A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  “Bludgeoned,” said Gillian, glancing at Charlie but leaving him out of it. “Somehow it doesn’t seem an appropriate way for him to go.”

  “Stiletto would have been better,” agreed Lettie. “Or some subtle poison. He was a subtle guy.”

  “I never saw him, remember,” said Gregory. “I went off on the first morning of the Conference.”

  “Well,” said Felicity, “he was a rather pleased-with-himself, soft-living sort of a man—plump, devious, not-to-be-pinned-down.”

  “Sybaritic,” said Gillian. “And up to something.”

  “Did you realize that at the time?”

  “No,” she said ruefully. “I was fooled because I wanted to be fooled.”

  “And what was he up to?”

  “Forgery,” said Vibeke Nordli bitterly. “Among other things, probably.”

  “And someone battered him to death, did you say, Gillian? How exactly? What were the circumstances?”

  They all looked at Charlie.

  “Someone seems to have called on him late at night, and when he answered the door he was battered to death in the little hallway.”

  Gregory’s brow furrowed. He turned to Gillian.

  “But we looked through the windows of the farm on Friday evening. It’s one big room. There isn’t a hallway.”

  Gillian shook her head.

  “I didn’t say he was murdered at the farm. It was in his own cottage.”

  “Sorry. Stupid of me. I knew he owned it, and I assumed he had quarters there.”

  “Oh no,” said Charlie. “When he was up here he lived in his cottage in Oxenthorpe.”

  “Oxenthorpe?”

  It was said a mite too loudly, and Charlie could have sworn that something—a shadow, a memory—passed over Gregory’s face.

  “Yes, a cottage just before you get to the village, on the road from Batley Bridge.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you know Oxenthorpe?”

  “I stayed there overnight,” said Waite, choosing his words with care. “I only camp out alternate nights.”

  “It wasn’t Sunday night, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t Sunday. Tuesday, I think.”

  Charlie held his peace. He ate his lychees, which he thought a remarkably uninteresting fruit, and halfway through his second glass of wine, while the conversation was ranging from conjecture to misunderstanding, he slipped out of his seat and went to the lavatory. It was a matter of seconds before he heard the door open and someone was standing beside him.

  “Can we talk?”

  “Yes. When?”

  “It would be difficult now. Too obvious.”

  “Tomorrow morning early?”

  “Yes. I’m not a breakfast person. I could tell Gillian I have to get something from the Chemist’s. I’m asthmatic.”

  “You could come along to my b. and b. place. Forty Haworth Road. I’ll get Oddie along.”

  “Right . . . Thanks.”

  Charlie ruminated as he zipped his fly that he had once done business with a snout in a public urinal while he was with the Metropolitan Police. It wasn’t something he would have expected to happen in rural Yorkshire.

  Chapter 19

  Unravelling

  Mrs Ludlum was over the moon at the prospect of two extra men for breakfast.

  “One will just have toast and tea,” Charlie explained. “I should think the other would appreciate the whole caboodle.”

  “No problem,” said Mrs Ludlum. “Though it might mean slightly short commons for you.”

  “Oh, please,” said Charlie, but silently. Then aloud: “If you could get everything on the table, then disappear. Sorry to put it like that. This may be important and we can’t do with interruptions. When the case is over I’ll nip across and tell you everything that went on. But till then . . .”

  She nodded, hardly disguising her reluctance. She never actually listened outside doors, but she did sometimes find, with her hands full, that it was a long time before she could find a way to turn the handle. But next morning she was as good as her word. When the three men were assembled in the front room she brought cereals, tea, toast and two laden plates and then, with a last appraising look at the newcomers, she disappeared back to the kitchen with all the enthusiasm of Macbeth going off to murder Duncan.

  “You saw it in my face, didn’t you?” Gregory Waite said to Charlie.

  “Yes, I did. And I heard it in your voice.”

  Gregory toyed with a butter-knife and an unwanted slice of toast.

