A Dangerous Deceit Page 17

  Not naturally aggressive, Frank Greenwood, as Eileen Gerrity had said, though nervously plucking at his tie, sweating at the thought of being involved with the police. But he and his more belligerent partner, Charlie Bell, had unshakeable alibis. Both had been attending a nine o’clock meeting in the Town Hall to put in their application to have their rates reduced because of the proposed erection of a new bus station, which would hinder the parking of their vans and lorries.

  ‘It’s not them I want to talk about, it’s Aston.’

  ‘What do you want to know that I haven’t already told you?’

  ‘I want to know what sort of a man he was, really. And you knew him as well as anybody.’

  She gazed down into the depths of her port-and-lemon as she swirled it around in the glass, saying nothing. After a moment she looked up and said, ‘Well, Ron’s right in a way, he could be a … No, I’m too ladylike, but he wasn’t always, and anyway, he was very good to me.’

  ‘But not to his wife.’

  She gave him a look. ‘You get what you deserve, sometimes.’

  ‘I hear he treated her as a skivvy, didn’t speak to her much, kept her short … Did she deserve that?’

  ‘Lily Aston,’ said Eileen, ‘is a bitch.’

  Joe was taken aback at the venom in her voice. From her point of view, of course, that might be how it seemed, but it wasn’t how Joe had seen Lily. Soured by her life with a domineering, tight-fisted husband; trapped into a loveless marriage from which she felt there was no escape. It wasn’t an unusual situation – there were thousands of women like her, unable to see their way out. It needed courage to start afresh at her age, with no money and nowhere to go. ‘That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?’

  ‘He didn’t know what was going on behind his back. At least, what I think was …’ She stopped uncertainly, looking sorry that she’d spoken.

  ‘All right, let’s try something else. ‘What do you know about the people at number eighteen, Henrietta Street?’

  ‘I know nothing about anybody on Henrietta Street. I only work there.’ She shrugged. ‘I sometimes go into the corner shop for fags, but otherwise …’ She lifted her glass for another sip of her drink.

  ‘Does the name Wim Mauritz mean anything to you?’

  Ruby drops landed on the table as she put the glass down too quickly. ‘Should it?’

  ‘He lived at number eighteen. He was the WIM that Aston kept jotting down. Come on, he came to the works to talk to Aston, didn’t he?’

  He thought she was going to deny it, but after a second or two she said, ‘All right. He did come in a few times. Arthur said he was a potential customer but I didn’t believe that. They never talked business, see, just general chat.’

  ‘Did they ever mention the name Rees-Talbot?’

  ‘Who?’ She seemed genuinely not to know the name, and shook her head again. Then she said abruptly, ‘He was the chap in the snow, wasn’t he? Mauritz, I mean. The Snowman?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  A movement from the far table as Ron got to his feet. She noticed and waved him back. Her face looked pinched, the way it had when he’d seen her just after Aston’s body was found. She had been fonder of him than she had admitted, hard as it was to see why. He didn’t want to upset her unduly, but he wanted to know what it was that she was keeping back. With a shaky hand she took out a packet of Players. Joe lit a cigarette for her and waited for her to answer his question.

  ‘Well, he was South African, wasn’t he?’ she said at last. ‘So who else could it have been? Added to which he’d suddenly stopped coming into the office. The last time he came in Arthur grabbed his hat and coat, said they were going for a drink – and that was the last I ever saw of Mr Mauritz. Not that I was sorry. I didn’t like him. Thought himself God’s gift to women … you know the sort. Good looking, but I thought he was shifty. He’d flirt with anybody – even someone my age.’

  ‘Did you know he had a wife?’

  ‘A wife?’ Clearly she did not.

  ‘Can’t you try and recall anything he and Aston spoke about?’

  She thought about it and in the end said reluctantly, ‘They were up to something. I don’t know what it was, but Arthur didn’t want me to know about it. I … I think – do you think that may have been why Arthur got himself killed?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, Eileen.’ Joe finished his drink and stood up. ‘But thanks for your help. We’ll need you to come to the station and confirm what you’ve just told me.’

