The Crimson Rooms (37 page)

Thorne paused and looked about. Near his left hand, a pair of blue butterflies touched midair and flitted away, and from trees to the left I heard the faint knocking of a woodpecker. “The reason I wanted to come here,” he said, “was that I thought it essential to understand the lie of the land. You will gather that I’m frustrated at not being involved in the case myself but Hardynge takes a great interest and so do I. Maybe I’ll notice something that I can pass on to Wainwright.”

“In the end details of the crime may prove irrelevant. Mr. Breen is still considering a fitness-to-plead argument.”

“Is he indeed? Fiendishly difficult. Especially given Wheeler’s coherence both at the police station on the day after the murder and subsequently in jail. I’m surprised at Breen. He hasn’t a chance. Wainwright won’t entertain the idea.”

“Perhaps Mr. Wainwright should have met us here today,” I said curtly, stung by the criticism of Breen.

“I confess it never occurred to me to ask him, Miss Gifford. Probably I was being selfish . . .”

Altogether he was far less at ease than on other occasions; his irritation at Breen seemed uncharacteristic and even his movements lacked the wonderful fluidity that had so drawn my attention before. He opened a gate, held it for me, and closed it after us. I didn’t look up at his face as I passed but mumbled my thanks. Afterward, I remembered how the hinges groaned, the snick of the latch, and under my hand the warmth of weathered wood polished by decades of passing cattle.

“Did you have a good weekend, Miss Gifford?”

I quickened my pace. The breeze was light and fragrant but my heart ached. At that moment, as my shoulder had so nearly brushed his arm at the gate, as I turned away my head though I knew he was smiling down at me, I had so yearned for him to touch me that to keep up this façade of indifference seemed unendurable. “Much as usual, thank you.”

“We played tennis, would you believe. Whenever it stopped raining we dashed onto the court, never mind the risk of slipping. I spend more time than I can afford playing tennis, always on a Saturday, sometimes Sundays too. The Hardynges have a grass court and Sylvia and I are quite addicted, though neither of us is half as good as Donald, who was an ace. Do you play, Miss Gifford?”

“Not anymore. I used to.”

“So how
did
you spend your weekend?”

“Mostly working.”

“I might have guessed. I’ll bet you drive yourself atrociously hard. Do you ever let yourself have a holiday, I wonder?”

“I try to. Last week was exceptionally busy so there was catching up to do. Unusually for me, I was out of the office a good deal.”

“Why was that?”

“This Wheeler case, among other things. And then the Leah Marchant affair is dragging on. If you remember, her children are being looked after in a home from which we’re now trying to extract them.”

“Of course. Any progress?”

“We are afraid it will be difficult to have the children released. Their home life is far from ideal. Mr. Wolfe suggests we may need to pull strings.”

“You have only to say the word and I’ll see what I can do to assist.”

I was silent, caught by the twist of anger that habitually followed one of his assumptions of superiority, whether imagined by me or otherwise. Then I said: “Thank you. I’ll consult first with Mr. Breen.”

After a few moments, Thorne tried another tack. “So, when the Wheelers came up here, he was carrying a picnic basket and she presumably a little handbag of some kind. Has anyone mentioned a handbag?”

“It was scarcely more than a purse, I believe, the same color as her dress, containing comb and compact—it was buried with her.”

“Has anyone made a suggestion yet about where Wheeler hid the revolver on the way to the picnic?”

“We presume it would have been in his jacket or the picnic basket.”

“A revolver is quite bulky and heavy. And there’s another question I have. It’s odd that Wheeler should have been in possession of such a weapon during the war, let alone after it. They tended to be the preserve of officers.”

“I believe Wheeler was promoted to corporal during the war.”

“Nonetheless. Noncommissioned officers didn’t usually carry revolvers, as I mentioned to Breen the other day.” We were walking briskly, despite the heat. Though I didn’t look directly at Thorne, I couldn’t avoid his shadow, which sometimes tangled with my feet. “If you like, I could carry your jacket, Miss Gifford.”

