Put on by Cunning (14 page)

‘I expect Mrs Arno asked you a great many questions, didn’t she? I expect she asked you to remind her of things in her childhood which had slipped her mind. The name of a grey kitten, for instance?’

‘Panther,’ said Mrs Woodhouse. ‘That was his name. Why shouldn’t I tell her? She’d forgotten, she was only a kiddy. I don’t know what you mean, asking me things like that. Of course I’ve got a good memory, I was famous in the family for my memory. Mr Camargue – he was Mr Camargue then – he used to say, Mary, you’re just like an elephant, and people’d look at me, me being so little and thin, and he’d say, You never forget a thing.’

‘I expect you understand what conspiracy is, don’t you, Mrs Woodhouse? You understand what is meant by a conspiracy to defraud someone of what is theirs by right of law? I don’t think you would want to be involved in something of that kind, would you? Something which could get you into very serious trouble?’

She repeated her formula fiercely, one hand clutching the crochet hook, the other the ball of yarn. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Mavis Rolland, the music teacher, was next on his list to be seen. He had the phone in his hand, he was about to dial the school number and arrange an appointment with her when Kennth Ames was announced.

It was as warm in Wexford’s office as it was in the Kingsbrook precinct, but Ames removed neither his black, waisted overcoat nor his black-and-grey check worsted scarf. He took the chair Wexford offered him and fixed his eyes on the northern aspect of St Peter’s spire just as he was in the habit of contemplating its southern elevation from his own window.

The purpose of his call, he said, was to inform the police that Symonds, O’Brien and Ames had decided to recognize Mrs Natalie Kathleen Camargue Arno as Sir Manuel Camargue’s rightful heir.

In fact, said Ames, it was only their regard for truth and their horror of the possibility of fraud that had led them to investigate in the first place what amounted to malicious slander.

‘We were obliged to look into it, of course, though it never does to place too much credence on that kind of mischief-making.’

‘Camargue himself . . .’ Wexford began.

‘My dear chap, according to Mrs Steinbeck, according to
her
. I’m afraid you’ve been a bit led up the garden. Lost your sense of proportion too, if I may say so. Come now. You surely can’t have expected my client to play you a pretty turn on that fiddle when she’d got a nasty cut on her hand.’

Wexford noted that Natalie Arno had become ‘my client’. He was more surprised than he thought he could be by Ames’s statement, he was shocked, and he sat in silence, digesting it, beginning to grasp its implications. Still staring skywards, Ames said chattily:

‘There was never any real doubt, of course.’ He delivered one of his strange confused metaphors. ‘It was a case of making a mare’s nest out of a molehill. But we do now have incontrovertible proof.’

‘Oh yes?’ Wexford’s eyebrows went up.

‘My client was able to produce her dentist, chappie who used to see to the Camargue family’s teeth. Man called Williams from London, Wigmore Street, in point of fact. He’d still got his records and – well, my client’s jaw and Miss Natalie Camargue’s are indisputably one and the same. She hasn’t even lost a tooth.’

Wexford made his appointment with Miss Rolland but was obliged to cancel it next day. For in the interim he had an unpleasant interview with the chief constable. Charles Griswold, with his uncanny resemblance to the late General de Gaulle, as heavily built, grave and intense a man as Ames was slight, shallow and
distrait
, stormed in upon him on the following morning.

‘Leave it, Reg, forget it. Let it be as if you had never heard the name Camargue.’

‘Because an impostor has seduced Ames into believing a pack of lies, sir?’

‘
Seduced
?’

Wexford made an impatient gesture with his hand. ‘I was speaking metaphorically, of course.
She is not Natalie Arno
. My firm belief is that ever since she came here she’s been employing a former servant of the Camargue family to instruct her in matters of family history. As for the dentist, did Symonds, O’Brien and Ames check on him? Did they go to him or did he come to them? If this is a conspiracy in which a considerable number of people are involved . . .’

