Honourable Intentions (5 page)

“Very fully, thank you.”

“And incidentally, remember that someone
did
set fire to that police station, and if Langhorn didn’t do it, he probably has a very good idea who did. As I said: degrees of innocence.”

There was a gentle rap on the window and Quinton looked up with an impatient sigh. But it was just one of his clerks with a couple of papers to sign.

Ranklin asked: “Then we won’t be hearing any of Langhorn’s story?”

Quinton smiled briefly. “Oh, we’ve got nothing to hide. He needed the petrol because he’s helping put a motor in a boat in the nearby canal, as I shall tell the court. And at the time of the fire, he was
resting
in his room. But this isn’t a case that turns on an alibi. The facts all depend on this afternoon’s witness.”

“And Langhorn hasn’t said any more about his threat . . . ?”

“Captain, I hope you aren’t relying on me for any more explanation of that. As I suggested yesterday, I have a certain amount of experience at not being told what I don’t want to hear.”

Mildly annoyed, though without any justification, Ranklin said: “Never mind. Tomorrow we may well have our own man sharing his cell.”

“In Brixton? You won’t, you know. Things have changed since Dickens’s day. Whenever I go down there, each prisoner
has a cell to himself and a number of empty ones left over. They don’t like prisoners on remand talking to each other and cooking up mutual alibis.”

Blast.
And the Commander would say it was another of Ranklin’s half-baked, unthought-out wheezes, quite ignoring how eagerly he’d adopted it himself.

Pleased at ending the conversation on a winning note, Quinton smiled and said: “We’d better be getting back. Wish me luck.”

“
Hals und Beinbruch
,” Ranklin murmured, and if Quinton really had broken his neck and legs at that moment, he wouldn’t have minded at all.

There was a public telephone in the ante-chamber to the courts – probably for journalists – and Ranklin caught it at a free time. He called the office and made some arrangements. Then he had at least twenty minutes before the court restarted. He should have lunch, but there was hardly time enough, so he went outside again to light a pipe.

By the doorway was the man in the check suit, and by now a foreign-looking hat, who had been taking so many notes. He was a little taller than Ranklin, a little older, wore a neat grey-flecked black beard and was smoking a small cigar.

They looked at each other, smiled tentatively and then it became impossible not to speak.

“Are you a reporter?” Ranklin asked politely.

“Of a sort.”

“For whom?”

“Les Temps Nouveaux
of Paris.” The man had an unidentifiable Continental accent. But that wasn’t rare: Continental frontiers were porous and cross-border marriages common. “And yourself?”

“Oh, I’m keeping a watching brief for the American fund defending this lad. Sorry, I should introduce myself: James Spencer.”

“Feodor Gorkin.” They shook hands, and Gorkin consulted his watch. “The court does not reconvene for half an hour. Do you like a drink?”

“Happy to.”

In Covent Garden you’re never more than a few steps from a public house, but Ranklin let Gorkin choose which. As they walked the few steps he was trying to dredge up what he knew of
Les Temps.

“I say,
Les Temps Nouveaux
– isn’t that the anarchist . . .” he searched quickly for an alternative to “rag”; “. . . er, – publication?”

“It is. I think that is why I am not permitted to sit with the other journalists.”

“Ah.” Ranklin put on an innocently puzzled expression – easy for him. “I can’t make this lad Langhorn out. A waiter in an anarchist café, but no mention of him being an anarchist himself.”

“What does Mr Quinton say?”

“Yes, I was talking to him –” since Gorkin had obviously seen that already “– but he wouldn’t say much. You know lawyers, I dare say. Some stuff about if you’re an anarchist you can’t claim you committed a political crime. I’m not sure I follow that, but I don’t follow most of what lawyers say . . .” They were at the bar now. “What would you like?”

They sat down, Gorkin with a brandy-and-soda, Ranklin with a whisky, and nodded to each other and drank. Gorkin might be ten years older – it was difficult to tell with people of different backgrounds – with a face that was very calm and dark eyes that were quietly watchful. Ranklin said: “Is this
affaire
causing much interest in France, then?”

“But yes. The burning of a police station, the
Préfecture
takes that most seriously. I think they will do anything to get a conviction.”

“Ye-es, I suppose it strikes at the whole edifice of law and order . . . But that’s what anarchism’s about, isn’t it?”

“Striking at law, yes. Laws are not needed, and every law breeds another law until, you say yourself, you cannot understand what lawyers talk about. But order, people will make their own order, without leaders, after government has collapsed.”

“Government collapsing? What makes you think . . . ? But then you’d have . . .”

“Anarchism, not anarchy.”

“Oh.” Ranklin hadn’t planned on getting into a political argument; he was just, suddenly, there. “But I thought you wanted a revolution?”

“That is one way to make a government collapse, yes.”

“But do you really think a revolution is likely?”

“Unless government collapses of its own weight, it is inevitable. Do you know how much your factory workers and farm labourers are now paid?”

“Pretty damn little, I imagine,” Ranklin admitted. “But people get killed in revolutions.”

“People are killed in wars between nations now. But never the generals and politicians who decide to have a war, just the workers who can gain nothing even if they win.”

Ranklin had his puzzled frown working overtime. “Well, I suppose so . . . But you can’t mean in Britain. We haven’t had a war for a hundred years.”

“Not in South Africa? And other parts of Africa? And all the time in India?”

“Oh well, those are just . . .”

“Just imperialist wars?”

“Oh, dammit all . . .” But he didn’t want to get embroiled in arguing a defence of empire: Gorkin must have had such discussions so many times before that he always had the answer ready, soft, polite and smiling. It was like playing chess against a master.

So he switched tack. “But whoever we were fighting,
they
all seemed to have leaders. Don’t revolutions throw up leaders, too?”

