Kate set out so early enough to see Max Cornfield on Monday morning that she got thoroughly snarled up in the rush-hour traffic. To add insult to injury, she found she couldn’t park outside Mrs Barr’s – Mr Cornfield’s? – house for another hour; not just legally but morally: to shove any obstruction into this tangle would surely be to cause tailbacks long enough to paralyse the whole city, maybe, she thought ghoulishly, the whole of the West Midlands. Shrugging, she pulled on to the drive in front of the converted garage. No access, of course, except via the main house.
This time when the doorbell pealed the response was immediate. The door – held on a security chain – opened a few centimetres to reveal a grey-haired man.
Kate produced a smile and her ID. ‘Good morning. Are you Mr Cornfield? Might I have a few words with you? I’m Detective Sergeant Kate Power, West Midlands Police.’
The man peered at the ID, then nodded. ‘To open the door fully I have to close it first,’ he said.
So where did he come from? For all the name Cornfield sounded quintessentially English, Englishman Cornfield was not. His accent was middle-European, maybe German, maybe from further east.
The door opened, and Mr Cornfield gestured her courteously inside. The hall was much darker, much narrower, than his neighbour’s. Kate recognised the tiles as Minton precursors of those in her vestibule, but they were badly worn and in some places missing.
‘How may I help you, Sergeant?’
‘It’s a matter of some delicacy, Mr Cornfield: perhaps we could sit down somewhere?’
‘You are not arresting me and dragging me off to the Tower of London? After you, please.’ He pointed down the hallway.
‘We don’t do things like that,’ she smiled. ‘This way?’
‘Into the kitchen, please. It gets the morning sun.’
It did. But it was still gloomy. The sash windows were too high and too small: servants were no doubt not intended to enjoy the advantages of bright light.
Cornfield pulled out a chair for her. ‘Coffee, Sergeant? You can see I’m about to have some myself.’
‘And smell!’ she said, with an appreciative sniff. ‘Hmm! Yes, please.’
‘Good.’ He reached for another cup and saucer, stretching rather stiffly. He was about sixty-five, she thought, maybe older, with his face surprisingly unlined and hair only now receding. The grey woollen cardigan he wore over a white shirt and grey flannels was pilled and darned on the elbows, but was clean.
The kitchen itself was in a time warp, stuck in the nineteen-fifties, maybe early sixties. From the colour of the walls to the kitchen units, such as they were, everything spoke of a time before she was born. The paint was very shabby, but it looked very clean, as did the porcelain sink.
‘May I offer you a biscuit? I didn’t make them myself, I’m afraid,’ he said, opening a tin and laying some on a plate. Langues de chat! ‘My neighbour did. Mrs Hamilton. She mentioned that you had been to see her, but seemed uncharacteristically vague as to the reason.’
‘She makes wonderful biscuits,’ Kate said, taking one, ‘but that doesn’t entitle her to know what business I may have with you, does it?’
He poured their coffee, offering milk and sugar but apparently pleased when Kate took neither. ‘So what is your business with me?’ He sat down at right angles to her.
‘It’s about Mrs Barr’s will. I’d like to talk to you about that. This is very good,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Mrs Barr insisted on so many economies, Sergeant. But coffee was one I would not let her make. Camp Essence, indeed!’
‘Did she need to make economies?’
He shook his head. ‘She was a very rich old woman, but she lived in constant fear of debt.’
‘Very rich?’
He shrugged. ‘Look at the position of this house, Sergeant. It may be shabby and in need of more maintenance than I was able to give it, but I cannot imagine it fetching much less than half a million if it went on the market. And she had other property too.’
‘“If it went on the market” – is there any doubt that it will?’
He smiled sadly. ‘It is my home, Sergeant. I have lived here for more years than I care to remember. Absurd as it may be, I am strangely loath to leave it.’
‘Mrs Barr left it to you?’
‘Mrs Barr left everything to me,’ he said simply.
‘But she had a family?’
‘They quarrelled with her years ago and never came near her. Never. She never saw hide or hair of them, Sergeant. They sent her Christmas cards all right, because at least they could presumably remember when Christmas was. As for her birthday, forget it. Family? They were not her family!’ His accent was becoming more and more pronounced.
‘Had you become her family?’
‘I was all she had,’ he said simply. His voice was so sad he might almost have added that she was all he had. He straightened. ‘I suppose, Sergeant, that the family wish to dispute the will. I have told my solicitor to expect that. What I cannot understand is that they should have involved the police. You.’
