A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  The flat had a view over the Thames towards Battersea and the sad defacement of the power station. Sitting snugly between the Tate Gallery and Chelsea the flat itself belied its bland exterior by being undoubtedly the home of an artist of sorts, though certainly a self-indulgent rather than a rigorously disciplined one: there were plush, soft carpets, silk shirts and dressing-gowns, gastronomic delicacies from Harrods. There were books everywhere, especially expensive art books, which looked like complimentary copies of volumes which Suzman had been concerned with in some way, some having grateful personal inscriptions. Everything in the flat spoke of—nay, announced in a loud voice—the amateur litterateur, the epicurean, the connoisseur.

  Nothing, however, spoke of criminal activities.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t expect to find traces here,” said Oddie dispiritedly. “If he puts together, say, an early, privately printed edition of a Matthew Arnold poem—”

  “No ‘say’ about it: he did,” said Charlie.

  “Right. But not so as to be convicted in a court of law. Anyway, you wouldn’t expect to find copies here. Similarly if he’d produced a choice piece of Swinburne erotica apparently printed for circulation to the poet’s similarly inclined friends, you wouldn’t expect him to treasure a copy for himself—especially as his tastes certainly don’t seem to have taken him in that particular direction. No, he’d want to sell the small number he produced, and not keep any incriminating evidence.”

  “It’s disappointing, though, that there’s so little correspondence, and no financial records.”

  “Any dubious transactions would be done on the ’phone, I imagine. The telephone is the great avoider of written records. The bank may give us some idea of how much his activities raked in, but not what the activities were, or who the money came from.”

  “The big things are well in the past,” Charlie pointed out. “The Brontë booklets and the sexy Byron letters. Those were way back in the ’sixties.”

  “That doesn’t mean there haven’t been big things that nobody has cast doubts on,” said Oddie. “He may simply have got better at it. We might get more idea about that from his bank. I doubt whether we’ll find out much from either of his bookshops. Someone who is obviously keen to cover his traces wouldn’t leave anything of interest in such obvious places.”

  “One’s just off Piccadilly, isn’t it? Where is the other?”

  “Pocklington—little village in Sussex. I’m sure both will be meeting places, places to conclude deals at, but I doubt whether there’ll be anything in the records. Of course the managers just might talk, now that he’s dead.”

  “And the heir is a godson aged five,” said Charlie, going over in his mind the information that Trethowan had produced for them at Scotland Yard, “That doesn’t sound very promising.”

  “No. Though the question ‘Who benefits?’ obviously has to include his parents in the answer, rather than the boy himself. Jonathan Charlton his name is. What did Trethowan say? His father is something in publishing, isn’t he?”

  “Yes—I suppose that could be interesting, some sort of connection. What next, boss?”

  Mike Oddie screwed up his face.

  “While we’re down in London we have to see the boy’s parents, and we’ll need to talk to Randolph Sneddon. We’ll go along and see the bookshop manager in Mandeville Street, and if possible the one in Sussex too. Meantime we’ll hope that Scotland Yard will come up with something meaty on his financial position. I’ll get on the phone now and try to set some things up.”

  The dossier of information provided by the Yard told Oddie that the stockbroking firm in the City which employed Randolph Sneddon was called Massingham Richards, and that it had a better-than-average reputation. The impression of respectability was confirmed by Sneddon himself: his response to Oddie’s call was friendly, but he said that police on the premises of a stockbroking firm was something (especially these days, with all the trouble at Lloyds) to be avoided at all costs. He made an appointment with the policemen at his Notting Hill flat for six o’clock that evening. Mrs Charlton, the mother of the heir to whatever Suzman had left, sounded young and bright, though she also claimed to be “very upset” by Suzman’s death. She said she was “flat out” for the rest of the day, but agreed to see them next morning at ten. She added that she had no idea of the sort of sum that would be involved in the Suzman legacy, but said that Suzman had always given her the impression of someone who lived up to his income.