Gorkin nodded and sighed perfunctorily, as if he always did when about to make this point. “It happens, and it is always a mistake. When a revolution creates leaders, even elects them, the revolution is finished. Anarchists know that people are truly
sociable, that if they are left alone they will work at what they do best for themselves and for others. You do not believe this.”

“I think people need a framework.”

“But then the framework, as you call it, becomes a shell like a . . . a lobster and holds everyone in, makes them slaves to that shell. Is it not so in England? With your King and your ministers and Parliament and law, your judges and generals, all this becomes your nation that you worship and cannot ever say is wrong. And yet –” he smiled sadly “– it began so harmlessly as just
a framework
to make life more efficient.”

The King can do no wrong,
Ranklin recalled. Did that still hold good? Certainly Parliament could do no wrong: it was the final arbiter of such matters. On earth, anyway. “I imagine,” he said, “that you don’t believe in God?”

“I think that does not matter so much.” Gorkin finished his brandy and checked his watch again. “Just look about and ask: does God believe in us?”

As they walked back towards the court, Ranklin’s thoughtful frown wasn’t all acting and he asked: “But thinkers, intellectuals perhaps like yourself, aren’t you leaders?”

“There will be no laws to make people do as we suggest.”

Ranklin nodded.

Gorkin said: “I should enjoy to continue this discussion. Perhaps if you care to call while I am in London . . . ?” He took out a card and wrote an address on the back. Glancing at it, Ranklin noted that Gorkin was a “Dr”, but of course that didn’t necessarily make him medical; on the Continent, it only meant a university education. He handed over a James Spencer card of his own, with the address as just Whitehall Court.

Raymond Guillet, meat porter aged twenty-five with an address in the rue Petit, looked the part: blunt and hefty, with cropped fair hair and a tiny patch of moustache, dressed in his Sunday suit of shiny black. Above all, he looked
genuine
: a proper
workman, worlds away from what Ranklin imagined anarchist café society to be.

Even through an interpreter and with the need to write everything down, it didn’t take long to extract Guillet’s story. At about half-past eleven he had been returning home when he passed Langhorn, the waiter from the
Deux Chevaliers.
He knew him because he was the only American he had ever met; everybody around there knew him. That night, Langhorn had been carrying a green petrol tin in the direction of the police station.

When the story was finished, Quinton stood up slowly and said: “Half-past eleven at night.”

Guillet agreed.

“How did you know the time?”

“I have a watch.” There was a silvery – though probably nickel – chain across Guillet’s waistcoat.

“Good. Will you show us how it works?”

Ranklin looked on, puzzled, as Guillet fumbled the time-piece from his waistcoat pocket and offered it.

“No, show us yourself. Just open it and re-set the time to an hour ahead.”

Then Quinton’s tactic became clear. Guillet took two tries to open the case and was quite unable to set the hands.

The lawyer watched with a slight, patient smile. When Guillet’s struggle had got almost unbearably painful, he asked: “Is that your own watch?”

The relief on Guillet’s face was obvious. “No. I borrowed it. My own is broken. Since two days ago.”

“And is this one very different?”

“Yes, quite different.”

“Perhaps now you would show it to his worship.”

The usher passed it up to the magistrate, who fiddled with it for a few seconds then handed it back impassively. It was quite obviously a standard watch.

But Quinton didn’t labour the point any further. “What time do you start work?”

“At four in the morning. Usually.”

“Yet on that evening, little more than four hours before you
were due to start work, you were still out on the street?”

“Sometimes I stay up late.”

“Where had you been that night?”

“In a big café in the Rue Manin.”

“Whereabouts in the Rue Manin?”

“Towards the Rue de Crimée.”

Quinton pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and peered short-sightedly at a guide-book map. “Ah yes. And to reach your lodging you turned down the Rue du Rhin . . . Do you then turn left or right into the Rue Petit?”

“Right.”

“And coming up the Rue du Rhin, you saw Mr Langhorn carrying a tin of petrol – is that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“But obviously you could not see the petrol, could you? How do you know it was not an empty tin?”

“He was leaning with the weight of it.”

Quinton appeared foxed by this. He frowned, play-acted himself carrying something heavy, then seemed to get the point. Guillet smiled and relaxed.

“What was the weather like?”

“It was clear. It had rained earlier in the day but not for several hours. Now the streets were mostly dry,” Guillet replied confidently, as if that had been an expected question.

“Why did you say he was going towards the police station rather than anywhere else? Was he on that side of the road?”

“Yes.”

“And you were hurrying home to bed, weren’t you?”

“Not hurrying, no.”

“But you didn’t pass close to him, did you?”

“Yes. Very close.”

“Very close? How close?”

“Less than a metre.”

Quinton nodded. “Why did you cross the road?”

Guillet was baffled and suddenly suspicious. “I did not say I crossed the road.”

“You turned
right
into the Rue du Rhin, you were going to turn
right
out of it. Why did you cross to the other side, the police station side, where you said Mr Langhorn was?”

Quinton’s opposite number, the prosecutor whose name Ranklin hadn’t caught, stood up and said mildly: “Your worship, I feel that Mr Quinton is hectoring the witness.”

The magistrate nodded but spoke to Quinton: “May I see your map for a moment?”

Quinton passed it to the usher, pointing out the locality, and it went up to the magistrate. He peered closely for a time, then looked up. “Well, Monsieur Guillet?”

“I made a mistake. Langhorn was on my side of the road. But still going up the hill towards the police station.”

“A mistake,” Quinton said, and after waiting a moment, the interpreter said: “
Une erreur
.”

Quinton selected one of his papers and glanced at it, then: “The street lighting in the Rue du Rhin is turned off at eleven o’clock, is it not?”