Heirs and Assigns

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘How nice to meet you, at last. Come in and tell me all the news about Ellen.’

  Her front door opened into a room that stretched from front to back. The walls were painted a warm cream colour and it had an untidily comfortable, lived-in look with a big, squashy old sofa, a lot of bookshelves and by the large window at the far end a desk and table littered with papers and a typewriter. Through the window could be seen a garden with a path down the middle of a grass patch. There was an old gnarled tree set in the grass, with a seat around it, where no doubt it would be very pleasant in summer.

  When he was seated, Reardon handed over his wife’s letter. She didn’t open it immediately. ‘Of course, you’re a policeman, aren’t you? I suppose you’re here about poor Pen Llewellyn?’

  ‘That’s why we’re in Hinton, yes.’

  ‘He was a friend, a good friend,’ she said sadly. ‘I shall miss him very much, we all will. I was there at Bryn Glas for supper, you know, the night he died.’

  ‘Then I’d like to hear about it, at some point.’

  ‘I can do better than that. I have it all written down.’ She smiled at his surprise. ‘I keep a journal and that night I wrote it up before bed. You can read it while I read Ellen’s letter.’ She fetched a hard-backed exercise book with a marbled cover, opened it and leafed through it until she reached the page she wanted. ‘You can start there. It’s not private from there onwards.’

  He read with interest as Kate walked up and down, turning over the pages of Ellen’s long letter. She was a great letter-writer, Ellen, witness the hundreds of pages, the thousands of words she’d written to him during the war, before they were married. Mostly in French, he remembered with a smile, because she’d been the teacher, he the pupil. That was how they’d met, at one of the self-improvement classes he was addicted to. Glancing up from his own reading occasionally, he saw Kate smiling as she read. She was tall and fair-haired, a good looking woman with an athletic way of moving and a self-assurance that came, possibly, from making her own way in the world after the death of her husband. What was the work she had referred to at the beginning of this journal extract he was reading? he wondered. Perhaps she had become a writer. The account of the supper party given by Penrose showed she was observant, with a shrewd assessment of the effect the news of his forthcoming marriage had had on the Llewellyns. He found it interesting that she had speculated they might all have been living above their incomes and sponging off Penrose, though she had retracted that. She had mentioned something of the other guests, too – the three he had yet to meet, and would have to follow up: in particular, the good doctor who had later issued Pen Llewellyn’s death certificate and who could not be feeling very chipper about the situation, and Anna Douglas’s son. He wondered, too, what connection the young woman who had also been invited to share the supper, Carey Brewster, had had with Penrose Llewellyn.

  ‘Poor Gerald – Dr Fairlie,’ Kate said, as if picking up his thoughts, folding Ellen’s letter. ‘All this has hit him very hard. I don’t suppose anything like this has ever happened to him before in his career – he’ll be seeing it as a slur on his professional integrity. Knowing Gerald, I doubt he’ll ever get over it.’

  ‘Very upsetting for him.’ No doctor liked to admit a mistake – they were supposed to bury them, weren’t they? ‘You mentioned Miss Lancaster being taken ill. What do you think was wrong with her? You didn’t seem to believe it was something she’d eaten?’

  ‘Verity?’ She looked troubled. ‘No, I think that was an excuse, she was upset over something else.’

  ‘The fact that her uncle was going to be married again? I’ve yet to speak to her. She was in her room and according to Mrs Knightly, that’s where she’s spent nearly all her time since her uncle’s death, doesn’t want to talk to anybody.’

  She looked concerned. ‘I didn’t know that, perhaps I should go and see if she’ll talk to me. She adored Pen, but I can’t believe she’d be upset about the marriage. She gets on really well with Anna.’ She was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up beneath her and leant dangerously forward to pick up the poker to stir the fire. ‘The fact is, she’s been a bit of a handful to her mother, ever since her divorce. I’m afraid they’re not getting on at present. Ida’s not …’ She stopped herself. ‘No, I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I’ve met Mrs Lancaster.’

  ‘Oh.’ She pulled a face. ‘Then you probably know what I mean. I have to say, it sometimes seems she’s too concerned with that wretched hat shop and her so-called smart friends to spare time for her daughter. Which is a beastly thing to say, but all the same … sorry, I’m too outspoken.’

