Put on by Cunning (4 page)

‘Do what?’

‘Go to that inquest. People will think . . . I mean, it’s possible they might think . . .’

‘People will think!’ Wexford scoffed. ‘You sound like a dowager lecturing a debutante. What will they think?’

‘I only meant they might think there was something fishy about the death. Some hanky-panky. I mean, they see you there and know who you are and they say to themselves, he wouldn’t have been there if it had all been as straightforward as the coroner . . .’

He was saved from an outburst of Wexford’s temper by an intervention from outside. Mr Haq had glided up to beam upon them. He was small, smiling, very black yet very Caucasian, with a mouthful of startlingly white, madly uneven, large teeth.

‘Everything to your liking, I hope, my dear?’ Mr Haq called all his customers ‘my dear’, irrespective of sex, perhaps supposing it to be a genderless term of extreme respect such as ‘excellency.’ ‘I see you are having the rice Ruwenzori.’ He bowed a little. ‘A flavourful and scrumptious recipe from the peoples who live in the Mountains of the Moon.’ Talking like a television commercial for junk food was habitual with him.

‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Wexford.

‘You are welcome, my dear.’ Mr Haq smiled so broadly that it seemed some of his teeth must spill out. He moved off among the tables, ducking his head under the polythene fronds which trailed from polyethylene pots in polystyrene plant-holders.

‘Are you going to have any pudding?’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Wexford, and he read from the menu with gusto, ‘Cake Kampala or ice cream eau-de-Nil – does he mean the colour or what it’s made of? Anyway, there’s enough ice about without eating it.’ He hesitated. ‘Mike, I don’t see that it matters what people think in this instance. Camargue met his death by misadventure, there’s no doubt about that. Surely, though interest in the man will endure for years, the manner of his death can only be a nine days’ wonder. As a matter of fact, the coroner said something like that.’

Burden ordered coffee from the small, shiny, damson-eyed boy, heir to Mr Haq, who waited at their table. ‘I suppose I was thinking of Hicks.’

‘The manservant or whoever he was?’

‘He found that glove and then he found the body. It wasn’t really strange but it might look strange the way he found the dog outside his back door and took her back to Sterries and put her inside without checking to see where Camargue was.’

‘Hicks’s reputation won’t suffer from my presence in court,’ said Wexford. ‘I doubt if there was a soul there, bar the coroner, who recognized me.’ He chuckled. ‘Or if they did it’d only be as Stewardess Curtis’s dad.’

They went back to the police station. The afternoon wore away into an icy twilight, an evening of hard frost. The heating came on with a pop just as it was time to go home. Entering his living room, Wexford was greeted by a large, bronze-coloured Alsatian, baring her teeth and swinging her tail. On the sofa, next to his daughter, sat the girl who had crept away from the inquest, Camargue’s pale bride.

He had noticed the Volkswagen parked in the ruts of ice outside but had thought little of it. Sheila got up and introduced the visitor.

‘Dinah, this is my father. Pop, I’d like you to meet Dinah Sternhold. She was engaged to Sir Manuel, you know.’

It was immediately apparent to Wexford that she had not noticed him at the inquest. She held out her small hand and looked at him without a flicker of recognition. The dog had backed against her legs and now sat down heavily at her feet, glaring at Wexford in a sullen way.

‘Do forgive me for bringing Nancy.’ She had a soft low unaffected voice. ‘But I daren’t leave her alone, she howls all the time. My neighbours complained when I had to leave her this morning.’

‘She was Sir Manuel’s dog,’ Sheila explained.

A master-leaver and a fugitive, Wexford reflected, eyeing the Alsatian who had abandoned Camargue to his fate. Or gone to fetch help? That, of course, was a possible explanation of the curious behaviour of the dog in the night.

Dinah Sternhold said, ‘It’s Manuel she howls for, you see. I can only hope she won’t take too long to – to forget him. I hope she’ll get over it.’

Was she speaking of the dog or of herself? His answer could have applied to either. ‘She will. She’s young.’

‘He often said he wanted me to have her if – if anything happened to him. I think he was afraid of her going to someone who might not be kind to her.’