  ‘No, no, I can’t do that!’

  Joe put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to.’

  ‘Eileen’ll have to do nothing of the sort.’ The heavyweight boxer stood there. Joe was half a head taller and several years younger, but he didn’t feel inclined to argue with him. He took his hand from Eileen’s shoulder and left. He could catch her later, when she’d had time to think over what else she might have told him.

  Seventeen

  They drove down to Maxstead in a jangling silence, in the yellow Alvis which even Opal, with her madly expensive tastes, had to admit was a huge extravagance. Silent because the lively, noisy twins, normally squashed into the back with their nanny whenever the Binkie Scroopes went down to Maxstead (since their presence was expected – if not commanded – by their grandmother) were on this occasion absent, never mind that she would not be pleased. Jangling because of the monumental quarrel between Binkie and his wife the evening before, when everything that could be said at that time had been said, leaving behind only this great hiatus of what couldn’t be voiced.

  Money, as usual. ‘It’s gone,’ Binkie had announced baldly.

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  ‘Gone, as in disappeared, down the plughole, melted into thin air. Vanished. We are stony broke.’

  For a moment, Opal didn’t believe him. ‘Not … not all of it, surely?’ she asked sharply, her mouth hardening.

  ‘Every last penny. In that so-called dead cert investment that rotter Mauritz put forward. Gone, and him with it.’

  Mauritz.

  The name had a familiar ring, and though she was sure she’d heard it somewhere before, she couldn’t for the moment think where. Things she didn’t want to know about never settled in Opal’s mind for more than two seconds before taking wing like butterflies. But he must have been referring to That Man. Binkie had always avoided actually mentioning his name whenever he had needed to speak about the stranger whom he – but not she – had met somewhere or other, and who had promised the earth, and whose influence over Binkie it now seemed she had been right after all to suspect and resent so much.

  ‘Well then,’ she returned, even more sharply, ‘you must get it back from him.’

  It was at that point that the sight of his stony face caused her suddenly to feel frightened – no, afraid was the better, graver word. Especially when Binkie laughed harshly and said, ‘That might be difficult.’

  ‘You can’t mean he’s absconded – with our money?’

  ‘I mean Wim Mauritz has disappeared, like everything we once had. To be more accurate, he’s dead. Dead and buried, with a hole in his head. But resurrected.’

  Opal’s stomach lurched as though she’d missed the bottom step. It came back to her, instantly, where she’d heard the name before and what it might mean. This Wim Mauritz, this man with the foreign name, was the one the police had arrived to enquire about when she and Binkie were last down at Maxstead. He was the unidentified man who had been found dead at the edge of the forest … the one whom Binkie had denied any knowledge of.

  With an intuitiveness not normally given to her, she knew now why he had always forbidden her so fiercely ever to mention That Man in his mother’s presence – and why he had also sworn to her, Opal, that he hadn’t seen his mysterious acquaintance for months, when all the time … Her thoughts were like scrambled eggs as she tried to fit the facts together. She remembered the horrid corpse being found buried under
the snow, and the hue and cry that had gone on for weeks and weeks. While Binkie had apparently known who it was all the time, but had kept his mouth shut! That she might have got things wrong in her usual scatterbrained fashion never even entered her head. She needed no convincing – what else could he have meant by ‘resurrected’? Her husband had known all along that the stranger found buried under the snow was the man he had known as Wim Mauritz. He had known his name, where he came from, yet during all the enquiries, the appeals for information – even when faced directly with the police – he had kept silent.

  There could, even to Opal, be only one reason for that. My God, oh my God!

  Whatever his other faults, Binkie was rarely drunk. And he wasn’t drunk now, the day after that appalling admission. He loved high-performance cars and always drove well, extremely fast but sure, and his hands were steady on the steering wheel, his foot pressed no harder than usual on the accelerator. All the same, there was a kind of blazing, barely contained rage emanating from him that brought her heart into her mouth, as though they were hurtling at top speed into disaster.

