XII
When Charles got back to Hereford Road, there was a Swedish scrawl on the note pad-JERRY VENERAL RING. After a few moments’ deciphering he rang Gerald Venables’ number.
‘Charles, look, we can’t talk on the phone.’ Gerald was obviously taking all the detective bit to heart, and entering into it with the spirit of a child’s game of Cops and Robbers. ‘Listen, I’ve found out about the “you-know-what”. We must meet somewhere and talk.’
‘OK. Where and when?’
‘Two o’clock. The back bar of the Red Lion in Waverton Street.’
‘Why? Is it quiet there?’
‘No, but you can be overheard in quiet places. The Red Lion’s so noisy, nobody’ll hear a word,’ said Gerald with complete seriousness.
‘All right, Peewit.’
‘What do you mean-Peewit?’
‘Code-name. I’ll be wearing a carnation. What’s the password?’ Charles put the phone down, imagining the expression on Gerald’s face.
He was out of costume and looked like Charles Paris when he arrived in the back bar of the Red Lion. Squeezing past the milling lunch time crowds he found himself pressed closely between Gerald and a rather busty Australian. ‘Who’s she?’ he hissed.
‘No idea. Where’s your carnation?’
‘That was a joke.’
‘Oh.’ Gerald sounded genuinely disappointed.
‘Well, you recognise me, don’t you?’ Gerald was forced to admit he did. ‘So, what gives?’ Charles shouted above the din.
‘Ssh.’
‘What gives?’ Softer.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
Eventually, as the lunch time crowds subsided officewards and the pub was left to a few loud tourists, they found a quiet corner and sat down with their drinks. Charles had a pint and Gerald a dry martini (Charles almost expected him to ask for it ‘shaken not stirred’). The solicitor looked round with conspicuous caution.
‘The will is very interesting,’ he hissed. ‘Well, not so much the will as the whole situation. Basically, Nigel gets everything, but he’s got a lot of it already.
‘Marius Steen made over his three houses and about 75 per cent of his other assets to his son some years ago. You know, the old gift inter vivos dodge, to avoid estate duty.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know the old gift inter vivos dodge. I’m very stupid about the law.’
‘So’s everyone. That’s what lawyers thrive on. What it basically means is that if someone makes a gift during his lifetime and doesn’t die for a given period, that gift is free of estate duty, or partly free. There’s a sliding scale. If the donor dies more than seven years after the gift, there’s no duty at all payable. If he dies in the seventh year the whole duty is reduced by 6o per cent, if in the sixth by 30 per cent, and in the fifth 15 per cent.’ Gerald was talking very fast and fluently, as he always did on the subject of money, but Charles reckoned he had got the gist. ‘When was the gift made, Gerald?’
‘Nearly six years ago.’
‘So Nigel had absolutely no motive to kill his father. In fact, it was in his interests that the old man stayed alive.’
‘Ah. That’s it, is it?’ Gerald’s eyes narrowed in the manner of a thousand television thrillers. ‘I think you’d better tell me the whole story, Charles.’
So he got the whole story, and when it was spelled out, the catalogue of suspicions and circumstantial evidence did sound pretty feeble. Gerald was clearly disappointed. ‘That all hinges on Nigel Steen having a financial motive to kill his father, and, as you just observed, he very positively didn’t have such a motive.’
‘And it wouldn’t have made any difference even if Marius Steen remarried?’
‘It would have made a difference in the disposition of that part of the estate which hadn’t been given away. But the gift of the rest couldn’t be revoked. He had given away all rights in the property. You know, the freeholds were made over by deeds of gift by way of conveyance, and the-’
‘Please talk English.’
‘All right. Basically, all of the property is Nigel’s-exclusively. Marius could not have any beneficial interest in any part of it. In other words, he couldn’t benefit from the property or the dividends on the shares, or any part of the gift.’
‘So what did he live on?’
‘Interest from the remaining shares. Still quite a substantial amount, but only a tiny part of the whole.’
‘And how could he still live in the houses?’
