‘Probably the Vicar,’ announced Miss Rudyard. ‘We are not at home,’ she added emphatically and much to Benny’s evident if unexplained delight.
‘I think we’d better be,’ said Treasure. ‘My driver’s sitting in the car for a start. Perhaps if I answered?’ There were two police cars in the drive drawn up, the banker noted, so that there could be no movement from the Rolls in any direction. There were two uniformed officers standing under the porch, and two men in plain clothes with another in uniform talking to Pink in the drive.
‘Good evening, sir. Is Miss Spotter at home, please?'
‘I’m here, I’m here. Oh, it’s Mr Jones.’ Florence emerged from behind Treasure. ‘Not on your bike?’ she added.
‘ ’Evening, ma’am, No, got a lift tonight,’ said Constable Jones, the older of the two, touching his helmet: his uniformed colleagues wore peaked caps. ‘We saw the lights. You all right, Miss Spotter?’
Treasure concluded the remark about the lights was palpably untrue if the first observation was supposed to have been from the road. He also noticed the second policeman shift a heel into the door-jamb.
‘Perfectly all right, thank you, Mr Jones.’
‘And Miss Rudyard? She’s all right too?’
‘Yes, thank you. We’re both in the pink.’ Florence burst into a fit of nervous coughing. ‘Oh dear. Swallowed the wrong way. Better now. How very kind of you to . . .'
‘Could we come in a minute, then?’ The policeman, like his colleague, was now keeping his gaze on Treasure as were the others in the drive.
‘Yes . . . I suppose so. Yes, please do come in.’ It was Florence who was now eyeing the banker most earnestly and evidently beseeching guidance as she spoke.
‘My name’s Treasure.’ He stood aside to let the two into the hall.
‘We gathered that from your chauffeur, sir. Paying a late call, is it?’ Despite twenty-two years’ service on the Surrey/Berkshire border Evan Jones’s Welsh accent was as true as the day he had left Tonypandy.
‘Picking up a young friend who’s been staying with Miss Stopper. Actually we were just leaving.’
‘I see, sir. There was another gentleman who came with you like?’
‘Yes, Mr Gold.’
‘And the young friend, sir?’
‘Pierre Grub a.’
‘We thought it might be, sir.’
‘They’re both through here, Mr Jones, with Miss Rudyard. If Miss Spotter doesn’t mind, you’re welcome to meet them.’
Florence was only too pleased to have the responsibility of directing Constable Jones’s next move taken Firmly out of her hands.
Treasure, in turn, aware the door to the studio was open had been offering his proposals in a voice almost loud enough to have alerted Miss Rudyard herself.
A few minutes later the banker was showing Jones back through the hall. The second policeman had left already, though Treasure suspected in time to inspect the other downstairs rooms before actually rejoining the others in the drive.
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said the Constable. ‘Not often mistaken for a royal bodyguard.’ He chuckled. ‘She’s very good for her age, sir, don’t you think? And it’s my belief she knows perfectly well what’s going on. Just enjoys a bit of make-believe. And where’s the harm in that?’
‘Perhaps now you can tell me what’s going on, Mr Jones,’ Treasure enquired affably.
‘Pleasure, sir. Didn’t want to alarm the ladies, of course. Not over a hoax. Especially not Miss Rudyard.’ He paused at the open front door. ‘The Station got a call, see. Anonymous it was, saying Mr Cruba was being held here against his will. Kidnapped, like. Had to treat it seriously. I said a warrant wouldn’t be needed. Guessed it was a hoax. Known the ladies for a long time.’
‘But you came in strength.’
‘CID, the lot. You get very fast back-up in this area, sir,’ said Jones proudly. ‘Had to be sure the ladies weren’t being held under duress, of course. Lonely house, this. Big too. Wonder why they keep it on, really. Anyway, if you’re leaving now, sir, we’ll wait to see you off. Then we can get the ladies tucked down.’ He smiled warmly but indicated he had no intention of moving from where he was.
‘We’re on our way, Mr Jones. Ready, you two?’ Treasure called back into the house with undisguised urgency.
