by Jo Walton
“Little red Austin. But you really think he’s dead?”
“There’s a distinct possibility, sir. At present making an identification of Miss Gilmore’s companion would be most useful to us. What I’d like to ask would be for you to wait until mid-day for Marshall to report in. If he does report in, please call me at the Yard and I’ll continue to pursue other possibilities. If not, then I’d like you to send an officer who knew Marshall well to London to attempt identification.”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll do that, Inspector. Terrible business. Terrible. Getting himself blown up having lunch with an actress. Not safe in our beds. The Prime Minister’s quite right.”
“Yes, sir,” Carmichael said, though he wondered again whether Mark Normanby might have had rather more to do with setting the bomb than trying to prevent it. Though why would an aging actress and a naval lieutenant have become a danger?
“Just like that bomb in Wales,” Beddow went on, underlining Carmichael’s thoughts.
“Can you tell me anything about Marshall?” Carmichael asked.
Beddow spluttered for a moment. “Good man. Good sailor. Came into the service in the war and stayed in. Patriotic. He was due for promotion, overdue really, but with the naval cuts nobody’s been moving on as fast as they could. The sort of man the country really can’t spare.”
“How old is Marshall?”
Beddow seemed a little taken aback. “I’d have to look it up. Within a year or two of thirty, I’d say. Shall I have his records sent to you?”
Young for Gilmore, even if she had a thing for sailors, Carmichael thought, then immediately reproached himself for jumping to conclusions again. Though surely he couldn’t be another son? “That would be very useful, sir,” he said. They rang off in an exchange of platitudes. Carmichael repeated the gist of the conversation to Royston.
“A red Austin?” Royston asked.
“They both seemed to think he’d crashed it. He must have been a terrible driver. Or maybe he drank. The Austin’s not a dangerous car.”
“It’s not that, sir,” Royston said. He went to the window. “There’s a red Austin right outside the house. And it was there yesterday too, I remember noticing it while you were talking to the reporters in the rain.”
“Yes, one of them was leaning on it,” Carmichael said. “It could be a coincidence. They’re not that rare. All the same, I have a strong feeling Marshall never reports back to his ship and we don’t need to ring the rest of these names.”
“A hunch, sir?” Royston asked.
Carmichael rolled his eyes wearily. “Have you found anything else?”
“Lots of rubbish mostly, bills for dresses and letters arranging parties. More cuttings. But there’s this.” He handed Carmichael a thick sheaf of stained and yellowing papers, stapled in the corner with a rusty staple. Carmichael looked through them at first casually, and then again with interest.
“These look like instructions for building a bomb,” he said.
“That’s what I reckoned,” Royston said. “And they were close to the top of one of the piles.”
“It seems ridiculous, but maybe she really was making a bomb herself.” Carmichael felt his spirits lift at the thought.
“Kinnerson said she was a red,” Royston pointed out.
“So he did,” Carmichael said, looking down at the yellowed pages, so different from the elaborately floral diary. “Where I really do have a hunch, sergeant, is that we’re going to be finding out an awful lot more than we want to about Lauria Gilmore in the near future.”
“And I remember you said that you always followed up hunches that mean extra work,” Royston sighed. “I can’t imagine why she’d have wanted to make a bomb.”
“When we know that, we’ll know everything about the case,” Carmichael said. “Let’s get on with that desk. Jacobson will be here any minute, and I want to check the other rooms, just in case.”
7
The station for Coltham is Eskridge. It was a perfect June Sunday, and of course there was nobody there to meet me. As I stood there fuming and cursing Siddy, I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever thought for a minute that there would be. In all my childhood memories of her she was unreliable and sometimes actively treacherous. I stood there fuming at myself.
It’s a boring little nowhere place, Eskridge, not really even a village, just a slew of ugly little houses that look as if they’ve washed up around the railway station. Nobody else had left the train. I was alone on the platform but for a few iron benches painted green and a hanging basket of geraniums. I went out through the station. A ticket collector nodded to me. I walked out onto the forecourt impatiently. There was absolutely no sign of anyone. I might as well have stayed in bed. Just as I was turning to look at the timetable to see when there would be a train back to London, a little open-topped sports car drew up with a squeal of brakes and a total stranger got out.
