Winter of Discontent

by Jeanne M. Dams

  Her voice was steady, her eyes dry. She had come to terms with this second tragedy in her life, perhaps better than with the first. I couldn’t quite match her aplomb when I said, “I’m so very sorry.”

  “It was long ago. At the time I wanted to die, but one doesn’t die of wishing. The Burtons were very kind, though quite dreadfully disappointed. They had wanted that grandchild almost as much as I had wanted George’s son. For some reason I was sure it was going to be a boy. But there were some compensations. You see, I was now the only link George’s parents had to him. They began to draw me more and more into their lives, treat me more and more like their daughter. I’m a quick study, and they completed my social education. I learned how to dress, how to carry on a genteel conversation, how to behave in their world. After a while it became my own.”

  “Yes, I see. Did you ever—that is, you were young and now single, and mixing with eligible young men. Did you ever consider remarrying?”

  “No. Oh, no. That wouldn’t have done. I had grown fond of Grace and Andrew, and they of me, but theirs was a possessive sort of love. I was of value to them only as George’s widow. If I had remarried they would have lost interest.” She spoke about it dispassionately. Apparently the passage of years had taken the sting out of that possessiveness as well. That or the acquisition of wealth. Money may not buy happiness, but it surely can soften the blows life deals us.

  “So you went on living with the Burtons.”

  “For about a year after the war ended, yes. Then one of their friends, Sir Robert Lesley, offered me a position as his confidential secretary. He was a widower with a big country house in East Sussex. He needed someone to oversee the running of it and deal with his business affairs. Well, of course I had no money of my own and couldn’t keep on sponging off Grace and Andrew forever. I leapt at the offer.

  “It worked out very well. I had exactly the qualifications he needed: tact, a presentable appearance, that sort of thing, and I’d learnt enough from Grace about the operation of an important house that I could manage very well. He didn’t require a stenographer, and I learnt typing very quickly. Sir Robert was getting on in years and was not in the best of health. He came quite to rely on me, and when he died he left me a nice little bequest and a glowing letter of recommendation. The contacts I’d made while working with him made it easy for me to find another position, this time for a cabinet minister’s wife at their country house in Kent. Living there, I had no expenses to speak of and was able to save nearly all my salary. So what with one thing and another I had acquired quite a pleasant nest egg, and I decided to buy this house. It was near enough to Deepings that I could keep in close touch with the Burtons. Frankly, I had thought they would probably remember me in their will, but I had no idea they would leave me as much as they did. Of course, if George had lived, or even if his son had lived, there would have been Deepings … but they both died. I was left with enough, however, to furnish this house rather nicely.”

  Her glance strayed around the room, caressing the Adam fireplace, the Persian rugs, the Wedgwood sconces. Her austere face softened into a half smile that wasn’t entirely pleasant and I got a sudden jolt. There was a wolfish look about that smile, a revelation of avarice that sent my thoughts off on an entirely new tack.

  Perhaps it was true that she hadn’t known about the Burtons’ will. Perhaps she hadn’t known about Sir Robert’s will, either. Perhaps she hadn’t exercised any of what lawyers call “undue influence” on any of them. But if what I thought I’d just seen of her character was accurate, I was willing to bet she’d been happy enough to take the money and run, and had shed few tears about the demise of her benefactors.

  I wondered what she’d gotten out of the cabinet minister?

  “You must have been devastated by the death of George’s parents,” I said sweetly, testing her.

  She didn’t bat an eyelash. “Of course,” she said, and glanced at her watch.

  I was jolted into remembering why I’d come. “Oh, dear, your story is fascinating, but I’m taking too much of your time, and I did want to ask a bit about Bill Fanshawe.”

  “Fanshawe? Why?” Her voice sharpened; her disturbing smile disappeared.

  “Only because I know most about him. I thought I’d make his story the focus of the book, relating everything else to him, you see.”

