Invitation to Die

by Barbara Cleverly

  “It seemed like such a mad idea, he thought he must be mistaken, so he said nothing to his tutor, but on the quiet he made enquiries with the Inland Revenue, the Property Registration Records, Somerset House, and other bodies and made a very strong case of . . . not sure what to call it.”

  “Try ‘fraud,’ ‘embezzlement,’ ‘theft’ . . .”

  “Naw! None of those. Big sums of money coming into an account without any explanation. No bequests, no wins on the stock market, no loans. Just cash out of the air. In large sums over the years.”

  “I can’t think of a word for that, either. There’s no such thing as regular windfalls, and good luck doesn’t cover it. The horses?”

  “Not in these amounts.”

  “Am I going to be allowed to hear the name of this Midas with the golden touch?” MacFarlane asked.

  Ratty breathed deeply. He’d shot off at a fair lick on hearing the starting pistol, but he seemed about to refuse at the first fence.

  “Before you commit yourself, Ratty, let me tell you that I know all about the unit and Pretoria,” he lied. He didn’t really know the half of it. “I even know the name you’ve got on the tip of your tongue. For Ernest’s sake, you should confirm.”

  He fished in his pocket and produced a photograph. A solitary figure, head bowed as though in mourning, was sitting on the steps of the war memorial, surrounded by wreaths. “He was just there with the British Legion, paying his respects to the fallen. Someone bashed Ernie’s head in, Ratty, and dumped his body there. You could be next.”

  Ratty looked with undisguised sorrow at the lonely body of his friend, and his mouth tightened. “Those bloody diamonds! They were bad luck! I knew they were trouble, but who’d have thought they’d follow us home?”

  “Diamonds, Corporal Merriman? Er, would you like to turn back a page and give me a chance to catch up?”

  MacFarlane took no notes. He merely nodded his head sadly as Ratty finally came up with the name. It took far less effort for him, on shaking hands in farewell with MacFarlane, to look furtively from side to side then breathe, “Flapdoodle.”

  “What was that, Ratty?”

  “Flapdoodle. The three-thirty on Saturday. York Races. You’ll get good odds. Just place your bet somewhere other than Barnsley, eh? I don’t want to attract the attention of the law.”

  MacFarlane grinned in appreciation. “Will do! And thanks!”

  “And . . .” The cheeky grin faded from Ratty’s face, and MacFarlane saw the drawn, determined features of the young corporal appear for a moment. “When you get your hands on the treacherous, murdering shit . . . Well, you’re a soldier. You’ll know where to put them! Squeeze hard. For Ernie!”

  “I will at that, lad! And when I’ve done with ’is balls, I’ll ’ave ’im by the neck!” MacFarlane vowed.

  Chapter 22

  Cambridge, Friday, the 23rd of May, 1924

  “Great Heavens, sir! You’re back early.” Redfyre jumped back in surprise as he entered MacFarlane’s office with a pile of papers for his records.

  “No, just earlier than you were expecting, it seems. I came back yesterday more dead than alive—the trains are a bugger! Then I snatched a few hours’ sleep and came in at six to dig through this pile of awfulness you’ve left for me. I can hardly begin to digest what I have, and I see you’re about to add to it. Sit down man, and, give me my bearings. Start with this cove, Fanshawe, now gracing the marble slab in the Trumpington morgue. Did he fall, or was he pushed? I see you won’t commit yourself.”

  “Not until I have Doc Beaufort’s report, which is expected this afternoon.”

  “You’re kidding. You know as well as I do that the doc talks as he works, unlike some, and he’ll have given you chapter and verse. But anyway, before we plunge in . . . Yes, thanks for asking, Inspector, I had a very successful time gathering poisoned fruit in the north.”

  He passed two pages of notes over the desk. “For entry in the file. Stick them where you think fit. Both interviewees came up, one consciously, one unconsciously, with the same name. Now Fanshawe. Pity he’ll never be able to spell out that name for us. I wonder if he was looking at the same murdering features when he experienced his defenestration.”

  “I was just bringing the police photographs of the body and locating shots of the scene, sir.” Redfyre passed them over.

