A Going Concern (7 page)

‘My name is Gregory Rosart. I'm from Chernwoods' Dyestuffs in Luston …' There was nothing in his voice, decided Amelia, to convey the man. ‘I do apologize for troubling you so soon and on a Saturday afternoon, too, but I've just seen the announcement in this morning's newspaper. We're all naturally very sorry to learn of Mrs Garamond's death …'

‘How kind of you to ring,' said Amelia.

‘But,' went on the voice fluently, ‘I'm the firm's librarian and information officer and I'm ringing to say how very much we at Chernwoods' would appreciate a sight of Mrs Garamond's papers – she and her husband used to work here, you know, during the war – and we'd also very much like the opportunity to purchase any documents that there may be for our archives …'

Amelia gave a sudden high and humourless laugh. ‘I'm sorry, Mr Rosart, but you haven't been quite quick enough off the mark.'

‘But …'

‘Saturday or not,' she declared, very conscious that she was being watched by two policemen and her stepmother, ‘I'm afraid someone else has already had first pickings.'

‘What!' exclaimed the voice. ‘How did tha –'

‘Without asking,' said Amelia astringently.

Gregory Rosart let out a low whistle. ‘That was quick …'

SEVEN

Bid the black kitten march as chief mourner
,

Gregory Rosart lost no time in calling on Joe Keen, the chief chemist of Chernwoods' Dyestuffs, Ltd., in person. He drove swiftly out to Joe's home in Larking. The house there, set in its own mellow grounds, was a far cry from the grimy building in Luston where both men worked. There was no doubt, thought Rosart, looking round him, that the Keen family home had that certain something called style.

Joe Keen took some pride in being a man of few words. He heard Rosart out and then said: ‘And?'

‘And,' said Rosart, ‘we still don't know how much Harris and Marsh have really got hold of.'

‘Enough to make them go on buying, anyway,' said Keen. ‘They picked up another sizeable tranche of Chernwoods' 25p Ordinary Voting Shares late yesterday afternoon.'

‘Good timing, that,' said Rosart appreciatively. ‘You can't teach 'em much.'

‘Just before the Stock Exchange closed for the weekend,' nodded Keen. ‘Neat, wasn't it?'

‘Our Claude won't have got a lot of sleep then …'

The chief chemist said: ‘It frightened the life out of him.'

Claude Miller, Chairman and Managing Director of Chernwoods' Dyestuffs, was a living exemplification of the old saw about it being ‘only three generations from clogs to clogs'. His father hadn't been the man his grandfather was and, worse still, Claude Miller wasn't even the man his father had been.

‘I'll bet it did,' grinned Rosart. ‘What we still don't know though,' he went on more urgently, ‘is whether Harris and Marsh have got it or not.'

‘That's true, Greg,' Keen gave a thin smile, ‘but I think we soon will.'

‘How come?'

‘Because I reckon Harris and Marsh'll take the pressure off Chernwoods' just as soon as they have. I bet you they'll want to stop buying the stock just as quickly as they can. After all, it's not that much of a bargain and God knows what they're using for money.'

‘Credit,' said Rosart pithily. ‘What you're really saying, Joe, is that if they've got what they want then they don't need us.' Rosart looked at the chief chemist and said: ‘And then what?'

‘Then it would become a slightly different ball-game, that's all.' Joe Keen was looking out of the window at the rural scenery but his mind was back in Luston. ‘And then, Greg, only if what you call OZ is actually what Harris and Marsh's Chemicals is after.'

‘But …'

‘But we don't even know that for sure, do we?' Keen swung his gaze back into the room and fixed it on Greg Rosart.

‘We do know, though, that they want us,' persisted Rosart, subconsciously bracing his shoulders. He never enjoyed it when Keen stared like that. ‘And only us,' he reminded him.

And that was what was really important, added the librarian and information officer – but under his breath.

‘And only now,' Keen put it. ‘That's the most interesting development of all, isn't it?'

‘True …'

‘I think, Greg,' said Joe Keen profoundly, and rather pleased with his deliberate understatement, ‘that we could call Harris and Marsh the unknown quantity in the equation.'

