A Dangerous Deceit Page 15

  ‘Sir?’ The sergeant’s voice cut into his thoughts. He pulled his mind back to the present discussion.

  ‘Just thinking, Gilmour. How it all leads back to South Africa, when Rees-Talbot and Aston were serving there. Maybe something happened that gave Aston the hold he had over his former officer. If so, it must have been something pretty damning, all things considered. Look at it for a minute. Say the man Mauritz somehow learns about it – never mind what or how for the minute – and comes over here to join in and demand his share, teams up with Aston. The pressure on Rees-Talbot is increased, until finally it becomes intolerable, he’s had enough, says to hell with them all and takes the only way out he can see. No more golden eggs – the goose that laid them is gone. No point in Mauritz hanging around after that. But he does. Until he gets himself killed. Murdered and shovelled into the ground.’

  ‘Who by? Aston? And if it was him, why?’

  ‘Falling out among thieves isn’t unknown. Except it’s only a guess that Mauritz knew either of them. Apart from the swarf on his boot soles, of course. And the fact that they were living practically opposite Aston’s workshops. He – and his wife. Now here’s a thought – why did she never come forward to say he was missing? Odd, to say the least. Unless she did him in herself.’

  ‘A woman, getting him out there, and burying him at the edge of the woods? Heck, I doubt I’d have attempted to dig a grave with the ground as hard as it was, sir, never mind a woman!’

  ‘She could if she’d had an accomplice. If, say, she and Aston did it together. He had a car, remember, he could easily have driven Mauritz’s body out to Maxstead and buried him.’

  ‘Why?’ Joe asked again. ‘I mean, why Mrs Mauritz? What reason could she have had for killing her husband?’

  ‘Since we don’t know anything about either of them yet, there’s no telling – but for what it’s worth, I’m not inclined to bet on it that she did. For one thing, Mauritz was hit pretty damn hard on the head, several times according to the autopsy, and with some strength. It would depend on the woman, of course. I’ve seen plenty of women I wouldn’t like to encounter on a dark night and Mrs Mauritz may have been built like a prize fighter for all we know. But if Aston did kill her husband, that still leaves the question of who killed him.’

  ‘It’s not impossible, is it, supposing she knew or suspected it was Aston who’d bashed her husband’s skull in, that Mrs Mauritz might have gone after Aston for that? If so, she took her time. Mauritz died before Christmas.’

  ‘Waiting for the right opportunity, maybe.’

  It was possible, of course it was. An easy crime for a woman to commit. The woman Gladys Ibbotson had seen running away? Away from Henrietta Street. Possibly for ever.

  ‘If that’s what happened – but it’s a big if. We’re guessing, Gilmour. And if she is our lady, and she’s any sense at all, she’s on her way back to South Africa, across the other side of the world.’

  He leaned back and his eye fell on this week’s Herald, which some fool had placed on his desk, open at the exact place Joe had been hoping the DI wouldn’t see. Reardon picked it up.

  ‘The police would like to interview a woman who was seen in the vicinity of the Henrietta Street premises of Aston Engineering at nine a.m. on the tenth of April, the day Mr Arthur Aston was found dead. Mr Vincent Tompkins who was delivering milk, has reported seeing a woman run across the road, causing his horse to rear up and plunge to one side. “Daisy’s not a nervous horse, but the woman ran directly in front of her,” Mr Tompkins said. “She was lucky I was there to grab hold, or she would have been run down.” The woman is thought to have been wearing a brown coat and—’

  At this point, a tap on the door was followed by Pickersgill, attempting with some success to push the door open with one hand while carrying in his other two full mugs of tea by their handles and not spilling any. He was just in time to catch the end of Reardon’s fury as he flung the newspaper from him. ‘What the devil does the woman think she’s up to?’

  Tea slopped out of the mugs and spread across the desk as the constable put them down too quickly. His face as he spluttered apologies had turned crimson. Reardon gave an exasperated grunt and quickly shoved a pile of files out of the way, while Joe reached for the fold of blotting paper on the desk, jerked his head as a signal for the constable to make a hasty exit, and began to mop up the mess. Pickersgill fled. The telephone rang.

