcanic spiritual tussle about to break out.

  “Ah well! That’s Aidan for you!” Joe heard his own voice, jovial, a touch desperate, out of place. “First class in orienteering with the Scouts, don’t you know! If there was a way, he’d find it!”

  They both turned to stare at him.

  “Unfortunately, in these days of medical ubiquity, souls of the dying are frequently reduced to receiving improper and unskilled guidance in their last moments on earth,” Sweeting said with waspish regret. He actually wrung his hands, Joe noted. He didn’t believe he’d ever encountered that gesture before in real life. Either the man was drawing attention to a magnificent amethyst ring he was wearing or he was nervously playing a part. A full check on Sweeting and his curriculum vitae had moved to the top of his list.

  “Lucky old souls!” Adelaide drawled. “They always know a doctor is on their side, fighting to keep them alive and not prepared to consign them to the flames, even the imaginary flames of an imagined hell.”

  “It’s Aidan’s last ten hours on earth I’m keen to get in focus,” Joe said hurriedly. “He spent them here under your roof, so to speak, Sweeting. At eight o’clock the candles were lit for your symposium—was that the word you used?—on the darker emotions. We’ve lived through turbulent times and, in these enlightened days, many of us have a deeper understanding of the human condition. Men are learning to un-stiffen their upper lips and lay bare their souls in a way they would never have contemplated before the war.” They were at least listening to him as he burbled his calming platitudes. “I would be surprised to hear that my friend was entertaining such doubts but you never know. Tell me, Sweeting—was he present from the beginning of the session?”

  “Yes, he was. Everyone appeared on time.”

  “Everyone? How many would that be?”

  After a slight pause, he replied: “Eight.”

  “I shall need to know their names.”

  “There were two groups of four. It was well balanced.”

  “Balanced by you? I note that your card specifies ‘By invitation only.’”

  “Naturally. Personal matters are not discussed in front of an audience of any rag-tag-and-bobtails! The members of this particular group were sympathetically chosen. By me.”

  “But you let in a man you considered a sinner?” Adelaide was keeping up the pressure and avoiding Joe’s narrowed eyes.

  Sweeting smirked. “Of course! A group of eight happy, virtuous believers—now where would you find those? A mixture is the best composition for a helpful debate. Mountfitchet played the Devil’s Advocate quite admirably.”

  “You’re saying you used Mountfitchet as an awful warning?”

  “He was that indeed. But a good speaker. Trained, I’d have said, in argument and rhetoric. Equipped also with a certain devilish wit and charm. Laughter, I’ve always suspected, is an unacknowledged tool of Satan. If you wish to seduce, lubricate your Primrose Path with laughter.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try to remember that,” Adelaide said brusquely. “Now what about answering the commissioner’s question?”

  “You were about to give me the names of the other seven guests . . .” Joe prompted.

  “No. I was not. This . . . doctor . . . will tell you that the consulting room is sacrosanct, as is the lawyer’s office, the banker’s books and my church. I cannot be made to give up the details of my congregation.” The blue eyes flashed with a martyr’s fervour, inviting further intimidation.

  “That is, indeed, your privilege, Reverend, and the fact that you choose to invoke it speaks volumes,” Joe said dryly and turned to Adelaide. “I fear they were not gathered here to knit socks for Albanian orphans,” he confided.

  Turning once again to Sweeting, he extended a hand in farewell. “We’ll continue this conversation at a later time when I have at my fingertips the results of the tests on the forensic evidence these premises have thrown up. Copious and fascinating is my first assessment. I look forward to sharing the revelations with you. Well, we’ll say goodbye and leave you to your ecclesiastical charring, sir.”

  At the gate, Joe turned to Risby. “I’m going to ask the superintendent to release you from duties to accompany me about the town for the next two days at least. Do you see any problems with that arrangement? Any objections?”

  As the constable mumbled his astonishment and willingness, Joe asked further, “Look, this is a long shot, but are you able, by any chance, to drive a motor vehicle?”

  From his suite at the Garden House, Joe settled in to make several more telephone calls. His first was to the Mill Road garage. “Simpson, do I remember you offering me the use of a chauffeur along with the Lagonda? You did? Good. Is that still available? Well I have rather a particular request . . .”

  Chapter 10

  Joe returned to his hotel room the next morning following a solitary walk along the towpath to Grantchester. The beauty of the light slanting down from the intense blue sky and through the leaves to the green gloom of the river below seemed to reduce his problems, easing them into to a more accurate perspective. His thoughts were calmed. Thoughts that always returned to Adelaide. Why would any woman in her situation give up this peaceful place and worthwhile life to join him in the smoke and bustle of London, was the question he repeatedly put to himself.

  Adelaide had given him a blatantly invented excuse for not seeing him the previous evening in spite of Hunnyton’s skill in persuading Easterby to cancel her evening duties. A locum had been engaged and the shifts redistributed, though Adelaide had insisted on taking one of the daytime duties herself. A duty she could on no account neglect, she’d said. Joe had just caught her swift, dismissive explanations, “Work for the public good . . . children’s philanthropic clinic . . . no business of yours, Joe . . .”

