Traitor's Purse (18 page)

Campion stared at her. In spite of his preoccupation some of the urgent tragedy in her story forced itself through to him. He saw her world vividly, with painful clarity. He saw the narrow, self-important old man clinging to his inherited privileges amid a snowstorm of falling shares, rising prices, fleecing taxes, whispers in the towns, nudges, older clothes, tradesmen waiting, and silly little economies which did no good.

‘What did he do?’ he said, his eyes reflecting some of the awe in her own.

‘I’m not perfectly sure.’ Now that she was holding him she was less antagonistic. They had become fellow investigators, gossips with a licence. ‘For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to consider it, but now that he’s dead I feel I must tell all that I do know. I’m afraid poor Robert sold his honour and his integrity, Mr Campion. I think he must have used his position as Secretary of the Masters to permit some
sort
of smuggling to go on in those caves under the Nag. And then later I think he changed his mind and was trying to expiate the sin he had committed. I don’t know how he died. If it was an accident it was the hand of God, but if he took his own life, or if someone else killed him, I shouldn’t be in the least surprised. I’ve lived through several wars and one can’t do that without realizing that the world contains violent men.’

Campion felt the muscles at the corners of his jaw contracting. This was truth. This was a break. At last a real break, if only he had the wits to assimilate it.

‘Smuggling what?’ he enquired.

‘I don’t know. I’m only guessing that,’ she reminded him quickly. ‘But there was a Mr Feiberg who came to the house once or twice to see my brother. That was in the spring of ’thirty-nine, when my brother was most hard pressed for money. After he left Robert began to talk about the Nag and about the smuggling that was done there in the seventeenth century. He covered it up at once, of course, but I never forgot it. Mr Feiberg came twice after that, but never after the war broke out. I mentioned him at once, of course, because he was an alien and my brother said definitely then “We shan’t see him again”.’

‘Had your brother acquired his new money then?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, he had, but it was after that that his conscience began to prick him.’

‘Long after?’

‘No.’ She paused. There was uncertainty in her whole poise. She waited until he was exasperated with her and then, with an apologetic smile, came out with the one remark in the world which could have brought him up on his toes and re-kindled a flicker of hope in his heart.

‘I mustn’t mislead you,’ she said. ‘I think his conscience slept until he heard of fifteen.’

‘Fifteen?’ His voice failed and he whispered the word.

She ignored the interruption.

‘It must have been then that he saw his terrible mistake. I think he did everything he could after that. He decided to
resign
his Secretaryship. He drew out every penny he had in the bank, and he was bringing it back with him yesterday when you drove him home. Also this morning his bank manager called on me and told me in confidence that Robert gave instructions for all his securities to be turned into cash and the money delivered to him.’

‘But that’s extraordinary!’ Amanda spoke before she saw the pitfall, and, having seen it, went on sturdily. ‘I mean, that doesn’t look like suicide. That suggests to me that he was going to clear out.’

‘Yes.’ Miss Anscombe was not offended. It was evident she held no very high opinion of her brother. ‘It does, doesn’t it? Unless, you see, he meant to give it all back to someone. We shall never know and I prefer to be charitable.’

Campion was not listening to them. His ears were still tingling from the shock of hearing that one most elusive, most tantalizing word of all, the keynote and symbol of the whole maddening enigma.

‘Tomorrow is the fifteenth,’ he said stupidly.

‘I didn’t refer to the date.’ The old lady made the remark with complete conviction. ‘I don’t know exactly what fifteen refers to, but it isn’t a day of the month.’

‘How do you know?’ Even then he did not believe her. The tension was still there, straining every nerve in his body, urging him to hurry.

‘Because of the diary.’ She had been holding the little pocket-book all the time and he had not noticed. Now he would have snatched it from her, but she was not to be hurried. ‘Robert was a very unmethodical man,’ she remarked with exasperating deliberation. ‘I thought the book was empty at first but then I found just these two entries. Here’s the first, just over a month ago. Look for yourself. It’s almost as though the poor man bought the book just to write something melodramatic in it. That would have been very like him.’

Campion took the book and Amanda looked over his shoulder.

‘Friday the 7th,’ they read. ‘Just heard of Minute Fifteen. See it all. What have I done?’

