"Gill, B M - Tom Maybridge 03 - The Fifth Rapunzel 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)
He decided to give Simon the good news first. "Your inheritance, after inheritance tax and including the house and insurance policies, amounts to just under six hundred thousand pounds net. A nice sum."
Simon, who already had an inkling that it would be a fair amount, though not as much as that, nodded happily. Very nice. He would take a holiday in the Far East, perhaps, listen to the Buddhist prayer bells, see the golden temple in Amritsar, trek through the Australian outback, go sailing off Turkey, eat well in Paris, buy a chalet in Austria, climb the Andes and ... and ...
Drew, reading his expression correctly, went on briskly. "It's a combination of assets. Your mother's inheritance from her family in Norfolk is included. Your father inherited rather less. The rise in property values over the years has been dramatic. Your father's flat in London, which isn't included, is quite small - worth about fifty thousand a few years ago, but double that now."
He waited for the question.
It came. "What flat?"
"Your father's base - his pied-A-terre in Islington. His job took him to London frequently. He probably found it convenient to stay overnight."
Simon pointed out that when his father was in London, either lecturing or doing whatever forensic work he was asked to do, he stayed in his club or at the Royal Society of Medicine. "You must have made a mistake."
Drew said he hadn't. He'd liked Bradshaw. And he'd brought a lot of business to the firm. But, at moments such as this one, he wished he'd taken his investments and tax returns elsewhere, or else conducted his extramarital affair with more sense. Not that he blamed him for having a woman on the side. Married to Lisa, it was forgivable.
Simon, coming to the conclusion that his father must have bought the flat recently and had forgotten to mention it, started thinking about the extra hundred thousand pounds. It would buy a Ferrari, a vintage Bentley, or a ... His conscience suddenly kicked him hard: he was being abominably selfish. He told Drew that he would sell the flat and give the proceeds to Teresa or to her successor if she wasn't around.
"Commendable," Drew said, slightly surprised. "Unfortunately, it's not yours to sell. Your father has bequeathed it to a Mrs Clare Warwick. Perhaps she was of some service to your father at some time?"
Simon, shaken by what he had been told, mused over the words - 'some service to your father'. What sort of service? That sort of service? The kind of service Trudy Morrison might have given his father all those years ago when his mother wasn't there? Or the kind of washing-up and cleaning service she was supposed to give? He hadn't known that his father had other women until he had read his mother's diaries. She had used the word 'screwed' a few times, which had shocked him. The name Clare Warwick hadn't turned up anywhere, and his father had never mentioned her.
"Are you sure you have the right name?" he asked Drew. "It wouldn't be Trudy Morrison, would it?"
Drew, relieved that he seemed to be taking it very well, said he was quite sure he had the right name. It was quite definitely a Mrs Warwick - a Mrs Clare Warwick. (Who, he wondered, was Trudy Morrison?)
The camaraderie of men when discussing the opposite sex has its own lingo, but Bradshaw had spoken of her very protectively. Even tenderly. A serious affair, obviously. She didn't know the flat would be hers, he said. He was just trying to safeguard her future. All this had sounded as if Bradshaw had received a warning of impending heart failure and Drew had wondered if he was physically okay - he'd looked all right - or had merely lost his marbles. Love was an unbalancing disease, cured usually by time and too much proximity. As in his own case. He had been divorced for two happy years. So, apparently, had Mrs Warwick. Bradshaw hadn't been involved in the divorce, he'd told Drew. He'd met her afterwards. Apart from those few details,
he hadn't told him anything that might help to trace her now.
And obviously Simon had never heard of her. So no help there.
He wrote the address of the flat and gave it to Simon. "I'm afraid you can't have access. It's hers to sell - or live in - when we eventually make contact with her. She might be out of the country - on holiday. If you should find the keys at home, post them back here. The sooner we get everything tied up, the better."
Before bringing the interview to an end, Drew thought it his duty to fire a few salvoes and sink Simon's yacht in the Caribbean. Well, it was a normal dream for an eighteen-year-old, wasn't it? His inheritance might seem a lot of money, he told him, but he had to consider rising inflation, heavy taxation and other boring things. Tax avoidance was legal, and he'd explain that later. His father had invested safely and that was important, too.
