Murder for Money Read online

  ‘We’ll want to talk to him. Where is he staying?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said sullenly. ‘He said he’d find a hotel and then ring me. He hasn’t done it yet.’

  Crow nodded as though satisfied and then addressed himself to Wilson.

  ‘Put out a call to the Mets for Bert Orchard to be picked up. We’ll want to talk to him.’ Doris Orchard was glaring at him, her mouth open to protest, but Crow forestalled her. ‘And we shall want to take a look around the Three Bells. Do you have any objection? If you do, I’ll ask the inspector to swear out a search warrant.’

  For a moment he thought she was going to argue, but the dullness came back over her eyes and she shook her head.

  ‘All right,’ Crow said quietly. ‘Now tell me about the last time you saw Charles Rutland.’

  * * *

  ‘She’s lying, of course,’ Wilson said emphatically after Doris Orchard had finished her statement and been allowed to leave. Crow stirred his tea thoughtfully and shrugged.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well look how she was so quick to tell us about Rutland. She knew she had to give us something, to keep us happy. She knew there was enough gossip around to link her with Rutland so she admitted that. But she didn’t tell us the whole story.’

  Crow sipped his tea, pulled a face, reached for the sugar bowl and added another spoonful of sugar. It helped kill the bitterness of the long-standing canteen brew.

  ‘I agree: she’s keeping something back. We’ll find out what it is when we get our hands on Bert Orchard.’

  ‘It could be him.’

  Crow was inclined to agree. The fact that the man was not available for questioning and Doris Orchard had been so evasive as to his whereabouts made it obvious he was to be regarded as a prime suspect.

  ‘You think Bert Orchard was prepared to look the other way when she was with Rutland?’ Crow asked. ‘Seems a funny way to go on.’ Wilson said, disapproval of such goings-on showing in his face. ‘But it’s possible.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Crow pushed away the tea, admitting defeat. ‘I’m a bit puzzled about her and Rutland anyway . . . I wouldn’t have thought she was his type.’

  ‘The slick journalist and the overblown barmaid. Maybe he just wanted an easy lay.’

  ‘He certainly seems to have relaxed with her, maybe she was just that, relaxation from other things he had on his mind.’

  Wilson turned in his chair to face Crow.

  ‘I don’t know we should pay too much attention to her story. She’s trying to shield Bert Orchard, and maybe her talk about Rutland being different that evening could be just an attempt to cloud issues. Saying he was keyed up, excited, bothered, it could be a false trail to pull us away from Bert Orchard.’

  ‘There are plenty of trails open to us,’ Crow murmured. ‘His managing editor, Earl Robson, reeled off a list of names of Rutland’s enemies without even thinking about it.’

  ‘I’ll still settle for Bert Orchard.’ Wilson said with a doggedness well known to Crow. He smiled and turned from the window. The light striking behind him emphasized his leanness and accentuated the hairless line of his skull.

  ‘Yes, I want Bert Orchard too. And I want the Three Bells searched. Get it organized. As for Doris Orchard, we’ll just accept Rutland was using her while he devoted his attentions to something important. Now, you’ve been to the bungalow — what about Rutland’s possessions there?’

  ‘I’ve got them in the other room, sir.’

  * * *

  They amounted to very little.

  Charles Rutland had lived for the last few years in a flat in London but had accumulated few possessions. He had lived in a comfortable manner, and a perusal of his bank account suggested he had lived up to his salary. It had not been a munificent one, in spite of what Earl Robson had said: Scathe paid adequately but not tremendously well, probably because of the hidden overheads — particularly the threat of lawsuit.

  It led Crow to the conclusion that Rutland worked for Scathe because he liked the sort of job he was called upon to do, ferreting out the secrets that their owners wanted to keep hidden. It was not the sort of job that Crow would have liked; indeed, it was too near to the most distressing aspect of his own job to be comfortable. Crow was a professional, but that did not mean he enjoyed peeling away the veneers to disclose human frailties beneath.

