Anything For a Quiet Life

by Michael Gilbert

  “Start,” said Queen.

  Trotter said, “Christ!” and turned pale. He knew that the house was empty. And now he heard, coming from it, exactly the sound he had heard before. Was the spirit of Dr Rainey haunting his old residence?

  The noise stopped.

  “Keep going,” shouted Queen urgently.

  Trotter paced forward, hardly daring to contemplate what was going to happen next. He reached the end of the little lane that ran between the doctor’s house and the next one. His astonishment escalated when he observed a figure disappearing down the path. He was about to pursue it when Queen stopped him.

  “All right!” he said.

  “All right,” said Whaley grimly. And to a still shaken Trotter, “I take it you can confirm that that was the noise you heard?”

  “I certainly can, sir,” said Trotter. “But who—”

  “The man you saw was Sergeant Fox. He was helping us. I’ve warned him. And I’m warning you. Not a word about this to anyone. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He understood nothing. But that was a direct order and could be obeyed.

  Later that morning Queen and Whaley faced each other in Whaley’s office. Neither of them looked happy.

  Whaley said, “Experiment successful. What does it mean?”

  “It can only mean one thing, sir. There was another man inside the house. When the electric lock is on, a door or a window can be opened from the inside. Whilst it’s open, the apparatus gives a warning bleep. That was the noise Trotter heard.”

  “And once the door was shut again, the noise would stop?”

  “Exactly. The man would slam it shut behind him and nip off, down the garden path and into the lane. The timing was right for that, too.”

  They thought about it and the more they thought the less they liked it.

  “By the way,” said Queen, “I meant to ask you. That order about keeping an eye on the doctor’s house. What was the reason for it?”

  “I seem to remember that he’d had some sort of threat. He took it seriously enough to fortify his house, so we took it a bit seriously, too.”

  Queen said, “If someone did kill him, it must have been by poison. Yet Dr Smallhorn seemed satisfied that death was due to natural causes.”

  “Dr Smallhorn’s an old woman,” said Whaley. “He’d give any diagnosis that saved him trouble. I didn’t question it at the time, because there seemed no reason to do so. Now, I wouldn’t rely on it any more than when he said my daughter was suffering from heat rash and it turned out to be measles.”

  “So,” said Queen, “there’s only one way to settle it.”

  “Right. An exhumation order. I don’t like it, but I can’t see any way round it.”

  “We shall need the agreement of the next of kin, which means going to Jonas Pickett.”

  Whaley said, “Yes.” He did not say it with great enthusiasm. There had been passages in his earlier dealings with that lawyer which he remembered with distaste. However, time had smoothed things over and there had been at least one occasion on which Jonas had proved decidedly helpful to the police.

  “All right,” he said. “He’s by way of being a friend of yours, isn’t he? You have a word with him.”

  “I’m Dr Rainey’s sole executor,” said Jonas. “I didn’t like the idea, but he insisted. As soon as I’ve got the estate wound up, I shall hand over to Jock Lovibond. He’ll have to appoint trustees to help him with the charitable part.”

  “But, for the moment,” said Queen, “you’re in charge of everything?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you’ve got all his papers?”

  “I’ve got what there was. There wasn’t a lot.”

  “I wondered if they might have given us a lead about his next of kin.”

  Queen, who had considerable confidence in Jonas’s professional reticence, had explained what they had in mind.

  “It’s often been my job to go through the papers of a dead person,” said Jonas, “but I can’t remember any case in which they were so uninformative. He seems to have destroyed his professional records when he retired. Sensible thing for a doctor to do, perhaps. Then there are the sort of household records you’d expect. But there isn’t a single paper that’s more than four years old. No birth certificate. And – this really is odd – no passport.”

  “Might it be at the bank?”

  “The bank has the deeds of this house and some share certificates. No personal papers at all. And when he left his previous solicitors, a Portsmouth firm, and came to me – that was shortly after I got here – he seems to have removed his papers from them and destroyed the lot.”

  Queen said, “It looks as though something happened four years ago that scared him. It was then that he asked for police protection and fortified his house.”

  “I think that’s right,” said Jonas. “He got a jolt of some sort.”

  “But it doesn’t help us much.”

  “There’s one point in his papers which might give us a lead. I explained to him that his will could only be proved in this country if we could establish that his domicile was England. Fortunately he was able to make a clear statement about that, as you’ll see.”

  He pushed a copy of the will across to Queen, who read:

  “‘I, Claud Rainey, doctor of medicine, declare that I am a domiciled and naturalised Englishman.’”

  “The point is that this declaration does suggest two lines of enquiry. As he’s a doctor there must be some record of his qualification. The BMA would be the people to ask. I think you’d have to do that. They wouldn’t open up to me. On the other hand I have got an old friend in the Home Office. He might be able to tell me about the naturalisation. Also, perhaps, it would help if I had a word with the gardener. He works on Fridays and Saturdays for my partner, so it’d be easy to keep it informal. He’d be more unbuttoned with me than with you.”

  The truth of the matter was that Jonas enjoyed an enquiry of this sort. Queen was well aware of this. He respected Jonas’s ability and the sources of information that a long professional life had made available to him. He was delighted to have his help.

