Charters and Caldicott

by Stella Bingham

  ‘Oh, she’s alive all right – just. You know her father threw her out? She went to San Francisco and began drifting across America. One day she was driving to some commune or other with a bunch she’d got mixed up with, all of them high as kites – they met a truck coming the other way. Three of them died instantly. Jenny wasn’t so lucky. She’s been living for the past year in a private sanatorium in upstate New York, almost completely paralysed.’

  Caldicott shook his head sadly. ‘Poor girl,’ Charters murmured.

  ‘All right – we’ve had the two minutes’ silence,’ said Wrigley. ‘Now let’s have that letter.’

  Meg turned to him. ‘Do you really think they’re going to show us where the will is hidden when they don’t even know why Jenny wants us to have it, why I deceived them, how this whole nightmare started?’

  ‘Your wife has a point there, Wrigley,’ said Caldicott.

  ‘How much do you know?’ asked Meg.

  Charters and Caldicott answered simultaneously: ‘A great deal,’ and ‘Not a lot.’

  Charters nodded to Caldicott to continue. ‘Only what we’ve learned from Darrell.’

  Charters felt this didn’t do them justice. ‘Plus what we’ve deduced ourselves.’

  ‘It started in Hong Kong,’ said Meg. ‘Dad had given me the money to take myself off on a kind of flying world cruise while I sorted out what to do about my failing marriage.’

  ‘They don’t need to know about that,’ said Wrigley.

  ‘I wish I’d known it wasn’t his to give, then none of this would have happened.’

  ‘You didn’t know because you didn’t want to know. Daddy could do no wrong! The sun shone out of his backside!’

  Charters glared. ‘That’s enough of that, Wrigley!’

  ‘Jenny’s father took me out to dinner. He told me how popular Birdade had become with the Chinese, just from the few crates we were exporting to Hong Kong. He was convinced there was an enormous market for us, just waiting to be tapped.’

  ‘Shrewd fellow, Jock. Knew how many beans make five,’ said Caldicott.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t much interested at first. We’re such a tiny company we don’t have the capacity to expand on that scale. But then he mentioned the Zazz Corporation and how they were trying to break into China. He thought Josh Darrell would leap at the idea of taking us over. And so then I was interested. I cabled Dad – not knowing, of course, that he lived in terror of an outsider examining the books. My husband arrived on the next plane.’

  ‘With the object of blocking Jock’s bright idea by hook or by crook,’ said Caldicott.

  ‘Or murder,’ said Charters grimly.

  Meg looked shamefaced. ‘There was no murder. I’m afraid I had to pretend it wasn’t a straightforward heart attack for the same reason I pretended I was being followed. So you would take me under your wing.’

  ‘Yes, we rather fell for that, didn’t we?’ said Caldicott.

  ‘Never mind going on,’ said Wrigley. ‘The old man’ll be home any minute. Are you going to get that letter or shall I?’

  Meg stood up. ‘Is there anything you’d like. Coffee?’

  ‘This isn’t a café.’

  ‘There is one thing you might rustle up, since you ask,’ said Caldicott, brightening. ‘Mrs Mottram’s pigskin suitcase.’

  Margaret repaired to the semi-darkness of the Wild West bar to recruit her strength with a gin and tonic before setting out in search of Charters and Caldicott.

  ‘May I join you, Mrs Mottram?’ Inspector Snow materialised beside her, flicked imaginary dust off the adjacent saddle-shaped stool and sat down.

  Margaret managed to hide her surprise. ‘We must stop meeting like this, Inspector. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Not while I’m on duty. Oh, go on then. A Virgin Mary while I’m waiting.’

  The barman looked blank. ‘That’s a Bloody Mary without the vodka,’ Margaret translated. ‘And I’ll have a gin and tonic without the tonic. Waiting for what?’

  ‘My opposite number to arrive with a warrant. It’s all got to be done by the book, you know.’

  ‘Of course it has,’ said Margaret, suppressing a smile.

  ‘So where are they? Your wandering boys.’

  ‘Watching the Test Match, if I know them. They’re not in the hotel.’

  ‘I only hope they are watching the Test Match, out of harm’s way. They were over at Norton and West earlier this morning, I know that much.’

