Trick of the Mind

by Cassandra Chan

  And that was really the only thing in the flat that had anything to do with Gibbons’s work. Carmichael had rather expected it to be so; he knew from his own experience that detectives spent so much time at work that many of their personal effects ended up at the Yard, rather than Yard business at the home. Still, he had had to make sure.

  There was in the end only the computer to be taken back to forensics. With a better heart, Carmichael took extra care to make sure he had left as little trace of his presence as possible before wrapping the computer in a polythene bag and tucking it under his arm. He locked the door behind him and sought out the stairs, thinking to himself that he should have known Gibbons would not let him down, not even in this.

  8

  The House in Southgate

  This is it,” said James.

  The taxi made the turn down what in summer would be a green, leafy street but which in November was merely a wilderness of stark, bare limbs. On James’s instructions the taxi rolled to a stop in front of a pleasant house, set back from the street and partially obscured by a large plane tree in the front garden. It was a big building, but very well proportioned, and unaltered from early Victorian times.

  James asked the taxi to wait and then led the way through the rain into the porch and the front door.

  “Most of the land is at the back, of course,” he said, patting his pockets in search of the key. “These places are all like that. A nice bit of property, though, if you ask me.”

  Bethancourt merely nodded agreement; he had taken his glasses off and was drying the lenses with his handkerchief while he squinted about him. A slight frown appeared between his brows and once he had returned the horn-rims to his nose, he observed, “It’s not very well kept up, though, is it?”

  “No, the old lady had let things go of late years,” agreed James, at last uncovering the key in his pocketbook and inserting it into the lock. “Everyone thought, of course, that it had merely become too much for her in her old age, but in fact she had pretty much run out of money. The property is heavily mortgaged.”

  Bethancourt looked startled at this bit of information. “She can’t have been that hard up,” he said. “She had a jewelry collection worth a million pounds.”

  “Well, yes, but that doesn’t actually produce income, does it?” said James.

  “Perhaps not,” admitted Bethancourt. “But if she was in difficulties over money, a single auction would have netted her a small fortune. Or she might have sold off just a few pieces and invested the proceeds.”

  “But if she didn’t choose to sell it,” said James, holding open the door and ushering Bethancourt in, “the jewelry actually cost her money rather than making it. I mean, there were the insurance fees and things.”

  Bethancourt looked blank. “But why wouldn’t she have sold it?” he asked. “It’s not as if she ever wore it, or was holding it in trust for a beloved daughter or something. In fact, she barely knew her heir.”

  James paused, his hand on the doorknob, and looked upward at the cracked lintel. “I think it was pride,” he said, “though of course I don’t really know. Why did she keep this house? She couldn’t afford it and she didn’t need anything nearly this big, but she refused to sell. I think it was because it was her family home, her birthright, and she wasn’t going to admit that she couldn’t afford it any more than she would admit that, unlike her forebears, she had to sell her gems.”

  This was a new take on the woman whose jewelry had brought them here, and Bethancourt was thoughtful as he looked about the foyer, which badly needed new wallpaper.

  James punched in a code on the alarm and closed the door before joining him. “Faugh,” he said with an energetic snort. “It’s amazing how quickly a closed-up house becomes fusty, isn’t it? The study’s at the back—down the hall this way.”

  Bethancourt obediently fell into step beside him.

  “The alarm wasn’t triggered on the night of the robbery?” he asked.

  “Not a bit of it—these chaps knew their business,” replied James. “They also knew their parsimonious old ladies—the windows above the ground floor aren’t wired. How she got that by the insurance company I can’t imagine, especially in this house with convenient porch roofs jutting out all over the place. It was child’s play for the thieves to climb up, break a window, and let themselves in. Here’s the study—we shall ignore the police tape if you don’t mind.”

  Bethancourt obligingly ducked beneath the tape to enter the study. James followed him and then produced latex gloves from his coat pocket.

