Gavin Lyall - Honourable Intentions

Ranklin was waiting in Noah Quinton’s outer office when the solicitor bustled in at a quarter past nine the next morning. He stopped abruptly when he saw Ranklin, then said: “Yes, you’d better come in,” and bustled on through.

As Ranklin had half expected, Quinton’s office was not just grand, but self-consciously so. There was nothing in it that a long-established and successful solicitor might not have in the way of antique desk, Turkish carpet, silver ashtrays and client chairs covered in dark green plush, but they should have been stained and worn, as if the owner didn’t think or care about them. Quinton obviously cared, and you didn’t want to be the first to spill coffee or drop cigar-ash.

“I suppose,” Quinton said, unpacking papers from a briefcase on to his desk, “that I have you to thank for a new client. I’m getting a little too old to be hauled from my bed in the early hours, but the Mrs Finn connection is . . . welcome, shall we say?”

Ranklin, sitting uneasily in an easy chair, just smiled.

“I suppose you want to know what happened.” Quinton sat down and automatically shifted his chair by fractions of an inch to just how he liked it. “Well, it’s not privileged . . . The police haven’t charged Ma’mselle Collomb with anything, they’d only detained her but were clearly going to hang on to her for as long as they could. I got her released on bail, put up by Mrs Finn, who’s now looking after her.”

Ranklin frowned; he hadn’t expected that, and Corinna wouldn’t have, either. He was going to hear more about it. Considerably more.

“The police objected to Ma’mselle Collomb going back to her Bloomsbury address. They made it out to be a community -” a very suspect word, that, “- of intellectual depravity. My own brief impression of Ma’mselle Collomb is that she could teach any Bloomsbury intellectual more about depravity than he could stomach – but that’s neither here nor there. So she’s now officially in the care of Mrs Finn.”

“Did Ma’mselle Collomb say anything interesting?” Ranklin asked casually. “Or tell the police anything?”

Quinton looked at him warily, but Ranklin was all boyish innocence. So Quinton said: “I wouldn’t say so . . . The police didn’t even seem certain that Guillet’s death was murder.”

“They can’t be,” Ranklin said. “Death was due to a mixture of asphyxia and shock. Not enough water in the lungs and stomach for drowning. There had been a heavy blow to the head, above the right ear, some time before death, but it’ll take more time to work out if it was long enough to suggest he’d been deliberately whacked. It might have been him hitting a moored boat or river steps – they don’t even know where he went into the water. He hadn’t got enough alcohol in him to have been drunk.”

After a time, Quinton said: “I suppose I hadn’t better ask you where you got such remarkably exact information.”

“Take it as some small recompense for having to get up so early.” And for what was to come.

Quinton nodded, quickly, birdlike. “So it may be that the police can persuade the coroner to write it off as an accident if they can’t induce anyone to confess to it. Or does your behind-the-scenes knowledge give you a different opinion?”

“We have professionally suspicious minds,” Ranklin said, “so naturally we incline to murder. But I suppose accidents do happen, even to important witnesses in the middle of a case. And concerning that, what’s going to happen now Guillet’s dead?”

Mention of the case made Quinton look at his watch; there was a clock on the wall, but it looked too expensively antique to be trusted. “That’s up to the magistrate. The French will fight tooth and nail to keep Langhorn in custody until they can come up with something, and I shall fight just as hard to have the matter wound up. Knowing this magistrate, I think he’ll adjourn until Monday now, and hope for divine guidance over the sabbath.

“But remember, even if Langhorn’s freed, he won’t have been declared innocent. Extradition isn’t about guilt or innocence, so there’s no double jeopardy involved. The French could ask for him to be re-arrested on new evidence – if they can find it.”

“And if they can find him,” Ranklin mused. “I’d think he’d be off home to America like a shot from a gun.”

Quinton nodded. “And America won’t extradite one of its own citizens.”

But did the Bureau want young Grover – and presumably his mother – landing in America stony-broke and looking to raise cash from the American scandal sheets? Incautiously, he said: “I’m not sure we’d like that, either.”

“I’m sorry if that displeases you,” Quinton said, dryly sarcastic. “Does that mean that you’ve been investigating further, and found there was something to investigate?”

But it had to come to this anyway, and this was one of the reasons Ranklin had come, though it still wasn’t going to be easy. “I was down in Portsmouth yesterday looking for traces of Mrs Langhorn, the boy’s mother. There was a Portsmouth address on the marriage certificate. I had to have some sort of excuse so I, er, said I was working for you.”

“Did you?” Quinton considered this. “And did you learn anything?”

“Nothing of relevance to Grover Langhorn’s case.”

“Oh? I think I might be the better judge of that.”

Ranklin said nothing. Quinton leant forward, chin on hands, elbows on desk, expression stern. “Let me see if I’ve got this right: without my permission, you posed as an investigator working for me, but you won’t tell me what you found out – is that correct?”

No, it was not going to be easy. Ranklin did his best at a disarming smile; at least his features ran to that. “Well, more or less, but-”

“Captain Ranklin -” Quinton threw himself back in his chair “- when we first met, I assumed you must be Palace officials or liaison between them and the Prime Minister. I’m sure such people exist, and it seemed quite reasonable that, moving in the circles she does, Mrs Finn should know them. It seems I underestimated the width of her acquaintance; judging from your behaviour, I do believe that you and your precious Commander are from the Secret Service.”

It was said with such contempt that Ranklin recoiled. He knew that the Bureau and spying generally weren’t held in high regard, but what right had a Jew lawyer to sneer at him? Then he recoiled again, only inwardly this time, and took a hasty glance at his own prejudices. He hadn’t (he told himself) been despising Quinton for being . . . well, what he was. But perhaps he had been secretly hoping the man would do or say something so that he could despise him anyway.

“Or, at the very least,” Quinton added, “take it that your conduct leads me to that conclusion.”

Ranklin squeezed out a smile. “If we were what you suggest, then obviously we’d deny it. But whoever we are, you must have known we’d have to follow this up in a rather surreptitious manner. And I thought you were happy to remain ignorant of that and concentrate on the legal end.”

“True. But I then believed, rashly it seems, that you could do such following without pretending that I was behind it. So in effect, you’ve been spreading the idea that I sought and have now got knowledge that I didn’t seek and haven’t, in fact, got. What sort of position does that leave me in?”

“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

“I wish I had a penny for every time someone has told me, in this very office, that there was ‘nothing to worry about’ or so-and-so ‘wouldn’t do that’ and so on. My whole professional life is worrying about such things. Trying to make legally sure of things my clients are certain about already. Believe me, they shriek loud enough when I fail. So unless you tell me exactly what you’ve learnt, I’m sure you’ll understand that I reserve my position on this.”