A Hovering of Vultures (24 page)

“A bit primitive.”

“We were.”

“So who went?”

“Oh, the schoolmaster, the doctor, and suchlike: the respectable people, the un-superstitious ones. After all, Susannah was
known
, a definite name, and from the village. They felt that respect should be paid. And then there was the cousin—George Sneddon from Abbotsford. His wife too, though she was pregnant. That would be with the father of Heathcliff, I would think. That was about it, really.”

“Was it a ‘good' funeral?”

“Middling, my mother says. Not a ‘no expense spared' job, but better than the village had expected, given that Cousin George had the reputation of a skinflint.”

“Had George Sneddon taken over at High Maddox by then?”

“Oh yes. Came over and installed himself there soon as the bodies were taken away almost. Said the farm needed all his time to get it round, after Joshua had all but ruined it. And to give him his due, Mother says that he did get it round, to the degree that he could sell it. That was all he was
interested in doing. As soon as it was in better shape he put it on the market and took the best offer. And a bit later he sold his own farm and moved South. Said the North was finished. A lot thought that in those days. I'm not sure I didn't myself.”

“Any idea what he did down there?”

“Set up in his own business somewhere in Essex, so they said in the village. Builder and decorator. Always a very handy person, Cousin George.”

“Do you have any recollection of him, personal recollection?” asked Vibeke Nordli.

“Precious little,” replied Lettie, considering. “He was never much around the village, I think, and he wasn't one to socialise. If he wasn't at the farm he was at Abbotsford. But he did sometimes come to the Methodist Chapel, so I saw him there. Tight, mean little mouth and eyes.”

“Do you remember the funeral?”

“Yes, I do. That whole week, from the deaths to the funeral. My brother and I watched the coffins coming down the hill from the farm, then turning right towards the churchyard. They all walked in procession—no cars. They weren't buried in the Methodist plot, which must have been a big relief to all us Methodies, but in the parish churchyard, and the service was in the parish church. You were assumed to be Church of England in those days if you never showed signs of having a religion.”

“Makes sense,” said Charlie. “You say the week after their deaths. There wasn't any great delay before the bodies were released, then?”

“Oh no. The village constable was Tom Harker—a big, stupid chap, whose idea of law-enforcement was spanking kids who'd been caught stealing apples. But they sent someone
up from Batley Bridge, or maybe from Halifax, and they were perfectly clear about what had happened. So the funeral went ahead quite quickly, and George Sneddon took over at the farm.”

“And he wasn't liked in the village either, I suppose?” Charlie asked.

“Not greatly, Dexter, from what I remember. They thought he was getting above himself—they always hated that in Micklewike, and they had a great variety of words for people who did. Oddly enough, they didn't resent his inheriting the farm—that was natural, according to their way of thinking. But they did resent his getting money from the books. He must have got the advance for
The Black Byre
—the one that was just finished when she was killed—as well as anything still coming in from the earlier ones. My mother said this afternoon: ‘He never wrote them books. He'd no right to take money for them.' That must have been what people said at the time: my mother nurses every little grudge and resentment she's ever known, even if they are not hers. But it was a very illogical line to take. After all, if he hadn't had the money, who would have had it? And if you can inherit a farm, why not royalties? But she just shook her head grimly when I said that.”

“But I think a lot of people may feel like that,” said Felicity. “People get a good feeling out of Bernard Shaw's royalties going to the British Museum. You don't get such a good feeling out of royalties going to the not particularly talented children of great writers.”

“And an awful lot of great writers seem to have had untalented children,” said Lettie. “But it
is
illogical.”

“She didn't mean it personally about children of great writers,” said Charlie, turning to Felicity with a grin.

“I'm not the child of a great writer,” said Felicity. “Nor anything remotely approaching one.”

“There was something you said,” Charlie took up, with a frown on his face, “something you said when we talked yesterday in Leeds. Was it about the
re
-establishment of a copyright? Surely that isn't possible, is it? Not if an author has been dead for fifty years?”

