The Executor (Keith Calder Book 10)

by Gerald Hammond

  THE EXECUTOR

  Gerald Hammond

  © Gerald Hammond 1986

  Gerald Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1986 by Macmillan London Limited.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter One

  Keith Calder stepped, rather guiltily, over the threshold of his shop. He expected to find his partner, Wallace James, presiding fussily over the guns and fishing tackle and general sporting paraphernalia; or possibly Janet, Wallace’s blonde young wife, holding the fort and lending it a much-needed air of glamour.

  Instead, he found his own wife, Molly, demonstrating pigeon-decoys to a spindly youth. In accordance with custom they exchanged no more than a nod. Keith waited patiently until a deal was finalised. He wrapped the awkwardly-shaped purchase while Molly made change.

  The bell pinged at last and they had the shop to themselves. Keith kissed his wife, but his first thought was for his daughter. School was out for the summer. ‘Who’s looking after Deborah?’ he asked.

  It was not Molly’s habit to answer a direct question with equal directness. ‘Wal had to go into Edinburgh to fetch some clay pigeons for tomorrow’s competition,’ she said. ‘They didn’t come with the bus as promised.’

  ‘That wasn’t—’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Molly said sternly. ‘And Janet wanted to go along with him. She wants to get a coat and some blouses while the sales are on.’

  ‘I asked—’

  ‘So I said I’d look after the shop if they’d take Deb along and get her some new shoes for school.’

  ‘Was Wal looking peeved?’ Keith asked.

  ‘He was, rather. Keith, did you have to go off for three days with hardly a word?’

  ‘When somebody pays nearly four thou’ for a gun, the least I can do is to deliver it to him and help him settle down with it.’

  ‘So you said. And I told Wal. And he said it didn’t take half the working week and that if you brought all the money back with you, he’d eat it. Did you, Keith?’

  ‘Bring back the cash? Most of it, more or less. I got him to trade in a German wheellock from about seventeen forty.’

  ‘In good working order?’

  ‘Well, no. You know how much a good wheellock can fetch.’

  ‘That’s what was worrying me.’

  ‘The chain had broken at some time – during an emergency, to judge from the signs—’

  ‘Oh well. You can repair that,’ Molly said thankfully.

  ‘—so the owner had had to use it as a club.’

  ‘Keith! Wal will have kittens if it’s not repairable.’

  ‘It’ll repair.’

  ‘And I bet you weren’t doing what you said all the time,’ Molly said. ‘You were shooting pigeon.’

  ‘I was not.’

  ‘Or rabbits.’

  ‘I gave him a hand getting rid of some mink which had been preying on his pheasant poults,’ Keith said. ‘That was all.’

  ‘Wal—’

  ‘Never mind Wal,’ Keith said irritably. ‘I started this business with my own capital and I’ll take a couple of days off when I feel like it without asking Wal’s permission.’

  ‘I thought you were equal partners.’

  ‘We are. But I’m more equal than he is. Have you ever known me show less profit on the antique guns and the repairs than he does on the shop?’

  ‘Well, no. But Wal says you tie up a hell of a lot more capital. I’m only repeating what Wal says. Which reminds me. Mr Enterkin wants to see you, urgently.’

  Keith blinked. The connection was obscure. ‘What about?’ he asked.

  ‘Old Robin Winterton’s dead. Didn’t you hear? It was on the news. It happened on Monday night. He was alone in the house and somebody broke in and hit him on the head. The police think he disturbed a burglar. His wife came home late and found him lying there, dead.’

  ‘Ah,’ Keith said. All was explained. Mr Winterton’s collection of antique arms was superb. ‘They didn’t get away with any of his guns, did they?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard. The papers were vague about what was taken.’

  ‘You’d have heard.’ The important issue dealt with, Keith was free to think about the death of an old friend. ‘Poor devil. Still, he was in his seventies. He’d had his money’s-worth out of life.’

