Shadows & Lies Page 16

  Ah, but what lady, Meredith asked himself, and wondered why Lady Emily was lying.

  “I’ll do my best to see they cause no embarrassment,” he said, with which she had to be content.

  After making the abortive telephone call to Shropshire, Crockett went back to his desk. He rocked his chair on its back legs. Through the already murky window, made even murkier by the fog, he thought he dimly discerned a faint lightening of the atmosphere, a distant gleam of sun. He flipped through Meredith’s report again. He smoked a cigarette. At last, throwing caution to the winds, he poured a slug of whisky from the hidden bottle in his locked bottom drawer, then stood in the shadowy room, lit only by the popping gas fire, sipping his drink with his back to it, one thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, debating his choices. He could let the matter take its own time and direction, or he could make things happen.

  Tipping the rest of the whisky down his throat, almost without conscious decision, he knew his mind was made up to take the latter course, one much more to his taste. There were too many loose ends, which had never been pursued, or tidied up to his satisfaction. He began to have a little idea. It wasn’t very professional, and he couldn’t be sure if it would pay off, or whether, in the end, there would be nothing for it but to seek permission to take up the investigation again, though he had doubts that his superintendent would support such an application.

  In the absence of any female detectives in the CID, he would normally employ the wife or sister of one of his constables for any job needing a woman’s touch, but in this case something more was needed. He decided to make an approach to Agnes Crawford, the lady who stood highest of any in his regard, and enlist her help. Although having refused to become engaged to him until the question of women’s suffrage was settled and her work for the Cause would be over – which as far as Crockett could see, would be never – he was still hopeful that she might, one day, be induced to change her mind. And since she was, for the most part, of a naturally sweet and helpful disposition, he was almost certain she could be persuaded to assist him on this occasion.

  Agnes lived with her father, a schoolmaster from whom she had absorbed radical inclinations from an early age, and who tolerated – nay, encouraged – such unwomanly activities as she was presently engaged in. These days, Crockett could never be sure of when he might catch her at home – she always seemed to be out when he called, doing God knows what for this dratted Women’s Political and Social Union (though as to the precise nature of this work, and in view of the opinions she’d recently been expressing, he preferred to remain in ignorance). To his sorrow, she’d once more taken part with other women in a rowdy disturbance; this time in harassing the Prime Minister while he was on holiday at Lympne Castle in Kent, following him everywhere he went, even to church, throwing stones through the window when he was having his dinner, yelling their slogans. She and others had been dragged away kicking and screaming by the police and once again taken before the magistrates. That the women arrested were so obviously ladies had influenced the magistrate to be lenient with them, which had not been their intention at all and had infuriated Agnes. Next time, she would certainly do something they could not ignore, so that they would be forced to send her to prison – she might even take it into her head to go on hunger strike. Sweet and angelic-looking Agnes! He lived in constant fear that one day it might fall to his unenviable lot to have to arrest her in the course of his duty.

  Rather than make a fruitless journey to her father’s house in Ealing to find her not there, he sent a note round, asking if they might meet at a time and place convenient to her. She must have been at home, after all, for she was prompt in her reply, and asked him to meet her at the Lyons’ Corner House in Piccadilly at four that afternoon.

  Half an hour before he was due to set off, there was an interruption. He very nearly persuaded himself to refuse to admit the callers; afterwards, he was very glad indeed that he had not succumbed to the temptation.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The two men were patently foreigners: the one big and shambling, with a sallow complexion, a drooping moustache and sad, dark eyes which also drooped at the corners; the other a thinner, sharper and younger version of him. Their names were Saroyan: Gevorg and Stepanos. They were brothers and they said they were Armenian. Both were bundled up against the onset of an English winter in long, shabby dark overcoats and thick scarves and hats which they kept on, and the big one, Gevorg, was already exuding sweat by the time they were shown in to see Crockett. Perhaps it was the sweat of fear. Armenian exiles who had fled their country had plenty of reasons to be afraid of officialdom. Driven from their homes at the whim of the Turkish janissaries who were tools of those who presently ruled then, they were accustomed to equating any form of authority with violence. The two men had been passed on to Crockett as a person who’d had some little experience in dealing with their compatriots when he’d worked in the East End some years ago, where the immigrants were constantly being brought to the attention of the authorities: Londoners were automatically suspicious of anyone with a foreign accent, and particularly of those who lived together in tight little enclaves, kept to their own language and customs, were always in debt, and regularly drunk; they were suspected of being anarchists, of making bombs with which to blow up the Houses of Parliament. And indeed, they were a fierce lot, bridling at any imagined insult and ready to fight with any who dared challenge them. Not infrequently they fought among themselves.

  Crockett did not at that moment want to see them. He had a good deal of sympathy with these shipwrecked survivors of humanity, but they always spelled trouble; he wished to the devil the desk sergeant who had sent them in to him, but his antennae began to quiver when he learned they’d come to the police asking for help in tracing a fellow countryman of theirs – or rather, fellow countrywoman. Her name was Rosa Tartaryan and she hadn’t been seen for two months. That ‘two months’ was what made him sit up and take notice. The exact date was even more significant, for it was the day before the murder at Belmonde Abbey.

