A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  As ordinary members were questioning her and consulting her. Charlie had little need to worry about her for the rest of the day. Her taxi driver took her down to the Duke of Cumberland, where she sat through the late afternoon and early evening, pausing only for a brief dinner, surrounded by loyal Sneddon admirers, racking her brains for memories that would answer their queries. There could be no danger there . . . Yet danger, oddly, was what preoccupied Charlie, and he hung around, occasionally catching Lettie’s eye and communicating twinkles of amusement. At last she was tired and ready for an early bed. Charlie stood up, ready to attend her. Felicity, ensconced with her parents in a cosy corner nook, saw him resume duty as Lettie’s attendant and suddenly realized that, though he had told her a great deal about himself, none of it was recent. What was he actually doing in Leeds? Her parents had been very insistent in their questions about what he did, and all she could give them was the description that he had given her: security and investigative work. Her father had immediately decided he was part of a criminal gang—one of the rare signs he gave of a creative imagination. But Felicity’s brow creased. Exactly what sort of work was he in?

  As Charlie and Lettie hobbled through the bar and out to the foyer, Charlie thought he had better find out Lettie’s plans.

  “How long are you going to be here?” he asked.

  “Oh, till Tuesday, I suppose. Or Wednesday. I may go up and see Mother again. Oh, don’t smile. There’s a sort of . . . grisly fascination about it all.”

  They started up the stairs.

  “What sort of lock is there on your door here?” Charlie asked.

  “Oh, just an ordinary Yale lock.”

  “Any chain on the inside?”

  “Yes, there is a chain.”

  “Put it on, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “And maybe put a chair against the door and keep the phone close.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say: better safe than sorry. Do it, Lettie.”

  “I suppose you’re the guy who knows.”

  He waited in the corridor till he had heard the chain being put up, and a chair being drawn across the floor. Then he shook himself, dissatisfied, went down the stairs and then out into the twilight.

  Chapter 9

  Corpse

  Charlie was coming down to breakfast next morning when the phone in the hallway rang. His landlady was bustling through from the kitchen with a laden tray, and Charlie took it from her and went into the dining room. He had asked for scrambled eggs, as a light option, but his heart sank as he saw it was surrounded by substantial mounds of fried bacon, mushrooms and tomatoes. He was just setting the things out and mentally saluting the pile when he heard Mrs Ludlum say:

  “Oh yes, he’s just down. He’ll be tucking into his breakfast. Won’t it wait? It’d be a pity to—oh, urgent, is it? Who shall I say, then?”

  Charlie was already at the dining room door, and she handed him the phone.

  “It’s a Mr Oddie.”

  She stood in the hall, lingering in the doorway to the dining room.

  “Mike?”

  “Charlie, I want you to get a taxi. Have you got the number of the local people?”

  “Yes—what is it? Not Lettie Farraday?”

  “No the man himself. He’s got—he had—a cottage called Moor View, just outside Oxenthorpe. I’d pick you up, only it’s too far out of my way.”

  “Dead, I take it?”

  “As the proverbial dodo.”

  Charlie pressed down the telephone rest and then dialled the Batley Bridge taxi firm.

  “I want a cab right away, to 40 Haworth Road. The name is Peace. To Oxenthorpe.”

  Mrs Ludlum shook her head, grief-stricken, when he dashed back into the dining room.

  “Surely you can make a start on it?”

  “No way. You have it.”

  “Oh, I don’t eat stuff like that.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what”—he took up the bacon and put it between two slices of toast—“emergency rations. Could you find me a bag for this?”

  As she came back with it he was at the front door, and his taxi was drawing up. He had grabbed his wallet, and he handed her the cost of his room for three nights.

  “Here’s what I owe you. If you could keep the room for me tonight, just in case. I’ll ring you later.”

  “But what is it? What’s the rush?”

  “Murder.”

  “Murder? Who’s been murdered? And what’s it to do with you?”

