A Hovering of Vultures (16 page)

“I think I'd better ask the questions,” said Oddie hurriedly. “It'll all be clear in time. Perhaps I could start by asking you both the same question: what were you at the Weekend for?”

The pair sat down on the sofa, looked at each other, then at the policemen. Felix Potter-Hodge's face resembled some vandalised Gothic church: all cracks and craggy edges, with stubbly cheeks and chin and brown stubs for teeth. His long body seemed ill-coordinated, his hands claw-like. Mavis on the other hand sat there like a white meringue, a series of blobs waiting passively for someone who liked that sort of thing.

“Well,” said Felix, “first of all, we're not great readers.”

“That's right,” said Mavis. “I'm afraid the telly's good enough for us.”

“Except on Saturday night, of course.”

“You go out on Saturday night?” Oddie asked.

“Oh no. I mean that nobody could find Saturday night telly good enough for them. Anyway, I've known as long as I can remember that my Gran was great friends with this woman who wrote novels. It was something Gran took pride in—though she never liked to talk about her death: it upset her too much. But she'd mention her, just dropping it into the conversation, like saying ‘My friend Susannah Sneddon, the novelist,' though more often than not the name meant nothing at all to the person she was speaking to. But the name started coming up, now and again, in the years after she died, either because of the novels, or because of the murder case.”

“There's talk of a television series from one of the novels,”
said Mavis, in the tone of one who thought that this was the fictional equivalent of beatification.

“That's right,” said her husband, nodding complacently, “there is. That'll be good for Micklewike. Anyway, when I inherited this house from my father, along with the grocery business—Ilkley's the sort of place where you can still keep a good
family
grocery business going, and we do very nicely—well, we went through everything, because my Dad had been a bit of a hoarder and collector, and he loved anything to do with the family.”

“It was Felix's father who was responsible for the ‘Potter-Hodge' thing,” said Mavis apologetically. “Felix's Gran was Mrs Potter, but she'd been a Miss Hodge. His father said the family had always been men of substance in Ilkley, so he added his mother's name to make it sound grander. But it doesn't, does it? It's a bit of an embarrassment, really.”

“So when we were going through all this junk—cuttings about my Granddad when he was Mayor of Ilkley, that sort of thing—it was a bit touch-and-go whether we'd throw out this pile of letters from Susannah Sneddon. She was nothing to us, to be perfectly frank. But as luck would have it we sat down and read through one or two of them, and—I don't know—”

“We just thought,” said Mavis, “that they were something out of the ordinary. I mean, we're not scholars or anything, but we could tell these weren't just the usual letters between friends, the sort of people who used to write regularly, but don't any more because they phone instead. They were—well—so nicely written, so vivid, they gave you such a good picture of what her life was like, how she wrote the books. There was nothing run-of-the-mill about them.”

“So, to cut a long story short, we decided to keep them.
We've got this big house with just us rattling round in it. There's no shortage of storage space. Then we started hearing her name mentioned, didn't we, Mavis?”

“That's right, like I said. In the papers, even on TV, and a little piece on her and Micklewike in
The Yorkshire Countryside.
People were starting to get interested. So when we heard about the Sneddon Weekend we thought we'd go along.”

“We got down the letters and had another peek, and it struck us we really had something to contribute.”

Watching these two ill-favoured people chattering on, so happy with their tiny corner of literary history, it suddenly struck Charlie that his view of them had been horribly coloured by the fact of their physical unattractiveness: it was not nice to look into the gaping hole of Felix Potter-Hodge's mouth and see his discoloured teeth; Mavis's plump and placid whiteness was that bit off-putting. And yet they seemed perfectly ordinary people, with simple pleasures and no discernible malice.

It was the converse of his thought of the night before: if Gillian Parkin and Vibeke Nordli had blinded him—as perhaps they had—by being healthy, handsome and open people on the surface, had not this pair done the same by being so physically off-putting? They might be dull, conventional, constitutionally lethargic types and still be morally above reproach. A policeman should not come with an in-built bias in favour of beautiful people. Reality, in his experience, was all the time conflicting with appearance. He had personally arrested many handsome people of both sexes.

