Put on by Cunning (8 page)

‘So that when she came Sir Manuel was quite alone?’

‘Quite alone. What I’m going to tell you is what he told me the next day, the Sunday, when Ted drove him over to my house in the morning.

‘He told me he intended to be rather cool and distant with her at first.’ Dinah Sternhold smiled a tender, reminiscent smile. ‘I didn’t have much faith in that,’ she said. ‘I knew him, you see. I knew it wasn’t in him not to be warm and kind. And in fact, when he went down and opened the front door to her he said he forgot all about that resolve of his and just took her in his arms and held her. He was ashamed of that afterwards, poor Manuel, he was sick with himself for giving way.

‘Well, they went upstairs and sat down and talked. That is, Manuel talked. He said he suddenly found he had so much to say to her. He talked on and on about his life since she went away, her mother’s death, his retirement because of the arthritis in his hands, how he had built that house. She answered him, he said, but a lot of things she said he couldn’t hear. Maybe she spoke low, but my voice is low and he could always hear me. However . . .’

‘She has an American accent,’ said Wexford.

‘Perhaps that was it. The awful thing was, he said, that when he talked of the long time she’d been away he actually cried. I couldn’t see it was important, but he was so ashamed of having cried. Still, he pulled himself together. He said they must have tea and he hoped she would stay the night and would she like to see over the house? He was always taking people over the house, I think it was something his generation did, and then . . .’

Wexford broke in, ‘All this time he believed her to be his daughter?’

‘Oh, yes! He was in no doubt. The way he saidhe found out – well, it’s so crazy . . . Anyway, he actually told her he was going to make a new will after his marriage, and although he intended to leave me the house and its contents, everything else was to go to her, including what remained of her mother’s fortune. It was a lot of money, something in the region of a million, I think.

‘He showed her the bedroom that was to be hers, though she did say at this point that she couldn’t stay, and then they went back and into the music room. Oh, I don’t suppose you’ve ever been in the house, have you?’

‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ said Wexford.

She gave him a faintly puzzled glance. ‘Yes. Well, you’ll know then that there are alcoves all round the music room and in one of the alcoves is a flute made of gold. It was given to Manuel by a sort of patron and fan of his, an American of Italian origin called Aldo Cazzini, and it’s a real instrument, it’s perfectly
playable
, though in fact Manuel had never used it.

‘He and Natalie went in there and Natalie took one look in the alcove and said, “You still have Cazzini’s golden flute,” and it was at this point, he said, that he knew. He knew for certain she wasn’t Natalie.’

Wexford said, ‘I don’t follow you. Surely recognizing the flute would be confirmation of her identity rather than proof she was an impostor?’

‘It was the way she pronounced it. It ought to be pronounced Catzini and this woman pronounced it Cassini. Or so he said. Now the real Natalie grew up speaking English, French and Spanish with equal ease. She learnt German at school and when she was fifteen Manuel had her taught Italian because he intended her to be a musician and he thought some Italian essential for a musician. The real Natalie would never have mispronounced an Italian name. She would no more have done that, he said – these are his own words – than a Frenchman would pronounce Camargue to rhyme with Montague. So as soon as he heard her pronunciation of Cazzini he knew she couldn’t be Natalie.’

Wexford could almost have laughed. He shook his head in dismissal. ‘There must have been more to it.’

‘There was. He said the shock was terrible. He didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked hard at her, he studied her, and then he could
see
she wasn’t his daughter. Nineteen years is a long time but she couldn’t have changed that much and in that way. Her features were different, the colour of her eyes was different. He went back with her into the drawing room and then he said, “You are not my daughter, are you?”’

‘He actually asked her, did he?’

‘He asked her and – you understand, Mr Wexford, that I’m telling you what he said – I feel a traitor to him, doubting him, as if he were senile or mad – he wasn’t, he was wonderful, but . . .’

‘He was old,’ said Wexford. A foolish, fond old man, fourscore years . . . ‘He was overwrought.’

