Death in the City, page 5
He had the northern half of the sheet open, and it made me feel worse, for it showed the estuary, Foulness Island, and the junction of the Crouch with the River Roach – just the area where I wanted to potter in Joanna. ‘Here are the Maplin Sands, off Foulness Island, where at one time we were going to have a great new airport complex,’ he said. ‘Well, maybe the wild duck and the other birds have gained. That doesn’t concern us now. What I want you to look at is this area to the north-west of Foulness Island, the stretch called Winter Marsh. It’s not really part of Foulness – if you look closely you can see that it’s cut off from Foulness proper by a sort of strait linking the rivers Roach and Crouch. But it’s the same Thames estuary country, not all marsh, some of it quite good land, but crisscrossed by creeks and swatchways, and interspersed with saltings. That’s where the army’s old infantry training ground use to be. If we were the Dutch, no doubt we’d have reclaimed it long ago.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, here’s the old Winter Marsh depot. It’s abandoned now, and might have been a huge new town if politics and economics had gone differently.’
‘On the whole I’m glad it’s not. I don’t know what progress is, but I don’t think that would really have been progress,’ I said.
‘Maybe not. To be practical rather than philosophical, this is the place that’s upset the Ingard empire. More accurately, it’s made things worse, for it was pretty seriously upset anyway. Being government land, it was sold by tender. Ingard, guessing wrong about the airport, put in an enormous tender to be sure of getting the land. Even the Treasury thought he was paying a ridiculous price, but that was up to him. Now he can do nothing with it. As you can see, there are virtually no roads. He put in some pretty hopeless plans for housing development – it would have been catastrophically expensive – and, as Sir Geoffrey told us, they were turned down. The next news came from Rome.
‘Rome may seem to have no very direct connection with Foulness, but a good deal of international business is done there. In a rather roundabout way the commercial section of the Foreign Office heard that the Ingard land on Foulness was being offered to a group headed by a man called Felix Varsov. Now we know a little about Mr Varsov, and he is not the most estimable of characters. He has been mixed up in a number of shady deals in the Middle East. His nationality is obscure, but at different times he has been known to use both an American and a Belgian passport. He is believed to have acted as a kind of broker for that dangerous spy ring that was broken up in Holland last year. Now I don’t suppose that even Sir Geoffrey knows this, but Irwin Osnafeld, the payee of that £300,000 cheque, was at one time an associate of his. Osnafeld is a British subject, a financier of sorts who has sailed very close to the wind on a number of occasions, but there has never been enough evidence to proceed against him.
‘Now, why is the Ingard group paying Osnafeld £300,000 when, if our other information is correct, Varsov, or Osnafeld on behalf of Varsov, might be expected to be paying Ingard? And what does Varsov want with land on Foulness? It is a sensitive area, well placed for keeping an eye on anything that happens in the Thames, and, seaward, in the North Sea. I don’t like it. From the present state of the Ingard bank account it looks as if the deal hasn’t – or hasn’t yet – gone through. And the cheque to Osnafeld suggests that something very odd is going on. It is highly important that we should know what. And that, Peter, is your job.’
‘That makes much more sense,’ I said. ‘And I win over you in one way – I’m going to have at least a weekend in Joanna. I’m going to have a look at Winter Marsh. I can do it easily from the Crouch, and old Joanna will attract no sort of attention. I’ll report to Sir Geoffrey Gillington at four o’clock on Monday afternoon.’
* See Death in the Desert (Gollancz).
† See Death in the North Sea (Gollancz).
III
WINTER MARSH
I SPENT MOST of Friday morning having a long talk with Paul Seddon – Assistant Commissioner Seddon, who is our department’s special representative at New Scotland Yard. Seddon knew more about the Ingard-Stavanger case than I did, because, being an ex-chief of the Fraud Squad, he’d been consulted about it before it came to us, and had, in fact, directed the preliminary police inquiries. ‘It’s certainly an odd business, Peter,’ he said. ‘On the face of things it should be an ordinary police inquiry – and not a very difficult one – to find Andrew Stavanger, or, if he is abroad, at least to discover where he is. But it’s like digging in treacle – you get nowhere. And the Irwin Osnafeld link is highly interesting. It’s hard to see what on earth the Ingard group would be paying £300,000 to Osnafeld for. He’s not a property dealer – at least, not in any way we’ve come across. And at a time when the Ingard lot are pressed for money, he’s about the last person you’d have thought they’d go to any trouble over. He’s not likely to sue.’
