Orders from Berlin (11 page)

‘What did you assume?’ Quaid pressed.

‘Well, that he would leave his property to me, I suppose. I’m his daughter and he has no other relatives as far as I know. At least none that are alive. He had a brother, but he died in the last war. On the Somme,’ she added irrelevantly.

‘Except he has a son-in-law, doesn’t he?’ said Quaid, looking grimly over at Ava’s husband, who had now retreated to a position just inside the door of the room, as if to enable him to beat a fast retreat at a moment’s notice.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Ava, clearly not
understanding
.

‘I mean that your father’s will provides for you and your husband, Dr Bertram John Brive, to inherit the estate jointly, and names your husband as the sole executor. There’s no mistake – it’s quite clear. Here, you can read it yourself if you want,’ said Quaid, passing the vellum pages over to Ava.

‘What about you? Is this news to you too, or did you know about your good fortune already?’ asked Quaid, turning his attention back to Bertram. The doctor seemed to be having competing reactions judging from the look on his face. He was certainly embarrassed, that much was obvious – a scarlet flush had spread across the expanse of his fat cheeks – but there was something else as well. Relief, maybe. Perhaps the will was what he’d been looking for when he’d raced up the stairs earlier; perhaps he’d been worried that it had disappeared.

‘I knew about it. Why shouldn’t I?’ Brive said defiantly. ‘Albert wanted it that way. It was his decision. Ava and I are married, and he thought that a husband should direct his wife’s affairs. I can’t see anything wrong with that.’

‘No, of course you can’t. Anything’s justified as long as the money ends up in your pocket,’ Ava burst out angrily, getting to her feet. ‘God damn you, Bertie. Now I understand why you’ve been spending so much time over here this last year, ministering to his hypochondria, writing him prescriptions for drugs he didn’t need, and filling them yourself at the pharmacy. It wasn’t him you cared about, was it? It was his stupid money.’

Trave put his hand on Ava’s arm, anxious that she might rush forward and physically attack her husband, but he needn’t have worried. Her angry outburst exhausted her and she collapsed back into her chair, sobbing.

Downstairs, Quaid paused in the hallway, drawing a deep breath of what appeared to be satisfaction as he pulled on his black leather driving gloves. Albert’s corpse had been removed, replaced by a chalk outline of where his body had lain.

‘Good work,’ he said, smiling benignly at his assistant. ‘We’ll let the medicine man stew in his juices tonight and see what we can find out about him tomorrow. Can I give you a lift home?’

‘No thanks. I’d like the walk. I don’t live too far from here,’ said Trave.

‘All right, suit yourself.’

Trave watched from the doorstep as the inspector got into his car and drove away, then waited until the Wolseley had turned the corner at the end of the street into Albert Bridge Road before he went back inside and knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat.

Quaid might be focused on the dead man’s son-in-law, but Trave was curious to know more about the victim and the mysterious visitor who’d left the note with the old lady downstairs – the note that had made Albert Morrison so agitated when he got back from the park. A fireside chat with Mrs Graves wasn’t on the list of Quaid’s instructions, but Trave didn’t feel he needed the inspector’s permission to ask her a few questions. The time to make a report would be after he’d found something out, not before.

As he’d hoped, Mrs Graves was still awake. The only change was that she had exchanged her black widow’s weeds for a floral dressing gown and curlers in her hair. Mourning was clearly not a night-time occupation. And instead of tea, she offered the young policeman something a little stronger from a bottle that she stood on a chair to get down from a high cupboard in her kitchen.

‘I think we need a little pick-me-up after all that’s happened,’ she said. ‘There’s not been a murder in this house before – at least not in my time.’

‘Well, I’d like to thank you for your kindness to Ava. I don’t think she’d have been able to answer the inspector’s questions if you hadn’t helped her out to begin with,’ said Trave.

‘It was the least I could do. She’s not had a very happy life, the poor girl, and now this …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, should we, but her father wasn’t an easy man, you know. More often than not he looked daggers drawn if you so much as wished him good morning, and he didn’t like anyone except Ava going into his flat. Apart from her husband, of course – the doctor. He was always round here with his bag of tricks, ministering to Albert. Much good all that medicine did him, God rest his soul,’ said Mrs Graves, crossing herself before pouring Trave and herself two more generous measures from the half-empty whisky bottle on the table.