Kate would have liked to believe him. ‘They allege that there are certain … irregularities about it, Mr Cornfield. Do you know of any?’
‘I knew it, I knew it!’ He beat a fist into his palm. ‘I begged her to have a solicitor. “Fifty pounds,” I told her, “that’s all it would cast!” But she was stubborn. All her life she was stubborn, Sergeant, and towards the end … She became, shall we say, very … very difficult.’
Kate nodded. Mrs Hamilton had implied as much, hadn’t she? ‘But she wouldn’t have a lawyer?’
‘Under no circumstances. Indeed, Sergeant, when I persisted – believe me, I persisted – she became so distressed I was afraid she would have a stroke or heart attack and drop down without any sort of will at all. So eventually I simply let her dictate it to me. She signed it. There you are.’ He spread his hands expansively: they encompassed years of fruitless battles and now, with a tiny spreading of the fingers, his new domain. ‘I suppose, as a police officer, you’ll wish to inspect the premises,’ he added suddenly.
‘As a human being, I’m always interested in other people’s houses. I’d have loved a conducted tour of Mrs Hamilton’s.’
‘Ah, this doesn’t have the elegance of Mrs Hamilton’s. Architecturally, I would say it has very little to commend it. Take this kitchen, for instance: if you turn round you will see a door to the dining room. Whoever conceived of a room with virtually no natural light should have been condemned to eat in there forever.’ He pulled himself stiffly to his feet. ‘However, since it hasn’t been used for its true purpose for at least forty years, I suppose we can truncate his sentence.’
He pushed open the door and reached for the light switch. Kate followed, gasping. The room should have been dominated by a dark oak dining suite worthy of Balmoral – a sideboard that must have been eight feet tall, a table that could without additional leaves have seated ten, high-backed chairs and matching carvers. But it wasn’t. It was dominated by newspapers. Piles of papers rose five feet up each wall. More piles swamped the sideboard and the table. The chairs groaned under further piles. Someone – Cornfield, no doubt – had ensured that there was a canyon about a foot wide between the great cliffs of newsprint. She picked her way carefully along it.
‘Take care – they’re very dusty.’
‘Nineteen sixty-six!’ She pointed to the date on the top of a Times.
‘They go back further than that. To nineteen fifty-six, in fact. I tried to get rid of them, handful by slow handful. But Mrs Barr noticed, and I had to stop. She always intended to re-read them for her research.’
‘Research into what?’ She started to pick her way back.
He lifted his shoulders in a huge shrug. ‘Who can tell?’
‘Are you saying her mind was unsound, Mr Cornfield?’
‘Is your mind sound? Is mine? Oh, Mrs Barr was unusual, maybe eccentric, but she knew her own mind. No doubts, no hesitations.’ His hand sliced the air. ‘Decision made – there. There are some more newspapers elsewhere, as it happens. She always planned to do that research, you see. Or for me to do it – it would have come to the same thing. Shall we move on?’
‘It’s a wonderful old place,’ Kate said, as she stepped back into the hall.
‘Wonderful! Believe me, it needs thousands spending on it. Thousands.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘I understand that the National Trust or English Heritage or some such is now preserving properties as they were when they came into their hands, not as they were at their peak. Now, Sergeant, do you think I should ask them to take over this place? Item, dining room! Item, butler’s pantry.’
‘Butler’s pantry!’ She gazed at not newspapers but rank upon rank of cardboard boxes.
‘The wooden sink, for washing precious glasses. The store cupboards. Maybe it was a housekeeper’s store, but butler’s pantry was what she always called it. All those boxes are full, by the way. China, glass: I should take a couple along to the Antiques Road Show – see what they make of them. Now, the living room.’
This wasn’t as funereal as the dining room but was far from cheerful. Although it had windows at either end they were too small for the overall size of the room, and certainly out of proportion to the high ceiling and deep cornices, which needed dusting at the very least. The emulsion on the ceiling and at the top of the walls was grey with age. Originally the wallpaper might have been expensive, but now it was faded. The carpet was threadbare, the leather of the three-piece suite bruised and split. But there was a baby grand in one corner, music open on the stand, and what looked to Kate’s untutored eye some good paintings on the walls. The curtains – heavy brocade, once – had been unevenly bleached by the sun.
‘Quite rotten,’ Cornfield said, sadly. ‘Thank goodness we have the original shutters. I use them too, Sergeant, for both warmth and security. I tried never to be away overnight – and never was, once Mrs Barr took to her bed. The house was too vulnerable. Too vulnerable.’ He held open the door. ‘The other rooms down here—’
‘Rooms!’
