The Price of Butcher's Meat

by Reginald Hill

  “Stop there, Andy. Why has she suddenly become a maid? I thought the whole point was she was a patient.”

  “Sorry. Word association, that’s all.”

  He whistled the opening bars of the rugby song. Pascoe, an unreconstructed soccer fan, looked blank. So Dalziel sang the words. Pascoe, who was slightly prudish, looked blanker.

  Dalziel said, “First time I set eyes on Denham and Fester together, Ted whistled that song and old Fester nearly blew a gasket. I reckon when Ted first let Fester know he knew, he rounded it off by singing the song, and thereafter whenever he wanted to wind him up, he’d whistle the tune.”

  “That sounds as if it might be a motive for getting rid of Denham too, but as far as I know, he’s alive and well.”

  “Pete, what’s happened to that sharp mind of thine? It’s talking to Roote that’s done it. Always acted on you like salt on a slug.”

  “I don’t quite care for the slug image, but do put me straight, Andy.”

  “Last thing Teddy would want is for Daph to get Fester down the aisle. What might that do to his hopes of inheriting? So Ted would use the Indian maid to warn Fester he’d better keep his hands off Daph or else. Randy Daphne were likely doing the opposite, using the Indian maid to pressure Fester into laying his hands on her! Poor sod. Two blackmailers, neither of ’em he can satisfy without pissing off the other! Must have felt like they both had their hands on his bollocks and were pulling different ways!”

  “So you’re saying that, with Lady Denham gone, Feldenhammer would have no more need to worry about Ted?”

  “Well done, lad! Long time coming, but you get there in the end…”

  “…as the actress said to the very old bishop.”

  “By the cringe, stealing my lines now!”

  “You once told me, Andy, if it’s useful, use it, doesn’t matter how polluted the source. Miss Heywood!”

  Charley looked in their direction, then finished off what she was saying to Gordon Godley before walking slowly toward them. Pascoe, who knew how to manage these things, didn’t let her come all the way but took a few steps to meet her.

  “Miss Heywood,” he said. “I’d like to say that I’m sorry if I have appeared rather cavalier in the way I’ve dealt with you.”

  “Not cavalier. I’ve got you down more as a roundhead,” said Charley. “If you think it’s right, do it, and to hell with other people’s rights and feelings!”

  Pascoe ran his hand through his hair as if to check it hadn’t all been shaved off.

  “Perhaps, but more protestant than puritan, I hope. I certainly think it’s right now that I should apologize for listening in on your conversation with Mr. Godley without your consent.”

  “That’s nice. He’s here too, you know. You going to apologize to him as well?”

  “No,” said Pascoe. “If he’d been open with us from the start, the situation would not have arisen.”

  Then he grinned his famous boyish grin, which Dalziel claimed could charm warts off witches, and added, “I think in any case he may be inclined now to regard it as felix culpa, seeing that it seems to have brought him rather closer to yourself.”

  Charley felt herself blushing.

  “What is it with you people?” she demanded. “I thought this was a murder investigation you were running, not a dating agency!”

  “Sorry again. Yes, that was a rather archly cavalier sort of thing to say, wasn’t it?”

  He put on his rueful self-mocking look and Dalziel saw the girl stifle a smile.

  Then the entertainment was interrupted by the sound of a car. Not that it made much sound. It was a dove-gray Daimler with tinted glass that made it hard to see the inmates. The driver when he got out was perfectly cast. Tall, slim, wearing a dark suit that came close to being a uniform, an impression confirmed when he put on a peaked cap before going to the rear door and opening it.

  “You didn’t say the Queen were coming, Pete,” said Dalziel.

  The passenger’s legs appeared. Unless her majesty had taken to gray pinstripes, this was not going to be a royal visit.

  And now the man himself appeared and stood upright. But not very far upright. He was broad and squat and had a bushy black beard, trimmed square. And he came up to the chauffeur’s third rib.

  “It’s Gimli from The Lord of the Rings,” said Charley.