  ‘I’m used to that. I live with an outspoken woman, remember.’

  At that she laughed. ‘Still the same, is she? Oh, how I’d love to see Ellen again! It’s years, you know, we ought to have kept up better.’ Giving him a sideways glance, she added, ‘Any chance of her coming to stay while you’re working here?’

  ‘No.’ The too-casual way she’d said it told him that wasn’t her own idea. Ellen wouldn’t actually have suggested it outright after their conversation about it, would she? But she had evidently managed to put the notion into Kate’s mind. ‘Sorry, work and pleasure don’t mix.’

  ‘No, of course not, I should have realized.’ She looked contrite. ‘But you’ll be staying here, in Hinton, will you?’

  ‘At the Fox, if my sergeant has managed to persuade the landlord to open up and arrange rooms.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, Fred Parslowe! He’s a law unto himself, but he’s all right, really, and so’s his wife, Flo. She’ll see you get a good dinner. She fattens geese up for Christmas, and Fred likewise.’

  ‘Which reminds me it’s time I went to see how he’s fared.’ But Reardon was comfortable and disinclined to move. He almost wished he hadn’t declined the offer of tea. The fire was warm and he stretched out his legs and steered the conversation away from the enquiry, venturing to ask about that work she’d mentioned in her journal.

  ‘Oh, it’s doubtless very boring to anyone who isn’t actually concerned. In lieu of the teaching job I was trained for, I devote my energies to obtaining justice for women – married, widowed or unmarried. Or at any rate, trying to. We might have succeeded in getting the vote, but I’m afraid that’s only the beginning. We’re a long way from equality with men, or being treated fairly, in practically anything.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘Sorry, you’ve touched a nerve. I’m afraid I tend to bore people once I start.’

  ‘Someone with such passion is never boring, Mrs Ramsey. In any case, it’s a subject not unfamiliar to me.’

  ‘No, it won’t be. Knowing Ellen, I’d expect nothing less.’ Her warm smile brought home to him how close Ellen had said they’d once been.

  ‘It’s been the saving of me, you know.’ She waved a hand at the papers strewing the table. ‘I used to love teaching, any kind of teaching, so I found it very hard when I was forced to leave. It’s a monstrous rule and that’s why I’m working for the NCW – the National Council of Women – to get it revoked, among other things. It’s appalling you have to choose between marrying the man you love and having children, or the work you love and a life of spinsterhood.’

  ‘A hard choice and hard work.’

  ‘Yes, it’s uphill work, with all the endless letters, meetings. But worth it …’ There was a certain fervour in her manner, a light in her eyes that reminded him of those women who had fought for women’s suffrage before the war. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to learn she’d been one of them. But she stopped herself with a small laugh. ‘And that’s enough of that. If you’d like to step in for a cup of tea any time while you’re around here, I promise I won’t bend your ear again.’

  Regretfully, he stood up, offering his hand. ‘When all this business is settled, I’ll bring Ellen over to see you, I promise. I’m glad to have met you – no doubt I shall be speaking to you again before we’ve finished.’ He stepped to the door, then turned. ‘I didn’t mean to be
churlish about her visiting, you know, Mrs Ramsey.’

  ‘Don’t give it another thought. But if Ellen can persuade you to change your mind, I should be more than pleased.’

  ‘I should think the likelihood of that is remote. For now, let me wish you luck in your work.’

  She had a very attractive smile, with something mischievous in it as she said, ‘You might be sorry you said that one day, Mr Reardon. The NCW is lobbying for women police and I know what you men think about that.’

  Kate waited for the sound of the latch on the garden gate. Tree roots had lifted one of the paving slabs on the path to the front door and the gate needed to be eased up and over to enable it to be closed. Not everyone bothered to do this, and then it swung to and fro and banged in the wind. But her visitor had closed it properly, adding another point in his favour. She liked her friend Ellen’s husband, with his honourable scars, and thought it good that a man like him had been sent to find out about Pen’s death.

