Angels Dining at the Ritz

by John Gardner

  When it came down to it, MacRoberts’s defence were calling all four of the men as witnesses to establish the alibi. ‘Whole case revolved round them,’ Willoughby said.

  But Max demolished the lot: starting in a friendly way, implying he had only a couple of routine questions, leading them down a path strewn with deadly obstacles, and finally teasing, then bludgeoning the truth out of them, laying them bare, knocking them into a corner where they finally condemned themselves through their own muddled stories.

  ‘As it turned out, the defence only called two of them, and after hearing the first one go to pieces it was too late. MacRoberts was found guilty of rape and murder, but the psychiatrist’s report led the judge to reluctantly sentence him to be held at His Majesty’s pleasure. Screamed at Max, MacRoberts did, just as he was being taken down, “I’ll get you, you slimy bastard. I’ll do for you.” Or words to that effect.’

  ‘A lot of them say things like that.’ Tommy smiled. ‘I’ve even been at the receiving end of similar curses.’

  ‘Yes, and MacRoberts meant it. Wouldn’t put it past him to try masterminding a murder from his cell at Rampton.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘A handful, yes. We all collect them along the way. All barristers do, but few take it seriously.’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘I doubt it. Max is — was — a fairly relaxed person. Christ, I can’t yet believe he’s gone.’

  ‘He has, I’ve seen him.’ This time Tommy wasn’t smiling.

  Suzie often thought that Tommy Livermore should have been a barrister, told him so more than once. ‘Don’t look good in one of those stupid wigs, heart. Not my style,’ usual flippant self. Now he was batting questions off Willoughby Sands like a fast game of table tennis: probing into Max Ascoli’s professional career.

  He went through some of Max’s big cases, using the melodramatic names Fleet Street assigned to them at the time, making them sound like detective stories by Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. The Edmund Diamond Mystery, for starters, the mystery being that Mr William J. Edmund didn’t have the diamond he sold to a syndicate for almost a million pounds sterling — lot of money back then, middle thirties. On that occasion Max Ascoli put Edmund away for fifteen years. Then there was the Vicarage Murder: the vicar, the Revd Arthur Hilton, returning after evensong one Sunday to find his wife of two months — Ruth, ten years his senior — battered to death in the bedroom. Eventually Arthur Hilton was arrested on very slim evidence, but Max untangled the threads in court and laid out a thoughtful and damning case which led to the vicar taking his last walk with the public hangman. Revd Hilton was, beneath the cloth, a man just like any other and craved money and a life in which to spend it. The week he was married was the week that he took out a £500,000 insurance policy on his new bride.

  The Affair of the Gold Tooth followed soon after, then the Greased Lightning Killings and the Laddie Green Kidnapping, possibly Max’s most notable trial, the result of which sent four men directly to jail for thirty years each.

  Tommy thought maybe he should look more carefully into those whom Max had sent to prison for significantly long terms.

  For almost an hour and a half, Sir Willoughby Sands discussed the cases of his partner, Max Ascoli, skilfully and with élan: Willoughby talking quietly, absorbed by what he was saying almost as though he was celebrating Max’s life and gaining some form of comfort by doing so.

  Finally, Tommy led him towards what had occurred in the past twenty-four hours. ‘Who gave you the news, Will?’

  ‘Of Max’s death? Adrian Russell, my Clerk of Chambers. Told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘And who told him?’

  ‘Somebody from the Yard. Fredo and Helena had people call on them. And Freda, Benito’s widow’s staying with Fredo and Helena at the moment. Copper turned up at the house, Montpelier Square. Said they’d been trying to get Freda for hours, in Scotland where she lives for most of the year.’

  ‘The local lads went round to Montpelier Square, eh? Handy really: they probably picked up their rations at Harrods first. You know where they came from? I mean was it the local nick, or did the Yard really send them?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘What number Montpelier Square?’

  Willoughby told him and Tommy got to his feet. ‘Good of you, Will. Good of you to put up with us for so long. Invaluable.’ He gathered up his notebook and Suzie saw him glance towards her, out of the corner of his eye really, just a tiny movement of his head at almost the same time as Imogen Sands came back into the room with a tray of coffee: well, a silver coffee service with the usual appurtenances, six different kinds of sugar including the coloured crystals, and what Tommy always called ‘those horrible dinky little cups’.

