He said nothing more. Bohun was longing to know what development had sent him scurrying back, but realised that his curiosity was unlikely to be satisfied.
In fact, his visitor was actually getting into his car before he decided to speak. He said, “Austin presented that passport at Heathrow, half an hour ago. When he spotted that there was going to be trouble, he ran for it. They haven’t picked him up yet.”
Bohun stood in the street and watched the tail-lights of the car disappear. Then he slowly climbed the stairs back to his flat. A thin light was beginning to come back into the sky. It was clear to him that he wasn’t going to get his ration of sleep that night. He put on the kettle, made himself a cup of coffee, and finished his reading of the Bellinger family files.
At ten o’clock that morning he called on Miss Louise Bellinger at her house in Hertfordshire. She received him in a decaying morning room, turned a resentful Siamese cat off the sofa, and invited him to sit down. Bohun had wondered how he was going to explain the real motives for his visit, but she saved him the trouble.
“Do you think,” she said, “that I’m going mad?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I think I am. Have a look at that. It came this morning.”
It was a letter scribbled on two sides of a sheet of thin foreign notepaper. Bohun turned to the end, and read, “Yours affectionately, Herbert.” He then turned back to the beginning and saw that the address was Salzkammergut, in the Austrian Dolomites, and that it was dated four days before. Light dawned.
“That’s all right,” he said.
“It’s not all right,” said Miss Bellinger. “That’s the whole point. It’s all wrong. I’m beginning to have illusions. Terribly graphic illusions. Four days ago – on the very day this was written – a young man came into this room. I couldn’t recall his name, but I knew him by sight. He was a friend of Herbert’s. Herbert had sent him. He wanted me to write a letter to a Mr. Bohun – he’s that old donkey Craine’s junior partner—”
“That’s me,” said Bohun.
The old lady peered at him in mild surprise, and said, “Oh, that’s who you are, is it? You don’t look much like a lawyer.”
“Did this man say why Herbert couldn’t have come along himself?”
“He was busy doing something. I’ve really forgotten what it was. Does it matter ?”
“Not a bit,” said Bohun. “Please go on.”
“Well, that’s all. He said it was urgent, so I sat down and wrote the letter. He posted it for me.”
“I see,” said Bohun.
“Well, I don’t. If Herbert was already abroad, why should he need a passport?”
“I’m afraid this man was lying to you.”
“What a very curious thing to do. Of course, people nowadays haven’t got the same regard for truth. Stop it, you brute!” This was to the resentful cat which had emerged from ambush under Miss Bellinger’s chair and buried its claws in her ankle.
She kicked at it deftly, and it disappeared, in spitting fury, under the sofa.
“There’s one thing I would like to know,” said Bohun. “You said you recognised this young man. Can you remember where you’d seen him before?”
“At a wedding.”
“Whose?”
The old lady shook her head. “You can’t expect me to remember things like that,” she said. “It was a family wedding. A very pretty one. He sat on the other side of the church to us, and came and talked to us afterwards. Herbert and he found they’d been at school together – or it may have been at college. I can’t remember anything else.”
As soon as he got back to the office, Bohun sent for Sergeant Cockerill. He said, “I want all the files we’ve got on the Bellinger family. Not just Herbert and Aunt Louie, the lot.”
“Right back to Sir Rawnsley Bellinger?”
“Back to Adam, if we go back that far.”
“I don’t remember an Adam Bellinger.”
“Skip it,” said Bohun. “I was speaking metaphorically. I meant, go back as far as our records go.”
“It’ll be quite a big job. I’ll have to go down to Slough and Crawley and may be to Ware as well. Is it an urgent job?”
“It’s not just urgent. It’s a job of national importance. Hire a car. Make a round trip. The firm will pay.”
By that evening the fruits of the sergeant’s round trip were completely filling one end of Bohun’s sitting room. Eight black japanned tin boxes, two tea chests, a pile of deed wallets, a stack of letter files, and an old, brown leather suitcase, which turned out to contain the full-dress levée uniform, complete with sword, which Sir Rawnsley Bellinger had deposited with Abel Horniman in 1888.
