Seeing Red

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘Oh, I see.’ She nodded, and smiled weakly, acknowledging the logic. ‘Yes, I suppose he timed it well. Another minute, and I’d have been across to the house.’

  ‘He must have known how long it would take you.’

  ‘I suppose he would.’ A shade of annoyance framed her mouth for a moment. ‘If it matters.’

  ‘I don’t know what matters,’ I said casually. ‘I’m just getting the background. He knew you’d type it again for him?’

  ‘You keep getting at him,’ she said tersely.

  I sighed. ‘Here’s a man, in such a temper that he tore up your evening’s work in front of you, and stormed...’

  ‘Not stormed! Not that!’

  I raised my eyebrows at her. ‘Went, then. Quietly but angrily he went into the house, but all the same he was sufficiently in control of his temper to realise you’d stay here and do it all again — and he timed it!’

  ‘You’re just making him sound...’ She had raised her voice, but caught it with severe control.

  ‘Sound what?’

  ‘He was not his usual self.’

  ‘That’s quite plain.’ Then I changed the mood. ‘So eventually you were able to leave. You drove home, but came across your friend, dead in front of her car.’

  She banged across the carriage of her Royal. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then — in the morning — the Sunday morning,’ I pressed on, steering her away from her friend’s death, ‘he was still moody. He didn’t notice you were upset. Would a quarrel with his son still be affecting him?’

  ‘I’m not sure it was that, not entirely.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘This was a paper he was presenting. A bit more than a speech, you see. His reputation was going to be resting on it. Or so he told me. And he knew it wasn’t ready, and you can’t blame him for being worried.’

  Only for having been so short with her. ‘He told you he was?’

  ‘I knew. He’d rushed his results. The special spectacles he’d made — they weren’t fully tested. And the work on the Escort’s windscreen…’

  ‘Passenger’s side?’

  ‘Yes. That wasn’t proved, either. It was the reason he got Neville to use the Escort the previous evening, it gave him one more chance to check the results, before he went to Blackpool.’

  ‘So obviously he was disappointed with them.’

  She turned away. There was a kettle boiling its head off that neither of us had noticed. She gave her attention to the coffee mugs. Presumably I was using Gledwyn’s. Suddenly I’d lost her. She’d felt I was reaching for something she believed should not be pursued.

  ‘I really don’t see what this has got to do with anything. I don’t see why I should answer your questions.’

  ‘I’m interested in his work.’

  She made a sound of disgust. ‘You’re only trying to belittle what he was doing.’

  ‘I did get the impression,’ I suggested, ‘that you were upset because of the way he ignored your distress on the Sunday morning, and because he didn’t tell you what was upsetting him.’ Her eyes were gravely on me. ‘But perhaps he had a very good reason — if he was convinced his work wasn’t much of a success.’

  ‘I don’t see what you mean.’

  ‘He wouldn’t want to tell you, would he! After all, if it was as much your work as his...’ I left the thought hanging.

  She was silent for a few minutes, stirring her coffee round and round, not realising she was doing it. Then she looked up at me with a small smile.

  ‘He’d have shared it with me, if it’d been a success.’

  ‘Of course he would.’

  Her coffee was too hot and too strong. I put the mug down to cool off. ‘One thing...you said Neville didn’t come in to speak to you, because he wouldn’t know you were here.’

  She nodded, managing a real smile for me now, trusting me.

  ‘But you didn’t hear him, it seems, putting the Escort away, and the garage is right next door — the other side of this wall.’

  ‘Oh, I was typing, wasn’t I! Clattering away like mad.’ She paused. ‘How d’you know he put it away?’

  ‘It was raining. Wasn’t it raining? I seem to remember—’

  She laughed. ‘He wouldn’t worry about that. A bit of rain on the Green Dragon.’

  ‘The what?’ Then I caught myself. Keep to the point, Harry. ‘He might not worry about the Escort, but he’d have had to get out the Metro. That was new, so he wouldn’t have left it out in the open. He’d have put it away in the garage.’