  It was a disaster, whichever way you looked at it. Not only because of the money, though heaven alone knew that was devastating enough, impossible to contemplate without panic. But what was even worse than that amounted to nearly the end of the world: that the man Mauritz – the one Binkie had been so sure would be their salvation, whose advice or recommendations he had followed to invest all their money, was dead, murdered. But no – the idea of Binkie killing anyone was simply too, too ridiculous. He had refused to speak of it any more last night. She had asked, but not begged – scared, really, of knowing the details.

  No one had ever thought Opal clever. All the same, she could see what it all meant, whichever way you looked at it. Last night, realizing what the future might hold, in the end it had all been too much for her. She had finally given way to hysterics and Binkie had slapped her face, cold and hard as he always was when they quarrelled, though he could when he felt like it be so sweet, her Binkie-Boo. Not last night, though. After her hysterics had subsided into hiccuping sobs, and then finally ceased after the glass of brandy he thrust into her hands and made her drink, they had gone to bed, lying as far away from each other as they could, on the very edges of the mattress. He had made a perfunctory apology for having to slap her, though she didn’t believe he was really sorry, and he hadn’t slept any more than she had, she was sure. And then, this morning, he had announced his intention of going down to Maxstead. Where it had happened. They would both go.

  It was a horrible day, grey and still, with lowering yellowish clouds, as if to underline the disaster that had befallen them, a day unlike the glancing April days of the last couple of weeks when there had been sun, showers, daffodils and bursting greenery in the park their windows overlooked, new spring clothes to think about and the social season ahead. Today the sky hung over the earth like a lid, heavy with rain that wouldn’t fall. Opal, usually exhilarated by the speed at which Binkie drove, prayed he would slow down.

  He hadn’t forbidden her to speak to anyone else of what had passed between them. He evidently felt there was no need, knowing she was well aware which side her bread was buttered and what would happen if all this came out. It hadn’t been greed, he had said, it had been necessity which had made him so reckless with their money. Just damned bad luck it should have turned out the way it had. But what are we going to do, how are we going to live? Cut back, he said, they would have to cut back. On what? The idea of going without anything at all in their luxurious lifestyle was incomprehensible to Opal.

  And how would she bear the double-edged sympathy of her friends? ‘How too simply awful, darling!’ (But what a fool, letting himself lose everything … although, there but for the grace of God …) His mother would not lift a finger to help, though help of some kind was certainly what Binkie was heading towards Maxstead for – yet surely not to admit to her the idiocy of the actions which had brought them to this pass? The old witch would not say anything, but she would look. As if she had always known their marriage must come to this, that it was all Opal’s fault. In any case there was every possibility that she couldn’t help, not with the great white elephant that was Maxstead hanging round her neck – round all of their necks – the source of all this trouble, thought Opal, too muddled, miserable and confused to see anything at all amusing about the image that conjured up.

  Anyway, who would want to live in this mausoleum, even if they could afford it, she thought peevishly as the square grey house appeared; they all thought so much of it, but to Opal it was nothing more than a fortress, a prison.

  ‘Oh God, the Reverend’s here,’ Binkie said, seeing a car he recognized before the front flight of steps, as they emerged from the long avenue of trees that darkened the day even further.

  It was barely five o’clock on a spring day, but dark enough to have lights already blazing out from the house, as though the economy Maude preached to her son didn’t apply to her beloved Maxstead. Even as Opal thought this, all the lights in the house went out.

  Symon and Margaret had driven over to Maxstead that day in the Rees-Talbot family motorcar. It was a comfortable, if not luxurious one that Osbert had bought and Margaret had learnt to drive, simply in order to forestall the possibility of her father having a heart attack by having to submit to the breath-stopping terrors of being driven around by Felix.

