Tea was sent in for the policemen — after Sir Daynes had brusquely turned down an invitation to the Place table both for himself and Gently. It was no makeshift affair. Three maids with two dumbwaiters were necessary for its expedition, and the table, that important adjunct of interrogation, had to be arranged in the centre of the room and accept the dignity of a damask cloth for the occasion.
Sir Daynes was patently impatient of such a wholesale interruption. Hestood by the hearth, hands clasped behind his back, pishing and pshawing as silver was laid out, the cake and the trifle installed, crackers dispensed, and a dozen seductively laden dishes set at points of vantage. Then came two bowls of peerless fruit, a dish of mixed nuts, some boxes of dates, Chinese figs, Turkish delight, creme de menthe, chocolate liqueurs and a large case of preserved fruits. Finally, with the baronet at breaking point, a tray on which were several bottles and a box of Coronaswas brought in and placed handily on a side-table.
‘Confound the man!’ fumed Sir Daynes balefully. ‘Does he think we’re giving a party, or some damn thing?’
‘You’ll not be swearing on Christmas Day, Sir Daynes,’ came a reproving voice from without the door.
‘Eh?’ exclaimed the baronet. ‘What’s that? Didn’t see you there, Mrs Barnes.’
‘It doesna matter if you did or you didna, Sir Daynes.’ The little silvery-haired housekeeper took a step into the doorway. ‘It doesna become a man of your standing and principle to be making heathen oaths on such a day, and well you know it.’
‘But dash it all, Mrs Barnes-’
‘Och, there you go again.’
‘I mean — bless my soul! A fine thing at a police inquiry-’
‘You are not quarrelling with your vittels, Sir Daynes?’
Sir Daynes bit back an unholy expletive.
‘Now just take it easy, or you’ll be ruining your digestion. In forrty years there hasna been a man nor mouse in this establishment who lacked his vittels on a Christmas Day, and the good laird will make no exception now…’
Mrs Barnes departed with her minions, leaving a smirk on the face of Inspector Dyson and a broad grin on that of Gently. Sir Daynes tried to quell his rebellious subjects with a display of baronetics, but giving it up as a bad job, ordered an immediate assault on the offending tea-table. It was obeyed with alacrity. Five appreciative policemen set themselves to expunge all matters of business from their minds until justice had been done to the hospitality of Merely Place. Crackers, alas, were pulled, and caps were worn, and Sir Daynes, forgetting the relative solemnity of the moment, laughed loud and long at a printed joke that for some reason struck none of the others as being particularly funny. He remembered himself immediately, however. From the serious way in which he lit his cigar, it was plain that he felt his hilarity to have been out of place. Christmas Day it might be, but it was a grim occurrence that had brought this odd quintet together at its festive board.
‘Ring the bell and get this lot cleared away — we’ve still got the best part of a day’s work in front of us!’
A reluctant constable, Corona in hand, went to do the baronet’s bidding. Soon the table was bared and replaced in its official position, and the room, apart from lingering samples of fruit and confectionery, more in keeping with its temporary character. Inspector Dyson reoccupied the inquisitorial seat, his shorthand man took office beside him, Sir Daynes straddled the hearth, and Gently, continuing to acknowledge his role of supercargo, retired once more to the seat by the window. But before a fresh victim could be hailed in there was a tap on the door, and Somerhayes entered.
‘I thought I’d look in, Daynes, to make sure that you had been well looked after.’
‘Eh?’ queried Sir Daynes, frowning. ‘Yes, thank you, Henry — everything first-class. Couldn’t have been better. Compliments to Mrs Barnes, Henry.’
‘If there is anything you would like sent in…’
‘Nothing, man, nothing. We’re damn near bursting at the seams.’
Somerhayes hesitated, as though at a loss to express himself; then he turned to Gently at the window.
‘You are fully occupied here, Mr Gently?’
‘Occupied…?’ Gently glanced at him in mild surprise.
‘I cannot help remembering that you are a guest who has been unhappily involved in this tragic affair… If you feel you would like to relax for a little while, my library is a very quiet and comfortable room.’
