Put on by Cunning (10 page)

‘Well, in a funny sort of way,’ Burden said almost apologetically, ‘she told me so.’

‘It was while we were up at Sterries about that burglary. I was in the dining room talking to Hicks when Natalie and the Zoffany couple came downstairs. She may have known I was within earshot but I don’t think she did. She and Mrs Z. were talking and Natalie was saying she supposed she would have to get Sotheby’s or someone to value Camargue’s china for her. On the other hand, there had been that man she and Mrs Z. had met that someone had said was an expert on Chinese porcelain and she’d like to get hold of his name and phone number. Zoffany said what man did she mean and Natalie said he wouldn’t know, he hadn’t been there, it had been at so-and-so’s party
last Sunday evening
.’

‘A bit too glib, wasn’t it?’

‘Glib or not, if Natalie was at a party there’ll be at least a dozen people to say she was, as well as Mrs Z. And if Camargue was murdered
we will never prove it.
If we’d guessed it at the time it would have been bad enough with snow lying everywhere, with snow falling to obliterate all possible evidence. No weapon but bare hands. Camargue cremated. We haven’t a hope in hell of proving it.’

‘You’re over-pessimistic,’ said Wexford, and he quoted softly, ‘If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.’

A shop that is not regularly open and manned seems to announce this fact to the world even when the ‘open’ sign hangs on its door and an assistant can be seen pottering inside. An indefinable air of neglect, of lack of interest, of precarious existence and threatened permanent closure hangs over it. So it was with the Zodiac, nestling in deep Victoriana, tucked behind a neo-Gothic square, on the borders of Islington and Hackney.

Its window was stacked full of paperback science fiction, but some of the books had tumbled down, and those which lay with their covers exposed had their gaudy and bizarre designs veiled in dust. Above the shop was a single storey – for this was a district of squat buildings and wide streets – and behind it a humping of rooms, shapelessly huddled and with odd little scraps of roof, gables protruding, seemingly superfluous doors and even a cowled chimney. Wexford pushed open the shop door and walked in. There was a sour, inky, musty smell, inseparable from secondhand books. These lined the shop like wallpaper, an asymmetrical pattern of red and green and yellow and black spines. They were all science fiction,
The Trillion Project, Nergal of Chaldea, Neuropodium, Course for Umbrial, The Triton Occultation
. He was replacing on the shelf a book whose coverbore a picture of what appeared to be a Boeing 747 coated in fish scales and with antennae, when Ivan Zoffany came in from a door at the back.

Recognition was not mutual. Zoffany showed intense surprise when Wexford said who he was, but it seemed like surprise alone and not fear.

‘I’d like a few words with you.’

‘Right. It’s a mystery to me what about but I’measy. I may as well close up for lunch anyway.’

It was ten past twelve. Could they hope to make any sort of living out of this place? Did they try? the ‘open’ sign was turned round and Zoffany led Wexford into the room from which he had come. By a window which gave on to a paved yard and scrap of garden and where the light was best, Jane Zoffany, in antique gown, shawl and beads, sat sewing. She appeared to be turning up or letting down the hem of a skirt and Wexford, whose memory was highly retentive about this sort of thing, recognized it as the skirt Natalie had been wearing on the day they were summoned after the burglary.

‘What can we do for you?’

Zoffany had the bluff, insincere manner of the man who has a great deal to hide. Experience had taught Wexford that what such a nature is hiding is far more often some emotional disturbance or failure of nerve than guilty knowledge. He could hardly have indulged in greater self-deception than when he had said he was easy. There was something in Zoffany’s eyes and the droop of his mouth when he was not forcing it into a grain that spoke of frightful inner suffering. And it was more apparent here, on his home ground, than it had been at Sterries.

‘How long have you known Mrs Arno?’

Instinctively, Jane Zoffany glanced towards the ceiling. And at that moment a light footstep sounded overhead. Zoffany didn’t look up.

‘Oh, I’d say a couple of years, give or take a little.’

‘You knew her before she came to this country then?’

‘Met her when my poor sister died. Mrs Arno and my sister used to share a house in Los Angeles. Perhaps you didn’t know that? Tina, my sister, she died the summer before last, and I had to go over and see to things. Grisly business but someone had to. There wasn’t anyone else, barring my mother, and you can’t expect an old lady of seventy – I say, what’s all this in aid of?’

