Murder for Treasure

by David Williams

  They had turned right on leaving the cathedral and were approaching the stone bridge dimly discernible in the gathering dusk.

  ‘You came down the steps,’ said Anna. ‘This is quicker. My car is somewhere over there.’

  ‘I suppose my demented friend ran off this way.’ Treasure shook his head. ‘I’m glad he’s alive and safe, but I doubt if he’s well.’ He had already described the curious happening before the recital.

  ‘You’re sure it was the same man—the one from the train?’

  ‘Pretty sure. I mean, he was dressed differently and had lost his wig and so on, but he’s a marked man, you know, with that scarred forehead. I thought Crabthorne had gone after him but he . . . he said not.’ He had intended keeping Crabthorne out of the conversation but the name slipped in.

  ‘The music was . . .’

  ‘I should have known . . .’

  They had begun speaking at the same moment to end an embarrassing pause, only to invent another one. They grinned at each other—like old friends: the uneasiness disappeared.

  ‘Edgar Crabthorne and I —’

  ‘I don’t need to know.’ This time he had intended to interrupt. ‘It really is none of my business.’

  ‘You’re very English. Always the well-mannered protest. I appreciate it, and your sincerity.’ She took his arm unaffectedly, a measure of gentle intimacy—and of the woman Henry Nott-Herbert was about to marry. ‘I knew Mr and Mrs Crabthorne during the little while Ralph was their company pilot. It was before he’d leased his own plane.’

  ‘And before you lived in Miami?’

  ‘No, we were there already. Hutstacker’s had a new plant nearby and they kept the plane there. Mrs Crabthorne didn’t care for the area so didn’t come down very much.’

  ‘What about Crabthorne?’

  ‘He was down a good deal, didn’t know many people.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Sometimes if he was stopping over a day or two he’d come to us for dinner, or we’d go swimming. He’d rented a beach cottage, I remember. He liked my husband’s company.’

  ‘Yours too, I’m sure.’ There was more than gallantry in the comment.

  ‘Perhaps. Ralph hoped Edgar might become a sleeping partner in the charter business we were planning. Put up some of the money, you understand?’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No dice, as the Americans say. But he was very good in pushing charters Ralph’s way later on. Here’s my car.’

  ‘Allow me. Do you have the key? Oh, the door’s unlocked.’

  ‘With the key in the ignition. I was in such a hurry when I got here.’ Anna looked lightly chastened by the reproving glance as Treasure helped her into the car. He got in the other side after putting the folio case in the boot through the also unlocked hatch-back door. ‘I don’t think they steal cars in St David’s,’ she added with mock innocence.

  ‘Which makes it exceptional if not unique in the whole civilized world.’

  They looked at each other and laughed. She placed a hand on his sleeve, and in the reflected light from a solitary and suitably aged streetlamp nearby he saw her expression change.

  ‘I’m so glad you were there this evening when I walked in on the Crabthornes.’ She hesitated, looking for words, and he saw her eyes had suddenly filled with tears. ‘It was . . . it was such a shock. I knew Edgar Crabthorne was involved in your business here with Henry, but I didn’t know he was in the country. It brought back memories.’

  ‘I understand.’ She looked so dependent, and trusting, and so very, very beautiful. ‘I didn’t know they were here either until a moment before you arrived.’

  ‘Could you make them go away? I have a special reason—and you are too gallant to ask what it is.’

  He smiled. ‘The sooner they’re on their way the better I’ll like it. Yes, I think I probably can get Crabthorne to understand he’s gumming up the works by staying.’ He was thinking of the American’s effect on Nott-Herbert. ‘Pity. Patience is good company, don’t you think?’

  Anna didn’t answer the question. ‘Thank you, dear Mark,’ she said. Her fingers seemed to make tiny electric currents as they reached up to the base of his neck. Her hands drew his face to hers and she kissed him tenderly on the lips.

  This seemed hardly the moment for philosophical cogitation but it went through Treasure’s mind that it had been a singularly curious day.

