Put on by Cunning (7 page)

It was three o’clock on the afternoon of a dull day. Not a light showed in the Sterries windows. Still, many people preferred to sit in the dusk rather than anticipate the night too soon. He rang the bell. He rang and rang again, was pleased to find himself not particularly disappointed that there was no one at home.

After a moment’s thought he walked down the path to Sterries Cottage. Ted Hicks answered his ring. Yes, Mrs Arno was out. In fact, she had returned to London. Her friends had gone and then she hadgone, leaving him and his wife to look after the house.

‘Does she mean to come back?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea about that, sir. Mrs Arno didn’t say.’ Hicks spoke respectfully. Indeed, he had far more the air of an old-fashioned servant than his wife. Yet again Wexford felt, as he had felt with Muriel Hicks, that at any moment the discreet speaker might break into abuse, either heaping insults on Natalie or dismissing her with contempt. But nothing like this happened. Hicks compressed his lips and stared blankly at Wexford, though without meeting his eyes. ‘Would you care to come in? I can give you Mrs Arno’s London address.’

Why bother with it? He refused, thanked the man, asked almost as an afterthought if the house was to be sold.

‘Very probably, sir.’ Hicks, stiff, soldierly almost, unbent a little. ‘This house will be. The wife and me, we couldn’t stick it here now Sir Manuel’s gone.’

It seemed likely that Natalie had taken her leave of Kingsmarkham and the town would not see her again. Perhaps she meant to settle in London or even return to America. He said something on these lines to Sheila as he drove her up to London on the following morning. But she had lost interest in Sterries and its future and was preoccupied with the morning paper which was carrying a feature about her and the forthcoming wedding. On the whole she seemed pleased with it, a reaction that astonished Wexford and Dora. They had been appalled by the description of her as the ‘beautiful daughter of a country policeman’ and the full-length photograph which showed her neither as Stewardess Curtis nor in one of her Royal Shakespeare Company roles, but reclining on a heap of cushions in little more than a pair of spangled stockings and a smallish fur.

‘Dorset Stores It’ was the slogan on the side of the removal van that had arrived early in Hamilton Terrace. Two men sat in its cab, glumly awaiting the appearance of the owner of the flat. Recognition of who that owner was mollified them, and on the way up in the lift the younger man asked Sheila if she would give him her autograph for his wife who hadn’t missed a single instalment of
Runway
since the serial began.

The other man looked very old. Wexford was thinking he was too old to be of much use until he saw him lift Sheila’s big bow-fronted chest of drawers and set it like a light pack on his shoulders. The younger man smiled at Wexford’s astonishment.

‘Pity you haven’t got a piano,’ he said. ‘He comes from the most famous piano-lifting family in the country.’

Wexford had never before supposed that talents of that kind ran in families or even that one might enjoy a reputation for such a skill. He looked at the old man, who seemed getting on for Camargue’s age, with new respect.

‘Where are you taking all this stuff?’

A list was consulted. ‘This piece and them chairs and that chest up to Keats Grove and . . .’

‘Yes, I mean what isn’t going to Keats Grove.’

‘Down the warehouse. That’s our warehouse down Thornton Heath, Croydon way if you know it. The lady’s not got so much she’ll need more than one container.’ He named the rental Sheila would have to pay per week for the storage of her tables and chairs.

‘It’s stacked up in this container, is it, and stored along with a hundred others? Suppose you said you wanted it stored for a year and then you changed your mind and wanted to get, say, one item out?’

‘That’d be no problem, guv’nor. It’s yours, isn’t it? While you pay your rent you can do what you like about it, leave it alone if that’s what you want like or inspect it once a week. Thanks very much, lady.’ This last was addressed to Sheila who was dispensing cans of beer.

‘Give us a hand, George,’ said the old man.

He had picked up Sheila’s four-poster on his own, held it several inches off the ground, then thought better of it. He and the man called George began dismantling it.

‘You’d be amazed,’ said George, ‘the things that go on. We’re like a very old-established firm and we’ve got stuff down the warehouse been stored since before the First War . . .’

‘The Great War,’ said the old man.

