by Tim Heald
‘Cumberledge thought your husband took it seriously.’
‘Oh, Cumberledge is a fossilized old woman. He’s been reading too much romantic fiction. I’m sure he gave you the impression that Canning and I were fearful enemies.’
‘Not quite.’
‘But almost. Canning and I remained the best of friends all our lives. There was just one area where our interests ceased to coincide. That was very upsetting at first, I don’t deny it, but later we came to an arrangement. It’s what we call being civilized and it worked very well. Cumberledge is too concerned to force people into court so that he can get his fee. That automatically makes things uncivilized and acrimonious. It was one thing I made Canning promise. Never anything legal, and especially never through Cumberledge.’ She paused. ‘You know, I have a vague feeling you don’t wildly enjoy being a whatever you are.’
Bognor shrugged. ‘I don’t mind the ordinary work but I’m not crazy about murders. This is only the second lot I’ve done.’
She smiled. ‘Oh dear, we are being serious, aren’t we?’
She stood up and stretched her long, still-elegant legs. ‘Let’s go and freshen our drinks a little and then we’ll solve your crime over lunch. Only, so that none of us get over-excited about it, let’s try to think of it all as a puzzle. Like the question to “who rode a horse and who rhododendron”. That way it might even be rather fun. After all, we can’t bring them back, can we? And I’m sure they’d both want us to enjoy catching the villain.’
They walked back to Green’s palm tree, slowly. The Mediterranean sparkled in the sun and away near the horizon they heard the distant hum of a small motor-boat dragging a water skier behind it. It was very still and quite hot. ‘Getting near siesta time,’ she said. ‘When do you have to leave?’
‘I’m booked on the night flight home.’
‘How sad. It would do you good to lose some of that terrible London pallor.’
‘Yes.’ He would have liked it and for a moment he was almost tempted to send Parkinson a cable saying ‘Must keep alongside prime suspect. Returning later’ but he rejected the thought as soon as it occurred. Instead he realized that he would have to change back into his hairy tweeds for lunch.
‘We’ve found you some more suitable clothes,’ said Green, when they reached his tree. He was sitting under it and had mysteriously acquired a parrot to which he was feeding nuts and muttering good-naturedly. ‘Sandro will show you. I hope they’re better than the ones you had after you fell in the river.’ He laughed at the thought and both Bognor and Lady Abney joined in. ‘We’ll see you upstairs when you’ve changed,’ he said.
Bognor rejoined them, wearing an Italian linen suit in cream, with a lilac shirt and dark blue rope-soled sneakers. He felt cooler and the clothes, though inappropriate to himself, were much more appropriate to his surroundings. They also fitted. Green still wore the Bermuda shorts and the purple shirt; Isobel Abney had changed into heavy wooden sandals and a curious silk kimono. They were sitting on a vine-covered terrace, looking out to sea. On the round wicker table there was a heavy stone flask dripping with condensation, and three silver goblets. As Bognor sat down at the third place three servants entered with an extraordinary assortment of Mediterranean crustaceans, squid, octopi, red mullet and innumerable unidentified marine objects.
‘Isobel says we’re going to play detectives, which is all right by me if it helps you to put things in order.’ Cosmo waited while one of the boys poured out the wine. ‘You’ll like this,’ he said, ‘it’s very special made by some good friends of mine from down south. Business friends, you understand,’ he added.
Simon watched as the servants heaped more and more seafood on to his plate. When they’d done, he said, ‘My only rule is absolute truth.’
‘We have to pretend that both Freddie’s and Canning’s death were murders,’ said Lady Isobel.
‘Pretend?’ asked Bognor.
‘Accept,’ said Mr. Green. ‘Simon, you begin.’
Bognor started to break into a lobster. ‘The only two who almost certainly didn’t shoot Lord Maidenhead are the two who spent the night at the Compleat Angler. If they had they would have been spotted by the hotel staff and we’ve checked that out—or the police have—they were there all night. Otherwise no one has an alibi except that they were in bed with a partner. That isn’t an alibi, that’s conspiracy.’
