Past Tense Page 5

‘Precisely,’ said Simon Puckle. ‘It is dated – let me see now – just under three years ago.’

  ‘That would have been when she first went into the nursing home,’ supplied Joe Short, nodding, ‘which was soon after my parents were killed. She sold her house then and almost everything in it.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Simon Puckle, specialist in the winding-up of homes as well as estates. ‘If I may say so, that is quite clear from the provisions of the will.’

  Joe Short visibly relaxed. ‘That’s quite a relief, Mr Puckle. Sorting out my parents’ estate is being quite a problem, my being out in Lasserta and the airline people and the airport owners there still being at loggerheads after the accident. I just can’t get anywhere with them yet…’

  ‘And you are described here as an employee of United Mellemetics plc in Lasserta…’

  ‘I was with them,’ replied Joe Short immediately. ‘I moved to Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons not long after I lost my parents. A good friend of mine had gone missing about the same time and I thought a change of scene might help…’

  The solicitor, a man still working in offices in a fine early Georgian house bought by his great-great-grandfather and by both nature and profession therefore constitutionally opposed to change, nevertheless nodded sympathetically.

  ‘But it didn’t,’ admitted the younger man, ‘at least, not much.’

  Simon Puckle, mindful of a famous legal comment made when people were straying from the point, soon got back to his muttons. ‘The will appoints myself and failing me, members of this firm, as sole executors of the will…’

  Joe Short nodded again. ‘That figures. Granny knew I couldn’t get back to England very easily or often and she didn’t want me to have to. And anyway she always said her family’s obligation was to the living not the dead and that was what mattered.’

  Simon Puckle, who dealt with the estates of the dead as much as with those of the living, and did feel an obligation to them, made no comment on this and said instead, ‘In my capacity as sole executor I can therefore advise you of its contents.’ Something of a specialist in reading body language, he waited for any increase in tension in the man opposite, but there was none that he could observe. Joe Short seemed very relaxed and so the solicitor deduced that what was to come was probably not news to him.

  ‘As her only grandchild, you are her residuary legatee,’ said Simon Puckle formally, ‘and subject to the obtaining of probate and paying the necessary inheritance tax and, of course, making the small bequests she listed, to the Rowlettian Society and so forth, and seeing to a gravestone for her in Damory Regis churchyard – she wanted your parents’ names on it, too, by the way, as well as the old-fashioned plumb line—’

  ‘Plumb line?’ said Joe Short, a bewildered look on his face.

  ‘A medieval symbol meant to represent the expression “Death levels all”.’

  His face cleared. ‘I see.’

  ‘…the remainder of the estate will be coming to you. In due course.’ He added the caveat carefully.

  Joe Short nodded. ‘Poor Granny.’

  It wasn’t what the solicitor had expected him to say. At this stage most legatees only wanted to know how much money would be coming to them.

  ‘Subject, naturally,’ continued Simon Puckle fluently, ‘to your also providing satisfactory evidence of identity.’

  Joe Short jerked his head. ‘Of course. I quite understand that.’ He fumbled in his jacket pocket. ‘I’ve got my passport here if you want to see that,’ he said, putting it on the desk.

  ‘Thank you.’ The solicitor picked it up, glanced at the man and the photograph, made a written note of its number, and then rang for a clerk and asked her to make a photocopy of it. She was back in minutes and he handed it back to Joe Short, who stowed it away in his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Let me see now,’ said Simon Puckle, delicately casting a fly with all the finesse of an experienced freshwater fisherman, ‘I am not sure if the source of your late grandmother’s money is known to you.’

  Joe Short frowned. ‘And I’m not sure that I know all the details myself. I can only tell you what my father told me.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That round about the time when Dad had just left school Granny’s own mother died…’

  ‘Ah, I see, an inheritance…’

  ‘No, no. Well, not exactly. Only in a way. Her mother didn’t leave Granny any money at all. In fact, believe it or not, the family actually tried to cut her off with a shilling…’

  As it happened Simon Puckle had no difficulty in believing this: that the making of testamentary dispositions didn’t always bring out the best in people was a lesson learnt early in the legal profession.