  ‘Oh, you’re clever!’ She didn’t say it as a compliment. ‘Very cute, I must say.’

  I grinned at her. ‘And what’s this Green Dragon business?’

  ‘It’s what Neville called the Escort. What it was called when he bought it. Oh, it must’ve had a dozen owners before he got it, and one of them had put that at the top of the windscreen. You know, a strip of green plastic with words in white on it. Green Dragon, it said. Neville seemed to think that was very funny. I’ll swear he bought it because of that. Men can be so childish! His name, you see — Neville Green. But it meant I was always sitting under the dragon bit when we went out in the Escort. He thought that was a joke. Does it seem amusing to you?’

  ‘Nobody would take you for a dragon, Lynne,’ I told her solemnly.

  It seemed to please her. ‘You wouldn’t?’

  ‘Never in a million years.’ I took her for a rather naïve young woman, who hadn’t known where she was with the men in her life.

  ‘It was stupid, anyway,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t green at all. It was red.’

  The only red I’d seen on it had been from rust.

  She walked out into the lab with me, moving round, touching things. ‘His vacuum chamber,’ she said. ‘His colorimeters, his Munsell charts.’ Now she’d gone vague again. She hadn’t come, this day, specifically to see me. I’d been the excuse. She just couldn’t keep away from his ghost which still prowled.

  ‘You fetched him home the following Friday,’ I said. ‘You told me he was still in a mood.’

  ‘I guessed the reason. Sometimes I could read him like a book, sometimes I could get nothing. But obviously his paper hadn’t been a success.’

  ‘But surely, in all that journey, he’d said something.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said brightly. ‘He said he’d finally decided to alter his will.’ She frowned. ‘But he never got the chance, did he?’

  Chapter Six

  We were going to have mushroom omelette for lunch, followed by fresh fruit salad. The fruit was all from Angie’s orchard. As it wasn’t going to need much preparation, I persuaded Angie to take me into the room she called the office, which was at the far end of the hall. It had a rattly old roll-top desk in one corner and a much-used easy chair by the fireplace, and not much else.

  I asked her whether she’d been through her father’s papers, and she said she had, in detail.

  ‘His will was here?’

  ‘No.’ She seemed surprised. ‘I came down for the funeral and his solicitor approached me. It was the first I knew about what he’d left me.’

  The window looked out on a corner of the yard. I peeped out at my caravan, wanting to make it all seem casual.

  ‘Which turned out to be this house and its contents?’

  ‘Yes. Why’re you asking this?’

  ‘Interest.’ I turned my attention to the desk. ‘Did you come across the registration document for the Escort?’

  ‘I think I noticed it,’ she said indifferently, her mind still on my mention of the will. ‘Somewhere in there.’

  Lynne had told me that she knew the contents of Gledwyn’s proposed revised will. It had been on his mind for some time, and, as seemed to have been his habit, he’d discussed it with Lynne. She had even drafted a copy for him, but he’d apparently taken no action to get it made legal. The existing will Lynne knew nothing about, except that the sum of £1,000 was to come to her. Presumably it still would. The revise
d will, she had said, would have left the residue of his estate to Neville.

  I found the registration document. ‘Did you know Lynne gets £1,000?’ I asked, reading the details at the same time.

  ‘Yes. The solicitor told me that.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything more?’

  ‘Nothing I hadn’t guessed. The remainder of the estate to my brother, Paul.’

  ‘Ah.’

  The registration was for a Ford Escort, 1972, described as green. Clearly, it had been green when an early owner christened it. Previous owners? Five, it recorded. Any one of them could have given it the name of Green Dragon. Any subsequent one could have had it re-sprayed red without regard to the legal requirement of changing the registration details.

  It was all I’d wanted. We locked up the desk, and left.

  ‘Why did you say “ah”?’ she demanded, halting me in the hall.

