by Moody, Susan
‘Why would he have come to you if he wasn’t going to go along with your suggestions?’
Compton shrugged. ‘Who knows? I’m truly sorry about what’s happened to him, but he always thought outside the box, and that, I’m sorry to say, may have been his downfall.’
‘And you can’t clarify your somewhat mysterious remarks any further?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ He stroked his grape-smooth chin. ‘I’ve probably said too much already.’
I waited while he reluctantly wrote down my email address. ‘So all Tristan’s income derived from his design company?’ I said.
‘Oh … uh … pretty much.’
Which meant no. Which meant he had alternative sources of income. How could I find out what they might be? Dimsie? I’d have to try and pressure her again. ‘Pretty much? What else might there have been?’
‘The Huber-Draytons aren’t exactly scratching round to put shoes on the baby’s feet,’ he said.
‘Is that true? I understood the Dame was always skint.’
‘The house is worth a mint, but I agree, ready money has always been a problem for her.’
‘So you’re talking trust funds, inheritance, that sort of thing?’
He seemed relieved. Did some heavy nodding. ‘Trust funds, exactly.’
He was as twisty as a tiger snake. And probably as deadly. I really wished I was able to buy his shtick.
Could I really accept that Tristan had been commissioned by clients from such disparate locations? I knew nothing about the upmarket interior designer world. It was perfectly likely that he had, though the thought of some rich guy in Istanbul or Cairo hiring the talents of a guy from the British Isles to fuss round with fabric samples and paint-charts seemed unlikely. However big the rep. And although I’d never questioned it before (why not?), for the first time it occurred to me how very unlikely Tristan’s choice of post-Army career was.
All things to all men. He was too good … Were they talking morally or professionally? It was something I needed to explore further. And fast.
TEN
The halfwit receptionist girl was at the desk when I marched into Dimsie’s showroom. Seeing me, she pushed back her chair and bolted into the rear of the premises. I can’t possibly be that intimidating. Or can I?
I was saved from an uncomfortable bout of self-examination by the emergence of Dimsie from the back. She was dressed entirely in black, with a black scarf holding her golden hair away from her face. ‘Samantha says you’re being nasty,’ she announced.
‘Absolute bollocks. I didn’t even open my mouth.’
‘You didn’t need to. She said it was your expression. Gave her the heebie-jeebies.’
‘Heebie-jee—? What kind of an expression is that for a girl her age? My grandmother says things like that. Anyway, it’s not really my fault if I look like an ogre.’
‘I know you can’t help that,’ Dimsie said kindly. ‘But a smile, Quick. A smile wouldn’t go amiss.’ As if she had other things on her mind, she opened a catalogue displaying some fine examples of bespoke furniture made by a cabinetmaker near Barnard Castle, County Durham (my upside-down reading skills coming into play). ‘Anyway, what else have you discovered?’
‘Almost nothing. But I’ve had some interesting thoughts which might lead somewhere. So I need to examine Tristan’s recent bank statements, and also his passport.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you asked me to look into his death is why. However, if you’d prefer to leave it all to the police, that’s fine by me.’ I turned and headed towards the doors. ‘I’ve got plenty of work to be getting on with.’
I pulled open the heavy glass door and, as I expected, she started squeaking. ‘Come back, Quick,’ she pleaded. ‘I need you.’
I stopped in the doorway. ‘I’ll carry on for Tristan’s sake,’ I said. ‘And if you want my advice, get rid of that airhead receptionist of yours. Not that that’s a condition …’
‘She’s pretty,’ Dimsie said. ‘It’s good for business.’
‘Hmmm … anyway, just find me those papers I asked for. Like I said, I’ve got a couple of ideas I’d like to follow up, if I can get hold of the necessary information. I may say your man of affairs was on the wrong side of helpful when I went to see him.’
We went into the back, behind the showroom, where she reluctantly foraged through a filing cabinet – nothing like as fancy as Michael Compton’s – and unearthed some papers, which she handed to me. ‘As for his passport,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure he’d have kept it here. We don’t share absolutely everything, you know. He has his own office.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Had.’