Bohun started with the tin box labelled, Sir Rawnsley Bellinger, Marriage Settlement and set out to reconstruct the family.
Sir Rawnsley had sired three boys and a girl. Henry, the eldest, born in 1890 had, at the early age of twenty-one, married a French girl, Celestine Legrange. Bohun pictured her as a fluffy little thing whose extravagance had driven Henry to his unfortunate financial crash. Their daughter, Lettice, married George Vaisey in 1934. That wedding could be ruled out. Herbert would have been one year old at the time.
There were two children, Christopher Vaisey, a doctor, as yet unmarried, and Agnes, who married Hugo Marlin in 1957. Distinctly more possible. Herbert would be twenty-four, just down from Oxford. And the marriage was long enough ago for Aunt Louie to have forgotten all the details. File that one for reference.
Ruling out Aunt Louie, and her brother, Arthur, who had married Millicent and produced Herbert, that left only Sir Rawnsley’s youngest child, Alfred. Married in 1932, to Margaret Parker, daughter of the Bishop of Putney. Marriage dissolved in 1937. No children. Second marriage in 1939 to a Miss Broach. A gap, represented no doubt, by the war, then six children in rapid succession; but the eldest only born in 1947 and all unmarried as yet. So it must have been the Agnes Vaisey – Hugo Marlin wedding. And if Austin had been sitting ‘on the other side of the church’, he must have been a friend of the Marlins before he met Herbert at school or university.
Bohun proceeded to concentrate on the Marlin side of the family.
Fortunately, they had been clients for almost as long as the Bellingers. A busy set – with settlements, wills and deeds of family arrangement. Hugo was an insurance broker, who had taken over his father-in-law George Vaisey’s business and expanded into half a dozen profitable lines.
Bohun took five large pieces of paper. In the centre of each he inscribed a name – George Vaisey, Lettice Bellinger, Christopher Vaisey, Hugo Marlin and Agnes Vaisey. He then proceeded to write round them, in concentric circles, the names of all the people who had been connected with them, in private life or in business: the trustees and beneficiaries of their settlements; the people who had witnessed their own and their family’s wills; their partners, the secretaries and directors of the half dozen companies with whom they had been concerned, and the names of the other companies of which those directors had, in turn, themselves been directors. Hugo seemed to have been an uncommonly quarrelsome man, and one circle comprised the people against whom he had litigated, and the names of the witnesses on both sides.
Lettice Bellinger had been a compulsive letter writer, both before and after her marriage to George Vaisey, and her correspondence produced a whole catalogue of names which, in turn, produced further names, and those names suggested different avenues of research.
Six o’clock was sounding faintly from the clocks in the Strand when Bohun straightened his aching back, and regarded his first night’s work with satisfaction.
There were nearly a thousand names on the sheets of paper, but they were by no means a thousand different names. It was extraordinary how the same people recurred in quite different contexts. It was like seeing your favourite character actor, thought Bohun, turning up in half a dozen different parts. For instance, a man who had been a secretary in one of George Vaisey’s early companies, and had witnessed h
is will (the first of three that he made), had married a distant Marlin cousin, subsequently divorced her, and was now a director in one of the Marlin company’s main competitors, and had featured in the big patent dispute three years before.
William Austin’s name had appeared in several different capacities, and each time Bohun had underscored it heavily in red. His mother had been a friend of the Miss Broach who had been Alfred Bellinger’s second wife. He had been a contemporary of Herbert’s, both at school and university, and had spent one complete holiday with him, a fact which Aunt Louie had evidently forgotten.
His acquaintanceship with Hugo Marlin had arisen because they used the same church and had been involved in the troubles of its vicar, who had been forced to resign over a matter concerning choirboys. Marlin had used his influence to get Austin started at the Bar, but then seemed to have drifted out of his life. Quite a few other people had drifted into it, however, leaving their footprints in the sands of time and in the records of Horniman, Brewer and Craine.