  ‘You have your spies everywhere.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Sergeant Tipper’s just checked with their receptionist. She said they’d been and gone.’ Snow began to arrange a dish of olives on sticks in a sunburst pattern. ‘Which is one load off my mind, I must say. That’s not far off a maniac they’re tangling with.’

  ‘Gordon Wrigley?’

  Snow looked surprised. ‘How did you work that out? Intuition?’

  ‘Something like that. How did you work it out? Inspiration?’

  ‘Perspiration.’ Even the mention of the word made Snow reach for a cocktail napkin and wipe his hands. ‘I’m a meticulous man, Mrs Mottram.’

  ‘So I’ve noticed.’ Margaret pointed to one of the olives. ‘Shouldn’t that be at nine o’clock?’

  Snow made the necessary adjustment to the straying olive. ‘Matching fingerprints, breaking alibis, comparing statements, collating descriptions, putting hairs and fag-ends and buttons in plastic envelopes, comparing pictures of Mrs Wrigley with descriptions of a young lady seen leaving your house with a pigskin suitcase.’

  ‘Oh, my pigskin suitcase!’ said Margaret, her voice unnaturally high. ‘It’s all right, Inspector, I don’t want to prefer charges.’

  ‘Checking, double-checking, treble-checking… hard slog, that’s what detective work’s all about, Mrs Mottram, not chasing round the country like, well, like…’

  ‘Blue-arsed flies,’ said Margaret, to save him the embarrassment. ‘Still, it’s a hobby for them, isn’t it?’

  ‘Playing Sherlock Holmes at their age is a riskier hobby than hang-gliding, Mrs Mottram.’

  ‘Would you say Sherlock Holmes? I think they’re both Dr Watsons.’

  ‘That’s even riskier. They’re very old friends of yours, aren’t they?’

  ‘Caldicott is,’ said Margaret, with a reminiscent smile. ‘I think Charters simply tolerates me.’

  ‘You don’t know how near you came to having to identifying the pair of them on a mortuary slab.’

  Margaret shivered.

  Charters completed his protracted and careful study of Jock Beevers’ letter and handed it to Caldicott with a significant grunt and a meaningful look. Caldicott glanced blankly through the letter and returned it.

  ‘Now look here, Wrigley, you’re quite right,’ said Charters. ‘This letter should lead us to the will.’

  ‘What?’ said Caldicott, slow to take his cue. Then he remembered Charters’s grimaces. ‘Oh, absolutely. You see, it’s in code.’

  Wrigley sighed. ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘However, that will is meant to be in our trust,’ said Charters, ‘Mrs Wrigley, if we’re to place it in your hands, I’m afraid we shall require a fuller explanation than you have volunteered so far.’

  ‘Hear jolly hear,’ said Caldicott. ‘Now you said this started as Jenny’s idea. Does that mean she asked you to find the will!’

  ‘Find it and destroy it – so that the previous will would become valid.’

  ‘Whereupon, so a little bird tells me, she and Helen Appleyard would have carved up the estate between them. Well that seems incentive enough.’

  ‘That wasn’t the incentive. She was only thinking of me.’

  ‘Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?’ said Wrigley. ‘You’ve done her enough favours.’

  Meg followed what seemed to be normal practice and ignored him. ‘After Colonel Beevers’ funeral I flew to New York to see Jenny. They’d been close to one another once and I thought she’d need a shoulder to cry on. By n
ow, Gordon had told me the trouble my father was in if Josh Darrell took us over. I poured out the whole story to Jenny and she had what seemed, up there in the Adirondack Mountains, a wonderfully simple idea.’

  ‘Impersonate her, destroy new will, produce old will, presumably in her possession,’ Caldicott summed up. ‘Then what?’

  Wrigley answered him. ‘The same stroke I’d already meant to pull with Beevers. Buy Norton and West out of what’s coming to her, straighten out the books, sell out to Zazz, and we’d all be laughing.’

  ‘But how could the poor girl lying in hospital all those thousands of miles away know where the new will might possibly be?’ asked Charters.

  ‘Helen Appleyard,’ said Meg.

  Charters snorted. ‘Scheming baggage.’

  ‘Helen kept her in touch with everything that was going on, particularly the fact that Colonel Beevers had sent the only draft of his new will off to England so that “no one could throw a spanner in the works,” as he put it. Helen thought, so therefore Jenny thought, that it must have come to you.’

