A New Lease of Death (16 page)

‘It amounts to that. She didn’t mention the murder.’

‘We can’t do anything. You realize that?’

‘I want you to tell me if I have sufficient grounds to write to the Home Secretary.’

A constable appeared from somewhere, tapped on Wexford’s door and was admitted.

‘You haven’t any circumstantial evidence,’ Burden said. ‘I’m sure the Chief Inspector wouldn’t encourage it.’

A roar of sardonic laughter sounded through the thin dividing wall. Archery felt unreasonably piqued.

‘I think I shall write just the same.’

‘You must do as you please, sir.’ Burden got up. ‘Been seeing much of the country round here?’

Archery swallowed his anger. If Burden intended to terminate the interview with small talk, small talk he should have. Hadn’t he promised his old friend Griswold and, for that matter, the Chief Inspector, not to make trouble?

‘I went to Forby yesterday,’ he said. ‘I was in the churchyard and I happened to notice the grave of that boy Mr Wexford was talking about in court the other day. His name was Grace. Do you remember?’

Burden’s face was a polite bank but the station sergeant glanced up.

‘I’m a Forby man myself, sir,’ he said. ‘We make a bit of a song and dance about John Grace at home. They’ll tell you all about him in Forby for all it was twenty years ago.’

‘All about him?’

‘He fancied himself as a poet, poor kid, wrote plays too. Sort of religious mystic he was. In his
day
he used to try and sell his verses from door to door.’

‘Like W. H. Davis,’ said Archery.

‘I daresay.’

‘Was he a shepherd?’

‘Not as far as I know. Baker’s roundsman or something.’

Wexford’s door swung open, the constable came out and said to Burden, ‘Chief Inspector wants you, sir.’

Wexford’s voice roared after him, ‘You can come back in here, Gates, and take a statement from Guy Fawkes. And give him a cigarette. He won’t blow up.’

‘It seems I’m wanted, sir, so if you’ll excuse me …’

Burden went with Archery to the entrance doors.

‘You had your chat with Alice Flower just in time,’ he said. ‘If you had it, that is.’

‘Yes, I talked to her. Why?’

‘She died yesterday,’ said Burden. ‘It’s all in the local rag.’

Archery found a newsagent. The
Kingsmarkham Chronicle
had come out that morning and fresh stacks of papers lay on the counter. He bought a copy and found the announcement at the bottom of the back page.

‘Death of Miss A. Flower.’

He scanned it and took it back with him to the terrace of the hotel to read it properly.

‘The death occurred today …’ That meant
yesterday
, Archery thought, looking at the dateline. He read on. ‘The death occurred today of Miss Alice Flower at Stowerton Infirmary. She was eighty-seven. Miss Flower, who had lived in the district for twenty-five years, will be best remembered for the part she played in the notorious Victor’s Piece murder trial. She was for many years maid and trusted friend of Mrs Primero …’

There followed a brief account of the murder and the trial.

‘The funeral will take place at Forby parish church on Monday. Mr Roger Primero has expressed a wish that the last rites may be celebrated quietly and that there will be no sightseers.’

Roger Primero, faithful to the end, Archery thought. He found himself hoping that Charles had done nothing to distress this kindly and dutiful man. So Alice Flower was dead at last, death had waited just long enough to let her tell him, Archery, all she knew. Again he seemed to feel the working of destiny. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter thou into the joy of the Lord!

He went in to lunch, feeling jaded and depressed. Where on earth was Charles? He had been gone more than two hours. By now Primero had probably seen through that absurd cover story and …

His imagination showing him his son being interrogated by Wexford at his nastiest, he was just picking at his fruit salad and warm ice-cream when Charles burst into the dining room, swinging the car keys.

‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’

‘I’ve had a most instructive morning. Anything happened here?’

‘Nothing much. Alice Flower is dead.’

‘You can’t tell me anything about that. Primero was full of it. Apparently he was at her bedside for hours yesterday.’ He threw himself into a chair next to his father’s. ‘God, it was hot in that car! As a matter of fact, her dying like that was a help if anything. Made it easier to get him on to the murder.’

‘I didn’t think you could be so callous,’ said Archery distastefully.

‘Oh, come off it, Father. She’d had her allotted span plus seventeen. She can’t have wanted to live. Don’t you want to hear what I got out of him?’