  ‘Just something I couldn’t understand. Lynne told me that your father was talking about changing his will. This was on the trip back from his Convention. He mentioned it. It sounded as though it could mean he was going to disinherit you, and I couldn’t understand that. I mean to say, it wasn’t you who’d upset him, it was your brother, apparently. So now it’s explained. It was your brother he intended to cut out of his will.’

  We walked into the kitchen. Angie was quiet. I could almost hear the hum of her brain working. She was silent over the meal, and it was not until halfway through the fruit salad that she spoke.

  ‘I don’t think I like what you said about the will.’

  ‘There’s no reason to doubt the truth of it. On the Saturday evening, before he went away for a week’s Convention, your father seems to have had a row with your brother, and...’

  ‘How could he? Paul’s in the USA.’

  ‘No he’s not. He was at Aberystwyth, the week before your father’s death. Whether he’s there now...’

  ‘He’s in England? And he’s not even phoned.’ She tossed her head, her eyes avoiding mine.

  ‘He might not know you’re here,’ I said comfortingly.

  But Angie was distressed, her eyes bright and moist. ‘The solicitor would have told him. Paul! And he didn’t get in touch!’

  I allowed it to cool. We had coffee. Angie was smoking. At last she spoke in a controlled voice.

  ‘Where is he...Paul?’

  ‘Possibly still at the same hotel. Your cousin — Neville — he’ll know. He drove your father there. If there was trouble, he’ll know. In any event, your father was deeply upset, and after the Convention, when he’d had time to think it through, he told Lynne he was going to change his will.’

  ‘Oh, he’d tell Lynne! Everything...he told her.’

  ‘So it seems he intended to cut Paul out of his will.’ I paused, then asked quietly: ‘Would it involve much?’

  She jerked the cigarette towards her ashtray and made an angry sound when the ash missed. ‘I don’t know. Probably. My grandmother, that’s daddy’s mother, she had money, and left it equally between daddy and his sister, Flora. Neville’s mother, that’d be. But Martin Green was a gambler, and all my aunt’s money just melted away. But daddy...money wasn’t of much interest to him. I don’t think he remembered he’d got it in the bank...look at the way he bought that Escort from Neville! He could’ve bought a new one.’

  I didn’t say so, but it seemed he had — the Metro for Neville.

  ‘Much money?’ I prompted.

  She shrugged exaggeratedly. ‘How can I know? I’d guess between twenty and forty thousand.’

  ‘But he didn’t have time to disinherit your brother,’ I pointed out.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ she flared.

  I made a great performance of staring at my pipe, filling it, lighting it, and staring at it again. Anything to avoid looking at her and revealing my anger. She was lying. Of course she knew Paul was in Britain. He’d surely have attended his father’s funeral, and he’d have met Angie there. So she was lying, and her pretence had been so false as to be laughable. If I’d been in the mood for laughter.

  She had welcomed my efforts to help her, though beneath it she’d feared what I might find. The mention of the will had pushed her fear beyond the borders into panic. Did that mean she believed that Paul had killed her father? Did she fear that knowledge, yet know she had to face it?

  But she’d been furious at me for mentioning the will. That was fine; just what I needed! And if I ever reached the truth — which I now believed was going to be unpalatable — who the hell was going to tell her, and face those frantic eyes and the distraught face?

  Harry Kyle was.

  I pushed on with it, seeing how far it would go before she told me to go to hell and out of her life. I didn’t answer her angry question: ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘Guess who’d have got the money if he’d changed it,’ I said.

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘My information is: Neville.’

  ‘Neville?’ She stamped out the cigarette. ‘Neville would’ve got it?’

  ‘So I’m told. But after all, Neville’s apparently the only relative who’s really done anything for your father for some time. If he was looking for a new beneficiary, maybe your father would look close to home. And Neville’s been on the spot.’

  She glared at me. ‘How dare you!’

  ‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘It’s rough. But you’ve missed the main point. Not who might have got the money if he’d changed his will, but who would have lost out.’

  Angie had her chair back. She was motionless, half crouched, her eyes smouldering. Suddenly she spun the chair away and marched over to the window, clasping her elbows in her crossed hands, and her voice was so quiet I barely heard it.

