Murder for Treasure

by David Williams

  But worst of all the urbane banker had been applying himself with an extra zeal which, he could not conceal, had stemmed from a need to maintain admiring attentions. Nothing could be so humiliating as the awful realization that those attentions had been not merely frivolous but deeply insidious.

  It was enough that unprotected widows, superannuated members of the bar and bench of bishops, postmen, clergy, policemen—at least some policemen—not to mention incautious insurance companies and impersonal government departments could have been deftly manipulated. Merchant bankers reckoned they were made of less malleable stuff—even when submitted to burnishment.

  It was clear he could not follow a rational inclination to walk away from the whole business. He had performed the favour he had been summoned to provide, and in the process should have secured the deal which had been his only true commission. But he was in too deep—and into something a good deal more serious than Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s awful experience.

  Nor was the emotional imperative steeling him to persist to do with matters so trivial as his own bruised amour propre, the likelihood of some marriage plans being cancelled and the consequent possibility of Hutstacker having to soldier on without benefit of Rigley & Herbert.

  To the exclusion of all other considerations Treasure was voluntarily applying himself to what the Judge had in mind for him from the first. He was investigating a mysterious dead body—a real one—in response to an irresistible compulsion wholly unconnected, he told himself, with an attachment as shallow as it had been predictably inept.

  Since Anna’s call he had delayed only as long as it took a bewildered but compliant Henry Nott-Herbert to telephone an appropriately influential friend, at Treasure’s request, for some privileged information. Once this had been obtained the banker set off on foot for the art gallery half way down the hill and for the light luncheon offered by its owner.

  This was the fourth time since early morning that Treasure had found himself in the Panty High Street. At six-thirty it had been relatively deserted: now, at midday, the bumper to bumper crawl of westbound traffic witnessed an urban exodus that scarcely proved the boast of the cogniscenti that West Wales was still largely undiscovered.

  The trailers and caravans, the tents, inflatable dinghies and household utensils stacked on car roofs, the white faces of the travellers contrasting with the dark of the now heavily threatening rain clouds evidenced that the gipsy in the soul of many an Englishman was still finding outlet—if not at the loss-making Sunfun Hotel.

  Many appreciative glances were beaming from traffic-jammed conveyances at the mostly bogus old-world shop fronts along the High Street. It was television advertising come to life: you could almost hear the wrapped brown bread and processed cheese being lovingly compounded in stone-flagged kitchens ready to be rumbled away in hand carts up country lanes to heaven knows where to the accompaniment of better known bits from the Pastoral Symphony.

  ‘Thank you for inviting me.’ Treasure embellished the greeting with the looked-for formal kiss upon the cheek. Why did this make him feel like a Judas, he wondered—perhaps because Anna was innocent until proved otherwise. He wished they could dispense with the preliminaries.

  ‘It makes it easier for Mrs Evans today with the garden refreshments to arrange. Henry doesn’t take lunch anyway. You said on your note you wanted a private word.’

  Anna locked the street door after he had entered, hanging a ‘Closed’ sign in the centre glass panel. Then she turned to face her visitor.

  ‘So?’ She leaned back against the door, arms limp at her side, chin high, eyes wide open and questioning. ‘You’d like to see the pictures?’

  He shook his head. ‘Later perhaps.’ She hadn’t moved. Was she willing him to reach out for her?

  ‘There isn’t much to see right now. Local artists’ work. Quite nice and inexpensive for holidaymakers. Now they begin to arrive. You saw the traffic in the street?’

  ‘Henry has all your best stuff I expect.’ He paused. ‘Anna, I have—’

  ‘Last night I embarrassed you.’ She interrupted deliberately. ‘You feel compromised over your wife, or Henry, or both of them perhaps.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  She smiled. ‘Guilty then, and that’s worse for an Englishman. It’s my fault. I am of course indiscreet and perhaps I have spoiled our friendship before it properly started. There. Now you can scold me. Say it’s shameless of me to be impulsive—to take what I want . . .’

