The King's Commissar

by Duncan Kyle

  'I think,' Graves said seriously, 'that five hundred might be just a little high.'

  Miss Drummond giggled yet again. 'Oh, I am enjoying this!'

  'A reasonable sum might be -'

  'Reasonable is what the market will bear, that's what my father always said.'

  'And he -?'

  'Dealt in Oriental carpets, Mr Graves. Look, why don't you do it this way. See if you can find out somewhere else. Then if you can't, and if it's important, you can always come back to me.'

  Graves came to his feet. 'Well, five hundred is rather a lot. Maybe I will try -'

  'Of course, you understand the price will go up, Mr Graves, if you have to return to me.'

  He looked hard at her. 'How do I know it's worth the money?'

  The giggle had subsided into a broad and very confident smile. 'You don't, Mr Graves. That's what's so delightful. Tell me something. Do you like dust?'

  'Dust?' Graves repeated, perplexed.

  'You'll be up to your neck in it, hunting through history for Carfax House.'

  He blinked at her. 'Fifty pounds seems fair. Including support for a worthwhile cause.'

  'Five hundred.'

  Graves wriggled around miserably for a minute or two, but he was done and he knew it. And the money, after all, was not his. He even thought for a moment that he might renege on the promise, but that was before she made him write it out.

  Carfax House, she told him, once the paper was locked away, had been built in the 1790's and burned to the ground during World War One, when a passing Zeppelin dropped an incendiary on it. It was rebuilt after that war by a certain Mr Cavendish, who had made money out of army contracts for bully beef, and who liked it to be thought that he was related to the Dukes of Devonshire, whose family name, was Cavendish. Cavendish House it now became. It may be true of lightning that it rarely strikes twice in the same place; but the same cannot be said for German bombs, for in the autumn of 1941 a Heinkel 111 proceeding upon an attack on the Isle of Dogs was hit by anti-aircraft fire and turned for home, jettisoning a stick of bombs, one of which turned Cavendish House into a ruin. But once again, said Miss Drummond, it was rebuilt, still as Cavendish House. The man who rebuilt it - she had forgotten his name - was something of a recluse and had, in any case, eventually moved away.

  'So who has it now?' Graves asked.

  'Oh, some frightful people. He's something in popular music, or advertising is it? I forget which. She's just a tart. Well, a model anyway. I always think they're interchangeable, don't you?'

  'Do you know the name?'

  The name merely cost him a fiver, this time for the Lifeboats.

  The house was not big. It stood two storeys high in a walled garden close to the grass of the Heath. It was painted a delicate shade of pale lemon, with white window-frames, and it was clearly in first-class order. Miss Drummond's view that There's precious little of the original fabric left, of course, but it's still one of the prettiest little Georgian houses in the village,' was obviously sound.

  Graves lit a cigarette and paced across the grass, looking thoughtfully at Carfax/Cavendish House. Somewhere inside must lie the second part of Dikeston's story, no doubt carefully hidden. By whom - by Dikeston himself? It seemed at least possible that the recluse whose name Miss Drummond could not remember was in fact Dikeston.

  Had he then moved away and left the packet of par concealed? They'd have to be well concealed, Graves thought, or somebody who had no business to do so might find them.

  The white front door, with its gleaming lion's head knocker, looked somehow forbidding in the sunshine. Graves, who would not normally have hesitated to approach the devil's own front door on Hillyard, Cleef business, found the thought of knocking on that door strangely daunting. How did one say it: 'Good afternoon, I'd like to search your house'? Graves felt himself agreeing with Pilgrim's stated view that Dikeston was a joker who was going to make all of them run their butts off.

  His own butt first. He returned to 6 Athelsgate.

  'Do next?' said Sir Horace Malory. 'Good Lord, isn't it obvious - you find the packet of papers, man! They're somewhere in the house - must be. Go and look! And get a move on!'

  The white door, now lit from above by a bulb encased in a gleaming brass fixture, looked still less inviting as Graves crunched up the short gravel path towards it. His hand already on the lion's head knocker, he paused as laughter sounded from inside the house. Was it a dinner-party in there - or a television set? He knocked, and felt as he did so like an encyclopaedia salesman.