  They had sat down to a lavish tea, while Symon listened to his mother’s news of Giles Frith’s pending retirement with mounting anger against his brother. How the dickens would she cope alone, without Frith’s efficient management of the estate? He had been a prop and a bulwark ever since Sir Lancelot had died.

  Symon held out his cup and saucer for her to refill. A match had been put to the fire and lamps had been switched on to relieve the dark and dismal afternoon, and the one next to Lady Maude reflected a sharp, momentarily dazzling flash of light from the silver teapot. Symon blinked and shifted his glance, and it came to rest on her face. There were lines of worry creasing her forehead, round her mouth, that he hadn’t noticed before. He was suddenly aware that his indomitable mother was approaching fifty. Not old yet, by any means, but not immortal.

  Once, for the sake of the family, when he was contemplating taking up a career, Symon had briefly entertained the idea that he might take over from where his father had left off, working in harmony with Frith, as Sir Lancelot had done, in default of any interest from the rightful person, Binkie, who had a dog in the manger attitude towards taking on responsibilities along with his inheritance of the title. It might have worked. It was not in Symon to be idle and he knew himself capable enough and indeed felt a strong leaning towards the idea; what he didn’t already know he could soon learn, providing he put his mind to it. Family tradition meant a great deal to him, the steady continuation of the ancestral line, though not as much as it did to his mother, who had not even been born a Scroope.

  Weighing up the possibilities, he had been forced to acknowledge it was not a feasible proposition, for him or for any of them, in the ultimate. Estates like Maxstead, families like theirs, the Scroopes, looked increasingly unlikely to have any future in this post-apocalyptic world. Nothing was ever going to be the same after that last war. Tell Maxstead’s predicament to the man in the dole queue, waiting for a pittance handout to feed and clothe his family, and hear what he would say about it! His mother shut her eyes to this and Binkie didn’t give a fig – all he cared about was that the estate sucked up money like a whale sucked up plankton. Symon knew that although he could have succeeded in keeping things ticking along, sooner or later the axe was bound to fall. The attempt to discuss it with Binkie had ended in a row, and he had tried to tell himself these were decisions it was not up to him to make, though this did not assuage his guilt.

  He looked at other ways of spending a useful life and had surprised himself by the career he had been drawn to, never before having thought himself religious. He had excelled
in his studies and by the time he was ordained as curate, clearly before him stretched the path towards preferment, with its eventual goal. Here, however, when his thoughts reached the archdeaconry in the cathedral close, he abruptly checked such pleasurable meanderings before they should stray as far as the bishop’s palace. Yet he chose to believe that it was not sinful ambition or false pride that drove him, but an inborn conviction that one day he would surely be directed there.

  At that precise moment in his thoughts, the lights went out. He gave a long-suffering sigh, put his teacup down and went to seek candles and matches where he knew they would be found, lit oil lamps already primed for such a regular emergency, while reflecting grimly that the unreliability of the electricity supply might be a profound metaphor for Maxstead’s precarious existence.

  He hadn’t lit all the lamps when from the front of the house came a roar and a scrunch of gravel that proved to be the arrival of what was known in the family as Binkie’s Yellow Peril. Maude gave a distracted cluck. ‘What are they doing here? They were only down a few days ago and— What a surprise! Julian darling, Opal. Lovely to see you, but where are the children?’ she cried, hurrying out to greet her son and his wife as they came into the hall.

  ‘Oh, they have a little cold, we thought it best …’ Opal replied vaguely.

  How odd this was. And where was the baggage train that usually arrived with Opal – the suitcases, hatboxes, trunks, even if only for a few days? Just one overnight valise for the two of them. And both of them looking … well, Binkie, always pale, was even more so, and drawn, too, nervously slapping his driving gloves against his thigh. But Opal! Maude had never seen her so distraught. Her face was white and pinched under the grey of the velour cloche hat pulled down close to her ears, and it was obvious she wore no make up at all. She had quite clearly dressed in a hurry; when she took off her coat, underneath was a mismatched collection of unsuitable clothes. Being Opal, all this spelled some dire disaster.