After Clare (19 page)

‘St Albans, wasn't it?'

‘Not my best move.'

‘We all make mistakes.'

‘A disastrous one in my case,' he said ruefully. ‘It put me in Queer Street, no doubt about it. If it hadn't been for Hugh Markham, we'd have been left with nowhere to live, Peter and I. Hugh often came into the shop to buy books, and we struck up a friendship. He offered me this cottage, and occasional work for the Markham Press, as a publisher's reader. Which means I've just about enough to exist on, if I'm careful.' After a moment he added, ‘I'm not an entirely well man – poor heart, you know – and I've been advised to take things easy. So the pace of life here has suited me.'

Novak said, ‘I'm afraid I have to ask you some questions that might be painful, about Peter. We're going to have to dig into his personal life as deeply as we can.'

Sholto didn't reply at once. ‘Your sergeant searched his room and found nothing,' he said at last.

‘That's true.' Novak had glanced round the small bedroom that Peter had occupied before leaving Willard to it. Nothing would have escaped the sergeant, and the search had indeed been unproductive, though as Novak recalled, it had hardly been an onerous task. A bed, a chair and a small chest of drawers was all the furniture the room contained. An alcove with a curtain suspended from a high shelf across it had formed his wardrobe: two suits and an overcoat, and in the drawers just the usual – shirts, socks and underwear.

No tennis racquets, cricket bats, school trophies or photographs, other boyhood paraphernalia. No books – though there were enough of them downstairs. Neat, tidy and anonymous, not the usual room of a boy or a young man. A room where he slept, and no more, revealing nothing of himself.

‘Tell me about his friends, Mr Sholto.'

‘Friends? Well, there were boys he'd been at school with and so on, but no one special, apart from the Markham boy, David. They were on very good terms. In fact Peter was somewhat lost when the war came and David joined the RFC. It was hardly a surprise when Peter himself volunteered.' He patted his pockets, looking for a pipe, which he brought out but didn't attempt to light. He sat with the bowl in his hand, looking at it for some time without speaking. ‘They were hardly more than boys, didn't know what they were letting themselves in for,' he said sadly. ‘But then, did anyone? And I suppose it came at the right time for Peter, he was at a loose end after Dirk Stronglove had gone off to live in London and left him without a position.'

‘Had Mr Stronglove dismissed him?'

Sholto reddened. ‘Not in so many words. But I think the London move was a good excuse. I somehow think they were not actually getting on very well.'

‘Why was that?'

‘I'm not sure. He used to shrug and say it was a job, and I couldn't get much more out of him than that.' After a moment he added, ‘To be truthful, Peter couldn't settle on what he wanted to do with his life. He'd tried his hand at various things but nothing seemed to work. Nothing I suggested filled him with any enthusiasm and that caused a few father and son arguments, as you might expect – unresolved, I'm afraid, as they usually are.' He smiled slightly, but Novak thought that despite his diffident manner, Edmund Sholto might have been a formidable opponent in an argument. ‘Then Marta Heeren persuaded him to work for her brother. She . . . always took a kindly interest in Peter.'

Novak wondered if her interest had lain only in Peter's direction. A widower like Edmund Sholto might well present an attractive prospect to an unmarried woman like Marta Heeren. But he saw his mistake as Sholto went on quickly, his mouth turned down, ‘Too much maybe, she encouraged the wrong ideas in him.' He didn't say what these were.

‘Working for Stronglove – was Peter himself interested in writing?'

‘Good heavens, no – that sort of thing wasn't Peter!' He paused. ‘Although you know, I did once wonder . . . He had some old notebooks he was always scribbling in, he was very secretive about them, wouldn't show them to me and said they were nothing but doodles when I asked. I haven't found them anywhere so I expect he destroyed them when he joined up.' All at once he came to a decision and stood up. ‘Come with me, Inspector.'

Novak followed him out of the back door and down a brick path, through a surprisingly spruce garden. As in other Netherley gardens, sunflowers and pinks flourished among the cabbages and bean sticks, but the rows of vegetables were neat, and there was an arch with a Dorothy Perkins clambering over it. Beside the door a huge patch of rhubarb grew rampant.

