‘A refugee?’
‘An old story. I’m now the proud holder of one of Her Britannic Majesty’s official passports. Or at least, the EEC version.’
‘The newspapers date from 1956, you say. So we’re talking Hungary?’ Was it really Mrs Barr who’d kept them, or Cornfield himself? He was surely the more likely to hoard information about such a traumatic year.
‘We are.’ He turned abruptly.
She followed him along the back of the house to a wooden door.
‘You asked to see my room, Sergeant: here it is.’
Yes, the converted garage. And although it was as shabby as the rest of the place – the armchair looked as if it had been discarded from the main house as being too battered even for that – it was clean. The roof had been insulated and sheets of heavy-duty polythene covered it and the big garage doors. She took in a single bed, neat enough to have satisfied the most pernickety sergeant at police training college, a single wardrobe, and a coffee table with a wooden chess-set laid out ready for play. A bookshelf crammed with a heterogeneous collection of books, a wooden chair and a desk completed the furniture. The only modern items were spotlights over the bed and desk, a jug-kettle and – so out of place Kate walked across to take a closer look – a lap-top computer of a generation later than Kate’s own.
‘Virtual chess,’ Cornfield volunteered. He tapped a key. A chessboard materialised. ‘I play with friends all over the world.’
‘All over the world?’
‘A lot of us were displaced in 1956,’ he said.
They returned via the garden to the conservatory.
‘I’d ask you if I’ve replied to all your questions satisfactorily, Sergeant,’ Cornfield said, ‘but you don’t seem to have asked very many.’
‘You’ve given me a lot of answers, though. You came here during or after the Hungarian uprising as a refugee. You’d have been about twenty? Mrs Barr took you in as a gardener, and for some reason, though she had plenty of room in the house, offered you accommodation in the garage.’
‘She didn’t have so much room then. Her husband was alive, and she had her son and daughters living here too.’
‘Daughters?’
He nodded. ‘Edna and Mavis. Edna would have been about eighteen, Mavis thirteen when I came. Then there was Michael. A very bright boy, but troubled. He was about sixteen then.’
Kate wrote in her notebook. ‘What happened to Edna?’
Another of those continental shrugs. ‘Who can tell? It wasn’t a very happy family, Sergeant. The father … was a very strange man.’
Stranger than a woman who kept newspapers dating from the year dot?
‘In what way strange?’
‘Had he been anything other than a perfect English gentleman I would have called him a brutish lout. But I hesitate to speak ill of the dead, and he passed away – oh, back in 1963. It was a very cold winter, lots of snow, and he gave himself a heart attack pushing the car he would have done better to leave at home.’
‘He didn’t mind a handsome young gardener on the premises?’
‘I might have been young, and I might have tended the garden, but I was never handsome, Sergeant.’
She wasn’t sure she believed him. His bones, quite striking now, would have given a good structure then. In any case, as Cassie would have observed, you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you poke the fire.
‘In any case, I don’t suppose he noticed me. He spent more hours at the office making money than today’s city workaholics are rumoured to do. Well, a place like this takes a lot of maintaining—’
‘But it hasn’t been maintained – hadn’t even then, surely!’
He smiled sadly. ‘Things may fall into desuetude quite gradually. One room falls out of use, then another. They used the drawing room as a dining room, for instance: Mr Barr believed that his furniture was too valuable to sell, let alone throw away, so he left it in situ and bought G-Plan.’
‘Which is still there?’
‘Under Mrs Barr’s clothes. I had to move them from the bedroom when – when she became … bedridden.’ He was ready to weep again. Turning to her he said, ‘Sergeant, would you mind if we continued our conversation over more coffee?’
‘I think you’ve answered enough questions for one day, Mr Cornfield. I’ve only a couple more.’
He nodded.
‘I take it Cornfield is an anglicisation of another name?’
‘Yes. I was born Maxim Kornfeld. Not a difficult transliteration.’
‘But Kornfeld sounds more – more German?’
‘Polish. After Auschwitz my family drifted to Hungary.’
‘Auschwitz!’
