A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  “When did things start going off the rails?”

  “Well, I suppose I started getting worried at the wine and cheese party. That girl going on about the manuscripts—two girls, in fact. And I thought: these people know something about Susannah Sneddon. They want to see the manuscripts, and when they do they’re going to spot that they’re fakes.”

  “I doubt they would have,” Charlie interjected. “They wanted to believe. It’s like miracles: if you want to believe enough, you do.”

  “Maybe. But they got me nervous. They showed me that it wasn’t as easy as I’d thought, not as foolproof. And then people were talking about this couple with letters from Susannah. And perhaps because I was already nervous, that got me jumpy too: I hadn’t expected that, and neither had Suzman. They were a bolt from the blue for him too. He was very keen to get his hands on them, because he feared what I feared: there’d be something in them that showed that the typescripts were fakes.”

  “There was,” said Charlie.

  “What was it?”

  “There were only ever hand-written manuscripts. That’s what the publisher sent to the printers.”

  Randolph Sneddon’s mouth dropped with disbelief.

  “My God! In the twentieth century! I can’t believe it. That wasn’t what I was afraid of at all. I thought maybe she might have said something in the letters about the publishers always accepting what she wrote, never asking for cuts, never trying to censor—that kind of thing. Because that would have exposed the typescripts and knocked the new edition on the head straight away. And then there was that American woman . . .”

  “Lettie Farraday,” said Oddie. “She had the best knowledge of the Sneddons of anyone there.”

  “That’s right. She wasn’t particularly a danger that I could see, but she set me thinking: if there was a hand-written manuscript and it turned up—any one, for any of the novels—that would expose the typescripts even more definitely than any letter could. No hired typist was going to hot up someone else’s novel. Suddenly it all began to seem dicey, dangerous. Because I had even more to lose than Suzman: the Stock Exchange protects its own where it can, but its writ doesn’t extend to straight criminal matters outside the markets. If I’d been tried, even if the charge was relatively minor, I’d have been finished, washed up.”

  “So what did you do?”

  He cradled his glass in his strong hands.

  “I suppose I panicked. After the Sunday meeting I talked to Suzman—apparently about dates for Committee meetings, but I whispered to him that he had to get his hands on those letters. He took that ghastly looking couple off to lunch and sweet-talked them as only he knew how, but it was still no go. ‘No luck as yet, dear boy,’ he said airily to me after the lecture. By then I was trying to be seen talking to him as little as possible. I made small-talk with the hoi-polloi, and one of the things that kept coming up was the letters. ‘Wasn’t it wonderful that there were some, and to an intimate friend? We’d learn so much about their home life, and the inspiration for the books.’ It was driving me out of my mind! So when everything was over I tanked up in the Duke of Cumberland and drove over to Suzman’s cottage.”

  “What was his attitude?”

  “Still airy.”

  “He didn’t see the dangers?”

  “He said if everything went wrong he could brazen it out. He’d done it often enough in the past.”

  “That was true enough.”

  “But it was different this time. He’d told me about some of his clever wheezes, and then he’d made sure to keep his distance from the money transaction. This time he was in the centre of the frame. I said this, and he just waved it aside. I said ‘You’ve got to keep me out of it entirely,’ and he said ‘You’re in it, dear boy. There is no risk-free way of making lots of money.’ ”

  “Well, he found that out soon enough,” commented Charlie.

  Randolph Sneddon looked ahead, seeming not to hear.

  “Things started to get heated then, and he turned the music up loud. I told him he had to get hold of those letters at once. He thought about that, and said it was just possible the Potter-Hodges were staying in the Batley Bridge area and wouldn’t be home. He hadn’t bothered to ask—he was too airy by half. He said he’d go over to Ilkley and investigate after dark.”

  “He wasn’t above a spot of burglary, then?” Oddie asked.

  “Oh no. And I got the impression he’d have known how to go about it. I’d have liked something done about that old American bag, but it just wasn’t on.”

  “Somebody ‘doing something’ about her was just what I feared,” said Charlie. “Why wasn’t it on?”

  “Once what she said about Susannah not typing was out, it was out. People would remember, even if she was out of the way. Added to which, we couldn’t have two incidents connecting back to the Fellowship Weekend in one night. And Suzman wasn’t a murderer.”

  “Whereas you, you found, were.”

  “It was manslaughter! Anyway, the neighbour came in at that point and broke things up. I think I carried things off well enough with her. But I was out of my mind. I went back to Batley Bridge and had a bit more in the bar. Then I went to my room and had a whisky or three there. About half past eleven I thought he might be back and I rang him. ‘Nothing doing, dear boy. They were home, and so was their damned great dog. I saw him in the window—Rottweiler or some such thing. But don’t worry, dear boy. Something will turn up.’ I screamed an obscenity at him and hung up. By now I knew I had to do something about him.”

  “Murder was already on your mind, was it?”

  “No! . . . But I knew that there was very little to connect me with him, apart from my gracing the Weekend as the last representative of the Sneddon family. With him out of the way . . . I threw things into a case, got in the car and drove off . . . not knowing what I was going to do, I swear.”

  Oddie and Charlie both took that with a pinch of salt.

  “But by the time you got to the cottage you knew?”

