“I don’t know why it should.”
“Because the so-called salary payments were bogus, that’s why. Pettifer never did the work. Foreign book royalties for books he didn’t even write. Retainer money that didn’t retain him. The entire structure was a figment from start to finish, and not a very competent one either, if you want my opinion. You haven’t any theories to offer, I don’t suppose, at all, have you, Mr. Cranmer, as to who might be going to all this trouble on the Doctor’s behalf?”
I had none and was quick to say so. And I was appalled to confirm that the Top Floor’s vaunted arrangements for paying Larry his Judas money could, as I had always suspected, be cracked open in a couple of days by one fanatical policeman with a desktop computer.
“There’s a very funny thing about this firm Mills and Highborn which I might be permitted to share with you,” Luck resumed with dinning sarcasm. “One of its fringe activities, so far as we can establish from certain sources, is channelling unofficial payments on behalf of Her Majesty’s government.” My world rocked. “By which I mean receiving large cash sums from Her Majesty’s Treasury and turning them into other forms of disbursement”—sticking out his jaw at me on the word Treasury—“such as bribes for foreign potentates, such as slush funds for defence contracts and other so-called grey areas of government spending. You wouldn’t know anything about that side of things, would you? Mr. Bryant and myself were somewhat enchanted by the coincidence, you see, of you being in Treasury and British government funds being siphoned off to Pettifer’s Channel Islands benefactors.”
In my wildest nightmares it had not occurred to me that Pay & Allowances Section could be so crass as to use the Larry laundromat for other, unrelated clandestine operations, thus multiplying to infinity the risk of compromising Larry and anybody else on the payroll.
“I’m afraid all this is far beyond me,” I said.
“Maybe you’ll tell us what isn’t beyond you, then,” Bryant suggested coarsely. “You being a high-ranking Treasury gentleman, which is about all we’re allowed to know about you.”
“I’ve no idea what you are trying to imply.”
“Imply? Me? Oh, nothing, nothing, Mr. Cranmer-sir. That would be above my station. Very heady stuff, Treasury slush money, they tell me. Well, I can understand that. After all, if you’re slipping a few million to some Arab shyster for helping you flog off your clapped-out fighter planes, why not slip yourself a few bob for being an English gentleman? Or slip it to your accomplice, better still?”
“That’s a scandalous and totally untrue allegation.”
“Page thirteen,” Luck said.
“Notice anything?” Luck asked.
It was hard not to. Page thirteen of Larry’s bankbook covered the month of July 1994. Until the twenty-first of that month Larry’s current account stood at upwards of £140,000. On the twenty-second Larry had withdrawn £138,000, leaving £2,176 to his credit.
“What do you make of it?”
“Nothing. He probably bought a house.”
“Wrong.”
“He invested it. What do I care?”
“On the twenty-second of July, having advised the manager of his intention by telephone two days before, Dr. Pettifer drew the entire sum of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds in cash across the counter of his bank, in brown envelopes of twenty-pound notes. He refused to accept fifties. He had failed to bring a container, so the cashier had a whip round among the girls till one of them produced a Safeways carrier bag, into which the envelopes were stashed. The next day he paid one thousand pounds cash to his landlady and settled four outstanding bills, including his wine bill. The destination of the remainder of the cash—totalling one hundred and thirty thousand pounds precisely—is as of now unknown.”
Why? I was thinking stupidly. What logic is at work here, when a man who is swindling the Russian Embassy of thirty-seven millions has to empty his own bank account for a hundred and thirty thousand? For whom? For what?
“Unless he gave it to you, of course, Mr. Cranmer,” Bryant proposed from the head of the table.
“Or unless it was yours in the first place,” Luck suggested.
“Not legally, of course,” said Bryant. “But we’re not talking legal, are we? More the thieves’ code. You fiddled it. The Doc banked it. He was your winger. Your accomplice. Right?”
I disdained to reply, so he continued in his tone of laboured knowingness.
