Really they got on very well together.
The next morning he was picked up by Mike Oddie and they began the drive in the direction of Bromley. As they made their stop-go way through suburb after suburb, litter-ridden and burdened with estate agents’ signs, Charlie wondered how he had ever borne living in a city which it was so impossible to get out of. He had never felt claustrophobic in London before, but he felt it now. Bromley of course was a cut above most of the places he had driven through, and it soon became clear that they were heading for the better part of Bromley. This was stockbroker’s Tudor of the most impressive kind: the houses were bigger, and the artificial beams better fastened to the walls.
“Money,” said Charlie.
“A nice class of person,” said Oddie.
The Charltons’ house, when they found it, was very substantial by commuter-belt standards: set well back, guarded, like the house in Ilkley, by dark evergreens, but giving off a sense of prosperity and well-being. But if the house exuded middle-class doing-very-nicely-thank-you, the woman who opened the heavy front door dissipated that atmosphere more than somewhat.
“You’ll be the policemen,” she said, with an unconstrainedly friendly smile. “Come along through.”
She was in her early thirties, still pretty in a youthful way, and with a figure that eyes had to follow appreciatively. Her sensible skirt and cream blouse were good, but not ostentatiously so, and she wore flat-heeled shoes and no jewellery. The furniture in the large, surprisingly light drawing room was ’thirties-inherited: substantial, well-stuffed and worn. Where the walls were free of radiators there were bookcases—books everywhere, of every conceivable type, from the collector’s item to the latest novel in paperback. These were seriously bookish people, as opposed to the bookish dilettante that they had sensed in Suzman’s flat.
Coffee cups were set out on a low table, and she went straight into the kitchen and brought in the coffee pot.
“I reckoned on your being on time,” she said. “I do like people who are. I’m Virginia Charlton, by the way.”
“I’m Detective Superintendent Oddie, and this is Detective Constable Peace. We’re both with the West Yorkshire CID.”
She smiled sadly and blinked.
“It seems so odd for poor Gerald’s murder to be investigated by Yorkshire policemen,” she said, sitting down and handing round cups and the sugar bowl. “Sorry—I didn’t mean that to sound rude. But he was such a metropolitan person: he loved his clubs, revelled in Soho, liked to be seen at the opera—Covent Garden for preference. If he’d been more of the ‘great and good’ kind, he’d have sat on governing bodies and Arts Council enquiries.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“Well, hardly. In fact, not at all. And the great and good don’t get themselves murdered, do they? Except casually, and maybe domestically.”
“I’ve known pillars of the community with more secret lives than Walter Mitty,” observed Oddie. “But as you say, Gerald Suzman was in any case not one of them. I presume, since he was godfather to your son, that you’ve known him for some time?”
“Oh yes—quite a time. Ten years or so.”
“Did you meet him through your husband?”
“No, though I think Tom has known him longer than me. Tom’s been in publishing for twenty-five years. When I met Suzman I was just starting: bottle-washing, humping parcels, running errands. It was my way into the business. Nowadays, with Jonathan growing up, I don’t do much more than a bit of copy-editing, but before long I’ll be back into publishing—and I was on my way up when I married Tom.”
“You haven’t told us yet how you and Suzman met.”
“I was getting to that. I was doing a stint as stand-in receptionist at Cowper-Hollins, where I worked—where Tom still works—and Gerald came in for an appointment. There was a bit of delay—meeting running over time—and instead of sitting in a chair and browsing through one of our books as most people did, he sat himself on my desk and chatted about me, my prospects, publishing in general. The phrase we’d have used then was that he was ‘chatting me up’. I expect there’s another, more brutal phrase for it these days.”
“But you didn’t find it objectionable?”
“No, why should I? I can take care of myself. I thought he was a rather distinguished gentleman.”
“You can’t remember what his business was?”
“Good heavens, no. I don’t suppose I knew at the time.”
“Was he a frequent visitor to Cowper-Hollins?”
“Occasional. He had interests in certain books, as a sort of consultant. When I’d got a bit further up the slippery pole I got a better idea what those were.”
“What were they?”
“Quite various, really. He was very good on pictures—old engravings, photographs, that kind of thing—so he was often consulted on the illustrations for books, particularly when the author of the book was not very interested. And then there were books with a bibliographical slant: he was very often the outside reader for them at that time, though publishers became a bit more careful later on. Tom may know a bit more about that, though it’s not his field.”
“Did you or your husband ever hear—rumours?”
“Yes, now and again. If there was anything dubious in his career there would be bound to be whisperings in the publishing world.”
“But that didn’t put an end to your husband’s friendship with him?”
“Oh no. I think Tom regarded him rather as a merchant seaman might regard a pirate: with a sort of disapproving admiration. Tom is rather scholarly, precise, conscientious—a bit of a fish out of water in present-day publishing, or at least a throw-back. You could say that there was an attraction of opposites.”
“You never had any specific knowledge of anything he’d done that was dubiously legal?”
“Never. That wasn’t my interest. I was looking for good new novelists, and Tom is mainly on the history side.”
“So what sort of a friendship was this?”
