Treasure by Degrees Read online

  University College, Itchendever, Hants, is long on brains, short on funds and up for grabs. It seems to be facing a take-over either by the American Funny Farms Foundation or by the calculating Crown Prince of Abu B’yat.

  Banker sleuth Mark Treasure tries to adjudicate but finds baffling murder on his hands.

  Of course the vital question is who did it, not to mention other knotty problems that have a bearing on the case. Who sent the gory sheep’s head – and worse – to the eccentric American matron with millions of dollars in her gift? Was her neurotic attorney entirely to be trusted ? Was the celebrated Dr Goldstein, senior tutor and TV personality, behind the Arab bomb scare? Why did the Arabs kidnap the lecturer in English Literature?

  Readers of David Williams’s first book, Unholy Writ, which Patrick Cosgrave in the Spectator called ‘by far the best written detective story I have read for months’, will not be surprised to find the college housed in a stately home with an impeccable architectural provenance and peopled by a wealth of memorable characters. A tantalizing choice of suspects and a pervasive humour make this indeed a Treasure for the connoisseur.

  The Author

  DAVID WILLIAMS was born in South Wales, read history at Oxford, and began a career in advertising which has taken him to the top. He is chairman of David Williams & Ketchum, Ltd, and a director of Ketchum, MacLeod & Grove, Inc. in the USA.

  He is well known in the advertising industry, has been a Council member of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising since 1959, and at various times has been Honorary Secretary of the IPA and chairman of its working party on the Royal Commission on the Press, as well as a Council member of the Advertising Association and of the Advertising Standards Authority. He is a frequent broadcaster, speaker and writer on the ethics of advertising and modern marketing.

  Mr Williams is an active Anglican, Governor of Pusey House, Oxford, and churchwarden of St Mary Aldermary in the City of London, of which he is also a Freeman. He has for some time been vice-chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind.

  His interests include architecture, music, golf and gardening. He is married, with two children, and lives at Wentworth, Surrey.

  TREASURE BY

  DEGREES

  DAVID WILLIAMS

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  NEW YORK

  TREASURE BY DEGREES. Copyright © 1977 by David Williams. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Williams, David

  Treasure by degrees.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.W72254Tr3 [PR6073.I42583] 823’.9’14 77-76658

  ISBN 0-312-81643-X

  All the characters and incidents in this book are imaginary. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  This one for Rene and Jenny

  Cause

  CHAPTER I

  ‘BUT, MY DEAR chap, you must have played Funny Farms at some time in your life.’ Mark Treasure, Vice-Chairman of Grenwood, Phipps & Co., merchant bankers, punctuated this remark by affecting a look of benign good humour over the gold-rimmed half-glasses. He had been cultivating this particular expression – chin down, eyebrows raised, the long, lean face still undeniably youthful under the hardly receding hairline. He doubted anyone would credit he had reached forty; he could scarcely do so himself. The glasses, recently accepted as inevitable – like the last birthday – were adapting nicely as a prop to sagacity. Vanity and middle age were also coming to terms.

  The histrionics were entirely wasted upon Wilfred Jonkins, Assistant Manager of the Trust Department for the last twelve of his fifty-nine years. For his part he perceived Treasure as the promising young graduate who, despite the lack of any family connection to speak of, had been tipped to achieve great heights when he joined the bank nearly two decades earlier. This promise long since fulfilled, Jonkins’s image of Treasure was unaltering and would have remained so even if his superior had appeared with a long, white beard and a hearing trumpet.

  The fact remained that Wilfred Jonkins had never played Funny Farms. Further, he had never even heard of Funny Farms until the day before. Since he had no enduring corporate ambition save the attainment of pensionable age two years hence, he had no hesitation in imparting this extra intelligence to ‘young’ Mr Treasure.