‘Oh, yes – the drawing room and the study. They are in very poor shape. I hardly like anyone to see them before I rehabilitate them. And upstairs – well, you may wish to see where Mrs Barr lived her last years.’
Kate nodded, not because she had any ghoulish inclinations but because this house had gripped her imagination almost as Mrs Hamilton’s had. Almost, but not quite. Whereas Mrs Hamilton’s called out to be lived in, she found this almost repellent. She longed – perhaps as Mr Cornfield longed – to strip everything out and start again.
Upstairs she saw no reason to change her mind. The same air of decay hung about it, now augmented by a sad smell of unwashed old age, the smell of Aunt Cassie’s residential home multiplied several-fold.
‘I did my best,’ he said. ‘I urged her to keep active, to use the bathroom. She could have done. But not latterly.’
He was weeping. The old chap was weeping.
‘The only thing to do with her room is to empty it completely. Every stick of furniture, every thread of fabric. And there are times when I believe I shall have to strip the wallpaper and sand down the floorboards. Oh, Sergeant, forgive me but if you go in there, you go in alone.’
She nodded.
Yes, the smell was bad. The bed had been stripped down to the utility wire spring sub-frame: no mattress or blanket left. No books on the bedside cabinet, more surprisingly no medicines. Just what looked like a doorbell, with a thin cable running down to the skirting-board. But illness and death lingered everywhere, despite the wide-open window. She walked across. Again, the window was too high for the proportions of the room, again the curtains rotting. She looked down at the garden. It was as huge as the house.
‘Could we go down into the sun?’ she asked, coming back into the corridor.
‘Permit me to show you the bathroom first,’ he said. ‘Lavatory here, you see, and next door …’
An enamel bath, feet exposed. No means of heating, not that she could see. No comfort. None in the towels, almost too threadbare to be able to dry anyone.
‘Which is your room?’ Kate asked. If she were having a conducted tour it might as well include the parts behind the green baize door.
‘My room? Sergeant, you do not understand. I never slept in the house, never. Only recently, when she was very ill, and I slept on a camp-bed out here, on the landing. Within earshot, you see.’
‘What was that press-button by the bed? Wasn’t that to summon you?’
‘It’s a big house and she was too ill to wait that long,’ he said gently. ‘My room is the one it always was, the garage. You can see in there with pleasure. Shall we go down?’
A conservatory ran right across the back of the house. Nothing uPVC about this one, however: cast iron, with Victorian curlicues. Old glass, too, nothing like as uniform and clear as modern. Inevitably, she supposed, where panes had broken, they’d been replaced badly, the putty ugly, or cardboard had been taped across the gaps. At one end was a Welsh dresser, inexplicably painted turquoise, stacked high with empty jam-jars. At the other were beautifully maintained garden tools. Between lay a jumble involving, as far as she could see, canvas deckchairs, broken washing-baskets, both wicker and plastic, a pram and a half-full wine rack.
‘You see,’ Cornfield said sadly, ‘it’s not just a matter of having a skip on the drive and slinging everything in. Some of that wine – and there are a couple more cases under there somewhere – may not simply be drinkable, it may be valuable. And if you should ask why a man with several millions in real estate should want even more money, it is because I, like Mrs Barr, hate waste. When I first knew her she was – newspapers apart – merely economical: she became obsessive only in later years.’
Kate turned to him. ‘She must have been a difficult employer. Why did you stay with her?’
‘Why does anyone stay with anyone? There are answers, but maybe only a psychiatrist could make any sense of them.’ He opened the door to the garden, stepping out before her, then pausing to gesture. ‘How far are we from the city centre, Sergeant? Two miles? And a garden like this!’
An estate agent would have referred to mature trees: these were woodland trees, the sort you found in parks, not in the average garden. Why, they were bigger than those Kate had had to have uprooted from her patch. And they were not out of keeping with the rest of the garden. They shielded it from the gaze of most of the surrounding houses, but not an office block some planner had unaccountably permitted.
‘I did my best, Sergeant. But I’m no longer a young man, and latterly Mrs Barr needed me more than the herbaceous border did.’ His face crumpled again.
‘Were you originally her gardener, then?’ Kate asked at last.
‘Originally, Sergeant, I was a waif, a stray. A refugee. An economic migrant. A bogus asylum seeker. Miss Widdecombe would have given me a voucher or sent me back on the next boat. Mrs Barr took me in and gave me shelter and a job.’
