A Question of Betrayal

by Anne Perry

  They heard the car pull away and silence settled again. Lucas turned to Josephine. He wanted to determine if anything about Stoney’s death made her uneasy, or if it was only sadness that took the light out of her face. If it was as the doctor and police had said, there was no proof that this was anything other than an ordinary domestic death, inevitable at some time. And Stoney’s death had been comparatively easy. No fear, no indignity, and possibly only a moment’s pain.

  He looked at her to read her face. Was it just grief, or was there something else?

  “I’m so sorry, my dear,” she said quietly. “It’s a shock, even though he was old. Pieces of our lives being chipped away reminds us of our own fragility, and how precious life is.” She moved closer to him and touched his arm very gently. “What is it? Don’t let guilt eat at you. You were kind to him; and you could not have prevented this.”

  He put his hand over hers. “I suppose not, but when he came to me he was seriously worried about a lot of figures he’d collected. He thought there was something badly wrong. I agreed with him, but I didn’t do anything about it.”

  “What could you have done?” she asked reasonably.

  “I don’t know.” Still, he had the feeling he could have done something.

  Josephine was waiting.

  “He had a lot of figures,” he told her again. “He said they showed some pretty large movements of money. It seems he kept detailed records of the amounts, as well as their transfers to unknown destinations.”

  “Theft,” she said.

  “Stoney didn’t know, but that’s not what he thought.” Lucas tried to remember exactly what Stoney had said, but the words eluded him. Only the impression was sharp in his mind, the worry and the fear. “I think he suspected the money was being hidden in some secret fund.”

  “Belonging to people we should be afraid of?” Her eyes were very steady, her face pale now.

  He looked at her and saw a shadow cross her eyes. “Yes,” he agreed. “Very probably Nazi money. But precisely who and what for, I have no idea. He was going to follow it up.” It was barely a question now. In his own mind, he was certain of it.

  “Yes, of course,” she said with a tight smile. “What else could he possibly do? And he told you because he wanted to see if you shared his fears.” She bit her lip very slightly. “And he was right, and that is why he is dead.” That was now her assumption, and it was up to him to deny it.

  “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “I’m trying, and it doesn’t work.”

  “I have to know,” she insisted.

  “Of course you do, my dear. It was unfinished business. If you are right, then there is someone guilty of Stoney’s death. What greater and more dangerous purpose had he begun to discover that whoever is behind it had to kill him?”

  “What do you think we should do?” she asked.

  “We?” He felt his throat tighten at the word.

  “Of course we,” she said tartly. “I suggest we search the house, in case he left you some kind of message, or at least evidence we could follow. And we had better do it now, in case other people come to the same conclusion as soon as they hear of Stoney’s death.”

  “You don’t think there might be someone responsible for it who knows far better than we do exactly what happened?” he asked, thinking aloud. “I am afraid I do.”

  She looked doubtful. “In that case, they will already have searched. If we can’t find proof of that, I’m not sure what there is left for us to do.” She looked around the room, seeing shelves and shelves of books until there was hardly any wall space left. The few pictures were landscapes, with high views from the Pennines, smooth water in the Lake District, always a sense of space and memories. And imagination. “I see nothing disturbed here,” she added.

  “They wouldn’t leave it disturbed,” Lucas answered. “If they did, the police might take it for a burglary, and that would mean a lot of further investigation…and a likely assumption of murder. Although Stoney was untidy—or looked it to others—he always knew where everything was.” He gazed around with an overwhelming sense of loss. Without Stoney’s presence, it looked chaotic.

  “What will it be—this evidence of a secret fund? Papers? Figures? Names?” Josephine asked.

  “Almost certainly figures.” He stared at the shelves, seeking a pattern, but they looked in order exactly as he would have expected them to be. “We could search through this lot for the rest of our lives.”

  “He would expect you to look for it,” Josephine said quietly. “So he would have put it somewhere you would look, but other people would not. How well did you know him, Lucas, really? Memory and sentiment aside.”

  “Lately, not so well,” he answered. “But ages ago we were close. He was an odd duck, eccentric, good at conversation—sometimes he was very funny—and he was always kind.” He heard again the sound of laughter from so many evenings long ago on the river, cricket games won or lost, but played hard, all with an innocence that they would never see again, that the next generation could not even imagine. It tore away part of your own life when those who remembered the same shattering events, the victories and defeats, were no longer there, no longer survivors but part of the vast bank of memories…Now there was an aching space where Stoney had been.

  “Where would he expect you to look?” Josephine asked again. “What was important to him that only you knew?”

  “Not in the pages of a book,” Lucas said with certainty, thinking as he spoke. “It’s such an obvious place, and easy to search, if tedious. All Stoney’s books would have been read. It’s not as if you could look for uncut edges.”

  “His papers?” she suggested. “Not behind a photograph or a painting, that’s obvious, too.”

  “We’ll start with his papers,” he agreed. “I might recognize something.”

  “What would you like me to do?” she asked.

  “Make sure there isn’t anything in the places we’ve ruled out, just to be sure.”

