Джозефина Тэй - A Shilling for Candles

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Williams, and was silent until Grant dropped him at the Yard.

“Tell the superintendent I’ll be in as soon as I’ve seen Lord Edward,” Grant said, and was driven on to Regent’s Park.

In an atmosphere of marble mantelpieces and sheepskin rugs he waited half an hour before Champneis arrived.

“How are you, Inspector? I hear from Binns that you’ve been waiting. Sorry to subject you to the furnishings longer than is vitally necessary. I hope you drink tea? But if you don’t there are what my uncle called ‘cordials.’ A much nicer word than ‘drinks,’ don’t you think? Have you news?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry to break in with it when you’re just after a journey.”

“It can’t be worse than the drawing-room lecture of my great-aunt’s yesterday. I only went for the old lady’s sake, but I found that she thought I should have canceled it. It would have been more ‘fitting.’ So tell me the bad news.”

Grant told him what had happened, and he listened gravely, the unusual defensive flippancy gone.

“Is she insane?” he asked, when Grant had finished.

“Yes. Reynolds thinks so. It may be hysteria, but he thinks it’s insanity. Delusions of greatness, you know.”

“Poor wretch. But how did she know where my wife was?”

“Owen Hughes told her in a letter from Hollywood. He forgot that it was a secret that she had taken his cottage. He even mentioned the early-morning swimming.”

“So simple. I see… Was she very expert with a motorboat, then?”

“She had been practically brought up on one, it seems. Used the river constantly. No one would have thought of questioning her comings and goings. She may have made that night journey down the river more than once before the opportunity she was looking for turned up. Curious, but one never thinks of the river as a high road to anywhere. We had considered the possibility of a motorboat, naturally, but not a motorboat from London. Not that it would have helped us very much if it had. The man’s coat she wore was very misleading. Lots of women wear men’s oilskins yachting; but I don’t think it would have occurred to me.”

There was a short silence.

Each man watched in his mind that boat’s journey down the misty river, out to the many-lighted estuary, and along the many-lighted coast. One little town after another, from flaring dockyard lights among the flats to twinkling villa lights among the cliffs, must have lit that progress. But later, there must have been darkness; complete darkness and silence, as the summer fog pressed down on the water. What had her thoughts been, in that time of waiting? Alone, with time to reflect. And with no stars to remind her of her greatness. Or was her madness even then so sure that she had no doubts?

And afterwards – each man watched that, too. The surprise. The friendly greeting. Chris’s green cap bobbing alongside the grey hull – the cap that had never been found. The woman leaning over to talk to her. And then–

Grant remembered those broken nails on Christine’s hands. It had not been so easy, then.

“That finishes the case, sir, but it was really something else that brought me to see you. Another case altogether.”

“Yes? Here’s tea. You needn’t wait, Binns. Sugar, Inspector?”

“I want to know where you took Rimnik.”

Champneis paused with the sugar poised. He looked both surprised and amused and – somehow – admiring.

“He is with friends of Harmer’s, near Tunbridge Wells.”

“May I have the exact address?”

Champneis gave it, and also gave Grant his tea. “Why do you want Rimnik?”

“Because he is in this country without a passport – thanks to you!”

“He was . The office issued him a landing permit this morning. It took a lot of eloquence – Britain the lover of justice, the defender of the persecuted, the home of the righteous homeless: all that stuff – but it worked. Chests still swell in Whitehall, do you know? They were like a collection of pouter pigeons when I finished.” He looked at the inspector’s disapproving face. “I didn’t know that that little business had been a worry to you.”

“Worry!” Grant burst out. “It nearly ruined everything. You and Harmer both lying about what you had done that night –” He found that he was treading on delicate ground and pulled himself up.

But Champneis had understood. “I really am sorry, Inspector. Are you going to arrest me? Can one be arrested retrospectively, so to speak?”

“I don’t think so. I shall have to inquire about it. It would give me great pleasure.” Grant had recovered his temper.

“All right. Let’s postpone the arrest. But tell me how you found out? I thought we’d been so clever.”

“I might never have found out if it hadn’t been for a good bit of work by a young officer – Rimell – at Dover.”

“I must meet Rimell.”

“He found that you and Harmer had met that night and had been worried about the Customs.”

“Yes. Rimnik was in a cupboard in my cabin. It was an exciting half hour. But the customs and harbour masters are only human.”

This Grant took to mean that they knocked off the Champneis pegs and lacked the nerve to knock on the bulkheads. “It was then I began to feel that if I could remember something you had said just before you – misled me about the time of your arrival in Dover, I would have the key to everything. And I remembered it! You said, talking of Galeria: ‘Her only hope is Rimnik. But I doubt if he has the necessary selflessness. He is a Jew. And Jews rarely have that personal disinterestedness that makes a saviour. But he has two valuable subsitutes: the theatricality that makes martyrdom acceptable; and the backing of the whole of his race.’ It was when I remembered that, that I found what you and Harmer had in common. The rest was easy. The Special Branch knew all about Rimnik’s disappearance, his being refused a passport, and Britain’s refusal to have him here. They even knew that he was supposed to be in England but had no confirmation of it. So the motorboat came ashore a second time?”

“That night, you mean? Yes. Harmer drove us over to his friend’s place. He has guts; he was scared stiff, I think, but he went through with it. I see Tisdall has turned up,” he said as Grant rose to go. “That must be an enormous relief to you. Is he ill?”

“No. He has a chill, and he’s overwrought, of course. But I hope he’s going to be all right.”

“In the midday edition I bought at York, I read a harrowing description of his sufferings. Knowing the press, I believed with confidence that not a word of it was true.”

“Not a word. That was just Jammy Hopkins.”

“Who is Jammy Hopkins?”

“Who is –” Words failed the inspector. He looked enviously at Champneis. “Now I know,” he said, “why men go out into the waste places of the earth!”

Herbert Gotobed left England about a month later on his way to explain to the inquisitive police of Nashville, Tennessee, what he had done with the two thousand dollars old Mrs. Kinsley had given him to build a church with.

And on the day that he sailed – although neither party knew of the other’s activities – Erica had a dinner party at Steynes “to take the taste of the last one away,” as she said bluntly to Grant when she invited him. The only addition to the original personnel was Robin Tisdall, and Grant found himself ridiculously relieved to find that her small nose was still as casually powdered, and her frock still as childish as on the first occasion. He was afraid that contact with anyone as good-looking and ill-used as Robin Tisdall would have bred a self-awareness that would be the end of her girlhood. But it seemed as if nothing could make Erica self-conscious. She treated Tisdall with the same grave matter-of-factness she had used when she had told him that his shirt collar was too tight. Grant saw Sir George’s eyes going from one to the other in glad amusement. Their glances met, and moved by a common impulse the two men raised their glasses in a small gesture of mutual congratulation.