  “Here,” he said, offering a pair to Bethancourt. “We don’t want to leave any fingerprints for the police forensics department. A long and varied life has taught me that they are picky about such things—though in this case, I very much doubt whether they’ll be back.”

  “Still, you never can tell,” said Bethancourt, putting on the gloves.

  “Exactly.” James paused to look around and take stock. “I was only here the once,” he said. “On the Monday, when I met your Sergeant Gibbons. The place was crawling with forensics and policemen of every possible stripe then. There was so much bustle it was impossible to think, much less investigate.”

  Taking this as a cue to keep quiet and out of the way, Bethancourt only nodded and turned his attention to the room, more in search of hints to Miranda Haverford’s personality than in the hope of finding any actual clues. He knew his limitations and much preferred to leave clues to the professionals.

  The study was a large room with windows looking out over the back garden, a somewhat overgrown expanse of lawn and large trees with bare patches that in summer would no doubt hold flowers.

  It was a lived-in room, with a leather sofa and armchair arranged to look out at the garden and two oak filing cabinets standing in for end tables. The safe stood in the darkest corner of the room, a squat, weighty thing with its door hanging open to reveal an empty interior.

  Set against the opposite wall was a large cabinet desk. It was ornate and heavy, a late Victorian creation with its finish much worn beneath a liberal smearing of black fingerprint powder, and its pigeon holes crammed with bits of paper. It bore very little resemblance to its elegant cousin in James’s office. James stood in front of it with fierce concentration, hands on hips, as though he might be communing with the desk, drawing its secrets out of it psychically.

  Along the back wall of the room were bookshelves, and after a moment Bethancourt strolled over to inspect them, drawn by several rows of ledgerlike volumes. They were ranged along the bottom shelves, below a leather-bound collection of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. The Cooper books were not in the best condition, and were not first editions, but they were a nice set from the turn of the century, and Bethancourt thought they should be worth a bit. Which led him to wonder whether they, too, were a treasured family inheritance, or whether Miranda Haverford had simply not realized their value. They had certainly not been kept for their own sakes; the one volume he selected at random had several uncut pages.

  The ledgers were a different matter. They were as old as they had looked from across the room, their tops liberally bestowed with dust, and were apparently the household accounts from the period when Evony St. Michel and her button manufacturer had lived here. Bethancourt, who liked that sort of thing, settled himself on the ottoman, opening one of the volumes on his lap, and began to pore over the references, in faded ink, to “three cords of firewood—1 pound, 4 shillings, & sixpence” sitting just above the entry “silk shawl embroidered with roses, from Paris—25 guineas.”

  James meanwhile had seated himself at the desk and, with a delicacy of touch unexpected in a big man, begun to carefully go through each pigeonhole’s contents.

  The silence, broken only by the rustling of paper and the steady drone of the rain outside, continued for some time. James, having dealt with the pigeonholes, moved on to the desk drawers, while Bethancourt slowly began to build a picture of a marriage. Haverford had apparently
realized that even jewelry from the best shops in London could not compete with the jewels previously bestowed on his wife by dukes and kings; there were virtually no entries in the ledger for payments to jewelers. A few years into the marriage there was one large expenditure for copies to be made of some of Evony’s jewelry, and there was another on the couple’s tenth anniversary for a ruby ring, but apart from that the only jewelry purchases were of inexpensive items, like an enameled brooch.

  Evony’s dressmaker’s bills, on the other hand, were large and frequent, dwarfing the salary of her lady’s maid. In fact, Bethancourt noted, none of the servants’ wages came anything close to the amount he was accustomed to pay his charwoman. All in all, the household expenses, though certainly well above the norm, were quite reasonable for a wealthy Victorian household.

  The ledgers were all meticulously kept in a neat hand, and Bethancourt wondered if they had been penned by Haverford himself. There was no record of a bookkeeper being paid, but Haverford might have had someone in from his office to do the household accounts.

