A Coat of Varnish (21 page)

Luria started one of his courteous, unflurried professional enquiries. He was as discreet as they were, a question about the case was impermissible, but he had his vocational curiosity, he wanted to learn about a detective’s life, what led them to it, what kept them going. They were complaining, with hearty rancour, about being needed to stay on duty on a Saturday night. They both lived in the distant suburbs, miles away. It would be late before they got home at night. They would get back tired. It interfered with your married life, they said. Policeman’s malady, they said. Worse for the boys in uniform. They complained about their pay. But they relished talking about the job. Luria persevered in searching for what the rewards really were.

After they had departed, he told Humphrey that there must be human rewards somewhere, those men were more content, or at least more alive, than most. Humphrey said that a good many people, probing into others’ affairs, got some satisfaction. Luria nodded his massive prophetic head, and said, with more weight or sententiousness than was strictly necessary, yes, as the French used to say, people liked living in the odour of man.

Then Luria said: ‘You notice they didn’t talk about their chief? They all know you see something of him.’ He went on: ‘They don’t know about me. I’ve heard some of them talking about him once or twice. Most of them are in favour of him. He’s a slave driver, but they like having a leader.’

‘Most of them?’

‘I did hear one stab in the back. From someone who must be a bit higher up the ladder. Quite young. Dark. Too smooth and glossy for a policeman. I didn’t catch his name.’

For a moment, Humphrey was thinking of Flamson, and described him. Luria shook his head. ‘No, that doesn’t sound right.’ Luria couldn’t trust himself with English accents, but this man might have been a cockney.

It must be Shingler, Humphrey broke out. Shingler was Briers’ bright particular star, the coming man in the Murder Squad.

‘That bright particular star doesn’t think much of his boss. And is mingy and snide about him. Briers wasn’t a copper’s copper, he said. He was a showman. He got there on the work of the real coppers, and then took the credit.’

Humphrey was cursing. ‘Do you realise that that bastard has been made by Frank Briers? Briers has taken care of his whole career.’ Humphrey went on angrily. Briers really did like talent, talent in his subordinates anywhere. He had been a hungry flyer knocking at the door himself – he was good at giving other hungry flyers a hand.

‘If I were he, I should keep an eye on that young man. He could do some damage.’

‘Bastard.’

Luria was giving his melancholy sardonic smile. ‘You don’t often get upset by human frailty, do you? Why now? Don’t you remember the old wail – why does he hate me so much? I’ve never done him any good.’ Luria was remembering. ‘That sounded madly cynical when I first heard it. Life couldn’t be as beastly as that. But folk sayings sometimes have their point. I fancy this one comes from the old Russian pale. It must have come from my people, mustn’t it? It can’t be Russian.’

As he grew older, Luria had come to refer to ‘his people’ as though he were responsible for them all.

There might be a time, Humphrey thought, when he could ask Briers whether Shingler was the model of loyalty. It would be a delicate operation, and he couldn’t attempt it now. The candour between them was still qualified. It hadn’t been a surprise to Humphrey to hear that questionings were going on methodically among people he knew. The police teams hadn’t stopped their visits to the purlieus of Pimlico; but there were others, more repetitive, to more privileged persons. Paul Mason had been questioned again, Kate had been asked to explain some of her answers about Susan and Loseby. It seemed bizarre, but Monty Lefroy had been visited, which he seemed to regard as entirely fitting. Mrs Burbridge had been taken over a timetable of Humphrey’s own movements. So had Stella Armstrong over Tom Thirkill’s. Susan Thirkill, so Kate reported over the telephone, had been interrogated with an appearance of informality, in her own apartment, not once but twice, for something like five hours each time, by Superintendent Bale. Briers himself was said to have spent long periods with Loseby and some brother officers of his.

The process was grinding on, but Briers had called at Humphrey’s house on several evenings, talked with affectionate openness, given bulletins about his wife’s illness, gazed at Humphrey with those splendid candid eyes, and given no hint of such enquiries. It didn’t even seem like professional caution. He should have known, for certain, that Humphrey must have already heard. Then at last Briers did give a hint, in a singular fashion. He invited Humphrey along to the police station for a morning briefing.

