A Going Concern Page 5

  ‘It looks,’ said Amelia, ‘as if every single book in the room has been taken off its shelf, thoroughly shaken and then dropped on the floor … and as for that …’

  She pointed at a fine burr-walnut bureau which stood open, its drawers upturned and empty on the floor.

  ‘It wasn’t locked so it’s probably not badly damaged,’ said the policeman with a wisdom born out of years of experience. ‘No, don’t touch it, miss. Don’t anyone touch anything. Crosby, get a scenes of crime officer out here and the photograph people – Dyson and Williams if they’re free.’ He stood for a long moment on the threshold of the library, gazing at the scene of chaos before him.

  Amelia shivered at his side and said: ‘It wasn’t an ordinary burglary, was it, Inspector?’

  Sloan shook his head. ‘And it wasn’t an ordinary search either, miss. Now, if you two ladies will just wait here, my constable and I will take a quick look round upstairs.’

  He didn’t know how old the house was but it was big and comfortable and there was an old-fashioned pre-war opulence about its fixtures and fittings that had never come back after August 1914. The staircase was wide and the treads deep and the banister had been crafted out of cedarwood and was well polished for this day and age. The two policemen mounted it carefully, mindful of the possibility of the impression of footprints on the thick Turkey carpet.

  Sloan sent Crosby to examine all the lesser rooms while he himself made for what the house agents call the master bedroom. He was not unbearably surprised to see the disturbance of the library replicated there.

  Some person or persons at the moment unknown would seem to have been looking very hard indeed for something. The degree of devastation was so wide as to suggest that the search had failed. With luck, time would tell whether or not this was so.

  Time and hard work.

  Not forgetting luck, though.

  If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.

  Whoever had been conducting the search of the Grange hadn’t scrupled to heap the contents of the bedroom drawers on to the bed so recently occupied by a dead woman. Here was no ceremonial lit de mort but a stripped bed, the mattress ticking covered with a single sheet, but otherwise bare.

  To begin with Sloan stood just inside the doorway, letting his first impressions sink in. A medical oxygen bottle, mask still dangling from the knobs, stood to the far side of the head of the bed. On the side nearer the door, standing on a little cabinet that William Morris himself might have designed, was a telephone and two bottles of tablets, both nearly full.

  Whoever had been in the room, then, since Mrs Garamond’s death, had either not been concerned with removing her medication or had wished it to be seen and examined.

  Examined it would be, he decided, shifting his gaze to the bed itself. It was a double one, with a second bedside cabinet at the further side. Also on the far side was a bed-light. It was of the movable vintage that sat on the bed-head, a pull-cord hanging down from it. On a tallboy beyond the bed had clearly been a small selection of books between ornamental book-ends. Books and book-ends were now all scattered on the bedroom floor.

  Sloan stooped and tried to read a title or two without touching anything. Bedroom books, he reminded himself, were the books a person usually read – Gault and Synge’s Dictionary of Roses lived by his own pillow – and he was beginning to be very curious indeed about what sort of a person the late Mrs Octavia Garamond had been.

  Educated, he decided at once.

  Widely educated, he decided a few moments later, having found one of the works of Sigmund Freud on the carpet cheek by jowl with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Sloan himself, when an aspiring young constable, had – like many another – been drawn by the title. It had seemed almost required reading for a budding policeman but he had soon taken the book back to the public library. There had been no more connection between crime and punishment in the novel than there was in real life …

  ‘Ain’t nobody about, sir, but us chickens,’ said Crosby, ‘though all the other bedrooms are in pretty much the same state as this one.’

  ‘Upside-down?’ It was a calculated understatement.

  ‘And how! Whatever it was they wanted, sir, they sure wanted it pretty badly.’

  ‘And,’ observed Sloan, moving carefully in the direction of the fireplace, ‘we don’t even know whether they found it, do we?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Crosby squinted down at the floor. ‘Funny book-ends …’

  Sloan took another look. They still seemed vaguely ornamental to him. Metal but stylish.