It was said with studied indifference, but both Gently and Sir Daynes caught the curious little undertone of appeal that accompanied it. Sir Daynes fired a sharp look, first at Somerhayes and then at Gently. The latter, after a moment’s pause, rose slowly to his feet.
‘Thank you for the offer… I think I might take advantage of it.’
‘In that case I am glad I thought of it.’ There was no mistaking the eagerness in Somerhayes’s tone. ‘You did not require Mr Gently, Daynes?’
‘Require him? No! Daresay we can get along on our own.’
‘Then I can carry him off with a clear conscience… I would not want to interrupt if he were assisting you.’
‘Damn it, man!’ erupted the baronet. ‘Think the Northshire County Constabulary can’t handle an investigation on their own?’
Somerhayes smiled humourlessly and retired with his capture.
He led the way down a long, parquet-floored corridor from the grey-panelled walls of which stared down several generations of the Feverell family, their wives and their children. He gestured to them ruefully in passing.
‘Decline and fall,’ he observed. ‘My father hung them there, and I have not had the heart to take them down. This way, if you please.’
Gently shrugged and followed him. They had turned a corner into a small hall, and from here a door decorated with a painted armorial shield gave into the library. Somerhayes, having made way for Gently, closed the door silently behind them.
It was a large, well-appointed room with a handsomely decorated drop-ceiling and six tall windows draped with green damask curtains. The walls were completely furnished with glass-fronted mahogany bookcases, about half of them fitted with cupboards below, and a glance at the shelves showed a great catholicity in bindings and periods. Opposite the windows an ashy wood fire burned in a basket in an immense freestone hearth, the mantel of which was ornamented with shields, and above it hung framed several antique maps of the county in their original colouring and gilt. From the ceiling depended two chandeliers, but the only illumination came from a parchment-shaded pedestal lamp standing near the hearth. At an appropriate distance were arranged two wing-chairs with a table and decanter between them.
‘Please sit down and make yourself comfortable, Mr Gently. Can I pour you a glass of this port?’
Gently shook his head and selected the chair nearest the lamp.
‘You will join me in a cigar, perhaps?’
‘No, thank you… I’ve had rather too many.’
‘Like you, I find they pall if one smokes nothing else.’
Somerhayes poured himself a glass from the decanter and took it to the other chair. In spite of Gently’s strategic positioning, the nobleman’s handsome features were indifferently lit, and by withdrawing them slightly he could obscure them in the shadow of the chair-wing.
‘You know, this is not our first meeting, Mr Gently.’
‘Hmn?’ Gently was really surprised.
‘No. Though I doubt whether you would be able to remember the other occasions. But I have been in court twice when you were giving evidence at the Quarter Sessions here, once at the Old Bailey, once at Lewes, and once at the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. So you see, in a manner of speaking we are old acquaintances.’
Gently nodded dubiously. ‘In a manner of speaking…’
‘More so, perhaps, than you think, Mr Gently.’
Was there a smile playing round that thin-lipped mouth?
‘As you are perhaps aware, there are few situations which reveal a man’s character and personality so strongly as the occupancy of a witness-box. This is true at any level, but particularly true where such a grave matter as homicide is in question, and where the witness has a great deal of sometimes complex evidence to give, in the teeth of ruthless attacks by the defence counsel. Those are the times which try men’s souls, Mr Gently. They bring to the surface all the strengths and weaknesses, the virtues, the vices, in a phrase, the naked ego of a man. One sometimes sees one’s friends as one would not wish to see them.’
‘I trust I didn’t expose myself too much…’ Gently stirred uneasily.
‘On the contrary — quite on the contrary. It was by being able to observe you in these circumstances that I became so strongly impressed with your personality, Mr Gently. I am not a man who impresses easily. By education and avocation I have learned to treat my fellow men with the greatest reserve and, I am afraid, distrust. But in your case I felt an immediate confidence. I felt that there stood a man with a deep and — may I say it? — compassionate understanding of human failings and follies. I felt this so powerfully that I made a point of being present at other times when you were likely to be called, and when I learned that you were visiting the neighbourhood, I took immediate steps to become personally acquainted. I felt, in a sense, that the hand of providence was in the circumstance.’
