Cargo of Eagles (6 page)

She regarded him with astonishment.

‘I still assume that they must be people who had hoped to inherit themselves. Who else?'

‘Do you know of any?'

‘Not yet. According to Hector she had no living next of kin if you cut out really distant cousins. She was over eighty. His firm were her only advisers and they've been in the business so long that they seem to have the whole district in their pocket. She left quite a lot, one way and another, apart from the house. Several people did far better than I. But I've been trying to find out about your point. I rang Hector as soon as he wrote me and I said that I hoped I wouldn't be depriving someone with a better right. He said certainly not—I was no more likely or unlikely than any of the other heirs. Apparently she was always changing her will and altering the bequests as her old friends died off or she quarrelled with them. Hector assured me—and he was absolutely positive about this—that this was the first occasion since he'd had anything to do with it when everybody concerned was well looked after. What he said was “As her wills went this was a very good specimen—probably the best”.'

‘You get the house and most of the contents,' said Throstle. ‘Now someone must have been in line for that before you—or thought they were. You've no idea who you superseded?'

‘No.' Dido hit the table with the flat of her hand and Morty placed his own deliberately over it.

‘I think I do,' he said unexpectedly. ‘It's the talk of Saltey. Although I'm very much a foreigner down there, I've been told all about it twenty times by the locals who use The Demon, where I'm staying, as their social headquarters. Miss Kytie lived in the Forty Angels hamlet all her life and she'd been the local heiress ever since her brother died in the thirties. I really
didn't pay much attention till Dido appeared on the scene. The old girl seems to have been very careful, not to say downright skinflint mean and a bit of a mischief maker into the bargain. She used to play up one person against another and her will has been the one subject of interest in Saltey for years. ‘Quack, quack, quack. “She will, you know. She won't, you know. Leave it all to a cats' home, that's what she'll do, mark my words”.'

‘Now I can't swear to it but my belief is that the person who was disinherited in favour of Dr Jones got a much more valuable piece of property in exchange—half the land he farms, in fact. He's a local character called Jonah Woodrose who seems to be a distant relative of everyone in the place but no more a bona fide heir than Dido. My impression is that they were both used one after the other by the old lady to annoy somebody else. She did it all the time by hints and nods and accepting favours whenever some toady offered them.'

‘Who would this somebody else be?' said Throstle.

‘I haven't the faintest idea, any more than I can work out who in the village is related to who. There seems to have been a period, not very long ago, when even the bicycle was unknown. That name Woodrose, for example—it's wonderful when you come to work it out.'

Mr Campion sighed audibly. The sound was so unexpected that it surprised everyone and they stared at him. He had the grace to look embarrassed.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, laughing. ‘I was thinking that “they're all distant relations” are fatal last words. There is absolutely no tangle on earth that is so inextricable and frustrating as the English country family dispute. Time doesn't come into it. Characters live and die and never see the beginning or the end. A rural Jarndice v. Jarndice can take a century. If this turns out to be one of those none of us will ever see the last of it. And meantime, of course, there isn't a moment to spare.'

As soon as the words were out of his mouth it was evident that he regretted them.

‘I was thinking,' he said lamely, ‘that you two have got quite a journey before you.'

As a performance it lacked his usual adroitness and Morty was clearly surprised. He glanced at Dido who gathered up her bag and gloves. Throstle, like a chairman who hopes to conclude a meeting with some semblance of having made progress turned to Campion.

‘I'd like you to glance over these photostats and give me your expert opinion. We'd all appreciate that, I think?' He produced a large buff envelope from the folio on the floor by his chair and placed it on the table.

‘I'd like to say one thing about them before I go.' Dido spoke with professional dignity and a touch of anger coloured her cheek. ‘In the letters which were sent to me and in one of the others I was accused of influencing a senile patient. Miss Kytie certainly wasn't senile when I saw her and I've taken the trouble to investigate her medical history right up to the time she died. Senility is a real condition. Geriatrics is my subject, so I should know. It doesn't just mean having white hair and blue rings round the irises of the eyes. It's a marked state of mental deterioration capable of being accurately observed and recorded. In fact she was a little over-bright. In spite of her heart she actually died of a cerebral thrombosis and you can take it from me that up to that moment she was probably quite as sharp and on the ball as she'd ever been. Certainly Hector thinks so and I'd say he was an expert, with his sort of experience. He won't be very pleased if I keep him waiting. Shall we go, Morty?'

