7 - Death of a Dean
Page 18
Chapter 21
So it doesn’t look as if Adrian is going to be prosecuted,” I said. “The police can’t really prove that he knew what his father intended to do, and presumably you wouldn’t bring charges against him?”
“Good God, no!” David exclaimed.
“I gather from Roger that Inspector Hosegood is a bit miffed about the whole thing—I can see that it’s not a very satisfactory solution from the police point of view. Adrian’s lost his job, of course, but Judy’s going to teach him how to be a computer programmer. He’s moved in with her now and Joan’s going to live with Evelyn Burgess. Do you know, Francis must have stolen some of poor old Canon Burgess’s morphine when he went to visit him on his deathbed, isn’t that unspeakable! And, of course, Evelyn is so vague she thought that the district nurse had taken the remainder away and didn’t realize.”
David and I were back in Stratford, sitting in the Pizza Hut chatting over a late lunch. I had originally expressed surprise at David’s choice of venue, but he said that he’d got into the habit of lunching there with his lodgers. “Such a good place to bring the young, darling,” he said, indicating a notice that said, “All the pizza and salad you can eat for £4.99.”
“I’m going to give Joan the money for Francis’s share of the house,” he said.
“Oh, David, that’s incredibly generous of you!”
“Well, the cathedral people have been very good. Obviously they don’t want a scandal any more than we do, so the treasurer chap said that if the money was paid back—in view of what’s happened—they’d quietly forget the whole thing. So the Beaumont name won’t be dishonored! And there should be a bit left over for Mary’s stable thing.”
“You’re too good to be true!” I smiled at him affectionately.
“We-ell. I’ve got enough from my share of the house for what I need—and I must say, Francis did a really good deal, he got a fantastic price—and, now that splendid Beth Cameron has confirmed my appointment as head of the study center, I shall have everything in the world that I want!”
“Not many people can say that.”
“The only thing that worries me,” David said, “is poor old Nana. Do you think Francis really did push her downstairs?” This remark, uttered in David’s resonant actor’s voice, caused a woman with two small children at the next table to turn and eye us apprehensively.
I shrugged my shoulders. “We shall never know now. Adrian obviously had no sort of suspicion that her death wasn’t an accident, so Francis couldn’t have said anything to him about it. I think, on balance, that it was. After all, she was pretty tottery and those stairs were always badly lit, so try not to brood about it.”
“Actually, I’m going to be so busy soon that I won’t have time to brood about anything. Now then, when’s this chap Mike arriving?”
I was in Stratford because one of my American friends was visiting and wanted me to show him around. “He’s coming on the twelve-thirty London train tomorrow.”
“I suppose,” David said resignedly, “you’ll want to take him to Wilmcote to share in your lovefest with those terrible birds?”
I thought of the hawks, handsome, ruthless, single-minded in pursuit of their prey, and I thought of Francis. I shivered. “I don’t know,” I said, “there may not be time.”
“Oh well,” David replied, “there’s always masses to show him in the town, goodness knows!”
He gestured to a plaque on the wall informing the curious that this fine Tudor house, one of the oldest in Stratford (now alas, inside at least, in the red and chrome uniform of the pizza chain) had been restored by the writer Marie Corelli.
“You do know,” he said, “that she had a gondola with a gondolier, specially imported from Italy, to row her up and down the Avon.”
“How lovely.”
“Actually, I know a man who nearly bought it. He went to a country house sale at Shottery, just after the war, and there it was.”
“But he didn’t buy it?”
“He was very tempted, but, as he said, he’d nowhere to put it, so it would have just sat in the garden and quietly rotted away. The way things do, you know.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
David moved an olive stone around the rim of his plate with the tip of his knife.
“Sheila,” he said, not looking up, “there’s something I must tell you.”
“What is it?” I asked, slightly bewildered by his sudden change of mood.
“It’s just that—oh God, this is so difficult!'' He looked up at last and said, “When I went to see Nana that time—you know—she was already dead.”
“What!”
“I found her there in the hall. She’d obviously fallen down the stairs. She was quite dead.”
“And you left her there?”
“Oh God, I know—it sounds so awful—but I panicked. I knew how suspicious it would look—I simply lost my head and got out as fast as I could.”
“But how did you get in, if she was ...”
“I rang the bell and there was no answer so I went around to the side door and that was open so I just walked in. I called out but of course there was no reply, so I went into the hall and there she was.”
He buried his face in his hands. “The times I’ve seen her since then, lying there ...”
“But how could you? She might have lain there for days!”
“I know, I know! But once I’d done it, then it seemed impossible to tell anyone. I was so ashamed! I tried to rationalize it—there was a bottle of milk by the side door, I told myself the milkman would see it the next day and investigate—actually, that’s what did happen, Francis told me. I felt a bit better after that.”
“Oh, David.”
“And then, all that business with Francis and the police and everything. You do see, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“I’m afraid I’m not a very strong person. Francis had all the decisiveness in our family. I know it was a feeble thing to do—a rotten thing to do—but, well ...”
He looked at me appealingly. Dear David. Perhaps I would never feel quite the same about him again, but all those years of friendship and fondness bound us with strong ties. And I did understand.
“Of course I see,” I said. “I’d probably have done exactly the same thing myself.”
David gave me a wry, lopsided smile, his Inspector Ivor smile.
“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps.”
Mrs. Malory Mysteries
Published by Coffeetown Press
Gone Away, or Mrs. Malory Investigates (1989)
The Cruellest Month (1991)
The Shortest Journey, or
Mrs. Malory's Shortest Journey (1992)
Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murder, or
Uncertain Death (1993)
Murder on Campus, or Detective in Residence (1994)
Superfluous Death, or Mrs. Malory Wonders Why (1995)
Death of a Dean (1996)
Other Mysteries by Hazel Holt
Published by Coffeetown Press
My Dear Charlotte (2010)
Hazel Holt was born in Birmingham, England, where she attended King Edward VI High School for Girls. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, and went on to work at the International African Institute in London, where she became acquainted with the novelist Barbara Pym, whose biography she later wrote. She also finished one of Pym’s novels after Pym died. Holt has also recently published My Dear Charlotte, a story that uses the actual language of Jane Austen’s letters to her sister Cassandra to construct a Regency murder mystery. Holt wrote her first novel in her sixties, and is a leading crime novelist. She is best known for her Mrs. Malory series. Her son is novelist Tom Holt.
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