‘I thought I had.’
‘What, risk the sack for a couple o’ pints o’ Tetley’s? You’re wet behind the ears, young feller, for all you think you’re smart . . . Now, for a double whisky an’ a little jug o’ warm water I’ll tell you the talk that’s been goin’ around.’
Charlie sighed, raised his eyebrows towards the grimy ceiling, and turned to the bar. The farmworker turned to his fellows and winked. Everyone in the room save Charlie knew that old Harry would turn sixty-five come Friday, and would then leave Sir George’s employ.
CHAPTER 18
The One Who Cared
It was three days before Charlie and Oddie took the road out to Otley again. There was so much to be looked into, so many connections to make. Rumour was not evidence; beguiling conjunctures of timings were possibilities, maybe even probabilities, but only by sightings or other concrete physical evidence could they be hardened into certainties. Some cases presented police detectives with massive, unavoidable definites; others dangled before them an infinite number of suggestive and tantalizing indefinites, and challenged them to form them into a pattern.
Once again they had phoned the Manor in advance to say that they were coming. ‘Just a few small matters that needed to be tied up,’ Oddie had said, in his comfortable Yorkshire voice. When they got to the gate and stated their business they got a cheery: ‘Right-ho – you know the way.’ They were let in by an amiable but mute Filipino, and in the drawing room they had a sense of seeing an early fifties comedy for the second time. Lady Mallaby was in another of her shapeless gardening garments, and Sir George was doing the country squire for all it was worth – firm handshake, fingering of the moustache, and offering of drinks with an off-hand recognition that they were on duty. The script could have been by William Douglas-Home.
‘Sorry to get you in from your gardening,’ said Oddie to Lady Mallaby, as they let Sir George pour them small sherries. ‘Early evening’s the nicest time for it, I always think.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ she said, coming up to stand beside him at the French windows. ‘I’d be coming in anyway to change and have a sherry before dinner. With a bit of luck you’ll stay for a second one and I can eat dinner without changing. I like early evening too. You must have very little time for gardening in your job, though.’
‘Very little, but I enjoy it when I can get out and help the wife. The Colutea floribunda doesn’t seem to like it out here. Is the soil too clayey?’
‘Much too,’ said Lady Mallaby. ‘It was a mistake even trying to grow it. I’ll have it out and put an azalea there. Nothing sadder than straggly bushes, is there?’
She led the way back to the sofa, and they all sat down.
‘I’ve had a talk with Ben Marchant since I saw you both,’ said Oddie.
‘Oh, Ben can talk now, can he?’ said Sir George. ‘On the mend – that’s capital!’
‘I talked. Mr Marchant just tapped his replies,’ amended Oddie. ‘Not a satisfactory form of interview, I’m afraid. But it does seem that he and the girl – her name is Mehjabean Haldalwa – saw nothing. Or at least, if he saw anything, he’s saying nothing.’
‘He would hardly keep quiet if he had anything to offer, would he?’ volunteered Sir George. ‘If the man’s not caught, Ben will never be able to feel safe again.’
‘So you’d have thought,’ agreed Oddie neutrally, intent on keeping the temperature low. ‘Unless he had some reason for keeping shtoom that outweighed the danger.’
‘Difficult to imagine what that might be,’ commented Lady Mallaby, her tone as bland as Oddie’s.
‘It is, yes. But we have advanced a step or two in a direction that could explain his caginess. We’ve established, for example, that he never had a National Lottery win.’
‘What!’ exclaimed Sir George.
‘No, no biggish sum from Camelot, I’m afraid.’
‘But – I mean, he was so convincing! – ’
Oddie raised his eyebrows ironically.
‘I think Ben Marchant has spent his life being convincing,’ he said drily. ‘So the question arises, where had he got the money to set up the refuge, and where did he get the money to run it week by week?’
‘Some rich relative pegged out?’ hazarded Sir George.
‘Did he give the impression of coming from a moneyed background?’
