From Higher Places

by Roger Curtis

  The narrative of Lionel Bentley’s life included public school, profligacy, ruin and a clawing-back of respectability. That aside he was almost, but not quite, the perfect solicitor. The not quite part explained both why she was there and why she did not know why she was there.

  ‘I’m going to leave the room, Sarah. Do you remember when you used to come here with your father and we would play I-Spy while he was talking to boring Carruthers? Well, I’m going to leave the room now and the clue is something beginning with W. Suddenly he looked sad and old. I should add that the game becomes more serious with the passing of time. I’m sure you will understand why.’

  Window, wall, wicker basket… will! It was poking out from a neat pile of papers on a desk remarkably clear of the legal detritus that littered the rest of the room.

  Sarah-Jane pulled out the copy of her mother’s will and read: To my daughter Sarah I bequeath my house and all its contents and all my jewellery and personal effects together with the sum of five thousand pounds. And lower down: To my dear friend Thomas Sharp I bequeath the residue of my estate.

  It took only a second for the significance to sink in, confirmed by something she had at first thought odd: a single teetering stack of one pound coins precariously near the corner of the desk.

  Bentley had re-entered the room without her hearing. ‘Don’t let them fall, Sarah; they are too valuable to lose.’

  ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘It’s quite a relief if you do.’

  ‘Mr Bentley, I’m sure I can ask you this. When my father died intestate…’

  ‘That is our understanding, Sarah. Go on.’

  She couldn’t see where this was leading, but continued, ‘… why was his true financial situation not revealed?’

  ‘Surely because it all went to your mother. A few years back she was in control. The house was in her name also, as were various accounts held jointly with your father. The rest happened to be insufficient to attract death duties, so nothing was ever publicised. You are not aware of the sums involved?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should raise the matter tactfully with your mother. The emphasis is on tact, Sarah.’ He touched the side of his nose with his finger and winked. She could picture him with his back to the fire in a prim London club, communicating with the bar waiter behind the back of a demanding and obstreperous colleague.

  Back in the general office he offered his hand. ‘It was nice to meet you again, Mrs Preston. Do call again to see us.’

  Brian arrived earlier than she had anticipated; her taxi followed his car into the drive. He walked back and offered to pay but she would not hear of it.

  After they had eaten, Brian said, ‘You remember that game – what was it? – that we once played? It would be jolly to do it again.’

  ‘But Brian, you’ve got to get back to London. You must be exhausted after your paper.’

  ‘I’m as right as rain, really. Though I thought perhaps I might ask if I could…’

  ‘Mum,’ Sarah-Jane called to the kitchen, ‘Is there any more coffee left?’

  She turned back to him, knowing that her words would hurt. ‘Look, Brian, before you say anything. Five years is a long time and things change. I’m Mrs Preston now and we’re in my mother’s house. There are things you can’t take for granted, or expect.’

  ‘But you’re not exactly a changed woman are you, Sarah?’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That from what I’ve heard you’re not too… well… discriminating, in your choice of…’

  ‘Of men? Is that what you want to say?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  Sarah-Jane hunched her shoulders with the petulance of a small girl. ‘If you just knew how trivial it’s all been.’

  ‘Then is there not an opportunity now for something better, more meaningful?’ He waited for a response which did not come. ‘You saw in the painting the depths that can be reached.’ It was a bold card to play, but the timing was wrong.

  ‘So I was right!’

  ‘You were right.’

  ‘But it still doesn’t change anything. I’m grateful to you for bringing me but I’m not sleeping with you. It’s probably better if you go.’

  Betty Potter came in with a steaming pot of coffee on a tray.

  ‘Brian miscalculated, Mum. He’s got to rush off after all.’

  At the gate she intercepted his car. Angrily he wound down the window.

  ‘Stay friends with me, Brian. One day perhaps I’ll have sorted myself out.’

  Sarah-Jane took the precaution of drawing all the downstairs curtains, carefully closing any gaps.

  ‘Mum, there’s something we have to talk about urgently.’

