In Vino Veritas

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘I understand,’ Yewdall replied with a nod of her head. ‘So what do you know about her husband?’

  ‘One old smoothie.’ Dorothy Parker exhaled through her mouth as she spoke, causing her smoke to be chopped up by her voice. ‘He claimed – probably still claims – to be “something in the city”, but both my husband and I doubted that. To me he had all the superficial charm of the typical psychopath. He just saw people as being there for his use, to be used to further his own ends, but he did, and probably still does, have a splendid house, so money was coming from somewhere. But what sort of money? I mean, honest or dishonest … that remains to be seen.’

  ‘Where is his house?’ Tom Ainsclough asked.

  ‘St John’s Wood.’ Dorothy Parker inclined her head to one side. ‘All right for some, eh? But I love this house and we are paying for it. One day it will be ours and bought with moral money.’

  ‘Yes … all right for some.’ Tom Ainsclough wrote St John’s Wood on his notepad. ‘But, as you say, moral or immoral money … that is the question.’

  ‘Yes, lived in St John’s Wood, and when he was still in his forties.’ Dorothy Parker forced a smile. ‘You can’t help but be suspicious.’

  ‘Was her husband any more specific about his source of income?’ Penny Yewdall asked. ‘Any hint at all could be very useful.’

  ‘No … not to me or Nigel, my husband. He just kept saying he was “in the world of finance” … “international finance”. He talked about “futures” and “commodities”; he talked about “phoning Jo’burg”, and “San Fran” and “HK” and places like that.’ Dorothy Parker took another deep drag on the cigarette.

  ‘Which could cover a multitude of sins.’ Yewdall sighed.

  ‘Nigel used exactly that expression. He said, “It could cover a multitude of sins” – anything from merchant banking and high finance to extortion and racketeering, but probably the latter, Nigel said, because you don’t get to own property like that at that age unless you pay hard cash … and he wasn’t in the world of entertainment where that sort of big money can be had so he was probably, is still probably, up to no good. My husband was anxious to leave his home when we had accepted Victoria’s invitation to visit and he wouldn’t be dragged back. He said he couldn’t risk being known to associate with him. If you do visit him and he plays down his wealth, take what he says with a pinch of salt.’

  ‘We’ll remember that.’ Penny Yewdall smiled.

  ‘Even Victoria didn’t know what he was doing and she had some banking experience. She was made to feel wholly out of her depth and eventually she didn’t even try to understand his world. I mean, he never had an office phone number; he only ever gave her his mobile phone number. So when he was out at work she never knew where he was. I mean, that’s no marriage.’ Dorothy Parker took one last drag on the cigarette and tossed the quarter-inch butt that remained into the fire grate. ‘But she was totally bowled over by his lifestyle. She grew up in a tiny little bungalow down Croydon way, where her parents still live, and to go from that to being the lady of the house in a property in St John’s Wood, more or less overlooking Regent’s Park … that was quite a step up for her, but she was a very materialistic person. My husband always said that he couldn’t understand what I saw in her – she just had no soul, he said, just no soul at all. He said it was all about money for Victoria Keynes. My husband is a banker but he helps with the church youth club and sings in a male voice choir; he is an amateur military historian. There’s more in his world than money but he said that Victoria Keynes was all about the old doe, ray, me.’

  ‘Do you know if there was anything unusual … out of the ordinary going on around the time of Victoria’s disappearance?’ Ainsclough asked.

  ‘No … no … I confess I knew of nothing like that.’ Dorothy Parker pursed her lips. ‘I can’t say I remember anything out of the ordinary going on. I only remember her being fixated upon taking her husband for every penny she could. I thought perhaps she was over-fixated … needlessly angry. If I was in her shoes I doubt that I would have been so emotional about it. I would have been more calm, more collected in my determination and I would have been more inclined to accept a fair settlement, but she was determined to wring every last penny out of him. I did wonder if she was being driven by another agenda, as if the anger towards her husband was possibly a vehicle to express anger at another issue in her life which was totally unconnected with her divorce … As if her husband’s infidelity had released deeply held emotions about some other matter – something she’d kept buried. It was as if the future held some form of vengeance for her and she was sharpening her knives … or her claws.’