‘Not something you can always tell.’
‘In any case, why would he lie, if that was the source? If he disapproved of inheriting money – and I’ve no earthly reason for thinking he might – is he likely to approve of a lottery that hands out multiple millions? The likeliest reason for his keeping quiet about who attacked him is that he or she was involved in the financing of the refuge, and the means of getting the money out of them was dubious, or downright crooked.’
‘Doesn’t sound like Ben,’ said Lady Mallaby. Oddie wasn’t going to give the impression he accepted unquestioningly their version of Ben’s character.
‘Maybe, maybe not. Certainly I’ve no evidence at all of any criminal activities by Marchant in the past. He has no record. On the other hand . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I have a strong sense of him as a slightly Walter Mitty-like mind, seized by whatever was the fantasy or the project of the moment. I can imagine such a person being quite ruthless about how he got the money to “make his dreams come true”. If the project was clearly a good, a benevolent thing, then I think he could be willing to sail on the windy side of the law. Especially if he could present the process to himself as something the person he was screwing money out of thoroughly deserved.’
Charlie had got a bit tired of his superior’s circumlocution.
‘We’re talking blackmail,’ he said.
‘Yes. Yes, I can see that,’ said Sir George, nodding his head in Charlie’s direction. ‘Difficult though to see who Ben might blackmail, or what sort of a hold he could have over them.’
He looked up to see two pairs of eyes fixed on him, and began immediately to bluster.
‘I say! This is outrageous! Ben and I were perfectly good friends. You’ve no cause whatever – ’
‘It is awfully unfair,’ said Oddie quietly, with an air of agreeing with him entirely. ‘But as soon as the idea of blackmail came up – and it would have to be blackmail for something more than peanuts – then it did occur to us that probably the only rich man he knew was you, that you were also his employer, and that he lived in your vicinity and was therefore in a position to know something about you that he could use.’
‘If that’s all you’ve got to go on,’ said Sir George aggressively, ‘then I’d advise you to be very careful what you say or do. Very careful indeed. If you do anything to damage my business I’ll have your guts for garters.’
‘There was something that struck both of us as just a little bit odd when we talked to you first,’ said Oddie, ignoring his bluster but turning for confirmation in Charlie’s direction. ‘When we were talking about your business, Sabre plc, you said, “Ben had nothing to do with that”.’
‘Well, he didn’t.’
‘You may have a low opinion of policemen, Sir George – I know you’ve been a magistrate, and many magistrates do – but I assure you neither of us would have imagined that your estate manager out here was likely to have anything to do with the running of a heavy industry firm like Sabre plc.’
‘Mountain out of a molehill,’ said Sir George. ‘Just trying to make the position clear.’
‘It occurred to us, too, later, that you never actually told us what Sabre plc made. No reason why you should, of course, but it was just possible the omission was significant.’
‘We make armaments.’
‘Exactly. Not difficult to find that out. And we found out too that there have been rumours over the years – ’
‘I tell you, I’ll – ’
‘ – rumours about arms to Iraq and Iran. Recently rumours about arms to Nigeria.’
‘If you damage my business or my
reputation by spreading rumours which have no basis in fact, I’ll go as high as need be to get you drummed out of the police.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t go as high as a government minister, if that’s what you mean. They’ve tended to be broken reeds as far as armaments manufacturers are concerned – encouraging them to slide round the regulations, then washing their hands as soon as they land in trouble. But we’re talking here about rumours already in circulation, and in any case we’re not primarily interested at the moment in possible breaches of international embargoes.’
‘Then what the hell did you bring it up for?’
‘What we’re interested in is whether the money for the refuge came from you, and whether there was blackmail. The possible reasons for the blackmail we can go into at our leisure.’
‘There was no blackmail. He had no cause to blackmail me.’
‘Yet he had been continuing to come out here, hadn’t he? Regularly – once a week, the locals say. Every Monday afternoon he’d be out here for an hour or two.’
