A Hovering of Vultures (15 page)

“So you approached Mr Suzman?” Mike Oddie asked.

“Yes, I did. Twice—no, three times.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Cool. Distant. The general drift of what he said was that everything was in hand, the typescripts were being edited—by him, I gathered, and lucky little me would have the benefit of reading them when, one by one, they are published.”

“No special favours?”

“That was the gist. A courteous brush-off. That's why I got Vibeke to propose me for the steering committee of the Fellowship. I thought it would give me a bit of leverage. Obviously he wasn't going to ask me to edit one of the books, or establish a definitive text, but maybe he'd give me an advance look at the proofs or whatever.”

“When Vibeke Nordli heard he was dead her first reaction was: what's going to happen to the new edition of the novels?” said Charlie. “Would you say that was your reaction too?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't care for Suzman?”

“I thought he was a creep.”

“Creep covers a lot of ground. What sort of creep?”

“You sound like my supervisor: ‘To convey a meaning language must be used precisely.' All right, fair enough: what sort of a creep? The sort who looks up women's skirts, given half a chance. He had a letch for Vibeke, by the way. The sort
who smarms, who would call you ‘dear lady' except that he knows any feminist would brain him if he did, the sort who is in it for himself—a sort of literary limpet. It so happens that he picked on Susannah Sneddon to suck blood out of, but it could just as easily have been Jeffrey Archer or Barbara Taylor Bradford. Literary values just didn't enter into it.”

“But what was the blood he was getting out of Susannah Sneddon?”

She shook her head and shrugged.

“Search me. But there was blood, I'll bet.”

“Or would have been, if he hadn't been killed,” said Charlie.

“Right . . . Right,” said Gillian Parkin, for the first time uncertain. “I suppose there's got to be a motive there somewhere, but I don't get what it could be.”

• • •

Lettie Farraday came last, and made no bones about her enjoyment of the murder enquiry. Mike Oddie saw at once what had attracted Charlie to her, and understood his feelings of protectiveness.

“You've no idea what
fun
it is down there in the bar!” she said, levering herself down heavily into the chair with Charlie's help. “The fuss, the people! The landlord's all but purring, and he's put on three extra bar staff. There's an old boy there—Len Trubshaw is his name—that I went to school with down here in Batley Bridge. He was the sort of little boy who loved pulling the girls' hair and making them cry. He's sitting there just lapping up all the scandal and innuendo and conjecture.”

“So are you, Lettie,” said Charlie mischievously.

“In a different way. Just show a bit more respect for age, Dexter.”

“When did you go to school with him, Mrs Farraday?” Oddie asked.

“The late 'twenties. When George V was on the throne. Are you asking exactly how old I am?”

“Yes.”

“Dexter knows. I was born in 1917. So I was a little kid of five and upwards when Susannah and Joshua were writing all those novels.”

“So you have a lot more memories of them than Mrs Marsden, say?”

“Is that the curator? Oh yes, sure. I can't say I remember her, but I'd guess she was a good ten years younger than me. A girl of fifteen, about to stretch her wings and fly the nest, doesn't take much notice of a five-year-old.”

“Is that the age you were when you left?”

“Yes, sir! Soon as I decently could. I went as a maid to a woman in Halifax, because it was live-in, and I knew she was about to move to London. Five years later it was the USA.”

“How did that come about?” Charlie asked.

“Don't ask! But knowing you I suppose you'll guess that good old s.e.x. was involved.”

“What made you decide to come back?”

“Oh, I come back regularly. I come back to Europe every year, though I can't say that Britain is my favourite place to come to. I decided to include Micklewike this year because I read an article about the Weekend and the Sneddon cult in
Time
magazine. I decided I wanted to be part of it.”

“Why? Were you suspicious?” Charlie asked.

“No. Why should I be?”

“The police have been suspicious of Suzman for a long time.”

“I'm not police. I don't think I'd be a lot of use to the law-enforcement agencies. No, it was just
interest.
Tinged with vanity, I suppose. I realized I was one of the people who did know a bit about the Sneddons. They weren't well-known in the village because they weren't liked. People would never have dropped in and called on them. Just because my mother went up there to clean the place meant I knew more about them than most.”

