Blame The Dead

by Gavin Lyall

He shrugged. 'I don't think she was very interested in Daddy's work.'

  'I have to see her sooner or later. Do I mention that I'm working for you?'

  'I'd rather you didn't.'

  'Okay. You're the boss.'

  He looked startled at the idea, then smiled.

  'And now,' I said, bouncing a sideways look off Harry, 'I want you to talk generally about your father – if you feel like it.'

  Harry got the look – or maybe he just had good manners. He got up sharpish. 'I'm off, now. I hope I'll see you again, sir.' We shook hands and he went out.

  David smiled again, a little sadly. 'Well, sir… he was a rather quiet man. I think he worked hard. He loved Lloyd's -that was really his whole life. I mean he didn't have any hobbies; he just played golf most weekends, but I think that was for exercise. He didn't talk about his scores or anything.' He went off into a thoughtful dream.

  I said gently, 'When he took you out at weekends or whatever – what did you do?'

  'On our exeat Sundays… we went to a museum or to the pictures, or… whatever I wanted to do. He didn't have, sort of… many ideas of his own.' His eyes were slowly filling with tears; he blinked, annoyed. 'He was a veryhonest man. You know the Lloyd's motto is "Fidelity". Well, he really meant it, he really did. And I don't see why anybody should kill him!'

  He put his head in his hands.

  After a while I got up and touched his shoulder. 'All right, son – try a sip of liquid manure.'

  He looked up and smiled through his tears and gulped at my glass, choked and sputtered, but looked a bit better.

  'One last thing.' I began to unwrap my new Bertie Bear parcel. 'And I want you to take this seriously. Have you ever seen this book before? Does it mean anything to you?'

  He stared at it, thumbed through it, finally looked up at me. 'What is it, sir?'

  I sighed. I hadn't really expected, but I'd hoped. 'Your father was carrying it to Arras. Wrapped up. It was the parcel he was supposed to deliver.'

  He looked back at it incredulously.

  'Put it another way,' I said. 'Wrapped up, does it remind you of anything the same size? Anything to do with his work?'

  He shook his head slowly. 'Most of his Lloyd's work was on little scraps of paper or big ledgers… You mean you think he was taking a dummy parcel?'

  'That's one of the things you're paying me to find out. Well -is there anything else?'

  He thought about it. 'I don't reallyknow, but Ithink Daddy was hiring a private detective at one time.'

  'You think?'

  'Somebody rang up when I took a message for Daddy. It was just that he'd ring again later and he said his name was James Bond and Daddy said hewas a sort of James Bond… well, that's all.'

  I chewed it over and couldn't get any more taste from it than he had. 'I'll see if I can track them down; there may be some papers from them at the flat. And I'll keep in touch. If you want me…" I explained about my problems with the press and gave him my hotel number – and my name there.

  He showed me back down the stairs and to another front door – the boys' entrance, I suppose. Did I want to see Hawthorn again? No – I'd only end up telling him lies. So I shook hands again, got quickly into my car, and pushed off.

  By now outbound traffic had built up into a snarling, crawling stream, but I had a fairly clear run back to London. I cruised past my flat and spotted what I had to assume was the press'Nachtwachet(so why couldn't a jumbo jet crash or Princess Anne fall off her horse?). But at least the pubs were just opening, so I parked at the hotel, then walked around to the Washington.

  Of course, I could have gone and burgled Fenwick's flat, but maybe that should wait until the morrow. The building would be emptier, and people are less suspicious of strangers in daylight; they should read the crime statistics sometime. Then again, I could sit down with a big piece of paper and write down everything I'd learned about Fenwick himself – except I knew that would come out just a little bit south of bugger-all. Or I could just have an early dinner and an early bed. The day had got started rather early, and punch-ups before breakfast take it out of me these days. Getting old.

  Nine

  I let the next day get started at its own pace. When I reckoned the working world had got into gear, I did a round of telephoning: my answering service (nothing worth while), Oscar (expected back this afternoon), and a couple of clients just to reassure them that I was still around and in business (neither of them actually told me to get lost).