  Dandy Tom had drunk a large cup of black coffee the previous night when they got back to Suzie’s flat in Upper St Martin’s Lane — said it always helped him rise to the occasion — and it did with spectacular results.

  ‘Oh, you going?’ Lady Sands asked, sounding happy about it.

  ‘’Fraid so, old dear,’ Tommy, all light-hearted with matching smiles.

  ‘Have some coffee, Tom, please.’

  ‘Couldn’t, heart, got things to do, people to see. Got to sharpen the old handcuffs and clean off the magnifying glass, rub down the truncheon with linseed oil.’

  ‘If you must, then. Should’ve brought it in sooner, but been a bit occupied with the cretin.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh, I did take a cup of tea to your man, to your chauffeur.’

  ‘Brian,’ Tommy said, his smile turning into a smirk. Most unattractive, Suzie decided. ‘Good show. He’d appreciate that.’

  ‘Yes, I thought he looked like a tea person.’

  ‘You have the most wonderful instinct, Imo.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, the drawl catching up with her now. Yerse.

  Suzie followed Tommy to the door, where he stopped, half turning, hand on the brass doorknob. ‘Where were you on Sunday night, Will? Sunday night and the early hours?’

  ‘He was here all evening. Back from chambers around five, didn’t go out again. Stayed in all night. Slept with me.’ Imogen quick. Like a blur.

  ‘See ourselves out,’ Tommy said and hustled Suzie towards the front door. ‘Can’t stand Imogen,’ he whispered when they got outside.

  At the car he leaned into the front passenger window. ‘Brian, we’d like to go to Montpelier Square when you’ve finished your tea: don’t rush on our account.’

  Chapter Five

  Some of the photographs sitting in silver frames on the baby grand were duplicates of the ones they’d seen in the late Max Ascoli’s house at Long Taddmarten. Now Tommy Livermore and Suzie Mountford were in Fredo’s home, Montpelier Square: high ceilings and wonderful old furniture, expensive wallpaper and nice pictures, including an obscure Turner and a Canaletto, both here in the drawing room. Venice in Knightsbridge.

  Pride of place on the baby grand was a large photograph of Max and his bride Jenny in their going-away clothes. She looked small and vulnerable with luscious blonde hair high on her head. Max looked tall and proud, smiling down on her with a possessive expression.

  The photographs all contained Ascolis, living and dead, with famous people and with each other, showing what a close family they all were. If you knew the Ascolis and they regarded you as friends, they would help in time of trouble. If you were in any danger the Ascolis would close around you and protect you, fight off all comers. They were all loyal and true to friends. Brave and steadfast: made you part of their society, part of their gang.

  Tommy caught a whiff of gangsterism about the Ascolis, power hanging around on the fringes of the British upper classes. It was that odd cross between fragrance and the reek of corruption. He wondered again about their place in the United Kingdom, why they had come here, how they had settled seamlessly into an almost aristocratic stratum.

  Suzie thought of the British army she’d learned about in school, the k
ind of army that formed a square to hold off the enemy, mainly your Zulus or your Indian mutineers: the square that didn’t break unless the Gatling was jammed and the colonel dead, regiment blinded with dust and smoke with some kid shouting, ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

  Old Tony Ascoli was there in a lot of the photos, him and his wife, Clara, in front of the country house they’d owned near Bicester in Oxfordshire, or the other one up near Balmoral; also plenty of them with the three boys growing up: Sammy, Benito and Fredo, Sammy dead now but snaps of him and Cynthia with Max growing up, happy families. Benito with Freda before he was killed in 1937 — motor accident near Monte Carlo, on one of those dangerous mountain roads that snake along towards Italy. Freda had been with him at the time and walked away from the wrecked car — a Bentley, naturally, fit for the captain of industry that Benno had outwardly become. Willoughby Sands said that in private Freda claimed she was asleep when the crash occurred, but reckoned that Benito had become confused, forgot he was driving in France (it was always happening, she’d said) and crossed over to the left side of the road — bang, head-on into a van. It made Suzie reflective, sad because the van that killed her father had drifted over to the wrong side of the road outside her family home near Newbury, on the Kingsclere Road.