The following pages were blank until they came to the space allotted to the day before the one on which its owner had died.

‘Done,’ he had written. ‘Done at last. Conscience clearer. Resigned. Expiation must follow. Shall I see Henry Bull?’

On the following page, and right across the three days it represented, two words had been scribbled large.

‘
Minute Fifteen
.’

Campion sat down. The train had snapped. He felt flat and exhausted. If the fifteenth was not a date there was no hurry. As he sat gazing at the page, however, the three printed dates stood out in relief. Sixteenth? Seventeenth? Eighteenth? Which? None of them or all of them?

The insufferable burden of anxiety returned more heavily than before. Weaver, B.’s mission became more rational and therefore more serious. Fifteen itself was still a mystery. ‘Minute Fifteen’ might mean anything.

Miss Anscombe rose to her feet.

‘Where is Annie?’ she enquired, looking at Amanda.

‘In the next room, waiting for you. Are you sure she can take you home all right?’

‘My dear, don’t let her hear you say that.’ The old lady laughed as she spoke. ‘Annie used to be my personal maid. Now I think she’s my guardian. She delivered the message safely to you, did she, Mr Campion?’

‘Eh? Oh yes, rather. Brilliantly. Was that your maid?’ Campion was talking without thinking and he bundled his scattering thoughts together impatiently. ‘I’m afraid she must have thought it a rather unconventional method of approach,’ he said apologetically.

Miss Anscombe patted Amanda’s hand.

‘Not at all,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘These are unconventional times. We’re not blind. It’s no good being conventional in a world which is blowing up all round one. When the streets become a shambles one has to raise one’s skirts. Good-bye. I don’t know if I’ve been helpful, but at least
I’ve
cleared my conscience without giving poor miserable Robert’s mistakes over to the police.’

‘Wait.’ Campion was still clinging to the pocket diary. ‘Who is Henry Bull?’

Both women stared at him. Miss Anscombe looked startled.

‘Sir Henry is a Conservative and one of the Tey family,’ she said. ‘At the moment he’s the Senior Master of Bridge and a Junior Lord of the Treasury.’

‘Don’t be silly; you know that,’ said Amanda. ‘Besides, we met him, didn’t we, at your sister’s wedding?’

XIV

AMANDA CAME BACK
into the room after seeing Miss Anscombe and her maid out. She closed the door carefully behind her.

‘I say, what’s the matter with you?’ she demanded.

He eyed her guiltily and got up to get away from her searching enquiry.

‘I’m all right. When the wind is southerly I can tell a hawk from a handsaw.’

The quotation escaped out of some shrouded cupboard in his mind without any context, so that he heard the words as though for the first time. They meant nothing to him now he considered them and left him considerably startled.

‘That’s good,’ said Amanda. ‘The fancy dress was a mistake,’ she added, picking up the peaked cap. ‘I told you to come clean. She’s that sort of old pet. I thought that would warn you.’

‘Oh I see. I’m sorry. It never occurred to me to take the words literally. I didn’t realize the message came from you, you see.’

‘You …?’ She swung round and stared at him. He did not understand her expression. She was astonished, but also,
in
some indefinable way, hurt. ‘But we’ve used that sort of language between ourselves for years and years,’ she said at last.

‘Oh, yes,’ he agreed in horror as he saw the trap. ‘Yes, we have, haven’t we? I forgot.’

He expected her to be angry with him. Any woman would be. He was grateful that he had said it. Those intelligent young eyes terrified him. He needed her beside him with an unbearable urgency quite out of character. He was not the sort of man who ought ever to need the moral support of anyone else on earth with this dreadful sick anxiety. Once she knew the truth about him she’d stick to him with all that eager generosity which was her mainspring. She’d be so kind, so sorry. Pity, filthy humiliating weakening pity! Nauseating compassion! His soul retched at it – the ultimate concentrated essence of second-best.

His earlier determination to hold her at whatever cost shrank before that price. To have forced her into fidelity might have been admissible and even pleasurable, but to sneak it, to grovel round it, and prize it up this most repulsive of all ways, that was too much. He hadn’t come to that yet.

He glanced across the room at her. She was sitting on the arm of a chair, looking half her age. Her short skirt showed her knees and her thin arms were folded on her chest. She grinned at him.

