The Nine-Spoked Wheel, page 20
‘Had you met those groups before in investigations relevant to this case?’
‘Yes. The blood of the late Mr Clayton belonged to one, the blood of the late Mr Korsky to the other.’
There are times when the wisest course for counsel is to say nothing. Sir Joslin and Mr Borrowdale both came to the conclusion that this was one of them. Both indicated that they did not wish to cross-examine the inspector.
The next witness was another sensation. It was Mr Tothurst, who had been taken to the mortuary at Milford Haven to see Dr Arbolent’s body.
‘Had you ever seen him before?’
‘Yes. He bought a hammer in my shop.’
‘Is this the hammer?’ (Produced.)
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because of that small split in the handle. I knocked 50p off the price because of it.’
Sir Joslin rose. ‘Really, Mr Tothurst! Dr Arbolent was a very well known man, and you must have seen many photographs of him in newspapers. How can you possibly be sure that this was the man you met briefly in your shop, now several months ago?’
Mr Tothurst was unshaken. ‘Because I am,’ he said.
After this, the detailed forensic evidence seemed dull. Then came the final sensation. The coroner said, ‘I wish now to recall Inspector Revers.’
Revers returned to the witness box, and the coroner asked the court usher to give him a document.
‘Have you seen this document before?’ The coroner asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In the breast pocket of Dr Arbolent’s coat, after his death.’
Revers stood down, and was replaced by a man who said that he was the manager of a bank where Dr Arbolent had an account. He was asked if he could identify the signature at the end of the document. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is that of our customer Dr Ragmund Arbolent.’
The coroner then proceeded to read out the document. It was Dr Arbolent’s last letter. After doing so, he summed up, and the jury retired. They were out only ten minutes. Their foreman said they had come unanimously to the conclusion that Paul Clayton had met his death by murder.
‘You are not obliged to say more,’ said the coroner, ‘but if you have reached any further conclusion about who seems to you to have been responsible for his murder, you may add this to your verdict, if you wish.’
The foreman said that they did so wish. ‘We think there can be no doubt that the murderer was Dr Arbolent.’
Mr Borrowdale made a final effort on behalf of the Sunday Examiner.
‘May I say,’ he observed, ‘that this inquest can properly be concerned only with the death of the late Paul Clayton. It can have no bearing on the authenticity or otherwise of the pictures and inscriptions discovered by Dr Arbolent in his remarkable archaeological career.’
‘You may say so by all means, Mr Borrowdale,’ said the coroner, ‘but whether anybody would now accept your statement is another matter. Fortunately, it is not one on which I need express an opinion.’
*
There was no disposition to accept Mr Borrowdale’s statement. The media of mass communications present news – and, indeed, see news – through a simplifying glass as well as a magnifying one. Whatever was genuine in Dr Arbolent’s work, and the tombs undoubtedly were, was ignored, and the man in death became larger than he had ever been in life, a villain of such monstrosity that all the millennia since his lost civilisation can scarcely have held his like. As he was dead, there was no inhibiting risk of libel, and the unmasking of his frauds made almost a better story than belief in them. Moreover, the Press generally was very much annoyed: it felt that it had been fooled, but only partly by Dr Arbolent. There was much criticism of the Sunday Examiner for its promotion of the story, its readiness to accept all Dr Arbolent’s statements, and its use of copyright protection to inhibit challenging examination of them by other experts. Fleet Street’s motto is, of course, that dog doesn’t eat dog, but that is not to say that one dog does not enjoy giving another one a sharp nip.