  It was a dinner-party. The door was opened by a man flushed with wine and carrying a napkin. Damn!

  'Mr Abrahams?"

  'Bit late, don't you think. Whatever you're selling, come back another time.' Abrahams dabbed the napkin at his lips and made to close the door.

  Graves thrust a visiting card at him. 'Please,' he said. 'It's quite important.'

  'Oh?' Abrahams glanced at him with some suspicion, and then at the card. After a moment his thumbnail scraped at the embossed lettering. 'Hillyard, Cleef? Merchant bank, isn't it?'

  'Yes.'

  'First time I heard of a merchant bank going door-to-door,' Abrahams said, grinning. 'I know about the recession, but Christ!'

  Graves, feeling the beginnings of fluster, now turned to dignity. He emitted a sombre laugh and said, 'We have a request, Mr Abrahams. You may see it as somewhat unusual, but we hope you may consider helping us in a small way.'

  Abrahams's eye ran over him knowledgeably, pricing the suit, the haberdashery, the shoes. Miss Drummond had done the same, Graves thought. Blackheath and its denizens clearly judged the goods by the wrapper.

  'Come in, Mr Graves,' Abrahams said abruptly. 'Have you eaten yet? We have a couple of friends in for a meal but I'm sure there'll be plenty.' He closed the door and led the way into the dining-room, where three slightly startled faces turned towards him.

  Abrahams's initially suspicious manner had now become airy. 'Mr Graves is from a merchant bank. Just dropped in to see me about something they want.' He contrived to imply that nocturnal visits by City figures were commonplace events at Cavendish House. Abrahams was also, Graves shortly understood, trying to drum up business from the other male guest. Graves found himself being used, and disliking it.

  But the evening ended, the guests departed, and at last Graves found himself making the nightmare request: 'We'd like to search your house!'

  He had to repeat it, naturally, more than once. The eccentric client, now regrettably deceased, made a further appearance -

  'Search the house?' screeched Mrs Abrahams. She was much as Miss Drummond had described her: half-tart, half-model. 'You mean, go poking into the cupboards, don't you?'

  Graves explained, with all the smoothness he could muster, which was a good deal, that the Abrahams' own possessions would of course be inviolate. It was likely to be in the fabric of the house -

  'You're going to lift the floorboards!' she yelled accusingly-

  'There would,' Graves assured her, 'be a fee to cover any inconvenience.'

  'A fee?' said Mrs Abrahams.

  'Good one, I should hope,' said her husband.

  Negotiations proceeded. The search, it was at last agreed, was to be in two stages. In the first of them, Graves accompanied by a man expert in building matters, and no doubt by Mrs Abrahams too, was to have complete access to loft and attics and cellars. The living-rooms could be examined but not disturbed. In the event that the search revealed nothing, Stage Two arrived. For that the removals department of Harrods would arrive, the entire contents of the house would be removed to store while the search took place. Mr and Mrs Abrahams would be accommodated in a suitable hotel, and the interior of Cavendish House would be redecorated pending the return of the owners and their possessions.

  Mr Abrahams had ideas similar to, though grander than, Miss Drummond's. Stage One was a thousand. Stage Two was five thousand, plus all costs. Take it, or leave it.

  Graves took it. He
also required the deeds of the house, the plans, if any, from which the house had been rebuilt on the second occasion; also, before he began handing over money he needed corroboration of the statement by Miss

  TX Drummond that Cavendish House had once borne the name of Carfax. Brief consultation with Hillyard. Cleef's solicitors gave Graves the welcome tidings that all the information could be obtained. The less happy news was that he would have to take trouble to get it.

  This entailed first an easy trip to the Borough Records Office in nearby Lewisham, where a yellowish rate book for the year 1910 demonstrated Miss Drummond's veracity. At that time Carfax House had a rateable value of £125. Graves now telephoned Abrahams at the advertising agency of which he was a director, to ask the whereabouts of the deeds. Abrahams replied that, since the house was mortgaged, the deeds were lodged with the building society from which he had borrowed money, and would remain so until the mortgage was paid off in twenty years or so.