Sir George changed tack.
‘We took an interest in the Centre. Naturally. Ben had worked for us for many years. We were in on the project from the launching-pad stage. We’re not a bleeding-hearts club in this house, but you can’t help noticing all the young people on the streets. We hoped he’d make a go of his hostel.’
‘So he reported out here on the progress once a week?’
Sir George spluttered.
‘Yes. Yes, he did.’
‘I suggest you contributed to its expenses.’
‘Small sums. Occasionally.’
‘Really? And yet he came here regularly as clockwork. On a Monday.’ Oddie looked at Charlie, then smiled bleakly and spread out his hands. ‘I think we should come clean with you, Sir George, Lady Mallaby. We think you’ve been putting on a charade for our benefit. There is Sir George, the bluff country squire with business interests, and there is his lady, the dumpy, frumpy wife whose great pleasure is working in her garden, because you can’t get the staff these days. Sir George’s role is one he’s playing all the time out here at Otley. Yours, Lady Mallaby, was I suggest assumed for the occasion. When I mentioned Colutea floribunda you didn’t catch on that it was a nonsense name I’d made up.’
‘I never know the Latin names of plants. I could see the shrub you were looking at.’
‘And what shrub was it, in popular language?’
‘A . . . a jasmine.’
‘Actually a daphne. You’re no more a keen gardener than Sir George is a country squire.’
In the silence that followed Charlie put in his oar, looking hard at Susan Mallaby.
‘I saw a picture of you the other day – a picture of you a few years ago at a Tory Party function,’ he said. ‘The real you is smart, still quite trim, and very good-looking. Anyone could have told us that, just as anyone who works at Sabre plc could have told us that Sir George is tough, foul-mouthed and a slave-driver of his work force – an industrialist with the necessary eye on the main chance. So the fact is, you were both in collusion on this, both playing parts for our benefit. What we want to know is why, and how did it come about?’
‘That’s it,’ chimed in Oddie. ‘We asked ourselves how this partnership – whether reluctant or enthusiastic – to put on a play for our benefit came about. Why was it necessary? And we note that Ben always came out here on a Monday, at a time when Sir George would almost certainly be at the Sabre works, and we note that the names of Ben’s lady friends that you gave us related to affairs of his that were some years in the past.’
‘And we noted another thing,’ took up Charlie. ‘Which is that Ben Marchant always seemed to take up with women decidedly older than himself. You yourself told us, Lady Mallaby, that one of his girlfriends was past child-bearing age. The mothers of both his children we know about – young people who are working at the Centre at the moment – are well into middle age. Ben himself, we have discovered, is just turned forty. He went for older women.’
‘Why that should be isn’t for us to ask,’ said Oddie. ‘Whether he preferred a woman with a lot of experience, whether he likes the fuller figure, whether he wanted gratitude. The plain fact is, that’s what he preferred – prefers, I should say.’
‘So it seemed logical, Lady Mallaby, to ask if the girlfriend he’d had out here since the last of the women whose names you gave us, might in fact have been you.’
Susan Mallaby remained silent, looking straight at them.
‘You’ve no comment to make?’ Oddie asked.
‘None.’
‘Very well,’ he resumed. ‘So the pattern that seemed to us to emerge is this. For some time Ben and you have been having an affair – whether or not with your husband’s concurrence and blessing we don’t know – and in the course of it, perhaps from pillow talk, perhaps because you were happy to give him a handle on your husband, Ben finds out from you that Sir George has been trading illegally in arms with countries that have been internationally declared to be beyond the pale.’
Again he looked at her. Still she looked back, unflinching and unspeaking.
‘When Ben got the idea of the refuge – and Ben is a man of myriad ideas, which he pursues for a time, like his women, and then passes on to others – the question of money was vital. He had nothing, I would guess, beyond any saving he might have made from his salary here, and I don’t get the feeling that Ben is a saving sort of person. So he began the process that I will call blackmailing, though no doubt he managed to present it in a much kindlier light: in return for his silence, you were providing initial help with the project, and then a small weekly sum as a contribution to its running expenses.’
