Henrietta Who?

by Catherine Aird

  “Make a nice rest home for tired constables,” said Crosby.

  James Hibbs saw them in his study. He was a well-built man in well-built tweeds. His hair was black running to gray and Sloan put his age at about fifty-five. As they went in two aristocratic gun dogs looked the two policemen over, decided they were not fair game and settled back disdainfully on the hearth.

  “Shocking business,” agreed Hibbs. “Don’t like to think of something like that happening on your own doorstep, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Any news of the fellow who did it?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “All in good time, I suppose.” He sighed. “A good woman. Brought that girl up very well considering.”

  “Considering what, sir?”

  Hibbs waved a hand. “That she’d had to do it on her own. No father, you know. Just her pension.”

  “Had you known her long?”

  “Couldn’t say I really knew her at all. She wasn’t that sort of a woman. But she’d been here quite a while.” He looked curiously at Sloan. “She came to Larking in the war. Couldn’t tell you exactly when. Is it important?”

  “No, sir. What we’re trying to trace are some other relatives besides the girl.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose she’s still under age. Must be, of course, now I come to think of it.”

  “Why?”

  “The Thorpe boy wanted to marry Henrietta and Mrs. Jenkins said no.”

  “Really, sir? On what grounds?”

  “Age. The girl wasn’t twenty-one at the time and still at university. Another year to go, then.”

  Sloan’s gaze traveled upwards over the fireplace. An old oar, smoke-darkened, rested above it. A long time ago James Hibbs had rowed for his college.

  “Nice lad,” remarked Hibbs inconsequentially. “Can’t think why she opposed it.”

  “To go back a bit further, sir …”

  “Yes?”

  “When she came here. Do you know where it was from?”

  Hibbs frowned. “I had an idea it was East Calleshire somewhere but I couldn’t be certain. I’d plenty of empty cottages on my hands at the time and old White would have been glad enough to get a tenant of any sort.”

  “Old White?”

  “My agent at the time. Dead now, of course. He fixed it all up. I was only here intermittently. On leave.”

  “I see.”

  “Never thought we’d get anyone to live in Boundary Cottage after old Miss Potter died. Too far out.”

  “And how did you get Mrs. Jenkins?”

  Hibbs shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn’t tell you, Inspector, not at this distance of time. White might have advertised it but I doubt it. Sending good money after bad in those days.”

  “Not now, sir.”

  “Good Lord, no. I could have sold it a dozen times since then if it had been empty. Sort of place people see on a Sunday afternoon drive in summer time and think they’d like to live in.”

  “Yes.” Sloan looked reflectively round the study. “You wouldn’t happen to have any records about this tenancy still, would you, sir?”

  Hibbs considered this. “It’s worth a look, I suppose. Old White was one of the old school. Neatest man I ever knew. Care to walk across to the Estate Office?”

  Hibbs introduced them to the young man who was working there, called Threlkeld.

  “Boundary Cottage, Mr. Hibbs?” Threlkeld stepped across to a filing cabinet. In the background Sloan could hear the low hum of a milking machine plant. The Hall was being run on very businesslike lines. A file was produced. “What was it you wished to see?”

  “The tenancy agreement, please.”

  Sloan watched him turn back the contents of the file. On top were details of the Rural District Council’s Main Drainage connections, then, under a date for a few years earlier an estimate for repairs to the roof, Schedule “A” forms galore, more estimates, much smaller ones as they went back through the years. Nothing recorded the falling value of the pound like labor costs.

  And rent.

  Sloan almost—but not quite—whistled aloud when he saw the figure.

  “Not a lot, is it?” said Hibbs ruefully. “That’s the Rent Restriction Act for you.”

  Threlkeld went on turning back the pages. Everything was in date order. Suddenly the handwriting changed to an old-fashioned copperplate.

  “Old White,” said Hibbs. “Wrote a beautiful fist.”

