Henrietta Who?

by Catherine Aird

  Henrietta turned towards the Minster. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

  Bill Thorpe turned an eye on the towering stone. “It’s more than lovely. Do you realize it could be useful to you?”

  “To me?”

  He nodded. “That chap in the photograph …”

  “My father,” responded Henrietta a little distantly.

  “He was—what did you say?—a sergeant in the East Calleshires?”

  “That’s right. What about it?”

  “He was killed, wasn’t he?”

  She flushed. “So I understand.”

  “Well, then …”

  “Well then what?”

  “Calleford’s their town, isn’t it?”

  Henrietta sighed. “Whose town?”

  “The East Calleshires,” explained Bill Thorpe patiently. “The Regiment. They’ve got their barracks here. Like the West Calleshires have theirs in Berebury.”

  “What if they have?”

  He pointed to the Minster. “If this is their home town then I think we might find their memorial in the Minster here, don’t you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said slowly. “He—my father—’ll be there, won’t he?”

  Bill Thorpe led the way towards the Minster gate. “We can soon see.”

  The East Calleshires did have their memorial in the Minster. Henrietta followed Bill Thorpe into the Minster and down the nave. She lagged behind slightly as if she did not want to be there, glancing occasionally at the memorials to eighteenth-century noblemen and nineteenth-century soldiers.

  An elderly verger led them to the East Calleshire memorial on the north wall of the north transept.

  “It catches the afternoon light just here, you know,” he said. “Nice piece of marble, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” said Bill Thorpe politely.

  “They couldn’t get no more like it,” the man said. “Not when they came to try. Still, they weren’t to know they were going to need a whole lot more less than twenty years later, were they?”

  Bill Thorpe nodded in agreement. “Indeed not. That knowledge was spared them.”

  “So that,” went on the man, “come 1945 they decided they would put those new names on these pillars that were there already. Quite a saving, really, though the money didn’t matter, as it happened.” He sighed. “Funny how often it works out like that, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” said Bill Thorpe.

  “The same crest did, too.” It was obvious that the man spent his days showing people around the Minster. His voice had a sort of hushed monotone suitable to the surroundings. “That’s a nice bit of work, though they tell me it’s tricky to dust. They don’t think of that sort of thing when they design a monument.”

  “I suppose not.”

  The verger hitched his gown over his shoulders. “You two come to look somebody up?”

  “Yes,” said Bill. “Yes, we have.”

  “Thought so. People never ask unless they particularly want to see someone they was related to.” He looked them up and down and said tersely, “First lot or second?”

  “Second.”

  He sucked his breath in through gaps in his teeth. “It’ll be easier to find them.”

  “‘An epitaph on an army of mercenaries,’” said Bill Thorpe sadly as the old man wandered off.

  Henrietta wasn’t listening.

  “Bill,” she tugged his sleeve urgently. “Look.”

  “Where?”

  She pointed. “There …”

  “It goes,” agreed Bill Thorpe slowly, “from Inkpen, T.H. to Jennings, C.R.”

  “There’s no one called Jenkins there at all,” whispered Henrietta.

  NINE

  Bill Thorpe shifted his weight from one foot to the other and considered the matter.

  “He should have been here, shouldn’t he?”

  “He was in the East Calleshires,” insisted Henrietta. “My mother always said he … I was told he was but there’s the photograph too.”

  “The man in the photograph was wearing their uniform.”

  “Exactly,” said Henrietta.

  “But that’s all.”

  “All?”

  “All you know for sure,” said Thorpe flatly.

  Henrietta turned a bewildered face back to the memorial. “Do you mean the man in the photograph wasn’t killed?”

  Bill ran his eye down the names. “He may have been killed and not called Jenkins.”

  “Or,” retorted Henrietta astringently, “I suppose he may have been called Jenkins and not been killed.”

  “That is the most probable explanation,” agreed Thorpe calmly.

  “How—how am I going to find out?”

  “Did you ever see your mother’s pension book?”

  “She didn’t cash her pension at the post office,” she said quickly. “She took it to the bank. She told me that. Then she used to cash a check.”

  “I see.”

  There was a long pause and then Henrietta said, “So that, whether or not he was my father, he wasn’t killed in the war, was he?”

  “Not if he was in the East Calleshires and was also called Jenkins,” agreed Bill Thorpe, pointing to the memorial. “Of course there is another possibility.”

  Henrietta sighed but said nothing.

  “He might not have been killed on active service,” went on Thorpe.

  “You mean he might have died a natural death?”

  “People do, you know,” said Thorpe mildly. “Even in wartime.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then, “Nothing seems to make sense any more.”

  “Everything has an explanation.”

  “This must sound very silly,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “but let me say what I know for certain. There is a photograph.”

  “The photograph is a fact,” acknowledged Bill Thorpe.

  “Which you have seen.”

  “Then the photograph is doubly a fact,” he murmured ironically.

