by Bill James
Chapter Eighteen
Esther, sitting at the breakfast table, worked through the main section of The Times to the right page. Gerald came in, glanced at it for a few minutes over her shoulder before taking his place opposite and pouring himself some tomato juice. He reached across for the newspaper’s separate Travel Supplement.
Esther read:
CORNELIUS MAX TURTON
Cornelius Turton, who has died aged eighty-four, was once the uncontrollably powerful and autocratic head of a group of companies eventually proved to be the biggest British criminal organization outside London. ‘The Guild’, as the group was sometimes known, ran drug trafficking on an enormous scale and dockyard freight theft. From 1986 until 2007, the Guild was able successfully to masquerade as a reputable commercial enterprise based, apparently, on legitimate trading as shipping and cargo agents, and as couriers, and on property development. It was said that, at the height of its crooked success, Mafia chiefs came deferentially to visit Cornelius Turton in his stately Victorian office headquarters for tips on how to create credible lawful ‘fronts’ on out-and-out criminal firms. Turton was a learned devotee of Georgian and Victorian architecture and an active conservationist except, as one associate said, of enemies.
Local police found it impossible to investigate the Cormax Turton Guild effectively by conventional methods of detection and finally decided to put in an officer under cover to gain incriminating evidence. It was as a result of this tactic that Cormax Turton became for a while of nationwide interest. Ambrose Tutte Turton, a nephew of Cornelius and one of the Guild’s directors, was accused of the murder of the undercover officer, Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew, after discovering his real identity. But juries twice failed to reach a verdict and Ambrose was formally acquitted. A suggestion of police perjury was not substantiated.
When Ambrose returned to the companies, Cornelius, who had been suffering from knee and other health problems, began to withdraw from Guild leadership. This led directly to a conflict between Ambrose and Nathan Crabtree (ironic nickname, Palliative), a relation of Cornelius through marriage, and also a Guild director. They jointly ran many activities of the Guild from late 2004. But each sought the full leadership role and each saw himself as Cornelius’s proper successor. This antagonism was aggravated by Palliative’s claim that Ambrose had deliberately left him exposed during a gang battle in 2004, hoping in this way to clear the route to the top of the Guild. Rumour about how Cornelius proposed disposing of his fortune after death following specialist financial advice increased antagonisms between Ambrose and Palliative Crabtree.
Late last year, Ambrose deliberately shot and killed Palliative while the two practised with handguns on the Cormax Turton private firearms range. Eighteen months after his acquittal in the Dean Martlew case, Ambrose was convicted of Palliative’s murder and jailed for a minimum of twenty years. Cornelius never altogether recovered from the shock of these events and his already poor health grew worse. At the trial of Ambrose for the Palliative murder, Felix Glass, an armourer from the Guild, accused of providing the murder weapon, turned Queen’s evidence and said that, in fact, Palliative had murdered Detective Sergeant Dean Martlew because Palliative thought Ambrose was gathering a private band to help him take over Cormax Turton and had recruited Martlew, a noted marksman, to this cabal under the pretext that cargo consignments needed special protection.
In his later months, following the loss of Ambrose and Palliative to the companies, Cornelius had to watch the Guild disintegrate. For some time before his death, it was no longer a force, commercially or criminally. He had certain lifelong interests to occupy him in his later months and years. He loved to read nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, and was an expert on the life of Winston Churchill. He also studied minor Victorian poets such as W. E. Henley. Cornelius Turton was well known for magnificently polished manners, except when business matters required viciousness. During the Guild’s most prosperous years he could exercise his taste in cars and would drive only state-of-the-art Bentleys. It became one of his most keenly held ambitions to earn an obituary in The Times, and he would have been pleased to know he was considered significant enough to merit these words, regardless of what they say about his arrant gangsterism. He married Jane Closse in 1946. She and two daughters survive him.
Esther put the newspaper down. ‘Do you think we should do something about avoidance of Inheritance Tax, darling?’ she said. ‘Even though we benefit from the new exemption level, there’s the value of the house and my retirement lump sum. Plus, when you get back to orchestral starring work you’ll pile up capital. I have nieces to think of, and you, your cousin. The Millicent puts on advisory seminars.’
‘I told you that, an age ago,’ Gerald snarled. ‘Do you think I’d go back to that shit-hole after the way they treated me?’
‘That wasn’t you as a man of potential wealth. That was you as a bassoonist.’
‘I am a bassoonist, you dim prat.’
He stood and she thought he might move around the table to her. ‘Gerald, love, I don’t want any violence or wound sucking, not exactly now. I have to look all right for this conference in Hull.’
‘Do I care what you want?’
‘Yes, ultimately I really think you do.’
‘How ultimately? I think you love attending such damn orgies alone.’ But he sat down again. ‘Well, I think I’ll go somewhere solo. I’ve been reading about Kashmir. And Tasmania.’
‘This trip of mine is only work – the way you used to go off on orchestral tours, and will again.’
‘My God, a complete week at Hull on “What next for multiculturalism: a police strategy”. That’s what you said it is, didn’t you? Who cooks up that kind of thing?’
‘You’ll be fine, Gerald. The fridge is full. Stay away from Pastel Head, won’t you? Please. So corny.’
‘And will you be fine? Of course you will. What do you mean, you have to look all right? Is that sly slob Iles there? You’ll be able to celebrate your triumph, won’t you?’ He nodded towards the account of deaths and jail in The Times. ‘Damn disgusting rapport with him. Did you notice his Adam’s apple? How couldn’t you?’
‘Some conferences Iles is absent from,’ she replied.
