‘My dear!’ Summoning a kindness she normally found difficult to show to her daughter-in-law, Maude sat her in a chair near to the fire. Opal held her hands out to the blaze and Margaret poured tea and handed it to her, with a scone which she left untouched on her plate.
Binkie ate nothing either, but thirstily drained a cup of tea and then, immaculate as usual, stood up with his back to the fire, cleared his throat and prepared to make his pronouncement. ‘Rather glad you’re here, Symon. There’s something I have to say, and you should hear it.’
Opal’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Binkie …’ she began, but he stopped her with a dark look. She was terribly afraid he might be going to confess.
It was too bad Symon was here, with Margaret, too. Opal, for all her sophistication, didn’t know how to talk to him. He always listened courteously, which somehow made her inconsequential chatter and gossip sound too silly for anything. Binkie said he was a prig, but she supposed he couldn’t help that, being a parson … Meanwhile, she couldn’t think of a single thing she might do to stop Binkie. He continued relentlessly.
‘It will probably be a shock to you all, but I have decided to sell Maxstead – if anyone can be found to buy it, that is. As well as most of the estate.’
Into the stunned silence following this announcement, old Henry, lying at Maude’s feet, gave one of those single deep, rumbling barks he sometimes made in his sleep. As if it were a signal, the lights came on again, flickered uncertainly once or twice and then settled down, though no one moved to turn off the now redundant oil lamps.
This was it, Maude thought, feeling the energy drain from every part of her, from her very fingertips; this was what she had been afraid of for so long. ‘Why?’
‘Because this house is eating money; it costs a fortune simply to keep it standing up, as you all know. Don’t worry about yourself, Ma. You needn’t move too far. The Bothy will be empty when Frith leaves. It’s a nice house, perfectly acceptable for you to live in, without the constant worry this place brings.’
The Bothy, as Frith’s Scottish wife had whimsically named it, was a nice house, reasonably sized, manageable and pretty, but it’s not mine, thought Maude, not the house I love, where I’ve lived for thirty years and hoped to die.
Symon had his eye on her, knowing what must be going through her mind, but after the first tremble, her lips pressed together in a firm line. She had lost colour, but otherwise seemed quite all right. He suddenly stood up. ‘A word in private, Binkie. Not here, come with me. Look after Ma and Opal for now, Margaret, please.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Binkie abandoned his position on the hearthrug and threw himself down into his former seat with every intention of staying put.
‘Then think again.’ Symon’s hand fell on his shoulder, gripping it hard, drawing him upward in spite of himself. Symon was bigger than he was, stronger and fitter, and seeing his expression, the will to resist suddenly left Binkie and he allowed Symon to propel him with some force out of the room, along the corridor and into what had always been called the garden room, an untidy repository for flower vases and baskets, gumboots and mackintoshes, deck chairs, and plants being nursed by their mother on the windowsills. It was cold, and a tap over the sink in the corner dripped intermittently.
‘Right,’ Symon said, letting him go, but still facing him. ‘What’s all this damned nonsense about Maxstead, and Ma?’
‘Maxstead has nothing at all to do with you, and Ma will be taken care of.’
‘Maxstead has everything to do with me. Come on, spit it out or I’ll knock your blinking block off. And take that smirk off your face.’
The juvenile threat had come from nowhere and colour ran up under Symon’s skin even as he heard himself utter it, but his eyes darkened ominously. Binkie, finding it hard not to grin, didn’t notice this, nor his brother’s clenched fists. ‘The last time I heard you use that sort of language was when you were sixteen.’
When they had been good friends, easy with each other. And here you are now, a reverend gentleman in a dog collar, though let’s not be fooled by that, Binkie thought, now very much aware of Symon’s scarcely controlled rage. In truth, Binkie had written off his younger brother when he had chosen a vocation that was to him incomprehensible, relegating him to the ranks of the God-botherers. Only now did he see his mistake. Attempting to show sangfroid, he raised an eyebrow but said nothing more.
