Death Has Deep Roots Read online

  A warm June afternoon on the cricket field. The smell of a motor-mower; the maddening, indescribable, never-forgotten sound of an old leather cricket ball on a well-oiled cricket bat. That was the first picture. Then a country house, near Basingstoke, in the autumn of 1942. Coming into the lounge and suddenly recognising a back. “Good heavens, sir, fancy seeing you.” “Young Rumbold, isn’t it. What are you doing here?” The same as you, sir, I expect.” That was the sort of way people cropped up in wartime. That house near Basingstoke was one of the training schools for the Free French Forces and their helpers. Nap was a learner – he was due to spend some months near Besançon before D-Day. Major Eric Thoseby was already an old hand, installed and in charge of the Basse Loire, but now home for a short spell of Staff talks and a refresher course in the new daylight sensitive fuse. A café in Sedan, in August, 1944—

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, becoming aware that Mr. Spence was asking him a question. “I was thinking – by the way, how does Thoseby come into it?”

  “He was found,” said Mr. Spence patiently, “in March of this year, in a hotel in Pearlyman Street. He had been stabbed with a knife. That is the crime of which Mademoiselle Lamartine is accused.”

  “I see,” said Nap.

  The affair had come quite close to him, and he was thinking about it properly now.

  “If she killed Eric Thoseby,” he said, “I should be the last solicitor in London to undertake her defence.”

  “Certainly,” said Mr. Spence. “The basis of her defence, of course, is that she did not kill him.”

  “Of course. That’s the only line she could take.”

  “Not quite,” said Mr. Spence. “Our case, if I might speak perfectly frankly, would have been that it was not proved that she had killed him – and even if she had been found guilty of killing him, that she had a certain measure of justification.”

  “I see,” said Nap. He also saw why Miss Lamartine had wanted to change her professional advisers. “What is the next move?”

  “She wants to see you.”

  “Now!”

  “There is very little time to spare,” said Mr. Spence. “As I was telling you, the trial opens at the Central Criminal Court on Monday – the day after tomorrow.”

  “There certainly isn’t,” said Nap. “Are you coming with me?”

  “I have made all the necessary arrangements,” said Mr. Spence. “But I’m afraid I shall not be able to accompany you. It is her express desire that she should see you alone.”

  An hour later Nap was talking across a bare table to Victoria Lamartine.

  It was an interview which, by all the rules, should have been dramatic, even passionate. It was, in fact, businesslike and quite short. Mademoiselle Lamartine did almost all the talking and the measure of her success was that Nap, who had come to the interview determined to say No, went away twenty minutes later with a full promise of assistance.

  Victoria Lamartine was no beauty. She was nearer to thirty than twenty and her figure, in five years’ time, would be unhesitatingly described as dumpy. The skill with which her hair was done did not conceal the fact it was basically straight and mouse-coloured. But all, to Nap’s mind, was saved by the eyes. Not only were they kind eyes, but from them looked that intellectual honesty which would seem to be bred in the bones of a certain sort of French girl: a nation famed for looking on facts as they are.

  “I appeal to you, Mr. Rimbault,” she said, and Nap was absurdly charmed, at the outset of the interview, by hearing his name in its original French form, “for you alone in London are a lawyer I can trust.”

  “You are too kind.”

  Mademoiselle Lamartine brushed this aside.

  “First you must understand,” she said. “I did not kill Major Thoseby.”

  “I see.”

  “I did not have a child of him. I had a child, yes. A boy. He would now be five years old, but he died. He was not of Major Thoseby. He was of another man.”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not hate Major Thoseby. Why should I? The child was not of him. Why should I hate him?”

  “Why indeed?”

  “Now you understand.”

  “Mademoiselle,” said Nap, “I understand nothing. If you would be so kind as to begin at the beginning, telling me, as concisely as possible, what has happened to bring you—” he waved a hand round with an infinitely delicate gesture—“to bring you here. Also, if it will assist you, pray speak in French.”

  “Voyons: un expośe.”