Wexford ignored the question as he usually ignored such questions until the time was ripe to answer them. ‘Your sister and Mrs Arno shared a house?’

‘Well, Tina had a flat in her house.’

‘A room actually, Ivan,’ said Jane Zoffany.

‘A room in her house. Look, could you tell me why you want . . . ?’

‘She must have been quite a young woman. What did she die of?’

‘Cancer. She had cancer in her twenties while she was still married. Then she got divorced, but she didn’t keep his name, she went back to her maiden name. She was thirty-nine if you want to know. The cancer came back suddenly, it was all over her, carcinomatosis, they called it. She was dead in three weeks from the onset.’

Wexford thought he spoke callously and with a curious kind of resentment. There was also an impression that he talked for the sake of talking, perhaps to avoid an embarrassing matter.

‘I hadn’t seen her for sixteen or seventeen years,’ he said, ‘but when she went like that someone had to go over. I can’t think what you want with all this.’

It was on the tip of Wexford’s tongue to retort that he had not asked for it. He said mildly, ‘When you arrived you met Mrs Arno? Stayed in her house perhaps?’

Zoffany nodded, uneasy again.

‘You got on well and became friends. After you came home you corresponded with her and when you heard she was coming back here and needed somewhere to live, you and your wife offered her the upstairs flat.’

‘That’s quite correct,’ said Jane Zoffany. She gave a strange little skittish laugh. ‘I’d always admired her from afar, you see. Just to think of my own sister-in-law living in Manuel Camargue’s own daughter’s house! I used to worship him when I was young. And Natalie and I are very close now. It was a really good idea. I’m sure Natalie has been a true friend to me.’ She re-threaded her needle, holding the eye up against the yellowed and none-too-clean net curtain. ‘Please, why are you asking all these questions?’

‘A suggestion has been made that Mrs Arno I not in fact the late Sir Manuel Camargue’s daughter but an impostor.’

He was interested by the effect of these words on his hearers. One of them expected this statement and was not surprised by it, the other was either flabbergasted or was a superb actor. Ivan Zoffany seemed stricken dumb with astonishment. Then he asked Wexford to repeat what he had said.

‘That is the most incredible nonsense,’ Zoffany said with a loaded pause between the words. ‘Who has suggested it? Who would put about a story like that? Now just you listen to me . . .’ Wagging a finger, he began lecturing Wexford on the subject of Natalie Arno’s virtues and misfortunes. ‘One of the most charming, delightful girls you could wish to meet, and as if she hasn’t had enough to put up with . . .’

Wexford cut him short again. ‘It’s her identity, not her charm, that’s in dispute.’ He was intrigued by the behaviour of Jane Zoffany who was sitting hunched up, looking anywhere but at him, and who appeared to be very frightened indeed. She had stopped sewing because her hands would have shaken once she moved each out of the other’s grasp.

He went back into the shop. Natalie Arno was standing by the counter on the top of which now lay an open magazine. She was looking a this and laughing with glee rather than amusement. When she saw Wexford she showed no surprise, but smiled, holding her head a little on one side.

‘Good morning, Mr – er, Wexford, isn’t it? And how are you today?’ It was an Americanism delivered with an American lilt and one that seemed to require no reply. ‘When you close the shop, Ivan,’ she said, ‘you should also remember to lock the door. All sorts of undesirables could come in.’

Zoffany said with gallantry, but stammering a little, ‘That certainly doesn’t include you, Natalie!’

‘I’m not sure the chief inspector would agree with you.’ She gave Wexford a sidelong smile. She knew. Symonds, O’Brien and Ames had lost no time in telling her. Jane Zoffany was afraid but she was not. Her black eyes sparkled. Rather ostentatiously, she closed the magazine she had been looking at, revealing the cover which showed it to belong to the medium hard genre of pornography. Plainly, this was Zoffany’s under-the-counter solace that she had lighted on. He flushed, seized it rather too quickly from under her hands and thrust it between some catalogues in a pile. Natalie’s face became pensive and innocent. She put up her hands to her hair and her full breasts in the sweater rose with the movement, which seemed to have been made quiteartlessly, simply to tuck in a tortoiseshell pin.

