‘It won’t stay like this for long, of course. There’s some talk of a parade of shops … which brings me to what I want to talk to you about.’ She paused and then said, ‘Osbert Rees-Talbot was my brother.’
He had of course marked her down several minutes ago as being the aunt Gilmour had spoken of, who’d been so good to his Maisie when she first went to work at Alma House, as well as being the doctor, Kay Dysart’s, aunt. Maisie apparently had a great respect and liking for Aunt Deborah, Gilmour had said. Aware of her watching him from under the brim of that peculiar hat, he could understand why she was said to be eccentric – not mad, but a little fey perhaps. He decided to humour her.
‘Forgive me, but what has a parade of shops here to do with your brother?’
‘Oh, Osbert had nothing to do with this place – that was just an association of ideas. Though Arthur Aston, as far as I know, might well have been amongst those who are wanting to buy it, for the same reason he was wanting to buy Hadley Piece from us – to make a profit.’ She paused and plucked another of the weeds growing near the step on which she was sitting, while looking at him with guileless brown eyes.
‘Oh.’ He had a feeling this was going to take more than the few minutes she had suggested if he was to make any sense of it. She made him feel large and awkward, looming in front of her as she perched on the steps, so he seated himself at the far end of the one she occupied. ‘What or where is Hadley Piece?’
‘I thought you might not know,’ she said, nodding her satisfaction, and then went on to explain with admirable succinctness, ‘It’s a run-down, tumbledown old factory. Arthur Aston had been hankering after buying it for ages. It was originally bought by my grandfather, and eventually came to the three of us jointly, to my brothers Hamer and Osbert, and myself. When Mr Aston approached us to buy it, Hamer was quite willing to sell his share. He lives in Malvern, you see,’ she added, as if residence in the spa-town was quite enough to explain everything, ‘and has no idea what goes on around here – but Osbert and I were dead against it. I’m afraid Mr Aston made rather a nuisance of himself, pestering us to sell, despite our refusals.’
‘A tumbledown building? I’m tempted to ask why you refused.’
‘He said he wanted it to expand his business, but that was nonsense. The place is practically derelict, goodness knows what it would have cost him to make it usable again. No, he wanted to buy cheap and sell dear. I’m afraid he was not a nice man, Inspector.’
‘Ah. But who would want to buy it from him?’
‘The council, eventually. Not the building, but the land. They need land to build more homes, and it’s in my mind Hadley Piece should be given to them for that purpose.’ At his raised eyebrows, she smiled. ‘We all – myself, Hamer and Osbert’s children, to whom his share has now passed – have more than enough money for our own needs without the necessity for extracting that bit more from what the sale of a white elephant like that would bring. I shall do my best to persuade the others.’
He thought with amusement that her ‘persuasions’ might well be irresistible. ‘Why are you telling me this, Miss Rees-Talbot?’
‘None of it matters any more now, of course, unless …’ She paused. ‘I have to confess, I am concerned why Osbert, just before he died, for some reason gave in to Aston’s pestering to sell to him, so that in actual fact I was the only one who was holding out at the end.’
She was not an old woman – in her mid-fifties, he judged – but that odd, old fashioned get-up made her seem so, until you looked at her face, which was still youthful. But now, suddenly, she did look older, and very sad as she sat on the steps, the willowherb in her hand. Suddenly she asked, ‘How many accidental drownings in the bath have you known, Inspector?’
He met her clear gaze gravely. ‘Personally, I have never come across any. The human instinct for survival is very strong. One would struggle, unless …’
‘Unless one were handicapped, unable to struggle. Yes, yes. But you see, Inspector, Osbert was well able to cope with the loss of an arm. You would have been amazed at what he could do. I do not believe for one moment that his disability would have prevented him from saving himself.’
‘I understand that his general health wasn’t good. It might have caused him temporarily to lose consciousness.’