And there was substance in the complaints. The public mood turned to counting the cost of Dr Arbolent and the Sunday Examiner, and the sum was horrifying: two lives directly taken to prevent exposure of his frauds, six more lost at sea with an untried vessel forced to sail as a publicity stunt. The enormous kick that the public itself got out of the story was forgotten: Members of Parliament, bishops and retired admirals seethed with indignation, and there were demands that the Examiner’s editor should be put on trial for manslaughter of the drowned members of Lady Penelope’s crew. This was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who concluded that lamentable as the whole matter had been there did not appear to be any legal grounds for pursuing the editor: morally, the newspaper could be held to bear a heavy weight of responsibility, but those who died were all volunteers, who had demonstrably been keen to take part in the enterprise. Roger Freemantle became something of a public hero. He had shown coolness and fine seamanship in a situation made appallingly difficult by Dr Arbolent’s prescribed limitations on Lady Penelope’s equipment, and it was reckoned – with some justice – that the fact that there were any survivors at all was largely due to him. Paul Clayton also attracted much admiration, though for him, alas, the acclaim was posthumous. Subscriptions to a Clayton Memorial Fund poured in, and a considerable sum was handed over to the University of Cambridge to establish a Clayton Lectureship in Archaeology.
The Sunday Examiner did what it could to make amends by giving large grants to the families of those lost in the shipwreck. All were unmarried, but brothers, sisters and parents had their lives helped in various ways. Money could not make up for the loss of vivid young life, but at least something came out of the tragedy to benefit the living. Clayton’s memory was cared for by his Memorial Fund. Feelings about Jan Korsky were more mixed. He had been brutally murdered, and he merited pity as a waif left by the war, but he had used his skill to assist Dr Arbolent to perpetrate his frauds. Did he, however, know what he was really doing? It was an unanswerable question, and as he had no dependants there seemed no need for anything officially to be done about him. But the outcome of his death was not quite nothing. Revers and the police surgeon still felt strongly about the Kranzes, and the doctor wrote privately to the editor of the Sunday Examiner pointing out that the old couple had been largely supported by Korsky, and asking if some ex gratia payment could be made to help them. The Examiner responded with a sum so generous that it enabled a bungalow to be bought for them. So out of that evil also came some good.
*
To celebrate their engagement, Marryat and Juliet took John and Diana Revers out to dinner. They all avoided discussing the case during the meal, but over coffee afterwards Revers said, ‘I wonder what would have happened if Diana had not made me go to bed for a few hours instead of leaving at once for Fishguard.’
‘You’d have arrested Arbolent before he sailed, and I suppose there’d have been no shipwreck,’ said Marryat.
‘Yes. But Grey and I were both tired. Suppose we’d crashed?’
‘Then the shipwreck would presumably have happened as it did, and you and I would not have been around to rescue Juliet and the others . . . But the “ifs” of history are a profitless speculation. You can say that Diana’s intervention may have cost six lives, but you can equally well say that it saved six. It happened, and as things turned out it helped to secure justice. If Arbolent had ended up in the sea his body might never have been found, no one would have known of his suicide, and his confession would never have come to light.’
There was a longish silence. Juliet squeezed Marryat’s hand. Then she asked, ‘Do you think Dr Arbolent would have been convicted if he had been brought to trial?’
‘Probably,’ said Revers. ‘Mr Tothurst’s evidence about selling him the hammer was damning. He was a good witness, and he’d have stood up to any cross-examination. And the forensic evidence about the cigarette end, and Korsky’s shoes, would have been very hard to explain away.’
‘Yes, but Arbolent’s counsel could have argued that none of this had any direct relationship with him,’ put in Marryat. ‘He might even have admitted buying the hammer – there wasn’t any proof that he’d used it. He could have said that it had been lost, or stolen from him.’
‘God knows . . . I think he would have been convicted. You’re leaving out the effect of the trial on him. Even without knowing that he was going to be arrested, he broke down and wrote his confession.’
‘For an exceptionally clever man he did some exceptionally stupid things,’ Marryat said.
