A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  It took Mike Oddie quite a time to drive to Pocklington. The drive took him through landscape and townscapes very different from what he was used to: gentle slopes predominated in the terrain, and tweeness and genteelery in the buildings, though there were small signs here and there that where once everyone had been well-heeled, now the heels were wearing down. Mike Oddie tried to suppress a feeling of satisfaction that, whereas the last recession had bludgeoned mainly the North, this time it was hitting the South as well. He tried, but he failed.

  He found Pocklington nestling, as villages of that sort are always said to do, in the Sussex Downs. It was overpoweringly middle-class and picture-postcard, more a location for a TV crime series than a real place. It was difficult to believe that the pub could sell anything so vulgar as beer. The shops did not sell meat or fish but designer clothes, antiques, or souvenirs. Suzman’s, the antiquarian second-hand booksellers, fitted in very well: it was recently painted, bright as a new pin, and its shelves were groaning with leather-bound desirables from the libraries of gentlefolk.

  It was a very different figure who rose to greet him from the manager of the Piccadilly store: long, fair locks falling over his eyes, baggy sports-jacket and flannel trousers, and a general air of enthusiasm and youth. It was possible he even loved books.

  “Oh, police. I wondered if you’d be calling here. I’m Simon Westbury, by the way: manager, one-man band, general dogsbody. Do you want me to close the shop? We do most of our business by post, so it’s not likely we’ll be disturbed.”

  “Don’t bother, then. You say you wondered whether we’d be on to you?”

  The man gave him an attractive, lop-sided grin.

  “Well—murder, with literary connections, generally bookish in some way. I thought if there wasn’t any obvious motive—sexual, say, or financial—that you might be looking at that side of his life. I must say I always wondered about that Micklewike Weekend.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, there had to be something, didn’t there?”

  “Why? Because there always was with him?”

  Simon Westbury thought.

  “No. That’s almost but not quite true. Suzman had a part of him that genuinely loved books. This bookshop is an expression of that part. He almost never put anything dodgy through this shop. You’ll say I would say that, but it happens to be true. The books he loved and sold here were mainly the nineteenth century ones which are our speciality: the novelists, the poets, even the hack dramatists that came before Shaw. Our real interests went up to, say, Wells and Galsworthy in the fiction line, but not beyond. Now, Susannah Sneddon was very much a figure of the ’twenties. And that heavy-breathing-in-the-hedgerow stuff was laughably outside Gerald’s natural interests. Ergo, I was always convinced that his attraction to her sprang from the other side of him.”

  “The crooked side?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And did you work out what precisely was crooked about the whole enterprise?”

  He shook his head with an engaging candour.

  “No, I never did. I’m looking forward to you finding that out. Very interesting.”

  “How much did you discuss it with him?”

  “Not greatly. It’s outside my own sphere of interest too.”

  “You didn’t even speculate in your own mind?”

  He pursed his lips.

  “I suppose I did. If it had been an author who was popular with the rich and influential—Trollope, say, or Waugh—then I’d say that readers, the members of the new Fellowship, were the target. It would be in character for him to see them as targets, either for getting money out of them, or as important contacts. But that’s not Susannah Sneddon’s audience at all: in spite of the feminist interest in her these days, her appeal was and is basically middle-class, middle-brow, with a reasonably strong appeal to the young. Not at all the sort of people whom Suzman usually cultivated. So as I say the whole thing was a mystery to me, and one I’ve never solved.”

  “Did Suzman ever talk to you about his . . . dodgier enterprises?”

  “Not directly. Not in so many words. This, and the West End shop, were his impeccable fronts to the world, so he wouldn’t have. But if he was talking about his various interests, things sometimes slipped out that made me think this or that might be dubious—particularly if he ‘purred’ as I always called it to myself: gave off a feeling of being particularly pleased with himself.”

  “Anything of that kind recently?”

  “Oh, there were always one or two things of that kind in the pipeline. I do remember his saying a week or two ago that he was going to meet a Norwegian up in Micklewike—about a Knut Hamsun letter. He was purring a good deal about that, so I would think there was something very fishy there.”