  “What the devil are you reading there?” demanded James, interrupting this reverie. “It’s not the damned Fenimore Cooper, is it?”

  “No,” answered Bethancourt with a grin. “It’s the household ledgers—from Evony’s time. Rather interesting, really.”

  James raised an eyebrow. “Read history at University, did you?”

  “Close,” answered Bethancourt. “I took a degree in classics.”

  “Did you, indeed?” James was slightly surprised. He absorbed this information for a moment, eyeing Bethancourt the while, and then a slow smile spread over his face. “And got a first, I’m betting.”

  Bethancourt inclined his head modestly.

  James gave a bark of laughter. “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” he declared. “I had quite put you down as a dilettante. But I should have known—I knew Sergeant Gibbons had a first from Oxford. Is that where you met, by the way?”

  “Initially,” said Bethancourt. “We were in different colleges, and didn’t really become friends until after we had come down.” He grinned. “We ran across each other in a pub in Bayswater one night and the rest is history.”

  “Drowning your woes together, eh?” said James, amused. “Well, great friendships have been founded on less. Anyway, I’ve found our combination—look here.”

  He exhibited his find, a small black leather-bound notebook, holding it carefully by the edges with his gloved fingertips.

  “It’s one of those little address books they used back in the forties and fifties,” he said. “The kind of thing a woman would slip into her purse or a man into his breast pocket, before we all had mobile phones and BlackBerrys and PDAs. It doesn’t seem to have been used much—there’s only a few addresses in it—but here in the back where one’s supposed to write down birthdays or what have you, there’s a list of names and dates. And then, at the bottom, there’s a series of numbers written in fresh ink.”

  He held the page open for Bethancourt’s examination.

  “How odd,” said Bethancourt, adjusting his glasses and peering down at it. “The numbers she used for the combination are the same as this chap’s birthday.”

  “Which chap?” asked James, turning the little book back so he could read it. “Ah, this one at the top—Andrew Kerrigan. I didn’t notice that. I wonder who he was.”

  “A lost love perhaps?” suggested Bethancourt.

  James snorted. “You young people are all obsessed with romance,” he said. “He was probably her milkman. Well, I think we’ll pass this along to Scotland Yard forensics, for all the good it will do.”

  “You don’t think the thief left his fingerprints?”

  “Do you?” retorted James. “No, I expect them to find this little gem wiped clean. However, if it’s not …” He tapped his chin thoughtfully with one finger.

  “Then it will mean the thief already knew the combination,” supplied Bethancourt.

  “Yes,” affirmed James. “And that would be a pretty little twist, but it’s very unlikely.” He stood silent for a moment, his eyes passing over the room and its contents. “The thief knew the safe was here,” he said musingly. “Nothing else in any of the other rooms was touched. Not, mind you, that there was much worth stealing in any of them apart from a bit of sterling in the dining room.”

  “And the Fenimore Cooper,” added Bethancourt with a jerk of his head.

  “Good grief, what thief in his right mind would steal those?” said James. “No, he knew about the safe, right enough. The question is: did he know what was in it?”

  “In other words,” said Bethancourt, following this logic, “was it a crime of opportunity, or was he specifically after the jewels?”

  “Exactly,” said James. “The jewelry was mentioned in the obituary naturally enough, but one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find it on the premises. Most people,” he added with a scowl, “keep their valuables in a safe deposit box.”

  “But anybody who owned a fortune in antique jewels might be presumed to have other things worth stealing,” said Bethancourt.

  “So one would have thought,” agreed James dryly. “I certainly did.”

  “So did I,” agreed Bethancourt. He looked about him at the worn spots on the leather sofa, and the spoilt finish of the tops of the oak filing cabinets, at the damp spot on the wall in one corner, and said, “I hope to God that I’ll have the sense to sell my grandmother’s jewelry if I end up penniless at the end of my life.”

  James looked interested. “Does your grandmother have particularly nice jewelry?” he asked, and Bethancourt laughed.