  ‘I doubt if you’ll still say that when you’ve had your four-score and ten.’

  ‘Possibly not. But, when we had old Brutus put down, Robin said that he wished he could count on somebody doing as much for him.’

  ‘You won’t go buying all those guns?’ Molly asked anxiously.

  ‘I couldn’t. They’ll fetch the earth. But there are one or two pieces. . . .’

  ‘Now, Keith—’

  ‘Not the cream of the collection, but good stuff. I found them for him and I’ve always regretted not buying them myself. Any coffee going? I’m starved.’

  ‘The percolator’s on in the back shop.’

  When Keith came back with his coffee, Molly was putting down the phone. ‘Mr Enterkin would like to see you at three this afternoon, prompt and without fail. I said you’d be there.’

  ‘But—’ Keith wanted to reach his workshop and start work on the wheellock. Or take a gun out in pursuit of the pigeon.

  ‘But first,’ Molly said firmly, ‘you can take over here. If I don’t get some shopping in, there’ll be nothing to eat tonight.’

  Keith sighed. He knew when he was beaten. ‘Well, be quick,’ he said, on principle rather than with any real hope.

  ‘And I might get my hair done if Maggie can fit me in. You can have my sandwiches.’ As she turned in the door Keith saw her for an instant, backlit by the sun. Her thirty-five years sat very lightly on her. Then she vanished as though she had never been there.

  Keith sighed again. He drank his coffee, served a customer and then went back to his usual occupation of displaying the stock the way he liked to show it, with the shooting equipment to the fore. In summer, Wallace usually gave undue prominence to fishing tackle.

  *

  Molly was, by her own standards, remarkably prompt, so that it was only a little after three when Keith crossed Newton Lauder’s square through gentle sunshine. A dank summer had relented at last and, Keith thought, the farmers might for once take what they got and be thankful.

  He climbed the barren stairs to Mr Enterkin’s office. The plain and elderly receptionist passed him through into the solicitor’s sanctum, a room the respectable dignity of which was quite spoiled by a perpetual drift of loose papers. The solicitor never seemed to refer to any of them and Keith suspected that he retained them only as stage props.

  Behind his desk, Ralph Enterkin, the plump and balding doyen of Newton Lauder’s legal brethren, was fidgeting under the eye of a lady of uncertain but no little age.

  Robin Winterton, now deceased, had once, with some reluctance, introduced Keith to the lady whom Keith understood to be his second wife. She had let it be seen that she was not impressed. Keith for his part had thought her a formidable old biddy.

  He murmured a few words of condolence. Mrs Winterton looked at him coldly, down a nose which she probably thought of as patrician but which, in Keith’s view, was definitely hooked. In a dark fur over a grey suit which
Keith judged to be off-the-peg but undoubtedly expensive, and with a single, decorous string of pearls showing, she suggested a more wealthy version of the grandmother who had filled his childhood with awe. Keith, who went everywhere in stout, country clothes, ready at any time to take part in a shoot or to help with a little keepering, felt that she expected him to stand behind her chair, but he dropped into the empty chair which had evidently been placed for him and looked enquiringly at the solicitor.

  ‘We gather,’ Mr Enterkin said, ‘that you have heard about the unfortunate decease of Mr Winterton.’

  ‘Molly told me.’

  The widow’s response to Keith’s words of sympathy had been a sniff. Now she sniffed again, but this time the sniff, instead of a rebuff, was clearly a token tear shed for her late husband. Mrs Winterton seemed to favour her nose as a means of communicating her emotions.

  ‘It would appear,’ Mr Enterkin resumed, ‘that Mr Winterton was killed on the spur of the moment by an intruder. That being so, confirmation of his will need not be unduly delayed. It would be prudent to await the outcome of the necessary enquiry in the sheriff court. However, as his solicitor I thought that some preliminary discussion would not be wasted.’

