Stiff News

by Catherine Aird

  He stood up abruptly, scraping his chair on the floor. ‘Come on, Crosby, let’s go and see what this lot got up to in the war.’

  The Regimental History of the Fearnshires was full of names familiar to the two policemen but attached to much junior ranks. The Judge figured as a mere Captain while Peter Markyate and Donald Tulloch had been Second Lieutenants. The account of the Tinchel written in the dry words of the professional military historian was in its way even more stirring than any amount of emotional purple prose would have been.

  At Wadi el Gebra, A Company of the 3rd Battalion of the Fearnshires, under the command of Major Lionel MacFarlane, had held out against heavy odds. Captain Calum Gillespie had led a secondary decoy action …

  ‘That’s the Judge,’ remarked Sloan.

  ‘Crafty, even then,’ opined Crosby.

  … while Lieutenant Walter Bryant, although severely wounded, had acted with extreme gallantry in defending the Company’s position.

  ‘Got it in the legs,’ said Crosby, who had been known to complain about the rigours of the beat.

  Second Lieutenant Peter Markyate had led the break-out of the encirclement.

  ‘You wouldn’t have thought he had it in him, would you?’ said Crosby.

  ‘That was then,’ said Sloan.

  And, ran the history, Second Lieutenant Hector Carruthers …

  ‘He must have been the husband of the woman who arrived the day before yesterday,’ said Sloan, reminding himself to have a word with her. She had obviously known the Brigadier, at least of old.

  … had distinguished himself in action. Other casualties had included Captain Roderick Forbes, wounded …

  ‘Where, I wonder,’ murmured Sloan, shutting the book, ‘was our Hamish MacIver at the time or Mrs McBeath’s husband?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Detective Constable Crosby helpfully.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When they, pale captives, creep to death

  Lionel Powell came away from the telephone at his home in suburban Luston shouting, ‘Julia! Julia! Where are you?’

  Julia winced. Noise didn’t help her headache. ‘Here,’ she called unsteadily.

  He made towards the direction whence the sound had come and found his wife sitting at the kitchen table nursing a cup of black coffee in both hands, her ample figure crammed untidily into a jumper and skirt.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. She looked as if she had slept in her clothes, although he knew she hadn’t.

  Lionel Powell tightened his lips. ‘I really don’t know what’s going on over at the Manor.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ she asked. ‘After all, your mother’s gone now.’

  ‘Of course it matters, my dear.’ Not for the first time, he experienced an involuntary pang of sympathy as he looked at his wife. She was a woman who somehow contrived to look raddled without having enjoyed – except now and then – the excesses of life.

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘But,’ he said aggrievedly, ‘I couldn’t get any sense out of them at all. They sounded completely at sixes and sevens…’

  ‘I expect they’re still worrying about that silly letter of your mother’s.’

  ‘And I only rang to say we were on our way over to collect that amulet thing of Mother’s and hand it over to Captain Markyate—’

  He was interrupted by his wife. ‘I said you should never have given it to the Manor.’

  Actually Julia had said that she thought the library at the Manor was the best place for anything so peculiar, but Lionel knew better than to remind her of this. Julia was always a great one for being wise after the event. ‘You never liked it,’ he pointed out, ‘and I must say neither did I.’

  ‘I still don’t like it,’ she said.

  ‘How was I to know that Mother had particularly wanted it given to Markyate?’ he demanded of the world at large.

  ‘Trust your mother,’ said Julia obscurely.

  ‘I just didn’t think it was somehow quite right to open her Letter of Intent until after the funeral, that’s all.’

  ‘Not decent,’ agreed Julia, spoiling the effect by saying, ‘What’s a Letter of Intent?’

  ‘A statement you leave for your executors with your will which isn’t actually part of it.’ Lionel was always at his best stating – and restating – unvarnished fact.

  Julia pushed some coffee in his direction. She frowned. ‘What’s the point of that?’

  ‘It’s how you tell them what you want doing with items too small to be mentioned individually in the will itself. Keepsakes and so forth.’

  Julia suddenly sat up straight. ‘Such as jewellery?’

  ‘No. Such as that wretched amulet,’ said Lionel sourly, ‘which I am told the police have taken away for further examination. Not that it matters too much in law what happens to it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s not the same as if it was in the will,’ explained her husband.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Then we’d have had to do everything she had wanted.’

  This was clearly a new concept to Julia. ‘You really mean the executors don’t have to do everything the Letter of Intent says?’

  ‘Yes. They don’t. Or more precisely,’ Lionel Powell enjoyed being precise, ‘the executors of the will cannot be challenged in law for not disposing of items in the Letter of Intent exactly as requested.’

  Julia suddenly looked quite shrewish. ‘That means that they can be asked about the things in the will proper? That’s if they don’t do the right thing by the dead person?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘But who would do that?’

  ‘I suppose theoretically anyone could,’ he said, ‘but in the ordinary way it would be the heirs who did the challenging if they weren’t happy with the way things had been handled.’

  Julia Powell replaced her coffee cup on the table. ‘Those heirs of the body female in the will?’

