A Hovering of Vultures (18 page)

“How did you spend the rest of the evening?”

“Had a drink in the bar at the Cumberland—someone will have remembered seeing me. That was eight-thirty, nineish. Showered, went to bed for a few hours' sleep, then up at four to drive to London, so as to be at work yesterday morning.”

“Is there anything more you can tell us about Gerald Suzman?”

He considered. “Not facts, no. Impressions? He was probably a phoney, but a very entertaining one. He used to say mildly amusing things: ‘Be a Sneddon, dear boy—it's your mission in life.' That kind of thing. All things considered, I shall miss him. And I suppose I'll even miss the Fellowship, if it's wound up.”

“You knew he owned the farm?”

“I gathered so. I don't know if there's anyone else in the Fellowship rich enough to acquire it? What about that American woman you seemed so matey with?”

He had turned once again to Charlie, about whom he had seemed distinctly uncertain throughout the interview.

“I think she regards the Sneddons with something less than idolatry,” said Charlie. Randolph Sneddon laughed.

“I find it difficult to think in terms of ‘the Sneddons' at all.”

They smiled, got up, made the right noises and took their leave. But even as he walked to the car Charlie was thinking: there was something not quite right about all that. Was it something missing, something wrong, or something that simply hadn't jelled with what they already knew?

C
harlie Peace spent the night at home in Brixton. He hadn't seen his mother for six months, and was pleased to find that she was without a man. Mrs Peace had been a bad picker of men all her life, and she had finally decided to give up picking. After his experiences of the long string of losers who had shared her life—losers of every race and creed, of every size and shape and every variety of hopelessness—Charlie trusted she could now settle down to a life of single blessedness. When he found she was conceiving a compulsive interest in his love life and marriage prospects he told her bluntly that there was no way such a bad picker as she was was going to be allowed to start picking for him.

Really they got on very well together.

The next morning he was picked up by Mike Oddie and they began the drive in the direction of Bromley. As they made their stop-go way through suburb after suburb, litter-ridden
and burdened with estate agents' signs, Charlie wondered how he had ever borne living in a city which it was so impossible to get out of. He had never felt claustrophobic in London before, but he felt it now. Bromley of course was a cut above most of the places he had driven through, and it soon became clear that they were heading for the better part of Bromley. This was stockbroker's Tudor of the most impressive kind: the houses were bigger, and the artificial beams better fastened to the walls.

“Money,” said Charlie.

“A nice class of person,” said Oddie.

The Charltons' house, when they found it, was very substantial by commuter-belt standards: set well back, guarded, like the house in Ilkley, by dark evergreens, but giving off a sense of prosperity and well-being. But if the house exuded middle-class doing-very-nicely-thank-you, the woman who opened the heavy front door dissipated that atmosphere more than somewhat.

“You'll be the policemen,” she said, with an unconstrainedly friendly smile. “Come along through.”

She was in her early thirties, still pretty in a youthful way, and with a figure that eyes had to follow appreciatively. Her sensible skirt and cream blouse were good, but not ostentatiously so, and she wore flat-heeled shoes and no jewellery. The furniture in the large, surprisingly light drawing room was 'thirties-inherited: substantial, well-stuffed and worn. Where the walls were free of radiators there were bookcases—books everywhere, of every conceivable type, from the collector's item to the latest novel in paperback. These were seriously bookish people, as opposed to the bookish dilettante that they had sensed in Suzman's flat.

Coffee cups were set out on a low table, and she went straight into the kitchen and brought in the coffee pot.

“I reckoned on your being on time,” she said. “I do like people who are. I'm Virginia Charlton, by the way.”

“I'm Detective Superintendent Oddie, and this is Detective Constable Peace. We're both with the West Yorkshire CID.”

She smiled sadly and blinked.

“It seems so odd for poor Gerald's murder to be investigated by Yorkshire policemen,” she said, sitting down and handing round cups and the sugar bowl. “Sorry—I didn't mean that to sound rude. But he was such a metropolitan person: he loved his clubs, revelled in Soho, liked to be seen at the opera—Covent Garden for preference. If he'd been more of the ‘great and good' kind, he'd have sat on governing bodies and Arts Council enquiries.”