  ‘That might be of interest,’ Yewdall replied. ‘What was her day-to-day routine when she vanished?’

  ‘She went out each day – that is, when she was here.’ Dorothy Parker leaned back against the wall. ‘I don’t know where she went … visiting her parents, visiting her sol-icitor … maybe just sitting in the library, maybe she just walked about, trying to be a good guest … did a little housework then kept out of the way. She came back in the evening and although she stayed in her room it was then that the house began to feel overcrowded. My husband would make comments, and he began to go to the pub more often than he used to go, which I didn’t like, and it was then that I suggested to Victoria that she might want to look for some alternative accommodation. She promised that she would do so and returned to her parents.’

  ‘And then she disappeared?’ Yewdall suggested.

  ‘Yes … one Friday afternoon she didn’t call on me as usual,’ Dorothy Parker explained. ‘The following day I phoned her parents to see if she was there because she had left some of her possessions in the box room she had occupied, but no, she wasn’t. So we – or rather I – expressed our concern, and her parents reported her to the police as a missing person. The police called here and took a statement, which is apparently all they could do. I believe you do not search for missing adults?’

  ‘No, no, we don’t,’ Tom Ainsclough confirmed. ‘Not unless there is clear evidence of foul play at the time of the dis-appearance, and we will also search for a person who we have reason to believe might be in grave danger … a missing fell walker in bad weather, for example, but in the sort of situation you have described, an adult who did not return home after being out all day with no way of knowing where she spent the day or who she was with … then in that case, all we can do is to take a “mis-per” report.’

  ‘Fair enough. I understand most missing persons are found or they return home within twenty-four hours of being reported missing.’ Dorothy Parker glanced to her left as her eye was caught by a middle-aged woman walking past her house.

  ‘Yes, that is the case,’ Yewdall replied. Then she asked, ‘I assume that your husband is at work?’

  ‘Yes, he is a banker, as I said – he’s the branch accountant.’ She added with a note of pride, ‘I worked there too, though I was only a cashier, courtesy of Glenvale School for Girls in Putney. Our “gels” go to university and if a “gel” can’t get to university she goes to a teacher training college, and if the “gel” can’t get to teacher training college then the “gel” goes to work in a bank. My mother and grandmother both went to Glenvale and when my grandmother was there she and her friend were beaten in front of the whole school for going into Woolworths … three of the strap on the palm of each hand. They had stopped doing that by the time I went there but that nose-in-the-air ethos still prevailed and I was a “plonker” who left at sixteen and went to work in a bank. I didn’t last very long in banking – it was all too straight-laced and humourless for me, and so I left but not until I had acquired a husband, which is why “gels” go and work in a bank, and not until me and Victoria Keynes had befriended each other.’ Dorothy Parker shrugged her shoulders. ‘I dare say we make an odd couple … me and Nigel … him so smartly dressed and me sadly clinging on to my youth, but I don’t put flowers in my hair and I can get dolled up if I have to go
with Nigel to a “do” with the bank staff … but it’s always uncomfortable.’

  ‘Well that’s life for us poor women.’ Penny Yewdall grinned. ‘As my mother once told me, “If you glam up and you are not uncomfortable, you’re just not glammed up.”’

  ‘That’s a very succinct way of putting it.’ Dorothy Parker returned the grin. ‘But you know, my husband – he is in the world of legitimate finance, and he said that if Victoria’s husband was a legitimate financier then he was a Dutchman … but I didn’t think it was my place to interfere or sound alarm bells. I don’t think Victoria’s parents were wildly happy with the union but it was up to them, not me or my husband, to fire warning shots across their daughter’s bows.’

  ‘Fair enough, I dare say.’ Penny Yewdall looked briefly around the room. It was, she thought, definitely a ‘her’ house, not a ‘his’ house. It was the home of an ageing hippy chick, not an established banker. There would also be, she firmly believed, a plentiful supply of cannabis in the house kept somewhere just out of sight, and doubtless to be plundered as soon as she and Tom Ainsclough had taken their leave. She then asked, ‘What did you feel about Mr Woodhuyse, Victoria’s husband?’

