Table of Contents
Cover
Further Titles by Veronica Heley from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Further Titles by Veronica Heley from Severn House
The Ellie Quicke Mysteries
MURDER AT THE ALTAR
MURDER BY SUICIDE
MURDER OF INNOCENCE
MURDER BY ACCIDENT
MURDER IN THE GARDEN
MURDER BY COMMITTEE
MURDER BY BICYCLE
MURDER OF IDENTITY
MURDER IN THE PARK
MURDER IN HOUSE
MURDER BY MISTAKE
MURDER MY NEIGHBOUR
MURDER IN MIND
MURDER WITH MERCY
The Bea Abbot Agency mystery series
FALSE CHARITY
FALSE PICTURE
FALSE STEP
FALSE PRETENCES
FALSE MONEY
FALSE REPORT
FALSE ALARM
FALSE DIAMOND
FALSE CHARITY
Veronica Heley
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2007 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2007 by Veronica Heley.
The right of Veronica Heley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Heley, Veronica
False charity
1. Widows – England – London – Fiction 2. Detective and mystery stories
I. Title
823.9'14[F]
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6527-4 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-022-8 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-561-1 (ePub)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
One
She was desperate to get home without breaking down. She’d been running on too little sleep and too much coffee for days. There was no one to meet her at the airport. Instead, there was a message from her son to say he’d been unavoidably detained. She couldn’t manage the two heavy suitcases on the Underground by herself, so hailed a taxi and gave her address in Kensington. In the taxi she tried to sit upright and not sag even though she ached with tiredness.
If Hamilton had been with her, he’d have helped her to relax. He’d probably have used the ‘lost’ time in traffic jams to remember friends who were in trouble, in sickness and in health. She couldn’t do that. Not yet.
It was over six months since Bea and her husband had left London on their long-planned trip around the world. He’d made it as far as New Zealand, but she was returning alone. She would not weep. Not in public, anyway.
Tuesday, late afternoon
He let the bloodied paperweight drop from his hands. It bounded away from the body and rolled under the coffee table.
Large tears appeared on his cheeks as his mother came into the room. ‘It wasn’t my fault, Mummy!’ From childhood he’d relied on his mother to get him out of trouble, and he was sure he could rely on her for this, too. ‘I told him what you said and he laughed! He turned his back on me, as if I didn’t count. I only hit him to teach him a lesson. It was all your fault, anyway. You should have come straight up with me. Richie should have parked the car by himself.’
He was a spoilt child in a nineteen-year-old body, holding out bloodied hands in supplication.
She pushed his hands aside, diamond earrings swinging as she knelt beside the body to feel for a pulse.
‘What …!’ A smallish man with a rounded stomach followed the woman in. He blinked rapidly. ‘He can’t be dead! We decided, you arranged, we agreed to pay him off.’
She screamed, lunging at the youth. ‘Can’t I trust you even to keep him talking for two minutes? Useless creature!’ She slapped his face open-handed, first one cheek and then the other. The slaps sounded like gunshots in that stuffy room.
Instead of giving ground the lad grovelled, clutching at her, burying his face in the floating fabric of her dress. ‘It wasn’t my fault, Mummy!’
The woman battled to control her temper. She was a handsome woman in her early forties; most of the time she looked ten years younger. Her son was the only weakness she allowed herself, but it was a weakness which was beginning to incise lines between her nose and chin.
The older man kept well away from the rug on which the corpse lay. To his eye, the man on the floor had been hit not once but many times. Once to knock him down, perhaps, but many times more to pound his skull to pieces. ‘He’s gone too far this time. I know he’s your son, but—’ The woman made a sharp movement, and he bit off the rest of what he was saying. After a moment he muttered, ‘We’d better pack, hadn’t we? We can be at Heathrow in an hour.’
‘Let … me … think!’ Eventually she relaxed. ‘We’ve invested too much time and effort to run. We’ve made a pretty penny with the other two functions, but it’s nothing to what we’re due to make this weekend. After that, yes; we’ll disappear.’ Hers was the deciding voice.
She surveyed the room. ‘Look on the bright side. We don’t have to cut him a share now, which means there’s more in the kitty for us. No one but us three knows he was to visit us tonight. There’s not much blood, except on the rug. We’ll dump that in a wheelie bin somewhere. Clothes can be dry-cleaned.’
‘But the body?’
‘Mummy, Mummy,’ said the boy, still on his knees. ‘You forgive me, Mummy?’
She stroked his forehead under the fringe of dark hair. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘There, there.’
Tuesday, late afternoon to evening
Bea Abbot leaned forward in the taxi as they reached her home territory. Nothing much seemed to have changed while she’d been away. The taxi turned off the busy High Street and made its way up the hill to a quiet side road. The ornate iron-work of the Victorian balconies and railings glistened black against the white of the house fronts. The tall windows gleamed a welcome.