‘That’s possible. He was often in a great deal of pain. But I don’t believe that, either. Let’s not beat about the bush … it’s clear that when you spoke to my niece and nephew, they didn’t mention this Hadley Piece business to you – probably because they didn’t think it important. But when Margaret told me about the other – transactions – with Arthur Aston that Mr Lazenby has discovered … well, put together, it seems to me very much like a case of what I believe is known as blackmail.’
She kept her eyes on him as he thought about what she’d said. ‘You are a very astute lady, Miss Rees-Talbot. So you must realize there has to be some cause for blackmail.’
‘Well,’ she said quite sharply, ‘Osbert’s life, since he was wounded and came back to live in Folbury, didn’t lead to opportunities for the sort of activities I imagine would give rise to blackmail. At the same time,’ she added sadly, ‘I have to admit there was always something reserved, secretive even, about my brother. He never revealed himself, not entirely, even as a boy.’
She stopped, for so long he thought she might be having second thoughts about approaching him with all this.
‘Miss Rees-Talbot, is there something more you feel you should tell me?’
‘I’m afraid there is. It pains me to say my brother was not a man who would face up to things. He was not a physical coward – far from it, and his military record will prove that. But he would not always face facts. He preferred to walk away, to shut his eyes. I’ve thought very hard about this … maybe he was being made to pay, not for something he did, but something he did not do. A sin of omission, Inspector.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
She sighed. ‘Well, I don’t understand either. Have they told you he was writing a book about his army experiences in South Africa – which he abandoned when it was nearly complete? No? It might be a good idea if you asked my niece for a look at it. He must have witnessed many injustices when he was out there fighting – in fact I know that he did, though he would say little about it – and in the end perhaps he was unwilling to acknowledge certain things, until he saw them put down in black and white. Perhaps he was being blackmailed not to mention them? Perhaps Aston was involved in the same thing, and he was being blackmailed, too? Otherwise, why has he been killed?’
The sonorous boom of the parish church clock reminded Reardon he’d planned to be back at the station twenty minutes since. He stood up and shook her hand, dry and papery in his grasp. ‘Miss Rees-Talbot, thank you for bringing this to our notice. I won’t forget what you’ve said.’ He smiled. ‘We could do with someone with your intuition on the Force.’
‘It’s only common sense.’ She too stood up and picked up her parcels. They were numerous but not heavy and she shook her head when he offered to help her with them. ‘I’ll just leave you with this, Inspector … If Osbert did take his own life, it must have been under the greatest provocation. I believe in the end, despite everything, he would never have done that had it not been to protect his family. He would not have committed the ultimate sin, otherwise.’
Twelve
I could get used to this, better than Shanks’s pony any day, Joe was thinking as he stepped out of the police car on the opposite side of the road to Aston’s workshop on Henrietta Street – though not if it meant being driven by Stringer, the young constable who had come with the car to act as driver. Joe had taken an instant dislike to him, a moaning minnie with a permanent grievance and a constant gripe about why, when he was so keen, had been to grammar school and had a gift for sniffing out suspects, he’d been unaccountably passed over for selection into the ranks of the detectives. Joe could have told him why.
He had barely
stepped thankfully out on to the pavement and shut the car door behind him before he heard a reedy voice summoning him: ‘You there – policeman! Here a minute.’ He turned in the direction of the call and saw a white-haired woman sitting at an open window in one of the houses just behind him, beckoning. ‘Policeman!’ she called again.
Joe was over the moon that Reardon had succeeded in having him taken off all other duties in order to work with him on this case, but so much for plain clothes and anonymity! He hoped he hadn’t developed police plod. More likely it was the hair that made him a target for anyone who thought they could nobble him to find out what was going on. This woman had obviously seen him previously with the other police and remembered. He sighed and walked over to the house.
The warm weather was continuing and the sash window had been thrown up from the bottom. The old woman sat in a chair in front of it, swathed in shawls. Behind her he glimpsed the sad trappings of an invalid’s existence: a table with pillboxes and a jug of water, a white counterpane on a brass bedstead that had been brought downstairs for the convenience of those who had to care for her, a helpless old person who had to be helped from bed to chair.