He followed the older man to a large shed. Garden implements were stacked just inside the door, but this was no potting shed. Most of the space was occupied with woodworking equipment: a sawbench and saws, chisels and other tools neatly lined up in a rack, a small lathe, and stacks of new wood leaning against the walls. ‘This was my son's main interest. I'm not handy – gardening, yes, nothing else. But Peter – this was his forte. The little table and chest you maybe noticed in the house—'

‘They're very professional – and you say they were Peter's work?'

‘Give him a piece of wood and he could do anything with it. That was the talent he'd been given, that he should have been using, but I'm afraid he regarded the idea of making a living using his hands as rather infra dig.' He shook his head. ‘Such a waste. The boy had so much to offer. If only . . .'

The saddest two words in the English language, it often seemed to Novak, hung on the air. Fleetingly, the thought of his own two children passed through his mind, little Evie, and Oliver, whose highest ambition at the moment was to be an inventor or, God help him, a detective like his father. How would he feel if they grew up to disappoint him, didn't take the chances life offered?

‘Perhaps he'd have come round to it,' Sholto said. ‘His interest came from my father – it was his hobby, too, and Peter had his tools.' He frowned. ‘Actually, I don't know what's happened to them. I'll have to scout around. I wouldn't want to lose sight of them.'

‘He took a great interest in the old furniture at Leysmorton House, I'm told.'

‘Did he? I didn't know that – but he would, wouldn't he?' He considered for a moment. ‘I never thought to show your sergeant this shed when he looked at Peter's things. He might have found this if he had.' He turned to one side and extracted something wrapped in sacking from behind a leaning stack of wood and placed it on the bench. ‘Go ahead!' Pushing his hands into the pockets of his woolly cardigan, he stood back to let Novak unwrap the covering.

The box underneath was about twelve by six, five or six inches deep, with a small, ornate brass keyhole. It was handsomely polished, its lid inlaid with ‘oysters' of richly whorled, blond-edged, chocolate-brown wood. ‘It's laburnum,' Sholto said, reaching out to smooth its soft patina. ‘The dark is the heartwood and that yellow round the outside is the sapwood. It took him weeks to make.'

‘It's quite remarkable.' It was more than that, Novak thought, a thing of beauty, like the little table and chest.

‘Yes.' Sholto stood looking down at it. ‘I rarely went into Peter's room. I'd no reason to, and no one else does. I look after the house myself, there's not much to it, and Mrs Baxter next door takes pity on me and does my washing, cooks the occasional meal. It was only after you told me that the body you'd found was Peter's that I went into his room, and that was when I noticed this box was missing from the chest of drawers where it usually stood. Unless the house had been broken into and the box stolen when I was not here – which I'd never had any reason to suspect – only one person could have removed it and that was Peter himself. So I came out here to look for it – the only other place I could think of where it might be – and found it hidden behind that timber. I think,' he said slowly, ‘you should take a look inside. It's open – I forced the lock.' Novak gave him a sharp glance as he raised the lid and stood back.

Inside, the box was crammed with fat brown paper envelopes, unsealed but encircled with rubber bands, and in each was a bundle of crisp white five-pound banknotes, printed in black. Novak made a quick calculation. At a rough estimate, the lot probably amounted to something not all that far off his own annual salary, he thought, stunned. He closed the lid and saw Sholto's eyes on him. ‘Any ideas about where all this might have come from?'

‘I've done nothing but ask myself that since I found it. It has me baffled.' His eyes looked tormented.

When you turned up stones, ugly things crawled from beneath. And blackmail was an ugly word. This man was intelligent enough to know that his son's murder had not been a motiveless, random affair – and that this amount of money, one way or another, represented as good a reason for it as any. How else could a young man like Peter have obtained such an amount? Novak looked again at the notes in their separate envelopes. Regular payments. Realistically, it was the only answer – and Edmund Sholto had known this, too, and must have realized how it would reflect discreditably upon Peter. He could have kept his mouth shut about finding it, yet he had not. Novak wondered how many other fathers would have done the same.

‘I think this might have been what he came back for that night,' Sholto said.

Novak thought so too. But in that case, why had he gone to Leysmorton, rather than here?

