Джозефина Тэй - The Daughter of Time

‘Ah, well, here are some more pictures for you.’

Marta up-ended the quarto envelope she was carrying, and spilled a collection of paper sheets over his chest.

‘What is this?’

‘Faces,’ said Marta, delightedly. ‘Dozens of faces for you. Men, women, and children. All sorts, conditions, and sizes.’

He picked a sheet off his chest and looked at it. It was an engraving of a fifteenth-century portrait. A woman.

‘Who is this?’

‘Lucrezia Borgia. Isn’t she a duck.’

‘Perhaps, but are you suggesting that there was any mystery about her?’

‘Oh, yes. No one has ever decided whether she was her brother’s tool or his accomplice.’

He discarded Lucrezia, and picked up a second sheet. This proved to be the portrait of a small boy in late-eighteenth-century clothes, and under it in faint capitals was printed the words: Louis XVII.

‘Now there’s a beautiful mystery for you,’ Marta said. ‘The Dauphin. Did he escape or did he die in captivity?’

‘Where did you get all these?’

‘I routed James out of his cubbyhole at the Victoria and Albert, and made him take me to a print shop. I knew he would know about that sort of thing, and I’m sure he has nothing to interest him at the V. and A.’

It was so like Marta to take it for granted that a civil servant, because he happened also to be a playwright and an authority on portraits, should be willing to leave his work and delve about in print shops for her pleasure.

He turned up the photograph of an Elizabethan portrait. A man in velvet and pearls. He turned the back to see who this might be and found that it was the Earl of Leicester.

‘So that is Elizabeth’s Robin,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I ever saw a portrait of him before.’

Marta looked down on the virile fleshy face and said: ‘It occurs to me for the first time that one of the major tragedies of history is that the best painters didn’t paint you till you were past your best. Robin must have been quite a man. They say Henry the Eighth was dazzling as a young man, but what is he now? Something on a playing card. Nowadays, we know what Tennyson was like before he grew that frightful beard. I must fly. I’m late as it is. I’ve been lunching at the Blague, and so many people came up to talk that I couldn’t get away as early as I meant to.’

‘I hope your host was impressed,’ Grant said, with a glance at the hat.

‘Oh, yes. She knows about hats. She took one look and said “Jacques Tous, I take it.”’

‘She!’ said Grant surprised.

‘Yes. Madeleine March. And it was I who was giving her luncheon. Don’t look so astonished: it isn’t tactful. I’m hoping, if you must know, that she’ll write me that play about Lady Blessington. But there was such a to-ing and fro-ing that I had no chance to make any impression on her. However, I gave her a wonderful meal. Which reminds me that Tony Bittmaker was entertaining a party of seven. Magnums galore. How do you imagine he keeps going?’

‘Lack of evidence,’ Grant said, and she laughed and went away.

In the silence he went back to considering Elizabeth’s Robin. What mystery was there about Robin?

Oh, yes. Amy Robsart, of course.

Well, he wasn’t interested in Amy Robsart. He didn’t care how she had fallen down stairs, or why.

But he spent a very happy afternoon with the rest of the faces. Long before he had entered the force he had taken a delight in faces, and in his years at the Yard that interest had proved both a private entertainment and a professional advantage. He had once in his early days dropped in with his superintendent at an identification parade. It was not his case, and they were both there on other business, but they lingered in the background and watched while a man and a woman, separately, walked down the line of twelve nondescript men, looking for the one they hoped to recognize.

‘Which is Chummy, do you know?’ the super had whispered to him.

‘I don’t know,’ Grant had said, ‘but I can guess.’

‘You can? Which do you make it?’

‘The third from the left.’

‘What is the charge?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t know anything about it.’

His chief had cast him an amused glance. But when both the man and the woman had failed to identify anyone and had gone away, and the line broke into a chattering group, hitching collars and settling ties preparatory to going back to the street and the world of everyday from which they had been summoned to assist the law, the one who did not move was the third man from the left. The third man from the left waited submissively for his escort and was led away to his cell again.

‘Strewth!’ the superintendent had said. ‘One chance out of twelve, and you made it. That was good going. He picked your man out of the bunch,’ he said in explanation to the local inspector.

‘Did you know him?’ the inspector said, a little surprised. ‘He’s never been in trouble before, as far as we know.’

‘No, I never saw him before. I don’t even know what the charge is.’

‘Then what made you pick him?’

Grant had hesitated, analyzing for the first time his process of selection. It had not been a matter of reasoning. He had not said: ‘That man’s face has this characteristic or that characteristic, therefore he is the accused person.’ His choice had been almost instinctive; the reason was in his subconscious. At last, having delved into his subconscious, he blurted: ‘He was the only one of the twelve with no lines on his face.’

They had laughed at that. But Grant, once he had pulled the thing into the light, saw how his instinct had worked and recognized the reasoning behind it. ‘It sounds silly, but it isn’t,’ he had said. ‘The only adult entirely without face lines is the idiot.’

‘Freeman’s no idiot, take it from me,’ the inspector broke in. ‘A very wide-awake wide boy he is, believe me.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean that the idiot is irresponsible. The idiot is the standard of irresponsibility. All those twelve men in that parade were thirtyish, but only one had an irresponsible face. So I picked him at once.’

After that it had become a mild joke at the Yard that Grant could ‘pick them at sight.’ And the assistant commissioner had once said teasingly: ‘Don’t tell me that you believe that there is such a thing as a criminal face, Inspector.’

But Grant had said no, he wasn’t as simple as that. ‘If there was only one kind of crime, sir, it might be possible; but crimes being as wide as human nature, if a policeman started to put faces into categories he would be sunk. You can tell what the normal run of disreputable women look like by a walk down Bond Street any day between five and six, and yet the most notorious woman in London looks like a cold saint.’

‘Not so saintly of late; she’s drinking too much these days,’ the A.C. had said, identifying the lady without difficulty; and the conversation had gone on to other things.

But Grant’s interest in faces had remained and enlarged until it became a conscious study. A matter of case records and comparisons. It was, as he had said, not possible to put faces into any kind of category, but it was possible to characterize individual faces. In a reprint of a famous trial, for instance, where photographs of the principal actors in the case were displayed for the public’s interest, there was never any doubt as to which was the accused and which the judge. Occasionally, one of the counsel might on looks have changed places with the prisoner in the dock – counsel were after all a mere cross-section of humanity, as liable to passion and greed as the rest of the world, but a judge had a special quality; an integrity and a detachment. So, even without a wig, one did not confuse him with the man in the dock, who had had neither integrity nor detachment.