  Mike Oddie sighed with satisfaction. At last the bland exterior of Vidkun Mjølhus was going to get some detail added to it. He had not been there for love of Susannah Sneddon.

  “Now that is interesting. Who is this Knut Hamsun? Is there any interest in him in this country?”

  “Oh yes, of a cult kind. Quite a lot more in the States, with its big Scandinavian population. He’s a very fine writer. And there’s one more thing about him: he was a Nazi sympathiser.”

  “Ah!”

  “During the German occupation of Norway he was an apologist for the Quisling government. Not a popular stand to take, not then, nor after the war, when he stood by it and was put in an asylum. But he had always had a strong streak of obstinacy, and by then he was a cussed old sod. Suzman told me that the letter was a late one, written a year or two before his death, defending his stand. That could be the reason for his interest.”

  That surprised Oddie.

  “Why? Suzman wasn’t a right-wing nutter, was he?”

  “Hardly. Almost a-political, I would say. No, I mean that it would increase its value commercially. Think of all the extreme right-wing, neo-Fascist groups springing up all over Europe, East and West. Think of the shops and dealers specialising in Nazi memorabilia. Most of it is junk for the skinheads, but there is a more cultivated—no, that’s the wrong word—a more affluent interest in the Fascist regimes of the ’thirties and ’forties as well. A letter of that sort could be very saleable.”

  “Do you think it was a genuine letter?”

  “In view of the purring I’d say not.”

  “It seems an odd departure for him—like the Sneddon business, in fact.”

  “No, it’s not really. Hamsun lived a very long time. His early books are late nineteenth century, well within our field of interest. And there’s another thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “People—the police, and literary experts—are getting very sophisticated about forgeries in this country. The scope is much more limited than it was.”

  “I rather suspected that, from what they told me at Haworth Parsonage.”

  “That’s right. They’ve suffered from literary shysters there. Well, Norway is a small, rather out-of-the-way country. Not backward, but backward in the sophistications of literary chicanery and its detection. No significant experience of it. Then again, they have plenty of fine writers and one great one—or many would argue two: Ibsen and Hamsun. No, my bet is that this was a broadening out, a development of a line which had become blocked for him, at least to a degree, here in this country: out and out forgery.”

  “For which, obviously, he’d need a Norwegian accomplice.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “It could be I know who that is,” said Oddie.

  • • •

  Felicity Coggenhoe had a bedsitter in—inevitably—Headingly. When Charlie got back to Leeds in the early evening he collected a car from the pool at Police Headquarters and went straight there. It was a comfortless room, suggesting no great parental generosity, but she had made it personal with posters and rugs. She was writing an essay against a deadline on a rather rickety table set to catch the evening sun, but she offered him a mug of instant coffee with
powdered milk, and he accepted. She seemed extremely pleased to see him.

  “I’ve heard all about you from my parents, who’ve been making agitated phone calls from Batley Bridge. They say they were ‘deceived’ in you, but even they admit that maybe you did it in the course of your job.”

  “I’m surprised to hear they admit that.”

  “Oh, it was never a colour thing. How is the investigation going?”

  “Progressing in a hundred directions. I’m not really allowed to talk about it. Are your parents still in Batley Bridge?”

  “They were due to go home today—‘with the future of the Sneddon Fellowship assured,’ as my father informed me last night. I suppose that means it’s all sewn up that he’s going to be in charge. He also said that they’d been deluged with enquiries about membership.”

  “That figures. Murder does attract all sorts of weirdos,” said Charlie.

  “All those people wanting a share in the Sneddons, and now hundreds more wanting a tiny part in the Suzman murder.”

  “Like vultures hovering,” said Charlie, remembering his earlier impressions. “Including your parents of course.” Felicity grinned her agreement. “Do you know how much contact they had with Suzman before they came to Batley Bridge?”

