Put On By Cunning

by Ruth Rendell

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  some cold duck and stuff for supper in the fridge.'

  'So that when she came Sir Manuel was quite alone?'

  'Quite alone. What I'm going to tell you is what he told me the next day, the Sunday, when Ted drove him over to my house in the morning.

  'He told me he intended to be rather cool and distant with her at first.' Dinah Sternhold smiled a tender, reminiscent smile. 'I didn't have much faith in that,' she said. 'I knew him, you see. I knew it wasn't in him not to be warm and kind. And in fact, when he went down and opened the front door to her he said he forgot all about that resolve of his and just took her in his arms and held her. He was ashamed of that afterwards, poor Manuel, he was sick with himself for giving way.

  'Well, they went upstairs and sat down and talked. That is, Manuel talked. He said he suddenly found he had so much to say to her. He talked on and on about his life since she went away, her mother's death, his retirement because of the arthritis in his hands, how he had built that house. She answered him, he said, but a lot of things she said he couldn't hear. Maybe she spoke low, but my voice is low and he could always hear me. However...'

  'She has an American accent,' said Wexford.

  'Perhaps that was it. The awful thing was, he

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  lid, that when he talked of the long time she'd ;n away he actually cried. I couldn't see it was iportant, but he was so ashamed of having ied. Still, he pulled himself together. He said icy must have tea and he hoped she would stay ie night and would she like to see over the )use? He was always taking people over the mse, I think it was something his generation

  and then...' Wexford broke in, 'All this time he believed 5r to be his daughter?'

  'Oh, yes! He was in no doubt. The way he lid he found out�well, it's so crazy.... lyway, he actually told her he was going to te a new will after his marriage, and although intended to leave me the house and its itents, everything else was to go to her, duding what remained of her mother's >hune. It was a lot of money, something in the fion of a million, I think. *He showed her the bedroom that was to be rs, though she did say at this point that she wldn't stay, and then they went back and into music room. Oh, I don't suppose you've ?er been in the house, have you?' 'As a matter of fact, I have,' said Wexford. She gave him a faintly puzzled glance. 'Yes. fell, you'll know then that there are alcoves all id the music room and in one of the alcoves a flute made of gold. It was given to Manuel a sort of patron and fan of his, an American

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  of Italian origin called Aldo Cazzini, and it's a real instrument, it's perfectly playable, though in fact Manuel had never used it.

  'He and Natalie went in there and Natalie took one look in the alcove and said, "You still have Cazzini's golden flute," and it was at this point, he said, that he knew. He knew for certain she wasn't Natalie.'

  Wexford said, 'I don't follow you. Surely recognizing the flute would be confirmation of her identity rather than proof she was an impostor?'

  'It was the way she pronounced it. It ought to be pronounced Catzini and this woman pronounced it Cassini. Or so he said. Now the real Natalie grew up speaking English, French and Spanish with equal ease. She learnt German at school and when she was fifteen Manuel had her taught Italian because he intended her to be a musician and he thought some Italian essential for a musician. The real Natalie would never have mispronounced an Italian name. She would no more have done that, he said�these are his own words�than a Frenchman would pronounce Camargue to rhyme with Montague. So as soon as he heard her pronunciation of Cazzini he knew she couldn't be Natalie.'

  Wexford could almost have laughed. He shook his head in dismissal. 'There must have been more to it.'

  'There was. He said the shock was terrible.

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  |e didn't say anything for a moment. He looked rd at her, he studied her, and then he could she wasn't his daughter. Nineteen years is a ig time but she couldn't have changed that ich and in that way. Her features were ferent, the colour of her eyes was different, went back with her into the drawing room id then he said, "You are not my daughter, are

  wi?'"

  'He actually asked her, did he?'

  'He asked her and--you understand, Mr Oxford, that I'm telling you what he said--I

  ;1 a traitor to him, doubting him, as if he were le or mad--he wasn't, he was wonderful,

  P" '

  l^He was old,' said Wexford. A foolish, fond

  man, fourscore years.... 'He was ferwrought.'

  J'Oh, yes, exactly! But the point is he said he ;ed her and she admitted it.'