  “I’d make an awful criminal . . . But I think I’ll be all right as a witness, if it should come to that . . . I’m hoping that maybe he’ll confess, whoever he is. Or that we can somehow arrange any evidence I have to give so that—”

  “So that the sleeping arrangements that night at your b. and b. don’t have to come out?”

  Gregory gave a lop-sided smile.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t see why they should. I take it you were sleeping in one of the back bedrooms?”

  Gregory sighed.

  “Yes . . . Gillian’s a strong-minded girl, and I want to marry her. She’s very much the monogamous type—says it’s the only sensible thing to be these days, but really it’s the old puritanism in a new guise. I’m afraid I’m just not the faithful type.”

  “We’re policemen, not father confessors,” Oddie pointed out.

  “OK, OK, I’m just talking to myself. It’s my problem.”

  “So you were in fact in Mrs Tuckett’s daughter’s bedroom,” Charlie pursued.

  “Yes. Well, in both hers and mine, actually. Mrs Tuckett went up to bed around ten. Then things sort of . . . developed, with both of us giving the usual signals, and by the time we went up the stairs the mother was snoring and somehow it was inevitable.”

  “I know how it is.”

  “I knew I’d have to be back in my room by morning. She’d said she’d bring me an early-morning cup of tea. I woke up around one . . .” He thought back, frowning. “I don’t know whether something woke me up. I think that must have been it, because as I was creeping out I automatically pulled the curtain aside to look out.”

  “Over to the cottage?”

  “Yes. The girl had told me that a literary gentleman lived there. That’s why I suddenly connected up last night. There’d been a light on there when we went to bed, and it was still on. And there was this figure at the door. I suppose it may have been his knocking that woke me . . .”

  He stopped, remembering.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “He was holding something in his hand, but . . . behind his leg, hidden. I think I should have known then. Not that I could have done anything . . . Carol Tuckett was fast asleep—just like her mother, that one. She’d got what she’d been after (well, so had I, I have to admit), and she was out to the world. I stood there watching. I must have been uneasy . . . After a few minutes the door was opened, they swapped a few words, and then the visitor was ushered inside.”

  “Could you see either of them?”

  “No. The visitor had his back to me, of course. He was tall, well set-up, and he masked the one who opened the door. I stood there . . . There must have been something nagging away inside me . . . Then after a minute or two he came out, shut the door, and began striding through the garden, then down the lane to the road. He was still carrying something—not hiding it now, but carrying it carefully. I tiptoed out of the room, along the landing and into my own bedroom. I went to the window, and he was getting into his car—a little sporty job, two-seater. He was putting whatever he was carrying against the passenger seat—gingerly, I thought. Then he started up and sped off.”

  “Did you watch him? Did he ever stop?”

  “For a minute or two. No, he didn’t. But you’d go a fair way before you’d throw away a weapon, wouldn’t you? If that’s what it was.”

  “Oh, that’s what it was. Did you ever see his face?”

  “For a moment, when he came out
of the cottage. Not well, because the light was behind him in the cottage, not over him.”

  “Could you identify him?”

  “I don’t know . . . I’d rather not have to, but possibly . . . What I got was hardly more than an impression.”

  “And what was the impression?” Oddie asked.

  “That he was very, very handsome.”

  • • •

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure why you are here,” said Randolph Sneddon. “I told you all I know on Tuesday. Naturally I’ve thought—racked my brains—to try to come up with anything else, anything I’ve forgotten, but nothing’s surfaced. I’d have rung you if it had.”

  He was walking up and down in his Notting Hill flat, but this time the nervous energy that Mike and Charlie had noticed before had a tenseness to it that suggested he sensed danger. There was a feeling that desperation was just around the corner, and Charlie wondered what it would take to make him crack.

  “Well, let’s get back to that visit you made to the cottage on Sunday evening, sir,” said Oddie. “Just for a friendly chat about the Committee and suchlike.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He had music on the CD player, I believe?”

  “Did he? Now you come to mention it, yes, he did. Don’t ask me what—I’ve no ear for classical music. Some romantic symphony or other, I’d guess.”