‘He actually paid rent.’
‘So if Nigel had wanted to, he could have turfed his father out of his own houses.’
‘Yes. Because they weren’t his own houses. They were Nigel’s.’
‘And what about the business? He still seemed in charge there.’
‘Only in an advisory capacity. He made no profit from any of it.’
‘Good God. So there again Nigel could have ousted him.’
‘Could have done, but wasn’t daft. He knew the business depended completely on his father’s skill and instinct. No, Steen had organised it all very meticulously to avoid death duties. Nigel has been an incredibly wealthy young man for years.’
‘How wealthy?’
‘Certainly worth more than a million.’
‘Shit.’ Charles was impressed. ‘And if none of this had been done what sort of death duties would have been charged?’
‘80 per cent.’
‘Blimey. The Government gets its pound of flesh, doesn’t it. But Steen didn’t go the full seven years.’
‘No, he died just before the six came up. So estate duty is only going to be reduced by 30 per cent. Makes a nasty hole in Nigel’s assumed possessions.’
‘And certainly rules out any motive for murder.’
‘Yes. The only motive for killing Marius Steen could he sheer bloody-mindedness on somebody’s part-a desire to make things really difficult for Nigel. Is there anyone around who hates him that much?’
Though everyone seemed to despise Nigel, Charles hadn’t met anyone whose feeling seemed strong enough to amount to hatred. It was Marius Steen who inspired violent emotions, not his son. ‘And there’s no mention of any legacy to Jacqui in the will?’
‘None at all.’
‘Hmm. I wonder what Marius Steen’s letter meant.’
Charles felt depressed as he walked through Soho to Archer Street that evening. For a start there was the gloomy news he had to pass on to Jacqui. And then London itself was depressing. It was cold and dark. Display lighting was out, as Edward Heath began his schoolmasterish campaign of mass deprivation, keeping the whole country in until the miners owned up that they were in the wrong. Time would show that the campaign had misjudged the reactions of the British public. Shops were dark, cold and uninviting. Familiar landmarks, like the neons of theatres and cinemas, disappeared. It was like the blackout, which Charles could suddenly remember with great clarity. A fifteen-year-old in grey flannel wandering around London in school holidays with an adolescent’s apocalyptic vision, praying that he would lose his virginity before the bombs came and blasted him to oblivion.
He took a couple of wrong turnings in the gloom and was angry when he reached Jacqui’s flat. He prepared an account of the will situation to break to her brutally. There was no point in kid gloves; she had to know sooner or later.
But he didn’t get the chance to drop his thunderbolt. Jacqui opened the door in a state of high excitement, more colour and animation in her face than he had seen since the Steen affair started. ‘Charles, come in. Bartlemas and O’Rourke are here!’
William Bartlemas and Kevin O’Rourke were a legend in the world of British theatre. They were a middle-aged couple, whose main activity was the collection of memorabilia of the two great actors, Edmund Kean and William Macready. Bartlemas had an enormous private income, and the pair of them lived in a tall Victorian house in Islington, which was filled to the brim with play-bills, prints, prompt copies, figurines and other souvenirs of their two heroes. They identified with them totally. Bartlemas was Kean, and O’Rourke Macready. In theory they were writing a book on the actors, but long since the fascination of collection for its own sake had taken over and work on the collation of evidence ceased. They spent all their time travelling round the British Isles, visiting auctions and antique shops, following hints and rumours, searching for more and more relics of their idols. But they always rushed back to London for the first night of every West End show. It was a point of honour that, if they were in the country, they’d be there, sitting in the middle of the fifth row of the stalls, both resplendent in Victorian evening dress, clutching shiny top hats and silver-topped canes. Quite what their role in British theatre was, was hard to define, but they knew everyone, everyone knew them and managements even came to regard their presence on a first night as an essential good luck charm. In the camper and more superstitious regions of the theatre world you’d often hear the sentence, ‘My dear, Bartlemas and O’Rourke weren’t there. The notices’ll be up within the week’.