Fault in the Structure mb-52 Read online

  The fenced lane was approached by a straight, unfenced road across a stretch of common, and the ‘fencing’ (so called) was a high stone wall bordering a large estate on the left-hand side of the road. At one time the road had been gated and the evidence for this remained in the form of two stone pillars between which the gate had been hung.

  Alfrist took the driver’s seat after his father had made certain that the road was clear and they approached the stone pillars at a speed which Osbert, himself a cautious driver, thought was excessive, as, just beyond the pillars, the little road dipped sharply and bent away to the right.

  The danger was upon them before either the driver or the passenger was aware of it. Up the rise came a car travelling fast in the opposite direction. Alfrist, racing towards the gap, pulled sharply over to avoid a collision, but misjudged the width of his vehicle and crashed it into the stone pillar at the left-hand side of the way. He himself escaped with shock, bruises and a severe shaking-up. Osbert, in the passenger seat, was killed.

  After the inquest the wife of the garage proprietor took Alfrist back with her and gave him a cooked meal. She was a large-hearted Lancashire woman and had conferred with her husband over what was to happen to the boy. They offered him a job as petrol-pump attendant. He would live in, learn how to repair and refurbish used cars and eventually take on the work his father had done.

  It was not a bad offer to a boy of whom they knew nothing except that he was the son of a shiftless and lazy sire who, like Tom Sawyer, could work when he had a mind to, but was precious seldom in this happy and useful state. However, they made the offer and were disconcerted and surprised when Alfrist thanked them and said loftily that he would think it over and let them know his decision.

  When school re-opened after the end of the vacation he went along to see his careers master, only to find that he had never been taken off the school roll and had been assigned a place in the Lower Sixth form and was to begin studying for his A levels.

  ‘You said nothing last term about leaving, did you, Swinburne?’ the master enquired.

  ‘No, sir. I was hoping to persuade my father to let me stay on. I thought he would have written a letter if he really intended to take me away.’

  ‘He intended you to leave?’

  ‘He said so, sir. He wanted me to get a job — get something to allow me to earn, sir — but I don’t know what I could do. I came along to see whether you had anything to suggest, sir.’

  ‘It seems a pity not to stay on and take your A levels.’

  ‘I have to keep myself, sir. I haven’t any money.’

  This was not quite true, His market dealings in stolen goods had left him with enough to pay the rent and keep him in food for a week or two.

  ‘No relatives who could help you?’

  ‘I’ve a grandfather in America, sir, but I’ve never met him.’

  ‘I think we must get in touch with him.’

  Dora Ellen’s father was a man who had never approved of his daughter’s marriage, but he was not insensible of his obligations to her now completely orphaned son. He made a settlement on the boy to tide him over until he came into the annuity already promised to him when he came of age and felt that this provision relieved him from further responsibility.

  Meanwhile, as these satisfactory arrangements were still being concluded, the chairman of the school governors had taken an interest in the (as he thought) unfortunate youth. He took him to live in his house until other provision could be made for him. Sir Anthony was neither a clever man nor an astute reader of character, but he was given to good works and trusted all men until he found them out, which he was both loth and slow to do.

  His charitable activities brought him into contact with a great many people. He also possessed, together with a trusting nature, a considerable bump of curiosity and it seemed to him strange that his young ward should have no relatives living except for an American grandfather. He ferreted around and eventually dug out a distant cousin of the boy’s father, a man with whom Osbert had never had any contact. This man, high up in academic circles, was persuaded to regard himself as a long-lost uncle to Alfrist. He was a childless widower whose wife had died in a car accident, so he felt sympathy for the bereaved youth. Old Sir Anthony retained interest in him and the young man did both his guardians credit in some ways although, unfortunately, not in all. His distant relative, now styled his uncle, was a distinguished but not a wealthy man, so that, while in his care, Alfrist was suitably clad and fed, but was not provided (in his own opinion) with sufficient pocket-money for his adolescent needs, neither was he given the motor-cycle for which, in spite of the accident which had resulted in his father’s death, he yearned, nor the fashionable gear he wished to wear.