  Her edginess had reduced him to silent acceptance. The girl probably needed a good night’s sleep, and she was sensitive enough to want to avoid distracting him from what was developing into a complex and puzzling case, Joe told himself without conviction. Though an internal voice whispered back that he was deceiving himself and that she was still in turmoil when it came to a consideration of her future with him, with all its drawbacks. Professional women were expected to give up their careers on marriage; snaring a husband from among the much-reduced male population was quite a coup, the crowning moment of their lives. But not all women reasoned in this way. Increasingly, women were forging ahead and enjoying jobs previously undertaken only by men. They were insisting on retaining them against much social pressure.

  Who made the rules? Could a lady doctor be a married woman? Joe had never thought to ask. It seemed to him that this might be the one profession where the married state could appear as a real advantage. The experience of marriage doubled a woman’s knowledge, surely, and therefore her value to society?

  On returning, he had a bath and put on his best Savile Row suit, choosing a lavender silk tie to spark it up. Rather daring. Twice thrown away by his sister—“It makes you look like a gigolo, darling!”—and twice rescued by him. He decided that this was its moment. If he was to play the role of art connoisseur, he ought perhaps to signal
his London sophistication. Out of habit, he checked that his Browning was ready to go. Worryingly, he’d been given clearance by his superiors—indeed, urgently advised—to carry his gun when confronting Pertinax. Any resulting messiness would be instantly swept up, he’d been reassured. “National emergency” had been invoked, but no one had located the line between emergency and civil war.

  Too late now to put in for one of those nifty little Italian pistols. He weighed the Browning in his hand, suddenly seeing the disadvantages. Though well-maintained with a soldier’s precision, it was hardly ever put to use and it looked bulky and dated. Too big to conceal about his person, it would be spotted by anyone with the slightest suspicion of his intentions. In his briefcase, then? By the time he’d opened the straps, scrabbled about, taken the safety off, aimed and fired, his target would be halfway down the drive or beaning him with a poker. Anyway, he was just playing a part, planning an innocent cup of coffee with a like-minded art admirer. Watteaus and lavender ties jarred with the blunt ugliness of the revolver. He settled down to read again the art crib sheet dictated by Dorothy over the phone, his mood lightened by the memory of her eager complicity.

  “It’s a game, Joe,” she’d said to encourage him. If only it were!

  The views of the small committee convened to brief him in Whitehall some five weeks before had been quite another. Joe winced as he remembered the way he’d been set up, handed a tin opener and a can of worms.

  Joe had grumbled to his secretary on being handed the summons.

  “Sir, you can’t wriggle out. It would appear to be a national emergency,” Miss Sturdy, interpreting the Top Secret heading and the eyes only cast list, had told him firmly.

  “Then it’s the fourth one this month. The first three ran happily into the sand. So will this one.”

  “The security service will be present,” she added cunningly. “You’ll want to hold your end up.”

  “Huh! Fine security service that announces its appointments two days in advance! They’ll be taking out an advertisement on the front page of The Times next. How many people have seen this?”

  “Oh, I think it’s very civilised to let us know, sir. Gives everyone a chance to reschedule. I’ll put the Wormwood Scrubs visit back a week, shall I?”

  Four pairs of eyes had turned to study him as he entered the room set aside for the meeting at the Foreign Office, expressions ranging from the warmly welcoming to the coldly suspicious.

  At the table had been the reassuringly familiar features of his commanding officer, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Trenchard. The commissioner was the most imposing of the four grandees present, Joe thought. Authoritative, brisk and tireless, the man had Joe’s respect for the many reforms he’d made in a short time to the failing police service. A severe taskmaster, he was acknowledged to be hardest of all on himself.

  He greeted Joe with a twitch of his bushy eyebrows, which hid a pair of surprisingly warm and humorous eyes. Trenchard was a man of few words but all those words were caught, noted down and moulded into rolling prose by the man seated at his side: Howgrave-Graham, secretary to the Metropolitan Police Force. This man had Joe’s trust and affection. His post was a civilian one, but Joe regarded Howgrave-Graham as the heart, mind and filing cabinet of the Yard. Ranged up opposite this pair were two men who, awkwardly, did not see eye to eye with each other.

  Put in to bat for MI5, the protector of state security, was Sir Vernon Kell’s deputy, Maximilian Knightly. Elegantly grey-haired, clever and suave, he was the man frequently chosen to be the face of the Secret Service when it had to take off its mask for government. The fourth man was technically their host, the foreign secretary. Sir John Simon’s bland, shiny face under a high, round forehead and sleek hair correctly reflected his high intellect but gave no clue as to his humble origins in a bleak, northern town. A self-made man, he should have had Joe’s approval. Such, however, had been his soft approach, and so uncertain his handling of foreign affairs, Joe was reserving judgment. In Joe’s eyes, running down the British military whilst simultaneously underestimating the rising menace of Fascist Germany was a disastrous policy.