‘You’re up to something you don’t want me to know about,’ she said. ‘That’s all right. Don’t fluff.’

‘I’m not fluffing.’ The protest sounded childish and he could have smacked her. She was so like that. They seemed to get on to schoolroom terms the moment they spoke together. He must have known her very well for a long time.

‘Sorry,’ said Amanda. ‘To me you fluff. Miss Anscombe sounded as if she might have been being useful. Was she?’

‘She was, very. I hope she keeps her mouth shut now. Aubrey suggested that you brought her along, did he?’

Campion was watching her very closely and he thought he saw her change colour.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he didn’t, as it happens. I rather edged her off Lee.’

‘I see. You’re going back there now, are you?’

‘If you think I ought to.’

‘My dear girl, that’s your affair entirely.’ Campion hoped he was not bickering.

To his consternation she got up and came over to him.

‘Look here, Albert,’ she said with unusual earnestness, ‘I’m not asking for any explanation, of course. Our usual arrangement stands. You know exactly what you’re doing and I’m only out to be useful, but just at the moment I’m probably rather slow. I’m not too good. I’ve had a bit of a shock, as a matter of fact. I’ll tell you about it later, when I’m better. But at the moment it’s making me a bit ingrowing and slow on the uptake and I don’t see what you’re up to at all. I don’t know what to look for. I don’t even know if I’ve done the right thing about Hutch.’

Hutch? Good heavens, of course! The Superintendent. Campion hoped that the sweat which had broken out on his face was not visible. The nightmare was riding him with a vengeance. It was bad enough to have one’s previous life wiped clean off the slate on one’s mind without developing this new propensity for forgetting any act of violence which came his way. First it had been Anscombe’s murder and now it was his own attack on the unfortunate Superintendent.

‘What did you do?’ he enquired anxiously.

‘Well, I convinced him that you were you, to start with. That took a bit of doing, but I got it into all their heads in the end. Then’ – she coughed delicately – ‘then I said you were never afraid to take the unconventional line if the urgency of the job demanded it.’

‘How did they take that?’

‘Not too well,’ she admitted. ‘You can’t blame them, Albert. It was pretty drastic and high-hat, wasn’t it? Very unlike you, too,’ she added after a pause. ‘You’re not much like yourself at the moment. You’ll find the police looking for you, by the way. They’re not entirely satisfied and Hutch wants his car, for one thing.’

Campion held his breath. He could just remember that there must have been a car, but what had happened to it or to himself between the moment when he had knocked out the Superintendent and had subsequently walked into the paper shop he had no idea.

This was dreadful. Amanda must find him out at any minute now. Her trust was heartrending, too. He wished she would not treat him with the blind faith of the silly little sister who follows her brother up the elm tree.

‘You knew where to find me yourself,’ he remarked. ‘How was that?’

Again that look of hurt bewilderment.

‘That was our arrangement, wasn’t it?’ She did not speak of the car again and he guessed that his reticence must be part of their arrangement also. Evidently she was his lieutenant. She offered any information she found but their plan of campaign was entirely his own.

‘I must see Henry Bull,’ he said.

‘Ye-es.’ Her hesitation was fractional but it infuriated him.

‘What else can I do?’ he demanded. ‘Stanislaus has disappeared and someone has got to explain this damned fifteen.’

She sat up stiffly, her eyes widening.

‘But I thought you knew. I thought you’d been given all the hush-hush dope and that you and Oates were holding the entire baby between you, because nobody dare risk any sort of leakage. I didn’t realize that you were in the dark at all. No wonder you’re so jittery.’

He looked at her as she stood over him. His taut brown face was expressionless.

‘Do you find me jittery?’

Amanda laughed. It was spontaneous amusement and her heart-shaped face was alive and sane and lovely.

‘I find you theatrical, stinker,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

He took her hand and swung her arm to and fro. He had seen someone else do that. It had been Lee Aubrey. That was right; it had been that blighter Lee. He had done this, leaning against the doorpost, peering down.

‘I can’t look at you with great constipated cow’s eyes,’ Campion said suddenly. His wretchedness had assembled the words and they were out of his mouth before he could censor them.