Sight Unseen (15 page)

'Would you like a drink? I'm having a G and T.'

'The same for me would be fine.'

'Great.' She moved to a cabinet in the far corner of the room and poured his drink. The trim-jacketed, short-skirted suit flattered her. Umber could not fail to notice as much.

She returned with his drink and sat down. He half-raised the glass and sipped from it. 'It was... good of you to see me.'

'I could hardly turn you away when you'd come all this way.' She took a long draw on the cigarette. 'I often get confused over dates myself.'

'I suppose I'm lucky... there's anyone here.'

'I've been over doing some shopping. Oliver knows I have to hit Bond Street sooner or later. Jersey may be a tax haven. But fashion? Forget it.'

'Did he tell you... why we've arranged to meet?'

'Oh yes. Jane's been on to him. Everyone's in the loop, David.' The use of his first name sounded entirely natural, for all its suddenness. 'Radd's murder' -- she smiled -- 'has really put the cat among the pigeons.'

'You think so?'

'What do you do for a living?' she asked, blithely ignoring his question.

'I'm kind of... between livings at the moment.'

'Do you think that's why you've started down this road?' She gazed at him, defying him to be offended by her candour. 'Too much time on your hands?'

'I don't believe Radd killed your husband's daughters.'

'Somebody did.'

'Does Oliver... talk about them much?'

'No.'

'Do you ask him?'

'No.'

'A closed subject, then?'

Marilyn shrugged. 'Isn't that what the past should be?'

'I don't think so, no. Especially when we don't understand it.'

'Ah. I see.' She sipped at her drink. 'But, then, Oliver tells me you're a historian, so I guess... that makes you biased.'

'Not biased. Just... inquisitive.'

'Well, inquire away. I can't help you. And you'll get nothing out of Oliver.'

'Is that so?'

'Take it from one who knows.'

'How long have you been married?'

'Long enough.'

'How's your stepson?'

'Oh, Jeremy's fine. Just fine.'

'It must have been difficult for you, marrying a man with so much tragedy behind him.'

'Oliver's very resilient.'

'He's needed to be.'

'Are you in London for long, David?' Marilyn's ability to pose questions out of the blue was already apparent to Umber. Less apparent to him was the direction such questions were likely to take them in.

'Not sure.'

'I'm here for at least another week.'

'Really?'

'What's in the bag?' She nodded towards his holdall.

'I've been doing some research.'

'Into what?'

'Eighteenth-century politics.'

'Amazing.'

'But true.'

She chuckled. 'I'm sure it is.'

'Ever hear the name Junius?'

'No.'

'Or Griffin?'

'Some sort of... dragon?'

'Some sort. Yes.'

'Oliver tells me you're a widower as well as a historian.'

'That's true.'

'Being alone... after years of love... can't be easy.'

Umber could find no response to that. He was in truth surprised by the degree to which Marilyn had taken him aback. He stared into his glass and swallowed some gin.

'If you are alone... that is.'

He managed a smile. 'More or less.'

'Would you like to go to the theatre with me next Thursday?'

'What?'

'I have a couple of tickets. It's Shakespeare. Your sort of thing, I imagine. And Oliver's. But he's not going to be able to make it. It seems a pity to waste the seat.'

She was asking him out. It seemed barely credible. But it was true. She was a mature and attractive woman, unafraid to hold his gaze. She knew what she was doing. What she had said merely skimmed the surface of what she meant. An offer of some kind was on the table. Who ran the bigger risk -- she by making it, he by accepting it -- was far from clear. But in that uncertainty, her half-smiling expression implied, lay the object of the exercise.

Umber cleared his throat and swallowed some more gin. 'Which play?' he asked.

Marilyn leaned back in the couch and blew some smoke towards the ceiling. 'Does it matter?' she said softly.

Umber said nothing to Sharp about Marilyn Hall's theatre invitation. He told himself this was because it was not entirely clear he had accepted it and, besides, it was even less clear he would still be in London come Thursday. 'Call me on the day,' Marilyn had ambiguously concluded. She had been casting frequent glances at her wristwatch by then, as if this visit was threatening to make her late for something. It had been time for him to leave. Though there had been just time enough for Marilyn to pose a parting question.

'Would you prefer me not to mention your visit to Oliver?'

'Why should I?'

'Oh, just because... he might not believe you'd mistaken the day.'

'But won't it be rather awkward for us to pretend we haven't met?'

'Not really. I won't be here, you see.'

'No?'

She had smiled. 'Oliver's choice.'

'Well... in that case...'

'I'll say nothing.'

* * *

'It was a bloody stupid idea to go there in the first place,' Sharp complained when Umber reached Ilford and reported what had happened.

'Maybe,' Umber admitted. 'But, as it turns out, I've got the better of Oliver Hall without him being aware of it. He didn't want us to meet Marilyn, did he? Well, now one of us has.'

'And what have we got out of you meeting her?'

'The knowledge that she and Oliver don't trust each other.'

'We might have been able to work that out anyway. The question you should be asking yourself is whether
you
can trust Marilyn Hall to keep her mouth shut.'

'I think so.'

'You
think
?'

'Time will tell, George.'

* * *

In that regard, time was bound to tell. In terms of Umber's Junian researches, it seemed much less likely to prove revelatory. He spent most of the daylight hours of Sunday sitting at the table in Larter's dining room sifting through the notes and photocopied extracts he had brought back from the Library -- to little avail.

