Seventy-Seven Clocks (24 page)

28 / Visited by Devils 

David Balbir Denjhi, aged twenty-nine, was survived by a wife and three children, Janice Longbright noted as she pulled back a corner of her hastily compiled background file. He and his young bride had met in London, having both emigrated to England with their respective parents. David had clashed with the legal system several times, first with tax inspectors over a filed claim for company bankruptcy, then over an accusation of handling stolen goods. This had attracted the unwelcome attentions of the immigration authorities, but he’d come through the ordeal and had satisfactorily proved his right to remain in the country. 

The woman seated before Longbright seemed calm and sensible. If she had been crying earlier, she gave no sign of it. Mrs Denjhi poured coffee and sat back in her chair, waiting to be asked more questions. The sergeant knew that her life had become a nightmare, culminating in the identification of her husband’s body. Sirina Denjhi had spent several hours making statements to the police, and now faced another interview. Matters would not improve for her; soon she would receive the less sympathetic attention of the press. 

‘I must understand what happened to my husband,’ said Sirina softly. 

Standard interview procedure dictated that the sergeant could not reveal details of the investigation in progress, even if she felt that doing so would facilitate the discussion. Instead she concentrated on David Denjhi’s background. 

‘Our families had known each other in India,’ Sirina explained, ‘and although our marriage was not arranged it was understood that one day we might wed. Our parents were business partners, you see.’ 

‘What kind of business were they in?’ asked Longbright. 

‘Exporting silk. At first it was very successful, but then David’s father died. Our money was invested in a business that went bankrupt. We lost everything. David was a good father, a good provider. He worked hard to keep his company afloat, still dreaming that one day his children would run it. But it was not to be.’ She folded her hands in her lap, looking away. 

‘Tell me what happened after the company collapsed.’ 

‘David set up the window-cleaning firm. He was expanding it, taking on office contracts. His head was filled with ideas.’ 

‘Did your husband have many friends?’ 

‘We were his friends. His family. He had no others. People saw him in the street, at his job, but I don’t suppose they really saw him. People don’t, you understand? They don’t notice us. We go about our work, we spend time with our families, but to most English people we’re quite invisible. The hostile ones see us, of course. The others are neither angry nor happy that we’re here—just disinterested. When we came to this country, we thought we had left the castes behind, but we hadn’t. We simply became a new one.’ 

Silence settled in the room. ‘We need to talk about David’s disappearance,’ Longbright said. ‘I know you’ve already made a statement, but I must ask you to think harder. You say he’d been troubled . . .’ 

Sirina Denjhi withdrew a handkerchief from her sari and dabbed her nose. ‘That’s right. It was on Friday morning. The devil was in him. He would not go to work, and he would not tell me why. He was furious with the children. Our youngest daughter broke a saucer, and he slapped her face. He had never raised his hand in violence before. His mood grew worse and worse. Finally, just after ten in the morning, he stormed out without a word.’ 

‘You asked him where he was going?’ 

‘Of course, but he gave me no reply. I watched from the window as he drove off in the van.’ 

‘Had he ever done anything like this?’ 

‘No, never.’ 

‘And the name Peggy Harmsworth, he’d never mentioned it to you?’ 

Sirina shook her head. She turned her amber eyes to the sergeant. ‘You must find out why this terrible thing happened. Perhaps he was possessed. All I know is that we have been visited by devils, and there will be no rest for us until we know the truth.’ 

By lunchtime the blustery day had swept the sky clean of cloud, and the two detectives sat in the operations room at Mornington Crescent bathed in winter sunshine. Bryant was trying hard to stay awake, but the long hours were beginning to take their toll. They were awaiting the preliminary forensic report on David Denjhi’s body. 

‘You haven’t found any connection at all between Denjhi and the Whitstables?’ Bryant asked May. 

‘Not on the surface, but it’s conceivable the families had crossed paths in business. I’ll have to go through Denjhi’s company records. And I’ll see if he’d ever had window-cleaning appointments at any of the Whitstable houses. God, Arthur, a window-cleaner. It doesn’t make sense.’ He shoved the folder away from him. ‘Jerry saw him leave the crypt seconds after Mrs Harmsworth screamed, so there’s no doubt about who attacked her.’ 

‘It’s in,’ called Longbright, walking briskly between the typewriters with a pair of document pouches in her hand. Bryant was charmed by his glamorous sergeant, just as he had been by her mother so many years earlier. Last night, without a word of complaint, she had stayed with them through the shift in order to help clear the backlog of interviews. ‘Finch wasn’t going to release it without speaking to you first, but I managed to persuade him.’ 