  At about eleven o'clock I arrived at Fenwick's flat. It was on the second floor of one of those buildings built in the 1920s with rounded corners and metal-framed windows with lots of tiny panes; the best of German modernism and Elizabethan tradition combined.The flat-door lock was a simple Yale without even a reinforcing strap, so I could have slipped it myself in a few seconds. But the key was my proof of respectability: an old family friend picking up some things for David, in case anybody asked.

  It was a simple two-bedroom, one-living-room, kitchenette-off-the-tiny-hallway layout; the rooms weren't either big or small, but a bit higher than they'd build these days. I shut the outside door quietly and just sat down to try and absorb the feel of the place.

  After a few minutes I gave that up; either I couldn't do it or it didn't work in this flat. The furniture was just furniture; not old or new, not cheap or pricy. Just comfortable. The only 'personality piece' was a small, round antique table, but you can't get a modern table that size and height anyway. There was a double bed in one room, a single in the other; built-in cupboards instead of wardrobes. No paintings on the walls -just a print of an old-style Admiralty chart and a couple of nice photographs of clippers under full sail.

  So then I started to work the place over properly. Well, not properly: if you were on a real job – say an espionage case where you're up against professionals at hiding things – you'd take a team of men and spend a week on a flat that size. But I did what I could.

  What interested me most was a smallish bureau-style desk, a reproduction of a style that had never existed outside Hollywood. It was locked, of course, but I thought that might be a problem that would solve itself if I left it long enough. It did: there was a duplicate key, along with one for a car and several for doors (at Kingscutt?) in an old tea-caddy at the back of the kitchen cupboard. Another reason why burglars are such traditionalists.

  By then I'd learned that Fenwick hadn't been much of a cook, that he liked reasonably expensive, sober clothes, changed his shirts and pants a lot – anyway, he had twice as many as I owned, and presumably more down at Kingscutt -and kept everything neat and tidy. Using that description, pick this man out of a crowd.

  There hadn't been any signs of Miss Mackwood – or any woman. And women usually manage to leave something around a place where they've got an emotional stake. Like a dog pissing up against lamp-posts and trees to mark out his territory. Not conclusive, of course (though it told me Mrs Fenwick never stayed there), but something.

  Oh yes, and one other thing: somebody else had searched the flat recently.

  There were only small signs, and maybe only somebody with a suspicious mind would have spotted them. A stack of clean sheets had been taken from the top shelf in the cupboard and put back too far, so that they were a bit crumpled; the trousers of a couple of suits hung slightly wrong; the bedside table lamp was moved so it didn't quite fit the dust pattern.

  Mockby's boys? If so, he'd found himself new boys. This lot had been professionals, though not quite top class. The Yard? -no. They'd've done it properly, with a warrant and one of the family or Oscar in attendance, and they wouldn't have worried about leaving traces. Still, they'd do it sooner or later andthey might spot traces; I put the sheets, trousers and the lamp back in parade order.

  So then I tried the bureau. I'd stopped being very hopeful about that; my predecessors would certainly have gone through it, and if Fenwick had been keeping a Dear Diary confessing All, then it wasn't likely to be there any more. The worst thi
ng was I wouldn'tknow if there'd been a diary or anything; the place had stopped being a picture of Fenwick because somebody else might have taken, rearranged, even added something. Hell's teeth – why hadn't I thought of him having a second place before, and come around and t»rned it over myself first?

  Still, I did the bureau. It was as well organised as I expected – household bills, bank statements, income-tax returns and the jungle of paperwork that clings to any solid citizen like the ivy on the old garden wall. 'Dear Sir, with reference to your heating problems our engineering report suggests that the fault may lie in the ventilation system to the ultra-sub-dinglefoozit which indicates the need for a prefrontal lobotomy and if you send us ten quid now we'll come round at the most inconvenient time and louse up your flat for twenty-four hours or infinitely whichever shall be the longer…'

  I grinned. At least Fenwick had had his small problems, too, like the rest of us. But those aren't the ones that get solved with a nine-millimetre pistol.

