‘But you must know what the gossip is? I’m not asking for a statement of facts. Who is thought to be behind Dorman?’
‘Quite honestly, I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But I do know this: Burston didn’t make a pile in Mexican oil and Cappock didn’t strike lucky in Rhodesia. They were both of them down and out before they returned to England.’
‘You mean they were both broke? Yet they returned to England and immediately plunged up to the hilt in Calboyds?’
He nodded. ‘That’s about it. Considering what big holdings they have, they don’t live over well. Burston has a little place down at Alfriston and Cappock lives quite quietly at a London hotel.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.
His face creased into a smile. ‘You needn’t worry about my source of information. It’s all true enough.’
‘Why don’t you use your knowledge? I should have thought it would have been in your line.’
‘So did I — at first. But I know which side my bread is buttered.’
‘How do you mean?’
But he did not answer my question and I saw that his eyes were fixed on the doorway. I turned in my chair and saw the neat rather podgy figure of Max Sedel entering the room. Instinctively I turned to conceal my face. But I was not quick enough. For a second his small steely eyes met mine and I saw him half-check in his stride. Then, with a brief nod of recognition, he passed on to the bar.
‘My bête noire,’ said Evelyn Ward in a low tone. ‘What do you know of him?’ I asked.
‘He’s an adept at my own game. He’s in here or one of the other clubs practically every day, pumping people.’ Then he outlined for me Sedel’s story, much as Henderson had told it to me. But he added one point which I thought significant. ‘He hates Jews,’ he said. ‘That’s his weak point, for he finds it difficult to hide his hatred of them, and you know how lousy the City is with Jews.’
I laughed. ‘Well, anyway, that’s a good sign,’ I said. ‘If the City is full of Jews even when there’s a war on, things can’t be so bad.’ An American once told me that he followed the migration of the Jew from capital to capital on the principle that the place the Jews were flocking to was the place where there was money. The American had been in London in 1933 and England was the first country to recover from the Great Slump. I began pumping Ward for more information about the Calboyd control, but either he knew nothing more, or else he did not want to talk. ‘Why don’t you go and see Dorman or one of the other two dummies?’ he suggested.
‘Not a bad idea,’ I said, rising to my feet. A frontal attack might at any rate rattle them.
When I got outside the club, I found it raining. It was prematurely dark, and the lights blazed in rows in the windows of the offices on the other side of Threadneedle Street. It was like the old days before the black-out. Behind me loomed the bulk of the Royal Exchange, and as I came out into Threadneedle Street I saw the long façade of the Bank. Opposite me, dominating the junction of Old Broad Street and Threadneedle Street, stood the imposing granite bulk of Marburgs, the big merchant banking house, with its somewhat indecently blatant sign of an eagle sweeping down upon its prey blazoned in gold above the massive bronze doors. I cut down Old Broad Street, past the Stock Exchange and into Austin Friars.
Needless to say, I got nothing out of Ronald Dorman. And yet I did not feel that the visit had been wasted. The extraordinary thing was that I felt as though I had been expected. An exquisite young man took my coat and hat, and with the minimum of delay I was ushered into Ronald Dorman’s luxurious office. The whole place was ostentatiously sumptuous. From its thick-piled carpets to its heavy gilt-framed pictures, it was designed to impress. ‘Cigar, Mr Kilmartin?’ A deferential air and a glimpse of white teeth behind the little black moustache was symbolic of the whole atmosphere of debonair success that the man affected. Ronald Dorman spared no pains in the dressing of his window. But it was not only dressing. He was astute. I lit my cigar and then, as I blew out the flame of my match, I said, ‘Who is behind Calboyds, Mr Dorman?’ I put it quietly, hoping to catch him on the hop.
But he didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘What has that to do with you?’ he countered.
In the end I had to be satisfied with the assurance that he was the owner of his own holding. But not before my persistence had rattled him a bit. It wasn’t noticeable in his manner. He was charming and very patient with my thirst for knowledge, but I noticed that his long, rather artistic fingers were never still.
Ronald Dorman was my last call of the day, and in the gathering black-out I joined the rush-hour crowd that surged towards the Bank. I found an empty taxi, and within ten minutes was back at my digs. There had been no phone-calls for me, but would I join Miss Smith in her room for tea. I went upstairs to find Freya lounging on her bed, eating crumpets and reading. She seemed glad to see me and thanked me for the chocolates. She jumped up and settled me down in a chair by the gas-fire with tea and a crumpet. ‘Look,’ she said, and thrust the morning paper into my hand. ‘It’s down in black and white now for all the world to see.’
She was excited, and well she might be, for there in print was what Crisham had told me on the phone the previous day. Franz Schmidt was no longer wanted for murder. But the story explained that the police wanted to discover his whereabouts as they were afraid that he, too, might have suffered harm. ‘If he’s at liberty, I hope he sees it,’ I said. I carefully refrained from saying ‘if he is alive’.
‘Oh, I hope so, too,’ she said, with a mouth full of crumpet. ‘Mustn’t it feel marvellous, when you’ve been hunted for three weeks for a murder you didn’t commit, suddenly to find that you’ve been given an alibi.’
I was just putting the paper down, when my eye caught sight of a small paragraph farther down in the next column headed: CAR OVER BEACHY HEAD. My eye had caught the name Burston. It was my Burston all right. John S. Burston of Woodlands, the Butts, Alfriston. His car had apparently gone over the cliff near Birling Gap. The paragraph explained that it had been a foggy night and that Burston had been to a party. Coming down the road from Beachy Head to Birling Gap, he had apparently mistaken the road under the Belle Toute and driven straight over the cliff.
Freya sensed my change of mood and asked me what was wrong. There was no point in bringing sudden death into the conversation, so I handed her back the paper and gave an account of my activities during the day. After all, people did get drunk and miss the road. But Beachy Head is associated in my mind with suicides, not accidents. I saw the sheer white cliff under the Belle Toute lighthouse and pictured the wreckage at the foot washed by the chalky sea. Death was so certain that way. And why had Burston been driving along that road at all? He lived at Alfriston. The road to Birling Gap was all right. But to get home, he had to take the track to East Dean. I knew it well. It was a terribly bad surface and not the road one would choose in thick mist.
I suppose my preoccupation was obvious as I ran quickly through the various interviews I had had, for Freya picked up the paper and began searching for the page at which it was folded. And when I had finished she said, ‘Won’t you tell me what is on your mind, Mr Kilmartin? It was something you saw in the paper, wasn’t it?’
I said that it was nothing, just a thought that had crossed my mind. But she was insistent, and in the end I told her.
She read the paragraph through, a frown wrinkling her usually smooth brow. Then she looked across at me. ‘My father once mentioned the name Burston to me,’ she said. ‘He was talking to Evan Llewellin, but I happened to be present. They were discussing Calboyds and I remember him saying that he thought Burston the weak link.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
But she shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘are you certain you have told us everything you know? Didn’t your father discuss the position with you?’