A Six-Letter Word for Death

by Patricia Moyes

  Henry sat down at the table, as the others bustled in a haphazard pattern, seating themselves. Emmy sat as far back as possible, and wondered what her role was to be. When everybody was settled, Henry smiled at his audience.

  “Just like old times,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but Mr. and Mrs. Turnberry have not yet arrived.”

  “Is that important?” asked Sir Robert. “Surely they can’t be—”

  “It’s very important, I’m afraid, Sir Robert,” Henry said. “You see, as I go through this story, I’m going to ask some or all of you to corroborate both my facts and my theories with your testimony. And that of the Turnberrys is vital. I shall also need Mr. Timmond to come in for a short time.”

  “So you told me,” said Sir Robert. “He’s waiting in the kitchen, and he’ll come as soon as I ring.”

  Almost at once came the peal of the front doorbell, and a moment later Sowerby was ushering Mr. and Mrs. Turnberry into the drawing room. They looked stiff, formal, and ill at ease, dressed in their Sunday best.

  Pamela Oppenshaw rose immediately to greet them. “Nora, my dear…and James…come along in… Now let me see, Robert and Barbara you know, of course, and I believe you’ve met the Tibbetts. Now this is Mrs. Waterford…”

  Introductions were made, and the Turnberrys took their places in the semicircle.

  “Right,” said Henry. “Now we can begin. The difficulty is to know exactly where. I think it’s best to go right back to the death of Mr. Francis Warfield, first husband of Lady Oppenshaw, and the owner of a considerable fortune, including this property of Carnworth.”

  If any of the group were surprised, they did not show it. The Turnberrys looked uncomprehending, and Sir Robert put his hand over his wife’s in a protective gesture. Otherwise there was no reaction.

  Henry went on. “Mr. Warfield had a daughter by a previous marriage—Eugenia, known as Jeannie. She was fifteen when he died. Now we come to the crux of the matter—Mr. Warfield’s will. It left an outright but not large sum to his widow. The rest—including Carnworth Manor—was also willed to the widowed Mrs. Warfield for her lifetime, provided that she did not remarry. Should she do so, everything would revert to Jeannie on her twenty-first birthday.”

  Sir Robert had turned purple. “Really, Mr. Tibbett, is it necessary to go into all this?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid it is,” said Henry. “I’m sure that everybody here will treat it in confidence. As I was saying, if Mrs. Warfield did not remarry, then Jeannie would have to wait until her stepmother’s death to inherit. That is quite a usual arrangement. However, there was another strange clause. It stated should Eugenia die before the age of twenty-one, all bequests relating to her should apply to any child she might leave, legitimate or not. In other words, the child would inherit immediately if Mrs. Warfield remarried, otherwise on her death.”

  “It sounds very peculiar to me,” remarked Myrtle.

  “It was a strange provision to make on behalf of a fifteen-year-old girl,” Henry agreed. “Mr. Warfield may have had a reason—but we shall never know it. What we do know is that within two years of Mr. Warfield’s death, his widow did remarry, and became Mrs.—now Lady—Oppenshaw. Her second husband and his little girl, Barbara, moved into this house, and the new ménage was set up.

  “Now, on the face of it, this meant that Jeannie’s death before her twenty-first birthday would be of great benefit to Sir Robert and Lady Oppenshaw. There was, of course, no question of her leaving a child.”

  In a choked voice, Pamela Oppenshaw said, “If you think that we’d have murdered Jeannie…especially when we knew she had so little time…”

  “So little time?” Dr. Cartwright spoke sharply, puzzled.

  Henry appealed to Pamela Oppenshaw, who was now sitting with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes. “Lady Oppenshaw, your husband told me the truth in great confidence. Now that you have mentioned it, do you agree that I should tell these people? After all, it was a long time ago.”

  Without removing the handkerchief from her eyes, Pamela Oppenshaw nodded.

  Henry went on, “Well, the sad truth is that Jeannie, although outwardly healthy, was suffering from a fatal disease—multiple sclerosis. She might well never have survived to her twenty-first birthday. The Oppenshaws’ one idea was to make her last years as happy and carefree as possible—and they were succeeding. Jeannie obviously got on well with her stepfather and adored her new little sister. The family was very close—the more so, perhaps, because of the impending tragedy that only the parents knew about.