  The widow Freda sat, straight-backed, quite close to the baby grand not really looking her fifty-eight years. More a well-preserved forty, Suzie thought. A slim, lithe forty with an unextinguished sensuality in her movements. ‘Panther, I thought, heart,’ Tommy said later.

  Fredo and Helena, his English wife, sat together on a long divan and they didn’t look much older than their wedding photo with Benno the best man and bridesmaids neither Tommy nor Suzie could identify, Fredo maybe greying a little now, clear blue eyes that always seemed to have a hint of amusement in them, dancing and twinkling.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude,’ Tommy began, sounding genuinely concerned, and Suzie looking soberly grave, backing him up. Grief was a nationwide experience now in time of war. People dreaded the knock at the door, a policeman or a telegram. Too many remembered the telegrams from the Great War and the deluge of misery they brought.

  Fredo raised a hand, ‘Our nephew, Max?’ He started, the voice flat, no particular accent and no trace of his Italian lineage. ‘We know he’s dead, with Jenny and young Paul. But we have no details.’

  ‘One of my colleagues came to see you, I understand.’

  ‘An inspector, uniformed, from Scotland Yard. With a young woman police sergeant. They were very kind, but said they hadn’t got the full story.’ Fredo was an exact man, a man careful in speech and a neat man in dress and habits, from his carefully combed hair to the clean manicured fingernails.

  ‘No.’ Tommy didn’t look any of them in the eye, looked down at the carpet and across the room instead. ‘Do you mind if we sit down?’ Not waiting for a reply, he settled himself on to the arm of the long sofa facing the divan, casual and relaxed. Suzie found a padded stand-chair and sat, awkwardly to attention, doing a little rumba movement with her buttocks to settle.

  Tommy said, ‘I’m afraid the details aren’t very appetizing. The ladies may —’

  ‘The ladies’ll be fine.’ Helena Ascoli was a tall, striking woman, with a steel-tipped glint in her eye, svelte, not a pound of extra fat on her hips, wearing a summer cotton dress, pink and blue pattern, beautifully tailored, long legs, her make-up perfect and her hair, dark with a hint of grey, impeccable: Harrods beauty salon perhaps. The tough quarter of a bridge four, Suzie thought: the kind who never forgave a partner’s error, played to win.

  ‘They were shot.’ Tommy spoke quietly as though he didn’t want them to hear him.

  ‘Yes, we knew they were shot.’ One of the women — Suzie wasn’t quick enough to see which one.

  ‘Shot. Yes, we knew that much. Just.’ Fredo simply repeating the word.

  ‘With a twelve-bore shotgun.’ Tommy still kept it low, and added, even lower, ‘In the face. All three of them.’ He paused and this time looked at each of them in turn, saw them absorbing it, wincing as they tried to picture the circumstances. ‘I wanted to get the rest of you together, the remainder of the Ascoli family, see if you had any ideas. Anyone’s name who maybe had reason to hate Max.’ Pause of around three seconds. ‘Just to be certain: you are Freda Ascoli. Benito’s widow —’ turning to the other woman — ‘and you’re Helena, Fredo’s wife…?’

  ‘I prefer to be called Freddy,’ said Fredo. Freddy.

  ‘The three of you are basically all that’s left of the Ascoli family, yes?’ He’d bet that Benno called himself Ben. Benny.

  ‘Not quite the whole family.’ Freda’s voice was gruff, throaty: a sexy voice, Tommy thought, attractive. If Freda spoke in a crowd and you heard that voice you would immediately turn towards her: match the face to the voice, instantly interested.

  ‘No. There are your children of course.’

  ‘I’ve two sons fighting for king and country in North Africa. Ben’s and my sons. Emelio and Vittorio.’

  Ben (told you so): good old English names, Tommy thought and with the thought heard Freda again, ‘Emil and Victor.’

  Freddy gave the grin of a simpleton. ‘And I have three girls. Wouldn’t you know it? Three girls to bring up, pay for, marry off. All intelligent, pretty and naughty as elves. Maria, Francesca and Margherita.’ He gave a roguish grin, shrugged and said, ‘Mary, Frances and Margaret. All Ascolis and each one a special joy of my heart.’

  ‘My heart as well,’ Helena not wanting to be left out.