“And I gather when you mentioned the letters, Gerald Suzman was interested?” Oddie was asking. The two nodded vigorously.

“Oh yes, very much so,” said Mavis complacently. “Wanted to acquire them for his Museum.”

“But you wouldn't sell?”

“Well, we didn't want to rush into selling, at any rate,” said Felix cautiously. “I mean, it was the opposite way round to the usual: the more interest he showed, the less we wanted to sell—not because we wanted to make them more valuable and stick out for a high price, but because, well, we liked having some part in this literary figure people were talking about, and we didn't feel like giving it up at once.”

“We said we'd lend,” said Mavis, nodding like a doll to everything her husband said. “We'd have been quite happy to have a letter—or more, even—on exhibition at the farm, on more or less permanent loan.”

“There are quite a number of them, you see. And we made it quite clear that we'd be willing to make them available to anyone doing work on Susannah Sneddon—like scholars and reporters, and anyone writing a book.”

“But we wanted to keep them, at least for the moment. They're a bit of history that is ours.”

Zoë came in heavily from the hall, and muzzled her big head in Mavis's lap, her round eyes straying shamelessly to a box of chocolates on the side table.

“She's just a big softie, you see,” said Mavis fondly, opening the box and selecting one. “Who's a lucky girl, then?”

“Just how keen was Suzman to buy the letters?” asked Oddie. “Did you talk about it just the once?”

“Oh no. He phoned us on the Saturday evening, late on: very interested he was, and hoping to see the letters. We said there wasn't any problem about that. Then on the Sunday, after the meeting, we were going back to our car, intending to drive back here, because we didn't fancy the lecture, and he drove past, stopped, and insisted that we went to lunch with him.”

“It was Chinese,” said Mavis. “Not what we'd have chosen.”

“It was very nice of him,” insisted Felix. “But I always say you don't know what you're eating.”

“You say it was nice of him, but he was still after the letters?”

“Oh yes, but he didn't have to buy us lunch, did he? Oh, he was after them all right, and getting down to figures by the time we had coffee.”

“What kind of figures?”

“Well, it started at three thousand, and it was up to five by the time he was driving us back to Micklewike.”

“Sight unseen?”

“Yes. He'd never seen any of them.”

“But you didn't accept?”

“No. The most we would say was that we might think about it in two or three years' time.”

“Did that satisfy him?”

“Well, it had to, didn't it? He couldn't make us sell. But we could tell he wasn't happy.”

“I'm finding his interest that bit odd,” said Mike, “because apparently he was otherwise not at all interested in the biographical details of the Sneddons, or facts about their daily life.”

“He might have been planning to publish the letters,” Charlie pointed out. “If he owned them he could do that, couldn't he? And there might be a bit of money in it. Did he mention the possibility?”

“Oh no,” said Mavis. “Just the fact that they ought to be at the farm.”

“Really he played his cards very close to his chest,” said Felix.

Zoë suddenly leapt up and charged out the living-room
door into the hall, barking like a machine-gun. The two policemen nearly jumped out of their chairs.

“Just the milkman,” said Mavis. “He's shockingly late by the time he gets to us.”

“You can't tell her not to,” said Felix, “because that's what we keep her for, isn't it?”

“Half the time it's just a cat, though,” said Mavis. “Like Sunday night.”

The policemen pricked up their ears.

“Sunday night?”

“Put on a great performance just after we'd got into bed. Felix got up, but there wasn't anybody.”

“You're sure?” asked Oddie, turning to her husband.

“Just someone walking down the road some way away. Looked perfectly respectable. It was probably next-door's cat set her off.”

“I think,” said Oddie, “that, just to be on the safe side, we'd better take those letters into safe keeping.”

The two looked outraged, as if he'd proposed to take their baby into custody.