  ‘Anything I can do,’ Keith said vaguely. ‘I suppose, as his executor, you want to discuss the disposal of his guns?’

  Mr Enterkin frowned at him. ‘You are not making yourself clear,’ he said. ‘Or, if you are, I must be being obtuse. Would you mind rephrasing that last remark?’

  Keith thought that he had made himself perfectly clear, but he knew better than to argue with the old pedant. ‘I was supposing,’ he said, ‘that you, acting as executor of the late Mr Winterton’s will, wanted my help in disposing of his collection of guns.’

  ‘That is what I thought you were supposing,’ said Mr Enterkin. ‘And there’s only one thing wrong with it. I’m not his executor. You are.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? About nine years ago, when he made a fresh will. In this very office. He asked you whether you were agreeable to being named executor and you said that you were.’

  Keith felt himself flush. ‘I’d forgotten,’ he said humbly. ‘At the time, it seemed to be one of those things which’ll never happen.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Enterkin, ‘the moment is upon us.’

  ‘I have never understood,’ Mrs Winterton said suddenly, shattering the discussion like a stone through glass, ‘why my husband chose this . . . gun-person to be his executor.’

  ‘Nor, as a matter of fact, have I,’ Mr Enterkin said patiently. ‘It was unusual, not to say improper, and I tried to dissuade him. But he was concerned about the disposal of his collection—’

  ‘His old guns and things? You don’t have to worry about them any more.’

  Keith felt a cold sweat of apprehension break out on him. This was a very odd way to refer to a valuable collection. ‘We don’t?’

  Mrs Winterton shook her head. ‘Certainly not. They have all gone, and a good riddance too! I was going to call my son to come and take them away and dump them somewhere. But yesterday afternoon quite a respectable man came to the door. He gave me two hundred pounds for them and took them away in a van.’ She nodded, in satisfaction with herself.

  Mr Enterkin was the first to break the silence. For once his careful articulation had deserted him. ‘Those guns were . . . are worth . . . how much would you say, Keith?’

  ‘There were items in that collection,’ Keith said slowly, ‘the likes of which have never come on the market before, so I’ll not state a figure offhand. Enough to make Mrs Winterton a very wealthy lady, that’s all I’ll say for now.’

  The widow seemed to be stumped for a moment but she made a quick recovery. ‘You’ve said more than enough already,’ she snapped, ‘and I wish to hear no more of it. I am just not interested. All I wanted was to get rid of the things.’ She glared defiantly from one man to the other. ‘Those guns ruined my marriage. Whenever I wanted company, my husband would disappear among those insufferable guns.’ (Keith found himself nodding. He would have done the same.) ‘It was as if he had had a mistress, but worse, because I could soon have settled a mistress’s hash if I had chosen to do so. Understand me, if those guns were worth ten times as much as the crown jewels, I still wouldn’t care about the money. I’m glad they’ve gone,’ she finished. ‘I can manage on the money Robin left.’

  Keith looked up at the ceiling and wished that he were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘Because yours was a late marriage and took place after Mr Winterton retired, his pension died with him. His assets consisted almost entirely of the collection. There may be some money in the bank—’

  ‘There should be a thousand or more,’ Keith said. ‘Unless he made any substantial purchases recently. I sold a good jezail for him last month.’

  ‘I advised Mr Winterton to open a joint account marked “Either or Survivor”,’ Mr Enterkin said. ‘If he did so, then any money in it is yours. Apart from that he had, as far as I am aware, no other money whatever. Not even life assurance.’

  ‘You must be wrong,’ said the widow blandly. ‘Or else he was mad.’

  ‘Neither,’ said Mr Enterkin. ‘Explain, Keith.’

  The widow switched her cold glare to Keith, who cleared his throat. ‘I knew Mr Winterton for nearly twenty years,’ he said. ‘He came to see me about a pepperbox pistol and asked me some pointed questions about trends in the values of old guns. He had come by some guns through inheritance, and this had stimulated him to buy others. I told him that his family guns were of considerable value, and that his later purchases had gone up. I helped him to do his sums. He was a widower at the time but earning good money. He reckoned that antique guns, carefully bought, would show a better return than almost any other investment.

