Death in the City, page 23
*
We had little to do with the collection of evidence for the trials of Ingard, Lennis, Osnafeld and half a dozen of their various associates. Once they had been arrested they were so busy trying to accuse each other that they convicted themselves. The abject failure of Vivian Carolan’s Neo-Fascist Socialism left none of the conspirators with any hope of a political swing in their favour, and the evidence of financial fraud was damning. Carolan’s movement simply fell apart – there was a healthy upsurge of national feeling against way-out movements committed to violence, and the minuscule blood-letting at Winter Marsh brought a lot of people to their senses. Recognising this, the Government wisely pursued only the major conspirators, and was content to let the small fry go. Mrs Carolan was never brought to trial. Among the practices which she and her husband copied from the Nazis was the precaution of equipping themselves with tiny capsules of hydrocyanic acid, which could be concealed in their teeth. Carolan had not needed his. When it became clear that she was going to be charged and removed to less comfortable quarters in prison, Mrs Carolan did use hers. She had full access to lawyers by then, and she did one more extraordinary thing: she added a codicil to her will, leaving the Cezanne in her drawing room to me!
*
I knew nothing about this until I had a letter from the lawyers some months later – it came on the day that Ingard and his gang were sentenced at the Old Bailey to terms of imprisonment that would keep them in gaol for most of the rest of their lives.
Pusey had invited Seddon and me to a small dinner party at his flat – the others were Sir Geoffrey Gillington, the Foreign Office man, and, I was delighted to see, James Henniker. Sensitivity in things like this is among Sir Edmund’s nicer characteristics.
Inevitably we discussed the case. ‘I thought at one time they would probably be hanged – there is still capital punishment in Britain for treason,’ said the Foreign Office man. ‘I’m a little surprised they weren’t charged with treason.’
‘I am not privy to the Cabinet’s discussions,’ said Sir Edmund, ‘but I understand that some Ministers were in favour of invoking the law of treason, and of letting the law take its course. I think the final decision not to was wise. I believe it was the late Sir Winston Churchill who observed, “The grass grows quickly over the battlefield – over the scaffold, never.” Ingard and Co would have been distasteful as martyrs – and if they’d been hanged they’d certainly have been seen as martyrs by some people. As it was, they were properly shown up for the nasty bunch of crooks they were. I thought counsel for the Crown did well in emphasising all the time that it was a criminal trial, not a political one.’
‘Would you regard the Carolans as just plain crooks?’ I asked.
‘The Carolans, perhaps mercifully, were not on trial. There was plenty of crime in what they did – Mrs Carolan was undoubtedly prepared at least to acquiesce in her father’s murder, if the suggestion didn’t originally come from her. But I would agree that they are not quite in the same galley as Ingard and Co. Vivian Carolan, I think, was mad. He hadn’t really any deep political ideas – he had a sort of guilt-complex about his own family’s place in the sun, he was a powerful orator, and I think he just loved to have people cheering him. He wanted power, and the claptrap he preached seemed to help in getting it. Some people will always respond to the primitive call, “Here’s a stranger – knock him on the head” – it’s one of the nastiest of our atavistic human inheritances.’
‘Did he go personally to Winter Marsh because he couldn’t get in touch with his wife?’
‘We can’t know. Certainly it may have been one reason – that’s why it was so vitally necessary to prevent Mrs Carolan from being able to answer the telephone. But I think he’d probably have been there anyway. It was the headquarters of his private army, and if the Agnes had delivered her load it would have been quite a formidable armed force. There must have been other deliveries to Winter Marsh – they had a substantial arsenal there as it was.’
‘From which they supplied anyone who was ready to pay for guns. It was a horrible business.’
‘From which Ingard and Co were prepared to supply guns – I doubt if Carolan was mixed up in that side of the business.’
‘Mrs Carolan?’
‘God knows. Personally, I’d give her the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t know. She was far cleverer than her husband. I think her real tragedy was not being born a boy, to succeed to the Stavanger ships. She’d have been a good master mariner. In a generation or so when women have achieved more real equality of opportunity, society will probably benefit from women like her. As things are, she had to work through other people. She certainly wanted power – more passionately, I suspect, than her husband.’
‘Do you know that before she killed herself, she added a codicil to her will, leaving me the Cezanne in her drawing room?’
‘Peter! You certainly have a way with women! Is the bequest legal?’
