Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  “No!” The word was spat out unanimously—hardly surprisingly.

  “It’s obvious,” Mary appealed to me, “he was clearheaded when he spoke to me, and then he either took, or was helped to take,” she said meaningfully, “the pills later.”

  “Are you implying, Auntie Mary—” Nigel emphasised the word, probably to help me get the message that she was ancient and therefore out of her tiny mind—”that either Donald or myself administered a fatal dose of sleeping pills to Uncle?”

  “If the cap fits...” Mary said belligerently.

  “Did any of you notice the pills on his bedside table?” I asked firmly. I needed control here.

  A pause, while they all thought about their own best interests. “I saw his water glass and a flagon of water. I didn’t notice the pills. Did you, Donald?” Mary asked stiffly.

  Nigel instantly chimed in to say he hadn’t, either, and Donald claimed the moral high ground. “I did, as a matter of fact. I noticed the bottle was nearly empty. Thought I should mention it to William in case Great-Uncle Silas needed a new prescription.”

  Mary retorted with a stage gasp. A hand flew to her throat. (Nice one, I thought.) “And you didn’t think dear Uncle might have taken too many?”

  “I didn’t know how many pills dear Uncle had left from the night before,” Donald snapped back. Perhaps his birds never gave him this trouble. “And might I point out, Aunt Mary, that if he had already taken all those pills he wouldn’t have been compos mentis enough to talk to any of us.”

  “Unless one of you is lying,” Mary said brightly. “As I was the first there, it’s clearly not me.”

  Nigel retaliated. “How do we know you went at eight, not ten?”

  “Because I say so.” Mary stood up angrily, then must have realised this was hardly going to help, so she sat down again.

  Divide and rule, I thought. An excellent maxim. I had them all on the run now. Or did I?

  “Just a minute, Mr. Bone.” From the look on his face Donald was trying to metamorphose into Hercule Poirot. “Why on earth should any of us want to bump dear old Great-Uncle Silas off, even if we did each of us think we were his sole legatee? Not to put too fine a point on it, we’d be getting our money pretty soon anyway in the natural course of events. Moreover, even if he’d left his money among the three of us, we’d get a fair amount each.”

  The other two rapidly appreciated his point and nodded solemnly. “Quite a few million each, I imagine,” Nigel remarked hopefully.

  He was right. More than a few, in fact. The three of them smiled at me.

  Time for me to puncture their little balloon. I too can be a wicked old man. I sighed heavily. “Do you know how many times Mr. Carter has either changed his will or threatened to?”

  There was instant silence.

  “I see you do,” I continued. “Your point is answered. Need I say more?”

  Apparently not.

  “All right, then,” Nigel said at last, not nearly so belligerently, “what did the blasted will say? Which of us did he leave it to?”

  My big moment. Hollywood, here I come. I remembered the delightful letter Silas had written to me with the will. “You’re blasted well going to work for your money, Humphrey, since I shan’t be here to see you squander my money.” And then he’d told me why.

  Uproar had broken out again as they each debated the merits of their own case for sole inheritance.

  I cleared my throat then: “Silence,” I roared.

  Startled, the three of them instantly obeyed.

  “I am sorry to say,” I continued blandly, “that none of you is the sole beneficiary.”

  A silence of a different sort. “You mean we have to share it?” Donald asked warily.

  “In a way.”

  “What the devil does this will say, then?” Nigel was getting very edgy. What a shame, poor lad.

  “It’s a question of which will,” I answered.

  “What the hell do you mean?” Nigel roared. “You mean he wrote more than one? That’s no problem. The relevant one is the one with the later date. When did—”

  “Please!” I held up my hand, looking very grave indeed.

  “Which will?” Nigel’s voice went satisfactorily out of control. No pretensions to being artsy-craftsy now. “Were there three of them?”

  “No.”

  “How many, then?” Mary squeaked impatiently.

  “Seventeen.”

  Puzzlement at first, then:

  “Seventeen? You mean drafts?” Donald asked weakly.

  “No, Mr. Paxton. Seventeen wills all fully signed and witnessed and in order. All different in content.”

  Nigel broke the stunned silence. “The latest is the valid one, you fool. Which is it?”

  I was delighted to tell him. “All seventeen wills are dated the same day. All posted that day, too.”

  “But there must be a way of telling which was signed last. Weren’t you present? What the hell were you playing at?” Donald was growing squeaky, Nigel and Mary gaping like goldfish.

  “I was not present. All the signatures are valid; all of them, Mr. Carter informed me, were witnessed together by the same two people, a postman and the gardener. Just the signatures; they weren’t told what the documents were, I gather.” You bet they weren’t. They might have spoiled his fun.

