A Going Concern

by Catherine Aird

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  A Going Concern

  A C. D. Sloan Mystery

  Catherine Aird

  For Louis and Joan

  with affection

  The chapter headings comprise

  ‘The Burial of the Linnet’

  by Mrs Ewing.

  ONE

  Found in the garden dead in his beauty –

  The undertakers had been very helpful.

  No, she thought immediately to herself, that wasn’t putting it anything like strongly enough. She promptly rephrased the sentiment in her mind.

  Messrs J. Morton and Sons, Funeral Furnishers, of Nethergate Street, Berebury, couldn’t in the circumstances – the rather special circumstances – possibly have done more than they had done.

  Even that, she felt on consideration, wasn’t quite stating the true position really fairly.

  Amelia, no dissembler, braced her shoulders and for the very first time she admitted the whole truth to herself: which was that without young Tod Morton’s help she wouldn’t even have known where to begin to arrange this particular funeral.

  And here she was, only a week after Tod Morton had first spoken to her, following her Great-Aunt Octavia’s coffin up the path towards the church of St Hilary in the small village of Great Primer in the county of Calleshire after the manner born.

  It was after the manor born, too, as it happened. Great-Aunt Octavia’s cortège had set off only a very short time before from her home – the Grange at Great Primer – which was near enough to the church for the tardiest worshipper: a quick walker might even have waited for the minute bell before starting out.

  Amelia had followed in the first car behind the hearse, which was a clear sign to everyone else there of her position.

  The police had not been at all happy about this, earnestly counselling a rather lower profile, but in this respect Amelia had been adamant. Chief mourner at the funeral she was and in the place of chief mourner at the funeral she would be.

  And now Tod Morton, wearing a black suit with striped trousers, black gloves and top hat in hand, was standing discreetly at her elbow the while and indicating to her what to do as if she had known him all her life instead of only seven days.

  The last seven days.

  It had all begun with a death.

  Funerals usually did, thought Amelia grimly, following Tod Morton’s unobtrusive directions with child-like obedience. As the coffin was carried through the lichgate she found it quite difficult to believe that this time last week she’d been in the middle of a carefree holiday abroad.

  In fact she had been vacationing in France when the strange message about her Great-Aunt Octavia’s death had reached her. She and three of her friends had been renting a gîte for the month of August. They’d all shared school and then college and a certain indefinable nostalgia had been keeping them together still for one last holiday before they were severally claimed by life and work.

  It had been Mary-Louise who had actually picked up the telephone receiver when the instrument gave its unfamiliar Gallic trill. And she had been expecting nothing more earth-shattering than her mother ringing from home with her examination results. Until that moment young Mary-Louise hadn’t thought that anything more earth-shattering existed than examination results.

  ‘It’s for you, Milly.’ Mary-Louise had looked quite distressed. ‘It’s an undertaker ringing from England.’

  In the space of time that it had taken Amelia to cross the room to the telephone she knew beyond doubt that it couldn’t have been her father who had died. If it had been, then Phoebe – dear Phoebe – would have told her so herself even if she had had to down tools and come out to Dordogne in person to do so. And yet, thought Amelia, very puzzled, it was only her stepmother Phoebe who had the telephone number of their holiday cottage near Montpazier.

  ‘Is that Miss Kennerley?’ Tod Morton had asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Amelia cautiously.

  ‘Dr Plantin told me how to get in touch with you.’

  Amelia had been even more reassured. Come hell or high water, Phoebe Plantin would never have delegated the breaking of really bad news to anyone else, but least of all to an unknown undertaker telephoning from another country. That, at least, confirmed her view that nothing terrible had happened to her father.

  ‘What about?’ she had said then to Tod Morton. He could hardly be ringing about her own mother’s grave. Nothing urgent happened to graves already twelve years old. She realized at once that her question must have sounded inept and ungrammatical and she had amended it before the voice at the other end could answer. Ironically, two weeks spent concentrating on the French language had already done something for her English. ‘Has somebody died?’

