To the Hilt (18 page)

“You’ve lost me,” I said. “What’s a beach-towel and hotel job?”

I looked inquiringly at Tobias, but he shook his head. “Never heard of it.”

Margaret, smiling, explained. “I got the idea one day on holiday, while I was lying sunbathing on a beach chair round a hotel pool, watching people come and go. They would put a towel on a chair and go off and leave it, maybe for hours, and then come back and pick it up and wander off... and no one working for the hotel would think of asking who the towel belonged to ... do you see?”

“No,” I said, but Tobias thoughtfully nodded.

“Suppose,” Margaret said, “that you were Norman Quorn, and you wanted to retire with a pension big enough to give you all the luxuries you’d never had—not just a bungalow on the south coast, counting the cost of things like postage stamps, but round-the-world cruises and a big new car and a bejeweled companion and caviar and playing the tables in a casino or whatever excites your dry conventional old bachelor mind—suppose you got the sparkling explosive idea of taking enough for a glorious sunset, and you know how easy and fast it is now to send money whizzing round the world impersonally by wire.... Then you open small banking accounts here and there... you sort of check into hotels... and every so often you leave a beach towel on a chair for a while... and move it onwards to another hotel... and no one pays much notice, because the beach towel never goes missing, and comes safely home.”

“Only one day it doesn’t,” Tobias said. “I lost him in Panama.”

We drank the substantial red wine and ordered fried Brie and cranberries with another half-bottle.

Margaret’s job fascinated her. “Almost everyone sees when their bankruptcy’s looming,” she said, “and nearly everyone makes the giveaway mistake of removing their most valuable possessions before torching the premises. Insurance fraud is the worst way out of bankruptcy. It never works. I won’t take those cases. I tell them to go to jail and get it over with. Most bankruptcies are caused by bad luck, bad management and changing times. Last year’s rage is this year’s ruin. And then sometimes you get a Norman Quorn. Ingenious, careful. A small trial run, to get the hotels used to the arrival of his beach towel ... and they give the towel a sunbed to lie on for a day or so, and send it on unsuspectingly when the right instruction arrives—right codes, right signatures... Lovely job.”

“And no one asks questions?” I said.

“Of course not. Millions of transactions take place round the world every day. Hotel guests arrive and leave by the hundred thousand.”

“And beach towels”—Tobias grinned—“get sent to the laundry.”

 

 

I went to see Young and Uttley.

Neither Mr. Young (mustache, suit and hat) nor Mr. Uttley (football coach, ball and whistle) was in the office, and nor was the skinhead. Alone in occupation I found a secretary at work at a computer, a young woman with dark curly hair, black tights, short black skirt, loose bright blue sweater, scarlet lips and fingernails.

Giving me a flick of a glance, she said, “Can I help you?” and went on working.

“Well ...” I looked at her carefully. “You can tell me why the hell you made sure Surtees Benchmark saw you following him.”

The busy fingers stilled. The bright eyes looked at my face. The familiar voice deepened and said in exasperation, “How the shit do you
know?”

“Eye sockets.”

“What?”

“I draw people. I look at their bones. Your eye sockets slant down in a particular way at the outer comers. Also your wrists are male. You should wear frilled cuffs.”

“Bugger you.”

I laughed. “So why did you let Surtees see you?”

“Let him? I made sure he did, like you said, I got him real worried. See, if someone knows they’re being followed, they’re dead careful, but when they
don’t
see their shadow they think they’re safe, so they go at once and do what you could wait weeks for them to do otherwise, and you’d never know, either, what things he didn’t care about anyone watching, and what he really wanted to keep hidden. See?”

“I guess I do.”

“So I got him busy looking out for a skinhead.”

“And,” I suggested, “he then doesn’t notice a secretary in a dark brown wig?”

“You got it.”

“What did the secretary see?”