“Oh, but it is, nowadays. Something to do with a recent Copyright Act. I know it's happened in the case of D. H. Lawrence. And that's pretty funny in itself . . .”

“Why?” asked Lettie.

“Because when Frieda Lawrence died the people who inherited the rights and the royalties were the children she had left behind when she ran off with Lawrence. Her children by Ernest Weekley, who was a professor of English at Nottingham. That's a pretty odd way for them to end up, though I suppose you could say there's a sort of poetic justice.”

“But this about re-establishing copyright,” insisted Charlie, forking in food that was, indeed, glorious.

“Well, as I say, it's recent, and I don't know all that much about it. What happened in the case of Lawrence was that a new edition of the books came out—a scholarly edition from the manuscripts, with a lot of stuff the original publisher had censored. This edition superseded the old ones, and you couldn't reprint or even quote from them, or the new ones, without permission. So in essence the copyright was re-established.”

“And the heirs—or the heirs of the heirs of the heirs, or whatever—go on enjoying royalties for another fifty years?”

“Something like that. I'm no expert, as I say, but I did look into the Lawrence situation when I was thinking of doing him for my thesis subject. The main thing is that editorial
work is done, and new material added. Then copyright can legally be re-established. I think something of the same sort is happening with James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald.”

“Oh my!” said Charlie, but he said it to himself.

They were interrupted by an incursion—Gillian. Parkin, arm in arm with Gregory Waite, looking tanned and fit from his walking holiday, both of them obviously overjoyed at being in each other's company again. Trailing in their wake was Mike Oddie.

Charlie took advantage of all the introductions and the arrangement of chairs and places to slip aside with his boss.

“Did you remember what you'd forgotten to do?” he asked.

“No—it's eluded me. I thought I needed a bite—”

“It wasn't to ring that woman at Bennett and Morley's, the publishers, was it?”

“Damn!” said Oddie violently. “Yes, it was. I'll go back and do it now.”

“No, I'll go. You must be hungry.”

“No, you stay here. They're all young people, apart from your elderly girlfriend. They'll be constrained by me, but they will probably talk more freely with you. I should have done it before, because they could stand to lose a lot of money with that edition. I don't suppose it will take long. Vigne's not a particularly common name.”

“Well, when you get on to her, ask about copyright.”

“Copyright?”

“In particular the re-establishment of copyright.”

“I didn't know you could. Do you think it's relevant?”

“I do. Please Mike, make a point of it. You know, there's something that bothered me quite early on in this case, and I've just remembered what it was.”

“What was it?”

“Let's just say it's musical. Think on't, as you say in Yorkshire.”

“I do hate a cockney smartarse,” said Oddie, hurrying away.

At the table the newcomers were settling in and orders were being taken. Charlie let them take away his conspicuously cleared plates, and ordered the inevitable lychees and another glass of wine. Gregory Waite was reading the menu as if it were the
News of the World,
and ordering dishes on a gargantuan scale.

“I've been eating as and when I could,” he explained to excuse himself. “And I've always said that the old canard about being hungry again soon after a Chinese meal doesn't apply if only you eat enough.”

“We've been doing nothing but sitting around in bars nibbling and drinking,” said Gillian. “I'll just have little bits of whatever you're eating. By now murder has dulled the appetite.”

“Oh yes, murder,” said Gregory, with a smile of relish. “What a thing to miss! There's me been tramping all over the moors thinking wholesome thoughts, and you've been living in the middle of a glorious sensation. I wish now I'd stayed for the Weekend. How was he murdered?”

“Bludgeoned,” said Gillian, glancing at Charlie but leaving him out of it. “Somehow it doesn't seem an appropriate way for him to go.”

“Stiletto would have been better,” agreed Lettie. “Or some subtle poison. He was a subtle guy.”

“I never saw him, remember,” said Gregory. “I went off on the first morning of the Conference.”

