Heirs and Assigns

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘It needn’t be, not at all. I came because it seemed such an opportunity to see Kate again, with you away. Please, just forget I’m here.’

  How did she imagine he could do that? With her not half a mile away and always at the back of his mind? He looked at her, grey eyes wide and her chin up in a way he knew so well, and realized with a sinking feeling that this could build up to some sort of confrontation. He couldn’t believe it. Himself and Ellen? There’d never been anything much more than an occasional disharmony between them – and in any case, wasn’t this something he’d wanted, a kindling of interest after her illness? Somehow, the rage that had taken hold of him now seemed irrelevant, and despite himself, he could feel it beginning to fizzle out like a damp squib, leaving only exasperation. He sighed. ‘Look at the size, Ellen. The size of that bike.’ The size of it, and Ellen, five foot nothing.

  ‘It was an impulse, and I’m not an impulsive woman, am I?’ she said with a small attempt at humour that didn’t hide the shake in her voice. He was glad to know she’d not only scared him, she’d frightened herself. Yet it was something more than an untypical act of defiance, something she had to do for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

  ‘I really have come just to see Kate, you know. Not to get in your way.’

  He felt a smile beginning. ‘I’ll never get the better of you, woman, will I? All right, put that map away, you’ve got yourself to the right place. It’s just up this lane.’ He lifted the kickstand and began to wheel the bike towards the cottage.

  She was wearing her wartime breeches and a leather coat with a large fur collar. There were some women who, while they had no fear of riding a motorcycle, still wore a woolly cap rather than run the risk of looking unbecoming in a close-fitting leather helmet. Ellen wasn’t one of them. She pulled the helmet off and shook her head to free her hair as she walked beside him. He stopped as they reached Kate’s door. ‘You understand we shan’t be able to see anything of each other, no cosy evenings together, right?’

  She nodded. ‘Forget I’m here,’ she repeated.

  As if he could.

  ‘Well. Well, right now I’ve got work to do – but look here. Don’t you go riding home on this bloody machine, do you hear?’

  They stood looking at each other. Bloody machine. His beloved motorbike, his treasure. The absurdity of it struck them simultaneously. It seemed a long time since they had laughed together. They were still smiling when Kate Ramsey came round the corner from her back garden. She stopped in her tracks and then gave a delighted cry. In a moment, she and Ellen were embracing.

  ‘Coffee, Mr Reardon?’ she asked after a moment, her arm around Ellen, preparing to lead the way indoors.

  ‘Thank you, but I have an appointment with Dr Fairlie,’ he said drily. ‘If you’d just tell me where my motorbike can be safely put away?’

  Anna Douglas’s house was small and neat, situated right in the centre of Hinton, its front door opening directly off the Townway. Rosy pink brick, red tiled roof. Three windows and a door at the front, a long and narrow garden at the back. In the kitchen-living room were shelves, home to dozens of mismatched china plates, some of them cracked, all of them pretty and colourful, plus a battered desk at that end of the room which constituted her office. A gently purring fire warmed the room and from the oven came the smell of a savoury casserole which she’d made and had no desire for. But Jack had to be provided with something to eat, even if he was lately eating the food she put before him as though he had little taste for it.

  He’d disappeared upstairs immediately the red-haired police sergeant had left, after taking his statement about the night of the party, as if he wanted to avoid talking with her about it. It wasn’t only a mother’s perception that told her he had something on his mind. Ever since the night of the supper party at Bryn Glas, he’d been preoccupied – which had nothing to do with the rather scratchy attitude he’d been adopting towards Pen lately, she told herself, resolutely ignoring the plunging feeling this gave her. It had to be Carey’s return that was upsetting him, for some reason. She had tried to face the fact that the thing she’d always wanted to happen between Carey and her son wasn’t going to. Jack’s face was set towards yet another stint for God knows how long somewhere at the end of the world and Carey was preparing to sell her house and make off, possibly to the other end of it. She sometimes wanted to shake him.

