A Dangerous Deceit

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘If recognition was all you wanted,’ he said dryly, ‘I wonder you didn’t simply make yourself known to your father.’

  ‘I’ve told you – I had to be sure how he felt, first. He might have refused to believe me. I had no proof, nothing.’

  She had only been a child when she had fancied she had no likeness to her mother. But had she looked in a mirror lately?

  ‘He died before I could pluck up courage to approach him. But … but he knew anyway, and that’s why, when Felix …’ She left the rest unspoken. ‘Well, anyway, I’m convinced he knew.’

  He must have been blind if he hadn’t. The striking resemblance to her mother – and those blue eyes, now tear-filled, so like Felix’s, which must have come through Osbert himself. He had known the truth was facing him at last, and what he had chosen to do was kill himself …

  ‘You stayed on, though, after he was dead,’ Joe put in.

  ‘There was still the family. I thought perhaps … I was desperate that we might … but then things became difficult with Felix.’

  ‘In what way?’ Reardon asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’m afraid it does, you know.’

  ‘Well, he’d convinced himself he wanted to marry me. Of course he didn’t know who I was – and anyway, I knew it didn’t go very deep.’ She looked at Judy for help, but Judy was looking resolutely away. ‘Besides,’ she added in a low voice, ‘everything had fallen apart and I was responsible. If I had never come to Folbury, my father would still be alive. You think the family would have welcomed me, opened their arms, if they knew about me? I had to go home.’

  If she was acting, she was doing it very well. So perhaps she did have regrets, maybe she was sorry for the events she had set in motion. On the other hand, there had been resentment in that letter she had written. Hadn’t she written that her mother had been ‘left in the lurch’?

  Judy leaned forward, picked up the poker and jabbed angrily at the fire, which responded with a little burst of smoke but nothing else. She threw it down. ‘So now you’ve got the sordid truth, maybe you’ll leave us in peace, Inspector.’

  ‘Not, I’m afraid, until you’ve both told us what you know about Wim Mauritz’s murder.’

  Despite what Judy had just said, he was sure they had been aware this must come, after what had just passed. But he hadn’t expected the sudden capitulation, though to deny any knowledge of it, to say nothing, wasn’t a realistic option now. Neither woman was slow to see that. Very likely it was a relief, to Vinnie at least. The last hour had taken its toll on her. She looked dramatically tired, her head drooping, dark circles round her eyes. She was a young woman who, in her own opinion, had gone through a harrowing experience, and there was yet more to confess – but from which of them?

  It was Judy Cash who spoke first. ‘Wim didn’t want to go back home,’ she began abruptly, ‘he wanted to stay in England, though not in Folbury. Fair enough, but we both agreed to tell him that the least he could do before he left was to give back his share of the money they’d got from the major.’

  ‘To which I’m sure he agreed immediately!’

  Vinnie said angrily, ‘Of course he didn’t. Being Wim, he thought we were mad. So we decided we had to do something about it.’ She hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘There was no question of opening a bank account here, so he kept it hidden at Henrietta Street. I went back that night to get it from him.’

  ‘We went back,’ Judy said. ‘We went together. It was very late, nearly midnight, but when we got there he was still out. Luckily, they’d had an extra back door key cut and Vinnie still had it. We daren’t light the gas, so we had to fumble about in the dark with a torch.’

  ‘But I knew where he’d hidden it,’ Vinnie said, ‘in an envelope, taped behind a wardrobe.’ Now they had started talking it was going along almost like a well-rehearsed script. ‘There was precious little left – I should have remembered what a gambler he was – but it was better than nothing. We were halfway down the stairs with the torch when the front door opened and he came in. He was in a state.’