It was obvious the news of the assault on François Cruba had not been included in the so-called hoaxer’s intelligences. The banker decided not to volunteer the information which would no doubt filter through to the Surrey Police in due time. Immediately, he was more anxious than ever to have Pierre re-installed in the Cruba household—a more appropriate base for the issuing of whatever denials might be necessary than isolated, mock-Norman castles.
CHAPTER 14
AT THE TIME TREASURE AND PARTY WERE leaving Rudwold Park a nervous, exhausted Everard Crow-Patcher was paying off a taxi outside the flat in Guilford Street. ‘Keep the change.’ He thrust a note at the driver.
‘Ain’t any. Exactly two quid,’ came the prompt, laconic response.
‘Sorry. Here’s another. Take . . .’ He noticed the two policemen patrolling up the other side of the road. ‘That’s all right. Been a nasty evening.’
The cabbie stopped the slow fumble for silver. ‘Thank you, guv,’ but his late passenger was already out of hearing, having difficulty fitting a key in a street door.
‘Everard?’ The call had come from the living-room: he had hoped she would be in bed.
He swallowed. ‘Coming, my love.’ He put the black attaché case inside the hall cupboard, took it out again, paused uncertainly, then put it back where he had it before, behind the Hoover. He’d decide about the money in the morning.
‘Everard, you’re soaked.
‘Dried out nearly. It was raining, or didn’t you notice? Nothing like it since the flaming Flood. Shower in a minute. Drink first.’ He took off his jacket, poured himself a huge scotch, and dropped into his usual chair. He gulped at the drink. ‘Plenty to tell you.’ He thought he had the authorized version ready for promulgation.
‘You located Stephen Spotter?’ He quite missed the disquiet in her tone.
‘Where I said. Top of those steps. And he was early, but not too early for yours truly; oh no.’ His confidence was building.
‘He didn’t see you?’
‘Well, I wasn’t exactly waving a flag. Went down to the bottom and waited—in the monsoon. He came past me like a bat out of hell, pelted up the Mall to Spring Gardens—that’s at the end by Admiralty Arch. He’d parked his car there—Florence’s car—on the corner, and they’d towed the bloody thing away.’ He slapped his leg and gave a great hoot of laughter. ‘That’s how I caught him—well, caught up with him. Police had towed away his getaway car. Thought he’d have apoplexy.’
‘But he got the money?’ Dina was concerned with the tangibles.
‘Oh yes. Your Mr Big was after the piddling fifty thousand all right. Said he would be. Cruba must have been there like Santa Claus dishing out largesse to all comers. Could have handled it myself.’
‘No, you couldn’t. Would have taken guts.’
He looked hurt, but inwardly he agreed. ‘Couldn’t be certain about the police, of course. But they weren’t there. It was just as planned, except the geriatric kidnapper got nothing.’
‘How much did you get?’
‘Difficult, that bit. He was grateful, of course, relieved too, at first, that I wasn’t the ever vigilant constabulary. Didn’t recognize me straightaway. Knew there was someone after him. Called his name.’
‘How much?’
He ignored the repeated question and continued earnestly. ‘Got him off the street. Not having transport and all that. Pity I’d sold the BMW. Cheap too,’ he reflected bitterly. ‘Anyway, walked him straight to the Institute of Directors, round the corner. The RAC would have been better, but too far in the rain.’
It went without saying Everard belonged to neither establishment. He used all the larger London
Clubs and with what he considered a nice lack of discrimination in view of the wide differences in the quality of the services and quite probably the size of the membership fees. The Royal Automobile Club happened to be his marginal favourite at the moment. The name lent credibility to his standing as a motor-trader.
‘And you divided the money?’ Dina tried a new tack. ‘Went to the washroom in the basement. Great hangar of a place. Plenty of privacy. Always is.’
‘How much?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased about that.’ He reached for his discarded jacket and from various pockets began producing bundles of bank notes—slowly, like a conjurer. ‘Five thousand,’ he announced boldly.
‘Not enough. You were robbed.’
