Put on by Cunning (11 page)

‘We hope it won’t come to that,’ he said. ‘You seem to be her nearest relative, Mrs Mountnessing. Will you agree to see her in my presence and tell me if she is who she says she is?’

Her reaction, the look on her face, reminded him of certain people he had in the past asked to come and identify, not a living person, but a corpse in the mortuary. She put a hand up to each cheek. ‘Oh no, I couldn’t do that. I’m sorry, but it’s impossible. I couldn’t ever see Natalie again.’

He accepted it. She had forewarned him with her mention of Anastasia. If he insisted on her going with him the chances were she would make a positive identification simply to get the whole thing over as soon as possible. Briefly he wondered what it could have been that her niece, while still a young girl, had done to her, and then he joined her at the other end of the room where she stood contemplating a table that was used entirely as a stand for photographs in silver frames.

‘That’s my sister.’

A dark woman with dark eyes, but nevertheless intensely English. Perhaps there was something of the woman he knew as Natalie Arno in the broad brow and pointed chin.

‘She had cancer. She was only forty-five when she died. It was a terrible blow to my poor brother-in-law. He sold their house in Pomfret and built that one in Kingsmarkham and called it Sterries. Sterries is the name of the village in Derbyshire where my parents had their country place. Kathleen and Manuel first met there.’

Camargue and his wife were together among the photographs on the table. Arm-in-arm, walking along some Mediterranean sea front; seated side by side on a low wall in an English garden; in a group with a tall woman so like Camargue that she had to be his sister, and with two small dark-haired smiling girls. A ray of sunlight, obliquely slanted at three on a winter’s afternoon, fell upon the handsome moustached face of a man in the uniform of a colonel of the Grenadier Guards. Rupert Mountnessing, no doubt. A little bemused by so many faces, Wexford turned away.

‘Did Sir Manuel go to the United States after your niece went to live there?’

‘Not to see
her
. I think he went there on a tour – yes, I’m sure he did, though it must be ten or twelve years since he gave up playing. His arthritis crippled him, poor Manuel. We saw very little of each other in recent years, but I was fond of him, he was a sweet man. I would have gone to the memorial service but Miranda wouldn’t let me. She didn’t want me to risk bronchitis in that terrible cold.’

Mrs Mountnessing, it seemed, was willing to talk about any aspect of family life except her niece. She sat down again, blinking back non-existent tears, held ramrod stiff by her corset. Wexford persisted.

‘He went on a tour. Did he make any private visits?’

‘He may have done.’ She said it in the way people do when they dodge the direct affirmative but don’t want to lie.

‘But he didn’t visit his daughter while he was there?’

‘California’s three thousand miles from the east coast,’ she said, ‘it’s as far again as from here.’

Wexford shook his head dismissively. ‘I don’t understand that for nineteen years Sir Manuel never saw his daughter. It’s not as if he was a poor man or a man who never travelled. If he had been a vindictive man, a man to bear a grudge – but everyone tells me how nice he was, how kind, how good. I might say I’d had golden opinions from all sorts of people. Yet for nineteen years he never made an effort to see his only child and allegedly all because she ran away from college and married someone he didn’t know.’

She said so quietly that Wexford hardly heard her, ‘It wasn’t like that.’ Her voice gained a little strength but it was full of distress. ‘He wrote to her – oh, ever so many times. When my sister was very ill, was in fact dying, he wrote to her and asked her to come home. I don’t know if she answered but she didn’t come. My sister died and she didn’t come. Manuel made a new will and wrote to her, telling her he was leaving her everything because it was right she should have his money and her mother’s. She didn’t answer and he gave up writing.’

I wonder how you come to know that? he asked himself, looking at the crumpled profile, the chin that now trembled.

‘I’m telling you all this,’ said Mrs Mountnessing, ‘to make you understand that my niece is cruel, cruel, a cruel unfeeling girl and violent too. She even struck her mother once. Did you know that?’ The note in her voice grew hysterical and Wexford, watching the blinking eyes, the fingers clasping and unclasping in her lap, wished he had not mentioned the estrangement. ‘She’s a nymphomaniac too. Worse than that, it doesn’t matter to her who the men are, her own relations, it’s too horrible to talk about, it’s too . . .’

He interrupted her gently. He got up to go. ‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Mountnessing. I can’t see a sign of any of these propensities in the woman I know.’

