by Jo Walton
“I sobbed and sobbed for Antony,” she said. Then she saw Devlin in the doorway. “Who’s this?” she asked, frowning at me then glancing down at her dressing gown to make sure she was decent.
“This is Devlin Connelly,” I said. “He very kindly ran me back to London. I’m going out for dinner with him. Come in properly, Devlin, and have a glass of wine or something while I get myself together. This is my flatmate Mollie Gaston.”
“I saw you in Dunkirk,” Devlin said, taking her hand. “I’m sure you’ll make a beautiful Gertrude, but nobody will believe you’re old enough to be Viola’s mother.”
“I’m going to have silver streaks and do older body language,” Mollie said, but her eyes were on me, and she was still frowning. Well, it wasn’t like me to turn up with strangers at odd hours. “Viola—”
“Where’s Mrs. Tring?” I asked.
“It’s Sunday night, she’s gone to chapel,” Mollie said. I should have thought that for myself.
“Do give Devlin a glass of wine while I duck into my room for a moment!” I said.
“Of course,” Mollie said, and led Devlin off to the kitchen pro testing that he didn’t want anything and we were only stopping for a moment.
My script was already in my bag. I threw clothes and underwear and makeup and everything I thought I might need into a carpet bag. I knew I could ask Mollie or Mrs. Tring to bring anything I’d forgotten to the theater. I threw off the clothes I was wearing and put on my turquoise Parisian dress, the one that shows off my collarbones and which Mrs. Tring says is only barely respectable. I wanted to look nice for Devlin. I dug around in my underwear drawer and found my Dutch Cap, in its little box, and thrust that into my bag next to the script. I might live longer than the next two weeks, I might. I sprayed perfume everywhere, brushed my hair, pinned it back, and stuck one of Antony’s pink roses into the pin. I looked at myself in the mirror. In Buttered Toast my cue had come at the end of a poem the young hero recited to Mollie as Lucinda. As he finished I came on as the maid, saying “Buttered toast?” and holding a plate of it out in front of me; it always got a huge laugh. But it was his lines that came into my head as I looked at myself in the mirror in my best dress, with the rose, and the Dutch Cap in my bag. “Though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run!”
“Not more beautiful, that isn’t possible, but beautiful for the evening,” Devlin said, when I came into the kitchen. He was standing by the window, keeping an eye on the car. He looked relaxed and at ease. He had been busily charming Mollie, but Mollie wasn’t entirely charmed. “We have to leave you alone for a moment, if you don’t mind waiting, Mr. Connelly,” she said, and dragged me into her room. So much for doing less explaining!
“What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered as soon as the door was shut.
“What, you don’t think he’s gorgeous?” I asked.
“Charm of the Irish,” she said, rolling her eyes. Mollie was part Irish herself, or so she sometimes said. “But this isn’t like you! You never go out with men when you’ve got a part.”
It was true. Men were for between-parts times, or when I was well into a successful run. I’d never normally start something new just when I was beginning to rehearse. “But look at him,” I said, feebly enough, but it was all I had. “Don’t worry. I’ll be at the theater in the morning, word perfect.”
“You’d better be, or I’m calling the police,” she said. “Are you sure everything is all right?”
I thought about telling her. But what could she have done? She might even have approved—she’d certainly said now and then when she heard one of those stories about stone soap that she hated Hitler. Besides, Devlin could have easily killed us both if he thought we were a threat. “Everything’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry, Moll. I know what I’m doing. I’m pretty sure I won’t be back tonight, we did some kissing in the car, but I’ve got my Cap.”
“He’s probably a Catholic,” she said, direly.
He almost certainly was. “He needn’t know I’ve got my Cap then,” I said.
“There’s something about him,” she said, frowning. “Vi—”
“That’s what I find so devastatingly attractive,” I said. “I can look after myself.”
She frowned, but stepped away from the door. I went out to Devlin.