  ‘So, until his retirement, all his spare cash went into the collection. He looked on it as an easy way to provide for the future without giving up a hobby which was beginning to grip him. In fact, he became very expert – not just on values but on history and technicalities forby. The market dipped once or twice, but in the long run he was well satisfied. Latterly, of course, he was selling an occasional gun to maintain your standard of living.’

  The widow seemed to have shrunk inside her unseasonable fur, but she was undefeated. ‘I shall sell Halleydane House and its contents,’ she said. ‘At least Robin owned it outright. I still own a small house in Portobello from my first marriage and the tenants are leaving in December. I shall move back there. It is not such a good address as Halleydane House but. . . .’

  Her voice tailed off. Mr Enterkin was shaking his head, pouting his lips in the moue which always reminded Keith of a suckling piglet. ‘I’m afraid you still don’t understand,’ he said sadly. ‘I had hoped that your son would be here,’ he added.

  Mrs Winterton snorted. ‘Young man,’ she said (Mr Enterkin brightened at hearing himself so described), ‘I do not need my son with me, interfering. He has not been to see me since his stepfather died and I can manage without him now. In any case, he is not concerned in this.’

  ‘Your stepson, then.’

  ‘Certainly not him. I may have been kept in the dark so far, but I am perfectly capable of understanding whatever you care to tell me now.’

  Although seated, Mr Enterkin managed to draw himself up with dignity. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I will make the matter as clear as I can. Your late husband’s assets were almost entirely in kind rather than in cash. And he was well aware that you still owned the house in Portobello. Accordingly, he directed that all his assets – comprising Halleydane House and its contents including the collection of antique firearms – be sold. After payment of all debts and duties, he left a specific and generous sum of money to his son by his first marriage, a similar sum to his married daughter in Canada and the remainder to yourself. In effect, of course, this meant that the capital transfer tax payable on those two legacie
s would have come out of your share of the estate, but you would still have been exceptionally well provided for.

  ‘The position now has changed considerably. Due to your ill-advised and, I may say, quite illegal action, it would seem that there are insufficient assets to meet the bequests to your stepson and stepdaughter. In fact, I stand open to correction but I would suppose that there will be a considerable shortfall. Anything realised from the sale of assets, therefore, would go to them. And, since you had not the least right to sell anything before confirmation of the will, a court might very well hold you liable for the balance of those legacies. Possibly even for capital transfer tax on the whole of those two legacies.’

  The widow looked at him as if he had suddenly broken into Swahili. ‘A court? But how on earth would a court come to know such a thing?’

  ‘It would be the duty of the executor to bring it to the court’s attention.’

  Mrs Winterton again turned her frosty glare on to Keith. ‘Whatever my opinion of you may have been in the past, Mr Calder, I never thought that you would sink so low as to be an informer for the police.’

  Mr Enterkin swelled and seemed about to launch himself into a diatribe on the differences between civil and criminal law. But, because when launched the solicitor was capable of keeping up his momentum for hours, Keith stepped in quickly. ‘First let’s see whether we can’t retrieve the situation,’ he said. ‘How did this man come to call? Tell me everything that happened.’

  She sighed and cast up her eyes as if her patience was being taxed by a tiresome child, but the effect was in itself childish. Keith decided that, in addition to being an arrogant old bitch, she was cursed with an IQ which barely got out of single figures. ‘Yesterday afternoon, the front door bell rang. I’m without a maid at the moment – you can’t keep servants in the country – and the daily woman had already gone home, so I answered it myself. There was a man at the door and a grey van was parked just behind him.’

  Keith turned to Mr Enterkin. ‘Had any announcement of the death been in the papers?’ he asked.