“Thank you. No. I prefer to keep it on.” This last remark was so churlish (and untrue) that I had to make up for it by saying the first thing that came into my head: “Actually, it’s possible that you could help me with the Leah Marchant case. I’m afraid to say that when she and I visited the children’s home things went very badly. My fault as much as hers. I had an argument with the matron.”

He laughed, youthful, delighted, and for a fatal moment I caught his blue, brilliant eye. “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I was most unprofessional, I admit, but the sight of two little girls clinging to their mother’s skirts unhinged me. So now I have to find a way of extracting the children, knowing that I have lost any hope of the matron’s sympathy. And I have found that they are vulnerable in another way. Did you know that this country apparently ships hundreds of foundling children to colonies overseas?”

“I had heard, at Toynbee. And I believe there is to be a government commission to look into the practice this autumn. Surely the Marchant children are too young.”

“I’m not so sure. And if they’re too young now, they won’t be in years to come.”

“What you need is contacts, Miss Gifford. If you could find out who is on the board . . . Why are you laughing at me?”

“I was ahead of you, Mr. Thorne, I took a list of board members from the matron’s office. I intend to write to each in turn but maybe I should save myself the trouble and hand the list over to you. You’re bound to know someone, there are a few titles, I’m sure a word in the right ear from you would save me six weeks’ work.”

“Do I detect a note of bitterness there, Miss Gifford?”

“Really, you can’t blame me for having a chip on my shoulder.” It was happening again, the fatal allure of pitting my wits against his. “I’ve heard all kinds of arguments against women entering the legal professions, the stuff about special spheres and women having no understanding of relevance or analogy or evidence, but there is one that nobody quite brings themselves to mention: that unless their fathers happen to be high up, women will lack the connections that make all the difference between success and failure in the law.”

“It’s the same for men. Connections help men to get on too.”

“Connections they have formed over generations, at ancient schools and universities, through family and friends.”

“Miss Gifford, I do sympathize with you, I really do. In fact you’d be astonished to hear how much my views have changed since I met you. But in one thing I cannot sympathize, this constant wailing that life is tough for women in the professions. Instead of griping about your disadvantages, why don’t you make use of them, turn them on their heads? After all, it’s a device we use all the time in demolishing an opponent’s argument. You, as a woman, have the advantage of surprise and novelty. You are a pioneer, which in your place I would find extraordinarily exciting rather than a bind, as you seem to. I do believe that women have different qualities from men, you can’t persuade me otherwise, but you should play on them. Even your enemies can’t deny that women are often intuitive, eloquent speakers. Since you and I last met I’ve listened to another of your female colleagues performing in court—a Miss Cobb—very impressive.”

“Yes, but the reverse is used against us too. Our critics translate intuition and eloquence into an overreliance on instinct, too much talk. Now here, I believe, the infamous picnic took place.”

Since my last visit with Breen and Wolfe, summer had deepened in that unremarkable field. Rain had fallen, so that the meadow grass was taller and the hedgerow busier still with insects. A cloud swept across the sun and at some distance a tractor engine wheezed into life. “Are you looking for anything in particular?” I asked. “Mr. Wolfe, for instance, is very intrigued by the fact that poor Stella became separated from her hat, which suggests that Wheeler . . . the murderer, I should say, whoever he was, perhaps took the trouble to carry the hat back to this picnic spot though he’d buried her handbag and shoes. Wolfe thinks that a girl as fashionable as Stella would not have left it here herself unless she was in a great hurry.”

“I gather she was shot more than half a mile away, is that right?”

“It is, and although I’ve never met Stella, I just can’t understand why she agreed to walk so far. I’ve seen the type of shoes she wore. It’s one of the things that troubled me, why she should stray such a distance from the picnic spot. There must have been very powerful persuasion.”

“You don’t think she was forced at gunpoint?” Thorne stood with his hands in his pockets, hat crushed under his arm, absorbed apparently in studying the ground. I slid my jacket off at last, very conscious of my bare wrists and the thin layer of cotton voile on my upper arms. He glanced at my throat and away.

“My own belief is,” I said, “that Stella may have had a love affair.”