  ‘Made from shrapnel,’ said Crosby confidently. ‘There’s a chap with a shop down by the market who still sells that sort of thing. Undertones of War, he calls himself.’

  Sloan peered more closely. ‘So they are.’ He started to study the photographs on the mantelpiece. They were all in silver frames but did not seem to have interested the searcher since they appeared quite undisturbed. In the centre was an amateur snapshot of a tall, laughing girl, her hair swept back from a fine face. One hand was waving gaily at whoever had been taking the photograph, the other engaged in holding her coat together in a high wind.

  ‘That the girl downstairs, then?’ asked Crosby over his shoulder.

  ‘Not in that style of coat,’ said Sloan. ‘But there’s a family likeness, I’ll grant you that …’ The next two photographs were of a man taken decades apart but pipe-smoking in both.

  ‘Youth and age,’ commented Crosby. ‘Wore quite well, didn’t he?’

  ‘And here, Crosby, at a guess, is where the shrapnel came from.’ He pointed to a picture of a large factory building covered in camouflage paint, with three rows of staff standing and sitting outside. There was an inscription in the bottom right-hand corner, which read Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, May 8th, 1945.

  The day peace broke out.

  In Europe, that is.

  For the time being, anyway.

  ‘Chernwoods’ doesn’t look like that now,’ said Crosby. ‘I passed it last week.’

  ‘It isn’t covered with camouflage paint any longer, that’s why.’ Sloan searched the faces in the photograph carefully until he found the one he wanted – it was halfway along the middle row. ‘And they’ve repaired the bomb damage.’

  He knew the building well enough as it was now. Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs was still one of the biggest employers in Luston, which was Calleshire’s only really large industrial town. Sloan turned back to the door with the distinct feeling that his mind had failed to register something significant. He would have to come back again later, although he knew for a start that there would be no point in examining the back of the wardrobe, now or then. Anyone ever searching a woman’s bedroom always went straight to her wardrobe first.

  And with good reason.

  Especially if the woman was a drinker.

  Instead, Sloan bent down and had a look at the jumble of books on the floor.

  There was no Bible.

  He would have expected to have found a Bible. His own mother always had one at her bedside. Old ladies in chronic heart failure usually had a Bible by their beds. And inside their Bible was where they often kept their really precious mementoes.

  He looked on the floor and beside the bed again.

  There was definitely no Bible.

  Sloan and Crosby were half-way down the stairs when they heard the telephone bell ring.

  Amelia Kennerley picked up the receiver in the hall and said: ‘Hullo …’

  ‘Great Primer Grange?’ enquired a male voice. ‘The late Mrs Garamond’s house?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amelia, conscious that everyone in the Grange was watching her face. ‘Who is that speaking, please?’

  ‘My name is Gregory Rosart. I’m from Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs in Luston …’ There was nothing in his voice, decided Amelia, to convey the man. ‘I do apologize for troubling you so soon and on a Saturd
ay afternoon, too, but I’ve just seen the announcement in this morning’s newspaper. We’re all naturally very sorry to learn of Mrs Garamond’s death …’

  ‘How kind of you to ring,’ said Amelia.

  ‘But,’ went on the voice fluently, ‘I’m the firm’s librarian and information officer and I’m ringing to say how very much we at Chernwoods’ would appreciate a sight of Mrs Garamond’s papers – she and her husband used to work here, you know, during the war – and we’d also very much like the opportunity to purchase any documents that there may be for our archives …’

  Amelia gave a sudden high and humourless laugh. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rosart, but you haven’t been quite quick enough off the mark.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Saturday or not,’ she declared, very conscious that she was being watched by two policemen and her stepmother, ‘I’m afraid someone else has already had first pickings.’

  ‘What!’ exclaimed the voice. ‘How did tha –’

  ‘Without asking,’ said Amelia astringently.