Lady Abney remarked on the excellence of the wine. ‘I happen to know it couldn’t have been my husband,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you won’t accept that.’
‘Keep it at the back of our minds,’ said Green. ‘Nobody except me and Lady McCrum much liked Freddie. So count us out for the moment.’
‘No,’ said Bognor. ‘You weren’t getting the interest on your loan to him. And she could have had a tiff with him.’
‘Have it your way, my boy. McCrum is jealous of Freddie’s seducing his wife. Miss Johnson wants him dead on account of some political deal I don’t understand. Grithbrice wants him dead to please his friend and because Maidenhead is a difficult rival who won’t be bought.’
‘He was difficult to buy, wasn’t he?’ said Bognor.
‘No unpleasantness, Simon,’ said Cosmo sharply, ‘otherwise we can’t help.’
‘Sorry,’ said Bognor, stuffing himself with squid. ‘This is fantastic.’
‘I like simple things,’ said Mr. Green. ‘Isobel, you had no reason to kill Freddie.’
‘I didn’t care for him, but not enough to kill him,’ she said.
‘That leaves one,’ said Green. ‘Nice old Basil Lydeard. Anyone think of any reason why he would kill Freddie?’
‘No,’ they chorused.
‘Right,’ said Green, ‘let’s remember that. Now Sir Canning.’
‘The most obvious suspect is the main beneficiary in the will,’ said Bognor, ‘who would be helped by his black girl friend as a reward for previous services.’
‘I suppose,’ said Lady Isobel, ‘we have to consider the two who spent the night at the Compleat Angler. I must say I thought that was incredibly poor form. That woman really does let the side down.’
‘Not for the moment,’ said Green. ‘They complicate matters. The McCrums have no motives this time?’ He looked round the table and the other two shook their heads. ‘And neither of us.’
Again Bognor remonstrated. He mentioned the life insurance, trying to make a joke of it and reminded them of Cumberledge’s evidence.
After some griping they agreed ‘for the sake of the game’ to concede motives. ‘So,’ said Green, ‘that leaves us with Basil Lydeard. Does he have a motive?’
Again, less happily this time, they all said ‘no’. The servants came in again to clear away the fish. ‘Now, Simon,’ said Mr. Green, ‘I have my figure to watch. I’ll have some grapes and maybe some dolcelatte, but you have something else. Anything. Anything, eh, Carlo?’
‘Sí, Signor Green,’ said the senior boy. Bognor wondered if there were a harem, and said he’d be happy with cheese.
‘Let’s think about the nice old Marquess from Somerset,’ said Isobel, ‘and talk about something more cheerful until we’ve finished.’
For the next twenty minutes they discussed servants and money and how Mr. Green was going to introduce Bognor to some friends so that he could make enough of one to be able to afford the other. Finally when lunch had been cleared away they went back to the pool and sat by the edge with their feet dangling in the water. A boy brought three glasses and a bottle of Sambucca Negro. Cosmo Green watched him pour it out and then applied a light to the top of each one with the flame from his heavily jewelled lighter. Bognor watched the three little blue flames and thought of Basil Lydeard.
‘A funny thing happened to me and the Marquess,’ he said finally, ‘on the day Sir Canning died.’ He told the story of Basil Lydeard and the interlopers and the poker.
‘I think that’s rather significant,’ said Isobel Abney, when he’d finished.
‘Oh. Why?’ he asked.
She blew out her drink, and frowned. ‘In all the years I’ve known him I’ve never ever seen him lose his temper like that. You saw him during the tennis. Everyone else was furious, but he just seemed mildly put upon.’
‘My feeling,’ said Green, holding his flame up to the sky and inspecting it, as if he were examining the watermark on a banknote, ‘is that behind that nice gentle shell there was a lot of very angry person bubbling away.’
‘I thought that was his liver playing up,’ said Bognor facetiously.
‘No. More than liver,’ said Green. ‘When you’ve been around as long as I have you start to notice things other people don’t see. The first thing I thought to myself when I met the old man was, Cosmo, this old aristocrat is all twisted up inside.’