  The bookshop was a disappointment: it was very smart, very well-stocked with collectable books, and its manager was very bland. A modern office block was, by comparison, communicative. The man admitted under forceful questioning that he had heard “a rumour or two” about Mr Suzman’s activities in the literary world, but the dead man had kept anything of that sort quite distinct from his activities in the shop; otherwise, the manager said, he would have severed any connection with him. “I’m just a simple bookseller,” he said, with a smile that verged on the nervous, “and I manage the place for him.” And as far as they could tell from the investigation of shop records and invoices that was the truth—the superficial truth, if not the underlying one.

  It was clear as soon as they drew up outside Randolph Sneddon’s flat that it was a very desirable one. They were in the best part of Notting Hill, and the house was an impeccably renovated nineteenth century one: three stories and an attic, spick and span as if it had been built yesterday. Beside the door there were only four bells. They were a few minutes early, and they got no response when they tried the bell marked “Sneddon.” As they stood waiting, though, an elderly lady, dressed for an evening out, came out of the door and smiled at them.

  “Was it Mr Sneddon you wanted? I heard the bell as I came down the stairs. I imagine he’ll be home soon. Rush hour traffic is hell these days.”

  “Our appointment’s not till six,” said Oddie.

  “Yorkshire . . .” said the woman pensively. “The Sneddon Conference. You wouldn’t be policemen, would you?”

  “Well—”

  “Of course you are. Funny how you can always tell, isn’t it? Policemen have a certain . . . aura, I suppose. Well, I think it’s rather a splendid murder. It has all the ingredients, which so few do these days. Odd to be nostalgic for the murders of one’s girlhood, isn’t it? I’ll be very sad if Mr Sneddon did it, but he’ll make a perfectly lovely suspect. What a handsome man!”

  “Heathcliff, one lady suggested,” put in Charlie.

  “Yes . . . Or Mr Rochester. Or, better still, Lord Byron. There’s something very raffish there—gambling, hordes of women, fast cars. Something deliciously beyond the pale of respectable society. Oh—here he is.”

  She gave him a sweet-old-lady smile as she passed him, but he was dashing along after locking his Porsche and did not notice. He was profuse in his apologies.

  “Can’t tell you how sorry I am. There were hold-ups all the way. Can’t imagine why everyone has to take their cars to work these days. Come along up . . . Here we are.”

  His flat occupied the whole of the first floor. After a spacious entry hall they were led into a very large living room, furnished mainly in black leather, with a plethora of dark wooden side tables scattered all around, all seeming to be waiting for drinks to be set down on them. The pictures on the wall were modern, but displayed no particular taste—reproductions of a Hockney, a Lucien Freud, a rather pallid abstract. Through open doorways Charlie caught a glimpse of a fair-sized dining room and two bedrooms with capacious beds. In contrast to Mr Suzman’s flat, there was not a sign of a book anywhere to be seen. This is a very high-class bachelor pad, thought Charlie to himself, and the bachelor prefers to live rather than read.

  “Well!” said Randolph Sneddon, throwing himself on to the sofa, having fixed himself a whiskey and water after his offer of a drink for them had been refused. “What do you want to know? Silly question: of course you want to know about Mr Suzman, and I’ve been racking my brains as to what I do kno
w about him. Because he was rather a cagey bird—or he was in my few dealings with him. Well, he lived in Dolphin Square—I don’t suppose that’s news to you—”

  “What about if I ask the questions, sir,” Mike Oddie said. “Then we can find out if there’s anything I’ve missed at the end. How long have you known Mr Suzman?”

  “I’m not sure I can be said to have known him at all. How long have he and I been in contact? That should be easy enough.” He got up with athletic grace and went over to the telephone table by the door to consult an engagement diary. “We first met for a proper conversation five months ago at the Groucho Club.”

  “His place or yours?”