He smiled. ‘You know the newsreel shots of kids pressed up against the wire? I was one. Happy ending for me. Both parents and I – all saved.’
‘And what happened to them when the tanks rolled into Budapest?’
‘They chose to stay.’
It seemed impertinent to ask more. And irrelevant, surely.
He looked at her wearily. ‘You said you had two questions.’
‘Yes,’ she said, wishing she didn’t have to ask the second. ‘Did you forge Mrs Barr’s will?’
Chapter Nine
‘You don’t want him to be guilty! What sort of fuckwitted answer is that?’ Lizzie demanded, raising her eyes in exasperation and pushing away the last of her lunchtime sandwich.
‘An honest one. On the face of it, he’s the only sane man in a family for whom the term dysfunctional might have been coined. We’ve got a missing sister, a brother who seems to have changed his name and my tight-arsed Mrs Duncton, so far. The late Mr Barr appears to have been unpleasant in an unspecified way, and Mrs Barr seems to have made eccentricity an art form. Mr Cornfield’s neighbour says that he nursed the old lady through her last years, which is confirmed by the district nurse the two old ladies shared. The district nurse, by the way, declared he was a blessed saint, the way he put up with her carryings on. Sure, Cornfield’s sitting on a goldmine, but he’s already spent more years than I’d care to imagine excavating it – and I’d have thought it would take him twelve months’ tedious work to finish.’ She explained about the house.
‘What you really want me to do,’ sighed Lizzie, ‘is tell you to file the case at the very bottom of your in-tray and get on with something else. Tell you to let it go.’
‘Ultimately that wouldn’t solve anything, would it?’ Kate said, regretfully. ‘No, Duncton’s not the sort of woman to let go once she’s got her teeth into something. Tell you what, Gaffer, I’ve already got the probate people to pop the original of the will into the post—’
‘Are you or they off their heads?’
‘Guaranteed delivery. I’ll get a handwriting expert to cast her beady eyes over it before I ask you to tell me to let it go.’
Lizzie pulled a face. ‘I thought you high-flyers were supposed to be able to string a decent sentence together. OK. It’s what I’d have wanted you to say, incidentally. If not quite like that. There’s something altogether too pat about what you’ve told me. He’s too good to be true. The happy ending would definitely be too good to be true. No, Power, don’t stop sniffing till we’re sure there isn’t a bone. What I’d like you to do this afternoon is to go and talk to the brother.’
‘You’re sure we shouldn’t wait for this report to come through? We may simply have a weird family with one one decent person in it. Which is what I’d go for, after this morning at least.’
‘OK. I suppose so. Yes, if Ben’s around we could go through those cases you looked at. Wheel him in.’
‘There is just one thing, Gaffer. Now Bill’s left – now there’s no reason for his nickname – I think he’d rather be called Derek.’
‘Derek? You’re telling me his name’s Derek?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d have thought any name preferable to Derek. Especially Ben.’
The rain Derek had been predicting for so long arrived during the evenin
g rush hour, reducing traffic to a snail’s pace. And snails were what Kate found in her garden that evening. Snails and slugs. In profusion, but definitely not gay. Well, at least she had slug pellets.
Slug-killing apart, her evening felt very empty. No exams to revise for. No tennis – it was the others’ night for aromatherapy classes. Nothing on TV. If only she could have reached for the phone. She didn’t want to say anything, just to hear Graham’s voice. And couldn’t.
So thank goodness for Aunt Cassie. At least ten minutes with her would give a focus to the evening. They could chew over yet again all the things that had prevented Cassie from coming out to see her garden: the heat, the garden party, the second barbecue, the pain in her hip. No, the truth was that Aunt Cassie hadn’t wanted to go back to what had been her house, and any protestations that she made were simply token, Kate was sure.
Since she’d eaten, Kate risked a gin and tonic when she mixed Cassie hers.
‘Tell you what we had yesterday, in the garden,’ Cassie said, ‘Pimms. And very nice it was too. You could get me some of that, if you like.’
‘Wouldn’t it be a bit of a pain – trying to store your cucumber and mint and so on?’
