Heirs and Assigns

by Marjorie Eccles

  He was taken aback. Yet she had been crying, and if it wasn’t for Murfitt, who was it for? She would of course still be grieving for Pen, the uncle she’d thought so much about, but she’d surely got past the floods of tears stage by now? It made him feel sorry for her and he didn’t pursue, for the time being, what he suspected might be an unprofitable, if intriguing line. ‘I’m sorry if I got it wrong, but all the same, you might feel able to answer a question that’s puzzling us a bit. We’re interested in a coat of his that appears to have gone missing. Would you know if he’s got rid of it recently? A dark green one?’

  ‘Oh, that coat!’ She added scornfully, ‘His prize possession. He’d never have got rid of that, never. He said it had belonged to his father.’

  His father?

  ‘The old man had had it specially tailored for him years ago in London. Green loden cloth – you know, the sort they wear in Austria, with a Persian lamb collar. It had his father’s name or something embroidered on the inside.’

  Green loden overcoat, with a fur collar. The last word for the dashing Edwardian gentleman, worn with a homburg or a top hat and a silver-topped cane. Bespoke London tailoring like that was expensive, built to last, and it was often passed on, he knew – men’s fashions didn’t change that much, after all, and there were still coats around like that. They cost a fortune and were made to last a lifetime – that of the original owner and anyone he passed it on to.

  ‘His name was inside, you said?’

  ‘Well, I never actually saw it. Adrian only mentioned it to show off, when he told me the coat had belonged to his father.’ She sounded far too bitter for such a young woman.

  After a moment he said carefully, ‘Then you didn’t know he was illegitimate?’

  ‘Adrian? What? Really?’ She went silent, and began to look very troubled. After a moment or two she said, ‘That would explain a lot, I suppose. He had a huge chip on his shoulder about families and money and that sort of stuff. He was very mixed up, you know, apart from that pacifism thing.’ She began to cry.

  ‘Miss Lancaster, please. I hadn’t realized you were so attached to each other.’

  He judged it better not to risk putting his foot further in and presently she recovered herself sufficiently to scrub away at her wet face with her handkerchief, before saying, in a subdued voice, ‘No, I’ve just told you, we weren’t. We weren’t attached. I was fool enough to think we were, perhaps, once, but not lately. And Adrian, never. I mistook his interest. He used me, like I said.’

  Reardon was caught in a dilemma. He ought to take advantage of this opening to find out if she knew more, but he had doubts about whether she really did and in any case found himself loath to press her. If Murfitt had been as mixed up as she said he had been, then this young woman was even more so. He was saved from making a decision by the entrance of her mother.

  His hope that Ida would be able to help calm down the situation was short-lived. Regarding the woeful appearance of her daughter with rather less exasperation than was usual, she went straight up to her and took her hand. Verity looked alarmed at this unaccustomed sign of affection, as well she might. ‘Verity dear,’ Ida said, in tones usually reserved for imparting the death of a loved one, ‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but it’s Huwie …’

  ‘What about Huwie? What’s happened?’

  ‘Well, you see –’ she looked apologetically at Reardon – ‘he’s gone.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Verity.

  ‘The thing is, Vee … now you mustn’t get upset … he’s taken your car.’

  If Verity was beside herself with rage – and she surely was, her fury having miraculously dried up her tears – then Reardon was even more angry. Mainly with himself, for not having sought out Huwie immediately after seeing Mrs Knightly. But he didn’t have to blame himself for long. Ida soon told them that he had left before breakfast. The Baby Austin had passed Prue, arriving for work, but she’d been in a hurry and hadn’t looked at the driver. No one had noticed Huwie wasn’t around until Theo, wishing to speak to him, had found his room empty and his belongings gone. Uncanny, almost a repeat performance of Verity’s disappearing act, Reardon thought.

  No one seemed particularly concerned that he had once more taken himself out of their lives, but they were united in indignation about the motor car. Something that had been regarded with amused tolerance in the family – Verity’s little toy – had now caused Huwie to become a target for their condemnation.

  ‘That’s probably the least of it,’ Theo said sourly. ‘We’d better get Mrs Knightly to check the spoons and anything else of value. Though I can’t really see what there is to be worried about. He’ll come out of the woodwork sooner or later if he wants his share of Pen’s money.’