‘Of course.’

‘You don’t want any coffee, do you? Let’s go outside.’

There was no one on the terrace. A yellow climbing rose had shed its petals all over the ground and the battered cane chairs. What residents there were had left possessions out here as if to reserve permanent perches, magazines, library books, a roll of blue knitting, a pair of glasses. Ruthlessly Charles cleared two chairs and blew away the rose petals. For the first time Archery noticed that he looked extremely happy.

‘Well,’ he said when they had sat down, ‘the house first. It’s quite a place, about ten times the size of Thringford Manor, and it’s all built of grey stone with a kind of pediment thing over the front door. Mrs Primero lived there when she was a girl and Roger bought it when it came up for sale this spring.
There’s
park with deer in it and a vast drive coming up from a pillared entrance. You can’t see the house from the road, only the cedars in the park.

‘They’ve got an Italian butler – not so classy as an English one, d’you think? But I suppose they’re a dying race. Anyway, this butler character let me in and kept me hanging about for about ten minutes in a hall the size of the ground floor of our house. I was a bit nervous because I kept thinking, suppose he’s rung up the
Sunday Planet
and they’ve said they’ve never heard of me? But he hadn’t and it was all right. He was in the library. Superb collection of books he’s got and some of them looked quite worn, so I suppose someone reads them, though I shouldn’t think he does.

‘It was all furnished in leather, black leather. You know that rather sexy modern stuff. He asked me to sit down and have a drink …’

‘A bit early, wasn’t it?’

‘People like that, they slosh it down all day. If they were working class they’d be alcoholics, but you can get away with anything when you’ve got a butler and about fifty thousand a year. Then his wife came in. Rather a nice-looking woman – a bit past it, of course – but magnificent clothes. Not that I’d want Tess to dress like that …’ His face fell and Archery’s heart moved with pity. ‘If I ever get a say in what Tess wears,’ he added dolefully.

‘Go on.’

‘We had our drinks. Mrs Primero wasn’t very talkative, but her husband was most expansive. I didn’t have to ask him much, so you needn’t get
all
steamed up about your conscience, and he got on to the murder, quite naturally. He kept saying he wished he hadn’t left Victor’s Piece so early that Sunday evening. He could easily have stayed.

‘“I was only going to meet a couple of chaps I knew at a pub in Sewingbury,” he said. “And, as it happened, it was a dead loss because they never turned up. Or, at least, they did turn up but I got the wrong pub. So I waited about for an hour or so and then went back to my lodgings. I wonder,” he said, “how many times I’ve cursed myself for not staying at Victor’s Piece.”

‘What d’you think of that? I thought it was fishy.’

‘He didn’t have to tell you,’ Archery said. ‘In any case the police must have questioned him.’

‘Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. He didn’t say.’ Charles lounged back in his chair, and swinging his feet up poked them through the trellis. ‘Then we got on to money,’ he said. ‘Money, I may add, is the mainspring of his existence.’

Inexplicably, Archery felt himself marked out as Primero’s defender. Alice Flower had painted him in such glowing colours. ‘I had the impression he was rather a nice sort of man,’ he said.

‘He’s all right,’ Charles said indifferently. ‘He’s very modest about his success and about his money.’ He grinned. ‘The kind of character who cries all the way to the bank. Anyway, now we come to the crux of the whole thing.

‘Just before Mrs Primero was killed some mate of his asked him if he’d like to go into business with him. Importing or exporting. I don’t quite know
what
it was but it doesn’t matter. The friend was to put up ten thousand and so was Primero. Well, Primero hadn’t got it, hadn’t got a smell of it. As far as he was concerned it was hopeless. Then Mrs Primero died.’

‘We know all this,’ Archery objected. ‘Alice Flower told me as much …’

‘All right, wait for it. Alice Flower didn’t know this bit. “That was the making of me,” he said very breezily. “Not that I wasn’t devastated by my grandmother’s death,” he added as a sort of hasty afterthought. His wife was sitting there all the time with a blank look on her face. He kept looking at her uneasily.

‘“I put up the money and we were away,” he said, talking rather fast. “And since then I’ve never looked back.”

‘I was in a bit of a dilemma. Everything was going so smoothly and I didn’t want to mess things up. I thought he was looking defiant and suddenly I realized why.
He didn’t know how much I knew about Mrs Primero’s money
. She’d died intestate, it was sixteen years ago, I was a newspaper reporter and for all he knew I was interested in him, not his grandmother.’