‘I never saw him after the war ended, you know. He was expecting his release any day, and I was actually writing my weekly letter to him when I heard footsteps on the path. I jumped up, thinking it was him, home at last, but it was the Redcaps looking for him.' He bowed his head, then raised it and looked Novak in the eye. ‘Find his killer, Inspector. It might be a long haul, I realize that. I don't expect miracles – but whatever Peter did that he was killed for, find who did it.'

Novak clasped his shoulder. It wasn't the first time he'd been asked that and he'd always found it impossible to answer.

As a motive, it was as good as any. But who was being blackmailed?

Novak thought of the edginess Stronglove had shown about Peter, and his mind flew back to that first meeting in the library at Leysmorton. He saw again a slim hand fingering an expensive enamelled cigarette case, looks exchanged. Was he correct in assuming a guilty connection between Dirk Stronglove and Stella Markham, and that Peter had made use of it? His instinct told him yes. But would Stronglove – or Stronglove and Stella together – have been willing, or indeed able, to part with such an amount of cash to keep it secret? That might depend on what damage Peter could have done with such knowledge.

Stronglove was a known ladies' man, so would another affair with a married woman bother him too much? It was more likely Stella Markham who would have borne the brunt of such a disclosure. She was in a comfortable niche here, she obviously liked the good things in life, like her daughter – not Rosie, the other one – and he'd be prepared to bet she wouldn't be in a hurry to give any of it up. But would Stronglove have been honourable enough to stump up to protect her, to avoid their affair becoming public knowledge? In fact, how far would she – would either of them – go to save her marriage? To the point of actual murder?

Yes, he thought immediately and unfairly. Stronglove would, if something stood in his way. He knew he was not being objective enough, but his antennae quivered whenever the man's name came up.

But . . . and here he stumbled on the physical aspects of it. Stronglove was a half-blind man – and in any case had not been living at Leysmorton at the time Peter deserted. And a woman built like Stella Markham? Another aspect occurred to him: Stronglove was published by the Peregrine Press. It would hardly have done his standing as one of their authors much good if there were suspicions of him being involved with the wife of Gerald Markham, whom Novak hadn't yet met.

It was one of those melancholic, end of summer days, cool and grey, very still, the sky flat and colourless, when everything seemed sharply etched and defined, hard-edged against the light. From where she sat, in Hugh's room at Steadings, Emily could see along the length of the smoothly manicured lawn, a swathe of velvet down to where a maple at the end glowed as if on fire, its leaves already turned a deep, rich red. Fallen leaves scattered the lawn too, and in the regimented flower-beds nearer the house a gardener worked, tossing into a barrow the summer bedding that had gone over.

She sat to one side of Hugh's desk, sipping coffee while he put aside the letters he'd been writing and began to leaf through the drawings she had brought over. ‘Take a look at these, will you, Hugh?' she'd asked as she handed him the large envelope. ‘See what you think.'

While he gave them his usual careful consideration, she picked up her cup and walked to the window. Beyond the limits of the garden, far off in the Leysmorton grounds, a figure could just about be discerned: Marta, in her green cardigan, stomping purposefully down a path, busy with her own concerns. Absently she watched the gardener at his task, and was suddenly transported to another garden, fifteen hundred miles away.

‘Well,' said Hugh at last.

‘Mm, yes,' she mused as she went back to her seat by the desk. ‘The agapanthus will still be out.'

‘The what?'

‘Sorry, Hugh.' She was embarrassed to realize she'd spoken aloud. ‘The African lilies. In Madeira. I was thinking about them. They grow wild, by the side of the road, an absolute sea of blue and white. Hydrangeas as well. But anything grows in Madeira.'

Madeira, that small, temperate island of volcanic lava rising from the sea, where her home, the Quinta Miranda, stood, reached only by the road that curled upwards in a succession of hairpin bends, twisting at what appeared to be an almost vertical gradient, with dizzy-making drops to the crashing sea on one side, on the other a series of thickly forested peaks, split with deeply cut ravines. A church with an odd, onion-shaped dome and, clinging to the slope, occasional houses and villas, Portuguese style, softly colour-washed with red-tiled roofs and stepped gardens. Every kind of creeper spilling over walls, roofs and terraces in almost indecent profusion, a rainbow spectrum of scarlet, purple and yellow. Her own garden ablaze with purple bougainvillea, morning glory, feathery palms and a bright stream of falling water above a pool. There, at last, she had found a garden other than Leysmorton that she could love.