by Muriel Spark
‘Ah, you might get better,’ said Dan. ‘You might come out and be normal.’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Magnus. ‘It is written, “The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man, he shall stir up jealousy like a man of war: he shall cry, yea, roar: he shall prevail against his enemies.” That,’ said Magnus, ‘is what I cite and it is what I say. See also Isaiah 38: 12, “I have cut off like a weaver my life: he will cut me off with pining sickness.” So what I suggest is that you make Ma change her will, cutting me out and the girls, and leaving the lot to you.’
‘Easier said than done,’ said Dan.
‘See the lawyer. Primogeniture is a necessary concept in law when a house has to be kept up. When Ma made that will the upkeep of big houses was an afterthought. If you count me out because of my pining sickness, incurable, you are the only son and the eldest.’
Dan repeated this to his wife Greta. She thought it a good idea that Dan’s mother should be asked if she wanted to make a new will, but she did not want to be the person to suggest it. Nobody wanted to suggest it.
‘Anything the matter?’ said the elder Mrs Murchie.
‘No,’ said the visiting son. ‘Perhaps one or two things we have to discuss some time.’
‘We can discuss them after I get home. Next week, they say. Waters came to see me.’
‘What did he want?’ James Waters was the family lawyer in Edinburgh.
‘He came to see me. People do come to visit.’
Dan felt relieved. He had been uneasy at the prospect of approaching the family lawyer about his mother’s business. He wanted her fortune, and it was really hers, not inherited from his late father. But Dan also wanted to keep the affection between them afloat. Greta, too, was fond of her mother-in-law and she, too, was relieved to know that the first step toward the elder Mrs Murchie seeing a lawyer had been taken by the lawyer himself, even if the step involved no more than bringing her twelve pink roses to the nursing home.
Dan’s mother was to visit St Andrews the following week. She had suffered a heart attack. Her condition now seemed to be under control. Greta was to go and fetch her at eleven in the morning.
But at four in the morning the telephone was screaming beside the bed. ‘Perhaps it’s your mother. You answer it,’ said Greta.
Dan answered it. ‘Yes, her son speaking,’ said Dan. ‘Police?’ said Dan. ‘Oh, God, right away. I’ll come right away. No, I’ve got a car; yes, perfectly able.’ He was hardly able to drive in his state of shock. Greta pulled on her trousers and her woollens and got in the car with him. Mrs Murchie had been murdered, strangled by an escaped maniac, a young woman who had been in a mental home for twelve years, as a secondary result of an irreversible drug sickness; the primary cause of the woman’s psychotic state had been a built-in mental defect. There was nothing to be done about the strangler, who was caught without fuss, calmly walking along the road towards the docks at Leith in the moonlight.
But how she had got away from the maximum security wing of the mental home, why she had made straight for the nursing home in Edinburgh where Mrs Murchie lay in her private room, how she had entered this nursing home, and how and why she had gone to Mrs Murchie’s room — why exactly Mrs Murchie? — were questions to which the police and after them the press set about to try to obtain answers. They tried in vain, and not for long: ‘It’s useless’, said the Chief Inspector to Dan, ‘trying to find a motive when you are dealing with the insane. They are infinitely cunning, they bide their time. Perhaps she was hypnotized. Or perhaps the woman knew, or got to hear, of the Calton Nursing Home and thought she would be better off there, herself, than in the Jeffrey King, and somehow got into a room, any room, and found your mother there, and …’
‘The Jeffrey King?’ said Dan.
‘Yes, that’s the name of the clinic near Perth where the woman got out of. A security wing, mind you. Lock and key, it means nothing to them. Cunning. Superhuman strength.’
Dan left it at that. He didn’t even tell Greta where the strangler came from; she read it in the papers. The coroner brought in a verdict of death by strangling at the hands of one not fit to plead. There was not a great deal in the press. One day’s horror headline and a report of an enquiry at the Jeffrey King clinic into security measures; that was all.
It was Greta, on the way home after the funeral, who finally said to Dan, not he to her, ‘Magnus must be behind it.’