‘Who, exactly, is Irwin Osnafeld?’
‘Hard to say. He’s in business as an import-export dealer – quite a substantial business. Buys and sells anything, from the odd tanker-load of cut-price petrol to the whole output of washing machines from some factory that’s going bust. On the export side, he specialises in bankrupt stock – at least, it’s nominally for export, but we suspect that a good deal of it comes back to the home market at ten times the price. We also suspect that other parts of his business are even less above board. He was probably mixed up in disposing of the pictures stolen in that big robbery from the Duke of Suffolk’s place, and there’ve been other things. But we’ve never managed to get hold of any real evidence against him. He’s a very canny bird.’
‘Sir Edmund described him as a financier of sorts.’
‘You could say that. He was behind that very nasty business of the Indian Ocean Bank – that was the nearest he got to coming unstuck, but the thing was so complicated with nominees in the Caribbean and nominees of other nominees in Hong Kong that he got away with it. But that sort of finance is not quite his cup of tea. He likes to deal in physical things – things he can touch.’
‘I suppose he could have lent money to Ingard, and been pressing for payment.’
‘It’s possible, of course. But I can’t see anyone as shrewd as Osnafeld lending money to Ingard. The Ingards of this world live on the savings of elderly clerks and retired schoolmasters – and then get helped out by respectable banks because of the suffering they cause when they crash. The puzzling thing to me is how a man like Stavanger ever came to be mixed up with him.’
‘I wish you’d take part in the special audit instead of me. You’d be infinitely better.’
‘No good, Peter – I’ve been in court in far too many fraud cases. Someone would be sure to recognise me. Besides, you have a way of chatting innocently to people. It’s no good pretending you haven’t.’
‘Well, I’ll just be living on your doorstep.’
‘Better come home, then, instead of here. You don’t know what you may be up against.’
I was not greatly comforted by my talk with Seddon. It seemed that I was being sent to fish in very muddy waters – and without knowing what bait to use, or what sort of fish I was to try to catch. Seddon’s remark that I shouldn’t try to get in touch with him at Scotland Yard set me thinking. I had no idea what my activities as an auditor might involve, and I might need an address. There was no reason why I shouldn’t live in my chambers in the Temple – but I lived there as Colonel Blair. If I was going to be an auditor as Peter Mottram, it might be better to give Mottram an address of his own. So I went to that big block of service flats in Peel Square, Chelsea, and engaged one of their self-contained one-room flats for a fortnight. Peel Square flats are really a sort of superior hotel, but they offer a slightly more permanent-sounding address than a hotel. It was expensive, but as I was giving up my holiday I saw no reason why the department shouldn’t pay. The Peel Square room had a telephone, which was also useful. Sir Edmund was out when I got back to the office, so I gave my new name and address to Rosemary and went back to the Temple to collect some kit for my weekend with Joanna.
*
My mooring belonged to a small boatyard near Fambridge, about six miles above Burnham. It had the disadvantage of drying out, but Joanna took the ground easily, and was happy enough on the mud. It suited me, because the yard kept an eye on Joanna, and I could leave my car there. Also, there was a pleasant inn about a quarter of a mile away where I could get a room if the tide – in the way of tides – served at some merciless hour of the early morning.
That evening I was all right – Joanna would be afloat in the late afternoon, and I could get away before dark. There wasn’t much to do. I kept Joanna in commission, her food locker in the small cuddy where I both cooked and slept well stocked with keeping-stores, and she had a good reserve of fuel for the outboard. All I had to do was to ferry myself out to her in the inflatable dinghy, with a jerrican of water and a bag of fresh vegetables, eggs, and some rashers of bacon.
