No Place of Safety (25 page)

‘I tell you, I'll – '

‘ – rumours about arms to Iraq and Iran. Recently rumours about arms to Nigeria.'

‘If you damage my business or my reputation by spreading rumours which have no basis in fact, I'll go as high as need be to get you drummed out of the police.'

‘Well, I wouldn't go as high as a government minister, if that's what you mean. They've tended to be broken reeds as far as armaments manufacturers are concerned – encouraging
them to slide round the regulations, then washing their hands as soon as they land in trouble. But we're talking here about rumours
already
in circulation, and in any case we're not primarily interested at the moment in possible breaches of international embargoes.'

‘Then what the hell did you bring it up for?'

‘What we're interested in is whether the money for the refuge came from you, and whether there was blackmail. The possible reasons for the blackmail we can go into at our leisure.'

‘There was no blackmail. He had no cause to blackmail me.'

‘Yet he had been continuing to come out here, hadn't he? Regularly – once a week, the locals say. Every Monday afternoon he'd be out here for an hour or two.'

Sir George changed tack.

‘We took an interest in the Centre. Naturally. Ben had worked for us for many years. We were in on the project from the launching-pad stage. We're not a bleeding-hearts club in this house, but you can't help noticing all the young people on the streets. We hoped he'd make a go of his hostel.'

‘So he reported out here on the progress once a week?'

Sir George spluttered.

‘Yes. Yes, he did.'

‘I suggest you contributed to its expenses.'

‘Small sums. Occasionally.'

‘Really? And yet he came here regularly as clockwork. On a Monday.' Oddie looked at Charlie, then smiled bleakly and spread out his hands. ‘I think we should come clean with you, Sir George, Lady Mallaby. We think you've been putting on a charade for our benefit. There is Sir George, the bluff country squire with business interests, and there is his lady, the dumpy, frumpy wife whose great pleasure is working in her garden, because you can't get the staff these days. Sir George's role is one he's playing all the time out here at Otley. Yours, Lady Mallaby, was I suggest assumed for the occasion. When I mentioned
Colutea floribunda
you didn't catch on that it was a nonsense name I'd made up.'

‘I never know the Latin names of plants. I could see the shrub you were looking at.'

‘And what shrub was it, in popular language?'

‘A . . . a jasmine.'

‘Actually a daphne. You're no more a keen gardener than Sir George is a country squire.'

In the silence that followed Charlie put in his oar, looking hard at Susan Mallaby.

‘I saw a picture of you the other day – a picture of you a few years ago at a Tory Party function,' he said. ‘The real you is smart, still quite trim, and
very
good-looking. Anyone could have told us that, just as anyone who works at Sabre plc could have told us that Sir George is tough, foul-mouthed and a slave-driver of his work force – an industrialist with the necessary eye on the main chance. So the fact is, you were both in collusion on this, both playing parts for our benefit. What we want to know is why, and how did it come about?'

‘That's it,' chimed in Oddie. ‘We asked ourselves how this partnership – whether reluctant or enthusiastic – to put on a play for our benefit came about. Why was it necessary? And we note that Ben always came out here on a Monday, at a time when Sir George would almost certainly be at the Sabre works, and we note that the names of Ben's lady friends that you gave us related to affairs of his that were some years in the past.'

‘And we noted another thing,' took up Charlie. ‘Which is that Ben Marchant always seemed to take up with women decidedly older than himself. You yourself told us, Lady Mallaby, that one of his girlfriends was past child-bearing age. The mothers of both his children we know about – young people who are working at the Centre at the moment – are well into middle age. Ben himself, we have discovered, is just turned forty. He went for older women.'

‘Why that should be isn't for us to ask,' said Oddie. ‘Whether he preferred a woman with a lot of experience, whether he likes the fuller figure, whether he wanted gratitude. The plain fact is, that's what he preferred – prefers, I should say.'

‘So it seemed logical, Lady Mallaby, to ask if the girlfriend he'd had out here since the last of the women whose names you gave us, might in fact have been you.'

