Murder for Treasure

  Could the takeover of Rigley’s Patent Footbalm by the giant American Hutstacker Chemical Corporation really be scuppered by Mrs. Ogmore Davies’s parrot finding a body in Panty Harbour?

  It looked like it, but banker sleuth Mark Treasure, British banking’s answer to Emma Lathen, took a different view when a second body was discovered the morning after he arrived in the little West Wales sailing village close to St. David’s. By then Treasure had already survived a murderous assault aboard the Fishguard Express, a pitched battle on Whitland Station, and the inexplicable disappearance of a battered Australian clergyman. And that was only the start of his exceedingly unquiet weekend. It was to involve his host, the eccentric Judge Henry Nott-Herbert, a T-shirted detective-inspector, the high-powered, lady-fancying head of Hutstacker’s and his understanding wife, a local schemer with a siren spouse, two children, an immense Irish wolfhound, a tone-deaf Welsh vicar, and a pacifist postman.

  It also involved the breathtakingly lovely Anna, the young German widow already promised in marriage to someone more than twice her age.

  As always, it’s a fast-moving, witty and baffling mystery—the first from David Williams set in his native Wales. “He goes on improving steadily,” said the late Edmund Crispin in the Sunday Times of his last novel. He does indeed.

  DAVID WILLIAMS was born in Bridgend, South Wales, in 1926. He served as an RNVR officer and read History at Oxford before starting a career in advertising which took him to the top. He founded the highly successful David Williams & Ketchum agency in London and is a Director of KM&G International in the USA.

  Although a well-known writer and broadcaster on the social implications of advertising (he was on the Council of the “watchdog”. Advertising Standards Authority) his fiction only incidentally (and irreverently) involves the industry he knows so well.

  He is a Governor of Pusey House, Oxford [very High Church] and Vice-Chairman of the Royal Commonwealth Society of the Blind [very worthwhile]. His loves: 17th- and 18th-century buildings, music from Bach to Beethoven, the Impressionists, and the USA. His hates: humbug and sloppy prose. He is married with two children—and a retriever called Mr. Pooter: they live at Wentworth, Surrey, England.

  MURDER FOR

  TREASURE

  DAVID WILLIAMS

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  NEW YORK

  MURDER FOR TREASURE. Copyright © 1981 by David Williams. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Williams, David

  Murder for treasure.

  I. Title.

  PR6073.I42583M8 1981 823’.914 80-51899

  ISBN 0-312-55296-3

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

  This one for Elizabeth

  CHAPTER 1

  Mrs Ogmore-Davies had not been looking for a dead body. What she said later about a premonition was regarded by many as embellishment, but not by older Panty residents who respected Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s much advertised psychic powers.

  There were others who remained undecided about the whole business. If she had known there was going to be a body in the harbour, why had she not said so to Dai Rees, instead of telling him her parrot Gomer had been blown away again and she was going to fetch him from the harbour to save his having to walk home. That was understandable, especially with the Easter holidays on and the children about: it was well known that Gomer bit children.

  If Mrs Ogmore-Davies had said to Dai Rees, ‘Dai, there’s a body by the water’, it stood to reason he would have stopped delivering post and gone with her; in any case, it was mostly circulars he had in his bag—nothing that couldn’t have waited. But Dai had been definite: it was only the parrot she had mentioned—that and the wind and the time of day. Even the village elders had to accept as much. They trusted Dai. His grandfather had been a deacon in the days when there had been chapel deacons—and a chapel.

  Mind you, Mrs Ogmore-Davies did not state categorically she had told Dai that supernatural forces were impelling her towards the harbour. She only thought she might have implied—through her manner, even—that there was more than Gomer at stake. So there were no other witnesses and you could hardly blame Police Constable Lewin for taking the whole thing with a pinch of salt—psychic powers and all. As it happens, Constable Lewin was wrong, at least about the existence of a body.