The car was smart as paint, and the stranger was smarter. He was tall and dark and, yes, handsome, in a devil-may-care way. You stop taking much notice of looks in the theater; you see so many pretty faces and lots of them belong to people who don’t deserve them, or who think that owning that face means it will be their fortune. They have to learn that no face is anyone’s fortune without an awful lot of hard work going with it. Still, this man had such perfect features, such artfully cut hair, such an air of arrogant charm, that I kept looking at him to see if he could keep on carrying it off.
“Viola Larkin, I presume?” he asked. His voice was educated, impeccably top-drawer, and had just the faintest touch of Irish.
“Lark,” I corrected him automatically. “But yes, I am.”
He smiled, consciously turning on the charm. “I’m Loy Farrell,” he said, offering his hand. “They sent me to get you. I’m sorry I’m late.”
There are people you can trust as soon as you meet them. Loy wasn’t one of them. No, more than that, Loy was the opposite. I had a strong feeling I couldn’t trust him. I shook hands with him warily.
He opened the car door for me. I took a scarf out of my bag and tied it over my hair while he came around the car again and got in at the driver’s side.
“What a pity,” he said.
“What?” I asked, frostily.
“That you’re covering up your pretty hair.”
I looked at him incredulously. He must have seen that his roll-on charm and shallow compliments weren’t getting anywhere with me, because he laughed.
“Well, it was worth a try,” he said, as if I couldn’t possibly hold it against him. He started the car, and drove off, looking at the road and smiling to himself.
“So, are you staying at Coltham, Mr. Farrell?” I asked, after he’d swung the car around a few corners in silence.
“It’s Sir Aloysius, actually, but please call me Loy, everyone does. And no, I’m just like you, come down for lunch with the old man.”
What I’d hoped for was an explanation of who he was, how he knew Uncle Phil, why he was there. What I’d been given satisfied none of this curiosity but opened up more. He was awfully young to be a knight—was he a baronet? He seemed awfully young for that too. He had only a few wrinkles in the tan around his eyes. I doubted he was even my age. Sir Aloysius Farrell. I’d certainly never heard of him. I’d have to ask Mrs. Tring.
“I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay, Loy,” I said, blandly.
“You’re even prettier in person than on stage,” Loy replied.
At that moment the road turned a corner and came onto a straight stretch and he put his foot down. Trees passed by in a green blur. I ignored the flattery. “Oh, have you seen me act?”
“I saw you in Creatures of the Summer Heat,” he said.
“With Siddy?” I asked.
He glanced at me for an instant as if I’d scored a point. “You’re not at all like her, you know,” he said, as if it must be news to me. “Were there ever sisters so different?”
“Siddy and Dodo look like Mamma,” I said. “Pip a
nd Rosie and I look like Pappa.” Poor dead Olivia had looked like Mamma too, but I wasn’t going to bring her up to Loy.
Loy didn’t say anything for a moment, he was overtaking a station wagon. “You’re not very like Lord Carnforth either,” he said, consideringly.
I laughed. “How do you know Pappa?”
“I know everyone,” Loy said.
That was no sort of answer, because Pappa didn’t know anyone. The only conclusion was that Siddy must have introduced them. But she wouldn’t have done that unless she was very serious about him, and not even then perhaps, if Mamma really had cast her into the ninth circle of Hell. If she was involved with Loy, that contradicted my theory about her and Boo and why she had the right to invite to Coltham. But then if they’d gone to the theater together a year before, they must have been seeing each other then. What I really wanted to ask him was whether Siddy was all right and what all this was about, but I couldn’t because I didn’t know who he was and where he fit in, and I didn’t want to air my sister’s mysterious private business in front of someone I didn’t trust.
