by Ruth Rendell
'Not yet,' he said. 'At present I'll be content if Ju'll give me the name and address of the )ple whose party you and Mrs Zoffany went on the evening of 27 January.' She told him, without hesitation or surprise. 'Thank you, Mrs Arno.' At the door of the room where Jane Zoffany she paused, looked at him and giggled. 'You call me Mrs X, if you like. Feel free.'
if
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>
A housekeeper in a dark dress that was very nearly a uniform admitted him to the house in a cul-de-sac off Kensington Church Street. She was a pretty, dark-haired woman in her thirties who doubtless looked on her job as a career and played her part so well that he felt she was playing, was acting with some skill the role of a deferential servant. In a way she reminded him of Ted Hicks.
'Mrs Mountnessing hopes you won't mind going upstairs, Chief Inspector. Mrs Mountnessing is taking her coffee after luncheon in the little sitting room.'
It was a far cry from the house in De Beauvoir Square to which Natalie had sent him, a latterday Bohemia where there had been Indian bedspreads draping the walls and a smell of marijuana for anyone who cared to sniff for it. Here the wall decorations were hunting prints, ascending parallel to the line of the staircase whose treads were carpeted in thick soft olivegreen. The first-floor hall was wide, milk chocolate with white cornice and mouldings, the same green carpet, a Hortus siccus in a copper trough on a console table, a couple of fat-seated, round-backed chairs upholstered in goldenbrowii velvet, a twinkling chandelier and a brown table lamp with a cream satin shade. There are several thousand such interiors in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. A
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idled door was pushed open and Wexford lound himself in the presence of Natalie Arno's luint Gladys, Mrs Rupert Mountnessing, the lister of Kathleen Camargue. His first impression was of someone cruelly icaged and literally gasping for breath. It was a �ting image. Mrs Mountnessing was just a fat xnan in a too-tight corset which compressed ier body from thighs to chest into the shape of a rusage and thrust a shelf of bosom up to ittress her double chin. This constrained flesh is sheathed in biscuit-coloured wool and upon ie shelf rested three strands of pearls. Her face id become a cluster of pouches rather than a ;st of wrinkles. It was thickly painted and |armounted by an intricate white-gold coiffure it was as smooth and stiff as a wig. The only of Mrs Mountnessing which kept some hint youth was her legs. And these were still tcellent: slender, smooth, not varicosed, the les slim, the tapering feet shod in classic iurt shoes of beige glace kid. They reminded of Natalie's legs, they were exactly like. Did it mean anything? Very little. There are only w types of leg, after all. One never said 'She her aunt's legs' as one might say a woman id her father's nose or her grandmother's eyes. The room was as beige and gold as its owner, a low table was a coffee cup, coffee pot, pgar basin and cream jug in ivory china with a ik key design on it in gold. Mrs
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Mountnessing rose when he came in and held out a hand much be-ringed, the old woman's claw-like nails filed to points and painted dark red.
'Bring another cup, will you, Miranda?'
It was the voice of an elderly child, petulant, permanently aggrieved. Wexford thought that the voice and the puckered face told of a lifetime of hurts, real or imagined. Rupert Mountnessing was presumably dead and gone long ago, and Dinah Sternhold had told him there had been no children. Would Natalie, real or false, hope for an inheritance here? Almost the first words uttered by Mrs Mountnessing told him that, if so, she hoped in vain.
'You said on the phone you wanted to talk to me about my niece. But I know nothing about my niece in recent years and I don't�I don't want to. I should have explained that to you, I realize that now. I shouldn't have let you come all this way when I've nothing at all to tell you.' Her eyes blinked more often or more obviously than most people's. The effect was to give the impression she fought off tears. 'Thank you, Miranda.' She took the coffee cup and listened, subsiding back into her chair as he told her the reason for his visit.
'Anastasia,' she said.
The Tichborne Claimant had been recalled, now the Tsar's youngest daughter. Wexford did not relish the reminder, for wasn't it a fact that
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istasia's grandmother, the one person who juld positively have identified her, had refused
;r to see the claimant, and that as a result of
it refusal no positive identification had ever
;n made?