  It was six-thirty in the morning when Mrs Ogmore-Davies pulled on her late husband’s oilskin coat and set off from Mariner’s Rest in the direction of the harbour. Her cottage, at the old and top end of Panty High Street, is perched two hundred feet above sea level. Although it had offered the once retired and now deceased Captain Ogmore-Davies a nostalgically commanding view of St Brides Bay, as well as a good deal of the surrounding West Wales coastline, it had been the steep climb back on the next to shortest route from the Boatman Inn, executed twice daily, that had finally precipitated enduring rest for that particular merchant mariner, ten minutes after closing time on a wet night in the previous November.

  Tragic as it had been for Mrs Ogmore-Davies to be deprived of her soul-mate through the intervention of fate and the demon drink—officially he had succumbed to heart failure while falling down some area steps—it was not long before she had re-established communication with the departed over what she referred to as the ether. She was thus able to make up for years of frustration and confer with him during opening hours, and if his reported responses were to be credited, then she permitted him a much larger role in the conversation than he had ever enjoyed during nearly half a century of marriage.

  Mrs Ogmore-Davies chose the longest route to the harbour, following the descending High Street to sea-level at the head of the cove. She then had to walk back along the recently cobbled track skirting the river estuary to the land-locked and half-tidal harbour directly below her own property. The cobbles—or popple-stones, to use the local name—were as uncomfortable underfoot as some had predicted, but there was a grudging consensus that they added colour and credibility.

  In the words of Edwin Egor, Estate Agent and Chartered Surveyor, ‘the village of Panty sits astride the coast road ’twixt Haverfordwest and the ancient cathedral seat of St David’s’. Until very recent times, it has not so much been long forgotten as never remarked at all. Historically, economically and strategically, it lacked any firm reason for being. Its shallow harbour, approached from seawards via a cliff-hung, twisting inlet, had lent itself to clandestine enterprise such as the export of stolen cows in the sixteenth century and the import of illegal Irish immigrants in the nineteenth, but nothing had happened in between or after.

  When the shipment of lead and later iron ore offered other ports in the area periods of reasonable prosperity, Panty had been tried and found too shallow. It had been too far west to profit when coal became the staple export of Wales. Even the lifeboat station established in 1860 had been abandoned two years later, when it was admitted there were too few fishermen in the area to muster an adequate crew.

  The emergence and advertisement of Panty as a picturesque old fishing village in the latter part of the twentieth century thus owed more to the property speculators than to historical fact: hence the popple-stones.

  The transformation had begun the day after The Mistake. A Panty ploughman, living in an officially condemned and near-derelict dwelling, had been in the act of moving his family and chattels to a new Council house in St David’s, when a passing and opportunist tourist from London had made him an offer for the property. The ploughman, a simple and honest fellow, was also a man of few words—and most of those were Welsh. Having shaken hands on what he had understood to be three hundred pounds—a s
um in excess of the compensation due to him from the Local Authority—he was so overcome with his good fortune on receiving a cheque for three thousand that he revealed all to the local butcher, who normally obliged with the processing of cheques for those of bis customers without bank accounts.

  Pausing only to advise the ploughman to keep the whole affair secret, the butcher had closed his shop and promptly applied himself to the ready cash acquisition of other condemned properties in the village, as well as a few that were not. It was only a matter of weeks before the whole story was out, but they were profitable ones for the butcher.

  What came to be known as The Mistake was soon established as part of local legend, and the expectancy of all Panty property owners increased forthwith not ten but twentyfold—a tribute to the enduring quality of Welsh optimism despite centuries of disappointment.

  At the time of The Mistake, a decade ago, Panty had comprised a cluster of dwellings, most of them high above the harbour, and, as Edwin Egor was to put it, ‘atop the proud and rugged coastline’, and exposed to the prevailing north wind which blew off the land with such ferocity that even the local oaks grew to resemble inverted giant umbrellas snagged in the act of hurtling seawards.