Bohun shaved and breakfasted, and reached the office in time to get hold of the various assistants he wanted. One went to Somerset House, another to the Companies Registry, and young Rowley was dispatched to a newspaper-cutting service which he had used before and which kept, as he knew, a back-numbers section.
Bohun tackled one or two routine jobs that morning, but was unable to concentrate on them. More than half his mind was pursuing the winding tracks of William Austin through the mazes of a solicitor’s records. Soon after lunch he abandoned the effort and went back to his flat, where he found Sergeant Cockerill unloading a further cargo of files.
“You’ll know something about this family before you’ve finished,” he said approvingly. “That lot’s Sir Rawnsley’s brother’s family, the Chatterton-Taylors. I’d forgotten we had them. They married into the Carew family, but we don’t act for them.”
At five o’clock Rowley arrived with a bundle of press-cuttings and stared in amazement at the scene in Bohun’s room.
“What on earth are you doing?” he said. “Programming a computer?”
“In a way,” said Bohun.
“What do all those colours mean? Who’s the one you’ve underlined in red?”
“That’s a man called William Austin.”
“Never heard of him.”
“You will,” said Bohun. “You will.”
Rowley looked at him curiously. He had a great respect for Bohun. “You’re not pulling my leg, are you?”
“Certainly not. This is one of the most serious pieces of research I have ever undertaken.”
“Who are the blues and greens and purples and yellows?”
“It’s a colour code. They are the people who feature most often in Austin’s life. The darker the colour, the closer the association.”
Rowley had been leaning forward to read the names in Bohun’s microscopic handwriting. Now he straightened up and pulled a sheaf of cuttings from his pocket. “You’ll find quite a few of them here,” he said. “Look, there’s a purple for a start, and a green, and a brown.”
Bohun said, “What’s that one you’ve got there?”
“It’s a list of the guests at the Vaisey-Marlin wedding. It wasn’t actually published, but this place keeps them. They sometimes come in useful.”
“Useful?”
“Well, you never know. The best man might rape one of the bridesmaids. I say, can I help? It looks rather fun.”
“If you promise to keep your mouth shut,” said Bohun.
An hour later, Rowley, looking down a long list of legatees in a will said, “It’s rather like Happy Families, isn’t it? Have you got Master Bones, the Butcher’s son? No, but you can oblige me with Mrs. Block, the Barber’s wife? Talking about Block, here’s Colonel Block turned up again. What’s he?”
“Outer fringe,” said Bohun. “Pale green.”
It was two o’clock in the morning when he closed the final file. Rowley had given up an hour before and was fast asleep on the sofa. Bohun gazed at the completed pattern: the assets and liabilities, the lives and loves, the hopes and fears of a group of people, seen through the peep-hole of a solicitor’s practice. The colours around the red had sorted themselves out in a remarkable way. The predominance of the purple, the blue and the scarlet was apparent to the naked eye. He reached for the telephone.
Shipman answered it. He said, “No, we haven’t traced him yet. We’ve checked all the normal places. Hotels, boarding houses, bed-and-breakfast places, brothels, Turkish baths, and main-line stations. He may have spent two nights under a hedge, but he can’t keep that up. He’ll show up soon.”
“You’ve checked on his family?”
“Of course.”
“And his friends?”
Shipman said, the lack of two nights’ sleep lending a ragged edge to his voice, “Unfortunately we don’t happen to possess a directory of his friends. If we did, of course we could check them.”
“That’s what I rather thought,” said Bohun. “Austin’s a sensible chap. He’s been a sort of policeman himself. He knows the routine. The place he’d make for would be the house of a friend. But not one with too obvious a connection. Someone who’d helped him out in the past, and would do so again, if he spun them a convincing yarn.”
“Have you got any ideas?”
“I can give you three names and addresses. There’s a man called Lewis. Averill Lewis. A barrister, not now practising. He paid Austin’s debts for him at Oxford, and helped him at the Bar. He’s got a country cottage. I’ll give you the address. Next candidate, the Reverend Arthur Champerdowne – spelt with an ‘e’. Used to have a North London living, now incumbent of a small Kentish parish. There could be an element of blackmail there. Third, Mrs. Chatterton-Taylor. She’s shown a motherly interest in Austin on a number of occasions. Extremely motherly. If you hang on, I’ll give you her address, too.”
