Needless to say, news of the Needham Court break-in soon got about, and for a brief time fuelled the general excitement about the murder. But both press and police put an unsporting damper on matters by declaring that such intrusions were common in houses whose occupant had recently died and that there had been a similar incident at Seaford only a few weeks previously. ‘It’s just an opportunist pushing his luck,’ MacManus was reported as saying, ‘it happens all the time.’
‘In which case, why hadn’t the police been more vigilant?’ Charles Penlow was heard to ask. In the circumstances surely a fair comment – though I certainly wasn’t going to reveal my part in the event and kept my mouth firmly shut. The pot hardly needed stirring.
Indeed, this is exactly what I said to Ingaza when, as arranged, we met by the tennis courts in Eastbourne’s Gildredge Park; and where, idly watching a game of doubles, I told him all about my bizarre afternoon with Alice Markham, its alarming outcome and the subsequent incident at Needham Court.
He didn’t say anything at first, dragging on his cigarette and eyeing one of the tennis players. ‘Legs better than face,’ he murmured, ‘but nice hips.’
‘Oh really, Nicholas,’ I expostulated, ‘I didn’t bring you here to ogle the flanks of cavorting young men. These are vital matters and I should be grateful if you would give me the benefit of your support. I mean to say, I could have been killed!’
‘No, you couldn’t, the gun was a fake.’
‘That’s as maybe. But I can assure you that it was all very harrowing and if it hadn’t been for the cat anything might have happened!’
‘Ah, but anything did, didn’t it – she was mown down from the top of your drive. That’s the intriguing part. Somebody must have known or guessed she was with you. Or do you think it was just some over-zealous target practice by one of the Erasmus masters? Or maybe that school secretary Emily Bartlett has a pistol and wanted to let off steam.’
If Ingaza was trying to rile me he was certainly succeeding. ‘Oh, very funny,’ I replied impatiently. ‘Besides, Emily has a fear of hedgerows, she thinks they harbour mice.’ I paused, and then added ruefully, ‘I was rather expecting some congratulations for my unerring instinct re the Travers drowning. You may recall I said all along that—’
‘Ah, yes, of course. Remarkable, dear girl. Your nose for trouble never ceases to amaze me. What it is to have such powers of deduction!’
‘Oh, be quiet! You could at least give me a cigarette; I’ve left mine behind.’
He passed me a Sobranie, clicked his lighter and then said thoughtfully, ‘This person you saw at the writing desk – how do you know it was a random burglar?’
I told him I was simply echoing ‘received opinion’, that the police reckoned it was the work of a mere chancer exploiting the situation.
‘And is that what you think?’
‘What do I think? Well, I suppose—’
‘You see from what you have told me about your little tête à tête with crazy Alice you now know a number of things the police don’t … for example the small matter of she and her friend “X” pulling the plug on Mrs T. Therefore, you might conceivably draw conclusions about the identity of this intruder which differ from theirs, especially as there’s no news of money or jewellery being taken – something one might expect from a professional thief.’ He fell silent and returned his gaze to the tennis court’s muscular activity.
Brooding on this I too fell silent, my attention drawn not by the leaping figures a few yards away, but by the one bent over the bureau in Alice’s drawing room. What had I seen of that shadowy form? Very little. Although largely obscured by the long coat, it had seemed that the person had been of slimish build and good height, but there was nothing especially distinctive there, it could have been anyone really – Charles Penlow or the Reverend Egge, for instance! And yet, I reflected, that being the case, it could equally have been Alice’s accomplice, her ‘London friend’ searching the house for incriminating material – correspondence between the pair of them perhaps, something rashly penned and thus dangerous … notes for a plan of disposal? Or since the desk was likely to have been used by both sisters perhaps it was a family relation, Aston Travers, for example, pursuing a missing will or some valuable he had been hoping to get his hands on before other claimants. It wouldn’t surprise me!
I turned to Ingaza. ‘Is that what you are thinking, Nicholas? That it wasn’t a stranger but someone known to Alice, a confidant or maybe even the nephew?’
‘Hmm,’ he murmured, ‘what I am thinking is that the chap prancing around at the net has remarkably neat ankles … Oh, the fool, he’s missed it!’ The ball thudded into the wire mesh at our end of the court.
‘For God’s sake, Nicholas, be serious!’
