A Coat of Varnish (36 page)

Briers listened. That manner of Perryman’s told him nothing he didn’t already know: the man was cool, assertive, in command of himself. So were many men in trouble. It was no guide either to guilt or innocence, just to temperament. Briers had interviewed a good many men, completely innocent, who at the first prick of suspicion went in for bravado. He had done so himself, when once he had been the subject of a police enquiry. If he had ever believed the conventional wisdom about human behaviour, he didn’t now.

There weren’t any shorthand answers. It wasn’t in his mind that night, but he was apt to tell his young men about the silliness of shorthand answers. Bullies were not always cowards: rather more often than not, the reverse was true.

Perryman had not asked to speak to his solicitor. Both he and Briers knew that the detective had a card to play. If Perryman didn’t want to help the police, he might prefer to help the income tax authorities. Those simple transactions about Lady Ashbrook’s medical payments were docketed in the files. That would be enough for the present.

Days before deciding to fetch Perryman in, Briers had concluded that Perryman would be thinking much as he did himself. Just to make sure he began the evening with some thoughtful questions about Lady Ashbrook’s standard of living.

‘We are rather interested, you know,’ said Briers.

‘What is the problem, Chief Superintendent?’ said Perryman, in a similar, thoughtful, unexcited tone.

‘Well, it is a bit of a puzzle, how she managed to live on her income. That is, on the income she returned to the Revenue?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know enough of the details. I wish I could help.’

‘It would be very valuable if you could help, of course.’

‘I’m sure you realise’ – Perryman’s lustrous eyes were gazing straight into Briers’ fine acute ones – ‘that she did live very economically. As her medical adviser, I often told her that it was time at her age to have someone permanently in the house.’

‘That was very sensible advice, you know. But we still don’t quite understand how she managed. It was an expensive house to keep up, wasn’t it? You must have thought so yourself.’

There followed a knowledgeable discussion of the minimum outgoings on Lady Ashbrook’s house. It might have sounded like an exercise in domestic science, all of them earnest seekers after a balanced budget. It was something like a parody of other discussions in that room, when the detectives first tried to make sense of Lady Ashbrook’s finances.

Flamson, who had been taking notes and who continued to do so, began to have a speaking part. Briers asked him questions, inviting Perryman to do the same, saying – what was true – that Flamson would have made a good businessman. To himself, looking at his junior, Briers thought he would have made a better businessman than detective. He sat there, solid, fleshy, with heavy eyelids and underlids, shrewd and self-indulgent. He was shrewd enough, but not committed enough, maybe. But he hadn’t been a bad pick of Briers’. After all, it was he who had first disbelieved in Lady Ashbrook’s will. He might be slow, but somehow he had lumbered on to the right track.

Now he was testing Perryman about Lady Ashbrook’s expenses. ‘They didn’t fit,’ he said, with a slumbrous accountant’s pleasure. ‘They can’t have fitted.’ This again was a recapitulation of what the police had long since seen. Flamson brought out the facts as, weeks before, he had done to his colleagues.

Briers intervened. ‘You were familiar, weren’t you, with her habit of paying bills in ordinary notes? Not cheques. She even paid some of her major bills that way. That was a curious habit, shouldn’t you say?’

Perryman gave a companionable, superior smile, the smile which Kate had once found attractive.

‘You must live in a very sheltered world, Chief Superintendent.’

They were all three speaking in even tones, more like a conversation than a detective enquiry. This was Briers’ style. He wouldn’t change if he didn’t get his results that night. He didn’t believe, any more than he did in other conventional wisdom, cherished by outsiders, in a soft-hard series of sessions with his suspects. That wasn’t for professionals. The professional method for an interrogation was simpler than the conventional wisdom thought. It was just to be oneself. Interrogators weren’t clever enough, nor was anyone else, to put on an act for long. If the man on the other side tried it, so much the worse for him.

There were, of course, one or two techniques. One was to hold a fact in reserve, and spring it as a surprise: That was something you could teach. Another, much harder to teach, was to know when to change one’s pace. A good interrogator did that as it were by nature, and only another good interrogator would recognise the art; just as only a good interrogator would recognise the quiver of the nerve ends which another showed.

