A Proposal to Die For

by Vivian Conroy

  ‘Maybe it is the man who has been watching us all day.’

  ‘What?’ Jake asked.

  ‘I thought I saw somebody.’ She shrugged. ‘You would probably have called it paranoia so I did not mention it before. But now that you say he is waiting, it makes sense he watched us first and when he believed we were getting closer to the truth, he approached us to give us answers.’

  ‘He?’ Jake queried.

  ‘The figure I saw was probably a man. Rather tall and heavily built, you know.’

  Jake nodded. ‘You could have said something.’ He glanced at her. ‘Is it even possible he was watching us in the village and he is now at the ruins ahead of us?’

  ‘If he knew a short cut…’ Alkmene shrugged. ‘Or he came on horseback.’

  They should have looked into the possibility of hiring horses. She was a great rider and could have raced ahead of Jake instead of limping beside him on her tortured feet.

  Jake said, ‘I wonder if our landlord wrote this note himself. Maybe he wants to meet up with us and tell us something his wife is not supposed to know. After all, his wife is Mary Sullivan’s own sister and fiercely protective of her memory.’

  ‘Or her own part in the tragedy. If she hated Mary for being prettier and shovelled all the housework onto her, she might not have been eager to see her leave with this rich and handsome man who could offer her a better life in the city.’

  Alkmene’s right foot slipped on some mud, and she was swept off balance, barely managing to stay upright. After an undignified wave with her free arm and a stumble for a few paces, she continued as if nothing had happened, ‘She might have conspired to end the relationship, you know, leaking information about it, or something. But when her sister vanished and was presumed dead, she did blame herself for it.’

  She was silent for a minute, wondering what it would be like to hate somebody and wish they were out of your life, and then they vanished and you wished they were back. That you could undo the damage, turn back time.

  She said, ‘Wally seemed to blame the sister for a lot. His presence here in the village and at her husband’s inn must be a constant reminder to her of that guilt.’

  Jake nodded. ‘Perhaps you were right in your first assessment, Alkmene.’

  Alkmene perked up, clutching the bothersome basket tighter. ‘I was?’

  ‘Yes. There is something sinister here in Cunningham. Not because there is a dark secret, but because people hated and manipulated each other and paid the price for that. They all wanted something – Mary her pretty things in the city, Mary’s sister to be loved like Mary, Wally to be loved by Mary – but in the end nobody got what they wanted. They all ended up unhappy and bitter.’

  ‘Well, Mary had the worst lot,’ Alkmene said. ‘She ended up dead.’

  ‘If we believe she is dead. Wally spread the tale, but is it true? If the man who appeared in London is her son, she did not die here on the moor.’

  Alkmene nodded thoughtfully.

  At last the ruins came within reach, and they walked up to them, just a few crumbling walls, old stones, covered with moss and weeds, weathered by ages of rain and hail and snow beating down upon them.

  A raven rose from behind the walls, giving his ominous cry.

  Alkmene shivered and inched closer to Jack. The basket banged against him, and she transferred it to her other arm.

  Jake held her elbow as he ushered her through a narrow archway. Alkmene glanced up to see if there was a loose stone about to drop. You never knew…

  Inside the circle of sadly decayed walls, grass grew and crinkled paper lay, suggesting people came here for sightseeing, or to picnic, and then left something behind.

  Alkmene suppressed the urge to go pick it up and take it back to the village. Father had taught her to hate it when a pure landscape was desecrated by waste.

  Jake halted and listened. Then he called out, ‘Is anybody there?’

  His voice echoed away across the stones out into the open spaces of the empty moor.

  The sun was vanishing behind some thin clouds, and the wind became colder, breathing down Alkmene’s neck again. She shivered, narrowing her eyes.

  ‘I am here,’ a voice said behind them.

  They both spun.

  The man was tall and blond, staring at them with a dispassionate expression. His feet were planted apart, his hands dangling loosely by his sides. But his stance crackled with tension. Alkmene noticed the redness of a scar snaking from his neck up behind his right ear. Someone who was not afraid of a fight.