“Ah.” Young, Uttley (and associates) enjoyed himself. “Yon bonnie Surtees has a lady wife who keeps him on a throttling leash, and some men enjoy subjugation, I’m not saying they don’t, but Wednesday afternoons it seems Mrs. Surtees chairs some sort of local women’s action committee and her mister bolts into Guildford to consult his business colleague. Seems Surtees runs a stud farm that’s half owned by his wife and half by someone else, the business colleague. Anyway, Wednesday afternoon—yesterday—Surtees drives round in a circle or two looking out for the skinhead, and when he thinks it’s safe he steers not to any business office but to a terrace house on the outskirts. That’s to say, he parks in the next street and looks all around carefully—a dead giveaway, he’s stupid—and then he walks to the little house and opens the front door with a key.”

I sighed.

“Don’t you want to hear about it?”

“Yes, but I’d rather he’d visited four thugs in a gym.”

“Sorry about that. Anyway, yesterday Mr. Young paid a visit to the house at Guildford, as soon as Surtees had left.”

“Mr. Young in suit, hat, mustache?”

He nodded. “The lot.”

“And?”

“And there’s a poor little cow lives there that lets inadequates like Surtees pay to spank her before sex.”

“Damn.”

“Not what you hoped?”

“Too simple.”

“Do you want me to carry on?”

“Yes.” I brought a foil-wrapped packet out of a pocket and gave it to him. “This is a pair of glasses left behind by one of the four robbers. They’re the strength people take off when they want to read. I don’t suppose they’ll be much use, but it’s all they left.”

He/she unwrapped the glasses without excitement.

“Also,” I said, “see what you can find out about a goldsmith working in London in around 1850 or 1860, called Maxim.”

After a short stare, he said, “Anything else?”

“How do you rate as a bodyguard?”

“That’s extra.”

I paid him another week’s retainer. Expenses and extras, he said, would fall due at the end.

When Ivan spread out the creditors’ agreements on his table and slowly took each of them onto his lap to read them carefully one by one, his overall reaction was one of relieved gloom.

When my mother came into his room, though, he lifted his head to her and smiled, and for the first time since his illness the worry dissolved from the lines on her forehead. She smiled back with the deep understanding friendship of a strong marriage, and I thought inconsequentially that if the area bank bighead had seen that exchange he would have counted it benefit enough for anything I had done.

“Our boy,” Ivan said (and I was usually “your boy”), “has signed the brewery into chains and penury.”

“But ...” my mother asked, “why are you pleased?”

He picked up a thick batch of paper in a blue cover and waved it at her.

“This,” he said, “is our annual audit. Tobias Tollright has signed it. It is our passport to continue trading. The creditors’ terms for payment are tough, very tough, but they’ve been fair. We ought to be able to win our way back. And they’ve factored in the Cheltenham race! I was sure we’d have to cancel it. But the chalice and Golden Malt are still at risk ... I’ll not give them up. We
must
meet the payments. Increase sales ... I’ll call a board meeting.”

One could actually see his resolution trickling back.

“Well done, Alexander,” he said.

I shook my head. “Thank Mrs. Morden. It was all her work.”

We spent an easy, companionable evening, the three of us, but by morning Ivan’s euphoria had mostly vanished and he was complaining that the brewery’s share-holders would be receiving only tiny token dividends for the next three years. To do him justice, he wasn’t thinking of himself, although he was by far the major shareholder, but of various widows and relations left behind by time and mergers from the days before he’d inherited. Several widows relied on their dividends for existence, he said.

“If you’d have gone bankrupt,” I pointed out, “they’d be lucky to get anything at all. A tiny lump sum and no dividends forever.”

“But still ...”

I’d hoped he would have had energy enough to dress, but he fretted instead about the widows. “Perhaps I can afford... out of my own funds ... heating bills this winter ...”

My mother stroked his hand fondly.

I had expected, since he had written his codicil the day before, that he would have told his lawyer not to bother to come, but it seemed he had forgotten to cancel the meeting, and Oliver Grantchester, with his loud voice, bulky frame and room-filling presence, arrived punctually at ten o’clock, the meek Miranda in tow.

Ivan began stuttering an embarrassed apology, to which Grantchester didn’t listen.

