Howard went to the back of the house. A gander came at him hissing. A horse’s head appeared over a gate, inviting him to make friends. He looked in at the kitchen: clinically clean, with blue and white vinyl flooring. He looked up at the upstairs windows, saw that one of them had fitted bars—as one might, for instance, protect an adventurous child.
He looked over his shoulders in every direction. At this moment the premises were certainly deserted, but there was no guarantee that someone might not appear at any moment. He reflected—not for more than seconds. He had to throw all professional propriety to the winds: the consequences as far as the Force was concerned did not have to matter to him. There was one thing about outlawing oneself: one gained mightily in freedom—for the time being.
He went into such of the sheds as were not locked, looking for something with which he could climb up to look in at the barred window. He did not find a ladder—they were not going to make that kind of blunder—but he did manage to put together a combination of an old table and two barrels, together tall enough for him to get his head above the level of the sill. He looked in at a bedroom that someone had evidently left without time to put things in order. The bed had been slept in, but not remade. A plastic curtain had been drawn back in front of a washbasin alcove. There was a goodly array of toilet stuff, talcs and nail varnish, hair lacquer and cologne. The toothpaste had been left with its screw-top off. But there was nothing that he could recognize specifically as Anne’s. There was a nightdress crumpled at the foot of the bed, but it was not one that he remembered ever having seen her wearing. There was a slip lying over a chair, actually hers—but he did not know that.
He climbed down, put the components of his pyramid back where he had found them and stood for a few moments in the middle of the yard as if willing some helpful clue to emerge. There was nothing he could see that told him anything.
Then he heard the creak of the front gate at the other side of the house, and the confident tread of feet on the gravel. He waited. Perhaps it was someone who would knock or ring, wait, look in and go away again. If it was someone who belonged to the house, and he was discovered here, then he would have to play it as it came.
He heard door-chimes sound somewhere indoors—so it wasn’t a resident. He could picture the caller doing what he himself had done, looking in at each window before coming round the back. He heard the gander hiss and the horse try again to make a new friend. And indeed, this man did stop to fraternize briefly with the animal. Howard stood still where he was, facing the way the stranger would come. But it was not a stranger. It was Professor Fynes-Pym.
‘Ah, Sergeant: you’re still here. I hoped you would be. If you’ll come back to the cottage, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
Parked outside the cottage was the most disreputable old green van that Howard thought he had ever seen. Sitting at the kitchen table, talking to Mrs Fynes-Pym over an enamel mug of tea, was a man of indeterminate age whose clothing matched his transport.
‘Meet Michael Osgothorpe, mole-catcher.’
And Mr Osgothorpe spoke a word or two in a language that Howard presumed to be a local variant of English.
‘Mike was along this way, a few mornings ago, weren’t you, Mike?’
The man nodded: a friendly informer.
‘Tell Mr Lawson what you saw.’
The mole-catcher did, his enunciation not helped by the facts of being without teeth and having a mouthful of tea. Mrs Fynes-Pym laughed.
‘Shall I translate?’
‘Please.’
What Mr Osgothorpe had seen had been a car that fitted beautifully with the description of the one that had been parked in the forecourt of Shortlands railway station in Kent. The car had stopped a few yards after entering the Drove—Osgothorpe’s van had been parked out of sight just inside a field-gate. The activity in which he had been involved that morning—concerned with creatures other than moles—had been something that he had no wish draw to the attention of the public.
The car had stopped, and a young lady had been helped out to be sick on the grass verge. He gave a description of her that really was not helpful at all. But he had been able to keep her in view until she had been assisted, walking very uncertainly, into the house.
Howard asked to use the professor’s phone. It was a relief to get a direct line to Shiner.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Another who did not in the least care whether he was breaking rules, disobeying lawful commands or risking discipline was Kenworthy. He again approached Swannee Foster’s property by his private road across the downs, and this led him into an altercation with a horsey security watcher from neighbouring territory, who suspected him of taking a devious interest in early morning performances. Kenworthy drove on, making no attempt to identify himself.
It was early, still wanting minutes to seven. Kenworthy assumed that Swannee Foster was an early riser: most things about Swannee suggested self-discipline. But Kenworthy did not care whether the champion forger was up or not. He was going to disturb Swannee in other ways than getting him out of bed. He pulled up in Swannee’s yard, which looked very like any other complex of stables. And there was something about the yard that was not quite as it should be. There was nothing supernatural about the policeman’s sense that told Kenworthy that. For many years he had been drawing conclusions from the lie of things, and the process of mind had become such a habit that he sometimes came to the final answer without consciously analysing the underlying pattern.
