A Hovering of Vultures (19 page)

She shook her head, very unhappy with herself.

“But that's in fact how it turned out. And your husband accepted the child as his all along?”

“Oh yes: there's been no problem about that—or at least any problem there is is mine:
I
see, even if he doesn't.”

“Wasn't it a bit unwise to choose Gerald Suzman as Jonathan's godfather?”

“It didn't seem so at the time. Tom, you see, is vehemently anti-religion—irrationally so. His mother was converted by the Plymouth Brethren when he was in his teens, and he's always felt that he lost her, that he could never have any sort of relationship with her after that, could hardly even talk to her. I was brought up a high Anglican, and I'm still what you might call an Easter communicant. When I said I'd like Jonathan to be christened, Tom just said ‘Fine, so long as I don't have to have anything to do with it.' So I asked the only other Anglo-Catholic I knew to stand godfather, and that was Gerald. We went off one morning to a church in Pimlico and ‘had it done.' ”

“Did Suzman know he was the father?” Charlie asked.

Virginia Charlton smiled in remembrance.

“Let's say he looked at him closely. At the time Jonathan just looked like a baby—any baby. But Suzman met us some time later, when Jon was about three, in Selfridges during the Christmas bun-fight. He took him up in his arms and talked to him and, well, by then the resemblance was becoming more marked. I'm sure he saw what you saw—in fact I know he did, because he looked at me roguishly and winked. I expect it was around that time that he made the will in his favour.”

“Did you know that he had?”

Virginia Charlton hesitated for a moment.

“We met at a party, nearly a year ago . . . He got me into a corner, well away from Tom, and said that when he, Gerald, died, which he wasn't intending to do for a long time yet, Jonathan would be the gainer. But he hoped to see something of the boy when he was grown up . . . I shouldn't be admitting this, should I?”

“It's always better to tell the truth rather than having it prised out of you,” said Oddie. “What did you say?”

“I said in the meanwhile keep well away. That sounds pretty ungrateful, but he was sophisticated and sensible about it. He realised I didn't want him seen
with
Jonathan, so that the resemblance could be noted. In particular I didn't want them together when Tom was around.”

“Did he tell you how much his estate was likely to amount to?”

“No. How could he know, anyway? His business was a pretty dodgy one, with plenty of ups and downs. He said something like: ‘It won't be riches, dear girl, but it'll be something for the proverbial rainy day, if he turns out to be the dreary sort of person who is always expecting one.' I'd bet on a few thousand.”

“I think rather more than that,” said Oddie, getting up and gesturing to Charlie to do the same. “Well, I think that covers most things. I'm sure you must see that this does give you an interest in his death. May I ask what you were doing on Sunday evening?”

“Of course. I knew you'd ask that. We had a small dinner-party here.”

And she named a writing couple with such stupendously right-thinking credentials that they had supported every
good radical cause going in the last quarter-century and as a consequence had the distinction of never having appeared in any Honours List. And she gave them their address and telephone number to boot. Oddie smiled briefly.

“That does sound like rather a splendid alibi. Tell me, how did your husband react to Suzman's death?”

“He said that if he
had
to go now, that might be the way he would have chosen: mysterious, sensational—not
ordinary
.”

“And you're not afraid that one day he might look at Jonathan and
wonder
?”

“Fortunately Tom is very short-sighted,” said his wife.

“I
think we should split up,” said Mike Oddie, as they stood in the forecourt of a horrible hamburger joint, eating horrible hamburgers. “I think we should get the message back to Batley Bridge that operations are going to shift back to West Yorkshire. There are a lot of people we need to talk to again up there, and we don't want those that remain simply to evaporate. I'll ring up the operations room at the Cumberland, and they can give a message to the landlord.”

“I'll ring up my b. and b.,” said Charlie. “That'll get it round the place. And maybe Lettie as well.”

“That Norwegian girl staying up at Micklewike wasn't leaving till Friday, was she?”