‘Well, but why? The way he was talking last Sunday would seem to show that he wanted to keep Ma alive, at least until she made a new will.’
‘Funny that the mad woman was in the same home as Magnus. How could she have made her way to Edinburgh, precisely to the Calton Nursing Home and to poor Ma’s room?’
They were badly shaken by the horrible affair, but even more so when they heard that Mrs Murchie had indeed changed her will.
‘I think I am going mad,’ said Dan. What he meant was that he couldn’t face the implications. Only Margaret had been with him the previous Sunday when Magnus suggested that their mother change her will.
‘Phone Margaret,’ he said to Greta. Margaret at this time had a job and a flat in Glasgow. She had just got back from the funeral when her mother got through on the telephone. ‘I know she changed her will,’ said Margaret. ‘I arranged for Waters to go and see her. I was there. I said, “You asked for Waters, Granny, as you wanted to change your will in my father’s favour, which I think is logical.” Waters fully agreed. She was delighted with the flowers. He had brought a newly drafted will. At first she wanted to divide her property between the aunts and my father, but we said that wouldn’t work. Anyway, we amended the draft and Waters took it away. He came back the next day and she signed it in front of witnesses. She was very happy. At least she died happy. Now Dad’s quite well off, we can keep the house.’
Greta conveyed all this to Dan and then by phone to her two elder daughters, who were so different from Margaret.
These daughters were not long married. They both had jobs. The eldest, Flora, was an elementary teacher, her husband a junior solicitor; they lived in a house at Blackheath, where they let a flat to help pay up the mortgage. The next younger daughter, Eunice, was married to a personnel manager in a car factory. She taught in a comprehensive school at Dulwich, where they lived. Flora was fairly pretty, cautious, pedantic, with a deep craving for a life of fixed routine which her young husband fitted in with; it didn’t matter much what exigencies arose in Flora’s life because she could somehow fit them in with a known scheme, an already documented case-history, or under some trite heading. Her husband was helpful in supplying the right language. The murder of her grandmother was ‘an unfortunate incident’, the fact, with which Flora was presently acquainted, that the will had been changed in her father’s favour, was a ‘coincidence, fortunate in the circumstances’. That Magnus was mad was something that ‘happens in the best of families’. The fact that the homicidal maniac came from the same mental hospital as the one where Magnus was lodged, was just a fact: ‘One thing has nothing to do with another.’ Flora took her bath, which she always did at night, prepared her clothes to put on the next day, while Bert, her husband, set the breakfast things ready for the morning. Qualmless and orderly, they went to bed.
Her sister Eunice, fair with pale eyes and long hair, was now five months pregnant. Her general outline was vague and fuzzy, like a shakily taken photograph. She said to her mother, ‘I hope this news doesn’t upset me. The murder was bad enough.’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you,’ said Greta.
‘Well, you’ve done it now.’
‘I thought you’d like to know at least that Daddy will be free from financial care.’
‘Lucky him.’
‘It was Margaret who sent Waters to visit your grandmother. And make her change her will.’
‘And Granny was killed the next day?’
‘No, three days later. I mean, Waters went back on Friday to get her signature.’ Mrs Murchie had died on
the Saturday night.
‘It looks very fishy,’ said Eunice. ‘I feel bad about it. Peter won’t like it.’
‘We don’t like it,’ said Greta. ‘Your father and I feel it looks so bad. But what can we do about it?’
‘It was Margaret’s idea, then?’ Eunice said.
‘Yes. Well, no. To change the will was your Uncle Magnus’s idea.’
‘Oh, God. If the press gets hold of this, there’s going to be trouble. It’s all so bad, in my condition.’
Jean, the youngest daughter, still at school, had been sent to a convent in Liège the Monday following the fatal Sunday when Mrs Murchie senior was murdered. Greta had been to school in this convent. Jean, a hankerer after adventure, went willingly, quite unaware of the cause of her grandmother’s death. It was at Liège, that innocent and beautiful city, that young Jean was to encounter a certain Paul, eighteen years old, son of an old Belgian school friend of Greta’s, preparing to be what he himself called a Eurocrat. Eventually Jean was to have a child by Paul and to live lovingly with him year in, year out; but that is another story, or would be but for the mere fact that her destiny was contingent upon the murder of her grandmother and her having been packed off quickly to those faithful nuns at Liège.
