The Broken Penny Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright & Information

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Quote

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Symons' Series Bibliography

  Inspector Bland Titles

  Inspector Crambo Titles

  Joan Kahn-Harper Titles

  Sheridan Haynes

  Standalone Novels

  Non-Fiction

  Synopses of Symons' Titles

  Copyright & Information

  The Broken Penny

  First published in 1953

  © Estate of Julian Symons; House of Stratus 1953-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Julian Symons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  1842329162 9781842329160 Print

  0755128125 9780755128129 Kindle

  0755128168 9780755128167 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

  Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

  Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

  He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘...a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons' works have been filmed for television.

  Julian Symons died in 1994.

  Dedication

  For

  Marcus Richard Julian Symons

  Introduction

  The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

  His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

  That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

  This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death's Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

  The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. 'Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,' says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

  Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. 'To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel' he writes in Critical Occasions, 'is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.' And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

  H R F Keating

  London, 2001

  Quote

  ‘The thing which it is attempted to represent is the conflict between the tender conscience and the world.’

  ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 1850

  Part One

  PLAN

  Chapter One

  The board in the hall said:

  CENTRAL LIAISON ORGANISATION, 3RD FLOOR.

  Charles Garden took the self-service lift up and
stepped out into a waiting-room with Cézanne and Matisse reproductions on the walls. Behind a desk sat a rather dowdy girl wearing large horn-rimmed spectacles, reading a book. She looked up from it reluctantly and said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name’s Garden. An appointment with Mr Latterley.’

  The girl picked up a telephone. ‘A Mr Garden. Says he has an appointment with G. L. Section Three.’ She listened, then said without smiling, ‘Won’t keep you a moment. Take a seat, please.’

  Garden leaned over the desk. ‘The name’s Garden, not a Mr Garden. And I have got an appointment, there’s no doubt about it.’

  She said without much interest, ‘We get all sorts here, sometimes one name and then another. And your name, I mean Garden, well.’ She did not think much of Garden as a name, that was clear.

  ‘What sort of liaison goes on here?’

  ‘We’re hush-hush,’ she said, and added generously, ‘especially Section Three.’

  ‘What’s Section Three?’

  She stared at him through the big horn rims. ‘Better ask GL.’ She put down the book as if conceding a point, and took up some knitting. Garden looked at the title. It was War and Peace.

  He walked round the room looking at the pictures and then, checked by a mirror, stared into that instead. It reflected back at him a large blunt-featured reddish face, originally amorphous seemingly and battered into some kind of shape only by the assaults of time; the nose a bit askew through untimely contact with some brick or stone, small dents and bumps over the whole rough surface testifying to distant occasions when the face had stood up reasonably well to illness, exposure or personal attack. Out of this knobbly time-beaten face looked faded blue eyes.

  Now these eyes showed a mild surprise at the hand, well-manicured, a thick gold ring round the third finger that rested on his shabby raincoat. The mirror, abruptly ending, left the hand disembodied. A man’s voice, light and high, rippling with mockery or self-mockery, said, ‘Chas, my dear, it’s been an age. So nice of you to come along.’ Now a face entered the glass, smoothly fortyish, with only a few lines of laughter round the brown eyes, thinning hair carefully brushed, delicate cheeks faintly pink. Above a discreetly expensive blue suit a stiff collar showed dazzlingly white. This was Geoffrey Latterley.

  ‘Has La Harbottle been entertaining you? She’s the dragon who guards the gate, isn’t that so, Enid?’

  ‘Oh, G. L., you really are.’ Behind the large spectacles eyes were cast demurely down.

  ‘Harbottle,’ Garden said severely. ‘It’s an improbable name.’ He had the pleasure of seeing Miss Harbottle blush as they passed through swing doors down a corridor with numbered rooms on either side. ‘She didn’t like me very much, but she likes you.’

  In front of him Latterley checked his spring-heeled walk to look back and say ruefully, ‘I have a terrible fascination for a certain kind of undesirable female. You remember that, I expect. Here we are.’

  He pushed open a door leading to a tiny box of a room, with a chair behind a desk for Latterley and another in front of it for Garden. ‘You don’t look a day older than when I last saw you, Chas, and that was – how many years ago? – really I blush to remember.’ He giggled. ‘It’s true of course that you were thoroughly looking your age then. Just come back from Spain, hadn’t you?’

  Garden drew from his pocket a telegram folded neatly into four, and opened it. The telegram said: ring me urgently whitehall 96944 extension 361 geoffrey latterley.

  ‘Down to business at once. You haven’t changed, Chas. When was our last meeting now?’

  ‘At your flat.’ Garden stirred impatiently, his foot flickered on the carpet. ‘You remember it perfectly well.’

  ‘Do I? Perhaps I do. I never could resist teasing you, Chas. Do you remember my little sherry parties? I still give sherry parties, but different people come to them now. Though the young girls – really, you might think they were the same young girls.’ His look at Garden was quizzical, humorous and in a way tender.