  “No, I don’t. He was at Luftwich for a matter of months. George was there for years. I know George had some sort of attachment to Fanshawe, but really he was a complete bore. Oh, I know he just died, and de mortuis and all that, but really! He flew a few raids, never accomplished much of anything, never hit a single plane or ship or any target of any importance whatever, at least to my knowledge. He was a nonentity. I should think he’d be worthy of a footnote, at best. He wasn’t even an effective curator for our museum. He was extremely casual about some memorabilia I donated, very casual, indeed. Of course you’ve been talking to Jane Langland, who thought the sun rose and set on her precious Bill. For whatever good it did her.”

  This time her look at her watch was long enough that she could be sure I noticed, and furthermore she rose, leaning heavily on her cane, from her chair. Clearly our interview was at an end.

  I stood. “Yes. Well, thank you so much. It’s been most interesting to meet you, and your house is simply beautiful. I wish I’d had time to see it properly.”

  “Yes, a pity.” Her tone made it quite clear that I would never be invited for a tour. I shook her hand and walked to the door with hypocritical expressions of gratitude, and made my escape.

  What a shame she hadn’t the strength to have assaulted Walter. That cane would have made a marvelous weapon, and I wouldn’t have bet a nickel that any milk of human kindness would have stayed her hand.

  I wondered just how long ago Sir Robert Lesley had died, and if it would be possible to find out exactly what he’d died of?

  TWENTY-ONE

  THAT WAS THE FIRST THING I ASKED ALAN WHEN HE CAME HOME. I accosted him before he’d finished hanging up his coat.

  “If somebody died quite a while ago, is there any way I could find out how he died?”

  “I’m delighted to see you, too, my dear,” he said, dropping his hat on the hall table. He plodded into the parlor and sank into his favorite chair. Grunting, he pushed his shoulders back, rotated his neck. “Out of condition,” he complained. “I haven’t pushed papers about for years. And what’s this about somebody dying?”

  “Never mind. I’ll ask you later. I might have come across something useful today, that’s all. I forgot about your project. How did it go? And would you like a drink, or some tea?”

  “Tea, thanks, love. The museum was frightfully cold.”

  I put the kettle on and came back to the parlor, sitting on the arm of Alan’s chair and massaging his shoulders while he made blissful sounds. When the kettle shrieked, I gave him a final pat. “There. My hands are giving out. That’ll have to do.”

  I laced the tea with a little Jack Daniel’s to complete the relaxation routine, added some goodies to the tray, and came back to find Alan had recovered enough to build a fire. It blazed up almost immediately and felt lovely.

  “Mince pies!” said Alan. “Isn’t it a little early to eat them?”

  “Men! You cry for mince pies, I give them to you, and you complain that it isn’t Boxing Day yet. Fie upon thee, thou black-hearted foosh! Pretend it’s ten days from now and eat them. I’ll make more if we run out. But tell me about today at the museum.”

  In between sips of tea and bites of the flaky little tarts, he told me. There wasn’t much to tell, actually. He and two other policemen had spent the day trying to organize Bill’s files.

  “There’s an incredible amount of material in that room, and if it has ever been organized in any fashion whatsoever, we could find no evidence of the fact.”

  “Alan, that’s odd! Because there certainly was some rudimentary organization when Jane and I left it the other day. I won’t say the room wa
s a model of neatness, but the papers were in stacks and the other artifacts were in piles, and if you could figure out Bill’s system, it was easy enough to assign categories to the groups. Names, events, whatever.”

  “This morning it was chaos.”

  “Then the intruder, whoever he was—or she—searched up there, too.”

  “And, of course, may have found whatever he or she was looking for. Which might make our search fruitless. It has to be done, nevertheless. Is there more tea?”

  There was. I poured it out. “I don’t suppose you found Bill’s calendar. Diary. Whatever you want to call it.”