  “I only know what they told me. I suppose you’ve asked them? Oh, I see—you don’t necessarily believe them. Fair enough. All I know is that my father said he’d talked on the phone to Gerald Suzman before the Weekend.”

  “And at the Weekend?”

  “Well, as you know, during the Weekend if I wasn’t with them I was with you. Whilst I was with them the contacts between them and Mr Suzman were of the most innocuous kind. Just casual social encounters. While I was with you, who knows? I had the impression that they spent their time steaming around trying to find out where their chick had escaped to, but that may be just my paranoia. They may have been having meetings or making telephone calls I knew nothing about.”

  “By the way,” said Charlie, curious, “you said just now their attitude to me had nothing to do with colour. What did it have to do with?”

  Felicity looked down.

  “I’m afraid it was drugs. I was expelled from my private school when I was sixteen for experimenting with drugs. I shouldn’t have said it was nothing to do with colour. I’m afraid they associate black people with drugs.”

  “Charming.”

  “I’m deeply ashamed.”

  “For experimenting with drugs?”

  “For them and their prejudices, you oaf! They assumed I was back in the drugs scene, just because I was going around with you. It was very unintelligent. In fact the drugs were only an experiment, springing from a general feeling of being underloved and irrelevant. My mother’s life revolves around my father, and so does my father’s. His greatest pleasure is saying ‘As a writer myself,’ and hers is saying ‘My husband, the writer.’ It’s never left much room for me.”

  “I got the idea at one point that their concern for you was really a concern for themselves and their image.”

  “Your idea is right. Dad can’t be said to have an image at the moment, but he’s pulling out all stops to get one.”

  “But the drugs business is over?”

  “Over? Long ago. I’m happy here, have friends, am doing quite well, and thinking towards going on to do a Ph.D.”

  “Another opus on the rural novels of you-know-who?”

  She gave him a rueful smile.

  “We-e-ell . . . I was thinking of doing D. H. Lawrence. A really feminist diatribe on the awfulness of the man and his attitudes and most of what he wrote. With the re-establishment of the copyright and the new, unexpurgated texts there’s a wealth of new material, most of it damning. But with all this coming up, I have toyed with the idea of Susannah Sneddon, Mary Webb and one or two more. I’d treat them as popular writers, of course, and not make exaggerated claims, but I could tie them in with D. H. Lawrence, and maybe bring in Winifred Holtby, though she didn’t really write grunting-on-the-stable-floor stuff. It is a thought, though . . .”

  “I found I got a bit fed up with Susannah Sneddon by the third book I read.”

  “Oh, I’d probably find the same. By the time I have to decide on a subject I’ll probably have gone off on to an entirely new tack: Elizabethan drama or Romantic poetry or something major and mainstream. I might not be willing to settle for a back-alley of literature. God knows, I’ve had enough second-rate fiction in my life!”

  “Well,” said Charlie, getting up from the bed on which he had been sitting and making notes. “I’m off to Ilkley, then back to Batley Bridge.”

  “Ilkley?” Her eyes lit up with an excitement that had a hint of voracity in it. “Is that the Sneddon letters people? Are you going to read the letters?”

  “I am. You’re obviously not all that fed up with second-rate fiction writers.”

  “It would be interesting.”

  “Can’t take you along, I’m afraid. But we are hoping to get together with a few of the Weekend people tomorrow—those who are still around. Follow up some of the things they said in their initial statements. Any chance of your coming over to Batley Bridge?”

  “I’ve got two lectures early on, and I’ve got to hand this essay in. I could be over there by lunchtime, or not much later.”

  “It’s not quite the first date I had in mind, but it’ll do,” said Charlie, bending and kissing her on the cheek, then raising his hand in farewell.

  • • •

  Mike Oddie had pulled into a motel on the A1. It was not far out of London, but it gave him the basis for an early start in the morning. He had showered, poured himself a small Scotch from the emergency flask that he always had with him and added plenty of water. Then he lay on his back thinking about what he had learnt.