  “I’ll dig out the papers,” said Michael Doneval, “and see what I can turn up.”

  Although he was now number two in the Aliens’ Department at the Home Office, Michael, who had once been Jonas’s articled clerk, still tended to call him ‘sir’.

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” said Jonas.

  “The amount of trouble will depend on when he came over. In the years immediately after the war, I’m told, there was a sort of tidal wave of immigrants. Mostly professional men. Not as many as went to America, of course. But more than enough to keep this department busy. Especially since we weren’t back to peacetime staffing levels.”

  “Difficult to see why a lot of professional men should have wanted to uproot themselves after the war was over.”

  “I imagine,” said Doneval drily, “that they’d seen what the Germans were capable of and thought it might be the Russians next. And we must still have been feeling sorry for the people in the occupied countries, because, from what I can see in the records, we were letting them in pretty easily just then. All they had to do was to produce one respectable citizen from their own country to act as a reference. Give them a clean sheet as far as crime or over-enthusiastic co-operation with the Germans was concerned.”

  “A referee,” said Jonas thoughtfully. “If he should happen to be still alive that would indeed be helpful. We might get the whole story.”

  “Why don’t we talk about it over lunch?” said Doneval. “I’ll see if I can get a table at the Travellers.”

  Over lunch their talk wandered from the stupidity of the English cricket selectors to reminiscences of Doneval’s brief flirtation with the law.

  “I was sorry you didn’t stick to a solicitor’s practice,” said Jonas. “You’d have made a great success of it. Even when you were a youngster I noticed you
had a wonderful knack of sidetracking any conversation that looked like getting difficult for you.”

  “That’s useful in the Home Office, too,” said Doneval. “You know, sir, one thing you told me is really significant. You say that he didn’t appear to have a passport.”

  “No trace of one.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that he was afraid to apply? There are special rules when the applicant has been naturalised. The Passport Office has to have certain facts from his pre-naturalisation days. Country of origin, his original name, if it’s been changed and so on. Everything that you’ve told me seems to suggest that he was anxious to bury his past.”

  Jonas, who was cutting himself a slice of the club’s famous Stilton cheese, said nothing until he had completed this important operation. Then he said, “Yes, that seems to be the picture that’s emerging.”

  “If you want a word with Fred,” Sabrina had said, “you’d better go up to my place about eleven tomorrow. You’ll find him in the kitchen, making himself a cup of coffee. Make one for you, too, if you ask him nicely. He’s a remarkable person.”

  Jonas had previously classed Fred as the sort of man you would pass in a crowd without noticing him at all, but when he viewed him across Sabrina’s kitchen table he changed his mind. He was remarkable. He had a face like a clenched fist. There was strength in the nose and chin and the line of the thin lips was uncompromising. His voice was surprising too. It was totally classless and unemphatic. He might have been anyone, done anything, been anywhere. The face was giving nothing away.

  Not a man to take liberties with, Jonas decided. He said, “Dr Rainey was my client. I’ve been asked by the police to see if I can trace his family and his next of kin. We wondered if you could help. You must have known him better than most people.”

  “I worked for him for two years. He never said anything about his family. Or about himself. When we did talk it was mostly about gardening or cooking.”

  “I’m told he was a keen cook. Do you happen to know what he was planning to have for dinner that Monday night?”

  “It would have been a mutton stew. He was cutting up the meat when I came for my coffee at eleven. He called it by a French name. Navvy something.”

  “And all the vegetables came out of the garden.”

  “All except the tomatoes. He had some he’d bought from the shop. He didn’t fancy shop vegetables. That’s why I was going to grow some tomatoes for him. They can be tricky. You need a south wall and a lot of luck.”

  “But you’d managed all the other vegetables he was using that evening?”

  “Right.” Fred ticked them off on his thick, brown fingers. “Potatoes, onions, peas, mushrooms, globe turnips, artichokes.”

  “It sounds delicious. Tell me, when you spoke to him that morning, did he seem to be in his usual spirits?”

  “He was never a very happy man, I’d judge.”

  “Oh. What makes you say that?”

  “The way he behaved. As if he was afraid that someone was after him. He’d ask if any stranger had been enquiring for him particularly.”

  “Can you remember any who had?”

  Fred scratched the grizzled hair at the back of his neck while he thought about this. He said, “Only the usual sort of people that I can remember. Trying to sell him double glazing or insurance or things like that. He’d have no truck with them.”

  “Did you see him when you went up to the house in the evening to collect your money?”

  “I didn’t see him. He’d left the money on the kitchen table. I could hear him moving about in the house, though.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Who else would it have been? The meat was in a pan on the fire. He’d need to keep an eye on it, wouldn’t he?”

  “That would have been five o’clock?”

  “I work till five. Then I have to clean up. It would have been a quarter or twenty past.”

  Jonas finished his coffee and got up. There seemed to be no more that Fred could, or would, tell him. He debated whether he ought to offer him a tip, but decided against it. There was something about Fred which made the idea inappropriate.