  “No, nor much of anything else. The three of us got through quite a lot of, frankly, extremely boring memorabilia of various prominent Sherebury families. We were able to sort it by family and date, not much more. We’ll leave the historical aspect of it to whoever takes charge of the museum. Our concern is with anomalies, and if we found any today, we didn’t recognize them. But you said you might have a line on something.”

  “Oh, probably not. I went to see a woman named Leigh Burton. She’s the widow of one of Bill Fanshawe’s war buddies. I told you.”

  “You didn’t mention the name. So you went to see the Ice Princess, did you?”

  I snickered. “I see you know the lady.”

  “We’ve met. I can’t say I was ever on friendly terms with her, but then I haven’t enough money to be of interest.”

  “So she really is as fond of money as she seems to be. I think she’s also something of a social snob. Funny, given her background. She was the daughter of a tobacconist, you know.”

  “Hard as she’s tried to keep that titbit hidden, yes, it’s well known. But you know, my dear, there’s no snob quite like the nouveau riche.”

  “And that’s what I was wondering about. She must have a lot of money to have a house like that”

  “Pots of it, I understand. The story is she inherited it from a grateful employer and her late husband’s family.”

  “Oh, well, if you know the whole story there’s no point in me telling you.” I checked the teapot. It was empty.

  “I suppose you were wondering if she did them in.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Why am I going around wasting my breath when you know everything anyway!”

  Alan laughed. “Not everything, but I do happen to know about the fair Mrs. Burton. There was an inquiry, as a matter of fact, when her employer died. He had no close family, but there was a third cousin or something who thought he was coming in for the boodle, and was livid when darling Leigh scooped the lot.”

  “All of it? She gave me the impression—well, in fact she said, ‘A nice little bequest.’”

  “Every penny the old man had, and there were quite a number of them.”

  “This was around here?”

  “In Kent, but we heard about it. There was quite a to-do, but it was absolutely proven that the old man had died quite legitimately of whatever he had been expected to die of, and about when he had been expected to die. And his will made it quite clear that he left Mrs. Burton the money because she’d been kind to him and the cousin had ignored him for years. Of course the cousin tried to prove undue influence, but the courts made short work of him.”

  “Oh, dear. And she would have been such a lovely villain. I’d thought maybe Bill had found out something about her and she’d come to the museum to talk to him … although I doubt she could have struck down Walter, and come to think of it, Bill wasn’t even there when Walter was injured. Well, I mean he was there, but he was dead. Oh, well. I don’t suppose she did in her in-laws, either?”

  “If she did, it was the perfect murder. They died in an automobile accident near their home in Hampshire. It was in the seventies, sometime, and Mrs. Burton was in hospital at the time, appendicitis, I believe. In Surrey,” he added before I could ask.

  I sighed. “If I’d known you could tell me all that, I could have saved a good deal of time.”

  “But you went there to talk to her about the war, didn’t you?”

  “I confess, I got interested in her background. Jane had told me enough about her that I was thoroughly taken aback when I saw that house. So I got a bit sidetracked. She did tell me a little about the war, though, from her husband’s point of view, of course. She seemed to think the Luftwich operation was pretty much a washout. She said their missions weren’t often successful, and so on. And she had no opinion at all of Bill, called him a ‘nonentity.’ Which put the final stamp on my opinion of her.”

  “Not a congenial sort of person,” Alan agreed, “but almost certainly not a murderer.”

  “Pity. I liked her in the role.”

  “Have you heard anything about Walter today? I intended to ring up the hospital, but the time got away from me.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. When I got home from visiting the Ice Princess, I went over to see Jane, and she’d been to the hospital. They let her see him for a few minutes. She said he was much better, still somewhat confused, and chafing because he couldn’t remember, but he knew her, and was able to say a few sensible things and move his arms and legs. So that’s good news.”