'We hope it won't come to that,' he said. 'You
an to be her nearest relative, Mrs Lountnessing. Will you agree to see her in my
jsence and tell me if she is who she says she
i?'
Her reaction, the look on her face, reminded of certain people he had in the past asked to 3me and identify, not a living person, but a &pse in the mortuary. She put a hand up to
:h cheek. 'Oh no, I couldn't do that. I'm 5ny, but it's impossible. I couldn't ever see
italic again.'
ik
|e accepted it. She had forewarned him with mention of Anastasia. If he insisted on her ling with him the chances were she would ce a positive identification simply to get the lole thing over as soon as possible. Briefly he >ndered what it could have been that her :e, while still a young girl, had done to her, id then he joined her at the other end of the >m where she stood contemplating a table that used entirely as a stand for photographs in |ver frames.
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'That's my sister.'
A dark woman with dark eyes, but nevertheless intensely English. Perhaps there was something of the woman he knew as Natalie Arno in the broad brow and pointed chin.
'She had cancer. She was only forty-five when she died. It was a terrible blow to my poor brother-in-law. He sold their house in Pomfret and built that one in Kingsmarkham and called it Sterries. Sterries is the name of the village in Derbyshire where my parents had their country place. Kathleen and Manuel first met there.'
Camargue and his wife were together among the photographs on the table. Arm-in-arm, walking along some Mediterranean sea front; seated side by side on a low wall in an English garden; in a group with a tall woman so like Camargue that she had to be his sister, and with two small dark-haired smiling girls. A ray of sunlight, obliquely slanted at three on a winter's afternoon, fell upon the handsome moustached face of a man in the uniform of a colonel of the Grenadier Guards. Rupert Mountnessing, no doubt. A little bemused by so many faces, Wexford turned away.
'Did Sir Manuel go to the United States after your niece went to live there?'
'Not to see her. I think he went there on a tour�yes, I'm sure he did, though it must be ten or twelve years since he gave up playing. His arthritis crippled him, poor Manuel. We saw
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little of each other in recent years, but I was id of him, he was a sweet man. I would have me to the memorial service but Miranda louldn't let me. She didn't want me to risk Michitis in that terrible cold.' Mrs Mountnessing, it seemed, was willing to %bout any aspect of family life except her lece. She sat down again, blinking back non dstent tears, held ramrod stiff by her corset. Texford persisted.
'He went on a tour. Did he make any private sits?'
r'He may have done.' She said it in the way >ple do when they dodge the direct
mtive but don't want to lie. 'But he didn't visit his daughter while he was |ere?'
^'California's three thousand miles from the ft coast,' she said, 'it's as far again as from re.'
IWexford shook his head dismissively. 'I don't |derstand that for nineteen years Sir Manuel irer saw his daughter. It's not as if he was a )r man or a man who never travelled. If he been a vindictive man, a man to bear a idge--but everyone tells me how nice he was, kind, how good. I might say I'd had golden long from all sorts of people. Yet for leteen years he never made an effort to see his child and allegedly all because she ran away college and married someone he didn't 105
know.'
She said so quietly that Wexford hardly heard her,
'It wasn't like that.' Her voice gained a little strength but it was full of distress. 'He wrote to her�oh, ever so many times. When my sister was very ill, was in fact dying, he wrote to her and asked her to come home. I don't know if she answered but she didn't come. My sister died and she didn't come. Manuel made a new will and wrote to her, telling her he was leaving her everything because it was right she should have his money and her mother's. She didn't answer and he gave up writing.'
I wonder how you come to know that? he asked himself, looking at the crumpled profile, the chin that now trembled.
'I'm telling you all this,' said Mrs Mountnessing, 'to make you understand that my niece is cruel, cruel, a cruel unfeeling girl and violent too. She even struck her mother once. Did you know that?' The note in her voice grew hysterical and Wexford, watching the blinking eyes, the fingers clasping and unclasping in her lap, wished he had not mentioned the estrangement. 'She's a nymphomaniac too. Worse than that, it doesn't matter to her who the men are, her own relations, it's too horrible to talk about, it's too....'
