by Dick Francis
‘No,’ I said. ‘If he dies from normal causes, we all inherit equally.’ I paused, and added an invention. ‘If someone murders him, it all goes to charities. So how about you getting on the telephone and telling the whole tribe to help me find out who’s trying to do them out of their future?’
Fourteen
In my room at Cookham in the evening, I read Norman West’s notes on Gervase and Ursula.
Gervase first:
Mr Gervase Pembroke (35) lives with Mrs Ursula at 14 Grant St., Maidenhead, a detached house with a quarter-acre garden in good residential neighbourhood. They have been married for 11 years and have 2 daughters (8 and 6) both attending a private school.
Mr G. is a stockbroker who commutes to the City firm of Wells, Gibson 6c Cathcart. (Wells, Gibson and Cathcart have all died or retired long ago, but the respected name is kept.) Mr Gervase works for his own commission within the firm: each partner does. He has flexible working hours; he’s his own boss to a great extent. He used to work harder than he does now but has become erratic of late, according to the firm’s lady receptionist. She didn’t like to say outright, but I gathered Mr G. sometimes returns from lunch the worse for drink, and sometimes doesn’t return at all.
She didn’t of course note down such times. She said she’d heard two of the other partners discussing Mr G., saying he’d lost his nerve and was selling his clients only gilts. They thought that too much playing safe was bad stockbroking. She had no qualms in denigrating Mr G., who she said has a filthy temper when things don’t go his way, and never appreciates how hard she works (!)
I requested to interview Mr G. at his place of work. I was shown into his office and explained who I was. He said he knew. I said as a preliminary that I understood he was the illegitimate son of Mrs Alicia Pembroke, and the interview ended immediately. He physically hustled me out (bruise on left arm). He said I’d insulted him. Perhaps I did! I managed to say that if he could produce office records - letters written, brokerage transactions - for the Tuesday in question, he would be in the clear. He said to consult his secretary, which I did. Mr G. went into the office that morning, she confirmed, and dictated two letters. Mr G. told her he was going to see a new client, and left at 10.30 am. She didn’t know who the client was, he was not listed on Mr G’s office diary. It was more usual for new clients to come to the office, but not invariable. Mr G. didn’t return to the office that day, but returned Wednesday in bad mood (with a hangover?).
Mr G. left the office the previous Friday (secretary’s notes) at midday, didn’t return. (Mr G. worked normally all day Monday.)
Mr G. commutes by train, leaves off-white Rover in station carpark. His car clean and unmarked when I saw it.
Visited Mr G. at his home to ask about the client on Tuesday re solid alibi. Mr G. said none of my business. Guess: client was either a mistress or a bottle, or else Mr G. wants me to believe that.
Mr G.’s alcohol problem is serious (my opinion) but not incapacitating. He has strong masterful manner, but must have insecurities (illegitimacy??) to make him drink and treat people badly. (His secretary does not love him.) Mr G. appears to make good income, no sign of financial straits.
Attentive to Mrs Alicia. Bossy and possessive with his wife and children. Jealous of Mr Ian and (my judgement) fears him. (I don’t know why this is. Something in the past? Mr Pembroke’s preference?) Despises but also fears Mr Pembroke. (A lot of bluster when he talked of him.)
Mr G. is physically strong but getting less so, I’d think. Takes little exercise, somewhat overweight. Difficult personality. A bully.
End of enquiry.
I paperdipped Gervase together with a sigh. Norman West, for all his ineffective appearance, had a way of getting to the heart of things pretty smartly.
What had he made of Ursula, I wondered. Ursula, the quiet wife, who had talked in tears to Joyce. Pretty enough in an insipid way, she was like an unfinished painting, without highlights. Pleasant enough to me whenever Gervase allowed, she had never told me her thoughts. I turned with unexpected interest to the West view of Gervase’s wife.
Mrs Ursula Pembroke (35) wife of Mr Gervase, lives with him at 14 Grant St., Maidenhead. She has no employment beyond looking after children and household. A cleaner comes in Monday to Friday mornings, 9 am to 1 pm, stays Tuesdays and Thursdays until 4 pm, also baby-sits whenever asked. (I had to make two visits to Mrs U. On the first occasion she had been crying and wouldn’t talk. On the second she was cooperative.)