It was one of those still, lovely evenings that you sometimes get in October. There would be mist on the river and the saltings later, but for the moment it was clear, and utterly peaceful. I decided to sleep on board, but not on the mooring. There was a deepwater anchorage a few miles downstream, in an inlet of Bridgemarsh Island. There I should be out of everybody’s way, disturb no one, and be disturbed only by the marsh birds.
There wasn’t enough wind to stir a lock of hair, but I didn’t want the noise of the outboard. The tide had turned, and the ebb would help me downstream. And I wanted to practise sculling with the big single sweep that could be worked from Joanna’s transom, the sculler standing up to work it. I have seen an old lighterman take a loaded barge across the Thames in the Pool of London with a few strokes of his sweep – and a canny use of the tide. I had no such skill, but I was learning, and it was an infinite satisfaction to keep Joanna moving, and going where I wanted her to go, with the sweep.
I was away in ten minutes. Under sail I should probably have towed the dinghy, but, wanting to use the sweep, I didn’t want the tow astern. I didn’t deflate the dinghy. It was heavy to get on board singlehanded, but I’d worked out a good method of lifting it with a spare halliard fitted with a simple purchase. Once swung up, the dinghy fitted neatly between the forrard end of the cuddy and the mast.
Clear of the mooring, I felt the tide, not much yet, for the ebb had not long started, but enough to grip Joanna and carry her seawards in a strong, invisible hand. I had little to do except to give her steerage way – for a boat simply moving with the water cannot be steered – and to keep her head up. We were not going fast, but I did not want to. There would be light for an hour yet, and I had only about three miles to go. I had to round Landsend Point, on the south bank of the Crouch, and get into Easter Reach. Then, about halfway to Black Point, I’d snug down in the anchorage off Bridgemarsh on the north bank. I had a glorious sense of freedom. It was late in the year for late evening sailing, and anyway, there was no wind. There was nothing else moving on the river. To the north, the land rose slowly from the marshes to to Althorne ridge about a mile and a half inland; to the south there seemed nothing at all, only a grey-green, indeterminate merging of water, land and sky, beginningless and endless. It was certainly going to be misty, though. When the lights of Canewdon village began to spring up on their hill they looked like lights through frosted glass.
*
After two rashers of bacon, two eggs, and a couple of potatoes boiled in their skins, I surveyed the little private world of Joanna’s cuddy with deep contentment. It was lit only by a hurricane lamp – I had no mod cons – but the gentle light was reliable, and made no noise. I could hear only the little lap of water slipping past Joanna’s planks as she lay at anchor. Before getting into my sleeping bag I made myself a mug of cocoa, without milk, which I don’t much like, and with a generous lacing of whisky, which I do. The hurricane lamp swung within reach – I could turn it out when I wanted to. Warm in the sleeping bag, I leaned back against the after-wall of Joanna’s cuddy, drinking my cocoa before settling down to sleep.
