“So, there is nothing to link her to them.” I said.
“Then there won’t be any prosecution?” asked Zoe looking relieved.
“At worst a summary offence,” I volunteered. “She has no previous criminal history, does she?”
Zoe pursed her lips. “I don’t think so,” she answered.
“Well then,” I continued, “if they can’t get positive proof, I doubt any prosecution will get very far.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” answered Gale. “No prosecution, doesn’t mean she’s not guilty, eh? As guilty as sin!”
I wondered if anything more had been discovered about Merridew. “Was Jack Merridew his real name?”
“No,” answered Gale. “He’d invented that name for Hunter’s Meadow. Halliday turned up his real name; Jack Mervyn Duikas.”
I could see how that might morph into Jack Merridew.
“What about Franklin Gifford?” I asked diverting the subject off Ursula, as I could see it was upsetting Zoe.
“The dead can’t speak!” cried Gale.
I pursued my diversionary path. “How is Hilary . . .? I suppose I should call her Mrs. Lawson?”
“Agnes Beaver told me that Hilary was her niece. That’s why she came to live in Lower Bramsham after that chap Ross King died. She could have stayed with her, but wanted her independence, so Miss. Beaver found her the cottage. She was very cut up when this Ross chap died suddenly and wanted to be near someone who loved her.”
“Until she met Franklin Gifford . . .” I murmured. “Poor Hilary lost both the men in her life in the space of a few days.”
“Did you hear that she tried to take her own life?” Gale asked.
We shook our heads.
“After the police dropped her off home that day they took her in for questioning, she swallowed some pills . . . Fortunately Miss Beaver went round to see her about something. She saved her just in time.”
“That’s terrible,” said Zoe. “It’s terrible the things people go through . . . This has just been the most dreadful business . . .”
Gale followed his roast suckling pig with a delectable chocolate pudding. When we had finished he insisted we go back into the other room and Zoe sit for him while he made preliminary sketches for a portrait.
“He’s really a very nice man, isn’t he?” she whispered to me when he was out of earshot.
I nodded. “Underneath all that bluster and lunacy . . .”
Gale placed a canvas on the studio-easel, and worked feverously with a soft pencil, totally absorbed in transferring Zoe’s likeness to the white canvas surface. After a while he stopped, leaned back, raised one eyebrow and rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. “That should crack it,” he cried. “I’ll have it finished in a couple of weeks for you . . .”
I saw Zoe was about to protest . . .
“Hell’s bells,” he cried. “Can’t a feller give you a descent engagement present!”
EPILOGUE
A year, almost to the day, following our lunch with Simon Gale, Zoe and I were married in Chelsea. The charges against Ursula Bellman were eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Fourteen months from the death of Joshua Bellman, Ursula inherited her husband’s estate and became a very wealthy widow. She went to live in Knightsbridge.
Hunter’s Meadow was sold. Trenton received sufficient money from Bellman’s estate to buy himself a small cottage in Lower Bramsham.
Ursula was frequently spotted at the most exclusive restaurants and clubs in London. Following the coronation of George VI and his wife Elizabeth as king and queen of the British Empire and Commonwealth at Westminster Abbey in May 1937, Ursula was seen at several royal events marking the occasion, and it was at one of these she met Duke Friedrich Wilhelm von Strasser of Lieben. I read in the papers they were married at the Cathedral of Cologne in November that same year, a very grand affair to which Zoe and I were invited. We declined.
Following a short stay at von Strasser’s castle, the Schloss Lieben, on the Rhine, Ursula and her Duke travelled from Cologne to London on an airliner owned by Belgian airline Sabena. The flight was scheduled to stop at Brussels, but the weather was so bad the pilot was forced to continue to Ostend, where conditions were little better. While circling to land at Stene Airport the tip of a wing hit a factory chimney, ripping away the wing and an engine. The airliner burst into flames and plummeted to the ground, killing all passengers and crew.
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The Snark was a Boojum Page 19