  “Can’t say. It’ll be on the local news. I should have told you I’m a policeman.”

  And leaving her open-mouthed in the doorway (to ring around to her friends, to mention Oxenthorpe, and to start making all sorts of connections, many of them surprisingly accurate) he climbed into the car. The taxi driver was not Lettie’s friend, but he had observed the scene in the doorway.

  “Not often we get a fare to Oxenthorpe,” he angled delicately as he pulled away from the kerb.

  “It’s a rush job. I’m a policeman,” said Charlie, to foreshorten the process.

  “Must be a rush job if they can’t send a police car for you . . . And something pretty important.”

  “Suspected murder or manslaughter.”

  “Really . . . ? That Gerald Suzman has a cottage over Oxenthorpe way.”

  “It’s his cottage we’re going to.”

  “Is it him as has been murdered?”

  “Don’t know yet, do we? Till he’s been identified.”

  “Oh, right . . .”

  “Why did you mention him?”

  “Don’t know. It was the name that sprang to mind. He’s had a pretty high profile round here this last weekend.”

  “What did people here think of him?”

  “Oh, he was perfectly nice to people, no question of that. But they couldn’t . . . well, let’s just say they didn’t think he was in this just for love of Susannah Sneddon and her novels. But they couldn’t see what there was in it for him.”

  “They’re not alone,” said Charlie, in heartfelt tones.

  As the car sped through moorland and grazing pastures Charlie meditated on his feeling that all the people at the Weekend were, in their various ways, laying claim to a stake in Susannah Sneddon. And the biggest stake of all was that claimed by Gerald Suzman. Yet the lesser claims all seemed obvious enough: knowledge of the woman, inherited letters from her, genuine love of her books. It was only the largest claim that was mysterious. No doubt Gerald Suzman had a love of the books . . . Charlie pulled himself up at that thought. That wasn’t really the case: there was plenty of doubt. Gerald Suzman saw primarily in the books some . . . some future possibility, some prospect of profit, some glittering financial prize. His connections with literature were strong, but their foundations were not laid in love, but in money.

  “Any idea where the cottage is?” the taxi driver asked.

  “None. It’s called Moor View, and it’s on the outskirts. We can ask the locals if necessary. News is bound to have got around.”

  But it was not necessary to ask. Gerald Suzman’s cottage, conveniently for him, was on the Batley Bridge side of Oxenthorpe. It was up a wide lane off from the main road into the village, and it marked itself off by the number of police cars outside it. They pulled off the road, Charlie paid off the driver and got a receipt. Then he went to make one more policeman.

  The cottage had a small, ill-kept garden at the front, and an iron fence separating it from the lane. Charlie stood at the gate to get a view of it before he went in. It was a genuine cottage—a rural worker’s home when it was built. It was small, poky and ill-lit, but it had the advantage of being sturdy and belonging to the landscape. No attempts had been made at prettification beyond a clematis, an old, straggly plant, which grew by and around the front door. The other honest thing about the little building was its name: it did indeed have a view of the moors—a particularly fine one if you averted your eyes from the road to the left and took
in rolling acres of rough scrubland to the right.

  Charlie swallowed hard before knocking at the door: he had not yet got used to dead bodies, though in honesty he had to admit to himself that a degree of hardening had taken place—becoming habituated did lessen the shock.

  The door was opened to him cautiously, and he saw at once why: the body of Gerald Suzman was just inside the door, and all the business of measuring and photographing was having to take place in difficult, cramped circumstances. With due precaution he stepped around the body and looked. It was a hideous sight. Mr Suzman had been battered to death.

  “Who found him?” he asked one of the Keighley policemen standing in the background.

  “A neighbour. The postman tried to deliver a parcel, got no answer, so he left it at the house down the road. The woman there had a key, because this bloke’s not often here. It’s more of a holiday home than a residence.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Yes. Or mainly of him.”

  “Looks a respectable bloke enough.”

  “So did Lord Lucan.”

