Fault in the Structure mb-52

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Nearly twelve years. I went north to take up an appointment when I left College and did not take her with me. She was hardly an asset in university circles. She is a chorus girl.’

  ‘Nearly twelve years? I suppose you are certain it was your first wife who turned up again?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I insisted on a second meeting to make sure, although I hadn’t any doubt the first time. We arranged to meet in a pub out on the Bicester road where I thought there was little chance of running into anybody I knew.’

  ‘And you recognised her again?’

  ‘Oh, yes, there was no doubt it was Coralie. I was in my second year at university when I married her, but she hadn’t changed a bit. She made herself very charming in her uneducated, low-class way and said she was down on her luck and asked me what I was prepared to do about it.’

  ‘How long did you live with her?’

  ‘I’ve never lived with her. I had rooms in College when I married her, and I could hardly take her there.’

  ‘So the marriage was never consummated.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it was. We used to meet secretly at her mother’s place when she wasn’t on tour.’

  ‘But you said you’d never lived with her.’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you referred to our setting up an establishment. We never did.’

  ‘Was there a child?’

  ‘I don’t know. After I’d done a bit of private coaching I got this job at a northern university and after a time – I forget how long – Coralie and I ceased to correspond. It began with me. I stopped answering her letters. All she did was ask for money. I sent her what I could, but she kept on pestering to join me. By that time I knew what a fool I’d been to marry her. We had nothing whatever in common and the tone of her letters became vulgar and abusive in the extreme.’

  ‘She never attempted to seek you out and challenge you face to face to acknowledge her as your wife?’

  ‘It was soon obvious that such was not her aim. All she wanted was money and for a time I was glad enough to send it so long as she kept away from me. Then I changed my digs without leaving a forwarding address. I was living out of my College – all the staff and students up there do – and in my next letter I did not give her my new address. I kept my eyes open after that, thinking that she would put in an appearance and renew her demands, but she didn’t, and very soon I thought I had found out why. A friend, an undergraduate who was in my confidence, wrote to me and told me to go back at the first opportunity and study the grave-stones in the town cemetery.

  ‘I realised what he was telling me, so on my next vacation I went back. I searched among the graves until I found the one I was looking for, the grave of Coralie St Malo.’

  ‘She wasn’t using your name, then?’

  ‘She’d stuck to her stage name. She’d been a chorus girl, as I said, and I expect she thought St Malo sounded better than Lawrence. At any rate, there the grave was, and mighty relieved I was to see it. Meanwhile I’d fallen in love with Margaret and, as I thought, I was free to marry her. My uncle was pleased with the match. Margaret is a junior don at Abbesses College, in this his own University, so he knew her. Naturally he knew nothing of Coralie. At least I’d had the sense to keep her dark.’

  ‘So you assumed that the happy ending was in sight when you married for the second time.’

  ‘Wouldn’t anyone? And then, clean out of the blue, I ran into Coralie in the town market here at the beginning of the Long Vacation. I had the shock of my life, I can assure you. I must simply have stood and gazed at her. She said, “Well, dearie, have you come back to keep me in the style to which I am not accustomed? I know all about your second marriage, you rat.” I managed to gargle out something to the effect that I thought she was dead and that I’d seen her grave. She laughed in a very nasty way. “That was my poor mum’s grave,” she said. “Her stage name was the same as mine. Ever been had, you two-timing Casanova? Well, you’ve done for yourself now, haven’t you? I suppose you’re prepared to pay me to keep my trap shut? Wouldn’t do you or the lady don much good to be labelled as bloody bigamists, would it? All right, my greatest lover of all time, I want my first instalment and I want it soon.” ’

  ‘And you met her again at the pub on the Bicester road?’