  The few other occupied houses were arranged, Italian style, on irregular terraces between the High Street and the harbour and served by a minor labyrinth of lanes, paths and steps. For the most part, though, the cliff-top heart of Panty had been oriented to connect with the fertile land behind the village, the local breadwinners being mostly employed in agrarian rather than maritime pursuits. The Mistake had changed all that.

  Within a year of the famous error ‘old fishermen’s cottages’ were being erected on a wholesale basis. Whitewashed, pink-washed and unwashed stucco dwellings in ‘traditional style’ sprang up by the dozen, offering maximum untraditional comforts at matching prices to the foreign—meaning English—weekend sailors queuing to buy them. The harbour acquired a marina complete with a prefabricated wooden yacht club. Disused shops reopened as boutiques, ships chandlers and outlets for the sale of antique and ‘antiqued’ brassware. There was a brisk trade in fish netting for adorning walls and patios—plain for indoors and tarred when there was any risk of it getting wet.

  Although the buildings in Old Panty had been the first to change hands, and suffer the modernizing process, their numbers were limited and, while they provided a degree of authenticity, they were hardly convenient for those newcomers whose interests centred on the marina and the moorings off shore. Thus it was that New Panty was created—a fresh and alien community clustered around the river estuary close to the bridge at the bottom of the High Street with the broad popple-stoned link to the pleasures of the sea.

  It would be an overstatement to say that all who survived (inevitably to be dubbed as Old Panties) were hill dwellers, while all New Panties languished in the river valley, but the division roughly worked that way. Old Panties were, in any case, very much a minority. They consisted in the main of freeholders whose optimism had been so divorced from reality that two property booms had come and gone leaving them and their asking prices still in situ, together with those tradespeople who had eschewed short-term gains in favour of the rich rewards offered from the long-term exploitation of the affluent new arrivals.

  There remained the Old Panty carriage trade—the doctor, the vicar, and a handful of gentlefolk, who had enjoyed a quiet and fulfilling existence in Panty since before The Mistake. Although they were not exploitable, they were not themselves exploiting. They deserved honouring on both counts.

  Numbered among these last was the Judge, who had long since retired from administering justice in the Colonies—and rather earlier than expected at the time, due more to the increasing eccentricity of his judicial pronouncements than to the decreasing size of the British Empire.

  What the original inhabitants lacked in numbers, they made up in homogeneity. The newcomers at best had a hobby in common plus a shared and growing distaste for being fleeced by the locals—loosely binding influences not exactly scenting of the stuff that built nations. In contrast, Old Panties were held together by an influence older than Cadwaladr. They were Welsh, a fact that transcended all other considerations—allowing for a modicum of licence where large sums of money might be involved.

  ‘Go-mer! Go-mer!’ Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s powerful mezzo-soprano summons carried seawards and echoed against the cliffs as she progressed along the quayside in the half-light and the morning drizzle, her substantial figure swaddled from neck to ankle in black oilskin. She peered closely through pebble-lenses into the porch of the Boatman and further along at the doorway of the yacht club. Gomer often homed in on licensed premises, redolent of the scent familiar to any who had lived in close proximity to the late Captain.

  Gomer had been reared in the Tropics and had never ceased to be irritated as well as surprised by the northerly gusts that caught him in mid-flight between kitchen and greenhouse, whisking him seawards. True, he had developed a free-falling technique that facilitated a rapid if unnerving descent before the land gave out beneath him, but the experience was always upsetting as well as undignified.

  ‘Go-mer!’ Mrs Ogmore-Davies descended the steps that led from the old quay to the marina boardwalk and its berthing sprigs. It was still early in the season, but already most of the berths were occupied by bobbing, tall-masted sailing boats.

  ‘Come, pretty. Come to Mammy, then. Go-mAAHH!’ What the final exclamation lacked in musical quality, it made up for in volume. The sudden weakness in Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s knees was not transmitted to her vocal cords. She had found Gomer—perched on the prow of a cabin cruiser and gazing quizzically at the contorted, sandalled but otherwise naked body of a man, draped across the foredeck of the same craft and apparently petrified in the act of crawling aft.