‘Just have a look, will you?’ Although I felt for her tragic loss, I wanted to tell her she needed to be helpful if she wanted me to go on checking things out for her. After all, I wasn’t a qualified detective, only a former cop with an inquisitive nature, trying to do my best to help an old friend.
‘If I can’t find anything here, you can always go down to his premises and look there. It’s bound to be one place or the other. Oh …!’ She uttered a little cry of triumph. ‘Got it!’ She brought out a maroon passport. Held it in both tiny hands. Screwed up her face in an effort not to cry. ‘It’s all so horribly heartbreaking.’
‘Poor little Dimsie. I know it is.’ I stuck the papers and passport into my bag. ‘That’s why I really want to do whatever I can to find out who’s responsible for this.’ I blew her a kiss. ‘I’ll be in touch, soon as I’ve got something to tell you. Meanwhile, be assured the police are doing what they can.’
As I’d told Dimsie, I had work of my own to do. Having glanced through Tristan’s passport, I sat at my desk, pondering while I scrutinized various picture reproductions and realized that if I wasn’t careful, Eat, Drink and Be Merry would end up as a collection of still lifes. It required a real effort to find paintings with the bucolic feel that I was after. I thought it would be fun to include Picasso’s painting called L’Ascetique as a kind of moral counterweight to the excesses displayed elsewhere. Nothing could be further from being merry than the misery etched on the face of the anorexic old man with his simple jug of water and his hunk of hard bread. The same was true of The Frugal Feast, a sort of companion piece by the same artist.
Some pictures absolutely had to be included. Diego Rivero’s portrait of Cecilia Armada. Still life with parrot, by Frieda Kahloo. Caravaggio’s Young Bacchus in the Uffizi, where the subject clearly has a hangover. The famous Déjeuner sur l’herbe, though the picnic was remarkably ascetic compared to the gargantuan al fresco feasts of earlier years. It wasn’t the déjeuner which usually caught my attention so much as the breathtaking sexism of the scene … two fully dressed men talking across the naked body of a woman.
The phone beeped. ‘Quick,’ I said.
‘Fliss here.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘Slowly. We’ve had a couple of summing-up meetings. So far, there’s darned little to sum. Your friend Tristan’s turning out to be a bit of a mystery man, far as we can see.’
‘Explain.’
‘We’ve managed to extract a list of his current or recent commissions from a slimy sort of guy who appears to be his financial adviser. Compton?’
‘I’ve met him.’
Fliss huffed for a moment. ‘If ever strong drink was needed to calm me down …’
‘I know exactly what you mean. But what’s with the “we”? I thought this was Garside’s call.’
‘It is, but I stupidly, for old time’s sake – that’s you, Quick – volunteered to go round and see the guy, since one of Garside’s team was off sick and another was in court.’ More huffing. ‘If ever I’ve met an arrogant sod …’
‘Compton gives arrogant sods a good name.’ I paused for a moment. ‘Apart from that, did you think there was anything off about him?’
‘Most definitely. I’m still trying to work out exactly what it was.’
‘Someone connected to Tristan in some way is te
lling porkies, or at least practising evasion tactics and obfuscation, and I don’t know who,’ I said. ‘But Compton’s among them, I’m quite certain.’
‘I gather that even the grieving sister is being cagey.’
‘Yes, I thought that. I wonder why, when she specifically asked me to look into matters since she didn’t feel the police would keep her properly informed.’ I frowned. ‘And when I went over to a place called Rollingford, near Folkestone, it was very clear that something not at all kosher was going on.’
‘Is that the place with the rodeo show? Sir Piers Paramore?’
‘Yup.’
‘Hmm … we’ve been keeping an eye on them for over a year now.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Isn’t it just?’
‘Gonna tell me why?’
‘No, mainly because we don’t know. We have our suspicions – horses, luxury cars – but little more than that. So we have no cause – as yet – to search the place. Trouble is, the Paramores are so well connected that they’d be warned immediately if a raid on their property was imminent, which would give them ample time to hide any evidence there might be.’
‘Kind of hard to hide a horse.’
‘Not really. It’s like a stolen car: you give it a paint job, add a sunroof or fancy hubcaps—’
‘A horse with fancy hubcaps I gotta see.’