  Charlie’s friend at Scotland Yard, Superintendent Trethowan, had dug up some pretty interesting new stuff about Suzman’s recent activities. He had not entirely given up on the forgeries, apparently. There had been an obscene early short story by Joe Orton, snapped up eagerly by a collector in Chelsea from a dealer known to be a friend of Suzman’s. The paper it had been written on certainly dated from the ’fifties, but the state of the typewriter was identical with its condition when Orton was writing What the Butler Saw at the end of his life a decade later. The piece was hastily reclassified as a late one, possibly by Orton’s friend Halliwell. Almost certainly, though the collector was not inclined to accept this, the piece was a forgery: somehow Suzman had got hold of Orton’s typewriter, and had put together a scatological piece in the pair’s early manner—much easier to imitate than the epigrammatic demotic of Orton’s mature plays. Money in the bank for Suzman, yet he was never directly associated with the typescript.

  And so it went on: dodgy hitherto-unknown private printings of short pieces, unknown early manuscript versions of well-known poems with interesting variant readings, doctored first editions. All of them meaning a nice little cash sum for Gerald Suzman, but none of them being directly traceable back to him. He had perfected his art as a sort of literary Houdini. Oddie guessed that some of the pleasure, for him, lay in the sheer cleverness of the operation: it was an optional extra to the money.

  But money there undoubtedly was. The information collected by Scotland Yard gave an idea of wealth that was, if not staggering, then extremely impressive: leaving aside his flat and his two businesses, all lightly mortgaged, his various bank accounts, building society accounts and investments amounted to some three hundred thousand. There was also the Micklewike farm which Oddie rather suspected might have been sold when agricultural property picked up, and when it had served its turn. And he was willing to bet there were assets stashed away abroad.

  So the answer to the question of cui bono? was that Jonathan Charlton benefitted considerably, and so, more indirectly, did his parents. But that dinner-party alibi was hard to break. The impeccably credentialled writing pair had unanimously assured him on the phone that they had been with
the Charltons in Bromley until eleven o’clock. Somehow he could not regard the Charltons—though admittedly he had not met the husband—as likely murderers. Did the murder bear the hallmark less of murder for gain than of a falling-out of thieves? He rather thought it did. And if so the Norwegian began to come more clearly into focus. Was the whole Sneddon business—whatever the crooked plan behind it, and Oddie was in no doubt that there was one—merely a red herring, or perhaps a smoke-screen?

  But as he lay there sipping his drink he remained convinced that the question of who benefitted was central to the riddle of who took Suzman’s life: it was just that the terms of the question had to be changed, or enlarged, or made less basic. But for the life of him he couldn’t think how.

  • • •

  Charlie collected the photocopies of Susannah Sneddon’s letters from the late-duty sergeant in Ilkley.

  “I read one or two of them while I was copying them,” the sergeant said glumly. “The changing seasons in Micklewike. I wish you joy of them—rather you than me. But there’s obviously some as’ll find them interesting. People are ringing up the Potter-Hodges about them. I’ve already had them in to collect their photocopies.”

  “How did they strike you?”

  “Oh, the Potter-Hodges are well-known in Ilkley. Respected local citizens. They’re no oil-painting, I admit. He always reminds me of one of those listed houses that the owner is letting go to rack and ruin so he can demolish and sell the land for development. Still, it’s not everyone can be handsome young fellows like thee an’ me, is it?”

  He winked. He was a good forty-five, and homely.

  Charlie had rung the Ludlums from London to advise them of his return, but when he got to Batley Bridge he first slipped in to the Duke of Cumberland and went to the little operations centre set up there. He read through various messages from Mike Oddie, and put in train a request to the Oslo police for any information they could dig up on Vidkun Mjølhus. Then he went down to the bar for a pint, less from any need of one than from a desire to advertise the fact that enquiries had shifted back to the Batley Bridge area. He was received with enthusiasm by the landlord, avid delight by Lettie, and an interest everywhere. It is not often, these days, that policemen find themselves so popular.