Diana's Altar Page 20

  Joe was alarmed by his vision. Everywhere he’d turned in this enquiry he’d stubbed his toe on the same sinister words: red . . . Bolshy . . . Communist Society . . . Russian scientists . . . Only to be soothed by the constantly repeated, “But good old Ivan is our friend. The Russians fought against the Germans, on the side of the Allies, did they not?”

  He called a halt to his fervid imaginings. He was a policeman, for God’s sake! Not a politician! Evidence. He’d work away, building a case or demolishing a case according to the evidence. That was his job. Then he’d chuck his report onto the lap of MI5 and it would do the rounds of Home Office, Foreign Office and War Department. If the country still had a War Department. It would, as he’d explained to Hunnyton, bounce right back at him while a good deal of ministerial hand-washing and back-turning went on. Sandilands would be the one left wielding the sword. And, like the bloodthirsty numbskull who’d assassinated the Roman Pertinax, his head would roll in revenge the moment the next man came to power. Joe had learned some lessons from history, one being that assassins rarely got away with it.

  “Ad signa!” certainly. He’d vowed: “Ad Victoriam!” Yes, he was ready to shake out his plumes, polish up his breastplate and fall in for one last effort. But he would tread a careful path.

  Joe hurried to his room with Ralph’s package under his arm and settled at his desk to make sense of the car numbers.

  He poured out a cup of coffee from the jug he’d had sent up and lit a cigarette, his hand trembling with anticipation.

  The agreeable tension he was feeling was that of a hunter who hears the hounds call from two fields away, the stab of excitement of a copper on stake-out who sees a light go on in the window he’s watching or the elation of a man turning to the Times crossword to find that he has the answer to number one across. He laid out the ten sheets in order, one for each month, January to October, and calmed himself sufficiently to give them an overall appraisal.

  Red lines, green ones, blue and black. Dots and numbers. Christ! It was like looking at a piece of Fair Isle knitting! Whilst he admired the hours of work Ralph and his small crew had put in, he was at first stunned by the complexity of the result they had produced. All this from a scruffy little book compiled by a child!

  After a while, priorities suggested themselves. Patterns began to emerge. Where to start? Joe controlled the moment of panic and reminded himself that the list, whatever it revealed, gave him his sole objective view of the situation, though this represented a mere ten-month slice of a portion of the problem. It did not include the guests who had arrived by train and taxi, for instance. Or bicycle. Cycle clips on a pair of evening trousers? Possible but unlikely. He would just have to take what he had so unexpectedly been offered and work on the evidence.

  The names now linked to the vehicles stunned him. After a while he began to compose a working list of his own, categorising the revellers according to status and occupation:

  Politicians: including two—two—cabinet ministers. Handily one on each side.

  Aristocracy: making up about 50 percent.

  Ambassadors and State officials: Russia, Germany, France. Always singly, not competing for attention, clearly.

  Armed forces: thinly represented. Army and navy.

  Entertainers: baritones and jazz pianists heavily represented.

  Newspaper men.

  Law and order: one high court judge—surely too old to have survived the Pertinax experience?

  Other.

  He marked down the repeat performers and bracketed the ones who made a single appearance only.

  He was particularly interested in the latest session of hospitality when Clarice Denton had writhed in agony, dying despite Adelaide’s attentions, well away from the revelry in the company rooms. Pertinax and his ex-sapper butler had, he believed, administered a fatal dose of arsenic. Not difficult to do when your chosen poison is tasteless and odourless and much fine wine is being drunk in a convivial setting. But why? Some rift in the relationship? Had Mrs. Denton represented a threat to the Madingley establishment? He turned to the last entry on the night she died, checking the Rolls-Royces and Daimlers against their registered owners, and his pencil dropped to the floor as his body shook with a sudden surge of horror. With his forefinger he traced again the name that had so startled him. A name he knew well. A name that his worst imaginings had never offered up as a possible victim of Pertinax. Though it had occurred—albeit glancingly—to a prescient Aidan, he remembered from his friend’s briefing.