‘Oh, Cosmo, you didn’t. You’ve always thought the same as I do. He’s just a nice harmless old buffer.’
‘Nice harmless old buffer on the outside maybe. But nice harmless old buffers don’t threaten innocent members of the public with pokers.’
‘But they weren’t innocent. They were trespassing.’
‘Did you really never see him lose his temper?’ asked Bognor.
Lady Abney made gentle splashing movements with her feet. ‘I honestly don’t think so.’ She went on splashing idly. ‘No, wait a moment, that’s not quite true. Years ago we went down for the first of his annual traction engine dos and it absolutely poured with rain. It came down in buckets and buckets and buckets all the night before and all that morning and hardly anyone came and his own engine got stuck in the mud. He lost his temper then. It was terribly funny if it hadn’t been so pathetic. He got down from the cab and stood in front of it shouting at it as if it was a horse. He used the most appalling language. In the end Dorothy had to take him away and make him lie down. Poor old Dot.’
‘Dorothy?’ asked Bognor and then paused. ‘Did you say traction engines?’
‘Yes,’ said Lady Abney, ‘Dot’s the Marchioness. She’s a dear. Very countrified and absolutely hates going away. That’s why she wasn’t at Abney last weekend. Yes, traction engines, why?’
‘Did he drive one himself?’
‘He tried. Without much success, like most of the things he tries.’
‘And he has an annual traction engine festival?’
‘He did. For about three years, but it never worked. No one was interested, so he gave it up and bought the bison instead.’
‘Forgive my ignorance,’ said Cosmo who had been looking uncharacteristically puzzled. ‘But would someone tell me what is a traction engine?’
‘From the Latin trahere to draw,’ said Bognor, ‘an engine which pulls things.’
‘So I don’t have the benefit of your education,’ he said testily ‘So what’s so special about these ones?’
‘What’s special,’ said Bognor, suppressing his excitement badly, ‘is that these traction engines are powered by steam. And perhaps you remember that during lunch that day our friend from Somerset asked if he could have a glance at the Lysander before the official opening. Then later when the police asked him about it he said he didn’t know anything about steam engines. Obviously nobody remembered his obscure traction engine exhibition because no one much went to it and it stopped years ago. Anyway, as you said, he’s such an old buffer nobody bothered to take him seriously.’
‘So,’ said Mr. Green, ‘you have a practical possibility that he could have interfered with the steam engine in the boat.’
‘I think so,’ said Bognor.
‘But that doesn’t prove anything,’ said Lady Isobel. ‘You know that any of you could have sneaked a look at the boat beforehand without any trouble. And you haven’t given the old thing a proper motive. Why should he want to kill them both? Grithbrice has a motive for both of them.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Mr. Green. ‘I think perhaps the boy has hold of something interesting. Now am I right that our Somerset friend is a very conservative old gentleman? He likes his hunting and shooting and fishing. Now he’s older than everybody else. He can’t adapt to change so quickly. He inherited the house late. He hates people he doesn’t know paying to come to look at him.’
‘We all hate that, Cosmo, surely, but we don’t go round killing people because of it.’
‘He would have beaten a whole family to death with a poker.’
‘That’s an exaggeration.’
‘But why kill Freddie and Canning?’
‘Because they were the ones who were forcing the pace. They made him commercialize and pay money to go to conferences and buy bloody bison and sell his Canalettos and change everything. And finally it got too much for him and he decided to stop them. He thought that if he got rid of the show business peers then he could stop having to be in show business himself.’
‘That’s not logical.’
‘It’s logical enough for someone who’s going slowly batty.’
They all stopped at once. One of the boys approached and poured more Sambucca, which Green lit once more. The sun and the drink and the excitement were making Bognor sleepy. He yawned. ‘It’s all speculation in the end,’ he said. ‘Impossible to prove.’
‘And,’ said Green, ‘no jury will believe a motive like that one. Whereas any jury will believe Grithbrice’s motive. Once twelve Englishmen hear that the Grithbrice boy was due to inherit that estate they won’t hesitate about waiting for evidence.’