  Gregory Rosart let out a low whistle. ‘That was quick …’

  SEVEN

  Bid the black kitten march as chief mourner,

  Gregory Rosart lost no time in calling on Joe Keen, the chief chemist of Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, Ltd., in person. He drove swiftly out to Joe’s home in Larking. The house there, set in its own mellow grounds, was a far cry from the grimy building in Luston where both men worked. There was no doubt, thought Rosart, looking round him, that the Keen family home had that certain something called style.

  Joe Keen took some pride in being a man of few words. He heard Rosart out and then said: ‘And?’

  ‘And,’ said Rosart, ‘we still don’t know how much Harris and Marsh have really got hold of.’

  ‘Enough to make them go on buying, anyway,’ said Keen. ‘They picked up another sizeable tranche of Chernwoods’ 25p Ordinary Voting Shares late yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Good timing, that,’ said Rosart appreciatively. ‘You can’t teach ’em much.’

  ‘Just before the Stock Exchange closed for the weekend,’ nodded Keen. ‘Neat, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Our Claude won’t have got a lot of sleep then …’

  The chief chemist said: ‘It frightened the life out of him.’

  Claude Miller, Chairman and Managing Director of Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, was a living exemplification of the old saw about it being ‘only three generations from clogs to clogs’. His father hadn’t been the man his grandfather was and, worse still, Claude Miller wasn’t even the man his father had been.

  ‘I’ll bet it did,’ grinned Rosart. ‘What we still don’t know though,’ he went on more urgently, ‘is whether Harris and Marsh have got it or not.’

  ‘That’s true, Greg,’ Keen gave a thin smile, ‘but I think we soon will.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because I reckon Harris and Marsh’ll take the pressure off Chernwoods’ just as soon as they have. I bet you they’ll want to stop buying the stock just as quickly as they can. After all, it’s not that much of a bargain and God knows what they’re using for money.’

  ‘Credit,’ said Rosart pithily. ‘What you’re really saying, Joe, is that if they’ve got what they want then they don’t need us.’ Rosart looked at the chief chemist and said: ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then it would become a slightly different ball-game, that’s all.’ Joe Keen was looking out of the window at the rural scenery but his mind was back in Luston. ‘And then, Greg, only if what you call OZ is actually what Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals is after.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘But we don’t even know that for sure, do we?’ Keen swung his gaze back into the room and fixed it on Greg Rosart.

  ‘We do know, though, that they want us,’ persisted Rosart, subconsciously bracing his shoulders. He never enjoyed it when Keen stared like that. ‘And only us,’ he reminded him.

  And that was what was really important, added the librarian and information officer – but under his breath.

  ‘And only now,’ Keen put it. ‘That’s the most interesting development of all, isn’t it?’

  ‘True …’

  ‘I think, Greg,’ said Joe Keen profoundly, and rather pleased with his deliberate understatement, ‘that we could call Harris and Marsh the unknown quantity in the equation.’

  ‘So, miss,’ Sloan said presently, ‘we know that at least two other people called here at the Grange yesterday afternoon …’

  ‘That’s what Tod Morton told me, Inspector,’ replied Amelia. ‘The rector, Mr Fournier, who came to deliver a letter about the funeral service … hymns and things.’

  ‘That’s on the hall table,’ interposed Dr Plantin. ‘It was on the door-mat as we came in and I automatically picked it up and put it there. That was before I saw the rest of the house.’

  ‘And a young woman called Jane Baskerville whom Mr Fournier saw while he was delivering his letter,’ finished Amelia.

  Sloan made a note of the names.

  ‘We also know now,’ said Amelia tightly, ‘that Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs wanted her papers, too.’

  ‘Badly enough to ring here the very day they knew from the newspapers that she’d died,’ said Phoebe Plantin, ‘weekend or no. If that’s how they did find out, of course,’ she added shrewdly.

  ‘We’ll be calling on Chernwoods’ in the course of our enquiries,’ said Sloan formally. ‘There’s nothing else you can tell me, is there, miss?’

  Amelia said slowly, ‘Only that the undertaker told me that the rector didn’t seem very willing to take my great-aunt’s funeral but she had left instructions that he should.’