They had been at it for an hour. Repetitively, Flamson had been going over the puzzles of Lady Ashbrook’s income. There was much repetition in any process like theirs, which was why tapings of interrogations were among the most tedious records ever made. A young woman constable – who, though it wasn’t Flamson who was the happy adulterer in Briers’ squad, made his eyes light up underneath the padded flesh – entered with three cups of tea. The tea was very weak and very milky. Briers, who had smoked half a dozen cigarettes in the first hour, lit another.

‘You might care to know,’ he said, casually, offhand, as though he were mentioning that the BBC television news that night would be twenty minutes later than usual, ‘that we have information which you could be interested in. About a source of money for Lady Ashbrook. You know. The American fund, the Comptroller Fund.’

‘The Comptroller Fund?’ Perryman said, without expression or concern.

‘You know. Money came over at intervals. Reached someone here in English currency. Went to pay those bills.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Perryman, as though nothing could be less so.

‘And this has been going on after her death.’

‘Has it now?’

‘Yes, it has. The fund has gone on operating. A sizeable sum – we don’t know the exact amount, let’s say a thousand pounds – has been passed to Lord Loseby.’ Briers didn’t change his tone. ‘Our information is, passed by you, Doctor.’

Perryman’s face had gone smooth, youthful, for a moment transformed by shock. For a moment he didn’t utter. Then he began to sound harsh and haughty.

‘I think I ought to congratulate you or whoever else it is on their imagination.’

‘You’d better think before you go any farther.’ For once Briers let authority emerge. ‘Our information is solid. You were also responsible for passing money from the fund to Lady Ashbrook in her lifetime.’

Just then, Briers made his single mistake of the night. Up to now, he had been a shade more positive than the information would have supported. It wasn’t a bluff, but perhaps half a bluff. Perryman hadn’t challenged him. So far it had gone easier than Briers expected, as easy as he could have hoped. He went on, with what he thought was certain knowledge: ‘You were the Comptroller, weren’t you?’

‘The what?’

‘The Comptroller.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean.’

‘Shall I spell it? C-o-m-p-t-r-o-l-l-e-r.’

‘No one’s ever called me that in my life. It seems to me a very silly word.’

Briers knew, had known for instants past, that he had made a mistake. This wasn’t like Perryman’s other protest. The incredulity, the ignorance were total. It was only later that Briers understood the origins of the mistake. It was oddly mechanical. In O’Brien’s office, before and after the old lawyer’s death, there had been talk about the control of funds. There was someone in London to whom money was transferred. They weren’t allowed to know his name. He had better be called the Comptroller. So, by a piece of inadvertence, had Susan and Loseby. There was a tag of paper, with an inscription typewritten, inserted in one of Loseby’s payments, and they adopted the title. The American and English detectives had picked up the term. Perryman had never heard of it.

It was a piece of carelessness. Briers was blaming himself. As a rule he checked his references. It gave Perryman confidence back, and a share of the initiative. He had enough assertion, affected it might be, or even disdainful, to break into the questioning. Briers was just lighting another cigarette.

‘Forgive me, Chief Superintendent,’ said Perryman, ‘but aren’t you smoking too much?’

Briers looked blank-faced, at a loss.

When he replied, he said: ‘I dare say I am.’

‘If I were your medical adviser, I should want to have your lungs examined. Regularly.’

Briers said: ‘Well, you’re not, are you?’

Perryman went on: ‘That might be unfortunate for you.’

Briers said: ‘We’ll wait and see, shall we? We all have to die some time.’

That was accompanied by the grim policeman’s smile which Humphrey would have recognised. It would have been grimmer if the end of this interrogation could have been the gallows. In retrospect, Briers felt some respect for Perryman’s nerve. It might have been the kind of nerve that some patients showed – as by a perverse irony Perryman himself had seen them – when mortally anxious in a medical examination; and, to get on terms of moral equality, enquired with concern about some symptom in the doctor’s own health.

‘We’d better get on,’ said Briers, with a shade of roughness that he hadn’t let enter before. ‘There’s a lot to do.’ He went on: ‘Yes, we know that you passed money after the old lady’s death, and before. You can’t hide that business any longer. We’re going to know it all.’