  ‘What information can you offer us?’ Jake asked.

  The man shook his head. ‘No. You are going to tell me a thing or two. Why are you here? What are you after?’

  Jake held his gaze. ‘You know my name, but I don’t know yours.’

  The man shrugged. ‘It would mean nothing to you.’ He pulled back his shoulders. ‘I do know you, Dubois. I looked into you when you first appeared on the scene. You are a reporter, a bloodhound. You do anything for a story. You want something sensational to spread across the papers’ front pages. I am here to convince you not to do that.’

  The latter words were uttered calmly enough but with a hint of menace.

  Jake held his gaze. ‘I have already had a soaking by the friendly villagers here. Do you have worse in mind?’

  The man lifted a shoulder and let it drop again. ‘It depends on how much you want the story.’

  Jake shook his head. ‘No, you are wrong. I do not want a story. I want justice for Silas Norwhich.’

  The young man’s face contorted. He pulled up his lip like a snarling dog. ‘For Silas Norwhich? That bastard?’

  Jake didn’t flinch. ‘He was killed in his own home. No man deserves to die that way.’

  ‘He had made other people very unhappy. He was living a lie, smiling like he was a happy man.’

  Jake said, ‘So? Did he deserve to die for that reason?’

  The young man shifted his weight. ‘We are not talking about his death here, but about what he was guilty of.’

  Jake was unperturbed. ‘Isn’t the one tied in to the other?’

  The young man pursed his lips. ‘Maybe. But I asked you a question. How badly do you want your story? Will you take money to drop it?’

  Jake laughed. ‘You are not the first to offer me money to drop it. If I play this well, it could make me a rich man.’

  The young man stepped forward. ‘You toad! Using other people’s hurt for gain.’

  Jake lifted a hand. ‘I didn’t say that I am actually accepting money. I only observed I could take it and be rich. But I am not. You do have a temper. Were you in Silas Norwhich’s house the night he died? Did you argue with him and push him? Or did he just back away from your grabbing hands and fall on the hearth rim by mistake? Was it really an accident?’

  The young man laughed shortly. ‘Oh, he backed away from me all right. But when I left him, he was still alive. I do not know how he died. I am not one bit sorry for it, but I do not know how, and I was certainly not responsible for it.’

  Jake smiled. ‘I am glad to hear it. Now I want to know what information you do have for me. Or was your threat against me all I am going to get in exchange for my long walk out here?’

  ‘You sniff out people’s private affairs. You deserve some hardship for it.’ The young man raked back his hair. ‘I can only tell you it is better to forget about it.’

  Alkmene said, ‘Others have said that too. But nobody has given us any good reason so far.’ She hesitated a moment, then she said, ‘Silas Norwhich was a deluded man. He made mistakes, not just in the past when he came here to convince his brother’s wife to set him free, but also when he took on Evelyn Steinbeck as his heiress. He did not know she was a fake.’

  Jake stared at her as if he could not believe she was just telling this to somebody. But Alkmene continued, ‘I assume I am telling you nothing new in revealing she was a fake. That you already knew. But it might be new to you that Silas No
rwhich earnestly believed her to be his heiress. The one he had sought for years, to set things right.’

  ‘Not even that is new to me,’ the man said with a smile. ‘I heard it from his own lips, but I did not believe him. I believed he had taken her on as an extra insult to my mother.’

  Jake shifted his weight. ‘Mary Sullivan?’

  The young man nodded. ‘When I read in the papers about Mr Silas Norwhich appearing everywhere with the daughter of his late brother, the heir to it all… I…I know my mother would not have liked me to confront him. She raised me to forget him, to despise the sort of man he was, the class he stood for. Vain privileged people who do anything to preserve their titles and their wealth.’

  Alkmene cringed under his assessment, not daring to look at Jake.