  ;xford leaned forward, frowning a little, his |es on Dinah Sternhold's flushed, intent face. ^'Are you telling me this woman admitted to Manuel that she wasn't Natalie Arno? Why I't you say so before?' IfBecause I don't believe it. I think that when said she admitted she wasn't Natalie and led ashamed and embarrassed, I think he

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  was�well, dreaming. You see, he told her to go. He was trembling, he was terribly distressed. It wasn't in him to shout at anyone or be violent, you understand, he just told her not to say any more but to go. He heard her close the front door and then he did something he absolutely never did. He had some brandy. He never touched spirits in the normal way, a glass of wine sometimes or a sherry, that was all. But he had some brandy to steady him, he said, and then he went to lie down because his heart was racing�and he fell asleep.'

  'It was next day when you saw him?' She nodded. 'Next day at about eleven. I think that while he was asleep he dreamt that bit about her admitting she wasn't Natalie. I told him so. I didn't humour him�ours wasn't that kind of relationship. I told him I thought he was mistaken. I told him all sorts of things that I believed and believe now�that eye colour fades and features change and one can forget a language as one can forget anything else. He wouldn't have any of it. He was so sweet and good and a genius�but he was terribly impulsive and stubborn as well.

  'Anyway, he started saying he was going to cut her out of his will. She was a fraud and an impostor who was attempting to get hold of a considerable property by false pretences. She was to have nothing, therefore, and I was to have the lot. Perhaps you won't believe me if I

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  I did my best to dissuade him from that?' ^Wexfbrd slightly inclined his head. 'Why

  Jt?'

  ii'It would have been in my own interest to

  ree with him. However, I did try to dissuade and he was sweet to me as he always was but wouldn't listen. He wrote to her, telling her it he intended to do, and then he wrote to his icitors, asking one of the partners to come up Sterries on February 4th--that would have �n two days after our wedding.' |*Who are these solicitors?' |*Symonds, O'Brien and Ames,' she said, 'in

  High Street here.' IKingsmarkham's principal firm of solicitors, ley had recently moved their premises into the Kingsbrook Precinct. It was often ffexfbrd's lot to have dealings with them. IfHe invited Mr Ames to lunch with us,' Sternhold said, 'and afterwards he was to iw up a new will for Manuel. It must have �n on the 22nd or the 23rd that he wrote to italic and on the 27th--he was drowned.' Her

  shook a little. fWexfbrd waited. He said gently, 'He had no Mention of coming to us and he wasn't going to

  ide in his solicitor?'

  jShe did not answer him directly. 'I think I did it,' she said. 'I prevented that. I couldn't suade him from the decision to disinherit her I did manage to stop him going to the police.

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  I told him he would make a�well, a scandal, and he would have hated that. What I meant to do was this. Let him make a new will if he liked. Wills can be unmade and remade. I knew Natalie probably disliked me and was jealous but I thought I'd try to approach her myself a month or so after we were married, say, and arrange another meeting. I thought that somehow we'd all meet and it would come right. It would turn out to have been some misunderstanding like in a play, like in one of those old comedies of mistaken identity.'

  Wexford was silent. The
n he said, 'Would you like to tell me about it all over again, Mrs Sternhold?'

  'What I've just told?'

  He nodded. 'Please.'

  'But why?'

  To test your veracity. He didn't say that aloud. If she were intelligent enough she would know without his saying, and her flush told him that she did.

  Without digressions this time, she repeated her story. He listened concentratedly. When she had finished he said rather sharply:

  'Did Sir Manuel tell anyone else about this?'

  'Not so far as I know. Well, no, I'm sure he didn't.' Her face was pale again and composed. She asked him, 'What will you do?'

  'I don't know.'