We turned into the gates of Coltham then. I hadn’t been there since the year I came out. It’s a pretty Queen Anne manor house built of soft golden stone that has weathered well. It looked glorious in the sunshine. The garden seemed very green after the rain the day before. Loy parked on the circle of the drive, next to two or three other cars.
“Thank you for coming to fetch me,” I said, very formally. He came around and opened the door for me, that sardonic look on his face. It occurred to me that he was exactly the sort of man I most disliked and, if he was rich as well as titled, which he gave every sign of being, exactly the kind of man my mother had most wanted me to marry. In my ordinary life, I met rather fewer men like Loy. There are men in the theater who think themselves God’s gift to women, but few of them have the instinctive arrogance of those who have been born to privilege.
I got out and pulled off my scarf, shaking my hair as I did, so that it would fall together, which would have to do until I could get a comb to it. I wasn’t about to comb my hair on the front drive in front of Loy. Then I heard a voice, much more distinctly Irish than Loy’s, though I absolutely refuse to spell out the accent.
“Well, it’s the luck of the Irish you have after all, Loy.” Coming around the side of the house was a man, as ugly as Loy was beautiful, as rough as Loy was smooth, as genuine as Loy was false. “Getting the chore of driving to the station and fishing out such a very pretty one.”
“Miss Larkin, Devlin Connelly. Devlin, Miss Larkin.” Loy’s introduction was as smooth and untrustworthy as the rest of him.
“It’s Viola,” I said, taking Devlin’s large hand. “And Lark, not Larkin.”
He smiled.
His eyes were blue, his hands were strong, his smile was kind and interested and there’s no kind of description that’s going to do justice to him. You’d think you could find fifty just like him digging up the streets of London, yet you can’t, because Devlin was unique. I can’t explain why it is that while Loy’s flattery irritated me, Devlin’s charmed me. It may be because it was plain that Devlin was saying it because he felt like saying it, not because he expected to achieve anything from it.
“You’ll be the actress, now,” he said. “I loved you as Saint Joan year before last.”
“Oh, did you?” I was absurdly gratified.
The front door opened and Uncle Phil came out. “Viola, my dear child!” he called. “How lovely to see you. Come in, come in.”
Devlin let go of my hand. Uncle Phil and I embraced. We went through the house and out to the terrace at the back, where Siddy and a young man were sitting on lawn chairs. Malcolm, Uncle Phil’s secretary, was sitting on the grass.
“Here’s Malcolm, and I don’t suppose you’ve met Bob Nash?” Uncle Phil asked.
The young man rose and Uncle Phil introduced me and we shook hands. I resigned myself to being Larkin again for the afternoon. Malcolm came and hugged me. I had seen him and Uncle Phil only a year or two before, when we’d had supper together after they’d seen me in Much Ado.
Siddy was looking much prettier than the day before in a full flowered skirt and a white blouse. I felt grimy next to her after the railway carriage and the open-topped car. She put her cigarette down in an ashtray and hugged me. She seemed terribly thin.
“So, the inner circle,” Loy said as he took a chair.
Siddy shot him a quick glance. He smiled back, smooth as a Jameson whiskey and twice as expensive.
Devlin sat down next to me. Uncle Phil rang a little bell and summoned a servant, who brought a drinks tray. The whole thing was absurd, like something in a farce. The inner circle of what? I asked for a martini and excused myself to powder my nose.
I did powder it, reapplied lipstick and combed my hair, which desperately needed it even after the scarf. My hair is fair and horribly fine, and despite having the best cuts I can afford, it likes to fly all over the place given any chance at all. When I came out again, Loy was sipping a scotch and giving Siddy one of his sardonic looks. Uncle Phil was saying emphatically, “Absolutely sure we can trust Viola!” and I wondered whether the words before were that he was or he wasn’t.