  ‘It did,’ said Wrigley.

  ‘But not as directly as you would have liked,’ said Caldicott.

  ‘Helen Appleyard was livid,’ Meg continued. ‘She wrote that she’d a good mind to track down the will and burn it. I suppose that’s what put the idea into Jenny’s head.’

  ‘The trouble was, it also put the idea into her own stupid head,’ said Wrigley. ‘If the silly bitch had kept her nose out of it, she could be sitting at home in Hong Kong waiting for a million quid to drop into her lap.’

  Caldicott turned his back on Wrigley and his coarseness. ‘So you came back to England primed as Jenny Beevers, with Jenny’s papers, plus cock-and-bull yarn for my consumption, about wanting to see Jock Beevers’ diaries. But your nerve failed, so you thought you’d resort to burglary.’

  ‘I suppose my nerve did fail. You see, on one of my visits to Viceroy Mansions, while I was screwing up the courage to go in and ask for you, I saw someone I recognised coming out. I’d seen her at the funeral.’

  ‘Helen Appleyard. Fresh from greasing Grimes’s itchy palm, I suppose.’

  ‘I assumed that she must have been to see you. Why, I didn’t bother to think – it never occurred to me that she must be after the will, too. I thought that as a friend of Colonel Beevers you must be a friend of hers, too.’

  ‘Hardly likely.’

  ‘Her returning like that upset everything. If she had spoken to you, if she had told you that Jenny Beevers was in a nursing home three thousand miles away, and then I arrived at your door pretending to be Jenny…’

  ‘You’d have been in the soup sooner rather than later,’ Caldicott finished for her. ‘But hang on, according to Grimes, admittedly not a reliable witness, that’s precisely what you did do.’

  ‘I had to double-check that you were out, though he’d already told me you were never in on the first Friday of the month.’

  ‘I’m amazed he doesn’t announce my movements on the Residents’ Association bulletin board,’ said Caldicott crossly.

  ‘You know how I got the key. This time Gordon was waiting for me outside. He went up to your flat first.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been puzzling about that.’

  ‘I must say there’s one thing I’ve been puzzling over, Mrs Mottram,’ said Inspector Snow, consulting his notebook.

  ‘Aren’t I supposed to say that?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘“But there’s one thing I don’t understand, Inspector. If the 3.17 from Bodmin was running forty minutes late that day, how could the murderer have hidden in the library before the butler came in with the sherry tray at 6.30?”’

  Snow discreetly but firmly moved Margaret’s gin glass out of her reach. ‘You read a lot of detective stories, do you?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Then tell me this. Wrigley’s wife wasn’t a party to any of these murders, I’m convinced of that. He was alone with Helen Appleyard when he killed her.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. She steals pigskin suitcases but wouldn’t stoop to murder.’

  ‘Then why did Wrigley go up to Mr Caldicott’s flat ahead of her? Obviously to check there was nobody on the premises – a cleaning-lady, say – before she let herself in with the key she’d just pocketed. But why make a double-act of it? Why couldn’t she have just marched up and rung the doorbell herself, and if anyone answered, claimed she was selling encyclopedias?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy-peasy,’ said Margaret, rocking back dangerously on her bar stool. ‘If Mrs-Duggins-what-does had answered the door she’d have got a good look at her. Now, if she didn’t get her hands on that will – which indeed she didn’t – and had to fall back on passing herself off as Jenny Beevers – which indeed she did – she couldn’t run the risk of Mrs-Duggins-what-does blurting out, “That ain’t no Miss Jenny Beevers, Mr Caldicott – that’s the lady what came round selling encyclopedias”.’

  Snow nodded slowly. ‘That fits.’

  ‘Now I’ll give you one. You keep saying she let herself into the flat after the murder.’

  ‘That’s right. She was seen hanging about near the lift, nervously fiddling with a key. Evidently she thought she’d somehow missed Wrigley – that place is a maze of corridors – so she took a chance and let herself in.’

  Margaret shivered. ‘And found him standing over the body.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then who let him in?’

  ‘Helen Appleyard.’

  ‘But for Pete’s sake, why? Helen Appleyard wasn’t supposed to be in the flat. Why the hell would she answer the door?’

  ‘Mrs Mottram. Do you remember when I called on you the other day and you looked through your little spyhole and decided not to open the door?’