“No, but I'm not so sure about Vidkun Whatsit. I think he may already have gone. By the way, one person we haven't interviewed is Felicity Coggenhoe.”

“Do it. Give yourself a treat. Take the train, talk to her in
Leeds, pick up the photocopies from Ilkley, then try to be back in Batley Bridge by this evening.”

“Sounds good. What are you going to do?”

“Someone's got to talk to the other bookshop manager. Seems silly for both of us to waste our time. Then I thought I'd go back to the Yard and see if they've picked up anything new since yesterday.”

“I knew you were jealous of my Yard connections. You're trying to get a foot in that door.”

“I might be jealous if I had any desire to live in this Godforsaken part of the country. Still, I would like to have another talk with your Mr Trethowan if he's free. It was him that set us on to Suzman in the first place. I'd like to know if they've got anything concrete on Suzman's financial standing.”

“Well, while you mull over the bank statements I'll mull over the Sneddon letters,” said Charlie. “It seems a fair swap.” They threw away a half of their hamburgers and made towards the car. “I've got my things in the back. Leave me at the nearest Underground station and I'll get back up North.”

It took Mike Oddie quite a time to drive to Pocklington. The drive took him through landscape and townscapes very different from what he was used to: gentle slopes predominated in the terrain, and tweeness and genteelery in the buildings, though there were small signs here and there that where once everyone had been well-heeled, now the heels were wearing down. Mike Oddie tried to suppress a feeling of satisfaction that, whereas the last recession had bludgeoned mainly the North, this time it was hitting the South as well. He tried, but he failed.

He found Pocklington nestling, as villages of that sort are
always said to do, in the Sussex Downs. It was overpoweringly middle-class and picture-postcard, more a location for a TV crime series than a real place. It was difficult to believe that the pub could sell anything so vulgar as beer. The shops did not sell meat or fish but designer clothes, antiques, or souvenirs. Suzman's, the antiquarian second-hand booksellers, fitted in very well: it was recently painted, bright as a new pin, and its shelves were groaning with leather-bound desirables from the libraries of gentlefolk.

It was a very different figure who rose to greet him from the manager of the Piccadilly store: long, fair locks falling over his eyes, baggy sports-jacket and flannel trousers, and a general air of enthusiasm and youth. It was possible he even loved books.

“Oh, police. I wondered if you'd be calling here. I'm Simon Westbury, by the way: manager, one-man band, general dogsbody. Do you want me to close the shop? We do most of our business by post, so it's not likely we'll be disturbed.”

“Don't bother, then. You say you wondered whether we'd be on to you?”

The man gave him an attractive, lop-sided grin.

“Well—murder, with literary connections, generally bookish in some way. I thought if there wasn't any obvious motive—sexual, say, or financial—that you might be looking at that side of his life. I must say I always wondered about that Micklewike Weekend.”

“In what way?”

“Well, there had to be
something,
didn't there?”

“Why? Because there always was with him?”

Simon Westbury thought.

“No. That's almost but not quite true. Suzman had a part
of him that genuinely loved books. This bookshop is an expression of that part. He almost never put anything dodgy through this shop. You'll say I would say that, but it happens to be true. The books he loved and sold here were mainly the nineteenth century ones which are our speciality: the novelists, the poets, even the hack dramatists that came before Shaw. Our real interests went up to, say, Wells and Galsworthy in the fiction line, but not beyond. Now, Susannah Sneddon was very much a figure of the 'twenties. And that heavy-breathing-in-the-hedgerow stuff was laughably outside Gerald's natural interests. Ergo, I was always convinced that his attraction to her sprang from the other side of him.”

“The crooked side?”

“Exactly.”

“And did you work out what precisely was crooked about the whole enterprise?”

He shook his head with an engaging candour.

“No, I never did. I'm looking forward to you finding that out. Very interesting.”

“How much did you discuss it with him?”

“Not greatly. It's outside my own sphere of interest too.”

“You didn't even speculate in your own mind?”

He pursed his lips.

