A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  Eureka!

  The old stone house on the Haworth Road was dark and still, so Charlie could not let out a victory yell. But he punched his fist in the air, in the manner of goal scorers.

  But as the significance of the letter sank in he paused in his jubilation. He turned over in his bed, put the photocopies on the bedside table and switched off the lamp. Then he lay on his back, thinking.

  The typescript at the farm was a fake. The purple passages in the typescript were inventions. Mr Suzman had been up to his old tricks: he had got a typewriter of the period, and paper, and had put together a fake. There never had been any typescript of a Susannah Sneddon novel.

  Before he drifted off into his usual dreamless sleep Charlie registered a definite sense that his discovery raised as many questions as it solved.

  Chapter 17

  Oxenthorpe Again

  The Duke of Cumberland, when Charlie got there next morning, was as much in contrast to its somnolent out-of-season self as it had been every day since the Sneddon Weekend began. Breakfast trade was booming, and extra staff had been laid on. Campers came in, forsaking their own burst bangers on spirit stoves to get the authentic whiff of murder. It was even said that some Batley Bridge locals had taken to breakfasting there, on the feeble excuse that they had forgotten how to do a real, old-fashioned English breakfast.

  Charlie told Mike Oddie of his discovery of the night before in the Incident Room.

  “It’s a whopping, massive fact,” Oddie said, his forehead creased. “But it doesn’t give us a motive.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” agreed Charlie. “The typescripts would be worth a fair bit in themselves, though, if they were accepted as genuine. And remember those proofs that arrived on the day he died? There was going to be a new edition of the novels, with all the added steam that Suzman had dreamed up. I imagine he’d get money out of them too.”

  “I expect he would. How many Sneddon novels were there all together?”

  “Twelve, by Susannah. I suppose he’d get some sort of royalty as editor, wouldn’t he? Whether it would amount to much for someone of Suzman’s financial standing is another matter.”

  “But it was a standing achieved precisely by frauds of this kind,” Oddie pointed out. “Of which we now have another example in a forged Hamsun letter. I must say this does bear all the hallmarks of a falling-out among thieves, and in the case of the letter we have a second thief to look closely at. Is there anything from the Norwegian police yet?”

  “Nothing. I did see the Norwegian girl—woman, sorry—lurking around downstairs when I came in just now. I think everyone on the fringes of the case is lurking around the Duke of Cumberland, when they’re not up at Micklewike. I wonder if it might be worthwhile having another chat with her?”

  There were routine matters to clear up first, and by the time they went in search of her the bars were open. She was sitting over a fruit juice with Gillian Parkin, and the two were on to the inevitable subject of the typescripts. Oddie and Charlie came upon them unnoticed from behind, and stood listening for a moment.

  “As far as I can gather from what he said, just the one book was going through press at the moment. Leaving presumably eleven—though I don’t recall him ever actually saying he had the typescripts for all twelve. But he did imply there would be a succession of new editions. If we could get permission to edit just one—we could do it jointly—”

  “Boy, do we have bad news for you,” said Charlie, insensitively. They jumped up as if they had somehow been caught out, then turned questioning faces towards the two policemen.

  “I’m afraid the typescripts are forgeries,” said Oddie.

  They leapt out of their seats.

  “No!” they screamed. “I don’t believe you.”

  “They must be real! They read just like her style!”

  “And just the look of them . . .”

  “I’m afraid it’s the essence of literary forgery that they look right and read right,” said Oddie. “Unfortunately they aren’t right. Suzman had very good reasons for keeping the editing of the new editions in his own hands. Susannah Sneddon never made typescripts, and neither did anyone else. We’ve established from the letters to her friend in Ilkley that she sent handwritten manuscripts to her publishers, which they then sent straight to the printers.”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Gillian Parkin, though it was clear she did. She sank back into her chair. “Handwritten manuscripts in the ’twenties?”