  It was Reardon’s boss from Dudley, Detective Chief Superintendent Cherry, no doubt wanting to know what progress was being made. As Reardon listened, he mouthed, ‘Leave that,’ to Joe, who picked up the half-empty mugs, grabbed the offending newspaper, and left the office.

  He found the young constable at the front desk, assiduously immersing himself in the night’s occurrences noted in the report book, his ears red. He tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Next time you think of chatting to Tinkerbell here’ – he tapped the newspaper – ‘keep your lips buttoned. She’s running rings round you, lad.’

  He saw his guess had been correct. Pickersgill had turned round, but was looking anywhere except at him, clearly wishing for nothing more than to find a crack in the floor to crawl through. ‘Sarge, I … Sarge …’

  ‘Pack it in before Reardon cottons on. He’s not a fool even if you are. No harm done as it happens, but she ain’t worth your job, Dave.’

  When he returned to the inspector’s office, Reardon had simmered down and was disposing of the sodden blotting paper. ‘Clumsy young clot,’ he remarked as he tossed it into the waste paper basket.

  ‘He’s all right, sir. Doesn’t know his arse from his elbow sometimes, but he’s OK.’

  Reardon grunted a laugh. ‘All right, if you say so. Where were we?’

  ‘Maxstead.’ Joe didn’t mention the newspaper and Reardon had evidently decided to ignore it.

  ‘I fancy I’d like to take to look at where Mauritz’s body was found,’ he said, adding after a moment, ‘You wondered the other day, why Maxstead, didn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I did. Just a passing observation – though actually, if you wanted to bury a body not too far out of Folbury and went in that direction, you’d be hard put not to bury it on Maxstead land. The Scroopes own half the county, or very nearly.’

  ‘That’s what Micklejohn told me.’

  So far, Reardon hadn’t seemed to feel it necessary to volunteer any account of his meeting with the man who had been in charge of the Snowman investigation. At the time, Joe, as one of the uniforms at Folbury, had only been co-opted to help with the routine enquiries of the case – but he’d heard a few grumbles from the detectives whom Micklejohn had brought in with him. He sensed there’d been a feeling that the enquiry had been sloppy, that the DI hadn’t been keen to push it further when the enquiries had threatened to grind to a halt. He wondered if Reardon had picked up on the fact that he had been a bit too overanxious to wrap it up before he retired. It had been a frustrating case, and Micklejohn quite obviously hadn’t been sorry to see the back of it, despite leaving behind him an unsolved investigation.

  Reardon said abruptly, ‘He believes the Scroopes wanted it hushed up. Was that the general feeling?’

  Joe considered. ‘A family like that … yes, I reckon it was. They just wouldn’t have been able to stomach the idea of their name being connected with anything of that sort, would they? Mud sticks.’ He was rather taken aback that Micklejohn should actually have said that to Reardon; at the time, he’d dismissed any idea that privilege should influence the matter either way.

  ‘You recall who found the body, Sergeant?’

  Cracking a knuckle, Joe searched his memory. ‘Wasn’t it the gamekeeper, out with his dogs?’

  ‘He wouldn’t like being called that, I suspect. Colonel Frith, according to Micklejohn, is Lady Maude’s land agent, the chap that administers the estate.’

  ‘Oh? He was the one who found him?’ Joe had forgotten the name, and not being a country boy, distinctions between gamekeepers and land agent
s didn’t mean enough to have registered with him. Though he’d no doubt they would be important to Colonel Frith. He remembered him all right – the chap who’d been with Lady Maude that day when Joe had visited her to tell her the enquiry was being suspended. Stiff sort of fellow, like the dowager herself. Between them they’d made his hackles rise. He liked to think he didn’t have the sort of chip on his shoulder some folk had against the gentry, but a cynical question had occurred to him at the time: would the same casual acceptance of the police having been unsuccessful in finding anyone to blame for the murder have applied if they’d failed to catch anyone poaching pheasant or stealing trout?