‘—forge the log book, and it could be a different car. Remember that case we had at those stables near Ashford? It was the same sort of thing.’
‘Whatever it is, the Paramores are in it up to the neck. And so is the Rodeo King himself, her father. And also …’ I had suddenly remembered Jerry Baskin. ‘There’s a guy there who’s been wandering round town here giving a spiel about his family, Louisiana aristocrats, if that’s not a misuse of the word. A gifted con-artist. Kept talking about unfinished business and now it’s more or less dealt with, he was going to blow town. And then, I found him right over there at Rollins Park, using an entirely different name, with an entirely different family story.’ I thought back. ‘Still using an American accent, though, even if it was less hokey than the last one. So maybe that’s where his roots lie. So you’d have to wonder why he’s hunting for prey over here, when the US is so large and it would be much easier for him to move on when or if he was rumbled.’
‘Interesting!’
‘Isn’t it just?’
We both laughed. Conmen came in all shapes and sizes and we’d met dozens of them over the years. Charm was an essential prerequisite of the breed, together with absolute ruthlessness. What always surprised me was the gullibility of the victims. Anyone asking me to hand over my life’s savings to help him through while he waited for a legacy from his hugely rich father/a cheque to clear/a house sale to be completed would, I’m afraid, be shown the door in pretty quick order. As for the ancient grandmother or adorable child needing expensive treatments to survive, complete with heart-rending hollow-eyed photos … Fliss and I had come across them all.
‘Back to my desk,’ I said. ‘Keep in touch, you hear?’
Some hours later, I put away the roughs for my book and got out Tristan’s papers and passport, both the stuff from Compton and the documents from Dimsie. They made interesting reading. Especially when given Tristan’s pretty full order book. How did he manage to squeeze in twelve trips to Hong Kong as well as satisfy his customers?
After a while, I telephoned my parents. Edred answered. ‘It’s me,’ I said.
‘Frideswide!’ he boomed. ‘Darling child!’
I remained silent. ‘Hello,’ he said after a while. ‘Hello, hello?’ Another pause, then a mutter over his shoulder. ‘We seem to have been cut off.’
‘A Frideswide by any other name, Edred,’ I said.
‘Oh Christ, what’s she calling herself these days? Hello?’
In the background, my mother shouted, ‘It’s Alex, you silly old goof.’
‘Ah yes, Alex. How are you?’
‘Fine,’ I said. Some years ago, my sister and I had rebelled against our given names of Frideswide and Ethelburga, becoming respectively Alexandra and Meghan. I do not answer to Frideswide. My brother remained with Hereward. ‘Edred, I have a question.’
‘Fire away.’
‘You’ve been friends with Dorcas the Dragon for years, haven’t you?’
‘Poor Dorcas. Yes, indeed. We were all up at Oxford together. I can’t remember what she read, but she was definitely there. Played lacrosse, as I remember. Captain of her college team in her final year. LMH, was it? Somerville? Or was it St Hi—’
‘Ask what she wants instead of waffling on,’ came my mother’s voice.
‘What do you want?’ Edred said.
‘Do you remember who she married?’
‘Remember? I don’t think I ever—’
‘Of course you do, you were their best man.’ My mother wrested the phone from my father. ‘He was called Padhraic Fitzgerald. Up at Magdalen. A handsome devil, full of Irish blarney, and none the worse for that. Edred and I even visited them when they were living for a while on the ancestral estates near Cork. Everything was falling to bits. A large piece of ceiling dropped on your father’s head one evening as we sat with a glass of Irish whisky in the freezing cold drawing room. That probably explains a lot of things.’
‘And what happened to Padhraic Fitzgerald?’
‘We never knew. They lived in London for a while, and Dorcas woke one morning to find he’d disappeared, none knew whither, leaving her with no money and two small children to bring up on her own.’
‘And nothing heard from him from that day to this?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Didn’t she try to find him?’
‘Not really. I think she’d realized by then that she was better off without him.’
It all seemed a little slapdash to me. ‘Suppose he’d had an accident. Lost his memory. For all you know, he could still be wandering round wondering who he is.’