“You’re a money bug, aren’t you, Mr. Cranmer, sir? Magpie is what I like to call them. You’ve got a lot, but you want more. Way of the world, isn’t it? You sit there in the Treasury all day, or you did. You see these big piles of money going here, there, and everywhere, and a lot of them doing no good, I dare say. And you say to yourself: ‘Now, Timothy, wouldn’t a little of that be better in my pocket than in theirs?’ So you fiddle a bit. And no one notices. So you fiddle another bit. A bigger bit. And still no one notices. So as a good businessman you expand. Well, we can’t stand still, can we, not in this day and age. No one can. Not human nature, is it? Not after Mrs. Thatcher. And one day an opportunity arises, let us say, for you to break into a certain foreign market. A market where you speak the lingo and have the expertise. Like Russia, for instance. So you pull the big one. You and the Doctor and a certain foreign gentleman of his acquaintance who calls himself Professor. Experts in your ways, all of you. But Mr. Cranmer-sir is the mastermind. The Mister Big. He has the class. The cool. The rank. Am I getting warm at all, sir? You can tell us. We’re little people, aren’t we, Oliver?”
When you are accused of monstrous things, nothing sounds so feeble as the truth. I had devoted my working life to protecting my country from its predators. Now I was being cast as a predator myself. I had never misappropriated a single penny entrusted to me. Now I was being accused of squirrelling large sums in the Channel Islands and paying them to myself by way of my former agent. Yet as I heard myself protest my innocence, I sounded like any other guilty man. My voice slipped and became strident, my fluency deserted me, I became as unconvincing to myself as to my accusers. Well, that’s the way of it, I heard Merriman say: punished for the crimes we never committed while we get away with grand larceny somewhere else.
“We’re only thinking aloud, Mr. Cranmer, sir,” Bryant explained with elephantine sweetness, when they had heard me out. “No charges are being preferred, not at this stage. It’s collaboration we’re after, not warm bodies. You tell us where to find what we’re looking for, we put it back where it came from, everybody goes home and has a nice glass of Honeybrook wine. Know what I mean?”
“No.”
A disjointed interlude followed while Luck produced earlier bankbooks, which differed only in degree from the first. The pattern was clear. Whenever Larry had any substantial money in his account, he drew it in cash. What he did with it remained a mystery. There was a monthly season ticket, still current, for the journey between Bath and Bristol, cost £71. They claimed to have found it in a drawer of the desk in his lecture room. No, I said, I had no idea why Larry should wish to be so much in Bristol. Perhaps for the theatres or the libraries or the women. For a happy moment Luck appeared becalmed. He sat as if winded, mouth open, shoulders rising and falling inside his sweaty shirtsleeves.
“Did Dr. Pettifer ever steal from you at all?” he asked, with that adamant sourness that made him such an unpleasant conversation partner.
“Of course not.”
“Odd, that is. You don’t have a very high opinion of him in other respects. Why are you so sure he wouldn’t steal from you?”
The question was a trick, a prelude to some new onslaught. But not knowing what sort of trick, I had no option but to provide him with a straight answer.
“Dr. Pettifer may be many things, but I do not regard him as a thief,” I said, and had scarcely spoken before Bryant was yelling at me. I thought at first it was a tactic to wake me from my absorption. Then I saw him waving a padded envelope in the air above his head.
&nb
sp; “What do you regard this lot as, then, Mr. Cranmer, sir?”
I heard it before I saw it: Emma’s antique jewellery, rattling and skidding down the table at me, every piece I had bought for her since my first timid offering of a pair of Victorian jet earrings, graduating by way of the three-string pearl collar to the intaglio necklace, the emerald ring, the garnet pendant, and the gold-backed cameo that could have been of Emma herself—all slewed down the table at me like so much dross by the inexpert hand of Detective Inspector Bryant.
I was standing. The jewels lay along the table like a trail, and the trail ended with me. I must have got up quickly, because Luck was standing also, blocking my path to the door. I picked up the intaglio necklace and ran it fearfully through my fingers as if to confirm it was unharmed, though in my mind it was Emma I was touching. I turned her cameo over, then her brooch, her pendant, finally the ring. A babble of Office buzzwords went through my head: linkage . . . spillage . . . interconsciousness. Keep her separate from Larry, I was telling myself. Whatever they do or threaten: Emma stays separate from Larry.