  He retrieved his pencil and entered a further devastating category on his sheet: royalty.

  If Pertinax had worked his evil magic and achieved his aims on the weekend Mrs. Denton had died, if he had photographic images in the can, still or moving, then all was lost. The conjuror had dealt himself the winning card.

  He forced himself to move on—to turn to the second date of death. The footman, Jeremy. August the 13th. Yes, there had been a party assembled that weekend. A three-day shooting party, to mark the opening of the season, Joe assumed. He checked the owners of the grand automobiles and saw there men he would not himself have been pleased to spend any time with under a roof or on a shooting field. Dubious characters. “Degenerates,” his sister Lydia would have called them. They were known, for the most part, to the police but, protected by their status, had always evaded a face-to-face run-in with the Met. Influence and cash kept their names out of the papers. A ghastly suspicion began to form in Joe’s mind. He did not rein it in but followed where it led. He resolved to gather evidence and take it as far as circumstances would allow.

  A few more minutes of careful study and he saw the anomaly. The dropped stitch in the pattern.

  A single entry which he’d bracketed and discarded in the month of July snagged at his attention. A modest motorcar, the only one in the entire list that did not speak of wealth and influence. A Morris. Joe was surprised that the boy Samuel had considered it worthy of being recorded. He opened a further category on his list. Scientists: one only.

  The owner of the Morris, a Doctor Humphrey Page, had arrived on July the 20th. Nothing further. Had he decided the scene was not for him? Another ivy and drainpipe job or a quick dash after breakfast? Joe checked Ralph’s additional notes. Bless the man, he’d found time to check up the name. A Cambridge man, address given. Physicist. Working at the Cavendish Laboratory. Was this an attempt by Pertinax to find a wormhole into the scientific world? What was special about Page? Why had he visited only once? Was he perhaps known to MI5? Oh, Lord! Was this Hermes? Joe looked at his watch, made a further entry in his schedule for the day and reached for the telephone.

  Number 50, Cherrystone Road, Aidan had said. Joe told his taxi to park well short of it and around the corner. The driver was to stay put until he returned.

  “Cost ya!” was the annoying response, and the driver left the engine running.

  “No, mate!” Joe said, flipping his warrant card at the man. “It’ll cost you! Possibly your license if you don’t cooperate. Now turn the bloody engine off! You’ll be paid what you earn. When I get back. It may be two minutes, it could be thirty.”

  “Ha! You’re a quick worker, guv!” the driver jeered.

  Joe walked on, straight past the large city villa on the corner, and peered back at it from a distance of thirty yards. There was a large front door and, he guessed, two others, a side and a rear door. It backed on to an area of grass and trees that Joe took to be parkland. In the distance a duck squawked. As he watched, a nanny pushed a pram down the narrow ginnel by the side of number 50. Off to air the baby and feed the ducks, doubtless. A gentleman being hauled along by two matching Labrador dogs took the same route. Joe wondered, with a wry grin and a suspicious mind, whether the establishment provided a hitching post for dogs at the rear while their masters were otherwise engaged.

  The area was suburban and very quiet at eleven in the morning. A fe
w maids appeared at doors and windows in the imposing houses, flapping dusters, shaking mats and scrubbing steps. No one appeared at number 50. Joe did, however, catch a glimpse of two students of the Minerva Milton Secretarial College busily working away at typewriters, backs to the central front window. Window dressing? Joe thought so.

  He walked back and strolled up the short black and red chequered pathway to the front door. He tugged on the bellpull and listened as footsteps scurried down the hall. A parlour maid in a mobcap answered mechanically, almost without looking at him. “Sorry, sir, the college is closed for business today.”

  “Not my business, miss,” Joe said with a smile. “I don’t wish to see Minerva Milton—or do you know her as Clarice Denton? Fetch any one of the students I see you have on the premises. One of those in the window will do. I’ll wait here. Impatiently.”