Miranda showed him out. As he crossed to the head of the stairs he heard a very soft whimpering sound from the room he had left, the sound of an elderly child beginning to cry.

A birth certificate, a marriage certificate, an American driving licence complete with immediately recognizable photograph taken three years before, a United States passport complete with immediately recognizable photograph taken the previous September, and perhaps most convincing of all, a letter to his daughter from Camargue, dated 1963, in which he informed her that he intended to make her his sole heir. All these documents had been readily submitted to Symonds, O’Brien and Ames, who invited Wexford along to their offices in the precinct over the British Home Stores to view them.

Kenneth Ames, distant and chatty as ever, said he had personally seen Mrs Arno, interviewed her exhaustively and elicited from her a number of facts about the Camargue family and her own childhood which were currently being verified. Mrs Arno had offered to take a blood test but since this could only prove that she was
not
Camargue’s daughter, not that she was, and since no one seemed to know what Camargue’s blood group had been, it was an impracticable idea. Mr Ames said she seemed heartily amused by the whole business, a point of course in her favour. She had even produced samples of her handwriting from when she was at the Royal Academy of Music to be compared with her writing of the present day.

‘Do you know what she said to him?’ Wexford said afterwards, meeting Burden for a drink in the Olive and Dove. ‘She’s got a nerve. “It’s a pity I didn’t do anything criminal when I was a teenager,” she said. “They’d have my fingerprints on record and that would solve everything”.’

Burden didn’t smile. ‘If she’s not Natalie Camargue, when could the change-over have taken place?’

‘Provided we accept what Zoffany says, not recently. Say more than two years ago but after the death of Vernon Arno. According to Ames, he would seem to have died in a San Francisco hospital in 1971.’

‘He must have been young still.’ Burden echoed Wexford’s words to Ivan Zoffany. ‘What did he die of?’

‘Leukaemia. No one’s suggesting there was anything odd about his death, though there’s a chance we’ll know more when we hear from the California police. But, Mike, if there was substitution, if this is an assumed identity, it was assumed for some other reason. This is, it wasn’t put on for the sake of inheriting from Carmargue.’

Burden gave a dubious nod. ‘It would mean the true Natalie was dead.’

‘She may be but there are other possibilities. The true Natalie may be incurably ill in some institution or have become insane or gone to live in some inaccessible place. And the impostor could be someone who needed an identity because keeping her own was dangerous, because, for instance, she was some kind of fugitive from justice. That Camargue was rich, that Camargue was old, that Natalie was to be his sole heir, all these facts might be
incidental
, might be a piece of luck for the impostor which she only later decided to take advantage of. The identity would have been taken on originally as a safety measure, even perhaps as the only possible lifeline, and I think it was taken on at a point where the minimum of deception would have been needed. Maybe at the time the move was made from San Francisco to Los Angeles or much later, at the time when Tina Zoffany died.’

Burden, who seemed not to have been concentrating particularly on any of this, said suddenly, looking up from his drink and fixing Wexford with his steel-coloured eyes:

‘Why did she come to his country at all?’

‘To make sure of the dibs,’ said Wexford.

‘No.’ Burden shook his head. ‘No, that wasn’t the reason. Impostor or real, she was in no doubt about what you call the dibs. She’d had that letter from Camargue, promising her her inheritance. She need do nothing but wait. There was no need to re-establish herself in his eyes, no need to placate him. If she’d felt there was she’d have tried it before. After all, he was getting on for eighty.

‘And it’s no good saying she came back because he was getting married again. No one knew he was getting married till 10 December when his engagement was in the
Telegraph
. she came back to this country in November but she made no attempt to see Camargue until after she read about his engagement. She was here for three or four weeks before that. Doing what? Planning what?’

Admiration was not something Wexford had often felt for the inspector in the past. Sympathy, yes, affection and a definite need, for Burden had most encouragingly fulfilled the function of an Achates or a Boswell, if not quite a Watson. But admiration? Burden was showing unexpected deductive powers that were highly gratifying to witness, and Wexford wondered if they were the fruit of happiness or of reading aloud from great literature in the evenings.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘So why did she come back? Because she was sentimental for her own home, her ain countree, as you might say?’ As Scott might say, thought Wexford. Burden went on, ‘She’s a bit young for those feelings. She’s an American citizen, she was settled in California. If she is Natalie Camargue she’d lived there longer than here, she’d no relatives here but a father and an aunt she didn’t get on with, and no friends unless you count those Zoffanys.