Symon turned from him in disgust and perched himself on the edge of a scruffy old wooden table, his folded arms holding in his anger, while Binkie, taking the opportunity to distance himself by exhibiting more nonchalance, sank into an old garden basket chair and threw his leg over the arm.
‘You’ve got yourself into some sort of scrape again, that’s obvious. What is it now?’
The tap dripped monotonously while Binkie picked up and examined an old yellow pigskin glove relegated now for use when pruning roses. A minute thorn was embedded in the thumb and he spent some time trying to remove it with his fingernails. Symon leant forward, snatched it from his hands and tossed it to the floor. ‘Well?’
There wasn’t much use in prevaricating. He knew Symon of old. Once he had his teeth into something, he was like a terrier with a rat. Tell him, then. But not everything … just enough.
He shrugged and said in an offhand way that he’d made some ill-advised investments which had failed, that he had debts which there was no prospect of covering, and that the only solution was to get rid of encumbrances.
‘Encumbrances? That’s how you see Maxstead, is it? And Ma? Is she an encumbrance as well?’
‘I’ve told you, Ma will be OK. I’ll see she’s all right.’
‘She’ll be happy, packed off to The Bothy, no doubt. That’s what you think?’
‘She will be when she ceases to have to worry about this place. It’s the only way,’ Binkie added, beginning to feel desperate.
‘What sort of investments?’
Binkie shrugged.
‘Come on, you’ve never been a speculator before, you’re not made that way. What the devil made you risk everything? Who got you into this?’
In his mind Binkie ran through a list of those old school friends of his who were successful in the money business, those he might lie about: bankers, stockbrokers, whom he might better have consulted than the disreputable – and with hindsight, plainly untrustworthy – Wim Mauritz, and then realized that was no good. Symon knew most of his acquaintances almost as well as he did. They’d all been to the same school; they’d grown up with many of them. ‘You wouldn’t know him. He was nobody.’
‘Was?’
When the two brothers had disappeared they’d left behind them a silence. Nobody seemed to be able to find anything to say, or even want to. For something to occupy herself with, Margaret went around turning off the oil lamps, then returned to the couch where Opal was sitting, nervously twisting her engagement ring, a lovely marquise-set fire opal surrounded by diamonds. Margaret had never imagined it would be possible to feel sorry for her prospective sister-in-law, but she did.
‘My dear,’ Maude said then, ‘why don’t you go upstairs and lie down for a little while? I’ll have them bring you some hot milk and whisky. If you don’t mind my saying so, you look as though you might be in for a cold, like the babies, and I’m sure you could do with a nap.’
Horrid as the hot milk sounded, Opal was astonished by the unexpected kindness, at the same time feeling an undreamed of stab of admiration for her bossy old mother-in-law, dimly sensing how much greater a blow to her this terrifyingly unexpected situation must be than to anyone else. The ring bit into her palm as she twisted it. They had said opals were unlucky when she and Binkie had chosen this. Unlucky Opal! She felt tears coming; she had a thumping headache after not sleeping last night, and would have liked nothing better than to go upstairs into the room that was always kept ready for them and weep and weep, or better still lie down and sleep for hours, but she was too afraid of what was going on between B
inkie and his brother.
‘Oh, goodness, no thank you,’ she said brightly to the offer. She stood up. ‘Where have they gone?’
‘Into the garden room, I believe,’ replied Lady Maude, attuned to all the sounds of the house. ‘But Opal—’
Opal left the room. She walked along the passage and opened the garden room door. Both men turned towards her as it opened.
‘Go away, Opal,’ Binkie said immediately.
She took another step inside and closed the door behind her.
‘Opal, my dear, I think Binkie’s right. Leave this to us.’