‘It appears to be – I had a letter about it from her lawyers this morning. Of course I’m not going to take it – I’m going to give it to the National Gallery. But I don’t like your bit about my having a way with women. You know perfectly well that I was about the world’s most unsuccessful husband.’
‘That’s not quite the same thing . . . but I’m sorry, Peter, it was a remark in poor taste.’
‘I find it more pathetic than anything else.’
‘Yes, but psychologically it’s interesting. It fits in with what I feel about her character – a thoroughly ruthless woman who had to work through men, and who despised most of them. You knocked all her plans to pieces – and in a way she respected you for doing it.’
Seddon, bless him, came to my rescue. ‘They were coming unstuck, anyway, because of the collapse of the Ingard empire,’ he said.
‘Yes, there’s not enough gold in Fort Knox to finance a big property company once it starts to lose money,’ observed the banker. ‘The profits from the arms deals were huge, but still not enough to make up for the decline in property values. Irwin Osnafeld chose a bad moment to put in his demand for money.’
‘I’ve never been quite clear what it was actually for,’ Henniker said.
‘No, and it didn’t come out at the trial, because in the nature of things it would have been very hard to prove,’ Seddon said. ‘Actually, I’m quite sure it was for nothing – just plain blackmail. Fortunately there were enough earlier dealings to convict Osnafeld – he undoubtedly financed arms deals before they got onto the fraud on the Belgians. As we know, they never paid for those arms, and didn’t intend to pay. I suspect that Osnafeld found out what was happening, and demanded his cut as the price of silence. And that was why his demand had to be met.’
‘I wonder what would have happened if the plans for building a new London airport on Foulness had gone ahead?’ asked the banker. ‘Buying Winter Marsh was a reasonable investment at the time.’
‘Thousands of suburban boxes on the marshes instead of a depot for gun-running . . . I’m not at all sure that the outcome might not have been worse. As things are, at least the wildfowl are undisturbed,’ Pusey observed.
‘What happens to Andrew Stavanger?’ asked the Foreign Office man. ‘He did well by his country, and he seems to have lost everything.’
‘The death of his daughter must be a permanent scar – for the rest, he may even begin a rather happier chapter of his life,’ I said. ‘Thanks to Sir Geoffrey’s vigilance, he doesn’t lose his £300,000. The bank acted on a forged signature, and has made no bones about accepting full responsibility. It has other claims against the wreck of the Ingard empire, of course, and what it will recover in the end, I don’t know. Stavanger himself, and the country generally, owe a lot to Sir Geoffrey. The Ingard liquidator has agreed to sell what’s left of the shipping company back to Stavanger. He has that splendid Miss Macdonald to comfort him – I understand that they are going to be married. It’s good to see her loyalty rewarded. They’ll have only three ships to start with, but Stavanger and Miss Macdonald between them can make a go of anything.’
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 Death in the City, why not continue reading The Peter Blair Mysteries . . .
Death in the Caribbean
When the Caribbean island of Nueva is struck by an earthquake - with near fatal consequences - Peter Blair is suspicious that this supposedly natural disaster might have a very unnatural origin - especially when the body of a government scientist is discovered in caves underneath the island.
Joined by the beautiful and intelligent Ruth Caval, Peter is determined to dig up the root of the mystery. But this is no ordinary murder case: devious political forces are at play, and as the Prime Minister himself gets involved, Peter is shocked to discover the identity of the authorities' number one suspect: him.
Can Peter solve the mystery as a wanted man - or will this case prove a step too far?
Featuring murder, corruption and a dazzling setting, J.R.L. Anderson's Death in the Caribbean is a gem of 1970s English crime.
Death in the Greenhouse
Old Mr Quenenden seems not to have an enemy in the world: having retired to a cottage in Berkshire, he leads an idyllic life breeding tropical plants. Which is why it comes as a complete shock when his body is discovered in his greenhouse - murdered.
In London, Peter Blair is hard at work on his own investigation into top-level blackmail in the City, but he quickly realises that the two cases have more in common than meets the eye.
A complex botanical clue means Peter must dig deep to stand a chance of solving the crime - but do the answers lie on home soil after all?
Wonderfully crafted yet grippingly tense, Death in the Greenhouse is a vintage J.R.L. Anderson mystery.
First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Victor Gollancz Ltd
This ebook edition published in 2015 by
Zaffre Publishing
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Copyright © J.R.L. Anderson, 1977
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: 978-1-7857-6010-5
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Zaffre Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing Fiction, a Bonnier Publishing company
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JRL Anderson, Death in the City