  The young man said, ‘But I went anyway. I wanted to see him and see for myself how he responded when I told him who I was. I chose a public spot so it would be painful if he tried to assault me. I was not afraid of him, but I wanted the encounter to hurt him, not me. He deserved every embarrassment he could get. It turned out differently. He was indignant, as if I was doing him wrong. Apparently he didn’t believe me. So I came to his house to prove it.’

  ‘With a birth certificate,’ Alkmene said.

  He nodded. ‘He wanted to keep a copy to have his lawyers verify it. I told him he could not trust his lawyers as they had lied to him all along, producing this fake heiress for him. This Steinbeck woman who was supposedly my mother’s daughter born after she had left for America.’

  He laughed softly. ‘Oh, they had done a clever job, choosing a girl whose mother had come from England and who was dead. A girl who even looked a little like my mother in her youth. So clever. I told him, warned him. But he did not believe me. He had such confidence in those lawyers.’

  ‘And then?’ Jake prompted.

  ‘I left him sitting at his desk, with the copy he had wanted. I left him believing in his stupid lies. And the next day he was dead. I read it in the paper.’

  Alkmene waited a moment. ‘Your mother? Is she still alive?’

  He nodded. ‘After his death I could do no less than inform her of what I had done. How I had sought a confrontation, which she had been so anxious to avoid, for all of those years. She was angry with me of course, but foremost worried that I would be charged with murder if it ever got out who I was. I tried to reassure her that nobody would make the connection. But then you began to appear everywhere. Even here. In Cunningham, which was supposed to be a place nobody knew about, except for the lawyers engaged by the dead man himself.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘There is no point in pursuing this. My father, if I can call him that, is dead. So is his brother who drove my mother into despair. I can only be accused of murder if you push this any further. Is that what you wish? Are you protecting this fake heiress by hounding me?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘Far from it. We are after the killer and we now know it was not you. You left him alive. It makes sense. You wanted something of him.’

  The young man flushed painfully. ‘Is it not just,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘that he would pay something for the hurt done to my mother and me? We have lived in poverty for all of our lives. I have done all kinds of lowly jobs. She laundered for people, cleaned house, but she is getting too old for that. All I wanted was a good old age for her.’

  Jake nodded. ‘You might still get it.’

  The young man looked puzzled. ‘How come?’

  ‘Evelyn Steinbeck confessed the truth to us. She will be going back to America, without any form of inheritance. Mr Pemboldt, the lawyer, knows that she was a fake and he will not push for her to stay. You can come forward as the real heir and inherit everything that Mr Silas Norwhich ever owned.’

  The young man scoffed. He raised a hand and rubbed his neck. ‘I am not even sure I want that. I have stood face to face with him and he denied my existence to me. He was exactly that vain, presumptuous man I had always believed him to be.’

  ‘You can think about it,’ Jake said. ‘There is no need to decide upon the spot. But I think you should go and show yourself to Mr Pemboldt. He wasn’t involved in the disastrous turn the deception took. He honestly wanted to help out, relieve Silas Norwhich’s guilt about the past. If you can prove you are indeed Mary Sullivan’s son, he will fight for you in court to let you have every penny of the estate that is rightfully yours.’

  The young man gasped for air. ‘I had not thought that possible.’ He raked a hand through his hair again. ‘Mother might hate me for this. She has raised me to forget about my father and never want a penny of his fortune.’

  Alkmene smiled at him. ‘Or she might be grateful when you explain to her what drove you to it. Your love for her, the wish she would be cared for as she gets older. Silas Norwhich wanted to set things straight. He was sorry for the harm he had caused and he spent many years trying to do penance for it. He even died because of it. I think that does mean something.’

  The young man hung his head. ‘When I first met him, I was livid with rage. I did not see him clearly and only hated him for denying it all. But when I saw him at his house that night, it was different. He was different. A broken man. He knew he had been lied to, but he still kept saying it could not be true. He was desperate, and it was pitiful to see. I could for the first time in my life believe he might have been sincere in his attempts to set it straight.’

  ‘See.’ Jake nodded. His tone was calm and compassionate. ‘So think about contacting Mr Pemboldt. Not at his offices, for his clerks cannot be trusted. Try him at home. And be very cautious in all that you do. The killer is still at large and might come after you too, if he thinks he can still save the fortune he always wanted to have.’