  He looked about him, not much admiring the outdated décor: dark red, flocked wallpaper; patterned, deep pile carpet and a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall. The freshly-polished surface of the mahogany hall table was taken up with a display of knickknacks of a traditional nature set out with precision. Matching silver-framed coronation photographs of King George V and his queen, the ever-glowering Mary of Teck, faced each other at a slight angle. “George and the Dragon,” Joe’s sister called the royal pair. Between the two, in pride of place on this shrine to the British monarchy, was a study of the six offspring of the marriage. Six! An heir and five spares. Probably taken some twenty years ago. Joe recognised Albert, with his serious and engaging features, looking dutifully at the camera; Edward staring insouciantly into the distance, wondering when this boring session would be over; and the daughter Victoria tricked out in white dress, ribbons and pearls, an uncanny echo of the Romanov princesses, her second cousins.

  Joe stopped himself from trying to identify the remaining children, realising that he’d fallen into the trap. The trap of reassurance, familiarity and respect for British convention. Leave a man in this hallway for five minutes and he’d be singing the national anthem.

  Looking aside, his eye was caught by a suitcase, a large going-away-for-some-time suitcase awaiting pickup at the bottom of the stairs. A not-unassociated coat was draped over the bottom of the banister rail. He approached and read the bold handwriting on the luggage label attached to the handle of the case. Miss Beatrice Stewart, 106 High Street, Templeton, Surrey.

  The first rat leaving the sinking ship? On an impulse, he threw back his head and yelled, “Beatrice! Beatrice! Where are you? Taxi’s here!”

  A distant noise of running water and a door banging at the end of the hallway announced the arrival of Beatrice.

  “Who the hell are you?” a pretty, dark girl wanted to know as she grabbed her coat and struggled into it and, suspiciously, “You’re no cabby!” She had the aplomb to adjust her fur toque in front of the hall mirror and check the contents of her handbag, keeping him waiting. When she bent to straighten a stocking seam Joe decided he’d had enough.He picked up her case, smiled and announced, “I have your taxi just outside, if you’ll step this way. Said your goodbyes have you, miss?” He whisked off through the door.

  Puzzled and fearful, the girl stumbled on high heels in pursuit of her suitcase, protesting as she tried to catch up with Joe.

  When they reached the taxi, Joe opened the back door and pushed her case inside. “Get in,” he said and shut the door. Turning to the driver, “Smoker are you?” he asked. “Good. Buzz off and leave us alone for a bit. There’s a wall over there. Go and sit on it where I can see you. Smoke two cigarettes before you come back to the taxi for further instructions.”

  Grumbling and scowling, the man shuffled off, settled himself and took a packet of Woodbines from his pocket.

  The girl was pale with fear, Joe realised, but she held her head high and managed to ask again haughtily who the hell he was. Beatrice had the right eyebrows to express haughtiness. She could have been one of the Russian princesses the photograph had brought to mind. Doomed but spirited and on her way to Ekaterinburg in the hands of revolutionary thugs. She smelled of toothpaste and cologne.

  He hurried to reassure her. “I’m not from Madingley, Beatrice. You’re in no danger from me. But you may well be in danger. I’m here to help you.”

  “What do you want?” was the abrupt response.

  “Cut the flannel do you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, you’re right. We haven’t much time. You have a train to catch. There is something I want. Information. I know who you are and what you do. I’m not talking about the typing. I want some information on Mrs. Denton. Clarice Denton.”

  She shook her head and seemed on the point of panic. “Nothing to say! Let me out! You are one of them.”

  He pushed on. “Mrs. Denton died in agony, of arsenic poisoning, last Tuesday at Madingley Court. I believe you were on the premises at the time, engaged in entertaining Sir Gregory’s guests.”

  “You can tell your boss I wasn’t there. I heard and saw nothing because I wasn’t there. Got that? Leave me alone. I’m on my way to my auntie’s down south in Surrey and I’ve sent her a letter saying if anything happens to me she’s to tell the police. I’ve sent her the full story. So get off my back! I’ve got a ticket for the twelve-thirty King’s Cross train and I’m going to be on it.”