This particular old person, however, though she looked frail, with lines of pain drawn round her mouth and her face leached of all colour, seemed far from helpless. She was briskly knitting a sock on four steel needles, the heel already turned, her hands moving ceaselessly, without the need to look at what she was doing. Her eyes were bright with intelligence. ‘Have you caught who did it yet?’
It was what he’d expected and he didn’t pretend not to understand. Aston’s death was presently the main topic of excited interest in the whole of Folbury, but especially here, in the street where it had occurred. ‘Not yet, Mrs …?’
‘Ibbotson. Miss Ibbotson. Gladys. You never came to ask me any questions.’
‘Not me personally, no, but I was under the impression everyone in the street had been approached by one of our officers.’
‘The rest of them were, but I wasn’t so well the day they came round. I’d had to take to my bed that day, so my niece didn’t bother me. She tells me they wanted to know if anybody saw anything funny going on.’
‘That’s right, but if you were confined to bed, Miss Ibbotson—’
‘Gladys. Nobody calls me Miss Ibbotson. See, I wasn’t in bed, not then. Not the day they say it happened, I mean.’ Joe felt a quickening of interest. He perched himself on the stone windowsill, where he could talk to her without having to bend down and not raise his voice too much, though there was no chance of being overheard since the street was deserted at the moment. ‘I see most things, you know, sitting here,’ she went on. ‘Nothing else to do but look out and watch folk.’
Day after day, Joe thought, nothing to see but the mundane life in the street: the comings and goings between the various workshops, children running about, bouncing balls against the wall or playing marbles, neighbours setting out to go shopping must provide the sum total of her day’s interest. No view except of Aston’s workshop, the motor repair place belching out fumes and the tall Victorian brick-built elementary school looming up behind that. ‘So what did you see, then, Gladys? Or maybe who?’
‘Well, for a start I saw Vincent.’
‘Who’s Vincent?’ He didn’t recall any Vincent being mentioned by the two bobbies who’d done the door-knocking, and he’d been looking through the notes they’d made just before he left the station.
‘The milkman. Tompkin’s lad.’ She was enjoying this, spinning it out. ‘I had my eye on him because he will leave his blessed float right in the middle of the road while he delivers, don’t matter how many times he’s told he’s obstructing other traffic, and I was going to give him a piece of my mind – until it happened. No thought for anybody else, not like his father used to be. It’s only a narrow street and if anybody else comes along it causes a right commotion, I can tell you.’
No one else had mentioned the inconsiderate milkman to the police, but then, his arrival was an everyday occurrence, so familiar no doubt that he’d grown to be part of the scenery – and in any case it hardly seemed likely he’d nipped in and shoved Aston down into the sand between delivering pints of milk. ‘What do you mean, “until it happened”? What happened?’
‘We-ell …’ Gladys did not intend to be rushed. ‘Somebody did want to get past the float – it was a butcher’s van, and the driver got mad and started tooting his horn enough to waken the dead. The poor old horse nearly bolted – would’ve done, I daresay, if Vincent hadn’t come back with his churn just in time to grab the reins before he’d fairly got going. But he nearly ran over that woman that was crossing the road, all the same.’
‘You didn’t say you’d seen a woman as well, Gladys.’
‘Didn’t I?’ She grinned mischievously, showing an unexpected dimple, then sobered. ‘Anyway, I hadn’t noticed her till then, you know, what with the milk cart in the middle of the road and all the shemozzle it was creating. But she could have come out of the foundry. I don’t say she did, mind, I didn’t actually see her come out, but she could have.’
What people thought they saw at the time of an incident and what they really did see didn’t always hang together. Neither did what different people had seen at the same incident always coincide. But Gladys Ibbotson didn’t seem like a person who made mistakes.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t a man?’