  ‘Yes, I hoped I could persuade her to call off her vendetta. However, as I said, she made herself very pleasant at first, but she stuck to this outrageous demand for what she was pleased to call alimony, although there had never been any question of divorce. She mentioned her marriage lines and said that they were in a safe place, but that she could and would produce them at any moment if I refused to pay up. I was scared out of my wits because I knew she meant what she said, so, in despair, I gave in. You see, she could prove that when I married Margaret it really was bigamy. Well, all that was bad enough and now, on top of it, comes this charge of embezzlement. It’s untrue, but I simply don’t know how to refute it.’

  ‘All right, Lawrence. For the sake of your uncle and his position in this my old College, I am prepared to guarantee you a long-term loan of forty thousand pounds, which will clear your name for the time being. I shall then go into the matter with your auditors. Who are they, by the way?’

  ‘Lestrange, Collins and Dobbs.’

  ‘My cousin Harry? Well, that’s a bit of luck for you, anyway. Once the money is repaid, I can fix Harry and ask for his discretion, so that nothing need be made public. That isn’t for your sake, but for Sir Anthony’s and the Warden’s. A stink of this nature wouldn’t do either of them any good. I shall need you to sign an undertaking to repay the money, of course, and with reasonable interest.’

  ‘There’s been some mistake, some ghastly mistake, Lestrange. I’m going to get another firm of auditors on the job.’

  ‘You would be very unwise to do that. I have influence with Harry, but none with any other firm if you have a second audit carried out.’

  ‘Oh, well, if you can get your cousin to stall for a bit, I suppose that will help. I’m going on holiday the week after next with old Sir Anthony, so I shan’t be on hand for a bit.’

  ‘Yes, it might be as well to get him out of the way while we settle things up and put you in the clear.’

  ‘And I suppose you expect me to thank you into the bargain!’

  ‘Oh, hardly! I feel I know you better than that,’ said Sir Ferdinand, going towards the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  « ^ »

  A place of security in times of insecurity

  The Stone House just outside the village of Wandles Parva on the edge of the New Forest belonged wholly to the eighteenth century. All the rooms in it were spacious, high-ceilinged and airy. The most pleasant room of all, thought Sir Ferdinand, meeting his mother, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, at the conclusion of his visit to Wayneflete College, was the drawing-room.

  It had two doorways, one leading in from the hall, the other to an ante-room. Both doors were augmented by six plain panels: two, small and square, at the top of the door, four, rectangular and beautifully proportioned, below. Both doorways were topped by broken pediments evolved from an earlier style, that of Renaissance architecture.

  In the drawing-room, as in every room in the house with the exception of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, there were bookcases. These were low and long and placed on either side of the elegant fireplace in the drawing-room, taller and more sombre in the dining-room, and lining all the available wall-space in the library.

  The bedrooms were stocked with lighter matter; poetry, essays, humorous literature and novels for the most part. In the small study where Laura Gavin, Dame Beatrice’s secretary and close friend, carried out such duties as answering letters and typing from Dame Beatrice’s manuscripts, the books were on law and forensic medicine; and here, too, were volumes for general reference, encyclopaedias, atlases, motoring and yachting manuals, guide books, year books, dictionaries both English and foreign.

  Ferdinand was being given tea in t
he drawing-room and he had turned the conversation on to his recent visit to Wayneflete College. Having greeted him and announced that she did not care for tea, Laura Gavin, the secretary, had slipped away and left the mother and son together.

  ‘So did you guarantee the forty thousand pounds?’ Dame Beatrice enquired, at the end of her son’s narration.

  ‘No, mother,’ Sir Ferdinand replied. ‘A most unexpected thing has happened. Perhaps I should say that two unexpected things have happened. All that I’ve told you so far is, so to speak, stale news, so I’ll come to the reason for my being here. I need your advice.’

  ‘Intriguing.’

  ‘My profession has aggravated and extended what has always been a suspicious mind. However, my cousin Harry suffers no such disadvantage, so I want to know whether you think, when I come to enumerate them, that his unusual suspicions are justified; if you decide that they are, I’d like to know what you think I ought to do about them. Harry is neither doctor nor lawyer, but he has a great fund of commonsense.’

