A Shilling for Candles (19 page)

But her efforts had come to nothing. Today an organized gang of amateur
searchers had undertaken the work—the police had no men to
spare—but so far no news had come. And in Grant’s mind was growing a
slow fear that he tried with all his self-awareness to beat down. But it was
like a moor fire. You whipped it to cinder only to see it run under the
surface and break out ahead of you.

News from Dover was slow, too. The investigation was hampered beyond any
but police patience by the necessity of (a) not offending the peerage, and
(b) not frightening the bird: the first applying to a possibly innocent, the
second to a possibly guilty. It was all very complicated. Watching Edward
Champneis’s calm face—he had eyebrows which gave a peculiar expression
of repose—while he discussed with him the trapping of Herbert, Grant
had several times forcibly to restrain himself from saying: “Where were you
on Wednesday night?” What would Champneis do? Look a little puzzled, think a
moment, and then say: “The night I arrived in Dover? I spent it with the
So-and-sos at Such-and-such.” And then realization of what the question
entailed would dawn, and he would look incredulously at Grant, and Grant
would feel the world’s prize fool. More! In Edward Champneis’s presence he
felt that it was sheer insult to suggest that he might have been responsible
for his wife’s death. Away from him, that picture of the man in the garden,
watching the lighted house with the open windows, might swim up in his mind
more often than he cared to admit. But in his presence, any such thought was
fantastic. Until his men had accounted—or failed to account—for
Champneis’s movements that night, any direct inquiry must be shelved.

All he knew so far was that Champneis had stayed in none of the obvious
places. The hotels and the family friends had both been drawn blank. The
radius was now being extended. At any moment news might come that my lord had
slept in a blameless four-poster and the county’s best linen sheets, and
Grant would be forced to admit that he had been mistaken when he imagined
that Lord Edward was deliberately misleading him.

ON Tuesday morning word came from Collins, the man who was
investigating Champneis’s wardrobe. Bywood, the valet, had proved “very
sticky going,” he reported. He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke and there
seemed to be no plane on which Collins could establish a mutual regard. But
every man has his price, and Bywood’s proved to be snuff. A very secret vice,
it was. Lord Edward would dismiss him on the spot if he suspected such
indulgence. (Lord Edward would probably have been highly pleased by anything
so eighteenth century.) Collins had procured him “very special snuff,” and
had at last got within inspecting distance of the wardrobe. On his arrival in
England—or rather, in London—Champneis had weeded out his
wardrobe. The weeding out had included two coats, one dark and one camel
hair. Bywood had given the camel hair one to his brother-in-law, a chorus
boy; the other he had sold to a dealer in London. Collins gave the name and
address of the dealer.

Grant sent an officer down to the dealer, and as the officer went through
the stock the dealer said: “That coat came from Lord Edward Champneis, the
Duke of Bude’s son. Nice bit of stuff.”

It was a nice bit of stuff. And it had all its buttons; with no sign of
replacements.

Grant sighed when the news came, not sure whether he was glad or sorry.
But he still wanted to know where Champneis had spent the night.

And what the Press wanted to know was where Tisdall was. Every newspaper
in Britain wanted to know. The C.I.D. were in worse trouble than they had
been for many years. The
Clarion
openly called them murderers, and
Grant, trying to get a line on a baffling case, was harassed by the fury of
colleagues, the condolences of his friends, a worried Commissioner, and his
own growing anxiety. In the middle of the morning Jammy Hopkins rang up to
explain away his “middle” in the
Clarion
. It was “all in the way of
business,” and he knew his good friends at the Yard would understand. Grant
was out, and it was Williams at the other end of the telephone. Williams was
not in the mood for butter. He relieved his overburdened soul with a gusto
which left Hopkins hoping that he had not irretrievably put himself in the
wrong with the Yard. “As for hounding people to death,” Williams finished,
“you know very well that the Press do more hounding in a week than the Yard
has since it was founded. And
all
your victims are innocent!”

“Oh, have a heart, Sergeant! You know we’ve got to deliver the goods. If
we don’t make it hot and strong, we’ll be out on our ear. St. Martin’s Crypt,
or the Embankment. And you pushing people off the seats. We’ve got our jobs
to keep just as much as—”

The sound of Williams’s hang-up was eloquent. It was action and comment
compressed into one little monosyllable. Jammy felt hardly used. He had
enjoyed writing that article. He had in fact been full of righteous
indignation as the scarifying phrases poured forth. When Jammy was writing
his tongue came out of its habitual position in his cheek, and emotion
flooded him. That the tongue went back when he had finished did not matter;
the popular appeal of his article was secure; it was “from the heart”; and
his salary went up by leaps and bounds.