Presumably she meant the daughter. Wexford sought about in his mind for some suitable words of condolence, but finding none that sounded neither mawkish nor pompous, he kept quiet. Sheila, anyway, could always be relied on to make conversation. While she was telling some rather inapposite Alsatian anecdote, he studied Dinah Sternhold. Her little round sallow face was pinched with a kind of bewildered woe. One might almost believe she had loved the old man and not merely been in it for the money. But that was a little too much to swallow, distinguished and reputedly kind and charming as he had been. The facts were that he had been seventy-eight and she was certainly fifty years less than that.

Gold-digger, however, she was not. She appeared to have extorted little in the way of pre-marital largesse out of Camargue. Her brown tweed coat had seen better days, she wore no jewellery but an engagement ring, in which the ruby was small and the diamonds pinheads.

He wondered how long she intended to sit there, her hand grasping the dog’s collar, her head bowed as if she were struggling to conquer tears or at least conceal them. But suddenly she jumped up.

‘I must go.’ Her voice became intense, ragged, charged with a sincerity that was almost fierce. ‘It was so
kind
of you to come to me, Sheila. You don’t know how grateful I am.’

‘No need,’ Sheila said lightly. ‘I wanted to come. It was kind of
you
to drive me home. I had a hire car, Pop, because I was scared to drive in the snow but Dinah wasn’t a bit scared to bring me back in the snow and the dark.’

They saw Dinah Sternhold out to her car. Ice was already forming on the windscreen. She pushed the dog on to the back seat and got to work competently on the windows with a de-icing spray. Wexford was rather surprised that he felt no compunction about letting her drive away, but her confidence seemed absolute, you could trust her somehow to look after herself and perhaps others too. Was it this quality about her that Camargue had needed and had loved? He closed the gate, rubbed his hands. Sheila, shivering, ran back into the house.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Round at Syl’s. She ought to be back any minute. Isn’t Dinah nice? I felt so sorry for her, I went straight over to Forby as soon as the inquest was over. We talked and talked. I think maybe I did her a bit of good.’

‘Hmm,’ said Wexford.

The phone started to ring. Andrew, punctual to the minute. ‘Oh, darling,’ Wexford heard Sheila say, ‘do you remember my telling you about someone I know who was going to marry . . .’ He began picking Alsatian hairs off the upholstery.

Father and daughter is not the perfect relationship. According to Freud, that distinction belongs to mother and son. But Wexford, looking back, could have said that he had been happy with his daughters and they with him, he had never actually quarrelled with either of them, there had never been any sort of breach. And if Sheila was his favourite he hoped this was so close a secret that no one but himself, not even Dora, could know it.

Any father of daughters, even today, must look ahead when they are children and anticipate an outlay of money on their wedding celebrations. Wexford realized this and had begun saving for it out of his detective inspector’s salary, but Sylvia had married so young as almost to catch him napping. For Sheila he had been determined to be well prepared, then gradually, with wonder and a kind of dismay, he had watched her rise out of that income bracket and society in which she had grown up, graduate into a sparkling, lavish jet set whose members had wedding receptions in country mansions or else the Dorchester.

For a long time it had looked as if she would not marry at all. Then Andrew Thorverton had appeared, a young businessman, immensely wealthy, it seemed to Wexford, with a house in Hampstead, a cottage in the country somewhere that his future father-in-law suspected was a sizeable house, a boat and an amazing car of so esoteric a manufacture that Wexford had never before heard of it. Sheila, made old-fashioned and sentimental by love, announced she would be married from home and, almost in the same breath, that she and Andrew would be paying for the entertainment of two hundred people to luncheon in the banquet room of the Olive and Dove. Yes, she insisted, it must be so and Pop must lump it or else she’d go and get married in a register office and have lunch at the Pearl of Africa.

He was slightly humiliated. Somehow he felt she ought to cut garment according to cloth, and his cloth would cover a buffet table for fifty. That was absurd, of course. Andrew wouldn’t even notice the few thousand it would cost, and the bride’s father would give her away, make a speech and hang onto his savings. He heard her telling Andrew she would be coming up to spend the weekend with him, and then Dora walked in.

‘She won’t be supporting her friend at the cremation then?’

