“We’re dealing with an accusation against the King-”
“Ah, the King. Yes, I wondered how soon we’d get around to that. Are you going to argue that the King needs you and your Bureau because he can’t answer back for himself? You know that’s nonsense. You just get on the wrong side of the monarchy in this country and you’ll very soon find yourself answered. You can say goodbye to promotion and your friends in your profession for a start. You’d be an outcast and you know it.”
And he stared at Ranklin until he nodded and said: “All right, I won’t argue that, then.”
“But don’t get me wrong, Captain. I’d take on the defence of the King myself, and guard his secrets with every law I know because he’s as much right to his secrets as any beggar in the streets. As much but no more.”
Ranklin nodded again. “But the trouble is that a beggar disgraced is just that, but the King brought low affects us all. The whole country. Like it or not, that’s what being a monarchy means. And whether it’s accidental or deliberate, if this country’s being put at risk, that’s where we come in. Not you, perhaps; you’re privileged.”
“Privileged?” Quinton both bridled and showed suspicion, getting a lot into a single word.
“Let me put to you a hypothetical question. Suppose you had a client who lied to you, lied about you, changed his story . . . in every way seemed likely to ruin you. What would you do?”
“I’d have to drop him.”
“In my profession,” Ranklin said mildly, “we call that desertion in the face of the enemy.”
After a silence, Ranklin went on: “Could we just take it that there are some problems you can’t touch? – but we have to? I’m not saying we’re the perfect solution. I’m Army and we’re never the perfect solution, only the last resort.”
Quinton looked at him for a long time, then nodded and sighed. “If we’d spent a hundredth – a thousandth - of our time and money trying to build international laws instead of guns and battleships . . . All right: I accept you – grudgingly – as a last resort, and thank God our civilisation isn’t a fragile thing. It can swallow a bit of law-breaking by men like you without it poisoning the whole system. But only so much, only so many, and God help us all if you ever become the first resort. Too many secret men doing secret things can pull a nation apart, as is happening in Russia. It could happen here. Anywhere,” he added, glancing pointedly at Corinna.
She bridled at having the United States suddenly bracketed with the other nations. “We don’t have a king and we certainly don’t have a bureau of . . . whatnot.”
“You have battleships,” Quinton pointed out.
“Anyhow,” she said, sweeping the US Navy a side, “have you found out whether this rumour’s true?”
She looked from Ranklin to O’Gilroy, who was looking at Ranklin, who was looking abstractedly at the floor. Did someone, he was wondering, really murder a man to disgrace a king? And kidnap and plan to murder a young girl for that? Then he half woke up and said absently: “What? Oh, that, yes. I met the woman’s sister when I was down in Portsmouth and she-”
“You did what?” Quinton asked.
“When I was looking for traces of Mrs Langhorn, I found her sister who was also looking.”
“Mrs Langhorn has no sister,” Quinton said flatly.
Ranklin woke up some more.
Quinton said: “When I took on Grover Langhorn as a client, I went rather carefully into what relatives he might have in this country – people who could visit him in jail, or give evidence as to his character. I’ve had his grandparents traced – they’re all dead – and his mother’s two brothers, who emigrated together to South Africa. She never had a sister.”
Ranklin said slowly: “This was a Mrs Simmons who seemed to know quite a bit about Mrs Langhorn’s life – when she was Enid Bowman – in Portsmouth. Personal things you’d only tell a sister.”
“Nevertheless, I can assure you-”
“Ye met Mrs Langhorn herself,” O’Gilroy said.
In the back of the taxi, Ranklin was trying to recall all he could of “Mrs Simmons”. “She was talking of Enid Bowman as a young actress and she said she’d been ‘unlucky’. She didn’t say ‘untalented’ or ‘not much good’. You wouldn’t say that about yourself, would you? You’d say ‘unlucky’. Oh blast!”
O’Gilroy said: “I should’ve worried more, with her turning up like that to answer jest the questions we was looking to be answered. And leaving her hotel address everywhere we was looking so’s we’d be blind not to fall over her.”
“I should have taken you with me to meet her.”
“I’d never have seen a thing. ’Twas all there in jest the finding of her, and I should’ve thought of it then.”
Ranklin glanced suspiciously at him, but O’Gilroy wasn’t giving him an oblique lecture, he really did blame himself as much as Ranklin. It was a comfort, but a bleak one. He’d had Mrs Langhorn, probably the key to the whole thing, in his grasp and let her slip away.
Could she have planned the deception all by herself? How could he know? He’d come away feeling he knew something, however little, about the woman he’d met – but now he knew she’d fooled him, he obviously hadn’t understood a thing. So she could have done anything. Except, of course, pay for it alclass="underline" the crossing to England, several nights at the Queen’s Hotel (she couldn’t be sure when she’d be found) plus a decent outfit and luggage. All that certainly hadn’t come from the purse of a woman living in La Villette.
It was a slightly less bleak comfort that he’d been duped by a conspiracy, not just one middle-aged woman.
“What’d ye have done if ye’d known ’twas her?”
Ranklin was still thinking back to Portsmouth. “Something else she was saying . . . not actually any one thing, more just the way she seemed to be thinking. As if Grover really had a right to the throne . . .” But had that, too, been part of the deception? Or the dream that made each new day in La Villette bearable? Aunt to the King hadn’t sounded like much, but mother . . . And mothers could certainly assume glittering futures for their sons; his own had once been sure he was a future Field Marshal.
“I asked ye: what’d ye have done if ye’d known who she was?” O’Gilroy persisted.
Ranklin shook his head. “God knows . . .”
Back at the office, the Commander had got impatient with keeping a lonely vigil in his own sanctum and was slumped in the most comfortable chair in the agents’ room. Jay, who had bought the chair, was sitting on a hard one at the telephone. He called off hurriedly as Ranklin came in. O’Gilroy had stopped off at the switchboard to start his round of calls to Paris.
“Well?” the Commander demanded.
Ranklin said to Jay: “Get on to the Queen’s Hotel at Portsmouth and see if Mrs Simmons is still there – and anything they can tell us.” He flopped into a chair. “What’s the position at the Yard?”
“They’re fuming about the usual things,” the Commander said. “Have you got anything new?”
“The last straw – the last one I found out about – is that I was probably talking to Mrs Langhorn herself at Portsmouth. Pretending to be her non-existent sister. I had her – and I let her walk away.”
“Hmm.” The Commander thought about this. “Well, just having her wouldn’t have solved our problems in the long run.”
Ranklin said nothing.
“Then is that all?” the Commander asked.
“We’re definitely up against a conspiracy.”
The Commander snorted. “Even I can see that. Murder, kidnapping, motor-cars . . . All that isn’t the work of one retired loose woman and her son – who’s in jail anyway. But who is it the work of? – this Gorkin fellow?”