Passing Strange (16 page)

“Murder being once done,” Sloan murmured straight from his subconscious. Now where had that come from?

“Probate had been obtained.” Stephen Terlingham restored his glasses to his nose. “There was no difficulty there.”

“And the next step?”

The solicitor took refuge in verbiage – and the impersonal mood. “It is in the fulfilling of the duties of executor and trustee that the present problem arises.”

“Richenda Mellows,” said Sloan helpfully.

“There is a problem of identity,” admitted Terlingham.

In a chair in the corner of the room Detective-Constable Crosby stirred. If, thought Sloan, Crosby said his cousin Ted had one of those, too, he'd put him on report. This was no time to be dragging in jokes about psychiatrists. The constable, however, said nothing while the solicitor cleared his throat. “There is some doubt – some considerable doubt – about whether Richenda Mellows is who she says she is. We have evidence – er – documentary evidence – part rather than parcel, you might say …”

“A letter,” said Sloan. Bushes would only stand so much beating about.

“Precisely. A letter written by old Mrs Mellows – when she was much younger, naturally – referring to the nephew's baby as having brown eyes. Hebbinge came across a box of old letters after she died and handed them over to me as executor.”

“I see.”

The solicitor straightened his waistcoat with a little tug and delivered himself of a further anxiety. “There is also the – er – more mechanical problem of what happens in consequence. There is a not invaluable property involved, Inspector.”

The double negative brought the memory of the smell of blackboard chalk flooding back to Sloan's inner mind. He could almost detect it in his nostrils now. And with it came the sound of the English master's voice barking at the class, “If you mean a thing, boy, say it! Don't say it doesn't mean the opposite.”

He lifted his head and said, “Yes, sir, I'm sure.” There was no doubt in his mind that what was up for grabs was worth grabbing. Indubitably. And he would not be alone in thinking so. That started another train of thought in Sloan's mind. “The other person or persons involved …”

“Mrs Edith Wylly.” Stephen Terlingham looked out of the window at the Minster. “She's the widow of a clergyman living in not uncomfortable circumstances here in Calleford.”

Sloan marked another double negative.

Terlingham stroked his chin, and chose his words with care. “She is not prepared to take any active steps to further a claim to the estate which would only be hers by default.”

“She's childless, I take it,” said Sloan. A man learned realism early in the police force. Sons and daughters – or at any rate their wives and husbands – would never have stood back. Or have let their mother stand back from the chance of three good farms and a small country house.

“Childless and no longer young,” said Terlingham. “If it is decided that Richenda Mellows is not entitled to the Priory estate …”

“If she's not the real Richenda Mellows?” put in Crosby, who was now following the proceedings with interest, “and the real one's dead …”

“Then,” said the solicitor, “it devolves on Mrs Wylly automatically. She is content to – er – rest in the Lord and let events take their course.”

“Religious,” diagnosed Sloan. It always made calculation difficult.

“Very.”

“And if anything should happen to her?” said Sloan.

It was his bounden duty to see – from this moment onwards – that nothing did happen to Mrs Wylly. Religion wasn't going to save her from irreligious attack. Police protection might but even police protection was no guarantee against Mother Nature. Or Original Sin.

He made a note.

“Then,” said the solicitor on firm ground now, “it goes to the descendant of a remote collateral branch.”

“Lock, stock and barrel?” enquired Sloan ironically.

“Yes,” said Terlingham without any touch of irony at all. “We – er – haven't been in touch with him yet. It seemed just a little premature.”

“Very wise,” said the policeman. And meant it.

“But, of course, should the necessity arise …” the sentence hung unfinished in the air.

“One thing puzzles me,” said Sloan. “I thought places like the Priory – landed property –” that was another phrase he used every day without knowing what it meant “– usually went to the men of the family.”

“The money in the Mellows family,” said Terlingham astringently, “came originally through the female line.”

“Ah.”

“And heiresses tend to come from infertile families.” Terlingham delivered himself of this unexpected pearl of received legal wisdom and sat back.

“Er – quite so,” said Sloan. The law could say what it meant when it wanted to. He knew that. Especially when it started talking about Equity. Its well-established reputation for not doing so came solely from an unwillingness to disclose information: which was something quite different.

Disclosing information reminded him of something else.

“Where does Maurice Esdaile come into all this?” asked Sloan.

A shadow passed over the solicitor's face. “The position of Esdaile Homes is undoubtedly complicated by the – er – unsettled business. The Trustees of Richenda Mellows, of whom I am one, are willing for the deal to go ahead – should they be appointed, of course. Mrs Agatha Mellows died just before the formalities could be completed, otherwise that transaction would have been quite straightforward.” He looked up. “She went quite suddenly at the end, you know.”

“I know,” said Sloan. It was one of the many things he had thought about during the night. “And Mrs Wylly. What does she think?”

Stephen Terlingham looked out at the Minster. “Informal approaches have been made to Mrs Wylly. Strictly off the record, you understand.”

Sloan understood. He probably understood more than the solicitor realized.

“She has – er – intimated,” went on the solicitor, “that in the event of her coming into the property she would wish the estate to continue to be administered as at present. I am happy to say that Mrs Wylly is not entirely without some knowledge of the capital and maintenance needs of property.” He took another look through the window at the Minster and added drily “I dare say we have to thank her close association with the Church of England for that.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan, matching the other man's tone.

“I think I may say that in any event the
status quo
would be preserved as far as possible.” He fixed Sloan with his eye. “But I am aware that the matter needs resolution.”

“We do not at this stage,” said the detective-inspector cautiously, “know what bearing, if any, the death of the District Nurse has on the Priory inheritance.”