  ‘In this instance, yes.’ As he drained his coffee he was assailed by another unhappy thought. ‘Or by anyone who thought they should have been an heir and who wasn’t.’

  ‘Lionel,’ Julia said in a small voice, ‘had you thought…’

  ‘Yes,’ he said harshly. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot.’

  ‘She would have been capable of bigamy,’ said Julia. ‘Enjoyed it, I expect.’

  ‘My mother would have been capable of anything,’ he said feelingly. ‘Anything at all.’

  Julia Powell was not a notably intelligent woman but she was right up there with her husband when she said, ‘It would explain her leaving everything to her heirs of the body female, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘That would cut out any previous husband still living from whom she had not been divorced before she went through a ceremony of marriage with my father,’ said the only child of that latter union with accuracy, all feeling tightly suppressed.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said his helpmeet.

  * * *

  The last Will and Testament of Gertude Eleanor Murton Powell was something which Detective Inspector Sloan was also studying with care and attention.

  He and Detective Constable Crosby were both doing this with the assistance of young Mr Simon Puckle of Messrs Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, Solicitors and Notaries Public, of Berebury. Young Simon Puckle wasn’t actually young but so called to distinguish him from one of his uncles. They had met at the firm’s offices in the town at Sloan’s request.

  ‘It’s a very old will,’ said the solicitor disapprovingly. ‘Actually it’s one drawn up by my late grandfather … nothing wrong with it, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sloan, who remembered Simon’s grandfather well. Old Mr Puckle had been a solicitor of the old school, capable of striking a good deal more terror into any client caught in wrongdoing than the police would ever have dared to do.

  ‘We do like clients to update their wills more often than this,’ frowned the solicitor.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan. He
himself had been brought up on the principle that a man’s financial affairs should always be conducted as if he were going to live for ever and his family ones as if he were going to die tomorrow.

  ‘Wills,’ said the solicitor severely, ‘should be revised at least every three years.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Sloan, who actually wasn’t at all sure if this advice was for the benefit of client or lawyer.

  ‘Because that’s at least three new Finance Acts,’ said Simon Puckle.

  ‘Is it still valid though?’ asked Sloan pertinently.

  ‘Oh, yes, Inspector. It’s been perfectly properly drawn up and signed and attested.’ He held it between his fingers. ‘The only unusual thing about it is that we – the firm, that is – agreed to be joint executors and trustees with a man who had barely come of age at the time, but I understand from my grandfather’s notes that Mrs Powell was quite adamant about her son being appointed in spite of his extreme youth when the will was drawn up.’

  ‘And I gather, Mr Puckle, that the late Mrs Powell had a mind of her own.’ The legal profession and the police were obviously both of the opinion that it was a good thing that ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’

  ‘There is one advantage,’ said Simon Puckle cannily, ‘of it’s being such an old will…’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It is unlikely that there can be any valid suggestion that the testatrix was not mentally competent to make a will at the time she did.’

  Sloan inclined his head. ‘That is useful to know.’ At least, then, the deceased had been in full possession of her faculties when she had put her name to the document and not ‘Over the hills and far away.’ What he would dearly liked to have been quite sure about was whether the same could be said for when Gertie Powell had written her last letter to her son.

  ‘It can get a bit tricky as time goes by,’ admitted the solicitor. ‘Especially when the testatrix has been a patient in a nursing home for months – years, perhaps.’

  ‘I can see that it might,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘Moreover,’ complained the lawyer, ‘we find that these days some registered medical practitioners are not as willing as they once were to agree to be witnesses to wills.’

  ‘Really?’ Detective Inspector Sloan tried to sound suitably concerned at the man’s discovery that dog did indeed eat dog – or rather at the failure of one professional to get something out of another professional for nothing. Puckle should have known this by now. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘if you would outline the contents of the will for us…’

  ‘The late Gertrude Powell left everything of which she died possessed, save for some minor dispositions of a personal and sentimental nature, equally to all her heirs of the body female.’

  ‘And that means?’

  ‘To all the children to whom she had given birth,’ explained Simon Puckle succinctly. ‘And per stirpes – should they have predeceased their mother and had children, to those children.’

  ‘So Lionel Powell might have to share…’

  ‘If we should find there are or have been other children with living issue of other marriages.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So naturally after her death we started to make enquiries,’ said Simon Puckle sedately.

  ‘And?’

  ‘As far as we have been able to establish through the usual channels, Mrs Powell’s first marriage – that was to the late Second Lieutenant Donald Tulloch of the Fearnshires – was childless.’ He coughed. ‘We certainly have no evidence to the contrary.’

  ‘I see.’ Detective Inspector Sloan made a note.

  Simon Puckle hesitated. ‘The problems arise after that.’

  ‘What problems?’ asked Sloan. The only interest the police had was in whether any problems might have been solved – not created – by the death of an old lady. An old lady who had asserted that she had been murdered.

  ‘We have reason to think she entered into another marriage – quite possibly in 1942 or 1943 while she was still in Egypt … we know she stayed on in Alexandria after her first husband was killed in action – and though there is no evidence of this in our records, Lionel Powell has always believed it to be so.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan glanced down at his notebook. ‘Not the man by whom she had Lionel Powell, then?’