  No one refuted this. Huwie, without much effort, seemed to have the ability to alienate everyone he came into contact with. What Reardon was finding hard to understand was why none of them was asking why he’d disappeared so abruptly, just as a second murder had been discovered.

  ‘You really mean there isn’t much chance of getting my car back, inspector?’ Verity interrupted, not intending to be sidetracked. ‘You can’t let him get away with it!’

  ‘We-ell,’ he temporized, not liking to be caught wrong-footed. Didn’t she realize how many Baby Austins there were on the roads? It was the cheapest little model in Britain and for anyone who could just about afford to buy and run a motor, it was far and away the most popular choice. In this case, the anonymity it afforded as a getaway vehicle couldn’t be faulted. Huwie had almost certainly headed back to London and the odds on finding the motor – or him – were about the same as backing the winner of the Grand National. But Verity wasn’t accepting that.

  She said, very sharply, ‘There must be something that can be done to find it, you’re the police, after all.’

  Nevertheless Huwie had unwittingly done her a good turn. Where everything else had failed, the theft of her beloved car had had a truly electrifying effect. There was colour in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes that didn’t bode well for Huwie, should he ever turn up again. She sounded almost like her mother.

  ‘We’ll do what we can,’ Reardon said weakly.

  But whatever was to be done, it was too late to do anything that night. He took himself back to the Fox, his mind churning.

  They met as Gilmour, feeling like the Second Murderer in Macbeth, was fastening a reproachful Tolly back into the kennel behind the Fox, avoiding the dog’s eyes. ‘No joy with Miss Bannerman, then?’ Reardon asked.

  ‘You could say that,’ Gilmour answered. ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘What? She’s gone as well? Gone where?’

  ‘Who knows? But it looks as though it’s for good. She left with all her luggage – in a chauffeur-driven car, according to her neighbour. Er – did you say “as well”?’

  ‘We’d better go inside. I need a drink.’

  Beside a roaring fire in the bar, over pints of bitter drawn by Fred, he told Gilmour about the missing Huwie, what Ledgerwood had uncovered about the burnt paper in the grate, and the information Verity had given about the missing loden overcoat. ‘Ledgerwood was a bit scathing when I suggested the towels might have been burnt, so I wouldn’t even suggest the coat could have gone the same way. It looks as though we might have been right, that our lad took it away when he left.’

  ‘Our lad being Huwie?’ Gilmour said. ‘He’d still have to dispose of it – especially if it has a name in it.’

  ‘If it has, you can bet on it that name won’t be Murfitt.’ Nor Llewellyn. Mrs Knightly had been adamant that Penrose Llewellyn hadn’t been Adrian Murfitt’s father. But then, Mrs Knightly, he was certain, hadn’t been telling the truth about everything – or not the whole truth.

  At the moment the question was academic. Neither of them, Pen or Adrian Murfitt, were here any longer to tell. And Huwie, who might have known, had disappeared. Sadie Bannerman gone, too. Huwie had left of his own free will, and so had Sadie – Reardo
n hoped. But was it coincidence that the two had shaken the dust of Hinton from their feet on the same day that Murfitt’s body was discovered? They hadn’t gone together, though. Mrs Tansley, Sadie’s neighbour, would hardly have mistaken the motor in which Sadie had driven off for Verity’s Baby Austin, much less Huwie Llewellyn for a smartly dressed chauffeur.

  ‘We need to find Huwie, and Sadie, I suppose – though she’d every right to leave if that’s what she wanted. She’s an unlikely suspect for killing Murfitt, anyway – she might have bashed him on the head in a temper, but to break his skull like that she’d have had to give it more clout than I imagine she’s capable of,’ Reardon said, translating Dr Emerson’s ‘considerable force’. ‘Any more than I can see her having the strength to drag him to the top of the cellar steps and heave him down.’

  ‘Not to mention cleaning up after she’d done it,’ Gilmour added. ‘She wouldn’t know one end of a scrubbing brush from the other, believe me.’

  ‘We’ve no reason to question her, in actual fact, though I’d liked to have talked to her. She said she came from London, didn’t she? Fat lot of help that is.’

  ‘We have her address, though.’