‘You know what that means,’ said Bryant, accepting the papers. ‘He must have found some positive matches. No one else knows about this yet, do they?’ 

‘I’m afraid he’s already copied in Raymond Land, Sir.’ 

‘Bugger, there goes our head start.’ Bryant yanked open the first document pouch. ‘I haven’t got my glasses. Could you decipher?’ 

May took the papers. ‘We’ve got multiple matches. Fingerprints all over the crypt, and on the knife Denjhi threw into the grass. For some reason he decided not to use it on her. Peggy Harmsworth’s blood on the crypt floor, and on Denjhi’s shirt and trousers. It looks as if she banged her head in the struggle. Keys fitting the crypt found on his body. No positive matches with the other deaths, but it’s early days yet. They need to check with the partials found on segments of the bomb that killed Peter Whitstable.’ He pulled out another carbon. ‘Definitely no match with the prints we found on the razor from the Savoy barbershop, though. So we’re dealing with at least two different killers. Oh, and Finch confirms that Denjhi died at the accident site.’ 

‘You can tell a man is dead by sticking his finger in your ear,’ recalled Bryant unhelpfully. ‘If you put your own finger in your ear you hear a buzz from tiny muscle movements.’ 

‘Two or more murderers,’ mused May. ‘I suppose it fits in with your Victorian conspiracy theory, not that it makes a blind bit of sense. Anything new to report on that front?’ 

‘I’ve got some people working on it.’ 

‘A couple of clairvoyants and a palmist, no doubt.’ 

‘There’s no reason why you should place more faith in technical wizardry than in the supernatural.’ 

‘Technology is about accurate prediction, which is more than can be said for your crystal-ball merchants. I know you’ve been seeing them again, Arthur, don’t pretend that you haven’t.’ 

Just then the overhead lights momentarily dimmed. ‘So much for the reliability of science,’ said Bryant with a mocking smile. ‘We’re not much good without electricity, are we? Suddenly we’re back in the Dark Ages, telling ghost stories in front of the fire. Janice, your interview with Mrs Denjhi was very thorough, but there’s still one thing I need to know. Where did he get the money?’ 

‘I’m sorry, Sir?’ 

‘Denjhi lost everything when his company collapsed. You can’t start a new one without capital outlay. Find out where he got the cash.’ 

The telephone rang, and Bryant answered it. ‘I just wanted to be the first to offer my congratulations to you and your colleagues,’ Faraday bellowed. The junior arts minister sounded extremely cheerful. ‘A job well done, I’d say. I haven’t received your full report yet, of course, so if you’d—’ 

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ snapped Bryant, although a terrible thought was forming in his mind. 

‘Catching our vandal,’ Faraday explained. ‘The news couldn’t have come at a better time. Things were getting pretty sticky with the Aussies, I can tell you.’ 

Suddenly the realization dawned on Bryant. Raymond Land had read the report and had immediately contacted the Home Office. Faraday seemed to have assumed that with the death of a confirmed assassin, all loose ends connected to the vandalism of the loaned Waterhouse painting were now tied up. It was essential for Land to prove that the new unit was getting results; it had been funded for an initial eight-week trial period. 

Bryant knew he would be expected to back up his superior. He also knew that he could not do so without compromising everything he believed in. 

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr Faraday,’ he said finally. ‘We’ve confirmed the identity of the person who assaulted Mrs Harmsworth last night, but that’s all.’ 

‘How can that be? I don’t understand,’ said Faraday with an anguished squeak. 

‘Put simply, there’s a murderer very much at large.’ 

‘You mean you still don’t know who he is?’ 

‘Worse than that,’ replied Bryant. ‘There’s more than one. And we don’t know who they are.’

29 / Brotherhood 

After a night of bad dreams, Arthur Bryant arose unrefreshed and sat on the end of his bed, trying to order his thoughts. He hated to admit it, but they had failed. Failed the public, failed themselves. He had not felt this depressed in years. The pestilence attacking the Whitstable family would try to run its course before they could discover its root. Checking the notes he had left for himself on the bedside table, he rang Jerry Gates at her home. An icy-voiced woman, presumably her mother, asked him to hold. A minute later, Jerry picked up the phone. 

‘Yesterday you mentioned something about your father working for the Whitstables,’ said Bryant. 

‘That’s right, he had contracts with a couple of their companies.’ 

‘There’s something you could do for me.’ 

‘Anything. Just name it.’ 