  No strictly private stuff at all except a packet of photos of David taken maybe a year ago. And no letters or bills from private detectives, either. That didn't prove anything, of course, because you often don't want a detective to put anything in writing, and they often don't want to be paid by cheque; simplifies their tax problems.

  So? So now it was one o'clock. I filed the bank statements and duplicate tax returns in the inside pocket of my raincoat and walked out into the rain with the brave, sad smile of any disappointed burglar.

  First thing after lunch, I went around to a local woman who runs a small secretarial service. It took a little time to persuade her that I wanted to run her photo-copying machine by myself, and I may have given her the impression that I was protecting the private life of a cabinet minister, but I finally got it. By half past two the tax returns and bank statements were back in Fenwick's bureau and I was sitting on the hotel bed with the copies.

  The bank statements might have sung like a sonnet to another computer, but to me they wouldn't mean a thing until I knew exactly what I was looking for. So I started on the tax returns. He'd given the Kingscutt address, allowances claim for wife, one Lois Linda Fenwick… children, David James born such-and-such. I opened the form and got down to the meat.

  It was thin on the bone. After a quarter, of an hour I had a simple picture of Fenwick's financial life and times over the past three years. He'd had a basic salary of £4,500 plus a little less than £500 in unearned income, which, at a guess, meant he'd got about ten or twelve thousand in shares. His wife had started off with about the same amount of share capital in her own name, but had sold maybe two or three thousand about a year ago.

  Each year also had the note: 'Underwriting profits – to be agreed.' Well, I knew that Lloyd's doesn't let you take a profit until three years late: they keep it in the kitty in case of late claims. But I also knew that, for the years involved, he was as likely to have taken a loss as a profit. Lloyd's came a crunch with Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and stayed crunched for three years.

  No mention of mortgage payments, but out of his total income of £5,000-odd, he was stumping up nearly a thousand a year in life insurance. I suppose that if you're in insurance you must believe in it, but this was ridiculous. His death would have cost the companies over thirty thousand quid – well over.

  Maybe it had been Mrs Lois Linda Fenwick behind that pillar with a nine-millimetre.

  That reminded me, and I rang Oscar. Yes, he'd just got back but he's very busy, no, even if it is about the trip, oh, it's you, is it? Well, I suppose, all tight.

  He came on. 'You again? There isn't much I can tell you.'

  'You saw the cops over there? '

  'Yes. Just between us, I don't think they're getting anywhere. They've asked Scotland Yard for help.'

  'I heard about that. What about me?'

  'Well, theinspecteurdoesn't like you very much – he got his arse roasted for letting you run away – but they've come round to thinking you weren't very important. Just a small-time bodyguard who beat it at the first shot.' He enjoyed saying that.

  Then he added, 'They'd still like to know what was in the parcel, mind.'

  'I'll tell them someday. Did you ask about the gun?'

  'Yes. A Browning pistol, I gather.'

  'Which model?'

  'Damn it all, I couldn't ask too many questions – they'd've hadme in the small back room.'

  'Sure. Thanks.' At least it hadn't been Mockby's Walther.

  'In case you'd like to know, the body's being shipped back tomorrow. Funeral probably on Saturday. I wouldn't send any flowers, if I was you.'

  'Bit quick, isn't it?'

  He made a verbal shrugging noise. 'Why not? There's no question about identification, no problem about cause of death, there'll be no argument about the medical evidence – if they ever come to trial.'

  'I suppose so. Well, at least he's left the missus pretty well fixed.'

  His voice got suspicious. 'What d'you mean?'

  'Just that. Nice dollop of insurance, hardly any death duties to pay, and nothing owing on the house.'

  'Have you been playing nasty little private-detective tricks?'

  'Not really. I may not even have been illegal. Well? '

  'Well what?'

  'Was he shovelling the profits from the good years across to her, putting it in her name? And into the house? '

  He sighed. 'You really don't know anything about Lloyd's, do you?'

  'My word is my bond and my bonds are in my wife's name, you mean?'

