Come to Grief Page 10

  “Great,” I said with satisfaction. “How many blue Land-Rovers did you sell in that year? I mean, what are the names of the actual buyers, not the middlemen like Ted James?”

  An open-mouthed silence proved amenable to a larger fee. “Our Miss Denver” helped with a computer print-out. Our Miss Denver got a kiss from me. Roger Brook with dignity took his reward in readies, and Jonathan and I returned to the Mercedes with the names and addresses of 211 purchasers of blue Land-Rovers a little back in time.

  Jonathan wanted to read the list when I’d finished. I handed it over, reckoning he’d deserved it. He looked disappointed when he reached the end, and I didn’t point out to him the name that had made my gut contract.

  One of the Land-Rovers had been delivered to Twyford Lower Farms Ltd.

  I had been to Twyford Lower Farms to lunch. It was owned by Gordon Quint.

  Noon, Saturday. I sat in my parked car outside English Sporting Motors, while Jonathan fidgeted beside me, demanding, “What next?”

  I said, “Go and eat a hamburger for your lunch and be back here in twenty minutes.”

  He had no money. I gave him some. “Twenty minutes.”

  He promised nothing, but returned with three minutes to spare. I spent his absence thinking highly unwelcome thoughts and deciding what to do, and when he slid in beside me smelling of raw onions and french fries I set off southwards again, on the roads back to Combe Bassett.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see your Aunt Betty.”

  “But hey! She’s not at home. She’s at Archie’s.”

  “Then we’ll go to Archie’s. You can show me the way.”

  He didn’t like it, but he made no attempt to jump ship when we were stopped by traffic lights three times on the way out of Oxford. We arrived together in due course outside a house an eighth the size of Combe Bassett Manor; a house, moreover, that was frankly modem and not at all what I’d expected.

  I said doubtfully, “Are you sure this is the place?”

  “The lair of the wolf. No mistake. He won’t want to see me.”

  I got out of the car and pressed the thoroughly modem doorbell beside a glassed-in front porch. The woman who came to answer the summons was small and wrinkled like a drying apple, and wore a sleeveless sundress in blue and mauve.

  “Er . . . ,” I said to her inquiring face, “Archie Kirk?”

  Her gaze lengthened beyond me to include Jonathan in my car, a sight that pinched her mouth and jumped her to an instant wrong conclusion. She whirled away and returned with Archie, who said repressively, “What is he doing here?”

  “Can you spare me half an hour?” I asked.

  “What’s Jonathan done?”

  “He’s been extraordinarily helpful. I’d like to ask your advice.”

  “Helpful!”

  “Yes. Could you hold your disapproval in abeyance for half an hour while I explain?”

  He gave me an intense inspection, the brown eyes sharp and knowing, as before. Decision arrived there plainly.

  “Come in,” he said, holding his front door wide.

  “Jonathan’s afraid of you,” I told him. “He wouldn’t admit it, but he is. Could I ask you not to give him the normal tongue-lashing? Will you invite him in and leave him alone?”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “I do,” I said.

  “No one speaks to me like this.” He was, however, only mildly affronted.

  I smiled at his eyes. “That’s because they know you. But I met you only this morning.”

  “And,” he said, “I’ve heard about your lightning judgments.”

  I felt, as on other occasions with people of his sort, a deep thrust of mental satisfaction. Also, more immediately, I knew I had come to the right place.

  Archie Kirk stepped out from his door, took the three paces to my car, and said through the window, “Jonathan, please come into the house.”

  Jonathan looked past him to me. I jerked my head, as before, to suggest that he complied, and he left the safe shelter and walked to the house, even if reluctantly and frozen faced.

  Archie Kirk led the way across a modest hallway into a middle-sized sitting room where Betty Bracken, her husband and the small woman who’d answered my ring were sitting in armchairs drinking cups of coffee.

  The room’s overall impression was of old oak and books, a room for dark winter evenings and lamps and log fires, not fitted to the dazzle of June. None of the three faces turned towards us could have looked welcoming to the difficult boy.