  ‘A Mrs Octavia Garamond of the Grange, Great Primer …’

  ‘My great-aunt …’ Amelia knitted her brow. ‘That is, I think that’s who she is.’

  ‘Yes, miss. That’s what Dr Phoebe said.’

  So her stepmother was ‘Dr Phoebe’ to Tod Morton as she was to half the population of the market town of Berebury.

  ‘I’m afraid, miss,’ he went on, ‘that she died last night.’

  ‘Well,’ said Amelia, ‘she was very old. She must have been.’ Mrs Octavia Garamond had been one of her dead mother’s aunts – or, to be more precise – the widow of her late mother’s uncle William.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ said Tod Morton. ‘So I understand …’

  ‘It’s very kind of you to have rung me.’ Amelia cast about in her mind for what to say next, and asked: ‘When is the funeral to be?’

  Her father, she decided, must be off on one of his famous field trips. If he had been at home in Calleshire he would undoubtedly have dealt with the matter himself, and perhaps even gone out into the country to the village of Great Primer for the funeral, snatching time from his desk of course with the greatest reluctance. After all, her father probably even remembered Great-Aunt Octavia from the old days when he – and she – had both been members of the extended Garamond family: it would have been easier for him anyway. Her father was an anthropologist and a great authority on extended families …

  ‘That’s really for you to say, miss,’ replied the voice at the other end of the telephone.

  ‘Me?’ Amelia very nearly said, ‘What am I to Hecuba, that I should weep for her?’ but she didn’t. This was no time for William Shakespeare and the Prince of Denmark. She said instead, rather lamely, ‘Why me?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Tod Morton, clearing his throat, ‘from the late Mrs Garamond’s solicitors, Messrs Puckle, Puckle, and Nunnery, that you are her executrix.’

  Amelia Kennerley very nearly said ‘Me?’ again from sheer surprise. She swallowed rapidly and said ‘Me and who else?’ instead, sounding, if she had known it, rather like the comedian Rob Wilton in his famous sketch about having to win the war single-handed.

  ‘Sole executrix,’ said the voice at the other end of the continental telephone.

  ‘What!… Oh, I’m sorry,’ Amelia apologized automatically, her mind in a total whirl: she thought she could just remember having seen her great-aunt. Only just, though. It must have been when she had been a very little girl indeed but it was true that she could conjure up in her mind’s eye an unfocused picture of a strange house where she had held on to her mother’s hand rather tightly while an unknown old lady (when you are small, all grown-ups are old) spoke to her. Amelia pulled herself together and said: ‘I mean, did she leave any instructions about her funeral?’

  She knew that people did this because her own mother had appa
rently said long before she died that she wanted to be buried by the bell tower at Almstone. She’d always liked the sound of church bells …

  ‘I understand from Mr Puckle – that’s Mr James Puckle – young Mr James, that is, not his uncle or grandfather – that Mrs Garamond had indicated in her testamentary dispositions a wish for burial …’

  Amelia’s mind had gone off at a complete tangent, trying to work out however many Puckles there must be in the firm. The old saw about thrift came into her mind: ‘Many a mickle makes a muckle …’ Could it be a case of many a client making a Puckle?

  Tod Morton was still speaking. ‘In the churchyard of St Hilary’s at Great Primer beside the graves of her husband and daughter.’

  It was beginning to come back to Amelia now. She could remember hearing that her late mother had had a cousin who had also died young. Dying young seemed to have been a characteristic of her mother’s family …

  ‘Well, then …’ she had said to Tod Morton.

  He coughed delicately. ‘I understand from Mr Puckle that as sole executrix the actual decision is yours. Executors and next-of-kin can over-rule the expressed wishes of the deceased.’

  ‘I shouldn’t dream of doing any such thing,’ rejoined Amelia crisply.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Tod Morton at once, ‘so I’ve spoken to the rector of Great Primer about having the Garamond family grave opened up.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And also made provisional arrangements for a funeral service to be held at St Hilary’s parish church at Great Primer on Friday next, that is, today week.’