  ‘Wrong again. I thoroughly enjoyed last evening. Every moment.’ Which probably suggested she hadn’t been impulsive enough: this was not what he had come to say. He started again. ‘I want to help you.’

  ‘Help?’ She stared straight into his eyes: now there was a touch of mockery in the expression.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand, Anna. I’m here to talk to you seriously . . . about your husband. Could we . . . ?’

  She held his gaze for a split second longer, then, pushing herself away from the door, she brushed past him without hesitation and made for the spiral staircase in the centre of the gallery. ‘I promised you a drink before lunch,’ she called.

  He followed, determined that neither the scent of her nor the sight of that tightly clad form lithely climbing the steps ahead of him nor anything else about this bewitching woman would deter him from following the course he had embarked on.

  He had not noticed her smoking before. Now she was lighting the fourth of the long, brown-papered cigarettes she had taken up in the twenty minutes they had been together. The three others she had discarded, half smoked, in the big glass ashtray. They both held drinks in their hands: Anna had hardly touched hers. Only the cigarettes belied her composure.

  ‘And assuming this hypothetical situation that I know my husband is alive, it would make a difference if I could prove I first believed him to be dead. That I was not a conspirator?’

  They were sitting across from each other on black leather sofas set at right angles to the large picture window that had replaced the south wall of the upper floor: the window opened on to a narrow wrought-iron balcony. The gallery extended to the front half of the higher storey. Anna’s private apartment was partitioned off near the top of the stairs.

  The main room was bigger than Treasure had expected—low-ceilinged with white walls contrasting with the gauds of bright colours in the pictures, the scatter rugs and the furnishings generally. A closed door on one side of the room presumably let onto the sleeping and bathroom arrangements while an open one opposite revealed a well-equipped kitchen.

  ‘I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a policeman.’ Treasure wanted to add he regretted he was also not a smoker: it was six months since he had given up the pipe he would dearly liked to have been fingering since the interview began, and most particularly since Anna had taken consolation in those cigarettes. ‘I believe there must be a distinction between conspiring to defraud before the event and being—what shall we say?—more or less obliged to co-operate afterwards.’ He paused. ‘Anna, I’ve told you I want to help you. I wish we could stop fencing about hypothetical. It’s all supposition on my part, but a lot of it’s provable for the asking.’ She remained silent. ‘I came down in the train yesterday with your husband who was assaulted and then carried off or else he ran away of his own accord. I suspect the latter.

  ‘I saw him again outside the Cathedral last evening. I believe it was your husband because I believe he was recognized by at least one of the Crabthornes and very possibly by two other people. No one has spoken out yet—of their own accord. No doubt they have their reasons. I can’t believe they’ll be permanent ones.’

  He was not yet ready to admit to Anna the circumstances in which he had obtained a near definite if un-volunteered identification of Ralph Spring.

  ‘So the husband you claim perished in an air accident somehow survived and came to Britain. He may not have had your help getting here, but he’s had it since. For instance, you got him a passport, I think, by pretending to Dai Rees h
e was an American deserter friend. Dai actually applied for a passport in his own name but with your husband’s picture on it. The Vicar authenticated the photographs which Dai had stuck on the backs of pictures of himself. With thin prints and volatile glue—the sort Henry uses—Wodd wouldn’t have suspected anything. You didn’t have to sweet-talk the Vicar too.’ There was no bitterness in his tone. ‘Dai described himself as a clerk. Postal clerk? Postman? Acceptable enough to all concerned I suppose.’

  Anna’s eyebrows rose a fraction in response, but she still said nothing.