She longed for a shower and bed, but as she paid off the taxi and heaved her cases up the steps, the front door of the house was flung open to shouts of ‘Surprise!’ and ‘Welcome home, darling!’
She tried to look delighted. Someone took the cases from her and stowed them under the stairs while she smoothed down the jacket of her cream trouser suit and shook her head to settle her ash-blonde hair. As hands reached out to greet her, she stretched her mouth into a smile and accepted kisses and good wishes all round.
‘Dear Bea, you’re looking well. How many hours is the flight from New Zealand? You must be exhausted.’
Did she look that tired? A sideways glance at the mirror in the hall assured her that she didn’t look bad for sixty.
‘Dear Hamilton, how we’ll miss him!’
It appeared that a number of their friends had assembled to celebrate her return. Her tall son Max surged forward to give her a hug and hold her close. She could feel his love for her, and it almost melted her into tears. But no, she must be strong. No more tears. Not yet, anyway.
Then it was the turn of her friends. ‘Darling, you look fabulous. Did Hamilton ask you not to go into mourning for him?’ A scratchy comment from an old acquaintance who’d worn nothing but black for years.
Bea almost lost her smile. ‘Seeing me in black depressed him.’
‘Darling, so sad!’
‘Dear heart, we’ve missed you both so much.’
Drinks circulated, nibbles ditto. The tall doors between the first-floor drawing and dining rooms had been thrown open so that guests could spread themselves out. Sympathy cards were double-stacked on the mantelpiece. Max had been dealing with most of the formalities that follow a death, thank goodness. The rooms had been decked with flowers, the antique furniture shone with polish … not that you could see much of it for people.
Max raised his glass and tapped on it with a knife to obtain silence. He also cleared his throat, which was a little trick he’d developed since his election to the House of Commons.
Dear Max, thought Bea, I do hope he’s not going to make a speech … She’d been through a lot in recent months, no, years; it was almost three years since her dear husband had started on the downward slope and she’d retired from the agency to look after him. She was feeling dizzy with tiredness. She touched her lips to the glass of champagne someone had kindly put into her hand and set it aside. Champagne didn’t help when you were as tired as she was. She wondered if she could get a cup of good coffee to perk her up. She parked her hip on the back of her settee and held on to her smile.
‘Mother, ladies and gentlemen, and those of you who are also our friends!’ Subdued laughter. Most people were relaxed enough to listen without looking at their watches. The phone rang in the agency rooms downstairs. Bea looked round for someone to answer it. Then relaxed. The Abbot Agency was being wound up. Someone else would deal with it. She didn’t recognize the sound as the Voice of Doom.
Instead, she thought what a pity it was that Max hadn’t inherited his father’s – her first husband’s – charm; though to give him his due, Max was a lot better looking than Piers had ever been. Tall, dark and handsome sounded good, until you added a little too much weight around the chin and midriff. It was hard work, attention to detail, marriage to an ambitious woman and a dogged belief in his political party that had got Max into Parliament at the third attempt, even though he hadn’t an original thought in his head.
Bea killed that thought as being unfair and possibly untrue. Max was a good boy, and would be a faithful representative of his constituency.
Max conducted his speech with his free hand. ‘It’s wonderful to see so many of you here to welcome my dear mother back from her travels. We’ve all missed her enormously, haven’t we? Welcome back, Mother!’
Glasses were lifted in a toast, to which Bea bowed and smiled. That part of Bea’s mind which was feeling waspish remarked that it had suited Max and his wife very well to live rent-free in this prestigious London address while Bea and Hamilton had been away. Max’s constituency and his chief residence were in the Midlands and it would have cost him the earth to buy a similar London house for the long months when Parliament was sitting.
The other part of her mind said, But he’s a good lad at bottom, and he really worries about me. I’m not so sure about that anorexic wife of his, but … no, I won’t think about that now.
‘… today’s gathering is both a sad and a happy occasion. Happy, because a wonderful lady has been restored to us. Sad, too, because my wonderful Super Dad – who was always better than a real father to me – has, after a long, brave fight, left his earthly remains on some …’
I do hope, thought Bea, that he’s not going to say, ‘on some foreign shore’.
‘… foreign shore,’ said Max. ‘We shall all miss him tremendously.’
‘True. True. Here’s to Hamilton.’
Max gestured to the mantelpiece on which stood a silver-framed photograph of a dark-haired, round-faced man, smiling benignly down on the gathering. Max brightened up. ‘No one can doubt that he had a good time while he was with us, that he wore out, instead of rusting out.’
‘Hear, hear.’