‘So, miss,' Sloan said presently, ‘we know that at least two other people called here at the Grange yesterday afternoon …'

‘That's what Tod Morton told me, Inspector,' replied Amelia. ‘The rector, Mr Fournier, who came to deliver a letter about the funeral service … hymns and things.'

‘That's on the hall table,' interposed Dr Plantin. ‘It was on the door-mat as we came in and I automatically picked it up and put it there. That was before I saw the rest of the house.'

‘And a young woman called Jane Baskerville whom Mr Fournier saw while he was delivering his letter,' finished Amelia.

Sloan made a note of the names.

‘We also know now,' said Amelia tightly, ‘that Chernwoods' Dyestuffs wanted her papers, too.'

‘Badly enough to ring here the very day they knew from the newspapers that she'd died,' said Phoebe Plantin, ‘weekend or no. If that's how they did find out, of course,' she added shrewdly.

‘We'll be calling on Chernwoods' in the course of our enquiries,' said Sloan formally. ‘There's nothing else you can tell me, is there, miss?'

Amelia said slowly, ‘Only that the undertaker told me that the rector didn't seem very willing to take my great-aunt's funeral but she had left instructions that he should.'

Policemen, pathologists, and information officers might all work on Saturdays and Sundays. Members of the legal profession, however, do not. It was Monday morning when Amelia kept her appointment with James Puckle in the solicitors' offices down by the bridge in Berebury.

‘Miss Kennerley, do come in …' He waved her to a chair. ‘All of this must have come as something of a surprise to you …'

Amelia considered the young solicitor before her and then said briefly, ‘Yes.'

‘The break-in must be a worry and I'm sorry that there had to be a post-mortem but in the circumstances …'

‘Like Mary Tudor,' remarked Amelia.

‘Mary Tudor?' James Puckle looked baffled.

‘She was “dead and opened”.'

‘Oh, really? I didn't know … well, just like Mary Tudor, then.'

‘Mary Tudor,' said Amelia bleakly, ‘told them that they would find “Calais” engraved on her heart.'

‘I understand that the results of the autopsy on your great-aunt are not yet available,' James Puckle opened a folder on his desk, ‘although I know she had had heart trouble … er … too. However …'

‘Yes?' Amelia's eye had been caught by James Puckle's tie. Blue with something crossed on it. Not swords, surely?

‘I understand, Miss Kennerley, that you didn't know your great-aunt well?'

‘Not at all,' she said with perfect truth.

The solicitor consulted a paper inside the folder. ‘Even so, she seems prepared to place a great deal of trust in you.'

‘It would appear,' said Amelia, matching his dry tone, ‘that there isn't anyone else in the family left.'

‘Perhaps … I mean, that may well be the case … exactly … perhaps that is so although we are not – how shall I put it? – absolutely certain about that yet.'

‘If you don't count my father,' said Amelia.

‘That relationship is even more tenuous than your own,' said James Puckle. ‘Besides there is also the matter of your appearance.'

‘My appearance? What on earth has that got to …'

‘Apparently,' said James Puckle, looking her straight in the eye, ‘you very much reminded our client of her deceased daughter, Perpetua.'

Amelia, slightly startled, said: ‘You seem to know quite a lot about me, Mr Puckle.'

The solicitor said: ‘We took steps to find out what we could on our client's behalf when we established exactly what it was that Mrs Garamond wanted you to do.'

‘Which is?'

‘Mrs Garamond,' he responded obliquely, ‘for reasons best known to herself chose to express her testamentary wishes in the form of some precatory words …'

‘And what,' asked Amelia immediately, ‘might precatory words be?'

‘Words of wish, hope, desire, or entreaty,' responded the solicitor.

‘I see …' She didn't see anything.

‘Usually accompanying a gift with the intention that the recipient will dispose of the property in a particular way.'

Light began to dawn on Amelia. ‘Great-Aunt Octavia wanted something doing?'

‘I think you might put it like that,' said the solicitor.

‘Something – this thing that she wants me to do – is it something that she couldn't do herself?'

‘I think that is a fair inference.' He hesitated. ‘Unless, that is, she had tried to do it herself and failed. We don't know about that.'

