A Shilling for Candles (8 page)

“I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but it was a matter of business. You
know that we are investigating Miss Clay’s death. And in the course of
investigation it is necessary to check the movements of everyone who knew
her, irrespective of persons or probabilities. Now, you told the sergeant of
the County police force, when you talked to him on Thursday, that you had
spent the night in a hotel at Sandwich. When this was checked in the ordinary
course it was found that you hadn’t stayed there.”

Harmer fumbled among the music, without looking up.

“Where
did
you stay, Mr. Harmer?”

Harmer looked up with a small laugh. “You know,” he said, “it’s pretty
funny at that! Charming gentleman calls in a perfectly friendly way about
breakfast time, apologizing for disturbing you and hopes he isn’t going to be
a trouble to you but he’s an inspector of police and would you be so very
kind as to give some information because last time your information wasn’t as
accurate as it might have been. It’s lovely, that’s what it is. And you get
results with it, too. Perhaps they just break down and sob, on account of all
the friendliness. Pie like mother made. What I’d like to know is if that
method goes in Pimlico or if you keep it for Park Lane.”

“What I would like to know is where you stayed last Wednesday night, Mr.
Harmer.”

“The Mr., too, I guess that’s Park Lane as well. In fact, if you’d been
talking to the Jason of ten years back, you’d have had me to the station and
scared hell out of me just like the cops of any other country. They’re all
the same; dough worshippers.”

“I haven’t your experience of the world’s police forces, I’m afraid, Mr.
Harmer.”

Harmer grinned. “Stung you! A limey’s got to be plenty stung before he’s
rude-polite like that. Don’t get me wrong, though, Inspector. There aren’t
any police brands on me. As for last Wednesday night, I spent it in my
car.”

“You mean you didn’t go to bed at all?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“And where was the car?”

“In a lane with hedges as high as houses each side, parked on the grass
verge. An awful lot of space goes to waste in England in these verges. The
ones in that lane were about forty feet wide.”

“And you say you slept in the car? Have you someone who can bear witness
to that?”

“No. It wasn’t that kind of park. I was just sleepy and lost and couldn’t
be bothered going any further.”

“Lost! In the east of Kent!”

“Yes, anywhere in Kent, if it comes to that. Have you ever tried to find a
village in England after dark? Night in the desert is nothing to it. You see
a sign at last that says Whatsit two and a half miles and you think: Good old
Whatsit! Nearly there! Hurrah for England and signposts! And then half a mile
on you come to a place where three ways fork, and there’s a nice tidy
signpost on the little bit of green in the middle and every blame one of that
signpost’s arms has got at least three names on it, but do you think one of
them mentions Whatsit? Oh, no! That would make it far too easy! So you read
‘em all several times and hope someone’ll come past before you have to
decide, but no one comes. Last person passed there a week last Tuesday. No
houses; nothing but fields, and an advertisement for a circus that was there
the previous April. So you take one of the three roads, and after passing two
more signposts that don’t take any notice of Whatsit, you come to one that
says Whatsit, six and three-quarters. So you start off all over again, four
miles to the bad, as it were, and it happens all over again. And again! And
by the time Whatsit has done that on you half a dozen times, you don’t care
what happens as long as you can stop driving around corners and go to sleep.
So I just stopped where I was and went to sleep. It was too late to drop in
on Chris by that time, anyway.”

“But not too late to get a bed at an inn.”

“Not if you know where an inn is. ‘Sides, judging by some of the inns I’ve
seen here, I’d just as soon sleep in the car.”

“You grow a heavy beard, I notice.” Grant nodded at Harmer’s unshaven
chin.

“Yes. Have to shave twice a day, sometimes. If I’m going to be out late.
Why?”

“You were shaved when you arrived at Miss Clay’s cottage. How was
that?”

“Carry my shaving things in the car. Have to, when you have a beard like
mine.”

“So you had no breakfast that morning?”

“No, I was planning to get breakfast from Chris. I don’t eat breakfast
anyway. Just coffee, or orange juice. Orange juice in England. My God, your
coffee—what do you think they do to it? The women, I mean.
It’s—”

“Leaving the coffee aside for a moment, shall we come to the main point?
Why did you tell the sergeant on duty that you had slept at Sandwich?”