  ‘Sure I knew he was getting married—but not to Anna Spring.’ The pyjama-clad President of the Hutstacker Chemical Corporation was standing before one of the twin washbasins in the bathroom of the Panty Sunfun Royal

  Suite, electric toothbrush at the ready and loaded with striped paste. He hesitated to begin operations at such a tricky point in the conversation in case he should place himself at a disadvantage.

  Patience Crabthorne had no such inhibition. She had already finished brushing her teeth at the other basin and was examining her eyebrows in the long mirror that spanned the ‘his and her’ pink-tiled vanitory area. This also gave her the opportunity to gauge the degree of discomfort the topic under discussion might be causing her husband. Suspectful sidelong glances at one’s partner’s reflection had not been included in the inventory of ‘togetherness’ activities that came with the ‘King and Queen’ sized bathroom, but the arrangements allowed for this all the same.

  ‘And Mrs Spring, or Anna as we came to know her . . .’

  Patience was now gently massaging her forehead with cream from an expensive-looking bottle. She let the sentence remain uncompleted, allowing it to build atmosphere. Crabthorne continued to contemplate his toothbrush.

  ‘. . . Anna may have known, I suppose, about your interest in . . .’ Patience leaned closer to the mirror, ‘. . . I declare, that’s a new wrinkle . . . heigh ho . . . yes, about your interest in Rigley & Herbert, or else her husband might have known.’

  ‘Her husband was a fine man and a great aviator. May he rest in peace.’

  Pleased with the knell of that pious incantation, Crabthorne began to clean his teeth. If there was anything you could count on with Patience, it was her sense of Christian charity.

  ‘You don’t have to be a Lindbergh to fly Lear Jets around Florida.’ Wrong again: this biting sally came loud and clear over the buzz of the toothbrush. He pretended not to hear.

  ‘I said you don’t have to be a Lindbergh . . .’

  He stopped the brushing. ‘Yes, I heard you. Sometimes, Patience, I think . . . well, we’ll let that go.’ He shot her a forbearing glance. ‘Sure, Ralph Spring may have known about this market hang-up we have over here. It’s been a corporate pain in the butt for years. But he wouldn’t have known we were planning to take over Rigley & Herbert. That kind of information you play close in.’

  ‘You don’t share it with company pilots . . . ?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ He rinsed and spat. ‘Rigley’s Patent Footbalm,’ he enunciated with venom, rinsed and spat again.

  Patience was now smoothing the cream into her neck. ‘. . .or the wives of company pilots whom you could run into while their husbands were flying here, there and everywhere at your feudal bidding?’ She gave a bland smile at the mirror before walking purposefully from the bathroom to the dressing-table in the matching pink bedroom, leaving her husband to consider the innuendo—and a blob of toothpaste on his brand new Saks Fifth Avenue white pyjamas with blue piping.

  She had come as close as ever she allowed to a direct reference to one of what she thought of as Edgar’s ‘little friends’ —those who composed the group of executive employees’ wives with whom he had enjoyed short-lived periods of amatory dalliance over the years.

  Patience sometimes wondered whether the word ‘enjoyed’ properly described what Edgar drew from such liaisons: it had often occurred to her that far from being an indulgence, they had something to do with his fixation about close corporate relations and company loyalty: management monographs had been produced to prove the existence of even less credible syndromes.

  No wor
d had ever passed between Edgar and Patience Crabthorne on the subject of these extra-marital adventures: it was sufficient that she knew when one was pending, happening and completed, the stages being reflected in her husband’s disposition to demonstrate nervous anticipation, burdening guilt, and huge relief in that order.

  She had long ceased troubling to identify the women involved, though it sometimes happened she found out by chance. Simply, she tended to take advantage of the burdening guilt phase to replenish her wardrobe, replace her car, or—selflessly—to exact a large tribute for her current favourite charity.

  What could be termed Crabthorne’s Syndrome had been quiescent until that very afternoon when Patience detected the onset of a nervous anticipation period brought on through the encounter with Mrs Crutt. She had suspected that nothing would come of this since she prided herself that Edgar had better taste.

