Murder At Wittenham Park

by R. W. Heber

  “Don’t waste my time, old cock. Down there’s what I want. Have to get rid of those lions, though. Nasty, dangerous animals. Frighten the kids.” He had returned and seated himself at a table, pulling a cheque-book and a flashy gold pen out of his inside pocket. “What’s your price? A million? All right, then, if you’re a bit short, say two.” He had flourished the cheque-book. “What’s a million between friends.”

  “Listen,” Gilroy managed to say, “that is not the land involved; and anyway, we don’t want houses.”

  “Homes!” Welch corrected him with an incisiveness that reminded Gilroy painfully of the Regimental Sergeant Major on parade, “not bloody houses. Two and half, then. And that’s my final offer.”

  “Mr. Welch,” Dee Dee had interrupted in her most glacial voice, “I don’t think you have quite understood. None of our land is for sale, least of all by the lake. We are looking for a co-developer for a golf course.”

  “All right, then,” Welch had replied in a resigned voice, “three million it is.” He laid the cheque-book on the table and unscrewed the top of the gold pen.

  “It absolutely is not all right,” Dee Dee had said. “Our land is not for sale.”

  “Thought he needed the lolly,” Welch had said, almost conversationally, then jerked his head towards Gilroy. “What does he do for a living then? Can’t spend his whole time grinding the faces of the poor, not these days.”

  “We have our own business,” Gilroy interjected.

  “Ah. Thought you might. Wouldn’t like to buy my Roller, would yer? Only thirty-one thousand miles, and not been clocked either. Only a fool clocks a Roller. I’ve seen a new model I rather fancy.”

  “He is not a car dealer,” Dee Dee had cut in.

  “No offence meant, lady.” Welch swung round. “Okay then. You’ve twisted my arm. Three and a half million.” He had squared up to Gilroy with all the amiability of a retired prize-fighter who had just decided to return to the ring. “Three and a half; and that’s my last word.”

  “No!” Dee Dee had burst out, exasperated at last. “No, no, no. If you can’t understand, you’d better go.”

  Welch had eventually left, with a very bad grace and a final remark that they had not forgiven him for.

  “Homes are what the people of this country want! And the sooner sods like you start getting them what they want, the better.” He had marched off down the wide stone steps, slammed into his apple-green Roller and accelerated away, scattering gravel onto the surrounding lawns.

  And now he was on the guest list for the weekend!

  “You must speak to that promoter man at once,” Dee Dee ordered. “What was his name?”

  “Wilkinson.”

  “Well, ask him what the hell is going on.”

  Gilroy departed to his office, holding the faxed guest list as if it were in flames and burning his hand. He returned fifteen minutes later and dropped heavily into the sofa.

  “Nothing we can do about it,” he announced. “Bloody man’s paid in full and threatens to sue if we cancel. Wilkinson got him on the blower. What’s worse, one of the others works for him.”

  “You’re joking!” Dee began to feel seriously alarmed.

  “’Fraid so.” Gilroy consulted the now crumpled fax. “There’s a couple called McMountdown. Welch must be bloody keen to do this deal. The McMountdown wife is his lawyer.”

  “All ready to draw up a contract, I suppose. Who are the others?”

  “McMountdown himself’s in Lloyds, and there’s another couple called Chancemain, friends of theirs from the same village.”

  “How very cosy!” Dee Dee said caustically. “It’ll be just like ‘Neighbours.’ And who else?”

  “Only Welch’s wife. Her name’s Adrienne.”

  “Buck, darling,” Dee Dee only called him Buck when she was furious, yet controlling herself, “we have been set up.” She felt like screaming and tearing her hair. Instead she was icy. “How the hell did you let it happen?”

  Mercifully for Gilroy, they were interrupted at this moment by the maid, Tracy, a girl of monstrous girth, but great good nature. In keeping with the times, she did not wear a uniform, only an apron over a bulging print dress. She held out a letter.

  “Registered, my lord.” She was aggrieved and sounded it, since this was the butler’s job. “He made me sign for it.”