  “But who are the beneficiaries?” Nigel yelped.

  “Each will leaves everything to a different person.”

  A nice moan from Mary now, but Nigel’s brain was meeting the challenge admirably. “You mean there are seventeen people all thinking they’re sole legatees?” A short laugh. “Of course the old chap was out of his mind. We can overthrow this easily if—” a glance at the other two—”we stick together.”

  Good. Another excellent line coming up for me to deliver. “Certainly, Mr. Carter. Provided, of course—”

  Instant attention now. “Provided what?” he snarled.

  “You have no objection to risking your inheritance. The will asserts that Mr. Silas Carter is writing this in full possession of his faculties—”

  “So what? That means nothing—”

  “And,” I continued happily, “that—to translate into lay terms—if anyone disputes this and tries to upset the will, they lose their inheritance.”

  “So what the hell happens now? It goes to court? They’ll see it’s nonsense...” Nigel suddenly saw the problem.

  “Indeed. Which will be the valid will out of the seventeen?” I took up the reins again. “In such cases, it is usually far more effective to present the court of probate with a way out of the dilemma.”

  “Which would be?” Mary asked eagerly.

  “All seventeen of you have to meet to agree to a solution, the most obvious of which is that the net estate be divided among all of you.”

  “But even we three never agree on anything,” Donald wailed.

  “Perhaps that is what Silas had in mind,” I murmured, although at a rough guess a million or so after tax would provide quite a few feathers to adorn their nests.

  The gruesome three looked at each other. “All right.” Nigel obviously spoke for all of them. “We’ll have to go along with it, I suppose. Who are the other fourteen lucky devils?”

  I paused. Now for my best line, which I flatter myself I then delivered with elegance and simplicity:

  “I don’t know.”

  They didn’t quite follow me at first. Then reality struck. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Donald yelled, in a tone he would never have used within a mile of one of his feathered friends.

  “Just that,” I replied. “All Mr. Carter sent me was a letter telling me the situation, and just one will. He did not tell me who the other beneficiaries were or where the relevant wills might be found.”

  A terrible silence now.

  “Then how do we know there were any more?” Mary was excelling herself. “It could be an elaborate joke. Dear Uncle was so fond of teasing people. He obviously just wrote t
he one will—to me. Of course.”

  Nigel glanced at Donald. “Who was the legatee in the will you hold, Bone?”

  Now, I don’t like being addressed as Bone, and it was therefore with particular pleasure that I put on my best boring-lawyer look of reproof. “I regret I am unable to say. It would be unethical until I have either gathered in the other wills or established whether this is indeed a practical joke.”

  Donald’s lip was trembling. “Then we don’t know—” he warbled.

  “Precisely.” I could not help it. I beamed. “None of you knows whether you have inherited a single bean. It could all, as you yourselves have pointed out, be Mr. Carter’s little joke.”

  * * * *

  After speaking to the family, it did not take long for me to realise how Silas Carter had met his end. At first I had remained inclined to the view that the gruesome threesome had conspired to bring about his death, but discarded this notion. Those three couldn’t agree on anything, much less to keep mum about murder. For I had no doubt at all that’s what it was. I decided to have one last look at the scene of this crime, and having visited Silas Carter’s bedroom with William at my heels, we then repaired to the living room.

  “Only those three knew about their presumed inheritance, of course,” I said casually. “He’d told them, but none of the others.” I paused. “Certainly not you, William.”

  He flushed. “He didn’t leave me one, the rotten skinflint.”

  “So that’s why you murdered him, didn’t you?”

  He went very white, and I quickly pressed Venus’s left breast for the whisky. The estate had been paying to keep the supply going. “Me?” he squeaked.

  “He told you he wasn’t leaving you a penny, and you knew he meant it, didn’t you? When you found out about those new wills, you saw your opportunity to get your revenge. If by bad luck the death was queried, there would be plenty of more likely suspects than yourself in the frame.”

  “How could I have known about those wills?”

  “Easily, William. He could get all those wills signed without you, but he couldn’t post them without you. You wheeled his chair, you saw them go into the box even if you didn’t put them in yourself. You probably stamped them, too. Envelopes with wills inside are a distinctive shape, and each one was addressed to a firm of lawyers. So after that you asked him what he was going to do for you, who’d looked after him so faithfully for all those years.”

  “That don’t mean I murdered him.”

  “Someone did, and it could only be you. The others all assumed the pills were in the water, and only you knew Silas never drank water at night, only whisky. You crushed them up in the whisky glass, removed it in the morning, and put traces of crushed pill in the water beaker.”

  “There’s no proof.” William watched me carefully. “You can’t go to the rozzers.”

