A Going Concern Read online

  Claude Miller gnawed the end of his knuckle. ‘True.’

  ‘And I was quite right. Someone had already been in there.’

  ‘Beaten us to it, you mean, Greg?’ said Miller. He liked to think he was good at facing up to the realities.

  ‘Ah,’ Rosart held up his finger, ‘now that’s something we don’t really know yet, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Claude Miller bitterly, ‘that’s the whole trouble. Nobody knows for sure how much of this business anyone else knows and we’ve got no way of finding out. It’s all guesswork.’

  ‘Now, I wouldn’t say that, Mr Miller. Not yet …’

  The care assistant who did the nights at the Grange was called Mrs Shirley Doves and made no bones about talking to a nice young police constable who seemed so interested in all her doings.

  ‘Thursday night? Like every other night, it was. My Ron took me over from Cullingoak, ’bout half nine, it would be. I’d settle the kids – my mum pops in then to keep an eye – and then Ron brings me over to Great Primer.’

  ‘So you’d get to the Grange when?’ said Detective Constable Crosby. He knew he should be calling her ‘madam’ but he hadn’t got it in him what it took to do it.

  ‘Oh, we don’t come straight to the Grange, lovey – I wasn’t due there until half ten, you know. No, you see we pop into the Dog and Duck first. You know … the pub the other side of the church from the Grange. You must have seen it if you’ve been out there – call yourself a policeman and not know the pubs? Oh, all right, then … if you say so … My Ron knows the landlord, see … well, we go there first, otherwise,’ Shirley laughed, ‘I’d never see Ron at all, would I? Oh, all right, well hardly ever. You see, he’s gone to work by the time I get back, mornings – my mum gets the kids off to school except the two littlest so this hour in the pub, evenings, is ’bout the only time we have together, Ron and me. Mind you,’ she said elliptically, ‘my mum says it’s long enough when you’ve got four under six. She thinks it’s time Ron shut up shop, anyway, but he doesn’t like the idea.’

  Detective Constable Crosby went a bit pink and asked if last Thurday night had been different in any way from other nights.

  ‘Seeing as you ask,’ admitted Shirley, ‘I might have been a bit later than usual. Not much, mind you. You see, we got talking with a fellow there and he stood us an extra round just before we went. Not,’ she went on hurriedly, ‘that the old lady minded. I don’t think she cared any more what time of day it was. ’Sides, she told me she was expecting a visitor the next afternoon. Quite excited about it, she was. Anyway, I settled her for the night like I always did, then I gave her a milky drink and her tablets, and went to bed myself. A bit early, actually. In the night? No, she didn’t ring once and I slept right through, I did. Course, in the morning she’d gone, hadn’t she? Not that that was any surprise to anyone. Could have happened any time, the doctor said. He’s ever so nice, is Dr Aldus. He wasn’t cross at all. He knew I wasn’t meant to be sitting up with her or anything. Just there to see that she didn’t come to no harm …’

  NINE

  Bury him nobly – next to the donkey

  ‘Phoebe …’

  ‘M’m?’

  ‘I think,’ said Amelia, ‘that I’m going to need to know where Great-Aunt was for the whole of the year when her daughter was born.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Tell me, if the baby was born on December 15th when would she have known that she was pregnant?’

  Dr Plantin thought for a moment. ‘In those days not until about the middle of May.’

  ‘Those days?’

  ‘Testing for pregnancy was different then.’ She raised a minatory hand. ‘I know, you’re going to tell me that of course she would have known sooner, but you must remember that it wasn’t like that then. Testing for pregnancy in 1940 took a long time and mice.’

  ‘Mice?’ echoed Amelia, surprised.

  ‘Mice, rabbits, or frogs.’ The telephone began to ring and Phoebe Plantin started to get to her feet. ‘You could make a beginning by trying to find out, if you can, where your great-aunt was somewhere about the second half of March 1940.’ She picked up her bag. ‘That’s when this baby would have been conceived. If that’s my surgery on the phone tell them I’m on my way.’

