A Going Concern Read online

  She would have liked to know who Kate was – she who had been left a candle – and to go over again the list of newspapers that Great-Aunt Octavia had asked to be notified of her death in order to see what she could glean from that but the details were still wtih Tod Morton and she didn’t want to bother him again.

  That left her with only the birth certificate.

  The birth certificate at least, thought Amelia, was tangible and evidence that she hadn’t dreamed the whole improbable affair. She took it up from the table and studied it once more. The birth certificate of an unknown woman about whom she knew nothing … well, not quite nothing. At least she knew the names her natural mother had bestowed on her – Erica Hester Goudy – even if they weren’t the names used by her in after life.

  And she knew, surely, that if she had been born in 1940 she must be middle-aged now. What she did not know, of course, was whether she was dead or alive. Looking for a nameless woman was going to be difficult: looking for an anonymous dead one would be pretty nearly impossible.

  She continued to regard the piece of official paper in her hand. As she did so something that the History Man at her college had often quoted came unbidden into her mind.

  ‘Documents,’ he’d insisted time and time again to his students, ‘don’t speak to strangers …’

  It was true, Amelia decided. This particular document was saying hardly anything at all to her. Perhaps she should try to remedy that. She wandered through the house into her father’s study. At least she could learn something about 1940.

  She looked at the shelves – there were bound to be books about the twentieth century there, to say nothing of books about war, since war and anthropology must surely be inseparable; or was that thought too cynical? Her father wasn’t here to argue the point with her and so she applied herself instead to finding a book that would tell her what had been happening in England in 1940. That had been in what she always thought of as the last of the black and white wars. The Great War had been where the film was of men walking jerkily. In films of the Second World War men moved smoothly – but still in black and white.

  There would be a scheme to her father’s library shelves if only she could work it out. Her father had never minded her reading any of his books and had been willing to explain most – only balking once that she remembered. That had been when she had picked out when very young Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, taken by the title and thinking it a children’s story.

  His only request ever was that she put any book back from where she’d got it. He’d say, ‘These are my tools, Amelia, and I need to be able to find them just like the mechanic in the garage does.’

  Now she ran her fingers along the shelves, looking for some books to tell her about 1940 and, sure enough, she soon found a small row of them. She tried E. S. Turner’s The Phoney War first as sound background; Margery Allingham’s The Oaken Heart she put aside for a good read later. Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags she left on the shelf. She was either too young or too old for the works of Evelyn Waugh – she didn’t know which – and then she found Winston Churchill’s history of the war. That would do to start with.

  The section entitled ‘The Twilight War: A Dark New Year’ gave her somewhere to begin. The early months of 1940 seemed to have been devoted to sending British Army divisions to France: and, by the Germans, to preparing to attack Norway. By the middle of March Russia had crushed Finland and on the 18th of that month Hitler met Mussolini on the Brenner Pass.

  And, it would seem, by then Octavia Harquil-Grasset had conceived a daughter.

  Amelia went back to Winston Churchill’s stirring narrative. He had become Prime Minister on 10th May 1940, offering nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’, the day when Hitler’s armies had marched into the Low Countries. Something Amelia had never heard of called the British Expeditionary Force, flanked by Belgian and French divisions, was moving against the enemy forces when the front was broken.

  She read on in the stillness of the library, strangely stirred by the prose of war, her reading only stopped by her eye happening upon a word she did know – Dunkirk. Churchill had written of ‘the deliverance of Dunkirk’ in the last week of May and the first week of June.

  By then, calculated Amelia, according to Phoebe, Octavia Harquil-Grasset must have known for certain, mice, frogs, and rabbits notwithstanding, that she was pregnant – and that there would be blood, toil, tears, and sweat ahead for her, too, never mind Great Britain.

  Amelia turned back to Winston Churchill, seeking the history of another month in that year of peril.

  December.

  On 15th December 1940 Octavia Harquil-Grasset had given birth to a live female infant in a London already facing attack from the air. And given birth, too, apparently without benefit of clergy, so to speak. Her mind skipped back to the egregious Mr Fournier: did he know about Erica Hester Goudy’s sub rosa birth? And was this why he was so reluctant to take her great-aunt’s funeral service? Or had it been because he was a fundamentalist and her great-aunt a Darwinian biological scientist?

  Answer – not unnaturally – coming there none, she went back to Churchill. There was nothing sub rosa about Churchill. He was, Amelia decided, a man you felt you knew where you were with. She sat on alone in the quiet study considering whether she had extracted all that she possibly could from the birth certificate.

  There was just one more thing that she could do while she was among her father’s books and that was to look up the meaning of the word ‘mitosis’ in the dictionary, since it was the study of this in sugar beet that had gained her great-aunt her essay prize at Boleyn.

  Amelia said the definition aloud to herself when she found it but was really no wiser: ‘the process of the division of the nucleus of a cell into minute threads’.

  ‘Where do we stand then, Sloan?’ There was every evidence that Superintendent Leeyes was about to leave his office.