  “Meanwhile, under Mr. Oppenshaw’s guidance, the old firm of Trilby & Son, now Oppenshaw and Trilby, was beginning to flourish. Not many years later, Mr. Oppenshaw became Sir Robert, recognized by a grateful country for his services to literature. Nevertheless, when Jeannie drowned just as the purchase deal for the firm was going through, it was more than a personal tragedy for the Oppenshaws. It put them in what might be an awkward position vis-à-vis anybody who knew about Mr. Warfield’s will.

  “Consequently—I am now guessing, and need confirmation—I think it was decided not to mention the fact that the house and estate had not been Sir Robert’s all along. A simple and harmless deception, to protect the family and its integrity.” Henry turned to Sir Robert. “Am I right, sir?”

  Oppenshaw, still holding his wife’s hand, had listened in silence, his face darkening with anger and embarrassment. He said, “Since you ask me, and I am an honest man, I must admit that you are right. After Jeannie’s death, Pamela and I decided to refer to Carnworth as my house. We saw no harm in it.”

  “None whatsoever,” Henry assured him. “Right. Now, for a complete change of scene, we go to the University of Oxford, and the late Professor Harold Vandike.”

  A little ripple of a sigh went through the room. Whether it was relief at a change of subject or mourning for Vandike, it was hard to tell.

  Henry went on. “You all knew Harry Vandike. And when I say ‘all,’ I include Mr. and Mrs. Turnberry. Correct?”

  Nora and James Turnberry nodded in unison, like mechanical dolls.

  “That being so,” said Henry, “you also knew that he was brilliant and entertaining, but had a streak of near-sadism in him. He delighted in practical jokes, some of them very cruel.

  “As a young lawyer, he arranged a number of private adoptions for people who did not care to go through adoption agencies. Among his clients were Mr. and Mrs. Turnberry.”

  Again the two heads nodded in unison.

  “They were recommended to him by a doctor, who was treating Mr. Turnberry for an ear complaint. Dr. William Cartwright, in fact.”

  “Nothing wrong about that, is there?” demanded Cartwright. “What did I know about adoptions? I told them to consult a lawyer, and Vandike came to mind. I had known him at the university.”

  “Good so far,” said Henry. “Vandike produced a little boy for the Turnberrys—Peter. Incidentally, the Turnberrys lived in Ealing in those days and had no connection whatsoever with the Isle of Wight. As is usual in these cases, only the lawyer knows the identity of both the true and adoptive parents, and it is a grave breach of legal ethics to divulge this knowledge. So I have no idea who Peter Turnberry’s real parents were. Nor did he, nor do Mr. and Mrs. Turnberry. And his real parents, wherever they may be, have no idea that it was their son who was killed—even if they happened to read of Peter’s death in the paper. The break is made clean and complete, as it should be. The only evidence of identity lies safely locked up in a lawyer’s office.

  “So matters stood, and life went on quietly. Barbara grew up, and turned out to be a talented writer. Dr. Cartwright, an old family friend, started to collaborate with Professor Coe on the Freda Wright books—just as a joke at first, I suspect. Naturally, Dr. Cartwright submitted them to Sir Robert, who saw possibilities in Miss Twinkley. The indefatigable Harry Vandike, another old friend of the Oppenshaws, was pursuing his career at Oxford, compiling crosswords and writing literary criticism,
excelling as an athlete, and also producing the Elaine Summerfield Gothic novels. Sir Robert hinted to me the other day that Oppenshaw and Trilby published them more out of friendship than admiration, although I know they have a big public among what I believe are known as class-C readers.”

  There was a small laugh at this.

  Henry went on. “Mrs. Waterford and Tex Lawrie were a different matter, I imagine,” Henry said, on a slight note of interrogation.

  Myrtle said, “I didn’t know any of these people, Mr. Tibbett. I had the idea for the first Tex Lawrie book because I was bored and had time on my hands.”

  “And you were longing for excitement—even at second hand?”

  “I suppose so. Anyhow, I submitted it to Oppenshaw and Trilby, and they took it—on the understanding that I changed to a masculine pen name.”

  “Good,” said Henry. “Just as I expected. Now we come right up to date, to a fact that is certainly known to the Oppenshaws, and maybe to others of you as well.”