The sixty-plus candidates for Junius's identity resolved themselves to fewer than twenty serious possibilities. Those were the ones Umber had concentrated on for his thesis. Yet there were, he now recalled, objections to all of them. Some of the objections were weightier than others. But none were insubstantial.

Umber wrote out his shortlisted names on a fresh sheet of paper, in strictly neutral alphabetical order. There were sixteen in all. He then struck out the names eliminated by strong circumstantial evidence, usually their absence abroad at times when Junius was writing chatty notes to Woodfall to accompany his public letters, containing information available only to someone actually resident in London. That reduced the list to eleven. Next to go were those who died before Junius wrote his last private letter to Woodfall in January 1773, emphasizing he would never go into print again. The list was pruned to nine. Next went those with whom Junius had engaged in private correspondence, writing to oneself to divert suspicion being a plausible tactic only if done publicly. The list was shortened to six: Edmund Burke, Lord Chesterfield, Philip Francis, Lauchlin Macleane, Lord Temple and Alexander Wedderburn. But Burke and Wedderburn were both lawyers by training. They would surely have avoided the legal blunder Junius made during his attack on Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in his last public letter. The list shrank to four.

Umber knew that if he worked at it he could reduce the figure to zero. Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a septuagenarian relic of a bygone political age when Junius began writing his letters. He was plainly too old and too ill to have been responsible for them. Philip Francis was an obscure War Office clerk, too young, some would say, and too low in the pecking order to be the author. Lauchlin Macleane was an unprincipled Irish-Scots adventurer with a taste for political intrigue. The Scots were, however, routinely abused by Junius and Macleane himself attacked in a letter generally reckoned to have been written by Junius under a different pseudonym. Richard Grenville, 2nd Earl Temple, shared many of Junius's prejudices, but was the brother of George Grenville, with whom Junius engaged in private correspondence without any apparent fear of recognition.

Modern historians had settled on Philip Francis. His opinions, his character and his whereabouts fitted Junius like a glove. A computer-aided stylo-statistical analysis had also fingered him as a habitual user of Junian phrases and constructions. His youth and his junior station counted for little in the face of that. Case closed.

Not quite. The handwriting was the problem. There was no similarity at all between his and Junius's. This was explained away by most experts as evidence of Francis using a disguised hand when writing as Junius. Fine. But Junius wrote fluently and elegantly, while Francis scratched away crabbedly all his life. The disguised hand should logically have been inferior to the real thing, not the other way round.

Amanuenses entered the argument at this stage. And certainty went out by the opposite door. Francis seemed too secretive a man to have employed an amanuensis and nobody could suggest who he might have chosen for the role in any case. Meanwhile, some graphologists detected a similarity between Junius's handwriting and that of Christabella Dayrolles, wife of Lord Chesterfield's godson Solomon Dayrolles. Thus, bizarrely, the finger of suspicion took a late swing back towards its least credible target -- a half-blind, stone-deaf and largely bedridden old nobleman, who had died two months after Woodfall's receipt of Junius's very last letter.

* * *

Christabella Dayrolles. The name chimed distantly in Umber's memory. Yes, that was it. She was the subject he had been working on at the end of the Trinity term at Oxford in 1981. She was the seemingly trivial point his researches had arrived at, never, in the event, to progress beyond. He could recall little of what he had learned about her and there was nothing in any of the books he had consulted to assist him. If he still had his boxful of Junius papers, it would be a different matter. But he did not. Christabella Dayrolles was, for the moment, out of reach.

* * *

'What
do
you know about her?' Sharp demanded when Umber explained the problem to him during their drive to Mayfair late that afternoon.

'Precious little. Her husband was a career diplomat and a favourite of his godfather. Chesterfield's letters to Dayrolles are a treasure trove of information on Georgian politics and court life. Mrs Dayrolles was ... Dayrolles's wife. Mother of his children. Keeper of the domestic flame. Stereotypical eighteenth-century female. Or not. I don't know.'

'But her handwriting resembles Junius's?'

'Yes. Superficially, I seem to remember. More than Philip Francis's does, that's for sure. But Chesterfield as Junius? I could never buy that.'

'What about her husband, then?'

'Dayrolles? He's never been in the frame.'

'Why not?'

'Because...' Umber hesitated. It was a good question. And there was a good answer, he felt certain, though he could not for the moment recall what it was. He had been trying to connect Mrs Dayrolles with Junian suspects other than Lord Chesterfield when he had abandoned his researches in the summer of 1981. His efforts had taken him nowhere -- as far as he knew at the time. But perhaps they had taken him closer to the truth than he could ever have suspected. 'I'm going to have to go back into it, George. That's all I can tell you.'

'Well, maybe you won't have to, if Oliver Hall gives us a lead.'

'Yeah,' said Umber half-heartedly. 'Maybe.'

* * *

Umber did not expect anything to have changed at 58 Kingsley House. But Marilyn's absence and Oliver's presence turned out to constitute more than a simple swap of hosts. The atmosphere was cooler, almost chill. There were fewer lights on. There was no music. The tone of everything was palpably different.

Umber remembered Oliver Hall as a quiet, reserved, smartly suited man in his early forties. He had less hair than a couple of decades before and what there was of it was grey. He had developed a slight stoop and a turkey neck. He was wearing what Umber took to be his idea of casual dress -- razor-creased trousers, cashmere sweater, check shirt. He looked neither relaxed nor nervous. He did not offer them a drink. He made no overtures. They had his attention. That was all.

'I never expected to see either of you again,' he said when they had sat down. 'It's doubly surprising ... to see you together.'

'I assume you've spoken to your former wife about our visit to her,' said Sharp.