A Going Concern Read online

  Amelia stared at him. ‘This woman – what does – did – my great-aunt know about her, then? If I’m to find her I shall need to …’

  ‘The name of her mother and when she was born …’ responded James Puckle.

  ‘And where?’ put in Amelia astringently.

  ‘And where,’ agreed the solicitor. ‘I have her birth certificate in my file here …’

  ‘And?’ said Amelia into the little silence that fell when he stopped speaking.

  ‘That would appear to be the extent of my client’s knowledge,’ said Puckle gently, ‘at the time when she made her Will, that is.’

  Amelia stared at him. ‘That’s all?’

  James Puckle reached inside the folder. ‘You were to be given this photograph, though.’

  Amelia put out her hand in silence.

  ‘I fear it is not a photograph of the person concerned,’ he said, handing it to her across the desk.

  ‘But I should be grateful for small mercies? Is that what you think?’ Actually it was more of a snapshot than a proper photograph, and a little blurred at that. It was in black and white, quite small and rather faded, too. It appeared to Amelia to be of a wayside memorial beside a country crossroads. She peered at the image carefully. ‘A memorial cross but not in a cemetery?’

  ‘Not a grave,’ agreed Puckle. ‘I think there is an inscription but it’s too small to read even with my grandfather’s magnifying glass.’

  Amelia screwed up her eyes but couldn’t read it either.

  ‘It looked to me,’ the solicitor said, ‘as if it’s at a road junction, but where – I couldn’t begin to say.’

  ‘In France, anyway,’ said Amelia promptly.

  ‘France?’

  ‘In Flanders fields, Mr Puckle, where poppies grow.’ Amelia regarded the solicitor across the tooled green leather-topped expanse of his partners’ desk and said: ‘You’re not pulling my leg about all this, are you, Mr Puckle?’

  ‘Oh, no, Miss Kennerley, indeed not, I do assure you. Quite the contrary, in fact. The matter is serious. Very serious indeed.’

  ‘I would say that whoever broke into the Grange was pretty serious, too.’ said Amelia. ‘Do you think that the two things are connected?’

  James Puckle frowned. ‘I can’t answer that. I can only say that my instructions were that you were to be given the key of the Grange as well as the birth certificate and the photograph.’ He straightened his tie and said, ‘It is possible that there is a great deal of money waiting for this woman if she can be found.’

  ‘Possible?’ Amelia said. ‘What exactly do you mean by possible?’

  James Puckle said: ‘Let me first of all explain to you the nature of a precatory trust.’

  ‘It might help,’ said Amelia, taking the tie-straightening as a sign of more to come. ‘On the other hand, it might not.’

  He gave a quick smile. ‘It is usually used as a legal device by which a man could arrange for the discreet support of a mistress, and any family which he has had by her, after he had died without his wife and the rest of his family needing to learn of their existence.’

  ‘I should have thought,’ rejoined Amelia militantly, ‘that any wife worth her salt would have guessed.’

  James Puckle did not rise to this but went on: ‘Precatory settlements were most commonly used in Victorian times …’

  ‘When the Queen would not have been amused …’

  ‘When there was a greater opprobium attached to … er … irregular liaisons.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ demanded Amelia forthrightly, ‘that my great-aunt had a toy-boy?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you about precatory trusts and settlements,’ said James Puckle mildly.

  ‘Oh, all right. Go on.’

  ‘The mechanism behind the device is really quite simple …’

  ‘Simple! Oh, sorry …’

  ‘The testator would leave an appropriate sum of money to his best friend or someone else whom he could trust …’

  ‘Best friends don’t always have a good track record for trustworthiness.’

  ‘True. Nevertheless the testator would select a friend or member of his family …’

  ‘Not always one and the same either.’

  ‘In whom he felt he could repose his trust and make them legatees – often residuary legatees as this was more flexible and then …’ James Puckle paused.

  ‘And then …?’ prompted Amelia, leaning forward in her chair now.