  She poured another cup of tea.

  A hard worker all her life, she could now settle to nothing. Since that moment when she’d seen Pen lying in the midst of those roiled, tangled sheets and had the intimation that he had not simply been taken peacefully and gently in his sleep, but had died a terrible, awful death, the drive to work had deserted her – work which had hitherto supported her through thick and thin. Through times that were sometimes good, but had often been very bad indeed. Yet now … a job started, left half done and the two young lads who were working for her at Bryn Glas becoming disorientated at not working under her hitherto clear direction.

  ‘What are you going to do about the garden?’ she’d asked Theo, but he’d simply shrugged and said he didn’t know, and yesterday, when she’d asked him again, he’d impatiently told her to go home and leave it.

  Dismissed like a redundant employee, she’d left the boys to potter about as best they could, come home and attempted work on her own garden, but there wasn’t much to be done at this dead end of the year, everything tidied up for winter, little growing but winter vegetables. In previous years this seasonal hiatus had given her space to enlarge on schemes that had been running through her head and which she’d had no time to get down on paper during the busyness of the previous growing season. But this year Pen had had great ideas for what they would do together after they were married: travel, catch up on the cultural life neither of them had previously had time for, and she’d been only too happy to agree. She was nearly sixty herself and the idea of retirement wasn’t unwelcome. Now, it had gone, all of it, Pen and with it the happiness that had come just when she had thought she was past all that.

  Yesterday’s conversation with Theo tumbled over in her mind yet again. Wearing a black tie and a suitably doleful expression which nevertheless was easy for him to assume, since it came naturally. Touched with arrogance when he told her she need no longer bother with the garden. Go home and take a break, Mrs Douglas. Not Anna. Mrs Douglas – when she’d known him since he was in short trousers and skinned knees, into mischief with Pen but always, even then, the one to wriggle out of trouble, the clever one. And look where he’s ended up, Pen had said with a short laugh. Up to his ears in debt, running to catch up with a wife streets ahead of him, in every way.

  When Pen had told them all he was going to marry her, she’d watched them looking at her, smiling but not able to hide their dismay or their thoughts, believing she’d caught him for what she was about to get out of him: his money. How far from the truth this was they couldn’t even have begun to guess. Nevertheless, one of them had taken steps.

  She scraped back her chair, cradling her teacup in both hands as she stared out of the window down the garden of a working gardener, its utilitarian path leading from the house directly to a large greenhouse and a potting shed at the bottom. There were no flower beds but row after row of plants and shrubs being brought on. She had allowed Jack to build a seat in front of the crumbling, disused privy and planted a Rambling Rector which had lived up to its name by climbing up to twenty feet and smothering the ugly old ruin with its creamy white blossoms. In summer, its intense fragrance took over the garden. It had been in her mind to plant the same rose at Bryn Glas, to mark their marriage.

  By the time he died, Pen had become as committed to the project as she was. He’d shared her excitement at the prospect of uncovering a lost, forgotten garden – possibly Tudor – and had enthusiastically suggested a knot garden. Trying his hand at copying complex designs from old books for interlacing box hedges, diamonds, lozenges and lovers’ knots, he’d laughed when s
he warned him that the undulations in the ground which she’d first suspected might be the outlines of a sunken garden might simply be the foundations of an old byre, or a row of pigsties. When Pen wanted to believe something, it was already a fait accompli in his mind.

  The main project was doomed now, of course, but however the enquiries into his death turned out – her mind skittered away from what she actually meant by that – it was inevitable that the house would at some point have to be sold. None of the family would ever want to live in it again, that was for sure. And even Theo must appreciate how much more it would fetch if the landscaping should be finished, Tudor garden or not.