As we went down to the car I realized that I was ridiculously overdressed for dinner, unless he changed too, and that meant going back to his place first. I hadn’t thought about it, I’d only wanted to make myself look my best, or I might have wondered whether he had evening clothes, or if he did whether they might be at Coltham. “Am I overdressed?” I asked. “Because I can change again if so.”
“I don’t know what part you think you’re dressing for,” Devlin said, smiling. “I like what you have on, what there is of it. We’re going to eat in a little Greek place I know in Whitechapel, and I don’t suppose you have any clothes suitable for going there. Then we’re going back to my place and you won’t need any clothes at all.”
There was something about the way he said this which made me—well, the conventional phrase is weak at the knees, but it wasn’t my knees where I felt it. I got into the car and didn’t even take the rose out of my hair. He drove through the light Sunday evening traffic to Whitechapel. He parked outside the glass window of a workmen’s café. There were no women inside, and the men looked rough and unfriendly. I was horrified when Devlin opened the door. “What will they think?” I whispered to him.
“They’ll think you’re slumming and you’ve picked me up,” he said, quite casually. “They won’t bother you, as long as you’re with me.”
It was strange how at home he managed to look anywhere he was. In Coltham, in the flat, and now here, he looked as if he fitted in. I didn’t know if he’d brought me here to punish me for dressing up too much, or because he wanted to come here and liked the food and didn’t think twice about what I was wearing. The food, when it came, was good, especially the lamb. They made good coffee too. I relaxed a little after a while when I saw nobody seemed to be giving me a second glance.
Afterwards we went back to his flat. He put Loy’s car in a garage, which he then locked. The flat was on the ground floor of a boring modern cube put up where the older buildings had been bombed in the Blitz. The front door opened into a little hall with two doors off it, and the hall then opened out into a kitchen, and on the other side of the kitchen a tiny bathroom. It was all neat and clean but rather anonymous, clearly let furnished. Devlin hadn’t made much mark on it. I wondered how long he had been living here. I already knew better than to ask.
Devlin opened the door on the left, which was a bedroom with a large bed. We went in, and Devlin carefully took all my clothes off and stroked me between my legs until I was almost howling with frustration then whispered in my ear that I ought to learn my lines. I actually did get my script out and tried to work on it, but he wouldn’t stop touching me. I rolled onto my stomach, but he kept teasing me, stroking my neck and my arms, and eventually I swore that I knew the part all through already, which was nothing like true, but I thought there would be time for learning lines later, or early the next morning. So Devlin patiently untangled the rose from my hair, took off his own clothes, and enthusiastically, for a very long time, made love to me. It’s hard to say how it was different from the other experiences of sex in my life before. It wasn’t just that he knew what he was doing, though he did, he made love with the same casual competence with which he did everything else. It wasn’t just that he expected to take complete control, though he did. I think it may have been that he had no hesitation, no diffidence. He knew what he wanted, and that surety, that knowledge, was what I wanted too.
At some point in that long night, long after midnight, I whispered those lines of the poem that had been in my head, and he squeezed me affectionately and surprised me by reciting the whole thing, out of his head, in the dark. After that I slept for a little, then woke and we did it a
ll again. When I got out of bed, naked, in the morning light, desperate for the bathroom and with my legs feeling as if they would hardly carry me, Devlin opened both eyes a crack. “I’d love a cup of tea,” he said.
I padded naked into the kitchen, and saw the shape of a man sitting at the kitchen table. I screamed, then saw it was Loy, reading a newspaper, and screamed again. Loy looked up over the paper and smiled at me. Devlin came running out of the bedroom, stark naked, with a gun in his hand. He saw us both and started to laugh.
I ducked into the bathroom and locked the door and sat in there listening to the two of them howling with laughter. I didn’t find it the slightest bit funny, and wouldn’t have even in the Frenchest of farces. I wanted to slap both of them. Devlin knocked on the door after a little while. “Are you all right?” he asked. “It’s only Loy, and he’s sorry he startled you. Are you coming out? I could use the bathroom myself.”
