Fraud Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Anita Brookner’s

  FRAUD

  “Fraud and denial, often yoked together, are indeed everywhere in life, and it takes a novel like this to show just how pervasive they are. Fraud sneaks up on you, delivering … more [than it promises] in terms of insight.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Brookner has built a reputation as Britain’s foremost novelist of sensibility. Her books are true to their subjects and scrupulously written.”

  —Time

  “Anita Brookner presents her people as if they were universals and then peels away layers to reveal a particular person infinitely more intricate and surprising. Fraud is no less serious than Brookner’s other novels, but it is funnier, sadder and ultimately more affirmative.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Transfixing … Brookner’s great gift as a writer is her … attention to the tiny details that compose her characters’ lives. Certainly no other contemporary novelist has conjured up so much elegant, precise prose. Upbeat … powerful [and] vibrant.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Brookner explores the themes of loneliness [and] deception in her quiet, elegant prose [and] brings new insight to old dilemmas. This remains Brookner’s subtle promise to her heroines and her satisfying gift to her readers.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “Her most complicated, sophisticated work to date.”

  —San Diego Union Tribune

  by the same author

  A START IN LIFE

  PROVIDENCE

  LOOKATME

  HOTEL DU LAC

  FAMILY AND FRIENDS

  A MISALLIANCE

  A FRIEND FROM ENGLAND

  LATECOMERS

  LEWIS PERCY

  BRIEF LIVES

  A CLOSED EYE

  DOLLY

  Anita Brookner’s

  FRAUD

  Anita Brookner has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the finest novelists of her generation.” She is the author of thirteen novels, including A Closed Eye, Brief Lives, Providence, and Hotel du Lac, for which she won the Booker Prize for fiction. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became in 1968 the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University.

  Copyright © 1992 by Anita Brookner

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover

  in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1992. Published in the

  United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brookner, Anita.

  Fraud / Anita Brookner.—

  p. cm.—(Vintage contemporaries)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82626-8

  1. Mothers and daughters—England—London—Fiction. 2. Missing

  persons—England—London—Fiction. 3. Women—England—

  London—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PR6052.R5816F67 1994]

  823′.914—dc20 93-6283

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  1

  THE FACTS, AS far as they could be ascertained, were as follows. Miss Durrant, a woman in middle years, living alone in apparently comfortable circumstances, had been missing for some four months, although no-one had seen her leave her flat in South Kensington, and her cleaner, who had a key, and who was used to finding the flat empty, thought little about the matter until the money, which was usually left on the kitchen table, was not replaced. The police, who were eventually contacted by Miss Durrant’s doctor after she had missed several appointments, visited the flat with a spare key obtained from a neighbour on the same landing, but found nothing out of the ordinary. The flat was clean, quiet, very tidy. Nor could they judge whether any of the cupboards had been emptied, as if in the act of packing for a journey: there seemed to be an abundance of clothes still hanging, still folded away. This was the first sight of anything unusual, the lavishness of the materials—the fine tweed, the cashmere, the silk—and the brilliance of the colours, surely a little exorbitant for a woman of Miss Durrant’s presumed age. The bedroom of the little flat contained a long looking-glass on a stand, and a faint odour of gardenias issued from the opened door of the built-in wardrobe. In the bathroom they found several bottles of expensive scent, some of them still sealed and in their original packages.

  The second unusual circumstance was that the neighbour from whom they had obtained the spare key was unable to tell them anything about Miss Durrant’s presumed disappearance because he was recovering from a stroke, and tended to muddle his words and also to mispronounce or forget them. So strenuously did he attempt to answer their questions that they were bound to him in pity and discomfort for far longer than was necessary, for they had seen at a glance that he could tell them nothing, yet, being young and kindly, they could find no formula with which to compensate him for his efforts. ‘That’s all right, Sir,’ said one of them eventually. ‘I expect she’ll turn up. Must have gone on holiday.’ The man, Eric Harvey, a retired solicitor, shook his head, advanced a mottled hand, touched a sleeve. ‘No. Would have heard. No door.’ From which they deduced that if Miss Durrant had been going away on holiday, or for any other purpose, she would have rung his doorbell to let him know. In addition to which she would surely have offered to help him with shopping and possibly cooking, if she knew him well enough to entrust him with her spare key.

  After this they went back to the doctor who had alerted them in the first place. ‘Well, Sir, there’s no body, no sign of a struggle or a break-in. What exactly were you worried about?’ The doctor, Lawrence Halliday, was tall, with receding fair hair, attractive in a Tell England fashion, as if he were an officer returning on leave from the trenches in the First World War. He looked uncomfortable, passed a hand over his hair before replying.

  ‘She’s missed several appointments, something she would never dream of doing. She was a regular patient, a private patient. My secretary telephoned more than once and got no reply. I began to feel a little uneasy—that’s why I contacted you.’

  A notebook was produced. ‘You say she was a regular patient. Was she ill, Sir?’