  “It was unusual,” put in Charlie. “Her publishers told her she was the last of their authors to do it. But I suppose it was the usual thing—the only thing—up until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”

  The two women thought.

  “What were the letters like?” asked Gillian Parkin. “Would they be publishable, do you think?”

  Charlie repressed the image of wings flapping over carrion that came once again unbidden to his mind. He tried to give a considered reply.

  “I thought they were interesting. I didn’t feel I actually liked the woman very much—”

  “Liked!” pounced Gillian Parkin. “Why do men always feel they have to like women writers?”

  “Is it just that way round? A woman was telling me yesterday how much she disliked D. H. Lawrence—”

  “Oh well—quite right. The complete pig.”

  “Anyway, yes, I could imagine the letters would arouse a certain interest. Perhaps not altogether of a literary sort. Of course I was seeing them as a policeman . . .”

  “As a policeman?”

  “Yes. I was wondering about the murder-suicide.”

  “And was there anything in the letters about that?”

  “Well—of a negative sort,” said Charlie, thoughtfully.

  “And what I’ve been wondering about,” said Oddie, turning to Vibeke Nordli, “is your fellow Norwegian.”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “I’m sure you’re quite right to. I was curious about him once or twice during the Weekend, because he never seemed to want to talk about the Sneddons, and if he couldn’t avoid it he didn’t seem to know much about them. I didn’t think much about it then, but after the murder I really did start wondering.”

  “And?”

  “I thought it might be a while before you got around to him and his background, so I rang up this friend in Oslo and asked her to go round and take a look at his bookshop. I rang her again last night, to hear what she’d found out. Well, on the surface it’s a perfectly respectable antikvariat—which in Norway is usually a combination of antiquarian and ordinary second-hand bookshop. It’s in a slightly run-down street, five minutes from the centre. When you look closely at the stock you notice that he has a special interest in loony-Right authors: Hamsun, of course, d’Annunzio, Lawrence, Ayn Rand, Henry Williamson—not, some of them, writers with any obvious appeal in Norway. But what’s really interesting is the shop next door.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s called Occupation, and it specialises in what it calls souvenirs of the Nazi occupation of Norway. Not the Resistance, note, but the Occupation. In fact it peddles a lot of cheap Nazi mementoes—tin swastikas, iron crosses, posters, that kind of thing—along with a bit of genuine stuff to give it some respectability. My friend said there was no physical connection between the two shops, but the assistant in the souvenir shop had been in the bookshop when she first went in there.”

  “Very interesting,” said Oddie. “But puzzling in a way. The image I have of Norway doesn’t suggest there would be a lot of neo-Fascist cranks to provide a market for that kind of thing. Isn’t it a time you would rather forget?”

  “Twenty years ago the cranks would scarcely have existed. But there’s been a big right-wing revival, with a nasty anti-refugee programme. ‘Refugee’ means anyone non-white—or even non-Scandinavian. I’m afraid the market is there.”

  “So . . . Here we have Mr Mjølhus in Micklewike, engaged in an underhand deal with Gerald Suzman which I ca
n’t go into. Did they clinch it, I wonder? And why didn’t he leave as soon as the murder was discovered?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that would have been a good idea,” said Vibeke Nordli, after a moment’s thought. “It would have aroused my suspicions immediately. He had told me and others too that he’d be here until Tuesday. In fact that had made me wonder too—combined with his lack of interest in the Sneddons. After all, there isn’t a great deal in Micklewike or in Batley Bridge, unless you’re a dedicated walker or a dedicated Sneddon reader. He didn’t seem to be either. Why stay on?”

  “To conclude the deal with Suzman, I imagine.” Mike Oddie turned to Charlie. “It may be we need to take another look at his cottage.”