“I suppose I did. If it had been an author who was popular with the rich and influential—Trollope, say, or Waugh—then I'd say that readers, the members of the new Fellowship, were the target. It would be in character for him to see them as targets, either for getting money out of them, or as important contacts. But that's not Susannah Sneddon's audience at all: in spite of the feminist interest in her these days, her appeal was and is basically middle-class, middle-brow, with a
reasonably strong appeal to the young. Not at all the sort of people whom Suzman usually cultivated. So as I say the whole thing was a mystery to me, and one I've never solved.”

“Did Suzman ever talk to you about his . . . dodgier enterprises?”

“Not directly. Not in so many words. This, and the West End shop, were his impeccable fronts to the world, so he wouldn't have. But if he was talking about his various interests, things sometimes slipped out that made me think this or that might be dubious—particularly if he ‘purred' as I always called it to myself: gave off a feeling of being particularly pleased with himself.”

“Anything of that kind recently?”

“Oh, there were always one or two things of that kind in the pipeline. I do remember his saying a week or two ago that he was going to meet a Norwegian up in Micklewike—about a Knut Hamsun letter. He was purring a good deal about that, so I would think there was something very fishy there.”

Mike Oddie sighed with satisfaction. At last the bland exterior of Vidkun Mjølhus was going to get some detail added to it. He had not been there for love of Susannah Sneddon.

“Now that is interesting. Who is this Knut Hamsun? Is there any interest in him in this country?”

“Oh yes, of a cult kind. Quite a lot more in the States, with its big Scandinavian population. He's a very fine writer. And there's one more thing about him: he was a Nazi sympathiser.”

“Ah!”

“During the German occupation of Norway he was an
apologist for the Quisling government. Not a popular stand to take, not then, nor after the war, when he stood by it and was put in an asylum. But he had always had a strong streak of obstinacy, and by then he was a cussed old sod. Suzman told me that the letter was a late one, written a year or two before his death, defending his stand. That could be the reason for his interest.”

That surprised Oddie.

“Why? Suzman wasn't a right-wing nutter, was he?”

“Hardly. Almost a-political, I would say. No, I mean that it would increase its value commercially. Think of all the extreme right-wing, neo-Fascist groups springing up all over Europe, East and West. Think of the shops and dealers specialising in Nazi memorabilia. Most of it is junk for the skinheads, but there is a more cultivated—no, that's the wrong word—a more affluent interest in the Fascist regimes of the 'thirties and 'forties as well. A letter of that sort could be very saleable.”

“Do you think it was a genuine letter?”

“In view of the purring I'd say not.”

“It seems an odd departure for him—like the Sneddon business, in fact.”

“No, it's not really. Hamsun lived a very long time. His early books are late nineteenth century, well within our field of interest. And there's another thing.”

“Yes?”

“People—the police, and literary experts—are getting very sophisticated about forgeries in this country. The scope is much more limited than it was.”

“I rather suspected that, from what they told me at Haworth Parsonage.”

“That's right. They've suffered from literary shysters there.
Well, Norway is a small, rather out-of-the-way country. Not backward, but backward in the sophistications of literary chicanery and its detection. No significant experience of it. Then again, they have plenty of fine writers and one great one—or many would argue two: Ibsen and Hamsun. No, my bet is that this was a broadening out, a development of a line which had become blocked for him, at least to a degree, here in this country: out and out forgery.”

“For which, obviously, he'd need a Norwegian accomplice.”

“Almost certainly.”

“It could be I know who that is,” said Oddie.

• • •

Felicity Coggenhoe had a bedsitter in—inevitably—Headingly. When Charlie got back to Leeds in the early evening he collected a car from the pool at Police Headquarters and went straight there. It was a comfortless room, suggesting no great parental generosity, but she had made it personal with posters and rugs. She was writing an essay against a deadline on a rather rickety table set to catch the evening sun, but she offered him a mug of instant coffee with powdered milk, and he accepted. She seemed extremely pleased to see him.