I sat down.
“Recognise any of these items at all by any chance, do we, Mr. Cranmer-sir?” Bryant was asking benignly, like a conjuror who had performed a clever trick.
“Of course I do. I bought them.”
“Who from, sir?”
“Appleby of Wells. How did you come by them?”
“On what precise date did you purchase them, if you don’t mind, from Messrs. Appleby of Wells? We do know you’re a trifle weak on dates overall, but—”
He got no further. I had driven my fist onto the table so hard that the jewellery danced and the tape recorder rose in the air and turned belly-up as it landed.
“Those jewels are Emma’s. Tell me where you got them from. Stop taunting me!”
It is a rare thing when emotion and operational necessity coincide, but they had done so now. Bryant had shed his smile and was studying me with calculation. Perhaps he thought I was about to offer him my confession in exchange for her. Luck sat upright, craning his long head at me.
“Emma?” Bryant repeated thoughtfully. “I don’t think we know an Emma, do we, Oliver? Who would Emma be, sir? Perhaps you could enlighten us.”
“You know very well who she is. The whole village knows. Emma Manzini is my companion. She’s a musician. The jewels are hers. I bought them for her and gave them to her.”
“When?”
“What does it matter when? Over the last year. On special occasions.”
“Foreign, is she?”
“She had an Italian father, who is dead. She is British by birth and was brought up in England. Where did you find them?” I resorted to a wistful fiction. “I’m her common-law husband, Inspector! Tell me what’s going on.”
Bryant had put on horn-rimmed spectacles. I don’t know why they should have shocked me, but they did. They seemed to drain his eyes of the last dregs of human kindliness. His moth-eaten moustache had turned downward in an angry sneer.
“And is Miss Manzini in any way friendly with our Dr. Pettifer at all, Mr. Cranmer, sir?”
“They’ve met. What does it matter? Just tell me where you got her jewellery from!”
“Prepare yourself for a shock, Mr. Cranmer, sir. We obtained your Emma’s jewels from Mr. Edward Appleby of the Market Place in Wells, the selfsame gentleman as sold you the said treasures in the first place. He tried to contact you, but your phone had gone funny. So, fearing the matter might be urgent, he reported it to the Bath police, who, being somewhat short-handed at the time, took no further action.” He had awarded himself the role of storyteller. “Mr. Appleby is doing his rounds of Hatton Garden, you see, calling on his jeweller friends, which is his way. All of a sudden one of them turns round and, knowing that Mr. Appleby deals in the antique variety of jewellery, offers him your Miss Manzini’s necklace—the Roman number, what do they call it? By your left hand there.”
“Intaglio.”
“Thank you. And after offering Mr. Appleby the entirely-o, he offers him the whole works. Everything you see before you. Is that everything you bought for Miss Manzini, sir—the full collection?”
“Yes.”
“And since all dealers know each other, Mr. Appleby asks him where he got the stuff from. The answer is a Dr. Pettifer of Bath. Twenty-two thousand pounds the Doctor obtained for his jewels. Family heirlooms they were, according to him. Inherited from his old mother, now alas passed on. That’s a fair price for this lot, is it— twenty-two thousand pounds?”
“It was a trade price,” I heard myself say. “They were insured for thirty-five.”
“By you?”
“The jewels are recorded as being in Miss Manzini’s possession. I pay the premiums.”
“Has any claim been made at all to an insurance company for the loss of these jewels?”
“Nobody knew they were missing.”
“You mean you didn’t. Could the Doctor or Miss Manzini have made a claim on your behalf?”
“I don’t see how. Ask the insurance company.”
“Thank you, sir, I will,” said Bryant, and wrote down the name and address from my diary. “The Doctor wanted cash for his old mother’s legacy, but the shop in Hatton Garden couldn’t do that for him,” he resumed in his false-friendly voice. “Regulations, you see, sir. The best they could manage was a cheque made out to cash because he said he hadn’t got a bank account. The Doctor then pops up the road and presents it at the jeweller’s bank, collects his loot, and is seen by the jeweller no more. Left his full name behind, though; he had to. Verified by his driving licence, which is rather amusing, considering how many points it’s got against it. Address Bath University. The jeweller rang the registrar’s office for verifica-tion: yes, we have a Mr. Pettifer.”