‘To do what?' asked Amelia.

‘Find someone.'

‘Who?'

‘Ah, there we have a slight difficulty.' James Puckle indicated a piece of paper in his hand. ‘She wants you to find a woman who would be in her fifties now but …'

‘But?' Amelia had managed to have a closer look at the design on the solicitor's tie. It wasn't crossed swords that she had been looking at but crossed hockey sticks. And the crest of the Berebury Hockey Club.

‘I'm afraid,' said Puckle regretfully, ‘that Mrs Garamond had no idea of the name this woman might be using at the time of her death.'

‘That does rather widen the field,' agreed Amelia gravely, ‘doesn't it?'

‘It is part of the difficulty,' said James Puckle. ‘Only part, though.'

She sat back in her chair. ‘Tell me …'

‘Once found, if she can be found, there is this precatory trust which Mrs Garamond created in her Will with which you will have to deal.'

Amelia stared at him. ‘This woman – what does – did – my great-aunt know about her, then? If I'm to find her I shall need to …'

‘The name of her mother and when she was born …' responded James Puckle.

‘And where?' put in Amelia astringently.

‘And where,' agreed the solicitor. ‘I have her birth certificate in my file here …'

‘And?' said Amelia into the little silence that fell when he stopped speaking.

‘That would appear to be the extent of my client's knowledge,' said Puckle gently, ‘at the time when she made her Will, that is.'

Amelia stared at him. ‘That's all?'

James Puckle reached inside the folder. ‘You were to be given this photograph, though.'

Amelia put out her hand in silence.

‘I fear it is not a photograph of the person concerned,' he said, handing it to her across the desk.

‘But I should be grateful for small mercies? Is that what you think?' Actually it was more of a snapshot than a proper photograph, and a little blurred at that. It was in black and white, quite small and rather faded, too. It appeared to Amelia to be of a wayside memorial beside a country crossroads. She peered at the image carefully. ‘A memorial cross but not in a cemetery?'

‘Not a grave,' agreed Puckle. ‘I think there is an inscription but it's too small to read even with my grandfather's magnifying glass.'

Amelia screwed up her eyes but couldn't read it either.

‘It looked to me,' the solicitor said, ‘as if it's at a road junction, but where – I couldn't begin to say.'

‘In France, anyway,' said Amelia promptly.

‘France?'

‘In Flanders fields, Mr Puckle, where poppies grow.' Amelia regarded the solicitor across the tooled green leather-topped expanse of his partners' desk and said: ‘You're not pulling my leg about all this, are you, Mr Puckle?'

‘Oh, no, Miss Kennerley, indeed not, I do assure you. Quite the contrary, in fact. The matter is serious. Very serious indeed.'

‘I would say that whoever broke into the Grange was pretty serious, too.' said Amelia. ‘Do you think that the two things are connected?'

James Puckle frowned. ‘I can't answer that. I can only say that my instructions were that you were to be given the key of the Grange as well as the birth certificate and the photograph.' He straightened his tie and said, ‘It is possible that there is a great deal of money waiting for this woman if she can be found.'

‘Possible?' Amelia said. ‘What exactly do you mean by possible?'

James Puckle said: ‘Let me first of all explain to you the nature of a precatory trust.'

‘It might help,' said Amelia, taking the tie-straightening as a sign of more to come. ‘On the other hand, it might not.'

He gave a quick smile. ‘It is usually used as a legal device by which a man could arrange for the discreet support of a mistress, and any family which he has had by her, after he had died without his wife and the rest of his family needing to learn of their existence.'

‘I should have thought,' rejoined Amelia militantly, ‘that any wife worth her salt would have guessed.'

James Puckle did not rise to this but went on: ‘Precatory settlements were most commonly used in Victorian times …'

‘When the Queen would not have been amused …'

‘When there was a greater opprobium attached to … er … irregular liaisons.'

‘Are you trying to tell me,' demanded Amelia forthrightly, ‘that my great-aunt had a toy-boy?'

‘I'm trying to tell you about precatory trusts and settlements,' said James Puckle mildly.

‘Oh, all right. Go on.'