  She drew the curtains and lit the lamps, though it wasn’t quite dark, and the action reminded her of how she had pulled her curtains the night Pen had died and watched Jack, his mother and Carey walk away down the lane after they’d left her. Under moonlight bright enough to read a newspaper by, they had all been able to see their way clearly that night along the stony, rutted lane that lessened the distance from Bryn Glas by almost a mile. As the other three reached the junction with the main road, Gerald Fairlie’s car had caught up with them. He’d stopped and offered them a lift, and they’d accepted, although they were less than ten minutes from home. It was then, after the car had disappeared, that she had fancied she’d seen that shadow moving in the darkness. Had it been imagination? Ought I to have mentioned it to Inspector Reardon? she asked the photograph on her sideboard. Her husband, Captain Rupert Ramsey, looked silently out at her, as he and all his dead comrades did in these photographs, spruce in their uniforms, eyes calm and confident, shoulders back, allowing no admission to be captured by the camera of the terror that they might be dead even before the recipient received the photograph. Tears welled before she turned away, angry with herself. How long before such habits – talking to a photograph, seeing imaginary shadows – became eccentricities? She was no better than a lonely old maid talking to her cat, though at least a cat could respond, by the simple fact of being alive.

  She picked up Ellen’s letter and read it again and presently began to smile.

  TEN

  Mrs Ramsey hadn’t been exaggerating when she said the food would be good at the Fox. It very nearly, if not quite, made up for the poky rooms and the beds which, although they gave the lie to the dark insinuations of dampness made by Mrs Petty, she of the tea shop, were as lumpy as if rocks rather than flock filled the mattresses. More than that, the rooms were dismal, approached by a back staircase and overlooking the backyard. Breakfast this morning had been an uncommunicative meal, taken too early because both of them had been wakened at the crack of dawn by the horrible honking of the geese the landlady was fattening in the backyard, eight Christmas dinners making their presence felt.

  ‘Another night like that and they’ll be foie gras before they know it,’ Gilmour muttered.

  But after being fortified by sausage, egg, bacon and black pudding, the world had taken on a rosier hue. After a last cup of satisfyingly strong tea, alone in the Parslowe’s private parlour – which was where their meals were to be taken, as it was the only suitable room, Mrs Parslowe had insisted – its fire already lit, they went through the plans for the day. Gilmour was to return to Bryn Glas, and begin a search through those desk drawers, while Reardon had made an appointment to see Dr Fairlie before he set out on his daily rounds. By then he hoped Verity Lancaster would have recovered sufficiently to allow herself to be interviewed. All the supper party guests would then have been accounted for, with the exception of Mrs Douglas’s son, Jack, and Miss Carey Brewster.

  It was into a murky November morning they emerged from the Fox. Still very cold, no rain, but a clinging dampness in the air, and Hinton already going about its everyday business. Half-day closing on a sunlit yesterday had given a false impression of sleepiness. The place could hardly be classed as humming with purposeful activity today, either, but the shops were open and Hinton was awake. A brewer’s drayman rolled beer barrels into the cellar of the Fox; a scant few stalls had been set up as a market in the middle of the main street, the Townway, and were being well patronized by women with shopping baskets. Clanging sounds issued now and again from the smithy and the adjoining wheelwright’s premises. A horse harnessed to a pony trap waited patiently, while a small boy on a bicycle too big for him wobbled along the centre of a road otherwise empty of traffic. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. An ordinary, dull little community with nothing special about it.

  Reardon had decided against using the motor, now parked with Fred Parslowe’s permission in the pub’s alleyway alongside the Fox. It was more bother to get it out, he reckoned, to start it up and have to worry about how far away the nearest petrol pump was – not to mention the state of the country roads around here and the probability of punctures – than it was to walk, when nowhere in Hinton Wyvering was more than ten or fifteen minutes away from anywhere else.

  Gilmour was to call and speak to Jack Douglas on his way to Bryn Glas. He waved a postcard at Reardon. ‘I’ll walk a few yards with you, sir. Just want to pop this in the postbox for Maisie.’

  ‘Give it here, I’ll do that. But you only wrote one for her last night, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but it occurred to me afterwards, she can leave a message at Bryn Glas to let me know if – if she’s all right. Or – er – even speak to me,’ he added with a grin that didn’t quite disguise his hopefulness.