Somerhayes paused, watching Gently from the shadow of the wing. The glass of port in his hand glowed ruddily in the fitful firelight, and the same illumination made a livid mask of one side of his face. Gently shrugged an indifferent shoulder.
‘It’s a great pity somebody jogged the hand of providence.’
Somerhayes laughed softly. ‘In a way, yes. But only in a way. Even this unhappy tragedy is subject to the point of view. And what makes you so certain that the hand was jogged, Mr Gently? Could it not have moved deliberately, when a certain propitious assembly of factors was complete?’
‘An assembly of factors…’ Gently’s eyebrows rose.
‘I call it that. You must consider me as being a fatalist.’
‘Me… I’m just a realist.’
‘That is your privilege, Mr Gently.’
‘I can see it in only one way. A young man who I liked has been killed… literally, on the threshold of life.’
Somerhayes’s head dropped a little. ‘I, also, was fond of Lieutenant Earle.’
‘By way of corollary, there’s a killer at large.’
‘And killers must be stopped — you are talking to one who has heard all the arguments. Yet consider a little, Mr Gently. The ways of providence are not our ways. A young man is killed. Another life must be given for his. Will you say outright that the event is devoid of pattern, and that a meaningless brutality has taken place and will take place? I do not believe you can be so positive. I believe there may be a point of view which, if it does not justify, will at least explain the occurrence and give it significance. We may not need to be divine to understand the workings of divinity.’
Somerhayes raised his glass and drank, and having lowered the glass, looked at it intently for a few moments as though giving Gently time to appreciate the point.
‘And you think you have this… point of view?’
Somerhayes nodded slowly. ‘To a limited extent, perhaps.’
‘And you wouldn’t mind explaining it to me?’
‘I’m not sure that I can, Mr Gently, though it may be that you are the one man who could understand it. But it is very difficult, and very complex.’
A silence fell between them… How complete were the silences in that great house! In this room there didn’t even seem to be a clock to break the cloistered stillness. Gently felt in his pocket for Dutt’s pipe, and finding it unemptied, rose and tapped it out against the smouldering log.
‘Suppose we start at the beginning?’ he suggested. ‘Just tell me how you came to start this tapestry business.’
Somerhayes repeated his soft laugh. ‘You realize, then, that the tapestry workshop was the beginning?’ he asked.
‘It’s where you gave up politics, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes… though it goes back further.’
‘Well, go back as far as you want… I’m here to listen.’
Somerhayes nodded and set down his glass on the table.
‘When I was in my teens — that would be in the Thirties — the world was still something of a place to live in. For me, I mean. For the prospective sixth Baron Somerhayes.’
Gently returned the nod… He remembered the Thirties!
‘My father continued to do things in Edwardian style, even up to the war. One was only vaguely aware that a world had changed and a world was dying, and that the standards to which one was born and bred were gravely suspect. Before I went to Oxford I never had any doubt. The social unrest that went on before my eyes did not belong to the world I inhabited. More important, perhaps, were the political events in Europe. They were certainly ominous, and more directly affecting the career of diplomacy for which, following the family tradition, I was being prepared…’
Gently filled his pipe from his magnificent quarter-pound tin and settled himself in the comfortable wing-chair. Somerhayes was not watching him now. Retired into his shadow, his eyes were on the sinking fire, his low, balanced, cultured voice seeming to flow from him without effort or conscious direction. Had he ever talked like this before, this enigmatic man with his lost and wistful eyes? Had he ever before drawn in words the pattern of his bewildered life? He was doing it now, talking, talking. Like a film that had never been unwound, it was coming off its spool.
He had gone up to Oxford, certain and sure of himself. The world had been his, wealth, rank and power to come. He was one of the elect. He was one of a chosen race. Far away had been the rotten tooth of envy and the jealous anger of the mob. And there he had met — whom? A young man, working his way through college. An angry young man, an arguing young man, a young man who thrashed the pretensions of the callow nobleman with the scorpions of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Shaw. And Somerhayes had had no answer to those scathing propositions. His naive Weltanschauung had taken no notice of such perverse logic. His defences were scattered, his arguments flattened, his comfortable assumptions buried under an avalanche of vicious, destroying fact. And what was a thousand times worse, he was obliged to admire the person who had bowled him over. Jepson, as his name was, appeared to Somerhayes as the epitome of all he would like to be but was not. In despair he made the comparison — himself, the spiritually bankrupt descendant of a family of social bandits; Jepson, the blazing prophet of a robbed and wrathful people. Could he fail to see that one was a dead branch, the other a new and irresistible shoot, in the tree of history?