The man’s face changed subtly. Until then he had been answering at ease,
automatically; the curves of his broad, normally good-natured face slack and
amiable. Now the slackness went; the face grew wary, and—was
it?—antagonistic.

“Because I felt there was something wrong, and I didn’t want to be mixed
up in it.”

“That is very extraordinary, surely? I mean, that you should be conscious
of evil before anyone knew that it existed.”

“That’s not so funny. They told me Chris was drowned. I knew Chris could
swim like an eel. I knew that I had been out all night. And the sergeant was
looking at me with a Who-are-you-and-what-are-you-doing-here expression.”

“But the sergeant had no idea that the drowning was more than an accident.
He had no reason to look at you in that way.”

Then he decided to drop the subject of Harmer’s lie to the sergeant.

“How did you know, by the way, where to find Miss Clay? I understood that
she kept her retreat a secret.”

“Yes, she’d run away. Gave us all the runaround, in fact, including me.
She was tired and not very pleased at the way her last picture had turned
out. On the floor, I mean; it isn’t released yet. Coyne didn’t know how to
take her. A bit in awe of her, and afraid at the same time she’d put one over
on him. You know. If he’d called her ‘kid’ and ‘chocolate’ the way old Joe
Myers used to back in the States, she’d have laughed and worked like a black
for him. But Coyne’s full of his own dignity, the ‘big director’ stuff, and
so they didn’t get on too good. So she was fed up, and tired, and everyone
wanted her to go to different places for holidays, and it seemed she couldn’t
make up her mind, and then one day we woke up and she wasn’t there.
Bundle—that’s her housekeeper—said she didn’t know where she was,
but no letters were to be forwarded and she’d turn up again in a month, so no
one was to worry. Well, for about a fortnight no one heard of her, and then
last Tuesday I met Marta Hallard at a sherry party at Libby
Seemon’s—she’s going into that new play of his—and she said that
on Saturday she had run into Chris buying chocolates at a place in Baker
Street—Chris never could resist chocolates between pictures!—and
she tried to worm out of Chris where she was hiding out. But Chris wasn’t
giving anything away. At least she thought she wasn’t. She said: ‘Perhaps I’m
never coming back. You know that old Roman who grew vegetables with his own
hands and was so stuck on the result that he made the arrangement permanent.
Well, yesterday I helped pull the first cherries for Covent Garden market
and, believe me, getting the Academy Award for a picture is nothing to
it!’”

Harmer laughed under his breath. “I can hear her,” he said,
affectionately. “Well, I went straight from Seemon’s to Covent Garden and
found out where those cherries came from. An orchard at a place called Bird’s
Green. And on Wednesday morning bright and early Jason sets off for Bird’s
Green. That took a bit of finding, but I got there about three o’clock. Then
I had to find the orchard and the people who were working in it on Friday. I
expected to find Chris straightaway, but it seemed that they didn’t know her.
They said that when they were picking, early on Friday morning, a lady
passing in a car had stopped to watch and then asked if she might help. The
old boy who owned the place said they didn’t need paid help, but if she liked
to amuse herself good and well. ‘She were a good picker,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t
mind paying her another time.’ Then his grandson said he’d seen the
lady—or thought he’d seen her—one day lately in the post office
at Liddlestone—about six miles away. So I found Liddlestone, but the
post office regular staff was ‘home to her tea’ and I had to wait till she
came back. She said that the lady who sent ‘all the telegrams’—seems
they never saw so many telegrams in their lives as Chrissent—was living
over at Medley. So I set out in the half-dark to find Medley, and ended by
sleeping in a lane. And sleeping out or no sleeping out, that was a better
piece of detective work than you’re doing this morning, Inspector Grant!”

Grant grinned good-humoredly. “Yes? Well, I’ve nearly done.” He got up to
go. “I suppose you had a coat with you in the car?”

“Sure.”

“What was it made of?”

“Brown tweed. Why?”

“Have you got it here?”

“Sure.” He turned to a wardrobe, built in the passage where the sitting
room led into the bedroom, and pulled the sliding door open. “Have a look at
my whole wardrobe. You’re cleverer than I am if you can find the button.”

“What button?” Grant asked, more quickly than he intended.

“It’s always a button, isn’t it?” Harmer said, the small pansy-brown eyes,
alert under their lazy lids, smiling confidently into Grant’s.