‘Oh, yes, exactly! But the point is he said he asked her and she admitted it.’

Wexford leaned forward, frowning a little, his eyes on Dinah Sternhold’s intent face.

‘Are you telling me this woman admitted to Sir Manuel that she wasn’t Natalie Arno? Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘Because I don’t believe it. I think that when he said she admitted she wasn’t Natalie and seemed ashamed and embarrassed, I think he was – well, dreaming. You see, he told her to go. He was trembling, he was terribly distressed. It wasn’t in him to shout at anyone or be violent, you understand, he just told her not to say any more but to go. He heard her close the front door and then he did something he absolutely never did. He had some brandy. He never touched spirits in the normal way, a glass of wine sometimes or a sherry, that was all. But he had some brandy to steady him, he said, and then he went to lie down because his heart was racing – and he fell asleep.’

‘It was next day when you saw him?’

She nodded. ‘Next day at about eleven. I think that while he was asleep he dreamt that bit about her admitting she wasn’t Natalie. I told him so. I didn’t humour him – ours wasn’t that kind of relationship. I told him I thought he was mistaken. I told him all sorts of things that I believed and believe now – that eye colour fades and features change and one can forget a language as one can forget anything else. He wouldn’t have any of it. He was so sweet and good and a genius – but he was terribly impulsive and stubborn as well.

‘Anyway, he started saying he was going to cut her out of his will. She was a fraud and an impostor who was attempting to get hold of a considerable property by false pretences. She was to have nothing, therefore, and I was to have the lot. Perhaps you won’t believe me if I say I did my best to dissuade him from that?’

Wexford slightly inclined his head. ‘Why not?’

‘It would have been in my own interest to agree with him. However, I did try to dissuade him and he was sweet to me as he always was but he wouldn’t listen. He wrote to her, telling her what he intended to do, and then he wrote to his solicitors, asking one of the partners to come up to Sterries on February 4th – that would have been two days after our wedding.’

‘Who are these solicitors?’

‘Symonds, O’Brien and Ames,’ she said, ‘in the High Street here.’

Kingsmarkham’s principal firm of solicitors. They had recently moved their premises into the new Kingsbrook Precinct. It was often Wexford’s lot to have dealings with them.

‘He invited Mr Ames to lunch with us,’ Dinah Sternhold said, ‘and afterwards he was to draw up a new will for Manuel. It must have been on the 22nd or the 23rd that he wrote to Natalie and on the 27th – he was drowned.’ Her voice shook a little.

Wexford waited. He said gently, ‘He had no intention of coming to us and he wasn’t going to confide in his solicitor?’

She did not answer him directly. ‘I think I did right,’ she said. ‘I prevented that. I couldn’t dissuade him from the decision to disinherit her but I did manage to stop him going to the police. I told him he would make a – well, a scandal, and he would have hated that. What I meant to do was this. Let him make a new will if he liked. Wills can be unmade and remade. I knew Natalie probably disliked me and was jealous but I thought I’d try to approach her myself a month or so after we were married, say, and arrange another meeting. I thought that somehow we’d all meet and it would come right. It would turn out to have been some misunderstanding like in a play, like in one of those old comedies of mistaken identity.’

Wexford was silent. Then he said, ‘Would you like to tell me about it all over again, Mrs Sternhold?’

‘What I’ve just told?’

He nodded. ‘Please.’

‘But why?’

To test your veracity. He didn’t say that aloud. If she were intelligent enough she would know without his saying, and her flush told him that she did.

Without digressions this time, she repeated her story. He listened concentratedly. When she had finished he said rather sharply:

‘Did Sir Manuel tell anyone else about this?’

‘Not so far as I know. Well, no, I’m sure he didn’t.’ Her face was pale again and composed. She asked him, ‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you’ll do something to find out. You’ll prove she
is
Natalie Arno?’

Or that she is not? He didn’t say it, and before he had framed an alternative reply she had jumped up and was taking her leave of him in that polite yet child-like way she had.