In the silence that followed there came again a thickening of the air, the muffling of other sounds, birds, a distant tractor. “I see,” he said. “Based on what evidence?”

“Various clues, little things she’d kept tucked away out of Stephen’s sight. The trouble is, if I’m right and he was consumed by jealousy, it would make him more likely to have killed his wife rather than less.”

He nodded and walked on, so that I wondered if he too had found the words
love affair
unendurably resonant. Our pace, under the hot afternoon sun, was much slower. The joy of being with Thorne, of finding him companionable and sympathetic, overcame my determination to keep him at arm’s length, and I talked freely about how I came to study law and my experience of postwar Cambridge. He had a most engaging way (probably honed through years of escorting Sylvia) of adapting his stride to mine and inclining his head when listening. For the first time in my life, I gave voice to the guilt I felt at having benefited from James’s death. “I doubt if Father would have had the money or inclination to let me study and apply for articles if James hadn’t died.”

“Yes, but you know, we are all victims of chance. I’m not so very different from you. Hardynge has proved an extraordinarily kind and influential patron but it’s partly because his own boy, Donald, will never be a barrister now. In that sense I too am a replacement son. I didn’t have too bad a war, fortunate postings, my luck was in, I suppose you could say. Like so many others, I feel a great surge of guilt sometimes that I am in one piece, that I even have one or two fine memories, of
fun
, would you believe? But Don didn’t survive—he did, physically, I mean he’s alive, but his nerve broke and he’s confined to a hospital—not far from here, in fact. I don’t think he’ll ever be right.”

“What happened to him?”

He swiped the hedgerow with his jacket. “He was in Wheeler’s regiment— Second London Rifles—most of the men from Imperial Insurance joined at the same time. Donald fought bravely but then there was an incident . . . forgive me, the details are private to the family . . . and he collapsed, mentally I mean. Since then he has been moved from one institution to another, seeking a cure. At present he’s in a place not that far from here beyond Princes Risborough.” Long silence. “Suffice to say the Hardynges are utterly stricken, still. I think in fact they’d all have been better off if he were killed outright—I’m sure they know that too, which makes things all the worse for them. Sir David visits weekly, the mother seldom, Sylvia when she can. She’s a trooper. I used to go quite often but my visits distressed him—they think I’m too much a reminder of the war.”

“Is it just a matter of luck, do you suppose, that enables one man to pull through the war in relatively sound mind, another not?”

“You’re thinking of Wheeler and the fitness-to-plead argument. All I can say is that if you and I, Miss Gifford, were to see a bull charging us from the other side of this field, we would each react differently. Of course if we were trained to run, we might run, or trained to face it with a bayonet, we might do that, but if terror got the better of us, who knows what we might do? Why, you, I suspect, would argue with it and I would attempt to pull rank and then if we both had any sense, we’d run like the clappers. And afterward you might recover in a minute, while I would shake for hours.” Inevitably, I loved to hear his laughter, deep-throated, soft.

“But Wheeler had a good war—I’ve seen the medical report.”

“A good war? War is so extreme. At times it was such lunacy I could have thrown up my hands and walked away, never mind the consequences. We were hungry, tired, bereaved, and often shaking with fright. Death was a second away. On the mornings of an offensive we woke up knowing that half of us would be dead by evening. When I ordered my men to attack, I was ordering them to be shot. And even when we thought we were safely at rest behind the lines, mishaps occurred. I saw a man who was tapping out his pipe against a tree one minute lose his head to a bit of flying shrapnel the next. Nothing would surprise me about what a person would do, or become, under those conditions. He might stand up in full view of the enemy and stroll out on no-man’s-land to pick up a dead friend”—here he glanced at me and I thought, he
knows
, can it be possible that he knows about my brother—“or on the other hand, I’ve seen a brave man cry because a tin of cocoa dropped from a shelf onto a duckboard. But we’re lawyers, Miss Gifford, we know all this. We often represent people who have behaved impeccably all their lives and then go and commit some extraordinary crime.”

“But have you ever known a good man do something really wicked, not just weak or cowardly but downright wrong? Could war make a man do that?”