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘No, he’d had a few but he wasn’t drunk, not bad enough that he didn’t see us. It was a freezing cold night but he’d no hat and coat on. His face was streaming with sweat as though he’d been running. I had to make up some story about having left something behind in one of the drawers. I wasn’t sure whether he’d believe me, but he was too full of what had just happened to him to bother about why we were there. Once he’d got his breath back, he couldn’t wait to tell us his tale.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Judy said, ‘It was farcical, really. Well, he found it amusing. He’d been having what you might call a cosy half-hour with Lily Aston at Cherry Avenue, when her husband came home unexpectedly. Luckily he wasn’t undressed, but he’d had to leave his hat and coat behind when he fled through the back door.’ He was still laughing about it when we heard a car draw up outside and there was Aston, bursting through the door. He had Wim’s coat bundled up under his arm and he threw it at him, then without any warning at all he punched him and knocked him down flat. He wasn’t really hurt, though. He just lay there, looking up at Aston, grinning. Then he said, ‘You’ve forgotten my hat, old boy.’

  Joe said, ‘His hat?’

  ‘I think that was what did it, the sneer. Aston went berserk. He grabbed the poker out of the stand and just smashed and smashed it down on Wim’s head, until … until …’

  Vinnie covered her face with her hands, and Judy was shaking, her voice barely a whisper. ‘It was all over in a few minutes, but it was awful, absolutely terrible. We tried to pull him off, but he was like an ox.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He just told us to get out – and after what we’d seen, we didn’t stop to argue. There was nothing we could do for Wim – anybody could see he was quite dead.’

  ‘And Aston? What did he do?’

  ‘Nothing. He just stood looking down at him. There was blood and … stuff, on the hearthrug … and I suppose elsewhere. He must have cleaned everything up and put Wim’s body in his car after we’d gone.’

  And then driven out towards Maxstead, until the most likely place to bury him was found. Sheer luck for him that it had been so late at night, that none of the neighbours had seen or heard anything they thought suspicious, or hadn’t thought it worth reporting if they had.

  The silence grew heavy. ‘So that’s it?’

  ‘You don’t believe we’re telling the truth, Inspector.’

  In actual fact he was inclined to believe them, though the chances of proving it or finding the evidence were slim. Aston’s car would have been thoroughly cleaned, probably several times. The hearthrug would have been disposed of – there was Aston’s furnace handily nearby – and the poker cleaned, too, a heavy great thing, he recalled, standing on the hearth at number eighteen, in a weighty cast-iron stand fashioned from a wartime shell case. And the perpetrator himself was now dead.

  ‘Go on, please. I’m waiting to hear the rest of it. Arthur Aston killed the man in a jealous rage, two of you actually saw him do it, and I’m wondering why you didn’t see fit to report it.’

  Neither said anything, which didn’t surprise him. The instinct not to get involved applied to most people, even if they had nothing to fear, unlike these two, who still had a great deal to hide, he thought.

  ‘All right. I think you didn’t report it because you were afraid that if Aston was charged with killing your friend Wim, he wasn’t going to keep silent about the connection you two had with him. And that might prevent you from leaving the country, as you were planning to do – that was what you needed the money for, you never intended to give it back to the Rees-Talbots, did you? But there wasn’t nearly enough to get you back to South Africa. So you stayed on, working until you had enough for your fares, I suspect, saying nothing, and he might have got away scot free, if he hadn’t been murdered himself.’

  ‘Not
if the Herald had anything to do with it,’ Joe said. ‘Not the way they kept on about Mauritz’s killer being found. Beats me why,’ he added, looking at Judy.

  They let her think about that.

  ‘When somebody you know has been killed, you don’t look at it that way,’ she said at last. ‘Wim was all sorts of a pain in the neck, but he was a sweetheart compared with Aston. He wasn’t evil – he didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t see why an animal like Aston should go unpunished. But what I was writing in the paper didn’t seem to be making any difference to him being found, and the enquiry was petering out.’

  ‘And then, of course, came Aston’s murder.’

  ‘I was pulled off that story. I only did the first couple of pieces before Butterworth insisted on taking it over himself. So …’

  While Joe was making a mental apology to Constable Pickersgill for thinking he’d been giving away information – it was Butterworth, the editor, with his police buddies! – Reardon finished the sentence for her. ‘So you took care of his punishment yourselves.’