“No,” I said, grumpily. I had a leisurely bath, and eventually I improvised a couple of towels into sufficient covering to get me back to the bedroom. When I came out the two men were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. I ignored them and stalked into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me.
After a few minutes, in which he must have used the bathroom, Devlin came in. “I can see it must have been a shock, but why are you so angry, love?”
That “love” didn’t mean he loved me, or even necessarily that he liked me, it was just what he quite naturally called everyone. “You sent me out there naked, knowing he was there,” I said.
“Loy has a key, he lives here too, sometimes, but I didn’t know he was there,” he said. “He told me he’d bring my car here and take his back, but he didn’t say when. I had no idea he was there. In any case, I’ve told him he’ll have to find himself somewhere else. Apart from anything else, it’s safer.”
I was busy pulling on the black slacks and jersey I always wore for rehearsals. There were always things I couldn’t say to Devlin. I couldn’t ask him if it was like taking me to the café the night before, because I didn’t know if he’d done that on purpose. I didn’t even really know if he wanted me, or if he was only with me because I was convenient and needed looking after. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. He must have dressed while I was in the bathroom. He looked a little concerned. “How long has Loy been there?” I asked.
Devlin looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to ask him,” he said. “Not long, I’m sure.”
It wouldn’t have to be very long at all to make me feel my privacy was quite thoroughly compromised.
“We had some fun, didn’t we, darling?” he said, coaxingly, holding out his hand for me to come to him as if I was a dog or something.
“Some fun” didn’t come near what I’d felt about that night, but I couldn’t say that, there wasn’t any way to say it. If I loved him I hated him too, and we were caught up together in this bomb business and it was all too much for me, especially on so little sleep. I just wanted to lie down and howl and be comforted.
“Oh well,” he said, dropping his hand. “Come out and eat some breakfast then, and I’ll drive you to the theater. Didn’t you say you had to be there by ten? It’s ten past nine now.”
“All right. But if he makes one joke—”
Devlin held up a hand. “Loy’s Loy,” he said; that absolute loyalty.
And that was that.
12
Carmichael stood in the lift clutching a pile of reports and counted the brass buttons. Button B would take him down to the basement, where the files sat in their cabinets in dusty splendor. Button G let him straight out again on the ground floor, where Sergeant Stebbings sat in his cabinet watching all exits and entrances. Buttons 1 and 2 would take him to the upper regions where his colleagues worked, each in their own little offices. Button 3 was forensics. The report on the bomb and the bodies were probably waiting for him there. But it was the unavoidable top button, 4, that he had to press. It was said that New New Scotland Yard cast a long shadow, and even respectable people crossed High Holborn to avoid walking through it. It was Penn-Barkis’s office at the top of the building that cast that shadow. Carmichael had never liked seeing the Chief, and since the time he had taken this lift up to be browbeaten into acquiescence with what was wrong, he had avoided him as much as possible. This morning, as soon as he came in, Stebbings had told him the Chief wanted to see him first thing, and waved him towards the lift.
There were other things he could do. Penn-Barkis might let him resign. He lived on his pay, but he had a small amount saved, enough for a month or two frugal living, and there were other jobs, even for a man who’d been Scotland Yard since he was demobbed at the end of the war. Penn-Barkis shouldn’t scare him, particularly not this time. He had the feeling Penn-Barkis was going to like what he had on the Gilmore case. He wished he could feel pleased about that and not uncomfortable. He took a deep breath and pushed button 4.
The sun streamed straight in to Penn-Barkis’s office, gilding the golfing cups behind the mahogany desk. A few dust motes danced guiltily in the beams. London lay spread out and shining beneath the windows as if Penn-Barkis were God, able to reach out his finger in the path of malefactors. As Carmichael came out of the lift, Penn-Barkis turned from the windows and walked over to his desk.
“So, sit down and tell me about this Gilmore business,” he said.
