Mr. Campion's Farthing

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

Variation on a Theme

The man who stood like a block of grey stone at the edge of a belt of elm trees was looking down a gentle slope towards his intended victim. For several minutes he had not moved, partly to make sure that he was quite alone but also because he was absorbed by the technical side of the problem.

There was the possibility of incidental death, which would be rated as murder, but this was no longer a deciding factor. He had already balanced risk against precaution, penalty against reward and now after days of waiting the odds were in his favour.

The night wind was blowing in gusts from the southeast, the perfect direction for his purpose. It made the evergreens in the garden below him chatter together: they and the outhouse doors nagging at their latches would conceal any betraying footfall.

To his left a bolster of cloud reflected the sodium street lights of London whose fringe began only five miles away and stretched for another forty. Below and ahead of him the motor way cut a deep swathe through the fields, proclaiming its presence by a procession of headlights which glowed and waned as they streamed eastwards to the coast.

The house, four hundred yards distant, presented its unlikely silhouette as each vehicle entered the arc of the bypass, only to vanish as it drew level. In this theatrical lighting the black shape suggested a Bavarian castle lifted by Disney from its mountaintop into the green belt which surrounds the city with half urbanized grassland.

Inglewood Turrets has been described by cynics as a mongrel by St. Pancras Station out of Holloway Gaol and this is not unjust. It is of whitish stucco, crenellated and illogical with occasional cones of steely slate projecting from assorted roofs. The walls are pierced by Gothic windows whose diamond panes, tormented by borders of coloured glass, dye the surrounding trees heliotrope and puce alternately. But the most remarkable thing about the house is that it should have survived for over ninety years.

At its creation it was hailed as “Cambric’s Folly,” for Sir Edwin had disagreed with several architects and finished by drawing his own plans and getting, as he generally did, his own way. He was of Huguenot blood, a textile prince who saw only one side of the coin, that which showed his own image and superscription. He had immortal longings and did not recognize opposition.

At the Turrets he entertained most of the intellectual lions of his day and many who came to scoff remained to prey upon his patronage. He was an excellent host who kept a fine cellar and understood the art of promoting and listening to good gossip.

Though he bought royally from academicians, in literary matters he was more discriminating and helped more than one poet from obscurity to fame. Nearly every celebrity of the age enjoyed his friendship and his table. Some have even paid tribute in forgotten memoirs. There are many references to him in the Greenaway Diaries, the letters of Lord Mountfitchet, and Mrs. St. John Gregory has described a Christmas week of the late nineties in nostalgic detail.

The host himself was painted by Millais, Solomon J. Solomon, Hubert von Herkomer and John Sargent, his whiskers changing from chestnut to white as canvas succeeded canvas over the baroque mantelpiece of Italian marble in the dining hall.

Sir Edwin may have been a pompous unimportant eccentric, as Mountfitchet, who survived his hospitality for twenty graceless years observed, but he had a glorious time making an a*s of himself, did no man harm, and enjoyed every moment of it.

Sir William Gilbert, who often partnered him at golf, was deeply moved by his death, and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s “Lost Chord” was played as an organ voluntary at the memorial service. Royalty, in the person of a retired Major General, was represented and Max Beerbohm shed an overt tear into his remarkable top hat.

In a sense the house died in 1904 along with its first master but it was embalmed intact. Not a stick was sold; every picture, curtain, trophy and knickknack remained where the owner had decreed it should be placed, for Lucian, his son, was a professional soldier, a colonel in Prince Albert’s Very Own, who preferred Poona and polo to obsolescent culture. The gardens dwindled but remained trim; the furniture was polished and dusted; but much of the park land, including the private golf course, was sold to farmers and speculative builders. Commerce encroached on the Turrets but did not devour it. In later years enlightened legislators, though they made no preservation orders, forbade further development except for the bypass which cut deep into the approach, destroying the rustic lodge, the ornamental lake and the wrought iron gates.

The present owner, Miss Charlotte Cambric, a great-niece of Sir Edwin, had very clear ideas on the subject of running an expensive anachronism which was also a Victorian treasure house. It was her life and her livelihood.

The man watching the house was not concerned with history or aesthetics. He was making a final check before the first trespass.

