The Crimson Rooms (59 page)

N
ext morning Breen and I
sat on either side of his desk in the Arbery Street office, and he rocked back in his chair, twiddled his thumbs, and gazed at the ceiling while I recounted events of the previous day, though not, of course, the detail of what had happened between Thorne and me.

“There’s no need to be so woeful and melodramatic about all this,” said Breen, fixing me with his blackbird eye. “I’m not a complete fool, I knew most of it. The moment we got back to London last night Wolfe and I visited Hyde Park police station to see what you’d been up to. I found the entry in the ledger, same as you did. And we were well aware that you had developed feelings for Thorne and, incidentally, he for you. Why do you think I excluded you from our investigations? You should not reproach yourself. As you well know, the world is oiled by people making connections with each other.”

“I let my feelings interfere with my . . .”

But he’d had enough of this talk of feelings. “None of us is made of stone, Miss Gifford. And if we become stone, we should give up criminal law at once and stick to conveyancing. It’s simply a matter of watching one’s tongue and keeping confidences where appropriate. I’d say, on the whole, feelings aside, that you have done rather well.” He was, I realized, concealing considerable excitement by shuffling papers, adjusting the knot in his tie and the handkerchief in his pocket, and seizing his hat. “I really do believe, Miss Gifford, that with all this new information, we shall be able to save Stephen Wheeler.”

Next we took a cab
to Wormwood Scrubs, where an officer friend of Breen granted us an interview with Wheeler, who received us as if we were paying a social call and expressed amazement that we had troubled ourselves to visit on a Saturday. Altogether, he was a different man from the one who had been confined each day to the dock. His beard and hair had been trimmed and he looked more comfortable in his laundered prison shirt than in the cheap suit he wore in court. We brought him the gift of half a fruitcake, the remains of one of Miss Drake’s offerings to Breen, for which he was touchingly grateful. Then I took out pen and paper and placed it neatly on the table, and Breen and I sat facing Wheeler, my hands gripped tight in my lap and my heart beating very fast in anticipation of his reaction to our news.

Breen wrapped his hands around his knee, cocked his head on one side, and looked Wheeler in the eye. “Stephen, we are here because more evidence has come to light about Hardynge’s involvement with Stella. I always counsel caution, I would advise you not to raise your hopes too far, but we think we have enough to suggest that there should be further investigations. Even his alibi for the afternoon of Stella’s murder is now questionable. And if the judge won’t allow us to suspend proceedings at this stage, we definitely have grounds for appeal.”

Wheeler’s reaction was not at all as I’d anticipated; in fact, it was the opposite of hope. The genial light went from his face and he adopted the same posture as in the dock, slumped, head bowed.

“You served with Hardynge’s son, Donald?” Breen said.

The slightest nod. “What has that to do with my Stella?”

“Stephen, you have asked us to defend you, but I think that you have been less than helpful in telling us what you know. You have kept quiet when you might have given us information that would have saved a lot of time. So now that we have found everything out, I hope you’re going to cooperate with us.”

Wheeler sat more upright, but would not look at Breen. “Go on, then. Ask me what you like.”

“What happened between your friend Paul Fox and Donald Hardynge, Stephen?”

This time, Wheeler did not seem in the least surprised by the question but nodded as if we had confirmed something in his mind. “The Hardynge boy got off, the young lad was sentenced to be shot. I’d known Fox since he was twelve—he used to be a messenger at work. Knew him to be a soft sort of boy.” He glanced at me. “Forgive me, Miss Gifford, he was a bit of a honey trap for men who took their pleasures that way. I kept my eye on him as far as I could but there was always someone else wanting to offer him a different type of protection.”

“Did you find it surprising that Hardynge was sent home while the boy was left to face a firing squad?”

“Neither of them should have died. They were too scared, not right for the war. I saw them when they were brought back to camp. Both crying.”

“Did you know which of them shot the military policeman?”

There may even have been a glimmer of humor in Wheeler’s eye. “Well, it couldn’t have been the boy, now, could it? Everyone knows that common soldiers aren’t issued with revolvers.”

“Weren’t you angry, then, that Fox was shot?”

“ ’ Course I was angry. But it wasn’t the Hardynge boy’s fault. It was the way things were bound to turn out given who each of them was.”

“Did Stella know this story?”

“I told Stella everything.”

Breen said: “You’ve heard already how Sir David made Stella a gift of the bronze dancer. And now we discover that there was a night in April that they were caught red-handed, Stella and Hardynge . . .”

Wheeler leaned forward. “What are you saying?”

“We think that Hardynge committed perjury last week in court or came damn close to it—I suspect he chose his words very carefully, I’ll have to look at a transcript. He knew exactly where Stella was on April 15, because he was with her. We think that afterward Stella tried to blackmail him by threatening to make public the story of Donald and Private Fox, and that’s why he killed her.”

Breen had spoken in the soft tones normally reserved for soothing distraught female clients, but Wheeler was stricken. I saw dawning comprehension in his eyes, then a kind of horror. Next he sprang to his feet so abruptly that his chair scraped back, teetered, and clattered to the floor. “If you bring this up in court on Monday, I’ll change my plea to guilty.”

“Stephen, you’ve said all along you’re not guilty. It is quite wrong to plead otherwise if you’re innocent.”

“Then don’t make me. I’m not having my girl’s name dragged through the mud. I don’t want to know any more about it, if she was connected to him.”