  The small woman, introducing herself as Archie’s wife, stood up slowly and offered me coffee. “And ... er . . . Jonathan ... Coca-Cola?”

  Jonathan, as if reprieved, followed her out to the next-door kitchen, and I told Betty Bracken that her colt was at that moment being operated on, and that there should be news of him soon. She was pathetically pleased: too pleased, I was afraid.

  I said casually to Archie, “Can I talk to you in private?” and without question he said, “This way,” and transferred us to a small adjacent room, again all dark oak and books, that he called his study.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I need a policeman,” I said.

  He gave me a long, level glance and waved me to one of the two hard oak chairs, himself sitting in the other, beside a paper-strewn desk.

  I told him about Jonathan’s night walk (harmless version) and about our tracing the Land-Rover to the suppliers at Oxford. I said that I knew where the Land-Rover might now be, but that I couldn’t get a search warrant to examine it. For a successful prosecution, I mentioned, there had to be integrity of evidence; no chance of tampering or substitution. So I needed a policeman, but one that would listen and cooperate, not one that would either brush me off altogether or one that would do the police work sloppily.

  “I thought you might know someone,” I finished. “I don’t know who else to ask, as at the moment this whole thing depends on crawling up to the machine-gun nest on one’s belly, so to speak.”

  He sat back in his chair staring at me vacantly while the data got processed.

  At length he said, “Betty called in the local police this morning early, but . . . ,” he hesitated, “they hadn’t the clout you need.” He thought some more, then picked up an address book; he leafed through it for a number and made a phone call.

  “Norman, this is Archie Kirk.”

  Whoever Norman was, it seemed he was unwilling.

  “It’s extremely important,” Archie said.

  Norman apparently capitulated, but with protest, giving directions.

  “You had better be right,” Archie said to me, disconnecting. “I’ve just called in about a dozen favors he owed me.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Detective Inspector Norman Picton, Thames Valley Police.”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  “He’s off duty. He’s on the gravel pit lake. He’s a clever and ambitious young man. And I,” he added with a glimmer, “am a magistrate, and I may sign a search warrant myself, if he can clear it with his superintendent.”

  He rendered me speechless, which quietly amused him.

  “You didn’t know?” he asked.

  I shook my head and found my voice. “Jonathan said you were a civil servant.”

  “That, too,” he agreed. “How did you get that boorish young man to talk?”

  “Er... ,” I said. “What is Inspector Picton doing on the gravel pit lake?”

  “Water skiing,” Archie said.

  There were speedboats, children, wet-suits, picnics. There was a clubhouse in a sea of scrubby grass and people sliding over the shining water pulled by strings.

  Archie parked his Daimler at the end of a row of cars, and I, with Jonathan beside me, parked my Mercedes alongside. We had agreed to bring both cars so that I could go on eventually to London, with Archie ferrying Jonathan back to pick up the. Brackens and take them all home to Combe Bassett. Jonathan hadn’
t warmed to the plan, but had ungraciously accompanied me as being a lesser horror than spending the afternoon mooching aimlessly around Archie’s aunt-infested house.

  Having got as far as the lake, he began looking at the harmless physical activity all around him, not with a sneer but with something approaching interest. On the shortish journey from Archie’s house he had asked three moody questions, two of which I answered.

  First: “This is the best day for a long time. How come you get so much done so quickly?”

  No answer possible.

  And second: “Did you ever steal anything?”

  “Chocolate bars,” I said.

  And third: “Do you mind having only one hand?”

  I said coldly, “Yes.”

  He glanced with surprise at my face and I saw that he’d expected me to say no. I supposed he wasn’t old enough to know it was a question one shouldn’t ask; but then, perhaps he would have asked it anyway.

  When we climbed out of the car at the water-ski club I said, “Can you swim?”

  “Do me a favor.”

  “Then go jump in the lake.”