Comfortable as I was, I couldn’t help thinking. I ought to be on holiday, but I wasn’t: this was merely a brief interlude before I had to report to that wretched banker and enmesh myself in a host of false relationships in the Ingard office, to try to discover – what? Whether anyone knew where Andrew Stavanger was – well, yes. And if they didn’t? It’s not a crime for anyone, even the managing director of a shipping company, to go off without saying where. Unusual, perhaps, tiresome to his office – but if the strange behaviour at which his daughter had hinted was really a sort of battiness, the office would have made its own arrangements to get by. Battiness – premature senility of some sort – seemed the most probable explanation of the whole affair. It would explain the extraordinary letter about the cheque – an act of ludicrous personal generosity to help Ingard out of a hole, or, perhaps, more sanely, to try to preserve the shipping company from going down if the rest of the empire crashed. And outside Stavanger himself, and perhaps his daughter, what did it really matter to anyone? Maybe it didn’t matter all that much even to the daughter. Vivian Carolan was a rich man, Eton and Oxford and all the rest of it, with an anti-his-own-class mania for ultra Marxist tub-thumping. Well, one could understand the sons of some rich men finding the face of capitalism repulsive. Not that that seemed to apply in Carolan’s case – his background was rich landowning, fox-hunting squires, dull, perhaps, and rigidly class-conscious, but, at any rate in recent generations, apparently quite decent sorts – Colonel Blimps rather than slick financiers or face-grinding industrialists. I knew about Vivian Carolan because one couldn’t help knowing about him – he was Public Enemy No 1 to the ultra Tory press, and equally the darling of the extreme Left, or some of it, because he combined ultra Socialism with a weird branch of English Nationalism, and a peculiar hatred of the Welsh and Scots, whom he dismissed as ‘Celts’. Every other paper one picked up had something either about his ancestors or his own latest piece of rabble-rousing. It was a stroke of genius by the Prime Minister to make him Minister of Fine Arts, where he could shout his head off and do little real harm. ‘Pictures for the People’ was a grand slogan, and if it extracted some national treasures from London for display in Middlesbrough and Huddersfield, it might even do some good. And Carolan was not negligible as an expert on painting in his own right. He had a good degree in art history, and had he not gone in for politics he might have made a name for himself as an art historian. He didn’t seem to come into it, anyway, except that his own wealth would cushion whatever blow Stavanger’s daughter might suffer from her father’s odd behaviour.
But there was more to it than Stavanger. Where did the weird story of the ex-army land in the Thames estuary fit in? Damn Sir Edmund Pusey – he probably knew more about it than he had let on, regarding it as better for my soul or something to find out for myself. On the other hand, he might not. And what good was the land, anyway? If the Ministry of Defence had any use for it, it wouldn’t have been sold. And if Ingard was going bust, he’d naturally try to flog the land to anyone he could. If whoever bought it had an unsavoury reputation it wouldn’t do much harm to the seagulls or Brent geese. They had articulate and powerful protectors – Ingard’s own application to develop the land had been turned down, and the planning authorities were wholly capable of turning down any other application they might not like. But what would anyone in the world of international big business want the land for? If Ingard had bought a pup, it seemed wholly improbable that any other shrewd financier would oblige by buying it from him. Well, I might get some ideas after having a look at the place tomorrow. At least it was giving me a weekend on my boat.
*
I had one of the best nights I’d had for ages, and slept through the rest of the ebb and the whole of the flood. Breakfast was simple – coffee, and a bacon sandwich. When I’d washed up, the ebb was going strong again.
That suited me well. I had only six or seven miles to go to get to Winter Marsh, and I didn’t want to spend the whole day there. Also, although I didn’t know the place, I suspected that most of the low-lying shore would dry out, and I wanted to go there on the flood. So I thought I’d go to sea with the ebb, spend half a day pottering off the fascinating banks of Ray Sand and Dengie Flat, and come back to approach Winter Marsh from seaward. The weather helped. The early mist cleared to a fine October day, and there was a little wind from the south-west. That was enough to keep Joanna sailing. I got up her big, loose-footed gunter lugsail, and, as always, marvelled at the sturdy simplicity of her rig. It was not an efficient rig in the modern yachting sense, and even with the headsail set to a bowsprit, it gave her next to no windward performance. But it suited the generations of North Sea fishermen who had used it – perhaps from the time of their Viking ancestors. It was simple, strong, and cheap. And if they wanted to go against the wind, they had men, and they had oars. The punishment of flogging to windward under sail is a modern form of masochism. The old seamen worked the sea. If the wind was unduly foul, they waited until it was fair. If they couldn’t get on, they put in somewhere and waited until they could, their boats designed to take the ground almost anywhere. Above all, they worked the tides, using those heaven-sent moving roads of water to help them on their way. Sailing mostly single-handed, and being like the rest of twentieth-century man a prisoner of time, I cheated by having an outboard engine to keep me going when the elements didn’t help. But I used it as little as I could, though if the wind stayed in the south-west I thought I’d probably have to use it for the later part of today’s outing.
