The Crimson Rooms (57 page)

He opened his eyes and smiled. Was that love, the softness and heat in his gaze, or was that how all men looked after sex? I stroked his face, waiting. It’s not too late, Evelyn, to say nothing. He caught my finger between his lips and kissed it, leaned over me and kissed me again.

The last thing I did, before I spoke, was to trace the shape and texture of him from chin to navel, the slight roughness of his throat, the muscular breast, the soft, tender skin of his stomach. Then a voice I scarcely recognized as my own said: “You know that Wheeler will hang.”

He tightened his arms about me. “I fear so.”

“Despite the fact that right at the last moment Wolfe found a new witness, an admirer of Stella’s who’d bought her that bronze dancer I mentioned to you.”

“How clever of Wolfe. But it made no difference?”

“Nicholas, you’d know the answer to that because the gentleman was Sir David Hardynge.”

His muscles became rigid. “Hardynge.”

“He met Stella at a Christmas party, so he says, dropped into Lyons on a whim, bought the bronze dancer as a wedding present. We could pin nothing else on him, even were it plausible that he wanted her dead. He has an alibi for the day of the murder, at home with his wife over lunchtime, then visiting Donald.”

He said again: “Hardynge.”

“Yes. I don’t expect you’re entirely surprised.”

“You’re mistaken. I’m shocked to the core.”

I lay for a moment longer in his arms, inhaling his scent, then jolted upright and knelt above him, my hair tumbling onto his chest and my arms crossed to cover my naked breasts. “Tell me the truth. Please. I need to hear it. Tell me you are not somehow bound up with Stella’s murder.”

He put his hands behind his head and stared at me. I saw the shadow of a defiant boy in him, a tightening of the lips, eyes voided of expression. Already we were so far from what we had been minutes ago. “I can only tell you what I believe to be true.”

“Tell me. Tell me. Nicholas, don’t you understand? Wheeler will hang.Who is protecting whom? What’s going on? You can’t let a man die, Nicholas.”

“I didn’t know that Hardynge had bought her the bronze dancer.”

“I wish I could believe you.”

“When Wheeler was arrested Hardynge telephoned my chambers and asked me to keep an eye on the proceedings which concerned a loyal employee—one for whom he had a particular affection and respect, especially bearing in mind Wheeler’s wartime service—and if possible to protect the good name of Imperial Insurance. He said he was worried for poor Wheeler and wanted him to have the best possible defense. He wanted to be kept abreast of developments. That was all.”

“No. It wasn’t all. You deliberately befriended me. You approached me after the Marchant case not because you admired me, but because you wanted to keep your eye on Breen and Balcombe and I was the easiest way in.”

“You knew that, I told you so in the café near Toynbee. You were utterly incensed, as I recall. But I was hooked after that. Believe me.”

“You looked up my brother’s war record so that you would form a bond with me.”

The briefest of pauses before he answered: “That was before I knew you. Once I’d met you everything changed.”

“I told you we were going for a fitness-to-plead argument. You dissuaded us after consulting with Hardynge, who I now realize would have been most unhappy if there had been excessive probing into what had happened to Wheeler during the war. And then the bronze dancer. Whom did you tell about the bronze dancer after I mentioned her to you during our tea at Fortnum’s?”

“I might have said to Hardynge . . .”

“And he somehow got to the salesman who disappeared, heaven knows where, we still haven’t tracked him down, though apparently Wolfe has discovered he has family in Devon, so the whole thing came to light too late for us to stop the trial. There are too many connections and too many things that don’t fit. And I haven’t told you the most significant thing of all. Do you remember an incident late at night on Tuesday, April 15, when you were called to Hyde Park police station?”

All this time he had lain with his hands behind his head, watching me. Now he raised himself on one elbow. Even in the last of twilight, I saw his sudden pallor. “Possibly.”

“Your name is on the records in the case of a Julie Fox and an unnamed other party. Julie Fox was Stella, I’m sure. Julie came to mind because it’s her sister’s name, and Fox . . . I’ll tell you later why she chose Fox because I think it could have been that use of a false name, on a whim, that got her murdered. Who was the man you bailed out, Nicholas?”

