by Ruth Rendell
But what had been contained in the envelope on the mantelpiece in Nineveh Road? A love letter? Or the outline of some kind of plan? And why had Gunner Jones kept the envelope when he had evidently discarded the letter? Why, above all, had he written those addresses on it and handed it so insouciantly to Burden.
Wexford ate his dinner and talked to Dora about going away for the weekend. She could go if she liked. He saw no prospect of his getting away. She was reading something in a magazine and when he asked her what interested her so deeply, she said it was a profile of Augustine Casey.
Wexford made the sound the Victorians wrote as, ‘Pshaw!’
If you’ve finished with The Hosts of Midian, Reg, can I read it?’
He handed her the novel, opened Lovely As A Tree which he still hadn’t got very far with. Without looking up, his head bent, he said, ‘Do you speak to her?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Reg, if you mean Sheila why can’t you say so? I speak to her the same as always only you aren’t here to snatch the receiver from me.’
‘When is she going to Nevada?’
‘In about three weeks’ time.’
* * * *
Preston Littlebury had a small Georgian village house in the middle of Forby. Forby has been called the fifth prettiest village in England, which he explained as his reason for having a weekend house there. If the so-called prettiest village in England was as near to London he would have lived there, but it happened to be in Wiltshire.
It was not strictly a weekend house, of course, or he wouldn’t have been there on a Thursday. He smiled as he made these pedantic remarks and held his hands together up under the chin, the wrists apart and the fingertips touching. His smile was small and tight and patronising in a twinkling way.
Apparently, he lived alone. The rooms in his house reminded Barry Vine of the partitioned-off areas in an antiques emporium. Everything looked like a beautifully preserved, well-tended antique, not the least silver-haired Mr Littlebury in his silver-grey suit, his pink Custom Shop shirt and his rose and silver spotted bow tie. He was older than he looked at first, as is also true of some antiques. Barry thought he might be well into his seventies. When he spoke he sounded like the late Henry Fonda playing a professor.
His circumlocutory style of speaking left Vine very little the wiser as to what he did for a living than when he began describing his occupation. He was an American, born in Philadelphia, and had been living in Cincinnati, Ohio, while Harvey Copeland had been teaching at a university there. That was how they came to meet. Preston Littlebury was also acquainted with the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the South. He had been some sort of academic himself, had worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, had a reputation as an art expert and had once written a column about antiques for a national newspaper. It seemed that he now bought and sold antique silver and porcelain.
This much Vine managed to sort out from Littlebury’s obscurities and digressions. All the while he talked he was nodding like a Chinese mandarin.
‘I travel rather a lot, back and forth, you know. I pass a considerable amount of time in eastern Europe, a fecund marketplace since the cessation of the Cold War. Let me tell you of rather an amusing thing that happened as I was crossing the frontier between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia . . .’
An anecdote on the perennial theme of bureaucratic bumbling threatened. Vine had endured three already and hastily cut him short.
‘About Andy Griffin, sir. You employed him at one time? We’re anxious to know his whereabouts during the days before he was killed.’
Like most raconteurs, Littlebury was not happy to be interrupted. ‘Yes, well, I was coming to that. I haven’t set eyes on the man for nearly a year. You’re aware of that?’
Vine nodded, though he wasn’t. If he demurred he might get to hear the further adventures of Preston Littlebury in the Balkans during that year. ‘You did employ him?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Littlebury spoke very carefully, weighing each word. ‘It depends on what you mean by “employ”. If you mean, did I have him on what I believe in common parlance is called a “payroll”, the answer must be an emphatic no. There was, for instance, no question of making National Insurance contributions on his behalf or applying myself to certain Income Tax adjustments. If, on the other hand, you refer to casual labour, to a role as odd-job man, I must tell you that you are right. For a short time Andrew Griffin was in receipt of what I will call an elementary emolument from me.’