‘And,’ added Isobel Abney, ‘once they see his girl friend they’ll be certain he killed Freddie too.’
Bognor looked at his watch. ‘If I’m going to get my plane I’ll have to go in a minute.’
‘Right,’ said Mr. Green. ‘Let’s finish the game. Everyone write down on a piece of paper who they think did the murders. No, wait.’ He pondered a moment and then clapped his hands. A boy came running. ‘Giuseppe,’ he said, ‘fetch three typewriters and three sheets of paper.’
They waited in silence until boys returned with three small tables and three electric typewriters on very long leads.
‘Now,’ said Mr. Green. ‘We all type the name of our guilty person on the paper and fold it up. All the typefaces are the same so we won’t know who suspects who. So. Ready. Off we go.’
When they had finished a boy was summoned to shuffle the pieces of paper and read them out.
‘Anstruther Grithbrice,’ he read first, murdering the name so that it was barely comprehensible. The second was Grithbrice again. The third, however, was Lydeard.
‘You know something,’ said Green, when the boy had been dismissed. ‘Whichever one it is, I think he’s going to do it again. And the very interesting thing is that he’s going to kill the other.’
Bognor and Lady Abney looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘How do you work that out?’ asked Bognor.
Mr. Green tapped his nose. ‘Grey matter,’ he said, ‘grey matter. If Grithbrice is killing people he is killing them so he can make his business empire bigger still, is that right?’
They nodded.
‘He killed Freddie Maidenhead because he wouldn’t join the business and because his girl friend wanted him dead for political reasons. He killed Canning for the estate. Next he’ll kill Lydeard because the old man won’t join his business and because Lydeard has more potential than any stately-home in Britain. Except Hook and, so help me, Hook stays private.’
‘He might try to kill you,’ said Bognor, obviously.
‘He should be so lucky,’ said Mr. Green contemptuously. ‘You look at my security. Tony Grithbrice has no chance of killing me. Now,’ he continued, ‘if Lydeard is doing the killing he is doing it to stop his life being made a circus. Am I right?’
Again they nodded.
‘So who, now, is going to be the big stately-home circus man? Who runs the big top now? Eh? Mr. Grithbrice! Abney-Arborfield Enterprises. Am I right?’
They all had a feeling he was right. Sandro appeared that moment with a suitcase. ‘I have brought Mr. Bognor’s tweed suit,’ he said. ‘It has been clean
ed and pressed as you asked, sir.’
Bognor started to protest but Green would hear none of it.
‘You keep the clothes,’ he said. ‘Nobody else can wear them.’
It was time to go. With some reluctance Bognor looked round once more at the palm tree bar and the twinkling water and said good-bye. In a few minutes he had gone up in the high-speed lift, out past the Picasso, and was sitting anguished in the back of the car as it negotiated the zigzag bends of the switchback cliff road. From the alcoholic fumes which came wafting towards him on wings of garlic he recognized that the return journey was going to be as alarming as its predecessor. He shut his eyes and tried to banish reality with sleep.
11
BY THE TIME HE got back to the office he was shattered. He had only managed a few hours’ broken sleep because Monica had insisted on going over every detail of his outing and also, with no regard for his exhaustion, on sex. She thought he had allowed himself to be soft soaped by the two of them and decided that the whole affair had been plotted by Green and Lady Abney, who were, despite the army of lissom Italian youths, lovers. Sitting in front of the Queen and Parkinson at eight-thirty, he scarcely knew what to think, let alone say.
‘Hunches, hunches, it’s nothing but bloody hunches and ifs and buts and on the one hands and hypothetically speakings,’ said Parkinson angrily. ‘I send you to bloody Naples and all you find out is that the Marquess of Lydeard once owned a traction engine which is something you could have found out a great deal more easily and a great deal more cheaply, and, I might add, a great deal less enjoyably, by looking in the library of the Western Gazette in Taunton or even by talking to the unfortunate Marquess himself. Instead of which you go gallivanting off to the Mediterranean and allow yourself to be lulled into a state of gullibility by this fat Jewish crook and his mistress.’