  She spoke composedly, with an indifference bordering on disinterest: as if she was a spectator of the misadventures she described. Nap, who spent a great part of his professional life in ordering facts into logical sequences, found time to admire the performance even whilst he listened intently to the performer.

  It was a strange enough story.

  At the end of it the girl asked, with the first hint of concern that Nap had yet detected in her voice and in her eyes, “You will help me?”

  “Yes,” said Nap. He spoke absently. He had made the decision ten minutes before.

  “Good. Then since I am now your client you may cease to call me Mademoiselle Lamartine. ‘Mademoiselle’ does not well become the mother of a child. And Lamartine is a name no Englishman can pronounce. Not even you, and your French is very good. I do not flatter you. But even you cannot place the stress evenly on the second syllable as it should go. Will you call me Vicky – or Victoria, if you wish to be more formal.”

  “Vicky will do,” said Nap. “Now tell me one more thing. Why did you change your mind? About your lawyer, I mean.”

  “It was after the first court – I do not understand your judicial system – it wants for logic.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Nap. “The police courts, I expect you mean.”

  “Yes. The police court. It was that Mr. Poynter. When he spoke to the magistrate, I understood for the first time what he meant. To me he had always been most polite. ‘Yes, mademoiselle’—‘No, mademoiselle’—‘I am quite sure that what you say is the truth, mademoiselle.’ But to the judge – he said something quite else. He said, ‘This woman is guilty.’ Not in those words, but I could hear it in his voice. He said, ‘She is guilty. But because she is a woman and because she is a stranger to this country, and because she has had a child and has been deceived by this man who is older than she, you must not be too severe.’”

  “That’s all right,” said Nap. “I thought that was it. I just wanted to be sure.”

  He was not surprised. He had heard it himself, an hour before, in the thin tones of Mr. Spence.

  Chapter Three

  A telephone call to Scotland brought the disgruntled Mr. Rumbold back to London on the night train, and on Sunday morning, after breakfast, father and son held council.

  ‘Tell me the story first,” said old Mr. Rumbold, “and then we’ll decide – about the other things.”

  “Well,” said Nap, “it’s only her version – but, with that reservation, here it is. She’s French – Parisian. Like a lot of other French girls she had a filthy time during the Occupation. She hasn’t got much left in the way of family. Her father was dead before the war, and her mother, who stayed on in Paris, died some time in 1943 – phthisis, hurried along by under-nutrition, I gather. To start with, she herself didn’t do so badly. She’d been evacuated, in 1940, to an old friend of the family, near Langeais. He was a farmer. A farm meant food. Vicky earned her keep, I don’t doubt, by working in the house. The farmer – Père Chaise – was a thoroughly warmhearted, garrulous, unreliable supporter of the local Maquis. Vicky helped him in that too – just in the same way as she helped him about the house. Ran errands, kept watch, carried food to the ‘active’ Maquisards.”

  “Thousands of French girls did as much, I suppose.”

  Thousands of French girls did as much,” agreed Nap. “I don’t think it makes it any less creditable. It certainly didn’t make it any less unpleasant for them w
hen they were caught – as Vicky was.”

  Nap paused for a moment and looked out of the breakfast-room window, over the sensible, sunlit, rose garden: and tried to re-create in his mind something of life as he had known it in France during those times: the hate and the fear, the hysterics and the exaggeration and the heroism.

  “Here’s where we’ve got to be careful,” he said, “because things which happened at that time always seem, somehow, to get a bit twisted in the telling. From what I know of the way things were worked, I should imagine that Père Chaise’s farm was really a sort of flytrap. The old man was much too noisy to be a conspirator. You can bet your bottom dollar the Gestapo knew all about him. But they let him alone, for the time being, until something really worthwhile should turn up. And in August of 1943 it did turn up, in the form of a British agent – a young and very inexperienced agent, I’m afraid, called Wells – a Lieutenant Julian Wells. I expect the planners in London had their eye on the Basse Loire. It lay in the flank of the turning movement in Normandy which must already have been on their map boards. Quite a lot of agents were flown in. Some were lucky; some weren’t. Wells had been told that his first job was to contact the British officer who was running the district – a very tough and crafty character called Thoseby – Major Eric Thoseby.”