  “There is a photograph of a man in the uniform of this regiment in the drawing room at home, and …”

  “And that,” said Bill Thorpe, “is all you know for certain.”

  She stared at him. “A man who I thought was my father.”

  “Ah, that’s different.”

  “Who I thought was called Jenkins.”

  “Who may or may not be called Jenkins.”

  “And who I thought was killed in the war.”

  Bill Thorpe pointed to the memorial again. “Don’t you see that he might be called Jenkins or he might have been killed in the war—but not both. The facts are mutually exclusive—unless he changed regiments halfway through or something out of the ordinary like that.”

  “Or died a natural death,” persisted the girl.

  “Or a very unnatural one,” retorted Thorpe.

  Henrietta waited.

  “Well,” said Thorpe defensively, “if he’d been shot as a spy or a deserter or something like that.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “We’re hardly likely to find his name here, are we?” Bill waved a hand which took in all the hallowed thirteenth-century stone about them.

  “That means,” decided Henrietta logically, “that you don’t think the man in the photograph is …” she hesitated, “or was my father.”

  “There is something wrong with the medals.”

  “There’s something wrong with everything so far,” rejoined Henrietta. “We’re collecting quite a bit of negative evidence.”

  “Just as useful as the other sort,” declared Thorpe.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said rather tartly. “At the moment the only thing we seem to be absolutely sure about is that there is a photograph of a sergeant in the East Calleshires which has been standing in Boundary Cottage ever since I can remember.”

  “The photograph is a fact,” agreed Bill Thorpe with undiminished amiability.

  “And so is the name of Jenkins not being on this
memorial.”

  “The evidence is before our very eyes, as the conjurors say.”

  “And the police say Grace Jenkins wasn’t my mother.”

  Bill Thorpe looked down at her affectionately. “I reckon that makes you utterly orphan, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Quite a good thing, really,” said Thorpe easily.

  Henrietta’s head came up with a jerk. “Why?”

  “I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to marry you.”

  She didn’t respond. “I’m worse than just orphan. I don’t even know who I am or who my parents were.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Matter?” Henrietta opened her eyes very wide.

  “Well, I can see it’s important with—say—Shire Oak Majestic. A bull’s got to have a good pedigree to be worth anything.”

  “I fail to see any connection,” said Henrietta icily.

  “I’m not in love with your ancestors.”

  The verger ambled up behind them. “Found what you were looking for, sir, on that memorial?”

  “What’s that? Oh, yes, thank you, verger,” said Thorpe. “We found what we were looking for all right.”

  “That’s good, sir. Good afternoon to you both.”

  Not unexpectedly, Mr. Felix Arbican or Messrs. Waind, Arbican & Waind, Solicitors, shared Henrietta’s view rather than Bill Thorpe’s on the importance of parentage. He heard her story out and then said, “Tricky.”

  “Yes,” agreed Henrietta politely. She regarded that as a gross understatement.

  “It raises several—er—legal points.”

  “Not only legal ones,” said Henrietta.

  “What’s that? Oh, yes, quite so. The accident, for instance.” Arbican made a gesture of sympathy. “I’m sorry. There are so many cars on the road these days.” He brought his hands up to form a pyramid under his chin. “She was walking, you say.”

  “She was.”

  “Then there should be less question of liability.”

  “There is no question of where the blame for the accident lies,” said Henrietta slowly. “Only the driver still has to be found.”

  “He didn’t stop?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nor report it to the police?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “That’s a great pity. If he had done, there would have been little more to do—little more from a professional point of view, that is, than to settle the question of responsibility with the insurance company, and agree damages.”

  Henrietta inclined her head in silence.

  “And they usually settle out of court.”

  Henrietta moistened her lips. “There is to be an inquest on Saturday morning.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Is Berebury too far for you to come?”

  “You want me to represent you? If your—er—mother was a client of mine at one time—and it seems very much as if she must have been, then I will certainly do that.”

  “The inspector told me she came to you once.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “You don’t recall her?”

  Arbican shook his head.

  Henrietta lapsed back in her chair in disappointment. “I was so hoping you would. I need someone who knew her before very badly.”

  “Quite so.” The solicitor coughed. “I think in these—er—somewhat unusual circumstances my advice would be that you should first establish if a legal adoption has taken place. That would put a different complexion on the whole affair. You say there are no papers in the house whatsoever?”

  “None. There was this burglary, you see.”

  Arbican nodded. “It doesn’t make matters easier.”

  “No.”

  “In the absence of any written evidence we could begin a search of the court adoption registers.”

  Henrietta looked up eagerly.

  “But it will necessarily be a slow business. There are about forty county courts, you see, and—er—several hundred magistrates’ courts.”

  “I see.”

  “A will,” said Arbican cautiously, “might clarify matters.”

  “In what way?”

