The Daughter of Time

Marta looked down on the virile fleshy face and said: ‘It occurs to me for the first time that one of the major tragedies of history is that the best painters didn’t paint you till you were past your best. Robin must have been quite a man. They say Henry the Eighth was dazzling as a young man, but what is he now? Something on a playing card. Nowadays, we know what Tennyson was like before he grew that frightful beard. I must fly. I’m late as it is. I’ve been lunching at the Blague, and so many people came up to talk that I couldn’t get away as early as I meant to.’

‘I hope your host was impressed,’ Grant said, with a glance at the hat.

‘Oh, yes. She knows about hats. She took one look and said “Jacques Tous, I take it”.’

‘She!’ said Grant surprised.

‘Yes. Madeleine March. And it was I who was giving her luncheon. Don’t look so astonished: it isn’t tactful. I’m hoping, if you must know, that she’ll write me that play about Lady Blessington. But there was such a to-ing and fro-ing that I had no chance to make any impression on her. However, I gave her a wonderful meal. Which reminds me that Tony Bittmaker was entertaining a party of seven. Magnums galore. How do you imagine he keeps going?’

‘Lack of evidence,’ Grant said, and she laughed and went away.

In the silence he went back to considering Elizabeth’s Robin. What mystery was there about Robin?

Oh, yes. Amy Robsart, of course.

Well, he wasn’t interested in Amy Robsart. He didn’t care how she had fallen down stairs, or why.

But he spent a very happy afternoon with the rest of the faces. Long before he had entered the Force he had taken a delight in faces, and in his years at the Yard that interest had proved both a private entertainment and a professional advantage. He had once in his early days dropped in with his Superintendent at an identification parade. It was not his case, and they were both there on other business, but they lingered in the background and watched while a man and a woman, separately, walked down the line of twelve nondescript men, looking for the one they hoped to recognise.

‘Which is Chummy, do you know?’ the Super had whispered to him.

‘I don’t know,’ Grant had said, ‘but I can guess.’

‘You can? Which do you make it?’

‘The third from the left.’

‘What is the charge?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t know anything about it.’

His chief had cast him an amused glance. But when both the man and the woman had failed to identify anyone and had gone away, and the line broke into a chattering group, hitching collars and settling ties preparatory to going back to the street and the world of everyday from which they had been summoned to assist the Law, the one who did not move was the third man from the left. The third man from the left waited submissively for his escort and was led away to his cell again.

‘Strewth!’ the Superintendent had said. ‘One chance out of twelve, and you made it. That was good going. He picked your man out of the bunch,’ he said in explanation to the local Inspector.

‘Did you know him?’ the Inspector said, a little surprised. ‘He’s never been in trouble before, as far as we know.’

‘No, I never saw him before. I don’t even know what the charge is.’

‘Then what made you pick him?’

Grant had hesitated, analysing for the first time his process of selection. It had not been a matter of reasoning. He had not said: ‘That man’s face has this characteristic or that characteristic, therefore he is the accused person.’ His choice had been almost instinctive; the reason was in his subconscious. At last, having delved into his subconscious, he blurted: ‘He was the only one of the twelve with no lines on his face.’

They had laughed at that. But Grant, once he had pulled the thing into the light, saw how his instinct had worked and recognised the reasoning behind it. ‘It sounds silly, but it isn’t,’ he had said. ‘The only adult entirely without face lines is the idiot.’

‘Freeman’s no idiot, take it from me,’ the Inspector broke in. ‘A very wide-awake wide boy he is, believe me.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean that the idiot is irresponsible. The idiot is the standard of irresponsibility. All those twelve men in that parade were thirty-ish, but only one had an irresponsible face. So I picked him at once.’

After that it had become a mild joke at the Yard that Grant could ‘pick them at sight’. And the Assistant Commissioner had once said teasingly: ‘Don’t tell me that you believe that there is such a thing as a criminal face, Inspector.’

But Grant had said no, he wasn’t as simple as that. ‘If there was only one kind of crime, sir, it might be possible; but crimes being as wide as human nature, if a policeman started to put faces into categories he would be sunk. You can tell what the normal run of disreputable women look like by a walk down Bond Street any day between five and six, and yet the most notorious woman in London looks like a cold saint.’