  ‘Not really. She was mildly anorexic, perhaps getting slightly more so. Women of her age are always at risk, although she was asymptomatic. I thought it sensible to keep a regular check on her, preventively, you understand. I believe in preventive medicine. She didn’t complain of anything, but then she was a stoical kind of woman.’

  ‘You say you felt uneasy, Sir. Why, exactly? She might have gone on holiday.’

  ‘A rather long holiday, surely? Three and a half months? More? I last saw her just before the summer. It’s now the beginning of October.’

  ‘Has anybody seen her?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ said the doctor explosively. ‘She didn’t seem to have any friends. Her mother, whom
I attended, died a year ago, and she moved shortly afterwards. I don’t know anyone who knows her, with the possible exception of Mrs Marsh. Another patient,’ he added. ‘Though one whom I rarely see. Anyway, that’s hardly my business. What is my business is that she seemed to have no other contacts.’

  ‘Was she very dependent on you, Sir?’

  He shrugged. ‘She may have been.’

  ‘In love, perhaps?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And you, Sir. Were you attracted to her?’

  ‘Good God, Inspector! She was a woman of fifty! Anyway, I’m happily married. She’s met my wife. We asked her to dinner, earlier this year. Some months ago, now. Before she disappeared.’

  The younger of the two policemen noticed that he still looked uneasy, and a little flushed, since mentioning his wife, but could not at the moment think why this should be so. Any irregularity would be so easy to check that there was hardly any point in concealing it. Besides, he put the doctor’s age at about forty-six or -seven, and could not conceive why anyone would fall in love with a woman of fifty. He was twenty-nine and married to a girl five years younger than himself.

  ‘We found these pills,’ he said. ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘Oh, a mild hypnotic. They wouldn’t have done her any harm. Anyway, as you can see, the bottle’s nearly full.’

  ‘Could you describe her, Sir?’

  ‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘She was thin, slight, about five foot three. An ordinary sort of face, quite a good colour. Poor skin, some slight trace of adolescent acne. Rather fine dark red hair, a lot of it. She wore it long, coiled up, somehow.’ He described a vague circle round the back of his head.

  ‘Normal, would you say?’

  ‘Oh, well, normal. Nobody’s normal.’

  ‘Could you be more precise, Sir?’

  ‘She was mildly eccentric, perhaps, but no more so than any other woman of her age, living alone. No family—I think I said that.’

  ‘Whom did she know? Did she have friends?’

  ‘My wife thought not. But she wasn’t depressed, far from it. Good-tempered. She was a good woman.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I believe she was friendly with one or two of our old people. Mrs Marsh—I think I mentioned her. I think she took her to church. Very kind like that.’

  ‘And you can tell us nothing else? You see, we’ve nothing to go on.’

  ‘Well, that’s your affair. I’ve notified you. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I really am very busy.’

  ‘Thank you for your time, Sir.’

  ‘You’ll let me know …?’

  ‘I doubt if there’ll be anything to tell you. Women disappear all the time, sometimes because they want to. She might have gone on a cruise, or something. If you could give us this Mrs Marsh’s address?’

  ‘Might as well walk,’ said the elder of the two policemen, glancing at the paper in his hand. ‘I could do with a breath of air.’ He regretted, as ever, his Suffolk boyhood, for which this mean dirty London failed to compensate him. In Cheltenham Terrace, outside the surgery, the early October air was mild, damp. From the barracks came a faint sound of marching: as they walked towards the King’s Road iron heels thudded to a halt somewhere out of sight. The light was fading, yet in the dusk they could make out a tree, still with its leaves, which a dry summer and a beneficent autumn had turned to gold, like a tree in Paradise. Leaves, those which remained, floated silently down on mysterious currents of air. There was no wind: it was almost warm. The solemnity of the early evening, and the touching sight of two elderly men, each with a stick, each with a dog, but deep in conversation, reduced them both to silence. They got on well together. Neither was given to excessive spirits.

  They walked across the King’s Road, down a side street, referring once again to the paper which the doctor’s receptionist had given them, until they came to a looming block of flats.

  ‘This is it,’ said the sergeant.

  They took the lift to the first floor, and rang the bell. The door opened onto the urgent music which heralded the news programme. Lights blazed from the hallway lantern, as advised by the local security officer. The elder of the two men showed his warrant card to Mrs Marsh, a tall grey-haired woman, whose look of violent annoyance seemed habitual. She examined the card closely, then scrutinized their faces. They noted that she was not in the least intimidated.

  ‘Inspector Maigret! Well, well. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Butterworth, Madam. This is my colleague, Barry Talbot. A few questions, if you don’t mind. We shan’t keep you long.’

  ‘It’s not my daughter, is it? Or my son? Nothing’s happened to Nick, has it?’

  ‘Nothing like that, Madam. May we come in?’