Susan Mallaby remained silent, looking straight at them.

‘You've no comment to make?' Oddie asked.

‘None.'

‘Very well,' he resumed. ‘So the pattern that seemed to us to emerge is this. For some time Ben and you have been having an affair – whether or not with your husband's concurrence and blessing we don't know – and in the course of it, perhaps from pillow talk, perhaps because you were happy to give him a handle on your husband, Ben finds out from you that Sir George has been trading illegally in arms with countries that have been internationally declared to be beyond the pale.'

Again he looked at her. Still she looked back, unflinching and unspeaking.

‘When Ben got the idea of the refuge – and Ben is a man of myriad ideas, which he pursues for a time, like his women, and then passes on to others – the question of money was vital. He had nothing, I would guess, beyond any saving he might have made from his salary here, and I don't get the feeling that Ben is a saving sort of person. So he began the process that I will call blackmailing, though no doubt he managed to present it in a much kindlier light: in return for his silence, you were providing initial help with the project, and then a small weekly sum as a contribution to its running expenses.'

‘This is fucking preposterous,' said Sir George, his civility slipping badly. ‘There were no illegal arms sales, so how could he blackmail me?'

‘I think, you know, that we'll find out about the illegal arms sales once we start digging. I think it's important to realize that the sums involved in the blackmail, though sizeable, were not enormous. Those decrepit late-Victorian terrace houses go for comparatively little. To a reasonably successful businessman and country landowner they were affordable. Feeding nine or ten people a fairly basic meal each night wasn't vastly expensive. And Ben was far from a
professional blackmailer. I don't imagine when you went along with this gentle pressurizing for funds that you foresaw it escalating in the usual blackmailer's way. It was much more in the nature of a quid pro quo: you know something I don't want known; I'm willing to pay you an agreed sum if you keep quiet about it.'

‘Practically standard business practice,' commented Charlie. ‘But someone has tried to kill him, and that's what we're
really
interested in.'

Oddie nodded.

‘So if we can't see it in Ben to keep upping the ante – because we have no evidence he was interested in money for itself – we have to look for other possibilities. Did you, Sir George, only recently find out about Ben and your wife, and were you driven mad with jealousy? Possible in the abstract, but it hardly rings true to character or situation. Around here one person's business seems to be everyone's business. I think the important thing is that there is no sense of this being a
planned
murder attempt. No one could have gone to the refuge expecting to find Ben or Mehjabean alone, and to be able to kill or maim them without being recognized. The conclusion must be that it was a spur-of-the-moment affair, one born of an overmastering emotion, and botched for that very reason.'

‘So what we need to look at,' said Charlie, ‘is what happened that evening.'

‘You know about the spot of bother at the Centre?' said Oddie.

‘What bother? You told us nothing about that,' said Sir George, puffing self-importantly.

‘Your wife knows. I'm sure she's told you. Let's look at the sequence of events. The proposed husband of Mehjabean, an Asian girl at the refuge, comes along, apparently to say that the arranged marriage between them is off. She has nothing to fear. The residents come to bar him from seeing her and preferably to see him off, very protective of the girl. While the row is going on, Mrs Ingram arrives, sees the row, is rather pleased for reasons of her own,
and recognizes Ben Marchant
.'

‘We went over the fact that she knew him from before,' said Sir George.

‘Yes, we did. The first thing that occurred to her was that if he was the man who had come into a big lottery win, as rumour had it, he should damned well support the handicapped child he'd had by her sister. When she got home, much later, she rang her family down in Lincolnshire and pressed this view strongly.'

‘But before that,' said Charlie, ‘she went to a Conservative Party recruitment do, of her own organizing. Rather a posh affair at the Royal, because she likes to do things in style and wanted to attract the right sort of person – very dainty nibbles and a carvery afterwards. This was a drive for the Leeds area as a whole, which includes Otley. Hardly any recruits, as it turned out, but lots of party stalwarts. And when she met Lady Mallaby there, it was another aspect of Ben Marchant's career that struck her.'