  Joe Short was still looking at him across the desk. ‘That bit about a shilling’s an old saying, isn’t it? At least someone once told me it was.’

  ‘Indeed, it is, and one with some legal significance.’

  Joe Short looked up. ‘Tell me.’

  The solicitor rested his elbows on his desk and steepled his fingers before he said, ‘To be cut off with a shilling is to be disinherited. To be left a shilling in a will indicated that the testator had not forgotten or overlooked the person concerned but had intentionally disinherited him or her by bequeathing them a trifling sum.’

  ‘There was plenty of room on Granny’s side for hurt feelings,’ Joe Short sniffed, ‘so in my opinion it should have been the other way round: Granny cutting them off.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the solicitor alertly.

  ‘It must have been like rubbing salt into an old wound as far as Granny was concerned,’ said Joe Short heatedly, ‘her own mother trying to do her out of what was rightfully hers.’

  ‘Indeed, but do go on. You were telling me about your grandmother’s family and this inheritance.’

  ‘I was told that the family tried to cut Granny out of her share of her own grandmother’s estate but they found they couldn’t. By the provisions of some old trust – I don’t know anything more about it than that – when Granny’s own mother died all that was held in it had to be divided up between her descendants per…’ He stopped and looked uncertainly at the solicitor.

  ‘Per stirpes?’ suggested Simon Puckle. He coughed and explained that the distribution would therefore be equally shared between the immediate heirs and not according to the number of children they had if they had predeceased the testator.

  ‘That’s it. I didn’t know what it meant, but anyway I know Granny was entitled to her fair share all right, just like the rest of her grandmother’s descendants – all her own sisters and brothers.’

  The solicitor nodded and added pedantically, ‘And cousins, if any.’

  ‘They – well, all but one of them, her brother, William – tried to stop her having it but you didn’t know Granny.’ Joe Short’s face broke into a smile for the first time that day. ‘She was a fighter. She took them to court and won her share. Her family found out the hard way that they couldn’t do her out of the money in that trust however hard they tried.’

  The solicitor glanced down at the will and said wryly, ‘She seems to have put it to very good use.’

  Joe Short was still smiling. ‘There were no flies on Granny, Mr Puckle. I can tell you that. No flies at all. That money bought her house and put my father through university and then some.’

  ‘Your father…’ said Simon Puckle. ‘Let me see now, his name was…’

  ‘George Peter Arden Short,’ supplied Joe Short. ‘Inevitably known as “Lofty” at school.’ He grimaced. ‘When I was at school they used to say “Short by name and tall by nature”.’

  ‘Ah, I was going to ask you about your schooling, too.’ Simon Puckle’s pen was poised over the notepad on his desk.

  ‘Here, there and everywhere,’ said Joe Short cheerfully. ‘Dad was working all over the world – he was an engineer, like me – and Mum didn’t want me sent back to some boarding school thousands of miles away so I got sent to school whe
rever they happened to be at the time.’

  Simon Puckle made a note and then went on, ‘Presumably this money that your grandmother inherited was the basis for her…er…shall we say – future prosperity?’

  Joe Short said, ‘That’s what I’ve always been led to believe. My father told me that she went into property a bit earlier than most people.’

  ‘A lot earlier, I should say,’ said the solicitor approvingly, ‘judging by the size of her estate. She would appear to have been very far-sighted.’

  Again the man in the client’s chair did not say what Simon Puckle had expected. Instead he shook his head sadly and said, ‘After my parents died Granny said money didn’t matter. All the money in the world wouldn’t bring them back.’

  ‘It’s the hardest lesson of all,’ murmured Simon Puckle, a man trained to be the interface between money and life.

  Joe Short started to get to his feet. ‘There was one thing, though, that I’d rather like to know…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Suppose I’d died before Granny – what would have happened then? You know, another plane accident – not, I can assure you, that I’ll ever travel by Lasserta Airlines again. Ever. But working with querremitte can sometimes be dangerous, too.’

