A Hovering of Vultures (20 page)

“I've heard all about you from my parents, who've been making agitated phone calls from Batley Bridge. They say they were ‘deceived' in you, but even they admit that maybe you did it in the course of your job.”

“I'm surprised to hear they admit that.”

“Oh, it was never a colour thing. How is the investigation going?”

“Progressing in a hundred directions. I'm not really allowed to talk about it. Are your parents still in Batley Bridge?”

“They were due to go home today—‘with the future of the Sneddon Fellowship assured,' as my father informed me last night. I suppose that means it's all sewn up that he's going to be in charge. He also said that they'd been deluged with enquiries about membership.”

“That figures. Murder does attract all sorts of weirdos,” said Charlie.

“All those people wanting a share in the Sneddons, and now hundreds more wanting a tiny part in the Suzman murder.”

“Like vultures hovering,” said Charlie, remembering his earlier impressions. “Including your parents of course.” Felicity grinned her agreement. “Do you know how much contact they had with Suzman before they came to Batley Bridge?”

“I only know what they told me. I suppose you've asked them? Oh, I see—you don't necessarily believe them. Fair enough. All I know is that my father said he'd talked on the phone to Gerald Suzman before the Weekend.”

“And at the Weekend?”

“Well, as you know, during the Weekend if I wasn't with them I was with you. Whilst I was with them the contacts between them and Mr Suzman were of the most innocuous kind. Just casual social encounters. While I was with you, who knows? I had the impression that they spent their time steaming around trying to find out where their chick had escaped to, but that may be just my paranoia. They may have been having meetings or making telephone calls I knew nothing about.”

“By the way,” said Charlie, curious, “you said just now their attitude to me had nothing to do with colour. What did it have to do with?”

Felicity looked down.

“I'm afraid it was drugs. I was expelled from my private school when I was sixteen for experimenting with drugs. I shouldn't have said it was
nothing
to do with colour. I'm afraid they associate black people with drugs.”

“Charming.”

“I'm deeply ashamed.”

“For experimenting with drugs?”

“For them and their prejudices, you oaf! They assumed I was back in the drugs scene, just because I was going around with you. It was very unintelligent. In fact the drugs
were
only an experiment, springing from a general feeling of being underloved and irrelevant. My mother's life revolves around my father, and so does my father's. His greatest pleasure is saying ‘As a writer myself,' and hers is saying ‘My husband, the writer.' It's never left much room for me.”

“I got the idea at one point that their concern for you was really a concern for themselves and their image.”

“Your idea is right. Dad can't be said to have an image at the moment, but he's pulling out all stops to get one.”

“But the drugs business is over?”

“Over? Long ago. I'm happy here, have friends, am doing quite well, and thinking towards going on to do a Ph.D.”

“Another opus on the rural novels of you-know-who?”

She gave him a rueful smile.

“We-e-ell . . . I
was
thinking of doing D. H. Lawrence. A really feminist diatribe on the
awfulness
of the man and his attitudes and most of what he wrote. With the re-establishment of the copyright and the new, unexpurgated texts there's a wealth of new material, most of it damning. But
with all this coming up, I have toyed with the idea of Susannah Sneddon, Mary Webb and one or two more. I'd treat them as popular writers, of course, and not make exaggerated claims, but I could tie them in with D. H. Lawrence, and maybe bring in Winifred Holtby, though she didn't really write grunting-on-the-stable-floor stuff. It is a thought, though . . .”

“I found I got a bit fed up with Susannah Sneddon by the third book I read.”

“Oh, I'd probably find the same. By the time I have to decide on a subject I'll probably have gone off on to an entirely new tack: Elizabethan drama or Romantic poetry or something major and mainstream. I might not be willing to settle for a back-alley of literature. God knows, I've had enough second-rate fiction in my life!”

“Well,” said Charlie, getting up from the bed on which he had been sitting and making notes. “I'm off to Ilkley, then back to Batley Bridge.”

