But apparently the Criminal Investigation Department’s darling was ‘indisposed’. Or he had holiday booked. The rumours varied and Darbishire believed none of them. Nothing short of his own deathbed would keep George Venables away from something he really wanted. So here was Darbishire, a mere detective inspector, along with his trusty, useless sergeant, Woolgar, in charge of the whole shebang, and expected to be grateful instead of suspicious, which he was.
He stood at the entrance to Cresswell Place, a cobbled street of mismatched two-storey mews houses just off the Old Brompton Road. Darbishire happened to know, because his uncle Bill was interested in etymology, that ‘mew’ referred to the moulting feathers of birds of prey, and the first mews – on the site of the present National Gallery in Trafalgar Square – was built to house the king’s hunting hawks while they moulted. Uncle Bill wasn’t so interested in the monarchy, so Darbishire didn’t know which king, but one long ago enough to have gone hawking.
That mews burned down and was replaced by stables for the royal horses, which kept the name. Afterwards, mews streets like this were built to house the horses, carriages and, later, the cars and servants of the grandest London houses. Since the war, hardly anyone could afford servants like before, so these places had become chichi little pieds-à-terre for the posh set. From hawks to horses, and from housemaids to Hooray Henrys. Uncle Bill would sniff at them: once a home for horseshit, always a home for horseshit. But now, it seemed they were good enough for the Dean of Bath and his ilk. And for men with their high-class escorts dripping in diamonds.
The house rented by the Dean of Bath at number 44 was a two-up-one-down affair in faded pastel pink, which had originally been built to serve one of the grand Chelsea villas of the Boltons. Like most of its neighbours, it retained the inbuilt garage it came with. According to the dean, the garage space was rented separately for parking a vintage motor, and the owner of the vehicle confirmed this. There was no longer an internal door between the garage and the rest of the house, and no indication the garage had been used that night, so that person was out of the frame for now.
‘I don’t see why we have to go back inside. We’ve got the pictures,’ Detective Sergeant Woolgar muttered.
Len Woolgar was six foot four, built like a brick shithouse, and unbelievably lazy for a man in mint condition. Put him in a rowing boat on the river and he was a demon – practically Olympic standard, so they said at the Yard, which was why he’d joined the force. The Metropolitan Police boat crew was top class. But put him on an actual police job, requiring thought and dedication to duty, and he was a liability. He was usually hungry. He would be now, but he’d had two egg sandwiches for tea before they left. A third created an unsightly bulge in the pocket of his coat.
‘It’s not the same if you can’t stand in the room and look around it,’ Darbishire told him. ‘We might miss something.’ By which he meant he might miss something. Woolgar would miss everything, guaranteed.
The constable guarding the front door of number 44 gave them a respectful nod. ‘Afternoon, sir. Sergeant.’
‘Any trouble?’
‘Only a few pressmen. Nothing I can’t handle. There’s one at the far end taking a picture of you now.’
‘So there is.’
Darbishire took the house key from his pocket and let himself inside. Woolgar followed.
‘Watch yourself on the—’
‘Arse!’
The sergeant had beaned himself on the low door lintel again. You’d think, being six foot four, you’d learn to duck eventually.
The door opened straight on to a long, narrow living room with a kitchenette at the back, the right-hand half of the downstairs space being taken up by the garage. At the far end, a little window above a Belfast sink overlooked a small yard with an ivy-covered wall. Woolgar’s presence seemed to fill the modest seating area at the front, where the canasta game had taken place. It was furnished with two rickety card tables and bits of old mahogany furniture that still showed evidence of a dusting with fingerprint powder.
The only new piece was a chrome drinks trolley, well stocked, which Darbishire suspected was the tenant’s own addition. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a senior member of the Church of England to be a demon with a cocktail shaker but, having met the man, Darbishire suspected he probably was.
Clement Moreton and his three fellow members of the Artemis Club had made liberal use of the trolley on the night of the thirty-first. The dean had treated them to a cocktail of his own construction featuring lemon juice and vodka. He claimed that was the cause of his headache the following morning and the reason he told the charlady not to linger any longer than strictly necessary, and not to clean upstairs.
‘She’s noisy. She rattles round the place like a Sherman tank. I don’t make a mess. I’d only been there overnight and I was going home that day anyway, so I assumed another week wouldn’t make much difference before she changed the sheets . . .’
The guests that night had comprised a university professor who had been friends with Clement Moreton since his Oxford days, a widely respected circuit judge and a canon at Westminster Abbey. All were known to each other, but did not socialise as a unit. According to their matching testimonies, each man had been out of sight of the others for a matter of a few minutes, no more.
To Darbishire’s right, an open staircase was set against the wall that divided the living area from the garage. Between hands of canasta, Moreton and the other three men went upstairs once each to use the facilities. There was no lavatory downstairs – no room for one.
Darbishire thought back to the pathologist’s comment from an hour and a half ago.
‘Not my place to do your job for you, but if one of those highfalutin clubmen card players did it, I’ll eat my hat.’
Darbishire’s own visit to the Artemis Club yesterday had proved a disappointment. It sounded a grander institution than it was, physically at least – which was little more than a doorway off a street near Piccadilly, leading up to a few rooms for drinking and gaming and a private dining room. He wondered if Bertie Wooster’s Drones Club was a bit like this. Except that one had a swimming pool, so possibly not.
Anyway, pool or no pool, membership of the Artemis included half the aristocracy and most of the Cabinet. Darbishire knew a thing or two about what went on in those exalted circles and wouldn’t put anything past them. The problem was not where the dean and his guests came from, but the layout of the mews house when they got here. There was simply no way to murder two people upstairs in the way it was done and come down those open stairs without your physical appearance afterwards being observed by all concerned. So, either they were all in it together or the guests, at least, were innocent. They claimed not to know anything about the couple upstairs, but then they would, wouldn’t they?
He climbed the stairs with a heavy tread. He knew what lay ahead.
‘The one thing I don’t get, sir,’ Woolgar said on the way up – and Darbishire was intrigued by what was coming next, because there were at least a dozen things he himself didn’t get – ‘is, you know, the couple . . . Why they didn’t, you know . . . do it.’