  ‘Difficult to say, sir,’ said Sloan. The superintendent’s wastepaper basket was on its side, which was a sure sign that his superior had devoted at least some of that afternoon to practising the ancient art of putting.

  Leeyes grunted, one eye fixed on the clock. ‘You’d better try all the same.’

  ‘There’s a firm in Luston called Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals which is behaving as if it wants to take over Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, which fact may or may not be having any bearing on the business in hand.’

  ‘And a death that the doctors can’t make their minds up about …’ chipped in Leeyes. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  ‘It must happen sometimes …’

  ‘Voltaire said that the practice of medicine was murderous and largely conjectural. Did you know that, Sloan?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Sloan. Voltaire must have been a legacy from the superintendent’s brief attendance at an Adult Education class on ‘Famous French Writers’. The class had been notable at the police station for lasting only three sessions before the lecturer resigned, very hurt. Inspector Harpe from Traffic Division had been the winner of an informal sweepstake on the point within the station at the time.

  ‘So …’ said Leeyes.

  ‘So we’re on “hold” as far as Mrs Garamond’s actual death is concerned, and are continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding it.’

  ‘Sloan,’ said Leeyes dangerously, ‘you’re beginning to sound like a walking press release …’

  ‘Sorry, sir …’

  ‘Well, get on with it, man.’

  ‘There’s not a lot to tell, sir, at this stage. I am trying to establish whether Mrs Garamond’s holding in her old firm was large enough to be significant in take-over terms.’

  ‘And whether, if so, if she was killed to knock it into Tom Tiddler’s Ground,’ said the superintendent briskly, having no very high opinion of lawyers either.

  ‘That, too, sir. I shall have to see James Puckle about the actual size of it. Miss Kennerley can’t tell me; and I’m still awaiting a full report
from Forensic on any useful traces left at the break-in at the Grange.’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Leeyes.

  ‘I think we’re going to need to know a good deal more about Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs, and the work the deceased and her late husband did there.’

  ‘You’ve got a reason, I take it?’

  ‘Mrs Garamond was very insistent that a notice of her death appeared in their staff magazine.’ Sloan produced his notebook. ‘I have been given a note of the people with whom she worked most closely in her early days there. That is to say, those who are believed to be still alive.’

  ‘I think we are agreed, Sloan, that dead men tell no tales.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, although in fact he was not at all sure that he did agree with the proposition. Who was it who had said, ‘I look to Science for the cure of Crime’? True forensic scientists didn’t require the living, surely, for all their observations …

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Mrs Garamond worked – er – especially closely during the war with nine other people – seven men and two women. Six of the ten have died over the years leaving three men and one woman still alive. They are called Nicholas Cochin, Catherine Camus, Martin Dido, and Albert Harris …’

  ‘Any connection,’ said Leeyes smartly, ‘with Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals Ltd. also of Luston?’

  ‘Founder, and father of the present chairman,’ said Sloan, ‘but said to be mentally frail and now in a nursing home.’

  ‘Check that out,’ said Leeyes darkly. ‘People sometimes get put away like that because it suits other people.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan coughed. ‘I shall in any case endeavour to follow up all Mrs Garamond’s living colleagues as soon as I can …’

  ‘Do that,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Because it looks as if she tried very hard to make sure that someone – we don’t know who – got to know about her death.’

  ‘Then you’d better find out,’ said the superintendent, reaching for his coat.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, given this non-verbal congé, went back to his own office. There was a note waiting for him on his desk from Dyson, the police photographer, saying that he was attending to a serious case of hunger and thirst in the canteen. If D. I. Sloan cared to join him there in due course he might learn something to his advantage.

  Sloan turned up at Dyson’s table in the police canteen with a plateful of ham sandwiches and a mug of tea in his hands.

  ‘I didn’t realize how hungry I was,’ remarked Sloan, ‘until I saw food again.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ve heard of office hours in the Force, for all that they take on civilian employees,’ said Dyson. ‘I shan’t tell you when I got home Saturday night, but if you saw a big woman cruising round the streets of Berebury with a frying pan at the ready it was my wife. She pretty nearly murdered me, I can tell you, as I was that late, and when I told her what I’d been doing, she started on at me all over again.’

  ‘And what had you been doing?’ asked Sloan between mouthfuls.

  ‘Photographing a carpet.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Say on.’

  ‘You know you told me that whoever had been in the Grange stirring things up had worn something over their shoes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That checked with what traces I found on the carpets – lovely carpets, by the way,’ said Dyson, draining his mug.

  ‘She was a rich woman,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, they’d made an impression on the carpet …’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And so had the shoes that the two undertaker’s men who came to collect the body wore and the woman, Shirley Whatsit, who spent the night there and found the old lady dead in the morning.’

  ‘And those of the doctor who examined her?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Them, too. I photographed the lot,’ said Dyson. ‘This new camera I’ve got did them a real treat. I’ve told you about my new camera, haven’t I?’