“Well, thank you,” said Shipman.
Shipman thanked Bohun again, more officially, when Austin was discovered hiding in a back room of the Reverend Champerdowne’s rambling vicarage.
A long time afterwards, when the trial was over, and the sensation had faded out of the paper, Bohun told his senior partner all about it.
Old Mr. Graine was not in the least surprised. “The Special Branch, the Secret Service, the Police,” he said. “No doubt they’re all right in their own way. But they haven’t got our facilities.”
Cousin Once Removed
When Kenneth Alworthy said to his cousin Arthur, “I’ve fixed to take a little fishing holiday in early June. I’m going to a farm in Cumberland. It’s got two miles of fishable water and I’m told it’s as lonely as the Sahara Desert,” Arthur (himself a fisherman) felt that peculiar thrill which comes when, after the casting of successive flies, each gaudy, each attractive, each subtly different, the big trout is seen to rise ponderously from the peaty recesses under the river bank and cock his eye at the lure.
Arthur had wrought hard and long for this moment.
Almost a year ago he had mentioned Howorth’s Farm to his cousin. He had done it casually – so casually that Kenneth had already forgotten who had told him about it. Twice thereafter he had mentioned it to friends who, he guessed, would pass it on to Kenneth. Then, in March, at the time when the first daffodils look out and far-sighted people plan their holidays, he had sent a copy of a Cumberland newspaper to his cousin. In it he had marked for him an account of the newly discovered rock fissure below Rawnmere, for Kenneth was an amateur of speleology.
But it was not only the marked paragraph that he had counted on Kenneth seeing. Immediately below it was the five-line advertisement which the owner of Howorth’s Farm put into the local press each spring.
After that Arthur left it alone.
If a trout will not rise there is no profit in thrashing the water.
If you were asked, why was it so important to one cousin that the other cousin go apparently of his own free will, to a particular farm in Cumber
land, then you would have to cast widely for the answer.
First you would have to examine the will of their common grandfather, Albert Alworthy, who had made his money out of quarrying, and tied it up tightly.
His solicitor, Mr. Rumbold (the father of the present senior partner), had drawn the will, and his client’s instructions had been clear. “Tie it up as tight as the law allows,” said the old man. “To my children, and then to their children, and the survivor can have the lot. I dug it out of the earth by the sweat of my brow. Let them sweat for it.”
Fifty years later Mr. Rumbold, Junior, had attempted to explain these provisions to Arthur.
“Two wars thinned you out a lot,” he said. “Your father and your cousin Kenneth’s father – that was your Uncle Bob – were the only two of old Albert’s children who had any children themselves. And you and your cousin are the only two grandchildren left.”
“And so it goes to Kenneth and me?”
“To the survivor of Kenneth and you.”
“How much—about?”
The solicitor named a sum, and Arthur Alworthy pursed his lips.
He wanted money. He wanted it badly, and he wanted it fairly quickly. Not next week, or even next month, but if he didn’t get it in a year he was done for. Certain bills were maturing steadily. He might borrow to meet them, but borrowing more money in order to meet existing debts is an improvident form of economy, even for a man with expectations. And even borrowing could not keep him afloat for more than a year at most.
A second reason for the selection of Howorth’s Farm lay in a personal tragedy which had befallen Arthur some years before, when walking in the neighbourhood. He had lost his dog, an attractive but inquisitive cocker spaniel, down a pot-hole in the moor. It was a deep, ugly-looking hole, partly masked by undergrowth and surrounded by a rusty and unstable wire fence. Had it existed in a less lonely spot its dangers would have led to proper precautions being taken. As it was, it was fully three miles from Howorth’s Farm, and the farm was five miles from the nearest village. A few of the shepherds knew of the pot-hole’s existence and it was to one of them that Arthur had hurried, hoping there might be some way of saving the animal.
Stay of Execution Page 7