  The torso of Gomer’s macabre shipmate lay on its right side, chest exposed to Mrs Ogmore-Davies standing rooted to the boards. The head was turned away from her. The right arm was fully extended as though attempting to reach a handhold further along the deck. The left knee was bent up tight towards the stomach and covering the groin. Mrs Ogmore-Davies was later quite explicit on this point—and on one other. A thin wooden stake protruded from the victim’s back in the vicinity of the left shoulder-blade. This she noted with a shudder when she stepped forward to scoop up Gomer. There was no blood—not to speak of or not that she could later remember—but then, if there had been any, it would surely have been dispersed and diluted by the rain on the deck. This last was to be Constable Lewin’s theory up to the point where he ceased to accept the existence of a body at all.

  It was the Constable who was to be next on the scene for, although Mrs Ogmore-Davies’s scream was loud enough to wake the dead, it was mostly carried seawards by the wind, and those few of the living it roused from their slumbers assumed it to be the anguished cry of a seabird. Nor did Mrs Ogmore-Davies attempt to find assistance close at hand.

  Idwel Pugh, the landlord of the Boatman, and his stuck-up wife, lived on the premises, but they were the last people she would have turned to—especially with a nude man on her hands, dead or alive. She was panic-stricken, but she hadn’t lost her reason. Nobody lived at the yacht club nor at any of the few other buildings along the harbour, so it was Dai Rees the Post she hurried to fetch from near the bridge. But Dai had long since continued his rounds along River Street, and it was the Constable Mrs Ogmore-Davies sighted at the door of the new police house he occupied, rent free, at the foot of the High Street.

  ‘Come quick, back,’ she cried from across the road. ‘There’s a dead body. Murdered.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Lewin, more in irritation than rank disbelief. He had only come out to look at his daffodils while the kettle boiled. His police responsibilities didn’t rightly start until eight o’clock; up to then, it was the County Force that was supposed to keep law and order. The sight of Mrs Ogmore-Davies with a parrot on her shoulder and sounding like the prophet of doom made an unpromis
ing start to the day. ‘Where is it, then?’ He began buttoning up his tunic, the first slight indication that he was preparing for action.

  ‘In the harbour. In a boat—STABBED to death.’ The shouted emphasis caused Gomer to re-arrange himself on his perch. ‘Are you coming or not?’

  ‘ ’Course I’m coming. Let me get my cap.’ Constable Lewin went indoors reappearing a few moments later fully equipped for official business—or nearly. The drizzle had turned into quite heavy rain, so he went back for his raincoat.

  ‘Took long enough,’ complained Mrs Ogmore-Davies, nearly running to keep up as the Constable strode out along the popple-stones. He was shorter than she was but half her age. He increased his pace.

  ‘In my experience,’ he observed gravely, ‘dead bodies don’t go anywhere. Haste is no substitute for method, Mrs Ogmore-Davies. My wife is ringing the doctor.’ He glanced down at his companion. ‘You did take the pulse?’

  ‘Pulse? What pulse? Didn’t I tell you he’s dead as mutton? Knew that as soon as I got there . . . before I got there,’ Mrs Ogmore-Davies added darkly.

  Lewin disregarded the last remark. There was no point in complicating police reports with references to the alleged psychic experiences of witnesses. He knew what Mrs Ogmore-Davies was leading up to and he had no intention of humouring that particular whim.

  They reached the marina. ‘There,’ said Mrs Ogmore-Davies, pointing to the cabin cruiser a few yards ahead.

  The constable stepped forward. ‘Where?’ he asked, staring at the empty deck. There was a moment’s embarrassed silence.

  ‘It was there five minutes ago,’ Mrs Ogmore-Davies offered defensively. ‘We should have been quicker getting here.’