Lessons in Power (14 page)
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Charlie Cochrane
obliged to ask his father to accompany him but he’d demurred, stating that the presence of two men at any interview wouldn’t be conducive to absolute candour.
The angels, or whoever was smiling on him at present, then dispensed another piece of good fortune,
this time in the form of Mrs. Ward. Although luck wouldn’t really have been an appropriate description, more like perspicacity. The lady knew a lot about Norwich, having lived there twice. She had, like so many kind and garrulous women, soon acquired an intimate knowledge of the city, its characters and their
goings-on. Whoever envisaged espionage agents as being ideally cerebral, dashing young men or
glamorous, mysterious ladies had underestimated the potential of middle-aged women as finders and
interpreters of information.
“Of course I know the Kermodes, Dr. Stewart. I’d say the son’s perhaps a little foppish and spoiled,
no doubt the effect of an overbearing mother
.
”
Jonty, who
was the son of an equally domineering woman, had to bite into a cake at this point to hide his grin.
“Simon inherited his father’s estate and his debts. Mother and son ended up in a villa, I suppose you’d call it genteel, with an antique bookshop near the cathedral. We all thought he’d fail, but that business thrived. The last thing I heard, they were moving into a bigger house and talking of establishing a shop in London, of all places.” Mrs. Ward’s frown eloquently expressed her opinion of both London and the
Kermodes.
All this suited Jonty’s plans to perfection. It would be natural for the Kildare Fellow in Tudor
Literature to want to look for rare texts—Richard Barnfield might be one to work into the mix—and from there they could move onto other subjects. Especially if they discovered,
quite by chance
, that they went to the same school and if he offered to stand lunch. Alcohol might well loosen a tongue.
The trip to Norwich wasn’t a long one. Jonty enjoyed looking out over the flat landscape, staring and thinking of very little, although he wondered what “old grumpy breeches” was up to. It was unlike Orlando
to be quite so secretive. There was an uneasy feeling at the back of Jonty’s brain that he knew exactly what his lover was about—or
who
he was about, to be more precise, but he tried hard to ignore it. He had his own work to do.
Once off the train and out of the station, he decided to skirt the city, electing to take a walk along the river—pretty, but not a patch on the Cam—coming to the cathedral widdershins and finding the bookshop with no difficulty. Between them, his father and housekeeper could have guided a man to all the sources of the Nile. The shop was small, its stock clearly beginning to outgrow it, although it was well lit through scrupulously clean leaded windows.
If Timothy Taylor looked to have aged thirty years in fifteen, then Kermode appeared to have stayed
much the same as he’d have been at school. Given that the man was older than Jonty, he looked
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Lessons in Power
ridiculously young and there was hardly a piece of fluff on his face. While the Kildare Fellow blethered on about books, he also spent a minute wondering if Kermode actually needed to shave yet.
They did have a Barnfield in stock, although it was a heavily bowdlerised version, and when Jonty
turned it down Kermode was impressed, at least professionally, with his acumen.
The small talk flowed, each sentence edging Jonty nearer his goal. This he reached when Kermode
told his assistant that this customer was an old school chum who had to be entertained for an hour or so. As they walked through the busy streets, it struck Jonty that Kermode had exactly the same colouring and build as he had—they must have looked similar when at school. The uneasy thought flitted through his
brain that Christopher Jardine might have had a taste for the type.
The Stewart smile and the Stewart money ensured them a table at the best restaurant they could find,
at a hotel which had once been a coaching inn and still had the galleries to prove it. In a room which had probably changed little in a hundred years, they were entertained royally with a selection of excellent food and wines. The Chablis proved so effective in oiling Kermode’s tongue that once the reluctant bolt had been loosened the flow couldn’t be stemmed.
They spoke of the recent murders, quite naturally, then turned to their own memories of school. It
only needed the most oblique of references from Jonty to the unpleasantness of their former housemaster to produce a stream of vitriol.