Simon became less euphoric. Money, apparently, was a crafty commodity. If you didn't watch it like a hawk, it became liquid silver oozing away into subterranean passages that led either to the Inland Revenue or the pockets of shady stockbrokers.
He promised to be sensible. A smaller yacht - maybe? A younger vintage car?
When he got home he was relieved that Sally wasn't there. Perhaps she hadn't been. Perhaps the dreaded wardrobes hadn't been emptied. He went upstairs to look. His father's wardrobe had a naked, vulnerable feel to it and smelt of stale tobacco. A red tie which had escaped her attention, hung like a mute tongue,:on the tie rail. He touched it and felt a sudden hot rush of tears. Damn, oh damn!
His mother's wardrobe smelt sweeter and was bare, too, apart from a clown-like garment which he identified as a tracksuit in shades of crimson and grey, dangling like a cheerful marionette. A scrawled message on a piece of pink paper was pinned to it:
Just a little pressie.
He took it out and put it on the bed. So he was supposed to go running, was he? Forget the dead. Life goes on. Well, it did. She was right, of course. But a bright tracksuit wasn't what he wanted just now. He wanted a woman who didn't talk much and never giggled. A woman who brooded over his mother's papers and thought God knew what and lived God knew where. A woman with long black hair that he wanted to stroke. A woman who made his sexuality a glorious and terrible embarrassment, impossible to hide.
10.
Rhoda's last contact with Peter had been on the final day of Hixon's trial. He had called at her flat, a five-minute walk from his own, to say that Clare had put on a celebration party - had filled his flat with yobs he didn't know - didn't want to know - mainly journalists - and sleazy creatures who used his lavatory and drank his booze and squeezed any flesh they could get their hands on - and that Clare was revelling in it and wanted Rhoda to go along and revel in it too, and mend the rift between them that had gone on for too long. So he'd come to fetch her - or rather, to tell her. She could go along if she wanted to but he was staying here for a while, with her permission, of course. And had she got a decent drink to give him? No, he wasn't pissed already - apart from being pissed off generally. He wanted to sit somewhere quiet. And listen to silence. Why were Clare's friends so bloody loud?
It was eleven o'clock on a black night of rain. She'd wanted to send him back into it. Instead, she'd asked him in.
It was a similar night tonight, but less dark, and the rain was the warm rain of early summer. The photograph that she'd pinched from Simon and not returned was on the small rickety table she used as a desk. There was a sheet of paper in her typewriter with the heading
The Games Men Play' - a commissioned piece of nonsense for a magazine. She had chosen to call her contribution The Snooker Syndrome' and had attempted to be wryly amusing about balls and phallic cues. Freelance journalism was a penurious occupation, unless you were good at it. Tonight she wasn't good at it.
She was remembering that other night so strongly she could almost smell the wet leather of Peter's shoes and see the hair on the back of his hands. His sexy hands that had probed the cadavers of five strangled prostitutes. She'd asked him what he was celebrating. Nothing, he said. He wasn't celebrating. Clare was. So don't look at him like that. Hixon's conviction hadn't depended on his evidence alone. The bastard would have been convicted without it. It wasn't his fault that the Press had hyped him up - singled him out. He'd just been part of a team.
Modesty wasn't usually one of his strong points. Hixon's last outburst of aggro, widely reported in the evening papers, must have got to him. And Clare's party was just that much too much.
She hadn't gone to it. Parties weren't her scene, either. And the rift with her sister over Peter had seemed more of a chasm than it actually was. But it hadn't been an act of enticement when she had poured him a generous whisky, he'd looked as if he'd needed it, and his hand shook when she handed him the glass. He was cold, he said testily. Why didn't she keep her flat warmer? Because she hadn't paid the last electricity bill yet, she nearly told him. Her money problems had nothing to do with him. She managed.
Clare had been managing rather better, she guessed. A free billet in Peter's flat, and the modelling she had been doing for one of the London stores paid very well. The red outfit she had worn in the photograph had probably been bought at discount - or hired. Hadn't she known that you turn up to that sort of village do wearing tweeds and flat heels? Mrs Maybridge's gear. Why, in God's name, had Peter invited her? If he had.