‘You will observe what a quandary I was in. I dared not follow the direction which my new convictions urged on me. I was not simply a private person. I was the future Lord Somerhayes. My niche was already waiting for me in the Foreign Office, in the Lords, in Society and in the expectations of a father who had just lost his wife, and was himself already a sick man. How could I deal him such a blow as to declare myself, his only son, a Marxist, and he, my most affectionate parent, a social criminal?’
But something had had to come out of the shock he had received. It was impossible for him to continue entirely in support of a masquerade grown loathsome to him. It could not be Marxism, nor even socialism; the most he dared do was to proclaim himself a Liberal. And this, unfortunately, was enough to set him at odds with his father, to whom it appeared as a betrayal of the great Tory tradition of the Feverell family.
Jepson had graduated during Somerhayes’s second year, and with the removal of the irritant the young nobleman began to recover some of his lost equilibrium. To justify a step that had only been a compromise, he threw himself energetically into the cause of liberalism, seeking to find there a creed that would strike a balance between the implacable opposites of competitive industry and social justice. He learned many of the answers to Jepson’s furious logic. He discovered that the problem could not be stated in terms of pure black and pure white. When he emerged from the university he felt that to some degree he had achieved a balanced view of the contemporary social situation, and that, holding on to it firmly, he might proceed to his career with sufficient confidence. He had been admitted to the Foreign Office, and in due course was attached to the Paris Embassy.
‘At that time, although I did not know it, Leslie Brass had just forsaken the Latin Quarter for the tapestry factory at Aubusson.’
‘You didn’t meet him in Paris?’ enquired Gently, breaking the long monologue.
‘No. How should I have done? Our circles were hermetically sealed from each other. But it has always seemed significant to me that he and I were young men in Paris together.’
‘How do you mean… significant?’
Somerhayes’s eyes dwelt on him wistfully. ‘One of us a young artist, just beginning to find the channels for his creativity, the other… I won’t insist, Mr Gently. And now he and I are together.’
‘You wanted to be an artist too?’
‘In a way, I suppose, though I understand its impossibility.’
‘Could you explain?’
Somerhayes shrugged his elegant shoulders. ‘I don’t know, but I’ll go on trying.’
Eighteen months after he had gone to Paris Germany had invaded Poland. Back in London he had received quick promotion, and was engaged first in the tortuous relations that existed with the Vichy Government, and later in the endless negotiations and exchanges with Washington. Soon after the war his father had died, and Somerhayes succeeded to the title and a seat in the House of Lords. He had also been considerably impoverished by death duties, as a result of which he had been obliged to offer Merely Place to the National Trust. He now lived as a tenant in the petrified glories of the house that the second lord had built with the money that the first lord had ravished from the country at the time of the Bubble.
‘In effect I have become a curator… I am doing public penance, perhaps, for the sins of my ancestors.’
On his succession, Somerhayes had resigned from his post in the Foreign Office. His father had had a large town house in Mayfair, but this was much too big both for the tastes and the revenue of the new lord, so he had sold it and bought a smaller one in Chelsea. There, for several years, he had lived a rather solitary life during the parliamentary terms. The political climate of his father’s circle had made it uncongenial to him, and he was not a man who made new acquaintances easily. His predilection for art, however, had brought him into contact with several painters, among them Leslie Brass, who had now settled in Kensington and was making quite a stir with his pictures and tapestry. It was easy to detect Somerhayes’s almost reverent admiration for the man. Perhaps nobody but the plebeian Brass with his buoyant self-confidence and cynical shrewdness could have aroused it so strongly. Here was Jepson again, but better than Jepson. Jepson had been a mere revolutionary, a stormbird, an iconoclast; Brass was a creator, an artist, a visionary. Once more, Somerhayes had found all he was not enshrined in another man. Once more, he was shaken from an apparently secure spiritual perch, and driven to put himself agonized questions.