  The doctor came over, and they exchanged the greeting of men slightly known to each other.

  “Oddie’s coming, I hear.”

  “Yes. Should be here any minute.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know, then, or what I guess, and you can pass it on. As you can see he was battered with something—what I can’t guess as yet.”

  “Any sort of struggle?”

  “No, not struggle, but he knew what was happening, wasn’t caught unawares. I’d guess at an initial blow to the forehead, then, when he was staggering, a further series of blows from behind.”

  “A lot of strength needed?”

  “Some. But that’s a dodgy matter, difficult to judge, as you know very well. I’m not going to rule out a woman, just to make your job easier. Time? Well, I’d guess late at night, and I’m not just going by the fact that he was wearing his dressing-gown. He looks like the kind of chap who could be wearing his dressing-gown any time of day.”

  “I think he probably was. More the dressing-gown than the track suit and trainer type, anyway.”

  Ten minutes later, when Charlie’s favourite superior, Superintendent Oddie had arrived, and the crowd in the little living room was beginning to disperse, the two of them were able to pause for a moment and look down on the disfigured body.

  “Difficult to say,” said Mike Oddie, “whether he had just answered the door, was trying to escape through it, or just happened to be near it.”

  “The doc doesn’t think he was caught unawares,” said Charlie, and gave Oddie a summary of what he had said.

  “That seems to agree with the look of the thing,” said Oddie, nodding. “But even if he had just answered the door there’d be that moment of awareness, when he saw the man—the visitor—raising the weapon.”

  “The doc isn’t committing himself on the sex of the killer.”

  “Quite right too . . .” Mike Oddie averted his eyes from the body and looked around the room. “Comfortable enough, but hardly lived in, would you say?”

  Their eyes raked round the drab living room, which the little hallway opened into. Clearly it had once been two rooms of roughly equal size, but some time ago it had been made into a good-sized living room with a small kitchen opening off from it. It was decorated drably, with a fawn wallpaper that was in places dirty and starting to peel. There was evidence, where the paper was darker, of other furniture having stood there. Mr Suzman had clearly bought the property, made it marginally his, but had not thought it worthwhile to stamp his own fairly distinctive personality on to it. The furniture was standard, either second-hand or surplus to requirements in his other home. The only indications of taste were in the books and the records.

  “I wonder when he bought it,” mused Mike Oddie. “Was it just acquired for the Sneddon festivities? A short-term home for a short-term project, perhaps?”

  “Oxenthorpe is pretty convenient for Haworth too—much closer, in fact,” Charlie reminded him. “Remember that highly suspicious business of the Brontë manuscripts?”

  “Yes. That was twenty-odd years ago, though. I’ve made enquiries about that at the Parsonage. There seems to have been a whole lot of dodgy business in the past, the pretty distant past, that they’re still very cagey about. But the general view there seems to be that, just because of those dodgy deals, some of them involving Thomas J. Wise, the forger, most collectors would be much better informed these days. Quite simply, they’re more suspicious.”

  “I bet there are collectors who want to believe they’ve got genuine Charlotte Brontë stuff,” commented Charlie.

  “Agreed. There’s no fool like a man with an obsession.” Mike Oddie went over to the smart compact disc player in the wall unit. “Well, he was listening to the Bruch violin concerto.”

  “Ah—not La Clemenza di Tito?”

  “Eh?”

  Charlie reported the conversation with the Coggenhoes, imitating Suzman’s stance and voice, with its mixture of the pompous and the epicene.

  “You should have been on television,” said Mike appreciatively. “I get the impression of a pseud—is that right?”

  “Pretty much so.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s no great surprise.”

  “I’m not sure that he went down altogether well with most of the people at the Weekend. With a few exceptions they were ordinary, enthusiastic readers who just happened to have a particular love of the Sneddons. He gave the impression of being very much the sophisticated Londoner, whereas most of the rank-and-file people at the Weekend were provincial, particularly Northerners.”