‘You know I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about, don’t you? All I’m saying is, if a reputable firm of solicitors such as Symonds, O’Brien and Ames will accept this woman and permit her to inherit a very significant property, we will accept her too. And we’ll forget way-out notions of pushing old men into frozen lakes when we have not a shred of evidence that Camargue died anything but a natural death. Is that understood?’

‘If you say so, it must be, sir.’

‘It must,’ said the chief constable.

Not the beginning but the end. Wexford had become obsessional about cases before, and the path these obsessions took had been blocked by just such obstacles and opposition. The feeling of frustration was a familiar one to him but it was none the less bitter for that. He stood by the window, cursing under his breath, gazing at the opaque pale sky. The weather had become raw and icy again, a white mist lifting only at midday and then hanging threateningly at tree height. Sheila was coming back today. he couldn’t remember whether she was due in at ten in the morning or ten at night and he didn’t want to know. That way he couldn’t worry too precisely about what was happening to her aircraft in the fog, unable to land maybe, sent off to try Luton or Manchester, running short of fuel . . . He told himself sternly, reminded himself, that air transport was the safest of all forms of travel, and let his thoughts turn back to Natalie Arno. Or whoever. Was he never to know now? Even if it were only for the satisfaction of his own curiosity, was he never to know who she was and how she had done it? The switch from one identity to another, the impersonation, the murder . . .

After what Griswold had said, he dare not, for his very job’s sake, risk another interview with Mary Woodhouse, keep his appointment with Mavis Rolland, attempt to break down the obduracy of Mrs Mountnessing or set about exposing that fake dentist, Williams. What could he do?

The way home had necessarily to be via the Kingsbrook Precinct, for Dora had asked him to pick up a brace of pheasants ordered at the poulterers there. Proximity to the premises of Symonds, O’Brien and Ames angered him afresh, and he wished he might for a split moment become a delinquent teenager in order to daub appropriate graffiti on their brass plate. Turning from it, he found himself looking once more into the window of the travel agents.

A helpful young man spread a handful of brochures in front of him. What had been Dora’s favourites? Bermuda, Mexico, anywhere warm in the United States. They had discussed it endlessly without coming to a decision, knowing this might be the only holiday of such magnitude they would ever have. The poster he had seen in the window had its twin and various highly coloured siblings inside. He glanced up and it was the skyscraper-scape of San Francisco that met his eyes.

The fog had thickened while he was in there. It seemed to lay a cold wet finger on the skin of his face. He drove home very slowly, thinking once more about Sheila, but as he put his key into the front door lock the door was pulled open and there she was before him, browner than he had ever seen her, her hair bleached pale as ivory.

She put out her arms and hugged him. Dora and Andrew were in the living room.

‘Heathrow’s closed and we had to land at Gatwick,’ said Sheila, ‘so we thought we’d come and see you on our way. We’ve had such a fabulous time, Pop, I’ve been telling Mother, you just have to go.’

Wexford laughed. ‘We are going to California,’ he said.

The will, published in the
Kingsmarkham Courier
, as well as in the national press, showed Sir Manuel Camargue to have left the sum of £1,146,000 net. This modest fortune became Natalie Arno’s a little more than two months after Camargue’s death.

‘I shouldn’t call a million pounds modest,’ said Burden.

‘It is when you consider all the people who will want their pickings,’ Wexford said. ‘All the conspirators. No wonder she’s put the house up for sale.’

She had moved into Sterries, but immediately put the house on the market, the asking price being £110,000. For some weeks Kingsmarkham’s principal estate agents, Thacker, Prince and Co., displayed in their window coloured photographs of its exterior, the music room, the drawing room and the garden, while less distinguishable shots of it appeared in the local press. But whether the house itself was too stark and simplistic in design for most people’s taste or whether the price was too high, the fact was that it remained on sale throughout that period of the year when house-buying is at its peak.

‘Funny to think that we know for sure she’s no business to be there and no right to sell it and no right to what she gets for it,’ said Burden, ‘and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.’

But Wexford merely remarked that summer had set in with its usual severity and that he was looking forward to going somewhere warm for his holiday.

