Hung in the Balance (Simpson & Lowe Detective series Book 1)

  Hung in the Balance

  Roger Ormerod

  © Roger Ormerod 1990

  Roger Ormerod has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1990 by Constable & Co.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  1

  They eventually managed to contact me in Zurich, but barely in time for me to get to my husband’s funeral. I flew in, and Harvey was there to meet me in the small exit hall at Birmingham International. Dear old reliable Harvey Remington, my solicitor, whom I’d always suspected of having feelings for me beyond the normal ties of solicitor and client.

  ‘Philipa! My dear…’ He took my case out of one hand, caught the other in his pudgy paw, and kissed me on the cheek. He smelt of brandy. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry…’ He cleared his throat, swallowing the sentiment.

  I managed a smile. I was still trying to decide how I felt, unable to assess the degree of my sorrow. But it was necessary to conceal that and put on a neutral face. The tears were way back somewhere and I felt dry-eyed, my feelings for Graham unfocused and blurred. It had been four years. It was even difficult to recall his features.

  ‘We’ll have to drive straight to the church,’ he said, apologizing as though it’d been his fault that I’d been difficult to locate. ‘Afterwards…’ He glanced sideways at me as we crossed to the short-stay car park. ‘I’ve booked you in at The Carlton. I seem to remember that you always liked it there.’

  ‘Did I?’ I couldn’t raise any interest one way or the other.

  ‘For eating out, anyway.’

  ‘If you say so, Harvey.’

  He took the Rover out fast. Harvey’s old enough to have forgotten he was always a lousy driver, and to rely now on luck. There was silence until we reached the motorway.

  ‘Only one suitcase, my dear?’ he commented.

  ‘I travel light.’ We were on our way to a funeral, I had to remind myself. On a damp November afternoon. A funeral. ‘D’you think this’ll do, Harvey?’ I’d never felt so miserable.

  ‘This?’ He spared me a quick glance.

  ‘This outfit. It’s the most formal I’ve got. My working suit. But it’s not black. I feel…awful.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s very correct.’

  ‘They finally contacted me from New York. I was in conference. I had to rush away. I don’t know… I’ll have to set up another… Oh God, Harvey, I’m blathering on. Sorry.’

  He just nodded, and settled in at about sixty-five in the middle lane. It was useless to discuss anything involving emotion with Harvey. It would never occur to him that I would be confused, and that I was operating on not much more than instinct. For the moment, I was doing what was expected of me. The initiative had been snatched away, and I was still struggling for an image of Graham that I could recall with equanimity. His humour face or his anger face? His loving face or that final, dreadful hatred when I’d told him I was leaving him? For good. That meant for always. Good didn’t enter into it.

  And yet, good had come from it, or was growing from it. I had met Cornel Schmidt at a conference in Rotterdam, and he’d been in need of a partner. A woman partner, he’d said, his grey, dancing eyes smiling at me. We had both been personnel officers, but Cornel had broken away and opened his own office in New York. ‘I know nothing about American big business,’ I’d had to admit. But he’d argued that it would be people we would be selling, not equities. People. That had always been my job, my life, the understanding of human beings and the assessment of their abilities.

  It was ironic to remember that this encounter had occurred just at the time when my marriage was tottering. Face it, I’d never understood Graham, never got through to the inner core of his character. It saps your self-confidence, that sort of thing. I’d often wondered whether that was what I’d fled from, the subconscious awareness that Graham had been gradually robbing me of confidence in my own special expertise.

  ‘…probably members of his own family,’ Harvey was saying.

  ‘What? Oh, you mean at the funeral?’ I couldn’t restrain a shudder.

  He must have noticed, crafty old Harvey. ‘You’ll not be the chief mourner, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s a young lady named Anna, and perhaps her brother, even friends you might not know.’

  ‘Graham’s latest?’ I asked. ‘This Anna?’

  ‘Well…no. Not as you mean it, Philipa. His latest for the past two years, I gather. Perhaps longer. She calls herself his common-law wife.’