  Threlkeld paused. “Here we are, Mr. Hibbs. Miss Potter died in December.”

  “Pneumonia,” said Hibbs. “I can remember that much.”

  “The new tenant,” went on Threlkeld, “took possession at the end of May. It was empty in between. You apparently signed an all-repairs lease.”

  “For my sins,” groaned Hibbs.

  “And it was accepted by her solicitors on behalf of their client in this letter, dated May 28th.”

  “Oh,” said Sloan.

  “It was East Calleshire then,” said Hibbs. “I had an idea it was. Look, they were Calleford solicitors.”

  Sloan leaned over and read the address aloud. “Waind, Arbican & Waind, Ox Lane, Calleford.”

  Acting on behalf of their client, Mrs. G.E. Jenkins, they had advised her to accept Mr. Hibbs’s offer of Boundary Cottage, Larking, at the rent as stated.

  “You don’t remember her at all before this date, sir?”

  Hibbs shook his head. “No. She came quite out of the blue. Old White probably thought that was a fair enough rent at the time and better than nothing.”

  “He was wrong,” said Threlkeld unwisely. “No rent at all would have been better.”

  Hibbs turned. “It’s easy to be wise after the event, Threlkeld. Besides, in those days one did give some consideration to widows and orphans.”

  Hibbs agreed readily enough to Sloan borrowing the letter and they took it back to Berebury with them.

  Henrietta waited until Sloan and Crosby had gone.

  She made herself stay sitting down in the front room until she heard the police car draw away. Then she slipped on a coat and left the house.

  It was fresher outside. There was a March wind blowing and she felt more free than in the confined atmosphere of the house. Boundary Cottage had suddenly become much too small for her—there hardly seemed air enough inside for her to breathe.

  She didn’t go along the road but through the orchard behind the cottage and then along the old footpath. It brought her out near the church. Across the green from the church was the rectory.

  She went up to the door. It was half open. Somewhere beyond in the wide hall someone was counting aloud.

  “Four, five …”

  She knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” called a woman’s voice.

  “I d—don’t know,” said Henrietta miserably.

  “Well, come in whoever it is. Oh, it’s you, Henrietta. Come in, dear, and just hold that for me, will you, while I finish these. I won’t be a minute.” A short, stout woman pushed a pile of freshly laundered surplices into Henrietta’s hands. “Now, where was I?”

  “Five.”

  “Six, seven, eight—what that Callows boy does with his, I can’t think—nine, ten. That’s the lot, thank goodness.” She took the bundle back again. “Edward can take them across with him later. Now, come along in by the fire. You look frozen.”

  “I’m not cold. Just a bit shaky, that’s all.”

  “I’m not surprised,” retorted Mrs. Meyton. “Losing your poor mother like that. A terrible shock. The rector was coming down to see you this afternoon. Didn’t you get his message?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.” Henrietta drew in a deep breath. “Mrs. Meyton …”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I want you to tell me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you remember my mother and I coming here?”

  Mrs. Meyton nodded vigorously. “Yes, dear. It was just before the war ended.”

 
; “Did we come together?”

  “Did we come together?” She smiled. “Of course you did. You were only a very tiny baby, you know. I remember it quite well. Such a sad little family.”

  “My father …”

  Here Mrs. Meyton shook her head. “No, it was just after he was killed. I never met him.”

  “But,” urgently, “you do remember us coming together?”

  “Certainly. Boundary Cottage had been empty for a long time—since old Miss Potter died, in fact—and I remember how glad we were that someone was going to live in it after all.” Mrs. Meyton raised her eyebrows heavenwards. “A rare old state it was in, I can tell you, but your mother soon got to work on it and she had it as right as ninepence in next to no time—garden and all.”

  “She liked things just so.”

  Mrs. Meyton wasn’t listening. “How the years do go by. It hardly seems the other day but it must be all of twenty years.”