Littlebury put the tips of his fingers together and twinkled at Vine over the top of them. ‘He performed such menial tasks as washing my car and sweeping my yard.’ The use of this word was the first hint he had given of his Philadelphian origins. ‘He took my little dog – now, alas, passed on to the rabbit warren in the sky – for walks. Once, I recall, he changed a wheel when I had a flat – a puncture, I should say to you, Sergeant.’
‘Did you ever pay him in dollars?’
If anyone had told Vine that this man, this epitome of refinement and pedantry, or as he himself would doubtless put it, of civilisation, would use the old lag’s favourite phrase, he wouldn’t have believed it. But that was what Preston Littlebury did.
‘I might have done.’
It was uttered in as shifty a way as Vine had ever heard. Now, he thought, the man would probably start using those other giveaways: ‘To be perfectly honest with you’ was one of them; ‘To tell you the absolute truth’ another. Littlebury would doubtless have no occasion to use the defendant’s biggest whopper: ‘I swear on the lives of my wife and children I’m innocent.’ He appeared, anyway, to have neither wife nor children and his dog was dead.
‘Did you, sir, or didn’t you? Or can’t you remember?’
‘It was a long time ago.’
What was he afraid of? Not much, Vine thought. No more than the Inland Revenue catching up with his back-pocket transactions. Very likely he dealt in dollars. Countries in eastern Europe liked them better than sterling, far better than their own currencies.
‘We found a certain number of dollar notes . . .’ He corrected himself ‘. . . er, bills, in Griffin’s possession.’
‘It’s a universal currency, Sergeant.’
‘Yes. So you may have paid him occasionally in dollars, sir, but you can’t remember?’
‘I may have done. Once or twice.’
No longer tempted to illustrate every rejoinder with an amusing tale, Littlebury seemed suddenly ill at ease. He was bereft of words. He no longer twinkled and his hands fidgeted in his lap.
Vine was inspired and said quickly, ‘Do you have a bank account in Kingsmarkham, sir?’
‘No, I do not.’ It was snapped out. Vine remembered that he lived in London, this was only a weekend or occasional retreat. No doubt, though, he sometimes stayed on over Mondays and needed cash . . . ‘Have you anything else you want to ask me? I was under the impression this enquiry was concerned with Andrew Griffin, not my personal pecuniary arrangements.’
‘The last days of his life, Mr Littlebury. Frankly, we don’t know where he spent them.’ Vine told him the relevant dates. ‘A Sunday morning till a Tuesday afternoon.’
‘He didn’t spend them with me. I was in Leipzig.’
* * * *
Greater Manchester Police confirmed the death of Dane Bishop. The death certificate gave the cause as heart failure and the contributory cause as pneumonia. He had been twenty-four years old and living at an address in Oldham. The reason for his failing to come to Wexford’s notice before had been his lack of a record. There was only one offence recorded against him and that had taken place some three months after the death of Caleb Martin: shop-breaking in Manchester.
‘I’m going to have that Jem Hocking charged with murder,’ Wexford said.
‘He’s already in jail,’ Burden half-objected.
‘Not my idea of jail. Not real jail.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ said Burden.
Chapter Twenty
‘If Miss Jones had died, Miss Davina Jones, that is,’ said Wilson Barrowby, the solicitor, ‘there is no question but that her father, Mr George Godwin Jones, would have inherited the estate, would indeed have inherited everything.’
‘No other heirs exist. Miss Flory was the youngest of her family.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Indeed, we know she was the “youngest wren of nine”, and was in fact five years younger than her youngest sibling and no less than twenty years younger than her eldest sister.
‘There were no first cousins. Professor Flory and his wife were both only children. They were not a prolific family. Professor Flory might well have expected to have eighteen or twenty grandchildren. In fact, he had six, one of those being Naomi Jones. Only one of Miss Flory’s siblings had more than one child and of those two the elder died in infancy. Among Miss Flory’s four surviving nieces and nephews ten years ago, three were not much younger than she herself and the fourth was only two years younger than she. That niece, Mrs Louise Merritt, died in the South of France in February.’