He interrupted her gently. He got up to go. 'Thank you for your help, Mrs Mountnessing. I
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I't see a sign of any of these propensities in woman I know.' IMiranda showed him out. As he crossed to head of the stairs he heard a very soft ipering sound from the room he had left, sound of an elderly child beginning to cry.
CHAPTER NINE
I'birth certificate, a marriage certificate, an irican driving licence complete with lediately recognizable photograph taken years before, a United States passport iplete with immediately recognizable )tograph taken the previous September, and ips most convincing of all, a letter to his ighter from Camargue, dated 1963, in which informed her that he intended to make her sole heir. All these documents had been ly submitted to Symonds, O'Brien and is, who invited Wexford along to their :es in the precinct over the British Home Ires to view them.
lenneth Ames, distant and chatty as ever, he had personally seen Mrs Arno, Jrviewed her exhaustively and elicited from a number of facts about the Camargue ly and her own childhood which were ftently being verified. Mrs Arno had offered 107
p*
to take a blood test but since this could only prove that she was not Camargue's daughter, not that she was, and since no one seemed to know what Camargue's blood group had been, it was an impracticable idea. Mr Ames said she seemed heartily amused by the whole business, a point of course in her favour. She had even produced samples of her handwriting from when she was at the Royal Academy of Music to be compared with her writing of the present day.
'Do you know what she said to him?' Wexford said afterwards, meeting Burden for a drink in the Olive and Dove. 'She's got a nerve. "It's a pity I didn't do anything criminal when I was a teenager," she said. "They'd have my fingerprints on record and that would solve everything".'
Burden didn't smile. 'If she's not Natalie Camargue, when could the change-over have taken place?'
'Provided we accept what Zoffany says, not recently. Say more than two years ago but after the death of Vernon Arno. According to Ames, he would seem to have died in a San Francisco hospital in 1971.'
'He must have been young still.' Burden echoed Wexford's words to Ivan Zoffany. 'What did he die of?'
'Leukaemia. No one's suggesting there was anything odd about his death, though there's a chance we'll know more when we hear from the
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ifornia police. But, Mike, if there was ibstitution, if this is an assumed identity, it assumed for some other reason. That is, it isn't put on for the sake of inheriting from
largue.' iBurden gave a dubious nod. 'It would mean
true Natalie was dead.' i'She may be but there are other possibilities. ic true Natalie may be incurably ill in some stitution or have become insane or gone to live some inaccessible place. And the impostor hild be someone who needed an identity mse keeping her own was dangerous, mse, for instance, she was some kind of jitive from justice. That Camargue was rich, it Camargue was old, that Natalie was to be sole heir, all these facts might be incidental, ;ht be a piece of luck for the impostor which only later decided to take advantage of. The rntity would have been taken on originally as a jfety measure, even perhaps as the only ssible lifeline, and I think it was taken on at a it where the minimum of deception would |ve been needed. Maybe at the time the move made from San Francisco to Los Angeles or ich later, at the time when Tina Zoffany id.'
Burden, who seemed not to have been icentrating particularly on any of this, said Idenly, looking up from his drink and fixing ixford with his steel-coloured eyes:
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'Why did she come to this country at all?'
'To make sure of the dibs,' said Wexford.
'No.' Burden shook his head. 'No, that wasn't the reason. Impostor or real, she was in no doubt about what you call the dibs. She'd had that letter from Camargue, promising her her inheritance. She need do nothing but wait. There was no need to re-establish herself in his eyes, no need to placate him. If she'd felt there was she'd have tried it before. After all, he was getting on for eighty.
'And it's no good saying she came back because he was getting married again. No one knew he was getting married till 10 December when his engagement was in the Telegraph. She came back to this country in November but she made no attempt to see Camargue until after she read about his engagement. She was here for three or four weeks before that. Doing what? Planning what?'
Admiration was not something Wexford had often felt for the inspector in the past. Sympathy, yes, affection and a definite need, for Burden had most encouragingly fulfilled the function of an Achates or a Boswell, if not quite a Watson. But admiration? Burden was showing unexpected deductive powers that were highly gratifying to witness, and Wexford wondered if they were the fruit of happiness or of reading aloud from great literature in the evenings.
'Go on,' he said.