Dan’s favourite among his children was Margaret. It was a passion that he mutely controlled. Dan could sit for hours simply watching Margaret. Wherever she went, his eyes followed her as far as they could. He watched her reading, marvelling over the bloom of her lovely complexion. He thought her intelligent, too original to be appreciated.
‘Someone put that maniac up to killing my mother,’ Dan said to Greta.
‘It must have been Magnus. It must be,’ said Greta. ‘They say there was no contact between Magnus’s wing and the dangerous cases. That’s what they say, it’s what they always say, what else can they say?’
‘He knew the will had been changed.’
‘Someone must have told him,’ said Greta.
‘Yes, I believe Margaret told him. She rang him up in the home and she said he’d be glad to know the will was changed as he suggested. Apparently, he was delighted. And if Margaret was mixed up in this, I’m stunned,’ said Dan.
‘I’m not,’ said Greta. ‘And there’s no “if” about it. She sent Waters to change your mother’s will in your favour, and then told Magnus. That’s being mixed up.’
Margaret turned up that night. She had a few days off from her job as a ceramics designer in Glasgow. Her parents looked at her with fear, in a new way, not quite knowing her for the first time in their lives. Dan said, ‘I wonder how Magnus got to know that psychotic woman? It must have been Magnus who sent her.’
‘But supposing it wasn’t?’ said Margaret. ‘Aren’t you doing Uncle Magnus a great injustice? You have no proof at all.’
‘That’s what I say,’ said Greta, although it wasn’t at all what she had been saying.
‘And then’, said Dan, ‘she had only just changed her will, and Magnus knew it.’
‘But she didn’t change it in his favour,’ Margaret said. ‘Don’t you see, Granny cut him completely out. Nobody could accuse him of killing Granny for her money. They say in the hospital that he’s very upset. Won’t move out of his bed.’
‘Have you been in touch with the hospital authorities?’
‘No, the police have. And they were in touch with me,’ said Margaret.
‘What for?’ said Dan.
‘About the will.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Greta, ‘the will isn’t our fault. It was natural that she should make a new will, wasn’t it, after all these years?’
The police apparently thought so, too, or were obliged to recognize that possibility. The official enquiry at Jeffrey King mental home led to nothing but some recommendations for tighter control. There was no trial. The strangler, found unfit to plead as indeed she was unfit to utter any consecutive sense or implication, and more victim than brute, was sent to an institution for the criminal mad. The press went on to more intense and exciting things and would have stopped giving up even a paragraph to the case had Dan’s married sister who lived in Kenya not decided to challenge the will. She had flown home for the funeral. She now mobilized her two unmarried sisters in favour of a theory of ‘undue influence’ having been put on her mother on her sick-bed by the interested party, Dan. There was no way in which they could prove anything against Dan or Margaret. The nurses were in perfect accord that Mrs Murchie had, on her own, asked Margaret to send the lawyer in to see her, and Mr Waters himself insisted indignantly that Mrs Murchie had made a new will of her own volition and while in her right mind. Dan settled the business out of court, as he had in any case intended to do, while the sisters stomped in and out of their late mother’s flat in Edinburgh, removing things, assessing things, parcelling them out amongst themselves.
Dan had never had much to say to his mother; he was at a loss. What had affected him at his mother’s funeral was the actual sight of her coffin, the sight of that brown coffin, that box. Now, he was amazed at her daughters’ looting her goods —her daughters, one of whom had been extremely devoted.
‘Surely we should have a say in all this?’ said Margaret. ‘It would be good to remind them of your rights.’
‘Yes, good. But at this particular moment it would look bad,’ said Dan. ‘Our hands are tied.’