‘Oh, I am, dear girl, I am.’
Luckily at that moment the players elected to end their session and trooped off. A blessed relief. However, fearful they might be replaced by others equally riveting, I hastily suggested that we stretch our legs and commune with nature, i.e. the frogs in the lily pond. Not a good idea: the pond had been drained and the frogs on holiday. Nevertheless, a leisurely stroll among the park’s trees and flowerbeds was not uncongenial and Ingaza seemed more ready for serious debate.
‘I suppose it could have been Aston,’ I said, ‘though in the circumstances and being a close relation of the victim, it seems a pretty stupid thing to do. I mean, if the police had caught him sneaking around there in the middle of the night they’d have taken a very dim view. I am sure Sergeant Wilding would have raised a rumpus and been most suspicious! Still, from what I’ve seen, he’s an arrogant young man and I suppose he would take the risk, might even enjoy it.’
‘Arrogance and stupidity often go together,’ Ingaza remarked. ‘It’s a common enough blend. Take MacManus, for example. What chief superintendent of any nous is going to chance his arm poncing about in a brothel dressed as a grizzly bear and being prodded by an ostrich with a whip?’ He emitted a nasal hoot of laughter.
‘I wonder if he still engages,’ I mused. ‘Unlikely, I should think. It may have been a passing fad, an odd whim which he is now bitterly regretting. I don’t suppose the whey-faced wife can be much fun; perhaps it was a novel port in a storm of boredom.’
Ingaza smiled, and then looked grim. ‘You could be right. But whether he still practises is neither here nor there: he did once, and you have the tangible proof. Any gossip or revelation of that kind would destroy his career. The Topping chap knew what he was doing when he kept those photos and it was a stroke of luck you found them. If Topping had felt threatened by MacManus he wouldn’t have hesitated to use them. And if he starts any funny business make sure you do the same. We don’t want old Francis’s idiocy disinterred, do we? And I certainly don’t want my part in the Beachy Head palaver exposed. Bad for business – I’ve got a couple of lucrative deals on hand and I can’t afford to have them scuppered by officious questioning from the boys in blue.’
These were my sentiments exactly, but I couldn’t help being amused. Since when had Ingaza not been engaged in some lucrative deal? His art business thrived on such transactions, deals invariably of a delicate nature. I was about to turn back to the Elspeth/Alice topic, but suddenly remembered something and started to giggle. ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘how are you getting on with your admirer?’
He smirked. ‘My admirer? You mean a tango fan?’
‘No, or at least I don’t think so. I mean Judge Ickington’s grandson, the little fellow you gave a lift to the other night.’ And I reminded him of Sickie-Dickie’s avowed ambition to follow in his footsteps and become, to quote the boy’s mother, ‘the best slippery art dealer on the south coast’ – though tactfully I omitted the term slippery and the bit about the ferret.
‘Ah yes,’ he replied carelessly, ‘a bright kid. He was quite appreciative of my voice I seem to remember.’
‘But Nicholas, you didn’t really sing “La Mer” to him, did you?’ (I should have known!)
‘Why not? You did say he needed to improve his French, and after all it is one of my better pieces. Shall I—’
‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘nature has its own lyricism.’ And I gestured vaguely at some roses and a passing duck.
By this time we had reached the park gates and were standing under the arch at the top of the steps. I pressed him again about the recent drama.
‘You must admit, Nicholas, it’s all fearfully rum. Extraordinary really. Obviously Alice was pretty barmy – though whether before or as a result of the Elspeth project one can’t be sure. But who on earth has killed her? I know you joked about Emily letting off steam, but maybe that’s exactly what it was: some crazy clown fooling about who took a wild pot-shot and is now cursing himself to kingdom come. What do you think?’
He shrugged but regarded me soberly. ‘Yes, it could have been – there are such cases and I daresay the police will be looking in that direction. But meanwhile I suggest you continue as you have been: say nothing to anyone and keep your head down. Silence is more than golden, it’s platinum. The less one knows the safer one is, that’s my motto … Oh but I tell you what: make sure you don’t keep those bear-suit photographs in your bureau. Shove ’em in a Wellington boot. We don’t want any more break-ins, do we?’ He grinned, cocked his thumb and sauntered off.
I sighed and walked to my car. What a scintillating ray of sunshine!