  “What fact is that?” demanded Fred Coe.

  “The fact,” said Henry, “that Vandike, under his own name, was writing a history of the publishing house of Oppenshaw and Trilby, with emphasis on the career in the eighteenth century of the pioneer publisher Richard Trilby. However, towards the end of the book, he wanted to pay tribute to his friend Sir Robert, and so described how the firm was saved from near-failure after World War II, and was reborn as Oppenshaw and Trilby. Vandike had a young man doing research for him, the undergraduate with whom he was spending a holiday when he died. I have spoken to this young man. He tells me that in the course of his research, he looked up Mr. Francis Warfield’s will and got a copy of it for Vandike.

  “Now we come back to that impish sense of humor. Impish and unkind. Peter Turnberry, whom Vandike knew very well to be adopted, had won his way to Oxford and become one of Professor Vandike’s favorite pupils. In the meantime, the Turnberrys had moved to the Isle of Wight, quite close to Carnworth. Vandike worked out the scenario for a practical joke, with his usual mixture of wit and cruelty. He told Peter Turnberry that he was, in fact, the illegitimate son of Jeannie Warfield, and so the rightful owner of Carnworth and the entire inheritance. But, Vandike explained, his own lips were sealed. As a lawyer, he could not make this knowledge public. Under present law, as you are probably aware, an adopted child is entitled to know the identity of his real parents. But that was not the case when Harold Vandike quite improperly told Peter Turnberry who he was. Left to himself, Peter would never even have known that he was adopted, for Mr. and Mrs. Turnberry had decided never to tell him. Vandike, however, supplied Peter with some spurious documents, intended to support his claim. He also suggested that in the event that he failed to make the claim stick legally, Peter could always marry Barbara, and, thus come into his inheritance by the back door, as it were.”

  Barbara looked up, her eyes blazing. “I knew it!” she said. “That was the only reason he ever proposed to me. And that’s why I chucked him.”

  “Chucked him?” exclaimed Mrs. Turnberry, suddenly sitting upright.

  “Yes. The evening before his accident, I broke the engagement. Mother knew all about it, didn’t you, Mother?”

  Pamela nodded sadly. “I was hoping it was just a lovers’ tiff, and that it would blow over. But then poor Peter was killed, and there seemed no point in…”

  “The crossword puzzle,” Henry went on, “was, of course, Vandike’s idea. He knew I was coming here as guest speaker, and the notion of sending me a classic murder puzzle was too tempting to resist. He had it all worked out in his mind—how Barbara had drowned her stepsister, even though she was only six. How Peter was the true heir. He was hoping that I would unravel not just the crossword and the other foolish red herrings, but the heart of this manufactured mystery. Peter was a sort of protégé of Vandike’s, and naturally knew all about the crossword. What he did not know was that Vandike was playing a cruel joke on him. He really believed himself to be the Carnworth heir.

  “Of course, Vandike forbade him to produce the spurious papers he had prepared, on the grounds that it would ruin him—Vandike—if it was known that he had shown them to anybody in the days when it was illegal to do so. So Peter, more and more frustrated, decided to take the second suggested course, and proposed marriage to Barbara. It seemed a reasonable arrangement. They both loved horses, and seemed on the surface to be an ideal couple. However, Miss Oppenshaw is a very sensitive and intelligent young lady, and she soon began to realize that Peter Turnberry was more in love with her inheritance than with her.”

  Henry turned to James and Nora Turnberry. “I’m very sorry to have to say this, Mrs. Turnberry, but I’m afraid it’s true.”

  James Turnberry started to mutter something angrily, but his wife restrained him with a gentle hand on his arm. She said, “I know it’s true, Mr. Tibbett. It made me very unhappy. Sometimes I felt that I didn’t know Peter at all, especially after he went to Oxford and did so well. It was as though his life was one of those rock climbs he used to do, and he was determined to get to the top. He seemed to think Father and I were dragging him down. Of course, I didn’t know anything about this inheritance business, but I don’t mind telling you I never did think Professor Vandike was a good influence on the boy.”