  “Very definitely his. We’d been in telephone and written contact for a week or two before that.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “Well, initially it was by letter—I expect I’ve got it somewhere if you want to see it. He wrote asking if I was the Randolph Sneddon whose grandfather had been cousin to Susannah Sneddon the novelist.”

  “How had he found that out?”

  “Some kind of genealogical research, I think. My grandfather had moved down to Essex in the ’thirties, and set up a small building firm, which my father took over after his death. My father was fairly prominent in the Romford Conservative Association. It wouldn’t have been difficult.”

  “Anything else in the letter?”

  “Oh, some stuff about a new interest in her work, and so on. I wrote back and said that I was her whatever-it-is cousin, but that I really had no info about her. I was born in 1960, my grandfather was dead, my father told me no more than the basic facts about Susannah and Joshua. After that Suzman phoned me, told me about his plans for the Weekend, and invited me to lunch.”

  “Why did you accept?”

  Sneddon shrugged his broad shoulders and frowned.

  “Why indeed? It’s a fascinating story, of course. I think my father was always more proud of being associated with a sensational murder-suicide than with a not-very-well-known writer. And then again it’s family. Most of the chaps where I work have family of a rather different sort. I suppose I thought it was a step in the right direction—interesting, scandalous, if hardly distinguished.”

  “So you met him for lunch: how did he strike you?”

  He frowned again, as if unused to describing people, except in the most conventional terms, or simply by the extent of their money.

  “Well . . . not the sort I’m used to, frankly, so I’m rather at a loss . . . I mean, here we were in the Groucho, with people all around that I’d heard of, or knew from the box. That Private Eye man was there, getting pie-eyed on treacle tart. And that young actor from Heavy Metal. It was all . . . arty, I suppose you’d say. Not the world I know at all, but somehow flattering to be in. Something to talk about with friends afterwards.”

  “But what about Suzman himself?”

  “Well, the same goes for him; he was arty, very sophisticated, very much at home in that world, greeting friends, pointing out celebrities or people I felt I should have heard of. So it was, as I say, rather exciting, the sort of thing I knew I’d boast about next day, or let drop ever so casually.”

  “You’re something in the City, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. I sit in front of a screen watching figures change upwards or downwards. What used to be called a Yuppie until our world collapsed.”

  “So you were seduced by a different sort of world to your own?”

  He smiled a smile of devastating, saturnine charm.

  “Not exactly seduced, Superintendent. But I did agree to do what he wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “Oh, nothing very strenuous. He wanted me to tag along to this Weekend thing and represent the family. Well, there was no one else who could do it. My father died a couple of years ago, by the way. And Suzman made me feel in an odd way rather, well, chuffed. Silly damned feeling, but there it is: she was my whatever-it-is cousin, and all those people would be coming because they love her books. Childish for me to feel chuffed, but I did, so I said yes. And I did my bit: I read a couple of the books.”

  “Boned up on family history?”

  “Well, that was a bit more difficult: nobody to ask.”

  “Wasn’t it talked about at all when you were a child?”

  “Hardly at all. As I said, I never knew my grandfather. My father did no more than mention that there was a novelist in the family, because he didn’t remember her and had no special information on the murder-suicide. So any info I had on the family I got from Gerald Suzman, not vice versa.”

  “And that was the extent of your knowledge of Suzman before the Weekend?”

  “The odd extra letter later on, with details—otherwise yes.”

  “You trusted him?”

  He raised his eyebrows in a gesture which in other circumstances must have been devastating.

  “Why not? What was it to me? If you mean, do I think he was in general a man to trust, I’d say: as much as most. In the City we never trust anybody all the way down the line.”

  “We feel the same way in the CID,” murmured Oddie. “So, when you went up to Yorkshire, what happened there?”

  “Well, most of it you’ll have been told,” said Sneddon, gesturing towards Charlie.