  The solicitor scanned the pages in front of him. ‘Let me see, now…ah, yes, here we are. Any wife and children of yours would take first, then someone called William Wakefield of The Old Post Office, Staple St James, would inherit.’ He looked interrogatively at Joe Short. ‘Presumably he is the husband of the Mrs Janet Wakefield who made the funeral arrangements and was the person the deceased gave as her next of kin?’

  ‘That’s right. And it makes sense. As I said, his grandfather, a William, too, was a brother of Granny’s and the only one of the family who kept in touch with her after…after…’

  ‘Shall we say the “disruption”?’ The solicitor was more used to dysfunctional families than most and had found over the years that this word – carefully selected from the history of the Scottish Church in the nineteenth century – had come in very useful.

  Joe Short grinned. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  ‘So this William Wakefield, or failing him, any heir male of his body, would have become the residuary legatee,’ resumed Simon Puckle punctiliously.

  ‘That figures, doesn’t it?’ said Joe Short, suddenly rising and putting out his hand. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I take it you’ll be staying at the Bellingham for a little while?’ said Simon Puckle.

  ‘Just a very few days. I have to get back to Lasserta as soon as I can, the firm having been so good,’ said Joe Short from the doorway. ‘But first I’m going over to Kinnisport to look up an old boy called Sebastian Worthington who came to the funeral. I want to talk to someone who really knew Granny well and he seemed to fit the bill.’

  And then he was gone.

  The bridge across the River Alm at Billing was situated at the lowest point downriver at which it had been possible to build a bridge with the tools, materials and know-how around in rural Calleshire in 1485. Its pointed stone piers had deflected the waters of the Alm between the arches ever since.

  What the piers of the bridge hadn’t done today was to deflect the body of a fully clothed girl through them and into the mainstream. Instead, some vagary of the current had caused her body to fetch up in a little patch of still water near the northern bank.

  ‘Bream,’ spluttered one of the fishermen, when Detective Inspector Sloan arrived. ‘We were fishing for bream.’

  Sloan nodded. People said the oddest things when under stress. This man was clearly stressed. His friend was a bit more composed. ‘I got a hook into her clothes, Inspector,’ the other fisherman said, ‘though it seemed a bit disrespectful.’

  Sloan was reassuring. ‘You did the right thing. Looking for her lower down the river would have been more difficult.’

  ‘And then we hauled her out,’ said the first man, adding anxiously, ‘hope that was all right, too?’

  ‘In case the river took her away again,’ explained his friend. ‘It could have done. Easily. The Alm can come up quite quickly when it has a mind to.’

  ‘After heavy rain upriver,’ supplemented his companion. ‘And you don’t always realise here downstream when that’s been happening. Takes time to get here does heavy water, but when it comes, it comes down sudden.’

  ‘I know you’re not supposed to touch a body…’ The first fisherman still needed reassurance.

  ‘It’s better than letting her go out to sea,’ said Sloan firmly. ‘Now, both of you keep well back and let me have a proper look…’

  Not only the two fishermen but Detective Constable Crosby, too, kept their distance as the detective inspector advanced carefully towards the body of the girl. He judged that she was aged about twenty-four or -five and certainly hadn’t been in the water long. She was wearing a very light coat over a blouse and brightly coloured summer skirt, strands of auburn-coloured hair falling wetly round her face. As far as he could see at first glance there was no sign of injury on the body but that was something that would have to await the arrival of Dr Hector Smithson Dabbe, the forensic pathologist. Post-mortem evidence was what would be wanted, not the unskilled observations of anyone else.

  ‘Tape off the site, Crosby,’ he ordered, ‘watch out where you walk and establish a single route to the scene.’ He turned to the fishermen. ‘You two stand over there until we’ve had a chance to take down your names and addresses.’

  ‘But I told my wife I’d be home for breakfast,’ began one of them.