  “No proof, but I could stir the waters, so to speak. With a murder investigation, probate on those wills could be held up for a long time.”

  “So what? Nothing coming to me.” He looked at me uncertainly when I did not comment. “What are you going to do, then?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, William.” And I did.

  * * * *

  Now here we sat two years later, enjoying our last glass of whisky together at Silas’s expense. My fees had added up nicely. It had taken nearly all this time before we had finally sorted out the truth, and then we had to hold the meeting for those of the seventeen who wished to attend, and negotiate the agreed division with those who didn’t. Two had died in the meantime, leaving further complications with their estates; three preferred not to attend the meeting, but the other twelve met at a most interesting and lively gathering. The Court of Probate duly agreed the resulting settlement, and at last I was free of my obligations to Mr. Carter.

  William is a rich man—and so am I—for William was a beneficiary of Silas’s will. Indirectly, that is. In fact, through me.

  There never was a seventeenth will, not a genuine one anyway. Silas only wrote sixteen. With so many other wills before them, all with the same text and signatures, save for the legatee’s name, how likely was the court to notice that one was forged? Or that, faced with such overwhelming evidence of the letter’s truth, the signature to that too was forged. Silas’s original letter had stated only sixteen wills. I myself added the seventeenth.

  I developed many useful skills during that period of work. I could hardly make the forged will out to myself, but in William I had seen the opportunity I was waiting for. We have gone fifty-fifty on the proceeds. Can I trust him to hand over my share? Of course. He isn’t going to risk his inheritance going up in smoke if the will is declared a forgery. Can he trust me not to blackmail him for more? Of course he can ... I’m a lawyer.

  I told you I was a wicked old man.

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  * * * *

  THE STOLEN CHILD

  Brian McGilloway

  The cry, when it came, was not what she had expected. For five months she had sat, night after night, her legs gathered beneath her on the sofa, the baby monitor resting on the arm of her chair, waiting, hoping to hear a cry. But, what she heard was not so much a cry as a ghost of a cry, like an echo without a source, its presence confirmed more by the flickering of the lights on the monitor than the tinny sound it produced. It was enough, certainly, to make her shiver involuntarily, to rub the goose-bumped skin of her arm with her palm. The second cry, though, was stronger, building in intensity then cutting short with a strangled yelp.

  Thoughts tumbling, Karen stumbled to the foot of our stairs, staring up at the nursery door, willing herself to go up. Gripping the banister rail with whitened knuckles, she attempted to lift her foot onto the first step, but her legs weakened and she staggered. The floor seemed to shift beneath her and she had to grab the other banister rail in order to lower herself onto the step. It was there that she was sitting, her face bleary with tears when I got in from work later.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I heard a baby crying. In the monitor. Will you check?” she urged. “I can’t go up; it might be Michael.”

  I took the stairs two at a time, opened the nursery door and flicked on the light, but the room was quiet. A teddy bear had fallen off the dresser and lay on the floor, face down. I picked it up, smelt the newness of its fur.

  “Is everything ok?” she called up, her mouth a tight white line.

  “Fine,” I muttered, closing the door behind me.

  She looked at me quizzically. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “I did hear it. He cried so hard. Why would he cry so hard?”

  I stared at her, but could think of nothing adequate to say.

  * * * *

  “Therewas a cry,” she said, one week later. “I know you don’t believe me but I did hear a child. And I don’t think it was Michael.”

  “I know it wasn’t Michael,” I replied.

  “Where did it come from?” She looked at me pleadingly.

  “There must be a simple reason for it,” I suggested. “I’ll find out.”

  I dug out the box for the baby monitor on which was a help line number.

  “Can I help you?” The voice was female, English, young.

  “We have your monitor system,” I explained. “My wife heard a baby cry in it.”

  A pause. “Is that not what the monitor is meant to do?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I understand,” I said, a little flustered. “It wasn’t our baby. She heard someone else’s baby crying through our monitor.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t your own child?”

  “Certain.”

  “It could be that someone else in your street has the same monitor as you. If they are operating on the same frequency, you’ll hear their baby and they’ll hear yours.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Can I help you with anything else today, sir?” English asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”


  * * * *

  One week later, Karen was sobbing when I came home, her arms gathered around her, her left hand at her mouth, her small teeth worrying her thumbnail.

  “He’s been crying all night,” she whispered. “It’s Michael. He needs me.”

  As I opened my mouth to speak, the monitor crackled with static. The lights registered the sound briefly, and subsided. But, when the crying started, there could be no doubt. It developed from a raw scream into coughing sobs, as if the child was tiring. But no one responded to its cries.