“And yet from what I hear from Charlie, Suzman wasn't particularly interested in your memories,” said Oddie.

“No, he wasn't. Maybe I was just flattering myself thinking that he would be. Perhaps he was just interested in the books, not the Sneddons' lives. Remember the woman in the Thurber cartoon: ‘Mere proof won't convince me!' Maybe he wasn't interested in mere facts about them. But in that case why buy High Maddox Farm, and why set up the Museum at all?”

“I've been wondering why nobody seems to be writing a biography,” put in Charlie.

“Right. With all that sensational material to end up with it does seem odd. Maybe I shall write down what I remember, and leave it with this curator person.”

“What was your opinion of the Museum?” Oddie asked.

“I've talked about this with Dexter, and at the meeting. Too clean, too hygienic, too antiseptic. Suzman and whoever helped him with it
tried
to give a feeling of a pretty disorderly household, but they didn't go nearly far enough. Susannah was a sloven, and the place was a tip. Perhaps it was inevitable they wouldn't get it right: those farmyard smells are gone today, and people would have been just nauseated
walking round the farmhouse as it usually was before my mother got going on it. But there's another thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“It was rather like a stage set. Or a film set for
The Last Days of Susannah Sneddon.
When it came down to it there was very little of the Sneddons there. And what there was was sometimes wrong. As I said at the meeting, Susannah Sneddon didn't type. I'd confirmed this with my mother the night before. I expect someone in the village or down here in Batley Bridge typed up the manuscripts. But Mr Suzman obviously didn't know that.”

“And he didn't follow it up when you told him,” said Charlie.

“I expect he thought this was just the ramblings of an old lady with a lousy memory,” said Lettie shrugging.

“Others didn't,” Charlie pointed out. “As soon as I began introducing you as someone who knew the Sneddons there was enormous interest.”

“Right. Rather pleasing to the vanity I mentioned. Mind you, I don't think I made those fans very happy. I couldn't hide the fact that I just never liked Susannah Sneddon. That wasn't because my mother went on about her writing dirty books. If my mother said something I disagreed with her on principle, even if it had to be quietly. Looking back I find that Susannah was very self-absorbed, living a life cut off from the rest of us, so—as a child—I found her creepy. Now I'm older—much older!—I can admire her for achieving so much against the odds, but then I found her antipathetic.”

“And Joshua?”

“Hardly ever saw him. But in the village he was not really liked. He wasn't understood, or sympathised with. They said the war had made him a bit strange. Though to be sure they always said he was harmless enough. Just prickly and odd.”

“None of which, apparently, interested Gerald Suzman enough for him to want to talk to you,” said Oddie thoughtfully. “I agree with Charlie: there's something here that doesn't add up.”

“What about last night?” asked Charlie suddenly. “I asked you to put the chain on the door and a chair in front of it. Did anything happen?”

Lettie's brow furrowed.

“I honestly don't think so. I didn't take you too seriously, and I slept. Yes—I did wake up now and again, and I could have been woken by something. But old people generally don't sleep that well. I know I don't. So waking up in the night is perfectly natural. I just thought—still think—you were scaremongering.”

“Maybe I was,” agreed Charlie. “I just sensed something.”

“Oh, I'm not knocking ‘just sensing something.' I do it myself. And you were right, weren't you? You just got the wrong victim.”

When he was back in his room in Haworth Road and hunched over his little typewriter, Charlie wrote: “The wrong victim?” But then he shook his head. Gerald Suzman was a crook, and therefore murderable, even if they had not yet discovered a really concrete motive.

He wrote: “I do not know these people. I go by appearances.” He thought: Gillian Parkin seems bright, open, quickwitted, uncomplicated. So does Vibeke Nordli. But are they? How do I know they are not greedy, power-mad, vengeful? I don't. I am accepting the surface they present to the world as a reality. In everyone there's an element of performance. I don't even
know
that Lettie is lame . . .