  ‘If this whole thing was a conspiracy from the start, then it’s easier to guess the scenario, although, if it can be proved, the consequences will be more serious for you. After establishing your husband’s death and collecting on the insurance, you planned to come together again in Panty, eventually. There’d be some risk, but it’s pretty out of the way down here. First, though, you meant to talk Henry into befriending you—even perhaps marrying you. You knew he was fond of you, that his wife was dead and through . . . er . . . a relationship with Edgar Crabthorne you knew that Hutstacker’s could possibly be on the way to making Henry very, very rich. And the scheme worked. Your husband was happy to keep his distance— though I think he visited you here at least once.’

  Treasure got up, walked to the drinks table and replenished his glass with ice and soda but not more whisky. He glanced enquiringly at Anna’s drink: it was still almost untouched. He was in time to light her fifth cigarette for her before he sat down again. She nodded her thanks without looking up at him.

  ‘The gallery was the perfect way to bring Henry seriously into your life and even if it kept your husband out it introduced Detective-Inspector Iffley who, I suspect, to use your own phraseology, you reached out for impulsively—and took.

  ‘I know a bit about Iffley’s work because he told me. I think it probable your relationship with him makes for profit and pleasure. He’s engaged in a perfectly legitimate way with the overlaps of highly illegitimate traders. He’s after drugs, but in the process it may be politic for him to buy lesser known but still valuable works of art coming on the market by devious means. Has he also been going out of his way to do so? “Anna’s finds” Henry calls them. They’re frankly so superior to anything you have here I’m surprised even Henry hasn’t queried their origins more carefully, particularly since he’s providing the seller’s good title.

  ‘Did Iffley spoil your relationship with your husband? Something did. Something brought Mr Spring here yesterday in the face of a good deal of opposition. Who laid that on I wonder? Could it have been the Inspector? He was very conveniently placed when those undernourished desperados on the train needed lifting out. They thought they had a car meeting them. Instead it may have met me.

  ‘Iffley drove me here, but he didn’t exactly hang around Panty afterwards. Risked being seen here too often, perhaps?’ He nodded towards the balcony. ‘Easter Saturday must have been a close thing with Henry standing here with his daffodils and Iffley climbing down the wrought-iron—naked and practically into the arms of Mrs Ogmore-Davies.’

  Anna looked up at this, but still she didn’t speak.

  ‘Which brings us back to your husband. Ralph, isn’t it? If I’m half right about what’s been going on, Ralph would have plenty of reason to feel cut out of things—perhaps even his share of the insurance money, not to mention a loving wife. And a supposedly dead man has so few rights when you think about it. But having failed to get what he wants by ’phone or previous visits he came yesterday, setting out, at least, disguised as a clergyman. An Australian clergyman. Somebody knew he was coming but the attempt to waylay him—or whatever it was—didn’t work.

  ‘What upset everything, of course, was not the expected arrival of Ralph but the unexpected one of the Crabthornes and Albert Crutt. They all know him by sight. Altogether he picked a bad day and I’m surprised someone didn’t warn him in his own interests to go away or get disguised again. Was there a rendezvous at the cathedral?’

  He paused only momentarily watching the huge raindrops that had begun to fall on the balcony. ‘And were you scared I might see that wedding photo, the one that mysteriously disappeared from the Ogmore-Davies ditty box, the one you’d forgotten you’d sent her? It was clever to go back for it. I suppose you have a key to Mariner’s Rest. It’s curious I don’t remember Mrs Ogmore-Davies talking about the picture when you were there. I hadn’t asked to see it. I might have today.’

  It was as though he was talking to himself. There was no visible reaction from Anna yet he was conscious this was the cruellest soliloquy he had ever felt obliged to deliver—even so, and paradoxically, he hoped fervently that for Anna the worst was still to come.

  ‘Whether I’m right or wrong on some of the detail I know I’m right on the central facts about Ralph. I can’t guess yet how much trouble you’re in. You must decide how much you want to tell me, if you want my help or if you feel the whole thing is none of my business.’ So this was it. ‘Up to this morning you seem to have been involved in nothing more terrible than an insurance swindle and in the obtaining of a false passport. But a few hours ago your husband was taken out of the sea. He was dead. There’s no question about identity. I give you my word, it was he,’

  The following silence he found almost unendurable. ‘He drowned himself.’ She said at last—slowly and deliberately, not as a question but as a statement. They were the words he had wanted to hear.