  ‘Well, I never,’ said Treasure. ‘How surprising. D’you know, I remember playing it in the nursery, before we were old enough to grasp Monopoly. Then there was Lexicon, and I suppose Scrabble came next . . . or perhaps that was much later: strange how the fashions change. But Funny Farms was always my favourite – really to quite a ripe age.’ This was followed by a good-natured grunt, consciously intended to emphasize the obviously relative nature of the last remark.

  ‘I did once play Monopoly,’ volunteered Jonkins, recalling that single experience with distaste. ‘The wife and I . . . that is, bridge is more . . .’

  ‘More in your line,’ interrupted Treasure. ‘Very sensible too. Tell me, how is Mrs Jonkins?’ he enquired opportunely on the strength of the information that such a person existed.

  ‘Very nicely, thank you, sir.’ Jonkins displayed none of the disappointment he felt at this galling admission. He had been passively plotting the woman’s destruction for years.

  ‘Good,’ said Treasure, unconscious of his innocent solecism as well as the secret criminal propensities of Jonkins, who not only looked like a churchwarden, but also was one. Treasure glanced down at the documents on his desk. ‘Well, despite the lack of your personal patronage, Funny Farms appears to have been in the top selling league of what are called board games for more than forty years. And a highly profitable operation it is too.’

  ‘The company does make other games, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Funny Schools, Funny Films, oh, and I see here Funny Golf – never heard of that before.’ Treasure had played golf for Oxford.

  ‘Hardly your style, sir,’ Jonkins put in deferentially. ‘I don’t believe they earn much from the other games.’

  ‘No, they’re just spin-offs. Our research people say that Funny Farms is still the breadwinner, and Funny Farms Incorporated made twenty million dollars before tax last year – which would seem to underwrite the stability of the Funny Farms Foundation. Well, no doubt I shall hear more about that at lunch.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The capital value of the Foundation is just over fifteen million dollars. Most of the assets are in Funny Farms Incorporated preference and ordinary stock made over by the late Mr Hatch during his lifetime.’

  ‘Mmm, the Foundation business is clear enough, though I must say I find the whole thing a bit eccentric. What’s potentially embarrassing is the prospect of all this manna from Pennsylvania being showered on University College, Itchendever. Anyway, you think Lord Grenwood’s going to feel cock-a-hoop when he hears?’

  CI don’t believe there’s any conflict of interest, Mr Treasure,’ said Jonkins earnestly. ‘In any event, you should be able to contact the Chairman through the Sydney office in the next twenty-four hours. We telexed last night.’

  Treasure privately wished that the Chairman of Grenwood, Phipps would spend more time tending the good works he espoused and less of it inspecting mining explorations in the Australian outback. ‘See for yourself’ was an excellent motto for a merchant banker but an impracticable one when it led a septuagenarian with indifferent health into making an uncomfortable expedition to antipodean fastnesses. It also made normal and necessary communication tiresomely difficult.

  ‘I think I agree on the interest of the parties being compatible,’ said Treasure slowly. ‘I’m more concerned about Lord Grenwood’s view on whether his pet educational establishment should house the Funny Farms Faculty of Agriculture.
Are they absolutely immovable about the name?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir,’ answered Jonkins, shuffling through the papers he was holding in search of supporting evidence. ‘If I might venture Lord Grenwood’s likely reaction as Chairman of the University College Trustees, I think he will be very much in favour of acceptance. The College is seriously short of funds.’

  ‘You mean they’re damned nearly broke so it’s a question of Funny Farms or . . . er . . . or founder?’ Treasure was pleased with the alliteration, and absolutely accurate in his judgement. It was the nod of affirmation from Jonkins that established his resolve to pursue the proposition before him. Even had Treasure taken a different decision it is doubtful whether that same project would have been abandoned. Grenwood’s enthusiastic approval was received within the day. There were, in any case, too many other interested parties involved for Treasure later to feel that his resolve did more than precipitate subsequent events by a few hours. Nevertheless, he was too sensitive a man not to be affected by the fact that the most memorable of those events was coldblooded murder.