‘OK, then, the
Great
War. We’ve got stuff been stored since before 1914. The party as stored it’s dead and gone and the rent’s like gone up ten, twenty times, but the family wants it kept and they go on paying. Furniture that’s been stored twenty years, that’s common, that’s nothing out of the way. We got on lady, she put her grand piano in store 1936 and she’s dead now, but her daughter, she keeps the rent up. She comes along every so often and we open up her container for her and let her have a look her piano’s OK.’

‘See if you can shift that nut, George,’ said the old man.

By two they were finished. Wexford took Sheila out to lunch, to a little French restaurant in Blenheim Terrace, a far cry from Mr Haq’s They shared a bottle of Domaine du Parc and as Wexford raised his glass and drank to her happiness he felt a rush of unaccustomed sentimentality. She was so very much his treasure. His heart swelled with pride when he saw people look at her, whisper together and then look again. For years now she had hardly been his, she had been something like public property, but after Saturday she would be Andrew’s and lost to him for ever . . . Suddenly he let out a bark of laughter at these maudlin indulgences.

‘What’s funny, Pop darling?’

‘I was thinking about those removal men,’ he lied.

He drove her up to Hampstead where she was staying the night and began the long haul back to Kingsmarkham. Not very experienced in London traffic, he had left Keats Grove at four and by the time he came to Waterloo Bridge found himself in the thick of the rush. It was after seven when he walked, cross and tired, into his house.

Dora came out to meet him in the hall. She kepther voice low. ‘Reg, that friend of Sheila’s who was going to marry Manuel Camargue is here. Dinah Whatever-it-is.’

‘Didn’t you tell her Sheila wouldn’t be back tonight?’

Dora, though aware that she must move with the times, though aware that Sheila and Andrew had been more or less living together for the past year, nevertheless still made attempts to present to the world a picture of her daughter as an old-fashioned maiden bride. Her husband’s accusing look – he disapproved of this kind of Mrs Grundyish concealment – made her blush and say hastily:

‘She doesn’t want Sheila, she wants you. She’s been here an hour, she insisted on waiting. She says . . .’ Dora cast up her eyes. ‘She says she didn’t know till this morning that you were a policeman!’

Wedding presents were still arriving. The house wasn’t big enough for this sort of influx, and now the larger items were beginning to take over the hall. He nearly tripped over an object which, since it was swathed in corrugated cardboard and brown paper, might have been a plant stand, a lectern or a standard lamp, and cursing under his breath made his way into the living room.

This time the Alsatian had been left behind. Dinah Sternhold had been sitting by the hearth, gazing into the heart of the fire perhaps while preoccupied with her own thoughts. She jumped up when he came in and her round pale face grew pink.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you, Mr Wexford. Believe me, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was absolutely – well, absolutely vital. I’ve delayed so long and I’ve felt so bad and now I can’t sleep with the worry . . . But it wasn’t till this morning I found out you were a detective chief inspector.’

‘You read it in the paper,’ he said, smiling. ‘“Beautiful daughter of a country policeman.”’

‘Sheila never told me, you see. Why should she? I never told her my father’s a bank manager.’

Wexford sat down. ‘Then what you have to tell me is something serious, I suppose. Shall we have a drink? I’m a bit tired and you look as if you need Dutch courage.’

On doctor’s orders, he could allow himself nothing stronger than vermouth but she, to his surprise, asked for whisky. That she wasn’t used to it he could tell by the way she shuddered as she took her first sip. She lifted to him those greyish-brown eyes that seemed full of soft light. He had thought that face plain but it was not, and for a moment he could intuit what Camargue had seen in her. If his looks had been spiritual and sensitive so, superlatively, were hers. The old musician and this young creature had shared, he sensed, an approach to life that was gentle, impulsive and joyous.

There was no joy now in her wan features. They seemed convulsed with doubt and perhaps with fear.

‘I know I ought to tell someone about this,’ she began again. ‘As soon as – as Manuel was dead I knew I ought to tell someone. I thought of his solicitors but I imagined them listening to me and knowing I wasn’t to – well, inherit, and thinking it was all sour grapes . . . It seemed so – so
wild
to go to the police. But this morning when I read that in the paper – you see, I know you, you’re Sheila’s father, you won’t . . . I’m afraid I’m not being very articulate. Perhaps you understand what I mean?’