  “Twenty-one,” said Henrietta. “I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

  “I suppose you will.” Mrs. Meyton regarded the passing years with disfavor. “I don’t know where the time goes. And the older you get the more quickly it passes.”

  “Baptism,” said Henrietta suddenly.

  “What about it, dear?”

  “Was I christened here in Larking?”

  But here Mrs. Meyton’s parochial memory failed her. She frowned hard. “Now, I would have to think about that. Is it important? Edward would know. At least,” she added loyally, “he could look it up in the Register.”

  Memory was not one of the rector’s strong points.

  “Do you think he would? You see”—she swallowed hard—“you see, the police have just told me that Grace Jenkins wasn’t my mother after all.”

  Mrs. Meyton looked disbelieving. “Not your mother?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “But,” said Mrs. Meyton in a perplexed voice, “if she wasn’t, who was?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.” There was a catch in her voice as she said, “I expect I’m illegitimate.”

  “Nonsense.” Mrs. Meyton shook her head. There were thirty years of being a clergy wife behind her when she said, “Your mother wasn’t the sort of woman to have an illegitimate baby.”

  “She hadn’t ever had any children,” said Henrietta bleakly, “and she wasn’t my mother, so it doesn’t apply.”

  “I shouldn’t have said myself,” went on Mrs. Meyton, “that she was the sort of woman either to say she’d had a baby if it wasn’t hers.”

  “Neither would I,” agreed Henrietta promptly. “That’s the funny thing.”

  “But if she did,” sensibly, “I expect she had a good reason. They must have adopted you.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “A cup of tea,” said Mrs. Meyton decisively, “that’s what we both need.”

  Ten minutes later Henrietta put her cup down with a clatter. “I’ve just thought of something.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “How do I know I’ll be twenty-one in April?”

  “Because …” Mrs. Meyton’s voice trailed away. “Oh, I see what you mean.” Then, “A birth certificate, dear. You must have a birth certificate. Everyone does.”

  “Do they? I’ve never seen mine.”

  “You’ll have one somewhere. You’ll see. Your mother will have kept it in a safe place for sure.”

  “The bureau!” cried Henrietta.

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Meyton comfortably.

  “It’s not right,” retorted Henrietta. “Someone broke into the bureau on Tuesday.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “And there’s certainly no birth certificate in there now.”

  “A copy,” said Mrs. Meyton gamely. “You can send for one from Somerset House.”

  “But don’t you see,” cried Henrietta in despair, “if she wasn’t my mother I don’t know what name to ask for.”

  FIVE

  “Crosby.”

  “Sir?” Crosby had one ear glued to the telephone receiver but he listened to Sloan with the other.

  “You tell me why a woman brings up a child as her own when it isn’t.”

  “Adopted, sir, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Why adopt, sir? I couldn’t say, sir. Seems quite unnecessary to me. Asking for trouble.” His early years on the beat had made a child-hater out of Crosby.

  “Why adopt when she did,” said Sloan. “That’s what I want to know.”

  “When?” echoed Crosby.

  “The middle of a war, that’s when. With her husband on active service.”

  “Do we know that, sir, for sure?”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” Sloan reminded him with some acerbity, “except that Dr. Dabbe swears that this Grace Edith Jenkins never had any children.” He paused. “We know a thing or two that are odd, of course.”

  “The bureau?”

  “The bureau. Someone broke into that for a reason.”

  “They found what they were looking for.”

  “Yes, I think they did. Something else that’s odd, Crosby …”

  Crosby thought for a moment. “Odd that they didn’t have to break into the house. Just the bureau.”

  “Very odd, that.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crosby waved his free hand. “Dr. Dabbe is coming on the line from the hospital now, sir.”

  Sloan took the receiver.

  “This road traffic accident you sent me, Sloan, one Grace Edith Jenkins …”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “I confirm the time of death. Between six and nine o’clock on Tuesday evening. Nearer nine than six.”