  “Good Lord above,” said Mr. Rumbold, “not that schoolmaster.”

  “That’s the one. You remember him?”

  “Yes. I do. Good heavens! So that was the chap Wells was sent to contact.”

  “Yes,” said Nap. “But he didn’t do it, that was just the trouble. He must have been dropped a bit off-course. He had to do the best he could for himself, and he holed up at the Père Chaise farm; he was there for about three weeks, hidden under a haystack, whilst the local Maquisards went to look for Thoseby. Unfortunately, before they could contact him – he happened to be across the Swiss border – the Gestapo descended on the farm and roped everyone in. Père Chaise and two other men were shot. Vicky, as being somewhat less deeply involved, was locked up whilst they made their minds up about her.”

  “And Wells?”

  “That’s just it,” said Nap. “We don’t know. After a raid of that sort the German policy was to keep the different prisoners separate. They could work on them better that way. One would believe the other had said things – and so on. Of course they told Vicky that they’d got Wells. They had a very good reason to think that they could influence her through him.”

  “You mean?”

  “I mean,” said Nap slowly, “that it soon became apparent that Vicky was going to have a child. Once she knew it was coming, she made no bones about it. She said it was Wells’s child. And to do her justice, she has stuck steadily to that story ever since.”

  “One of them must have been a fast worker,” said Mr. Rumbold. “Two perfect strangers of barely three weeks’ acquaintance—”

  “Well, do you know, I can believe that part of it easily enough,” said Nap. “They were both living under tension – a hothouse sort of life; these things were apt to happen much more quickly than they might in normal times.”

  “And the Germans,” said Mr. Rumbold, “believing this, used threats about what they would do to Wells in order to get information out of this poor girl.”

  “Good Lord, no.” Nap looked mildly at his father. “They could have got any blessed information they wanted out of her in five minutes, with a blowlamp. In any case, I don’t suppose she knew anything useful. As I said, she wasn’t deeply involved. The few actual Maquisard locations which she knew about would have been changed within half an hour of the news of her arrest. No, it was rather more than that. They wanted her to work for them. Then they would have released her and used her as a decoy. But if they were going to play that game they needed a good permanent hold over her. Hence Wells.”

  “She never actually saw him in prison?”

  “No. On one occasion, when she was getting difficult, they produced one of his boots, covered with blood—”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nap. “I really don’t know… the gentle Gestapo I knew would have been more likely to have shown her one of his boots with the foot still in it. Even that wouldn’t have proved anything. You could fake a boot just as easily as you could fake a foot. On balance I’m inclined to think they did have him, but he came to pieces in their hands, so they buried him quietly. Anyway, nothing’s been seen of him since. Time went on, and in the end she had the child, actually in the Gestapo prison hospital, just before D-Day. I don’t suppose it was exactly like a high-class London nursing home, but I think they were reasonably efficient. It was a boy, called Jules – an afterthought for ‘Julian’ perhaps. Then D-Day happened – and she was moved back with a lot of other prisoners, to a place near Strasbourg. They didn’t take her into Germany. Might have been better if they had. You know what France was like during the last year of the war. The baby must have had a hell of a time. He was never very strong. Vicky’s one idea was to get hold of Major Thoseby. She had two reasons for this, she says. He knew about her work with the Resistance, and might have persuaded the British Army authorities to look after the baby. Also he might have known where Wells was. Anyway, that’s her version of it, and it’s got to be borne in mind, in view of what happened later. She never caught up with Thoseby. As soon as his part of France fell he was flown back to London and he got an immediate job on the War Crimes Commission and spent most of the next three years in Germany.

