Herring in the Smoke Page 5

  ‘So you said, but why?’ I asked.

  ‘There are too many people around who remember Vane,’ he said. ‘He might be able to keep it up for a day or two, but the fact that he’s lasted even this long suggests to me that it must be him. Or somebody who was very, very close to him – and I can’t think who that would be. His brother’s dead. No first cousins, just one very distant one. But if I’m wrong, then we’ll know pretty soon. Is it true that Tim Macdonald’s writing his own version of the biography, by the way?’

  ‘That’s what I’m told.’

  ‘But you represent him, so you’d know what contracts he had signed. There’s no point in pretending, Elsie – it will probably be up on Amazon soon.’

  That was a good point. Actually it was up on Amazon already.

  ‘All right. But this is in strict confidence. Tim is doing a Vane book too. A very different one. Not in any way like yours. More … literary.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘More of a bestseller.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘More aimed at selling the US and translation rights. And maybe television or a film.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure. You only had to ask.’

  ‘But mine will at least be out first?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I’d scarcely let you waste your time otherwise, would I?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The cottage was not far from where I live in Sussex – just over on the far side of Chichester, in fact. It was small, quaint and had lavender growing on both sides of the path – now severely pruned but promising lush swathes of pale purple once summer arrived. Both the roof and the small porch were thatched, though many loose strands of wispy reed were blowing freely in the breeze.

  I knocked on the door. It was opened by a small, trim woman with grey hair. I could see the resemblance to Cynthia at once.

  ‘Margery Vane?’ I asked unnecessarily.

  ‘Absolutely. And you must be Ethelred,’ she said. ‘Come in and I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Cynthia’s mother was somebody else whom I had arranged to see as part of my attempt to get inside the enigma that was Roger Norton Vane. Twenty years ago she would have known him well – better in most ways than Cynthia would. I’d hoped, in the days when I had no hope of speaking to Vane himself, that she would be a valuable source of information. As with Cynthia, I had seen no reason not to keep the appointment just because Vane was now available in person. I suspected that Margery might have a slightly different perspective on Vane from the one he had on himself.

  ‘I’d so hoped he was dead,’ she said, as she poured the tea. ‘Better for everyone, really. I was quite upset when Cynthia told me he hadn’t been murdered. I didn’t go to that service thing they held – I couldn’t see much to celebrate in his life and work. I was just looking forward to Cynthia finally inheriting what was rightfully hers. There’s nothing to come from me … oh, she won’t get the cottage, I’m afraid. What you have to understand is that Cynthia’s father made almost no money until he was fifty-two and then died when he was fifty-three. Inconsiderate and irritating to the very end. We sold the house in London and bought this. It was fine for a while, then the crash came and interest rates dropped to nothing. So I signed up for an equity release scheme. The cottage is mine for life but it will be the bank’s when I die. Cynthia had always said that, once she inherited Roger’s money, she’d pass some of it onto me – which was sweet of her but it won’t be happening now.’

  ‘So, you could have bought the freehold back?’

  ‘Oh no, not enough for that. But the thatch needs repairing and the damp needs fixing – both rising and descending – and the gardener frankly hasn’t been paid for months. “Genteel poverty” doesn’t do justice to the position I’ll be in by this time next year. I don’t mind the bank inheriting a ruin, but I’m not sure I actually want to live in one. Still, unless you happen to do a bit of thatching or parge work on the side, I doubt that’s of much interest to you. What can I tell you about my brother-in-law?’

  ‘Anything you like. It’s all grist to the biographical mill. I suppose you saw a lot of him?’

  ‘No more than I had to. He would descend on us from time to time to ruin Christmas or Easter. There was something about him that was almost childlike, in the sense that children get a really big kick out of sadism. It’s what makes Roald Dahl so popular. It’s a basic instinct to laugh at somebody else’s extreme discomfort. Only as you grow older do you learn to empathise with an incompetent headmistress out of her depth or a gamekeeper just trying to do his job and feed his family. There but for the grace of God … Turning the gamekeeper into a rabbit who gets caught in one of his own traps doesn’t seem so funny after you’re thirty-five or so. Roger, bless him, never grew up. So, it always seemed funny to him.’