It was a depressing thought to go to bed on.

T
he house they were looking for was called Sandringham, and it was somewhere along Ladysmith Street, in Ilkley, a street which wound maddeningly, edged by Edwardian villas well-shaded by shrubs from the prying vulgar. Solid, middle-class houses for solid, middle-class people, they boasted names rather than numbers. The whole street was a postman's nightmare, and Mike Oddie and Charlie Peace were getting decidedly fed-up with it too.

Charlie had had a late night, going over and over in his mind the interviews of the day before and typing up the meagre scraps of information and impressions that he thought might prove of interest. He had woken up bright as a button, though: he was well-used by now to the irregularities of police routine. His landlady had had the pleasure of watching him eat a good half of his breakfast, and had done her best to pump him the while. Charlie, at his most genial
and tantalising, had given her the sort of information that would be common knowledge in Batley Bridge by the end of the day, and in return Mrs Ludlum had promised that, even if he didn't need it that night, his room would be kept for him: “Just whenever you need it, Mr Peace, it'll be there.” Charlie liked the feeling of being a prestige guest.

Later in the day they were off to London, to Mr Suzman's home base, but Mike Oddie had decided to let Scotland Yard—who had started the whole thing, after all—find some of the routine answers before they got there. It was just possible, he thought, that the Potter-Hodges had the answer to the curious incuriousness of Mr Suzman concerning the lives of Susannah and Joshua. Was he not so much indifferent to the details of their lives as determined to suppress or filter them?

It was now ten o'clock, as early as seemed decent for a police visit to a couple whose connections to Mr Suzman seemed at most tangential.

“There it is,” said Charlie.

The name, considerately, had been put on the gate, as the house itself was shrouded by dark green shrubs and trees—ivies, laurels, the darker kind of firs.

“They do go in for mountain greenery, don't they?” said Charlie, cheerfully.

He found another notice on the gate when he approached it: “Beware of the Dog.” He experimentally clicked the latch and was rewarded by a thunderous peal of barking and a sound like the charge of a tank regiment. From round the side of the house, recklessly oblivious of branch and fern, careered an enormous Rottweiler, throwing itself against the gate from which Charlie had prudently retreated.

“Well, you're a fine fellow, aren't you? Or do I mean lady? What's your name, then? You're doing a good job here.”

The dog thought, then tentatively waggled its rear and its end stump. Charlie, equally tentatively, advanced on the gate again, and the dog went off in an ecstasy of barking.

“Who is it, Zoë? Good girl—quiet now.” Coming out from the front door was Felix Potter-Hodge. He advanced down the path to the gate, but stopped in bewilderment when he saw Charlie.

“Oh—weren't you at the Sneddon Weekend?”

“That's right,” said Charlie, taking out his ID. “West Yorkshire Police.”

The man took it and inspected it, an expression of curiosity and puzzlement on his cratered face.

“
Really
? But . . . We'd heard he'd been killed, of course, but . . . Why were you at the Weekend? Does this mean?—”

“Do you think we could come in, Mr Potter-Hodge?” Oddie said, coming up from the car in which he had prudently stayed. “We've a few questions—it won't take long.”

“Of course, of course. Down, Zoë—she's just a big softie, really. Yes, they're
friends
, Zoë. Come along in.”

Gingerly they went through the gate, brushing aside the cold green branches and leaves, then down the front path towards the house—a confection of grey stone, awkward arched bays and lead-lighted windows and door. Once inside Mr Potter-Hodge called “Mavis” towards the kitchen and led them—Zoë blundering along very much in their way—through to a sitting-room furnished with a mixture of heavy old tables and cupboards and an anonymous modern sofa and chairs, with a television set as the central feature. It was a comfortable enough room, but without any sign of individual taste.

“Well!” said Mavis, as she came in after a whispered consultation with her husband in the hall. “We didn't expect . . .” She turned to Charlie and became almost roguish. “You
are
a
dark horse, aren't you? Going to the Weekend as if you were a Sneddon fan, and being a policeman all the time. You put on a very good show, I'll give you that. But what were you there for, eh?”