In fact, as I drove home to Lewes rays of sunshine were gilding the landscape in the most enchanting way. Enchanting is perhaps an overly romantic adjective, but that evening our Sussex Downs and fields were looking truly magical. The trees of distant Wannock, sleepy Folkington, Wilmington with its Long Man starkly clear, the Berwick levels peppered with placid sheep, the meandering Ouse – all went by in a soothing trail of languid beauty. Indeed, I was so taken by the aesthetics of the hour that my mind was temporarily free of the grisly events we had been discussing.
But the mind is a fickle thing and is readily diverted. And for no reason at all – in fact, just as I was admiring the outline of a church spire – I was suddenly struck by an alien thought. In a trice nature’s bright images were replaced by a prospect dark and sinister. The scene of a shrouded Aston rifling through the desk had reappeared. But it was a scene overlaid by another: Aston concealed in bushes, patiently crouching with pistol primed and levelled, alert to every sound and all poised to extinguish his quarry as she came zooming to the top of my drive … Possible?
Well, anything is possible – but probable? For a few seconds my mind was gripped by the question; so gripped, in fact, that I narrowly missed a squirrel as it leapt headstrong from the kerb. I swerved, hit the brake and hastily collected my senses. Really, what it was to have a dramatic imagination! And yet so vivid was its picture that the landscape – which only a moment ago had held such charm – was now eclipsed and I arrived home in a state of febrile excitement. However, on entering the drawing room and faced by Pa’s glaring portrait I was instantly sobered, and his favourite word balderdash echoed in my mind.
Yes, the idea was surely absurd. Why should Aston Travers want to murder his aunt? A futile question. How was I to know – or anyone not privy to the exact nature of their relationship? After all, any bland-fronted family could be internally battle-scarred – as Alice Markham had made so graphically clear! But was Alice’s resentment of her sister replicated in the nephew’s feeling for his aunt? And if so, was it enough to induce the same deadly result?
I remembered his tone when speaking of her in the café – sardonic, snidely dismissive: no problems with that one, or at least none that can’t be handled! The accompanying laugh had been cold and perfunctory. Of merriment there was none … All right, so she irritated him – but did that matter? I thought of our recent encounter after his police interview. He had been civil enough in a provocative way, vaguely human even. At the time I had sensed an air of loss, a loosening of the rigid guard. And yet now as I sat pondering the scene, I remembered he had also called her ‘a manipulative old bat’ and described her as ‘Maddening. Utterly maddening.’ Yes, I brooded, despite the somewhat rueful tone the words had betrayed a latent anger, and I wondered in what ways she had been manipulative. And had she become so maddening that despite his boast in the café he could no longer handle her? Had ‘Auntie’ grown so difficult that she was marked for extinction? Or, I pondered, might there have been a more serious reason to kill her? Revenge. Might Aston have somehow learnt of Auntie’s hand in his mother’s drowning and elected to mow her down in retaliation? Was that what it had been – a grimly vicious tit for tat? For a few moments I entertained the image, but then dismissed it feeling that from what I had seen of Aston he was not the sort to take up lethal cudgels on another’s account (even that of a parent). No, any such cudgels would doubtless be for his own ends: to smooth a personal path … and had Auntie been obstructing that path? Quite possibly.
I leant back on the sofa and once more confronted my parent’s thunderous brows. From the depths of the past I heard an explosive Pah! Pure conjecture, Primrose! ‘Yes, yes,’ I retorted irritably, ‘but conjecture can often contain a strong element of truth. So there!’ And on that point I arose and poured myself a liberal glass of his beloved Talisker.
The next day just as I was finishing a late and leisurely breakfast, the telephone rang. It is rare for Ingaza to call me unsolicited, thus when I lifted the receiver I was surprised to hear his reedy tone. ‘I’ve got a little bit of gossip that might just interest you,’ he began.
‘Oh yes?
‘You know your friend we were talking about yesterday, Aston Travers—’
‘No friend of mine,’ I mumbled digesting a crust of toast, ‘a pretty slippery type if you ask me. In fact, Nicholas, I’ve been doing some thinking and wonder if … Er, so what about him?’
Ingaza sighed. ‘That’s what I am trying to tell you if I am given a chance. Listen, will you!’