  Reardon suppressed a sigh. In the circumstances it seemed churlish to object to something as harmless as that, when Bryn Glas was the only place round here which boasted a telephone, except for Dr Fairlie’s. The Gilmours themselves didn’t run to such luxuries, and the convenience of a public telephone kiosk, such as Maisie (or someone else on her behalf, if things became urgent) would have to use if it was necessary to contact Gilmour, hadn’t yet reached these rural parts.

  At that moment, into the quiet street erupted the sudden roar of an approaching motorcycle. As if a tableau had come to life, everyone present on the Townway turned in a concerted movement to watch this phenomenon. In a moment it had passed them.

  ‘That was your motorbike, sir!’ Gilmour’s awed voice seemed to echo in the silence left as the engine noise receded into the distance. His eyes were popping.

  ‘And that was my wife,’ Reardon said grimly.

  He thrust the postcard back at Gilmour and set off in the opposite direction to where he’d been going, this time towards Bryn Glas and the little lane where Kate Ramsey lived, leaving Gilmour to his call on Jack Douglas, who lived with his mother further along the Townway.

  Ellen was no stranger to motorcycling. For the duration of the war, she had taken on a man’s job. Wearing breeches, and riding one of the two-stroke motorcycles they called the Baby Triumph, she had delivered mail: parcels, letters from the Front, besides all too many of those tragic telegrams giving news of sons, husbands and brothers who had been wounded, killed in action or were missing, presumed dead.

  Reardon’s own powerful BSA was a different, more powerful matter. He was looked on as eccentric by those he worked with, using it whenever he could rather than one of the official means of transport. It was his pride and joy. He would have ridden it here had he been on the investigation alone. By the time his rage-propelled stride had got him to the end of Kate Ramsey’s lane, he was red-faced, sweat mingling with the atmospheric moisture that beaded his face, hair and clothes. Ellen had dismounted by the side of the road, removed her gloves and goggles and was taking her time about consulting a map. She stood stock still when she saw him and waited for him to reach her.

  ‘Ellen. Well.’ He breathed deep, leant across the motorc
ycle and kissed her.

  For a moment they were very still. Her hand as it rested on his arm was still trembling from the vibrations of the engine. Her legs were probably feeling like jelly, too. He hoped her heart was still in her mouth at what she’d done. She’d ridden pillion a hundred times, of course, her hands clutching his waist, but she’d never before, thank God, expressed any desire to take control and ride it alone. This fine drizzle had made the road surfaces, diabolical at the best of times, greasy. They could have been a death- trap. For a split second, watching her speed past him as he stood outside the Fox, a panicking memory had invaded his mind and images of that near-fatal wartime collision of his own as a dispatch rider had ricocheted crazily around: the hail of continuous shellfire and deafening guns; the groans of injured men, the screams of terrified horses, the chaos of wagons, gun-carriages and ambulances on a muddy road made nearly impassable by bomb craters ten-foot deep and more. The column of wounded, limping along, that he’d made a desperate bid to avoid. The next months spent in various military hospitals. Ending up with a medal, a face scarred for life and a woman still waiting to marry him. Ellen.

  He might never have ridden a motorbike again if he hadn’t got on one as soon as he possibly could after leaving the last hospital. And the thought of such a thing ever happening to her almost stopped his heart.

  ‘That was a stroke of bad luck,’ she said softly. ‘I’d meant to break it gently to you that I was here.’ He didn’t reply and she went on in a rush: ‘Kate doesn’t know, but I’m sure she’ll be pleased to see me. I came before I could change my mind and I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to forbid—’

  ‘Forbid?’ he stopped her, stung.

  They had neither of them been in their first youth when they had met and later married. Ellen had already been a woman leading an independent life, with a career of her own, long before he had his feet on the first rung of the promotion ladder. That teaching career had been cut short, firstly by the war, and then by marriage. But that last had been her choice, and she had never by word or deed shown that she regretted it. He had married a wonderful, freethinking woman whom he didn’t want to be any other way. ‘Good God, Ellen, I’ve no right to forbid you to do anything!’ And immediately, heard himself, two days ago: ‘I can’t allow it.’ His official voice, when he’d been too preoccupied to consider the impact of it on Ellen. Provocation, to anyone with any spirit. ‘You could have come here to stay for as long as you liked, at any time. But why now – and when it’s so damned inconvenient?’