“Stella will not come out of this badly. Hardynge is the seducer, the manipulator. She was just a girl. Stephen, you cannot let a guilty man go unpunished.”

“I’m not interested in what happens to him. I’m interested in my girl and what people will say about her.”

“You’ll hang, Stephen. I cannot let an innocent man hang.”

“It’s not your choice. I want my Stella to myself. I’ll change my plea to guilty if you bring this up in court. For all you know I am guilty. For all you know I knew about Hardynge and Stella all along and killed her because I couldn’t bear that she had an affair with my boss. That’s what they’ve been saying in court or something like. Maybe it’s true. What do you think of that?”

“Then why have you pleaded not guilty all this time, if you suspected Stella of having an affair and didn’t want it to come to light? Why did you put yourself through a trial?”

Wheeler’s smile illuminated his face and gave a glimpse of an utterly different man. “I’m not such a fool as you all think me. I didn’t know what had happened to my Stella. Before they found her body I thought she’d met up with someone after I left her at that picnic place. Soon as I saw her hat I knew she’d gone off in a tearing hurry. Eloped, I thought. I’d known for months, before we was married, there was someone else on the scene though I’d never have believed it was him—that was a bad shock, to see Sir David in the dock and think it might have been him. He is a gentleman who always has been very good to me. But he was old and Stella . . .” He looked away and bit his lip, squeezed hard on the chair back. “I could tell by her eyes, the way she seemed to be listening to a voice in her head sometimes, that she was distracted. Even on our wedding day she was waiting for something else to happen. Then, when she was dead, of course I wanted to know who’d got hold of my revolver and killed her. Mr. Breen, you was just the man, I thought, to find out for me. And you have. I’m satisfied. I’ve got what I wanted, thank you.”

Breen said: “Well, I suppose that’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid. But now Hardynge must be charged with murder and we can only achieve that with your cooperation.”

“As I said, I don’t choose to say anything more about this. Stella is my dear girl. I won’t have her name publicly linked with his again.”

“But, Mr. Wheeler,” I cried, “we are sure Sir David Hardynge is guilty. All we are trying to do is bring him to justice. You can’t mean that you are prepared to hang instead of the man who seduced . . .”

“Now you just listen to me, Miss Gifford,” Wheeler held fast to the back of his chair and fixed me with suddenly fiery eyes, “in my book, this has nothing to do with the kind of justice you’re talking about. In my book, I have the right to be given what I want, and what I want is to save my Stella’s name. Her name is the one thing, the
one
thing, Miss Gifford, that has kept me alive for the last ten years, that name, Stella, and all that it means to me. Oh, I’m not saying I’m different from anyone else, I daresay you have your own terrible story of the war, and Breen here, I know, was out driving ambulances. I might have guessed,” and he grinned at Breen, “that my old school fellow Daniel Breen would be close to the thick of things, running about, getting people organized. But I, I took one look at that war and thought, I am done for, Stephen Wheeler cannot survive this. When I was a young man, before the war, these hands were good hands, Miss Gifford, they did good things. They held a pen and filled out insurance forms that made people feel safer, God help me. They made things about the house and served others in small ways. In the war they was required to be killing hands. But there was nothing in me that could find justification—or should I use your word,
justice
—for what we were doing. There was not a scrap of sense that I could see in living like insects, killing men we had no reason to hate except they was the mirror image of ourselves. So I died to myself, I did what was required and I did it as best I could.

“Haven’t you asked yourselves, how I could have formed part of a firing squad, taken a rifle, and pointed it at the heart of a boy who was very dear to me? I see him now, every hour of every day, that scrawny, sniveling lad, sniffing and sobbing, unable to stand upright so he had to be tied to a post, unable to control his bowels. I killed him as I would a rabid dog. It had to be done and it had to be done well. But what kind of a world was I in, that made the killing of that boy the kindest thing I had done in three years?

“And do you know why I’m here still, why I never pulled back my shoulders and walked into the teeth of machine-gun fire, it was the thought of a little girl who wrote to me every week and signed her letter,
Love, Stella
. In those nights when there’s no sleep because there’s rats and lice and mud and icy rain instead of a bed, there she was, light as air, this good, soft, rushing thing, this girl who had nothing whatever to do with the war, but who wrote me letters because she remembered the old Stephen who used to carry her on his shoulders and admire her dancing. Oh, I knew I would lose her in the end, she was always just out of reach, but she gave me all the joy I have ever known, and I won’t barter her good name for the sake of a life that means less than nothing to me.”

For a long time after he’d finished speaking, we were still. Breen’s chin rested on his palm as he stared at Wheeler, I looked at the blank sheet of paper before me. “So,” said Wheeler, as if both to recover himself and to stir us into action. With the hint of a conspiratorial smile, he held out his good hand to Breen.

We gathered up our things. Breen clapped Wheeler on the shoulder, gripped his upper arm, and said: “At least let me be there.”

Wheeler nodded and clasped first Breen’s hand then mine, smiling, to comfort me. At the door, I looked back to where he sat, very upright, hands resting on the table edge, like an obedient schoolboy. He was already far away from us and the look in his eye was achingly familiar. Hadn’t I seen the same in a thousand nightmares as I floundered across no-man’s-land, trying to reach my dying brother? And hadn’t Donald Hardynge sat just so in the elegant conservatory at the Grove; nowhere to go, nothing to do but attend to unquiet ghosts?