‘I understand you’ve been feeling diffident about giving some sort of information but I’m mystified as to what it is.’

‘Oh, of course you are! The point is, I don’t really believe it myself. I can’t, it seems so – well, outlandish. But Manuel believed it, he was so sure, so I don’t think I ought to keep it to myself and just let things go ahead, do you?’

‘I think you’d better tell me straight away, Mrs Sternhold. Just tell me what it is and then we’ll have the explanations afterwards.’

She set down her glass. She looked a little away from him, the firelight reddening the side of her face.

‘Well, then. Manuel told me that Natalie Arno, or the woman who calls herself Natalie Arno, wasn’t his daughter at all. He was absolutely convinced she was an impostor.’

He said nothing and his face showed nothing of what he felt. She was looking at him now, the doubt intensified, her hands lifted and clasped hard together under her chin. In the firelight the ruby on her finger burned and twinkled.

‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s it. It was something to – to hesitate about, wasn’t it? But I don’t really believe it. Oh, I don’t mean he wasn’t marvellous for his age and his mind absolutely sound. I don’t mean that. But his sight was poor and he’d worked himself into such an emotional state over seeing her, it was nineteen years, and perhaps she wasn’t very kind and – oh, I don’t know! When he said she wasn’t his daughter, she was an impostor, and he’d leave her nothing in his will, I . . .’

Wexford interrupted her. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it from the beginning?’

‘Where is the beginning? From the time she, or whoever she is . . .’

‘Tell me about it from the time of her return to this country in November.’

Dora put her head round the door. He knew she had come to ask him if he was ready for his dinner but she retreated without a word. Dinah Sternhold said:

‘I think I’m keeping you from your meal.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go back to November.’

‘I only know that it was in November she came back. She didn’t get in touch with Manuel until the middle of December – 12 December it was. She didn’t say anything about our getting married, just could she come and see him and something about healing the breach. At first she wanted to come at Christmas but when Manuel wrote back that that would be fine and I should be there and my parents, she said no, the first time she wanted to see him alone. It sounds casual, putting it like that, Manuel writing back and inviting her, but in fact it wasn’t a bit. Getting her first letter absolutely threw him. He was very – well, excited about seeing her and rather confused and it was almost as if he was afraid. I suggested he phone her – she gave a phone number – but he couldn’t bring himself to that and it’s true he was difficult on the phone if you didn’t know him. His hearing was fine when he could
see
the speaker. Anyway, she suggested 10 January and we had the same excitement and nervousness all over again. I wasn’t to be there or the Hickses, Muriel was to get the tea ready and leave him to make it and she was to get one of the spare rooms ready in case Natalie decided to stay.

‘Well, two or three days before, it must have been about the 7th, a woman called Mrs Zoffany phoned. Muriel took the call. Manuel was asleep. This Mrs Zoffany said she was speaking on behalf of Natalie who couldn’t come on the 10th because she had to go into hospital for a check-up and could she come on the 19th instead? Manuel got into a state when Muriel told him. I went over there in the evening and he was very depressed and nervous, saying Natalie didn’t really want a reconciliation, whatever she may have intended at first, she was just trying to get out of seeing him. You can imagine. He went on about how he was going to die soon and at any rate that would be a blessing for me, not to be tied to an old man
et cetera
. All nonsense, of course, but natural, I think. he was
longing
to see her. It’s a good thing I haven’t got a jealous nature. Lots of women would have been jealous.’

Perhaps they would. Jealousy knows nothing of age discrepancies, suitability. Camargue, thought Wexford, had chosen for his second wife a surrogate daughter, assuming his true daughter would never reappear. No wonder, when she did, that emotions had run high. He said only:

‘I take it that it was on the 19th she came?’

‘Yes. In the afternoon, about three. She came by train from Victoria and then in a taxi from the station. Manuel asked the Hickses not to interrupt them and Ted even took Nancy away for the afternoon. Muriel left tea prepared on the table in the drawing room and there was some cold duck and stuff for supper in the fridge.’