Put on by Cunning (26 page)

‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ Wexford said a shade testily. ‘Haven’t I said scarcely anything in this case was deliberate, planned or premeditated? It was just typical silly muddled Jane Zoffany behaviour. And what months it took me to guess it! I suppose I had an inkling of the truth, that wet day in the garden at Sterries, when Dinah said how strange it was Natalie could get the solicitors and Camargue’s old friends to believe in her, yet Camargue who wanted to believe, who was longing to believe, saw her
on that one occasion
and didn’t believe in her for more than half an hour. And when Jane Zoffany said how the police had taken her for her own sister and then stuck her hand up over her mouth – I knew then, I didn’t need to be told any more.’

‘But she did tell you more?’

‘Sure. When I talked to her last night. She filled in the gaps.’

‘Why did she go down to Sterries at all?’ asked Burden.

‘Two reasons. She wanted to see the old man for herself – she’d been an admirer of his – and she didn’t want his feelings hurt. She knew that if she phoned and told him Natalie had yet again to keep a hospital appointment he’d think she was making excuses not to see him and he’d be bitterly hurt. For nineteen years his daughter had stayed away from him and now that she had come back and they were on the brink of a reunion, he was to be fobbed off with a phone call – and a second phone call at that. So she decided to go down and see him herself. But not, of course, with any idea of posing as Natalie, nothing of that sort entered her head. It’s just that she’s a rather silly muddled creature who isn’t always quite mentally stable.’

‘You mean,’ said Burden, ‘that she came down here simply because it seemed kinder and more polite to call in person? She came to explain why Natalie couldn’t come and – well, sort of assure him of Natalie’s affection for him? Something like that?’

‘Something very much like that. And also to get a look at the man who had been acclaimed the world’s greatest flautist.’ Wexford caught Mr Haq’s eye for their coffee. ‘Now Camargue,’ he said, ‘was the first person to cast a doubt on Natalie’s identity, it was Camargue who started all this, yet it was Camargue himself who took Jane Zoffany for his daughter because it was
his daughter that he expected to see
.

‘He had waited for nineteen years – eventually without much hope. Hope had reawakened in the past five weeks and he was keyed up to a pitch of very high tension. He opened the door to her and put his arms round her and kissed her before she could speak. Did she try to tell him then that he had made a mistake? He was deaf. He was carried away with emotion. She has told me she was so confused and aghast that she played along with him while trying to decide what to do. She says she was embarrassed, she was afraid to disillusion him.

‘She humoured him by speaking of the Cazzini gold flute – which Natalie had possibly mentioned to her but which was in any case clearly labelled – and having no knowledge of Italian, she mispronounced the name. We know what happened then. Camargue accused her of imposture. But it was no dream of Camargue’s, no senile fantasy, that his visitor confessed. Jane Zoffany freely admitted what she had been longing to admit for the past half-hour – but it did her no good. Camargue was convinced by then this was a deception plotted to secure Natalie’s inheritance and he turned her out of the house.

‘And that, Mike, was all this so-called imposture ever amounted to, half an hour’s misunderstanding between a well-meaning neurotic and a “foolish, fond old man.”’

While Burden experimented yet again with ice cream eau-de-Nil, Wexford contented himself with coffee.

‘Natalie,’ he said, ‘came out of hospital on January 20th and she was so elated that the biopsy had shown the growth to be benign that instead of being angry she was simply amused by Jane’s activities. As I’ve said, she had a very lively sense of fun. I think it must have tickled her to imagine the pair of them at cross-purposes, the wretched Jane Zoffany confessing and the irate Camargue throwing her out. What did it matter, anyway? She hadn’t got cancer, she was fit and well and on top of the world and she could easily put that nonsense with her father right again. Let her only see if she could get a job out of Blaise Cory for her Johnny and then she’d see her father and patch things up.

‘Before she could get around to that Camargue had written to her, informing her she should inherit nothing under the new will he intended to make.’

‘Which led her,’ said Burden, ‘to plan on killing him first.’

‘No, no, I’ve told you. There was no planning. Even after that letter I’m sure Natalie was confident she could make things smooth with her father. Perhaps she even thought, as Dinah says
she
did, that this could best be effected after the marriage. Natalie was not too concerned. She was amused. The mistake she made was in telling Fassbender. Probably for the first time Fassbender realized just how potentially wealthy a woman his girl friend actually was.’

