A Dangerous Deceit (19 page)

‘Seems like a wild goose chase.' They had better call it a day.

Joe was already at the front door when he was halted by a call from the kitchen. He returned and saw that Reardon, in a last look around, had spotted a small drawer set underneath the unscrubbed deal top of the kitchen table. He had pulled it open and was rifling through what looked like decades-old, might-one-day-come-in-useful detritus – a miscellany of old keys, bits of wound-up string, odd screws, a broken comb; some thrifty soul had even saved a few old paper bags …

He had unearthed what appeared to be a rent book lying amongst the paper bags. On the front cover Joe saw the name Morris: the paid-up rent book, a final confirmation that the tenants had not intended to return. A used envelope with a shopping list on the back fell out as it was opened. He turned it over and pointed to the stamp on the envelope. It was South African, and the postmark was Cape Town.

Joe gave a low whistle, then took a look at the scrawled address. He stared at it for several moments before realizing what he was seeing. Wilfred Smith had obviously heard the name ‘Morris' when making out the rent book and his new tenant hadn't corrected the spelling when he had written it down. The envelope was addressed to Wm. Mauritz.

Yet looking even more closely, he saw it was not Wm., as he'd first thought, the usual abbreviation for William, but Wim – though that could possibly be an abbreviation for the same name. For a moment or two longer, he stared. Wim. WIM.

‘That's what Aston wrote against all those dates, sir. Not initials for something, it was a name.'

His mind was racing. Wim Mauritz. Foreign. Continental sounding. Dutch? There were a lot of families of Dutch origin in South Africa. The original Boers had been Dutch. Would anyone around here have recognized a South African accent? Probably not. Joe knew he wouldn't. Anyone originating from outside the radius of the Black Country was regarded as ‘a foreigner' and their accents as posh. Maybe theirs hadn't sounded that different to British upper class – ‘lah-di-dah', as Eva Smith had described it.

Reardon listened in silence. ‘Well, we won't start counting chickens just yet, but it's possible we might have a breakthrough. Could be we've found your Snowman. We need to talk this through.' He looked at the table, stained and sticky with God knew what, and the two dusty chairs drawn up to it, and glanced further round the room, but not for long. His eyes coming to rest on the unsavoury remains of the sandwich, green with mould, the obscene fly paper, he made a moue of disgust. ‘But not here. This place is only short of Miss Havisham in her wedding veil. Let's get somewhere we can breathe, for God's sake.'

Was the body of the Snowman that of Wim Mauritz? It was hard to believe now that it could be anyone else. The evidence was mounting, the ‘coincidences' becoming too many to ignore: an unidentified dead man found with a South African shilling in his pocket and brass swarf embedded in his boot soles; a South African, now missing, who had been living in Henrietta Street with Aston's machine shop only a few strides away …

The cumbersome business of tracing this Wim Mauritz through the South African Police would have to be set in motion, Reardon reminded himself, to provide the final proof. Meanwhile …

‘Three dead men,' he said.

‘Three?'

He had drawn his triangle again, this time with Osbert Rees-Talbot at the top. ‘I'm not suggesting that he – Rees-Talbot – was murdered,' he said, digging his pencil on the name, ‘but we can't rule him out of the equation. Those loans to Aston. Can you believe his gratitude would extend to paying out for the rest of his natural? Once, maybe, to help him start his business. But then, to start again, after so many years – cash payments, plus the Hadley Piece premises?'

‘Which all started after the arrival of Mauritz.'

‘Or at any rate after he rented Henrietta Street.' Reardon fell silent. He kept coming back to that strange conversation he had had with Deborah Rees-Talbot about her brother. Sins of omission! It wasn't a concept he'd ever had reason to consider, and he wasn't sure whether to put much credence to it, yet now he kept wondering. Omission, commission. They said, didn't they, that it wasn't the things you had done in your youth that you'd regret in later life, but those you hadn't. On the other hand, Reardon could think of a few things he'd done that he'd prefer to forget. The thought of Miss Rees-Talbot reminded him that he hadn't yet asked her niece if he could see what her father had been working on just before he died.