  Joe had been invited in his capacity as head of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, reporting back to the Home Office. Of the assembled company, all Savile Row suited, coiffed and manicured, Joe was the only one who knew how to fit a pair of handcuffs and bark out an order. His war years had equipped him with that quality so sought after by branches of both State and Military Intelligence—“training acquired in the school of experience.” If there were villains to be exposed and interrogated, charges to be laid and prisoners to be carted off to the Tower, Joe and his Specials would be there at the sharp end.

  In the public’s imagination, it was all done by muscle power and steel-capped boots. Joe knew that it was more often courage, patient surveillance and intelligence that got the unpleasant tasks done. MI5, constantly undermanned and underfunded, battled on gallantly, recruiting agents mainly from among friends, family and chaps they were at college with: “They tell me your cousin is something of an Arabist, Fortescue . . . He must have lunch with me at my club—I may have something for him . . .” Even women, it was rumoured, were being used as agents. But it was in the quality of MI5’s file-keeping, Joe reckoned, that their real strength lay. That and their judiciously dispensed gossip. And at least they were willing to share information with him when necessary.

  They seemed to trust him but he knew their trust was about as deep as that of the owner of a half-trained Staffordshire pit bull for his dog. Show the beast respect but carry a heavy stick and be prepared for it to bite your ankle. “Watch him! Joe Sandilands has previous,” was probably the first comment that came to the mind of his superiors. All too true. He’d taken on the great and the not-so-good, refusing to sweep dirt under the carpet, examining and dealing with the unpleasant writhing creatures he’d discovered under stones in the home counties. He expected no gratitude and was well aware of his vulnerability.

  Some figures in the British establishment were above the reach of common law and order and any policeman threatening to topple one of this élite group would himself be sent spinning base over apex before he could do any harm. Joe’s letter of resignation was lodged permanently in the drawer of Trenchard’s desk as a gauge of his independence and determination to uphold the law without fear or favour. The men assembled on this occasion were all well aware of that. Sandilands was not “One of Us” nor yet quite “One of Them.” Might even prove to be a loose cannon.

  Unsmiling and watchful of his reactions, the four men had outlined for Joe a political nightmare.

  The very worst scenario, they’d called it, and—inevitably—a national emergency. He’d remember to tell Miss Sturdy. Joe was not, at first, alarmed. The press announced a fresh one of these every day, but, looking round the table, he saw a quartet of men who were not given to exaggeration. “Of course,” the foreign secretary had added shiftily, taking out a bit of insurance in case it blew up in their faces and they were accused of hysterical overstatement, “it could all turn out to be no more than the licentious behaviour of a degenerate maniac whose idea of fun is to ensnare and ruin the more gullible amongst the ruling classes. These, sadly, are always with us,” he pointed out, “on the fringes, ripe for enticement—the daredevils, the disaffected, the experimenters, the ones lacking in moral fibre, the second sons . . .”

  Ouch! Joe calculated that, having scored four out of five on this gullibility yardstick himself, he’d better keep his head down. And—“degenerate maniac”? Plenty of those about. Which one did they have in mind?

  This was worrying enough, the foreign secretary declared, but was something Sandilands and the Met could cope with relatively easily given the instruction and the backup. Right now. Before the fire got out of hand. No need to alert the armed forces as yet.

  Armed forces? Christ! Where was he going with th
is? If this wet lettuce of a foreign secretary had been startled into action, trouble really was brewing. Was Hitler assembling an armada? Was Mad Mosely planning an armed coup?

  Everyone had learned the technique of containing a solitary fire in an oil drum, Sir John Simon had claimed mysteriously. (Joe wondered briefly what on earth this useful skill could possibly entail and where you could acquire it.) It could, on the other hand, Sir John had suggested, hedging his bets, in the light of present European turmoil, be leading to a problem of huge national and international proportions. With three ruined careers and two suicides already to be accounted for, questions were being asked. The Daily Herald was beginning to make connections. Communist-backed rag, of course, its cash blatantly being piped in from Moscow, it could create mayhem if it got at the truth.

  And then MI5’s man Knightly had pulled his nasty little rabbit out of the hat. “And there’s always—perhaps primarily—the Cambridge connection.” He had spoken through gritted teeth. “We had feared the worst of that place,” he added to Joe’s bemusement, “and it begins to look as though our fears are well-founded.” He cast a sideways glance at Joe. “I say, not a Cambridge man yourself, are you, Sandilands?”

  Joe knew that this sharp operator would already have ascertained as much from the file in his cabinet and was just underlining Joe’s neutrality for the benefit of the others by eliciting the response, “No, sir. I’m an Edinburgh man. Law. Fusilier and Military Intelligence in the war, and the rest you know.”