He had stayed a couple of hours, nursing his whisky and gazing morosely at the two-bar electric fire she'd switched on for him. He was almost fifty - twice Clare's age. And that night he'd looked it. She had sat up with him. Going to bed might have been interpreted as an invitation to join her. They'd had good sex together in the past, but on that last night there had been no sexual pull at all. She'd sensed he had something on his mind. He mentioned Simon once or twice - said he'd had a raw deal - been robbed of a normal upbringing - hoped everything would be better for him in the future. He hadn't mentioned Lisa at all, but by implication everything he said concerned her.
Rhoda picked up the photograph and had another look at it. Lisa appeared so sane, so normal. An attractive middle-aged woman. Had Peter been standing beside her - and Clare absent - it would have been a scene of bucolic bliss. Macklestone on a sunny day - villagers smiling - an enclosed safe little community - hurrah for constancy - married love - no roving husbands - no horror paintings - no hate - no fear - no terrible accident waiting to happen - everything clean and sweet. Macklestone as it never was.
The vicar's grumble about Creggan's dog digging a hole in the cemetery seemed relatively trite to Maybridge until the vicar pointed out that it was natural for a dog to go after bones, but that the bones of homo sapiens were sacrosanct. So would he please go along and have a word with Mr Creggan? Maybridge, stifling the retort that it would be better for the vicar to go along and have a word himself, said that he'd mention it to Doctor Donaldson. As medical superintendent, it was up to him to keep his patients and his patients' pets in line.
The vicar, who had been reluctant to broach the subject with Donaldson, was relieved. Several of his parishioners had complained from time to time about Donaldson's so-called progressive methods - with particular reference to letting Creggan creep around in the dark. A psychiatric hospital, especially when housed in a large forbidding building, didn't enhance the village, one of his parishioners had pointed out. It devalued one's property if one wished to sell. Sutton's pious response about being charitable to the afflicted had been greeted with polite derision. "The afflicted, Vicar? Those aren't long-term patients with Down's Syndrome or other incurable genetic disorders, they're victims of their own folly, their way of life, drink, drugs, etc. etc. and Donaldson is reaping a rich harvest." Another parishioner, homing in on the harvest theme, had been equally bitter. "It's all very well singing about ploughing the fields and scattering, but that damned dog of Creggan's has scattered a bedful of tulips at the end of my lawn."
That the dog's holes were, so far, desultory explorations and of more annoyance to Creggan than anyone else, no one knew. Creggan had expected better. The animal had a perverse habit of slipping out of its collar and lead and going in the wrong direction, whereas Creggan knew, or thought he knew, where a hole might produce something of interest - in the copse where the fifth Rapunzel had been found, somewhere just outside the area of the police search.
He guessed when he noticed Maybridge's car in The Mount's drive that a complaint might be about to be made. And wondered how Donaldson would react.
Would another bribe pacify him? If so, how much? When money doesn't matter it becomes a bit of a bore. It had bored him for years. How much would bore Donaldson? he wondered. People had different levels of financial boredom. Caviare, for some, descended to the level of baked beans rather fast. He debated whether to go out for a walk and avoid confrontation, or to lie on his bed and feign sleep.
Maybridge had never found Donaldson easy to communicate with, though he had always made an effort to attend any event that Donaldson had put on to give the patients an opportunity to mingle with the villagers. After a period of isolation, stepping back into society is made easier by meeting strangers at an art display or performing, rather amateurishly perhaps, at a musical soiree. Maybridge rather liked Donaldson's old-fashioned use of the word soiree, it had an air of elegance, of peaceful days long gone. That Donaldson's patients were bruised by late-twentieth-century stresses he could understand, though Victorian stresses had probably been worse. Sherlock Holmes had smoked opium and his doctor creator hadn't condemned him.
Maybridge, rather guiltily, lit a cigarette. Donaldson frowned. "It's not a healthy habit, Chief Inspector. Addictions are easy to acquire and hard to lose. Please put the ash in this." He indicated a crystal inkwell on his desk, a purely decorative item from a patient. He had never been able to call Maybridge Tom, though Maybridge had suggested that he might. Maybridge's attempt to call him Steven had been received coldly and he hadn't tried again. They might live in the same village, drink sometimes in the same pub, but each had his separate professional identity.
"I don't see that this is a police matter," Donaldson commented stiffly when Maybridge told him why he'd come.
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