  She was not, she thought, suddenly energized, going leave it in the desolate condition it was now, no matter what. She reached for her coat and a woolly scarf, pushed her feet into her working boots that stood on a folded newspaper by the back door, determined not to be intimidated by merciless Theo, and not to mind Ida’s barbed comments, or Claudia’s studied indifference. And to ignore Huwie, for whom she was finding it too easy to be sorry, when after all he – perhaps more than any of the others, come to that – might be the one who had ruthlessly killed Pen.

  In any case, there was something else tugging at her conscience, another problem. Not mine, if we’re being honest, she told herself as she began the brisk walk to Bryn Glas, but if Ida Lancaster either isn’t capable or doesn’t care, someone has to do something about the one person who was grieving over Pen as much as she herself was: that poor child, Verity.

  ELEVEN

  Since Dr Fairlie lived at the other end of Hinton, Reardon now had to retrace his steps, lengthening his stride to make up for lost time. The early morning drizzle had turned into a slanting, ill-natured rain, but it might at least, hopefully, clear the air. It was a stiff climb towards his destination, for perhaps half a mile, along yet another awkwardly twisting road known as Upper Bank, with only a few houses scattered along its length, until it eventually levelled out at a cluster of ancient cottages and other buildings that seemed to mark the extremities of Hinton like a full stop.

  At one side of the road stood the small school and its schoolhouse, where Mrs Ramsey had once lived and taught, its playground presently deserted. From inside the school came the faint sound of a piano and infant voices raised in the ragged singing of a hymn. Morning assembly, of course. Regardless of all that had happened, it still wasn’t much after nine. On the opposite side of the road was a small green, on which ancient stocks stood. Nearby was a churchyard with massive, dark yews, a lych gate and a path leading to the church. No house that looked like a vicarage, but Reardon guessed the parish wouldn’t be large enough to warrant a resident incumbent, and would share a vicar with Castle Wyvering. There was Fairlie House however, facing the church, a square Georgian brick-built house with a shallow roof and many windows. The juxtaposition of the big house, church and school, and the few cottages nearby suggested this might once have constituted the centre of the original Hinton village which over the centuries had gradually crept, as villages were apt to do, nearer to a more convenient and accessible spot; in Hinton’s case around the junction where steep Nether Bank emerged to join the Townway.

  He made for the only building to mar this peaceful, harmonious little enclave: a squat, uncompromisingly utilitarian affair which had to be the doctor’s surgery, separated from Fairlie House only by a gravel drive on which stood a motor car. Ellen’s escapade on his BSA earlier that morning now gave him reason to scrutinize the chocolate-brown, bull-nosed Morris parked in front of him. Reputedly reliable, suitable for a woman to drive. A little two-seater like this wouldn’t be beyond his means, would it?

  Making for the surgery, he could see that any garden Fairlie House possessed must lie to the rear; at the front there was only a short drive and a gravelled forecourt. A large group of elms stood behind it, at present bare, with rooks’ nests high in the branches; when they were in full leaf, the trees would form a softening backdrop to the not-very-attractive house. A big place for an unmarried man living on his own, thought Reardon, reminded of what Kate Ramsey had written in her diary about Gerald Fairlie’s devotion to the young woman, Carey Brewster.

  That a humble country doctor should occupy such a house didn’t surprise him as much as it might have done if Flo Parslowe, the Fox’s large and cushiony landlady (a tribute to her own cooking) hadn’t enjoyed a bit of gossip as much as she enjoyed her own renowned fidget pie. Last night, the half-dozen regulars to the pub had been happy to find a new source of entertainment in visitors willing to listen to chapter and verse about the area, its traditions, shortcomings and its characters. After they’d all departed homewards, he and Gilmour had sat with Fred Parslowe and his wife around the dying fire, nursing a last drink, and been regaled with the further history of most of those who lived in Hinton.