  ‘Good,’ said Amelia again.

  ‘Subject to your approval.’

  ‘You have it,’ said Amelia. She still felt quite bemused. ‘Tell me, Mr … er …?’

  ‘Morton, miss,’ the voice had said helpfully. ‘Tod Morton.’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Morton, did Mr Puckle – Mr James Puckle – say … I mean, is it known … why Mrs Garamond made me her sole executrix?’ It seemed to Amelia such a very long time ago that her mother had presented her to someone who even then had seemed as old as the hills: and even that memory was more than a little uncertain now.

  Of one thing, though, she was sure. It had been before she, Amelia, had become known within the family as ‘poor Helena’s girl’.

  ‘I couldn’t say, miss, I’m sure,’ said Tod Morton. ‘All I know is that her doctor told the solicitors that Mrs Garamond had died and they told me.’

  Amelia Kennerley suppressed a strong desire to add ‘and they went and told the sexton and the sexton toll’d the bell’. Quotations from parodies of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ were even less appropriate to the situation than those from Hamlet.

  ‘And I told Mr Fournier … that’s Mr Edwin Fournier,’ continued Tod Morton, who not unnaturally had no means of knowing what was going through her mind.

  ‘Mr Fournier?’

  ‘He’s the parson out at Great Primer,’ replied Tod. ‘Sorry, miss, I didn’t quite catch what you said then.’

  A feeling akin to hysteria had almost overwhelmed Amelia. She struggled for the right words. She must say something that had no connection at all with Cock Robin. ‘What did Mr Fournier say?’

  There was a pause at the end of the continental telephone: a longer pause than she had expected. It couldn’t be surely – could it – that Tod Morton – he sounded quite young over the telephone – was also trying hard not to say:

  Who’ll bear the pall?

  We, said the wren,

  Both the cock and the hen,

  We’ll bear the pall?

  It wasn’t.

  When he did reply to her, Tod Morton seemed to be choosing his words with unusual care and he reported something quite unexpected. He said: ‘When I told Mr Fournier that old Mrs Garamond up at the Grange had died and could he take the funeral service …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He said to me, miss, that it was both his Christian duty and his legal duty under English canon law to conduct Mrs Garamond’s funeral in a seemly and Christian fashion with a service from the Prayer Book …’

  Even Amelia, inexperienced in these matters as she was, thought this an unusual reaction by a man in Holy Orders to the news of the death of one of his parishioners.

  ‘And,’ continued Tod, ‘he said seeing as he was therefore bound to do so, do it he would.’ The undertaker sniffed. ‘If you were to ask me, miss, it sounded to me a bit as if he was miffed about something and that he’d sort of rehearsed what he was going to say against the time, like.’

  Somewhere at the back of Amelia’s mind she thought she remembered that burying the dead was one of the Contrary Virtues; the Contrary Virtues had been a puzzle to her at Sunday School until she got it into her head at last that they were called ‘Contrary’ because they were the opposite of the Capital Sins and not just plain awkward like in ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’.

  ‘Mr Fournier …’ Tod Morton began a second time.

  No, she thought again, burying the dead wasn’t one of the Contrary Virtues after all. Surely Burying the Dead was one of the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy? Like Harbouring the Harbourless …

  ‘Mr Fournier did say …’ persisted the undertaker.

  And, thought Amelia, surely the rector couldn’t say he wouldn’t bury her great-aunt, could he? Anyway, evidently he hadn’t because Tod Morton was saying something else now …

  ‘Mr Fournier,’ Tod Morton had finally succeeded in getting her full attention, ‘did say to me that he was equally bound by canon law to allow someone else to take the burial service in his church if we wanted another clergyman to do so.’

  ‘And do we?’ enquired Amelia, beginning to wonder if perhaps after all the telephone call from England was an elaborate hoax: or even a student rag.