  ‘You sound as if you hated him.’

  Margery paused in her rearrangement of a much-stained tea cosy.

  ‘No, I didn’t. Not most of the time, anyway. He was very good-looking in those days. It’s always easier to forgive people you lust after. And I could empathise with his inability to empathise with others. It’s just the way he was. My husband was a bit like that too. But I loved them both in different ways.’

  ‘Loved?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Roger, anyway.’

  ‘Family trait? The insensitivity, I mean.’

  ‘Oh no. Nothing to do with the family. My parents-in-law were nice enough. If I blame anyone I blame that school.’

  ‘I’m not even sure which school it was – Wikipedia is silent on the subject – just says he was educated in London and at Oxford. Roger said it was some inner-city comprehensive.’

  ‘He actually told you that?’

  ‘Well, he said it was some inner-city place with a drug problem.’

  ‘The Cordwainers School? An inner-city comprehensive? I think not.’

  ‘Is that where he was? He’s kept quiet about that.’

  ‘Didn’t fit the image, I would imagine. One of the country’s most expensive private schools, albeit based in central London. I was occasionally taken, as a spouse, to alumni events – I suppose that’s what you’d call them – but I always felt an outsider, because that is what I was and nobody ever saw fit to invite me inside. Cordwainers isn’t the sort of place that cares about anywhere else. It’s often said that Cordwainers boys aren’t snobbish, but that’s because they are so confident of their own superiority that they can’t be bothered to look down on anyone. Too much effort. To despise somebody you have to acknowledge their existence.’

  ‘Who were his contemporaries at Cordwainers?’

  ‘Roger’s? No idea. I could tell you one or two very famous names from my husband’s year, but Roger was three years younger. He’d have mixed with a different crowd.’

  Then something occurred to me.

  ‘Does the name Cousin Wilbert mean anything to you?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Should it?’

  ‘Roger mentioned him.’

  ‘Then one must conclude he is a cousin on that side of the family. But I can’t ever remember the name being mentioned. Wilbert? Not a name you would forget.’

  ‘You might have known him as Graham?’

  ‘Oh Graham … why didn’t you say so? Yes, he died last year … or the year before? One funeral merges into another after a while. But I never heard him referred to as Wilbert. Why would anyone want to do that to him?’

  ‘Roger said it was a nickname he’d had.’

  She shook her head again. ‘Sorry – can’t help you at all there. My husband would have known, of course, but there we are. What I can do is to show you some photographs. You might be able to use some of them.’

  An hour later I left the cottage with an envelope full of pictures of Roger Norton Vane, sitting or standing with various combinations of the Vane family as it had been twenty years before. I also took away growing doubts that I had been misled by Roger Vane in
some way that I could not yet put my finger on.

  But I had further interviews in London. Hopefully they would clear things up.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘Thank you.’ I took one and then wondered what to do with it. My notebook was perched on the side of William Ogilvie’s cluttered desk, with a dainty bone china cup and saucer beside it. I could see no space for a biscuit anywhere. I eventually placed it precariously on the edge of the small, gold-rimmed saucer. The lawyer said nothing, but helped himself from the pile of brightly coloured iced circles that could have graced any nursery tea. He bit into it with relish, spraying crumbs in my direction. If he normally ate with such gusto, he looked well on it. He was tall, thin and, to judge by the speed with which he had led me from the lift to his office, very fit.

  ‘You’ve always represented Mr Vane?’ I enquired.

  ‘Ever since I qualified. Ever since he needed to defend himself in defamation cases. That means we go back a long way.’

  ‘A colourful character?’

