Heirs and Assigns

by Marjorie Eccles

  He’d been a serious, clever and thoughtful boy, an only child who was the centre of his mother’s world until he was sent away for an expensive education, where it was very soon made clear to him that his cleverness was suspect, that his lacklustre participation in rough team games set him apart from his fellow pupils, and where his refusal to learn boxing branded him a coward. His schooldays were not happy, and it wasn’t until he went up to Oxford and found like-minded souls that his views began to crystallize and take form. There he embraced socialist politics and became a peace activist. An anti-militarist who believed that war and aggression was for the benefit of capitalist elites, and that the working classes were being conned by governments into supporting it. He joined in anti-war demonstrations, but when it did break out he registered as an absolutist, refusing in any way to be part of the war machine. He would not put on a uniform, pick up a rifle or take orders. When compulsory conscription arrived in 1916, he had ultimately been imprisoned, had suffered solitary confinement and at times lived on bread and water.

  What he himself had gone through physically was less than millions of men had experienced in trench warfare, yet it had left its mark. His experiences as a pacifist in a jingoistic world had changed him, instilled in him a bitter cynicism. Was it that which had, in some twisted way, turned him into a non-pacifist? Or more correctly, into a selective pacifist, one who only wanted to hit back at those who were wronging him. Who couldn’t now turn the other cheek. Pacifism as a general idea, but not when it came to personal issues.

  Gnawing his lip, he thought of the Llewellyns and what had just passed between him and the police. That inspector, Reardon, that scar on his face … he’d seen too many disfigurements like that not to know the man had almost certainly been a casualty of the war. Undoubtedly one of the ones who wouldn’t forget, or forgive, too ready to apportion blame.

  Sometimes, in the depth of a sleepless night, he wasn’t altogether sure that the accusations of cowardice that had once been flung at him – the hissed insults, the white feathers given him by self-righteous women, the cold contempt – hadn’t been deserved … and more recently, the indifference of these smug folk here in Hinton when they’d discovered – how? – his history. Well, he’d learnt the hard way that something like that wasn’t ever going to remain hidden.

  Yes, it was time to depart. He shoved aside the papers and the poem he’d been writing, and picked up another sheet of paper and his fountain pen. He unscrewed the cap, wrote the salutation, began and then stopped, tapping his teeth with the pen.

  Five minutes later, and no further on, he screwed the paper up and aimed it in the direction of the cardboard box that served as a waste paper basket. He began again.

  SIXTEEN

  Reardon, after his meeting with Cherry, was unusually silent as they drove into Birmingham city centre, but Gilmour, at the wheel, was happy with his own thoughts. He was feeling quite chipper, after spending an hour with Maisie while Reardon had been talking with the superintendent. He’d found her looking well, blooming in fact, sitting beside a warm fireside, knitting baby garments and gossiping with her sister, Ruby, who was staying with her for as long as Gilmour might have to be away. She’d hardly seemed to be missing him, in fact, until Ruby had tactfully slipped out to the shops and left them alone for a while to talk.

  He found a place to park near the green oasis surrounding the cathedral. The paths that crossed it were busy with people going about their business, feeding the pigeons or simply sitting on the park benches, taking advantage of the weak sun which the vagaries of the weather had brought out on this wintry day. After leaving the car, the two of them made their way down Bennett’s Hill, a prosperous commercial street of banks, insurance and other office buildings. The solicitors’ office they sought, unlike some of the newer, larger and more dignified buildings, was squeezed between two others, with a narrow frontage and a heavy door, though a brass plaque indicated this was indeed the offices of Harper, Kingdom and Harper. Outward appearances were deceptive. The premises evidently went a long way back and, inside, the front office was a hive of bustling activity with an overall impression that red tape and the stacks of paper on every conceivable surface might one day take over what little space was left. From behind frosted glass doors men, and sometimes women, emerged and disappeared through other doors on mysterious errands. An elderly clerk peered from behind an overloaded desk and asked in an offhand way what their business was, and when they’d shown their badges, spoke into an internal telephone. ‘You can go up,’ he told them. ‘Mr Robert’s office. Top of the stairs. He’s busy but he’ll see you for a few minutes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Reardon answered, with no little irony.