Throstle stood up to let them escape from the confining table.

‘How were you going to get down there if Mr Kelsey hadn't popped up with his car?'

‘Oh, I have one of my own,' she said. ‘I just felt I'd like the company.'

As they went out of the café, Throstle turned to Campion. ‘If she's going to meet one young man it's funny to take
another. What would you make of that? Does she just hypnotise every man in sight to provide an escort? Or do you smell a quarrel?'

‘It could be.'

‘Between her and the young solicitor? It crossed my mind it might be worth passing on to the County. The whole business is their pidgin by rights, only the complaint started at this end. He eyed Campion shrewdly. ‘This is the place where Teague's wallet was found. You knew that, of course? It's him you're really interested in, or so the Top Brass whisper to me. A lot of people would like to know where he is just now. I wonder why he left that little pointer behind?'

‘A “Kilroy was here” sign, or would someone like you to think so?'

‘I'm not a member of the Coincidence Club myself,' said the sergeant. ‘The answer is at Saltey—the answer to both enquiries. That's my bet. They'll pick him up down there and good luck to them. We can do without him in my manor.' He closed his briefcase. ‘Well, it's been nice meeting you, sir. Fancy you knowing old Oates. It was quite a shock to see him again this morning. He must be older than God and he's beginning to look it. Still as bright as a button, though.'

‘Aren't we all?' said Mr Campion.

After the rain the pavements were beginning to steam. The promise of high summer was in the air. He decided to walk, to sort out the elements of the problem and to restore his own self-respect by approaching his club without a sense of guilt.

In Soho Square the scent of new cut grass bewitched the air, whispering of cricket, garden chairs, strawberries and dalliance in the shade.

He strode briskly, almost jauntily, into the Adam brothers' masterpiece which is Puffins and was half way across the chessboard hall before the door porter caught up with him.

‘This came for you about half an hour ago, sir. By hand. I was to give it to you personally.'

Mr Campion opened the stiff white envelope with
misgivings. Inside was a single sheet of plain paper inscribed in a precise scholarly hand which was all too familiar. The message was very brief.

‘I'm afraid that the position has deteriorated. There is very little time. L.C.'

‘LADIES AND GENTS,'
declaimed Morty in the tones of a professional guide, ‘we are now approaching the site of Mob's Hole, notorious haunt of mobsters, dandies, doxies and all the picturesque riff-raff of seventeenth century London. On my left a prospect of Wanstead Flats and on my right a car breaker's yard which seems to have been abandoned owing to pressure of business.'

He was in tremendous form, elated as a schoolboy, and his companion was beginning to feel that it was time to cut him down to size.

‘If you drove and talked a little more slowly,' said Dr Jones, ‘I could take in more of the lecture. Abandon the Cockney accent which does nothing for your professional image and remember that I want to meet Hector, in one piece, at half past six.'

‘Blast his smug go-getting guts.' Morty was subdued but not defeated. ‘But I must get this off my chest. Bear with me, share my obsessions. Hear the fruits of my eager researches into this byway of history. If I'm incoherent the fault is yours. Do all your patients adore you, too?'

‘Get on with your lecture.'

‘If you say so.' Morty reduced the elegant Lotus Elan to a legal limit. ‘But right now we are at the start of my discovery. New readers begin here: Mob's Hole, a sort of roadhouse and open air barbecue, really existed, you know. Ned Ward, the London Spy, has a terrific description of it. It was bang in the middle of that heap of decaying ironmongery according to the old maps, and apart from being a picnic haunt of dubious café society, the sort of coxcombs, bullies, whores and pimps Ward
wrote about, it was also notorious as a Safe House, if you know what that means.'