  ‘And then arrange for them to be handed a sealed envelope with the Will in which the testator would explain that the money that they had been left was not actually for them at all but for the secret upkeep of the mistress.’

  Amelia sat back and said: ‘I really don’t see what this has got to do with me.’

  ‘Quite a lot, Miss Kennerley. You must appreciate that Mrs Garamond has made you her sole executrix and her residuary legatee on the understanding – the unwritten and discreet understanding as far as the Will is concerned, mind you – that you first find this woman …’

  ‘And then?’ said Amelia tautly.

  ‘Mrs Garamond’s instructions require that, once found, a judgement must be made before the bulk of her estate is handed over to her.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘A very subjective judgement about her worthiness to inherit.’

  Amelia took a deep breath. ‘So I’m to be both judge and jury, am I? Always supposing that we can find her in the first place …’

  ‘The precatory trust gives you total discretion.’ James Puckle rustled his papers. ‘However, should your actions be challenged at any time – although I can’t imagine by whom – then, of course, we would be very happy to act for you.’

  Amelia wrinkled her brow in puzzlement. ‘And if I don’t – if I can’t – find her, or even if she’s dead – then what?’

  ‘The residue of your great-aunt’s estate remains yours.’

  Amelia said wryly: ‘Keeping it in the family, I suppose?’

  ‘Just so, Miss Kennerley,’ said the solicitor. ‘The connection is there. Your late mother and the testator’s daughter, Perpetua, were first cousins after all.’

  Amelia nodded her concurrence with this statement. Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery had really done their homework on her background.

  James Puckle was still going on. ‘The precatory words, I must remind you, are merely a private wish, hope, desire …’

  ‘And entreaty,’ she finished for him.

  ‘Expressed in writing in private.’ He coughed. ‘I must remind you that no Trust within the legal meaning of the term is actually established although under more recent legislation it is possible that she might have a separate claim in her own right …’

  Amelia was scarcely listening now. Her mind had wandered back to the odd disturbance at the Grange: it might be even more important now.

  ‘And that the provisions of neither the various Trust Acts nor those of the precatory words are legally enforceable.’ He looked at her and asked, ‘Do I make myself quite clear?’

  ‘Like Charles II saying, “Let not poor Nellie starve”?’ said Amelia.

  ‘Just like King Charles, Miss Kennerley, except,’ he said drily, ‘that you may wish to take more note of what your great-aunt wanted than the King’s friends and relations did. I understand that, in fact, King Charles’ poor Nellie did starve.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’ asked Amelia curiously.

  ‘That,’ said the solicitor, ‘is a matter entirely between you and your conscience.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I must also advise you that you can, of course, decline to act at all if you so wish.’

  ‘It being a free country.’ Amelia looked James Puckle straight in the eye and said: ‘Do we know why Great-Aunt Octavia left her money in this way to a woman whose name she didn’t know and I mustn’t mention?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Miss Kennerley,’ responded the solicitor. ‘That’s no problem. You see, she was her daughter.�
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  ‘But her daughter Perpetua died …’

  ‘Not Perpetua,’ James Puckle said. ‘She had had another baby before she married your mother’s uncle …’

  EIGHT

  Weaving her tail like a plume in the air

  ‘And Phoebe,’ Amelia gulped, laying a copy of the birth certificate which James Puckle had given her on the kitchen table for her stepmother to see, ‘do you know, Great-Aunt Octavia’s left a pathetic message for me to give to her daughter when – if – I find her. And in her Will she’s left a candle – that’s all – for someone called Kate. Isn’t it all so sad?’

  Dr Plantin nodded.

  ‘To think she’s wanted to see her so badly all those years …’ said Amelia.

  Phoebe Plantin plonked her large lady doctor’s handbag firmly on the kitchen floor, pulled up a chair to the table, and examined the document. ‘A female child,’ she read aloud, ‘born December 15th, 1940. Mother’s surname Harquil-Grasset …’

  ‘Go on,’ urged Amelia.

