Читать книгу Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Jack Batten - Страница 25

THE WOMAN ON THE PHONE spoke in the language peculiar to Rosedale matrons. She doubled up on the vowels. Matthew came out “Ma-ah-tthew.” The woman was Mrs. Wansborough and she could lay honest claim to the accent. The Wansborough address, when I looked it up in the white pages, was in deepest Rosedale. Very proper and establishment Rosedale is, with a British tilt to it. Mrs. Wansborough said her husband was playing golf. She didn’t mind telling me the name of the club where he was playing, the Royal Ontario, but she had a warning.

“Ma-ah-tthew,” she said, “dislikes intrusions on his golf match.”

“Diphthong,” I said.

“Pa-ah-rdon?”

“What you do with the vowels,” I said, “I think they call that a diphthong.”

“Thank you so very mu-uh-ch,” Mrs. Wansborough said. I had no doubt she was truly grateful.

I dropped Annie off at the CBC Radio building on Jarvis and kept going north to the Royal Ontario Golf and Country Club. It was an old stomping ground of mine. When I was married to the beautiful and wealthy Pamela, her father enrolled me in the club. Family tradition, he said, all the males belonged, including quaint sons-in-law. Pamela’s father paid my initiation fee, five thousand dollars back then, five times as much today. I went into the club with the notion that golf was an effete activity for snobs. I was half right. Royal Ontario thrives on snobbery, but golf is a sport that plays hard tricks on the mind and body. I couldn’t get my handicap under twelve, and after Pamela and I broke up and her father nudged me off the membership rolls, I never played another round.

Royal Ontario is the last Toronto course that still lies inside the city limits. From the first tee, you can hear the big transports changing gears up on the 401. I turned the Volks into the parking lot. Made of white clapboard, the clubhouse is two storeys high and shaped in a U that faces inward away from the course. Around it there are stands of tall rowan trees and flowerbeds that are long on snapdragons. I circled the clubhouse to the lawn that looks over the course’s first holes. The course drops gracefully into a valley and makes a wide sweep through the valley’s floor until it begins to climb up the back nine toward the clubhouse.

On the lawn, three or four dozen people were sitting in wicker chairs. Stewards in white jackets moved among them serving drinks and tea. You got six fingers of buttered toast with each cup of tea. Ancient club rule. One of the stewards recognized me. His name was Will and he’d served at the club for half a century. Each morning, in season, Will raises the flag beside the clubhouse and lowers it at sunset. Will mourned the passing of the Union Jack. So did the members.

I stood at the edge of the crowd of wicker chairs and Will came over to me. He was slim and erect and had a clipped moustache from his days as a colonel’s batman in the Great War. Will thinks all wars are great.

“We haven’t had the recent pleasure of your company, Mr. Crang,” he said. Will knew that Pamela’s father had banished me. His code forbade the mention of such seamy details.

“Other duties, Will,” I said. “Other obligations.”

“There’s something we can assist you with this afternoon?” Will asked.

“Man named Wansborough,” I said, “I’d like a word with him.”

“The gentleman is in Mr. Thompson’s foursome,” Will said. He had a quavery voice. “That would be our Mr. Thompson the banker.”

“Of course.”

“Not Mr. Thomson the architect without a ‘p’. They teed off not long past eleven.”

“That ought to put them about the fifteenth hole by now.”

“Mr. Thompson likes his quick pace.”

“Maybe the seventeenth?”

“I should think.”

“I’ll pick them up at the eighteenth green.”

“The gentleman you spoke of isn’t a member,” Will said. It was an accusation.

“Wansborough?” I said. “Didn’t think I remembered him from my time.”

“A guest,” Will said. He walked away with his tray.

I wandered over to the eighteenth green. Four men were finishing their round. A young guy in lime-green slacks crouched behind his ball and lined up the putt. “For all the marbles, partner,” one of the other players said to him. The speaker had a broad, flushed face and was leaning on his putter at the side of the green. The young guy hunched over his ball in a stance that was part Jack Nicklaus, part vulture. He hit the ball with a firm stroke and it ran in a right-to-left curve and curled into the centre of the cup. “Not too shabby,” the man with the flushed face said in a loud voice. He and the young guy gave one another polite high-fives and walked away with their two opponents. No one glanced in my direction. Probably took me for a greenskeeper.

One more foursome played through the eighteenth before Matthew Wansborough came into view. The eighteenth hole at Royal Ontario is a long par four, about 440 yards, made longer by its steep upward slope. Good golfers have trouble reaching the green in two. Wansborough wasn’t a good golfer. He had a short, choppy swing. He was wearing red-and-green-plaid trousers, and the flaps on the pockets of his white golf shirt had trim of the same material. Wansborough shanked his third shot into a bunker to the left of the green. He needed two whacks at the ball with his wedge before he blasted out. He three-putted. An eight. It might have been my fault. Wansborough gave me a long look before he stepped into the bunker. The sight seemed to unsettle his concentration. Maybe it was my jeans.

Wansborough picked his ball out of the cup and walked to the back of the green where I was standing.

“Good heavens, man,” he said in a low, harsh voice, “you’re not dressed.”

I said, “Any guy got up like Sir Harry Lauder isn’t in the best position to pass judgment on taste in clothes.”

Wansborough made a snorting noise and looked over to the other men in his foursome. One was putting out and the other two waited at the edge of the path that led to the clubhouse. The man who was putting was large and meaty and wore rimless glasses. I took him for our Mr. Thompson the banker.

“You damned well cost me strokes on this hole, Crang,” Wansborough whispered at me. He was annoyed.