‘You could find out about the people he deals with. I realize this might involve a certain disloyalty to your father. I need documentation concerning deals with silk manufacturers and exporters in Calcutta and Bombay. You might talk to your father and find out if he’s seen or heard anything unusual. You know the investigation almost as well as we do. You should know what to ask, and what to look for.’ 

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll get on to it right away.’ 

‘Call me if you find anything, anything at all. Do you have the number of my direct line?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Neither do I. It’s written down somewhere . . .’ 

‘I’ll find you, don’t worry,’ she promised. 

The morning had dawned cold and dull, the weather Bryant loathed the most. His appointment with Peregrine Summerfield was set for nine a.m. He would walk as far as Vauxhall Bridge, then hail a cab. It was a pity the trams had stopped running in 1952; one used to pass right by the front door of his building. He missed the hiss and crackle of the gliding cars. 

That was the difference between himself and May. John had no attachment to the past, sentimental or otherwise. He was interested in moving on. He saw life as a linear progression, a series of lessons to be learned, all extraneous information to be tossed away, a continual streamlining of ideas. 

Bryant collected the detritus of historical data as naturally as an anchor accumulates barnacles. He couldn’t help it; the past was as fascinating as a classic beauty, infinitely fathomable and for ever out of reach. But this was one secret he was determined to lay bare. He would stake his life on the answer lying in the Whitstable family’s burst of good fortune at the end of the last century. Could there really have been an event of such magnitude that it involved an entire dynasty? A moment of such farreaching consequence that even now, nearly a hundred years later, it was reaping a revenge of misery and destruction? 

As he reached the eastern edge of the park, a phrase resounded in his head.
The sons shall be visited with the sins of the fathers
. James Whitstable and his kindred Olympian spirits, the Seven Stewards of Heaven. The Inner Circle. The Alliance of Eternal Light. They were one and the same. How the Victorians loved their secret societies, their gentlemen’s clubs and hermetic orders, their tablerappings, recitals, and rituals, gatherings primarily designed to
exclude
. 

Was that it? Who had James Makepeace Whitstable and his friends wanted to exclude this time? Their society of seven was no mere parlour game for the menfolk, somewhere to escape from family responsibilities. Their alliance was built
within the family itself
. 

If its purpose was not to exclude, then it must be to protect. 

To protect the lives of the Whitstable clan? No, these men were well respected and powerful. They would have made dangerous enemies. What else might they have wanted to protect? Their money? Wasn’t that far more likely? He looked out at the Thames, a curving olive ribbon two hundred and fifteen miles long, flowing back and forth with the pulse of the moon. 

The art historian was late, as usual. Summerfield was sporting the traditional English art-history uniform: an ancient tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a brown woolly tie, baggy corduroy trousers, and battered loafers, presumably intended to identify him to civilians in the event of an art emergency. He noisily hailed Arthur across the forecourt of the Royal Academy in a shower of pipe ash, then clapped him on the back as they entered Burlington House together. 

Although he had been a regular visitor in his youth, Arthur had not called at the Academy for quite a while, and was pleased to find it unchanged, Michelangelo’s spectacular Carrara marble tondo of
The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John
occupying its traditional space. Every accepted member of the foundation submitted a piece of his or her work to the Academy as a gift, with the result that Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner were all represented on its walls. The Academy’s summer exhibition, an event of unparalleled blandness open to all artists irrespective of nationality or training, had been dismaying critics for more than two centuries. 

‘Glad you could make it,’ boomed Summerfield, looking about them. ‘Some halfway decent pictures are hung around these walls. Y’know, this business of yours has got me hooked. The Waterhouse study is being authenticated downstairs. I told them it’s genuine but they insist on checking for themselves. Tosspots.’ 

They descended a winding marble staircase that led to the workrooms where paintings and sculptures were unpacked and studied. Summerfield pushed open a door marked
Access By Appointment Only
and led the way across a large white studio, one wall of which consisted of opaque backlit glass, to a cluttered wooden bench, on which lay the study Bryant had discovered in Bella Whitstable’s basement. 

‘Tell me what relevance you imagine this picture having to our investigation,’ he asked, watching as the historian lowered his bulk on to a corner of the bench. ‘Beyond the fact that one of the victims defaced it, I mean.’ 

‘Ah, I think you understand why I’ve asked you here,’ replied Summerfield. ‘I wondered if you’d see it first.’ 

Arthur stood before the study and examined it once more. Although just two thirds of the five-foot-long picture had been blocked with colour and all but two of the figures were only roughly delineated, the formal structure of Waterhouse’s finished painting could easily be discerned. 