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘Is it? But you’re forgetting I’m supposed to be helping you. And what did you say you wanted — to prove your father had been murdered.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

  I sat at the table, hands on its surface, my pipe cold between my teeth. ‘Oh, that’s fine!’ I said heavily. ‘You don’t want to hear any more. I’ve been hearing things I don’t fancy ever since I got here — but I suppose that doesn’t matter. My ears aren’t all that delicate. But you can put an end to it at any time, Angie. You simply tell me to leave. The caravan takes five minutes to hitch up, then I can be off. If you want that, you only need to promise one thing. That’s to phone Phil and say you want to be fetched home. Tell him I did what I could for you, but you don’t want to listen to any truth.’

  She turned. The light was behind her, her features dimmed. Her voice was equally shaded. ‘Then say it.’

  ‘Oh, come on! For God’s sake, you spoke of murder. The car was crashed, at speed. How the devil could that have been rigged?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was a catch in her voice. ‘I don’t know.’ Now almost in tears.

  ‘And if it was...no, listen. Don’t you dare walk away from me now. Take one more step towards that door, Angie, and I’ll know I’ve got to treat you like a spoiled child, wanting without the effort of reaching out. Sit down. Please.’

  She moved back slowly, rescued her chair, and sat down again. I reached out my lighter for the cigarette she fumbled out, but had difficulty trapping its shaking end.

  ‘Angie, if it was murder, then it was deliberately disguised as a car accident. I can’t see how, but that’s what it must have been if we’re to consider murder. But we discussed the difficulty there. Your father hadn’t driven for years, so it was a strange accident to fake — a driving one. It would have to be faked by someone who wasn’t aware that he didn’t drive anymore — or somebody who thought he’d started driving again. The sight of the Escort in the drive might give that impression. Now don’t you get mad at me. How long has your brother been in the USA?’

  ‘Six years,’ she murmured.

  ‘So you can see what I’m getting at.’

  ‘Not Paul! Paul
couldn’t...oh God!’ Then she clutched at a sudden thought as at a life raft. ‘But not for money,’ she said in triumph. ‘Paul wouldn’t need money, his wife’s rolling in it.’

  ‘Is she, now. Is she.’

  There seemed nothing to add. I didn’t trouble to point out that a wife with money might create an even more desperate personal need. Silence built up, and across the yard the gelding whinnied shrilly.

  ‘Did you know,’ I asked eventually, ‘that the Escort was red? It was called Green Dragon.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said Angie dully.

  More silence. Then I said something about washing the crocks, but she made no move. Suddenly she got to her feet and marched out into the yard. I gave her five minutes, then I followed her. She was leaning over the white rails, gazing down into the orchard. I went and brooded beside her.

  ‘There was an orchard like this,’ I said, ‘smaller perhaps, just along the road where I grew up. We used to scrump the apples, more than we could ever eat. It was the getting of them that was the thrill, because of the dogs. You were robbed of that, having your own orchard.’

  She tossed her head. It was a gesture of freeing, but not just her hair — her mind too — of what had passed.

  ‘It hasn’t always been like this. Some of those trees I helped daddy to plant. Doesn’t it show how time flies!’

  ‘Makes you feel old,’ I said lightly.

  ‘Older, certainly.’

  ‘Paul — is he older than you?’

  She no longer reacted to his name. ‘Two years. You’d think he’d have got in touch...’ She was still trying.

  ‘So he went through college that far ahead?’

  She laughed lightly. No recriminations were attached. ‘Not through. He went to college. But he was sent down at the end of his first year. It was just no good. Psychologically, Paul wasn’t suited for it. In school, oh he was clever. Daddy was very proud of him. But then he could be watched over — at school and at home. At Keele University — that was where he went — doing Science...at Keele, he had to do his own pressuring, and poor Paul...there were so many distractions. Sports — he was mad on sports, but he never seemed to get down to any solid work.’