  “It would perhaps refer to the relationship between you and Grace Jenkins. Whilst not being her—er—child of the body you could still stand in a legal relationship to her.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Have you thought that you could be a child of an earlier marriage of one of the two parties?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “If that were so then you must have been the child of one of them.”

  “Not Grace Jenkins,” reiterated Henrietta.

  “If you aren’t,” went on the solicitor, “and the fact of this in each case can be proved, then you could be a child of a marriage, the surviving partner of which subsequently married one of the two persons whom you had hitherto considered your parents.”

  She put her hands up to her head. “You’re going too quickly.”

  “That would entail a third marriage on someone’s part—but three marriages are not out of the place these days.”

  “It—it’s very complicated, isn’t it?”

  “The law,” said Arbican cheerfully, “is.”

  She hesitated. “Mr. Arbican, if I were illegitimate?”

  The fingers came up under his chin again while the solicitor pontificated. “The law is much kinder than it used to be, and if your—the person whom you thought to be your mother has made a will in your favor it is of little consequence.”

  “It isn’t that,” said Henrietta quickly. “Besides we—she had no money. I know that.”

  Arbican looked as if he was about to say that that was of no consequence either.

  “In any case,” went on Henrietta, “I wouldn’t want to claim anything I wasn’t entitled to, and if she wasn’t my mother, I don’t see how I can be.”

  “A will,” began Arbican, “would—”

  “She may not have made one,” countered Henrietta. “She wasn’t expecting to die.”

  “Everyone should make a will,” said the solicitor sententiously.

  While farmers lunch early, and clergy at exactly one fifteen, policemen on duty lunch not at all. Inspector Sloan and Constable Crosby found themselves back in the Berebury Police Station after two thirty with the canteen offering nothing more substantial than tea and sandwiches. Crosby laid the tray on Sloan’s desk.

  “It’s all they had left,” he said briefly.

  “Somerset House didn’t have anything either,” Sloan told him, pushing a message pad across the desk. “No record of any Grace Edith Wright marrying any Cyril Edgar Jenkins within five years of either side of when the girl thought they did.”

  Crosby took another sandwich and thought about this for the length of it. Then “Grace Jenkins must have had a birth certificate.”

  “Wright,” said Sloan automatically.

  Crosby, who thought Sloan had said “Right,” looked pleased and took another sandwich.

  “Though,” continued Sloan, “if she’s Wright, why bring Jenkins in at all, especially if she’s not married to him.”

  Crosby offered no opinion on this.

  “Moreover, where do you begin to look?”

  “Where, sir?” he echoed.

  “Where in time,” explained Sloan kindly. “Not where in space. It’ll all be in Somerset House. It’s a question of knowing where to look. The girl tells us Grace Jenkins was forty-five years old. The pathologist says she was fifty-five or thereabouts.”

  “Yes,” agreed Crosby helpfully.

  “And that’s not the only thing. The girl says she was married to one Jenkins, deceased, and her maiden name was Wright. Somerset House can’t trace the marriage and Dr. Dabbe thinks she was both unmarried and childless.”

  “More tea?” suggested Crosby constructively.

  “Thank you.” Sloan reached for his notebook. “We can’t very well expect
the General Register Officer to give us the birth certificate of someone whose age we don’t know and whose name we aren’t sure about. So, instead …”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You will start looking for a family called—what was it?—ah, yes: a family called Hocklington-Garwell. And a farm.”

  “A farm, sir?”

  “A Holly Tree Farm, Crosby.”

  “Somewhere in England, sir?”

  “Somewhere in Calleshire,” snapped Sloan.

  Crosby swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

  Sloan read through the notes of the interview with Mrs. Callows. “Then there’s the bus station. Grace Jenkins arrived there on Tuesday morning and left there on the seven five in the evening. See if you can find any lead on where she went in between.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you remember what it was that was unusual about her on Tuesday?”

  “She was killed?”

  “Try again, Constable,” dangerously.

  Crosby frowned. “She was dressed in her best.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It wasn’t her day for shopping in Berebury.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You could just say it wasn’t her day,” murmured Crosby, but fortunately Inspector Sloan didn’t hear him.

  Henrietta came out of the office of Waind, Arbican & Waind, and stood on the Calleford pavement. Bill Thorpe was a little way down the road and she waved. He turned and came towards her asking, “Any luck?”

  “None,” Henrietta said despondently. “He doesn’t remember her at all.”

  “What about the legal side?” He fell in step beside her. “I’ve found a tea shop down this lane.”

  “The legal side!” echoed Henrietta indignantly. “I’d no idea adoption was so easy. And there’s no central register of adoption either.” There was quite a catch in her voice as she said, “I could be anybody.”

  “We’ll have to get the vet to you after all. Turn left at this corner.”

  Her face lightened momentarily. “Strangles or spavin?”

  “To look at your back teeth,” said Bill Thorpe. He pushed open the door of the tea shop and led the way to the table. They were early and the place was not full. He chose the one in the window and they settled into chairs facing each other.