‘Sir?' The sergeant's voice cut into his thoughts. He pulled his mind back to the present discussion.

‘Just thinking, Gilmour. How it all leads back to South Africa, when Rees-Talbot and Aston were serving there. Maybe something happened that gave Aston the hold he had over his former officer. If so, it must have been something pretty damning, all things considered. Look at it for a minute. Say the man Mauritz somehow learns about it – never mind what or how for the minute – and comes over here to join in and demand his share, teams up with Aston. The pressure on Rees-Talbot is increased, until finally it becomes intolerable, he's had enough, says to hell with them all and takes the only way out he can see. No more golden eggs – the goose that laid them is gone. No point in Mauritz hanging around after that. But he does. Until he gets himself killed. Murdered and shovelled into the ground.'

‘Who by? Aston? And if it was him, why?'

‘Falling out among thieves isn't unknown. Except it's only a guess that Mauritz knew either of them. Apart from the swarf on his boot soles, of course. And the fact that they were living practically opposite Aston's workshops. He – and his wife. Now here's a thought – why did she never come forward to say he was missing? Odd, to say the least. Unless she
did him in herself.'

‘A woman, getting him out there, and burying him at the edge of the woods? Heck, I doubt I'd have attempted to dig a grave with the ground as hard as it was, sir, never mind a woman!'

‘She could if she'd had an accomplice. If, say, she and Aston did it together. He had a car, remember, he could easily have driven Mauritz's body out to Maxstead and buried him.'

‘Why?' Joe asked again. ‘I mean, why Mrs Mauritz? What reason could she have had for killing her husband?'

‘Since we don't know anything about either of them yet, there's no telling – but for what it's worth, I'm not inclined to bet on it that she did. For one thing, Mauritz was hit pretty damn hard on the head, several times according to the autopsy, and with some strength. It would depend on the woman, of course. I've seen plenty of women I wouldn't like to encounter on a dark night and Mrs Mauritz may have been built like a prize fighter for all we know. But if Aston did kill her husband, that still leaves the question of who killed
him
.'

‘It's not impossible, is it, supposing she knew or suspected it was Aston who'd bashed her husband's skull in, that Mrs Mauritz might have gone after Aston for that? If so, she took her time. Mauritz died before Christmas.'

‘Waiting for the right opportunity, maybe.'

It was possible, of course it was. An easy crime for a woman to commit. The woman Gladys Ibbotson had seen running away?
Away
from Henrietta Street. Possibly for ever.

‘If that's what happened – but it's a big if. We're guessing, Gilmour. And if
she
is
our lady
,
and she's any sense at all, she's on her way back to South Africa, across the other side of the world.'

He leaned back and his eye fell on this week's
Herald,
which some fool had placed on his desk, open at the exact place Joe had been hoping the DI wouldn't see. Reardon picked it up.

‘The police would like to interview a woman who was seen in the vicinity of the Henrietta Street premises of Aston Engineering at nine a.m. on the tenth of April, the day Mr Arthur Aston was found dead. Mr Vincent Tompkins who was delivering milk, has reported seeing a woman run across the road, causing his horse to rear up and plunge to one side. “Daisy's not a nervous horse, but the woman ran directly in front of her,” Mr Tompkins said. “She was lucky I was there to grab hold, or she would have been run down.” The woman is thought to have been wearing a brown coat and—'

At this point, a tap on the door was followed by Pickersgill, attempting with some success to push the door open with one hand while carrying in his other two full mugs of tea by their handles and not spilling any. He was just in time to catch the end of Reardon's fury as he flung the newspaper from him. ‘What the devil does the woman think she's up to?'

Tea slopped out of the mugs and spread across the desk as the constable put them down too quickly. His face as he spluttered apologies had turned crimson. Reardon gave an exasperated grunt and quickly shoved a pile of files out of the way, while Joe reached for the fold of blotting paper on the desk, jerked his head as a signal for the constable to make a hasty exit, and began to mop up the mess. Pickersgill fled. The telephone rang.

It was Reardon's boss from Dudley, Detective Chief Superintendent Cherry, no doubt wanting to know what progress was being made. As Reardon listened, he mouthed, ‘Leave that,' to Joe, who picked up the half-empty mugs, grabbed the offending newspaper, and left the office.