She knew from the atmosphere that Symon must have got everything from Binkie already, even though he spoke kindly to her, just as his mother had done, as if to a child who didn’t understand these things. And though she didn’t, not at all, it suddenly annoyed her intensely to know they all thought her such a brainless thing, nothing but a social flibbertigibbet, incapable of deep feeling. Drawing herself up very straight, she said, ‘Binkie had nothing to do with the murder of that man Mauritz—’
Binkie sprang up out of the chair as if he’d been electrocuted and grasped both her wrists, tight as handcuffs. ‘Shut up, Opal!’ His eyes were not sleepy and hooded now, they were wide open, and this time as she looked into their grey-green depths she was frightened, really frightened, something she had never thought possible of her own husband. ‘Not another word, you little fool. Not – another – word!’ he repeated, enunciating each word separately. ‘Do you hear me?’
‘That’s enough,’ said Symon, stepping up to them.
They all three stood in the centre of the shadowy room, looking at one another, as at last the threatened rain began in a sudden crashing deluge. Then Binkie let go of Opal’s wrists and sank back into the chair, his head in his hands. Symon went back to the table and again perched there with his arms crossed, looking stern and accusing and yet, Opal felt, in a funny sort of way, oddly reassuring. There seemed to be nothing more to say, and the sound of the rain drilling on to the paving outside made the silence within all the more intense.
‘Well, what am I going to do, Reverend?’ Binkie asked at last, looking up.
‘You’re a bloody fool, Binkie,’ answered the reverend forcefully. ‘But that doesn’t mean you don’t know damn well what you have to do.’
Eighteen
The following day, Reardon received a telephone message from Maxstead Court, requesting his immediate presence over there, concerning the matter they had previously discussed. Could this be a breakthrough, coming, as it so often did, through someone deciding they’d be better off telling what they knew? He made a thumbs up sign to Joe, but replied very politely indeed that if Sir Julian wished to speak to him, he would be here all morning at the police station in Folbury.
Now they were gathered in Waterhouse’s office, where there was enough room for the four of them: Sir Julian Scroope, Reardon, Gilmour, and Waterhouse himself, who had chosen to keep a silent watch over his domain from the background.
‘You told us you didn’t know Wim Mauritz, Sir Julian.’
‘Well, yes. I do rather think that’s what I may have led you to believe.’
Reardon waited.
‘What it is, I seem to have got myself into a bit of a fix through him,’ Scroope drawled, shrugging his shoulders and not quite looking at any of the police officers from under his hooded lids, though if he was overwhelmed by such a police presence, that was the only way he was showing it. ‘He was an embarrassment to me, don’t you see? To be more accurate, he took me to the cleaners, as they say. Scarcely something one wants to make public knowledge, hmm?’
‘Do I understand you are making a confession?’
‘If you put it that way, I suppose I am.’ Prepared for this, he answered with a consciously rueful smile. ‘But by God no, I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking. The bastard – if you’ll excuse me – was dead and buried, then found, long before I ever knew the extent of just what he’d done to me. Mind if I smoke?’
Reardon glanced at Waterhouse – it was his office – and received a nod. ‘If it’s going to help you tell us the truth, go ahead.’
Julian spent some time extracting a cigarette from a monogrammed silver cigarette case, lighting it and then offering the case in a general direction. Everyone else declined. ‘As a matter of fact, I find it rather a ludicrous notion,’ he observed lazily, ‘that I should be thought capable of killing anyone, much less someone of that size.’
Reardon inspected the man sitting in front of him, a slight man in well-tailored country tweeds, a soft Tattersall checked shirt, knitted silk tie. The no-doubt hand-made shoes shone with a deep, ox-blood polish. His cuff links were black, square-cut onyx and his hands were narrow and shapely, though disfigured by the nicotine stains and bitten nails. He was inclined to agree with Scroope’s estimation of himself: he did not look like anyone who could overpower and kill a muscular man of more than six feet, much less dig a grave for him in half-frozen ground. Always supposing, Reardon thought, allowing himself a passing touch of humour, that he would even have known where spades were located at Maxstead Court. On the face of it, Sir Julian Scroope, baronet, wasn’t a likely killer … but Reardon had known more unlikely ones, and above the brilliantine scent of his slicked-back yellow hair, he could also smell the scent of fear.