  At the same time, almost unnoticed, a slightly built young woman, wearing a heron gray business suit and carrying a black leather briefcase, slid out of the other passenger door.

  PC Scroggs once more advanced officiously and addressed the man. Words were exchanged, Scroggs looked chastened. He pointed toward the group in the garden, and the man marched toward them with a step that, though not actually ground shaking, gave the impression that if it wanted it could be.

  As he got near, he graveled out a single word.

  “Beard!”

  Pascoe’s susceptibility to sudden strange fancies was sometimes a plus in his profession, but just as often it could be a potentially fatal distraction. Now instead of concentrating on seeking a stratagem to identify the newcomer, who looked important enough to be a new home secretary (or even an old one—who the hell was home secretary anyway?), he found himself thinking that maybe this was one of those magical encounters when failure to utter the correct counter-word could bring disaster. He was still vacillating between bareface! and sporran! when the Fat Man stepped forward and said fulsomely, “Good to see you, Mr. Beard. We’ve been expecting you. I’m Dalziel, and this is Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe who is in charge of the inquiry.”

  Pascoe came back to earth. This was Lady Denham’s lawyer, Mr. Beard of Gray’s Inn Road, and Dalziel was keeping his promise of keeping his place, even though it meant being polite to a solicitor, quite something from a man who regarded Dick the Butcher’s proposal to kill all the lawyers after the revolution as an act of clemency.

  “I’m glad to meet you, sir,” said Pascoe, shaking hands. “And your colleague.”

  He glanced toward the woman. Beard didn’t.

  “Secretary. Sorry I didn’t get here earlier. Roadworks.”

  His voice was so deep and vibrant that it almost massaged you, thought Charley. Talk to this guy on the phone and you’d date him anytime, even though he did use the same dismissive tone for both secretary and roadworks.

  “Let’s step inside,” said Pascoe.

  As they set off he glanced round at Charley, made a rueful face, and murmured, “Sorry. The will. Hang about and we’ll talk later. If you can, that is. Thanks.”

  What had Dalziel called him? Old silver tongue. Well, she’d never been a pushover for a smooth talker. On the other hand, if his smooth talking was going to include some gobbets of info about the will, she certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance to hear that.

  She turned round to find Godley standing so close to her she took an involuntary step backward. At the same time he did a backward hop of twice the distance.

  She said, “Mr. Godley, if you’re going to make a habit of sneaking up on me, you’re really going to have to do something with that beard.”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  He looked so hangdog, she felt as guilty as if she’d given him a kick.

  Thinking only to make amends she said, “I was wondering—you must have heard all about Tom Parker’s plans for Sandytown from your sister…half sister…Doris. Right?”

  “Yes. Doris was very enthusiastic about the festival and everything.”

  “But you weren’t?”

  “Not really. Not my kind of thing. Don’t like a lot of people around. Don’t like a fuss. And with Doris being…well…being Miss Lee…”

  She saw what he was saying. He loved his half sister very much, but he didn’t do deception. Being around her professionally must have been a real trial.

  “So what made you change your mind?”

  Silly question. She knew the answer even as she asked it, but it was too late.

  He wouldn’t look a
t her but stared at the ground and gabbled something inaudibly.

  Inaudible was fine by her, so she didn’t say, “Pardon?” or “What?” but he took her silence as, “Sorry, I didn’t get that,” and straightened up and looked her in the eyes.

  “Because when you and Mr. and Mrs. Parker called at the mill and Mr. Parker said you were going to stay with them for a few days, I thought if I accepted his invitation I might get to see you again. That’s why I came.”

  “But that’s just…daft!” said Charley.

  “Yes, I agree,” he said instantly. “And I thought, the simplest way for me to see how daft it was would be to see you again and wonder why I’d bothered.”

  It was silly for a sensible adult woman who really didn’t fancy being fancied by a weirdo to feel disappointed, but Charley definitely felt a pang of something a lot like disappointment.

  “Good thinking,” she said heartily.