‘Yes. But surely that was the whole weakness of his character. He had a wonderful imagination, but he could see things only in global perspectives, as it were. He had no tactical sense. The idea of making out that Paul Clayton was killed by a falling stone was brilliant, but he made mistake after mistake over details. The placing of the body just didn’t make sense, and the broken timber support was preposterous. It was the same with the cremation urn. I didn’t know enough about it to spot that the engraving had been done after firing the clay, but any expert was bound to notice it – as he himself realised in the end. At the time, though none of these things mattered to him. He was concerned with the picture as a whole. He made a picture of a man killed by a falling stone – I’ve often wondered whether he got the whole idea from that old fourteenth century tragedy mentioned in the guide books. He made a picture of a vanished civilisation. If it looked all right to him, it was all right. If other people didn’t see what they were meant to look at, they were stupid. And in a way, he was right. I didn’t become suspicious about Paul Clayton’s death because I’m clever – I approached it as a practical, plodding policeman. He was far and away cleverer than I am, but he had no patience with my sort of mind. He was irritated by detail. There are lots of things we shall never know. What, for instance, happened to Paul Clayton’s torch? He must have had a torch – one of the things that bothered me from the start was that there wasn’t one. He must, I think, have dropped it when he was struck by the hammer. If Arbolent had left it where it fell, it would have been quite natural. But he didn’t see a torch in his picture, so he didn’t leave it there for me. He was so obsessed with what he wanted the rest of us to see that it seems never to have occurred to him that our eyes might be different.’
‘I suppose he was really mad,’ said Diana.
Her husband considered this. ‘I suppose so, in some sense, anyway,’ he said at last. ‘But he was also exceedingly bad. I’ve never been able to share the view that no one is ever to blame for his actions, that everything is the fault of upbringing, or society, or something else. No one forced him to carry out his frauds – I think he enjoyed them very much. No one forced him to kill Paul Clayton . . .’
‘Poor Ruth,’ said Marryat. ‘I keep thinking about her. She’s left with nothing . . .’
‘Well, she’s going to have a nice sister-in-law,’ Diana said practically. ‘We’re all being much too gloomy. This is supposed to be a happy party.’
‘Of course it is,’ said Juliet. ‘But . . . but . . . Oh, Tony, if it hadn’t been for that dreadful man, we’d never have met.’ And she burst into tears.
Marryat put his arm round her. ‘And the Kranzes wouldn’t have a nice new bungalow, and there’d be no Paul Clayton lectureship at Cambridge,’ he said. ‘My darling, the ifs of history really are profitless.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.R.L. Anderson was an author of fourteen mystery stories and numerous works of non-fiction. He was a journalist at the Guardian for many years, before retiring to pursue his career as an author. He had a life-long interest in sailing and adventure, which results in many of his novels (as his original author biography from the 1970s puts it) ending ‘with an exciting sea chase in a small boat’.
If you enjoyed The Nine-Spoked Wheel, why not try one of our other J.R.L. Anderson titles . . .
Redundancy Pay
Having recently been made redundant, thirty-one year old David Grendon relocates to the coast to become a fisherman. But when a priceless gold chalice, bestowed by Sir Francis Drake, goes missing, all fingers point to the new man in town.
Fighting to clear his own name, David is joined by Elizabeth Danvers, the rector's daughter, and together they set sail to follow a suspicious group of local divers. Little do they know, there are more than just secrets hidden down in the murky depths of the sea . . .
Filled with lies, betrayal and a heart-stopping ending, J.R.L Anderson's, Redundancy Pay, will keep you guessing until the very end.
Reckoning in Ice
When accountant Richard Garston is summoned to Scotland to meet with the chairman of a multi-million pound company that he is auditing, he has no idea of the danger that lies ahead.
Paul Villeneuve, the scientist and chairman at International Metals, believes somebody is out to steal his latest discovery. And he wants Richard to prove it.
Enlisting the help of Villeneuve’s beautiful daughter, Paula, they set sail for Greenland to follow up on a lead. But with danger lurking round every corner, Richard must keep all of his wits about him and track down the culprit, before the culprit tracks him down.
Brimming with greed, murder and a hair-raising showdown, J.R.L. Anderson’s, Reckoning in Ice, is a crime-lover’s must-read.
First published in Great Britain in 1975 by Victor Gollancz Ltd
This ebook edition published in 2015 by
Zaffre Publishing
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www.zaffrebooks.co.uk
Copyright © J.R.L. Anderson, 1975
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-7857-6017-4
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Zaffre Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing Fiction, a Bonnier Publishing company
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JRL Anderson, The Nine-Spoked Wheel