  “You were quite right, Mrs. Turnberry,” said Henry seriously. “In any case, Peter began to have a shrewd suspicion that Barbara was going to break the engagement—so, he had an idea of his own. He came to Carnworth for the Guess Who week and went around to the various authors, trying to peddle Vandike’s story in a slightly fictionalized form, as an idea for a plot. I suppose he had some sort of a Hamlet-like notion—‘The book’s the thing in which I’ll catch the conscience of…’ Well, never mind. Nobody bought his plot, although I understand Fred Coe did consider it.

  “On that Friday evening, Barbara broke her engagement. Peter was then staking everything on my interpretation of the crossword, with its very explicit clues—‘Peter holds the keys,’ ‘Hope Barbara has an alibi,’ and so forth. I’m afraid I let him down. I solved the puzzle all right, and I guessed your pen names correctly. As far as I was concerned, the joke was over. It wasn’t, however, for Peter, who wanted me to reveal him as the true heir to Carnworth, nor for Vandike, who wanted me to do the same, so that he could explode the whole balloon and make both Peter and me look extremely foolish.

  “So, after our meeting here, as you all remember, Peter made an appointment to see me privately at five, skipped lunch, and rode as fast as he could on Melisande to his parents’ house.”

  “Why on earth didn’t he take one of the cars?” Sir Robert was genuinely astonished. “He only had to ask—”

  “Because,” said Henry, “he’d had his license suspended for speeding. He had to go on horseback. He rode posthaste to St. Lawrence, barely said hello to his parents, ran up to his room, and collected something—something small enough to put in his pocket. Obviously the papers purporting to prove that he was Jeannie Warfield’s child.” Henry paused. “They were not found on his body. That made me suspicious for a start.

  “Then there was the question of why the mare, Melisande, took so long to get home. Peter was hurrying his ride along the cliff path to get back here by five, and according to his parents he left their house in time to do so. That means the accident took place well before five, and yet Melisande didn’t get home till nearly half past six. I was intrigued, and went to the stables to have a word with Mr. Timmond, the groom.” Henry turned to Sir Robert. “Would you mind?”

  “Certainly,” Sir Robert said. He got up, went over to an electric bell near the fireplace, and rang it.

  In a few seconds Timmond came in, cap in hand and awkward away from his own surroundings. He stood by the door, saying nothing. Henry gave him a big smile, and got a ghost of a grin in return.

  “Mr. Timmond,” said Henry, “I won’t keep you for more than a minute. You remember the day Mr. Turnberry died?”

  “Very w
ell indeed, sir.”

  “Then would you tell these good people about the conversation you had with me that evening?”

  Timmond looked briefly at Sir Robert, who nodded. He said, “You came around to the stables, sir, at about seven o’clock in the evening. I was still giving Melly her rubdown. In a proper state, she was. I told you, Mr. Tibbett, sir, that I didn’t believe the girth had broken—she’d come home without her saddle, see? I also showed you a piece of frayed old rope attached to her bridle. It was my belief that somebody had tied her up after Mr. Peter fell, and that it had taken her an hour or more of plunging and rearing to break the rope and get away. That’s why she were all of a lather.”

  “And the next morning?” Henry prompted.

  “The next morning, sir, I went out with Sir Robert to ride the cliff path and try to find out what had happened. Well, there was the saddle, with the girth broken, right on the edge of the cliff—and though there were trees on the other side of the path, there wasn’t any broken rope-end tied to any of them. So I reckoned I’d been wrong after all.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Timmond,” said Henry. “That’s all.”

  Timmond tugged at his forelock and took his leave.

  Henry said, “I got up very early next morning, and visited the site of the accident myself. When I got there, about five-thirty, the saddle was lying under the trees, not at the edge of the cliff—and there was a piece of old rope, which seemed to match the one on Melisande’s bridle, tied to one of the trees. I didn’t touch anything. I simply came away. But clearly somebody else visited the spot between the time I was there and the time Sir Robert and Timmond arrived, because by then the rope had gone and the saddle had been moved. I may add that I was under the impression that the girth had been cut and ripped.”

  A murmur of surprise ran around the room, a little interrogatory buzz. Henry went on, “I reported all this to the local police, but apparently Sergeant Hemming is all for a quiet life. He didn’t call me to give evidence at the inquest. Everything went like clockwork. Accidental death. But I’m afraid I’m a stubborn character. I couldn’t let the thing alone. So I started bothering you people.