“Oh—parties where we met, dining together regularly if infrequently, phone calls whenever anything came up that was of mutual interest.”
They were interrupted by the sound of the front door and a call of “Mummy! Mummy!” Flushed, Mrs Charlton started up and a second later a little boy burst into the room half-running, half-hopping, his leg heavily bandaged around the knee. He was followed by a capable-looking black girl, still in her teens.
“Mummy! I was running over to talk to Stephen, and I fell over, and—”
He stopped when he saw the strange men.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Charlton,” said the girl. “I left Jonathan at the gate as usual, but I stopped to see that he was all right, and he came this awful cropper when he was running over to his friends, as he said. There was blood and he seemed to be in pain, so I whipped him along to the doctor’s. He thinks the kneecap may be lightly dislocated, but he says if we keep him home for a day or two there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.”
“I don’t want to stay home!”
“Thank you, Nicole. I’m busy at the moment—”
“I’ll take him into the kitchen and get him something nice to eat. Is there any chocolate cake left in the tin?”
“Yes, one good slice.”
“Then I’ll try to settle him down to some drawing or painting.”
“Not easy,” said his mother.
“Not easy. Will you be long?”
“Oh”—she looked at Oddie—“I should think half an hour will do it.”
Oddie nodded, and the girl took the little boy by the hand and led him out of the room. When the door had shut and the sounds of Jonathan’s shouting had receded down the hall, Charlie spoke for the first time since they had arrived.
“Are you sure that Jonathan is only Gerald Suzman’s god-child?”
There was silence. Then Virginia Charlton started speaking, without any of the confidence she had shown before her son’s arrival.
“I
don’t know what you mean . . . What are you implying?”
Mike Oddie stepped in, looking at her closely.
“Constable Peace saw Mr Suzman while he was alive. I only saw him when he had been battered to death. I think you know very well what he is implying.”
There was another silence.
“Is there any need for—?”
“If this has no bearing on Suzman’s murder, there’s no reason why anything you tell us should go any further,” Oddie said. “No promises, but we do always try to handle this sort of thing as discreetly as possible.”
Mrs Charlton took a deep breath, then got up and started prowling around the room.
“I haven’t been entirely honest.”
“No.”
“Why does one start talking in clichés at times like this?”
“I don’t know, but everybody does.”
“That’s what clichés are—what everybody says. Well, here goes. I don’t see that there is any relevance, but the first meeting was as I told you, but it led to others. He came to Cowper-Hollins several times in the next few weeks, and always tried to bump into me. Eventually I agreed to go out to dinner with him.”
“Why? He was well out of your age group. Did you think he could help you to get ahead in publishing?”
“Oh no. He wasn’t in publishing at all, in any real sense. No, I’m just attracted to older men. My husband is seventeen years older than me. I suppose people would say I’m looking for father figures. I found boys of my own age callow and brash.”
“You must have known what he was after.”
“What an old-fashioned phrase! Of course I knew what he was after! It was what I was after too.”
“You had an affair?”
“Yes. Well, that’s perhaps too definite a word. We slept together now and again. No—that’s the wrong word too. Gerald hardly needed any sleep. Most of the time he’d prowl around the flat in his dressing-gown, and not come back to me till it was nearly light. What usually happened was, he would phone and suggest something—a meal, Covent Garden, a party he’d been invited to and I’d go along if it suited, knowing it meant bed afterwards. Mostly it suited.”
“Did you get any idea about his professional activities?”
“None. You have to believe me on that. What I told you earlier was true: beyond rumours I knew nothing. I wasn’t interested. I just found the man attractive: clever, subtle, amusing.”
“But not a man to marry?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“Oh no! No question of that! And then I started doing real publishing work, then Tom started noticing me and I him, and he was a man to marry—gentle, civilised, considerate—and that was the end of Suzman and me. I suppose the truth is that the father-figure I married had to be a reliable one. Anyway, as I say, Gerald Suzman became a figure of the past as far as I was concerned.”
“For the moment.”
She sat down facing them again, her handsome face troubled.
“Yes . . . I’m not at all proud of what happened, and it’s difficult to tell you about it . . . We’d been married about two years. Tom had to go to America about a blockbuster biography: the sex life of the last Kaiser. Tom thought that historically speaking it was a lot of baloney, but there was every indication it was going to go down big over there. He was going to be away about ten days. Coincidentally I was working on a mystery novel by one of our crime names, one of the ones that gets televised. The book happened to concern the lost Byron memoirs. There was something in it—I forget what it was now—that didn’t quite gel, and I rang up Gerald to check. He . . . well, I suspect he could have answered my question off the cuff, but he made a bigger thing out of it, said he had to check several books, said he was coming round to Cowper-Hollins anyway . . . If he’d asked me out to dinner there and then I’d have said no, but the next day he was there at the office and—well, I don’t need to go into detail about what happened. He could be very persuasive . . . I have to say that at one point the thought flashed through my mind that Tom and I had been married for two years and the child we’d both wanted had not come along, and if . . . Oh, it’s all pretty sordid, or at least morally dubious.”
She shook her head, very unhappy with herself.