  ‘Phoebe, I’m not sure if I should have told you about the baby … she must have wanted it kept secret.’

  ‘Mum’s the word,’ promised Dr Plantin as she left the room. She came back a moment later and said neatly, ‘And in more senses than one.’

  Amelia grinned and went to the telephone with Dr Plantin’s message but the call was not for her stepmother but for her.

  ‘Claude Miller here, Chairman of Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs,’ said a voice importantly. ‘I’m ringing to say that I would count it a great privilege to be allowed to say something about Mrs Garamond at the funeral. Or, perhaps, read a lesson. I don’t want to intrude, naturally, but, after all, she was connected with the firm here for a very long time.’

  Amelia promised to talk to the rector. And then she did some dialling on her own behalf. ‘Directory enquiries? I want the number of the bursar of Boleyn College please …’

  The bursar had a high, thin voice and was called Miss Wotherspoon. ‘In what way may I help you?’ she piped. ‘Who? Garamond, née Harquil-Grasset, did you say? Ah, yes, I saw that in the paper. Just a moment and I’ll turn up our records …’

  Amelia heard the patter of her footsteps across the floor and then their return.

  ‘Are you there, Miss Kennerley? She came up as Brakewell Scholar before the war and read biological chemistry – we hadn’t really started to call them biologists then – that word was only just beginning to come into fashion and Boleyn kept to the old style – Honours degree in Biological Chemistry.’ Miss Wotherspoon drew breath and said: ‘She did awfully well – awarded the Malthus Prize, Banksia Essayist for paper on mitosis in sugar beet … as it happened that was very useful afterwards –’

  ‘Afterwards …?’ broke in Amelia.

  ‘No imported cane sugar to speak of in this country after the war started – and I’m sure she’d have proceeded to a doctorate but for war breaking out … bound to have done.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Amelia. ‘That is certain to have made a difference.’

  ‘Then did research at the Linnean Institute until 1940,’ continued the bursar, obviously reading aloud, ‘war-work at Messrs Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, Luston, Calleshire, married William Garamond 1941 …’ Miss Wotherspoon’s voice died away in patent disappointment. ‘Only joint publications with William Garamond after that, I’m afraid. She doesn’t seem to have published anything entirely on her own from then onwards …’

  Amelia wondered briefly what Anne Boleyn would have made of this. Or Henry VIII.

  ‘Always so difficult,’ went on the bursar brightly, ‘where you have joint papers with spouses to know who’s done the real work but wives, even if they’re very good, will do it. You can’t stop them.’

  ‘No,’ said Amelia, ‘but you will be very pleased to know that my great-aunt hasn’t forgotten Boleyn in her Will …’

  Detective Inspector Sloan had barely got back to his own office before his telephone went. It was the pathologist.

  ‘She may have been murdered?’ repeated Sloan.

  ‘That’s what I said and that’s what I mean,’ declared the pathologist unrepentantly. ‘I’ve been talking to the people I sent those sections to.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re equivocal,’ said Dr Dabbe, adding cheerfully, ‘both the sections and the people.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘They’re going to do some more tests but I thought meanwhile I ought to keep you in the picture.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor, but …’

  ‘If some noxious substance had been administered to the deceased,’ swept on the pathologist, ‘to account for the post-mortem findings in her liver and kidneys, then we don’t yet know wha
t it was.’

  ‘When you say “administered”, doctor, what precisely do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ said Dabbe easily, ‘that it is not yet clear how the noxious substance got into the old lady’s system – if it did, of course.’

  ‘All her precautions,’ said Sloan warily, ‘seem to point to her having thought – er – malfeasance a possibility.’

  ‘And all I can say at this stage,’ said Dr Dabbe rather more informally, ‘is that if someone was out to get her then they might have done …’

  ‘But how?’ said Sloan, with the classic trio of the prerequisites of murder, means, motive, and opportunity, in the forefront of his mind but left unsaid.

  ‘Ah, that’s another matter altogether,’ said Dabbe. ‘We can’t tell you how just yet.’