  Policemen, pathologists, and information officers might all work on Saturdays and Sundays. Members of the legal profession, however, do not. It was Monday morning when Amelia kept her appointment with James Puckle in the solicitors’ offices down by the bridge in Berebury.

  ‘Miss Kennerley, do come in …’ He waved her to a chair. ‘All of this must have come as something of a surprise to you …’

  Amelia considered the young solicitor before her and then said briefly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘The break-in must be a worry and I’m sorry that there had to be a post-mortem but in the circumstances …’

  ‘Like Mary Tudor,’ remarked Amelia.

  ‘Mary Tudor?’ James Puckle looked baffled.

  ‘She was “dead and opened”.’

  ‘Oh, really? I didn’t know … well, just like Mary Tudor, then.’

  ‘Mary Tudor,’ said Amelia bleakly, ‘told them that they would find “Calais” engraved on her heart.’

  ‘I understand that the results of the autopsy on your great-aunt are not yet available,’ James Puckle opened a folder on his desk, ‘although I know she had had heart trouble … er … too. However …’

  ‘Yes?’ Amelia’s eye had been caught by James Puckle’s tie. Blue with something crossed on it. Not swords, surely?

  ‘I understand, Miss Kennerley, that you didn’t know your great-aunt well?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said with perfect truth.

  The solicitor consulted a paper inside the folder. ‘Even so, she seems prepared to place a great deal of trust in you.’

  ‘It would appear,’ said Amelia, matching his dry tone, ‘that there isn’t anyone else in the family left.’

  ‘Perhaps … I mean, that may well be the case … exactly … perhaps that is so although we are not – how shall I put it? – absolutely certain about that yet.’

  ‘If you don’t count my father,’ said Amelia.

  ‘That relationship is even more tenuous than your own,’ said James Puckle. ‘Besides there is also the matter of your appearance.’

  ‘My appearance? What on earth has that got to …’

  ‘Apparently,’ said James Puckle, looking her straight in the eye, ‘you very much reminded our client of her deceased daughter, Perpetua.’

  Amelia, slightly startled, said: ‘You seem to
know quite a lot about me, Mr Puckle.’

  The solicitor said: ‘We took steps to find out what we could on our client’s behalf when we established exactly what it was that Mrs Garamond wanted you to do.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Mrs Garamond,’ he responded obliquely, ‘for reasons best known to herself chose to express her testamentary wishes in the form of some precatory words …’

  ‘And what,’ asked Amelia immediately, ‘might precatory words be?’

  ‘Words of wish, hope, desire, or entreaty,’ responded the solicitor.

  ‘I see …’ She didn’t see anything.

  ‘Usually accompanying a gift with the intention that the recipient will dispose of the property in a particular way.’

  Light began to dawn on Amelia. ‘Great-Aunt Octavia wanted something doing?’

  ‘I think you might put it like that,’ said the solicitor.

  ‘Something – this thing that she wants me to do – is it something that she couldn’t do herself?’

  ‘I think that is a fair inference.’ He hesitated. ‘Unless, that is, she had tried to do it herself and failed. We don’t know about that.’

  ‘To do what?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘Find someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ah, there we have a slight difficulty.’ James Puckle indicated a piece of paper in his hand. ‘She wants you to find a woman who would be in her fifties now but …’

  ‘But?’ Amelia had managed to have a closer look at the design on the solicitor’s tie. It wasn’t crossed swords that she had been looking at but crossed hockey sticks. And the crest of the Berebury Hockey Club.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Puckle regretfully, ‘that Mrs Garamond had no idea of the name this woman might be using at the time of her death.’

  ‘That does rather widen the field,’ agreed Amelia gravely, ‘doesn’t it?’

  ‘It is part of the difficulty,’ said James Puckle. ‘Only part, though.’

  She sat back in her chair. ‘Tell me …’

  ‘Once found, if she can be found, there is this precatory trust which Mrs Garamond created in her Will with which you will have to deal.’