  Robert Harper was also surrounded by papers. The mountains they’d left behind at Bryn Glas, which had so overwhelmed Gilmour, were beginning to look like mere molehills beside these Himalayas. Could anyone ever find time to actually read them all? Presumably Mr Robert did; in the next few minutes he proved himself admirably au fait with the affairs of Llewellyn Holdings.

  ‘I was very sorry to hear of Mr Llewellyn’s passing,’ he said, swinging his spectacles by the earpiece. Removing them had the effect of making him look much younger than he had at first appeared. He was probably in his early forties, despite a receding hairline and a somewhat corpulent frame. Was he conscious of a lack of gravitas so that he chose to wear pinstriped trousers and black jacket, plus an old fashioned ‘come to Jesus’ wing collar? ‘And even sorrier,’ he added, resuming the glasses, ‘to hear there are distressing circumstances connected with it. How could such a thing have happened?’

  ‘We’ll come to that, but at the moment we’re here to learn what you can tell us of his business affairs.’

  This caused a certain amount of eyebrow raising, a pursing of his lips. ‘Everything in order, I can assure you of that. Mr Llewellyn was a stickler for such things – he came here only last week for a discussion. Always very keen to keep his finger on the pulse, Mr Llewellyn.’

  ‘Well, as we understand it, there’s likely to be a fair amount of money involved, and it would appear his affairs were fairly complicated, so in the circumstances of his death, you’ll understand we need to have our own people look at them.’ Good grief, it was infectious, Reardon thought, hearing himself. ‘We’d appreciate your cooperation.’

  Mr Harper agreed readily enough with that. ‘That goes without saying. You will find everything strictly in order, I assure you,’ he repeated.

  ‘It would be useful to know the contents of his will, but so far, we’ve haven’t been able to find a copy.’

  Mr Harper maintained a silence, during which his scrutiny became sharper. Reardon, watching him, said carefully, ‘Have you recently drawn up a new will for him, Mr Harper?’

  Gilmour shot him a look of surprise but Harper answered, equally carefully, ‘That was why he came in last week. He wished to write one which would revoke his previous will.’

  ‘It would be useful if you could help by giving us an idea of its contents.’

  He appeared to consider. ‘The beneficiaries will be informed in due course. It’s impossible to say how much will be inherited by any legatee until all the business of the estate has been settled. As we speak, everything is being prepared for probate. Until it’s been granted, as I’m quite sure you know, inspector, I cannot possibly breach my client’s confidentiality.’

  ‘Your client is dead, Mr Harper – in suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Therefore you will understand my caution.’

  And that, it transpired during the next half an hour, was as far as he was prepared to go.

  ‘No point in forcing the issue, all lawyers are born cautious,’ Reardon said as they set off for Hinton once more. ‘It was what I suspected – no copy left around for anyone to get their hands on. I wonder if Theo knew about the new will – or suspected?’

  They drove in silence for a while, until Reardon remembered he ought to give Gilmour an account of w
hat had passed between him and the superintendent while he’d been with Maisie. He appreciated, Cherry had said, that they’d hardly been two minutes on the job but unless Reardon came up with something more tangible to convince him otherwise, he didn’t feel justified keeping two of his best officers there much longer. He was sympathetic but his own hands were tied … directives from above … a big flap on because of a series of arson attempts at one of the big steel works, a moneylender murdered … And some possible new information had come in on the illegal dogfighting ring Reardon and Gilmour had been chasing up for months. None of it, especially the last, had Reardon any stomach for. But Cherry needed them both back.

  It wouldn’t be a matter of case closed, of course, Cherry said, but rather a temporary suspension. Unless or until some new evidence turned up that warranted reopening it …

  PART THREE

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘Dang-blast, I’ll strangle ’un, soon as I get the chance!’ growled Fred Parslowe, pummelling his pillows to find a place where he could bury his head.

  ‘Wha-at?’ Flo struggled upwards from the depths of sleep, pulling from her ears the cotton wool she’d stuffed into them in an attempt to blot out Fred’s snores. ‘What you on about now, Fred?’