It bore a family resemblance to others that Humphrey had once attended, back in the Army, and then at the old office. It was not noticeably more exciting. From the window-boxes there was a smell of watered soil. A very young detective sergeant was waiting in the hall, more than ever fitting into the mould of the accomplished aide-de-camp, like so many that Humphrey had had to negotiate with: private secretaries of Ministers and Civil Service eminences, captains at headquarters, unobtrusively more confident than generals sitting round, because they were in the commander’s confidence and the generals weren’t. This young man, educated at an expensive school, was acquiring like other aides-de-camp some of his master’s mannerisms, which didn’t entirely suit him. He led the way into the Murder Room, sweet with early-morning freshness, though there were still more filing cabinets, blackboards, sheaves of notices.

Humphrey was hoping that Briers would have something to say. He did have something to say, but it didn’t enliven Humphrey. Briers was a good public performer, experienced at keeping up the spirits of his team, which by this time crammed the room. There were jocular exchanges. Briers was experienced in those also. They were not in his style, but he could adapt himself to most kinds of camaraderie, particularly if it protected him from what he didn’t want to say. That didn’t tell Humphrey anything new about Briers. Right at the end, he made a short harangue which sounded as though it were one of his regular exhortations. Briers didn’t have to raise his usual voice to fill that room.

He was saying: ‘I want another blitz on who was walking about that Saturday night. Oh yes, I know we’ve done that till we’re tired. But there must have been someone walking about. We haven’t tracked the one sighting we really want. And someone else must have seen that young woman. We haven’t got anywhere. I want sightings of anyone between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m., specially anywhere round the mews and in Eccleston Street, as well as the Square. There haven’t been anything like enough sightings so far. You’d think this was the middle of a prairie. I want some more. Most of them will be nonsense. I’ve told you before, I’ll tell you again, I want them. I don’t care if it’s the local parson, or Humphrey Leigh who’s just down there (jocund laughter) or the Lord Chancellor, or three old prime ministers, or’ – he ripped off the names of two star actors, an American diplomat, an ecclesiastical dignitary, all of whom lived in Eaton Square – ‘or the fire brigade. I want them. We’ve got a couple of miserable sightings, and those may be a bit of a break. Now I want another blitz. Detective Superintendent Shingler is in charge. We go for everyone, everyone in the Square and round about. Some of them just must have seen someone. Oh, I know, you’ve bothered them before. A lot of these people are old. You be polite if you can manage it (dutiful laughter). If you can’t be polite I’ll look after you, if you can bring me one good authentic piece of observation.’

Something like that, Humphrey was still convinced, actually was one of his regular exhortations. The detectives must have heard it all before, for weeks past. The young woman he spoke of, they knew who she was. It hadn’t been necessary to say those words to the detectives. It was strangely oblique, but he was saying them to Humphrey.

Briers dismissed the meeting. When he was left alone with Humphrey, except for the sergeant still in attendance, Briers said: ‘There you are. What did you think of that?’

‘Interesting. Very interesting,’ Humphrey replied without expression.

‘I must get to work myself. See you soon, Humphrey.’

Smoothly, the young man took Humphrey out into the road. It had been a peculiar performance, he had been thinking, but it was one way of making a purpose plain.

In the gossip about the police interviews, there was one name which Humphrey had not heard mentioned. Paul Mason had described with some amusement how he had been pressed to answer for a discrepancy (there wasn’t one, his memory was slightly better than their script, he said, for once immodest), but he hadn’t spoken a word about Celia.

It would have been absurd to imagine that she was any sort of suspect. No one ever did think so, then or in the future, even those so credulous that the obvious truth didn’t seem believable enough. Apart from her last social appearance at the dinner at Tom Thirkill’s, none of Humphrey’s friends had met her for weeks. Kate remarked, she seemed to have dropped out of circulation.

In fact, she was to be seen most evenings in a little garden looking over the river, across the road from St George’s Square. Round six o’clock at night, she was making a habit of walking from her house in Cheyne Row along the Embankment, her young son scampering beside her. On that Friday evening, the day of Briers’ briefing, she did just that. People might have noticed a pretty young woman dressed simply, elegantly, in white, body slender and handsome, one hand holding a golf-umbrella, the other a small boy’s wrist, watching steadily for a chance to cross the road. The traffic was heavy, cars streaming out of the town. At last she could get the boy across. In the garden he was safe.