“I’ve got news that might cost you more,” I said.

“Couldn’t it wait until business hours?” Wansborough asked.

“Right now,” I said, “I’m on business hours.”

The man in the rimless glasses called over to Wansborough. “The last hole gave these boys the nassau, Matthew,” he said. He had a scorecard in one hand and was making notations on it with a stubby pencil. “We owe them, um, nine dollars apiece.” The way he said it, it might have been his bank’s reserve fund.

“You fellows go on ahead,” Wansborough called back.

The banker and the other two men gave Wansborough looks that asked why he was spending time on someone who plainly belonged below stairs.

“I’ll be right along,” Wansborough said. “Order me a gin and tonic.”

“Better make it a double,” I said to Wansborough.

“Whatever are you talking about, Crang?”

“The kind of news I have,” I said, “is usually followed by a double.”

Wansborough steered me along the path from the eighteenth green. Where it branched toward the clubhouse, he turned us in the direction of the parking lot. We sat on one of the white benches among the snapdragons.

“Now,” Wansborough said. His right leg jiggled. He couldn’t wait to join his cronies at the nineteenth hole.

“This is about your cousin.”

“My lord, Crang, is that all?” Wansborough said. “If something came out of your meeting with Alice, you could have phoned my office tomorrow.”

The man was aggravating me.

“Something came out of the meeting,” I said. “Alice’s death.”

Wansborough’s leg lost its jiggle.

“Your sense of drama is appalling,” he said.

I gave him an edited version of my early-morning call from Alice and my visit to the scene of her murder. Wansborough looked straight at me most of the time I talked. Toward the end, his gaze drifted away, and when I finished, he spoke in a slow, thoughtful voice.

He said, “We have four spaces left in the family plot at Mount Pleasant.”

The guy knew how to home in on the core of a situation.

I said, “We’ve got more immediate concerns, Mr. Wansborough.”

“Alice’s funeral is immediate to me,” Wansborough said. “Her mother is a widow. She’ll be on to me about arrangements.”

“Somebody else might be on to you,” I said. “The cops.”

Wansborough made a hmm sound.

He said, “It’s my duty of course to tell the police whatever I know that might assist them in their inquiries.”

“For the record,” I said, “it’s better that you don’t know anything.”

Wansborough straightened into his indignant posture.

“I know,” he said, “that it was my misfortune to have been persuaded by my cousin to invest a good deal of family money in a company that is in unsavoury hands. Now my cousin is dead and my investment remains in the same unsavoury hands.”

“Why not keep that summary to yourself for a few days,” I said. “Rushing off to the cops isn’t going to get back your investment in Ace.”

Wansborough looked down at his golf shoes. They were two-toned, black and white, and had little black tassels. Wansborough’s strict dress rules got a holiday on the golf course.

He said, “What are you suggesting?”

“Silence.”

“You’re an exasperating man, Mr. Crang.”

“Passive silence.”

Wansborough got off another hmm.

I said, “Don’t go to the cops with the suspicions about Charles Grimaldi.”

Wansborough started to say there were more than suspicions. But his heart wasn’t in the objection, and he allowed me to talk over him.

“You’re in violation of no laws,” I said. “Police come to you with specific questions, fair enough, you answer. But I’m betting that’ll be a couple of days. Until then, you concentrate on organizing Alice’s place in the family plot.”

Wansborough got his spacey look, the one that signalled deep contemplation.

He said, “Approaching the police would seem an unnecessary public fuss.”

“Alice is going to be on the front pages tomorrow,” I said. “No sense your name joining hers.”

“There’s something in what you say.”

“Done.” I stood up before Wansborough did more slow-motion thinking. “I’ll get back to you within forty-eight hours.”

Wansborough didn’t stand up.

He said, “Mr. Crang, you haven’t been entirely forthcoming about the nature of my cousin’s death.”

“Not much to be forthcoming about,” I said. “Someone whapped her. With a fist, I’d say. Must have been a man. Guy with a heft behind his punch. Someone built along your lines.”

“That last remark is personally offensive,” Wansborough said with his old snap.

“I could get more offensive and ask where you were early this morning.”

Wansborough rose from the bench. I’d been wrong about his height. He had two or three inches on me.

“I’ll await your report,” he said. “Wednesday morning is your limit.”

“All I want,” I said.

“It had better be all you need,” Wansborough said. “If you have no satisfactory solution, I’ll instruct Mr. Catalano to arrange other means of resolving this disgraceful business.”

“Resolve,” I said, “is a word that takes in plenty of territory.”

“When I retained you last week, Mr. Crang,” Wansborough said, “I was seeking information. I wanted to know why Ace Disposal was showing an inordinate profit and why Charles Grimaldi and my cousin were reluctant to furnish me with financial details. Those questions have now become irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. What I wish, Mr. Crang, is the return of my investment. By one means or another, I intend to be clear of Ace as soon as that can be managed.”

“Plain speaking. Mr. Wansborough,” I said.

“If there’s nothing more, Mr. Crang,” Wansborough said, “we’ll excuse one another.”

Wansborough had become more stiff and formal. At his best, he was as yielding as the Tin Man. I’d hurt him with the crack about his whereabouts at the time of Alice’s murder. A mild apology might be in order. Wansborough didn’t strike me as a prime suspect in the killing. My thinking was, whoever knocked her off had a more direct link into Ace.

Before I could say my sorrys, Wansborough spoke from three inches over my head.

“Last evening, Mr. Crang,” he said, “we had friends in for two tables of bridge and a cold supper. I spent the remainder of the night in bed at my wife’s side. What transpired in our bedroom is none of your concern.”