  “You weren’t surprised to see Detective Constable Peace, I noticed, when we turned up on your doorstep,” slipped in Oddie.

  “No, I wasn’t. I was rung up last night by Mrs Cardew, the Fellowship Secretary. I must say I was intrigued. Not something I expected at all. I won’t ask why he was at the Weekend, because I know I won’t be told . . . Well, I put up at the Duke of Cumberland, as you know. Suzman came down on the Friday evening and we had a good talk. He emphasized I was there to represent the family, and suggested I had a bit of family lore at my fingertips: ‘There’s a family tradition that Susannah was a terrible cook’—that sort of thing. If there was such a tradition it never got to me, but that’s by the way.”

  “It didn’t worry you, this kind of deception?”

  He spread out his soft hands.

  “Harmless enough, I thought. A bit like talking up shares on the Stock Exchange.”

  “And the rest of the weekend?”

  “Well—you’ll have seen.” He had turned again to Charlie. “Talking to devotees, getting better at it as the days wore on, making up my own family traditions—nothing elaborate or damaging, just adding to the harmless stock of Sneddon lore. In the end I got landed on the Committee, but I didn’t mind. It was beginning to seem like a great laugh.”

  “Did you have much to do with Gerald Suzman?”

  “Not much during the actual events. He was always here and there talking to participants, as I was. I was hoping to get hold of him at the end, but I got buttonholed and somehow missed him. So I went along to see him at his cottage—you’ll have been told about that?”

  Oddie nodded non-committally. “You knew where he lived?”

  “He gave me a map on the Friday—a simple one connecting Micklewike with the cottage at Oxenthorpe. I like a good, fast country drive. It was no problem finding the place. We had a talk about the Committee meetings, and I had to emphasize that my job in the City came first—I’d get to the meetings if I could, but I have my living to earn, and a damned difficult one it is too, in this recession. I told him I’d get there if I could, but I hadn’t a great deal to contribute, and he might have to regard me as something of a figurehead. That seemed fine by him—he said it was the name he wanted. Then a neighbour came about something and I said goodbye.”

  “How did you spend the rest of the evening?”

  “Had a drink in the bar at the Cumberland—someone will have remembered seeing me. That was eight-thirty, nineish. Showered, went to bed for a few hours’ sleep, then up at four to drive to London, so as to be at work yesterday morning.”

  “Is there anything more you can tell us about Gerald Suzman?”

  He considered. “Not facts, no
. Impressions? He was probably a phoney, but a very entertaining one. He used to say mildly amusing things: ‘Be a Sneddon, dear boy—it’s your mission in life.’ That kind of thing. All things considered, I shall miss him. And I suppose I’ll even miss the Fellowship, if it’s wound up.”

  “You knew he owned the farm?”

  “I gathered so. I don’t know if there’s anyone else in the Fellowship rich enough to acquire it? What about that American woman you seemed so matey with?”

  He had turned once again to Charlie, about whom he had seemed distinctly uncertain throughout the interview.

  “I think she regards the Sneddons with something less than idolatry,” said Charlie. Randolph Sneddon laughed.

  “I find it difficult to think in terms of ‘the Sneddons’ at all.”

  They smiled, got up, made the right noises and took their leave. But even as he walked to the car Charlie was thinking: there was something not quite right about all that. Was it something missing, something wrong, or something that simply hadn’t jelled with what they already knew?

  Chapter 14

  Mother and Son

  Charlie Peace spent the night at home in Brixton. He hadn’t seen his mother for six months, and was pleased to find that she was without a man. Mrs Peace had been a bad picker of men all her life, and she had finally decided to give up picking. After his experiences of the long string of losers who had shared her life—losers of every race and creed, of every size and shape and every variety of hopelessness—Charlie trusted she could now settle down to a life of single blessedness. When he found she was conceiving a compulsive interest in his love life and marriage prospects he told her bluntly that there was no way such a bad picker as she was was going to be allowed to start picking for him.