  ‘That bloody Jack Russell from across. Kept me awake half the night with his barking, he has. Hark at him now!’

  Flo sat up, now fully awake, and listened. ‘That’s not barking, Fred Parslowe, that’s howling. Summat’s up.’

  First Reardon, and then Gilmour, was dragged from sleep by the agitated landlady, still wearing her metal curlers, knocking on their doors. The distant sound of a howling dog, the reluctant clomping of Fred Parslowe’s boots down the stairs and the geese honking below did nothing to lessen what soon became a general pandemonium. Their rooms being at the back, neither Reardon nor Gilmour had been aware of the noise the dog was making during the night. By the time they threw on a few clothes and crossed the Townway to the bookshop, Fred was hammering on the door, only there because he’d been chivvied by his wife into seeing what was going on. Several interested spectators hung around and the blacksmith was offering advice and a crowbar if necessary. Parslowe had already tried the door and found it locked, and the only effect of his knocking had been to turn Tolly’s piteous howls into frantic barking.

  An alley ran behind the shop. Gilmour sprinted along it, past Murfitt’s old car and into the yard. It didn’t take him long to shoulder the locked back door open and then to free the dog from the tiny storeroom where he’d been shut in, and hand him over to Parslowe. Not without furious protest on both sides, he was manhandled across the road to the Fox and finally chained up in a disused kennel. Inside the shop there was no sign of his owner, upstairs or downstairs. His bed had been slept in, a lamp on the bedside table still burned, but of Adrian Murfitt there was no sign.

  Eventually, they found him. Beyond a door which opened directly off the shop on to a yawning black hole which was the cellar. He lay at the foot of the perilously steep stone steps, slipperless but wearing socks and pyjamas that revealed a natty taste in menswear. His limbs and his head lay at awkward angles. He was not quite stiff, but cold and unmistakably dead.

  Claudia Llewellyn might have had a point, after all, Reardon was now ready to admit, when she’d raised her eyebrows at the lack of telephones in Hinton. Communicating the news of this death to all those concerned was urgent. ‘Get your skates on and down to Bryn Glas straight away, Joe,’ he said. ‘There’s some telephoning needs to be done.’

  ‘Soon as I’ve made myself decent, sir. Bit parky, going like this.’

  ‘Don’t take too long about it.’ It was too early in the morning for humour. Too early for a lot of things, especially what they’d already found. Reardon needed to get dressed properly himself. Like Gilmour, he only wore the jacket and trousers he’d thrown on over his pyjamas, and the body in the cellar wasn’t going anywhere. All the same …

  Before he left he took the opportunity to take a quick look around the premises and mentally note what he found. It didn’t take long. At the top of the narrow, creaky old stairs was just the one small bedroom. Beside the lamp was a pair of spectacles and an opened book – the newest Sayers detective story, one of Murfitt’s disparaged modern authors, he noted with a touch of grim amusement. The clothes he’d worn the day before lay tossed in a heap on the floor, others hung on various pegs, and an open suitcase on the floor held underclothes. Underneath the bed was a chamber pot and in the corner stood a marble washstand, complete with jug and basin, a mirror and a grubby towel on a hook beside it.

  Downstairs, behind the shop and the small adjacent storeroom was the kitchen. Compared to the generally scruffy state existing everywhere else, it was fairly tidy – mainly because there was so little there to be untidy with. It smelled damp. Condensation ran down the windows. The fire had gone out but there was still a breath of warmth issuing from it, and a heap of ash in the grate, so it had presumably been banked up the night before. The shop itself appeared to be undisturbed. The papers and writing materials Murfitt had been occupied with when he and Gilmour had visited still sat on the table, as did the parcel which he’d said he so urgently needed to put in the post. Two keys on a ring lay beside it.

  Reardon left everything as it was and went back to his room at the Fox, dressed fully and then hastily breakfasted on the man-sized bacon sandwich Mrs Parslowe insisted on preparing for him. He took the opportunity to speak to her and Fred while he was eating it. She was dressed and now divested of her curlers, her hair in its usual tight waves and curls, and was full of the events that had so abruptly started the morning, agog for details he wasn’t prepared to give.