  When he told Sabrina she said, “He might have taken it, because he’s a polite person. But he wouldn’t have needed it.”

  “Has he got a lot of money?”

  “Do you know his cottage in Friary Lane? A very agreeable little property. He bought it when he came here four years ago. It’s been valued at eighty thousand pounds and there’s no mortgage on it.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “He’s selling it and he’s asked me to act for him.”

  “A tip would certainly have been inappropriate,” agreed Jonas. “Have you any idea where his money came from? He can hardly have made it by gardening.”

  “From something he said I gathered that he had a cottage at his last place. Probably bought it for twenty thousand pounds and sold it for forty thousand pounds. Once you get on the property market ladder you can’t go wrong.”

  “I suppose not,” said Jonas. “You’re a cook, Sabrina. If you were planning a dish, based on mutton, but involving also – see if I can remember – potatoes, tomatoes, onions, peas, mushrooms, turnips and artichokes, how long would it take to cook?”

  Sabrina was almost licking her lips. “What you’re describing,” she said, “is that most delicious French dish, a navarin of mutton.”

  “That’s right. It was a French word, navvy something,” he said.

  “You start by browning the meat in butter. Then you add the spices, with a cupful of flour to make a roux. Then—”

  “I’m not intending to cook it,” said Jonas. “I just wanted to know when it would be ready to eat. You can take it that the procedure had already started by a quarter past five.”

  Sabrina was making some intricate calculations, murmuring to herself words like ‘bubble’, ‘stir in’ and ‘simmer’. It was a witch’s incantation. Then she said, “It’d be ready by half past seven. And eaten by eight. Once it was on the table he wouldn’t want to waste a moment. One thing I don’t follow, though. You say that when Fred was describing this dish to you he said, ‘a French word, navvy something’.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s impossible. He spoke excellent colloquial French. Much better than me and I used to think I was a dab at it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard him. One of those French onion sellers had come to the door. I don’t think he knew I was in the front room, doing some work. I could hear them chatting.”

  “And Fred was keeping his end up?”

  “He wasn’t just talking French. He was talking like a Frenchman. And was the onion seller lapping it up!”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Jonas. He thought about Fred. “Did he say where he was going when he left here? Or why he was leaving?”

  “Not where he was going. I asked him that, in case he was thinking of buying a house. But he told me why he was going. He said that what had happened had upset him.”

  “He didn’t look to me,” said Jonas, “like the sort of man it would be easy to upset.”

  Next day, Queen called on him. The Superintendent listened to what Jonas had to tell him. He said, “I haven’t got a lot to tell you myself. The BMA looked up their records. Claud Rainey was a Belgian. He came over here at the end of the war, did his training at Bart’s and qualified in 1951. Then he came down here and practised until his retirement eight years ago. A perfectly straight record. They did say one thing, though. It seems that he had already got a long way on with his medical training in Belgium. That being so, there was a concession which would have short-circuited his training here. Only, of course, he had to provide proper details. Apparently he was unable, or unwilling, to do so; which meant that he had to start again at the beginning.”

  “He certainly seems to have been shy about his past life,” said Jonas. “And I don’t see how we’re going to dig it up.”


  The answer to this was on his desk three days later.

  As I expect you will already have discovered [wrote Michael Doneval], Claud Rainey, otherwise René Claude, was a Belgian. He came over here in July 1945, with a number of other European immigrants. His ‘sponsor’ was a Bruxellois dentist called Hervé Maxente. As I told you when we met, the office was understaffed and overworked at the time, but that shouldn’t have excused us from spotting that when Maxente came over here three months later and changed his name to Max Humbolt his ‘sponsor’ was René Claude! Which means, of course, that they could both have been bad hats, sponsoring each other. Humbolt, who set up his practice at Alfriston in Sussex, died four years ago. Now that Rainey’s dead too there doesn’t seem much anyone can do about their Siamese twins’ act.

  “A double dead-end,” said Queen when Jonas showed him the letter.

  “Maybe,” said Jonas, “but have you noticed one point? Humbolt died four years ago. Four years ago Rainey barricaded his house and started worrying about strangers who might be enquiring for him.”

  “Could be a coincidence.”

  “I don’t think it was a coincidence. I think that Rainey took his compatriot’s death as a warning. I’ll go further, I think that the mysterious man who left his house at six o’clock that morning was the stranger he’d been warned against.”

  Queen turned it over in his mind. He was a practical policeman. He distrusted theories, particularly when they seemed to lead nowhere. He said, “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “If the office can spare me for a couple of days, I’m going to Alfriston.”

  Jonas secured a room at the Star Hotel, which has a seventeenth-century background of smugglers and secret passages, but excellent twentieth-century accommodation. He did not have to pursue his enquiries very far. The newsagent, from whom he bought his morning Times, had been one of dentist Humbolt’s patients.

  “And a right good dentist too. We couldn’t understand why he stuck to a small place like ’Friston. Could have made three times the money in Brighton or Eastbourne. Glad he did, though. Died four or five years ago. Had that big house at the bottom of Hindover Hill. Brigadier Arkinwright has it now.”