Heirs and Assigns

by Marjorie Eccles

  I sat with Mrs Ghyll until her husband breathed his last. When I left I drove, not towards home, but to the bookshop on the Townway, resolved to make what good I could of it.

  I parked my car in the alley behind the shop. The back of the premises, where Murfitt lived, was all in darkness. I prepared to knock, my hand on the knob, but it twisted under my grasp and the door opened. It seemed he’d soon learnt our country ways, not bothering to lock his door. As I stepped inside, the dog, who slept in the shop with the kitchen door shut, began to bark. Not knowing where to find a light, I stood in the darkness until Murfitt came down the steps and opened the door into the kitchen. The beam of the heavy metal flashlight he was holding shone right into my face.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I want to talk, Adrian.’ He turned the lamp on and the kitchen was revealed in all its tawdriness and Murfitt in his pyjamas. Hearing his master’s voice, the dog had evidently been reassured and had grown quiet.

  ‘Haven’t you left it a bit late?’ he said. ‘Maybe I don’t want to talk to you.’ Shivering, he lifted the coat – the green loden coat! – carelessly hanging from a hook behind the door and shrugged himself into it, then walked to the fire, poked it to a blaze and put the kettle on. He took a mug from the cupboard and drew the teapot towards him. After a slight hesitation he reached up for another mug.

  ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t settle this thing amicably between us, somehow,’ I said as we drank the tea.

  ‘What? You’ve changed your tune! Too late. What I want I can get without you.’

  The spirit of conciliation I arrived with, my good intentions, evaporated. Looking at him, wearing the loden cloth coat as if it were his right, I remembered the first time I’d seen it, myself at eight years old and my father, tall and handsome, striding into my aunt’s house – the astrakhan collar turned up, a dashing figure, coming to drive me and my mother home to Fairlie House. To me, it was a symbol, that coat, of everything I admired about him, the father I worshipped, and to see Murfitt wearing it … and to know that Pen, too, would still have been alive if it were not for him. My actions were quite outside myself, I wasn’t aware of how murderous the rage consuming me was as I snatched the torch Adrian had left on the draining board and hit him, hard, at the point on the temple which I knew was most vulnerable. Instantly, without a sound, he staggered, fell to the floor and lay silent, blood pouring from the wound on to the coat. I raised the torch and hit him once more, then again, twice. It was over in a few seconds. He died quicker than Pen.

  After that I went upstairs and found what I needed among his personal papers: his birth certificate and the marriage lines that told the abominable, shameful truth. He had indeed not been lying about his mother’s marriage – a no doubt hasty and foolish act of remorse on my father’s part. I took the lot downstairs and burnt them in the grate.

  It wasn’t until I saw the amount of blood pooled on to the floor tiles that I almost panicked. My own clothes were covered in blood and the immediate surroundings were spattered. I needed to get the body out of the way and tidy up. The clarity of mind that comes in an emergency is an amazing thing. Remembering I’d attended the previous occupant of the shop who had once fallen down some treacherous cellar steps that led from the shop (and been fortunate enough to have suffered little more than a wrenched shoulder), I saw the possibility of making Murifitt’s death look like an accident. That dog was making a racket again and as I opened the door it launched itself at me. I had to let the body fall to fend it off but fierce as he is, he’s only a small dog. I grabbed his collar and forced him into the storeroom, shutting the door. The noise he made was terrible and I was afraid it would wake the neighbourhood before I could get away.

  I was about to drag Murfitt to the stairs when I realized he was still wearing the coat. It was useless now, soaked as it was with his blood, but not only had it the tailor’s label sewn into the inside, it had the Fairlie coat of arms and name, too. I removed it, rolled it into a ball with the towels I used to clean up and took it away with me. It went on to a garden bonfire and cost me more to see it burn than it had to roll Murfitt down those cellar steps.

  I am not a religious man, but if you should read this, Carey, and believe that God will have mercy on my soul, I beg you to pray for me. Until now, I have always lived honourably, tried to lead a good and useful life, but without you by my side, what have I to lose?

  Reardon had seen to it that Carey certainly did not read this, with its subtext of blame. It wasn’t Carey’s inability to accept him that had caused Fairlie to take his own life rather than face the music and be hanged for his crimes. It was seeing his overweening family pride and his father’s reputation in shreds, and by no means least, the damage to his professional reputation. The pity of it was another wasted life. Wasted? But Fairlie had murdered twice over and colluded in another. None of them in cold blood, but he was a killer just the same.

  Ellen sealed up the reply she’d just written to a newsy letter from Kate, who was presently sorting out loose ends in Hinton, then coming to spend Christmas with them before taking up that position she’d been offered with the NCW. The Llewellyns, without too much apparent regret, had put Bryn Glas on the market and left, she had written. Anna, with all her friends gone from Hinton and Jack and Carey making plans to marry, was going to shut up her house and make a long-promised visit to a cousin in New Zealand.

  The telephone rang and Ellen left the room to answer it. Reardon waited for the inevitable summons to some emergency, but he heard her laugh, and it was some time before she came back, with two glasses and a bottle she’d been keeping for just this occasion.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she announced. ‘Elizabeth. Elizabeth Ellen Gilmour. To be known as Ellie. Seven pounds and another little copperknob, just like her father.’

  ‘Good news. But Joe was hoping for a boy.’

  ‘Never mind that. If she’s half the man her father is, she’ll be all right.’

  Reardon raised his glass and drank to it. ‘He has his moments,’ he said.

  He picked up the typed papers, tore them across and dropped them into the blazing fire. A moment of his own had just come. He watched the sheets of paper curl up and finally disappear like the memory of green Shropshire hills shrouded in darkness. He raised his glass again. ‘To Ellie,’ he said.