“But that’s in fact how it turned out. And your husband accepted the child as his all along?”
“Oh yes: there’s been no problem about that—or at least any problem there is is mine: I see, even if he doesn’t.”
“Wasn’t it a bit unwise to choose Gerald Suzman as Jonathan’s godfather?”
“It didn’t seem so at the time. Tom, you see, is vehemently anti-religion—irrationally so. His mother was converted by the Plymouth Brethren when he was in his teens, and he’s always felt that he lost her, that he could never have any sort of relationship with her after that, could hardly even talk to her. I was brought up a high Anglican, and I’m still what you might call an Easter communicant. When I said I’d like Jonathan to be christened, Tom just said ‘Fine, so long as I don’t have to have anything to do with it.’ So I asked the only other Anglo-Catholic I knew to stand godfather, and that was Gerald. We went off one morning to a church in Pimlico and ‘had it done.’ ”
“Did Suzman know he was the father?” Charlie asked.
Virginia Charlton smiled in remembrance.
“Let’s say he looked at him closely. At the time Jonathan just looked like a baby—any baby. But Suzman met us some time later, when Jon was about three, in Selfridges during the Christmas bun-fight. He took him up in his arms and talked to him and, well, by then the resemblance was becoming more marked. I’m sure he saw what you saw—in fact I know he did, because he looked at me roguishly and winked. I expect it was around that time that he made the will in his favour.”
“Did you know that he had?”
Virginia Charlton hesitated for a moment.
“We met at a party, nearly a year ago . . . He got me into a corner, well away from Tom, and said that when he, Gerald, died, which he wasn’t intending to do for a long time yet, Jonathan would be the gainer. But he hoped to see something of the boy when he was grown up . . . I shouldn’t be admitting this, should I?”
“It’s always better to tell the truth rather than having it prised out of you,” said Oddie. “What did you say?”
“I said in the meanwhile keep well away. That sounds pretty ungrateful, but he was sophisticated and sensible about it. He realised I didn’t want him seen with Jonathan, so that the resemblance could be noted. In particular I didn’t want them together when Tom was around.”
“Did he tell you how much his estate was likely to amount to?”
“No. How could he know, anyway? His business was a pretty dodgy one, with plenty of ups and downs. He said something like: ‘It won’t be riches, dear girl, but it’ll be something for the proverbial rainy day, if he turns out to be the dreary sort of person who is always expecting one.’ I’d bet on a few thousand.”
“I think rather more than that,” said Oddie, getting up and gesturing to Charlie to do the same. “Well, I think that covers most things. I’m sure you must see that this does give you an interest in his death. May I ask what you were doing on Sunday evening?”
“Of course. I knew you’d ask that. We had a small dinner-party here.”
And she named a writing couple with such stupendously right-thinking credentials that they had supported every good radical cause going in the last quarter-century and as a consequence had the distinction of never having appeared in any Honours List. And she gave them their address and telephone number to boot. Oddie smiled briefly.
“That does sound like rather a splendid alibi. Tell me, how did your husband react to Suzman’s death?”
“He said that if he had to go now, that might be the way he would have chosen: mysterious, sensational—not ordinary.”
“And you’re not afraid that one day he might look at Jonathan and wonder?”
“Fortunately Tom is ver
y short-sighted,” said his wife.
Chapter 15
Lighten Our Darkness
“I think we should split up,” said Mike Oddie, as they stood in the forecourt of a horrible hamburger joint, eating horrible hamburgers. “I think we should get the message back to Batley Bridge that operations are going to shift back to West Yorkshire. There are a lot of people we need to talk to again up there, and we don’t want those that remain simply to evaporate. I’ll ring up the operations room at the Cumberland, and they can give a message to the landlord.”
“I’ll ring up my b. and b.,” said Charlie. “That’ll get it round the place. And maybe Lettie as well.”
“That Norwegian girl staying up at Micklewike wasn’t leaving till Friday, was she?”
“No, but I’m not so sure about Vidkun Whatsit. I think he may already have gone. By the way, one person we haven’t interviewed is Felicity Coggenhoe.”
“Do it. Give yourself a treat. Take the train, talk to her in Leeds, pick up the photocopies from Ilkley, then try to be back in Batley Bridge by this evening.”
“Sounds good. What are you going to do?”
“Someone’s got to talk to the other bookshop manager. Seems silly for both of us to waste our time. Then I thought I’d go back to the Yard and see if they’ve picked up anything new since yesterday.”
“I knew you were jealous of my Yard connections. You’re trying to get a foot in that door.”
“I might be jealous if I had any desire to live in this Godforsaken part of the country. Still, I would like to have another talk with your Mr Trethowan if he’s free. It was him that set us on to Suzman in the first place. I’d like to know if they’ve got anything concrete on Suzman’s financial standing.”
“Well, while you mull over the bank statements I’ll mull over the Sneddon letters,” said Charlie. “It seems a fair swap.” They threw away a half of their hamburgers and made towards the car. “I’ve got my things in the back. Leave me at the nearest Underground station and I’ll get back up North.”
A Hovering of Vultures Page 14