His appearance was exactly as he intended it to be, totally unremarkable from his shapeless green felt hat to his grey suit and his rubber-soled shoes. The anonymity went deeper; not a tailor’s label or a laundry mark remained to betray him and his brown gloves were designed to leave no print on anything he touched. An empty envelope picked up in the street and addressed to a total stranger was insurance in case he was required to produce proof of identity. He carried an old army haversack slung over one shoulder and this for the moment was incriminating, but the contents were essential and he would soon be rid of them.

A square of light in one of the servants’ rooms above the coach house, now the garage, died abruptly leaving only three glimmering needles to mark the galleried chamber called the Music Room. He gave himself ten minutes by the mass-produced wristwatch which was as impersonal as his muffler and began to walk deliberately down the hedge leading to the garden wall and the new approach which replaced the road wiped away by the bypass. No point in behaving suspiciously: if he was questioned he was bringing a message for a nonexistent chauffeur. Miss Cambric did not admit to owning a telephone.

He walked steadily down the tradesmen’s drive keeping to the grass verge by the laurels and halted at last in the protection they offered. The moon looked unexpectedly through the scudding sky and the final yards had to be made without cover. The entrance to the low level courtyard lay beneath a Gothic archway which suggested a portcullis. Once down the cobbled slope and into the lee of the walls and he would be safe. He crossed the open space in the moment of complete darkness which followed as the clouds closed in.

The situation was better than he had hoped, for a large American car, too long for its allotted space, squatted halfway between the open doors of a garage and at the back of this lay a door into the house itself. It was not secured, which meant that he had ten minutes in hand, valuable extra time to insure perfection. In unbroken silence he reached the semi-basement level of the wood store which had apparently been designed as the interior of a woodcutter’s cottage for “Hansel and Gretel.” He paused to unpack his haversack, pick out a flashlight and find the tools he needed to deal with the door to the wine cellar.

The lock presented no problem; it was decorated in tortured iron but had not been made to provide serious opposition to one determined to enter. It yielded without a creak and he found himself standing on the cool stone floor of the vault, cluttered with discarded crates and the straw wrappings of bottles which had been stacked in the bins lining the walls. Here the architecture suggested a dungeon and indeed Sir Edwin had called the service lift beside the spiral staircase the Oubliette.

The intruder made six separate piles of logs, straw and broken boxes, constructing each with unhurried care. To each he added three small white square firelighters, and a sprinkling of paraffin from the bottle he had brought. The door at the top of the stone steps leading up to the ground floor was slightly ajar and he considered this carefully for a minute, calculating the flow of air. It would be wiser to close it and rely on the gratings at ground level to provide a through draft. The smoke must not get into the house before the oak beams of the ceiling were well ablaze or the alarm might be given too soon. He pushed the latch home and wedged the foot of the frame with a wooden peg from a barrel.

If the big car, which must contain at least a dozen gallons of petrol, could be successfully fired it would block the outer entrance and leave the center of the house defenseless to burn as fiercely as an incinerator.

He made a final survey of his work, re-situating one of the heaps to insure that the main wood stack could be caught on three sides and as an afterthought dropped his haversack amongst the logs. Six matches and the job would be complete.

Half an hour after midnight: zero.

With a box in one hand and the first match in the other he froze, listening intently, aware of a trickle of sweat running down his neck from his hatband.

Far off in a room above him a woman was singing.

Back through sixty-odd years came the plummy contralto of Madam Kirby Lunn’s recorded ghost, wailing faintly through the enormous brass horn of an instrument called a Senior Monarch Phonograph.

“He—e—e shall fe—e—e—ed his flock like a shepherd….”

Another sound, close behind him, came too swiftly for reaction, and the blow caught him off balance. He pitched head forward onto the flagstones into oblivion. The matches which had been in his hand spun in the air to fall in a cascade on his neck. The box rested for a moment on his shoulder and then slid to the ground.

The unbroken flashlight beside his body threw a long shaft of light onto the piles of kindling and the eddying dust.

The voice, faint as potpourri, flowed on.

“And he shall ga—a—ther the lambs….”

There was often music at the Turrets on a Sunday night.