  ‘We have?’

  ‘There are copies of the letter Pen sent her when he offered her the job, and the one from her accepting it.’ Gilmour was looking smug. The hours he’d spent with those papers hadn’t been entirely wasted.

  ‘Well done, Joe,’ Reardon said, a bit winded, ‘then that leaves us with the elusive Huwie. I don’t suppose there were any convenient copy letters between him and his brother as well? All right, don’t answer that … We do have the address he gave us but there’s not much hope that he’ll be there, even if it was authentic.’

  ‘I dare say not,’ Gilmour said slowly, ‘but that note we found, the one Murfitt screwed up and chucked away: “Huwie, I have decided …” They knew each other, didn’t they?’ He was reaching for the appropriate folder, growing animated. ‘That antiquarian bookshop Theo said he dealt with. Wasn’t it in the Charing Cross Road?’

  ‘Yes, or near enough.’ Reardon’s heart lifted as he saw where Gilmour was pointing and realized the address of the shop and the one Huwie had given as his own were identical. It could mean nothing, probably just Huwie automatically covering his tracks, he cautioned himself, rubbing his face until the ridges of his scars beneath his fingers made him aware what he was doing. All the same …

  ‘Supper’s ready, I think,’ Gilmour said, interpreting signs from Fred at the bar.

  Mrs Parslowe was wasted on Fred and the Fox. In another life she might have been cooking for visiting princes and potentates at the Savoy. But after a manful attempt, Reardon braced himself to face her over his failure to do proper justice to her oxtail stew and dumplings and announced he was going to see his wife. He left Gilmour to make up for him as a queen of puddings arrived, a triumph crowned with an airy meringue, and prepared to leave for Kate Ramsey’s house.

  ‘I’ll take the dog with me, give us both some exercise.’ This at least earned him a modicum of forgiveness from Flo, who had taken a fancy to Tolly and thought it a crying shame he should be chained up outside on a cold night like this. But Fred, once he’d got a decision stuck into his thick head, was not to be moved. That dog wasn’t to be allowed a paw inside the Fox.

  The walk was brisk enough to clear his head and as the road was empty as usual, Reardon felt it safe to let Tolly off the lead to work off some of his surplus energy. He was relieved to find him obedient when called to heel as they reached the cottage and that he hadn’t rolled in anything unspeakable. The women had just finished their meal and were sitting by the fire with a tray of coffee. It took Ellen about ten seconds to uncurl herself from her favourite position on the hearthrug and cross the room. He gave her a husbandly kiss and warmed himself in her smile of welcome. ‘Well, you two look very snug in here.’

  There was a cosy, girls-together atmosphere that made him see with a sudden pang how much Ellen might miss evenings like this, with all those clever, like-minded chums she’d made in her previous life. She was London born and bred; the offer of a well-paid teaching job had brought her to Dudley and marrying him had kept her there. He was afraid that being a Black Country policeman’s wife, without the career she’d been trained for, didn’t offer much in the way of recompense. But he didn’t know what he could do about it.

  Kate went to fetch another cup. ‘And who’s this?’ asked Ellen, stretching out a hand towards the dog.

  ‘Tolly, short for Autolycus. Snapper up of unconsidered trifles, apparently,’ Reardon said apologetically, hoping he’d got it right.

  She laughed and held out her hand. Tolly needed no more invitation. She rubbed between his ears and when she resumed her place on the hearthrug, he sat beside her and put his head on her knee, gazing at her with ardent adoration in his eyes while she went on stroking him. After a while, soothed and with the edge taken off his exuberance for the time being by his walk, he settled to sleep in absolute bliss, waking up only to nudge her with his nose whenever her hand stopped stroking.

  ‘I’ve seen him before. Doesn’t he belong to that fellow who owns the bookshop? Adrian Murfitt?’ Kate asked. Taken aback slightly, Reardon realized that the papers left strewn across the table probably meant the women had been working in the cottage all day and had failed to hear the news about Murfitt. Kate, who hadn’t known him personally, but had been into the bookshop once or twice, was particularly shocked when he told them, as much at the thought of what was happening to quiet, uneventful Hinton as at the murder itself.

  ‘Do you think it has something to do with Pen Llewellyn’s death?’ she asked.