‘I don't, but no doubt I'll learn.'

‘You certainly will if you put up with me for long. Well now, a Safe House was an inn or a lodging with no questions asked. Suitable for thieves, smugglers, political refugees—anyone wanted by the authorities, in fact. You'll find relics of them dotted all round the Thames Estuary. A man on the run was naturally afraid of the main roads with their big coaching inns because they were the obvious places to watch. The road block idea isn't new. The Army, the Preventative Men, the thief catchers and so on have always used it since there was any sort of law. No, a man who wished to move secretly went, generally by night, from one Safe House to the next, making for a quiet part of the coast—some place where smuggling was regarded as being a proper trade and where inhabitants minded their own business.'

‘Like Saltey?' suggested Dido.

‘You have it in one, my proud beauty. Mob's Hole to Mob's Bowl, in fact. This was the route and it runs through some pretty queer country as you'll find out. London's back door, with a couple of centuries of unemptied garbage pails still awaiting collection by the look of it. It's a dreary run on the face of it but it has its charm for the likes of me.'

‘An acquired taste no doubt. Do you include the romance of Gallows Corner and the Great Southend Road in your saga?'

‘I can do better than that.' Morty was still enthusiastic. ‘I can dodge both of them for you if you don't mind a rough ride. Our eighteenth century friends didn't greatly care for that ominous crossroads. They used a mixture of loops and short cuts. It's not been easy to trace, and if I weren't so brilliant, intuitive and hard-working I would never have found it. But now that this particular piece of research is completed I'll tell you something which really is odd.
Highly remarkable
, as we say in Saltey.'

‘Go on,' said Dido. ‘Amaze me if you can. And keep both
hands on the wheel when turning sharp corners if you wish to remain just good friends.'

‘Sorry.' Morty was not penitent. ‘But this is genuinely odd. I was driving down from town last week rather late at night, after midnight in fact, and using my special route which is particularly impressive at night because once you're dear of the streets there are miles where you hardly pass a house at all and you get a tremendous sense of loneliness.

‘There I was, idling along—you know my style—when I was aware of someone behind whose headlights were shining in my mirror. I let him pass, making sure he'd turn off, but not on your sweet life. He was right with me all the way, ma'am. Once I stopped and smoked a cigarette just to let him get clear of me in his darned old white jalopy with a bashed-in tail, but in ten minutes I caught him up again, still dodging along, just as I was. He even used my special cut through the ghost town which I always thought was pretty fancy and custom built for me alone. He fetched up in Saltey. How about that?'

‘Now that certainly
is
odd.' Dido straightened her back. ‘Do you know who it was?'

‘Mr Jonah Woodrose,' said Morty, ‘whose family name if you trace it back is as ancient as anything in England. Woodrose—Woodwose. The Foliate Man, the Green Man, Robin Good-fellow, the nigger in the original woodpile of Christianity in this country.'

‘Play it cool,' advised Dido. ‘Fairies and sprites don't drive elderly cars. They go in for nutshell chariots, if I remember. But you've got a point there. What's your theory, master?'

He considered. ‘Could be a sort of inherited memory,' he said at last. ‘More likely tradition and force of habit. This was the track his forebears always took to Stratford and the other markets, so this is the way he goes. With all that inbred blood in his veins he's likely to be a creature of habit. I wonder what he was doing in London in any case?'

‘You sound as if you knew the answer.'

Morty hesitated. ‘I don't, and I wish I did,' he confessed.
‘But it did occur to me that he might have gone to post a letter, something that he didn't want to arrive with a Saltey postmark.'

Dido shivered involuntarily and to Morty's delight moved her shoulder a little closer to him.

‘It's beastly,' she said at last. ‘You know, if there was any sentiment involved in all this I'd give up. I mean, if I was grinding the faces of the widow and orphan by accepting the house, or doing some splendid young farmer out of his rightful home I'd be off like a flash. But I'm not. This is just pure venom and wickedness, and I won't put up with it. I'll . . . I'll . . .'