“Well,” Susan began, “I think you asked Jill about the will? Whether it had been sorted out and so on.”
“I was interested,” Xavier replied, “purely out of academic interest, of course.”
“I got a phone call last week,” Susan pressed on, “from someone called Trent Napkin. He said he was representing the – sorry, can I just get rid of this cat?” She scooped the cat up from her lap with both hands held out flat like shovels, which took it by surprise, and so she was able to dump it on the floor before it could dig its claws in. It looked at her hatefully, turned away with a superior flick of its tail and padded out of the room. “Sorry, my legs have gone totally dead. Ow,” she winced, stretching them.
“Don’t mind Mephisto,” Xavier said, “he means no harm.”
“No, I’m sure he doesn’t.” Susan rubbed her legs, and carried on. “Where was I? Oh yes – this guy Trent Napkin. He called me to his offices, read the will, and I seem to have inherited a pair of rather valuable Napoleon III side cabinets.”
“Really,” Xavier mused. “How was the will read?”
“Well, he kind of got the three of us in a room, and –”
“Only three of you?” Xavier was surprised. “Do you not think that a man as wealthy as Bartholomew would have a few more people to leave his money to? What did the others get?”
“I don’t remember,” Susan admitted. “I was so dazed I’d got anything, I wasn’t really paying much attention.”
“And who were they, do you remember that?”
“One was called Rankin, and the other –”
“Algernon Arbuthnot,” Xavier said softly.
“I think he was Arbuthnot, actually, yes. How did you know?”
“He’s turned up on the old radar many a time,” Xavier said. “I thought he’d be involved in this, somehow.”
“Who is he?”
Xavier got to his feet, crossed over to the writing-bureau again, pulled open a drawer and carefully extracted another dog-eared envelope, from which he slid a number of press cuttings held together with paper clips. “These,” he said, “are from the Eastwestchester Jester. Do you remember it?”
“Oh yeah,” Susan said, intrigued. “Vaguely. Didn’t it close down about twenty years ago after a fire?”
“Yes, it did. I think the Windsock’s headline was something like, ‘Rival Paper Reduced to Ashes Tragedy’, or something similarly sarcastic. Truth is, the Jester burnt down because of Arbuthnot. They’d always been less fearless than the Windsock, and more tenacious, in digging out the dirt on Bartholomew and his dealings. Arbuthnot, in answer to your question, was a business associate of Bartholomew’s; they met at the Bank, when Bartholomew was a junior.
“In those days, Bartholomew and I communicated quite regularly. He told me a fair bit about the dealings going on there – without ever revealing anything secret, of course; he was always the sole of discretion. Arbuthnot cropped up an increasing amount, as he was Bartholomew’s mentor, his boss if you like. He was the star trader, making the Bank tens of millions, and this was in the days when ten million pounds was worth a lot more than it is today. I clearly remember Barty, in one letter, admitting to me that he wanted to be as successful as Arbuthnot: he looked up to him in a way which I felt at the time wasn’t entirely healthy.
“Anyway, they became good friends. In the 1970s they were involved in a minor scandal which involved manipulating oil prices in the Middle East to make short-term gains in stock prices – ‘pump and dump’, I think they called it. These days they might get fired and that would be an end to their career, but in those days, before a lot of the big corporate scandals there have been lately, they escaped with a slap on the wrists. I believe this is what fuelled Barty’s lust for money, which is what I think drove him through the latter half of his life. I mean,” he leaned forward, fixing Susan with a penetrating gaze through his hooded eyes, “if you knew you could make almost unlimited sums of money in a slightly illegal way, and you wouldn’t suffer any of the consequences, wouldn’t you do it?”
“No, actually,” Susan said flatly. “I know it’s probably easy to say that because I haven’t got any, but money just doesn’t do anything for me.”