Grant found nothing of interest in the wardrobe. He had taken his leave
not knowing how much to believe of Jason Harmer’s story, but very sure that
he had “nothing on him.” The hopes of the police, so to speak, lay in
Tisdall.

Now, as he pulled up by the curb in the cool bright morning, he remembered
Jason’s wardrobe, and smiled in his mind. Jason did not get his clothes from
Stacey and Brackett. As he considered the dark, small, and shabby interior
which was revealed to him as he opened the door, he could almost hear Jason
laugh. The English! They’d had a business for a hundred and fifty years and
this was all they could make of it. The original counters probably. Certainly
the original lighting. But Grant’s heart warmed. This was the England he knew
and loved. Fashions might change, dynasties might fall, horses’ shoes in the
quiet street change to the crying of a thousand taxi hooters, but Stacey and
Brackett continued to make clothes with leisured efficiency for leisured and
efficient gentlemen.

There was now neither a Stacey nor a Bracken, but Mr. Trimley—Mr.
Stephen Trimley (as opposed to Mr. Robert and Mr. Thomas!)—saw
Inspector Grant and was entirely at Inspector Grant’s service. Yes, they had
made clothes for Mr. Robert Tisdall, Yes, the clothes had included a dark
coat for wear with evening things. No, that certainly was not a button from
the coat in question. That was not a button they had ever put on any coat. It
was not a class of button they were in the habit of using. If the Inspector
would forgive Mr. Trimley (Mr. Stephen Trimley), the button in question was
in his opinion of a very inferior make, and would not be used by any tailor
of any standing. He would not be surprised, indeed, to find that the button
was of foreign origin.

“American, perhaps?” suggested Grant.

Perhaps. Although to Mr. Trimley’s eye it suggested the Continent. No, he
certainly had no reason for such a surmise. Entirely instinctive. Probably
wrong. And he hoped the Inspector would not put any weight on his opinion. He
also hoped that there was no question of Mr. Tisdall being in trouble. A very
charming young man, indeed. The Grammar schools—especially the older
Grammar schools of the country—turned out a very fine type of boy.
Better often, didn’t the Inspector think so? than came from the minor public
schools. There was a yeoman quality of permanence about Grammar-school
families—generation after generation going to the same
school—that was not matched, outside the great public schools.

There being, in Grant’s opinion, no yeoman quality of permanence whatever
about young Tisdall, he forbore to argue, contenting himself by assuring Mr.
Trimley that as far as he knew Mr. Tisdall was in no trouble up to date.

Mr. Trimley was glad to hear that. He was getting old, and his faith in
the young generation which was growing up was too often sadly shaken. Perhaps
every generation thought that the rising one lacked due standards of behavior
and spirit, but it did seem to him this one…Ah, well, he was growing old,
and the tragedy of young lives weighed more heavily on him than it used to.
This Monday morning was blackened for him, yes, entirely blackened, by the
thought that all the brightness that was Christine Clay was at this hour
being transformed into ashes. It would be many years, perhaps generations
(Mr. Trimley’s mind worked in generations: the result of having a
hundred-and-fifty-year-old business) before her like would be seen again. She
had quality, didn’t the Inspector think so? Amazing quality. It was said that
she had a very humble origin, but there must be breeding somewhere. Something
like Christine Clay did not just happen in space, as it were. Nature must
plan for it. He was not what is known, he believed, as a film fan, but there
was no picture of Miss Clay’s which he had not seen since his niece had taken
him to view her first essay in a dramatic role. He had on that occasion
entirely forgotten that he was in a cinema. He was dazed with delight. Surely
if this new medium could produce material of this strength and richness one
need not continue to regret Bernhardt and Duse.

Grant went out into the street, marveling at the all-pervading genius of
Christine Clay. The mind of all the world it seemed was in that building at
Golders Green. A strange end for the little lace-hand from Nottingham.
Strange, too, for the world’s idol. “And they put him in an oven just as if
he were—” Oh, no, he mustn’t think of that. Hateful. Why should it be
hateful? He didn’t know. The suburbanity of it, he supposed. Sensible, and
all that. And probably much less harrowing for everyone. But someone whose
brilliance had flamed across the human firmament as Clay’s had should have a
hundred-foot pyre. Something spectacular. A Viking’s funeral. Not ovens n the
suburb. Oh, my God, he was growing morbid, if not sentimental. He pressed the
starter, and swung into the traffic.