‘I doubt it. He’d taken his passport and some clothes. Emptied their joint bank account. Obviously planned it all quite carefully.’
‘French and Italian studies,’ my father said in the background.
‘What is?’
‘That’s what Fitzgerald read when he was up.’
Tristan had also read modern languages when he was up at Oxford. Was there any significance to this fact? ‘I wonder where he went,’ I said.
‘Dorcas didn’t.’
‘And how come the two children were called Huber-Drayton instead of Fitzgerald?’
‘Dorcas had their names changed by deed poll the minute she could.’
‘Do they know about their father?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ Mary sighed. ‘This is horrible heartbreaking news about Tristan. I keep remembering him as a little boy. So very cute. Obstinate as hell, mind you. If he set his mind to something, he focussed on nothing else until he achieved whatever it was. Didn’t let anything or anyone get in his way. Ruthless, in many ways … I remember the giant radish he was going to produce when he was about eight, after Dorcas read him James and the Giant Peach. He was absolutely determined to go and live inside it in Hyde Park. Obsessed, he was.’
‘I remember that.’ My father spoke behind her.
‘He did end up with one the size of a turnip,’ said Mary, ‘but it wasn’t red. Another child tried to sabotage it so Tristan went round to his house one night and—’
‘Mary,’ I said. ‘Gotta go.’ This talk of giant radishes was doing my head in. I made my farewells. Promised to drive over shortly.
Call ended, I looked through the papers I’d received from Michael Compton and dialled a number. ‘I’m calling on behalf of Tristan Huber,’ I began. ‘I’m wondering if you—’
The voice on the other end burst in, raucous as a crow. ‘Look, if you’re trying to cause trouble, you’ve come to the wrong place. I know where you live and don’t you forget it.’
‘I’m quite sure you don’t,’ I said
. I’m very careful about releasing my address or phone number. I even sometimes find myself copying the tactics of various criminals I’ve known, using different disposable phones depending on the kind of call I’m making and then getting rid of them in due season. I’d been tracked down by too many villains with vengeance on their minds. If minds is the right word. Most crims are as thick as two short planks, unable to make projections beyond the simple arrangements for pulling off whatever particular felony they’re about to commit and often getting those wrong.
‘Oh yes?’ demanded this guy. ‘Wanna risk it?’
‘I just wanted to confirm that the last delivery did indeed go off,’ I said, winging it. All my copper’s instincts told me that this guy was not only not on the level but was so far below it, he couldn’t even see daylight. Whatever Tristan had been up to, it must have involved something being delivered from Point A to Point B, wherever either point might be.
‘You saying it never arrived?’ the voice at the other end of the phone said belligerently. ‘Cos I’m telling you the goods left here in perfect order, as agreed. So don’t you start telling me—’
‘Mr Colby, calm down, will you?’
‘I’m perfectly calm, as it happens. If it wasn’t for some stupid cow on the other end of the line trying to insinuate that—’
‘How’s the redecoration going, Mr Colby?’
‘Redecor— What the fuck you on about … oh yes, redecoration, see what you mean.’ Too late, Mr Marcus Colby realized that he had almost blown his cover. ‘Fine, thanks. The wife’s dead chuffed, the place looks a real treat.’
‘Good to hear.’
I was beginning to get a very faint glimmer of how Tristan had been organizing whatever it was he’d been up to. At least, although so far I had no facts, I felt that I might be skirting round the edge of something I didn’t yet understand. One thing was clear, however: Tristan’s affairs had very little to do with interior design. This guy was a case in point. One of Tristan’s copy invoices had been made out to Mr Maurice Colby, with an address in Gloucestershire, for redesigning the interior of his house, The Willows, Palmerston Drive, in some village (I checked it on Google) near Cheltenham. When I telephoned, Mr Colby didn’t sound the sort of man who would hire an upmarket well-known interior designer to do his renovations. Perhaps he had a rich wife. But was he or was he not being cuckolded by handsome Tristan? And if he were, was he depraved enough to murder his rival? If indeed he had a wife. Or was he – much more likely – involved in some shady deal with Tristan? It all needed to be checked out.