‘It was very good and patient of you to listen to me, Mr Wexford. I’m sure you understand why I had to come. Will you give my love to Sheila, please, and say I’ll be thinking of her on Saturday? She did ask me to come but of course that wouldn’t be possible. I’m afraid I’ve taken up a great deal of your time . . .’

He walked with her out to the Volkswagen which she had parked round the corner of the street on an ice-free patch. She looked back once as she drove away and raised her hand to him. How many times, in telling her story, had she said she didn’t believe it? He had often observed how people will say they are sure of something when they truly mean they are unsure, how a man will hotly declare that he doesn’t believe a word of it when he believes only too easily. If Dinah Sternhold had not believed, would she have come to him at all?

He asked himself if he believed and if so what was he going to do about it?

Nothing till after the wedding . . .

The success or failure of a wedding, as Wexford remarked, is no augury of the marriage itself. This wedding might be said to have failed. In the first place, the thaw set in the evening before and by Saturday morning it was raining hard. All day long it rained tempestuously. The expected crowd of well-wishers come to see their favourite married, a youthful joyous crowd of confetti-hurlers, became in fact a huddle of pensioners under umbrellas, indifferently lingering on after the Over-Sixties meeting in St Peter’s Hall. But the press was there, made spiteful by rain and mud, awaiting opportunities. And these were many: a bridesmaid’s diaphanous skirt blown almost over her head by a gust of wind, a small but dismaying accident when the bride’s brother-in-law’s car went into the back of a press photographer’s car, and later the failure of the Olive and Dove management to provide luncheon places for some ten of the guests.

The Sunday papers made the most of it. Their pictures might have been left to speak for themselves, for the captions, snide or sneering, only added insult to injury. Dora wept.

‘I suppose it’s inevitable.’ Wexford, as far as he could recall it and with a touch of paraphrase, quoted Shelley to her. ‘They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shafts light on a heart made callous by many blows or one like yours composed of more penetrable stuff.’

‘And is yours made callous by many blows?’

‘No, but Sheila’s is.’

He took the papers away from her and burnt them, hoping none would have found their way into the Burdens’ bungalow where they were going to lunch. And when they arrived just after noon, escorted from their car by Burden with a large coloured golf umbrella, there was not a newspaper to be seen. Instead, on the coffee table, where the
Sunday Times
might have reposed, lay a book in a glossy jacket entitled
The Tichborne Swindle
.

In former days, during the lifetime of Burden’s first wife and afterwards in his long widowerhood, no book apart from those strictly necessary for the children’s school work was ever seen in that house. But when he re-married things changed. And it could not be altogether due to the fact that his wife’s brother was a publisher, though this might have helped, hat the inspector was becoming a reading man. It was even said, though Wexford refused to believe it, that Burden and Jenny read aloud to each other in the evenings, that they had got through Dickens and were currently embarking on the Waverley novels.

Wexford picked up the book. It had been, as he expected, published by Carlyon Brent, and was a reappraisal of the notorious nineteenth-century Tichborne case in which an Australian butcher attempted to gain possession of a great fortune by posing as heir to an English baronetcy. Shades of the tale he had been told by Dinah Sternhold . . . The coincidence of finding the book there decided him. For a little while before lunch he and Burden were alone together.

‘Have you read this yet?’

‘I’m about half-way through.’

‘Listen.’ He repeated the account he had been given baldly and without digressions. ‘There aren’t really very many points of similarity,’ he said. ‘From what I remember of the Tichborne case the claimant didn’t even look like the Tichborne heir. He was much bigger and fatter for one thing and obviously not of the same social class. Lady Tichborne was a hysterical woman who would have accepted practically anyone who said he was her son. You’ve almost got the reverse here. Natalie Arno looks very much like the young Natalie Camargue and, far from accepting her, Camargue seems to have rumbled her within half an hour.’

‘“Rumbled” sounds as if you think there might be something in this tale.’

‘I’m not going to stomp up and down raving that I don’t believe a word of it, if that’s what you mean. I just don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing. I expected you to have shouted you didn’t believe it long before now.’