  ‘What?’ exclaimed Vinnie.

  At the same time, Judy burst out, ‘My God, you people have a one-track mind! I was actually going to say, so the time had come to leave Folbury.’

  ‘I can’t bear the place any longer,’ Vinnie said. ‘Everything. It started out as nothing more than wanting to find my father, but it’s become a nightmare.’

  Reardon suddenly recalled the unfinished remark she had made about Felix and his father. ‘Did Felix know about the relationship between you and his father?’ he asked her.

  She flushed angrily. ‘Of course he didn’t! And he still doesn’t.’

  ‘Then he didn’t know why his father was being blackmailed?’

  He saw they understood immediately what he meant. If Felix had known the real reason, it would have provided him with a far stronger motive for killing Aston than the one which had made him confront the man at his home.

  Vinnie said in an exhausted voice, ‘I’ve told you. He has no idea who I am – and he didn’t kill Arthur Aston, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  Reardon had been feeling tired, too. But they still had their statements to make before either he or Joe could go home, and in view of what he knew was still to come, that was a luxury they couldn’t afford. He looked at them, sitting there, still holding hands, and said deliberately, ‘It looks to me as though there’s every indication that’s exactly what Felix Rees-Talbot did.’

  A silence fell between them all until at last Vinnie spoke, so low he hardly heard her. ‘Nobody killed him. It was an accident.’

  Judy said, ‘Plum …’

  ‘You seem very sure. Tell me how you know.’

  ‘Because,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘I was there.’

  Judy closed her eyes and sat as if turned to stone.

  ‘I went to back to the house that morning, to number eighteen,’ Vinnie said, ‘and waited until he arrived for work.’ She stopped, then took a deep breath, and went on rapidly. ‘He went straight into the foundry and I followed him in. He was thumbing through some sort of book, a ledger or something, running his finger down the columns. When he turned round and saw me, he looked simply astounded, as if he’d never expected to see me again – I would swear he had almost forgotten the whole thing. I spoke to him about returning the money to Felix and he pretended he didn’t understand.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said, almost angrily. ‘I was there, wasn’t I?’

  ‘I mean, are you sure about the money? You didn’t go there believing he would return it, any more than Wim would have done, did you? You wanted it for yourselves to enable you to get home, or you would go to the police about Wim’s murder. It was the sort of threat he’d understand, being a blackmailer himself.’

  He thought she might burst into tears, that Judy Cash would come at him like a spitting cat, but neither happened. There was another long silence before she spoke. ‘You can’t know what it’s been like, ever since Wim died. It’s been horrible, horrible. Trying to forget it, as though nothing had happened, though nobody missed him, nobody except Aston knew he was dead. And then his body was found …’

  ‘We’ll come to why you neglected to come forward with information later. Carry on with what happened when you went into the foundry.’

  ‘He turned his back on me and began writing in that book. I tapped his shoulder and he swung round and took a step towards me and pushed his big, fat face into mine. I put my hand up and he jabbed it so hard with his pencil the point broke. He leant forward, raising his fist, and I knew he was going to hit me. I’d just time to step aside as he was bringing his arm down. He fell forward into that big heap of sand and just lay there, winded. I was petrified.’

  ‘Didn’t you even try to turn him over to see if he was all right?’

  She recoiled. ‘I couldn’t have touched him! Anyway, he was just winded by the fall. I didn’t want him to come after me again, so I got out, as fast as I could.’

  ‘After you’d held him down to make sure he wasn’t breathing.’

  ‘No! No, how can you say that? Why would you think that?’

  ‘There was a bruise on the back of his neck, as if a shoe or something similar had been planted there.’ But, he reminded himself, Dr Dysart had said it could just as easily have been caused by that fall across the brass fender when Felix had knocked him over.

  ‘Well, I didn’t do anything like that. I just left as quick as I could.’