But he was a little hurt that all his enemies-on-paper couldn’t see just
what a jape it was. He flung his hat with a disgusted gesture onto his right
eyebrow and went out to lunch.

And less than five minutes away Grant was sitting in a dark corner, a huge
cup of black coffee before him, his head propped in his hands. He was
“telling it to himself in words of one syllable.”

Christine Clay was living in secret. But the murderer knew where she was.
That eliminated a lot of people.

Champneis knew.

Jason Harmer knew.

Herbert Gotobed almost certainly knew.

The murderer had worn a coat dark enough to be furnished with a black
button and black sewing thread.

Champneis had such a coat, but there was no missing button.

Jason Harmer had no such coat; and had not lately worn any such coat.

No one knew what Herbert Gotobed wore.

The murderer had a motive so strong and of such duration that he could
wait for his victim at six of a morning and deliberately drown her.

Champneis had a possible motive.

Jason Harmer had a possible motive if they had been lovers, but there was
no proof of that.

Herbert Gotobed had no known motive but had almost certainly hated
her.

On points Gotobed won. He knew where his sister was; he had the kind of
record that was “headed for murder”; and he had been on bad terms with the
victim.

Oh, well! By tomorrow Gotobed might have declared himself. Meanwhile he
would drug himself with black coffee and try to keep his mind off the
Press.

As he raised the cup to his lips, his eyes lighted on a man in the
opposite corner. The man’s cup was half-empty, and he was watching Grant with
amused and friendly eyes.

Grant smiled, and hit first. “Hiding that famous profile from the public
gaze? Why don’t you give your fans a break?”

“It’s all break for them. A fan can’t be wrong. You’re being given a hell
of a time, aren’t you? What do they think the police are? Clairvoyants?”

Grant rolled the honey on his tongue and swallowed it.

“Someday,” Owen Hughes said, “someone is going to screw Jammy Hopkins’s
head off his blasted shoulders. If my face wasn’t insured for the sum total
of the world’s gold, I’d do it myself. He once said I was ‘every girl’s
dream’!”

“And aren’t you?”

“Have you seen my cottage lately?”

“No. I saw the photograph of the wreck in the paper one day.”

“I don’t mind telling you I wept when I got out of the car and saw it. I’d
like to broadcast that photograph to the ends of the earth as a sample of
what publicity can do. Fifty years ago a few people might have come a few
miles to look at the place, and then gone home satisfied. They came in
charabanc loads to see Briars. My lawyer tried to stop the running of the
‘trips,’ but there was nothing he could do. The County Police refused to keep
a man there after the first few days. About ten thousand people have come in
the last fortnight, and every one of the ten thousand has peered through the
windows, stood on the plants, and taken away a souvenir. There is hardly a
scrap of hedge left—it used to be twelve feet high, a mass of
roses—and the garden is a wilderness of trampled mud. I was rather
attached to that garden. I didn’t croon to the pansies, exactly, but I got a
lot of kick out of planting things people gave me, and seeing them come up.
Not a vestige left.”

“Rotten luck! And no redress. Maddening for you. Perhaps by next year the
plants will have taken heart again.”

“Oh, I’m selling the place. It’s haunted. Had you ever met Clay? No? She
was grand. They don’t make that kind in pairs.”

“Do you know of anyone who would be likely to want to murder her, by any
chance?”

Hughes smiled one of the smiles which made his fans grip the arms of their
cinema seats. “I know lots who would gladly have murdered her on the spot.
But only on the spot. The minute you cooled off, you’d cheerfully die for
her. It’s most unlikely death for Chris—the one that happened to her.
Did you know that Lydia Keats prophesied it from her horoscope? She’s a
marvel, Lydia. She should have been drowned when she was a pup, but she
really is a marvel. I sent her Marie Dacre’s year, day, and minute of birth
from Hollywood. Marie made me swear an oath before she divulged the awful
truth of the year. Lydia hadn’t the faintest notion whose horoscope she was
doing, and it was marvelously accurate. She’d be a wow in Hollywood.”