  ‘More and more intriguing! Would you take it amiss if I ventured upon a little wild guesswork?’

  ‘I know something about your kind of guesswork. It’s usually founded upon a brilliant series of deductions. Please go ahead.’

  ‘I can scarcely bear to wait for the full details which I trust you are about to supply, but my suggestion is that, since you have not needed to guarantee a replacement of the forty thousand pounds of embezzled money, old Sir Anthony must either have paid the debt out of his own pocket, or else he has died and the money has been repaid out of his estate. That is if I am correct in assuming that Mr Lawrence managed to become so much persona grata to the old gentleman as to be nominated as his heir.’

  ‘You must be clairvoyante, mother.’

  ‘That is not so flattering an observation as your previous attempt. It is true, then? Sir Anthony is dead?’

  ‘True as true can be.’

  ‘So what is the advice I have to give?’

  ‘Well, everything turns upon this suspicious mind to which I make claim and which gives me cause to think that Harry may be right, although I fail to see what anybody can do about it. The facts are these: a fortune, which was to come to this minor for whom Sir Anthony’s cousin and Lawrence himself were trustees, was left for the youth to enjoy at such time as he should come of age. No actual year was mentioned in the Will. I have seen a copy of the testator’s intentions and the words at such time as he shall come of age are plainly given. Well, of course, when the Will was made, the recognised date for a minor to come of age, unless otherwise stated, was on his or her twenty-first birthday.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I see. A comparatively recent change in the law could have made a difference of three years to the heir presumptive.’

  ‘Exactly. It is now recognised that youths and young women come of age at eighteen instead of at twenty-one. Old Sir Anthony’s cousin, the other trustee, had told Lawrence, it seems, that the testator expected his heir to inherit at the age of twenty-one, but the heir himself, not unnaturally, wanted the letter of the law to be observed, and confidently expected to come into his money as soon as he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. There was a legal wrangle and, owing to the wording of the Will, the trustees lost their appeal, although there is no doubt in my mind that their contention was right and that the testator had been thinking in terms of his son’s twenty-first birthday and not his eighteenth.’

  ‘If Lawrence was able to embezzle forty thousand pounds, the fortune must be a considerable one,’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Well, the youth claimed his legal rights, the auditors were called in and that is how Harry came to be mixed up in the business, for it was his firm which did the audit. Well, I don’t need to stress the result of the auditor’s findings. Instead of having three more years in which to make good the deficit or, as I think, make his arrangements to leave the country, Lawrence found himself in a most equivocal position.’

  ‘But what is Harry’s problem?’

  ‘Frankly, mother, Harry believes that old Sir Anthony was murdered.’

  ‘Evidence? Has Harry anything to go on?’

  ‘That’s the devil of it. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence he could offer. The death certificate was quite in order and Sir Anthony was duly buried, the chief mourner being his snuffling heir, Thaddeus E. Lawrence. There we stick. Harry wants me to carry the matter further, but how can I?’

  ‘What was the supposed cause of death?’

  ‘An unsuspected aneurysm blew up while he and Lawrence were on holiday.’

  ‘Unsuspected?’

  ‘Yes. The doctor later declared that, like so many of the wretched things, it was probably congenital, and that Sir Anthony either didn’t know of it or had never mentioned the possibility.’

  ‘What about the symptoms?’

  ‘He complained to Lawrence of not feeling well, but, until the symptoms of brain haemorrhage, prefaced by severe headache and vomiting, followed by a coma, appeared, no doctor was informed. By that time it was too late to do anything for the poor old boy and he died in an hour or two without coming out of the coma.’

  ‘So why does Harry think he was murdered?’

  ‘Chiefly because his death was such a fortunate thing for Lawrence; also because he thinks anybody else would have sent for a doctor as soon as the old man complained of feeling unwell. As it was, Lawrence decided to bring him home, and he died upon arrival. Has Harry any kind of a case, medically speaking? So far as I am concerned, although I agree with him over the matter, in law he has none.’