‘Here we have to go carefully,' said Oddie. ‘Because according to Mrs Ingram all she said to Lady Mallaby was, “I've just been round to that Centre place, run by your old estate manager. What a lot of trouble these do-gooders cause.” Mrs Ingram is very anxious now to distance herself from the refuge, from Ben Marchant, and from any suggestions that she may have been a catalyst in an attempted murder.'

‘But with Mrs Ingram it's always advisable to check her statements. We've talked to others who were nearby, and they tell us she said rather more than that,' said Charlie. ‘Putting accounts together it seems that what she also said, roughly, was: “He's got some coloured girl he's interested in, and all hell is breaking out there with her family.” '

Oddie looked closely at Lady Mallaby, but her eyes were unclouded with hate or rage.

‘ “Coloured” is the sort of word that's not used in politically correct circles these days,' said Oddie. ‘But we're not talking about circles like that. Older people still use it all the time. It's all-purpose, and it covers a multitude of shades. And you'd heard the rumour, hadn't you, Lady Mallaby, that Ben was now going with a “coloured” woman?'

She stared ahead, still unflinching and silent.

‘After that, people at the buffet dinner say you helped yourself to more food, hardly talked to anybody else, then abruptly put down your plate and left. Mrs Ingram no doubt saw this with amusement, because the only reason she'd said that was to annoy and upset you. She'd heard rumours. We're told the time you left was about half past nine. We've timed the drive to Portland Terrace. You would have got there around ten to ten – just the time.'

‘You would have parked the car,' resumed Charlie, ‘walked up to the house, and through the lighted window you would have seen facing you, backs to the hall door, Ben and Mehjabean – your lover and his “coloured” girlfriend, as you thought. Ben's hand was on her hand. A great wave of hatred swept over you. You'd been replaced by a beautiful young woman. At last Ben had in you what was surely inevitable in the long run – a lover who would not let him go, who would not be content with being just good friends, would not indulge him as a child is indulged. You saw them together, you ran into the house – '

‘How did she get in?' demanded Sir George. ‘Wasn't the front door locked?'

‘It was. We guess that she'd got a key after Ben had bought the houses, and while he was setting up the refuge there. It was an obvious place to . . . meet. She stood for a moment in the open door of the dining room. Then she attacked.'

‘What with?' came back Sir George. ‘My wife isn't the sort of woman who carries a knife around with her.'

‘She had just been to a buffet dinner, with a carvery. She had helped herself to unwanted food. That's when she took the knife.'

‘Prove it.'

‘The caterers say a knife is missing.'

‘Prove my wife took it.'

‘We hope to prove it by finding it here,' said Oddie, his voice confident. ‘And bloodstained clothes. I have a warrant, and a team from Leeds will be on its way by now. I imagine you both of you know where they're hidden, don't you? When you got home you must have told your husband everything and you made your plans. You concocted the
charade which you've played out for us, and you got rid of the evidence.'

‘Why did your husband go along with it, we wonder?' asked Charlie. ‘Was it because he still loves you? Was it because he was afraid of a trial for attempted murder harming his business? Or was it that he was afraid that once the police started digging into the background of it, the financing of the refuge must come out, and then the blackmail?'

‘We don't really need to go into that yet,' said Oddie. ‘We'll be investigating the illegal arms sales, so there may be charges there, as well as the charge of accomplice after the fact.'

‘You're bloody jumping the gun, aren't you?' said Sir George, his face apoplectic.

‘A little, perhaps. The important thing at the moment is finding the weapon, and maybe the bloody clothes, if they haven't been burnt. Not so easy, these days, to burn things, in houses that have oil or gas-fired central heating. Is there a hat with a feather among the clothes, I wonder? Or perhaps still in your wardrobe, Lady Mallaby? Mehjabean felt one against her cheek just before the knife attack. The cloakroom attendant at the Royal said you were wearing one when you arrived and left. We'll look for that, and the other things. We'll search the house from top to bottom, and then we'll search the grounds and the garden – look for earth that's been newly dug over – '