A Hovering of Vultures (14 page)

“Oh, I don't know,” said Charlie. “Lettie says that everyone who goes in for beanos of that sort is ever so slightly mad.”

The interview with Mary Coggenhoe produced nothing new. She merely repeated, as if they had discussed their evidence in advance, everything her husband had said. A parrot would have shown greater inventiveness. But talking to the pair of them crystallised one thought in Charlie's mind, and one of the notes he made back in his room later on read: “Their concern with their daughter is really a concern for themselves.” Thinking it over he decided that wasn't so unusual.

The next person they called was Vibeke Nordli. She sat down confidently and expectantly, quite without the tension unconcealable in Rupert Coggenhoe. Attractive, ambitious, strong-minded. The details were unsurprising: born 1962, resident of Tromsø, married, one child, writing a thesis on Susannah Sneddon's novels, for which she expressed considerable enthusiasm.

“How did you hear about the Weekend?”

“I wrote to the Untamed Shrew Press, asking if they knew of any unpublished stuff—early novels, maybe one unfinished when she was murdered. They wrote back and said that
The Black Byre
was just completed when she was killed, and was published posthumously. They didn't know of any unpublished stuff. I had this feeling from the letter of—I don't know—of a sort of starchiness, stiffness. I would guess that they weren't going to be the publishers of the new edition. But anyway they mentioned Suzman, and said there was going to be this Weekend in Micklewike, so I wrote to High Maddox Farm.”

“I suppose seeing the farm was a big attraction?”

“Yes, it was—and all the countryside around. For the thesis I was more interested in the manuscripts, of course, but seeing where she grew up, lived, the places that she wrote about—yes, that was an attraction.”

“Is anyone writing the biography?” Charlie suddenly asked, from his inconspicuous chair at one side, where he was taking notes. “Or perhaps a joint biography of the pair of them?”

“Not that I know of.”

Charlie looked at Oddie.

“A lot of people seem interested in the manuscripts. But I didn't hear one mention of a biography during the Weekend. You'd think if there was that much interest in her—in her and Joshua—someone would be writing her life.”

“I don't know,” said Vibeke Nordli, her forehead crinkling. “Comparing manuscripts with the printed texts is a comparatively straightforward matter, and not particularly time-consuming. Writing a life is a much bigger undertaking—particularly if it's a first one. You'd have to be really committed to take it on.”

“You talked to Suzman, didn't you?” Oddie asked.

“Just briefly, when we did the tour of the farm. I'm afraid he didn't say anything of interest . . . It was odd: I somehow didn't get any sense of a strong personal interest in the Sneddons.”

“You were puzzled as to why he was doing all this?”

“Frankly, yes. It didn't bother me for more than a moment or two at the time, but now that he's been murdered . . .”

Quite, thought the two policemen to themselves.

The next witness was Vidkun Mjølhus. His passport told them the personal details: born 1946, a bookseller, height, weight, and picture—the last showing he had not changed much in the eight years since it was taken. Though he was bulky, and had a bit more flesh on him than ideally he should, he was handsome, boyish and healthy. Yet Charlie thought as he sat there waiting for their questions that he was not entirely relaxed, not easy in the way that Vibeke Nordli had been.

“Oh yes, the Sneddon nowels go down werry big in Norvay. Susannah's, naturally. Two of them vos translated many years since. Nineteen thirty-five and six.”

“So the new paperbacks sell well?”

“Werry vel.”

“In English?”

“Yes, in English. Vee all read English—a little. But they start to be translated into Norwegian as well, the other ones.
Den Svarte Fjøs
has just been given out.
The Black Byre
—the last one. Werry popular.”

“Why, do you think?”

“Norvay is a rural country. Even if vee live in towns, vee go back to our roots in our minds, vee have a bit of the peasant in us still, and vee long to go back vere vee come from—at
Easter to ski, to fish in summer. Vee are not
easy
in towns, it does not feel
natural
.”

“I see. And that's why you came to the Sneddon Weekend?”