Sitting on a bench, with her clear clinical painter’s eye, Celia regarded the statue of William Huskisson. One shoulder was bare, he was dressed like a Roman senator. Some Victorian mind, some human mind, had considered that appropriate. He had been knocked down and killed by one of the earliest railway engines, travelling at ten miles an hour. Just the sort of thing he would have managed, she thought with detachment. She put up her umbrella to guard herself not from the heat, but the light of the declining sun. She wasn’t using an umbrella in imitation of Lady Ashbrook. Lady Ashbrook might have approved of her style, but she didn’t copy Lady Ashbrook’s. She carried an umbrella because it was functional, and she liked it. She was her own mistress. She was capable of thinking she was now certainly no one else’s.

She was capable of thinking that, but she was sad. Not bitter, not resentful, but sad. She had lost Paul. She didn’t blame him. She didn’t blame herself. It was in the nature of things. Or, rather, in her own nature. She was a loser. Others thought she had everything. Beauty. She dismissed that, but accepted that she was good enough to look at. Fairly intelligent. She could be entertaining with the right companion. She had known, since she was growing up, that she attracted a reasonable number of men. She liked some of them. She could give those she liked what they wanted in the way of sex. There she was easy, not passionate, not cold, so far as she could judge herself. She had done so with her husband. She had loved him. He had left her. She had loved Paul. Now he had left her.

She gazed at her young son, who was kneeling on the grass, carefully stalking a seagull. She loved him, too, more totally, or at least with more self-forgetfulness than she loved either of her men. Would that boy leave her, too? Of course. It would be wrong if he didn’t. While he was a child, she would keep something of him. But afterwards, sons ought not to be attached to their mothers. She couldn’t wish for that. Anyway, she took it for granted that she wouldn’t get him. They all found it easy, compulsory, almost friendly, to leave her.

She was thinking of herself, nothing else. All that had happened to Lady Ashbrook or acquaintances in the Square seemed insignificant, as though it were long ago. She had none of that kind of homesickness or clinging memory. It was only Paul that she remembered. Not with hatred, or violent longing, but as of someone who should be present, and was not. Yes, he had bright, intent, focused eyes, when he was teasing her; nose going white when he was getting urgent about bed. In bed (it seemed out of character) never ceasing to talk, fervently, insistently, right up to the climax.

Paul had left her. She hadn’t been pleased when that girl Susan had been making a play for him; but she had heard that it wasn’t Susan who had got anywhere with him.

If it were not that girl, it would be another, Celia thought acceptantly. Why hadn’t she held him? Why was she a loser?

When they had all been celebrating the good news for Lady Ashbrook (none of them had forgotten that night, and some of them were to go on feeling a kind of guilt), she had tried to confide in Humphrey. She knew already that Paul was slipping away. She wasn’t pitying herself. She had no more pity for herself than for others. It had been a relief to talk to Humphrey, who didn’t pity, either, and didn’t blame. She tried to be honest. And yet, even the most honest, when they were losing, found reasons – to themselves as well as to anyone else – which weren’t quite the reasons. Paul had wanted a bedmate, she had said, in her clinical style. That was fine, that was the easy part. But he also wanted a hostess, and that she couldn’t do, and so sometime they would have to part.

She had been searching herself, and found a lack which concealed a deeper lack. She could have made herself liked by anyone Paul brought in. They might have found her puzzling or far away, but they would have liked her, for she was more liked than, since her childhood, she could ever believe. She accepted that a few men loved her – but, driven into herself, she couldn’t accept that she was also liked. But really it wasn’t that she couldn’t give others what Paul wanted her to give. The trouble was, and this was too much like a trap of fate to recognise, that she couldn’t give it to Paul himself.

He was gifted, usually patient with her, confident. But, confident as he was, sometimes he needed a response, a completely ordinary response, a bit of encouragement, the feeling that the whole of her nature was with him. Occasionally, less often than most, he needed such a simple response; and she could only give him a splinter.