  Ogilvie laughed. ‘To the extent that I ought to comment on my clients to a third party, yes, a colourful character. With a colourful tongue. Still, it’s a matter of public record that he has been sued for libel several times. And sued somebody else once. He lost, of course. It’s difficult finding something to say about him that’s completely untrue.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem too concerned about his own reputation. I mean, he’s very open about his criminal past …’

  I stopped, aware of a sudden tension in the air. The lawyer’s eyes now had a steely tone that I had not noticed before. ‘I wouldn’t believe everything he tells you, especially that.’

  ‘Really? You mean it’s not true?’

  ‘Along with many other things he says, it’s not completely untrue. I mean, when he was at school he did learn how to start a car without using a key and did remove one from the school grounds – the deputy head’s, as it happens. He was stopped fairly quickly by a policeman who thought he looked a bit young to be driving. The deputy head generously didn’t press charges. The police were content to leave it to the school to sort out and ignore the small matters of the lack of a driving licence or insurance and of any danger to the public resultant from underage toffs hot-wiring cars. They probably wouldn’t do that now, but they did then. The past is a foreign country, as they say. But who wants to go to a foreign country? I always think you’re much safer holidaying in Britain. Much better all round on a nice English beach. Deckchair. Bucket and spade. Nothing nasty lurking in the water.’

  There seemed to be a message hiding not far below the surface – one that had nothing to do with travel bookings.

  ‘I can’t see why I shouldn’t quote it,’ I said. ‘It’s a story he told me himself, after all.’

  ‘In writing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In front of witnesses?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you are, then. Best to stay in Bognor Regis, don’t you think?’

  ‘I thought it was one of the more interesting anecdotes about him.’

  ‘It is. Of course it is. That’s why he tells it. But it doesn’t mean that it’s true or that nobody will take offence if you repeat it. The school acted with a certain amount of generosity. They might not take kindly to your implying that they’d prosecuted one of their pupils – which they emphatically did not. And there were others involved, who might not want their names mentioned – especially if your version, obtained from Roger, differed from the truth in even the most trivial way. I’m not offering you legal advice, but I would suggest you’d be much safer leaving it out of any account you are writing. Roger has always had a difficult relationship with the truth. Sometimes he’s been on speaking terms with it, sometimes not. Hence the work he’s kindly put my way over the years. Help yourself to biscuits, by the way.’

  Mentally I deleted an entire chapter of my book. There was plenty of other stuff, of course. I wondered whether I could put the story in while at the same time denying its veracity. It would be tricky. Maybe I shouldn’t.

  ‘And I’m told the school was Cordwainers?’

  ‘That’s right. One of London’s leading schools – along with St Paul’s and Westminster. Of course, it’s still on its original site, unlike St Paul’s. Right in the middle of Holborn. A bit cramped, but they bought up some houses nearby back in the thirties, evicted the tenants and built a new gymnasium and science block. It was all fine … I mean for a school, not for the tenants. They never seemed to feed you enough, and what they did give you was never terribly good, but none of us had any real complaints.’

  ‘He always tried to make it sound tough.’

  ‘It was in its way. If he’d really gone to prison, as he has occasionally tried to suggest he did, he’d have got a more comfortable bed and much better grub. And time off for good behaviour. It was what you’d describe as character building.’

  ‘He said the metalwork master had been a getaway driver for the Krays.’

  ‘Ah … that may have been true. No DBS checks in those days. I doubt he was the only one with a dodgy past. But it was a top school, then and now. That was why the police stayed out of it when he took the car. They wouldn’t have interfered in the internal affairs of a national institution.’

  ‘Who would have been at school with him? I guess with a place like that some of them would be in quite prominent positions now?’

  Ogilvie nodded thoughtfully. ‘Pretty well all of them would be in prominent positions. That’s what their parents paid for. You could check in Who’s Who, I suppose, to see who was around in Roger’s time. Let me think … You might want to talk to Lord Davies. He would have been there.’

  Ogilvie smiled, as if he had just given me unusually helpful advice. I could, however, see an immediate impediment.