‘And then my cousin and her husband came to live in Chelsea. Previously I had seen very little of her, since her home had been in Northamptonshire.’
Janice, like himself, was now an orphan. Her father, the late lord’s youngest cousin, had been killed in an air accident in the Thirties, leaving not much behind him, and Janice had passed from Girton to a library appointment in Edinburgh. There she had met her future husband, Desmond Page. Their courtship had been interrupted by the death of Janice’s mother, but Desmond, in the interim, had passed his final exams, and now he had an appointment in a London hospital under the eye of a distinguished surgeon. He was thought by many people to have a great career in front of him.
Two years later he died, a victim of a post-mortem infection.
‘Mrs Page was cut up?’ suggested Gently, as Somerhayes’s voice faltered to a stop.
The nobleman nodded silently. His face in the firelight looked drawn and puckered.
‘A very expressive phrase, Mr Gently… yes, she was terribly cut up. She had nobody in the world to turn to. It was a godsend that I was there to help her through it.’
‘She stayed in London, did she?’
‘Yes, she stayed in London. She continued to live in their Chelsea flat in a state of — how shall I put it? — suspended animation. It was as though for a time she couldn’t believe it had happened. She tried to continue her existence as though Desmond had just gone away, perhaps, and one day she would hear his car pull up again in the mews down below. Grief is a terrible thing, Mr Gently.’
But the months had passed, and Janice began to emerge from the shadow that had fallen across her path. In the meantime Somerhayes’s political life had gone from bad to worse. He could not forget his early brush with Jepson. So much of what the young Marxist had flung at him seemed to be illustrated by the workings of the machine of which he was a part. He witnessed the persistent operation of self and class interests. He saw how truth could be muzzled, facts distorted, justice mocked in the name of expediency. And he made a bad name for himself by some very peculiar speeches. He was distrusted by both sides equally, and rated as being ‘unsound’. The crisis came when the Silverman bill for the abolition of capital punishment was presented to the Lords. As a life-long abolitionist he had seen in this a charter for a new and better phase of civilization. He could not believe it would be rejected. There were no class interests at stake, it touched nobody’s pocket. The question was entirely a humanitarian issue, to be decided on humanitarian grounds. And yet, it was rejected. More, it was rejected in a way that made Somerhayes feel it impossible for him to remain longer a member of that betraying convocation.
‘One learns to forgive selfishness in politics, and dishonesty, and passion; but inhumanity one cannot forgive, or forget, or silently condone.’
He had made a bitter speech and left the House determined, he had said, never to set foot in it again while men were made of stone. The heart of politics was corruption, and he must turn his back on them. He knew what he would do. If he was not permitted to serve humanity as a law-giver, he would serve it by way of art. Himself a dying branch on a dead tree, he could yet provide the means for a genuine creator to express his vision. And so he had made his proposition to Brass, and Brass, having looked all round it to make sure that his independence wasn’t threatened, had consented. Janice had also been approached and had agreed to join in the venture. The looms and equipment were purchased, six weavers assembled, and now, eighteen months later, Merely Tapestry was a name beginning to be conjured with by interior decorators.
Gently sat in silence as Somerhayes, by the change in rhythm natural to an orator, indicated that he had come to the end of his long relation. What was it this man had been trying to tell him? What was the implied relevance of this excursion into autobiography? There had been no further mention of Earle, none at all. Presumably, from his knowledge of subsequent events, Gently should now be in a position to elucidate the significance of what he had been told…
‘A winter’s tale, eh, Mr Gently?’ Somerhayes was regarding him with his strange, sad little smile.
‘An assembly of factors.’ Gently heaved his bulky shoulders.
‘You begin to see my point?’
‘Perhaps… I begin to see something.’
‘As things have turned out, how can one believe that your presence here was simply an accident?’
Gently grunted, and felt around for a match. ‘Mind if I put a question?’
Somerhayes nodded slowly.
‘In this assembly of factors… would Mrs Page be an important one?’