“Accurate! . . . Sorry, I mean exactly. Excuse my English. I read the nowels, see they are in this vonderful tradition—like our Hamsun, Vesaas, and many others. And then I see a piece in
The Bookseller
—I get the publications for English bookshops, naturally, because I do business vith England—I see this piece about the Veekend and I say to myself: ‘I take a little holiday.' ”

“And did you talk to Mr Suzman during the Weekend?”

He grimaced and shook his head.

“No—is not my type. Werry smooth. Vibeke—she talk to him about the nowels. But I—no.” He turned to Charlie. “I only see vot you see, hear vot you hear.”

“Why,” said Charlie when he had gone, “do I get the impression that he's holding something back?”

“Or not telling the whole truth? Or not telling the truth at all?” agreed Mike. “It's more difficult to tell plausible lies in a foreign tongue.”

“Vibeke says he's a second-hand bookseller. It's difficult to imagine him having much to do with the new Sneddon boom.”

“Of course he didn't actually say he did,” said Oddie. “Not professionally. He presented it mainly as a personal thing . . . Though I can't see why he would do a lot of business with Britain, as he says he does.” He looked down at the jotted notes he had made during the interview.

“Something strikes you that passed me by?” asked Charlie.

“Maybe . . . I wonder how many Norwegians born in 1946 were given the Christian name of Vidkun.”

“Why on earth shouldn't they be?”

“It was the Christian name of Quisling.”

M
rs Cardew, the Fellowship Secretary, was a useless witness. She kept insisting that Gerald Suzman's death could have nothing to do with the Fellowship, could not be a consequence of the “most successful” Weekend, and said over and over that the new organisation was the brainchild of devoted and tireless workers with not a thought of self. If anyone had suggested the dear old “passing tramp” she would have embraced the idea enthusiastically, so anxious was she to distance herself and the new literary society from the gruesome deed in Oxenthorpe. Both men got the impression that she might be in the lists against Rupert Coggenhoe in any moves to take over the Fellowship.

Mrs Marsden was another matter. A strong-minded countrywoman, she was clearly both more sensible and more intelligent than Mrs Cardew, though certainly less well-educated. She made it plain she had been pleased to be offered the curator's post by Mr Suzman, had worked with him and
for him devotedly and efficiently, but for all that she had never lost her clear-sightedness in relation to him and his doings.

“By the time I got involved he'd already bought the farm,” she explained to Oddie and Charlie. “So I don't know much about that, apart from what I knew from living in the village.”

“And that was?”

“That it was a pretty run-down affair. It had been farmed for years by the son of the man who bought it at the auction in 1933. He got sick a few years back, never let go of the reins, and eventually died. Mr Suzman bought it at a knockdown price, what with agriculture being in the state it is in at the moment, and the general recession. He's leased out most of the fields to other farmers, just keeping the bits around the farm and the spinney where Joshua shot himself. All in all, I don't suppose he laid out that much money.”

“What about equipping it as a museum?”

“He enjoyed that, did Mr Suzman. It was like a bit of fun for him. He went to a lot of sales and auctions all round the country, buying up old stuff. But you wouldn't be talking high prices. He was just after the sort of furniture and kitchen utensils and stuff like that that they might have had.”

“Was none of it actual stuff owned by the Sneddons?”

“Well . . .” There came on her the hesitation of honest doubt. “There were the two little tables that served as desks, for example. One was possibly Susannah's, the other definitely Joshua's, so he said.”

“But you're not so sure?”

“It didn't look old enough to me. Like the American lady said, everything they had was old even then—fetched nothing at the auction after they died, so my mother always said.
So I did just wonder—well, if he said it was definitely Joshua's because
some
thing had to be authentically his.”

Mike Oddie nodded.

“But do you think, speaking as a countrywoman, that on the whole he did a good job with the place?”