  ‘I’m glad the matter has been resolved satisfactorily at last,’ her Ladyship had said, after he’d told them the enquiries were suspended. ‘Thank you, Sergeant, for letting us know. A storm in a teacup after all.’

  The worlds of Lady Maude and Joe Gilmour were a long way apart, and he had no desire to close the gap if she could describe any man’s death as a storm in a teacup. ‘It hasn’t been resolved, unfortunately, merely put in abeyance.’

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  She had actually looked disconcerted for a moment and it had given him a small satisfaction to know he had shown himself not suitably put in his place.

  Reardon said now, after a long silence, ‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing. Micklejohn probably did the best he could with what he had. All the same, I can’t see it would hurt to have another word or two with those out at Maxstead.’ He twiddled a pencil. ‘It’s a rum do, all this – posh folks at one end of the scale, Arthur Aston at the other, and the Rees-Talbots in between. Not to mention our friends from the other side of the world. What’s between them all is what I’d like to know.’

  Of course, there was shortly to be a marriage between the Rees-Talbots and the Scroopes, and the obvious links between the elder Rees-Talbot and Aston had been established, but to Joe, any connection between Rees-Talbot’s erstwhile batman and the family at Maxstead was as impossible to envisage as Lily’s crocheted cushion covers decorating the antique furniture there.

  Having obtained from Margaret Rees-Talbot the neatly typed manuscript of the booklet her father had been writing about the Second Boer War, Reardon took it home with him to read that night. It didn’t take long, and left him with mixed feelings.

  Her father had written of the military engagements he’d fought in, though without specifically mentioning his own involvement in them. The rest of the manuscript was written in an oddly perfunctory way that to Reardon’s mind would certainly not rouse any excitement in military historians – or even in a wider public. To most of the world, anyway, it had been a war between the British and the Dutch settlers and, bloody as it was (not only in the fighting but in the enteric fever that had killed more soldiers than enemy guns had), it had been eclipsed in many ways by the infinitely bloodier world war which had followed not much more than a decade later.

  It had, however, not been the battles or the extent of the deadly fever that roused Rees-Talbot to eloquence, but the British scorched earth policy that had ultimately ended the war but left the Boer settlers without their farms and driven them from their lands. It had forced their womenfolk to become refugees – after which they were herded into what became known as concentration camps, where the conditions were so horrific that thousands of women and children perished. It was evident where his sympathies had lain, but much of what he had written, even so long after the conflict, would not have been welcomed in Britain, had it ever been published. To have been labelled ‘pro-Boer’ would have damned the book before it ever saw the light of day.

  Rees-Talbot himself had in fact had second thoughts about publishing what he’d written, his daughter had told Reardon, when, not without protest, she had handed over the manuscript. ‘Why on earth does my Aunt Deborah think this will be of any use?’

  ‘I can’t say that until I’ve read it.’

  And having done so, he still couldn’t. It didn’t appear to throw any light on anything that might have given rise to Rees-Talbot’s blackmail.

  Dearest Plum,

  I must tell you what happened yesterday. About five o’clock, I bumped into Felix amongst the crowd who had just come out of the railway station. He was walking towards Alma House and as I was going that way too, I walked along with him.

  I saw immediately that he looked different – same old jacket and flannel bags, his hair still badly in need of a cut, still sloping along in the same loose-limbed way that made it difficult for me to keep up with him, but I had an odd fancy that he held himself straighter, and he was certainly looking flushed and elated, and his eyes were just blazing. He didn’t say anything about where he’d been, or why, and I didn’t ask, but after a while I could see he was dying to tell me. We were passing the park gates and all of a sudden he grabbed my arm, propelled me inside and threw himself down on the nearest bench. ‘Sit down a minute, I’ve something to tell you.’

  He has got himself a job! Yes, really. With the TUC, working in their London offices!