“Sebastian Rhodes was an absolute bastard, did you know that?” Kermode lowered his voice in
deference to their public location. “He made my short sojourn at school an absolute nightmare. Not him personally of course, he wouldn’t have sullied his hands or any other part of his anatomy with actual contact, but…”
Stewart froze. A cold sensation was creeping up his spine, making him feel by turns sick and excited.
He’d anticipated having to worm and wheedle to get Kermode to talk, yet they were getting close to the crux of the matter in hand with hardly any effort expended. He felt suddenly wary, as if
he
were the one falling into the trap. “I did know, Simon. I had personal experience of it, if you get my drift.”
“You too? I should have guessed that someone else would cop it once I’d gone. He couldn’t go
without his thrills for too long.”
The almost exact repetition of his own phrase made Jonty even colder and more ill at ease. He’d often said the same thing to Orlando, and now it was becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. “You’re right. It got to the point that I’d have given anything for a convenient gun, although whether it was to shoot them or myself I don’t recall.”
Jonty did remember of course. There would have been three bullets needed, not one, but he was
becoming good at acting, if required.
“I used to devise tortures for them. Not just at the time—on many an occasion since. Ways to make
them suffer as I did.” Kermode stopped, focussing hazy eyes on Jonty for the first time since they’d started
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Charlie Cochrane
on this subject. “As we did.” He seemed as if he was thinking hard, a process the alcohol was making
difficult.
“I can’t help admitting to similar fantasies.” Jonty grinned, although he was uneasy at the look in
Kermode’s eye.
“When Jardine was killed, were you down in Dorking?”
The abruptness of the question stunned Jonty. The tables were being turned on him again and it
wasn’t comfortable. “No, I was not. I happened to be at High Table if you must know, not many miles from here. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondered. I was there, you know.” Kermode offered this astonishing fact as simply as if he’d
mentioned a visit to the grocer. “I wondered whether it was you there as well. Whether you’d come here to tell me that you’d…”
That brought Jonty up short again. This must be why he felt so uncomfortable—Kermode suspected
him
, rather than vice versa—and he wasn’t sure how to handle the revelation. He changed tack. “What did you talk to Jardine about?” He had no great hopes for an accurate answer. Kermode was showing signs of sobering up, but not enough to guarantee the veracity of what he had to say.
“About
it,
what had happened back in school.” A strange look came over Kermode’s face as if even
he
doubted the truth of what he was saying. “It seems that Jardine was having a crisis of conscience. He told me he’d had a ‘road to Damascus’ experience and realised he had to come clean about the whole sorry business. He wanted to make some sort of public apology to the people he’d wronged—there’d been quite a few down the years, not just at school—and then quietly leave the country.”
“Did you believe any of this?”
“Surprisingly enough, I did. I knew the man could lie, we both know that, but this time he seemed in
deadly earnest. He said he’d been in touch with Taylor and tried to persuade him to do the same. He’d been refused, of course, and they’d ended up in a blazing row at his lordship’s club.”
The whole case had turned upside down. Jonty and Orlando had cheerfully assumed that what Taylor
had said was the truth, that
he
was the one who wanted to confess, who felt so weighed down by the burden of his sins that he wanted to be shot of them. They’d accepted as fact that Jardine had tried to talk him out of it and had planned to leave the country when Taylor made his confession.
Now they had to consider the exact reverse. If Taylor had been the one who’d argued for their
misdemeanours not to come to light, it gave him an ample motive for the killing. Had he been down to
Dorking, as they’d always suspected, killed Jardine and so given himself some breathing space? Nothing in the case so far argued against it. Even the lameness of the man Mr. Cartwright heard on the gravel could be accounted for by Taylor’s poor physical condition.
What about his lordship’s sea change concerning his disreputable youth? Had the man really had
some sort of conversion experience? Jonty found it unlikely, given his experience of Jardine, and especially 70
Lessons in Power
in light of his recent treatment of Angela Stafford. However, it would certainly be just like the swine to make a clean breast of things and then immediately bugger off to the continent before the manure hit the fan.