  “Not really. It doesn’t seem at all daft to me now,” he said. “In fact, it seems perfectly logical. And I’m sorry I thought even for a second you might have been in on that trick the police played to get me to talk. When I thought about it later, I knew I had to be wrong, and when I heard you stand up to the pair of them just now, I was certain. So there you go. What I feel about you might be hopeless, but it certainly isn’t daft. Now I’ve got to go.”

  “Where? Why?” she demanded.

  “To the Avalon. You were right, that girl Clara should be our main concern now.”

  He turned and walked swiftly away.

  She felt an impulse to shout after his retreating figure, to say they needed to talk more, but she was fearful that anything she said might be taken as encouragement. If he knew it was hopeless already, why risk changing that?

  As he climbed onto the bike, a familiar dusty old Defender drew up alongside the lawyer’s Daimler and the driver jumped out. He was a tall young man with broad shoulders and a smile to match as he strode across the lawn toward her.

  “Hi, Charley,” he said as soon as he got within distance. “Don’t be mad, but when we got your news, the only way to stop Dad coming straight over here to make sure you’re all right was for me to come, and I reckoned that was the lesser of two evils!”

  He was right. She should have felt mad, or at least hugely exasperated to know that the Headbanger still thought of her as a helpless child in need of protection.

  Instead, as her brother reached her and put his arms around her, she surprised herself even more than him by saying, “Oh, George!” and bursting into tears.

  7

  In the large drawing room, the late Sir Henry Denham looked down upon the newly entered quartet of men with a patrician indifference.

  Was the slight squint evidence of Bradley d’Aube’s determination to paint a true portrait, warts and all? wondered Pascoe. Or had he just got fed up with being patronized?

  The drawing room had been Mr. Beard’s choice. He had led them there without consultation. Presumably this was where he usually encountered Daphne Denham. Also he was clearly a man used to being in charge, even or perhaps especially in the company of policemen.

  He sat down on a huge sofa. His secretary placed the briefcase beside him as an unambiguous signal that he intended single occupancy, then she sat down at a small ormolu table by the wall near the big bureau, pad and pencil at the ready.

  Pascoe and Dalziel and Wield rearranged three armchairs so they centered on the lawyer and took their seats with a synchronicity worthy of Busby Berkeley.

  Beard said, “I take it, Mr. Pascoe, that you do not yet have the perpetrator of this monstrous crime in custody?”

  “Afraid not,” said Pascoe.

  Beard nodded as if this came as no surprise.

  “And you have not seen a copy of Lady Denham’s will?”

  “No.” Else we wouldn’t be wasting time sitting here with you, thought Pascoe, giving Dalziel a quick glower to stop him saying it out loud.

  “I see,” said Beard, not sounding surprised, but sounding as if he might be if he let himself. “In that case, assuming that you regard all of those who might reasonably expect to profit from my client’s will as possible suspects, I think I am justified in revealing its contents to you in advance of the beneficiaries.”

  Dalziel scratched the folds of double chin with the baffled air of one who couldn’t see how the fuck the lawyer should imagine he’d got any choice in the matter even if he did look like a self-portrait of Toulouse-Lautrec.

  “That would be most helpful,” murmured Pascoe.

  Mr. Beard unlocked his briefcase and extracted a folder that looked as if it were made of vellum. Out of this he took a document.

  He proclaimed, “I have in my hand what is, presumably, the last will and testament of Lady Daphne Denham.”

  “Presumably?” said Pascoe. “Any reason to think there might be a later one?”

  Beard sighed like a French horn and said, “No specific reason, else I would have mentioned it. But in her latter years Lady Denham had got into the habit of writing wills. It is not uncommon. Some aging people solve crosswords, some do cross-stitch, a few take to the composition of haikus. But a large number devote themselves to the writing and revising of wills. Basically, size does not matter. As long as there is portable property of any nature and any quantity, the habitual will writer gains hours of pleasure from distributing and redistributing it. But where the estate is, as in this case, substantial, there is the additional element of exercising real power.”