“But he wasn't?”

“Well, hardly. In fact, not at all. And the great and good don't get themselves murdered, do they? Except casually, and maybe domestically.”

“I've known pillars of the community with more secret lives than Walter Mitty,” observed Oddie. “But as you say, Gerald Suzman was in any case not one of them. I presume, since he was godfather to your son, that you've known him for some time?”

“Oh yes—quite a time. Ten years or so.”

“Did you meet him through your husband?”

“No, though I think Tom has known him longer than me. Tom's been in publishing for twenty-five years. When I met Suzman I was just starting: bottle-washing, humping parcels, running errands. It was my way into the business. Nowadays, with Jonathan growing up, I don't do much more than a bit of copy-editing, but before long I'll be back into publishing—and I was on my way up when I married Tom.”

“You haven't told us yet how you and Suzman met.”

“I was getting to that. I was doing a stint as stand-in receptionist
at Cowper-Hollins, where I worked—where Tom still works—and Gerald came in for an appointment. There was a bit of delay—meeting running over time—and instead of sitting in a chair and browsing through one of our books as most people did, he sat himself on my desk and chatted about me, my prospects, publishing in general. The phrase we'd have used then was that he was ‘chatting me up'. I expect there's another, more brutal phrase for it these days.”

“But you didn't find it objectionable?”

“No, why should I? I can take care of myself. I thought he was a rather distinguished gentleman.”

“You can't remember what his business was?”

“Good heavens, no. I don't suppose I knew at the time.”

“Was he a frequent visitor to Cowper-Hollins?”

“Occasional. He had interests in certain books, as a sort of consultant. When I'd got a bit further up the slippery pole I got a better idea what those were.”

“What were they?”

“Quite various, really. He was very good on pictures—old engravings, photographs, that kind of thing—so he was often consulted on the illustrations for books, particularly when the author of the book was not very interested. And then there were books with a bibliographical slant: he was very often the outside reader for them at that time, though publishers became a bit more careful later on. Tom may know a bit more about that, though it's not his field.”

“Did you or your husband ever hear—rumours?”

“Yes, now and again. If there was anything dubious in his career there would be bound to be whisperings in the publishing world.”

“But that didn't put an end to your husband's friendship with him?”

“Oh no. I think Tom regarded him rather as a merchant seaman might regard a pirate: with a sort of disapproving admiration. Tom is rather scholarly, precise, conscientious—a bit of a fish out of water in present-day publishing, or at least a throw-back. You could say that there was an attraction of opposites.”

“You never had any specific knowledge of anything he'd done that was dubiously legal?”

“Never. That wasn't my interest. I was looking for good new novelists, and Tom is mainly on the history side.”

“So what sort of a friendship was this?”

“Oh—parties where we met, dining together regularly if infrequently, phone calls whenever anything came up that was of mutual interest.”

They were interrupted by the sound of the front door and a call of “Mummy! Mummy!” Flushed, Mrs Charlton started up and a second later a little boy burst into the room half-running, half-hopping, his leg heavily bandaged around the knee. He was followed by a capable-looking black girl, still in her teens.

“Mummy! I was running over to talk to Stephen, and I fell over, and—”

He stopped when he saw the strange men.

“I'm sorry, Mrs Charlton,” said the girl. “I left Jonathan at the gate as usual, but I stopped to see that he was all right, and he came this awful cropper when he was running over to his friends, as he said. There was blood and he seemed to be in pain, so I whipped him along to the doctor's. He thinks the kneecap may be lightly dislocated, but he says if we keep him home for a day or two there shouldn't be anything to worry about.”

“I don't want to stay home!”

“Thank you, Nicole. I'm busy at the moment—”

“I'll take him into the kitchen and get him something nice to eat. Is there any chocolate cake left in the tin?”

“Yes, one good slice.”

“Then I'll try to settle him down to some drawing or painting.”