‘Why do you say for the first time?’

‘If he’d known it before,’ Wexford retorted, ‘why hadn’t he married her while they were both in California? That would have been a way of ensuring he didn’t get deported. She was an American citizen. In those days, no doubt, she would have been willing enough to marry him, so if they didn’t it must have been because he couldn’t see there was anything in it for him. But now he did. Now he could see there was a very pleasant little sinecure here for the rest of their lives if only she wasn’t so carefree and idle as to cast it all away.

‘That Sunday Natalie went to a party with Jane Zoffany. She went because she liked parties, she liked enjoying herself, her whole life had been blithely dedicated to enjoying herself. There was no question of establishing an alibi. Nor, I’m sure, did she know Fassbender had taken himself off down to Kingsmarkham to spy out the land and have a look at the house and the affluence Natalie was apparently so indifferent to. It was on the impulse of the moment, in a sudden frenzy of – literally – taking things at the flood, that he seized Camargue and forced him into the water under the ice.’

For a moment they were both silent. Then Burden said:

‘He told her what he’d done?’

Acurious look came into Wexford’s face. ‘I suppose so. At any rate, she knew. By the time of the inquest she knew. How much she cared I don’t know. She hadn’t seen her father for nineteen years, but still he was her father. She didn’t care enough to shop Fassbender, that’s for sure. Indeed, you might say she cared so little that she was prepared to take considerable risks to
defend
Fassbender. No doubt, she liked what she got out of it. Life had been a bit precarious in the past four years, hadn’t it? Once rid of Ilbert, it was a hand-to-mouth affair, and one imagines that while she was in De Beauvoir Place she was living solely on the rent from her house in Los Angeles. But now she had Sterries and the money and everything was fine. I’d like to think it was his murdering her father that began the process of going off Fassbender for Natalie, but we’ve no evidence of that.’

‘What I don’t understand is, since she
was
Natalie Arno, why did she play around half pretending she wasn’t? It was a hell of a risk she was taking. She might have lost everything.’

‘There wasn’t any risk,’ said Wexford. ‘There wasn’t the slightest risk. If she wasn’t Natalie there might be many ways of apparently proving she was. But since she was Natalie it could never possibly be proved that she was not.’

‘But why? Why do it?’

Burden had never had much sense of humour. And lately, perhaps since his marriage, Wexford thought, this limited faculty had become quiescent. ‘For fun, Mike,’ he said, ‘for fun. Don’t you think she got enormous fun out of it? After all, by that time she believed there was no question of our associating Camargue’s death with foul play. What harm could she do herself or Fassbender by just ever so slightly hinting she might be the impostor Dinah Sternhold said she was? And it must have been fun, I can see that. It must have been hilarious dumbfounding us by answering Cory’s questions and then really giving me hope by nicking her fingers with a bit of glass.

‘I said we were fools. I reckon I was an arch fool. Did I really believe an impostor would have had her instructor with her on the very morning she knew we were coming? Did I really believe in such an enormous coincidence as Mary Woodhouse leaving that flat by chance the moment we entered it? What fun Natalie must have got out of asking her old nanny or whatever she was to come round for a cup of coffee and then shooing her out when our car stopped outside. Oh, yes, it was all great fun, and as soon as it had gone far enough she had only to call in her dentist and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt who she was. For Williams is genuinely her dentist, a blameless person of integrity who happens to keep all his records and happens to have been in practice a long time.’ Wexford caught Mr Haq’s eye. ‘D’you want any more coffee?’

‘Don’t think so,’ said Burden.

‘I may as well get the bill then.’ Mr Haq glided over through the jungle. ‘Once,’ Wexford said, ‘she had proved herself Natalie Arno to the satisfaction of Symonds, O’Brien and Ames, everything was plain sailing. The first thing to do was sell Sterries because it wouldn’t do to have Fassbender show his face much around Kingsmarkham. But I think she was already beginning to go off Fassbender. Perhaps she saw that though he hadn’t been prepared to marry her in America, even for the reward of legal residence there, he was anxious to do so now she was rich. Perhaps, after all, she simply decided there was no point in marrying. She hadn’t done much of it, had she? Once only and she’d been a widow for nine years. And what would be the point of marrying when she now had plenty of money of her own and was happily independent? Still, this sort of speculation is useless. Suffice it to say that she had intended to marry Fassbender but she changed her mind. They quarrelled about it on the very eve of their going away on holiday together, and in his rage at being baulked of possession of the money he had killed for, had been to prison for, he attacked her and cut her throat.