Somerhayes continued to nod.
‘In fact, you’re in love with her?’
‘Yes… I have been for a very long time.’
‘And she with you?’
‘No. I do not think so. Naturally I have never mentioned it to her, and she was greatly in love with her husband.’
‘Then you don’t think’ — Gently struck a match fiercely — ‘that she was interested in Earle?’
A flicker passed over the crimson-lit face. ‘Of that I could not be certain…’
‘You saw what I saw — more, probably.’
‘I saw she was amused by him.’
‘More than amused.’
‘It might have appeared…’ Somerhayes broke off, raising his hand. From the far distance of the night had come a sound of singing, accompanied by what sounded like a bassoon, a trombone and a trumpet. Clearly it came to them in the book-lined room, the words if not distinct, distinguishable by virtue of their familiarity.
‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night
All seated on… the ground…’
Somerhayes rose from his chair. ‘You must excuse me, Mr Gently. Those are the carol-singers from the village. They pay a visit to the Place every Christmas… I must go and put in an appearance.’
Gently shrugged and blew out his match. Somerhayes left the room, not by the main door but by a smaller one concealed to look like an open-fronted bookcase. Outside, the carol-singers continued with their second verse:
‘“Fear not,” said he, for mighty dread
Had seized their troub-led minds…’
Gently sat up suddenly. A sound other than that of singing had struck his ear. Softly, furtively, the latch of the main door had been released… the door he clearly remembered Somerhayes closing when they had entered. He was across the room in a moment. Outside the hall was empty, but at the far end of it another door was just closing. He rushed to it and threw it open. It gave an icy blackness. He fumbled along the wall for a switch, but there was no switch to find, and hearing a door open further on, he gave up the attempt and made for the sound. He was in the state apartments… obviously. Heavy, carved furniture under dust-sheets met his groping hands and sent him stumbling. It seemed an age before he got to the end of the room. The door was ajar, and once again he felt for a light switch that wasn’t there. He stood quite still, listening. From very far away he could still hear the carol-singers and their brass accompaniment. Otherwise there wasn’t a sound. He was alone in the dark with his breathing. Or was the breathing all his…? Was there another pair of lungs just a few feet away?
He may have heard something or it may have been pure instinct that sent him leaping and sprawling and tumbling away from the spot where he had been standing. At almost the same moment there was a violent crashing sound, and something ponderous and irresistible went trundling along the parquet floor. He fought desperately with the tangle of objects into which he had fallen. Footsteps sounded, running towards the lighted hall. Scrambling up on his feet, he chased after them towards the distant slit of light, but when he arrived there the hall was conspicuously and bafflingly tenantless.
A moment more, and Somerhayes came hastening round the corner of the corridor, alarm on his face.
‘Good heavens, Mr Gently, what on earth was that appalling noise?’ he exclaimed.
‘I don’t exactly know.’ Gently threw a keen glance at him. ‘Perhaps if you can get some lights on down there, we’ll be able to find out.’
Somerhayes darted to a switchboard concealed behind a sliding panel, and immediately lights blazed in the great state room beyond the door. Gently led the way through it to the chamber where the disturbance had taken place. It was a long, comparatively narrow gallery lined with antique busts on pedestals. And the cause of the crash was not far to seek. An enormous marble bust, about three times life-size, lay gazing eyelessly at the ceiling from its resting place on the floor. Lying prone by the wall, its finial almost flush with the side of the doorway, was the ten-foot alabaster pedestal on which the bust had lately resided.
‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Somerhayes, going down on one knee by the bust. ‘It’s the Merely Euripides — no wonder there was a din!’
‘It’s not damaged, I trust?’ observed Gently ironically.
‘No, it’s not damaged — in any case it’s only a late Italian copy.’
He got to his feet and came back to the doorway. In the parquet floor was a welted bruise that had been made by a cannon-ball.
‘But think — if anyone had been standing there. They would have been killed in an instant.’
Gently nodded his mandarin nod. ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’ he replied, poker-faced.
Through the state room came running Mrs Page with Brass and one of the weavers. Somewhere out on the terrace the carol-singers were giving the final chorus of their hymn.