“Ilkley?” Her eyes lit up with an excitement that had a hint of voracity in it. “Is that the Sneddon letters people? Are you going to read the letters?”

“I am. You're obviously not all that fed up with second-rate fiction writers.”

“It
would
be interesting.”

“Can't take you along, I'm afraid. But we are hoping to get together with a few of the Weekend people tomorrow—those who are still around. Follow up some of the things they said in their initial statements. Any chance of your coming over to Batley Bridge?”

“I've got two lectures early on, and I've got to hand this essay in. I could be over there by lunchtime, or not much later.”

“It's not quite the first date I had in mind, but it'll do,” said
Charlie, bending and kissing her on the cheek, then raising his hand in farewell.

• • •

Mike Oddie had pulled into a motel on the A1. It was not far out of London, but it gave him the basis for an early start in the morning. He had showered, poured himself a small Scotch from the emergency flask that he always had with him and added plenty of water. Then he lay on his back thinking about what he had learnt.

Charlie's friend at Scotland Yard, Superintendent Trethowan, had dug up some pretty interesting new stuff about Suzman's recent activities. He had not entirely given up on the forgeries, apparently. There had been an obscene early short story by Joe Orton, snapped up eagerly by a collector in Chelsea from a dealer known to be a friend of Suzman's. The paper it had been written on certainly dated from the 'fifties, but the state of the typewriter was identical with its condition when Orton was writing
What the Butler Saw
at the end of his life a decade later. The piece was hastily reclassified as a late one, possibly by Orton's friend Halliwell. Almost certainly, though the collector was not inclined to accept this, the piece was a forgery: somehow Suzman had got hold of Orton's typewriter, and had put together a scatological piece in the pair's early manner—much easier to imitate than the epigrammatic demotic of Orton's mature plays. Money in the bank for Suzman, yet he was never directly associated with the typescript.

And so it went on: dodgy hitherto-unknown private printings of short pieces, unknown early manuscript versions of well-known poems with interesting variant readings, doctored
first editions. All of them meaning a nice little cash sum for Gerald Suzman, but none of them being directly traceable back to him. He had perfected his art as a sort of literary Houdini. Oddie guessed that some of the pleasure, for him, lay in the sheer cleverness of the operation: it was an optional extra to the money.

But money there undoubtedly was. The information collected by Scotland Yard gave an idea of wealth that was, if not staggering, then extremely impressive: leaving aside his flat and his two businesses, all lightly mortgaged, his various bank accounts, building society accounts and investments amounted to some three hundred thousand. There was also the Micklewike farm which Oddie rather suspected might have been sold when agricultural property picked up, and when it had served its turn. And he was willing to bet there were assets stashed away abroad.

So the answer to the question of
cui bono
? was that Jonathan Charlton benefitted considerably, and so, more indirectly, did his parents. But that dinner-party alibi was hard to break. The impeccably credentialled writing pair had unanimously assured him on the phone that they had been with the Charltons in Bromley until eleven o'clock. Somehow he could not regard the Charltons—though admittedly he had not met the husband—as likely murderers. Did the murder bear the hallmark less of murder for gain than of a falling-out of thieves? He rather thought it did. And if so the Norwegian began to come more clearly into focus. Was the whole Sneddon business—whatever the crooked plan behind it, and Oddie was in no doubt that there was one—merely a red herring, or perhaps a smoke-screen?

But as he lay there sipping his drink he remained convinced that the question of who benefitted was central to the
riddle of who took Suzman's life: it was just that the terms of the question had to be changed, or enlarged, or made less basic. But for the life of him he couldn't think how.

• • •

Charlie collected the photocopies of Susannah Sneddon's letters from the late-duty sergeant in Ilkley.

“I read one or two of them while I was copying them,” the sergeant said glumly. “The changing seasons in Micklewike. I wish you joy of them—rather you than me. But there's obviously some as'll find them interesting. People are ringing up the Potter-Hodges about them. I've already had them in to collect their photocopies.”