They weren’t able to know it all, but, as the night went on, they came to know more. Much of what they pieced together came to be near the truth. Not everything. Perryman was prepared, apparently even gratified, to explain. It had been a harmless, friendly, benevolent service.

‘We can leave that to the tax boys,’ Briers remarked, but without emphasis. It was possible, perhaps probable, he was deciding, that Perryman didn’t know the whole story. Certainly he couldn’t have known it from the beginning. That went back thirty years, to the end of the war, long before he had heard of Lady Ashbrook. However, he had met O’Brien and he admitted it.

‘Lady Ashbrook didn’t trust many people, did she?’ Briers said.

‘I should say not.’

‘She did trust him?’

‘And she was right. She was right.’ Perryman went on with unusual emotion: ‘He was a good man.’

It was a curious tribute, spoken as though by an authority.

At eight o’clock more cups of tea. Towards nine, a plate heaped with sandwiches. Perryman ate more than his share, either through strain or appetite.

For the present, Briers was not letting Perryman loose from the financial dealings. Who had thought out the method? Perryman didn’t know. That was probably genuine. Nothing had ever been put on paper. There the detectives had guessed right. Silence. Simplicity. That was the way to do any secret job, Briers was thinking. Humphrey would have agreed. It was the experienced who knew better than to try anything complex.

The method was working years before Perryman became Lady Ashbrook’s doctor, he said.

On the whole, the detectives’ reconstruction had again not been far from the truth. When O’Brien had his stroke, the difficulties were sharpened. He was immobile. There was no enquiry-proof method of getting money, messages, instructions, to Lady Ashbrook. This had not been foreseen as clearly, or as far back, as the police had imagined. That was an old story, Briers thought; one often over-estimated the other side. Lady Ashbrook and O’Brien didn’t seem capable of thinking of another recourse; there was no help for it, they had to find a third party. She might not like it, but she had to find someone she could trust in England. That was how Perryman had been invoked.

‘When was that?’ Perryman gave the exact date, June 1968. ‘Why did she turn to you?’

‘She had been my patient for several years. She trusted me.’

‘That was lucky for you, wasn’t it?’ Suddenly Briers shot out the question.

Perryman didn’t show a flicker of surprise, resentment, worry, didn’t alter his tone of voice. Instead he spoke with an aura of satisfaction.

‘Also she liked me,’ he said.

It didn’t need that expression to tell Briers that the man was vain, more than normally vain. But there was an effect which Briers, for the moment, couldn’t place or understand.

He said: ‘Sexually, you mean?’

Perryman replied, still with satisfaction: ‘Oh, between any man and woman, when there’s genuine liking, there’s bound to be some kind of sexual attraction. Of course, she was in her seventies, but as a doctor, let me tell you, sexual feeling doesn’t disappear with age.’

Briers broke out, control for an instant snapping: ‘Christ, man, you needn’t tell a policeman that.’

Unperturbed, Perryman continued: ‘Yes, there could have been a sexual element. We all realise that elderly women often make a cult of their doctor. But not with her. This was different. Nothing came of it, naturally. If one had been in a different capacity, it would have been possible–’

‘I dare say, I dare say.’ Briers got back to business. How did the money reach Perryman? How was it picked up? As Humphrey had said, that was one of the oldest problems in security jobs. Briers wasn’t certain that he was getting the full answers, but it wasn’t material, and he let it go.

‘You didn’t do any picking up yourself?’ Briers asked.

‘Certainly not. That would have defeated the object of the exercise.’

‘Why?’ But Briers knew this was the obvious truth.

‘I happen to be reasonably recognisable, I should have thought.’

Briers gave a side glance to his colleagues. They had foreseen questions about how Lady Ashbrook got her money. It might seem primitive, but it had worked.

Perryman had been Lady Ashbrook’s agent, he said. That was what in a satisfied tone he called himself. He said with scorn that neither he nor she would have imagined calling him a comptroller. She left the distribution of the money to him, both before and after her death.

‘She told me what she wished. As I said, she trusted me.’