  It had been in the winter of 1929 that Cyrus and Amelia Hatch had sold their Pennsylvania farmstead and moved into Pittsburgh. The couple were childless, and destined to remain so. Their failure to make a living from the land and the need to cut their losses and start afresh was thus a good deal easier than it might have been with a family to feed. In addition, Cyrus Hatch had been a man of intelligence with an evidently inventive mind. A farmer by inheritance, not vocation, the Depression had acted as a spur to his ambition to abandon farming and to seek a more profitable field of endeavour. He was also an optimist.

  Hatch had been to Europe to fight the Germans as a pilot in the Air Corps. Travel had broadened his mind. Hours of waiting between sorties had turned him into a skilled card player. It was this last interest that was partly to form the basis of his future fortune.

  Business school lecturers of a later, more sophisticated, generation might have said that Cyrus Hatch saw a potentially profitable market gap and proceeded to fill it. Indeed, several such sages made just this claim for Cyrus though he would have regarded it as a pretentious description of what really happened. Simply, he drew up a board and rules for a game he and his wife had been playing during the long winter evenings on the farm. They had called it ‘Going to Market’. They played it with the aid of a pack of cards, and counters representing sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens. It was not a complicated game but it was certainly more stimulating than checkers, a change from conventional card games, and it appealed to young and old alike.

  On the gratuitous and shrewd advice of an ex-pilot friend who had started an advertising business in Pittsburgh, Hatch made two alterations to the prototype of the game. He designed a special pack of sixty cards to be used instead of an ordinary pack, and he replaced the counters with tiny lead replicas of real farm animals – thus reducing the possibility of imitation, home-made or otherwise. He also changed the name of the game to Funny Farms. The rest of the story is legend – despite its failure to have touched the consciousness of Wilfred Jonkins.

  Within five years the rurally oriented game of Funny Farms had penetrated every self-respecting urban household in America. It was approved by educationalists, blessed by the thankful parents of happily occupied children, and played by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in public, at a Farmers For The New Deal Convention in Chicago. It also made Cyrus Hatch a millionaire by 1934.

  By the outbreak of the Second World War subsidiary companies of Funny Farms Inc. had been established in fourteen countries. It was not until 1970 that a Russian version of the game, royalties paid, became available at the GUM department store in Moscow. The misguided bureaucrat responsible – a convinced capitalist at heart – was certain that a knowledge of the game would act as an incentive to Collectivist farmers. Thereafter Funny Farms was much played inside the Kremlin – but hardly anywhere else in the Soviet Union.

  Cyrus Hatch continued to lead the business until he was well into his seventies – latterly to the considerable embarrassment of those who were doing all the work. He hovered in a state of what was euphemistically described as mild eccentricity for some time before it had to be admitted that he had become distinctly dotty. His whim for inventing impossibly complicated board games was easy to humour, though it was curious that even in his rational years the man who had conceived Funny Farms never seemed to produce another such original idea. This fact was probably as irksome to him as it was surprising to others. Certainly, it accounted for one of the two obsessions that eventually made it necessary for Cyrus to be ‘institutionalized’; the last two years of his life were spent at a very private sanatorium in Florida – in local and appropriate parlance a ‘funny farm’. The second fixation was so serious in the chairman of a public corporation that it qualified as an un-American activity: Cyrus began giving all the company’s money away.