  “It’s all earmarked for my sister in any case,” he said. “Everything but the engagement ring and wedding pearls.”

  “Then you’ll have to steal it first,” said James. “I do hope they’re not insured through one of my companies.”

  Both men grinned at this jest as they left the study, ducking under the police tape again and carefully closing the door behind them.

  “Do you have any interest in seeing the rest of the house?” asked James, leading the way back to the foyer.

  Bethancourt admitted that he did and James, who clearly did not, took him on a whirlwind tour of a once-graceful home that now showed signs everywhere of neglect. Some of the furnishings had been preserved from Evony’s time, but they were universally so worn and with so many defects that even the nicest of them was no longer fit for anything but the secondhand shops.

  Back at the front door, James glanced at his watch and said with satisfaction, “Just in time for me to get home and walk the dog.”

  “Me, too,” said Bethancourt, consulting his own watch. “What kind of dog do you have?”

  “English bulldog,” said James proudly, and then he added, with a rather abashed look, “His name’s Churchill, but I didn’t name him. What kind is yours?”

  “Borzoi,” answered Bethancourt. “He was an unexpected gift from my sister, but it’s turned out rather well in the end. His name’s Cerberus, for which I am responsible.”

  James gave a bark of laughter. “Ah, yes, that degree in classics,” he said as he locked the front door, struggling a bit with the key. “Well, can I drop you anywhere? I’m headed to Hampstead. Or you can take the taxi on from there if you like.”

  Bethancourt agreed to this latter plan, and arrived back in St. Loo Avenue just in time to catch the porter leaving the building with Cerberus. Mr. Kenilworth owned three dogs of varying sizes and pedigrees and had cheerfully agreed to take Cerberus along on their walks whenever Bethancourt was not at home.

  Cerberus, whose tail wagged with violent enthusiasm upon sighting his master, was far less pleased when Bethancourt guided him away from a delightful run in the park with his friends, and instead ushered him into the Jaguar.

  “We’ll have a good run later, lad,” apologized Bethancourt. “Right now it’s time to go visit Uncle Jack and cheer his no doubt flagging spirits.”

  Cerb
erus wagged his tail resignedly.

  Gibbons wondered vaguely if he was becoming a morphine addict. He had certainly dosed himself into a stupor on account of the hideous pain resulting from the nurse’s insistence that he get up and sit in a chair. He rather thought that being a drug addict would interfere with his career as a police detective, but that didn’t seem to matter as much as it had a little while ago.

  “Here we go,” said the nurse, bustling back in with a footstool.

  Gibbons glared at her, his normally fierce eyes mere glints of blue between puffy, sleep-swollen lids. It was grossly unfair, he thought, that a woman as pretty as the nurse should turn out to harbor sadistic tendencies. There was really no other explanation for anyone referring to his present agony as “discomfort.”

  “I can’t imagine where the one from this room went,” the nurse continued, kneeling to place the stool by Gibbons’s feet. “I think you’ll be more comfortable with your knees up a bit. I’ll help you get your feet up. Ready?”

  Gibbons was not ready, but before he could say so, the nurse—who also seemed to be much stronger than her diminutive size suggested—had lifted his feet in one smooth motion and rested them on the footstool. He let out an inarticulate moan of pain.

  “I know,” she said soothingly, rearranging the small blanket she had placed over his knees. “I know it’s difficult, but you’ll feel better for it in the end.”

  Gibbons, whose eyes had closed reflexively with the pain, opened them again to glare at her, but instead encountered a shocked-looking Bethancourt standing in the doorway.

  “Er,” said Bethancourt. “Should he really be out of bed?”

  The nurse swiveled on her heels and smiled brightly at this newcomer before noticing the large hound accompanying him.

  “It’s all right,” added Bethancourt hastily. “This is Sergeant Gibbons’s dog—I’ve cleared the visit with the matron.”

  He smiled down at her.

  “Well, if Matron okayed it,” she replied doubtfully.