  “After the war things didn’t improve much in France, and Vicky often thought of coming to England. She speaks quite good English, and she still hoped to find Thoseby. Then, in that very lean and very bitter spring of 1947 something did happen – it was sad, but in a way it made things easier. The child died. Vicky took what money she had, wangled her permit and came over and began looking for a job. There she struck oil almost at once – a man called Sainte who came from the same Basse Loire province. She didn’t know him – but he happened to have known Père Chaise. He was running a hotel on Pearlyman Street, near Euston. He knew something of what Vicky had been through – and gave her a job and looked after her. It wasn’t entirely charity. She worked hard for her keep. The French take a pretty realistic view of what constitutes a good day’s work for a woman.”

  “Not a bad thing, in the circumstances,” said Mr. Rumbold.

  “No. It didn’t give her too much time to think about things. Any spare moments she did get were spent pestering the War Office for news of Thoseby – and Wells.”

  “Judging from the upshot,” said Mr. Rumbold dryly, “she anyway succeeded in contacting Major Thoseby.”

  “In fact,” said Nap, “Thoseby found her. The French run an organisation in London – the Société de Lorraine – which keeps an eye on all the French who, for one reason or another, decided to stay on here after the liberation. It’s a sort of offshoot of their Embassy, and it has an office in Charles Street. Thoseby called in at this office when he was on a visit from Germany. He saw the name of Victoria Lamartine and asked the clerk about her. The clerk then remembered that Vicky had been inquiring about a Major Thoseby, did an unusually lucid bit of putting two and two together for a bureaucrat and turned up her address, the upshot of which was that Thoseby wrote to Sainte and booked a room at his hotel for the night of March fourteenth. He wrote on March twelfth, but I gather there was some difficulty at first in fitting the time in, as Thoseby was due back in Germany on the sixteenth and he was busy all day at the War Office. However, that’s the way he arranged it, and he wrote this letter to Sainte, who, of course, told Vicky. On the fourteenth Thoseby telephoned to say he would be at the hotel sometime that same evening.”

  Nap turned over the papers.

  “Various versions of what happened on the evening of March fourteenth can be found in the depositions at the police court—”

  “All right,” said his father. “I’ll read these now.”

  And read them he did, from b
eginning to end, without any comment, whilst Nap sat on the window seat and smoked his pipe and thought about a number of things.

  “This case has been remarkably well cobbled,” said his father at last. “That’ll be Claudian Summers. He started life as a Chancery draftsman and he’s got a most damnably logical mind.”

  Nap nodded his agreement.

  “You know,” went on his father, “there’s only one person who could have done this.”

  “And that’s—?”

  “Your young lady – Miss Lamartine.”

  “That’s rather what Spence and Company thought,” said Nap, “and I rather gather that’s why they’ve had the case taken away from them.”

  “When you say that,” said Mr. Rumbold gently, “you display to my mind a misunderstanding of the role of a legal adviser. I am prepared to take on this case, because I think that I ought to help anyone who went through what Miss Lamartine did, particularly when it was the result of her efforts – even indirect efforts – to help this country. Also I happen to be old – fashioned enough to think that a woman in distress ought to be helped. Especially when she is a foreigner and about to be subjected to the savage and unpredictable caprices of the English judicial system—”Nap had noticed before, in one or two men of his father’s age, a certain conditioning of their adjectives, the result, no doubt, of five years of Churchillian oratory—“but you must not imagine that we are playing the heroes of this melodrama to Spence’s villain. The only real difference between Spence and me is that I happen to be prepared to do some work on this case, whilst he is not. He is quite plainly prepared—” Mr. Rumbold ruffled over the depositions—“to go to the jury on what amounts to an admission of guilt with a plea in extenuation. Now I – assisted by you, Nap – am going to contest every step of the way. We’re going to fight a long, dirty blackguarding campaign in which we shall use every subterfuge that the law allows, and perhaps even a few that it doesn’t – you can’t be too particular when you’re defending. If we can’t get witnesses of our own we must shake up their witnesses. If we can’t shake them, we must discredit them. We’ll have to brief the counsel best suited to such tactics—”