‘Perhaps I should explain my thinking,’ said Arthur, picking up a paintbrush and running his thumb across the sable tip. ‘At an early point in the investigation I became convinced that the answer lay in the Whitstable family’s past. There was a madness of purpose that suggested a curious kind of Victorian sensibility at work. Each death has been achieved with grotesque flair, an oddness beyond anything we find in our bright, modern world. Naturally my partner doesn’t agree, so I’ve been forced to go it alone.’ 

He paused to scratch his broad nose with the end of the brush. ‘I only had a vague date, some time at the beginning of the 1880s, and a number, seven. Seven men in an alliance, six courtiers and an emperor gathered in a painting. I tried to imagine seven wealthy businessmen, heads of a successful trading family, forming themselves into a society that would protect their self-made fortunes from harm, a society with an acceptable public face, and perhaps less reputable private pastimes. But how would they commemorate its inception without drawing attention? What would the traditional Victorian do?’ 

‘Commission a painting,’ said Summerfield. 

‘Exactly. Your comment about Victorians smuggling sex on to their parlour walls in the form of mythological paintings gave me the idea. But there is a problem with the theory. When the details of this club—The Alliance of Eternal Light—finally came to light, I found that its foundation date was some time in 1881. And you say that Waterhouse produced his painting at the end of 1883. I have a two-year discrepancy in the dates . . .’

‘I can explain that easily,’ said Summerfield. ‘The first oil sketch for
Emperor Honorius
was knocked out on a manky old bit of board less than a foot square in 1882, and there was probably a gestation period predating that. So it could easily have been commissioned by your alliance. But you’ve got a bigger problem to think about.’ 

‘What?’ 

‘Well, look at it,’ said Summerfield, waving at the study. ‘If this really was commissioned to celebrate the founding of a new alliance, it doesn’t do a very good job. Think of the subject matter. What the finished painting shows is a society out of control. Honorius’s councillors can’t get his attention because he’s too busy pissing about with his birds. I told you before—as the supreme ruler of an empire, he was a plonker of the first order.’ Summerfield sucked his whiskers, thinking. ‘Suppose this bloke Whitstable chose Waterhouse for the painting, and then the artist discovered something unpleasant about his patron? Talk about having your cake and eating it! Waterhouse got to keep the commission by producing this wonderful, satisfying piece of work, and the artist got back at his patron through the insulting classical allusion contained within the picture.’ 

‘There’s no way of proving that.’ 

‘Perhaps not, until you remember what the finished painting looked like.’ Summerfield scrabbled beneath the study and produced a crumpled colour photocopy, which he proceeded to flatten out on a cleared part of the bench. 

‘Here,’ he said, pointing at the copy. ‘Remember I told you that the key character changes? In the study, the central figure is the emperor’s attendant. In the end result, he’s been relegated to the background. The former picture shows a group of men in repose. The allusion is greatly reduced in terms of offence. The latter shows a master surrounded by sycophants. It’s as if Waterhouse was intending to have a gentle dig at his patron, as many artists did, but then—some time between 1882 and 1883—discovered that the situation was far worse than he had imagined. So he changed the finished picture.’ 

‘James Whitstable was an educated man, by all accounts. Surely he would have understood the allusion and taken offence?’ 

‘I think that’s exactly what happened. The painting was sold to an Australian gallery soon after its completion. Waterhouse remained true to his ethical code. He produced a magnificent work of art. He simply went too far.’ 

‘Which helps to explain why William Whitstable threw acid on the picture. The painting was an affront to his ancestor, and by extension to his entire family. It was the first time it had been exhibited in this country for a century.’ 

‘I have another “seven” for you,’ added Summerfield. ‘John Waterhouse was a Royal Academy painter. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was begun by seven men. Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, and four others dedicated themselves to a “childlike submission to nature.” The actress Ellen Terry once told Bernard Shaw that she always visited Burne-Jones at his studio when it was foggy, because he looked so angelic painting by candlelight. Subsequently the group was joined by many other artists, and Oscar Wilde started poncing around with his sacred lily, wetting himself over the Pre-Raff sensibility because it neatly fitted in with the fact that he was horribly camp. It didn’t help having a fat old queen as a spokesperson, even a brilliant one, and pretty soon everyone started taking the piss out of the Pre-Raffs.’ 

‘Including Gilbert and Sullivan . . .’ 

‘That’s right. One of their productions parodied the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.’ 

‘. . . at the Savoy Theatre.’ Arthur reached for his cap and adjusted it on his head. ‘Peregrine, I can’t tell you what a help you’ve been.’ 

‘Let me know how you get on,’ shouted the historian. ‘I want to see how this one turns out.’ 

But by then his friend had already left the gallery workroom.