  ‘Well, that poor dog!’ she exclaimed. ‘The wonder is he didn’t stifle to death, locked up like that.’

  ‘He was in the storeroom, and there’s ventilation, Mrs Parslowe.’ A small grille six feet up, a device possibly there to keep those valuable books stored at an even temperature, it was the reason Tolly’s howling had been audible enough to disturb Fred Parslowe’s beauty sleep.

  ‘Not that he ever sleeps very deep,’ Flo commented with a sideways look at Fred. ‘Wakes himself up with his snoring, he does. Or I wake him up if it gets too bad.’

  ‘When did the dog start howling, Mr Parslowe?’

  ‘Been at it all night, I shunna wonder! But it was from two o’clock sure, when I looked out the window to see what was up and saw somebody walking from the door.’

  ‘You saw someone leaving the shop?’ All this going on, and it hadn’t occurred to him to say a word about something as suspicious as that. Sometimes Reardon didn’t believe in people like Parslowe.

  ‘Leaving, or mebbe just passing, I wunna swear to either.’

  Just passing, at two in the morning? ‘What sort of man? Can you describe him?’

  ‘Never said it were a man. Mighta been a woman. But if so, she were powerful big.’

  ‘Tall, you mean?’

  ‘Both ways. Not so ample a wench as Mrs Parslowe, mind, but a fair armful.’ Having delivered himself of this bon mot he went back to polishing pewter pots with an energy he didn’t expend on much else.

  Unoffended, Mrs Parslowe excused him placidly. ‘He didn’t sleep much last night.’

  Reardon couldn’t by any stretch credit Fred with enough imagination to conjure up what he’d seen. Any doubts he might have had that Murfitt’s death was anything other than suspicious disappeared. He thought of the women he’d met in Hinton, only one of whom, apart from present company, could fairly be described as big. But Fred Parslowe was highly unlikely to have met, not to say recognized, Claudia Llewellyn. He rarely stirred from his pub and she would certainly never have put a toe inside it. The other woman, Ida Lancaster, was also fairly tall, but thin as a beanpole. As for either of them being capable of what he’d just seen … Reardon had virtually discounted them for Pen’s murder – Claudia too indolent and Ida, for all her apparent brittleness, he didn’t seriously believe capa
ble of killing her brother. He gave up on the idea of either being involved in this latest killing and also on the attempt to get any more out of Fred, and concentrated on his more sensible wife.

  ‘What do you know of Adrian Murfitt?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much, always kept hisself to hisself, you know, hardly stirred out of the shop. When he did he was lately wrapped up in that big green coat and his cap pulled down right over his eyes, and never a word to nobody!’ She began clearing Reardon’s used breakfast things. ‘Your sergeant will be wanting something hot when he gets back.’

  He sensed evasion and recalled what Jack Douglas had said of Murfitt, and what Murfitt himself had said about the situation and the feeling against him in Hinton. Perhaps it had been stronger than anyone realized. Even so, it was difficult to believe that might have extended to death at the foot of his cellar steps.

  ‘Apart from customers, were you aware of any other visitors he might have had?’

  Mrs Parslowe shrugged her comfortable shoulders. ‘Well, being a shop, folks came and went, didn’t they? Not many, but some.’ She clattered crockery together, looking quite upset. ‘Look, if you want to hear some sense and not just mischievous gossip about that poor soul, you talk to Phyllis Knightly.’

  ‘Mrs Knightly, housekeeper at Bryn Glas?’

  ‘That’s right. Now, if you’ve finished your breakfast …?’ He knew by now that when Mrs Parslowe looked like that, he’d get no more from her.

  ‘Yes, thanks, I’ve finished. That was a great butty.’

  She smiled. ‘Could you fancy another?’

  ‘Enough is as good as a feast, Mrs Parslowe.’ He was beginning to feel sorry for the geese.

  When he crossed the Townway again, a smart maroon-coloured Morris Roadster was parked outside the bookshop, and standing by the door was a uniformed policeman, whom he recognized as the sergeant from Castle Wyvering.