“How did they strike you?”

“Oh, the Potter-Hodges are well-known in Ilkley. Respected local citizens. They're no oil-painting, I admit. He always reminds me of one of those listed houses that the owner is letting go to rack and ruin so he can demolish and sell the land for development. Still, it's not everyone can be handsome young fellows like thee an' me, is it?”

He winked. He was a good forty-five, and homely.

Charlie had rung the Ludlums from London to advise them of his return, but when he got to Batley Bridge he first slipped in to the Duke of Cumberland and went to the little operations centre set up there. He read through various messages from Mike Oddie, and put in train a request to the Oslo police for any information they could dig up on Vidkun Mjølhus. Then he went down to the bar for a pint, less from any need of one than from a desire to advertise the fact that enquiries had shifted back to the Batley Bridge area. He was received with enthusiasm by the landlord, avid delight by
Lettie, and an interest everywhere. It is not often, these days, that policemen find themselves so popular.

“What have you found out about Suzman?” whispered Lettie, when he had settled down at her table in the Saloon Bar. “Have you found out what was behind this Weekend?”

“I can't tell you what we've found out about Suzman,” Charlie replied, his voice equally low. “But I think I can say we still don't know what was behind the Sneddon Fellowship.”

“I've been to see my mother again,” Lettie said. “She's beginning to get very crabby and complains that I'm asking questions about the Sneddons the whole time. All she wants to talk about is her hard life. I can't think of a subject I'm less interested in. I don't think I'll be going again, unless you have something specific you want me to get from her. She asked me last time when I was coming back here to live. Next time she'll be assuming I'll have her to live with me!”

Back in his bed and breakfast place, where he parried questions with the assurance that they could have a good chat over breakfast, Charlie bathed, set out his things, then walked around the room thinking over his day. Then in his little notebook he made the entry: “needed little sleep.” After a pause for thought he added another one: “copyright?”

Then he turned on his bedside light, got into bed, and settled down to read the letters of Susannah Sneddon.

T
he letters spanned thirteen years. They were reasonably regular—every three or four months—and were meticulously dated. The sergeant at the Ilkley police station had helpfully put them into chronological order. They were beautifully written, and the early ones showed a self-consciousness of style such as many fledgling authors display. Susannah Sneddon was trying her wings as a writer:

“Now, with the coming of Spring, I feel the earth tremulously stirring into life, with tiny blades and shoots of hope and promise bravely piercing the soil, even here in exposed, windswept Micklewike. Yet the other day I was walking past the open door of the barn and I heard the wind sweeping up the dead leaves inside and dashing them against the walls, so that the
whole building seemed alive, the leaves resuscitated in a monstrous dance of death. When I think of our nation, slowly returning to life after the four dreadful years of slaughter, I see that same mingling of the dead and the living, see the timid shoots of new life peering up from the graves of our dead sons . . .”

That was in 1919, when the series of letters began. Charlie frowned a little at the tone: she was very hot on natural observation, was our Susannah. She wrote about hawthorn and bluebells as if they were never to be seen in distant Ilkley: “I know how you too once felt the rhythms of the seasons, the tug of Spring and the sated relaxation of Autumn,” she wrote to her friend at one stage. There seemed to be an undertone of pity, even of contempt, for the friend who had left Micklewike to marry an urban grocer.

Quite early on there were hints of her ambitions: “Oh, if only I could give shape to my feelings—give them
form
, find characters who could experience them, embody them.” And later:

“Joshua is writing; strange, disordered stuff, sitting at his old table in snatched moments in the evenings. He does not talk about it, but I read it when I am alone in the day, and do not understand it. That is not the sort of writing that I crave to do, but then I do not have the experience of having been in the trenches. He does not talk about that either, but I know that it is with him every hour of the day, haunting him.”