  Puckle shook his head. ‘No. That marriage – it is thought, her third – was later still.’ He coughed and said drily, ‘She gave the name of Smith when she married Hubert Powell, which has not proved particularly helpful when it has come to tracing her second marriage.’ He hesitated. ‘Both her son and ourselves as executors were hoping to find all the relevant details among her papers after her death and thus obviate a long search but…’

  Detective Constable Crosby uncoiled his length from the leather chair opposite the solicitor and said laconically, ‘But someone beat you all to it, didn’t they? They took her letters before Lionel got there.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The garlands wither on your brow

  ‘The fact that the deceased’s letters went missing just as soon as she died must mean,’ said Sloan, speaking as much to himself as to Detective Constable Crosby, ‘that – like it or not – at least some of the answers to all this carry-on must lie at the Manor.’

  Superintendent Leeyes wouldn’t like it, that was for sure. Crosby on the other hand did not even sound particularly interested when he said, ‘An inside job.’

  ‘It also lends weight to the probability of the deceased’s last letter to her son being genuine,’ said Sloan, thankful that at long last he had been able to achieve a few minutes back at his own desk in Berebury Police Station.

  ‘It is for real, sir,’ said Crosby, passing him a message sheet. ‘This has just come in. That handwriting woman…’

  ‘Graphologist is what she likes to be called,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘… graphologist, then, who we sent that copy over to yesterday with something else she’d written is prepared to swear to the letter being in the old lady’s handwriting.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan said he was glad to have something amounting to a fact in the case because as far as he knew they hadn’t got very many to date.

  ‘There’s the letters going missing from the deceased’s bedroom, sir,’ said Crosby. ‘Surely that’s evidence?’

  ‘A factor – no more.’

  ‘And there being no fingerprints on that ornament thing…’

  ‘I understand,’ said Sloan austerely, ‘that the technical term is artefact.’

  ‘It’s not natural,’ insisted Crosby, ‘not to have fingerprints on something that old.’

  ‘True. But all it might mean is that somebody just cleaned them off for hygiene’s sake.’

  ‘Then,’ said Crosby, undeterred in his theoretical endeavours, ‘there’s that funny old boy upstairs who threw a wobbly over someone doing up his ancient coat. That’s odd enough, isn’t it? Sounds as if a tramp would have turned it down. Then there’s the deceased…’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan fairly, ‘an allegation of murder is in itself evidence of something – if only of a mind deranged.’

  ‘We do have something else, sir,’ said the detective constable, warming to his theme.

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There’s those two doctors disagreeing with each other.’

  ‘Differing,’ Sloan corrected him. ‘That’s all doctors do. They just agree to differ.’

  Crosby looked quite blank. ‘Isn’t that the same as disagreeing?’

  ‘Not when it’s doctors,’ said Sloan ironically. ‘Then it’s called professional courtesy.’

  ‘Well, whatever,’ said Crosby, ‘one doctor wouldn’t certify that Maude Chalmers-Hyde had died naturally and the other doctor said she had.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Sloan nodded. Crosby had remembered something, then, from the mortuary.

  ‘Then next time round the first doctor goes and says Gertrude Powell died from natural
causes…’

  ‘And so does the second doctor,’ Sloan reminded him.

  ‘But the deceased says someone was going to kill her…’

  ‘… had killed her,’ Sloan corrected him, his mind going on to something else. ‘Does,’ he wondered aloud, ‘the fact that her son handed on to us that letter to him from her lend weight to the probability of its being genuine or are we supposed to think he’s a good boy and therefore not guilty of any malfeasance? That’s been done before…’

  ‘Couldn’t say, I’m sure, sir,’ responded the detective constable blithely. ‘Proper old fusspot, our little Lionel, isn’t he?’

  ‘Attention to detail,’ said Sloan, ‘is what makes a successful murderer – and a good police officer, Crosby, too. Remember that.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He cogitated for a moment and then said, ‘If Lionel Powell had hung on to that letter and not said a dicky bird to anyone no one would have been any the wiser, would they?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan turned over a new page in his notebook. ‘In theory, no. But that, Crosby, presupposes that no one apart from the writer of the letter and its recipient were aware of its contents.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘We know that Hazel Finch knew of its existence because she told us so.’

  ‘We know now.’

  ‘It would have been difficult for Lionel Powell to have denied receiving it and there was always the risk that we might have asked to be shown it.’

  A mulish look came over Crosby’s features. ‘Not if he hadn’t said anything,’ he muttered obstinately. ‘Then we’d never have known to start looking for there being something wrong.’

  ‘True,’ said Sloan equably, not displeased with Crosby’s line of reasoning. The constable always engaged gear before opening the throttle in a car but he didn’t always engage the mind before opening the mouth. ‘But there’s another possibility…’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We might be being meant to catch some of his chickens for him as they come home to roost,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Us? Catspaws?’ The constable considered the idea. It was clearly a new one to him.