  His protest fell upon deaf ears. Sloan thought he himself would be lucky to get home for his supper. Making a mental note to ring Margaret, his wife, and tell her so, he pointed authoritatively to the spot where he wanted the men to stand and then got back to business – police business.

  Meanwhile Detective Constable Crosby was obediently pegging out the ground. Then suddenly he raised his head, dog-like, for all the world like a pointer scenting game. ‘I can hear a car coming.’

  ‘Then get back up to the road, Crosby, and if it’s the doctor let him know exactly where we are.’ Injuries examined in situ after death were in the first instance a matter for Dr Dabbe, not a policeman. Police interest, if any, usually only arose after that. Natural causes let everybody off the hook – except perhaps the doctors. ‘The photographers should be on their way, too,’ he reminded Crosby.

  ‘And the river bailiff,’ said one of the fishermen. ‘He’s always about.’

  ‘You can count on it,’ added the other fisherman bitterly.

  Sloan made another mental note. The river bailiff, then, might well be the man to ask about the rate of flow of the River Alm. And if the pathologist could tell him how long the body had been in the water, then working out where the girl had gone in the river shouldn’t be too difficult. And if neither of them could help, the River Board should be able to provide the answer.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Sloan.’ The pathologist advanced across the grass and stepped carefully down the slope towards them. He was followed by his perennially silent assistant, Burns, who was carrying the doctor’s black bag. The doctor waved his hand airily. ‘Your photographer chaps are on their way, Inspector. They’ll be here soon. I overtook them about four miles back.’

  This came as no surprise to Sloan. The pathologist was one of the fastest drivers in Calleshire and that was without even having the excuse that his patients were urgent cases. ‘I expect they were obeying all the rules of the road, Doctor,’ he said without inflexion. ‘It wouldn’t do for them to be caught speeding, would it, now?’

  ‘Point taken, Sloan,’ said the pathologist jovially. ‘Now then, what have you here for me?’

  The detective inspector indicated the body of the girl outstretched on the riverbank.

  ‘She was floating in the rushes, Doctor.’ One of the fishermen hurried into speech. ‘On her back.’

  ‘Just like Ophelia,’ murmured t
he pathologist. ‘At least, just like Sir John Millais’ portrait of Ophelia.’

  ‘Beg pardon, Doctor?’

  ‘A girl in a famous painting, Inspector, who had drowned herself for love. Amazing what some girls will do for love, isn’t it?’

  ‘So I’m told,’ said Sloan austerely, not diverted from the matter in hand. What he himself had done for love was not something he cared to reveal to anyone. His wife, Margaret, knew and that was all that mattered. All he was ever prepared to say on the matter was that faint heart had never won fair lady.

  ‘Ophelia but without the flowers,’ said the pathologist, taking in the surroundings with a practised eye. ‘Burns, we’d better have the ambient temperature.’

  ‘What flowers?’ asked a bewildered Crosby, looking round and seeing nothing but grass and water in the countryside.

  ‘In that painting,’ explained the pathologist. ‘The artist, Millais, sent out for plants that grew at the water’s edge while he was working on it. He had some trailing willow branches brought round, too. Mind you, I don’t blame her…’

  ‘Who?’ asked Crosby, totally lost now.

  ‘Ophelia. Her lover was a very funny chap with big problems.’ Dr Dabbe’s manner changed as he peered at the body. ‘Millais’s model caught pneumonia but I think this girl might have drowned. Too soon to say, of course. Much too soon. But how and why is a different matter. Or to put it another way it’s the difference between “I shall drown and no one will save me”, which is a cry of despair, and “I will drown and no one shall save me”, which is suicidal.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ Sloan said stolidly.

  The pathologist was looking round now as two men, heavily burdened with equipment, started to struggle across the field. ‘Ah, here come your happy snappers. When they’re done, Sloan, perhaps I could get a bit nearer and tell you whether she did an Ophelia or her Hamlet pushed her.’

  Chapter Six

  At her home, The Old Post Office, in the village of Staple St James, Janet Wakefield was pushing a mug of coffee across the kitchen table to the woman sitting opposite her.