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|*So why did she come back? Because she was itimental for her own home, her am countree, 'you might say?' As Scott might say., thought Kexfbrd. Burden went on, 'She's a bit young those feelings. She's an American citizen, was settled in California. If she is Natalie largue she'd lived there longer than here, jpe'd no relatives here but a father and an aunt fce didn't get on with, and no friends unless you int those Zoffanys.
'If she's an impostor, coming back was a mad ig to do. Stay in America and when largue dies his solicitors will notify her of death, and though she'll no doubt then have come here and swear affidavits and that sort jthing, no one will question who she is. No one |uld have questioned it if she hadn't shown
self to Camargue.' put she had to do that,' Wexford objected. [pr whole purpose surely in going to see him to persuade him not to remarry.' >he didn't know that purpose would even 5t when she left the United States in member. And if she'd stayed where she was "might never have known of Camargue's re ige until he eventually died. What would announcement have merited in a California spaper? The Los Angeles Times, for ice? A paragraph tucked away somewhere. )rmer world-famous British flautist..."' ley say flutist over there.' Ill
'Flautist, flutist, what does it matter? Until we know why she came here I've got a feeling we're not going to get at the truth about this.'
'The truth about who she is, d'you mean?'
The truth about Camargue's death.' And Burden said with a certain crushing triumph, 'You're getting an obsession about who this woman is. I knew you would, I said so. What interests me far more is the murder of Carmargue and who did it. Can't you see that in the context of the murder, who she is is an irrelevance?'
'No,' said Wexford. 'Who she is is everything.'
The California police had nothing to tell Wexford about Natalie Arno. She was unknown to them, had never been in any trouble or associated with any trouble.
'The litigation in the Tichborne case,' said Burden gloomily, 'went on for three years and cost ninety thousand pounds. That was in 1874. Think what the equivalent of that would be today.'
'We haven't had any litigation yet,' said Wexford, 'or spent a single penny. Look on the bright side. Think of the claimant getting a fourteen-year sentence for perjury.'
In the meantime Kenneth Ames had
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interviewed two people who had known Camargue's daughter when she was an adolescent. Mavis Rolland had been at the Royal Academy of Music at the same time as Natalie Camargue and was now head of the music i department at a girls' school on the South Coast. -In her opinion there was no doubt that Natalie Arno was the former Natalie Camargue. She professed to find her not much changed except ifbr her voice which she would not have jfecognized. On the other hand, Mary fWoodhouse, a living-in maid who had worked for the Camargue family while they were in |Pomfret, said she would have known the voice lywhere. In Ames's presence Mrs Woodhouse id talked to Natalie about Shaddough's Hall 7arm where they had lived and Natalie had been ible to recall events which Mrs Woodhouse said 3 impostor could have known. Wexford wondered why Natalie had not roffered as witnesses for her support her aunt id that old family friend, Philip Cory. It was >ssible, of course, that in the case of her aunt |if she really was Natalie Arno) the dislike was mtual and that, just as he had feared Mrs Lountnessing would recognize her as her niece avoid protracting an interview, so Natalie ired to meet her aunt lest animosity should :e her refuse that recognition. But Cory she id certainly seen since she returned home, and >ry had so surely believed in her as to cling to
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her arm in the excess of emotion he had no doubt felt at his old friend's obsequies. Was there some reason she didn't want Gory brought into this?
In the early years of broadcasting Philip Gory had achieved some success by writing incidental music for radio. But this is not the kind of thing which makes a man's name. If Gory had done this at all it was on the strength of his light opera Aimee, based on the story of the Empress Josephine's cousin, the French Sultana. After its London season it had been enthusiastically taken up by amateur operatic societies, largely because it was comparatively easy to sing, had a huge cast, and the costumes required for it could double for Entfuhrung or even Aladdin. This was particularly the case in Cory's own locality, where he was looked upon as something of a pet bard. Driving out to the environs of Myringham where the composer lived, Wexford noted in the villages at least three posters announcing that Aimee was to be performed yet again. It was likely then to be a disappointed man he was on his way to see. Local fame is gratifying only at the beginning of a career, and it could not have afforded much solace to Gory to see that his more frivolous work was to be staged by the Myfleet and District Operatic