  On the drive over to Oxenthorpe Oddie leafed his way though the various reports that had been waiting for him in the Incident Room. The pathologist was inclined towards a late time for Suzman’s death: midnight or even one o’clock in the morning. The implement that killed him was probably a heavy iron bar of some kind. There was quite a lot of rust in the wounds. Nothing at the scene of the crime fitted the bill, and the weapon had presumably been taken away after the murder and somehow disposed of. In general Gerald Suzman was a healthy man for his age, and could have expected to live for many years.

  “And but for his cleverness he might have,” Oddie said, retailing this verdict to Charlie. “Don’t you get that feeling—that he had lived all his life on his wits, one clever wheeze after another, and at last he over-reached himself?”

  “Oh yes, sure. But the question is: which of the wheezes was the one that proved to be his downfall? If you look at both the current ones we know about, they seem . . . well, they don’t seem quite to measure up. The Conference is the biggest thing he’d gone in for so far—the biggest and the most public. But it seems out of all proportion to the current scams that we know about.”

  “Exactly. The Hamsun letter seems not much more than a nice little sideline: it might have led to further nice little sidelines, but somehow it doesn’t seem to amount to anything big, in the context of other things he’s been associated with.”

  “No . . . The Sneddon manuscripts are bigger, of course. There was money in the typescripts if they were accepted as genuine, and—subject to checking with the publishers—we can take it that the new, scholarly editions would bring in a bit of money to him as editor. That was something he was obviously unwilling to share with anyone like Gillian Parkin.”

  “For obvious reasons.”

  “True. She might have got on to their bogusness. But he may have been protecting a source of income too. Still, somehow we don’t yet seem to be talking big money.”

  “I suppose we have to ask ourselves if he had a partner in this, as he obviously had with the Hamsun letter. Did he have a Sneddon expert improvising the dirty bits? If so, why?”

  They thought for a bit.

  “Nobody springs to mind from the Conference,” said Charlie, “apart from Gillian Parkin and Vibeke Nordli. If it was one of them, they’re sending up a very good smokescreen. Rupert Coggenhoe seems to be too obsessed with his own fame to want to contribute to the increase of anyone else’s. His participation at the Weekend was self-promotion, not Sneddon promotion . . .”

  “Somehow I feel this was a one-man operation,” said Oddie.

  “So do I. In fact I feel that most of his scams were, though using others to load off the fakes. For anything foreign he would need a native speaker, but otherwise I’d guess he was a sort of literary chameleon: if he saw the opportunity he could write in the manner of anybody he chose. Probably prided himself on it. I suspect he did the Orton fake, and he was in the process of doing the Sneddon fakes. I imagine he rather liked doing ‘dirty bits’ of any kind.”

  “I think you’re probably right: he’d have rubbed his hands. But where does murder come in?”

  “Exactly. I can’t see Randolph Sneddon finding out about the forged dirty bits and murdering to protect his relative’s reputation. I have a feeling that the whole business of the Sneddon typecripts hasn’t come together yet.”

  When they got to the cottage they pulled off from the road and sat thinking. Then Oddie said:

  “I think if we’ve got time we should take this place apart.”

  When they got to the cottage gate Charlie said: “Wait.” They paused on the little dirt track. The gate to the cottage was wrought-iron, set in a squat little fence with thick iron palings. Some were rotting, and Charlie pointed to a point half-way along the front where one of the palings was missing. They went along silently and examined the gap, particularly where the paling had come away from the crossbars at top and bottom of the fence.

  “It looks recent,” said Oddie.

  “And it looks as if it has been wrenched away by force,” Charlie pointed out. “You might expect that sort of vandalism in the city, but not here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “The doc’s report spoke of rust in the wound,” said Oddie. “Have we found our weapon?”

  “Or not found it,” said Charlie pessimistically. “It could have been discarded anywhere—in the middle of the moors, miles from here, miles from anywhere. The chances of finding it are virtually nil. But if it was this iron bar that killed him, it does tell us something, doesn’t it?”