  'Which building society?'

  'The Leefield.'

  "Which branch?'

  Abrahams told him.

  Graves set off by car armed with Abrahams's written permission to inspect the deeds, duly did so, and discovered what seemed to be shining gold. The bomb-damaged Cavendish House had been purchased in 1945 by one Henry George Dikeston. And sold by him some twenty years later to the Land Commissioners, who now held the freehold.

  Carefully Graves noted the addresses: of the lawyers through whom the sales had been made, and of the Land Commissioners. There was not precisely a song in his heart at the prospect of tracking Dikeston down, for Dikeston at that stage was hardly the spectre he was later to become, but Graves was pleased. His pleasure increased when, later, at the offices of the Planning Department, he asked to inspect the plans of Cavendish House, and was given them.

  The pleasure evaporated at once.

  The bombs of 1941 wrecked Cavendish House. Its roof was destroyed: less than fifty per cent of the exterior walls remained standing. The architect's plans showed meticulous concern for the character of the house, and such of the original fabric as had been left standing was most carefully incorporated in the rebuilding. Turning the plan this way and that, looking for indications as to where the promised cavity might be. Graves found he was actually looking at that very word on the plan. In the architect's small, neat hand, appeared the phrase. Throughout in 9-inch cavity brickwork.' In the planning authority's office there was no shortage of people to explain the meaning: the walls of Cavendish House consisted of an outer and an inner skin of brick with a cavity between.

  Graves swore under his breath. The second part of Dikeston's narrative was now somewhere in the hollow walls of the house, and there was no indication at all as to where. Easy to imagine the scene: scaffolding, bricklayers, the walls rising - and a packet, contained in some waterproof material, simply dropped down between the two skins of bricks, there to be safe for as long as the house stood.

  'We need a consulting engineer,' Sir Horace Malory decided. Graves, surprised, thought he detected a trace of wry amusement in Malory's face. It was confirmed as Malory went on, This fella Dikeston's going to lead us the devil of a dance. I'm beginning to get a feeling about him.'

  'What's that?' Graves asked.

  'Remember the Cheshire cat, do you?' Malory asked ruminatively.

  'Well, sure. I read Alice at school. Who didn't?'

  'If you remember -' Malory was removing a Romeo No.3 from its tube - 'it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. Well, this is just the beginning of the tale, d'you see. And the grin is still here with us.'

  'I'll fix the engineer,' Graves said.

  Sir Horace, wise as he undoubtedly was in the ways of man, might have been a little surprised at the broad distribution already achieved by news of Hillyard, Cleef s interest in a private house in Blackheath. An advertising agency is not a Trappist community, Denis Abrahams was more loquacious than most. When he heard, by telephone from his excitable wife, that no fewer than five people had spent the morning at his house, inspecting it according to the agreed terms for Stage One, and that one of them was a Knight (Sir Horace was in fact a baronet, but Mrs Abrahams didn't know that) Abrahams opened his mouth wider and spoke more loudly. Since he was in the bar of the Wig and Pen Club at the time, his story was heard by lawyers, who were only idly interested, and by one or two reporters, who began to show a professional attention.

  Before Sir Horace returned to 6 Athelsgate, Mrs Frobisher, his secretary, had already twice denied knowledge of the matter to city-page reporters of two London newspapers.

  'Keep doing so,' Malory instructed her. He had spent an annoying morning. Not only had careful examination of the roof and walls of Cavendish House failed to produce any indication of where the Dikeston papers might be concealed; but while Graves and Smithson (the consulting engineer) had carried out the inspection, Malory, unable to climb to the roof space and unwilling to rummage in cellars, had been exposed to a good hour and a half of Mrs Abrahams. She had clutched his arm and given him precise information about every stitch of curtain and carpet, every Wedgwood cigarette lighter and every mock-Adam fireplace. He was mildly surprised to find he had lived through it.

  Now he must face Pilgrim, who would undoubtedly be amused, and probably patronizing. Pilgrim said, in fact, 'I told you this thing was going to get pricey and you ain't started yet. What's the next stage?'