He found the young constable at the front desk, assiduously immersing himself in the night's occurrences noted in the report book, his ears red. He tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Next time you think of chatting to Tinkerbell here' – he tapped the newspaper – ‘keep your lips buttoned. She's running rings round you, lad.'

He saw his guess had been correct. Pickersgill had turned round, but was looking anywhere except at him, clearly wishing for nothing more than to find a crack in the floor to crawl through. ‘Sarge, I … Sarge …'

‘Pack it in before Reardon cottons on. He's not a fool even if you are. No harm done as it happens, but she ain't worth your job, Dave.'

When he returned to the inspector's office, Reardon had simmered down and was disposing of the sodden blotting paper. ‘Clumsy young clot,' he remarked as he tossed it into the waste paper basket.

‘He's all right, sir. Doesn't know his arse from his elbow sometimes, but he's OK.'

Reardon grunted a laugh. ‘All right, if you say so. Where were we?'

‘Maxstead.' Joe didn't mention the newspaper and Reardon had evidently decided to ignore it.

‘I fancy I'd like to take to look at where Mauritz's body was found,' he said, adding after a moment, ‘You wondered the other day, why Maxstead, didn't you?'

‘I suppose I did. Just a passing observation – though actually, if you wanted to bury a body not too far out of Folbury and went in that direction, you'd be hard put
not
to bury it on Maxstead land. The Scroopes own half the county, or very nearly.'

‘That's what Micklejohn told me.'

So far, Reardon hadn't seemed to feel it necessary to volunteer any account of his meeting with the man who had been in charge of the Snowman investigation. At the time, Joe, as one of the uniforms at Folbury, had only been co-opted to help with the routine enquiries of the case – but he'd heard a few grumbles from the detectives whom Micklejohn had brought in with him. He sensed there'd been a feeling that the enquiry had been sloppy, that the DI hadn't been keen to push it further when the enquiries had threatened to grind to a halt. He wondered if Reardon had picked up on the fact that he had been a bit too overanxious to wrap it up before he retired. It had been a frustrating case, and Micklejohn quite obviously hadn't been sorry to see the back of it, despite leaving behind him an unsolved investigation.

Reardon said abruptly, ‘He believes the Scroopes wanted it hushed up. Was that the general feeling?'

Joe considered. ‘A family like that … yes, I reckon it was. They just wouldn't have been able to stomach the idea of their name being connected with anything of that sort, would they? Mud sticks.' He was rather taken aback that Micklejohn should actually have said that to Reardon; at the time, he'd dismissed any idea that privilege should influence the matter either way.

‘You recall who found the body, Sergeant?'

Cracking a knuckle, Joe searched his memory. ‘Wasn't it the gamekeeper, out with his dogs?'

‘He wouldn't like being called that, I suspect. Colonel Frith, according to Micklejohn, is Lady Maude's land agent, the chap that administers the estate.'

‘Oh?
He
was the one who found him?' Joe had forgotten the name, and not being a country boy, distinctions between gamekeepers and land agents didn't mean enough to have registered with him. Though he'd no doubt they would be important to Colonel Frith. He remembered
him
all right – the chap who'd been with Lady Maude that day when Joe had visited her to tell her the enquiry was being suspended. Stiff sort of fellow, like the dowager herself. Between them they'd made his hackles rise. He liked to think he didn't have the sort of chip on his shoulder some folk had against the gentry, but a cynical question had occurred to him at the time: would the same casual acceptance of the police having been unsuccessful in finding anyone to blame for the murder have applied if they'd failed to catch anyone poaching pheasant or stealing trout?

‘I'm glad the matter has been resolved satisfactorily at last,' her Ladyship had said, after he'd told them the enquiries were suspended. ‘Thank you, Sergeant, for letting us know. A storm in a teacup after all.'

The worlds of Lady Maude and Joe Gilmour were a long way apart, and he had no desire to close the gap if she could describe any man's death as a storm in a teacup. ‘It hasn't been resolved, unfortunately, merely put in abeyance.'

‘Oh, quite.'