  “It certainly tells us the thing was all but unpremeditated. It tells us that the man—or woman—was desperate, or beyond rational planning. It tells us that he was improvising. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  Inside the cottage they went about their business without further preamble. Charlie went through the books on the unit, flicking through them for letters or papers. Then he crossed the room to another untidy pile on the heavy cupboard over by the window, and here he was lucky. In among a fairly random collection of hardbacks and paperbacks designed for casual reading he found a leather folder, roughly A5 in shape, and inside he found an old, or apparently old, handwritten letter, six pages in length. It began: “Kjære venn!”

  “This must be it,” he said to Oddie. “The Hamsun letter.”

  Oddie came over and took it from him in his gloved hand.

  “Right!” he said. “We’re not going to get anywhere trying to read it. And I’m not sure our forensic people over here are the best ones to handle it. We’ll have to get it physically to Oslo, for tests on the paper, and to get a handwriting expert on to it. As far as we two are concerned there’s not much doubt it’s a forgery, or that it was Mjølhus who did it. The interesting thing about finding it is the confirmation that it was actually handed over.”

  “Yes. It could have happened during the Weekend, though,” Charlie pointed out. “There was plenty going on all over the shop that I didn’t see. On the other hand he could have brought it here. Safer, really, and giving more chance for talk—and maybe negotiation. I wonder if Mjølhus had a car with him.”

  “Could you get on to Vibeke Nordli and find out? She said he wasn’t interested in walking. I’ve found a stack of things here that seem to be of interest.”

  So while Oddie was rummaging down in the cupboard at the bottom of the wall unit, Charlie rang the Duke of Cumberland and the Incident Room. As he expected, one of the constables there was able to get hold of Vibeke Nordli, who was still hanging about in the bars exchanging gossip and hoping for developments.

  “He didn’t have his car with him, but he did hire one,” she told him. “He collected it from a car hire firm in Batley Bridge after the Weekend was over. He said he wanted to see a bit of Yorkshire, and so far as I know he did. I didn’t see anything of him on Sunday evening, and the only time I saw him on Monday or Tuesday was when he came down here to be interviewed.”

  “Right. Will you tell this to the constable who fetched you, and ask him to get what details he can from the car firm? By the way, is Lettie still around?”

  “Oh yes. Do you want me to fetch her?”

  “No—no point in getting her upstairs needlessly. And this is nothing to do with the case. Just ask her, if she does
go and see her mother again, if she’d make enquiries about what happened at the farm after the Sneddons’ deaths: did the cousin come and take over? Did he try and farm it, or did he sell it immediately—that kind of thing.”

  “Right, I’ll do that.”

  “And give her my love.”

  “That’s a very unpolicemanly thing to say.”

  “I’m a very unpolicemanly policeman.”

  Mike Oddie was now sitting on the floor, his feet stretched out in front of him, sorting through a disorderly mass of papers in the bottom of the cupboard unit.

  “He was a pretty unmethodical sort of guy,” he said as Charlie finished his phone call and came over to him. “The artistic temperament, no doubt. Electricity bills, bills for servicing the car, letters from Sneddon fans, letters from publishers. Here’s one from the people who are going—were going—to do the new edition of the Sneddon novels.”

  He handed Charlie a letter with the letterhead Bennett and Morley in stylish red lettering at the top.

  “There’s too many publishers in all this,” said Charlie, his forehead crinkling. “Now: the original ones, the ones she went to see, were Carter and Foreman.”

  “Probably long since gone to the wall,” said Oddie. “Or been swallowed up by some big Corporation.”

  “Right. She did say the big cheese there was interested in books. Probably fatal.”

  “Almost certainly. They say the men who buy books for W. H. Smith never ever read one, and go entirely on the covers.”

  “Right. Then the people who led the revival of interest in Susannah were the Untamed Shrew Press.”

  “Yes. You’ve got some of their paperbacks.”

  “Nicely produced. They do a good job. So Bennett and Morley are the people Suzman had got lined up to do the scholarly edition. I wonder if the Untamed Shrew Press people are happy about that.”