  'But you'll do something to find out. You'll

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  tove she is Natalie Arno?'

  |Or that she is not? He didn't say it, and before had framed an alternative reply she had iped up and was taking her leave of him in jt polite yet child-like way she had. *It was very good and patient of you to listen Ime, Mr Wexford. I'm sure you understand iy I had to come. Will you give my love to

  |eila, please, and say I'll be thinking of her on

  Iturday? She did ask me to come but of course it wouldn't be possible. I'm afraid I've taken a great deal of your time....'

  fHe walked with her out to the Volkswagen uch she had parked round the corner of the :et on an ice-free patch. She looked back once

  sshe drove away and raised her hand to him. >w many times, in telling her story, had she

  Id she didn't believe it? He had often observed people will say they are sure of something m they truly mean they are unsure, how a will hotly declare that he doesn't believe a rd of it when he believes only too easily. If lah Sternhold had not believed, would she re come to him at all?

  |He asked himself if he believed and if so what he going to do about it?

  ^Nothing till after the wedding....

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The success or failure of a wedding, as Wexford remarked, is no augury of the marriage itself. This wedding might be said to have failed. In the first place, the thaw set in the evening before and by Saturday morning it was raining hard. All day long it rained tempestuously. The expected crowd of well-wishers come to see their favourite married, a youthful joyous crowd of confetti-hurlers, became in fact a huddle of pensioners under umbrellas, indifferently lingering on after the Over-Sixties meeting in St Peter's Hall. But the press was there, made spiteful by rain and mud, awaiting opportunities. And these were many: a bridesmaid's diaphanous skirt blown almost over her head by a gust of wind, a small but dismaying accident when the bride's brother-in law's car went into the back of a press photographer's car, and later the failure of the Olive and Dove management to provide luncheon places for some ten of the guests.

  The Sunday papers made the most of it. Their pictures might have been left to speak for themselves, for the captions, snide or sneering, only added insult to injury. Dora wept.

  *I suppose it's inevitable.' Wexford, as far as he could recall it and with a touch of paraphrase,

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  jpted Shelley to her. They scatter their insults their slanders without heed as to whether poisoned shafts light on a heart made callous many blows or one like yours composed of we penetrable stuff.'

  t*And is yours made callous by many blows?' |No, but Sheila's is.'

  the took the papers away from her and burnt l, hoping none would have found their way 10 the Burdens' bungalow where they were ig to lunch. And when they arrived just after >n, escorted from their car by Burden with a ;e coloured golf umbrella, there was not a repaper to be seen. Instead, on the coffee tte, where the Sunday Times might have )sed, lay a book in a glossy jacket entitled Tichborne Swindle.

  former days, during the lifetime of Aden's first wife and afterwards in his long lowhood, no book apart from those strictly |essary for the children's school work was seen in that house. But when he remarried igs changed. And it could not be altogether to the fact that his wife's brother was a jlisher, though this might have helped, that inspector was becoming a reading man. It even said, though Wexford refused to Jjieve it, that Burden and Jenny read aloud to other in the evenings, that they had got nigh Dickens and were currently embarking Jlhe Waverley novels.

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  Wexford picked up the book. It had been, as he expected, published by Carlyon Brent, and was a reappraisal of the notorious nineteenthcentury Tichborne case in which an Australian butcher attempted to gain possession of a great fortune by posing as heir to an English baronetcy. Shades of the tale he had been told by Dinah Sternhold.... The coincidence of finding the book there decided him. For a little while before lunch he and Burden were alone together.

  'Have you read this yet?'

  'I'm about half-way through.'

  'Listen.' He repeated the account he had been given baldly and without digressions. 'There aren't really very many points of similarity,' he said. 'From what I remember of the Tichborne case the claimant didn't even look like the Tichborne heir. He was much bigger and fatter for one thing and obviously not of the same social class. Lady Tichborne was a hysterical woman who would have accepted practically anyone who said he was her son. You've almost got the reverse here. Natalie Arno looks very much like the young Natalie Camargue and, far from accepting her, Camargue seems to have rumbled her within half an hour.'

  '"Rumbled" sounds as if you think there might be something in this tale.'

  'I'm not going to stomp up and down raving that I don't believe a word of it, if that's what

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  ^ou mean. I just don't know. But I'll tell you ie thing. I expected you to have shouted you lidn't believe it long before now.'