‘And their children?’ Wexford asked. ‘The great-nieces and nephews.’
‘Great-nieces and nephews don’t inherit under an intestacy or, if a will exists as in this case, unless they are specifically named in that will. There are only four, the children of Mrs Merritt, both living in France, and the son and daughter of an elder nephew and niece. But as I’ve told you, there was no question of their inheriting. Under the terms of the will, as I believe you already know, everything was left to Miss Davina Jones with the proviso that Mr Copeland have a life interest in Tancred House and be allowed to live there for life, and the same in the case of Mrs Naomi Jones, who was to be allowed to live there until her own death. I believe you also know that in addition to the house and grounds and the extremely valuable furniture and the jewellery, alas lost, a fortune of just under a million pounds had accumulated, not I’m afraid a vast sum in these days. There are also the royalties from Miss Flory’s books, what I believe is called a “backlist”, amounting to some fifteen thousand pounds per annum.’
It seemed big enough to Wexford. It justified his description to Joyce Virson of Daisy as ‘rich’. He was paying this belated visit to Davina Flory’s solicitors because it was only now that he had come fully to believe that the Tancred murders were in a sense an ‘inside job’. Gradually, he had come to see that robbery, at least actual on-the-spot robbery of jewels, had little to do with these deaths. The motive was closer to home. It lay somewhere in this web of relationships, yet where? Was there somewhere somehow a relative who had slipped through Barrowby’s net?
‘If a blood relation of Davina Flory wouldn’t have inherited,’ he said, ‘I mean a great-niece or nephew, I don’t quite see why George Jones would have done. By all accounts, Miss Flory hated Jones and he hated her and he’s not named in the will.’
‘You could say it had nothing to do with Miss Flory,’ said Barrowby, ‘and everything to do with Miss Jones. I’m sure you know how the order of deaths is presumed to be when several people who are related to each other are killed. We assume that the youngest survives longest.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘Therefore, in this case, though it hasn’t come to that, the assumption would be that Davina Flory died first, then her husband, then Mrs Jones. In fact, we know that it wasn’t so from the testimony of Miss Jones. We know that Mr Copeland died first. But let us say that the perpetrator was successful and Miss Jones had died. Then assumptions of this kind would have had to be made, since there would be no surviving witness to help us. We would assume, in the absence of precise medical evidence of the time of death, in this case obviously not forthcoming, that Davina Flory died first, her granddaughter immediately inheriting under the will with the proviso that Mr Copeland and Mrs Jones have a life interest in the house.
Then, in order of age, we suppose Mr Copeland to die, then Mrs Jones, thus by death forfeiting their life interest. The property, in those few crucial moments, perhaps seconds only, is Miss Davina Jones’s alone in its entirety. Therefore, if and when she should die, her natural heirs would inherit under an intestacy, regardless of whether they were of Miss Flory’s blood or anyone else’s. Davina Jones’s only natural heir, after her mother’s death, is her father George Godwin Jones.
‘If she had died, as she might well have done, the entire property would have passed to Mr Jones. I cannot see that there would be any dispute about it. Who would contest such a thing?’
‘He’s never seen her since she was a baby,’ Wexford said. ‘He hasn’t seen or spoken to her for over seventeen years.’
‘No matter. He is her father. That is, he most probably is her father and certainly he is in the law. He was married to her mother at the time of her birth and his paternity has never been disputed. He is her natural heir as much as, in the event of his death, if he died without making testamentary disposition, she would be his.’
* * * *
The engagement would be announced any day, Wexford had begun to believe. Nicholas, only son of Mrs Joyce Virson and the late whatever-it-was Virson, and Davina, only daughter of George Godwin Jones and the late Mrs Naomi Jones . . . Virson’s car was outside Tancred House even earlier the next day, soon after three. He must be taking time off work, perhaps, with acute opportunism, part of his annual holiday. But Wexford really had no doubt that neither opportunism nor luck was needed. Daisy had been persuaded, Daisy would be Mrs Virson.