  ‘A mere motive for murder has never been sufficient to prove guilt, as you would be the first to admit. If the medical certificate is in order I cannot see that Harry’s suspicions can have any real justification. To show that they are justified he would need to prove that Sir Anthony had called for medical attention when he first complained of feeling ill, and that this had been denied him. Even then one would be faced with the most extreme difficulty in proving criminal negligence, I fear.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been at some pains to point out to Harry. The doubt in my own mind is whether there was any need for the aneurysm to have carried Sir Anthony off at all. Of course, he himself could not be questioned. By the time the doctor arrived, the patient was unconscious and died in coma, as I said. Is there anything which would look like a burst aneurysm but which would, in effect, be murder?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge and, in any case, a doctor who has issued a death certificate is not to be divorced at all easily from his findings. Who else was in the holiday lodging at the time?’

  ‘Nobody who would have reason for concern about the old man’s health. Sir Anthony and Lawrence had rented rooms in a small hotel on the Norfolk coast where they appear to have done no more than take short walks. They did not patronise the public lounge or the television room and no doctor saw Sir Anthony until he arrived home and was already comatose. Lawrence’s story is that as soon as Sir Anthony complained of feeling ill he bundled him into a car and took him home so that his own doctor could attend him. He says he telephoned the doctor, who came at once. He says he had no idea that the old man was at the point of death, or he would have called a doctor earlier, in spite of Sir Anthony’s protests.’

  ‘In spite of Sir Anthony’s protests?’

  ‘That is Lawrence’s story and there is nobody to challenge it unless you can think of some way in which Harry can take the thing further.’

  ‘Did Sir Anthony know of the embezzlement?’

  ‘Lawrence says not. He declares that he said nothing to Sir Anthony about it in order to spare him distress for as long as possible. Harry thinks differently. He contends that Lawrence sprang the bad news on the old man while they were on holiday, hoping that the shock would kill him.’

  ‘I doubt very much whether any such contention would hold water, although, medically speaking, it is sound enough. It does indicate, though, if it is true, that the presence of the aneurysm
was known to Lawrence. That would be a very serious matter, but one which would be difficult to prove.’

  ‘That is what I told Harry. It seems to me that all we could prove is certain negligence in that there was too much delay in calling for medical advice. Still, if Lawrence called a doctor as soon as he got the old man home – a thing which, no doubt, can be proved – I don’t think any jury would convict, even if the thing got as far as a trial, and I don’t believe it would. The strongest part of Harry’s argument is that Lawrence knew he was Sir Anthony’s heir and was in trouble over the embezzlement. Against that, though, is the fact (known not only to Lawrence and myself, but to the Warden of Wayneflete) that I had offered to guarantee the money before Sir Anthony died.’

  ‘Yes, it hardly seems necessary that Sir Anthony should have been murdered, does it? I think Harry had better forget the whole matter and reflect upon the saying that the Devil looks after his own.’

  ‘I’m sure you are right. Harry went to the length of having a word with the doctor, but only got a flea in his ear.’

  ‘As he might have expected.’

  ‘Yes. Well, now, mother, to other matters, although they are still concerned with Lawrence’s affairs. I want to trace this Coralie St Malo woman. I’d like to make quite sure that she isn’t dead, too. We can’t get Lawrence for Sir Anthony’s death, but if anything has happened to Lawrence’s first wife I think we might have a case. If only to satisfy Harry I’d like to look into things, for I believe, with him, that Lawrence is a thorough-going scoundrel.’

  ‘It has yet to be proved that Coralie St Malo was blackmailing Lawrence.’

  ‘That need not be his only reason for disposing of her. I’d tackle the job of ferreting around for her myself, but I’m tied up with R. versus Verinder at present and haven’t a spare moment after today, so I wish you would deputise for me. Will you?’

  ‘I had much rather not involve myself. These things are much better left to the police. Besides, ferreting around, as you call it, is not one of the things I do best, particularly when there is so very little to go on.’