  “Sod you,” he said, and actually laughed.

  Archie had meanwhile discovered that one of the scudding figures on the water was the man we’d come to see. We waited a fair while until a large presence in a blue wet-suit with scarlet stripes down arms and legs let go of the rope pulling him and skied free and gracefully to a sloping landing place on the edge of the water. He stepped off his skis grinning, knowing he’d shown off his considerable skill, and wetly shook Archie’s hand.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, “but I reckoned once you got here I’d have had it for the day.”

  His voice, with its touch of Berkshire accent, held self-confidence and easy authority.

  Archie said formally, “Norman, this is Sid Halley.”

  I shook the offered hand, which was cold besides wet. I received the sort of slow, searching inspection I’d had from Archie himself: and I had no idea what the policeman thought.

  “Well,” he said finally, stirring, “I’ll get dressed.”

  We watched him walk away, squelching, gingerly barefooted, carrying his skis. He was back within five minutes, clad now in jeans, sneakers, open-necked shirt and sweater, his dark hair still wet and spiky, uncombed.

  “Right,” he said to me. “Give.”

  “Er...” I hesitated. “Would it be possible for Mr. Kirk’s nephew Jonathan to go for a ride in a speedboat?”

  Both he and Archie looked over to where Jonathan, not far away, lolled unprepossessingly against my car. Jonathan did himself no favors, I thought; self-destruction rampant in every bolshie tilt of the antiauthority haircut.

  “He doesn’t deserve any ride in a speedboat,” Archie objected.

  “I don’t want him to overhear what I’m saying.”

  “That’s different,” Norman Picton decided. “I’ll fix it.”

  Jonathan ungraciously allowed himself to be driven around the lake by Norman Picton’s wife in Norman Picton’s boat, accompanied by Norman Picton’s son. We watched the boat race past with a roar, Jonathan’s streaky mop blown back in the wind.

  “He’s on the fence,” I said mildly to Archie. “There’s a lot of good in him.”

  “You’re the only one who thinks so.”

  “He’s looking for a way back without losing face.”

  Both men gave me the slow assessment and shook their heads.

  I said, bringing Jonathan’s signed statement from my pocket, “Try this on for size.”

  They both read it, Picton first, Archie after.

  Archie said in disbelief, “He never talks. He wouldn’t have said all this.”

  “I asked him questions,” I explained. “Those are his answers. He came with me to the Land-Rover central dealers in Oxford who put that red-dragon transfer on the windshield of every vehicle they sell. And we wouldn’t know of the Land-Rover’s presence in the lane, or its probable owner and whereabouts now, except for Jonathan. So I really do think he’s earned his ride on the lake.”

  “What exactly do you want the search warrant for?” Picton asked. “One can’t get search warrants unless one can come up with a good reason—or at least a convincing possibility or probability of finding something material to a case.”

  “Well,” I said, “Jonathan put his hand on the hood of the vehicle standing right beside the gate to the field where Betty Bracken’s colt lost his foot. If you search a certain Land-Rover and find Jonathan’s hand-print on the hood, would that be proof enough that you’d found the right wheels?”

  Picton said, “Yes.”

  “So,” I went on without emphasis, “if we leave Jonathan here by the lake while your people fingerprint the Land-Rover, there could be no question of his having touched it this afternoon, and not last night.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” Picton said.

  “I think,” I said, “that it would be a good idea to fingerprint that hood before it rains, don’t you? Or before anyone puts it through a car-wash?”

  “Where is it?” Picton asked tersely.

  I produced the English Sporting Motors’ print-out, and pointed. “There,” I said. “That one.”

  Picton read it silently; Archie aloud.

  “But I know the place. You’re quite wrong. I’ve been a guest there. They’re friends of Betty’s.”

  “And of mine,” I said.

  He listened to the bleakness I could hear in my own voice.

  “Who are we talking about?” Picton asked.

  “Gordon Quint,” Archie said. “It’s rubbish.”