He did not stop to analyse the pattern now. There was a silence about the place, a lack of activity that was unexpected. But maybe there would not be much activity about Swannee’s yard at this hour of the morning. Swannee lived the life of a relative recluse, wasn’t married, didn’t have women here. But he did keep—apart from a handful of inscrutable stable-hands—a servant, a taciturn male a few years older than himself, a sort of combination of handyman, cook, gardener, ostensibly a trainer of horses and, Kenworthy suspected, what is sometimes known as a research assistant. Kenworthy did not know what arrangements Swannee and this Broadbent had, but he did rather expect Broadbent to be about and doing things at this hour. And Broadbent wasn’t. Kenworthy had approached by the back of the house because he thought he might see more things of interest that way. He was curious to know, for example, what presses Swannee might have on his premises. And indeed he saw now, in what might have been taken for an ordinary tack-room, a very efficient-looking offset litho, bearing the metal plate of its Heidelberg manufacturer. He came to a door that led into the kitchen and tried the handle. It was locked, and the bellpush beside it did not look as if it were intended to be used. The button was permanently depressed and had been stuck down by a careless house-painter years ago.
The lock gave Kenworthy no difficulty. It might have done, for the skeleton keys that he carried on his ring were by no means a comprehensive collection. But the man from whom he had taken a lesson, after helping him to compose a statement, had taught him some elementary improvisations. But what Kenworthy did next was not so clever. After fumbling with the tumblers, he set his foot on a doormat that set off a burglar alarm of a primitive, quite obsolete type—simply a set of loud bells that set up a racket all over the house. The odd thing was that this barbarous noise did not evoke any response. But the thought did not remain odd for very long. Kenworthy believed he now knew what he was likely to find when he penetrated into the living quarters; and he now believed he knew what was wrong with the pattern in the yard.
Where simple pressure on a mat caused bells to ring, there must be an electric circuit to that mat. Kenworthy stooped, raised a corner of it and wrenched wire away from a terminal. Silence followed, once the last echo had died—a silence in which he could hear the mechanism of an electric kitchen clock and the scraping of a rose-tendril against a window-pane.
The house was nineteenth-century, amorphous, labyrinthine, designed without consideration for the convenience of living, working or
extending hospitality. Kenworthy went from the kitchen down a long, cold, dark passage that led into the main entrance hall. Lying across an antique settle in this hall was Broadbent, very evidently dead; any head that hung downwards and sideways at that angle could only be trying to depend on a neck that was broken.
Kenworthy paid no attention whatever to the corpse. He went straight upstairs to the study. It was either there or in one of the bedrooms that he expected to find another body. And it was in the study that he did find it. Swannee Foster’s head, arms and chest were spread inelegantly forward over his desk, with some congealment of blood on the hairs at the back of his head. It did not greatly matter to Kenworthy at this moment how he had been killed. The experts were to declare that it was by a blow from heavy metal against the cervical vertebrae, a good deal more power having been put behind it than is necessary to despatch a rabbit.
There was no sign that there had been any commotion. Current papers were about the room, but Swannee had been a moderately tidy man, and his possessions were moderately tidy. The murderer had not come here out of any interest in Swannee’s belongings; he had come here purely as a murderer.
Kenworthy, however, did take an interest in things in the room—a passing interest. He touched very few things. If this had been done by the man who he thought had done it, there would not be anything as careless as prints. But if there were any prints, they might save the prosecution from having to delve into ingenuity. The correspondence on the desk was mostly about printing. It made one wonder how much of Swannee’s life had been spent on his orthodox vocation. Orthodox? The top letter was from a bibliophile: trying to trace something in Latin, medieval, printed in Leipzig. Kenworthy moved over towards the shelves: great leather-bound books, a sixteenth-century German psalter, the Meditations of St Bonaventura. Orthodox? How many record sales at top auctions had been Swannee’s products? Was it possible to fake ‘early’ printing, to age paper, ink and old hides? No question of it—on a level that would fool suckers. But to get past the experts? That was the whole point of Swannee’s existence. It was the depth of the challenge that interested him, possibly more than the end reward. That was why, in the case of the birth certificates, he had made them mock originals.
Kenworthy’s eyes wandered along the shelves, and one title that he saw there had him reaching for it. Booth: Four Marys. It was a fine piece of book production, a limited edition, twenty only, numbered, printed on hand-woven paper, in a type with an outlandish name: by a firm that was another name for Swannee. Author’s vanity—even in the days before Edwin Booth’s reputation still had to be inflated. It was well known that he had not published in the normal way, hawking his typescripts from house to house. He had gambled with his wife’s capital to produce and promote himself. And Kenworthy now knew that Swannee Foster had been his printer. That explained things. It explained a lot of things. It explained why Angela and Jean Cossey had visited the downs on the day that Jean’s parents came to see her. There had been papers needed for the adoption of Stella Davidge’s unwanted child. This also explained how Jean Cossey had known where to come for birth certificates. But what concerned Kenworthy more at this moment was the knowledge that there had been dealings between Basset and Swannee—and between Swannee and Booth—before the kidnapping. Things were falling into place.
Kenworthy looked thoughtfully at the telephone, wrapped it loosely in a handkerchief and dialled with a pencil. Like Howard Lawson, he did not hesitate to beard the lion. He insisted on being put through to Cawthorne, wherever he might be, and he offered no explanation for being where he was. It was now seven-thirty. Cawthorne was shaving. He took in what Kenworthy told him, and did not find it necessary to ask any questions.