The daughters’ school is at the other end of Maidenhead. Mrs U. shares the school-run with a family nearby; Mrs U’s mornings are Tuesday and Thursday; afternoons Mon., Wed. and Fri. Mrs U’s car is a cream Austin. Clean.
On the Friday of the attack on Mr Pembroke, the daughters were invited to tea by the other school-run family (the mother corroborates). Mrs U. left the daughters there after school (4 pm). Picked them up about 6.30.
On the following Tuesday, Mrs U. arranged for the cleaner to stay and give the daughters their tea as she wanted a day out in London. The cleaner told me Mrs U. did the school run, came back and changed, and drove away to the station to catch the train. She (Mrs U.) said she would be back late as she would go to the cinema after she’d done her shopping. Mrs U. has done this several times lately. She returned at 10 pm. Cleaner went home. (Mrs U. gave me permission to consult the cleaner.) Mrs U. says she didn’t go to the cinema, she didn’t like the look of the films, she just had dinner in a steak house. She also said she had been into a church to pray. She hadn’t bought anything (nothing fitted).
Mrs U. nervous and evasive about trip to London. Did she go to Newmarket? Possible (my opinion) that she goes to London to meet someone, doesn’t want cleaner or husband to know. Who? Lover? Not possible, she hasn’t the air, they can’t hide that inner excitement. Priest? Friend unacceptable to Mr G.? Doctor? Some sort of solace, I would say.
Mrs U. unhappy woman but wouldn’t unbutton. Loyal. Any wife of Mr G. liable to be unhappy (my opinion). Mrs U. doesn’t like having the cleaner around for so long. Mr G. insists on cleanliness. Mrs U. gets tired of the cleaner’s incessant chatter. All adds to Mrs U’s stress. Mrs U. would like a job or to do voluntary work. Mr G. won’t have it. ‘The children come first.’ (Mrs U. obviously very fond of the children.)
Mrs U. wishes Mr Pembroke would give all the family a lot of money now so that they would stop griping about it. She sees nothing wrong in Mr Ian, but her husband won’t let her talk to him. She could like Mr Pembroke, she thinks he’s funny and generous, but her husband ditto. She can’t go against her husband. She has no money of her own, I’d say. She’s in a trap. (Can’t support children herself, couldn’t leave without them.)
Does she believe killing Mr Pembroke could solve her problems? Does she believe if Mr G. becomes richer it will make things right? I could tell her it won’t.
End of enquiry.
Poor Mrs U. Poor Ursula. Could she have blown up Quantum? Perhaps, if she’d wanted to. She sounded desperate enough for anything, but if she had any sense, her desperation should drive her to beg from Malcolm, not to kill him.
I clipped Ursula behind Gervase: forever in his shadow.
I wondered why she’d married him, but then I’d attended their wedding also, and if one hadn’t in the past been on the wrong end of his glowing cigarette, one could have taken him as he seemed on the surface, confident, good looking, positive and strong. A rising young stockbroker. A catch.
I put Gervase and Ursula back in the envelope but they wouldn’t stay there, they stuck like burrs in my mind.
There must be thousands, hundreds of thousands of sad marriages like that, I thought, where the unhappiness came from inside. Probably one could more easily withstand disasters that came from without, survive wars, poverty, illness, grief. Much harder to find any good way forward when personality disintegrated. Each of them was disintegrating, Ursula because of Gervase, Gervase because of…
Because of Malcolm? Because of Malcolm�
�s boredom with Vivien, his affair with Alicia, his quick marriage to Joyce? Because of illegitimacy? But Ferdinand had been a product of the same process, and Ferdinand was whole.
There were questions without answers. The most likely answers were often wrong. I didn’t know why Gervase was disintegrating: I thought only that the process had already begun when we both lived at Quantum; had maybe begun in the womb.
I slept with troubled dreams and went to ride the next morning as if for therapy and release. Solace, Norman West’s word, met the case. The raw morning, the moving horses, the filthy language and the crude jokes, a daily fix of the sort of reality I’d chosen at eighteen. I didn’t know why I’d liked horses so much. Choice sprang from deep needs, but where did the needs come from?