  “No! . . . Well, I suppose it was an option. I had a heavy spanner in the car. But I thought how messy it would be, and slow, and I’d noticed that rusty fence, with the thick, heavy palings. I suppose by the time I’d wrenched one of those out I’d decided. When he opened the door and said ‘Dear boy, lovely to see you, of course, but you’re making much too much of this’ I just . . . knocked him down. He was half turned away, but he saw it coming. I went on hitting until I knew he was dead, then I came away. God, what a fool I was, not turning off the lights. Somehow I didn’t want to go right into the cottage. I just wanted to get away . . . There’s not much more to say, is there?”

  “Not much,” said Oddie. “Randolph Sneddon, I am charging you with the murder of Gerald Suzman . . .”

  • • •

  Later that night, in the dining room of the hotel they had treated themselves to at the West Yorkshire Police Authority’s expense, Charlie paused, his knife about to cut into a thick steak, and said:

  “I’m not happy about the murder-suicide, you know.”

  “I know,” sighed Oddie. “You’re going to look into it. Ah well—I suppose it’s a few degrees more current than the Princes in the Tower.”

  “Of course I’m not saying that murder goes in families—”

  “I should hope not. ‘Bad blood’ and all that sort of thing went out with Agatha Christie.”

  “All right. But you do get families with a nasty streak in them.”

  “Maybe,” said Oddie, remembering an earlier case.

  “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “But kids more often react against their parents, rather than following them.”

  “Not in the case of Vidkun Mjølhus,” Charlie pointed out. They had had a nice little wad of information on that gentleman from the Oslo police the day before. “He was born in Brazil after his parents got out of Norway in 1945, in the nick of time, but he swallowed their line after the war hook, line and sinker. Anyway, I’m talking abou
t grandfather and grandson. They say things often skip a generation.”

  “Spare me the pop genetics. Tell me what you have to go on.”

  “I read those letters. I never once got the feeling that Joshua was jealous of Susannah’s greater success. Or even particularly bitter about his own lack of it. He accepted it, fatalistically. And although he didn’t greatly like her books he always defended them when they were attacked. I got the feeling of a rather good man—wounded by his war experiences, sometimes rather desperate, melancholic. But I didn’t get any sense of jealousy at all.”

  “Maybe Susannah was such an egotist she didn’t register it.”

  “They were alone together every evening of their lives. She was an egotist, but she’d have registered it. I think she’d even have enjoyed telling her friend about it, if it had existed. I don’t think she was a particularly pleasant person.”

  “The talk in the village was that he was jealous.”

  “It would be, wouldn’t it? Granted that situation, that’s just what the village people were bound to say. Particularly if there was some prompting.”

  “From Cousin George?”

  “Exactly. From the grandfather of our man. He knew them as well as anybody. If he started putting it around locally that Joshua was jealous of his sister’s success it would be accepted, and embroidered on.”

  “So when the deaths came, they would be accepted as a murder, followed by a suicide?”

  “Of course. But think how easily there could have been a different interpretation. He shoots Joshua through the head in the spinney (‘Just over for a spot of shooting, Cousin Josh’). He was shot through the head, you notice. Most suicides do it through the mouth, but that would have been an impossible murder. Anyway, in a rural area no one would think twice about a shot. Then he goes and has a cousinly chat with Susannah, and in the course of it he takes the axe from the woodpile by the fire and kills her. Scrawls a few words in something approximating Joshua’s writing, and Bingo! I get the impression that the investigation was pretty perfunctory. Why have the handwriting checked when it was obvious what had happened? Even that nasty little touch of the cigarette stubbed out on her corpse was witness to the hatred and jealousy everyone took for granted by then. And there was nobody else who had cause to feel that about Susannah.”

  “Hmmm. The motive at least is obvious. But is it strong enough?”

  “Good old cui bono? Not just the farm, remember. Susannah was getting one hundred-fifty pound advances on her later books, and there was one just finished. The books earned their advances and more. There’d be money coming in for a few years after her death, and probably money in the bank too, because I have the impression she spent next to nothing, apart from small subsidies to the farm. So in the grinding poverty of that region at that time, there was property and money that was well worth killing for.”

  “So . . . obviously there’s no question of proving anything at this stage. What you’ll do is put the case for honest doubt?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “That’s about it?”

  “How will you do it? Write an article?”

  “Maybe. I’m a member of the Sneddon Fellowship, courtesy of the West Yorkshire Police. They’re going to start a journal.”

  Oddie raised his eyebrows.

  “Good God! You mean you haven’t had enough of these literary parasites? If I were you I’d run a mile before I got involved with any literary society.”

  Charlie chased the last of his potatoes through the steak juices left on his plate.

  “Still, they are the audience that would be most interested. And they’d know of my connection with the Suzman case . . .”

  “Flap, flap, flap.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “A late-arriving vulture has caught sight of one last piece of carrion.”

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A Fatal Attachment

  A Scandal in Belgravia

  A City of Strangers

  Death of a Salesperson

  Death and the Chaste Apprentice

  At Death’s Door

  The Skeleton in the Grass

  The Cherry Blossom Corpse

  Bodies

  Political Suicide

  Fête Fatale

  Out of the Blackout

  Corpse in a Gilded Cage

  School for Murder

  The Case of the Missing Brontë

  A Little Local Murder

  Death and the Princess

  Death by Sheer Torture

  Death in a Cold Climate

  Death of a Perfect Mother

  Death of a Literary Widow

  Death of a Mystery Writer

  Blood Brotherhood

  Death on the High C’s

  Death of an Old Goat

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Robert Barnard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

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  ISBN 0-684-19625-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6841-9625-1 (Print)

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3728-7 (eBook)