  Alan shook his head slightly. “Good news for Walter, of course. But now that there’s no risk of his death, the investigation steps down a notch or two. Assault is a serious crime, but not as serious as murder. And when there are never enough men—”

  “I know, I know. It’s your theme song. Never enough men on the force to do it all. The more fools they, then, for not using woman power when it volunteers itself. But I know your answer to that, too. Now, do you want some more of those waistline-destroying tarts, or shall we start thinking about some real food?”

  We ended up going to the Rose and Crown for dinner, and had a pleasant time talking with the Endicotts, when they could spare a moment from serving the pre-Christmas crowd, about the newest exploits of their grandson, Inga and Nigel’s son. It seemed he had slept through the night for the first time, and produced an absolutely unmistakable smile, and such remarkable accomplishments had to receive their due praise.

  Next morning Alan headed back to the museum, leaving me at a loose end. I needed to go to London to finish my Christmas shopping, but first I needed to organize my mind. I sat down to make lists.

  The Christmas shopping list was soon finished. I added a few trinkets for the Evans baby, some videos for Alan’s younger grandchildren, and a really nice sweater for Alan.

  Then I pulled a fresh spiral notebook from my desk drawer, fended off Emmy, who dearly loves to sit on paper, and began to put down my few ideas about what I was beginning to think of as The Museum Mess.

  I found, as I sat and chewed on my pen, that my ideas were sorely in need of organization. I had nothing, really, that seemed to add up to any satisfactory whole or even reasonable-looking pieces. I’d talked to a lot of people, but their stories were so diverse, so lacking in focus, I wasn’t sure that I’d learned anything at all.

  Well, I’d better do something chronological, then. It had started—yes, a little over a week ago, when Jane and I had entered the museum looking for Bill. I remembered I’d been fretting about having done so little about Christmas.

  Bill had presumably been dead then, but we hadn’t found him until—no, take it in order. I began to write:

  1. December 8, Monday. Go to museum. Bill missing. Search for him, call in his assistant, Walter Tubbs.

  2. Tuesday. Bill still missing. Go back to museum, search through Bill’s workroom. Find nothing interesting except Bill’s atlas of the United States. Discover markings on the Indiana page.

  3. Wednesday. Take the atlas to Walter to see if he can make anything of it.

  4. Thursday. Find Bill, dead, in a tunnel under the museum. Walter has been attacked and seriously injured, apparently the night before. The atlas and Bill’s engagement calendar are both missing; the museum has been ransacked. Bill is clutching a letter in his hands, but it doesn’t make much sense.

  That r
eminded me that Charles Lambert and his friend were coming to dinner tomorrow to take a look at Bill’s letter. I should get that meat mixture made for the steak and kidney pie. Like most stews, it was much better the second day. I made a note on another page of the book and turned back to my uninspiring task.

  5. Friday. Go to see Stanley Rutherford and John Merrifield. Stanley wants to talk mostly about Stanley and how heroic he was. Hints there might have been something funny going on on the home front. Merrifield fills us in on the day his plane went down, killing everyone except Bill and himself.

  6. Saturday. Go to see Barbara Price and the Rev’d Mr. Tredgold. Price gives me some details about life at Luftwich, not much. Hates Merrifield at least as much as Stanley does, Tredgold a washout. Falls apart whenever the war is so much as mentioned.

  7. Sunday. Do nothing except brood about old age.

  I made a face at that. If I wasn’t careful, I could talk myself into a real depression about growing older. And really, when one considered the only alternative … I went on with my list.

  8. Monday, yesterday. Talk to Mrs. Burton. Learn a lot about her background, not much about the war in general or Luftwich in particular, except that she thought Luftwich men didn’t accomplish much.

  I looked at that entry again. Put in contrast with Stanley’s bragging, it was suddenly a bit startling. Stanley had bragged about how many planes he’d shot down, had sounded as though he’d won the war practically single-handedly. I marked that down as an oddity and then looked back once more at my chronology and sighed. If there was anything enlightening in that disjointed set of impressions, it certainly wasn’t casting any bright light on my mind. And Jane had run out of people for me to interview.