  However, he obtained his A levels and the offer of a place at no fewer than three universities. His so-called uncle might have been prepared to take the boy into his own ancient and distinguished university, where he was Warden of one of the Colleges, but a couple of years of acquaintanceship with Alfrist had convinced him that neither his own interests nor those of the young man would best be served by this. Alfrist was impatient of control and readily agreed that it would be better for him to accept a place in another university rather than to be continually under the eye of his uncle, even though he did not express his opinion in exactly those words.

  During his first year in College Alfrist contracted debts. In spite of his American annuity, his student grant and a small allowance from his uncle, he never had enough money for what he saw as his needs. His uncle settled the debts, but with such ill grace that Alfrist spent the long vacation with old Sir Anthony, who still looked upon him with an indulgent eye.

  Judging that the time was ripe, Alfrist confided to the old man a desire to visit his American grandfather. Sir Anthony, always sentimentally inclined, advanced him the money for his fare and sent him off with his blessing. Alfrist went to Paris on the money, enjoyed himself in various slightly dubious ways and returned with a story that his American grandfather had refused to see him, but that the annuity would still be paid.

  To strengthen his position with Sir Anthony, Alfrist spent the rest of the vacation tutoring a backward boy for Common Entrance. There was nothing wrong with his own brains and he proved a capable and conscientious mentor. This was not entirely to his credit for, as usual, keeping one eye upon the main chance, he thought that the boy might be useful to him in the future. He was the son of a wealthy industrialist and Alfrist decided that if university life did not suit him, there might be plums awaiting him in the industrial world if he played his cards wisely with regard to his tutoring of the rich man’s lad.

  His immediate future, as he saw it, involved the obtaining of a respectable degree and then a university post. After that, Fate, which had been kind to him on the whole, would be certain, he thought, to put opportunities in his way. He had no intention of living on a lecturer’s salary for the rest of his life, but it would do to begin with while he looked around for better – i.e. more lucrative – employment.

  After he left college Alfrist obtained a post at a northern university and soon found himself back in an atmosphere to which his schooldays had accustomed him. His fellow-lecturers either barely tolerated him or actually disliked him, for he proved to be arrogant, self-opinionated and conceited. However, so far as his uncle and old Sir Anthony knew, he kept out of trouble. At the age of twenty-six he published a novel which was kindly noticed but did not sell and, two years later, a collection of poems whose slightly erotic flavour brought him a certain amount of notoriety, if not exactly fame.

  He had published his poems under the name of Theddeus E. Lawrence, hoping, by this means, to attract the American market, and it was as T. E. Lawrence that he decided in future to be known, thus accomplishing a schoolboy resolve. The hoodwinked old Sir Anthony was delighted with him and showed his good opinion by suggesting him as co-trustee with a nephew of his (Sir Anthony’s) own, for a minor who was to inherit a fortune; the
same boy, in fact, as the one whom Alfrist had tutored and who had now entered his seventeenth year and had been left an orphan.

  It seemed to Lawrence, né Swinburne, that the accident to his own father had been the most fortunate of occurrences. Death, he realised, was, among other things, a solver of problems. But for his father’s demise, and the manner of it, he would never have been taken up by Sir Anthony. He cultivated the old gentleman and had high hopes of becoming his heir.

  CHAPTER 2

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  Those who are wise in their own conceit

  The garden seemed hardly the right setting for the conversation which was taking place in it. Its tranquillity and its age-old peacefulness were at odds with the matter which was being discussed. Its smooth green lawn was bordered by a broad, moss-grown path and between the path and that part of the old city wall which formed a bastion between the college and a busy street there were flower-beds in their summer colours of red, yellow, white, blue, purple, cream and pink. Trees and shrubs made a background to all this variety of tints and hues and, as though to add a touch of romance to the scene, there was a long flight of stone steps which led up from a scent-filled rose-bed to the top of the crenellated wall. It served as a reminder, perhaps, of old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago, but it was overgrown with lichen now, and never used.