He lay on his back with his palms crushed to his eyes. “Christ.”

“Nicholas.”

He sprang from the bed and began to dress. After a moment I did the same, though it seemed a dreadful thing to be struggling with buttons and hooks, arming myself against him. We didn’t look at each other. Now that I had wrenched myself apart from him, the process of dressing was cumbersome and shameful. Nicholas stood at the window once more, head bent in the low-ceilinged room, holding his elbows.

“Tuesday evening,” he said at last. “Mid-April. About eleven o’clock. I was telephoned from Hyde Park police station. A gentleman wished to speak to me. Hardynge. He sounded flustered, for him. In a spot of bother, he said. Come down to the station, Nicholas, I need your help. Turned out he’d been caught among the trees in Hyde Park embracing a girl, rather more than embracing. The pair had been arrested. Hardynge was agitated, didn’t want it to come to court, didn’t want his wife to find out, was obviously terrified lest it spoil his chances of being selected by his constituency. I had to use all my powers of persuasion, summoned the inspector who fortunately was of the opinion that women police officers were forever bringing time-wasting cases back to the police station. I made a few promises, alluded to a few influential people, and managed to get Hardynge out.”

“And the girl?”

“I knew nothing about the girl.”

“Not even her name?”

“I wasn’t told her name. I never saw her. Simply got the police agreement that a caution for her was the most convenient resolution for all. The thing was, Evelyn, I wasn’t surprised when I got the call from Hardynge that evening. It was an inconvenience to me rather than a shock. I’d known that he had a weakness for young girls—I suspect even his wife has an inkling—because I’d bailed him out before.”

“And when Stella was murdered, it never occurred to you that she might have been another of his dalliances?”

“It did not. I trusted him. As I trusted you.” It was too dark now to read his eyes as he said, very low, very cold, “I never thought to be used by a woman as you have used me. You knew all this, you believe me to be implicated in whatever it is that Hardynge has done, you were determined to confront me with all kinds of accusations and yet you asked me to make love to you first.”

“Was that using you? Perhaps. I love you so, Nicholas, you have no idea how much or how sure I am that it will be the only time for me. For once I took a risk and asked for what I wanted. But it’s hopeless because you are in Hardynge’s pocket. He whistles, you jump. A woman is dead and her husband will hang for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit because you couldn’t resist doing another seedy little favor. Can’t you see what happened after Stella was released that night? She had a hold on him, or thought she did. Perhaps he assumed he could buy her off with the bronze dancer. I’ll bet she tried to pester him into providing her with some other kind of life than that little terrace with Stephen Wheeler.”

He was a stranger, face averted. And still I loved him and wanted to take the step that would bring me back to his arms, surely, soften the steely perfection of his profile, restore his kisses. He said: “Doesn’t this give Stephen the motive we’ve been looking for, if he got wind of the fact that Stella was having an affair?”

“Wheeler didn’t kill Stella. You know he didn’t. My God, what that man could teach us all about love. At first, when I was at the police station today, I thought: probably Stella tried to blackmail Hardynge after that night by threatening to tell the press about the sordid outing to Hyde Park. But even I know that a man like Hardynge could buy off any number of newspaper editors or pushy little waitresses.” (I thought, but didn’t say: After all, Nicholas, he appears to have bought off you.) “Unless Stella threatened to tell a much more significant truth, one he couldn’t bear even to speak about. Nicholas, do you know what your friend Donald Hardynge got up to in the war?”

At last he faced me and grasped my shoulder. “Jesus Christ. Jesus. Jesus.” Thrusting me aside, he clattered down the narrow stairs and through the kitchen, where I heard him fumbling with the bolt on the scullery door. By the time I’d caught up with him, he was outside at the gate, white-faced, trapped within the low walls of the little garden. “Can’t you see,” he said, “have you any idea how this hurts? Donald. If I’d known Hardynge had bought the bronze dancer . . . I might have known . . .”