Mr Stephen Terlingham favoured the policeman with a remarkably shrewd look. “If the District Nurse had been able to identify Richenda Mellows as the daughter of Richard Charles Mellows, then of course this would have settled the matter as far as Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet are concerned.”

“Or not the daughter,” said the policeman. His concern was with the late Joyce Cooper and would be until he had brought her killer to book.

“That, too,” said the solicitor precisely, “would have settled the matter.”

Inside the Minster at Calleford the canon in residence was intoning “the Scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness …”

In the Minster Yard a detective-inspector and a detective-constable, both on duty too, were walking away from the offices of a solicitor.

“There's a lot of scope for sticky fingers in this set-up, sir,” said the detective-constable succinctly, “isn't there?”

But Sloan was whistling a tune to himself. It sounded very like “Take a pair of sparkling eyes.”

12

Hauteboy swell

Morning Service at St Peter's Church, Almstone, was both the same as and different from the Morning Service being conducted in the Minster at Calleford. The timing was the same and the form of the service was the same. The music was very different. At the organ in Calleford Minster (organ case carved by Grinling Gibbons) a budding organ scholar from one of the older universities was giving a virtuoso performance designed to further his career in the world of the long pipes.

There was no organist this Sunday at St Peter's, Almstone.

Last Sunday Nurse Cooper had played the organ there. This morning the Rector's wife, who hoped she knew where her duty lay, was doing her best at the piano.

Another thing that was different was the size of the congregation. That at the Minster was much the same as usual for the third Sunday in the month. That at St Peter's, Almstone, broke all records since 1928 when the then Rector had asked for – and got – a show of force over the proposed Revision of the Prayer Book.

The Reverend Thomas Jervis was not particularly disturbed. He had long ago come to terms with the innate frailty of human nature. He reckoned that a clergyman was not a real shepherd of his flock until he had. And he recognized that the threat of danger was what drew people together: that and simple curiosity. There was plenty of both of these ingredients about in Almstone after yesterday.

That this should manifest itself in the largest congregation he had ever had was merest accident.

He had, however, made two concessions to the changed circumstance. His sermon was to have been preached on the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter Five, verse five – ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.' He had been playing about in his mind with this intriguing piece of Scripture since the previous Monday. (Another thing that he had learned over the years was that the only way to put any doubts about the efficacy of the previous Sunday's sermon out of his mind was to start thinking about the one for the following Sunday.)

Like so much in Holy Writ, its application to present-day living was not immediately apparent. Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan had not struck Mr Jervis as particularly meek – nor Catherine the Great. Æsop – good old Æsop – had, of course, hit the nail on the head as usual with his fable about the reed and the olive (transmogrified for those in northern climes to the oak). The Reverend Thomas Jervis had paused in his thinking at that point (and in his shaving, as it happened: it was surprising how often the two things went together) to pay tribute to the works of Æsop. Keep them in view and you couldn't go far wrong.

On the other hand, though sound, they were pre-Christian and what he had wanted to do was to put the concept of the meek inheriting the earth into a modern context. He had abandoned Æsop by the time he had dried his face. It was just as well that he felt he was too old for a beard because all his best ideas came while shaving. His father had been too young to have a beard – and his grandfather had been thought old-fashioned with his.

Stones were not the only things to have sermons in them. There was obviously material in shaving brushes. Reflections in a mirror, you might say.

He had gone back to the possibilities of the meek inheriting the earth. There was the eminently tenable theory that the tribes which lived in the Kalahari Desert in Africa might well be the sole survivors of nuclear holocaust because they lived in the world's only totally windless zone.

That might one day hold water.

And there was the father of modern medicine, Sir William Osler. The great physician had noted that the meek shall inherit the earth because the aggressive achiever often died prematurely. ‘Kindness, gentleness, tolerance, generosity and charity' were ingredients for the prevention of coronary heart disease as well as the Christian way of life.

But none of that would do for today.

A very different homily was called for.

His sermon for today would have to be about the murder and yet not about the murder.

The Reverend Thomas Jervis, Rector of the parish, climbed the pulpit stairs, reached confidently for his notes and began to preach about the Mammon of unrighteousness.

His eyes strayed over his congregation while he delivered himself of his set piece. Everyone was there whom he had expected to see – Sam Watkinson in the churchwarden's pew, marked by its rod of office, Herbert and Millicent Kershaw, churchgoers since they became prosperous, Edward Hebbinge in the Priory pew but not in the front seat where the Brigadier and his wife used to sit, Miss Tompkins …

Unrighteousness was a good old-fashioned word. Everyone knew what he was talking about when he used it. There could never be anything righteous about the slaying of a sentient being.

While the law of the land – that law which was Cæsar's – took the view that the slaying of one person by another, with malice aforethought, was an offence against the Queen's Peace the Rector went back to the Ten Commandments.

Thou shalt not kill.

It had been written on tablets of stone.

It was attention to Mammon, pronounced the Reverend Thomas Jervis unequivocally, that led human sinners to break them.

There was, he had felt, no need to bring the Garden of Eden into his discourse. He felt reasonably sure that sex had played no part in the life or death of Joyce Cooper. She had had that uncherished look about her of a woman ‘who had never been asked'. He suspected that no willing Barkis had ever troubled that spinster's lonely dreams.

Mammon, though, must come in somewhere.

He ran his eye round the church again. The murderer might be there.

Fred Pearson and his wife were sitting at the back. So was Dora Smithson. And Mrs Wellstone, the woman who had won first prize for her unworthy tomatoes.

On the other hand the murderer might not be there.

Cedric Milsom never came to church, nor did his wife, – the equine world had a prior call on her time, and womanizing on his. The doctor wasn't there, nor Ken Walls. The Rector strongly suspected that Ken Walls had to cook the Sunday lunch.