‘He fought a good fight,’ said Max. ‘Cancer takes no prisoners, they say, and if he had any regrets at the end, it must have been that he wasn’t given enough time to retire to the seaside and work on his golf handicap after going around the world. He will be remembered not only as a brilliant party-giver – I fancy he may be looking down on us now, and wondering if the champagne will go round—’
Subdued laughter.
‘He will also long be remembered for running the highly successful Abbot Agency, with its watchword of “discretion”. Over the years the agency has solved countless problems for people in distress. My dear mother only bowed out of it when Hamilton fell ill, and he only handed on the baton to me when he grew too frail to direct operations himself. I hope, I think, I didn’t let him down when I took over from him, but now I’ve got a new career it’s time to wind up the agency, too. Here’s to an honourable retirement for the Abbot Agency.’
‘Hear, hear. The Abbot Agency.’
Bea sighed. It was the end of an era.
Again a phone bell trilled.
The phone continued to trill, and she realized to her horror that it was her own mobile which was ringing. Fishing it out of her jacket, she flicked it off, noticing as she did so that the call was from Piers, her first husband. They were good enough friends, nowadays. He’d phoned her in New Zealand after the papers had reported Hamilton’s death. Nice of him. But she didn’t want to speak to him now.
Max was winding down. ‘After her long years of service to the agency, followed by more years of loving care to Hamilton, we welcome my dear mother back home to a well-earned rest. Looking a million dollars as she does, I’m sure she’ll soon be enjoying a good time on the golf course at the seaside, and in the club house afterwards. To Mother.’
‘Bea!’ came the well-drilled chorus. Most of the women wore sympathetic smiles for a woman of sixty who might look younger than her years, but was not and never had been a bimbo.
Oh, well, thought Bea. I hope Max finds himself a better speech writer soon.
With many glances at watches, people began to pay their respects to Bea and drift away.
‘So sad, dear, but you’ve always been so strong.’
‘I just wish you weren’t leaving the neighbourhood.’
‘Dear Bea, you must come round to see us sometime before you go.’
Arms went round her shoulders. A lot of air-kissing went on, and promises were made to keep in touch. Some of them were meant.
Max was looking at the clock on the mantelpiece. Busy, busy. The very picture of a man on whose shoulders the fate of the world, or his constituency, rested. Bea knew she was being unfair to him because he really was fond of her, but she was too tired to guard her thoughts.
Max put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. She allowed herself to rest against him for a moment of much needed comfort.
‘Mother, I’m afraid I’m going to be late if I don’t … committee meeting … but you can cope, can’t you? Maggie
will fill you in. That’s the girl who’s been helping me close up the agency. I’ve let her use a room on the top floor, but she knows she has to be out by the end of the week. Must dash. I’ll come round tomorrow and we can have a good chat, tidy up the loose ends.’
Was Maggie the person manning the phones at the agency downstairs?
Following Max came his over-thin – not to say haggard – wife, Nicole, clutching her tiny Yorkshire terrier, which was wearing a tartan bow in its topknot. ‘Dear Bea, so good to see you coping so well, considering.’
Bea had a moment’s disorientation. Fatigue, of course. The room faded out and she clutched at something, anything, to avoid falling. Then she was all right again, and could hear and see as before. She discovered she’d grasped Nicole’s arm in her moment of weakness, and apologized. ‘Sorry, I’m more tired than I thought. What was it you were saying?’
Nicole gave her a look full of doubt, meaning, Was the old dear still compos mentis? Had grief turned her mind to jelly? Nicole said, ‘I was saying that I don’t think there’s much to discuss, but I’ll pop in tomorrow morning to go over a couple of things with you. Dear Hamilton, I shall miss him so much. You must come down to us some weekend; not this weekend, though. Some constituency function, you know.’
On her way out Nicole brushed past an occasional table, causing it to totter and the glasses on it to fall. Nicole didn’t notice in her haste to catch up with Max. Bea righted the table, thankful that the glasses that had stood on it were almost empty. The carpet might need shampooing, though.
She braced herself. The room was in disarray, with bottles, glasses, ashtrays – yes, some people had been smoking – and nibbles strewn on every surface. Also on the carpet. Max and Nicole had been living here for quite a while and various pieces of furniture had been moved to different positions. Ornaments had been switched round. Bea shrugged, thinking it wouldn’t take her long to clear up … if only the room didn’t keep swaying around her.
Then it settled. The silence was welcome. The bell at the agency door downstairs rang sharply but Bea refused to react. Enough was enough.
The sun had come out, and dust motes danced in the beams that shot through the half-open French windows at the back of the house. Bea thrust open the doors and went out on to the iron-work balcony to get a breath of fresh air. It was going to be a warm evening.
False Charity Page 1