‘It would help if you were to start at the beginning and tell us what you know about all this, Sir Julian. First, how did you meet Mauritz?’
‘Well, actually, it was at Maxstead.’ Fortified by the cigarette, he sat back, crossing his extended legs at the ankle.
‘Maxstead Court, I suppose you mean? The house? What was he doing there?’
‘He had come to see my mother.’
A quick look passed between Reardon and Joe, who was sitting at the end of the desk, his notebook open, pencil at the ready; Lady Maude, too, had denied ever having met Mauritz. ‘When was this?’
‘Oh, some months ago,’ he answered vaguely, and then suddenly became more communicative. The fellow had come uninvited, he said, and in fact had been rather forcibly escorted from the house by himself, at his mother’s request. Once outside, they had exchanged heated words, Sir Julian warning him to keep away from Maxstead. But far from leaving, Mauritz, undeterred, had suggested they try to talk more sensibly and resolve the situation. They could do so more comfortably if they went to sit in his car …
For some reason Sir Julian had agreed to do what Mauritz asked, and after a while the conversation had indeed taken a more amicable turn. In fact, one thing leading to another, it had ended up with Mauritz putting a proposition before Sir Julian, offering to put him in the way of some insider information regarding the flotation of shares in a newly formed South African copper-mining syndicate. ‘About which, he assured me,’ he finished bitterly, ‘there was no risk involved, otherwise, well …’
‘Otherwise you would not have agreed,’ Reardon finished drily.
‘I would have thought twice, certainly.’ They had met two or three times after that, he went on, when the Julian Scroopes were down at Maxstead, and negotiations for buying shares in the company, though proceeding slowly, were, Mauritz had assured him, going well.
‘How did you contact him? Presumably you had his address?’
‘No. He telephoned me to arrange our meetings. In a pub called the Fighting Cocks, on the other side of Arms Green.’
Reardon knew it – noisy, anonymous, crowded, not a place where strangers would be remarked upon. ‘When was the last time?’
‘Early December. He said he would report back to me after the Christmas holiday as to how things were going, give me some indication of when I might expect some return. He’d promised he would take care of everything, and I have to say he impressed me enough to trust him implicitly. I’d told him how many shares to buy and handed him a cheque and – I’m afraid that was that.’ The urbane mask slipped, his face suddenly twisted with held-in fury. It crossed Reardon’s mind
that he wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of Scroope’s temper.
‘You heard nothing more from him?’
‘Nothing. Nor had I any idea how to get in contact with him. He simply disappeared – until he turned up dead. By that time I was worried sick about what was to happen to my investment. I’d actually engaged a private investigator to see what he could find out, but he didn’t hold out much hope. Rightly so as it turns out,’ he added bitterly. ‘Just a few days ago, I learned there was no company, no mine, nothing, that every brass farthing of my money was gone. To be frank, the whole bloody thing had been cooked up in that damned rogue and swindler’s imagination. And now he’s dead and my money’s gone with him.’
There was a comprehensive silence when he had finished, his cigarette long since burned to ash. He lit another, with hands that were no longer quite so steady.
You had to wonder how anyone, given his advantages of birth and education, could be so incredibly gullible, stupid and – yes, selfish, in believing all that, in not taking into account the possible consequences to his wife and family. Though as far as Reardon knew, none of those things were confined to people of one class. Greed, pure and simple, had made fools of more than he.
‘Did he ever mention his wife?’
‘His wife? Mauritz? No, never.’ Scroope’s eyebrows rose disbelievingly. ‘Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine him as being married. Why?’ A ray of hope suddenly lit his face. ‘You think there could be any chance—?’
‘No. I should imagine she’s back in South Africa by now.’
‘God, yes, I suppose she must be.’ He looked bleaker than ever.
‘Let’s go back to when you first met him. You omitted to mention why it was necessary for you to “escort” him from the house, as you said you did?’
‘Ah, well.’ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘To be frank, he was threatening my mother.’
‘Threatening? Really? How?’
‘Perhaps that’s a bit strong, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer when she …’
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