The Case of the Missing Bronte (15 page)

‘That'll do. Come along with us.'

‘Is this necessary?' said the taller one, the spokesman. ‘We are here for the tennis.'

‘Are you? Odd you should have been making for the exit before the first game has begun, isn't it?'

He blinked. Fifteen-love to Perry Trethowan, I thought. We hove in on either side, and the four of us made our way silently to the administrative block. Once there I let the constable go, and we sat on either side of a bare deal table, looking each other up and down. The spokesman continued to look bland, totally cool, but the other seemed tense with bottled-up rage and a vindictive, indiscriminate violence.

‘Your names?'

The big blond one paused, thought, and seemed to decide it would be foolish to go into the Norwegian version of the Jones and Brown routine.

‘Rolf Tingvold. And this is Knut — ' and then something quite unpronounceable.

‘Do you have your passports?'

Pause again, then both of them took them from their pockets. Little red passports, Norwegian, the information inside typed. Rolf Tingvold, with an address in Hammerfest, North Norway. Knut Ratikainen, with an address in Vadso. Several entry stamps indicating lengthy stays in the United States. Profession: seamen. They did not seem to have followed their profession for some time, but in the current state of the shipping business that was not unusual. I turned to the threatening, blank-faced one.

‘Ratikainen — that's not a Norwegian name, is it?' I said to him. ‘Are you a lapsed Lapp, or something?'

He glowered ahead, silent. It wasn't much of a joke, but he could have made the effort.

‘It is a Finnish name,' said his friend. ‘There is big community of Finnish descent in North Norway. He is born Norwegian.'

‘I see. What are you doing in this country?'

‘On holidays. Between jobs. We are seamen.'

‘So I gather. And is Leeds the sort of place Norwegian seamen generally come to for a holiday?'

Tingvold remained neutral, unsmiling. ‘Why not? We like to see the world.'

‘Ah yes. And today?'

‘We came to see the tennis.'

‘Yet you were leaving before it even started.'

Pause.

‘It was something to do. Before the pubs opened. But we change our minds, see? Because we was not specially interested. Tennis isn't so popular in Norway.'

‘Difficult to play on skis, I suppose. So, having paid five pounds each, you leave without seeing a game.'

‘No law against that, is there? We pay to come in, we leave when we want to. I tell you, we're not that interested.'

‘Come off it,' I said, hotting up the pace. ‘I saw you. You didn't
decide
to leave. You met up, and without a word you went to the exit. It was a prearranged plan. You'd done what you came here to do, hadn't you?'

‘We decide to go. So who needs words? We know each other well, we don't have to speak.'

‘Touching. I don't believe a word of it. What's your connection with James L. Parfitt?'

‘Who? Who's he? I never heard of him.'

‘I doubt that. What about Mr Waddington?'

‘I don't know nobody with that name.'

‘I saw you in Bradford coming out of their hotel.'

‘So what? We go places to drink. Is that illegal?'

‘I heard you mention the name Waddington in a pub there.'

‘Ha. You understand Norwegian? You make a mistake, that's all.'

‘I also saw you at Milltown, coming out of the room of Timothy Scott-Windlesham.'

‘Where is Milltown? We never been there in our lives.'

‘Stand up. I want to search you.'

That pause again — insolent, reflective, an assertion of latent power. From the Finn, sitting there, his silver fair hair glinting under the light from the ceiling, it was especially fearsome. But then they stood up. I went over them thoroughly. Wallets, pens, cigarettes — not a thing of interest. Ratikainen, as I searched him, seemed barely able to suppress a desire to tangle with me. His eyes thinned, his blank, asiatic face took on a look of infinite menace. His silence, his compliance, implied a storing up for the future.

I had an idea.

‘Take your jackets off.'

They looked at me, with the usual powerful, threatening silence. Then they stripped off their jackets and threw them contemptuously over the table. They sat
down again on their chairs, folding their arms, looking straight ahead of them.