  Many women – amongst the sad stream who constantly disappeared in London – had been reported missing at that time, but none, for one reason and another, could have been the one the police had been seeking. Could this really be the break in the case he’d been hoping for? Crockett told himself this would probably be just another false trail, without really believing it.

  It was too late to ask the men to identify the body; she’d been buried long ago – just another unexplained death among the hundreds regularly coming to the attention of the police: mostly poor people without hope, down on their luck, homeless or dying of disease or starvation. The rich were rich but the lives of the poor were indeed ‘nasty, brutish and short.’

  But he did still have the sketches PC Barton had made of the corpse – and there were, of course, the clothes.

  The elder Saroyan rested his melancholy gaze on the sketch for a long time. It was a worthy attempt, a truthful enough representation of the dead woman’s features, but Crockett wondered yet again how anyone would be capable of recognising a breathing, sentient human being whom they had known, and perhaps loved, from it, though certainly the couple in Yorkshire, the Crowthers, had been adamant she was not anyone they had ever known. The man fingered the heavy woollen coat and skirt, nodded when he saw the Gladstone bag. But it was when he saw the hat that he broke down. Tears brimmed in his sad, dark eyes as he touched the cheap metal brooch, with its pathetic little chip of amber. “She is dead.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I am very sorry.” And so Crockett was, beneath the elation he felt that the identity of the murdered woman was no longer a mystery. He explained where she’d been found, and the circumstances of her death, and was met by stares of grief and bewilderment.

  “Rosa?” They exchanged uncomprehending glances. Gevorg was the first to recover himself. He dashed the tears away. “Tell me who did this. I will cut out his heart, I will—”

  His brother laid a restrai
ning hand on his knee.

  “Tell me about her,” said Crockett.

  He had to concentrate hard to penetrate the guttural accent, which grew thicker the more excited Gevorg became, the further the narrative progressed. The men were members of a cell of the Armenian Liberation Movement, exiles based here in London. In their own country, they had been working subversively for the liberation of their people, who were groaning under the yoke of Turkish tyranny. Forced to flee, lucky to escape with their lives, they continued their work here, by setting up printing presses and issuing pamphlets which they distributed whenever they could in an endeavour to stir up British interest (doomed to failure, thought Crockett cynically) in the plight of native Armenians. However, they were sometimes successful in smuggling some of their literature into the homeland and indeed had become a thorn in the flesh of the authorities there. “We are not peasants, we can read and write, we are teachers. In our own country, my brother was a lecturer at the university in Yerevan,” Gevorg stated with pride, and went on to say that they feared worse oppression there was still to come. “Our oppressors are only waiting to deal our nation a mortal blow. More Armenian blood will be spilt at the dictates from Constantinople! I spit on the Turks! But we shall never, never stop crying Liberty!” The sad eyes lit with a fanatical fervour.

  “All that is true,” put in the younger brother, Stepanos, silent until then. “It is difficult for you, here in Britain, to believe, but our tormentors are intent on nothing less than genocide, nothing will content the Turkish burchers but to wipe our nation from the face of the earth, to drown the Armenian liberation movement in a blood bath. All we have is a dream of creating a free and peaceful Armenia.” He was not as choleric as his brother; his voice held barely an inflexion, yet looking at them, Crockett knew which one he would rather take on. He knew, of course, that most of the Armenians gathered in London were dissidents, exiles from their country because they had lived in fear of imprisonment, or of losing their lives. No conquered people love their rulers – especially when they suffer terrible atrocities such as those he had read of in the newspapers, committed by those who called themselves the Young Turks, but it had all been happening a long way off, to an unknown people in a distant country that was only a name, a pinprick on the map of the world. Now, suddenly, it was in the room with him.

  “It is our enemies who have tracked her down,” declared Gevorg. “They must pay.”

  Crockett was not without sympathy for him. He could understand that as far as they were concerned, enemies lurked around every corner, every footstep behind them in a dark street might herald the approach of someone determined on revenge, or retribution, and he felt he couldn’t rule out the possibility, unlikely as it seemed, that Rosa Tartaryan had indeed been subjected to this fate, perhaps by someone who’d followed her and strangled her as an act of revenge, or as a warning to her friends. She had led a dark, secret and potentially dangerous life. But he was reluctant to accept this too easy explanation without reservations. Whether what Gevorg propounded was so or not, what had she been doing out in the woods at Belmonde in the first place?

  “She’s been missing for two months. Why did you not come to us before this?”

  There had quite often been times when they had not seen her for several weeks, Gevorg shrugged, taking up the tale again. It appeared that Rosa, though an exceedingly zealous member of the organisation, had found a position which had taken her away from them, but it paid such an excellent salary that it had justified her temporarily giving up active work for the movement; the exiles were always in dire need of money, and she contributed almost everything she earned to the common fund. She had gone to live in with her employer, although she had returned as often as possible to the house where most of her friends lodged, or to one of the cafés where they met. In between her visits, they had not kept in touch; it was safer that way.

  “Safer? Was there some reason her employer shouldn’t know about her private life?”

