A Timely Death

by Janet Neel

  ‘I take it there was no cash in the safe yesterday,’ he asked unhopefully.

  ‘There was nothing in the safe at all. But it could be that the chap, or chaps, who broke in cleaned it out.’

  ‘Then you can claim on our insurance. I mean, it wasn’t funny money, it was yours, you can explain.’

  ‘I suppose so. But I’d have to prove it was there. It’ll take time and I need the cash now, and I need it without having to explain the whole thing to Caroline.’ Miles Arnold threw himself back in his chair and semaphored to one of the distant British Airport Authority employees.

  Luke, who did not want his fifth cup of coffee that day, let Miles Arnold get out of his chair the better to communicate his needs; the man needed to discharge energy, and he needed to think. It was becoming more and more important to get to the office and find out where, if anywhere, there was any cash outside of the rainy-day money sitting in a bank in Geneva. He watched Miles Arnold come back, jacket flapping, with the politician’s fulsome smile for a BAA employee doing no more than his job in clearing away the coffee cups.

  ‘Who is Bill’s executor?’ Miles asked, as he sat down and reached for coffee.

  ‘Sylvia is one, I’m the other.’

  ‘Really?’ Miles Arnold stopped, arrested in mid-movement. ‘Is that usual? I thought there’d be a lawyer.’

  ‘If you want to ensure a small business fails when the main proprietor dies that’s a good way to do it. Bill knew that. He didn’t think he was going to die, well, none of us do, but he agreed Sylvia and I, who are the only other directors, had better be executors. The business was all he had to leave, after all.’

  ‘What about that great house?’

  ‘It belongs to Sylvia. The business is there on a yearly licence.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Not unusual. If you’re a businessman you try and keep some assets outside the company. So when you go belly up because the government’s decided to hook us on to the Deutschmark, or some other insanity, then you can start again.’

  Miles Arnold opened his mouth, presumably to produce a defence of recent government actions, but thought better of it.

  ‘So unless you can hide the asset you put it in the wife’s name, where the company’s creditors can’t get at it. You have to get your timing right; they can get the deal cancelled if you go down within two years of making the transfer.’

  ‘And how long ago was the house put in Sylvia’s name?’ Miles asked.

  ‘Well, it’s at least three years since they bought it. And she put up some of the money herself – she was a widow when Bill met her. Of course it left a problem for the company.’

  ‘What?’ Miles Arnold was very jumpy; well, anyone would be rattled by finding himself £80,000 lighter.

  ‘Banks won’t lend a small company much money unless they can find a solid asset as security. Bill always had a problem there; the bank kept him on a very tight rope. They’ve lent all they’re going to on the overseas stuff.’ He waited patiently to see if Miles Arnold was going to get to the point by himself.

  ‘Oh Christ. So all my money, including the cash in the safe, may have been used somewhere, and Sylvia – who has the house – might not be prepared to do anything about repaying it.’ The man had turned white, and Luke Fleming took pity on him.

  ‘When you’re in business, Miles, you don’t necessarily think you’ll live for ever.’

  ‘Of course, he was insured.’

  ‘As am I. Key Man insurance, £2m for him, £1m for me, it being thought you could get someone else to do what I do, easier than you can get someone to do what Bill does – did. Used to be only £1m and £500,000, but we upped it, thank God, sometime last year.’

  ‘But where does that money go?’

  ‘Into the company. The insurance is in their name. And the premiums were paid. I checked, first thing I did.’

  Miles Arnold was watching his face like a lover. ‘And will it be enough?’

  ‘It’ll help.’

  ‘You mean the company could still go down?’

  ‘Depends on the bank. They’ll want to hang on to all the money but they have to give the other creditors a chance. I can suck my teeth and sound dead gloomy about the properties in Spain, and persuade the bank they’d be better letting me finish up the ones we’ve got, get the punters’ money in and trade our way out.’

  He saw that Miles Arnold had understood exactly what he was being told and decided he could afford a pee. He rose heavily from the low chair, hitching his trousers and thinking he badly needed to play a bit more tennis and drink a bit less, but none of that was going to happen until he had this lot under control.