  “Odd that,” said Charlie, “to keep loud music playing while you’re having a chat with a guest. You might imagine some teenage yob doing that, but not a man who rather pushed his artistic sensibilities at you, as Suzman did.”

  “I bow to your knowledge of the artistic temperament, but that’s what happened. Maybe he wasn’t so cultivated as he gave out. Don’t ask me—I hardly knew the man.”

  “The only reason I can think of to keep loud music playing during a private conversation,” said Oddie, “is that there was a likelihood of its becoming a row. And when it comes down to it, it does seem a bit incredible that you would go by car all the way over to Oxenthorpe to tell him you were unlikely to be a very active Committee member. Three lines on a postcard or a quick phone call could have told him that.”

  “I had time to waste.”

  “Why? Why not drive home that evening?”

  “I like night driving. It’s the only time I can let rip in the Porsche.”

  “I must say I regard that meeting at around seven as a falling-out of partners. Because that’s what you were, isn’t it?”

  Randolph Sneddon shook his head with the guardsman-like decisiveness that now seemed to Charlie such a sham.

  “Certainly not. The only sense in which we were partners was that we were both Committee members of—”

  “I’m not talking about the Sneddon Fellowship. I’m talking about the new edition of Susannah Sneddon’s novels, copyrighted in your name. Bringing you royalties for the next fifty years.”

  He brushed aside the suggestion with his large, capable hand.

  “Some kind of legal technicality, Suzman said. Naturally it’s not the kind of thing I have any experience in.”

  “That’s not the impression I got when I talked to Deborah Vigne, at Bennett and Morley’s. She said there were long and detailed negotiations. I rather think that when we start digging with the lawyers we shall find an agreement between you—an agreement specifying the division of the spoils.”

  The hand fluttered, less decisively.

  “No . . . Well, now you mention it, I do seem to remember—”

  “Because what we’re talking about is royalties for probably the rest of your life on twelve books—and with Susannah Sneddon’s star in the ascendent that means a very considerable sum of money. Particularly with Suzman knowing all the tricks to make sure her star remains in the ascendent.”

  “I couldn’t see—can’t see—any harm in re-establishing the family’s rights in the books.”

  “But already your connection with Suzman is a lot closer than you’ve been willing to tell us about so far, isn’t it? How did you divide the expected loot? Fifty-fifty? Or did he want more, as the man who was cobbling together the fake manuscripts?”

  “Fake manuscripts? I had no idea—”

  He was crumbling rapidly, and the two policemen decided to go in for the kill. Charlie started off.

  “All this is a bit irrelevant, really,” he said, leaning forward. “In view of what we know about your second visit to Moor View Cottage on Sunday night . . .”

  “Second visit? There was no second visit.”

  “Oh, but there was!” said Charlie, leaning back in his chair. “Around one o’clock. You left your Porsche by the road and went up to the cottage. You’d seen the rotting palings in the fence earlier, and you went and wrenched one out.”

  “That may count in your favour at the trial,” put in Oddie, as the two switched into a sort of duet. “You didn’t go prepared with a weapon.”

  “Then you went and banged on the door.”

  “Suzman was still up—he needed very little sleep. You stood there, with the heavy iron bar behind your leg. And when he let you in you attacked him in the little hallway with it, and left him for dead. And that was when you made your mistake.”

  “Because if you’d switched the lights off, our witness wouldn’t have seen you as you came out.”

  “Though we’d still have your car to go on.”

  “As it was he saw you clearly. We can arrange an identity parade, and we’re quite confident he will pick you out.”

  “He saw you against the light, still carrying the iron bar. And he saw you put it into your car. We’ll be taking the Porsche into custody, sir. Forensic can do wonders these days. Even if we never find the murder weapon they can compare traces with other bars from that fence. We’ve got a motive, we’ve got a witness, and we’ll have conclusive forensic evidence. I think when you get your lawyer he’ll tell you to plead manslaughter.”