Carmichael sat in the chair indicated, on the other side of the desk, exactly where he had sat the last time Penn-Barkis had wanted to hear about a case. “It seems she was making the bomb.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“As sure as it’s possible to be when all the evidence has been blown to bits. The sappers seem quite sure.” Carmichael took Curry’s report from his pile. “Here’s the evidence if you want to look at it.”
Penn-Barkis took the report and turned one of the pages, then handed it back. “Bomb-making’s a tricky business, apparently. Surprising more terrorists don’t blow themselves sky-high. Any hints as to why she was doing it?”
“Nothing sure yet,” Carmichael said. “It seems she may have been a communist—left leaning anyway. Two of her servants, Jews, have disappeared. I spent most of yesterday trying to trace them, but I’ve had no luck. The man with her turned out not to be Kinnerson, who’s safe home in Amersham, but a naval lieutenant called Marshall who, as far as anyone knew, was all for King and Country.”
“You’ve been through her papers?”
“Yes, a first pass yesterday morning, though it needs doing again more thoroughly. My next step, unless you disagree, sir, is to get the papers here and put someone on to going through them, while I check out her associates and Marshall’s associates in the hope of finding out what they intended to do with the bomb.”
Penn-Barkis raised his eyebrows. “Not much danger of them doing it anymore,” he said.
“No, but our Prime Minister keeps making speeches warning us against the dangers of terrorists. I seem to have found some genuine ones, and it strikes me as worth bothering finding out what they thought they were up to. Also, they may have been part of a wider conspiracy, in which case—”
“Yes, yes.” Penn-Barkis cut him off. “Give a statement to the press telling them the truth, as sensibly constituted.” That meant leaving out details the police wouldn’t want the public to know. “Then get on with it. But try to clear it up as quickly as possible. Dead bombers ought to be good news, and they’re certainly no trouble. Take a couple of days on the connections in case, take until the end of the week if you need it, but don’t waste time.”
“Sir,” Carmichael said, standing. It did no good to protest that he never wasted time.
“And don’t let Royston use police cars to go home in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. He shouldn’t be able to charm you into it. You know it’s against regulations.”
“No, sir,” Carmichael said. He looked down at his boots. He had been in the wrong about the car, but the idea that Royston had charmed him
into it, that he was susceptible to being charmed, was just Penn-Barkis twisting the knife.
He felt unsteady as he went down in the lift. He couldn’t go on like this. He would resign when this case was over. He would talk to Jack, tell Jack about it and together they would make a plan.
In his own office he worked on the statement for the press. He had had much practice in the arcane art of couching his sentences in the careful passive and attributing everything good to the agency of Scotland Yard. He was surprised when his telephone rang.
“Carmichael,” he said.
It was Sergeant Stebbings. “I thought you were in,” he said. “There’s a Mr. Kinnerson on the line for you.”
“Put him through, please, sergeant.” Carmichael took a fresh sheet of paper and wondered what Kinnerson wanted.
“Any news on my mother’s death, Inspector?” Kinnerson asked.
“In fact we have made some progress,” Carmichael said. He hesitated for a moment and then decided Kinnerson was entitled to hear what he was about to tell the press, but he would prefer to see his face when he heard. He didn’t think he was involved, but he knew he had been keeping something back. “I would like to speak to you about it. Can you spare me an hour today?”
“As a matter of fact I have something I wanted to tell you too,” Kinnerson said. “Lunch at my club?”
“What club is that?” Carmichael asked, astonished that Kinnerson would suggest anything so friendly. Asking him to lunch at his club indicated that Kinnerson saw him as a social equal. That wasn’t at all how he had acted on Friday night.
“The Gresham,” Kinnerson said.
The bankers’ club, just what he would have expected. The food would be terrible, club food always was, but Carmichael certainly wasn’t going to suggest anything else. “At noon then?” Carmichael asked.
“Certainly, Inspector. I’ll look forward to seeing you.”