  ‘Can’t it wait until morning?’

  ‘No, it can’t. Here, sit down and have some of Brian’s coffee.’

  ‘You know, he hardly said goodbye to me, Sarah. Dr Hislop wouldn’t have behaved like that.’

  ‘Never mind. I want to ask you something important.’

  ‘I go to bed after the news.’

  ‘And you shall.’ Sarah-Jane grasped her mother’s hands, steeling herself for the task. ‘Mum, why did you change your will?’

  Betty Potter looked puzzled, as if unable to recall what had been asked. Then she smiled. ‘Oh, that was just after Christmas. I can remember Mr Carruthers bringing it for me to sign.’

  ‘But what made you ask for it to be changed?’

  ‘I didn’t need to ask. Tom said he’d arrange it for me.’

  ‘What did Tom have to do with it?’

  ‘It was such a little matter. I can hardly remember. He was kind to me when I was laid up with flu – nursed me like a son. He didn’t want any reward and I said I’d leave him some little thing if I went, and he said he’d arrange it. Then Mr Carruthers came. It was only a little thing, Sarah. Nothing to get het up about.’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t. But probably a better way would be for me to put it back how it was, all cut and dried, so that I can make sure he gets something reasonable. How it was left was a bit vague.’

  ‘I’d like him to have something reasonable, Sarah. Do you think a hundred pounds is too much?’

  ‘And some little personal thing, perhaps?’

  ‘You can be thoughtful sometimes, Sarah.’

  As soon as her mother had gone to bed Sarah-Jane telephoned Carruthers at his home.

  ‘By all means bring your mother in tomorrow morning. Not a problem at all to change it. It will be delightful to see you, Sarah. How did we know she wanted to change it? She wrote to us. I remember the letter was typewritten, so I suppose someone helped her with that. I assumed that was you.’

  ‘Well that’s right, Mr Carruthers. You must think I’m becoming quite senile.’

  ‘I hardly think that, Sarah. Bentley had quite a spring in his step after he’d seen you, but don’t tell him I said so.’

  Just after ten Sarah-Jane climbed the stairs and opened her mother’s door; the breathing was laboured but regular, promising sleep till morning. She went down the corridor to her own room and stood still in the doorway, listening. But for what? The curtains at the closed window were apart. Through it, in the distance, the treetops were the plumed helmets of warriors marching against a leaden sky. She wondered if a ladder was still propped against the wall.

  She got down on her knees and crawled to the window. Feeling with her hand she found with relief that the catch was locked. Then she withdrew as she had come and crawled backwards out of the door, which, deliberately, she left wide open. She took a blanket from the hall cupboard and switched off the light, leaving the house in darkness.

  She made first for the windowless toilet. Having closed the door she put on the light and stood motionless, staring into th
e mirror, her hands gripping the basin. With little adjustments of her position she inclined her head, letting the hair fall from her shoulder. Slowly her reflection became Brian’s painting, perfect in its execution; yet there was a discrepancy that, try as she might, she couldn’t identify. Then she sprinkled water on her face and hands and rubbed them briskly with a towel. In darkness once again she picked up the blanket and went downstairs.

  Her father’s study had been left untouched since the funeral. She sat in the high-backed armchair with its tapestry fabric and draped the blanket across her body. As a final precaution she got up and locked the door. She reasoned that anyone approaching the house would assume she had left earlier with Brian in the car. Not until the following morning would she ask herself why she was doing these things.

  Her dreams – if the thoughts compressed into the minutes when she was not awake could be considered as such – were of a packed courtroom in which she was counsel for both the prosecution and the defence. In the dock was a child of about twelve or thirteen but she couldn’t be sure about its age as the face bore no expression. As the trial proceeded the blank features became painted in according to the force of her eloquence; but changingly, so that the beginnings of a smile could move to a frown and back again as the thrust of her argument shifted. One moment there was the joy of innocence; then, in its place, fear and despair, and worldliness, and finally a plea for love and understanding, all in an recurring cycle. When she had finished the judge climbed down from the bench and drew from his gown a bejewelled mirror which he handed to the child. Look, child, he said, look carefully, and give me your verdict. Then he took the mirror with its imprinted image and handed it to the jurors, who passed it from one to another, nodding gravely as they did so.