Xavier raised his eyebrows. “Well, for Barty this was an attractive proposition. The problem was, of course, that the deeper he got into what were effectively Arbuthnot’s shady deals, the harder it was for him to get out of them. At one point in the early 90s, just before Black Wednesday, he owned over thirty vintage cars, three helicopters, a racecourse and a chain of cinemas. He just couldn’t spend the money as fast as he was making it, you see.”
“What happened to the chain of cinemas?” Susan couldn’t help asking.
“Oh, he sold it to help patch up the holes when Black Wednesday hit,” Xavier said dismissively. “Didn’t patch them all up, of course, but it helped. Meanwhile, Arbuthnot had been hit a lot harder: he’d got into currency speculation. The rumour has it that a lot of the money George Soros made that day betting one way on the euro, came from the money that Arbuthnot lost betting on it the other way. He had to sell three of his houses – one in Monaco, one in Aspen, Colorado, and a Knightsbridge townhouse he’d just spent a vast sum renovating.
“The 1990s came and went, and they both recovered and went on trading, but Arbuthnot was bitter. He had begun to hate Barty for not helping him out when the schemes and scams he’d taught him for so many years came back to bite him on the arse – and I think there was also jealousy there, too, that Barty seemed to have emerged unscathed when Arbuthnot hadn’t. By this time, I was following their exploits in the papers – there’s an article in there from the Economist from 2001,” he indicated the envelope Susan was holding, “and features from the FT, the Sunday Times ‘Money’ section, and Smash Hits magazine.” He noticed her quizzical look. “They had a number 1 in 1998, with a remix of a Schleswig-Holsteinian drinking song. They were going through a phase of making each other increasingly outlandish bets: Barty bet Arbuthnot that he could buy a number 1 hit, and Algy took him on. And lost.”
Xavier sighed.
“On the outside, they seemed like inseperable cohorts, but the resentment that I mentioned just now was, I think, seething underneath the surface. You know when you’re playing around with a close friend, and you can insult them or sometimes even cause them inconvenience but you both know it’s fine? Well, Arbuthnot was constantly trying to trip Barty up, and it became quite nasty at times. At an awards ceremony a few years ago, he arranged for Barty’s acceptance speech to be swapped for one Hitler gave in Munich in 1941. Not at all amusing, and very embarrassing for Barty… he, however, took it as one long joke, despite the difficulties it caused him. They were their own worst enemies.”
The cat stalked back into the room again, caught Susan’s eye, and stared unwaveringly at her. She tried to take it on, but lost: it raised a supercilious eyebrow, turned away from her and flowed itself upwards onto the sofa Xavier was sitting on.
“So my guess,” Xavier summarised, “is that Arbuthnot was there to… hang on. You said there weren’t any others present.”
“I think there was an independent witness there. Miss D’arblay.”
Xavier frowned. “The name doesn’t ring a bell,” he mused. “But I’m almost certain that you have in some way been set up. Had Barty ever spoken to you?”
“No, hardly ever,” Susan admitted.
“As you can probably gather, he wasn’t the kind of person to make random gifts,” Xavier said, “except when he was in one of those moods, I suppose. There’s very little reason why he would have given you something which sounds quite valuable, and left nothing at all to, for example, me.”
“There’s – one other thing about the cabinets,” Susan said hesitantly. “We looked in one of the drawers, and found this note.”
She produced the piece of paper with DESTROY ME written on it. “It was in an envelope addressed to me,” she added, “so it can’t have been an accident. Why would –”
“Have you destroyed the cabinets?” Xavier asked quickly, taking the note from her and scrutinising it. “Please tell me you haven’t.”
“No. I’m a bit loath to, I have to admit. They are utterly hideous, but I can’t help feeling a museum might want them, even if I don’t.”
“That’s good. Does anyone else know about them?”
“Only Paul. And we – we mentioned them to a forensic scientist who’s involved with the work up at the house… Meredith, I think Paul said.”
“Right,” Xavier said, passing Susan back the piece of paper. “Where are the cabinets?”
“Back at my flat. In my front room. Stopping me from watching TV.”
“Then let me get a couple of things,” Xavier replied decisively, “and let’s go there.”
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