I took up Ratikainen's jacket. It was a cheapish American job, stretched by his bulk, beginning to look tatty. I inspected the pockets and the linings. Nothing. Then I took up Rolf Tingvold's. Immediately I struck gold. Or at least solid silver. On the inside lining there was a long zip, carefully hand-sewn, with a sailor's skill. It ran almost from shoulder to waist. It opened to reveal a large, lined pocket, more than large enough to contain, say, a bulky foolscap envelope. It was empty.

‘Unusual,' I said.

‘Not so unusual. We are seamen. Is useful.'

‘Funny I've never seen one before. And what was in it?'

‘Nothing. We are in a hotel. All our stuff is in our room. We don't need to carry anything.'

‘Oh no? Not a large envelope, for example? Containing perhaps a manuscript?'

‘What is that, please? Manuscript.'

‘Paper. With writing on it.'

‘I don't write much.'

‘You know perfectly well what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the manuscript you stole from Dr Tetterfield. Let me tell you what I think happened. You made an appointment with somebody, to meet them at the tennis. You wanted to hand on the manuscript in some crowded place, rather than going to their home, where you might be followed. You had a description of him or her, and perhaps a sign between you to ensure you got it right. And when you saw whoever it was, you passed the manuscript over, and immediately tried to get out. I, like a fool, didn't take you when I first saw you, when you still had the manuscript.'

‘Is all a fairy tale.'

‘And you brought little endearing here along with you, to back you up if there was any rough stuff.'

‘There wasn't no rough stuff. We didn't make no trouble.'

‘Not with two policemen. If it had been Mr Scott-Windlesham or Dr Tetterfield — that would have been a different matter.'

‘Who are these people with the terrible names? We never heard of them.'

‘Well, perhaps we'd better see about that.'

I collected a constable and a police car, piled them in, and we drove from Leeds to Bradford in silence. Or near silence, for they swapped a few muttered sentences in Norwegian. I thought they could have been contemplating making a break for it at traffic lights, so I kept my eyes on them all the way, but they brazened it out — sitting there in the back, solid, silent, apparently quite confident. And how right they were to be that.

At Bradford we drove directly to Dr Tetterfield's house. It was Saturday, but his housekeeper was on duty. The sight of her on one side of the door, guarding, and us four heavies on the other side, demanding admittance, was full of comic possibilities, but I wasn't in the mood for quiet humour, and the Scandinavian heavies looked as if their sense of humour had been deep-frozen at birth. After the usual wait we were led up once more to Tetterfield's study. He was sitting convalescent in his armchair, a pathetic sight, his face and hands dotted over with sticking plaster, a great blue bruise over his right eye. At the sight of the Finn he visibly flinched.

‘Ah,' I said. ‘You recognize these two?'

And quick as a flash the answer came back:

‘No, no. I don't think I've had the pleasure.'

And the silly old buzzard started struggling to his feet as though we were making a social call. Why do I keep getting involved with raving lunatics in my cases? Other policemen spend their time with commonsense, down-to-earth,
perfectly talk-to-able villains, yet as soon as there's a certifiable lunatic on the horizon, the case is neatly lobbed into my lap. Here was this frail elderly man, beaten practically unrecognizable, and yet he fails to point the most fluttering finger of accusation at his tormentors because he still nourishes hopes of getting his precious little manuscript back, of having it all to himself, of drooling and dribbling over it in the privacy of his home, among his assemblage of old socks and cast-off suspender-belts. I ask you! And when I saw the shoulders of my two thugs perceptibly relax, and something close to a smirk waft over the lips of Rolf Tingvold, I got really mad. I started shouting at the silly old goat, demanding that he recognize them, admit that they'd roughed him up, come down to the station and lay a charge against them. But if he had any fear, it was not of me, and he sat there, immovable, complacent, denying it all.

And so there I was, up against another brick wall. We all drove back to Leeds, and I put them through it at West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police HQ. By now they were visibly complacent. They — or rather Tingvold, who did all the talking — stuck to their story, which was really no story, a prolonged negative. They didn't know Parfitt, they didn't know Waddington, they didn't know Tetterfield, they didn't know Scott-Windlesham. If I thought I'd seen them coming out of Scott-Windlesham's office, then I must have made a mistake, mustn't I? Bang, bang went my head against the brick wall of their denials. The tables were turned since old Tetterfield's refusal to recognize them, and they had only to keep up their stonewalling and eventually I would be forced to give in. And in the end I had to admit it, and let them go. They got up from their chairs, silent, and marched to the door.