  ‘Father unknown,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘When I find her,’ said Amelia a little unsteadily, ‘I’m to tell her how sorry she was to have inflicted the tache – James Puckle says that’s an old Scots word meaning mark – the tache of bastardy on her but she only did what she thought was right at the time.’

  ‘Nobody can do more,’ commented Phoebe Plantin sagely. ‘I don’t know about her surname but she gave her enough Christian names, didn’t she?’

  ‘Erica Hester Goudy,’ quoted Amelia. ‘I know, but James Puckle says she might not have kept them when she was adopted She’s just as likely to be called something like Mary Smith now.’

  ‘Born in a nursing home in London,’ observed Dr Plantin, still regarding the birth certificate minutely, ‘and while there was a war on.’

  ‘She probably told them she was a war widow,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Phoebe Plantin, who had ceased to be surprised long ago. ‘And arranged for flowers to be sent to herself, I expect. It’s been done before. Not that that sort of nursing home would ask questions, anyway.’

  ‘But, look,’ Amelia pointed at a line on the birth certificate, ‘she did put her own occupation down.’

  ‘Biological chemist …’ said the older woman thoughtfully. ‘She must have been pretty bright to go in for that before the last war.’

  ‘She’s left some money to her old college,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s in the Will.’

  ‘Thought of everything, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Amelia, turning to give something on the stove her attention, ‘it’s all different now – having a baby adopted, I mean. Wasn’t there an Act of Parliament or something whereby an adopted child can now find out about its real mother?’

  ‘Indeed there was,’ Phoebe Plantin said warmly, ‘except that they never use the term real mother nowadays. You have to call her the birth mother instead …’

  ‘But what about the new law?’ Amelia wished she’d paid more attention in her civics class at school – law seemed a very remote subject when viewed from the perspective of the sixth form. ‘What was that about, then?’

  ‘The Children’s Act of 1975 is the one you mean, but,’ Phoebe shook her head – ‘it isn’t going to help you find Octavia Garamond’s daughter, I’m afraid.’

  Amelia turned away from the stove. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because while the Act gave children who had been adopted the right to find out about their birth mothers when they reached the age of eighteen,’ said her stepmother, ‘it didn’t give their birth mothers any right to find out what had become of their natural children who had been adopted …’

  ‘But …’

  ‘What you might call sauce for the goslings but not for the goose.’

  ‘Or gander?’

  ‘Or gander,’ said Phoebe Plantin, tapping the birth certificate. ‘When Erica Hester Goudy Harquil-Grasset was adopted, which is presumably what happened to her since her birth mother couldn’t trace her later …’

  ‘If she tried,’ said Amelia. ‘We don’t even know that.’

  ‘She would have been given a new birth certificate.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Amelia, ‘but …’

  ‘The Registrar General keeps a confidential record of adoptions and the connection between the old and the new names to which only the child has access,’ said Dr Plantin, adding authoritatively: ‘and then only after he or she has reached the age of eighteen and has been professionally counselled.’

  ‘Not the real – sorry – birth mother?’

  ‘Not the birth mother,’ said Dr Plantin.

  ‘But there’s nothing, surely, to stop her trying to find out, is there?’ asked Amelia, stirring the while. ‘It’s a free country …’

  ‘Nothing.’ Phoebe Plantin pushed the birth certificate to one side and took up her table napkin. ‘But there are only two things that she can do which are really helpful.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘One is to deposit her name and address with the Registrar saying that she is willing for it to be given to her child should he or she ever try to seek to find out its mother’s identity, and indicating that she wishes to make contact with the child so that if the child wishes it can go straight ahead.’

  ‘And the other?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘Advertise. You’ve probably seen advertisements asking for an adopted child born on such and such a date to write to someone who may be its mother,’ said Dr Plantin. ‘It’s open to abuse on both sides of course, but you might have to do something like that.’

  ‘Or,’ said Amelia, ‘follow up every female child born on December 15th, 1940.’

  ‘Difficult,’ said Phoebe Plantin placidly. ‘Even Herod had his problems in that direction for all that he was King.’