  “Who is Gordon Quint?” Picton asked again.

  “The father of Ellis Quint,” Archie said. “And you must have heard of him.”

  Picton nodded. He had indeed.

  “I suppose it’s possible,” I suggested tentatively, “that someone borrowed the Land-Rover for the night.”

  “But you don’t believe it,” Picton remarked.

  “I wish I did.”

  “But where’s the connection?” Picton asked. “There has to be more. The fact that Twyford Lower Farms Limited owned a blue Land-Rover of the relevant year isn’t enough on its own. We cannot search that vehicle for hand-prints unless we have good reason to believe that it was that one and no other that we are looking for.”

  Archie said thoughtfully, “Search warrants have been issued on flimsier grounds before now.”

  He and Picton walked away from me, the professionals putting their distance between themselves and Sid Public. I thought that if they refused to follow the trail it would be a relief, on the whole. It would let me off the squirming hook. But there could be another month and another colt ... and an obsession feeding and fattening on success.

  They came back, asking why I should link the Quint name to the deed. I described my box chart. Not conclusive, Archie said judiciously, and I agreed, no.

  Picton repeated what I’d just said: “Rachel’s pony was bought by her father, Joe, on the advice of Ellis Quint?”

  I said, “Ellis did a broadcast about Rachel’s pony losing his foot.”

  “I saw it,” Picton said.

  They didn’t want to believe it any more than I did. There was a fairly long, indeterminate silence.

  Jonathan came back looking uncomplicatedly happy from his fast laps around the lake, and Norman Picton abruptly went into the clubhouse, returning with a can of Coke, which he put into Jonathan’s hands. Jonathan held it in his left hand to open it and his right hand to drink. Norman took the empty can from him casually but carefully by the rim, and asked if he would like to try the skiing itself, not just a ride in the boat.

  Jonathan, on the point of enthusiastically saying, “Yes,” remembered his cultivated disagreeableness and said, “I don’t mind. If you insist, I suppose I’ll have to.”

  “That’s right,” Picton said cheerfully. “My wife will drive. My son will watch the rope. We’ll find you some swimming tru
nks and a wet-suit.”

  He led Jonathan away. Archie watched inscrutably.

  “Give him a chance,” I murmured. “Give him a challenge.”

  “Pack him off to the colonies to make a man of him?”

  “Scoff,” I said with a smile. “But long ago it often worked. He’s bright and he’s bored and he’s not yet a totally confirmed delinquent.”

  “You’d make a soft and rotten magistrate.”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  Picton returned, saying, “The boy will stay here until I get back, so we’d better get started. We’ll take two cars, mine and Mr. Halley’s. In that way he can go on to London when he wants. We’ll leave your car here, Archie. Is that all right?”

  Archie said he didn’t trust Jonathan not to steal it.

  “He doesn’t think stealing’s much fun without his pals,” I said.

  Archie stared. “That boy never says anything.”

  “Find him a dangerous job.”

  Picton, listening, said, “Like what?”

  “Like,” I said, unprepared, “like ... well ... on an oil rig. Two years of that. Tell him to keep a diary. Tell him to write.”

  “Good God,” Archie said, shaking his head, “he’d have the place in flames.”

  He locked his car and put the keys in his pocket, climbing into the front passenger seat beside me as we followed Norman Picton into Newbury, to his official place of work.

  I sat in my car outside the police station while Archie and Picton, inside, arranged the back-ups: the photographer, the fingerprinter, the detective constable to be Inspector Picton’s note-taking assistant.

  I sat with the afternoon sun falling through the windshield and wished I were anywhere else, engaged on any other mission.

  All the villains I’d caught before hadn’t been people I knew. Or people—one had to face it—people I’d thought I’d known. I’d felt mostly satisfaction, sometimes relief, occasionally even regret, but never anything approaching this intensity of entrapped despair.

  Ellis was loved. I was going to be hated.

  Hatred was inevitable.

  Could I bear it?