Kenworthy let himself out of the house by the way that he had come in. He looked again round the yard: a new dent in a dustbin, the handle of a bass broom snapped along its short grain, where a wheel had run over it, tyre-marks reversing up to a stable-door at one angle, then out again at another. Someone had tried to do a three-point turn, unaccustomed to the confinement and the geometry: someone who had been in a hurry, in the dark—perhaps not entirely his normal self.
Kenworthy drove down towards the public highways of Royal Berkshire. Again a tweedy trainer’s strong-arm resented the intrusion. This time he was determined to make a job’s worth of trouble, stood in the path of the oncoming Kenworthy waving his arms. Kenworthy showed him his warrant card through the window.
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘Too much of a hurry. You’ll know why in the next news bulletin but one. Have you been on watch all night?’
‘Since first light.’
‘Anyone else come this way?’
A three-litre Merc, maroon with dove-grey trim. Driver was a big man, cross between a gorilla and a grizzly. The stable-guard had thought he was going to run him down.
Kenworthy stopped to phone again in the next village. Cawthorne was racing through his breakfast.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The jolting of tyres over the ruts in Spurlsby Drove; the marginally better surface of a flinty lane. Then came sleeping villages, humpy bridges over fenland drains, and at last a long straight road westwards towards the A1.
Anne had screamed at the moment when it had looked as if there was no stopping Basset. And Basset, clamping a sweat-salty, nicotine-stained hand over her mouth, had laughed at her, slapping his other hand over her breast and shoving her towards the bed.
But feet raced up the stairs.
‘Stop it, you bloody fool!’
Basset let Anne go—he really was quite drunk. Angela looked at him contemptuously, said nothing more, showed no sympathy for Anne.
‘She was getting out of hand,’ Basset said.
Anne had scratched his face badly. It satisfied her to see the blood running down past the corners of his mouth. Angela was looking at him as if she considered him a pathetic object. Then her forearm swept and her knuckles cracked down across his mouth, knocking him back against the washbasin.
‘I told you to lay off the booze. Put your head under the cold tap. Sober yourself. Big Daddy’s phoned. He’ll see us tonight.’
She turned to Anne.
‘Get yourself ready for the road. I can lend you an outdoor coat.’
Angela drove. Basset, slumped on the rear seat with Anne, smelt offensively of liquor, but mercifully could not keep awake. Anne tried at first to keep track of the crossings and turnings, but within a quarter of an hour all sense of direction had deserted her.
‘I didn’t think your Papa would agree without more fuss than this. Mind you, he knows it’s a little bit more than a family reunion. He knows what publicity could do for him. Still, the battle’s not on yet. We haven’t even drawn swords. And he’ll still have to be convinced. You’ve had no more ideas, I suppose?’
‘Not a thing.’
And she did not want to. Anne could hear Angela’s voice, but she was barely listening to it. She was weighing up the sense of making a dash for it, if they stopped anywhere. With Basset in stupefied sleep, it would only be between her and Angela. There were bound to be moments when Angela’s attention was divided. But she had to remember that Angela might be armed. She was quite likely to be carrying a miniature pistol about her somewhere.
Did she not want to meet her father? Did she believe now that Edwin Booth was her father? Yes and no. She supposed so, though the blue-bird was still the only positive evidence—except that there were scars of a sort under her shoulder-blade—visible if you were looking for them. The reality was too remote to mean much to her: as remote as the thought that if all Angela said was true, she might become a rich woman. Was it priggish to say that the money did not interest her? Well, if money was her due, why did she need Angela and Basset to claim it for her? The pair were going into this as if it were a new crime they were committing. It was a crime, anyway: there was a strong stink of blackmail about it. And it was in the course of these machinations that someone, someone w
ho was in this with Basset and Angela, had foully killed Jean Cossey. How many people were in on this?
‘You nearly spilled the beans once, you little brat, saying you saw Edwin come out of my room in his bathrobe. That’s something you might remind him of.’
Basset belched and slobbered in his sleep. They were quite likely to have to stop in a lay-by for him. She might be able to slip away into darkness, make her way to a phone.
‘Another time, Edwin and I were desperately trying to get you to occupy yourself for ten minutes. But would you turn your eyes the other way? In the garden of a pub at Shillingford Bridge, that was. You might try that one on him.’
‘He’d know you’ve been coaching me.’
‘Listen, you stupid little bitch, do you know how much depends on how you play this? If you go and goof it up—’
Basset lurched over sideways, his full weight across her right arm. She levered him off and he fell forward against the back of Angela’s head.
‘Angela, can’t I for God’s sake come and sit in front? And let this lump have the seat to himself?’
‘Makes sense. If I can find somewhere to pull up discreetly.’
That would be her chance.
‘We are not amused, Kenworthy. It is not amusing. We have work to do, and your troubles must wait. But you’re going to receive a ripe old panful from a high altitude this time.’
Cawthorne’s inner office: they were waiting for Wright and Lawson to join them.
‘Swannee wanted you off his back because he knew they’d kill him if you showed any more open interest.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’
‘You know what clout Swannee had in some quarters.’
‘Because he had provided forged documentation in his time—that had had people sent down?’
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