  If their minds had not been distracted by the awfulness of the guest list, the Gilroys would have recognized this moment as being portentous. In uncannily correct Agatha Christie fashion, the afternoon post had arrived.

  “Could be a cheque for four million,” Gilroy suggested cheerfully, oblivious of the portents, “that would be Welch’s style. Trying to force our hands.”

  “I wouldn’t sell for twenty million!” Dee Dee snapped.

  “Twenty? You think…?” There was a sudden diminution in his son Edward’s landowning prospects.

  “Forget it. Get a grip.” Dee Dee had not devoted herself to saving Wittenham in order to be deprived of the social rewards just as they began to matter. A housing estate in full view of the house would mean selling up completely, as Welch had astutely realized. “Where would we hold Sophie’s coming-out dance? How could you dream of cheating her!”

  Easily, was the true answer, at least for twenty million, but Gilroy kept quiet and attacked the envelope, trying to slide his forefinger under the flap, then impatiently ripping it apart. The letter inside was on thick, pale-yellow paper from a London literary agency at an oddly residential address off the Fulham Road. He was instantly suspicious. It was the sort of address at which married Members of Parliament kept their girl-friends. As he read it he winced.

  “Oh Christ!” he said. “Now we are in the shit!”

  “Don’t be so mysterious. What does it say?” Dee Dee could hardly imagine a problem worse than having Welch as a house guest.

  Gilroy handed her the letter, adding vengefully, “It was your bright idea to use Agatha Christie. All I wanted was a perfectly straightforward murder weekend.”

  Dee Dee sat upright on the long sofa, every inch the “grande dame,” and gasped in turn. The letter began, “Dear Sir,” and she understood why her husband had winced. Even creditors used his title. Especially creditors. But this was a cross between a creditor and the bailiffs. This was the representatives of one ancient British institution getting tough with the representative of another. As she read it, Dee Dee realized that Mike Tyson’s manager would have insisted on “no contest” in the threatened fight, or, in football terms the result could only be “Agatha Christie (deceased) ten goals, Lord Gilroy of Wittenham nil.” What the letter stated, unequivocally, was that Agatha Christie’s literary executors could not agree to any use of material from her books, or of her characters or plots. They would appreciate Lord Gilroy’s confirmation that he would not make any such use.

  “Brilliant,” Dee Dee said savagely. “Blame me, that’s the easy way out. You’re supposed to be the brains of the outfit. What do we do?” She knew the answer, of course, but let Buck sweat it out for a few minutes. “We have eight paid-up guests. We have Welch’s lady lawyer ready to sue us if the toast is burnt. We have two Agatha Christie buffs. They all arrive tomorrow afternoon; and now we have no characters and no plot. What are you going to do?”

  All Gilroy could bring to mind was the classic military message: “The situation is desperate, but not serious.” That pretty well summed up their predicament.

  “We’ll have to work out another plot,” he suggested.

  “Great.” She gave him one of those looks which implied that with his intellect he ought to be a road sweeper. “I suppose I’ll have to do that. And I tell you what, Welch can be the first victim.”

  “Leaving him with nothing to do except harass me?” Gilroy did not often become indignant with his wife. She might be relatively penniless, but he loved her. However, this idea was carrying conjugal fidelity too far. “To hell with the actress,” he insisted, “I have to keep Welch out o
f my hair. He can be the murderer.”

  “When we have a story-line,” Dee Dee said, getting in the last word. “Damn Agatha Christie!”

  2

  THE NEXT day, while Buck and Dee Dee Gilroy were still struggling to eliminate Agatha Christie from their murder plot, some of their guests were involved in arguments that would have worried the noble lord even more than the prospect of being sued by the Queen of Crime’s executors.

  Imagination was not a gift with which the Creator had over-endowed Lord Gilroy. He had shuddered with horror when he first saw Welch’s apple-green Rolls-Royce defacing his driveway, because it was so obviously ghastly. But he would never have guessed at the cold-blooded conversation going on inside it on this sunny afternoon, as its owner drove down the motorway towards the leafy lanes of rural Oxfordshire and the unexploited acres of Wittenham Park.