‘If she’s an impostor, coming back was a mad thing to do. Stay in America and when Camarguedies his solicitors will notify her of the death, and though she’ll no doubt then have to come here and swear affidavits and that sort of thing,
no one will question who she is
. No one would have questioned it if she hadn’t shown herself to Camargue.’

‘But she had to do that,’ Wexford objected. ‘Her whole purpose surely in going to see him was to persuade him not to re-marry.’

‘She didn’t know that purpose would even exist when she left the United States in November. And if she’d stayed where she was she might never have known of Camargue’s re-marriage until he eventually died. What would that announcement have merited in a California newspaper? The
Los Angeles Times
, for instance? A paragraph tucked away somewhere. “Former world-famous British flautist . . .”’

‘They say flutist over there.’

‘Flautist, flutist, what does it matter? Until we know
why
she came here I’ve got a feeling we’re not going to get at the truth about this.’

‘The truth about who she is, d’you mean?’

‘The truth about Camargue’s death.’ And Burden said with a certain crushing triumph, ‘You’re getting an obsession about who this woman is. I knew you would, I said so. What interests me far more is the murder of Carmargue and who did it. Can’t you see that in the context of the murder, who she is is an irrelevance?’

‘No’, said Wexford. ‘Who she is is everything.’ The California police had nothing to tell Wexford about Natalie Arno. She was unknown to them, had never been in any trouble or associated with any trouble.

‘The litigation in the Tichborne case,’ said Burden gloomily, ‘went on for three years and cost ninety thousand pounds. That was in 1874. Think what the equivalent of that would be today.’

‘We haven’t had any litigation yet,’ said Wexford, ‘or spent a single penny. Look on the bright side. Think of the claimant getting a fourteen-year sentence for perjury.’

In the meantime Kenneth Ames had interviewed two people who had known Camargue’s daughter when she was an adolescent. Mavis Rolland had been at the Royal Academy of Music at the same time as Natalie Camargue and was now head of the music department at a girls’ school on the South Coast. In her opinion there was no doubt that Natalie Arno was the former Natalie Camargue. She professed to find her not much changed except for her voice which she would not have recognized. On the other hand, Mary Woodhouse, a living-in maid who had worked for the Camargue family while they werein Pomfret, said she would have known the voice anywhere. In Ames’s presence Mrs Woodhouse had talked to Natalie about Shaddough’s Hall Farm where they had lived and Natalie had been able to recall events which Mrs Woodhouse said no impostor could have known.

Wexford wondered why Natalie had not proffered as witnesses for her support her aunt and that old family friend, Philip Cory. It was possible, of course, that in the case of her aunt (if she really was Natalie Arno) the dislike was mutual and that, just as he had feared Mrs Mountnessing would recognize her as her niece to avoid protracting an interview, so Natalie feared to meet her aunt lest animosity should make her refuse that recognition. But Cory she had certainly seen since she returned home, and Cory had so surely believed in her as to cling to her arm in the excess of emotion he had no doubt felt at his old friend’s obsequies. Was there some reason she didn’t want Cory brought into this?

In the early years of broadcasting Philip Cory had achieved some success by writing incidental music for radio. But this is not the kind of thing which makes a man’s name. If Cory had done this at all it was on the strength of his light opera
Aimée
, based on the story of the Empress Josephine’s cousin, the French Sultana. After its London season it had been enthusiastically taken up by amateur operatic societies, largely because it was comparatively easy to sing, had a huge cast, and the costumes required for I could double for
Entführung
or even
Aladdin
. This was particularly the case in Cory’s own locality, where he was looked upon as something of a petbard. Driving out to the environs of Myringham where the composer lived, Wexford noted in the villages at least three posters announcing that
Aimée
was to be performed yet again. It was likely then to be a disappointed man he was on his way to see. Local fame is gratifying only at the beginning of a career, and it could not have afforded much solace to Cory to see that his more frivolous work was to be staged by the Myfleet and District Operatic Society (tickets £1.20, licensed bar opens seven-thirty) while his tone poem
April Fire
and his ballet music for the
Flowers of Evil
were forgotten.