‘The body he put into that chest, which he locked, knowing it would be removed by Dorset’s on the following day. Then off he went in the yellow Opel to Heathrow to use one of the two air tickets they had bought for their holiday in the South of France.’

Wexford paid the bill. It was modest, as always. By rights he ought, months ago, to have run Mr Haq in for offences under the Trade Descriptions Act. He would never do that now. They walked out into the High Street where the sun had unaccountably begun to shine. The pavements were drying up, the heavy grey clouds rushing at a great rate away to the horizon. At too great a rate, though for more than temporary disappearance.

The Kingsbrook tumbled under the old stone bridge like a river in winter spate. Burden leaned over the parapet. ‘You knew Fassbender when we came upon him in that place in France,’ he said. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you how you did. You hadn’t seen him in America, had you?’

‘Of course I hadn’t. He wasn’t in America while I was. He’d been back here for over a year by then.’

‘Then where had you seen him?’

‘Here. Back at the very start of this case. Back in January just after Camargue died. He was at Sterries too, Mike. Can’t you remember?’

‘You saw him too,’ Wexford went on. ‘You said when we spotted him, “I’ve seen him somewhere before.”’

Burden made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Yes, I know I did. But I was mistaken. I couldn’t have seen him, I was mixing him up with someone else. One wouldn’t forget that name.’

Instead of replying, Wexford said, ‘Fassbender’s father was a Swiss who lived here without ever becoming naturalized. I don’t know what his mother was or is, it hardly matters. John Fassbender was born here and has dual nationality, Swiss and British, not at all an uncommon thing. Ilbert had him deported to this country in 1976 but of course there was nothing to stop him going back into America again on his Swiss passport. When Romero shopped him three years later he was sent back to Switzerland but he soon returned here. Presumably, he liked it better here. Maybe he just preferred the inside of our prisons – he’d seen enough of them.’

‘He’s got a record, has he?’

Wexford laughed. ‘Don’t happen to have your German dictionary on you, do you?’

‘Of course I don’t carry dictionaries about with me.’

‘Pity. I don’t know why we’ve walked all the way up here. We’d better take shelter, it’s going to rain again heavens hard.’

He hustled Burden down the steps into the Kingsbrook Precinct. A large drop of rain splashed against the brass plate of Symonds, O’Brien and Ames, a score more against the travel agency’s window, blurring the poster that still invited customers to sunny California.

‘In here,’ said Wexford and pushed open the door of the bookshop. The dictionaries section was down at the back on the left-hand side. Wexford took down a tome in a green-and-yellow jacket. ‘I want you to look up a word. It won’t be much use to you in your studies, I’m afraid, but if you want to know where you saw Fassbender before you’ll have to find out what his name means.’

Burden put the book down on the counter and started on the Fs. He looked up. ‘Spelt Fassbinder, a barrel maker, a maker of casks . . .’

‘Well?’

‘A cooper . . .’ He hesitated, then said slowly, ‘John Cooper, thirty-six, Selden Road, Finsbury Park. He broke into Sterries the night after the inquest on Camargues.’

Wexford took the dictionary away from him and replaced it on the shelf. ‘His father called himself Cooper during the war – Fassbender wasn’t generally acceptable then, on the lines of Beethoven and German Shepherds, one supposes. Fassbender held his British passport in the name of Cooper and his Swiss as Fassbender.

‘That burglary was the only bit of planning he and Natalie did and that was done on the spur of the moment. It was a desperate measure taken in what they saw as a desperate situation. What alerted Natalie, of course, was Mrs Murray-Burgess telling Muriel Hicks she’d seen a suspicious-looking character in the Sterries grounds and that without a doubt she’d know him again. The only thing was, she couldn’t quite remember which night. Natalie and Fassbender knew which night, of course. They knew it was the night Camargue drowned. So they faked up a burglary. Natalie slept in her late father’s room, not to keep away from the amorous marauding Zoffany, still less to wound the feelings of Muriel Hicks, but to be in a room where she could credibly have heard breaking glass and seen the van’s number.