  ‘Wife?’ But that was me.

  ‘Calls herself. You need not speak to her. And I shall be there,’ he said with mock grandeur.

  I couldn’t hold back a tiny smile. Harvey loved these little touches of self-denigration. They indicated he was not to be taken too seriously, but really they were intended to relax the opposition, when he would pounce in briskly and whip a judgment from the very jaws of failure.

  ‘Thank you, Harvey,’ I said dutifully. ‘But I’m no good at funerals, you know. Not my thing. I never know what to do or say, and I’m hopeless at conjuring up tears. I’m his wife. Am I expected to weep? And…heaven above…do I have to express my sorrow to this Anna person? I’m his wife, but…another woman! Harvey, I shouldn’t have come here. I left him, walked out of his life. It became so…well, totally degrading, I suppose. He flaunted them at me, his women. It was as though he’d been trying to demonstrate my inadequacy. And I was, in that way. You know what I mean, Harvey. He had them for sex. And of course, for me it became hopeless… I couldn’t meet him. I’ve wondered — tried to remember — which came first, my own failings or his. You see what I mean, Harvey?’ I appealed again. ‘I’ve been uncertain. I’ve never known who I was running away from, him or myself.’

  It came pouring out, when I’d have sworn it was a secret I’d been preserving for myself. But I hadn’t sealed it off properly, and it’d been fermenting away, until now it frothed out beyond my control.

  ‘And I don’t even know how he died!’ I heard myself crying somewhat shrilly, because Harvey had mercifully failed to respond. ‘He was only forty-one, Harvey. A young man.’

  ‘There was an inquest, Philipa,’ he said, staring ahead at the road surface. ‘We couldn’t locate you. Your New York office was vague.’

  ‘Inquest? Inquest!’ I repeated, suddenly alert.

  ‘Any death, in strange circumstances — you realize it’s almost routine.’

  ‘Strange? Harvey, stop being obscure. You’re keeping something from me.’

  ‘There’s hardly been time —’

  ‘What was strange about it?’

  ‘They brought in a verdict of suicide.’ He was still being evasive.

  I turned in my seat, watching his profile, his heavy, lumpy face, which I’d always considered attractive in an elusive way. He hid his charm behind sixty years of practised solemnity. ‘You sound as though you don’t accept that,’ I accused him.

  ‘I was trying to remain neutral.’

  ‘There. You see. You don’t believe it any more than I do. Graham wasn’t the type. He was too full of himself. No gloomy introspections for Graham. Come on, Harvey, how could he have done such a
thing?’

  ‘How he actually did it was to drive his car from the lane above Corry’s Head and on to the sloping field, then straight ahead and over the edge of the old quarry. That’s how he did it.’

  ‘Drove it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ I cried. ‘Quite out of the question.’

  ‘That was what the jury accepted.’

  ‘And nobody raised his little voice in protest? Nobody leapt to his feet and shouted out: no!’

  ‘The facts, my dear, are indisputable. That was what he did.’

  ‘But you know as well as I do that Graham couldn’t drive.’

  ‘It doesn’t take the ability of a rally driver to take a car over a cliff.’ He was quietly insistent.

  ‘It would take…’ I bit my lip to silence. I was probably the only person who knew and understood about Graham and his driving, but this was not the time to argue about it. ‘I should have been here.’

  ‘We couldn’t contact you.’

  ‘I’m not blaming —’

  ‘I know that. It was a reason, not an excuse.’ He made the little smacking gesture with his lips, tasting the words when he’d found a precise phrase. Harvey loved precision. It was why he’d studied law, upholding it in his mind as a precise science, and had spent the rest of his life battling with its vagaries.

  I touched his arm. ‘Sorry. We’ll talk about it later.’

  He took the inside lane in order to pull off at the next escape ramp. I looked round as we emerged on to normal roadways.

  ‘Where are we, Harvey? I don’t recognize this.’