  It was the mention of Forensic that seemed to do the damage. In Oddie’s view people had the most credulous notions—perhaps fed by articles in the popular press—about what the new techniques in forensic science can do. It had become a sort of modern superstition. Randolph Sneddon hardly tried any longer to hide how shaken he was. His hand was far from steady as he went to the bar, poured himself the stiffest whisky yet, and splashed it with soda. He walked around the room, gulped at his drink, then sat down facing them.

  “How did I get into this mess?” he asked, choking.

  “Money?” suggested Oddie.

  “Yes, money . . . Gambling has always been my passion. People assume it’s women, because I’m a fairly good-looking guy. But all the big mistakes I make are about money. When things started cracking up in the City I tried to recoup some of my losses by gambling. The mug’s answer. But I’ve always loved the tables—and a couple of years ago I started going to casinos practically every night. With the predictable result. That’s where I met Suzman.”

  “He was a gambler too?”

  “An occasional one. For him it added spice to a night out. Sensible man. We met at the Cockatoo, in Mayfair. Very exclusive, very expensive if you lose. We got talking in the bar, and when he told me he was a bookseller and generally somebody in the literary world I let fall that I was related to Susannah Sneddon. It was just a way of keeping the conversation going, really. I felt a bit out of my depth.”

  “Did he show interest at once?”

  “Not obviously. But he gave me his card, and got mine in return. Then we went back in, and he watched me losing. I suppose he investigated the position with regard to the Sneddon copyright, and the manuscripts. Her original publishers, Carter and Foreman, went under just after the war. Most of their archives and stock had been destroyed in the Blitz anyway. If anyone asked Suzman he said he retrieved the typescripts from the warehouse of the publishers who took over the name of Carter and Foreman in 1948, but it wasn’t true. Of course he was concocting them himself.”

  “And you came to an agreemen
t with him?”

  There was a pause, and then the voice seemed to come from a great ravine.

  “Yes. That was the moment, wasn’t it? The moment when I stepped into it, irretrievably. Of course we had the alternative scenario well-documented, if anyone should enquire. If you’d wanted to see Suzman’s original letter enquiring if I was Susannah Sneddon’s relative I could have shown it to you. But in fact we cooked it up between us, and had an agreement signed and sealed: the manuscripts remained his property, but the copyright was to be renewed, and we’d go halves on the royalties from the books . . . It seemed a harmless enough scheme.”

  “But you knew the typescripts were faked?”

  “Why do you think I panicked when—”

  “When the scheme blew up in your faces? Or seemed likely to. Yes, of course. But tell me more about this Sneddon Fellowship business.”

  “It was Suzman’s wheeze, of course, to ensure that interest grew and grew. What had he got to lose? He acquired the farm at a rock-bottom price. He was around the area, sniffing out what anybody remembered about the Sneddons and their writing habits, and he saw it was up for sale. He thought it would make an ideal centre—and if need be, when farming land was profitable again, it could be sold. So the Sneddon Fellowship could be centred in Micklewike—ideal. I went along with the idea. He told me there were literary societies for just about every author these days—Arthur Ransome, Angela Thirkell, people I’d never even heard of. So he bought up a lot of junk furniture from shops in Yorkshire and turned it into a sort of museum. I thought it was all pretty clever, frankly. He only claimed one or two things as actually theirs.”

  “In fact nothing was?” Charlie asked.

  “Nothing that I know of. It was all dispersed sixty years ago. Who would keep and cherish a typewriter because Joshua Sneddon had written his novels on it? No, it was all vaguely of the period, that’s all.”

  “But you had no doubts about getting involved with this Weekend,” Charlie asked.

  “Not really, at the time. A bit nervous about hobnobbing with all those culture vultures. I think I said something like that to you on that first night . . . If I’d known who you were—what you were—I’d sure as hell have been nervous . . . But I thought I could play my part all right, because it wasn’t a part. I was the only living relative of the Sneddons, and I didn’t know a great deal about their novels. And it all went well for a bit. There were a lot of elderly enthusiasts, not too high-powered, and I put on the charm for them. It wasn’t difficult, and from all I could see Suzman was carrying it off very well.”