  In his declining years Cyrus Hatch developed a concern for farming far exceeding in intensity any exhibited by the Department of Agriculture. Since he had abandoned the plough with no misgivings at the age of thirty-three, this turn of events must be accounted a delayed emotional throw-back, induced by lachrymose senility and overbearing nostalgia. Convinced that mechanization and chemicals were undermining rural husbandry and the moral fibre of the nation, Cyrus began funding a programme aimed at putting the clock back. He offered aid and countless unencumbered benefactions to farmers all over America in return for a simple pledge to observe the Funny Farms Pure Food Code. Broadly, the Code involved the eschewing of all mechanical implements and synthetic feeds, fertilizers and sprays down on the farm. If the whole farming community had adopted the principles involved, national food production would have dwindled to negligible quantities. Predictably, the vast majority of farmers and stockmen ignored the clarion call, the free plough horses, the three-legged milking stools, and the other nineteenth-century model-farm equipment on offer. A few however – mostly smallholders – were ready enough to accept the virtually unconditional cash grants that went along with the equipment because this was infinitely more agreeable than working. As the numbers of freeloaders grew, so did the apprehension of the Treasurer at Funny Farms Inc. What had initially been regarded, inside the company, as a harmless and possibly beneficial public relations exercise, soon began to loom as an unendurable drain on corporate resources. When Wall Street reached the same conclusion, action was instituted.

  Cyrus Hatch was never declared insane. The indignity and legal formalities thus avoided were traded for his consenting to retire from the Company and take up permanent residence with Amelia at their winter home in Florida. To the end of his days, spent at the nearby Sunny Times Sanatorium, Cyrus remained legally responsible for his own actions and arrangements despite the fact that by this time he had assumed the identity of ‘Farmer’ George – King of England from 1760 to 1820.

  Thus it was that the legal propriety of the Funny Farms Foundation was never in doubt. Indeed, the only person who might have proved grounds for challenging its validity – as well as its bizarre aims and objects – was Amelia Hatch, the doting widow of its deranged founder. Far from wishing to sully her late husband’s image, Amelia, who had never truly accepted that Cyrus had been off his head, viewed the fulfilment of his wishes through the Foundation as a fitting memorial to a very fine human being.

  It was in the months immediately following his enforced ‘exile’ to Florida that Cyrus Hatch had conceived the notion of leaving his fortune to further a good cause. He was, at the time, disenchanted with American farmers in general, and with the Secretary of State for Agriculture in particular; neither, through their recent actions or attitudes, had afforded his Pure Food project the acceptance and support it deserved.

  A convinced Anglophile since his youthful wartime sojourn in England, Cyrus determined that the British nation should benefit substantially from his accumulated wealth after his death. God might see fit to save America and its revolting colonists, but Cyrus Hatch,
like the Third Hanoverian, was washing his soul of the whole affair.

  Having already provided for Amelia’s well-being, Cyrus elected to transfer the remainder of his fortune into the Funny Farms Foundation. The object of the Foundation was to fund, out of income, a Funny Farms Faculty of Agriculture at some respectable institution for higher education in Britain ready to accept both the money and the peculiar conditions attaching. These last naturally involved the recipient institution in forgoing involvement or research in forms of agriculture and animal husbandry that were not exclusively to do with the production of pure food, unaffected and unadulterated by mechanical or chemical intervention. Thus Cyrus hoped to underwrite a return to Merrie England, complete with maidens dancing around maypoles at the appropriate time, and to the delight of menfolk clad in fustian smocks.

  Needless to say, three years after the death of Cyrus Hatch no ‘respectable’ British university had declared itself ready to humour his wishes, the fulfilment of which, on a big enough scale, would have put the nation on a starvation diet or qualified it for receipt of international famine relief. Existing agricultural faculties were for the most part too involved in finding ways of fooling battery hens into believing that dawn came twice a day to be interested in pursuing lines of enquiry that could easily involve those same creatures in discovering that legs could be used for tearing around farmyards, burning up energy earmarked for building up oven-ready bodies.

  The advertised availability of approximately a million dollars a year going spare for want of takers naturally produced some interest from educationalists. Universities, Polytechnics and other places of learning owning sound provenance and status cooled to the proposition on learning the terms, but there was no shortage of applications from the less worthy kind of establishments – some of whom appeared to have been brought into being for the specific purpose of applying for the bounty. Predictably, none of the latter kind stood the test of preliminary examination by the educational agency in London appointed by the Funny Farms Foundation.