  I must have looked astonished. Well, he hadn’t spent three years at Cambridge reading law for nothing, he said with a grin, though he wasn’t expecting to be anything but a dogsbody at first in this new job – or at least, he would be if he could take up the offer by the end of the week. Otherwise …

  His face fell. He might not be allowed to leave Folbury, he admitted at last, because he had got himself into a scrape with the police. And so, the whole story …

  ‘Though not a word of that must go into that paper of yours,’ he said, suddenly recollecting to whom he was speaking, grabbing my wrist tight. ‘Promise?’

  After a moment’s hesitation, I promised – but don’t read anything into that, Plum.

  He opened a new pack of cigarettes and lit one, which seemed to give him the courage to tell me the details of how the fight had happened. It seems Felix found out that Arthur Aston had been blackmailing his father, went to Aston’s house and picked a fight with him. They actually came to blows, but he’d done nothing more than knock Aston down before his wife came in and the fight stopped. I didn’t say that I already knew about this from Lily, and that the morning after, Aston had been found dead and, hey presto!, Felix is the chief suspect.

  Well, of course, it’s ridiculous. I know Felix couldn’t have done it, and if the police think he did they have a long way to go yet, but he’s by no means convinced they think the same, or that they have finished with him. And as I pointed out to him, it’s going to look even more suspicious that he’s suddenly decided to take a job away from Folbury.

  ‘What made you go for the job, anyway?’ I asked him. ‘What made you do it?’ I had a good idea, of course, but I needed to hear him say it.

  He didn’t want to say anything about why he’d decided until I prompted him: ‘They tell me you’ve resigned from your WSG, Felix.’ Though resigned seems a grandiose word for simply walking out of the meeting and leaving behind all the waffle and bad feeling. I hadn’t been attending their meetings lately – they’re a ridiculous waste of time – but I’d heard about the row. ‘The group will fall apart now.’

  He made a wry face. ‘Truth is, it was never much together, was it? Oh, I know, they’ll say I’m a traitor to the cause, et cetera, et cetera, but I hope I can do much more good in the end … You know Bobby Armstrong’s left as well? It was he who put in a good word for me at the TUC. He’s going there, too.’

  Well, the fact that Bobby was leaving didn’t surprise me. He’s a hothead from the Durham coalfields, with a chip on his shoulder the size of an oak tree about working conditions up there – and though I have every admiration for his sincerity, I do wonder how he’ll get on at the TUC. He’s convinced the union top dogs sold the rank and file down the river over the General Strike settlement.

  We talked about him, and the new job, for some time, then I asked, ‘Have you told Vinnie Henderson?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘If you want to marry her
, don’t you think she has the right to know?’

  ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to marry her, not now.’

  After that, he went silent. I thought he was sulking, but after a while he said, ‘I can’t make you out, Judy Cash.’

  ‘I can’t make myself out, most of the time. I don’t know why I do the things I do.’

  ‘All the same, nothing stops you. You always know just where you’re going.’

  ‘I must have what I want, if that’s what you mean. You know that, don’t you?’

  It was very quiet in the park, that time of day. Most people were at home, having or preparing their tea. Beyond the gates, I could hear the noise of motor traffic, the rumble of a cart, but in the park there was silence. You could have heard a leaf drop.

  ‘And we both know what we want, don’t we, Judy?’

  I held out both my hands and after a while he took them, and after that … well, you don’t need to know about after that, my darling Plum.

  Fifteen

  The following afternoon, Joe and Reardon were driven out to Maxstead Court. On Joe’s previous visit, since there were no buses out this way, he had cycled. It was quite a distance but he had been pleased to find it hadn’t taxed his staying powers overmuch. This time, they arrived in style. Given the option, Stringer would have driven down the tree-lined drive and swept ceremoniously up to the front door, but Reardon stopped him short of the house by a couple of hundred yards while he and Joe got out of the car and proceeded on foot down the double avenue of trees towards the big house set four-square in front of them.