  In contrast to the brilliant hall the sitting-room was dim, lit only by wall lights and a lamp near the armchair in which Mrs Marsh had been sitting, preparing to listen to the News. A copy of The Times was draped over the arm of her chair. A half-empty teacup and a spectacle case were on the table beside her.

  ‘Now what is all this? I was just settling in for the evening. I don’t like to be disturbed when it’s dark, and as far as I can see there’s no reason why I should be. One or two of these flats have been burgled: one hears such stories. Are you sure you’re policemen?’ She looked at them through narrowed eyes, her lips slightly drawn back from her teeth.

  ‘Quite sure, Madam. We wondered if you might know the whereabouts of a Miss Durrant. A friend of yours, I believe.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Dr Halliday. He reported the fact that she hadn’t been seen recently and had missed several appointments.’

  ‘Halliday is too soft. Oh, quite a good doctor, I suppose, but under the thumb of that wife of his. Attractive to women, which I dare say hasn’t made his life any easier.’

  ‘Miss Durrant, Madam.’

  ‘Anna. You’d better sit down.’

  She sat down herself, slowly. When she hoisted her feet on to a small stool which someone had recently covered with gros point, they could see that she was old, about eighty or thereabouts, perhaps more. Yet she was strong, a vigorous woman, only slightly impeded by age.

  ‘What’s this about Anna?’

  ‘She seems to have disappeared. We wondered how recently you’d seen her.’

  Mrs Marsh rubbed the cheeks over which age had laid a network of minute red veins.

  ‘I haven’t seen her recently. I assumed she’d gone on holiday. I thought she’d telephone when she came back.’

  ‘Were you surprised not to hear from her?’

  ‘Not really. To tell you the truth I thought she was offended with me. I may have been a bit sharp with her. I tend to lose my temper so easily these days.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Don’t get old, Inspector.’

  ‘She was a friend of yours, Madam?’

  ‘No. I used to visit her mother, when she was alive. She was frail, housebound. I doubt there was anything really wrong with her. But she died, so there must have been, mustn’t there? Ten years younger than me.’

  ‘And her daughter? She lived with her?’

  ‘Indeed she did. She was devoted, too devoted, sacrificed her life. And yet she seemed to want to. There was something odd about that household, the mother so frail, so delicate, and the daughter so cheerful. Marvellous, really. And yet she was too good, too filial. Like a daughter in a Victorian novel. Little Dorrit. Tried to be daughterly towards me, called me Aunt Vera. I tried to put a stop to that, but she didn’t take any notice.’

  She took a last draught from her almost empty cup of cold tea. Her hands shook very slightly, as if with anger at Miss Durrant’s remembered quaintness.

  ‘I inherited Anna from her mother. I dare say she was terrified of being alone, although she gave no sign of it. She called here once or twice, on a Sunday, sometimes on the pretext of taking me to church, as if she thought I was too feeble to get there on my own. I hadn’t the heart to put her off, although she ra
ther got on my nerves, to tell you the truth. She came here once when I was ill,’ she added remotely. ‘Kind-hearted, you see. Twice,’ she amended.

  ‘Did she go to church with you? In which case we might ask the vicar …’

  ‘No, she never would. “That’s not what I’m looking for,” she would say, with that everlasting smile of hers. “I’ll have my walk round the park, and look in on Miss Carter, and then I’ll collect you and walk you home.” So naturally I had to ask her to lunch. Not too often—perhaps it was only once or twice. Once,’ she added scrupulously. ‘I was exasperated with her: she obviously thought me senile. I’m quite capable of getting to the Oratory on my own. I was a magistrate for twenty years. To tell you the truth I was quite relieved not to see her for a bit. She had an unsettling effect on one. I thought she’d taken my advice and gone on holiday. Poor Anna.’ She brooded for a moment. ‘But she can’t be missing! That’s ridiculous. She was very level-headed. She must be away. She had a friend in Paris, I believe. That’s where she is, I dare say.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Well, I was away for most of the summer. Before that I told her I shouldn’t see her until the autumn. This is the autumn, I suppose. It would be three months or more.’

  ‘You didn’t think to telephone?’

  ‘Of course I did. There was no reply. I assumed she’d gone away. I wasn’t worried I knew I’d see her again. I was relieved, if anything, thinking she was enjoying herself somewhere. Oh, Anna.’

  She got up and poured herself a small whisky. She held up the bottle enquiringly. ‘You won’t?’ They shook their heads.

  ‘I doubt if there was any reason why I should see her, or she me. We got on each other’s nerves, although neither of us could bring ourselves to say so. She was far too good, of course, ever to think uncharitably of anyone. But she annoyed me, poor woman. She was too kind, made too much of an effort, fussed round me as she used to fuss round her mother. I wouldn’t have it, and I told her so. I didn’t want her for a daughter, poor Anna. I’ve got a perfectly good daughter of my own. And yet she was so well-meaning, so kind, but tactless, you know. Helping me up from my chair, taking my arm. I may be eighty-one but I’m not defunct.’