  ‘I see,’ he said.

  ‘I can tell you, though, some of the ways it wasn’t,’ said Dr Dabbe helpfully. ‘She didn’t swallow it because I took samples from her stomach, remember?’

  Sloan remembered.

  ‘And I also examined her body very carefully for puncture marks.’

  ‘There weren’t any.’

  ‘Precisely, Sloan,’ agreed the doctor. ‘There weren’t any. Like the curious incident of the dog in the night.’

  ‘It didn’t bark,’ responded Sloan. Two could play at this game.

  ‘That, as Sherlock Holmes remarked, was what was curious,’ said the pathologist. ‘Nor, I may say, were there any marks on her skin suggestive of the application of one of the transdermal poisons …’

  ‘Pardon, doctor?’

  ‘Hamlet’s father …’

  ‘The Ghost?’

  ‘The Ghost, if you remember, Sloan, had been murdered by having a transdermal poison poured into his ear.’

  ‘Mrs Garamond hadn’t though, had she?’ said Sloan, trying to keep his mind clear.

  ‘Both ears,’ responded Dabbe immediately, ‘were dry and the drums visible, and neither John Aldus nor I found anything on her skin.’

  ‘Yet she asked him to look,’ said Sloan.

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘That leaves the nose …’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, determined to remain undistracted by literary allusions. ‘Could she have inhaled something?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that she didn’t,’ said the pathologist blandly. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘So where are we now, Crosby?’

  ‘Just past the Calleford turn-off, sir.’

  ‘Not where are we on the road, Crosby. I can see that for myself, thank you – if and when, that is, I can bring myself to open my eyes.’

  ‘Sir?’ Detective Constable Crosby sounded injured.

  The two policemen were driving along Calleshire’s only stretch of motorway, satisfying Crosby’s lust for speed at the same time as seriously interfering with Sloan’s digestive processes.

  ‘I meant,’ sighed Sloan, ‘where have we got to in the case – if there is a case, that is – of the late Octavia Garamond?’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a long pause and then Crosby said tentatively: ‘Not very far?’

  ‘Surprise, surprise, Crosby. You could be right.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ A beam had replaced the injured look on the detective constable’s face.

  ‘All we’ve got so far might as well be called thistledown,’ said Sloan. ‘You could blow it away like a dandelion clock – what are you stopping for, Crosby? The road’s quite clear …’

  ‘Inspector Harpe of Traffic ordered a speed trap at the bottom of Bembo Hill today, sir.’

  ‘Did he, indeed?’ said Sloan. ‘Good for him.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby flashed the car’s headlights at a uniformed constable wielding a hand-held computer-assisted radar gun as he drove past at his lowest speed of the week.

  Sloan enjoyed a moment’s relaxation. ‘I shan’t ask how you got to hear about it.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘But now that the immediate danger is over, Crosby, perhaps you would turn your mind to the matter on hand.’

  ‘That,’ advanced Crosby, ‘was no ordinary turning-over at the Grange, sir.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘And whoever did it got started on the searching pretty quickly after the old lady died.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And then there was her wanting her doctor to have a look at her after she’d died.’

  ‘Good. Go on.’

  ‘And asking us to the funeral.’

  Sloan said very seriously, ‘I think that there is no doubt that – whether or not she was – the deceased would seem to have thought that she might be murdered.’

  ‘Seems to me,’ said Crosby, resuming his usual speed, ‘that she was pretty sure about it.’

  ‘Either way,’ said Sloan, ‘since she was, from all accounts, a pretty bright old bird, I think her last wishes ought to be respected by everyone.’

  ‘Then,’ said Crosby, ‘why didn’t she tell someone about being afraid of being killed while she was still alive?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ said Sloan, ‘and I’ve come to the conclusion that she wasn’t afraid of dying and didn’t mind.’

  Crosby took his foot off the accelerator in surprise. ‘Not mind being murdered?’

  ‘She was old, ill, and alone in the world, and her doctor agrees that she knew she hadn’t long to live.’