  Tommy let it all pause for a couple of seconds, two beats of a conductor’s baton. ‘So, that’s the entire Ascoli family: The three of you here, Mary, Frances and Margaret, plus Emil and Victor. The entire clan extended from those who came and settled in the UK from Rome in 1889?’

  Freddy nodded. ‘Now Max and his family are gone, yes. Yes, settled here in 1889 or ’90, nobody seemed certain of the date and I was still a babe, learning to walk, toddling.’ He toddled up his left forearm with the first two fingers of his right hand. ‘But we have relations who remain in Italy. Antonio had two brothers: Luigi in Perugia, and Guido in Milan. Both dead now of course, but we have cousins, male and female.’

  ‘They in the same line of business as you: ice cream, confectionery, cafés?’

  ‘On a smaller scale, but yes.’

  Since the end of the previous century the Ascolis’ name had become synonymous in Britain with cream cakes, ice creams, tea, coffee, neat little sandwiches, and even neater little waitresses.

  ‘Often wondered why your family left Rome in the first place?’ Said as though he couldn’t care less about the answer, just interested. For the record.

  ‘That is family business. Not for the wider world.’ For the first time Freddy sounded serious, as though the lightness had drained out of him.

  ‘The reason is for the Ascoli family alone,’ Freda very straight and solemn.

  Tommy wondered if there was some special ceremony once someone married an Ascoli, or when an Ascoli child reached the age of twenty-one: a ritual to pass on the family secrets.

  Suzie thought of the Masonic Order.

  ‘So, the Ascoli family in the United Kingdom consists of the three of you plus your five children?’

  Freddy spread the fingers of his right hand, holding it out, palm down, and tilting it: comme ci comme ça. Then he looked first at his wife, then at Freda. They both nodded. ‘There is one other,’ he said, and Tommy looked at him blankly. He had once instructed Suzie, ‘When somebody begins to offer information you should appear disinterested. That way you get more, heart.’

  ‘Two if you count Fillipo, Max’s brother. You know about Max’s brother?’

  Tommy nodded, didn’t speak even though he really wanted to know where the man, Fillipo, was, where he was being looked after. If he was still alive of course.

  ‘Okay. You ever hear of a woman, Paula Palmer?’

  Tommy shook his head.

 
‘Paula Palmer is a painter: watercolourist. Well-known for her Norfolk scenes.’ Freddy smiling as though he was looking at a pleasing picture now. ‘Does wonderful studies of the coastline, also some quite famous paintings of Norwich. There is a series of Norwich Cathedral, four pictures of the cathedral in the four seasons. Also a similar set of Ely Cathedral. She is much in demand as a book illustrator.’

  Both Tommy and Suzie recalled the painting they’d glimpsed in the master bedroom of Knights Cottage, the grey sea and sky with small boats propped upright on the dark beach.

  ‘So, she’s a painter. Paula Palmer? What else?’ Tommy, flat, dull but profitable.

  ‘She has a daughter.’ Freddy made a gesture with both hands this time. ‘Very pretty girl, the daughter. Sixteen, maybe seventeen years of age, name of Thetis, blue eyes and hair the colour of champagne.’

  ‘But really an Ascoli?’

  Freddy nodded. ‘When Max was Ned Sands’s pupil in chambers, he was, naturally,

  Ned’s junior for a number of serious cases, capital cases. One was at the Norwich Assizes. Rex v Betteridge. A murder. Ned prosecuted. Often did in Norwich. Had connections there.’

  A young woman cleaner had been stabbed to death while at work, doing Paula Palmer’s kitchen. Girl called Betteridge, Christine Betteridge: seven stab wounds, the body found by Paula Palmer, who claimed to have been working in her studio in the garden of her house in King’s Lynn. Christine Betteridge was her daily.

  ‘Made her an important witness, put her into close contact with Max.’ Freddy now in the jugular vein.

  ‘This was when?’

  ‘Twenty-four. February 1924. Basically Max was there to see that Paula was innocent and free: the local law, at one stage, had designs on Paula for the murder.’

  ‘And you’re saying…?’

  ‘Max had an affair. A most passionate affair. There was a kind of doomed obsession about it, and the girl, Thetis Palmer, is the result.’

  Doomed obsession, Suzie thought. Crikey!