‘A refugee?’
‘An old story. I’m now the proud holder of one of Her Britannic Majesty’s official passports. Or at least, the EEC version.’
‘The newspapers date from 1956, you say. So we’re talking Hungary?’ Was it really Mrs Barr who’d kept them, or Cornfield himself? He was surely the more likely to hoard information about such a traumatic year.
‘We are.’ He turned abruptly.
She followed him along the back of the house to a wooden door.
‘You asked to see my room, Sergeant: here it is.’
Yes, the converted garage. And although it was as shabby as the rest of the place – the armchair looked as if it had been discarded from the main house as being too battered even for that – it was clean. The roof had been insulated and sheets of heavy-duty polythene covered it and the big garage doors. She took in a single bed, neat enough to have satisfied the most pernickety sergeant at police training college, a single wardrobe, and a coffee table with a wooden chess-set laid out ready for play. A bookshelf crammed with a heterogeneous collection of books, a wooden chair and a desk completed the furniture. The only modern items were spotlights over the bed and desk, a jug-kettle and – so out of place Kate walked across to take a closer look – a lap-top computer of a generation later than Kate’s own.
‘Virtual chess,’ Cornfield volunteered. He tapped a key. A chessboard materialised. ‘I play with friends all over the world.’
‘All over the world?’
‘A lot of us were displaced in 1956,’ he said.
They returned via the garden to the conservatory.
‘I’d ask you if I’ve replied to all your questions satisfactorily, Sergeant,’ Cornfield said, ‘but you don’t seem to have asked very many.’
‘You’ve given me a lot of answers, though. You came here during or after the Hungarian uprising as a refugee. You’d have been about twenty? Mrs Barr took you in as a gardener, and for some reason, though she had plenty of room in the house, offered you accommodation in the garage.’
‘She didn’t have so much room then. Her husband was alive, and she had her son and daughters living here too.’
‘Daughters?’
He nodded. ‘Edna and Mavis. Edna would have been about eighteen, Mavis thirteen when I came. Then there was Michael. A very bright boy, but troubled. He was about sixteen then.’
Kate wrote in her notebook. ‘What happened to Edna?’
Another of those continental shrugs. ‘Who can tell? It wasn’t a very happy family, Sergeant. The father … was a very strange man.’
Stranger than a woman who kept newspapers dating from the year dot?
‘In what way strange?’
‘Had he been anything other than a perfect English gentleman I would have called him a brutish lout. But I hesitate to speak ill of the dead, and he passed away – oh, back in 1963. It was a very cold winter, lots of snow, and he gave himself a heart attack pushing the car he would have done better to leave at home.’
‘He didn’t mind a handsome young gardener on the premises?’
‘I might have been young, and I might have tended the garden, but I was never handsome, Sergeant.’
She wasn’t sure she believed him. His bones, quite striking now, would have given a good structure then. In any case, as Cassie would have observed, you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you poke the fire.
‘In any case, I don’t suppose he noticed me. He spent more hours at the office making money than today’s city workaholics are rumoured to do. Well, a place like this takes a lot of maintaining—’
‘But it hasn’t been maintained – hadn’t even then, surely!’
He smiled sadly. ‘Things may fall into desuetude quite gradually. One room falls out of use, then another. They used the drawing room as a dining room, for instance: Mr Barr believed that his furniture was too valuable to sell, let alone throw away, so he left it in situ and bought G-Plan.’
‘Which is still there?’
‘Under Mrs Barr’s clothes. I had to move them from the bedroom when – when she became … bedridden.’ He was ready to weep again. Turning to her he said, ‘Sergeant, would you mind if we continued our conversation over more coffee?’
‘I think you’ve answered enough questions for one day, Mr Cornfield. I’ve only a couple more.’
He nodded.
‘I take it Cornfield is an anglicisation of another name?’
‘Yes. I was born Maxim Kornfeld. Not a difficult transliteration.’
‘But Kornfeld sounds more – more German?’
‘Polish. After Auschwitz my family drifted to Hungary.’
‘Auschwitz!’
He smiled. ‘You know the newsreel shots of kids pressed up against the wire? I was one. Happy ending for me. Both parents and I – all saved.’
‘And what happened to them when the tanks rolled into Budapest?’
‘They chose to stay.’
It seemed impertinent to ask more. And irrelevant, surely.
He looked at her wearily. ‘You said you had two questions.’
‘Yes,’ she said, wishing she didn’t have to ask the second. ‘Did you forge Mrs Barr’s will?’