  George Welch’s robust physical appearance owed a great deal to the breweries. Drinking as a young construction worker had given him a beer belly, which later dietary intrusions by his wife Adrienne had not greatly reduced. At forty-nine, his complexion had a ruddiness unconnected with a healthy open-air life, even though in the tweed jacket which he reckoned appropriate to an upper-class weekend he could have passed for a choleric farmer. But the impression other drivers gained, as the outrageous Roller swept past them, was of a fleshy-faced photofit of road rage, who would cheerfully carve anyone up if they dared overtake him. If Welch had been an actor he would have been in constant demand to play self-made bastards like himself.

  Seated beside him was a pretty blonde in her thirties who might have been assumed to be his wife, but was in fact his lawyer, Dulcie McMountdown. His wife, Adrienne, was behind in the deep white leather cushions of the back seat, together with Hamish McMountdown, making the most of the walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet and listening to stereo music, while the two in the front talked business.

  Dulcie was petite, with thick, short-cut blonde hair, a tip-tilted nose, a determined little chin, and a wide, generous mouth that had prompted Hamish to nickname her “frogface” when they were first married. Now that he was heavily into an affair with the wife of a neighbour she refused to be called “frogface” any more, just as she refused to let their terrier be mated with the neighbour’s bitch. A woman had to draw the line somewhere!

  In fact, if her philandering husband didn’t stop, she was going to draw that line in the divorce court, though she could hardly believe he could be serious over such a feather-brain as Loredana. Not that Hamish knew that she knew. He and Loredana both thought they were being blissfully clever and discreet and that neither of their spouses suspected a thing. Quite possibly Loredana’s husband, Trevor, didn’t. But for the moment Dulcie had other things on her mind. She was George Welch’s legal adviser and George was being difficult.

  Dulcie was a hundred and four pounds of bounce and energy, while the sleekly brushed thatch of blonde hair concealed an acute brain. Anybody who treated her as a bimbo would live to regret it, a point which had not yet occurred to Loredana. Now Welch was suddenly treating her as one. Why?

  “Is the bloody contract watertight?” Welch was asking. “If Gilroy signs, can he back out?”

  “There’s no cooling-off period, if that’s what you mean, George. It’s not like one of those time-share contracts the law forces us to offer.” Dulcie bridled. Was she likely to draw up a document that wasn’t enforceable the moment it was signed and witnessed?

  “And how’s the land marked out? Thought of that, have you?”

  “We have large-scale maps of the whole area. Plus photocopies.” What had got into George today? Normally he would trust her grasp of detail. “The real question,” she added grittily, “is how you’re going to talk Gilroy into agreeing.”

  “He needs the money, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s lost a lot on Lloyds.” Dulcie kept her comment brief. This was dangerous ground.

  “As who hasn’t.” Welch glanced sideways at her. “As who hasn’t, eh, my girl?”

  In the silence that followed, Dulcie was tempted to reply that since he had been fool enough to let her husband Hamish manage his Lloyds insurance commitments, he deserved to lose his shirt. But she held her tongue. And anyway, Hamish had only done the same as most Lloyds professionals, even if collectively they had created a catastrophe which had shattered thousands of people’s lives and was threatening now to bankrupt Welch himself.

  When the Lloyds insurance market had turned into an international can of worms, Hamish unquestionably ranked among the canners. He didn’t rank high, but he had been in there exploiting the weaknesses of an eighteenth-century organization that existed on mutual trust and which had become a British institution. Its top men always had become extremely rich. Even Hamish had made a modest pile out of Lloyds. But any City institution that depended on mutual trust was wide open these days. Unsurprisingly, the fraudsters had moved in.

  And yet, she thought, gaining time by swinging down the sun visor in front of her to inspect her make-up in its little mirror, and catching Hamish’s unhappy eye in it as she did so, she did not want him ruined. She was not vindictive. She wanted to kick him in the teeth, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing. And if George Welch sued him for fraud, which she was afraid he might, Hamish would be ruined. She was always pretty sure that he had never actually broken the law, not because he was clever, but because he’d never needed to.