  ‘We might,’ responded Tod Morton frankly, ‘but the late Mrs Garamond didn’t.’

  ‘Oh?’ This conversation, decided Amelia, wasn’t anything to do with ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ after all. It was pure Alice in Wonderland, that’s what it was.

  The undertaker was still talking. ‘Mr Puckle told me that the late Mrs Garamond had asked specially in her instructions for Mr Fournier to take the funeral service.’

  ‘Did she, indeed?’ said Amelia. ‘And does that mean that she knew that the rector wouldn’t want to take it, then?’ Like Alice she was finding that everything was getting curiouser and curiouser.

  ‘I couldn’t say, miss, I’m sure.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we’ve provisionally fixed the funeral for today week, miss, like I said. If it’s all right with you, that is …’

  ‘It’s all right with me,’ Amelia Kennerley heard herself saying aloud, ‘but what about its being all right with everyone else?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the undertaker down the telephone line, ‘the late Mrs Garamond left precise instructions about that, too.’

  ‘Tell me …’ commanded Amelia. There was clearly a little more to all this than met the eye.

  ‘Very precise instructions,’ said Tod Morton, proceeding to spell them out to her.

  Her friend Mary-Louise had watched Amelia’s face as she had listened intently, thanked the speaker, and then replaced the telephone receiver with a very thoughtful expression indeed. ‘And what was all that about?’ she asked Amelia.

  ‘My great-aunt’s died.’

  Mary-Louise was the holiday party’s language specialist and immediately said: ‘“The young die sometimes, but the old always die.” That’s an old Breton proverb.’

  Amelia restored the telephone instrument to its resting place on the étagère, took a deep breath, and said: ‘Listen …’

  Mary-Louise gave her her full attention.

  ‘And,’ finished Amelia presently, ‘there’s a notice of her death and funeral to be inserted in the principal London newspapers and two Scottish ones as well as in the three Calleshire local papers …’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Mary-Louise, affecting a know
ledge-ability she didn’t really quite have yet.

  ‘And the Journal of the Courant Club,’ finished Amelia.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Courant Club.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Nor me, until this minute,’ said Amelia. ‘Apparently it’s the house magazine for present and past employees of an outfit that she and Uncle William used to work for in the war. Some big firm or other that had something to do with manufacturing dyestuffs.’ She pushed the caquetoire out of the sunlight and into the shaded part of the sitting room before sinking on to it. ‘I say, Mary-Louise, do you know that Great-Aunt Octavia had actually drafted the death notices for the newspapers herself and left them with her solicitor all ready prepared?’

  ‘Now that,’ said Mary-Louise respectfully, ‘is what I call really cool.’

  ‘Everything there, the undertaker said, except the actual date of death.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mary-Louise. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t know what date to put, would you, unless it was suicide …’ Her voice trailed away as she was struck by an uneasy thought. ‘It wasn’t, Amelia, was it?’

  ‘No,’ said Amelia. ‘I asked him. He said the date was blank.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mary-Louise gave a little sigh. ‘I’m glad about that.’

  ‘She also left,’ went on Amelia doggedly, ‘a list of those people who were to be asked back to the Grange at Great Primer after the funeral.’

  ‘Such as …’ That wasn’t very well put, decided Mary-Louise, but she knew what she meant.

  So, it seemed, did Amelia Kennerley.

  ‘Such as the police,’ said Amelia neutrally.

  TWO

  Oh, that a linnet should die in the spring!

  ‘Who, sir?’ asked Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan.

  ‘You, Sloan,’ barked Superintendent Leeyes.

  ‘Me, sir?’ said Sloan, who had just been summoned to his superior officer’s room at ‘F’ Division Headquarters in Berebury.

  ‘You heard me,’ growled the superintendent.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sloan hastily. So, probably, had half the police station. The detective inspector, known to his wife and family as Christopher Dennis and, for obvious reasons, as ‘Seedy’ to his friends and colleagues in the Calleshire Constabulary, was still mystified.