  ‘You mean intuitively?’ Dorothy Parker smiled gently as she and Penny Yewdall held eye contact. ‘The old “woman’s intuition foxtrot”? Well, I always felt that Vicky had jumped too eagerly into the wrong bed. She seemed to marry in haste and repent at leisure in the hereafter.’

  ‘Repent?’ Penny Yewdall repeated. ‘Does that imply that you believe her husband was responsible for her disappearance and for her murder?’

  ‘Yes, frankly I do,’ Dorothy Parker replied with a venomous tone. ‘Yes … as I said, it’s the old “woman’s intuition foxtrot”, but yes, I do think that he was at the bottom of it all. Have you met him yet?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ Penny Yewdall admitted. ‘We will, of course, be calling on him, but we’d like as much information about him as possible before we do visit. Not only about him, but really the entire situation, you know … their lifestyle, friends … everything.’

  ‘Friends?’ Dorothy Parker raised her eyebrows. ‘I think Victoria did have friends whom she met through her husband, but I never met any of them. She would go away during the day as if visiting but I don’t know where. Occasionally she would go out at night – that’s when she was living here with me and the bold Nigel and so with a sense that she was going somewhere, as if she was addressing a task to be completed. It really was not in Victoria’s nature to kill time by riding round and round on the Circle line or sitting in the reference section of the public library, although I suspect she did that so as to keep out of our way as much as she could. I’m sorry; I really don’t know who you can ask about her life with her husband.’

  ‘We could get sniffer dogs in here,’ Frankie Brunnie glanced round the lock-up, ‘but I doubt it would do any good.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree.’ Victor Swannell cleared his throat as the ammonia fumes reached him. ‘This place has been well sanitized.’

  ‘Which means,’ Brunnie also coughed, ‘that it has been very recently used, and used for the sort of purpose to which a sniffer dog would react and used by someone who knows the need to prevent sniffer dogs from detecting what they are trained to detect. No dog would lie down and wag its tail anywhere in here. And with David Danby in custody it means that Mr Big in his pig’s face mask and his heavies have got another refuse collector to tidy up after them.’

  Brunnie and Swannell had driven to the address in the rental book found in Danby’s flat. It was, not wholly to their surprise, unoccupied. The door was poorly secured by a barrel lock which Brunnie forced with his shoulder, and did so quite easily. The interior was wholly empty. Nothing was contained within. All was encased in a concrete floor, unfaced brick walls and a wooden roof. There was no need for elaborate locks when there was nothing to keep safe and secure, and nothing of value to store.

  ‘I reckon they must allow the door to remain open now and again to convince the local felons there is nothing worth stealing,’ Brunnie observed, ‘and so when a body has to be “cured” over a four-day period, no one will break in.’

  ‘That must be their practice,’ Swannell whispered in agreement. ‘So why would a burnt-out has-been like David Danby, who lives in squalor, have a rental of a lock-up which is kept empty and spick and span?’ Swannell commented. ‘I mean, you could eat off this floor, not that I would want to, but if you did you wouldn’t get food poisoning.’

  ‘We’d better secure it anyway.’ Brunnie turned to go. ‘Get the scene-of-crime boys and girls in here. There might be something of interest which is not visible to the naked eye, but somehow I don’t think they’ll find anything of interest to us.’

  ‘I doubt if they’ll find anything at all,’ Swannell replied dryly. ‘The owner might be able to tell us something. We ought to check with the Land Registry.’

  ‘I confess I was wondering when you’d deign to call on me.’ Elliot Woodhuyse stood in the doorway of his home on Springfield Road, St John’s Wood, NW8. Penny Yewdall and Tom Ainsclough had parked their car in the nearest available space and had walked the hundred yards to the last known address of the husband of the late Victoria Keynes. The house revealed itself to be a detached property on four levels, one being a basement. The basement level and the elevated ground floor were both painted white, which glared in the sunlight and caused Yewdall and Ainsclough to squint as they viewed the property from the pavement. The upper floors of the house were of unpainted light grey-coloured London brick with only the window frames painted in white paint to match the lower floors of the building. A small paved area stood in front of the house, upon which a black Porsche 911 was parked. Black painted railings separated the paved area from the pavement and from the road beyond the pavement.