  Admiring the girl’s pluck and sure by now of her stance, Joe judged the moment was right to produce his warrant. “Why not tell me to my face, right now? I’m from Scotland Yard, miss. Joe Sandilands.”

  She took the card and inspected it with care then stared back at him. “An assistant commissioner? You sure? Blimey! You had me going there! Big, ugly bugger with a scarred face and a slouch hat—I thought you’d been sent to take me for a ride. Thank God for that! I can’t be certain the local plod would ever have listened to my Auntie Vera. Chicken-nicking and apple-scrumping is about their limit.” She gulped and drew in a lungful of air in her relief. “Well, here we are then. This is it. Go on. What do you want to know?”

  “For starters: Why did she die? I’m sure that she was murdered and I need to understand what brought it about. What was the state of the relationship between Pertinax and Mrs. Denton?”

  He’d shown his hand, but he couldn’t be sure of her reaction. To his relief, she turned a calm face to him and replied with composure.

  “They were never the best of buddies but they’d known each other a long time, I think. They got along. She did her job well, Mrs. D. Always. Treated us girls well too. Saw to it we got paid a fair amount and made us keep a bank account. Just in case.” She clutched her handbag in an instinctive gesture that told Joe one of its contents was most probably a post office bank book. “Ran number 50 like a business with professional instruction and everything. She got someone in to teach us typing and shorthand. Proper little finishing school she had going! She could take us anywhere. Our table manners, French pronunciation, conversation, are all as good as any debutante’s. That made us feel a bit better about what we were doing. The blokes up at Madingley had no cause for complaint. Until that last evening. Gawd! Did the feathers ever fly!”

  “A row?”

  “I’ll say! Before it all kicked off. We’d got there, in our best frocks, made up, revved up . . . you know . . . They run it like an army manoeuvre—briefings and profiles and tactics . . .” She rolled her eyes. “Well on this occasion—All Hallows’ Eve, wasn’t it?—he’d told the girls to dress in something cobwebby and spooky just for a laugh. Mrs. D. had gone to town on the costumes—masks, the lot! We looked pretty good. It was then, the butler, Mr. Jennings, told us who the guests were going to be. We never knew in advance. To cut the risk of gossip, I suppose. Not that we’d have dared. He liked to keep the names quiet . . . some fellers’ names we never knew . . . but on this occasion there was someone . . .” She paused, unable to voice the name. The rules of silence still weighed heavily on her.r />
  “Someone every girl would recognise immediately? From a hundred press photographs? A household name? Let’s call him ‘H,’ shall we? No names, no pack drill. Just ‘H.’”

  She sighed with relief. “Right. Jennings reckoned forewarned is forearmed. He didn’t want any fainting fits or panic attacks when some girl realised what she’d got on her plate. So he came out with it. Well! Who’d have thought it! H! We were all excited and ready to have a giggle but Mrs. Denton blew her top! Life she’s led—I mean she’s seen it all!—you’d never have twigged that she’s a raving, patriotic royalist would you? Was, I mean . . . But then, her room here is a dead giveaway. Full of mementos, souvenirs, Wedgwood plaques . . . She can—could—recite the line right back as far as William the Conqueror. My granny was as bad. It’s like a religion with some women. We should have realised.”

  “What precise objection did she voice?” Joe asked carefully.

  “Ooh, hark at you!” Joe was glad to hear the joking jibe. She was beginning, at last, to relax and relish her story. “She gave him a right tongue-lashing! She ranted and raved. It sounded to me like the cork popping out of a bottle that’s already had a bit of a shaking. Pressure building up . . . you know . . . And by then the first of the guests was coming down the drive. No way was this illustrious personage whom she so admired going to be defiled (defiled!) by a bunch of tarts. (Tarts!) Pertinax had gone too far this time. Was he planning the Yellow Room treatment?” She looked questioningly at Joe, who nodded his understanding. “That amounted to treason! He deserved to be beheaded on Tower Green and she’d volunteer to wield the axe! She’d go to jail before she’d cooperate! She and the girls were getting straight back in the van and going back to the city.