The lawyer looked me up and down without favor and told Ivan that they didn’t need my presence. He pointed to me and then to the door, giving me an unmistakable order. I might in fact have gone, but at that moment Patsy arrived like a ship in full sail, Surtees floundering foolishly in her wake.

Surtees the spanker: weak, pathetic and vicious.

“You are not making any codicil, Father, unless I’m sure Alexander”—Patsy spat the word—“doesn’t in any way benefit.”

“My dear,” Ivan told her pleasantly, “I’m not writing any codicil this morning. None at all.”

“But you said... You arranged for Oliver to come ...”

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry I forgot to tell him, but I wrote my codicil yesterday. It’s all done. We can just. have some coffee now ...”

Ivan was naive if he thought coffee would quell a tempest. Patsy and Oliver both berated him. My mother stood like a shield beside him. Surtees glared at me as if his brains had seized up.

“It’s perfectly simple,” Grantchester boomed. “You can tear up yesterday’s codicil and write another one.”

Ivan looked at me as if for help. “But I don’t need to write another one,” he said. “Do I?”

I shook my head.

The bombardment of voices went on. Ivan, upset, nevertheless held to his position: he had written his codicil, it expressed what he wanted, and there was no need to write it again.

“At least let me check it from the legal point of view,” Grantchester said.

Ivan with a touch of starch told him that he, Ivan, knew when a document had been correctly executed, and his codicil had.

“But perhaps I can see it ... ?”

“No,” Ivan said, regretfully polite.

“I don’t understand you.”

“I
do, ”
Patsy said forcefully. “It’s quite clear that Alexander is manipulating you, Father, and you’re so blind you can’t see that everything he does is aimed at taking my place as your heir.”

Ivan looked at me with such troubled indecision that I quietly went out of his study and climbed the stairs to the room I’d slept in, to put together the few things I’d brought with me, ready for leaving. I’d done my best for the brewery—for Ivan, for my mother—but the biggest difference between my stepfather and me was the ease and extent of his mood swings and changes of opinions, and good and honorable man though he might be, I never quite knew what he believed of me from one hour to the next.

It had seemed, since his illness, that he had relied on and believed in and made use of my good faith, but it had been a frail belief after all.

I could hear shouting going on downstairs, though I’d thought my departure would at least have stopped Patsy haranguing her father.

I stood at the window looking out towards Regent’s Park and didn’t hear my mother come upstairs until she spoke behind me.

“Alexander ... Ivan needs you.”

I turned. “I can’t ... I’m not fighting Patsy.”

“It’s not just Patsy. That man who runs the brewery is here now too. Desmond Finch. Ivan thinks the world of him but he’s a terrific fusspot, and he trots to Patsy with every complaint. They’re all telling Ivan ... yelling at him... that the terms you signed with the creditors are disgraceful and they could all have done better, and they want him to cancel your powers of attorney retrospectively so that your signature on everything is void.”

I asked, “Did Ivan send you to fetch me?”

“Well, no. But last night he was so
pleased
...
”

I sighed and put my arm round her slender waist. And, I said, “He can’t legally make my signature void.”

We went down. Ivan looked hunted, harried by the pack. They all resented my reappearance, and I looked at them one by one, trying to put reasons to their antagonism.

Patsy, tall, good-looking, fierce and obsessed, had been an unappeasable foe since the day her father had fallen in love with my mother. Young women who felt possessive of their widowed fathers usually hated the usurper who displaced them, but Patsy’s rage had skipped over her sweet-natured unthreatening stepmother and fastened inexorably on me. If she had ever stopped to make a sensible reckoning she would know that she had never lost anything at all because of me, let alone her father’s love, but emotion ruled her entirely, and after twelve years of her steadfast detestation, I didn’t expect her to change.

She’d married Surtees two years after her father had married my mother, and in the weak, good-looking Hooray-Henry had chosen a mate she could indoctrinate.

I looked at Surtees as he stood behind Ivan’s chair; and he was a person, I thought, who would always seek such a shield, who would never have the steel to stand out in the open and say, “Here I am. Judge me as I am.” Patsy had married a man she could bully and it had been very bad for both of them.