  He did his teeth and washed his face as well, and put his glasses back on and contemplated himself in the mirror. Looked less than forty-seven, he thought, all his own dark hair, brown eyes and the sallow skin that was much improved by his permanent suntan.

  He paused outside the door and looked through glass and tall, green plants over the expanse of silver-grey carpet to where Miles Arnold sat, very still, leaning forward, hands clenched, and decided he would have to get this one off his back.

  ‘More coffee?’ Miles Arnold looked up, hopefully.

  ‘No. I have to get on. I’m expected. Look, your spot of bother. You’ve got a timing problem. I’ll have to talk to Sylvia of course, but yes, unless the situation’s much worse than I think, I’ll get you the £20k you need now.’

  ‘Oh yes. Thank you. That would help.’ He looked momentarily like a man reprieved from the electric chair.

  Luke said his farewells and strode off through the maze of Terminal 1, hoping that Sylvia would see the advantage of keeping Miles Arnold sweet while they grappled jointly with whatever mess Bill had left this time.

  John McLeish had agreed that he would interview Sylvia Price in her own living-room, rather than at Scotland Yard, or Notting Dale. It had been a choice between that and waiting until the next day, or the day after. Her solicitor, Peter Graebner, whom he knew of old, had made it civilly clear that medical certificates would block any attempt to get his client off her own base. The deceased’s wife was going to be able to tell them about the business and, assuming Catherine and her colleagues were anywhere near right, that might shed more light on the murder than anything else. He had read the pathologist’s report in the car, and it contained not a lot he did not already know. Bill Price had a slightly enlarged heart – indicative of possible heart disease and indeed the narrowed arteries that went with it. But that had not been what killed him. He had died from strangulation; the neck had not been broken, which indicated that he had not dropped suddenly and sharply as hanged murderers once had, with their hands bound behind their backs so that they could not claw vainly against the rope as Bill Price had done. McLeish, imagining the stifling darkness inside the inverted plastic bag, the sickening terror as the table went from beneath his knees and the rope tightening against the jugular, hoped that it had not gone on long.

  He thought about his notes as he went up the stone steps; he needed to know who had known of Bill Price’s sexual habits, and could have planned to take advantage of them. If his wife had been ignorant of them she was no longer; plenty of people including her own solicitor would have enlightened her. And if she had known, what had she felt about it? And had the dead man related sexually to her at all, or was the activity in the basement his sole outlet? The police psychiatrist, consulted in haste, had told him that the Prices might well have had at least the semblance of an ordinary sexual relationship. ‘Whatever that means, John, but lots of chaps have things they do to amuse themselves and still fuck the wife in a pretty straightforward way. Or they might have had a version of that game – deprivation of oxygen – that they played together and he just did the do-it-yourself variation when she wasn’t there. Or they might not be doing anything at all together and he got all his entertainment this way. No, it’s not a silly question, John, I just don’t know the answer.’

  B
ruce Davidson was waiting for him inside, passing the time by chatting to Margaret Howard.

  ‘That was Mr Fleming,’ she said, with unmistakable relief. ‘He’s at the airport. He’ll be here in about an hour.’

  ‘We’ll let him get his breath then,’ McLeish said, pleasantly. Whatever messages Luke Fleming had wanted to convey to the company’s secretary he had already passed. And a couple of his squad were on the spot, in the office, sorting through papers and answering the telephone under Bruce Davidson’s eye. Luke Fleming would not be able to move anything around unseen, assuming that he wanted or needed to.

  ‘Mrs Price is upstairs, sir,’ Bruce Davidson said formally, for the benefit of the youngsters in the office.

  ‘Let’s get to it.’ He nodded to the lads to sit down again, and realised wryly as he went upstairs that he now expected men only ten years his junior to stand when he arrived in a room.

  There were three people waiting for him, two standing already and one who did not get up to greet him.