  It was a grey area in a breathless city that sobbed with the pulse of traffic. The Victorian, dirty buildings were incongruous with their bizarre modern shop frontages. A mist hung in the streets. Automatic orange lamps were flicking themselves on, hesitating and straining to break from their initial blood-red flare, then suddenly bursting free into full and sombre glow. It was late afternoon, a murky day in November. A sad day for a funeral. A perfect day for a funeral.

  ‘You’ve probably never been to this part of Birmingham,’ he said. ‘This is where he came from. His family stepped in and claimed the body.’

  His calm and superficially callous observation was intended to strip the event of any stark distress I might have been feeling. The family had claimed the body. Even dead, Graham was not mine.

  ‘Here?’

  He’d halted. The church was down a side street, just a few yards from the roar of the traffic, a gloomy mass with the mist clinging like a banner to its spire. Black, leaning headstones scattered themselves in the foreground. The path was overgrown.

  ‘Here, Harvey?’

  ‘Here he was baptised Graham Mark. Forty-one years ago. I think they’ve started. Shall we go in?’

  It was only the second funeral I’d ever attended, the first being my father’s. In contrast, that had been a cheerful event, at a country church in Gloucestershire. This was a miserable way to go, I decided, stepping into the damp, chill interior and into the damp and chill of the sonorous voice from the pulpit. I don’t want to be here, I thought. I want to turn around and run away. Graham was nothing to me now. Nothing. My life was in New York, a new life, successful and blossoming. Challenging.

  We slipped into a rear pew. Towards the front was a small gathering of heads, bowed. His family. In the thickening gloom I could see them only as shadows, these heavy, anonymous shapes that were the background to Graham’s life. Three years married to him and living in intimacy with him, and I had never been asked to visit, or invite, a mother, father, sisters…anybody. And somehow this had not seemed unusual at the time. Graham had been a self-contained unity, the complete introvert who excluded anything extraneous that might be drifting in the background of his existence.

  I had met him at Fellowes and Simple, when I’d been Personnel Manager and he a junior officer in the financial section. The impression he’d given had been of possessing a graceful and unenergetic mastery of his work. There was never any sign of stress; he sailed blithely through and around the difficulties. There was no impression that he had ambitions towards a higher position, but he could have gone far, to the top, I knew. After all, it had been I who’d interviewed him for the job, and his IQ had been up in the 140s. But he was too indolent, completely lacking in ambition or initiative, was never bored with his own company, and needed no particular occupation to absorb him.

  That I had discovered when he’d resigned from his post at the time of the embezzlement, and the suicide of the Chief Cashier. Never from that moment had Graham indicated any intention of seeking other work.

  Looking back now, I could see that our married lives had never been really normal, in the traditional interpretation. We had lived at Lower Streetly, in a cottage he owned — though it had never been mentioned during our courtship — on my income, and he, from the moment of his resignation, had never stirred from beneath that roof, except for our trips out together. Perhaps he took the bus into Penley, while I was at my desk, but if so, he never mentioned it.

  After all, I had discovered, he’d not needed to stir himself. They had come to him, his women, his females, his adorers, though how he could have met them and invited them I never found out.

  At the front, the family was rising and shuffling out into the aisle. Harvey bent his head close and whispered, ‘Do you want to go to the crematorium?’

  ‘Heavens, no! Let’s get away from here, Harvey. Away. Please.’

  He took my elbow as though supporting me in my grief, and we hurried out to his car with close to indecent haste. I found myself leaning forward as he started the engine, mentally urging the car into movement.

  ‘Why did you bring me here, Harvey? Oh…why? I know I had to come home, if only to clear things up — the estate — you’ll know. But not that! It was…well, an intrusion. I felt I had no right to be there. None at all.’

  ‘The mist’s clearing, I think.’

  ‘To hell with your mist.’

  I saw Harvey smile to himself, not feeling any possessiveness towards the mist.