But the next moment he laughed, as if in rueful surrender to the fates that had so perversely brought him to Prudence’s cottage, looked about him at the darkly shadowed garden where the unruly gooseberry bushes extended vicious spikes, then returned to the house and sank down against the wall under the parlor window, hands loosely locked about his knees. “Don’t tell me, the other boy was called Fox. Is that where Stella got the name? I was never told it, though I knew Don liked boys, of course I did. He always had. And I knew that he’d run off with someone and that one of them had fired a shot. I knew that Hardynge had got Don home, even though he was the officer and older, and therefore far more culpable.”

“Did you never probe what happened? How Hardynge managed it?” He sank his head into his arms. “I owed him too much to ask questions. My life, probably. A month or two later he had me moved to a safer posting behind the lines. I wasn’t given a reason at the time, just thanked my lucky stars. Later, after the war, Hardynge told me he’d had a word in someone’s ear; he’d lost one son, he said, couldn’t bear to lose another.”

We sat shoulder to shoulder against Prudence’s cottage, just where James and I used to crouch safely out of sight. The stucco at our backs was still warm. “Stella knew all about it,” I said, and as I dropped words into the soft air, they became nuggets of truth, diamond-hard. “She’d have drawn the story out of Wheeler; how he formed part of a firing squad and all the details of the young boy’s crime, including the name of his accomplice, or rather leader, I should say, because he couldn’t deny her anything. Perhaps he even hoped she would comfort him. There was a photograph of Fox in their house. That’s why she used his name at the police station, as just a hint to Hardynge that she had a hold on him. Imagine if Stella had told the world not just about her little fling but that Hardynge had sacrificed the life of a frightened young boy for the sake of his son, who was, incidentally, a coward and a liar. Do you really imagine it was the boy Fox who shot at the policeman?

“Hardynge killed her, or had her killed—he has an alibi for the afternoon of the murder—because she was a liability. The gift of the bronze dancer wasn’t enough to satisfy her, so he visited her at home and perhaps promised her a tryst, an elopement even. I think he planned every detail so that we’d all focus on Wheeler. It was only the bronze dancer that betrayed him; a matter of pure arrogance to overlook the value of something that to him was a trifle. And it would have been simple for him to get hold of the gun and gloves, kept in an unlocked shed, once he’d persuaded Stella to tell him about any souvenirs Stephen had kept from the war. After all, he was a dab hand at using scapegoats. Like father, like son.”

The garden was warm and full of moths, and though ill-kept, some flowers had struggled up through their weedy beds so that I could smell the sweet, dusty perfume of perennial sweet peas. Still, in some drowning part of me, I hoped we might soon come to a resolution that would extract us from this dreadful place. Nicholas was bound to say something to save us.

“What will you do with all this speculation?” he said.

“I don’t know. Tell Breen. As you say, it’s only speculation. But perhaps there’s enough to convince the judge that to convict Wheeler would be unsafe. Perhaps it will buy us time.”

There was a long silence. “You know it will destroy me,” Nicholas said, “if it comes out that I put undue pressure on the police at Hyde Park; especially if Hardynge is brought back to court and has to admit to being with her that night.”

That was the worst. Until then I had thought that he might not be culpable. After all, my lips were still swollen, my body thrumming and overturned by our lovemaking. And yet there he sat murmuring of the damage this would do his career.

I went to the back of the cottage and locked the scullery door. Then I walked to the gate and waited. At last he too got up, brushed himself down, and followed me out of the garden. When I closed the gate behind us, I listened for the snick of the latch, remembering the flash of joy as James and I had been led away by Min, in such disgrace that Prudence couldn’t bring herself so much as to shake our hands or wave from the window; how the gate had snapped fast behind us and how we had pranced off one on either side of Min, who was in great good spirits due to the fun of an unexpected excursion to bring us home. Leaving the cottage, I had felt triumphant. By the time I reached home, I had been overwhelmed by guilt.

It was now quite dark in the surrounding woods, and through the trees I saw a gleam of orange; low sunlight reflected on a windowpane. The inside of the automobile was quite cool and steeped in that unforgettable scent of leather and oil. Nicholas’s hands gripped the wheel but he made no attempt to start the engine.

“I want to take you somewhere, Evelyn, that might make it easier for you to understand.”

I said nothing.

“Will you come and meet Donald?”