Lunch was awkward. We ate all the things people like Uncle Phil always eat in June, salmon and watercress and strawberries and cream. Oddly, I almost never ate things like that anymore, but the first taste took me back to Pip saying it was the most boring menu in England and the sign of a terribly unimaginative hostess, and Olivia bursting into tears. That was the year after she was married, it must have been June of 1933, immediately before Pip went to Germany. She was supposed to go for a year to be finished and improve her German, but instead she fell in love with Himmler and never really came back.
I was seated between Uncle Phil and young Nash, who was bland and English and who, it seemed, was in the Navy and had recently lost a good friend, who everyone else had also known, whose name was Pete. Nobody seemed about to explain anything to me. People kept starting to say things and then stopping. The situation would have been completely dire if not for Devlin, who started talking to me about Shaw and the way Saint Joan had been directed at the Aldwych when I was in it compared to the way he had seen it done in Dublin years ago. He was interesting, and he took the trouble to talk about something of interest to me. I found myself liking him more and more. Siddy sat at the end of the table and acted as hostess. Uncle Phil had never considered remarriage after Auntie Pam had died. They’d never got on very well together. She was killed in the Blitz, very early on, by the same bomb that killed my sister Olivia. They were in the same shelter, one for government wives, while the government members themselves were, typically, in a much better shelter somewhere else, and survived. I think on the whole Uncle Phil was happier with Malcolm looking after him.
After lunch, Uncle Phil took me into his study as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I had always loved his study. When we were children staying at Coltham, Pip and I would sometimes dare each other to creep in when Uncle Phil was at the House. The whole room was wood paneled, and there were carvings of roses in the center of the panels. We never found the secret passage Boo had told us about, though we tried tapping often enough. The room had an extremely masculine smell of leather and pipe tobacco, which hadn’t changed at all. The chairs were upholstered in red leather and squashed satisfyingly when you sat in them. There were two narrow windows, one on each side of the desk, which looked out over the back lawn down to the lake. There was a folly at the lake’s edge, looking like a ruined Grecian temple. One of the windows framed it exactly. I sat where I could see it.
Uncle Phil sat by his desk, piled with papers as always. He lit his pipe. “Siddy tells me she didn’t tell you anything,” he began.
“Not a thing, and I’m frightfully curious,” I said. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“No more than we all are,” he said. He looked at me for a long moment. “Viola, before I go
any further, I want your solemn word that nothing I tell you must go beyond this room, whether or not you agree to help us.”
“Uncle Phil—I’ll promise, of course I will, I won’t give you away, but what are you involved in that could possibly need this level of secrecy?” There wasn’t all that much it could be, and my mind leapt to the possibilities at once. The thought of Uncle Phil of all people brewing revolution was quite incredible.
“The country has been taken over in a bloodless coup, and the saddest thing is that nobody seems to care at all.”
“You said that in the House of Lords, and I read it in The Times,” I said, calling his bluff. The Times had called him “Crazy Lord Scott” and the Daily Herald had called him “Crazy Old Scotty.” He was quite right that practically nobody seemed to care.
“It’s true, though, Viola, however many times I’ve said it. Things have gone too far and they have to be stopped. This is not what we expect of England.” He looked at me seriously. I didn’t say anything. “I know you’re a woman, and an actress, and I know you haven’t thought very seriously about politics. But you were brought up the right way, and I know when it comes to the crunch a Larkin’s heart will be in the right place.”
With Siddy a communist and Pip a fascist? But I didn’t say it. I really wanted to know what this was about.
“What do you mean, stopped?” I asked.
“I have tried to do everything I can through legitimate channels,” he said. “There only remain to us desperate measures.”
“Desperate measures?” I echoed.
“You see here at Coltham this weekend a very strange alliance.” He hesitated, put down his pipe. “Lieutenant Nash, like his friend Lieutenant Marshall, represents the fraction of the armed forces who agree with me. Malcolm and I, necessarily, represent legitimate government. Your sister represents the working classes. Sir Aloysius and Mr. Connelly . . .” He hesitated, and I waited for him to say they represented the Empire or something. “They agree with me, and they have the practical knowledge we need.”