  Reluctantly, he turned to Stoney’s desk: the drawers, the piles of papers, letters, old diaries, and photographs. He sat in Stoney’s chair and started methodically, looking through one after another. He felt uncomfortable about it, but it must be done. He had not intended to read the letters, only to see if there was anything added or concealed in them. Mostly they were from old friends. He ended by reading them all. He realized that Stoney had observed far more than Lucas had imagined, and that he was funnier. In the diaries, Lucas recognized himself in Stoney’s view of him, standing on a punt in a summer evening, feeling awkward and afraid of falling in, and believing he looked dashing. Stoney had made fun of him gently. “Standish is so terribly clever,” he had written, “and yet unintentionally so funny, I sometimes wonder if he knows it.”

  Lucas knew it now, looking back, but he had not known it at the time.

  He skipped down the rest of the memories, tears coming unbidden to his eyes. Stoney had thought better of him than he deserved. It was clear in his choice of words, his gentleness. Lucas wished he had lived up to it. He was tempted to linger over each page; it was like having Stoney back again yet just out of reach.

  He read pieces about Peter Howard that he had not known. Vulnerabilities he had hidden from others that, strangely, Stoney had seen. They had not been intellectual so much as emotional. Lucas had never appreciated how much Peter had grieved for his elder brother. He had tried to live up to their father’s hope for both of them, and his father had not allowed him to. Reading it in Stoney’s words, Lucas could see it for himself now. How had he missed it before?

  “I think he’s given up at last,” Stoney had written in a diary a year ago:

  The gap in friendship has been partially filled by Standish. And he’ll be gentle, even if he has no idea why. Howard’s father will have lost both his sons, the fool. One to war, one to indifference. Pet
er is a good man. He might even become a great one. But like everybody else, he needs to be loved by someone, or at the very least to have been loved, and to know it. To walk entirely alone is to endanger your balance, to lean too far one way, in circles, without realizing it, until it is too late. I think Standish knows that instinctively, if not intellectually. We’ll see.

  Was that true? At least, in part? It felt right. It brought brief memories to mind, sharp and cutting with truth. He had no idea Stoney had seen and understood so much.

  Stoney also mentioned Jerome Bradley, who was now head of MI6, and Peter Howard’s immediate superior, whom he disliked intensely. Of course, he did not say so to Lucas, but it was in his omissions, the tightening of his mouth when Bradley was mentioned, as if he did not intend to betray it. Emotion in such relationships could be dangerous: they should be soundly based on loyalty, respect, trust, but also judgment, the ability to stand apart and see both sides of any decision, or however many sides there were, even an unthought-of third or fourth alternative.

  * * *

  —

  It was beginning to grow cooler as the sun’s warmth faded when Lucas at last found the information he needed. It was quite easily seen, but not so easily recognized. He had discarded most of the papers as unimportant calculations that Stoney had forgotten to dispose of. Stoney had been something of a squirrel. Then Lucas looked at them again and realized they were not as casual as they had at first seemed. The more he followed the figures, disregarding the signs of addition and subtraction, the more he saw a pattern in them. They were not calculations, as he had first thought; they were lists.

  Josephine came into the room without his noticing. He looked up to find her sitting in the chair opposite him, waiting.

  “What is it?” he asked, noticing that the light was deepening on the floor and shadows were encroaching further. “Have you found something?”

  “I think so, but so have you,” she answered. “What is it?”

  “Lists, but disguised as calculations,” he said. “Carefully hidden. They look crazy, full of error, until you try altering the pluses and minuses, and then suddenly it makes sense. I’m not a mathematician, but I can see the patterns. I think it’s money transferred secretly, well covered, but big amounts and over quite a few years.”

  “Embezzlement?” she said incredulously.

  “It’s a hell of a lot, if it is. I think there would have been a fearful stink if it had been known. There certainly would have been a crisis somewhere.”

  “Then what, if it’s not stolen? Why did Stoney care? And even more than that,” Josephine added, “why was he killed? It’s got to be something more than a hidden embezzlement, to murder for it. Are you certain he was killed?”

  Lucas did not want to say so, as he was wondering if the crisis was all in their imagination, or rather in Stoney’s. And because they cared for him, they were looking for some answer to his obsession, and to their own grief. It hurt like a knife turned in a wound to think that a magnificent mind could have drifted into such a loss of reason in his old age. Or was it possible that hundreds of thousands of pounds were being embezzled and laundered through MI6? Whose money? And why secretly, if it was empowered by the government?

  “What, then?” Josephine pressed.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You didn’t answer me,” she pointed out. “Do you think he was killed? Or do you think he had a heart attack or stroke sometime late yesterday evening?” She made it only half a question. Clearly, she intended to answer it herself. “He was still dressed, so say it was before eleven at night, definitely before midnight.”

  “Possibly,” he conceded. “Go on.”

  “And hit his head when he fell at the top of the stairs?”

  “Yes, you can see slight scrape marks. And it would perfectly explain his bruises and the faint mark on the wallpaper at the side. I did notice it,” he admitted.