Sheila had put the phone down. She was sometimes a little flushed and breathless when she had been talking to Andrew. But it was not now of him that she spoke. ‘Dinah’s not going to it. How could she bear it? Two days after what would have been their wedding day?’

‘At least it’s not the day itself,’ said Wexford.

‘Frankly, I’m surprised Sir Manuel’s daughter didn’t fix it on the day itself. She’s capable of it. There’s going to be a memorial service at St Peter’s on Tuesday and everyone will be there. Solti is coming and probably Menuhin. Dinah says there are sure to be crowds, he was so much loved.’

Wexford said, ‘Does she know if he left her much?’

Sheila delivered her reply slowly and with an actress’s perfect timing.

‘He has not left her anything. He has not left her a single penny.’ She sank to the floor, close up by the fire, and stretched out her long legs. ‘Her engagement ring and that dog, that’s all she’s got.’

‘How did that come about? Did you ask her?’

‘Oh, Pop darling, of course I did. Wasn’t I with her for hours and hours? I got the whole thing out of her.’

‘You’re as insatiably inquisitive as your father!’ cried Dora, revolted. ‘I thought you went to comfort the poor girl. I agree it’s not like losing a young fiancé, but just the same . . .’

‘Curiosity,’ quoted Wexford, ‘is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.’ He chuckled. ‘The daughter gets it all, does she?’

‘Sir Manuel saw his daughter a week before he died and that was the first time he’d seen her for nineteen years. There’d been a family quarrel. She was at the Royal Academy of Music but she left and went off with an American student. The first Camargue and his wife knew of it was a letter from San Francisco. Mrs Camargue – he wasn’t a Sir then – got ill and died but the daughter didn’t come back. She didn’t come back at all till last November. Doesn’t it seem frightfully unfair that she gets everything?’

‘Camargue should have made a new will.’

‘He was going to as soon as they were married. Marriage invalidates a will. Did you know that, Pop?’

He nodded.

‘I can understand divorce would but I can’t see why marriage.’ She turned her legs, toasting them.

‘You’ll get scorch marks,’ said Dora. ‘That won’t look very nice on the beach in Bermuda.’

Sheila took no notice. ‘And what’s more, he was going to cut the daughter out altogether. Apparently, that one sight of her was enough.’

Dora, won uneasily on to the side of the gossips, said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling her the daughter. Doesn’t she have a name?’

‘Natalie Arno. Mrs Arno, she’s a widow. The American student died some time during those nineteen years. Dinah was awfully reticent about her, but she did say Camargue intended to make a new will, and since he said this just after he’d seen Natalie I put two and two together. And there’s another thing, Natalie only got in touch with her father after his engagement to Dinah was announced. The engagement was in the
Telegraph
on 10 December, and on the 12th he got a letter from Natalie telling him she was back and could she come and see him? She wanted a reconciliation. It was obvious she was scared stiff of the marriage and wanted to stop it.’

‘And your reticent friend told you all this?’

‘She got it out of her, Dora. I can understand. She’s a chip off the old block, as you so indignantly pointed out.’ He turned once more to Sheila. ‘Did she try to stop it?’

‘Dinah wouldn’t say. I think she hates discussing Natalie. She talked much more about Camargue. She really loved him. In a funny sort of daughterly, worshipping, protective sort of way, but she did love him. She likes to talk about how wonderful he was and how they met and all that. She’s a teacher at the Kathleen Camargue School and he came over last Founder’s Day and they met and they just loved each other, she said, from that moment.’

The somewhat cynical expressions on the two middle-aged faces made her give an embarrassed laugh. She seemed to take her mother’s warning to heart at last, for she got up and moved away from the fire to sit on the sofa where she scrutinized her smooth, pale golden legs. ‘At any rate, Pop darling, it’s an ill wind, as you might say, because now the house is bound to be sold. I’d love to get a look at it, wouldn’t you? Why wasn’t I at school with Natalie?’

‘You were born too late,’ said her father. ‘And there must be simpler ways of getting into Sterries.’

There were.

‘You?’ said Burden first thing the next morning. ‘What do
you
want to go up there for? It’s only a common-or-garden burglary, one of our every day occurrences, I’m sorry to say. Martin can handle it.’