  As the foreman rose to deliver the verdict a yellow band from an opening door at the back of the courtroom became a sliver of grey between the closed curtains. Grasping for wakefulness, Sarah-Jane imagined torchlight playing across the window. She shrank further into her chair and did not sleep again until the room was suffused with the light of dawn, and filled with melancholy birdsong.

  She awoke to taps on the door. ‘Are you in there, Sarah? It’s nearly ten o’clock.’

  Graham Carruthers was the antithesis of Joshua Bentley. Closer though he had been to the family, to Sarah-Jane he was a more distant figure, and much more the product of a conventional education and apprenticeship than his more flamboyant, but fallen, colleague.

  The two women sat side by side in chairs set equidistant from the desk. Sarah-Jane would have preferred Bentley’s less formal style of the previous day.

  While her mother had prepared breakfast Sarah-Jane had scribbled frantically on a piece of paper, which she now handed to Mr Carruthers. ‘You will see that it’s much more specific now. I hope it can be incorporated as it stands.’

  Carruthers stared at it. ‘I can see you would be equally at home in our profession, Mrs Preston.’ His head swivelled. ‘This is your wish, Betty? Your late husband’s stamp collection to Mr Sharp? You will be content to sign this?’

  ‘You must do whatever Sarah says.’

  He peered at her over half-moon spectacles. ‘I assume that means yes. I will deliver it personally for your signature on Monday, as soon as it’s been typed. Would you like me to send Mrs Preston a copy?’

  ‘I would appreciate that,’ Sarah-Jane said. ‘Oh, by the way, Mr Carruthers, you will have on file my mother’s last instruction. Would it be an awful bother to run me off a copy of that too?’ She lowered her voice. ‘I think my mother has mislaid the file – it’s just lucky the will was kept separately.’

  Without looking at it, Sarah-Jane folded the sheet and put it in her pocket. ‘I’ve asked my mother to involve me if any further changes are to be made. I’m sure you will understand why.’

  ‘I’m beginning to, Mrs Preston, I’m beginning to. You may have every confidence in the firm – its reputation is founded on absolute integrity.’

  The taxi bumped its way back down Tippett’s Lane. Pleased as Sarah-Jane was at having resolved the matter of the will, her relief – she was slowly realising – related as much to having survived the previous night without incident. But now, in bright daylight, that notion of threat seemed unfounded and ridiculous. She looked forward to returning to Shirley Hills as soon as her mother had settled back into her routine.

  The absence of a particular feature from a familiar situation is sometimes more difficult to identify than the simple perception that all is not quite as it should be. As the taxi neared the house Sarah-Jane’s mood changed to one of alarm. For several seconds she struggled to understand why. Then it came.

  ‘Mum, I thought we left Moffat outside.’

  ‘We did, Sarah. We left the conservatory open for him in case it rained.’

  ‘Then why isn’t he waiting for us?’

  Her mother’s fingers dug deeply into her arm.

  The taxi driver was still rummaging in his purse when Sarah-Jane set off at a brisk walk towards the house. There were more important things than waiting for change from a twenty pound note. After a few paces she turned with an apologetic smile and a shrug to wave him away.

  Betty Potter circled the garden shouting for the dog, then disappeared indoors. Sarah-Jane’s feet crunched on the gravel path around the side of the house. She stopped at the corner before the conservatory, holding her breath. Are you psychic, Sarah-Jane, that you know what it is you’re going to find, you who believe in nothing beyond the physical world?

  Later, with hindsight, what worried her most was that the conservatory door was closed. April is a strange month for weather, but the morning had been still and the afternoon calm. The catch of the heavy door was difficult at the best of times. It would have taken a violent gust to have closed it.