“Oh surely,” protested Felix, “I mean, that can't be necessary, can it? Nobody can know what's in them, so they can't be after them.”

“Perhaps it's someone who
fears
what's in them,” Oddie pointed out. “Look, this is what I'd suggest: what if we take them to Ilkley police station, and ask them to keep them there for a while, and take photocopies: one for you and one for us. Then you could deposit either the originals or the copy with your bank. If you lose the originals entirely you lose your part in the whole Sneddon business—the books, the new fame, the murder.”

They thought about that, and then nodded. Felix went to the sideboard, bent down and brought out an old, collapsing
cardboard box that had “Seagrim's Luncheon Meat” printed on the side. The letters lay in four substantial piles, without envelopes, each one a thick wodge of paper. On top of them were three very amateur snapshots, all three of a heavy-looking woman, posing awkwardly against different backgrounds: High Maddox Farm; the little wood nearby; and a long, low hedgerow. Oddie took up one of the letters at random and Charlie, looking over his shoulder, read it with him:

High Maddox Farm,

March 19th 1932.

Dear Janet,

Well, the book is done, finished in rough draft at any rate. Much work still to be done on it. As usual at this stage I don't know whether it is good or bad, saleable or a drug on the market. Joshua, at least,
always knows
! He has one ready to send to the publishers—beautifully typed and to me quite incomprehensible. He is melancholy about it, but quite resigned. Also, he can't think of a title. Titles are so important. I am calling mine
The Black Byre.
It has a ring about it, doesn't it?

And so Spring is coming. I feel it in the air, even here, in our high, wind-swept village. It is not the meagre crocuses in the cottage patches in Micklewike that tell me that the earth is renewing itself once more, but the tang and zest of the breezes that blow across the valley. Joshua feels it as he ploughs his furrows, thinking his Modernist thoughts, and I feel it as I walk through the spinney and out to the moorlands, wondering whether the earth will give me one more tale to spin . . .

The two men looked at each other.

“I don't think she sounds like a very nice woman,” said Charlie.

T
he trip to London went very well. They said at Leeds/Bradford airport that they only had one spare seat on the twelve o'clock flight, but there quite often were cancellations. When they got to the makeshift little structure they found a Leeds businessman being decanted into an ambulance after a minor heart attack. “Dirty old sod!” Charlie heard one immaculately coiffed air hostess mutter to another. “Shan't have to worry about his hands for a month or two!” At Heathrow they found the car they had requested from Scotland Yard waiting for them: Charlie's friend Superintendent Trethowan was both interested and grateful, and he made that clear in the talk and exchange of information they had in his office an hour later, en route for for Gerald Suzman's flat in Dolphin Square.

The flat had a view over the Thames towards Battersea and the sad defacement of the power station. Sitting snugly
between the Tate Gallery and Chelsea the flat itself belied its bland exterior by being undoubtedly the home of an artist of sorts, though certainly a self-indulgent rather than a rigorously disciplined one: there were plush, soft carpets, silk shirts and dressing-gowns, gastronomic delicacies from Harrods. There were books everywhere, especially expensive art books, which looked like complimentary copies of volumes which Suzman had been concerned with in some way, some having grateful personal inscriptions. Everything in the flat spoke of—nay, announced in a loud voice—the amateur litterateur, the epicurean, the connoisseur.

Nothing, however, spoke of criminal activities.

“I suppose you wouldn't expect to find traces
here
,” said Oddie dispiritedly. “If he puts together, say, an early, privately printed edition of a Matthew Arnold poem—”

“No ‘say' about it: he did,” said Charlie.

“Right. But not so as to be convicted in a court of law. Anyway, you wouldn't expect to find copies here. Similarly if he'd produced a choice piece of Swinburne erotica apparently printed for circulation to the poet's similarly inclined friends, you wouldn't expect him to treasure a copy for himself—especially as his tastes certainly don't seem to have taken him in that particular direction. No, he'd want to sell the small number he produced, and not keep any incriminating evidence.”