  ‘I was in the loo, if you want to know,’ said Margaret defiantly.

  ‘I sent the car away and waited. Five minutes later you peeped out to see if I’d gone. As you know, I hadn’t.’

  ‘As you know, I came out to put out the milk bottles.’

  ‘You came out with the milk bottles, yes. Come on, Mrs Mottram. It’s human nature. Helen Appleyard waited, had to reassure herself, opened the door a crack, and saw Wrigley still standing there. He must have heard a movement in the flat – like the chink of milk bottles.’

  Margaret stretched across and retrieved her glass. ‘All right, I’ll give you that round, Inspector. But you still don’t know why he killed her, do you?’

  ‘I don’t have to know why, Mrs Mottram. I expect he’ll tell us, in the fullness of time.’

  Wrigley was unwittingly in the process of clearing up that aspect at that very moment. ‘Panic, sheer blind panic. She was wetting her knickers.’

  Charters frowned. ‘No need for that kind of talk.’

  ‘I can understand what the sight of you would induce a nasty turn in anyone, Wrigley, but why panic?’ asked Caldicott. ‘What did Helen Appleyard have to fear from you?’

  ‘Everything. She knew all there was to know about the scheme I hatched with Jock Beevers out in Hong Kong. If she was interested in selling that information to Josh Darrell, as I thought she was, then very likely I’d be interested in stopping her.’

  ‘You say “if”. You can’t be sure if Darrell was wise to your little plot or no.’ Caldicott turned bitterly on Meg. ‘So our role in that foul house party of his, when we thought we were investigating a murder, was merely to pick up any crumbs he might drop about your tinpot little pop factory.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ said Charters, ‘that was the most disagreeable weekend we’ve spent since we were snowed up in a Scottish temperance hotel in the bad winter of ’47.’

  ‘Not since – inclusive of. However, water under the bridge, old chap. So Helen Appleyard panicked?’

  ‘I bundled her back into the flat,’ said Wrigley. ‘She wouldn’t listen to reason, just went on struggling. Her hand closed on a knife of some sort
on the desk. She tried to lunge it into me. I twisted her arm round and she stuck it into herself. Finito. It was her or me.’

  ‘Self defence and no witnesses,’ said Caldicott scornfully.

  Charters turned to Meg. ‘Then you arrived on the scene?’

  Meg looked a little sick. ‘I was horrified.’

  ‘But not so horrified that you didn’t calmly proceed to change handbags.’

  ‘That was my idea,’ said Wrigley. ‘If Helen Appleyard was in London, Gregory had to be with her. She would have told him about Meg catching her coming out of Viceroy Mansions. As soon as he knew she was dead, he’d be on to us. So. His wife isn’t dead but her pal Jenny Beevers is.’

  ‘But he must have known, even though no one else did, that it couldn’t possibly be Jenny,’ said Caldicott.

  ‘Right. He’d guess it was someone posing as Jenny – someone after the will for her own reasons. Helen Appleyard surprises her, there’s a row, she kills her, panics and takes off.’ Wrigley shrugged. ‘All right, so he was bound to rumble it sooner or later, but it did give us a bit of time to play with while we looked for the will. Once we’d got it, easy enough to prove it’s all been a terrible mix-up by finding the real Jenny Beevers alive if not kicking in New York.’

  ‘I’d have given anything to have brought Helen Appleyard back to life, too,’ said Meg sadly. ‘But as it wasn’t possible, I couldn’t see what harm we were doing – apart from causing a little confusion.’

  Caldicott snorted. ‘A little confusion! One Jenny Beevers lying dead in my flat, a second Jenny Beevers lying in a nursing home bed in New York, a third Jenny Beevers getting us mixed up in one unpleasantness after another!’

  ‘And you really believe it was self-defence, do you?’ asked Charters.

  Meg met his eyes squarely. ‘I have to. The alternative to believing it is not believing it.’

  ‘How does he account for Gregory’s death?’

  ‘An accident.’

  ‘It was,’ said Wrigley. ‘I didn’t know he was going to be at Josh Darrell’s. As soon as he saw me he put two and two together. Figured I’d killed his wife and thought why shouldn’t I pay for it.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘Attempted. He pulled a knife on me and unfortunately got the worst of it.’