  Rutland’s flat was still being searched and an inventory made of its contents, but the bungalow at Earston had not faced Detective-Inspector Wilson with a difficult problem. Rutland had few possessions in London; he had even fewer at Earston. It was quite obvious that he had never intended staying at the bungalow for any great length of time on any occasion. There were few items of clothing in the wardrobe in the bedroom. There were no books, no ornaments, no pictures — just the bare necessities, old furniture that had been rented with the bungalow, two bottles of whisky and one of brandy, five eggs, half a pound of bacon, a bottle of cooking oil and a box of tea bags.

  ‘Hardly home from home,’ Crow murmured as he read the list.

  ‘It makes me wonder why he took the place,’ Wilson said, and then gave a half-smile as he caught Crow’s glance.

  ‘You agree it wasn’t love of Yorkshire, then?’

  ‘He was working on a story, wasn’t he?’

  ‘And he rented the bungalow as a base, probably to save on hotel bills?’

  ‘It still could have been a love of Yorkshire,’ Wilson pondered heavily. ‘There’s a fine view from Earston Hill — you can see for miles.’

  Crow grunted. ‘We’ll have to think about that one. All right, now let’s have a look at this diary you found in his jacket.’

  It was small, page-a-day, bound in red plastic. Inexpensive, it bore the appearance of regular use, the edges of the pages curling and grimed. Crow opened the diary. It was full of crabbed writing that made no sense to him.

  ‘It looks to me as though it’s a form of shorthand,’ Wilson said. ‘None of the accepted kinds, you know, but one that Rutland maybe worked out for himself.’

  ‘There’s none of it readable?’

  ‘Not a thing — apart from the odd word. If you look at the back, though, you’ll see he didn’t always use the shorthand.’

  Crow realized what Wilson meant. At the back of the diary Charles Rutland had kept brief notes of his expenses, with dates of the trips he had taken. The dates of his visits to West Berlin were there. No attempt had been made to use shorthand. Crow turned back in the diary to the dates of the German visit. The pages were crowded with notes, but they were all in Rutland’s shorthand.

  ‘This is more of annoyance value than anything else,’ Crow said. ‘We can get a cipher expert on it and it shouldn’t be difficult to crack. The trouble is it takes time. And the results might be negative. Still, we’d better get it started.’

  ‘You’ll see from his expenses claims he made several visits up here after coming back from Germany,’ Wilson said, ‘before he ever got around to renting the bungalow.’

  ‘I noticed. It may be we’ll find the answer to that once the shorthand is transcribed.’

  ‘There is another thing, sir.’

  Crow raised his eyebrows interrogatively.

  ‘Inside the front cover, sir.’

  Crow opened the diary again. There were a number of words written there, scribbled in haste. Telephone numbers, hotel addresses, a name — Sandra Robson, followed by an address. Crow looked up.

  ‘Have you checked all these?’

  ‘The phone numbers are mainly business ones. The hotel addresses seem to have little significance. Sandra Robson—’

  ‘Earl Robson’s wife?’

  ‘They were divorced some time ago.’

  Crow considered the matter. Earl Robson did not like Rutland even though he had employed him. Rutland liked women, and he could have got to know Robson’s wife easily enough.

  ‘Get in touch with Carson at the Met.’ he said decisively, ‘and ask him to check on Mrs Robson. We’ll want to know whether she knew Rutland well, and what Earl Robson thought about it. He’s already got a list of people he’s checking on; her movements during the last weeks might be of interest too. So ask Carson to add her to the list.’ He shook his head. ‘Robson told me it could be a long trail. Rutland wasn’t exactly popular.’

  ‘There is just one other thing,’ Wilson added, pointing to the diary. ‘This car number.’

  ‘Rutland didn’t drive. Could it be the number of the hire-car he used?’

  ‘No, sir. I made a check on that — first thing that occurred to me. You’ll see it’s a Leeds number. Turns out it was a Volvo sports. The Leeds police were able to give me the details — where and when it was bought, year of manufacture and all that.’

  ‘You mean they had the details?’ Wilson nodded, frowning slightly.