I wasn’t accustomed to thinking in that way. I usually coasted along, not worrying much, doing my job, enjoying riding in races, making love without strings. Lazy in many respects, I dared say, but uncomplicated. An opt-out that had come to an abrupt end with meeting Malcolm at Newmarket.
It was Tuesday.
Ursula’s cleaner, I thought, driving back to Cookham, would currently be chatting away with no respite for Ursula until the girls got back from school. I wondered if Ursula was quietly going bananas at 14 Grant St., Maidenhead. I changed into ordinary clothes and went along there to find out.
The cleaner came to the door; middle-aged, in a flowered overall, with an inquisitive face. Mrs Pembroke was lying down with a headache, she said, and yes, perhaps she could go upstairs and ask her if her brother-in-law might take her out to lunch. Perhaps I would like to wait in the hall.
I waited, and presently Ursula came downstairs looking wan and wearing a coat and gloves.
‘Oh!’ she said faintly when she saw me. ‘I thought it was Ferdinand.’
I’d hoped she would. I said, ‘Where would you best like to go?’
‘Oh.’ She was irresolute. She looked back up the stairs and saw the cleaner watching interestedly from the landing. If she didn’t come out with me, she’d be stuck with explaining.
‘Come on,’ I said persuasively. ‘The car’s warm.’
It sounded a silly thing to say, but I suppose she listened to the intention, not the words. She continued across the hall and came with me out of the front door, closing it behind us.
‘Gervase won’t like this,’ she said.
‘Why should he know?’
‘She’ll find a way of telling him.’ She gestured back to the house, to the cleaner. ‘She likes to make trouble. It brightens up her life.’
‘Why do you keep her?’
She shrugged. ‘I hate housework. If I sack her, I’d have to do it. Gervase thinks she’s thorough, and he pays her. He said he wouldn’t pay anyone else.’
She spoke matter-of-factly, but I was startled by the picture of domestic tyranny. We got into the car and I drove out of the town and towards the village of Bray, and twice more on the way she said, ‘Gervase won’t like this.’ We stopped at a small roadside restaurant and she chose homemade soup and moussaka, several times looking over her shoulder as if her husband would materialise and pounce.
I ordered a carafe of red wine. Not for her, she protested, but when it came she drank it almost absentmindedly. She had removed the coat and gloves to reveal a well-worn grey skirt topped by a blue sweater with a cream shirt underneath. She wore a string of pearls. Her dark hair was held back at one side by a tortoiseshell slide, and there was no lipstick on her pale mouth. The sort of appearance, I supposed, that Gervase demanded.
When the soup came, she said, ‘Ferdinand phoned last night and told Gervase that Malcolm had made a new will, according to you.’
‘Yes, he made one,’ I agreed. ‘He showed it to me.’
‘Gervase didn’t tell me,’ she said. ‘He phoned Alicia and told her, and I listened. That’s what usually happens. He doesn’t tell me things, he tells his mother.’
‘How do you get on with Alicia?’ I asked.
She very carefully drank the soup already in her spoon. She spoke as if picking her way through a minefield.
‘My mother-in-law,’ she said intensely, ‘has caused more trouble than anyone since Eve. I can’t talk about her. Drink your soup.’
I had the impression that if she once started talking about Alicia, she would never stop. I wondered how to start her, but when I tentatively asked what she meant about trouble, she shook her head vehemently.
‘Not here,’ she said.
I left it. She talked about her children, which she could do without strain, looking almost animated, which saw us through to the moussaka.
‘What do you do on your trips to London?’ I asked casually.
She looked amazed, then said, ‘Oh yes, that wretched Mr West. Gervase was furious with him. Then Gervase was annoyed with me also, and wanted to know where I’d been. I’d been wandering around, that’s all.’ She ate her moussaka methodically. ‘Ferdinand told Gervase and Gervase told Alicia something about a tree stump. What was that all about?’
I explained about the cordite.
She nodded. ‘Gervase told Alicia he’d had a good laugh when old Fred was knocked flat.’
She seemed undisturbed by the thought of explosives. We finished the lunch, I paid the bill, and we set off on the short road back to Maidenhead. A little way along there, I stopped the car in a lay-by and switched off the engine.
She didn’t ask why we’d stopped. After a pause she said, ‘Alicia is ruining our marriage, I suppose you know that?’