The Wexfords were not seasoned travellers and this would be the farthest away from home either had ever been. Wexford felt this need not affect the preparations they must make, but Dora had reached a point just below the panic threshold. All day she had been packing and unpacking and re-packing, confessing shamefacedly that she was a fool and then beginning to worry about the possibility of the house being broken into while they were away. It was useless for Wexford to point out that whether they were known to be in San Francisco or Southend would make little difference to a prospective burglar. He could only assure her that the police would keep an eye on the house. If they couldn’t do that for him, whom could they do it for? Sylvia had promised to go into the house every other day in their absence and he set off that evening to give her a spare key.

Wexford’s elder daughter and her husband had in the past year moved to a newer house in north Kingsmarkham, and it was only a slightly longer way round to return from their home to his own by taking Ploughman’s Lane. To go and look at the house Camargue had built, and on the night before he set out to prove Natalie Arno’s claim to it fraudulent, seemed a fitting act. he drove into Ploughman’s Lane by way of the side road which skirted the grounds of Kingsfield House. But if Sterries had been almost invisible from the roadway in January and February, it was now entirely hidden. The screen of hornbeams, limes and planes that had been skeletons when last he was there, were in full leaf and might have concealed an empty meadow rather than a house for all that could be seen of it.

It was still light at nearly nine. He was driving down the hill when he heard the sound of running feet behind him. In his rear mirror he saw a flying figure, a woman who was running down Ploughman’s Lane as if pursued. It was Jane Zoffany.

There were no pursuers. Apart from her, the place was deserted, sylvan, silent, as such places mostly are even on summer nights. He pulled into the kerb and got out. She was enough in command of herself to swerve to avoid him but as she did so she saw who it was and immediately recognized him. She stopped and burst into tears, crying where she stood and pushing her knuckles into her eyes.

‘Come and sit in the car,’ said Wexford.

She sat in the passenger seat and cried into her hands, into the thin gauzy scarf which she wore swathed round her neck over a red and yellow printed dress of Indian make. Wexford gave her his handkerchief. She cried some more and laid her head back against the headrest, gulping, the tears running down her face. She had no handbag, no coat or jacket, though the dress was sleeveless, and on her stockingless feet were Indian sandals with only a thong to attach them. Suddenly she began to speak, pausing only when sobs choked her voice.

‘I thought she was wonderful. I thought he was the most wonderful, charming, gifted,
kind
person I’d ever met. And I thought she liked me, I thought she actually wanted my company. I never thought she’d really noticed my husband much, I me an except as my husband, that’s all I thought he was to her, I thought it was
me
 . . . And now he says . . . oh God, what am I going to do? Where shall I go? What’s going to become of me?’

Wexford was nonplussed. He could make little sense of what she said but guessed she was spilling all this misery out on to him only because he was there. Anyone willing to listen would have served her purpose. He thought too, and not for the first time, that there was something unhinged about her. You could see disturbance in her eyes as much when they were dry as when they were swollen and wet with tears. She put her hand on his arm.

‘I did everything for her, I bent over backwards to make her feel at home, I ran errands for her, I even mended her clothes. She took all that from me and all the time she and Ivan had been – when he went out to California they had a relationship!’

He neither winced nor smiled at the incongruous word, relic of the already outdated jargon of her youth. ‘Did she tell you that, Mrs Zoffany?’ he asked gently.

‘He told me. Ivan told me.’ She wiped her face with the handkerchief. ‘We came down here on Wednesday to stay, we meant to stay till – oh, Sunday or Monday. The shop’s a dead loss anyway, no one ever comes in, it makes no difference whether we’re there or not. She invited us and we came. I know why she did now. She doesn’t want him but she wants him in love with her, she wants him on a string.’ She shuddered and her voice broke again. ‘He told me this evening, just now, half an hour ago. He said he’d been in love with her for two years, ever since he first saw her. He was longing for her to come and live here so that they could be together and then when she did come she kept fobbing him off and telling him to wait and now . . .’