‘This is fucking preposterous,’ said Sir George, his civility slipping badly. ‘There were no illegal arms sales, so how could he blackmail me?’
‘I think, you know, that we’ll find out about the illegal arms sales once we start digging. I think it’s important to realize that the sums involved in the blackmail, though sizeable, were not enormous. Those decrepit late-Victorian terrace houses go for comparatively little. To a reasonably successful businessman and country landowner they were affordable. Feeding nine or ten people a fairly basic meal each night wasn’t vastly expensive. And Ben was far from a professional blackmailer. I don’t imagine when you went along with this gentle pressurizing for funds that you foresaw it escalating in the usual blackmailer’s way. It was much more in the nature of a quid pro quo: you know something I don’t want known; I’m willing to pay you an agreed sum if you keep quiet about it.’
‘Practically standard business practice,’ commented Charlie. ‘But someone has tried to kill him, and that’s what we’re really interested in.’
Oddie nodded.
‘So if we can’t see it in Ben to keep upping the ante – because we have no evidence he was interested in money for itself – we have to look for other possibilities. Did you, Sir George, only recently find out about Ben and your wife, and were you driven mad with jealousy? Possible in the abstract, but it hardly rings true to character or situation. Around here one person’s business seems to be everyone’s business. I think the important thing is that there is no sense of this being a planned murder attempt. No one could have gone to the refuge expecting to find Ben or Mehjabean alone, and to be able to kill or maim them without being recognized. The conclusion must be that it was a spur-of-the-moment affair, one born of an overmastering emotion, and botched for that very reason.’
‘So what we need to look at,’ said Charlie, ‘is what happened that evening.’
‘You know about the spot of bother at the Centre?’ said Oddie.
‘What bother? You told us nothing about that,’ said Sir George, puffing self-importantly.
‘Your wife knows. I’m sure she’s told you. Let’s look at the sequence of events. The proposed husband of Mehjabean, an Asian girl at the refuge, comes along, apparently to say that the arranged marriage between them is off. She has nothing to fear. The resi
dents come to bar him from seeing her and preferably to see him off, very protective of the girl. While the row is going on, Mrs Ingram arrives, sees the row, is rather pleased for reasons of her own, and recognizes Ben Marchant.’
‘We went over the fact that she knew him from before,’ said Sir George.
‘Yes, we did. The first thing that occurred to her was that if he was the man who had come into a big lottery win, as rumour had it, he should damned well support the handicapped child he’d had by her sister. When she got home, much later, she rang her family down in Lincolnshire and pressed this view strongly.’
‘But before that,’ said Charlie, ‘she went to a Conservative Party recruitment do, of her own organizing. Rather a posh affair at the Royal, because she likes to do things in style and wanted to attract the right sort of person – very dainty nibbles and a carvery afterwards. This was a drive for the Leeds area as a whole, which includes Otley. Hardly any recruits, as it turned out, but lots of party stalwarts. And when she met Lady Mallaby there, it was another aspect of Ben Marchant’s career that struck her.’
‘Here we have to go carefully,’ said Oddie. ‘Because according to Mrs Ingram all she said to Lady Mallaby was, “I’ve just been round to that Centre place, run by your old estate manager. What a lot of trouble these do-gooders cause.” Mrs Ingram is very anxious now to distance herself from the refuge, from Ben Marchant, and from any suggestions that she may have been a catalyst in an attempted murder.’
‘But with Mrs Ingram it’s always advisable to check her statements. We’ve talked to others who were nearby, and they tell us she said rather more than that,’ said Charlie. ‘Putting accounts together it seems that what she also said, roughly, was: “He’s got some coloured girl he’s interested in, and all hell is breaking out there with her family.” ’
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