I murmured an assent.
‘I’d known Gervase for only four months when we got married. 1 didn’t realise… She’s twisted him from birth, hasn’t she? With her awful lies and spite. She sets him against you all the time. Gervase says terrible things about you sometimes… I mean, violent… I hate it. I try to tell him not to, but he doesn’t listen to me, he listens to her. She says you sneer at him, you think you’re much superior, because you’re legitimate. I know you don’t. Gervase believes her though. She tells him over and over that Malcolm threw them out and never loved them. She’s wicked. And look what she’s done to Serena. Gervase says she was a bright girl, but Alicia wouldn’t let her stay on at school, Alicia wanted her to be a little girl, not to grow up. And Serena hates all men, and it’s Alicia’s fault. The only men Serena will let touch her are Ferdinand and Gervase. It’s such a waste. Alicia got rid of Ferdinand’s first wife, did you know? Went on and on at her until she couldn’t stand it and left. I don’t know how Debs puts up with her. It’s driving me insane, you know, her drip, drip, drip. She’s the worst enemy you’ll ever have. If it was you that had been murdered, she would have done it.’
‘She wasn’t always like that,’ 1 said, as she paused. ‘When she lived at Quantum, she treated me the same as Ferdinand and Gervase.’
‘Then it must have started when Malcolm kept you there on your own, and as she’s got older it’s got worse. She’s much worse now than she was when we got married, and she was bad enough then. She hated Coochie, you know, and Coochie was nice, wasn’t she? I was sorry when Coochie died. But Coochie banned all the family from staying in the house except you, and I should think that’s when Alicia turned against you. Or let it all out. I bet it was there inside all the time. Like Gervase keeps things in and lets them out violently … so does Serena, and Ferdinand too… they’re all like that. I wish Alicia would die. I can understand people wanting to kill. I would like to kill Alicia.’
She stopped abruptly, the raw truth quivering in her voice.
‘Drive me home,’ she said, i shouldn’t have said that.’
I didn’t immediately restart the engine. I said, ‘Is it Alicia that’s causing Gervase to drink?’
‘Oh!’ Ursula gulped, the flow of anger ending, the misery flooding back. ‘It’s just… everything. I can see he’s unhappy, but he won’t let me help him, he won’t talk to me, he just talks to her, and she makes it worse.’
I sighed and set off towards Grant
Street. Alicia hadn’t quite reached sixty: the worst of the witches could outlive them all.
‘I shouldn’t have told you all this,’ Ursula said, when I stopped at the door. ‘Gervase won’t like it.’
‘Gervase won’t know what you’ve said.’
She fished a handkerchief out of her handbag and blew her nose.
‘Thank you for the lunch. Did your mother tell you we’ve had lunch a few times in London, she and I? She gives me good advice. I can’t tell Gervase, he’d be furious.’
I nodded. ‘Joyce told me you were friends.’
‘She’s awfully catty about Alicia. It cheers me up no end.’ She gave me a wan smile and got out of the car. She waved as she opened her front door: I waved back and drove away, and covered the few miles to Cookham.
I thought it might be interesting to see what Norman West had made of Alicia, and I searched through the notes until I came to her.
West had written:
Mrs Alicia Pembroke (59) refused to speak to me at all on my first visit and was ungracious and edgy on my second.
Mrs Alicia lives at 25 Lions Court, London Road, Windsor, a block of flats. She still maintains she can’t remember what she was doing on the Friday or the Tuesday: she was pottering about, she says. ‘One day is much like another.’ I think she’s being obstructive for the sake of it.
Mrs A. drives a big silver/grey Fiat. Clean, no damage.
Mrs A. antagonistic to me personally because of my following her in Mrs Joyce’s divorce case, although in the end she benefited. Twenty-eight years ago! She remembers every detail of that time. Can’t remember last Tuesday …
I asked her if she had ever engaged me to work for her. She said no. (?)
Mrs A. has changed from the Miss A. I followed. Miss A. was full of giggles, very little-girl. Mrs A. still dresses very young, acts young, but is embittered. Odd how some women flower in love affairs and wither in marriage. Seen it often. Seems as if the spice of secrecy and naughtiness is what they love, not the man himself.