He found himself very much disliking the idea. Not only was Virson a pompous ass with absurd notions of his own importance and status, but Daisy was too young. Daisy was only just eighteen. His own daughter Sylvia had been married at that age, rather against his and Dora’s wishes at the time, but she had gone ahead in spite of them and the wedding had taken place. She and Neil were still together but, Wexford sometimes suspected, only for the children’s sake. It was an uneasy marriage, full of tensions and incompatibilities. Of course Daisy had turned to Nicholas Virson to console her in her grief. And he had consoled her. The change in her had been remarkable, she was as nearly happy as anyone in her situation could be. The only explanation for that happiness had been a declaration of love on Virson’s part and of acceptance on hers.
He was one of the few young people she appeared to know, apart from those schoolfellows who may have invited her to stay but were certainly conspicuous by their absence from Tancred House. Well, there was Jason Sebright, if you could count him. Her family had approved of Nicholas Virson. At any rate, they had permitted him to accompany them to Edinburgh last year as Daisy’s acknowledged escort. It might have been true that Davina Flory would have smiled more graciously on a plan for the two of them to live together rather than marry, but that was itself approval. He was a good-looking man, of suitable age, with a satisfactory job, who would make a good, dull, and very likely faithful husband. But for Daisy, at eighteen?
It seemed to him a great waste. The kind of life Davina Flory had mapped out for her, though perhaps imperiously conceived, was surely the life that would just have suited her with its potential for adventure, for study, for meeting people, for travel. Instead, she would marry, bring her husband to live at Tancred and, Wexford had little doubt, after a few years divorce him when it was growing too late for the education and the self-discovery.
He was reflecting on all this as he had himself driven from the solicitors to the Caenbrook Retirement Home. He had not yet met Mrs Chowney, though he had spent an unproductive half-hour with her daughter Shirley. Mrs Shirley Rodgers was the mother of four teenagers, her excuse for seldom visiting her mother. She seldom visited her sister Joanne either and seemed to know very little about her life. At her age? was her immediate rejoinder when Wexford asked her if her sister had men friends. But he hadn’t been able to forget the wardrobe of clothes, the cosmetic aids to beauty and the gym full of fitness equipment.
Edith Chowney was in her own room but not alone there. A woman on the staff, receptionist or nurse, took him up to th
e room and knocked on the door. It was opened a crack by a woman who might have been Shirley Rodgers’s twin. She admitted him, he was expected, and Mrs Chowney in a bright red wool dress, red ribbed tights covering her bandy legs and pink bedsocks on her feet, was all smiles.
‘Are you the head one?’ she said.
He thought he might reasonably say he was. ‘That’s right, Mrs Chowney.’
‘They’ve sent the head one this time,’ she said to the woman she then proceeded to introduce as her daughter Pamela, the good daughter who came most often, though she didn’t say this. ‘My daughter Pam. Mrs Pamela Burns.’
‘I’m glad you’re here, Mrs Burns,’ he said with some diplomacy, ‘because I think you too may be able to help us. It’s now more than three weeks since Mrs Garland went away. Have either of you heard from her?’
‘She’s not gone away. I told the others – didn’t they tell you? She’s not gone away, she wouldn’t go away and not say a word to me. She’s never done such a thing.’
Wexford baulked at telling this old woman they were by now seriously worried not simply for Mrs Garland’s whereabouts but for her life. He was expecting any day another one of those calls that announced a gruesome discovery. At the same time he wondered if Mrs Chowney might not take it all in her stride. What a life hers must have been! The eleven children and all the consequent worries and stresses and even tragedies. Unwelcome marriages, even less acceptable divorces, partings, deaths. And yet he hesitated.
‘Wouldn’t you have expected her to have been in to see you by now, Mrs Chowney?’
‘What I expect,’ she retorted sharply, ‘and what they do are two different things altogether. She’s been gone three weeks before without showing her face in here. Pam’s the only one you can rely on. The only one in the whole lot of them isn’t for self, self, self morning, noon and night.’