‘Don't think you're getting away with this,' I said feebly, falling into cliché. ‘I'll know you again.'

The Finn turned round, eyes narrowed, gazing intently, and spoke for the first time:

‘And
we
shall know
you,
Mr Police,' he said.

The next few days augmented a feeling I was beginning to have of my head being held firmly up against a brick wall. Little things came up, such as the first dribbles of information about the two Scandinavians from the US, but most of the stuff that was shoved in my direction by the police at Milltown, Bradford and Leeds illuminated little and led nowhere. I had long conversations on the phone with Jan, in which she was pretty scathing, but dismally failed herself to come up with any further suggestions of where the investigation might go next. ‘Well,
you're
the one there on the spot,' she said resentfully, and with some truth. And I was on the spot in the other sense as well: I had a case to investigate, without the foggiest notion of the next steps to take; a manuscript to retrieve, without the first notion where it might be. Basically I was waiting till they allowed me to interview Miss Wing, without any great hopes of that getting me going again.

Meanwhile I went over and over in my mind the pattern of the case as it now presented itself to me. That the manuscript had been in the hands of Dr Tetterfield seemed to me incontrovertible — the only way I could account for his extraordinary behaviour. How it got to him was important for the attack on Miss Wing, though not so important for the ultimate destination of the manuscript. But the obvious connection between Miss
Wing and old Tetterfield was Timothy Scott-Windlesham, and I could easily see him committing the attack, in a frenzy of spite and fear. His motive in undertaking the theft was, I had no doubt, both academic and financial: he had no qualifications for editing a Brontë work, but if the manuscript could be kept under cover for a few years he could get himself qualified. And editing a newly discovered work by Emily Brontë would bring him academic kudos beyond his dreams. Not to mention an awful lot of money. Which no doubt was why he went in with mad old Tetterfield.

But then there was the question of how the real thugs, the professionals, came into the picture. Here things were much more misty, but I was ready to conjecture that the unsavoury old crook here (if he would pardon such an expression) was the unlovely Amos Macklehose. It was easy enough to see how he got wind of the manuscripts — either through a family tradition, or, more likely, through that cursed adherent of his in Hutton-le-Dales, who travelled regularly to the Tabernacle in Leeds, randy for robes and altar-cloths. Macklehose would certainly have been aware of the family's Brontë connection, and would have seen the plausibility of the story at once. From him to James L. Parfitt was a simple enough step, especially if Parfitt had just landed in the country and was already putting out feelers about his interest in buying. And Mr Parfitt had his strong-arm boys — kept at arm's length, probably never actually getting to see their patron. The thugs, I suspected, had come on a reconnaissance trip to Hutton, posing as Seventh Day Adventists or whatever it was, but they had left the action too late, and Timothy had popped in between intention and execution. They had followed the same trail as I did, and had had to catch up with the manuscript when it had passed to Tetterfield.

So far, so good. Then came that blank wall. They had
got instructions from Waddington, that I was willing to bet; and the instructions must have been to pass it on to someone. They organized the transfer at the tennis — crowded, chaotic, with very little likelihood of their being successfully prevented or properly observed. Clever of them, really. Because now I was back to square one. I had a list of four people who I was pretty sure had handled the manuscript at one time or another, yet I was no nearer to finding out where it was now. It had been handed on, and that was that. For all I knew the Norwegian toughs had now bowed out of the whole operation — leaving the field to heaven knows who. Mist had come down over the field of play, and for all one knew a whole new set of players were now kicking the ball.

As I say, I was far from confident that, when Miss Wing was well enough to talk to me, she would have anything to tell that would lead the chase more than a few steps further. But I waited, fumbled about with irrelevancies, and eventually on Thursday morning I got the message from the hospital in Milltown that I could go over and have a talk with her — but only for a short time.