  ‘I thought I would not faint in your arms again today, Detective Chief Superintendent.’ Sylvia Price was arranged gracefully on a sofa so that he had to avoid a low coffee table to take her outstretched hand. She was indeed a pretty woman, he thought, his first impressions confirmed, a little on the plump side perhaps, but that was a matter of taste, and she had the confidence of a woman who had always been to someone’s taste. She did dye her hair, blonde streaks on dark brown, but it was done with style and suited the slightly sallow skin and blunt features. If the late Mr Price had not been engaging in sexual activity with this one, then someone else had, McLeish thought and saw much the same conviction in Bruce Davidson’s face as he, too, took her hand.

  The other two people were male, one being Peter Graebner, looking as always tired, grey, stooped, and dressed by Oxfam, in a suit a size too large for him which sagged in folds. This derelict appearance concealed one of the most careful as well as one of the sharpest legal minds in London, and John McLeish considered him warily.

  ‘This is my articled clerk, Matthew Sutherland.’

  You didn’t see that particular dark red hair much outside the North, McLeish thought, interested, shaking the offered hand. The lad appeared to be wearing fancy dress and several layers of it, but Graebner’s firm had always been a law unto itself. A New Zealander from the accent. Now, where had he heard that recently?

  ‘I’ve met your wife, Detective Chief Superintendent, and your mother-in-law. At the Refuge.’

  ‘Mrs Price is aware that Matthew has some acquaintance with your family, Mr McLeish.’ Peter Graebner was sounding more exhausted than ever. ‘He is, however, the only articled clerk we have just now. Since we do not have the honour of acting for any of your family I could see no conflict.’

  ‘If it’s all right with Mrs Price, it’s OK with me,’ McLeish said, stolidly. The lad had obviously behaved with kindness and efficiency and Francesca would be amused to know that they had met. Just so long as this wasn’t a substitute for her absent brothers, he thought severely, as he looked for somewhere to sit.

  It was difficult to achieve an appropriate arrangement; three sofas, plump, pale gold and yielding, were arranged round the three sides of a vast square glass coffee table. A large marble fireplace in which flickered electric logs ornately set in an iron grate, bedecked with legs and curlicues, sat opposite the fourth side. This arrangment took care of much of the floor space, but the walls were lined with side tables and chairs. And every surface including the low glass table was thickly populated with objects: little china boxes, larger wooden boxes, china figurines, ivory statuettes, and photographs – an eclectic mixture. Some of it, he recognised, was good, or at least valuable, like the Dresden piece in the middle of the mantelpiece and a pretty Japanese ivory figure, but the rest looked as if it had been bought in an up-market tourist shop.

  He and Bruce Davidson sat on the sofa to Sylvia Price’s right while her legal advisers placed themselves to her left. Davidson found space for the police tape recorder by pushing gently at a raft of objects; a china box threatened to fall off the other side, but Matthew Sutherland saved it, reaching awkwardly round his knees to do so. He was having the same trouble as McLeish, fitting his knees between the squashy sofa and the coffee table and, like McLeish, he had tried sitting back, realised that would not work and was now perched, back strained and knees placed sideways, at the front edge of his sofa. Peter Graebner, with six inches less in the leg than either of them, was sitting in apparent comfort, watching his client.

  ‘First, let me say how very sorry I am about your husband.’ McLeish knew that the words were important whoever you were talking to, and Sylvia Price responded with a nod of acknowledgement and a tear, mopped up with a clean white handkerchief. ‘I’d like to ask some general background questions before I ask about your movements, if I may. Quite ordinary things, like how long had you been married.’

  She was very tense, and it was not helpful to be interrupted by Margaret Howard bringing coffee, but at least it gave him and young Sutherland a chance to rearrange their knees.

  ‘Sorry, what did you ask? Ah yes. I was married eight years ago. I was a widow.’

  ‘Were you born in this country?’

  ‘No, in Austria. My first husband – before Bill – was also English so I have lived here since I was twenty-six.’

  ‘And you are how old now?’

  ‘Forty-five.’

  Ten years younger than the dead man, whom she had married when she was thirty-seven, having presumably plenty of experience of men and their sexual behaviour. McLeish reminded himself that her own arrangements might be pretty strange; there was nowt so queer as folks’ sexual preferences. ‘Did you have children by your first marriage?’