It was the end of October. ‘Was it Undue Influence?’, ‘Magnus Murchie: Nothing Can Bring My Mother Back’, went the headlines. An editorial in a more sober paper pointed out that the days of witch-hunts were over. Nothing could be gained by persecuting the Murchie family. Plainly, the murder had not been planned by the interested party, her son Daniel. Equally obvious was it that the will had been changed in the ordinary course of the unfortunate Mrs Murchie’s illness: she had not changed her will for fifty years. What more logical than that she would wish to leave her fortune to the son who was of right mind? Her three daughters, who, it was understood, in a prior action decided to contest the will, had now withdrawn their case. The question had been settled out of court. Reasonable people might now agree to leave the Murchies to their grief.
The fuss blew over by the end of the year. Dan developed eye-strain and wore dark glasses nearly all day, even in the Scottish winter. Greta paid up her racing debts; got her brooch out of pawn, and sent cheques to Flora and Eunice, lamenting the fact that their aunts, by contesting their grandmother’s will, had ‘robbed’ them. ‘Think how much more we could have done as a family’, wrote Greta, ‘if those aunts of yours hadn’t been so avaricious. Margaret is wonderful. She refuses to touch a penny of her grandmother’s fortune. She says she’s happier that way.’
The fuss blew over, and two years later, when Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan were planning their dinner party, and various of their friends were discussing the newly married William Damien and Margaret, the Murchies’ name was only something a few of them remembered seeing in the papers. Murchie or some name like that. Some scandal, but probably, anyway, not the same Murchies as Margaret’s family.
‘If there is anything I could not bear to do,’ said Margaret to her father, ‘it is to profit by darling Granny’s death.’
Dan looked at his daughter through his dark glasses, as a rabbit might look at a stoat: dismay, fear, despair. If she had been greedy for her grandmother’s money, now her father’s, at least he could have understood. But beautiful Margaret was here detaching herself from any blame. But was she to blame? Dan felt, not with his mind, but deeply within the marrow of his bones, that she had sent the maniac to her grandmother.
‘Not a penny would I touch,’ said Margaret. Dan went cold. He was sure his daughter meant it.
Magnus again came to St Andrews for the Sunday, dressed in his gaudy clothes. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ said Dan; which was unusual, for it was known he didn’t like to be seen with Magnus, dressed like that. Who would? Only Margaret. She didn’t care what Uncle Magnus looked like.
They possessed a stretch o
f woodland, narrow but long. Greta from the window saw them walking between the trees, with large Magnus’s bright blues and reds flashing. She thought perhaps it was time, now that the financial side was settled, that Dan gave up Magnus as a guru and a guide. It was weakness on Dan’s part; madness. They were not a mentally stable family, those Murchies.
What Dan was consulting his brother about, there in the woods walking along the edge of the dank pond, was Margaret. ‘Do you think her capable of murdering Mama?’
‘I think her capable of anything,’ roared Magnus. ‘An extremely capable girl, very full of ability, power.’
‘But murder? Provoking a murder? Causing someone else to do it?’
‘Oh, that, yes, I dare say.’
‘Magnus, this is completely beyond me. It’s terrible. She refuses to touch any of our money, now. She won’t touch her grandmother’s money, not a penny.’
‘She is naturally a girl of high principle. I would have expected that.’
‘Sometimes I wonder, Magnus, if you advise us right.’
‘Who else have you got?’ Magnus bellowed. ‘Third-rate lawyers, timid little bankers from London. No guide whatsoever for a Scot.’
‘Magnus, keep your voice lower. Hush it.’ Magnus lowered his voice. ‘Who do you have’, he said, ‘but me? Out of my misfortune, out of my affliction I prognosticate and foreshadow. My divine affliction is your only guide. Remember the ballad:
As I went down the water side
None but my foe to be my guide
None but my foe to be my guide.’
‘Perhaps’, said Dan, ‘you can’t be a friend. Maybe in fact you’re our worst enemy. It may be.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Magnus. ‘In families, one never knows.’
‘What I am wondering,’ said Dan, ‘is if Margaret is sane.’