  The re-encounter with Anna Spring was something quite different: it fitted none of the phases though it absolutely confirmed in Patience’s mind not only that Mrs Spring had been one of the favoured few but also one curiously able to agitate her husband long after the end of the affair. It was not in Edgar’s nature to go back in any context, so what Mrs Spring had stirred was something other than a spent emotion.

  ‘Patience, if you have anything on your mind . . .’ Edgar had entered the bedroom determined to take the offensive.

  ‘How much are you paying for this Rigley outfit?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Cash and stock around five million dollars. It’s worth it. They have a whole lot of blocked assets besides their going brands. The hell of it is, but for Hutstacker competition they’d be worth peanuts. We built their market for them. Ten years ago we could have bought them out of petty cash.’

  ‘And the Judge owns fifty-one per cent,’ Patience interrupted. ‘And pretty soon Mrs Spring is going to own one hundred per cent of the Judge. You know, Edgar, that kind of makes up for some of the tragedy in that young woman’s life.’ She gave an understanding smile. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows, or rather blew . . . where was it? . . . oh yes, in the Gulf of Mexico.’ She looked about the room. ‘I’d swear I put my book down in here.’

  Crabthorne’s gaze happened to fall upon the Gideon Bible on the bedside table. After today he hoped he’d never have to swear to anything that had to do with Anna Spring—or her husband.

  CHAPTER 13

  Early rising happened to suit Mark Treasure’s constitution. This subtracted nothing from his thinking of it as an immensely virtuous habit.

  ‘Good heavens, I must have got you up at the crack, Mrs Evans,’ he volunteered more heartily than apologetically, and much in the tone of a patronizing professional commending a good amateur effort.

  ‘Ten to six you said, Mr Treasure, and there’s no way I’m letting you leave this house without something better than the cup of tea you asked for.’ She placed the half grapefruit before him where he was sitting in lonely state at the circular dining table. ‘There’s eggs, bacon, sausage and kidneys under the silver dishes. I had plenty of time to make kedgeree but not everybody likes it and I couldn’t very well wake you to ask’— advantage Mrs Evans.

  She put a full toast-rack near his left hand. ‘There’s terrible about the burglary. Ethel Ogmore-Davies could have been murdered in her own home. Murdered or worse. You never know these days’—meaningful nod.

  ‘I thought she was out.’ Treasure had finished the grapefruit and was attacking the chafing dishes. With such a highly civilized breakfast at stake, and only minutes in which to consume it, postulating on anything so improbable as the ravaging of Mrs Ogmore-Davies was a criminal waste of time.

  ‘She happened to be out, it’s true.’ Mrs Evans was in no hurry. ‘Delivering parish magazines she was. Full marks to Mr Lewin, anyway, seeing that window up—whatever the reason,’ she added uncertainly.

  ‘Constable walking the beat. Backbone of the system,’ said Treasure with his mouth full and without real conviction. He was content to utter any palliating platitude to forestall further discussion.

  In any case, the subject’s undramatic potential had been exhausted at bedtime the night before. It had been passed on to the Judge by his housekeeper that while he and his guests had been consuming cold salmon the vigilant Constable Lewin had come upon the invariably secured dining-room window at Mariner’s Rest standing wide open to the lane.

  Receiving no answer when he went to the front door to make enquiries, Lewin had himself entered the house through the open window, hoping to catch intruders redhanded.

  While searching the upper floor he had heard movements below, but on noisily racing down the stairs had succeeded only in terrorizing the just returned Mrs Ogmore-Davies washing her hands, she said, in the back lavatory: the door being half closed neither party had been able immediately to identify the other.

  Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s reaction had been to slam and lock the door, thrust her head through the tiny window and scream for the police. This had placed her beyond audible reach of Lewin’s insistence that he was the police, but not the sound of his heavy hammering on the door which massively increased her perturbation. Having failed to identify himself from inside, the policeman’s only recourse had been to rush outside and present himself to the now nearly apoplectic Mrs Ogmore-Davies from the trampled centre of her early lettuces. As a way of reducing consternation to mere vexation this had proved a winner.