  'That's the Stock Exchange. Now stop being cynical and start using your brains, unless you stuffed them down a drain in Arras. D'you know what Lloyd's is? The biggest betting shop in the world. And people like Martin Fenwick are just high-class bookmakers. D'you know how to make money as a bookie?'

  'Set the right odds, I'd guess.'

  'That's half of it, and it's what Fenwick did: insured only the right ships at the right premiums. But the other half is simply having as much money as possible so you can take as big bets as possible and make as much profit as possible. Lloyd's formalises these things. The more capital you can showin your own name the more bets you can accept. I mean insurance you can write,' he added sourly.

  'So you'd be a bloody fool to put it in your wife's name? It would just be cutting your own profit-making potential? '

  'I'll say one thing for you, Jim: as long as it's written in letters of fire ten feet high you do get the message sooner or later.'

  'All right, all right. So where did she get her money, then? And why did he buy that house outright?'

  'Who says he owned it? Or that she did? No-' he repented hastily. 'Just forget that. And I told younot to go poking into these things.'

  'Sorry, Oscar.'

  'Now, I'm busy.' And he slapped the phone down.

  I suppose I might have asked him about Fenwick hiring a private detective – he wouldn't have picked one from the yellow pages, he'd've asked his solicitor, same as he did about a bodyguard. But Oscar would never tell me, so why tell him I knew it had happened?

  Slowly, reluctantly – and rather dazedly – I picked up the bank statements and started analysing them, as far as I could.

  The standing orders were easy enough: they'd be payments to the life insurance companies and probably the rent on that flat. Then he seemed to take a regular £20 a week, various odd amounts that were probably clothes or garage bills – and three times in the last year he'd drawn cheques for £259 a time. Why? Why so precise a repetition of such an amount, and why three?

  School fees, of course. Harrow would cost around £750 a year in these hard times.

  But the real message was that the income and expenditure matched like a foot in a footprint. Yet it was only a one-legged trail I was following: half of Fenwick's life just wasn't there. No cheque that could have covered a new Rover 2000 in the last year; nothing for running expenses on a house big enough to call itself a 'manor' – and nothing for running expenses on a wife for th
at house, either.

  Working just from those figures, it was as if Kingscutt didn't exist – neither did Mrs Fenwick. Except for paying a thousand pounds a year, more than a quarter of his net income, in life insurance for her.

  Assuming it was for her, of course. I rang Hawthorn at Harrow.

  We said a few polite things; then he asked, 'I suppose you, ummm, want to speak to David?'

  'If he's available.'

  Til have him shouted for. I rather get the impression that you're, ummm, working for him now?"

  His intelligence system was good – but that would be part of his job, too. 'You may be right.'

  'I rather feel I stand – and particularly with this boy, now -in loco parentis. I can understand him wanting to know why his father got, ummm, killed, but I'm still a little apprehensive about the effect of him finding out anything detrimental to his father's image.'

  'Yes. But I told you: the police in two countries are working on this, too. I can't stop them."

  'Quite so. It's, ummm, difficult.'

  'They aren't interested in protecting anybody's good name. I just might be.'

  'Yes. I'm sure you know your own business… Here's David now.'

  He came on the line. 'Mr Card? Have you found out anything?'

  'Nothing much. It takes time. But I wanted to ask you something…'

  'Yes, sir?'

  'Have you heard from any insurance companies just now?'

  'Well – yes, sir. There've been three of them.'

  'Can you tell me what they said? I mean roughly?'

  'Well, just that my father had taken out life insurance in my name. They said it's quite a lot.'

  Ah!

  'Fine,' I said. 'Good. Well, that's all I really wanted to know.'

  'Is it?' He sounded disappointed.

  Til be in touch.'

  'I hope you'll be coming to the funeral, sir. It's on Saturday, at twelve o'clock.'

  'Well, I…' I hadn't expected this.

  'You'd have a chance to meet my mother, sir. And the other members of the syndicate.'

  'Fine,' I said. 'It's at Kingscutt, is it?'