  ‘They did. You see, the car was reported stolen from a car park behind the Headrow, near the Merrion Centre.’

  ‘Never recovered?’

  ‘No.’ Wilson hesitated. ‘It didn’t happen so long ago.’

  ‘When was it taken?’

  ‘It was reported stolen just three weeks ago.’

  ‘And the car number goes into Charles Rutland’s little red book,’ Crow mused. ‘Who owned the car?’

  ‘It was reported stolen by a Mrs Aileen Selby. She lives at Selby Grange. It’s a big house . . . about two or three miles from Earston by road.’

  ‘I think,’ Crow said slowly, ‘I’d better pay a call at Selby Grange.’

  Chapter 5

  It was all a question of patterns.

  In any investigation such as this one, Crow saw the emergence of facts and relationships and events and characteristics as forming a series of kaleidoscopic patterns. One would be built up, but the appearance of a new factor would change the pattern and its colours: the redness of violence, the green of jealousy, the black of despair, anyone of these could touch the quality of a personal relationship and remould it until a new pattern appeared.

  But at this stage it was too early to see patterns.

  Crow stared out over the hazy moorland as the police car drove him towards Selby Grange, and he was hardly aware of the distant cooling towers of Huddersfield, the grey dotted sheep in their grey-walled compounds, industry and husbandry, the old past and the recent past. He was preoccupied with the confusions in his mind, the stubbornness of a picture that refused to become clear, the denial of a pattern of behaviour.

  The journalist from Scathe magazine had come to Yorkshire and died there. He had formed a casual sexual relationship with a woman whose man had now gone south. Bert Orchard could have killed Rutland in a fit of rage, even though Doris said he didn’t care. Sexual passion could be the motive.

  But there was Robson too. He was a possessive, acquisitive, confident man: his confidence could have been shaken by the divorce his wife had won from him. Perhaps Rutland had had an affair with her, perhaps Robson had taken the chance to do something about it. A man could still want a woman he’d lost, still resent another using a possession that had once been his.

  These were possible patterns, but there was also the question mark posed by a German businessman called Conrad Gunther. If Gunther was still on Rutland’s mind when he died, for Crow the patterns were immediately disturbed, for a new factor was present. Was there any connection between Conrad Gunther and a village in Yorkshire, a bungalow in Earston?

  Then there was a Volvo sports car stolen from Leeds.

  It could be an irrelevance, but its number was noted in Rutland’s diary. Was there a connection between Rutland and Selby Grange?

  Germany and Yorkshire, Gunther and Mrs Selby. Shifting patterns, shadows on a wall. The car sped over the hill and the sun broke briefly through the haze, so that the walled fields were grey-green and the gates to Selby Grange glittered in their white paint.

  The gates were open and the car swept into the drive. Selby Grange lay three hundred yards ahead.

  * * *

  It was a nice house, a comfortable house. It had been built perhaps eighty years ago, Crow calculated, and was in a sense typical of the solidity of its builder: a man who would have seen profits come to him in middle age after years of hard work in the booming Yorkshire industries. From the mills had come the money that built homes like Selby Grange, not pretentious but practical, not flying too far from the sources of its wealth in either distance or attitude. Such men did not build follies, but homes.

  Crow stood in the sitting-room and looked out through French windows to the grounds of the house. They would have been splendid once, but now the lawns were thick-edged and untidy, there was an air of decay and loss among the borders, and the trees had a bedraggled look as though conscious of better days.

  The room in which he stood did not reflect such embarrassment. The furniture was hand-carved, cubes and oblongs, deep-cushioned and elegant. They formed a present which gave elegance to a past of dark oak floors and dark-beamed ceilings. The cream walls held original oil paintings in pale oak frames, the carpet was thick and deep. Expensive magazines made a casual litter on the marble-topped coffee table beside which Crow stood.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Crow?’ He turned and saw Aileen Selby.

  She came through a breakfast-room that was sunlit and furnished in mahogany, and the light picked out her figure. He calculated she was almost fifty, but the tall elegance of her body would never admit it. She walked towards him, holding out a slim hand, and she moved with the grace of a model, the tranquillity of a cat, confident and assured.