  Moffat lay stretched out along the centre aisle, his head in a pool of blue liquid that appeared to have spilt from a large can on its side on the shelf above. Upset flower pots and spattered liquid surrounded the body. Whatever had happened, the dog had not died swiftly. She set the can upright and read the label: Weedestruct Concentrate. And under that: contains 10% paraquat. She stroked the dog’s head and wept. Seeing her stained fingers she looked around for a cloth, unable to bring herself to wipe them on the hair of the dog’s chest.

  Her mother said, ‘Sarah, I think you’ve lost your only friend, as I’ve lost mine.’

  When the vet came Sarah-Jane held Moffat’s hind legs to lower him into the gaping orange bag, like the ones the hospital used for clinical waste. The indignity of it appalled her. She stopped and rearranged her hold so that the hind feet went in first, as gently as she could manage. She kissed the dog’s nose, mumbled an apology and left the kitchen to be sick. When she returned the vet said, ‘You must not draw premature conclusions, Mrs Preston. At least wait for the pathology report.’ Through the window she followed the tail lights of his car before it disappeared into the lane. ‘What possible good can a vet do now, Sarah?’ her mother asked. ‘He can tell us what happened,’ she replied.

  With an arm about her shoulders Sarah-Jane guided her mother to the living room sofa, puffed up the cushions and eased her down into them. At the kitchen door she looked back at a woman clasping her knees and rocking to and fro, suddenly old through grief and loss. There was, too, a frailty she had not seen – or did she mean noticed? – before. Years must have elapsed since they had last had physical contact of a similar emotional kind.

  She stayed until the following morning to keep her mother company. The night was silent, without incident. Of course it had been; what else might she have expected? She smiled, thinking to herself that it would have taken a reckless intruder to have approached the house on that occasion.

  In the taxi to the station she caught her reflection in the driver’s mirror. Instinctively she patted her hair, as she often did when driving herself in stat
ionary traffic. It was her expression that caught her attention. What could she see there? Anxiety? No, not really. Incomprehension? That was more likely. ‘It’s still weekend, why can’t you stay?’ her mother had asked. She couldn’t answer, only admit to herself that she was drawn back by a sense of expectation that had not been with her when she had left London with Brian on the Thursday. It occupied her thoughts for much of the train journey back to Paddington and another taxi ride across London to home.

  There were two envelopes waiting on her desk. One, in Alice’s scrawl, like stretched springs, was without a stamp; the other, typewritten, bore a local postmark. She fixed herself a drink and had poured another before deciding which to open first. Alice had written:

  My dear S-J. I had hoped to call on you this afternoon as there are things to tell you, but Brian arrived back so exhausted from his visit to Oxford that – against all the odds – I’ve persuaded him to take a break. So we’re heading off to the Norfolk coast for a couple of nights. What I really wanted to say was that Jeff Ellis – remember Jeff? – has heard from Alan Murphy. It seems that after Clare’s death he got very low and tried to end it with an overdose. Three deaths on his conscience were just too much. He’s now staying with Jeff at Bermondsey. You may – but probably won’t – want to do anything about it but I thought you ought to know. I should add that all this happened a week or so ago so things might have changed since. Wish us a tolerable two days. Love, Alice.

  The second letter resembled the one she had given Brian. It was, if anything, more threatening, promising physical harm. She regretted not having the first for comparison but the typeface looked the same. She hid it among the papers on her desk where the earlier letter had been and resolved to contact Brian as soon as he returned.

  The following Wednesday Sarah-Jane telephoned St Thomas’ but Brian had cancelled his clinic for that day. Then she rang the Harley Street number. He was consulting and couldn’t be interrupted. She left a message asking him to ring back.

  The next evening he telephoned. In the opinion of his friend, the psychologist, the letter had been written by a psychotic and should be taken seriously. It would be sensible to take it to the police along with all the others; he would put it in the post. He was interested to know if she had received any others. She said no without thinking and, having said it, could not account for why she had done so. When the first letter arrived on the Saturday morning post she took the whole collection to the police station.