  Alkmene looked at Jake. ‘Fitzroy Walker?’

  Jake nodded. ‘Has to be.’ He checked his watch. ‘It is too late for us to return to London tonight. We need two hours to get back to the village on foot and… We will have to do it tomorrow.’

  He looked at the young man again. ‘Take care.’

  He nodded and stepped back. ‘Thank you for coming here. I do not show myself in the village.’

  Alkmene frowned at him. ‘You do not… But…how? You were not spying on us at Wallace Thomson’s house this morning, and later at the church when I was looking at the family grave of the Sullivans?’

  He shook his head. ‘I never go there. I had a lad take the letter into town and leave it on the counter at the inn.’

  Alkmene frowned. If he had not been spying on them, then who had?

  And why?

  Jake had already pulled the basket out of her hand. ‘It’s still a long walk back, Lady Alkmene. Let me carry that thing. We’d better think up a plan along the way for how to smoke out Fitzroy Walker. Because I have a feeling he will be harder to get than we thought.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alkmene’s feet were positively on fire when they reached the inn again. She asked the innkeeper’s wife to bring her a basin with lukewarm water, large enough to put her feet into. Also some sherry and some cheese and cold cuts.

  Jake hitched a brow at her. ‘Used to command?’

  Alkmene was too tired to mind, or retort. She just dragged herself up the stairs and once the water had come, dipped her feet into it. It was bliss to sit and let the water play around her feet, through her toes, while the sherry warmed her from the inside out and the cheese caressed her palate.

  OK, it wasn’t French and refined like at home, but with an empty stomach everything tasted sweet.

  Sitting with her bed pillow behind her back, she closed her eyes and enjoyed the sense of elation that they were so close to the solution. They had their killer identified and only needed a strategy to smoke him out.

  Only, hmmm?

  Jake had been right that it might be harder than they thought. After all, they had no proof that Fitzroy Walker had been at the house that night, face to face with Silas Norwhich.

  As long as they
could not place him there, they had nothing to offer to the police. All the pieces they did have formed an intriguing picture, a motive certainly, but they also needed opportunity.

  Maybe Fitzroy Walker had already cleverly bought an alibi for the night, convincing some friends or men from a bar to lie for him that he had been with them.

  Maybe he would snub them to their faces, proving them wrong in their assumption it had to have been him. But who else?

  Somebody knocked on her door.

  ‘Yes?’ she called, too tired to get up.

  Jake came in, carrying her scarf in his hand. ‘This was still in my pocket. I should have returned it to you when we came in.’

  She smiled at him a moment. ‘Thank you. Put it on the bed, will you? Thanks also for retrieving it and keeping it safe. It was a present from my father, and he is fussy when I lose things.’ She yawned. ‘I feel bushed. I need sleep more than anything else. You have dinner alone, if you want to. I am turning in just as soon as my poor feet have cooled down.’

  Jake laughed. ‘You do know that if you stay too long in that water, your pretty little feet will get all wrinkled?’

  ‘Like that lasts for ever.’ She stretched her arms over her head. ‘You can’t rile me tonight, Jake. I feel glorious.’

  Jake stood, tall, imposing. ‘Strange. You met a man who was done a grave injustice and you feel glorious?’

  ‘Well, he is about to inherit all of Silas Norwhich’s estate. That should make up for something. I suppose if Mary Sullivan still loves pretty things, she will have some now.’

  Jake huffed. ‘That is so typical for your kind of people. Thinking money can buy off anything. As if injustice can simply be settled by paying a price into an account.’

  He turned to the door. ‘I am glad we are not eating together tonight. I couldn’t swallow a bite.’

  He slammed the door shut. The bang reverberated through the floor and creaked in the beams overhead.

  Alkmene sat stiffly, suddenly sensing the water was getting too cold, her poor feet were freezing and her stomach was warm from sherry but could perhaps have used some more substantial sustenance.