  ‘I’m sorry, but there appears to be some doubt. He wasn’t drowned. It could have been an accident, or suicide, or . . . or murder.’

  ‘Then whatever it was I killed him.’ The tears were now coursing down her cheeks. There was no audible sobbing, just the tears and the expression of utter despair. ‘I loved him . . . Once upon a time I loved him.’

  ‘And I don’t believe you had anything to do with his death.’ Treasure was convinced the emotion displayed was genuine. ‘Drink your drink, then tell me about it,’ he added gently.

  CHAPTER 19

  Not far away from Anna Spring’s living-room a figure had paused to gaze out over St Brides Bay—to gaze and to contemplate.

  It was, of course, the perfect crime. Granted, you were half way there with Ralph Spring supposed to have copped it over a year ago: made it easier to live with too.

  Anna was expecting her husband or his messenger to pick up the money at 3.00. And that was exactly what would seem to happen. So far as she was concerned her husband would be stepping out of her life two hours from now—bitter and resentful but well off, and alive; never to be heard of again.

  It would be the messenger who made the pick-up, but so what? Spring had had good reason to be suspicious: why shouldn’t he have sent a messenger? The last thing Anna would think about was a double cross.

  All the same it would have been a lot safer to have had that body float in a day or two later, or better still a day or two later and miles away. It should have been ditched further up the coast, of course, but time had been critical to the whole operation. Getting the clothes off and the swimming trunks on had taken too long as it was. The thing to avoid was putting signs out for over-keen pathologists.

  ‘The most difficult problem is to separate immediate ante-mortem from immediate post-mortem bruises.’ That was in the text-book—it had stuck in the memory. ‘The blow from the sandbag can be just as dangerous but so much more diffused and less determinable than one from a blunt instrument. The sandbag is much used in interrogation by totalitarian regimes.’

  Well, all that needed establishing was a simple case of over-enthusiastic swimmer falling off rocks, getting bumps on head, and cuts all over, precipitating accidental death: please inform the next of kin.

  With luck it could happen that way. With no luck at all and if foul play was suspected, trying to find the motive for an attack on a totally unidentified victim was archive stuff almost before it got on file.

  It was a pity about the platinum watch: wasteful and careless. Still
, it added credibility to the accident theory: foul players rarely left spoils.

  It was even more of a pity that the whole thing had been drawn out into two acts. If it had gone according to plan Spring should have had the bag of money with him last night and by now all would have been safely over.

  Still, the rain was a godsend. With all the wet weather gear on you couldn’t tell a woman from a man motorcyclist—and that mattered a good deal.

  ‘They’re going to believe I killed him in any case. Ralph left a letter for Scotland Yard.’

  Anna turned from the window where she had been standing. Unlike the rain, the tears had stopped. She took the fresh iced drink from Treasure and sat again on the sofa.

  ‘Glyn—that’s Inspector Iffley—thought maybe the letter didn’t exist, that it would have been too dangerous for Ralph to leave with anyone.’

  ‘Was there any reason he should think he was in danger before . . .’

  ‘Before yesterday on the train? No. Not physical danger.’

  ‘Then with his deep knowledge and understanding of the criminal mind Iffley’s probably right,’ said Treasure with undisguised acerbity.

  ‘If there is a letter will I be arrested anyway?’ There was now curiously little emotion in the tone of her voice.

  ‘Well, certainly not on suspicion of murder. Assuming it was murder—and that’s a very big assumption—at the relevant time you were seen selling pictures, listening to organ music or else you were alone with me’ —a fact that would no doubt add colour to any reports in the popular press: but there it was.