  She was dressed in black satin slacks of a casual cut and a white shirt. She was blonde, her short hair framing a face of classical lines. She was tall and small-breasted and her beauty was almost asexual, possessing a cold, controlled, clinical quality as firm and positive as her handshake.

  ‘Please sit down,’ she said, and took a seat herself, leaning back on one arm of the chair on the other side of the coffee table from him. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been kept waiting.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Crow said in his gallant voice, the one which occasionally caused Martha such amusement. ‘It gave me the opportunity to admire this room, and the view.’

  Aileen Selby smiled. ‘The room, yes, but the view . . . The cost of upkeep of gardens is prohibitive these days when a house like this has priority. My husband died almost ten years ago and he loved this house so much — it was built by his grandfather — but he would have been distressed to think I would have sold it. So, I retain it, even though it’s something of a struggle. I think it’s worth it.’

  ‘I’d agree,’ Crow said. ‘Your husband was a local man, then.’

  ‘Very much so. He never spent much more than a week away from his beloved Yorkshire. It’s a lovely county, you know — the dales are magnificent, and even the towns have a harsh beauty of their own. He was a local man and he carried on in the family tradition. But the shoddy market declined, and when he died the business really died with him. When I sold it, I think a little of me died too.’

  She said it lightly, dispelling any hint of sadness. ‘You’re not local, though,’ Crow said.

  She had green eyes that sparkled at him. ‘I don’t believe I ever came across an Australian who succeeded in eradicating the vowel sounds she heard as a youngster. I think it must be like an imprint on our vocal cords — and one completely irreversible. You’re right, you detect an accent. Faint, I imagine, but it’s there all right. I was born in Australia. I spent my youth there, came to England when I was twenty-five. I’ve lived up here in Yorkshire for more than twenty years now, though, so I ought to be counted a native.’

  She looked out through the window briefly, as though searching for something, perhaps the sights and sounds of her childhood, and then she turned back, smiling. ‘My husband, John, he always thought of me as being more Yorkshire than he. And that’s a compliment from a real native. But I’m chattering.’ Her face grew serious and he noticed for the first time the lines around her eyes. They betrayed her age, gave testimony to her life experience. ‘I suppose you’ve come about the car?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Calmly, she said, ‘I didn’t think it would be, exactly. I hardly imagined a detective chief inspector from Scotland Yard would be making enquiries about a stolen car alone. I imagine your primary task must be investigation of the Earston murder.’

  Crow smiled. ‘You’re well informed, Mrs Selby.’

  ‘Not really. It’s just a matter of deduction. I know most of the senior people in the area, the Chief Constable and so on — and the name Crow does not figure among staff in this area. And I have read about the murder at Earston, just beyond the hill. This man named . . .’

  ‘Rutland.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Well, it’s a case of putting two and two together. But you know all about that.’ She looked at him carefully, her head tilted a little to one side. ‘What puzzles me is why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m a little puzzled myself.’ Crow replied. ‘Can you explain why the number of your car — the stolen car should have been of interest to Charles Rutland? We found it noted in his diary.’

  Aileen Selby frowned. ‘Er . . . I did ask the maid to bring in some tea. Will that be acceptable? Good. Now then, my car number and Rutland. I can’t imagine . . .’

  ‘Did you ever meet Rutland?’

  She registered alarm tinged with a certain amusement. ‘Not consciously, I assure you. From what I read in the papers he was a journalist of dubious calibre, wasn’t he? I suppose there’s the possibility that I might have seen him in Earston village when I’ve been there, but as I say, not consciously.’

  Crow began to speak, but the maid entered from the breakfast-room with a silver tea-service. He waited until she had gone, and watched as Aileen Selby poured tea into two delicate china cups. When he took the tiny cup and saucer from her, they looked ridiculous in his long bony fingers.

  ‘Is it all right, Inspector? Now then, where were we?’

  ‘You told me you were not aware that you had ever met Charles Rutland.’