Jonty couldn’t deny even the most miserable of sinners the right to repentance. He had known it
happen—Richard Marsters had told him of many an occasion when a similar thing had occurred—and
sometimes the men involved made Christopher Jardine look like an angel.
“Dr. Stewart, what do you think?” Kermode had been blithely rambling on while Jonty’s mind
whirred into the past and the future and all sorts of places between.
“I’m so very sorry, I was woolgathering. Please be so kind as to say it again and forgive my
inattention.”
Kermode smiled. He assumed that Jonty’s mind had been back in the cold cruel dormitories at school
and was willing to forgive him any lack of consideration. “Do you think that Taylor might have killed Jardine? To stop him telling all and thereby to protect himself.”
“It’s at least possible.” Jonty eyed the other man. “Did you by any chance go and see Taylor? To get
his point of view?”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the shutters came down. “I had nothing to say to Timothy Taylor.” Kermode
pressed his lips together, his face growing as hard as the horse brasses which graced the restaurant.
It was immediately apparent to Jonty that he’d get no more from him, no matter how hard he tried. It
was now a matter of finishing their coffee, shaking hands and parting.
As the train wended its way back to Cambridge, Jonty began to speculate again. Even if they had a
potential solution to who had killed Jardine, the murder of Taylor himself remained a mystery. If he had killed his lordship, then revenge by a member of Jardine’s family became a possibility, although that all felt too disconnected. The solution must be simpler.
A vague recollection of what Mrs. Ward had said about Kermode’s mother flitted through Jonty’s
mind, making him wonder whether she might have seen fit to take a poker to the head of the man who’d
hurt her beloved boy. She certainly seemed likely to have had the gumption, and it would explain the man’s reluctance to discuss the second victim. Whatever the truth, they still hadn’t got to the bottom of this wretched case.
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Chapter Eight
There had actually been two letters from Collingwood delivered to Forsythia Cottage, one addressed
to Dr. Coppersmith alone, which he’d squirreled away. According to the solicitor’s sources, Rhodes was alive, well and living in Epsom, not far from the racecourse. He was within easy distance of the railway, in the house of a devoted maiden aunt who kept a carriage and probably let her nephew have free rein of it.
Orlando had immediately made what would, no doubt, turn out to be either an inspired or disastrous
decision. He wouldn’t tell his lover.
Jonty was fragile at present, despite all his bravado and insistence that he had to confront his own
demons. Orlando was determined that he alone should make the running here—only when he’d seen
Rhodes and drawn the man’s fangs would he allow Jonty to get anywhere near him.
If there was anything left of him to get near. Orlando hated his lover’s old schoolmaster even more
than he hated the boys who’d carried out the assaults. They might just, hypothetically, with a fair wind, have left the boy alone had Rhodes not egged them on. And Rhodes had been
in loco parentis
, a position that shouldn’t have been abused, especially not on
his
Jonty.
So he’d invented the nonexistent mathematical seminar and felt satisfied he’d pulled the wool over his friend’s eyes on that one. The plan, as he assembled it, was to spend a day or two snooping around Epsom, talking to Rhodes and his neighbours, then beating the man’s head to a pulp. Or that would be the ideal plan—murder really shouldn’t feature, not least because Jonty would spifflicate him. He’d have to restrain himself, reluctantly, when the time came.
When the time
did
come it caught Orlando by the lee. Meeting Taylor had left him surprised,
preconceptions all askew, but meeting the ringleader of the repellent gang of three shook his ideas to pieces. The attractive house up on Epsom Downs, where old Miss Rhodes lived with her favourite nephew, impressed him—a neat, well-kept property with pleasant views and even more pleasant servants. Orlando had expected Rhodes to be a snivelling wretch, like the man he’d met in London, but Jonty’s old