  ‘There appears to be some connection,’ he said cautiously, and since they were bound to hear of it, he told them of Huwie’s disappearance with Verity’s motor car and why he himself was angling for a trip to London, in an effort to trace him. He didn’t add his pessimistic view that nothing would come of it. ‘Miss Bannerman has left unexpectedly, too,’ he added.

  ‘Perhaps they’ve eloped,’ Kate said carelessly. ‘Oh, how crass of me! But those two! No, forget I said that.’

  ‘Kate, is there something I should know about them?’

  ‘No. What I mean is, I don’t know Huwie at all. I only met him that once, though he struck me as being … well, not the sort of person you would trust very far.’

  ‘And Miss Bannerman?’

  ‘Oh, Sadie. I didn’t know her much better, I must confess, but I always wondered what she was doing here. I know she was Pen’s secretary, but for someone like her to come and work here in Hinton … a bit odd, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s hardly the sort of job you’d choose to enhance your career prospects.’

  ‘The same thing, more or less, applies to Adrian Murfitt.’

  ‘Yes. And they both came here about the same time.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Not wanting to discuss the whys and wherefores of the case, which would be asking for it to be going round and round in his head all night, he slipped a hand inside his jacket and passed across to Ellen the poems Murfitt had been writing. ‘Tell me what you make of these.’ He watched her as she read them carefully, a little crease of concentration between her brows. She was wearing a jumper the colour of autumn leaves that he particularly liked her in. As she handed the papers to Kate, she caught him looking at her and smiled, looking more like herself than she had for weeks. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea for her to come here at that.

  ‘What do you think, Kate?’ she asked after a minute or two.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Not very good, are they?’

  ‘There are one or two that have something, but … oh well, one man’s meat, you know.’ She paused and pulled a face. ‘All right, since the poor man’s dead, it can’t hurt him if I say I don’t think they are … but it’s only my opinion.’

  ‘Mine, too, I’m afraid,’ Ellen agreed. ‘But as you say, poetry is very subjective. One thing I do think, though. Th
ere’s a lot of anger in them.’

  ‘He was angry about a lot of things that had happened to him,’ Reardon said. ‘I suppose it was one way of getting rid of it. It didn’t seem to help him like anyone very much.’

  ‘He liked his dog, though. What’s going to happen to poor old Tolly?’ asked Kate. Tolly pricked up his ears.

  ‘His nice warm kennel’s waiting for him.’

  ‘I don’t mean just now.’

  ‘There’s no future for him at the Fox, with Fred Parslowe around, that’s for sure.’ He explained the situation regarding Tolly and Fred.

  Ellen looked shocked. ‘Well, we can’t let that happen, can we?’ she said, looking at Reardon. ‘Not when we have Gypsy’s basket waiting at home. Which naturally had never even entered your head when you brought him here.’

  Gypsy was their mongrel puppy who’d been killed under the wheels of a milk float when she ran out into the road. And of course he hadn’t expected Ellen to think of taking Tolly on as a replacement. Of course not.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The enviable location of Bryn Glas did much to add to its attractiveness. Anna knew, however, those practical Tudor builders had almost certainly chosen the site for prosaic rather than romantic reasons, for the shelter the hill afforded, with its face to the light, rather than the magnificent outlook its principal windows commanded. Enough land surrounding the house for self-sufficiency in the days when it was a farm: a few rows of peas and beans, potatoes, a cow and a pig, perhaps, plus the extensive adjacent hilly acres where sheep could roam. A house like this, however, was nowadays expected to have something more than a one-time farmyard surrounding it. A garden would be required by any potential buyers, though would it now include the ambitious knot garden of Pen’s imagination? Wouldn’t keeping it clipped and in shape be too time-consuming to maintain, a Tudor conceit that wouldn’t be appreciated?

  ‘Are you sure you want to go on with the idea?’ she’d brought herself to ask Theo once more. Now that he’d had time to think it over he would almost certainly have said no, if the decision had been his alone, she was sure, but Ida was all for it and the now-absent Huwie had unexpectedly given the scheme his approval. They had both been aided and abetted in this by Claudia who waved away discussion, saying languidly that although she personally didn’t care one way or another, it would be an attractive feature when the house was put on the market.