  The Lloyds system was what her Australian cousins would have called a “beaut.” The managing agents like Hamish could hardly fail to get rich. Through them, wealthy individuals, known as “names,” pledged their assets to make money as insurers by joining underwriting syndicates. The agents collected a percentage on their “names” profits, but suffered no deduction on losses. It was an absolute beaut of a situation. Whether their advice was good or bad, they could not lose.

  It was highly attractive for the “names” too. All the professional work was done for them and they made their assets work twice, once as stocks or property or whatever they were, a second time through Lloyds. When Hamish was wooing potential “names,” he became quite ecstatic about it. With Welch he had needed to be. Anyone who persuaded George to part with money had to be convincing; and he had underwritten huge amounts.

  Poor old sod, Dulcie thought as she wielded her lipstick and tried to anticipate Welch’s next remark. “So proud of being one of the Perthshire McMountdowns, and what happened? He joined a gentleman’s club and discovered he actually had to work.”

  Two hundred years ago, fifty years ago, even thirty years ago, Lloyds was effectively a gentlemen’s financial club. And it was prudently run, even when accepting such bizarre risks as insuring Marlene Dietrich’s legs.

  In the rare event that claims were not covered by premium income, then the “names” had to pay up. So they took out “stop loss” policies to protect themselves against being wiped out. This was where some of the fraud began in the 1980s.

  “If what’s been going on ain’t fraud, I’d like to know what is,” Welch said, mirroring Dulcie’s thoughts.

  By the late 1970s the gentlemen had been ousted by, or themselves turned into, ambitious and greedy salesmen, who took on open-ended risks that their forbears would never have touched. Lloyds itself relaxed one crucial rule, namely that a person’s home could not be counted as an asset. With that barrier out of the way, the managing agents went down-market and courted people who could not really afford the risk. The lure of easy money was powerful. The downside featured very little in their expansive—and expensive—lunch-time briefings. The cut they made was never mentioned. It was not the sort of thing gentlemen discussed. Hamish was always skilful at implying this. Lloyds was still presented as an exclusive and profitable club.

  Tennis stars, authors, actors, army officers and widows were among those suckered into signing up. So were Buck Gilroy and George Welch. Gilroy could not afford it because Wittenham Park was his only major asset, George Welch because his capital was
tied up in his business. A further call from Lloyds for a few hundred thousand could wreck the lives of either of them.

  While Dulcie was wondering just how deep in the mire George had got himself, the man who had sweet-talked him into it was sneaking an early Scotch and soda in the back of the Roller, earnestly wishing that he were somewhere else. The wish was redoubled when he overheard Welch’s next comment.

  “Something bloody well has to be done by Monday, my girl.” Welch spoke roughly, but with intensity. Inviting Hamish along to this weekend was far from from being a gracious gesture. Whatever role he might have in the forthcoming “murder,” he had a far more important one in Welch’s plan. But Welch did not intend to spring it on him until escape was impossible.

  “Such as?”

  “Telling Lord Toffee-Nose as how the call what’s been posted off today is for the worst losses ever. Even if they ain’t. ‘Sign with me now, be safe on Monday,’ that’s the message.”

  “And just why should Hamish do that?”

  “Call it a favour to a client what’s suffered.”

  “You can’t blame Hamish for your losses,” Dulcie said. “You wanted to be on high-profit syndicates.”

  “Risky maybe, fraudulent never.”

  Fraud was close to the heart of it. A few Lloyds professionals turned out to have been charging for stop-loss insurance but not providing it.

  Court cases followed. American “names” refused to pay. Year after year brought more “calls.” All over Britain, country houses, racehorses and heirloom antiques were sold. For George Welch the only way to meet his obligations was to find more building land and then borrow both against its purchase and its future development. Naturally he blamed Hamish.

  “If you’re accusing my husband of fraud,” Dulcie said coldly, “you can tell him so yourself, not hide behind me.”

  “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” Welch backed off a little. At heart he was frightened of lawyers, even his own. “Who else have yer brought with her to make this flipping party swing? Hope I’m getting value for me money.”