  ‘Several times,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Well, I’ve developed the films today and I must say they’ve come up a real treat, too.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  Dyson leaned forward and said: ‘What would you say, Inspector, if I was to tell you that I’ve got as clear a print as any court would want of that carer woman’s shoe over as clear a print as any court would want of one of Mr Unknown’s fudged ones?’

  ‘I should say, Dyson,’ said Sloan giving the photographer an appraising look, ‘that it’s high time you had a second mug of tea and that it will give me very great pleasure to get it for you.’

  THIRTEEN

  Bury him softly – white wool around him

  There was at least one member of the City of London’s police force whose uniform was a black suit with pinstripe trousers, and who was armed not with the regulation wooden truncheon but with a tightly rolled black umbrella.

  His speciality was white-collar crime and his beat the environs of the Stock Exchange. To him a balance sheet was as clear a map as the back of his hand, traded options part of his daily routine. He declared himself over the phone only too happy to discuss any little local financial difficulty with Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan of the Calleshire Force and said he had the papers before him, thank you.

  ‘Is there any clue in Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs’ balance sheet and annual accounts as to why Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals should want to take them over?’ asked Sloan, going straight to the point.

  ‘Not that I can see, old chap.’ Some of the vernacular of business seemed to have rubbed off on the specialist because he said: ‘I’ve cast the optic over them and I should say that Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs’ trading position is pretty average for that sector. Bit below, if anything, actually.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Exactly, Inspector, but someone’s been buying into them lately, all right. And quite heavily, too, in spite of their having had the odd hiccup in their last trading year.’

  ‘Hiccup?’ said Sloan cautiously. Detection could be hindered by hiccups. Or helped.

  ‘They seem to have their problems,’ said the voice, ‘such as a fire in their packing department and a big claim for breach of intellectual property rights – that’s pinching somebody else’s ideas to you and me – and the odd boardroom row.’

  ‘They’re not exactly a jewel in the chemical research crown, then?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Keeping trading from sheer force of habit, I should say. Been doing it for long enough. My sources tell me that Chernwoods’ present chairman is a chip off the old blockhead his father was. Weak, too.’

  ‘He’s the third generation,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Mind you,’ said the specialist, ‘all these chemical companies depend on their latest compound doing better than the new compound invented by the fellow down the road. Or anywhere else in the world, in fact.’

  ‘I see.’ Sloan would have to submerge the rest of the world without trace when reporting to Superintendent Leeyes. The superintendent’s cosmography went no further than the county boundary of Calleshire. So far no one had thought fit to tell him that it had been William the Conqueror who had determined English county boundaries …

  ‘And,’ continued the City man, ‘with this sort of company there’s always the difficulty of having very big money tied up in research for years at a time. Until a breakthrough pays for the next decade.’

  ‘Or doesn’t?’ said Sloan.

  ‘True. Then they’d start to welcome predators. Preferably with long purses for severance pay-outs to the board and senior staff …’

  ‘Or a promise to keep them on?’

  ‘Not if they’ve got any sense,’ said the voice in London frankly. ‘If the old guard was any good in the first place they’d have been taken over themselves by the big boys long ago.’

  ‘We’re talking about small fry, then?’ said Sloan, unsurprised. Nature was, it seemed, as red in
tooth and claw in the Square Mile as it was everywhere else.

  ‘Relatively speaking. I dare say both companies are pretty big fish in your neck of the woods …’

  ‘It’s a small pond,’ conceded Sloan, who could mix a metaphor as well as the next man.

  ‘The other thing that would have happened if Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs was worth picking up,’ said the money-man at the other end of the line, ‘is that they would have been doing some natty taking-over on their own account, and there’s no sign of that having happened that I can find in either their figures or annual reports.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, anxious to get one thing clear, ‘if this Chernwoods’ outfit had some really marketable ideas in the pipeline someone would have snapped them up long ago unless they had been very secretive?’

  ‘Exactly. The big boys are always on the look-out for other people’s discoveries, and they’re not too fussy about how they get hold of ’em,’ said the voice. ‘Since we’re talking about fish you can think of them as pike.’

  ‘Pike?’ That parallel would be very difficult to convey to the superintendent.

  ‘Big, greedy, omnivorous, and lurking in muddy waters for whatever it can sink its teeth into,’ said the man in London. ‘And as tough as old boots.’

  ‘I get you,’ said Sloan. Suddenly, being a policeman combating ordinary crime out in the sticks began to seem more attractive. ‘Now, can you also tell me, please, if there is anything about Harris and Marsh’s Chemicals that might make them ripe for carrying out a take-over of Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs?’

  ‘No. Neither outfit seems to have come up with anything really worthwhile for quite a time. That’s the really interesting thing about the whole situation. It doesn’t make commercial sense.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan made a note: all good policemen were by nature connoisseurs of the unusual, not to say the improbable.

  ‘In my opinion,’ continued the financial expert, ‘Harris and Marsh would just be adding to their existing burdens by taking over Chernwoods’ Dyestuffs at this point in their mutual histories.’