  ‘The fund manager?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. People normally add the qualifier “billionaire” when mentioning him these days, but fund manager will do.’

  ‘He never gives interviews,’ I said.

  ‘He might. This time.’

  ‘Really? I’ll try to book an appointment with his secretary, then.’

  ‘She’ll say no. Because he never gives interviews. But I can let you have you his private email. Known just to his friends. Say you met me and I suggested it.’ He scribbled something on a torn-off slip of paper and passed it across the desk. I looked at it doubtfully, then pocketed it.

  ‘I’ll try it,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure. I always like to be helpful when I can.’

  ‘And you have no doubts that the person claiming to be Vane really is him?’ I asked.

  Ogilvie frowned and leant back in his chair, clutching his cup in both hands. He pursed his lips. ‘When he first came through that door, I genuinely didn’t recognise him. Right sort of height, right sort of bearing, but somehow …’ Ogilvie pulled a face indicative of extreme and justified legal doubt. ‘But then he spoke and I’d have known the voice anywhere. We chatted. He’d forgotten a few things I’d have expected him to remember, but then I suppose he might have said the same for me. I ended up completely convinced. I know young Cynthia’s still got her doubts, though.’

  ‘She’s been to see you?’

  ‘Yes, earlier today. I told her what I told you. In my humble opinion, it’s Roger returned from the dead. We had quite a long chat about this and that in the end – bit of a catch-up. Hopefully I managed to reassure her, in some ways at least. Sadly not in others.’

  ‘Well, now he’s back, there’ll be more work for you,’ I joked.

  ‘Maybe. I’ll be doing slightly less legal work from now on. I’m standing for Parliament in the next election. Safe-ish seat in Hampshire. The current incumbent is retiring, if the old buffer lasts long enough. Unless he cuts down a bit on his drinking, there could be a by-election in the very near future. They don’t mind moribund MPs in our party, but we draw the line at dead. The call may com
e any day or any hour.’ Ogilvie smiled. ‘Not that his constituency will be sorry to see the back of him. He’s gone a bit liberal in his old age. I’m reassuring the voters that I at least will be properly representing their views on inheritance tax, policing and immigration. I’m starting to spend more time down there, getting my face known. Ensuring they understand I’m one of them – not some city lawyer on the make at their expense. I don’t want them to listen to the siren calls of UKIP. I may drop hints I’d bring back hanging, for sheep stealing if not for murder. What you have to understand, Ethelred, is that if there are too few police, then the illegal migrants nick all your sheep, leaving you with nothing but shit-covered grassland to pass on to the kids. It’s a point I can’t make to the local press too often. Even a six thousand majority can evaporate if you’re not careful.’

  In spite of my doubts, Lord Davies replied to my email within a few minutes of my sending it. He could see me for half an hour tomorrow, if I wished. At his office in Cheapside.

  I phoned Elsie.

  ‘I’m making better progress than I expected,’ I said. ‘Ogilvie, the lawyer, was helpful and he’s put me onto Lord Davies, who was at school with Vane. Did you know he was at Cordwainers?’

  ‘Roger Vane?’ said Elsie. ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Did you? He kept that quiet. It’s not in any of the main sources – nothing on the Internet, nothing in the standard reference books. Told me it was an inner-city place with a drugs problem.’

  ‘Question of image,’ said Elsie. ‘Not edgy enough. Oxford was fine. Anyone can get into Oxford – you, for example. But you need wads of cash for a place like Cordwainers. And it has to be old cash – new money isn’t accepted. Or it wasn’t then. It’s probably all oligarchs’ kids now, ferried backwards and forwards in gold-plated Rolls Royces. But it did have a drugs problem in those days. I reckon a lot went on that you couldn’t get away with now. There will be plenty of respectable Old Cordwainers out there wondering what stories Vane is going to tell you. Drugs. Drink. And the rest. I’m not surprised Ogilvie tipped Davies off that he ought to see you.’