“When did all this happen?” I said.
How he loved to torture me with his knowing smiles. “That really bothers you, doesn’t it,” he said. “When. You can’t remember dates, but you’re always asking when.” He made a show of relenting. “The Doctor flogged your lady’s jewellery on July twenty-ninth, a Friday.”
Which was roughly when she stopped wearing it, I thought. After Larry’s public lecture, and the curry for two that did or didn’t follow it.
“Where is Miss Manzini, by the way?” Bryant asked.
I had my answer prepared and delivered it with authority. “When last heard of, somewhere between London and Newcastle on a concert tour. She likes to travel with the group that plays her music. She’s their guiding spirit. Where she is at this precise moment, I don’t know. It’s not our way to be in constant touch. I’m sure she will telephone me very soon.”
Now it was Luck’s turn to have his fun with me. He had opened another package, but it seemed to contain nothing but inky notes he had written to himself. I wondered whether he was married and where he lived—if he lived anywhere outside the shiny, disinfected corridors of his trade.
“Did Emma happen to inform you that her jewellery was missing at all?”
“No, Mr. Luck, Miss Manzini did not.”
“Why not? Are you trying to tell us your Emma’s been shy of thirty-five thousand quid’s worth of jewellery for a couple of months and hasn’t even bothered to mention it?”
“I’m saying Miss Manzini may not have noticed that the jewels were missing.”
“And she’s been around, has she, these last months? I mean around you. It’s not that she’s been touring all that time.”
“Miss Manzini has been at Honeybrook throughout the entire summer.”
“Nevertheless you did not have the smallest inkling that one day Emma had her jewellery, and the next day Emma was without it.”
“None whatever.”
“You didn’t notice that she wasn’t wearing the stuff, for instance? That might have been a clue, mightn’t it?”
“Not in her case.”
“Why not?”
“Miss Manzini is capricious, like most artists. One day she w
ill appear in her finery, then whole weeks can go by when the notion of wearing something valuable is anathema to her. The reasons can be many. Her work—something has depressed her—she is in pain from her back.”
My reference to Emma’s back had produced a pregnant silence.
“Injured, was it, her back?” Bryant enquired solicitously.
“I’m afraid it was.”
“Oh dear. How did that happen, then?”
“I understand she was manhandled while taking part in a peaceful demonstration.”
“There could be two views about that, though, couldn’t there?”
“I’m sure there could.”
“Bitten any more policemen recently, has she?”
I refused to answer.
Luck resumed. “And you don’t ask her: Emma, why aren’t you wearing your ring? Or your necklace? Or your brooch? Or your earrings . . . for instance?”
“No, I don’t, Mr. Luck. Miss Manzini and I don’t speak to each other that way.”
I was being pompous and knew it. Luck had that effect on me. “All right. So you don’t talk to each other,” he blurted. “Same as you don’t know where she is.” He appeared to be losing his temper. “All right. In your highly personal, highly privileged Treasury opinion, how does your friend Dr. Lawrence Pettifer, in July this year, come to be flogging off your Emma’s jewellery at two-thirds what you gave for it, to a dealer in Hatton Garden, claiming the jewels came from his mother, when in fact they came from you, via Emma?”
“The jewellery was Miss Manzini’s to dispose of as she wished. If she had given it to the milkman I could not have raised a finger.” I saw a means to strike at him and seized it gratefully. “But surely your Mr. Guppy has already provided you with your solution, Mr. Luck?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Wasn’t it July when Guppy claims he saw Pettifer approach my house? A Sunday? There’s your burglar for you. Pettifer approaches the house and finds it empty. On Sundays there are no staff around. Miss Manzini and I have gone out for lunch. He forces the window, enters the house, goes to her apartment, and helps himself to the jewellery.”