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.
'Oh yes. I'm fully apprised.'
'What about Sally's attempt to phone her just before she died?' put in Umber. 'Did Questred tell you about that?'
'You can assume I know everything I need to know,' Hall replied.
'She didn't by any chance try to phone you as well, did she?' asked Sharp.
'Not as far as I know.'
'Can't you be sure?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Because she might have phoned me, got no answer and failed to leave a message.'
It was a precise and incontrovertible answer. Hall's lawyer would have been proud of him. It gave nothing away – except, of course, his reluctance to give anything away.
'Has Radd's murder made you doubt his guilt, Mr Hall?' Umber asked.
'No.'
'It's made Questred doubt it.'
'I can't say that surprises me. Edmund's a rather woolly thinker.'
'What about your son?' asked Sharp. 'How does he feel about it?'
'The same as I do, I imagine.'
'You imagine?'
'We haven't actually discussed the matter.'
'Don't you think you should?'
'I'm sure we will. At some point. Jeremy clearly isn't concerned about it. Otherwise he'd have contacted me.'
'You don't see a lot of each other, then?'
'As much as we both want, Mr Sharp. Neither more nor less.'
'Relations with a step-parent can be difficult, I'm told. Maybe your remarriage… put some distance between you.'
Hall smiled faintly, as if amused by the blatancy of Sharp's attempt to prod a nerve. 'No. It didn't.'
'How does he get on with… Mrs Hall?'
'Very well, thank you.'
There was a magazine lying on the table in front of Umber. It was the Culture supplement of the Sunday Times, folded open at the theatre reviews page. The RSC production of All's Well That Ends Well at the Gielgud had been given a chunky write-up. He could not stop himself glancing down at it before he looked across at Oliver Hall, who was already looking straight at him. 'Has she come over with you?' Umber asked in as idle a manner as he could contrive.
Hall nodded. 'Marilyn's in London with me, yes.' Once again the studied accuracy of his statements was apparent. She had not come over with him. He had not claimed as much. But it was the inference he would happily have let Umber draw.
'Sorry we've missed her,' Sharp remarked.
'Your business is with me,' said Hall. 'There's nothing Marilyn can tell you.'
'There doesn't seem to be much you can tell us either.'
'True, I'm afraid. But…' Hall leaned back in his chair and spread his hands in a gesture hinting at conciliation. 'I accept your motives are honourable. I believe you're mistaken, though. Radd was responsible for my daughters' deaths. There's nothing any of us can do to bring them back. I've learned to accept that.' He fixed his gaze on Umber. 'Others must learn to accept their own loss. The idea that Sally was murdered…' He shook his head. 'It's simply not credible.'
'I believe it,' said Umber, with quiet emphasis.
'So do I,' said Sharp.
'I see.' Hall looked at each of them in turn. 'Well, let me tell you what I have in mind, then. I have business in the City tomorrow and the day after. I still sit on one or two boards. I can't get down to Marlborough until Tuesday night. That's really the soonest I can manage. It'll take time to talk all this through with Jane. And with Edmund, of course. But that's what we need to do. Discuss your concerns… calmly and rationally. Then…'
'Yes?' Sharp prompted. 'What then?'
'Report back to you, Mr Sharp. What else? If a joint discussion leads any of us to question the official view of the case, I can promise you our full support in reopening the inquiry.'
'You can?'
'Absolutely. I believe we already know the truth, dismal and tragic though it is. If I'm wrong, or if everyone else thinks I'm wrong…'
'All bets are off?' suggested Umber.
'Yes.' Hall smiled at him. But the smile did not reach his eyes. 'If you want to put it like that.'
Nothing was said during their ride down in the lift. For no logical reason, Umber felt unable to speak freely until he was off the premises. Sharp evidently felt much the same. They were in fact halfway between Kingsley House and the van before either of them broke the silence.
'He thinks he's got us where he wants us,' said Sharp.
'And has he?'
'This trip to Marlborough he's oh-so-reasonably agreed to take is just for show. He'll come back after a couple of days and tell us they're all singing from the same hymn-sheet: Radd guilty; Radd dead; end of story.'
'What can you do if that's the plan, George? You can't stop him going. Or dictate what he says to the Questreds when he gets there.'
'No. I can't.'
They reached the van and climbed in. Sharp started away promptly and did not speak again until they were turning into Berkeley Square.
'I don't have to sit around twiddling my thumbs while he plays his little game, Umber. And I don't intend to.'
'So what do you intend to do?'
'I'm going to Jersey.'
'You are?'
'No better time to size up Jeremy Hall than when his father isn't there to interfere.'
'You promised his mother you'd leave him out of it.'
'If I could. Well, I can't. Not any longer.'
'When do we go?'
'We don't. I do. I'm driving down to Portsmouth tonight. I've booked Molly and me on tomorrow morning's ferry. We sail at nine.'
'You've already booked the ferry?'
'Yup.'
'But… you couldn't have known… what Oliver Hall was going to say.'
'I could have cancelled if he'd proved more open-minded than I expected. Doubted he would, though. And I was right.'
'What am I supposed to do?'
'Go see Sally's therapist. Knuckle down to your research on Mrs Dallyroll. And cover my tracks if Hall or the Questreds get in touch before we're ready for them.'
'When'll that be?'
'No way to tell.' Sharp braked to a halt at the traffic lights on Piccadilly and glanced round at Umber. 'Let's just hope it's before they're ready for us.'