“Well,” said Felicity, “he was a rather pleased-with-himself,
soft-living sort of a man—plump, devious, not-to-be-pinned-down.”

“Sybaritic,” said Gillian. “And up to something.”

“Did you realize that at the time?”

“No,” she said ruefully. “I was fooled because I wanted to be fooled.”

“And what was he up to?”

“Forgery,” said Vibeke Nordli bitterly. “Among other things, probably.”

“And someone battered him to death, did you say, Gillian? How exactly? What were the circumstances?”

They all looked at Charlie.

“Someone seems to have called on him late at night, and when he answered the door he was battered to death in the little hallway.”

Gregory's brow furrowed. He turned to Gillian.

“But we looked through the windows of the farm on Friday evening. It's one big room. There isn't a hallway.”

Gillian shook her head.

“I didn't say he was murdered at the farm. It was in his own cottage.”

“Sorry. Stupid of me. I knew he owned it, and I assumed he had quarters there.”

“Oh no,” said Charlie. “When he was up here he lived in his cottage in Oxenthorpe.”

“Oxenthorpe?”

It was said a mite too loudly, and Charlie could have sworn that something—a shadow, a memory—passed over Gregory's face.

“Yes, a cottage just before you get to the village, on the road from Batley Bridge.”

“Oh.”

“Do you know Oxenthorpe?”

“I stayed there overnight,” said Waite, choosing his words with care. “I only camp out alternate nights.”

“It wasn't Sunday night, was it?”

“No, it wasn't Sunday. Tuesday, I think.”

Charlie held his peace. He ate his lychees, which he thought a remarkably uninteresting fruit, and halfway through his second glass of wine, while the conversation was ranging from conjecture to misunderstanding, he slipped out of his seat and went to the lavatory. It was a matter of seconds before he heard the door open and someone was standing beside him.

“Can we talk?”

“Yes. When?”

“It would be difficult now. Too obvious.”

“Tomorrow morning early?”

“Yes. I'm not a breakfast person. I could tell Gillian I have to get something from the Chemist's. I'm asthmatic.”

“You could come along to my b. and b. place. Forty Haworth Road. I'll get Oddie along.”

“Right . . . Thanks.”

Charlie ruminated as he zipped his fly that he had once done business with a snout in a public urinal while he was with the Metropolitan Police. It wasn't something he would have expected to happen in rural Yorkshire.

M
rs Ludlum was over the moon at the prospect of two extra men for breakfast.

“One will just have toast and tea,” Charlie explained. “I should think the other would appreciate the whole caboodle.”

“No problem,” said Mrs Ludlum. “Though it might mean slightly short commons for you.”

“Oh,
please
,” said Charlie, but silently. Then aloud: “If you could get everything on the table, then disappear. Sorry to put it like that. This may be important and we can't do with interruptions. When the case is over I'll nip across and tell you everything that went on. But till then . . .”

She nodded, hardly disguising her reluctance. She never actually listened outside doors, but she did sometimes find, with her hands full, that it was a long time before she could find a way to turn the handle. But next morning she was as
good as her word. When the three men were assembled in the front room she brought cereals, tea, toast and two laden plates and then, with a last appraising look at the newcomers, she disappeared back to the kitchen with all the enthusiasm of Macbeth going off to murder Duncan.

“You saw it in my face, didn't you?” Gregory Waite said to Charlie.

“Yes, I did. And I heard it in your voice.”

Gregory toyed with a butter-knife and an unwanted slice of toast.

“I'd make an awful criminal . . . But I think I'll be all right as a witness, if it should come to that . . . I'm hoping that maybe he'll confess, whoever he is. Or that we can somehow arrange any evidence I have to give so that—”

“So that the sleeping arrangements that night at your b. and b. don't have to come out?”

Gregory gave a lop-sided smile.

“Yes.”

“I don't see why they should. I take it you were sleeping in one of the back bedrooms?”