‘So he didn’t have any other visitors?’

‘No, like I said, he liked to keep himself to himself.’

‘But there was someone today, wasn’t there?’ asked Trave. ‘The man who left the note that you took up to Albert after he got back from the park. Ava told us about it.’

‘Oh, him. Yes, he’s been here before a few times, but not for a while now. Not until today.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I don’t know … middle-aged, in his early fifties, maybe, with fair-coloured hair going bald at the top – a bit of grey in it, if I remember rightly. Not thin, not fat, average looking, I suppose. No glasses. He’d got yellow fingers like people do when they smoke all the time, and his suit was crumpled up like he’d slept in it – that I do remember. I doubt he’s married or got anyone taking care of him, looking like that.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Nice-sounding voice. I might remember his name if you give me a minute. He didn’t tell me it this time, but we had a chat once when he was here before and he wasn’t in su
ch a hurry. Briars, maybe … no, somet
hing else that hurts – on plants.’ Mrs Graves scratched her head, searching for the word, and then abruptly found it. ‘Thorn – that’s it,’ she said, snapping her fingers. ‘I remember because it wasn’t the right name for him. He wasn’t prickly or up on his high horse like Ava’s husband. She’d have done a lot better marrying this bloke if she was going to go for someone older, if you ask me—’

‘You said he was in a hurry today,’ interrupted Trave, trying to get the widow back on track.

‘Yes, a real hurry. Couldn’t wait for Albert to get back, and so I got him a piece of scrap paper and he scribbled something on it, leaning over on the ledge in the hall where we leave the letters, so I couldn’t see what he was writing even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, of course. It was none of my business. And then when he’d finished, he folded it up and made me promise to give it to Albert personally when he got back, which I did just as soon as he came in. I hope I did the right thing,’ she said anxiously, looking up at Trave for reassurance. ‘I hope that note didn’t have anything to do with what happened – you know, afterwards.’

‘I’m sure it didn’t,’ said Trave, injecting a note of certainty into his voice that he was far from feeling. ‘We just need to get the whole picture, that’s all. You understand.’

Trave sensed that he’d got everything from Mrs Graves that was worth getting and stood up to leave. But the widow wouldn’t hear of it, keeping him prisoner for half an hour longer while she plied him with more whisky and memories of her late lamented husband, who’d died of something unspecified at the time of the General Strike. And in retrospect, Trave didn’t know how he would have got out of her flat at all if it hadn’t been for the air raid siren that came to his rescue on the stroke of eight o’clock, sending Mrs Graves scurrying to the basement with the other surviving tenants of Gloucester Mansions.

This time it was no false alarm, as less than ten minutes later, just as he was approaching Albert Bridge, Trave began to hear the sound of distant explosions. There was no one in sight, and he felt for a moment as if he were looking at a surrealist painting of an inhuman world – the pale metal girders holding up the bridge on either side appeared in the moonlight like the carcass of some monstrous prehistoric ship, while up in the sky above Battersea Park, a second silver barrage balloon had been winched up to join its mate, so that now they floated over the trees like gigantic headless creatures, inhabitants of another planet.

Further up the river towards Lambeth, a red-white glow began to suffuse the eastern skyline, and Trave felt a stab of pity for the poor people who were being bombed, defenceless against the rain of incendiaries and high explosives pouring down on them from up above. Try as he might, Trave could see no sense in this indiscriminate bombing of families in their homes. He wondered where it would end or if it ever would.

A memory came unbidden into his mind of an old man in Oxford before the war who used to stand by the Martyrs’ Memorial in St Giles, shouting at passers-by to prepare for the end of the world. Trave sighed as he remembered how he and his wife, Vanessa, had laughed at the crazy old fool back then, not understanding that he’d been quite right in his predictions. They’d been living in a fool’s paradise, with no idea of how little time they had left.

Trave shivered and turned his collar up against the cold as he stepped off the bridge and began to walk home along the deserted embankment, while behind him the bombs continued to fall.