‘Did you want to interrogate me, Mr Wexford?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘At present I’ll be content if you’ll give me the name and address of the people whose party you and Mrs Zoffany went to on the evening of 27 January.’

She told him, without hesitation or surprise.

‘Thank you, Mrs Arno.’

At the door of the room where Jane Zoffany was she paused, looked at him and giggled. ‘You can call me Mrs X, if you like. Feel free.’

A housekeeper in a dark dress that was very nearly a uniform admitted him to the house in a cul-de-sac off Kensington Church Street. She was a pretty, dark-haired woman in her thirties who doubtless looked on her job as a career and played her part so well that he felt she
was
playing, was acting with some skill the role of a deferential servant. In a way she reminded him of Ted Hicks.

‘Mrs Mountnessing hopes you won’t mind going upstairs, Chief Inspector. Mrs Mountnessing is taking her coffee after luncheon in the little sitting room.’

It was a far cry from the house in De Beauvoir Square to which Natalie had sent him, a latter-day Bohemia where there had been Indian bedspreads draping the walls and a smell of marijuana for anyone who cared to sniff for it. Here the wall decorations were hunting prints, ascending parallel to the line of the staircase whose treads were carpeted in thick soft olive-green. The first-floor hall was wide, milk chocolate with white cornice and mouldings, the same green carpet, a
Hortus siccus
in a copper trough on a console table, a couple of fat-seated, round-backed chairs upholstered in golden-brown velvet, a twinkling chandelier and a brown table lamp with a cream satin shade. There are several thousand such interiors in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. A panelled door was pushed open and Wexford found himself in the presence of Natalie Arno’s Aunt Gladys, Mrs Rupert Mountnessing, the sister of Kathleen Camargue.

His first impression was of someone cruelly encaged and literally gasping for breath. It was a fleeting image. Mrs Mountnessing was just a fat woman in a too-tight corset which compressed her body from thighs to chest into the shape of a sausage and thrust a shelf of bosom up to buttress her double chin. This constrained flesh was sheathed in biscuit-coloured wool and upon the shelf rested three strands of pearls. Her face had become a cluster of pouches rather than a nest of wrinkles. It was thickly painted and surmounted by an intricate white-gold coiffure that was as smooth and stiff as a wig. The only area of Mrs Mountnessing which kept some hint of youth was her legs. And these were still excellent: slender, smooth, not varicosed, the ankles slim, the tapering feet shod in classic court shoes of beige glacé kid. They reminded him of Natalie’s legs, they were exactly like. Did that mean anything? Very little. There are only a few types of leg, after all. One never said ‘She has her aunt’s legs’ as one might say a woman had her father’s nose or her grandmother’s eyes.

The room was as beige and gold as its owner. On a low table was a coffee cup, coffee pot, sugar basin and cream jug in ivory china with a Greek key design on it in gold. Mrs Mountnessing rose when he came in and held out a hand much be-ringed, the old woman’s claw-like nails filed to points and painted dark red.

‘Bring another cup, will you, Miranda?’

It was the voice of an elderly child, petulant, permanently aggrieved. Wexford thought that the voice and the puckered face told of a lifetime of hurts, real or imagined. Rupert Mountnessing was presumably dead and gone long ago, and Dinah Sternhold had told him there had been no children. Would Natalie, real or false, hope for an inheritance here? Almost the first words uttered by Mrs Mountnessing told him that, if so, she hoped in vain.

‘You said on the phone you wanted to talk tome about my niece. But I know nothing about my niece in recent years and I don’t – I don’t want to. I should have explained that to you, I realize that now. I shouldn’t have let you come all this way when I’ve nothing at all to tell you.’ Her eyes blinked more often or more obviously than most people’s. The effect was to give the impression she fought off tears. ‘Thank you, Miranda.’ She took the coffee cup and listened, subsiding back into her chair as he told her the reason for his visit.

‘Anastasia,’ she said.

The Tichborne Claimant had been recalled, now the Tsar’s youngest daughter. Wexford did not relish the reminder, for wasn’t it a fact that Anastasia’s grandmother, the one person who could positively have identified her, had refused ever to see the claimant, and that as a result of that refusal no positive identification had ever been made?