  “Thank you.” Sloan started to write.

  “She was aged about fifty-five,” continued the pathologist.

  “Forty-five, I think it was, Doctor.” Sloan turned back the pages of the file. “Yes. Her daughter said she was forty-five. Forty-six next birthday.”

  “And I,” said Dr. Dabbe mildly, “said she was about fifty-five.”

  Sloan made his first significant note.

  “She had also had her hair dyed fairly recently.”

  “Oh?” said Sloan.

  “From—er—blonde to brunette.”

  “Had she indeed?” The pathologist never missed anything.

  “I should say she had been hit from behind by a car which was traveling pretty fast. The main injury was a ruptured aorta and she would have died very quickly from it.”

  “Outright?”

  “In my opinion, yes.”

  That, at least, was something to be thankful for.

  “I should say the car wheel went right over her, also rupturing the spleen. There are plenty of surface abrasions.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Both antemortem and post-mortem.”

  “Post-mortem?”

  “There was also a post-mortem fracture of the right femur,” said the pathologist.

  Sloan said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I fear,” said Dr. Dabbe, “that these injuries are consistent with her having been run over by a heavy vehicle twice.”

  “Two successive cars?” asked Sloan hopefully.

  The pathologist sounded cautious. “I’d have to see the plan of how she was lying but I’d have said she was definitely hit from behind the first time.”

  “That’s what the constable in attendance thought.”

  “And from the opposite direction the second time.”

  “Nasty.”

  “Yes.”

  Sloan replaced the receiver and looked out of the window. “A car, Crosby, and quickly. I want to get back to Larking before the light goes. And get on to Hepple and tell him to meet us at the scene of the accident.”

  Henrietta was still at the rectory when the rector returned.

  He was undismayed when his wife told him that Henrietta was not Grace Jenkins’s daughter.

  “That explains somet
hing that always puzzled me,” he said.

  Henrietta looked up quickly. “What was that?”

  “Why she came to Larking in the first place. As far as I could discover she had no links here at all. None whatsoever.” Mr. Meyton was a spare, gray-haired scholarly man, a keen student of military history and the direct opposite of his tubby, cheerful wife. “If I remember correctly you both arrived out of the blue so to speak. And no one could call Boundary Cottage the ideal situation for an unprotected woman and child in war time.”

  Henrietta blinked. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “If she was deliberately looking for somewhere lonely …”

  “Nowhere better,” agreed Henrietta. “I just thought she liked the country.”

  “It occurred to me at the time she had set out to cut herself off,” said Mr. Meyton. “Some people do. A great mistake, of course, and I always advise against it.”

  “Now we know why,” said Henrietta.

  “Perhaps.”

  “She wanted everyone to think I was hers.”

  “She probably didn’t want you to know you weren’t,” said Mr. Meyton mildly. “Which is something quite different.”

  “But why on earth not?” demanded Henrietta. “Lots of children are adopted these days.”

  “True.” The rector hesitated. “There are other possibilities, of course.”

  “I’m just beginning to work them out,” dryly.

  “She might have had you by a previous marriage.”

  “No. It wasn’t that.”

  “Or even—er—outside marriage.”

  “Nor that,” said Henrietta tonelessly. “The police said so. She wasn’t anybody’s mother—ever.”

  “I see. There will be reasons, you know.”

  She sighed. “I could have understood any of those things but this just doesn’t make sense.”

  “It is an unusual situation.” Mr. Meyton gave the impression of choosing his words with care.

  “Grace Jenkins brought me up as a daughter,” said Henrietta defiantly, “whatever anyone says.”

  “Quite so.”

  “And I swear no one could have been kinder.”

  “No.” He said tentatively, “Perhaps—had you thought—most likely of all, I suppose—that you were a child of your father’s by a previous marriage.”

  Mrs. Meyton who had been sitting by, worried and concerned, put in anxiously, “That would explain everything, dear, wouldn’t it?”