Cassie withered her with a look. ‘You can get it in tins or bottles or something, ready mixed. You could bring me a couple of those.’
Kate nodded. ‘No problem.’ Except it was. Where on earth could you get ready mixed Pimms, for goodness’ sake?
Meanwhile the gin was going down, if not as sweetly as a Pimms would have done, very briskly. So she was topping up Cassie’s glass with her back to the door when she heard it open.
‘Hello, Aunt Cassie.’
Graham! Oh, Graham!
He was walking across to Cassie’s chair, would be taking the old woman’s hand and kissing her cheek. If only she dared hope that one day he might take her hand, kiss her like that. But married men mustn’t.
‘Fancy a gin, Graham?’ she asked as casually as she could. Aunt Cassie’s hearing might not be what it used to be, but sure as God made little apples she’d pick up any intonation she wasn’t meant to hear.
‘You know, I just might.’
He strolled over to where she stood. She risked a quick sideways glance, to be rewarded by the warmest of smiles. He could have touched her without Aunt Cassie seeing, but he didn’t.
‘Would you pass Aunt Cassie hers, while I wash out this glass?’
‘No need. I’m sure you haven’t got foot and mouth.’ He spoke as lightly as if they’d been in the canteen. But his eyes crinkled intimately. ‘I hear you people have been having high jinks,’ he said, squatting at Cassie’s feet. ‘Thanks, Kate. Cheers.’ He clinked glasses with Cassie.
‘We pay enough,’ Cassie observed. ‘And like they said, we might as well take advantage of the weather.’
‘Good job you did. It’s throwing it down, now.’
‘Thought it was cooler. At least young Kate’s got decent clothes on tonight. You should have seen her the other day, here in her nothings.’ Cassie sounded genuinely disapproving.
He looked up swiftly, eyebrows raised, but then said, ‘But I bet you lot were all in your nothings too. Come on, Aunt Cassie, I bet you wowed them in your bikini.’
‘Enough of your lip, young man,’ she snorted. But there was no doubt that she liked his teasing.
Young? He’d be forty this year, wouldn’t he? No doubt his wife would organise a big party, to which, of course, she would not be invited.
‘Mrs Nelmes tells me she’s getting new swimmies,’ he pursued.
They all laughed: Mrs Nelmes, rather like her daughter, was not the sort of woman to strip off for summer; almost certainly never had been.
And then, as Kate had known he would, he looked at his watch. One of the hairs on his wrist curled over the strap, as it always did.
‘Enough of this debauchery,’ he said, pulling himself to his feet. ‘And thanks for the drink.’ He’d barely touched the gin, but he passed Kate the glass. Their eyes met. Quickly she sipped from where he’d been drinking.
He bent to kiss Cassie and straightened, in the same movement brushing his lips against Kate’s. And was gone, leaving behind the echo of his cheery good nights and the draught from his wave.
Tuesday morning saw Kate with not only the original of the will in her hand, but an appointment booked for the middle of the afternoon with the forensic handwriting analyst whom Dr Walcott had recommended: Dr Kennedy. Over the phone Kennedy’s voice sounded full of energy, so Kate wasn’t surprised to meet a woman in her early forties, with good clear skin and blonde hair cut into a stylish bob. What she hadn’t expected was to find her ensconced in the English department at Birmingham University, surrounded by books on Elizabethan theatre and with a thick file of what looked horribly like exam scripts on her desk.
‘Eng. Lit?’ Kate asked. ‘Am I in the right place?’
‘Eng. Lit is what I trained in. Textual criticism. Comparing literary texts to find out what the author wrote in the first place.’
Kate stared.
‘What A levels did you do, Sergeant?’
‘Oh, Kate, please. Sociology, Psychology and English. Oh, and General Studies.’
‘OK: what English texts did you study?’
‘I can hardly remember. Oh, Shakespeare, of course – Hamlet –’
‘So you’ll know there are two main editions of the play?’
‘Hang on!’ She dug in her memory, ‘1602 and 1623?’
‘Well done. But did you also know that there are some fifteen hundred differences between these two editions?’