  Malory explained about the walls and watched crossly as Pilgrim controlled a laugh. 'It's not funny, Laurence!'

  'It's not bad from where I'm sitting,' Pilgrim said. 'You're actually going to pull half of it down?’

  'There's no alternative,' Malory said stiffly. 'You must see that.'

  'How much is the place worth?'

  'We have an estimate of about fifty-five thousand to rebuild.'

  'A hundred thousand bucks!' Pilgrim said. The humour was ebbing fast from his face and voice. 'Better take care, Horace.'

  Back in his own room, Malory instructed Graves to arrange as expeditiously as possible to transfer into Harrods' repository the Abrahams' furniture and effects; also the transfer of their persons to the Inter-Continental Hotel. He then made a neat little list of the visible difficulties. First, it would be necessary to inform, and indeed to persuade, the Abrahams of the necessity to pull down half of their beautiful house. Secondly, the local authority would have to be told and its consent probably have to be obtained before any work on the outside of Cavendish House could be carried out. Thirdly, the same must inevitably be true of the Land Commissioners, as ground landlords.

  None of them would agree, and Malory knew it.

  Then what? That the affair had its comic aspects was not lost on Malory. But his conviction that Dikeston's manuscript was of enormous importance was undiminished. His developing 'feeling' for Dikeston now told him that he was involved in a hunt and that like all good hunts it would be exciting and probably dangerous, and that there would be blood to be spilled at the finish.

  They would just have to pull the walls down - knock 'em down and take the consequences. And what consequences they would be: suits for civil damages from the Abrahams; prosecution by the local authority. Etcetera, etcetera.

  Horace Malory suddenly discovered he was holding his head in his hands, and frowning so hard that his forehead felt stiff. He sat up and looked around the room: that damned Cheshire cat grin was here somewhere.

  He said aloud: 'Just have to face it, that's all. Just have to face it.'

  A week later the furniture was expensively in store; so were Mr and Mrs Denis Abrahams; and the early morning calm of the leafy crossroads which had given Carfax House its original name was mildly disturbed by young mothers taking their offspring to school in French and German estate cars, and making way for a bulldozer which turned clumsily in at the side gate of Cavendish House, shoving the gatepost pillar aside.

  Sir Horace Malory an
d Jacques Graves were there to meet it, with Smithson the consulting engineer, and a small gang of workmen.

  As they stood watching they were joined by a neighbour whose presence had not been requested and who would certainly have been invited to leave had she not been an exceptionally handsome blonde in her mid-thirties. Malory tended to be gallant to handsome women.

  'Of course it's very pretty,1 she observed. 'But it's manicured half to death1. In any case, hardly any of it's original. Why are you doing this, anyway?'

  'Out of need, madam,' Malory muttered.

  'Yes, well . . .' The woman looked round her with a critical eye. Graves guessed she could price everything in sight to within a pound or two. '. . . I wouldn't really want any of it, myself. Ours is authentic Georgian, of course.'

  'Nice for you,' said Malory.

  'Except the sundial. 'I'd love that. Done long before they came here, naturally. Have you seen it?'

  'I believe not.' Malory's gallant habits were warring now with a growing dislike of her manner.

  'It's in the garden at the rear. Beautiful thing. A cockatrice. Highly imaginative.'

  Malory merely nodded, his attention on the now roaring bulldozer as it manoeuvred; but Graves frowned as a little bell tinkled in his mind. He turned to her. 'Did you say cockatrice?'

  She smiled. 'That's right. If you're interested, you should have a look.'

  'Some kind of heraldic animal, right?' Graves said. And when she nodded, he asked her, isn't there another name? Seems to me I've heard -'

  'Oh yes,' she said, it was also called a basilisk. That's the other name. Do you know about it?'

  But Graves, now with*both arms held high in the air, was signalling the bulldozer driver to halt. As the diesel's noise subsided he said, 'Sir Horace, this lady says there's a kind of special sundial. A basilisk.'

  interesting word,' Malory said. 'Tell me more, if you will, madam.'