  Dividing the lawn into two unequal parts was the famous lime walk. Between its two rows of trees whose pale flowers hung in clusters, filling the air with their elusive fragrance, the two men strolled up and down.

  Beyond the lime walk a retaining dry-stone wall separated the lawn from the terrace and from another riotous pageant of summer flowers; this second mass of colour was thrown into masterly assertiveness by the long façade of the fifteenth-century College buildings which acted as its background and its foil.

  This long line of pointed gables which made up the west front of the College was broken in the middle by a bold and massive tower which formed part of the Warden’s lodging, and it was the Warden himself who was pacing up and down between the rows of lime trees with his guest, the pair so much engrossed in their conversation that the garden, as such, went unnoticed and, so far as one of them was concerned, brightness fell from the air and no birds sang.

  ‘So there it is,’ he said at last. ‘Old Sir Anthony will have to be told, I suppose, and what we are to do if a scandal of magnitude is to be avoided, I cannot think. I suppose you have no suggestion to offer?’

  If some arrangement could be made – if somebody, for instance, was willing to guarantee the sum involved – could Lawrence pay back the money by instalments?’

  ‘I know of nobody who would be prepared to offer such security. My own fortune falls short of forty thousand pounds by a considerable margin and in any case I would not be willing to reduce my sister and her daughter to penury on Lawrence’s account. He does not deserve it. It is not, either, as though he were my son. He is not even, strictly speaking, my nephew.’

  ‘He is not in the hands of the police?’

  ‘It is only a matter of time, and a short time at that. I have managed to persuade the auditors to keep their findings to themselves for a few days, but they were very unwilling to allow us even that much grace.’

  ‘Does Lawrence say why he had such need of the money?’

  ‘He tells me nothing except to deny the charge in its entirety.’

  ‘Has he ever been in trouble before?’

  ‘Not in trouble of this magnitude, and not since his undergraduate days. At that time there were occasional debts to be settled and two or three jilted shopgirls had to be compensated. Fortunately he had seen to it that he was not a student here, and as Warden of Wayneflete I was not at all anxious to have him bring his profligate habits to this University, let alone to my own College, so we were in agreement so far as that was concerned.’

  ‘Is it possible that he is being blackmailed? You say you have settled debts for him before, so one assumes that he would have mentioned the fact if it was simply that he owed the money to someone – although, to a young man on a fixed salary plus, as I understand it, a small annuity, forty thousand pounds must seem a pretty considerable sum, even in these days.’

  ‘Considerable enough for him to know I could not replace it,’ said the Warden grimly.

  ‘I wonder whether you would like me to have a word with him?’ suggested Sir Ferdinand Lestrange.

  ‘I was hoping that you would offer to do so. Your legal training may enable you to elicit something from him which he has not confided to me. I feel that if only we knew why he needed the money so badly, there might still be some way of helping him cope with this dreadful situation. He is staying in College for the present. You will find him in the Senior Commonroom.’

  ‘From which I excused myself after dinner, as you had suggested this talk. I will return there.’

  The Senior Commonroom, like the west front of the College buildings, belonged to another century. It was part of the Tudor wing and its principal features were the linenfold panelling of its walls, a magnificent fireplace and a ceiling heavily plastered with meaningless arabesques and with oval lozenges incorporating the coats of arms of the various benefactors to the College.

  Surprisingly, the College bore the name of the founder of Magdalen College, Oxford. Above the fireplace were carved the mitre and the arms of Bishop William Wayneflete and on the ceiling in the largest of the ovals were ‘in lozengy ermine and sable a chief sable with three lilies therein’ the chaste ecclesiastical bearings of the late fifteenth-century prelate, one-time headmaster of Winchester College and, later, the Provost of Eton before he became exalted to the See of Winchester.