‘I knew there was that argument about flesh – whether it was sullied or solid … So how do people know what it’s supposed to be?’
Kennedy smiled. ‘That’s where people like me come in. At Oxford, then later at Yale, I learned how to decipher and identify the handwriting of various authors – it’s not just Shakespeare whose work comes out in different versions. And then I discovered those skills could be employed in forensic work too. So here I am and here you are.’
A cue for action, if ever there was one. So Kate dug in her briefcase for the will, secure in its folder.
‘There. What we’re interested in, as I said on the phone, is whether—’
‘Hang on. If you tell me what to look for, I may find that, but miss something else.’ She pulled out the sheet of paper. ‘Hmm. Ballpoint. OK. Now, how soon did you say you wanted this?’
‘Yesterday. Seriously, as soon as you give me an informal report, nothing fancy, nothing time-consuming, I can decide whether there’s a case to build or whether I can get back to harassing motorists, or whatever we’re popularly supposed to do. If there’s to be a case, then we’ll need the big, detailed analysis.’
Kennedy looked again at the will, and then at the pile of scripts on her desk. ‘Do I gather you can’t do anything till I get back to you? Well, I suppose it might make a pleasant displacement activity.’
Kate left the Arts Building to find that the sun had come out. She checked her watch: the interview had been far shorter than she’d expected, so she might as well look round the campus before she headed back to the office. To her right was a tower block swathed in tarpaulin and bristling with scaffolding. Someone had found a plank of wood and painted on it, ‘This way to the leaning Tower of Muirhead’. Then there was the library: that might be useful one day. Further off were more fifties or early sixties buildings she had no particular wish to explore. What about those grand Victorian edifices across the grass? You’d get a superb view from the top of the clock tower. What did they call it? Joe, that was it. After Joseph Chamberlain. Well, all very impressive, but not on her way back to the car park. Shrugging – one lot of civic pride was much like another, after all – she told herself it was time to retrace her steps, and picked her way across the granite setts. Why had no one ever told architects that fine though these might be for men with big feet wearing heavy shoes, for women with small feet in summer-weight sanda
ls they were murder? Murder! At least that was one advantage of being back in Fraud; there were no bodies to worry about.
Another sign caught her eye: an official one, this time. BARBER INSTITUTE. So that was where it was, this art gallery she’d read about when she’d checked out Birmingham before she moved up. No. She really had no time now. But the very next wet weekend, she promised herself, she’d be there.
Kate was back at the university rather earlier than that. The following afternoon to be precise. And not in the Barber Institute, but in Dr Kennedy’s room.
She hadn’t been in the office to take the call summoning her herself, however. She’d been down in the increasingly familiar meetings room talking to Dr Michael Barton.
The family resemblance between him and Maeve Duncton was very strong, though his hair was now quite white. Like her, he dressed well, if not in a suit: his jacket was as well cut as Graham’s favourite. He carried himself well; upright, strong about the shoulders. Unlike his sister, he’d shown every sign of pleasure when Kate had met him in reception. He’d had no difficulty with the ID badge, either.
He’d started to talk as soon as they got to the lift. ‘I gather Maeve came to see you the other day,’ he said. ‘Well, Mavis, really. She changed her name very early in her life, and who would blame her? Celtic-romantic beats old-fashioned English any day.’
‘And you changed your name too,’ Kate observed, holding the doors back for him to step out. ‘Here: along to our right.’
‘Oh yes. No big secret about that. I had this rich cousin who wanted to leave me a lot of money, only she brought in this dreadful Victorian proviso that I change my name. No problem. So now I live in this gorgeous Queen Anne house in Staffordshire.’
She unlocked the room, and showed him into the chair that his sister had occupied. Like her, he declined refreshment.
‘Maeve’s got this bee in her bonnet,’ he said as soon as she was seated too. ‘About the will. She’s got the idea that it’s forged, that Mother really wanted to leave everything to us. It’s nonsense. Absolute nonsense. I want you to stop any enquiries you’ve set in train. Let the poor old bugger have her estate. He’s earned it, believe me.’
Will Power Page 7