  No, it appeared. They had hoped but nothing had happened.

  ‘And Mr Price’s children? Do you see much of them?’

  ‘Francis we see only sometimes. He is an addict, and hopeless. I am sorry for him but there’s nothing to be done.’ The tone was absolutely dismissive; Matthew Sutherland twitched uncomfortably and McLeish remembered that he must be much the same age as Francis Price. ‘Antony yes. Not at first but more lately.’ She looked under her eyelashes at Peter Graebner who made a barely perceptible sign of prohibition, and she shrugged and fell silent.

  ‘So you and your husband lived here and the ground floor is the office and waiting-room?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She leaned forward to get her coffee; her grass-green woollen jacket was dotted with yellow and white flowers. It ought to have looked overdone but on her it seemed properly decorative. ‘We have two bedrooms and two bathrooms on the next floor, and this room and a little kitchen here just for coffee and breakfast. To eat properly we go all the way downstairs, to the basement.’

  And not just to eat, McLeish thought, irresistibly, and found himself wondering how she was managing for meals at the moment.

  ‘I shall sell this house when it becomes possible. When all is over.’

  McLeish, unable to think of an adequate response, made none, but let a pause elapse before he asked her about her movements on Friday.

  She looked at him warily. ‘I leave here at about four o’clock in the afternoon. I go to a little cottage – no, it is not ours, it is rented, near Bosham. I wanted … we wanted to find out if we liked the … the pattern … the going away at weekends.’

  ‘So Mr Price was not going with you?’

  ‘No. He did not want to this weekend. He had a meeting with two people – Mr and Mrs Rayner – who wanted to buy into our places in Soller on Saturday morning and he wanted to play golf here on Sunday. He belongs in Mill Hill as well as in Bosham.’

  There had been a message on the office answering machine from a Mr Rayner cancelling the Saturday meeting. He had been interviewed and his and his wife’s presence at a lunch party eighty miles away to the east in Norfolk confirmed.

  ‘When did he … did he die?’ She extracted the handkerchief from
a concealed pocket and held it to her nose.

  ‘Probably in the twelve hours after Miss Howard said goodnight to him at four fifteen on Friday. But this is only an estimate.’ McLeish believed that the deceased’s spouse was entitled to his best idea of the truth.

  ‘I reached the cottage about seven. I had hoped to be earlier but the traffic was terrible.’

  ‘Did you see anyone? Your cleaner, or a housekeeper?’

  ‘The man in the garage. I know him. I must have been there perhaps fifteen minutes before seven. Then after that, nobody.’

  ‘You saw nobody after seven in the evening?’

  ‘I was there by myself, I watch the television. I have supper – this I have in the car with me – I go to bed. Then next day I get up and go shopping. I was in the butcher’s, and he will remember. But Bill is by then dead, no?’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  There was a silence which McLeish finally broke to ask if anyone had telephoned her at the cottage. No? Would the car have been visible, or lights showing?

  ‘You mean, to prove I am there?’

  ‘Yes,’ McLeish said baldly, and felt rather than saw Matthew Sutherland shift in his seat.

  ‘The car was outside the front door. And of course I have lights on, but I draw all the curtains – it was cold. But I was there, where else would I be? I would not drive about in the middle of the night.’

  ‘We will need the address of the cottage, and the names of your garage and your butcher. You can give them to Inspector Davidson afterwards,’ McLeish said, calmly. ‘Tell me, did you and your husband get on well?’

  ‘What do you mean? Why do you ask this?’ Peter Graebner stirred minutely at her side.

  ‘As I am sure Mr Graebner will have told you, your husband was discovered hanging from the ceiling with the table that should have supported him out of his reach. Did your husband ever try anything like this before?’

  There really was no good way of phrasing that sort of question, he and Bruce Davidson had agreed. ‘She’ll have known about it, though. The wives always do,’ Bruce had said, with the blunt assurance born of his legendary sexual experience. And Bruce had been right as usual, he saw, suddenly alert – the woman had known it, or some of it, and was not going to deny it totally.