  In front of the fireplace stood Lestrange’s quarry. Thaddeus Edison Lawrence, as Swinburne now called himself, was a tall, thin man of thirty-two. His untidy, dark hair was worn collar-length, and he had large hands which he was using freely to emphasise his remarks to his only companion, an elderly, totally deaf don named Bagg. Lawrence had a peevish, sensual, melancholy face which reminded himself of Lord Byron and others of a disgruntled although rather handsome camel.

  As soon as he saw Lestrange enter the room he broke off what he was saying, raised his eyebrows and stared distastefully at the intruder. Lestrange, however, ignored him and joined the Dean and the Bursar, who had been arguing a point of law and who seized upon Lestrange to give a verdict.

  Finding that the mountain was in no hurry to come to Mahomet, Lawrence strolled over to the group of three, listened to the argument without joining in it, and then said to Lestrange, ‘I saw you walking in the garden with my uncle.’ His voice was not cordial.

  ‘Yes.’ The College dignitaries moved away, so, for the moment, the two men were alone. ‘I should be glad of a word with you.’

  Lawrence led the way to the rooms which had been allotted to him during his stay in College. Here he sported his oak and then produced whisky.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said ungraciously, ‘and if you intend to question me, please make the catechism short.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll be brief to the point of brutality. I suppose you’re being blackmailed,’ said Lestrange.

  The other was so surprised that he almost dropped the decanter.

  ‘Why on earth should you suppose that?’ he demanded.

  ‘It seems obvious, my poor chap. Look, Lawrence, come clean and I’ll see what I can do to help you. I owe that much to your uncle.’

  ‘Nobody can help me. I’m supposed to have embezzled forty thousand pounds and haven’t one chance in ten million of being able to prove that I did nothing of the sort. The auditors think they know better.’

  ‘Forty thousand is not such a vast sum. Relax and tell me the whole story. It is blackmail, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but not for forty thousand pounds. That is ridiculous,’ said Lawrence, after a pause.

  ‘You didn’t think of telling the blackmailer to go to hell and to spill the beans and be damned?’

  ‘I
couldn’t.’ He hesitated and then resumed: ‘It’s a matter of a previous marriage. It would kill my wife if she knew. You see, I thought Coralie was dead when I married Margaret, but a few months ago she bobbed up again and is bleeding me of sums I can hardly afford in return for not exposing me.’

  ‘But if you had reason to think she was dead, you have a good case. I call to mind R. v. Tolson, where an almost similar set of circumstances arose. In that case, a woman named Martha Ann Tolson had good reason to believe, on the evidence of his elder brother, that her husband, a sailor in the merchant navy, had been lost at sea on a voyage to America. Some years after his presumed death she re-married, supposing herself to be a widow.

  ‘However, her first husband turned up again and her second marriage was held to be bigamous. As she was able to plead that she genuinely believed the sailor to be dead, she was not convicted. There was no mens rea, you see.’

  ‘What does that mean in law?’

  ‘In layman’s language it means that Martha Ann Tolson had not meant to commit a criminal act; in other words, when the act was committed it was committed in good faith. She had not a guilty mind. It seems to me that, if you truly believed your wife was dead when you married Margaret, you have a good defence and can have no reason to give in to blackmail.’

  ‘But Margaret would know that I had been married before I met her.’

  ‘Did you not tell her?’

  ‘No. I was not even divorced, you see.’

  ‘What steps did you take to make certain that your first wife was dead?’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t dead, was she?’

  ‘How long were you married to her before you parted?’ asked Lestrange, without commenting upon this equivocal answer.

  ‘Two years. I’ve been married to Margaret for seven, but there was an interval, of course.’

  ‘So it was how long since you had seen or spoken to your first wife?’