“She seems to be heading that way,” Grant said dryly. “Do you like the
place?”

“Oh, yes. It’s restful.” As Grant raised his eyebrows: “There are so many
pebbles on the beach that you’re practically anonymous.”

“I thought they ran rubbernecking tours for Midwest fans.”

“Oh, yes, they run motor coaches down your street, but they don’t tramp
your flowers into the ground.”

“If you were murdered they might.”

“Not they. Murders are ten cents the dozen. Well, I must get along. Good
luck. And God bless you. You’ve done me a power of good, so help me you
have.”

“I?”

“You’ve brought to my notice one profession that is worse than my own.” He
dropped some money on the table and picked up his hat. “They pray for judges
on Sundays, but never a word for the police!”

He adjusted the hat at the angle which after much testing had been found
by cameramen to be the most becoming, and strolled out, leaving Grant vaguely
comforted.

THE person who wasn’t comforted was Jammy. The buoyant, the
resilient, the hard-boiled but bouncing Jammy. He had eaten at his favorite
pub (black coffee might be all very well for worried police officials and
actors who had to think of their figure, but Jammy dealt only in other
people’s worries and remembered his figure only when his tailor measured him)
and nothing during lunch had been right. The beef had been a shade too
“done,” the beer had been a shade too warm, the waiter had had hiccoughs, the
potatoes were soapy, the cabinet pudding had tasted of baking soda, and they
were out of his usual cigarettes. And so his feeling of being ill-used and
misunderstood, instead of being charmed away by food and drink, had grown
into an exasperation with the world in general. He looked sourly over his
glass at his colleagues and contemporaries, laughing and talking over the
coarse white cloths, and they, unused to a glower on his brow, paused in
their traffic to tease him.

“What is it, Jammy? Pyorrhea?”

“No. He’s practicing to be a dictator. You begin with the expression.”

“No you don’t,” said a third. “You begin with the hair.”

“And an arm movement. Arms are very important. Look at Napoleon. Never
been more than a corporal if he hadn’t thought up that arm-on-chest business.
Pregnant, you know.”

“If it’s pregnant Jammy is, he’d better have the idea in the office, not
here. I don’t think the child’s going to be a pleasant sight.”

Jammy consigned them all to perdition, and went out to find a tobacconist
who kept his brand of cigarettes. What did the Yard want to take it like that
for? Everyone knew that what you wrote in a paper was just eyewash. When it
wasn’t bilgewater. If you stopped being dramatic over little tuppenny
no-account things, people might begin to suspect that they were no-account,
and then they’d stop buying papers. And where would the Press barons, and
Jammy, and a lot of innocent shareholders be then? You’d got to provide
emotions for all those moribund wage-earners who were too tired or too dumb
to feel anything on their own behalf. If you couldn’t freeze their blood,
then you could sell them a good sob or two. That story about Clay’s early
days in the factory had been pure jam—even if that horse-faced dame
had
led him up the garden about knowing Chris, blast her. But you
couldn’t always rise to thrills or sobs, and if there was one emotion that
the British public loved to wallow in it was being righteously indignant. So
he, Jammy, had provided a wallow for them. The Yard knew quite well that
tomorrow all these indignant people wouldn’t remember a thing about it, so
what the hell! What was there to get sore about? That “hounding innocents to
death” was just a phrase. Practically a cliche it was. Nothing in that to
make a sensible person touchy. The Yard were feeling a bit thin in the skin,
that was what. They knew quite well that this shouldn’t have been allowed to
happen. Far be it from him to crab another fellow’s work, but some of that
article had been practically true, now he came to think of it. Not the
“hounding to death,” of course. But some of the other bits. It really
was
something amounting to a disgrace—oh, well, disgrace was a
bit strong; but regrettable, anyhow, that such a thing should occur in a
force that thought it was efficient. They were so very superior and
keep-off-the-grass when times were good; they couldn’t expect sympathy when
they made a bloomer. Now if they were to let the Press in on the inside, the
way they did in America, things like that simply wouldn’t happen. He, Jammy
Hopkins, might be only a crime reporter, but he knew just as much about crime
and its detection as any police force. If the “old man” were to give him
leave, and the police the use of their files, he would have the man who
killed Clay inside prison walls—and on the front page, of
course—inside a week. Imagination, that’s what the Yard needed. And he
had plenty of it. All he needed was a chance.