  ‘King Herod?’

  ‘He tried, didn’t he? And if that’s soup on the stove, it’s burning.’

  ‘Ah, Sloan …’ Superintendent Leeyes could usually be found sitting in his office very much as a spider saves her strength and keeps watch on her web. The only real difference was that while the spider has to wait for her victim to get entangled in her net, the superintendent sent for his.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘There you are, at last …’ The superintendent had long ago raised the wrong-footing of his subordinates to a fine art. ‘This Garamond business … you’re making progress, I hope?’

  ‘We’ve established that whoever did the damage at Great Primer Grange got in through a pantry window at the back of the house’ – Sloan wasn’t sure if this was exactly progress or not and pressed on – ‘at some time as yet unknown after Mortons’, the undertakers, removed the body during Friday morning, and before Miss Kennerley and Dr Plantin went in on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘You wouldn’t care to narrow that down at all, would you, Sloan?’ asked Leeyes with mock solicitude. ‘Say to Friday or Saturday or when there’s an “R” in the month?’

  ‘Not at the moment, sir, thank you.’ He consulted his notebook and went on: ‘We have also established that the intruder or intruders wore gloves …’

  ‘So what’s new?’ shrugged Leeyes.

  ‘The fact,’ replied Sloan literally, ‘that they also wore some sort of overshoe – presumably to blur any footprints that might have been left. The carpets at the Grange are very good ones.’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘Whether the young woman who was seen by the local rector leaving the premises at half-past four on Friday afternoon had a hand in the break-in we have yet to find out,’ went on Sloan. ‘The name she gave and a rough description have been circulated … and DC Crosby is out interviewing the woman who was on duty as a care assistant at the Grange the night Mrs Garamond died.’

  Leeyes grunted again.

  ‘And then we’re going over to Luston, sir. Both the Garamonds used to work at Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs and the old firm …’

  ‘Old firm nothing,’ said Leeyes br
iskly. ‘They were up in court last month for breaking the health and safety regulations and endangering the wellbeing of their work force. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘Even so,’ said Sloan, ‘they seem to be taking quite an interest in the break-in at the Grange.’

  ‘Do they?’ growled Leeyes. ‘Then make sure it’s a healthy interest. Wait a minute, though, wait a minute, Sloan … there’s someone else already taking an interest in Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, isn’t there? It was in The Chronicle, surely, last week …’

  ‘Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals, sir,’ supplied Sloan, who read the local newspaper too. ‘I had a word with “G” Division over at Luston about that this morning. Apparently Harris and Marsh’ve been trying for a takeover of Chernwoods’ for quite a while now.’

  ‘I always thought that dog doesn’t eat dog,’ objected Leeyes, ‘but I suppose I’m old-fashioned.’

  ‘If it’s business, it does,’ said Sloan without hesitation. ‘That’s not all, sir. The word in Luston is that rather than be – er – eaten by Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals some of the senior people over at Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs would go for a management buy-out.’

  ‘Would they?’ sniffed Leeyes. ‘I suppose they know what they’re doing, putting all their eggs in one basket like that.’

  ‘It did occur to me, sir, to wonder if the deceased could have had a significant holding in Chernwoods’, seeing as she and her husband both worked there once.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do any harm to find out,’ conceded Leeyes.

  ‘The deceased,’ said Sloan, glancing down at his notebook again, ‘would appear also to have had some profound disagreements in the past with the rector of Great Primer.’

  ‘I do hope, Sloan,’ said Leeyes irritably, ‘that religion isn’t going to come into all this. There’ll be no holds barred then …’

  As far as the chairman and managing director of Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs was concerned there never had been any holds barred in business. This had been one of many of life’s disappointments. He was now listening intently to Gregory Rosart’s account of his telephone call to the Grange and feeling even more aggrieved.

  ‘I thought I oughtn’t to wait until today, Mr Miller, to try to establish contact,’ said the press officer, carefully suppressing any mention of his visit to Joe Keen’s. ‘It might have been too late.’