I listened and he started to explain. ‘Eric has made an interesting discovery via a chum of his, one of his darts pals, Bullseye Bert. He used to be a copper – what you might call of the bent variety, though he’s retired now. And that being the case he—’
‘Eric knows a bent copper? I find that very hard to believe,’ I said caustically.
‘Well, not bent exactly, what you might call, uhm … flexible.’
‘Oh, all right, so what does flexible Bert have to say about anything?’
‘He says that in addition to supplying saucy outfits to that theatre shop in Bognor Travers is also supplying a different form of goods to Mercer’s Music Hall, or rather to its backstage sideline.’
‘You mean the brothel set-up?’
‘That’s it.’
‘What sort of goods?’
‘My dear Primrose, with your sparkling imagination I should have thought you would guess. Ladies of the Night, of course. Tarts.’
‘Good lord, you mean he’s a pimp?’
‘I do. And not just any old pimp, a very accomplished one.’
An accomplished pimp? The term struck me as being an unusual conjunct and I asked him to enlarge.
‘He has the trade down to a fine art; it’s elaborate, lucrative and smoothly executed. Eric says that according to Bert the inner cognoscenti call it the OTG.’ There was a faint chuckle.
‘Really – and what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Operation Tarts Galore.’
I was startled but couldn’t help smiling. Graphic and pithy, the title was not unlike the sort that might grace a military project, and I said as much to Ingaza.
‘Nautical would be a closer analogy,’ he replied. ‘When he’s not flogging star-spangled tights to the acting fraternity he is sailing back and forth across the Channel picking up French prostitutes for the British market and transporting ours to the Frogs in Dieppe. He keeps a boat down here. Some of the ladies are regular passengers – one week here, one there. They like to ring the changes and I gather it improves their language skills no end.’ He paused and then added, ‘What you might call a way of enhancing the entente cordial, I suppose.’
‘Oh, what a noble enterprise,’ I remarked acidly, ‘it’s just about his level: exploiting foolish women for personal gain. It’s odd the way Auntie was so besotted, but then she wasn’t the brightest spark in the box, just vain and self-obsessed. He only had to pay a few compliments and he was the blue-eyed boy!… But I say, are you sure Eric’s got it right – is this Bullseye Bert to be trusted?’
‘I am not sure that trusted is the word one would choose, but given his contacts and insider knowledge he’s as good a source as any. Eric thinks that if that’s what he says about Travers and OTG he is probably right.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Toodle-oo, dear girl, just thought you might like to know. One always tries to be helpful …’ He rang off and I was left frowning.
If Bullseye Bert was right about Travers’ activities it might explain a lot. I vaguely recalled Charles saying he had heard some rumour about a rift between aunt and nephew. Something Egge or Bewley had said in the pub apparently. At the time I hadn’t paid much attention, being too busy preventing Maurice from molesting Duster. But if that indeed had been the case it could certainly account for Travers’ less than gallant comments made just recently. Had Alice learnt of the blue-eyed boy’s grubby trade and cut up rough, threatening to withdraw support (and funds) for his lingerie business? According to Egge she had pulled levers to secure the latter for him, but was this other venture a sleazy bridge too far? Murdering a sister might be one thing but having a pimp for a nephew quite another – after all, what would those London friends think!
I dwelt once more on Aston’s words ‘manipulative old bat’. Having procured the deal, had said bat manipulated him into a corner, threatening exposure if he continued in his tawdry trade? Perhaps not – maybe she had just nagged and needled. But then given the woman’s increasing instability, could he have counted on her silence? He needed her money, and the worry must surely have cast a bit of a shadow. After all, what smart entrepreneur enjoys having a garrulous albatross clamped to his neck?
Again, my mind went back to our recent encounter and I wondered where he had gone since driving off in the smart sports car. Needham Court was still temporarily out of bounds so perhaps he was in Brighton or Bognor (was there a flat over the lingerie shop?). I snorted. Hah! No doubt busy ferrying the Dieppe and Bognor belles to their ‘language classes’ while carefully avoiding Lewes in case its police should require further visits to the interviewing room.
I glanced at Bouncer currently exploring his inner thigh. ‘It’s a very unsavoury world,’ I observed. He thumped his tail and returned to his task.
Breakfast over and despite Maurice’s disdainful gaze, I nevertheless buttered another slice of toast and crunched it with relish. It is amazing how greed and inspiration go together!