Trave woke up in the grey light of the early dawn. Not that he could see the rising sun from the window of his dingy single-room basement flat on the wrong end of the New King’s Road. The view was limited to the twisted trunk and lower branches of a leafless beech tree and the brick wall of a neighbouring boarded-up house whose owners had fled the capital in the first year of the war and never come back.

He put some water to heat on the small gas ring in the corner and raised the window sash, reaching for the remains of yesterday’s pint of milk, which he had left outside on the ledge the night before. It was frozen half-solid in the bottle, and the rush of cold air into the room was as effective as a cold shower to bring him fully awake. Quickly, he pulled his greatcoat from off the hook on the back of the door and wrapped himself in it as he sat shivering on the edge of the bed and sipped at the scalding tea he had made using the last leaves of his weekly ration. He held the chipped mug in both hands, feeling the warmth travelling up his arms, and thought of helping the bereaved woman to drink tea in her dead father’s flat on the other side of the river the previous evening. He’d felt sorry for her, and she’d reminded him of his wife in some way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about her hair, or maybe it was just that all women had started to remind him of Vanessa. He missed her and missed his three-year-old son too with an ache that had wound itself around his heart and never seemed to go away. They were only sixty miles away, still living in the same little terrace house in north Oxford that had been their first family home until Trave’s transfer up to London in the early summer, but they might as well have been at the north end of Scotland for how often he got to see them now. There was never any time. Between police work in the day and his civil defence duties at the weekends, he lived his life in a state of permanent exhaustion. In the first weeks of the bombing, he’d dutifully crossed the park with the rest of the local population and gone down into the Underground at Fulham Broadway to take shelter, but now on his nights off he didn’t bother. He was too damn tired, and he would kick off his shoes and fall into bed in his clothes on his return home and sleep even as the bombs fell sometimes as close as a few streets away. And then wake like today in the cold dawn with the sensation of having forgotten something vitally important – vivid important dreams that his conscious mind couldn’t recover.

Trave rubbed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the case in hand. He hadn’t liked the woman’s husband, the fat doctor with the bow tie, any more than his inspector had. He knew the type – officious domestic tyrants expecting to be waited on hand and foot by wives who’d been brought up to love and obey by equally chauvinistic fathers. And Brive hadn’t denied knowing all about the old man’s will; he’d probably had a hand in persuading Morrison to add his name to his wife’s as co-beneficiary of the estate. It was going to be interesting to see how much Mr Albert Morrison was worth. Perhaps the son-in-law was in financial need. God knows that could provide motive enough to commit murder in these impoverished times. But then why would he go about it in such a stupid, messy way? Ava had made her father sound like a professional hypochondriac, and Brive was Morrison’s doctor. It would have been easy for him to poison the old man by persuading him to take some newfangled medicine that he’d specially recommended. Unless, of course, the murder was unplanned: the result of some argument between the two of them that had got out of control – over money, perhaps, or the dead man’s will.

And if Brive was the murderer, why had he returned so quickly to the scene of his crime and with such an inadequate explanation for his sudden appearance? Was it to get rid of something incriminating, or was it to fetch something that he’d left behind when he’d had to leave in such a hurry, running breathless down the fire escape and out into the night? He’d certainly tried to pick up the discarded papers from the floor before Quaid had stopped him. Ava had been adamant that they hadn’t been there in the afternoon, and Morrison’s will had been among them. That much couldn’t be denied.

Trave knew what Quaid’s take on the case was going to be. It was obvious that Brive had made a bad impression on the inspector from the moment he’d walked through the front door of Gloucester Mansions, and Trave had worked with Quaid long enough to know how much importance the inspector attached to first impressions. Once he’d latched on to a suspect, the legal burden of proof in any investigation tended to get stood on its head. Today he would get busy building a case against Brive, and he wouldn’t stop until he had enough circumstantial evidence to charge him with the murder. Evidence that led in other directions would be studiously ignored – like the strange handwritten note that Trave had found in the dead man’s pocket or Morrison’s sudden unexplained departure in the taxi in the late afternoon, shortly after Mrs Graves had brought him up the other note that the middle-aged balding man called Thorn had left for him while he was out.