  ‘How much money do you think we’re calling on?’ Yewdall had considered the property. ‘Twenty, thirty million?’

  ‘More, I’d say.’ Ainsclough had walked from the pavement in front of the Porsche. ‘Probably twice as much, but I can see what Dorothy Parker meant: I can’t see a man in his forties getting a mortgage to buy this house. A man in his forties who is a rock star or a successful actor might be able to buy this house with honest cash … any other forty-something buys it with suspect cash. We’ll see what he says.’

  Ainsclough and Yewdall had then walked side by side up the flight of steps to the door which was at the side of the house. Yewdall had rung the bell, upon which they’d heard the sound of the Westminster chimes echoing loudly within the house. There had been a few moments’ delay and then the white-painted door had opened slowly, and somewhat imperiously, Ainsclough thought, by a tall, clean-shaven man who appeared to be in his late fifties. He wore a white T-shirt, white trousers and white sports shoes. Ainsclough and Yewdall had showed their identity cards and given their reasons for calling before he’d spoken. He stepped to one side and beckoned the officers to enter his house. ‘I am Elliot Woodhuyse, her husband.’

  ‘So you’re expecting us?’ Yewdall replaced her ID in her handbag.

  ‘Of course I was expecting you,’ Woodhuyse replied with a strong note of sarcasm. ‘I read the papers, I watch the TV news. So she has turned up … or rather her body has? I thought she might. I confess I didn’t think that it would take the best part of ten years though. Confess that surprised me. But do come in, it’s better than chatting on the doorstep.’ Woodhuyse stepped further to one side, allowing Yewdall and Ainsclough to enter the house. Yewdall noted that Woodhuyse wore an expensive-looking watch but no other decoration. He wore his black hair neatly cut. It crossed Yewdall’s mind that he was of the appearance that would make middle-aged women go weak at the knees if he were wearing a cassock and a clerical collar.

  She also sensed that the man was evil.

  The officers found that the inside of the house exuded a superficial air of wealth. No books were in evidence, no wall decorations other than a mirror; the walls were
painted white like the exterior of the house and the furniture was modern in white upholstery suspended from chrome frames. The floor was of varnished floorboards with white goatskin rugs, six in all, scattered in a haphazard manner. A large plasma TV screen was attached to the wall and expensive-looking hi-fi equipment stood on a low table beneath the screen. A modern-looking dining table stood beside the window on the opposite side of the room to the roadway side, which was surrounded by six very high-backed chairs, also of modern design. The rear window of the house, beyond the dining table, looked out on to a large, neatly kept garden, with a closely mown lawn and with shrubs and trees at the bottom of the garden.

  A young, slender, yellow-haired woman wearing a multi-coloured body-length kaftan in lightweight cotton stood by the table looking quizzically at Yewdall and Ainsclough.

  ‘We need privacy.’ Woodhuyse addressed the lemon-haired woman who then proceeded to glide silently out of the room, exiting by a second door which Yewdall and Ainsclough could not see from their vantage point. As she left the room the woman gave Yewdall and Ainsclough a smug, self-satisfied ‘I-bet-I-live-in-a-better-house-than-you-do’ look.

  ‘Do take a seat.’ Elliot Woodhuyse indicated the designer furniture. ‘I mean, there’s no point in standing when you can sit … none that I can see anyway.’

  Ainsclough and Yewdall sat on a low-slung settee; Elliot Woodhuyse occupied a chair of similar, matching design.

  ‘So we don’t have to tell you that your wife’s body has been found?’ Tom Ainsclough began.

  ‘No … no, you don’t – you can dispense with that formality,’ Woodhuyse replied in a reserved manner, holding his head slightly inclined backwards, looking down his nose at the officers. ‘She was found buried in an allotment somewhere south of the river – New Cross, I think the newscaster said. Do you know I had to look up what an allotment was – in that sense, I mean. I have heard of an allotment of money for one thing or another, but I never heard of a bit of land being allotted to someone to use to grow potatoes to eat. How charming; how very quaint, don’t you think?’