  Latterley’s sherry parties. Latterley’s young girls, they came back to Garden out of the lost world of the late thirties. There would be a sprinkling of MPs who supported the Popular Front, one or two journalists who had just returned from Spain full of enthusiasm for the Republican regime, some minor figures from the Foreign Office. And there would be the young girls, middle- or upper-class young girls just out of their teens, their eyes blazing with a desire for martyrdom which made conversation with them rather unrewarding. To these young girls Latterley was devoted, whereas he ignored the lusher feminine specimens at his parties, deep-chested women with magnificent limbs who found his jokes amusing and his insouciance delightful. The young girls, on the other hand, were deeply serious creatures who had nothing but contempt for Latterley’s flippancies.

  But the parties, the parties! How perfectly they belonged to their time. One of the deep-chested women would pant through a song about the iniquities of the Means Test, another would embark on a stirring piece in Spanish which was said to be a battle hymn of the Republic. During the singing of such songs faces all over the room took on that expression of respectful melancholy often to be seen in church. But Latterley, the host, was a conspicuous heretic among these worshippers. The downward look that he addressed to the sherry glass in his hand seemed to hold in it awareness of some private joke.

  What was the nature of the joke? Garden never found out. And what precisely was Latterley’s job? He worked during the day in some inconspicuous and mysterious way that had something to do with the Foreign Office. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with the Foreign Office, perhaps that was only one of Latterley’s little jokes. He had so many little jokes that one could never be quite sure.

  Out of these thoughts Garden said abruptly, ‘What do you do here? The Central Liaison Organisation, what’s that?’

  ‘We liaise, Chas, we liaise between people who want things to be done and the people who do them.’ Latterley giggled at Garden’s baffled look. ‘Officially the CLO is just a sort of government agency looking after the details of receptions for distinguished visitors here and our chaps abroad. In fact it’s something between a very discreet branch of MI5 and a bit of the Secret Service. Supposing an unofficial meeting is being arranged between one of the big shots from the satellite countries and someone from the FO. Such meetings do take place, I assure you. In cases like that the FO tell us what they want, and we arrange it. Simple stuff, but it can be ticklish sometimes. Section One handles it.’

  ‘That’s not your section.’

  ‘That’s not my section,’ Latterley smilingly agreed. ‘Section Three handles things that are – a little more complicated.’

  ‘And it’s Section Three that’s offering me a job.’ Latterley nodded. ‘I don’t need a job. I’ve got one already.’

  ‘Goldblatt’s Fur Repositories, Dingwall Road, Elephant and Castle. Night watchman. Not a very good job.’ Garden shrugged his shoulders. Latterley leaned across the desk. The smile had gone from his face, the brown eyes looked hurt. ‘We’ll get on faster if you try to trust me, Chas. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  Latterley’s brow was corrugated. ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve forgotten Peterson.’

  ‘Peterson, Peterson? That was your chum out in Spain. Believe me, Chas, there was nothing anybody could do about Peterson.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten him,’ Garden said.

  In the Spanish Civil War, Garden had gone out recommended by the wrong people, and had joined the wrong part of the army. Or that was the way it turned out. He had been a member of the Anti-Stalinist POUM militia, he was in Barcelona when the Stalinists ruthlessly repressed their nominal allies, the Anarchists and the POUM. He escaped from Spain only through the illiteracy of a frontier guard who could not read the words in his papers that showed he had served in the POUM 29th Division.

  Peterson did not escape. He was an Austrian Socialist, a veteran of many strikes and priso
ns, who held the rank of captain in Garden’s unit. Garden had seen Peterson in the last of his prisons, in Barcelona where he had been charged as a suspected Fascist.

  Garden was young in those days. When he got back to England he went, full of indignation, to see Latterley. He was coldly received. ‘I told you not to mix yourself up with people like that,’ Latterley said. ‘They are no good either to themselves or to Spain.’

  But, Garden protested, this was a case of flagrant injustice. Peterson had fought by his side and had been wounded in the Republic’s service. What about those MPs who had been so interested in Spanish democracy? he asked. What about the Foreign Office young men?

  Latterley was cool. ‘My dear Chas, don’t be absurd. The only people who could do anything for this man would be his own government, and from what you say they are hardly likely to help. And anyway, people like Peterson aren’t interested in making a united Spain. Here’s my advice, Chas. Forget your own experiences in Spain, you went out with the wrong people. Forget your chum Peterson, his fate is the misfortune of war.’

  It was sensible advice, as Garden found. The letters he wrote to highbrow weeklies and to important politicians received formal replies or remained unanswered. The only other news he ever had of Peterson was a rumour that he had been removed to Communist-controlled Madrid. But still Garden never forgot Peterson, and he never really forgave Latterley for his sensible advice.

  ‘Peterson.’ Latterley considered the name frowningly, as if it had some connotations of which Garden was unaware. ‘Yes, Peterson had slipped my memory. It was all so long ago. But I have quite a lot of information about you somewhere, that our researchers have grubbed up. Would you like to hear it?’ Well-washed well-scrubbed hands opened a manila folder. In his light voice, with its undercurrent of self-mockery, Latterley began to read.