  Crosby put his foot down again.

  Sloan said: ‘I would think that she had already decided that she hadn’t anything to live for …’ He looked up and braced himself as they overtook a TVR sports car at a speed he didn’t even like to think about. ‘I would like you to know that I have, Crosby.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Everything. A wife, a son, a pension, and now Madame Caroline Testout.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘An old Hybrid Tea rose. She’s at her best just now.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And furthermore I would like you to know that I do not share your rooted objection to looking at the back view of the vehicle ahead.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Especially when I’m thinking about a very odd case where the pathologist and his cronies can’t even be sure what the deceased died from.’

  Detective Constable Crosby pulled the police car into the slow lane of the motorway just behind a heavily laden articulated lorry and trailer and said, ‘This thing that someone was looking for at the Grange …’

  ‘I agree it would help if we knew what it was …’ Sloan responded to Crosby’s thought processes rather than his words.

  ‘Do you think, sir, that the old lady had it there? Whatever it was.’

  ‘If she did,’ said Sloan, ‘then what I think is that she either knew it was there …’

  ‘And that no one could find it?’ said Crosby, edging the police car nearer still to the lorry’s exhaust pipe.

  ‘That,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘or, whether it was there or not, that she wanted them to come and show their hand.’

  ‘Whoever they are?’ said Crosby.

  Sloan wound up the car window to keep the fumes out. ‘Exactly. There was something else …’

  ‘Sir?’ Crosby peered through the cloud of smoke rather ostentatiously.

  ‘Those notices about her death sent to all those different newspapers that Tod Morton told us about …’

  ‘What about them, then?’

  ‘I think that she was making absolutely sure that someone …’

  ‘Person or persons unknown?’ contributed Crosby, who was now rubbing the inside of the car’s windscreen as if to disperse the lorry’s effulgence.

  ‘Knew that she’d died when she did.’

  ‘So that they’d come and search her house?’

  ‘Not exactly. They could have done that any time. From what Dr Aldus said Mrs Garamond would have been too frail to stop them.’

  ‘So, what then, sir?’

  ‘So that they’d come and search her house afte
r she was dead. There is quite a difference.’

  It was too fine a point for Crosby. He concentrated on pulling the police car out into the fast lane instead.

  They were very nearly into Luston before he spoke again. ‘Sir, how are we ever going to know if they –’

  ‘Person or persons unknown?’

  ‘Them,’ said the constable, ‘got what it was they wanted or not?’

  ‘Ah! Now you’re asking,’ said Sloan.

  TEN

  Fetch the old banner, and wave it about;

  Exactly the same problem was worrying Michael Harris of Messrs Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals, also of Luston. He found it as difficult a question to answer as Detective Inspector Sloan had done.

  Unlike Sloan and Gregory Rosart, though, Michael Harris had no one with whom he could talk completely freely on that particular matter. He was, however, able to discuss his predatory stalking of Chernwoods’ Dye-stuffs with his finance director – indeed, he had to talk to David Gillsans because some of the fine print of the rules and regulations appertaining to take-over deals of limited companies still evaded him. Like his father before him, Michael Harris was primarily a chemist and not either a legal eagle or a money man. He looked to his finance director, David Gillsans, to be both.

  ‘So what do we hold of Chernwoods’ now, David?’ Harris asked him first thing Monday morning.

  ‘As of stock-market closing time last Friday afternoon, just one per cent under the percentage when we would have to go public on the bid.’

  ‘That’s not including my father’s own holding, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said the finance director patiently. This was old ground and they’d been over it before.

  ‘Or Octavia Garamond’s?’

  ‘Naturally not.’

  ‘She died on Friday.’

  ‘So I saw in the newspaper.’

  ‘What happens to her holding now?’

  ‘That depends on how she willed it. If she didn’t specify the shares in her Will as a bequest then her executors may choose to sell to raise funds for capital transfer and inheritance tax …’

  ‘I wish you’d call it by its proper name, David,’ said Harris snappily, ‘then at least I would know what you were talking about …’