  “Maybe his manner was one that went down well with collectors, but wasn’t well adapted to the real literary enthusiast.”

  “Maybe. I’ve never met a collector.”

  “Me too neither.”

  They peered down at the assortment of records and books neatly arranged in different parts of the unit.

  “Romantic concertos mostly: Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Dvorák. What you might call the Everyman kind of classical music.”

  “Not the impression he tried to give. But the books are a bit different,” said Charlie, crouching to look along the spines. “Limited choice. All the Susannah Sneddon novels, of course, in the Untamed Shrew paperback edition. A bit of Brontë, lots of D. H. Lawrence in several different editions—who’d want two or three copies of Women in Love in their holiday cottage? Oh, and some Joyce. But what he was actually reading was Brideshead Revisited.”

  “A different sort of lush read,” said Oddie, “and probably more to his taste than the Susannah Sneddon novels.” He looked at the book, turned face down on the shelf closest to one of the armchairs.

  “That suggests he hadn’t yet gone to bed.”

  “That doesn’t tell us much about the time of his death,” Charlie pointed out. “We don’t know anything about his habits. Shall we take a look upstairs?”

  But upstairs told them even less. It was, even more than the ground floor, a camping-place rather than a home. The bed had not been slept in, the drawers contained silk pyjamas and a range of fairly natty shirts, the suits in the wardrobe were Savile Row, and the man had shaved with a heavy, expensive safety razor and used a strong aftershave.

  “Nothing of interest here,” said Oddie. “Now, I think we’d better alert people in Batley Bridge, to try and stop people who were there for the Weekend leaving, or at least make sure they leave addresses.”

  “We can’t insist, can we? We have no proof the murder is connected with the Weekend.”

  “No. But if they hear it’s murder, and someone they know, a lot of them will stay. Who do you think we should contact?”

  “The Black Horse in Micklewike, the Duke of Cumberland in Batley Bridge, and the Tourist Office there,” said Charlie. “I’ve got all their numbers. Oh, and there’s a woman in Micklewike who’s Secretary of the Sneddon Fellowship. Mrs Cardew I think the
name is. I don’t have a number for her, but she’ll certainly have an address list of members.”

  “Right. Could you contact anyone you can? We can use the phone downstairs now. I’ll have a last look round, then we’ll go and talk to the woman who found him.”

  The woman was Mrs Tuckett, and she lived in a decent, uninspired ’thirties detached house directly on the main road into Oxenthorpe, with a bed and breakfast sign in the front window. She was not to be drawn on the subject of Mr Suzman, because she said she simply did not know him.

  “I’d just go and clean there now and then, when he was going to come up, and he paid me generously because I had the key, and looked after the place when he let it out, that kind of thing. But I didn’t know him at all. Perfectly friendly, quite the gentleman, but that’s as much as I can say.”

  “It must have been a shock finding him.”

  “It was! Horrible! Because I saw him only last night—full of life he was then.”

  “You saw him last night? What time was that?”

  “Early on. About seven. He wasn’t in his dressing-gown then. I knew he was off back to London today—would have been, had he lived—and I went to see if he wanted anything doing while he was away. There was music going, a symphony or something of that sort, and I had to bang on the door to be heard. Anyway, he and this other chap were having a drink.”

  “Other chap? You didn’t know his name?”

  “Oh no, I’d never seen him before. Youngish chap. Dark. Very good looking.”

  “Could be Randolph Sneddon,” murmured Charlie to Oddie.

  “Anyway, Mr Suzman said he wouldn’t be coming up till he had some kind of Committee meeting for this Fellowship thing. Said he’d give me a call before then. The young man said it was time for him to be off, and he walked with me down to the road where he’d left his car.

  “Didn’t say anything to the purpose?”

  “Just wasn’t it nice the evenings were drawing out.”

  “What kind of car did he have?”

  “Oh, I don’t know anything about cars. One of those sporty jobs. Dark green.”