  “It is always safer, my friend, that the left hand should not know what the right is doing,” said Stepanos.

  Crockett appreciated that secrecy and caution must by now be ingrained, while thinking at the same time that the occupation Rosa had taken up was a very innocent one, that of companion-housekeeper to a widow. Her English, according to the brothers at any rate, was very good, and she was also a fine cook, so she’d had no difficulty in being accepted for the position. She lived well and comfortably and best of all, she was able to put extra money into the exiles’ kitty from time to time, since she was often given presents of money by the woman for whom she worked.

  “What was the name of this generous employer?”

  She was a Mrs Hannah Smith, and she lived, they believed, in north London. More than that, they had never been told. Rosa, it seemed, had carried the code of secrecy to extremes, though her compatriots didn’t appear to find anything unusual in this.

  “Did she ever go to Yorkshire?”

  They looked blank, perhaps never having heard of Yorkshire.

  “Maybe with her employer? To the West Riding?” he pressed, able by now to quote the name and address found on the slip of paper by heart. But he drew blank. The brothers were evidently as nonplussed as he was as to why Rosa should have had this in her bag.

  As they prepared to leave, Gevorg asked if he might have the brooch. “I gave it to her,” he said, looking at the cheap little trinket as he might have looked at the Kohinoor diamond. “She wore it always – for me.”

  “I’ll make arrangements for you to have all her things, as soon as possible. Just leave me your address.”

  When they had gone, Crockett sat down to think, hardly able to believe that things were at last beginning to move. Perhaps he would not now need to ask Agnes to help him. But a moment’s thought showed him that it still might be desirable. And why should he deny himself the opportunity of seeing his beloved?

  Accordingly, he had set off at the appointed time, having had an interesting conversation with Inspector Daffyd Meredith in between. The morning’s fog had indeed lifted by this time, a pale sun had emerged to reveal a hazy autumn day, and now here he was, having smoothed his hair with brilliantine and combed his moustache carefully, made sure that his high collar was spotless, and bought a fresh carnation for his buttonhole and a bunch of Parma violets for Agnes from a flower-girl outside the underground station in the Circus. Why she had chosen this particular place, he couldn’t imagine, except that it was clean and convenient for a hot cup of tea and a nicely toasted and buttered teacake such as he had just consumed, and the presence of ladies was not frowned upon, even without a male escort.

  A waitress approached and asked if there was anything else they wanted.

  “Agnes?”

  Agnes, who had not eaten anything – she was one of those people who seemed to live on air – said no thank you, and pushed her teacake across to Crockett. “Another pot of tea, perhaps,” Crockett said to the waitress, and when she had gone, and the string trio in the corner by the palms was playing the Indian Love Lyrics, which he knew Agnes was very fond of, and which might soften her to agree to what he was about to ask, he reached across the table and took his young lady’s hand.

  “I want to ask you to do something for me, Agnes.”

  “Anything – within reason,” she answered cheerfully, but with a wary gleam in her eye.

  “Do you know a young woman called Louisa Fox, a member of your WPSU? She’s studying to become a doctor.”

  “Yes, of course I know Louisa – quite well, as a matter of fact. She’s not a committed member – yet. But I’m working on her. She does come to meetings occasionally, and addresses envelopes sometimes, that sort of thing. I like her very much, but I have to say she’s one of those who only gives the Movement half-hearted support.”

  Crockett let go her hand. Miss Fox had not struck him as being half-hearted; she had in fact impressed him with her sense and sensibility when she had marched in to see him. “I don
’t suppose it’s a case with her of not having anything else to do with her time,” he said stiffly. “She is committed to her studies.” He realised too late that his choice of words had scarcely been tactful, but he did not like to hear the censoriousness of her tone.

  And Agnes did not like the implied criticism. “Now, John, I won’t have you talking to me like that. I know she has her plate full — but she’s not the only one.”

  Crockett drummed his fingers on the green tile top of the table and looked dark.

  Agnes was exceedingly pretty when she was angry, with her face above the grey fur collar flushed, her chin lifted and her pretty dark blue eyes sparkling and matching the colour of her costume exactly. She wore an extremely becoming hat. He sighed and determined to try to repair the damage of his unthinking remark. But she was not one to hold on to a grievance, and before he could speak, she was smiling again and saying, “What is it you want me to do then, John?”

  His face cleared. He took her hand again, thinking how well the little pearl and garnet ring he had already bought for her would look on her slender fourth finger – or better still, the plain gold band he’d been waiting for nearly two years to slide on. Those pretty hands should be embroidering tablecloths and pillow cases for her bottom drawer, not sewing banners or throwing bags of flour or even worse, bricks. Patience was not one of his virtues and all this unnecessary waiting for their marriage exasperated him. He was by no means wealthy, and could never expect to be, but he earned a good wage and had put by enough to set them up when they were married. He had the sense, however, to know when he was banging his head against a brick wall.

  “Well, Agnes,” he said, forcing his mind from profitless thoughts. “It’s like this …”

  “Let’s get this straight,” said Agnes, who was a woman of direct speech, “you want me to spy on Louisa Fox.”