  ‘Picking up the keys and locking the door behind you.’ Not the actions of someone in a blind panic, though certainly someone not thinking straight. ‘And a woman in a brown coat was seen leaving the foundry, and almost being knocked over by a milkman’s horse.’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t me! I never saw any milkman – and I certainly don’t have a brown coat.’

  He didn’t doubt it. It would long since have been disposed of, like the keys, which were probably down a drain somewhere.

  So, just when they had started to wonder if either of these cases had a cat in hell’s chance of success, here it was, a result for both. So simple, cut and dried, presented on a plate, that it was hard to believe it could be true, that it had almost escaped their grasp.

  Perhaps it wasn’t that simple. They had a result, but how much could be believed? Confessions meant nothing without proof, and where was that?

  There was a long way to go yet.

  Twenty-Three

  Folbury wasn’t a town that came alive at night – apart from a few pubs that were rowdy at times but even then were hardly dens of iniquity, and the Town Hall Rooms which doubled as a cinema and dance hall, and youths horsing around on street corners. Otherwise, folk mostly kept to their own homes.

  They were walking through the quiet, gaslit streets, not with any particular objective in mind, but close together, Maisie’s arm tucked through Joe’s, their fingers entwined.

  ‘What’s going to happen to those two girls, then?’ Maisie asked.

  ‘They won’t get off scot free.’

  ‘They helped you find Mauritz’s killer, didn’t they?’

  ‘True – but they were witnesses to what had happened, not to mention keeping his identity secret after he was found. That’ll go against them. There’s something called perverting the cause of justice, or at least hindering the police in their duties. And it’s not certain yet about Aston’s death.’ Which was true. Reardon was by no means convinced by Vinnie Henderson’s version of events, any more than he himself was, but he felt sure it was only a matter of time. Joe didn’t really want to talk about any of it. He’d had enough the last two days, while the two women were being questioned. ‘Want some chips?’ he asked, twitching his nose as the odour of fish and chips drifted along from the lighted, open doorway of a shop a few yards further along an adjacent street.

  ‘Not unless you do.’ They walked a further few yards in silence but she wasn’t put off. ‘I can’t get ove
r it,’ she said. ‘Everything, but especially about that girl Vinnie, and their father. Margaret’s going to take that badly.’

  ‘Not to mention Felix. Hard cheese to find your girl is actually your sister.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry your head about him. It was the other one he used to take out into the garden after those meetings of theirs.’

  Joe thought about it. ‘D’you reckon?’ he said at last. ‘Well, she gets up my nose, but every man to his own.’

  ‘We shan’t see her at Alma House, anyway. No more of those meetings, thank the Lord, now he’s got this job in London.’ She paused. ‘Hark at me! What am I saying? There won’t even be any Alma House, not for the Rees-Talbots anyway, nor for me, of course, when Margaret gets married.’

  ‘Still over at Maxstead, is she?’

  They turned the corner and walked towards the bridge over the river. ‘She’s staying with Lady Maude. Bit of a battleaxe, I’ve heard, but the fire must have been an awful shock for her’. She spoke sympathetically, but her thoughts were still on the same track. ‘She won’t like it, you know. Margaret, I mean, about Felix and that girl from the newspaper.’ She sighed. ‘Well, we don’t all of us get what we like, do we?

  ‘Some of us do, if we’re lucky.’ There were benches overlooking the river, all of them deserted since there was nothing to see but the street lamps shining on the dark water flowing swiftly beneath and a distant view of the town’s gasholder, black against the far-off reflected red light from distant fires of forge and furnace.

  He drew her to a seat. ‘Speaking of which, Maisie …’ He took a deep breath. ‘Reardon told me my transfer will be coming through soon. How would you fancy becoming the wife of a detective?’

  She looked straight ahead and said nothing. The gasholder seemed to have a compelling attraction. It wasn’t the response he had hoped for and he turned her face towards him. ‘Maisie?’

  ‘Are you asking me that because of what I’ve just said – that I shan’t have a home when they’ve all gone? I can always go back to Mum’s, you know – or even stay with Lily. She’ll be glad of that till she gets her bearings.’