  “And you say it was you who discovered the body? Looking down from this here window?” MacFarlane pointed with his pencil to the distance shot. “Mm, as I recall, my last words to you were, ‘No way you’ll get a warrant to enter St. Jude’s.’ And there you were, hours later, up in the highest interior recesses of the college.”

  Redfyre decided on jovial insouciance for his response. “No storming necessary, sir! I was invited to tea with the master and his daughter, Miss Wells, in their drawing room. A room that interestingly overlooks the graveyard, where our tramp who has proven to be not a tramp met his end.”

  “The master, eh?”

  “Good man! He was most helpful. He’d make a good investigator. And thanks to his position, he had the means to organise the scene of crime swiftly and to everyone’s satisfaction.”

  “I bet! Principally his. Everything hushed up and shovelled out through the back gate, I expect. In earlier days, Fanshawe would have ended up in the Cam. He’d be halfway to King’s Lynn by now and no bother to us.

  “And this is the corpse? A Friend of Apicius, are you saying?” He studied the close-up of the broken body with its thatch of silver hair. “Hard to make out where the blood puddle ends and the sherry puddle begins. Drinker, was he?”

  “I’d say, certainly one of the Friends. An epicure, but not known to be a drinker to excess. Dr. Beaufort’s preliminary assessment is that he had in fact drunk only half a glass of sherry on this occasion. He had fallen, holding, or had thrown down after him as a distraction, a bottle of sherry the contents of which the doctor calculates—in difficult circumstances—correspond with four or five servings having been already dispensed. That would be half a bottle of that size.”

  “Any idea who his drinking companions were?”

  “Some. The table was laid on Friday evening for seven people, sir, so there’s a hefty clue. Here’s a photograph of it. Miss Wells counted four used sherry glasses and one that had contained nothing but water. Fanshawe was clutching a glass when he fell.”

  “The seventh man?”

  Redfyre shrugged. “A bloke who signed himself in the visitors’ book under a jokey pseudonym. Hardy?”

  “We know he was about the place at the crucial time. He left his body behind in evidence. You can’t be clearer than that.”

  “I’ve made off with the college refectory signing-in book, sir. Here, take a look.”

  MacFarlane took the book he was handed and studied the page for Friday the sixteenth. “The meal started at what hour?”

  “Seven o’clock on a Friday.”

  “The dons—they have to sign a book like the students? Don’t they object?”

  “No idea, sir. It’s only on weekends, apparently, and particular to Jude’s. It helps the chefs keep a tab on numbers and cuts down on waste. Even the colleges have to watch their budgets these days.

  “The first three—no, four—signatures are H. Sackville, Quintus Crewe, Digby Gisbourne and R. Rendlesham. Hmm . . .” He pointed to the page. “You did notice the placing of these?”

  “I did! And the ink. Amateurs! Still, given the circumstances, they may have been a little bit unsettled. Not their usual sharp selves. I’ve asked the science department to enlarge and evaluate.”

  “These are, at least, their bona fide signatures?”

  “They are, sir. I’ve had them all in for questioning and made them show me. I’ve interviewed the serving staff and other diners who claim to have observed all four of them, sitting together near the door. The four have c
lear and accurate memories of the menu. D. Gisbourne was voluble in his condemnation of the quality of the rice pudding. Skin too thick, apparently. They all tell the same tale. Their story is that during the aperitif upstairs in Fanshawe’s rooms, before they had a chance even to seat themselves, a quarrel of a nasty nature broke out between the two townies who’d been invited. Fanshawe was mortified by the unsavoury display and pettishly called off the banquet. Dismissed the four of them to the dining hall. They claimed not to be best pleased to end their day with shepherd’s pie.”

  “And Fanshawe remained behind up on the third floor with the two warring guests? They ask us to believe this codswallop?”

  “I’ve listened and noted, sir,” Redfyre said wearily. “I made a public performance of taking their fingerprints. Mostly to annoy them, but also to compare with those on the glasses upstairs in the Cromwell wing, where the incident occurred, and as a precaution in case of flight. They’re all poised to go down very soon.”

  “Exactly! Redfyre, I don’t want that Gisbourne fellow going any farther than the Parade—”

  “It’s all right, sir. He has been duly warned. And Miss Wells, who has access to college records, is compiling for me a list of home addresses and close family contacts.”