  ‘I brought you here,’ he explained, ‘for you to see that Graham did have a background. I wanted you to be aware that there were other people in his life, then you will not be surprised when the opposition hurls itself at you.’

  ‘Are you talking about his will?’

  ‘What else could I mean?’

  ‘But there can’t be much money involved.’

  ‘The word “much”,’ he said pedantically, ‘when related to money, is purely relative. You should know that, my dear, if my understanding is correct of what work you do.’

  In one way he was correct. I spent all my working life with people for whom money and power were the very centre of their existence.

  ‘I wonder what you’ve heard, Harvey,’ I said. ‘We, my partner Cornel Schmidt and I, find top executive positions for people who’re not as far up the ladder as they’d like to be. We help them to earn the extra 100,000 or so dollars a year, so that they can move up and on, and even further from the time and the inclination to enjoy it.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear you’ve retained a healthy disrespect for that attitude,’ said Harvey, who lived in refined and secluded luxury.

  I turned in my seat to face him. ‘But I’m in it for the money, too, you know. And precious little seems to drift my way. When it does — the vultures move in.’

  ‘Vultures?’

  ‘Their Inland Revenue. The IRS they call it. Then the accountants to make sure the IRS don’t get too much…’

  ‘It was ever so.’

  ‘…and the lawyers, Harvey, if we land in court because the accountants balled it up.’ I looked at him suspiciously. ‘You didn’t give me an answer.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Graham’s will.’

  ‘We’ll have to see. Come to my office in the morning.’

  ‘You can be annoying, you know. I’ve got to get back to Zurich, and I’ve bee
n unable to contact Cornel, so he’ll be wondering.’

  ‘This is your partner?’

  ‘I told you that.’

  ‘Smith or…’

  ‘The German spelling. Does it matter?’ I was short with him.

  He glanced sideways at me. ‘You must be tired. And talking about names, my dear, are you still calling yourself Philipa Tonkin?’

  I felt easier. He’d introduced a lighter tone, and I managed something close to a laugh. ‘You’ve always written to me as Mrs Tonkin, and I didn’t trouble to correct you. But over there I’m plain Philipa Lowe. Not even a Ms. We always have a laugh when I hear from you — and we’ve heard so infrequently, Harvey.’

  ‘There’s hardly anything ever happens in Penley. We? You said we. Who else but you finds me amusing?’

  ‘My secretary. Just Marietta. So formal of you, Harvey. But I couldn’t wait to get back to Philipa Lowe.’

  ‘But nevertheless,’ he admitted, ‘I’ve booked you in as Philipa Tonkin. And here we are. You haven’t been attending to what’s around you. This is Penley, changed since you last saw it, no doubt. And not,’ he grimaced, ‘entirely for the better.’

  But The Carlton had not changed, and was still clothed in its smug atmosphere of plush Victoriana. He wound down his window and called after me, ‘Ten-thirty in my office. Don’t be late, and I’ll take you to lunch.’

  Then the Rover glided away and I was alone, with the day’s miseries still heavy on me, and one small suitcase.

  My room faced the street. I stood for some moments just inside the door, breathing in the musty furniture polish smell, forcing myself to relax into the aura of soft carpet and heavy upholstery, the velvet curtains, the high and deep bed, the dark mahogany dressing table. Then I threw the case on the bed, drew the curtains, and rapidly stripped down. My skin felt clammy, my face taut, and all my muscles tense. When I stepped into the bathroom I found that they’d equipped it with a shower. I ran it as hot as I could bear it, then cold until my skin tingled, and towelled myself vigorously.

  It was like stepping into a new body. I stood before the mirror inside the wardrobe door, checking that everything was as it should be. Nothing had changed, though I’d felt something draining from me inside that wretched church. There’d been no point! Nobody had noticed me, and I might just as well have stayed away. It had been an exorcism. I can’t say I’ve ever been noticeably religious, and now it seemed I’d trespassed into a mourning that was not mine. I shouldn’t have gone to the funeral. There was no denying it.