  “So how often did Lady Denham revise her will?” asked Pascoe.

  “Four times this year that I know of,” said Beard. “By which I mean, four times when her purposed modifications were major enough to require my professional assistance. I suspect, nay I am sure, that there have been frequent minor changes, or even major ones that did not stand the test of time and bring her to the stage where she consulted me. Such documents of course would have no status unless properly signed and witnessed. So, as I say, this, to the best of my knowledge, is the last will and testament of Lady Denham. It is a document of considerable detail, and commensurate length. Do you wish to hear it all?”

  Dalziel let out a sighing groan, or a groaning sigh, the kind of sound that might well up from the soul of a tone-deaf man who has just realized the second act of Götterdämmerung is not the last.

  Pascoe said, “I think you might spare us the fine detail, Mr. Beard. The principal bequests are naturally what I am most interested in.”

  “As you wish. At what level would your definition of principal begin?”

  Another sound from Dalziel, this one more ursine than human.

  Hastily Pascoe said, “Start at the top and work your way down.”

  “That would in fact mean starting at the end,” said Mr. Beard with distaste. “But if you insist. ‘To my nephew by marriage, Sir Edward Denham of Denham Park in the county of Yorkshire, all the residue of my estate real and personal…’ You see the problem, Chief Inspector? Without the details of the other bequests, the term is meaningless…”

  “I’m sure you’ve made an estimate,” said Pascoe. “We won’t hold you to it.”

  “It isn’t easy, property and the market being constantly in flux. I would say at least ten million. In fact, it could be as much as—”

  “Ten million will suffice,” said Pascoe. “Go on.”

  He went on. Esther Denham got a million and all her aunt’s jewelry except for the single item Clara Beresford was invited to choose to accompany her five thousand.

  “Five thousand,” interrupted Pascoe. “Not five hundred thousand?”

  “No, five thousand,” said Beard.

  “Not a lot, considering. By comparison, I mean.”

  “It is not a lawyer’s duty to consider, Chief Inspector. Nor to compare. I will say that this was typical of the changes Lady Denham made in her will from time to time. The principal beneficiaries tended to remain the same, but the pecking order varied considerably. There have been ti
mes in the last twelve months when Miss Brereton was in line to inherit the hall and a couple of million beside. Presumably when my client prepared this will, she felt she had reason to feel ill disposed to her cousin. Had she survived another week or so, no doubt it would have changed.”

  Pascoe said, “Would these beneficiaries know of the changes Lady Denham made from time to time?”

  “I don’t think she made a public announcement, but I do not doubt she made her dispositions known to those most nearly concerned.”

  This would explain Ted Denham’s confidence that the hall and the bulk of the estate were coming his way, thought Pascoe. But why was he rifling through the bureau in the drawing room? Looking for the copy of the will, perhaps? But what need, if he knew its contents? And in any case Beard would be in possession of the original.

  Mysteries—but they were what kept him in gainful employment!

  “May I proceed?” said Beard, bringing him back to the present.

  “Please do.”

  “The other substantial beneficiary is Mr. Alan Hollis, who gets the freehold of the Hope and Anchor.”

  “The pub, eh? Worth killing for,” said Dalziel. “Looks a tidy little business to me.”

  “Indeed it is, as I can testify. I always stay there on my visits to Sandytown.”

  “Oh aye? Had you down as more the Brereton Manor type,” said Dalziel.

  “I have been coming here for many years now, and the hotel, of course, has only just opened,” said Beard. “In any case, I prefer the simple life.”

  “So what do you do when the pub’s booked up?” said the Fat Man.

  This sounded like irrelevant chitchat, but years of watching the Fat Man’s apparently aimless wanderings bring him to some longed-for shore kept Pascoe quiet.

  “The two letting rooms at the Hope and Anchor are used solely by myself and Miss Gay or any other visitors stipulated by my late client. I am sure Lady Denham made sure Mr. Alan Hollis did not lose by the arrangement, and in any case his great expectations must have made him more than willing to oblige his patroness.”