  “Did she think of doing that for the victim? I take it his family has been informed?”

  “It wasn’t easy. Fanshawe was one of those chaps whose whole meaningful life is—was passed in college. He had to clear out of his rooms during the vacation at some point, if only to fumigate and redecorate, but he went kicking and screaming and hanging on to the door handle. His nearest and dearest is a sister in Norfolk. So he doesn’t have to travel far from his books. He stays with her in the holidays. He has a small cottage on the estate, apparently.”

  “Right-oh. Now tell me, Redfyre, why the hell it took four days before anyone noticed the body. Did no one come looking for him? Did no one clap eyes on the corpse?”

  “Someone had taken the precaution, on leaving, of putting the oak up sign on the door. So of course, no one tried to enter, although the door was unlocked.”

  MacFarlane drew in a breath with irritation. “Well, of course!”

  “And if you’ll look again at the wider shot of the courtyard, you’ll see that the centre of the court is full of exotic shrubs—there’s a particularly good magnolia. He landed on a strip of paving—a water channel, I’d say—but his body, lying flat as it was, was not noticeable from the far side. I had to lean right out to catch a glimpse of it myself.”

  “Guests? Did you have the sense to—”

  “I did. I signed for it in triplicate for the porter, sir. Here it is. Two guests, indeed, for that evening. That nice young Mr. Gisbourne brought in the first: a certain Noël Coward, at six-oh-two, and then later, at six-fifty, we have a gentleman who appeared by himself but with prior instructions from Fanshawe to be admitted. Known in the portering trade as a PG, persona grata. Let ’im up, no questions asked! This was a certain Count Draco of Draconia, apparently. The porter maintained his sangfroid. He ‘gets all sorts at this time of year,’ he tells me. ‘But the ones in capes are usually quite harmless.’”

  “So Fanshawe marooned himself up there in his ivory tower with Dickie and Abel for company? A pair of hardened veterans, one of them a hired killer. You’re in your right mind, Redfyre—would you have done that?”

  “Lord, no! Well, not unless I was the one who’d hired the killer in the first place, sir. And I wanted to be quite sure I was getting my money’s worth. Unless I’d lured my victim or victims up, then arranged for the fox to be let loose in the hen coop.” He grimaced.

  “And at the end of the day, who’ve we got left standing? A cast of dodgy characters. Out of the trio in the room of doom: Fanshawe’s dead, Abel Hardy’s dead, Dickie Dunne’s done a runner. I think my arithmetic can handle those numbers. Our course is clear, wouldn’t you say, Inspector? Get that bloody Dickie Dunne here as fast as you can. Countrywide appeal. Can you get an artist’s sketch done? We have no photographs . . .”

  Redfyre made a note.

  “But I’ll tell you, Redfyre, there’s another villain left standing who by rights shouldn’t be! The man who’s behind all this bother. His eye strayed to the coffin box back on its shelf. “I’m going to have a rubber stamp made and take out all those case files and stamp them ‘solved,’ and I’ll write the name of the bugger responsible on each of them.”

  Redfyre got to his feet, retrieved the coffin box and placed it on the worktable once more. “I’ll leave that there until the day we can screw the lid down and bury it,” he said.

  “Why us, Redfyre? Eh? Going right back to that Chiqui bloke—what’s the Cambridge connection? I can see that the dirty deeds we’ve got in here could all have been done by Abel Hardy: ‘By special appointment, hired killer to the military.’ Up from London on a day-return jolly.”

  “They’ve got his dabs all over them. But what’s the pot of jam that drew him to our peaceable neck of the woods? And who’s behind him, paying for death?”

  “Oh, him? I found him up in Yorkshire, Redfyre, the skulking rat responsible for all this mayhem. You know me—I’m not a man to suffer ‘hunches’ gladly. Hunches are an excuse for sloppy method, but by Gow, I’m glad I followed one of my own and went up there! It didn’t take me long. The answer’s not hidden! It’s writ large in every town. Brazen as you please. Advertising itself.”

  He reached under his desk and produced a large carrier bag. “I brought the station a present back from the wilds.”