‘A lot to read into a defiant look,’ said Archery.

‘Perhaps there was a bit of hindsight in that. But just wait a minute. Then I asked a question. It was a shot in the dark but it came off.

‘“So you got your ten thousand just when you needed it?” I said casually. Primero didn’t say anything, but his wife looked at me and said, “Just
the
exact sum after death duties. You should really be asking me. Roger’s told me about it so often I know it better than he does.”

‘Well, I couldn’t leave it there. I persisted. “I understand you’ve got two sisters, Mr Primero,” I said. “I suppose they inherited similar amounts?” He began to look terribly suspicious. After all, it wasn’t my business and it had nothing to do with the story I was supposed to be writing. “Are they successful in business too?” I asked, trying to justify myself. It was a stroke of genius. Sorry to be big-headed but it was. I could actually see him relax.

‘“I really don’t see much of them,” he said. “Oh, Roger,” said his wife, “you know we
never
see them.” Primero gave her an icy look. “One’s married,” he said, “and the other has a job in London. They’re much younger than I am.” “It must be nice to inherit ten thousand pounds when you’re still a child,” I said, “I imagine it’s always nice,” he said, “but I’ve never had the pleasure of inheriting any more. Shall we leave the subject and get on with the story of my life?”

‘I pretended to take notes. I was doodling really but he thought it was shorthand. When we’d finished he got up and shook hands and said he’d keep his eye open for the
Sunday Planet
. I felt a bit awkward at that and I didn’t quite know what to say but his wife saved me by asking me to lunch. So I accepted and we had a splendid lunch, smoked salmon and enormous steaks, great sides of oxen they were, and raspberries in framboise liqueur.’

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ said Archery in grudging admiration. He pulled himself up. ‘It was very wrong of you. Most unethical.’

‘All in a good cause. You do see the point, don’t you?’

Why do one’s children always think one senile yet childish, dully practical yet irrational, capable of supporting them but unintelligent to the point of imbecility?

‘Of course I do,’ Archery said irritably. ‘Alice Flower and Mrs Crilling both said Mrs Primero had only ten thousand to leave, but apparently Roger Primero didn’t get only a third of that, he got the whole ten thousand.’

Charles jerked round to face him, scattering more rose petals from the trellis. ‘Now, why? There definitely wasn’t a will. I’ve checked on that. And there were just three heirs, Roger, Angela and Isabel. Mrs Primero hadn’t another relative in the world and according to the law it should have been divided between the three grandchildren. But Roger got the lot.’

‘I can’t understand it.’

‘Neither can I – yet. Maybe I shall when I’ve seen the sisters I couldn’t ask Roger where they lived, but Primero isn’t a common name and the single one may be in the London phone directory. I haven’t quite made up my mind about the line I’ll take with them, but I’ve got the glimmerings of an idea I might say I’ve come from the Inland Revenue …’

‘
Facilis descensus Averni
.’

‘In matters of this kind,’ Charles said crisply, ‘you
have
to be bloody, bold and resolute. Can I have the car again tomorrow?’

‘If you must.’

‘I thought you might like to go out to Victor’s Piece,’ Charles said in a hopeful tone, ‘and just have a look round. See if you can see if Primero could have hidden himself anywhere, sneaked upstairs or something, instead of letting himself out of the front door that Sunday night.’

‘Aren’t you letting your imagination run away with you?’

‘It’s a family failing.’ His eyes clouded suddenly and to Archery’s dismay he put his head in his hands. Archery didn’t know what to do. ‘Tess hasn’t spoken to me for two days,’ the boy said. ‘I can’t lose her, I can’t.’ If he had been ten years younger his father would have taken him in his arms. But if he had been ten years younger the whole thing would never have happened.

‘I don’t give a damn,’ Charles said, controlling himself, ‘what her father was or what he did. I don’t care if every one of her ancestors was hanged. But you do and she does and … Oh, what’s the use?’ He got up. ‘Sorry to make an exhibition of myself.’ Still looking down, he scuffed his feet against the eddies of petals. ‘You’re doing all you can,’ he said with a dreadful prim gravity, ‘but you can’t be expected to understand at your age.’ Without looking at his father, he turned and went into the hotel.