“Yes, I do. That's the sort of way farmhouses looked back in the years between the wars. 'Course, I remember thinking, just before the Weekend, that what it didn't have was the dirt and the smells, or only faint echoes of them. There'd've been pigs and hens quite close to the farmhouse in those days. But what can you do about farmyard smells, short of buying some kind of artificial spray? No, I'd say the place gave people some idea of what a farmhouse looked like back in the days when the Sneddons were alive.”

“You remember them, don't you?”

“Yes, just. I don't set much store by that. Just having Susannah pointed out to me in the street by my mother as the woman who wrote books. What I really remember was all the talk after they died.”

“What did people say?” Charlie asked.

“Well, of course they talked about it for years. A murder and a suicide in a little place like Micklewike—naturally it was a sensation. You're from the city, young man, I can hear that, and you wouldn't understand. What did people say? Well, they said he must have been jealous of her for years, her being so much more successful than him, and that finally he'd snapped. And I've never heard anything to show as we were wrong.”

“I suppose you read the novels after Mr Suzman asked you to be curator?”

“Yes, I did. I'm not a great reader as a rule. I enjoyed them. I liked reading about the places that I recognised, and
the sort of people that I know—or used to know, because times change, don't they, and people with them. Of course she exaggerated, like, but writers do that, don't they? No, I really enjoyed them, for all I was reading them as part of my job.”

“And Mr Suzman himself: what did you think of him?”

She considered the question seriously. She was the sort of person who did not make judgments lightly.

“I didn't
know
him. He was my employer, he always treated me well, was always considerate. Beyond that . . .”

“He was a mystery?”

“Not exactly that, but he was from another sort of life, wasn't he? One that I know nothing about. He always wanted me to call him Gerald, but somehow I never could. ‘Sir' came much more natural. People I called by their Christian names would be—well, different sorts of people.”

“Why do you think he was so active in setting up the Sneddon Fellowship?”

“I can't say I know, for all we talked about it so much. I suppose he thought highly of the books.”

“You don't think there was something in it for him?”

“Well . . . not to speak ill of the dead . . . but you've got your job to do, and
some
one killed him, and someone must have had a reason . . . Well, I wouldn't have said he was the kind to do something for nothing. Yes, I would guess that there was something in it for him, but what it was I never got any hint. Could it have been some kind of honour? Like from the Queen?”

But neither Mike nor Charlie thought he was in it for an OBE.

• • •

Mike Oddie liked Gillian Parkin at once. Frank, open, enthusiastic—he could see that she and Vibeke Nordli would get on, quite apart from their shared interests: they were similar types.

“As soon as I heard about the setting-up of the Fellowship I knew I had to come along,” she said, settling into her chair. “I've been working on the thesis for a year now, and I'm sort of saturated in Susannah Sneddon.”

“What about the chap who was with you in the pub on Friday?” asked Charlie.

“My bloke? His name is Gregory Waite. No interest in the Sneddons at all. Botanist, London University, like me. He was happy to come along, then to take off on a walking tour round Yorkshire. He'll be back on Thursday or Friday—I'm booked into the Black Horse until then.”

“Why did you decide to stay so long?”

“It's the best chance I've had to see the places that she wrote about. I'm ashamed to say I've never been to Yorkshire before. It's good to meet up with people like Vibeke who really know the novels. If you do research on Dickens there are people all around you with the same interest. With Susannah Sneddon you're on your own. This Weekend was a chance to feel less lonely.”

“Your particular interest is in the manuscripts, isn't it?” Charlie asked. Gillian Parkin grinned, as if this was some kind of dark secret, and she had been found out.

“OK, that's another reason for staying on a bit. I knew there were typescripts, knew they were being edited for a new edition, so I thought I might winkle my way in and get a share of the action. Anything wrong in that?”

“Nothing at all.”

“When I saw the pages he had put out in the Museum I
was even more keen. It wasn't just a matter of correcting errors; there was obviously lots of new stuff—things that had been cut out. Censorship. She was cut by her publishers because she was saying things that women weren't
allowed
to say at that time. Yes—I was very keen to get my hands on those typescripts.”