  “And the smear of blood on the bottom step,” she added.

  “So?” Lucas was not certain what she was driving at, but it chilled him to think there was anyone else involved in Stoney’s death.

  “I know.” She bit her lip. “But it would not explain the blood marks in the potting shed.”

  “In the potting shed?” He was lost. “What are you talking about?”

  “Haven’t you noticed how beautifully Stoney’s garden is kept? He did it himself. Haven’t you looked at his hands? No matter how many times, no matter how hard he tried to clean them, the earth stayed in his fingers.”

  He looked at her more intently. Her face was creased with sadness. He knew her so well. She was seeing in her mind the care a lonely man gave to his flowers, the beauty he had a part in creating.

  “He cut himself.” He offered the obvious explanation. “He probably put a plaster on it, so there’s no blood in here. I’ve seen enough of the papers. I’d have seen any blood.”

  “Unless it was dark,” she said.

  “Stoney wouldn’t have been working in the dark,” he argued. “There’s no lighting out there, not unless he’s put it in very recently.”

  “He hasn’t, I looked. He doesn’t have anything tropical, and there’s no heating.”

  Lucas thought for a moment. “Then he cut himself on whatever it was before dark.”

  “And if he has no cut?” she asked.

  “What? You think he hit his head? You think the blood in the potting shed was from his head wound?”

  “Yes, I do.” Josephine was quite certain. It was unmistakable in her face. Dr. Hardesty would have noticed a cut. “To bleed this much—and scalp wounds do bleed badly. It was a hard abrasion that we saw, bad enough to have killed him. We are only assuming it was a heart attack, and that the wound was a result of his fall. Lucas, what if he was attacked out in the potting shed and carried inside, cleaned up from the earth and compost he had been working with, then thrown down the stairs?”

  “Aren’t you bending the facts to fit the pattern you imagine?” he asked, but gently. She looked so earnest.

  She was not fazed in the least. “A theory has got to fit all the facts, Lucas. The blood in the shed has barely congealed. It’s from, at latest, last night; it certainly wasn’t several days ago. And it has to be from before dark, because he wouldn’t work out there after dusk. There’s nothing else there with blood on it. I looked. But there are certain tools you’d usually expect to find in a potting shed, and they aren’t there. Particularly, a small spade.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t have one.”

  “Yes, he did. Apart from the space where it would have been hung on the wall, and two empty rails it would hang on, the kind of garden work he did would need one. I have one myself and I know what I use it for, which jobs. It took me a while to work out what must have happened. Someone hit him with a spade pretty hard. It probably killed him outright. They carried him inside, washed his hands, changed his shoes to indoor slippers. They probably took the spade with them.”

  “Why not simply wash it?” he asked, playing devil’s advocate, but he knew the answer.

  “Not easy in the growing darkness to be sure of washing off every speck of blood, not if they were in a hurry. Blood seeps into a wooden handle, between the cracks. It would seem unnecessary to them for it to be spotlessly clean if it was found in a week or so. Who would be surprised? Gardeners get all sorts of cuts and bruises and scratches, and it would be too late to look at the body for the wound.”

  “Wouldn’t Hardesty have noticed that the body had been moved?” Lucas persisted.

  “It had fallen all the way down the stairs,” she pointed out. “The one thing it couldn’t have done is carry itself from the potting shed to the back door, through the kitchen, and up to the top of the stairs, ready to be in the right place to fall.”

  “Are his boots at the back door?” he asked.

 
“Yes.” Josephine did not take her eyes from him. “But there are no tracks of them back from the potting shed to the door, though there are some on the way out.”

  He stared at her. Her gaze was direct, troubled. She was waiting for him to reply.

  “You are sure?” It was not really a question, just a delaying of the moment he had to acknowledge it. He stared at Josephine. She had seen something she understood and could not deny.

  “I’m sure there’s something wrong.” She bit her lip. “Lucas, he went out, but he did not walk back, not on his feet. Can we look the other way and still face ourselves? Exactly what were we all fighting for in the war? Not for another war, God knows, but not to avoid it using any means, including joining the enemy or becoming him.”

  Of course, she was right, but exactly right? He could not answer that because he could see so little ahead of him.

  She waited for him.

  “We must tell the police that they should investigate Stoney’s death, because it’s murder.” He stood up slowly. He was stiff. There would have been no crick in his knees ten years ago. His mind would have been quicker. He would not have seen so many clouds of obscurity ahead, uncertain and full of the possibilities of war. Was he wrong then…or now?

  * * *

  —

  Josephine went with him to the police station. It was at least half an hour before the inspector came out to see them. He was clearly tired at the end of the day, and was straining his patience to deal with two elderly people whose grasp of reality seemed tenuous, at best. It was only because they were obviously grieved and completely out of their depth that he exercised as much patience as he did.

  Josephine explained what she had seen in the potting shed.

  “And did you see this lost spade, sir?” he asked Lucas.

  Lucas kept his temper with difficulty. “Do you mean on another occasion? No, we did not meet in the potting shed. We sat in Mr. Canning’s study.”