‘Actually it was Cruba . . .’ He let the attempted witticism get strangled by a nervous giggle. Then he looked suitably crestfallen: he wanted her to think he knew she was right, which she was if you didn’t count the other bundles in the briefcase. Those he would use for paying off the overdraft. ‘It’s ten per cent. He took all the risk. I mean I didn’t get involved till I knew there was no one else after him.’
‘Should have got more.’ She was sizing him up with a look that made him think she knew he had got more. ‘Everard, there’s something . . .’
‘It gets better,’ he injected. ‘We made the phone call. I made it, actually, tipping off the Egham Police about the kidnap. Where the boy was. Stephen said he’d have done it. That’s what he meant Sunday, saying we shouldn’t take any notice if we heard someone was bailing out the Rudyard. He’d intended to ring a newspaper . . .’
‘A newspaper! For crying out loud, that Trust would’ve been in the headlines for ever. Listen . . .’
‘Exactly. I said the police’d be better. Publicity the last thing we wanted. He understood. My way news of the kidnap may never get out. Important thing’s to be sure Cruba won’t need to pay the ransom tomorrow, that there’s nothing to stop the Trust being wound up . . .'
‘Lover, it looks like Mr Cruba won’t have to pay anyone anything again. They just said on the newscast Mr Cruba was stabbed on those steps tonight. They made it sound like tomorrow he’ll be the late Mr Cruba. So we’d better figure how to get rid of that money and any more of it you’ve got stashed away.’ He faked outrage at the last suggestion. ‘The dough may be marked,’ she added. ‘We don’t want you traced along with your second cousin for murdering anybody. You know how to reach him?’ Everard was sucking in air. His lips were drawn back tightly over clenched teeth.
‘Who saw you together?’
‘Only about half the members of the Institute of Directors.’ He’d never freeload there again. ‘Look, I’m positive Stephen didn’t stab Cruba,’ he insisted with utter conviction. ‘There was no reason. The man was waiting to part with the money. Stephen just got in first. He didn’t have to stab anybody.’
‘He didn’t have to. The police are looking for two men—two men and a missing attaché case. Black hide. Did Stephen get rid of it?’
A suddenly ashen Everard nodded. ‘He got rid of it.’
Stephen Spotter had heard no news bulletin. He had double-locked the door to his room in the Grosvenor Hotel next to Victoria Station and gone to bed. It was the third and best hotel he had been in since his arrival, showing caution and his improved financial state.
It wasn’t late but he needed to be up early to join the holiday charter flight to Dubrovnik from Gatwick Airport. Once in Jugoslavia he intended to settle in for a long relaxing summer. The Americans had no extradition arrangements with the Jugoslavs covering fraud. The chances were the California Court would lose interest anyway after a while. His luck had been in getting bail in the first place—because the Los Angeles jails were overflowing with people awaiting trial for violent crimes. It was an ill wind . . .
It wasn’t through luck that he had had two passports. They wouldn’t start looking for him outside the USA for a while even when he didn’t show up for the trial on Friday, not with the Court holding a valid passport.
As a British national all he had to do was stay clear of the USA for ever—and from the UK for a decent interval. Covering his tracks since Saturday had been easy, and he was mighty glad he’d come.
At the start he had intended just to borrow money from the old girls. He had never believed there was much to the Miff letter: the wording had been too careful—too ‘iffy’. Then everything had come up roses.
When Florence had First spilled the news of the kidnap he had meant to tip off the police as soon as he was clear of Rudwold Park himself. That was before the others arrived and told him about the fifty thousand—his for the taking, if he got in ahead of the Major, and still with time to blow the kidnap before Cruba needed to pay any lifesaving half-million to the charity.
And to think he had been conning his way around the world all these years when he was in line for a legitimate stake in a thing as big as the Rudyard Trust wind-up.
It was a long time since he had been in phoney oil exploration—or Texas. His last racket had been insurance. If only he had known about the potential in the Rudyard business he could have been here much earlier, moving it along. Facing facts, though, he wondered if he could have done as neat a job as Cousin Edna: that was some operator—deserving too. He thought back to their First meeting in the South of France all those years ago.
