Put on by Cunning

Author:Rendell, Ruth [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

12

The will, published in the Kingsmarkham Courier, as well as in the national press, showed Sir Manuel Camargue to have left the sum of £1,146,000 net. This modest fortune became Natalie Arno’s a little more than two months after Camargue’s death.

‘I shouldn’t call a million pounds modest,’ said Burden.

‘It is when you consider all the people who will want their pickings,’ Wexford said. ‘All the conspirators. No wonder she’s put the house up for sale.’

She had moved into Sterries, but immediately put the house on the market, the asking price being £110,000. For some weeks Kingsmarkham’s principal estate agents, Thacker, Prince and Co., displayed in their window coloured photographs of its exterior, the music room, the drawing room and the garden, while less distinguishable shots of it appeared in the local press. But whether the house itself was too stark and simplistic in design for most people’s taste or whether the price was too high, the fact was that it remained on sale throughout that period of the year when house-buying is at its peak.

‘Funny to think that we know for sure she’s no business to be there and no right to sell it and no right to what she gets for it,’ said Burden, ‘and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.’

But Wexford merely remarked that summer had set in with its usual severity and that he was looking forward to going somewhere warm for his holiday.

The Wexfords were not seasoned travellers and this would be the farthest away from home either had ever been. Wexford felt this need not affect the preparations they must make, but Dora had reached a point just below the panic threshold. All day she had been packing and unpacking and re-packing, confessing shamefacedly that she was a fool and then beginning to worry about the possibility of the house being broken into while they were away. It was useless for Wexford to point out that whether they were known to be in San Francisco or Southend would make little difference to a prospective burglar. He could only assure her that the police would keep an eye on the house. If they couldn’t do that for him, whom could they do it for? Sylvia had promised to go into the house every other day in their absence and he set off that evening to give her a spare key.

Wexford’s elder daughter and her husband had in the past year moved to a newer house in north Kingsmarkham, and it was only a slightly longer way round to return from their home to his own by taking Ploughman’s Lane. To go and look at the house Camargue had built, and on the night before he set out to prove Natalie Arno’s claim to it fraudulent, seemed a fitting act. he drove into Ploughman’s Lane by way of the side road which skirted the grounds of Kingsfield House. But if Sterries had been almost invisible from the roadway in January and February, it was now entirely hidden.

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