‘Not unless he was wearing women’s skirts.’
‘What sort of woman was she then? Old, young, short, tall? Had you ever seen her before?’
Gladys shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Only saw her for a second or two, out of my eye corner, so to speak, and the milk cart between us. She didn’t try to cross the road again, just jumped back sharpish from the horse’s hooves and turned and ran round the corner. I think that was why I remembered her, because she ran.’
‘What time would this be?’
‘Nine o’clock,’ Gladys said promptly. ‘The school bell had just sounded and everything went quiet in the playground, like it does. I checked my clock with it. Sometimes Muriel forgets to wind it up, and if there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s a clock that’s not right.’
‘Did you know Mr Aston, Miss Ibbotson?’
‘Gladys. Only by sight. I used to see him, him and that woman that works for him, but I’ve never had cause to speak to either of them. Very smart chap, I’ll say that for him. Always in a nice dark suit and a black bowler. Shoes polished.’
‘He used to be in the army.’
‘That accounts for it, then.’
‘Well, thanks – Gladys. You’ve been very helpful.’ Joe eased himself from the windowsill, ready to go across to Aston’s. ‘Don’t forget to let us know if you recall anything else.’
‘Well, you know, I do remember one other thing, now I come to think of it. I don’t suppose it’ll be any help, but she was wearing a brown coat, that woman.’
‘I’ll make a note of that.’ Maisie had a brown coat. And how many other women in Folbury owned one? Scores, for all Joe knew.
That women could and did murder was hardly news, but it was an intriguing idea, that a woman might have been responsible for killing a big man like Aston. And yet, it wouldn’t have needed much physical strength – a push from behind, Aston perhaps winded as he landed in the sand, and then a foot pressed on his neck – a minute or two would have sufficed.
The workshop was in full operation once more, men standing in front of their machines, the screech of grinding and drilling setting Joe’s teeth on edge. Straight away he spotted Stanley Dowson, who lifted a hand in recognition but didn’t accompany him into the office, where Eileen Gerrity, in a fug of cigarette smoke, was bent over a stack of what looked like invoices. Her coat was hanging on a peg at the back of the door. It was green, a darkish green, unlike the bright emerald shade of her jumper, patriotic to her native Ireland no doubt but a violent contrast to her hair – much more carroty than his own, he noted.
She made no objection to his request to look through the safe once more, and waved him to the desk which Arthur Aston had presumably occupied, after which she left him to get on with it and disappeared. In a few minutes, she returned with a pint mug of tea, which she placed at his elbow.
‘Thanks, Eileen. Very welcome.’
‘Sugar?’ She held out a blue sugar bag with a teaspoon stuck into it.
‘Please. I see you’re back in business already,’ he said, helping himself and then waving the teaspoon towards the activity beyond the glass. From where he sat, he could see every machine on the shop floor. Aston would have been well placed to keep an eye on the men working for him.
‘There’s no reason not to for the moment,’ she said, ‘until we know how things are going to pan out. We still have orders to complete, and the chaps need their wages.’
‘And after that?’
She shrugged. ‘It’ll depend on her, on Lily Aston, won’t it? Whether she keeps the place going or sells up.’ A shade of vindictiveness coloured the way she said it. Maybe it was a sore point that the business would go to Aston’s wife – especially if the rumours about Eileen’s association with her boss were true and she suspected he hadn’t left a will, and that she herself was therefore unlikely to get anything.
When he had first interviewed her, just after Aston’s body had been found, Eileen had been in a state of shock. Now she seemed to have recovered what seemed to be her natural bounce and resilience. She was a war widow and needed to work, she had told him then, her husband had been killed on the Western Front – thank God they’d had no children. A well-developed woman who gave off energy like an electric light bulb – even her orangey hair seemed to strike off sparks – she had worked for Arthur Aston ever since the establishment of Aston’s Engineering.
A Dangerous Deceit Page 12