  “Oh, sir, thank you from all of us,” Redfyre said uncertainly, receiving the bag. “Oh, I say! How generous!” he murmured as he unwrapped a large tin of biscuits. “Assorted Yorkshires. Shortbreads, chocolate fancies, gingersnaps . . . As the label says, there’s something in here for every taste. I claim the nut cluster!” And, meeting MacFarlane’s impatient stare, “I had noticed, sir. The name on the tin. A ‘household name’ in the north and soon, I hear . . .”

  “To be under new ownership.”

  “About to expand into the south.”

  “They’re growing like Russian Vine, Redfyre. I went looking for the roots. And like poor, daft Ernest Jessup, I tripped over something in the undergrowth no one was meant to find. Look—here’re my notes. I’ll give you a minute to read them and see if you don’t agree.”

  He watched as Redfyre read, shook his head, then, coming to the end, nodded sadly. “You’d worked it all out, hadn’t you?” MacFarlane commented.

  “I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to. Wrote it off as a hunch, sir. I had him right in my hands yesterday.” He smiled. “But he’s going nowhere. Can’t afford to go underground. He’ll keep until all our evidence is in.”

  “Can we afford to just give him free rein running loose about Cambridge, knowing what his game is?” MacFarlane was showing an unaccustomed uncertainty.

  “I think so. He’s exposed. In fact, his game’s over. His tool, his murderer for hire, is lying chilled in a drawer in the safekeeping of Doc Beaufort. Likewise, his Machiavellian go-between, ringmaster Fanshawe. Dickie Dunne, I’d say, was a victim on his list who proved too quick and clever for him, but he’s been smart enough to remove himself from the scene anyway, like an eel in the sand. I’m surprised you didn’t trip over him in Yorkshire.”

  “So we’re saying he’s achieved his aims. Worked his way through his list. A list that corresponds to the one General Whitcliffe sent us. Dunne, Hardy, Jessup . . . all witnesses to his shameful crimes in the past, whatever they were. Let’s just settle for theft involving diamonds, according to Ratty, treachery and false allegations . . . calumny, that’s a good one . . . yet, Merriman and Sexton remain unscathed. Why?”

  “Ran out of time?”

  “Ratty knows—Ernie Jessup confided in him. I warned him to keep a sharp eye out. Unnecessary, perhaps. That chap’s got the sharpest p
air of eyes I’ve ever seen, and then he’s got Rita guarding his stumps.” He rolled an expressive eye. “Sexton? Photographic evidence, which I’m about to show you, would indicate that he’s an ally and no danger at all. No, barring police interference, the future of this amateur lies in his own soft hands.”

  “All the same. In my book, sir, he’s poison. Bad stock, like your Russian Vine. Hacked back for the moment, but still deeply rooted. And in our patch. I’ll be watching him until you feel strong enough to seek that arrest warrant.”

  In whatever company Earwig Stretton found herself, she became the lightning conductor. Redfyre smiled and waved at his old friend across the crowded King’s Parade. His thought was not a flattering one. Earwig herself would have used a phrase like “life and soul” or “catalyst” to describe the effect she had on a crowd, but Redfyre knew that she drew trouble down towards her and anyone who happened to be taking shelter from the storm in her environs. When he saw Earwig loom over the horizon, he put on his tin helmet and prepared for the flash bangs to go off. He gave her another wave, which clearly indicated, I’m here and happy, and I know what I’m doing. Carry on—you don’t need me.

  With Madame Dorine’s dance demonstration about to take off, Earwig was passing on last-minute instructions to the band assembled on the green by King’s College gates. It was a rather large band, he noted, tough and professional-looking. Not one of them had cooed to a relative or friend in the crowd. “I recruited the ensemble in London,” Earwig had said. The saxophonists in particular, with their patent-leather hair slicked down about their gaunt faces, could have featured on any constabulary wanted list. But they were paying close attention to Earwig. Or were they simply ogling her? She was worth a second and third look in her fringed, low-cut yellow silk dress. He noted that this group was equipped with supplementary instruments not often seen in refined Cambridge musical circles: guitars, tambourines, rather a lot of drums and surely more trumpets than were needed.