  The Fairlies, it seemed, had been around this part of the world since the first of them had come over with William the Conqueror, or very soon after. At any rate, the name in one form or another – Ferrelys, de Ferelye, Faireleigh, among other variations – appearing in memorials and brasses in the church and on the churchyard tombstones, went back to Norman times. Yet the last of them, Gerald, chose not to live as unofficial lord of the manor, but earned his living working as the local doctor.

  ‘You munna think worse on him for that,’ Fred Parslowe had suddenly commented, a man of few words who had hitherto left the conversational ball to be kept rolling by his wife, which she was more than capable of doing. ‘Even though he be a Fairlie.’

  ‘Now, Fred.’ Flo turned to the others. ‘He means they weren’t all they should have been, some of them Fairlies.’ But it was late by then and she hadn’t been willing to expand on that. She had begun gathering up glasses and casting glances at the clock. Reardon would have been interested to hear more, but he wasn’t averse to taking the hint. It had been a long day, with no prospect of a shorter one to follow.

  He had made an appointment to see the doctor before his morning rounds and was greeted immediately he entered the premises by an untidy, middle-aged woman wearing a white overall and a bothered expression, who popped her head around a door marked ‘Dispensary’ as he entered the waiting room. ‘Doctor’s ready to see you,’ she announced, and took it on herself to add, ‘but you’ll have to be quick, he’s a busy man.’

  Reardon was no stripling himself, but Fairlie matched him for weight and height. Perhaps only a little over forty, but looking older. Light-haired, with a not particularly handsome face, a strong nose, a long upper lip. The last scion of the Fairlies looked as though he’d be more at home riding in a point-to-point, or on the back of a hunter, but he came with all the country doctor accoutrements: tweeds, pipe clenched between his teeth and a firm handshake. He was unsmiling but his eyes were quick and intelligent.

  He spoke with slight impatience, a busy, practical man with no time to waste, a little guarded and stiff. After the first moments he became more willing to talk, though whatever he was feeling about the gaffe he’d made over Penrose Llewellyn’s death he wasn’t showing it. ‘The night before, I’d become rather concerned about him. He sounded chesty and looked flushed, which I put down to all the drama and so forth following the announcement he’d just made to his family … You know about him and Mrs Douglas, I take it?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘That they were to be married? Yes.’

  ‘Would have been a very good thing, for both of them. She’s a brick, Anna.’ He paused to knock out the ash from his cold pipe. ‘Well, anyway, I went upstairs with him and gave him the once-over and there seemed nothing a good night’s rest wouldn’t put right. He was fine when I left him, advising him to get straight to bed. One can never be a hundred per cent certain, of course … It could have happened at any time, yet he could have gone on for years, if he’d been careful to avoid stress, excitement, overexertion. But it seemed as though the previous evening had been too much for him, after all.’

  ‘Did you happen to notice if he had
his medication by his bedside before you left that night?’

  ‘The amyl nitrate?’ He gave Reardon a sharp look. ‘No, I can’t swear to that. But I can tell you it definitely wasn’t there when I returned in the morning, which made it fairly evident that was why he’d died. Perhaps I should have questioned why it wasn’t there – Anna’s quite right about Pen being careful always to have it by him – but people tend to be forgetful, especially if their minds are full of other things, which no doubt his was. I was also rushed at the time, anxious to get back to a very difficult birth I’d left when I was summoned to Bryn Glas, where there was a very real danger to the mother.’ He paused. ‘In fact, I made a few rather short remarks about Pen’s carelessness with his medication, which I’m exceedingly sorry for now.’ Reardon liked him for having the guts to admit that. The call for a post-mortem must have shaken him. ‘I should have known him better,’ he finished abruptly.

  ‘How well did you know him?’

  ‘Known him all my life. Him, and all the Llewellyns. The older ones weren’t my generation, of course, but age differences don’t matter so much as you get older. Since Pen came back here to live permanently and I became his doctor, we’d become very good friends.’ His face looked drawn. ‘Perhaps the best friend I’ve ever had,’ he added quietly.