  Later, a careful search of Mariner’s Rest had revealed nothing stolen or even disturbed—save a few chairs knocked over in the dining-room.

  Although the notion was steadfastly denied by Mrs Ogmore-Davies, it had been assumed by most others, including Lewin, that she had simply gone out forgetting she had opened the window to air the room after the meeting. Thus the Constable was excused the need to report the event to higher authority. Naturally, Mrs Ogmore-Davies and Mrs Evans had reported it to everybody available, the former being convinced the raising of the sash had been the work of an authority higher than any accounted on earth: a sign from beyond, but so far not pointing anywhere in particular.

  ‘Ethel’s a bit fanciful at times—over that kind of thing, I mean. More tea, Mr Treasure?’ Mrs Evans was still hovering. ‘Mark you, the warning about her husband’s death was right enough. I can witness that.’ The head nodded in baleful confirmation. ‘Six stair rods removed and placed neatly on the kitchen table. Couldn’t have been plainer for those with vision,’ among whom presumably neither the speaker nor the gifted Mrs Ogmore-Davies could be numbered on that occasion. ‘Come to think, it was Mr Lewin who found him, too. And Ethel was right about my Doreen, that’s little Nye’s mother.’ She paused before adding, much to Treasure’s relief, ‘Well, that’s another story. Doreen’s married now. Not to the father and not what you’d call a prime specimen of a man, but still.’ A sigh followed these painful admissions. ‘Got their own house in Liverpool. Not Council,’ she added pointedly. ‘He doesn’t care for children . . .’

  ‘How curious.’ Treasure continued in his role as Greek chorus and reached for another piece of toast.

  ‘Well, there’s some like that, and to be honest Doreen doesn’t either. Unnatural, I call it, even though she’s my own daughter. Nye’s happy enough though, living here with me. And he idolizes Anna. Haven’t seen him yet, have you?’ The proud glance suggested a treat in store.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Another half cup of tea and then he should make for the harbour.

  ‘You will this morning, I expect. He and Emma, that’s the vicar’s daughter, Emma Wodd, they’re up before anyone on Saturdays out playing and having picnic breakfasts. Did you ever?’ Mrs Evans shook her head good-naturedly. Then the expression changed. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot. His Honour told me to say if you wanted to take Devalera you’re welcome. He usually goes with the children but a trained dog might be useful . . . in your investigations, like.’

  Treasure wondered what Devalera could have been trained for. It amused him, too, that the Judge wanted
it to be seen that the amateur investigation into an exceedingly cold case of suspected murder was being decked out with all available trimmings.

  Even so, Treasure liked dogs and if this one was handy to keep him company and to add a touch of nobility—it was a grand sort of dog, after all . . . ‘Where is he, Mrs Evans?’

  ‘He’ll be asleep in His Honour’s car. I’ll show you, sir.’ She glanced approvingly at the nearly empty dishes.

  Some minutes later Treasure was pausing after turning right half way down the High Street before what was evidently Anna Spring’s picture gallery.

  The noble Devalera was with him, responding impeccably to the touches on the short leather leash. His handler suspected the good behaviour was solely attributable to the fact that they had taken the walk Devalera would have chosen himself. It remained that the dog added dignity as well as pace to the expedition.

  Treasure had intended to trace Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s walk on that Saturday morning two months before but had now decided there was nothing to be gained in tramping down to the very foot of the hill. The harbour below had been partly glimpsed at various points along the way, as had the beginnings of interesting and tortuous-looking lanes and alleys that must lead to it.

  The near-side of Anna’s whitewashed pair of cottages provided a paved yard off the main road wide enough and more than long enough to accommodate her parked Honda.

  The shop-front—new, but decently ‘antiquated’—had no entrance directly on to the street. The common door to the commercial and domestic quarters was in the same little courtyard.

  At its far end the yard funnelled into a sloping alley separated at the top by a low railing from some steps on the right. These plunged steeply to a house built at a lower level from those on the High Street: the alley itself followed a less perilous inclination.