“She was very ambitious, you know,” she said. “That is how I remember her so well. She was not like the others: anxious to get away from school and become wage earners. That is what appeals to most elementary children, you know, Mr. Sanger: a weekly wage in their pockets and the means of getting out of their crowded homes. But Christina wanted to go to the secondary school. She actually won a scholarship—a ‘free place,’ they call it. But her people could not afford to let her take it. She came to me and cried about it. It was the only time I had known her to cry: she was not an emotional child. I asked her mother to come to see me. A pleasant enough woman, but without force of character. I couldn’t persuade her. Weak people can be very stubborn. It was a regret in my mind for years, that I had failed. I had great feeling for the child’s ambition. I had been very ambitious once myself, and had—had to put my desire aside. I understood what Christina was going through. I lost sight of her when she left school. She went to work in the factory, I remember. They needed the money. There was a brother who was not earning. An unsympathetic character. And the mother’s pension was small. But she made her career, after all. Poor child. Poor child!”
Sanger had asked, as he was taking his departure, how it was that she had missed the articles in the newspapers about Christine Clay’s childhood.
She never saw Sunday newspapers, she said, and the daily paper was handed on to her a day late by her very kind neighbours, the Timpsons, and at present they were at the seaside, so that she was without news, except for the posters. Not that she missed the papers much. A matter of habit, didn’t Mr. Sanger think? After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without. Very depressing reading they made these days. In her little home she found it difficult to believe in so much violence and hatred.
Sanger had made further enquiries from many people about that unsympathetic character Herbert Gotobed. But hardly anyone remembered him. He had never stayed in a job for more than five months (the five months was his record: in an ironmonger’s) and no one had been sorry to see him go. No one knew what had become of him.
But Vine, coming back from interviewing the one-time dresser, Bundle, in South Street, had brought news of him. Yes, Bundle had known there was a brother. The snapping brown eyes in the wizened face had snapped ferociously at the very mention of him. She had only seen him once, and she hoped she never saw him again. He had sent in a note to her lady one night in New York, to her dressing-room. It was the first dressing-room she had ever had to herself, the first show she had been billed in. Let’s Go! it was. And she was a success. Bundle had dressed her as a chorus girl, along with nine others, but when her lady had gone up in the world she had taken Bundle with her. That’s the sort her lady was: never forgot a friend. She had been talking and laughing till the note was brought in. But when she read that she was just like someone who was about to take a spoonful of ice-cream and noticed a beetle in it. When he came in she had said, “So you’ve turned up!” He said he’d come to warn her that she was bound for perdition, or something. She said, “Come to see what pickings there are, you mean.” Bundle had never seen her so angry. She had just taken off her day make-up to put on her stage one, and there wasn’t a spark of colour anywhere in her face. She had sent Bundle out of the room then, but there had been a grand row. Bundle, standing guard before the door—there were lots, even then, who thought they would like to meet her lady—couldn’t help hearing some of it. In the end she had to go in because her lady was going to be late for her entrance if she didn’t. The man had turned on her for interrupting, but her lady had said that she would give him in charge if he didn’t go. He had gone then, and had never to her knowledge turned up again. But he had written. Letters came from him occasionally—Bundle recognised the writing—and he always seemed to know where they were, because the address was the correct one, not a forwarded affair. Her lady always had acute depression after a letter had come. Sometimes for two days or more. She had said once, “Hate is very lowering, isn’t it, Bundle?” Bundle had never hated anyone except a cop who was habitually rude to her, but she had hated him plenty, and she agreed that hate was very weakening. Burned you up inside till there was nothing left.
And to Bundle’s account of Christine’s brother was added the report of the American police. Herbert Gotobed had entered the States about five years after his sister. He had worked for a short while as a sort of house man for a famous Boston divine who had been taken (in) by his manners and his piety. He had left the divine under some sort of cloud—the exact nature of the cloud was doubtful since the divine, either from Christian charity or more likely from a reluctance to have his bad judgment made public, had preferred no charges—and had disappeared from the ken of the police. It was supposed, however, that he was the man who, under the name of the Brother of God, had toured the States in the rôle of prophet, and had been, it was reported, both an emotional and financial success. He had been jailed in Kentucky for blasphemy, in Texas for fraud, in Missouri for creating a riot, in Arkansas for his own safety, and in Wyoming for seduction. In all detentions he had denied any connection with Herbert Gotobed. He had no name, he said, other than the Brother of God. When the police had pointed out that relation to the deity would not be considered by them an insuperable obstacle to deportation, he had taken the hint and had disappeared. The last that had been heard of him was that he had run a mission in the islands somewhere—Fiji, they thought—and had decamped with the funds to Australia.
“A charming person,” Grant said, looking up from the dossier.
“That’s our man, sir, never a doubt of it,” Williams said.
“He certainly has all the stigmata: greed, enormous conceit, and lack of conscience. I rather hope he is our man. It would be doing the world a good turn to squash that slug. But why did he do it?”
“Hoped for money, perhaps.”
“Hardly likely. He must have known only too well how she felt about him.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him to forge a will, sir.”
“No, neither would I. But if he has a forged will, why hasn’t he come forward? It will soon be a fortnight since her death. We haven’t a thing to go on. We don’t even know that he’s in England.”
“He’s in England all right, sir. ’Member what her housekeeper said: that he always knew where she was? Clay had been more than three months in England. You bet he was here too.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s true. Australia? Let me see.” He looked up the New York report again. “That’s about two years ago. He’d be difficult to trace there, but if he came to England after Clay he shouldn’t be difficult to trace. He can’t keep his mouth shut. Anything quite so vocal must be noticeable.”
“No letters from him among her things?”
“No, Lord Edward has been through everything. Tell me, Williams, on what provocation, for what imaginable reason, would a Champneis, in your opinion, tell a lie?”
“Noblesse oblige,” said Williams promptly.
Grant stared. “Quite right,” he said at length. “I hadn’t thought of that. Can’t imagine what he could have been shielding, though.”
17
So the candles weren’t the kind you go to bed with, Grant thought, as the car sped along the embankment that Monday afternoon en route for the Temple; they were the kind you put on altars. The Brother of God’s tabernacle had been none of your bare mission tents. It had been hung with purple and fine linen and furnished with a shrine of great magnificence. And what had been merely an expression of Herbert’s own love of the theatrical had in most cases (Kentucky was an exception) proved good business. A beauty-starved and theatrically-minded people had fallen hard—in hard cash.
Christine’s shilling was the measure of her contempt. Her return, perhaps, for all those occasions when Herbert’s Lord had seen fit to deny her the small things her soul needed.
In