  Burden gave one of his thin, rather complacent little smiles. In his domestic circle ie behaved, much as he had during his first larriage, as if nobody but he had ever quite iscovered the heights of marital felicity. Today ie was wearing a new suit of smooth matt cloth pie colour of a ginger nut. When happy he jalways seemed to grow thinner and he was very fphin now. The smile was still on his mouth as he ftpoke. 'It's a funny old business altogether, isn't ft? But I wouldn't say I don't believe it. It's fertile ground for that sort of con trick, after all. nineteen-year absence, an old man on his own tith poor sight, an old man who has a great deal frf money.... By the way, how do you know lis woman looks like the young Natalie?' 'Dinah Sternhold sent me this.' Wexford ided him a snapshot. 'Camargue was showing |er a family photograph album, apparently, and ie left it behind in her house.' The picture showed a dark, Spanish-looking rl, rather plump, full-faced and smiling. She ras wearing a summer dress in the style known it the time when the photograph was taken as ie sack' on account of its shapelessness and ick of a defined waist. Her black hair was short id she had a fringe. 'That could be her. Why not?'

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  'A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,' said Wexford, 'and two pitchballs stuck in her face for eyes. Camargue said the eyes of the woman he saw were different from his daughter's and Dinah told him that eyes fade. I've never heard of eyes or anything else fading to black, have you?'

  Burden refilled their glasses. 'If Camargue's sight was poor I think you can simply discount that sort of thing. I mean, you can't work on the premise that she's not Natalie Camargue because she looks different or he thought she did. The pronouncing of that name wrong, that's something else again, that's really weird.'

  Wexford, hesitating for his figure's sake between potato crisps, peanuts or nothing at all, looked up in surprise. 'You think so?'

  The thin smile came again. 'Oh, I know you reckon on me being a real philistine but I've got kids, remember. I've watched them getting an education if I've never had much myself. Now my Pat, she had a Frenchwoman teaching them French from when she was eleven, and when she speaks a French word she pronounces the R like the French, sort of rolls it in her throat. The point I'm making is, it happens naturally now, Pat couldn't pronounce a French word with an R in It any other way and she never will.'
<
br />   'Mm hmm.' While pondering Wexford had absentmindedly sneaked two crisps. He held his hands firmly together in his lap. 'There's always

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  le possibility Camargue heard the name icorrectly because of defective hearing while it is, in fact, pronounced in the proper way. mt I'm sure of is that Dinah is telling the ith. I tested her and she told the same story lost word for word the second time as she had ic first, dates, times, everything.' 'Pass over those crisp things, will you? I don't what motive she'd have for inventing it, lyway. Even if Natalie were out of the way she mldn't inherit.' 'No. Incidentally, we must find out who )uld. Dinah could have had spite for a motive, m know. If Natalie is the real Natalie no one of mrse could hope to prove she is not, and no >ubt she could very quickly prove she is, but inquiry would look bad for her, the mud f^ould stick. If there were publicity about it and |ere very likely would be, there would be some >ple who would always believe her to be an ipostor and many others who would feel a >ubt.'

  Burden nodded. 'And there must inevitably an inquiry now, don't you think?' i 'Tomorrow I shall have to pass on what I )w to Symonds, O'Brien and Ames,' said fexford, and he went on thoughtfully, 'It |ould be deception under the '68 Theft Act. :tion Fifteen, I believe.' And he quoted with le small hesitations, 'A person who by any :eption dishonestly obtains property

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  belonging to another, with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it, shall on conviction on indictment be liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years.'

  'No one's obtained anything yet. It'll take a bit of time for the will to be proved.' Burden gave his friend and superior officer a dubious and somewhat wary look. 'I don't want to speak out of turn and no offence meant,' he said, 'but this could be the kind of thing you get--well, you get obsessional about.'

  Wexford's indignant retort was cut off in mid sentence by the entry of Jenny and Dora to announce lunch.

  Kingsmarkham's principal firm of solicitors had moved their offices when the new Kingsbrook shopping precinct was built, deserting the medieval caverns they had occupied for fifty years for the top floor above the British Home Stores. Here all was light, space and purity of line. The offices had that rather disconcerting quality, to be constantly met with nowadays, of looking cold and feeling warm. It was much the same in the police station.