“Not easy,” said his mother.

“Not easy. Will you be long?”

“Oh”—she looked at Oddie—“I should think half an hour will do it.”

Oddie nodded, and the girl took the little boy by the hand and led him out of the room. When the door had shut and the sounds of Jonathan's shouting had receded down the hall, Charlie spoke for the first time since they had arrived.

“Are you sure that Jonathan is only Gerald Suzman's
god
-child?”

There was silence. Then Virginia Charlton started speaking, without any of the confidence she had shown before her son's arrival.

“I don't know what you mean . . . What are you implying?”

Mike Oddie stepped in, looking at her closely.

“Constable Peace saw Mr Suzman while he was alive. I only saw him when he had been battered to death. I think you know very well what he is implying.”

There was another silence.

“Is there any need for—?”

“If this has no bearing on Suzman's murder, there's no reason why anything you tell us should go any further,” Oddie said. “No promises, but we do always try to handle this sort of thing as discreetly as possible.”

Mrs Charlton took a deep breath, then got up and started prowling around the room.

“I haven't been entirely honest.”

“No.”

“Why does one start talking in clichés at times like this?”

“I don't know, but everybody does.”

“That's what clichés are—what everybody says. Well, here goes. I don't see that there is any relevance, but the first meeting was as I told you, but it led to others. He came to Cowper-Hollins several times in the next few weeks, and always tried to bump into me. Eventually I agreed to go out to dinner with him.”

“Why? He was well out of your age group. Did you think he could help you to get ahead in publishing?”

“Oh no. He wasn't
in
publishing at all, in any real sense. No, I'm just attracted to older men. My husband is seventeen years older than me. I suppose people would say I'm looking for father figures. I found boys of my own age callow and brash.”

“You must have known what he was after.”

“What an old-fashioned phrase! Of course I knew what he was after! It was what I was after too.”

“You had an affair?”

“Yes. Well, that's perhaps too definite a word. We slept together now and again. No—that's the wrong word too. Gerald hardly needed any sleep. Most of the time he'd prowl around the flat in his dressing-gown, and not come back to me till it was nearly light. What usually happened was, he would phone and suggest something—a meal, Covent Garden, a party he'd been invited to and I'd go along if it suited, knowing it meant bed afterwards. Mostly it suited.”

“Did you get any idea about his professional activities?”

“None. You have to believe me on that. What I told you earlier was true: beyond rumours I knew nothing. I wasn't interested. I just found the man attractive: clever, subtle, amusing.”

“But not a man to marry?”

She shook her head emphatically.

“Oh no! No question of that! And then I started doing real publishing work, then Tom started noticing me and I him, and he
was
a man to marry—gentle, civilised, considerate—and that was the end of Suzman and me. I suppose the truth is that the father-figure I married had to be a
reliable
one. Anyway, as I say, Gerald Suzman became a figure of the past as far as I was concerned.”

“For the moment.”

She sat down facing them again, her handsome face troubled.

“Yes . . . I'm not at all proud of what happened, and it's difficult to tell you about it . . . We'd been married about two years. Tom had to go to America about a blockbuster biography: the sex life of the last Kaiser. Tom thought that historically speaking it was a lot of baloney, but there was every indication it was going to go down big over there. He was going to be away about ten days. Coincidentally I was working on a mystery novel by one of our crime names, one of the ones that gets televised. The book happened to concern the lost Byron memoirs. There was something in it—I forget what it was now—that didn't quite gel, and I rang up Gerald to check. He . . . well, I suspect he could have answered my question off the cuff, but he made a bigger thing out of it, said he had to check several books, said he was coming round to Cowper-Hollins anyway . . . If he'd asked me out to dinner there and then I'd have said no, but the next day he was there at the office and—well, I don't need to go into detail about what happened. He could be very persuasive . . . I have to say that at one point the thought flashed through my mind that Tom and I had been married for two years and
the child we'd both wanted had not come along, and if . . . Oh, it's all pretty sordid, or at least morally dubious.”