His father had been killed during the war. His mother had never remarried and had worked very hard to keep a home going. They never took proper holidays, but his grandfather, the Reverend Canon George Spotter had been Filling-in as Assistant Anglican Chaplain in Nice one August. He and his wife had taken Stephen along.
Just about the First soul to come forward—not for curing but for old times’ sake—had been Fay Crow-Patcher, intrepid survivor of several divorces, countless scandalous love-affairs and a German occupation. She was as ebullient and vivacious as the Canon remembered her from the ’twenties—and even more of an embarrassment to the family and his cloth since she had reverted to her maiden name and embraced the Roman faith: maidenhood and piety were not conditions convincingly evoked by Fay Crow-Patcher.
The lady had been given tea and no encouragement to call again: her exposure to the eight-year-old, impressionable Stephen had been minimal. He being afterwards instructed that further intercourse with this intriguing, new-found relative was expressly forbidden, took every opportunity to foster some. This had not been difficult since Fay lived close by, the beach was common ground, and the Reverend Canon and his wife given to staying indoors, out of the sun, composing antioecumenical letters to The Times about Popish plots.
Thus Stephen alone had met Edna—down for a visit later in the month. She was the sole progeny of Fay’s short-lived marriage to a ship’s engineer, an honest Scot called McSlope. He had sternly abjured the offered pleasures of bedding without wedding but had been equally insistent about exclusive rights after the ceremony. Fay had had other ideas.
McSlope had been given custody of Edna after the divorce. Any doubts he had harboured about being her real father had been dispelled as she grew older, less like her mother, more like him—and increasingly dour, a propensity he was certain she could not have inherited from any of Fay’s frivolous paramours.
The girl had been brought up by McSlope’s God-fearing mother. She had not seen Fay from infancy until the visit to Nice that had coincided with Stephen’s: by then she was already earning her own living as a secretary in Glasgow.
Stephen’s next meeting with Edna had been on the Miff threshold two nights before. He had never told his grandparents nor his mother that he knew her, and thinking back he figured he was now probably the only member of the family aware of her existence. Assuming she was dead had been thoughtless—careless even. The bare news of Fay’s own demise had been transmitted to him years ago in Hong Kong—at the age of sixty-one she had broken her neck on the Cresta Run. There had been no mention of Edna then, and somehow her memory had merged with that of her irrepressible moth
er.
It was just dandy that a direct descendant of Marmaduke, brighter than Crow-Patcher, saner than Prudence, and clean of philanthropic hogwash (like Florence) was standing ready to see the Trust obliterated. All he had to do was sit and wait, and with £35,000 in used notes to do it with he could afford the interval. He had done his bit: there’d be no rescue payment for the Rudyard Trust tomorrow.
Right now he was relenting his generosity to Everard earlier: £5,000 should have been enough, £10,000 at the most—£15,000 was ridiculous. So at least he could count on the guy’s loyalty.
Stephen’s only serious concern was Clarence Miff. The man was a loser. Before Edna came along he had been on the take. He had also nearly been caught—would have been if Edna hadn’t arranged to pay his previous secretary to take the blame for a ‘misunderstanding’. All this had come out in the conversation Saturday evening with Miff present but mostly asleep. It was also clear Edna was genuinely fond of the slob. But why had she had to marry him, for heaven’s sake?
The question was, would Miff fall apart if there was any deep probing? The whole thing could be plain sailing unless the merchant bank trustees made problems— applied themselves to what they should have been doing for years. Stephen’s service with a British colonial bank had left him with a commendable awareness of other people’s responsibilities.
There were credible answers, for instance, about why the residents’ fees had been jacked up so drastically in the time since Edna had been effectively in charge. Simply, Stephen Spotter would rather it were she and not her husband who did the explaining. It would have been better still, of course, if she had been merely his secretary and not his wife. There could be millions at stake, literally, and it looked as though a fifth would belong to him. What if Clarence fumbled things, got faced with charges or irresponsible conduct—even criminally irresponsible conduct?
Stephen put the light on again and sat up in bed. Edna wouldn’t face the fact but Miff was a liability—could screw up the whole works. He took a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table. Then, for no especial reason, he switched on the radio and found himself listening to the start of a news broadcast.
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