‘And you probably have a surname too. I ought to know in case people ask for you. Though I was here all those weeks and everyone always called you Ben – and nothing else.’
‘Baker. Derek Baker.’
She reached to shake his hand. ‘Hi, Derek.’ This time both smiles seemed genuine. ‘But how public do you want to be about this? Isn’t Ben a bit of a shibboleth. If I call you anything else I’ll be marked down as an outsider?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, Kate, it marks you as an insider.’
‘Sufficient of an insider to bum cuttings and advice about my infant garden? I had it completely reorganised. My great-aunt – you know how she gave me her house – wouldn’t recognise it. Nice paths. Seating area.’
He whistled. ‘That must have cost a bit. No problem with the plants, though. I’ll be splitting quite a lot of stuff this autumn.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Tell you what, let’s check through that in-tray now, so you’ll please her majesty, and you can tell me what you need tomorrow over half of mild. Oh, and we might talk a bit of shop too.’
Would the red light be flashing? God, how absurd to have your pulse-rate ruled by a tiny light.
Kate fumbled her keys into the locks, killed the alarm and headed for the answerphone. A message.
‘I’m sorry. I really am. But my wife’s ill. She phoned work – pulled me out of that meeting. Talk to you as soon as I can.’
No greeting. No farewell. No endearment to hold on to.
And, of course, no Graham.
Kate wandered blindly back to pick up the post and close the vestibule door. As an afterthought, she went back and bolted the front door. No need to leave it for Graham, who seemed to derive an extra pleasure from letting himself into her house. Presumably his wife’s checks on his private life didn’t extend to his key ring.
Come on: this is what you get when you have an affair with a married man. Except it hadn’t been like that with her and Robin. She poured herself a glass of wine and wandered into the garden. The plants were so tiny the place looked more like a pin-cushion than a garden, but everything would grow. Even the seeds she’d scattered between the new shrubs to give some green, some colour in the garden’s first season. At the far end, instead of the ancient shed and the hoard of buttons it had concealed, were a bench and table. She tipped her head back to absorb the evening sun. She and Robin had been police partners months before they became sexual ones. Partners, not DCI and sergeant, so there was never any hint of promotion politics. And Robin had left his wife before they so much as kissed. So they’d never had to be furtive. They’d never had it easy, and the circumstances surrounding Robin’s funeral had been especially hard to bear. But at least, ninety-nine per cent of the time, they could be open and frank about their love.
So was that what she and Graham shared? Love?
The phone!
She ran back to the house.
Lorraine from the Domestic Violence Unit. Did she fancy a game of tennis? She and Midge had found a third keen player, and needed a fourth.
Sit around hoping against hope that Graham might phone, or an evening with the girls? Come on, what sort of woman was she?
‘So long as there’s a balti afterwards,’ she said.
It was a good hard game, and an excellent meal with rather more lager than she should have had.
But there were no more messages on the answerphone, and no matter how much she despised herself for doing it, she cried herself to sleep.
Chapter Two
Kate was just boiling the kettle for the first office coffee of the day when Derek appeared. She flourished a second mug.
‘Why not?’ he asked, dumping his raincoat and flopping on to his chair. ‘By the way, the gaffer says there’s some punter being a pain down in Reception and will you deal with her?’
‘Punter? Here?’
Lloyd House was the West Midlands Police headquarters building, not, like Steelhouse Lane nick, a natural target for Joe Public.
‘That’s what she says. Don’t ask my why and how.’
‘Or even who?’ Not to mention the rest of the six honest serving men.
He shook his head, taking the coffee and staring into the mug. ‘No idea. She said there was no hurry – the gaffer, that is. Said you could let her cool her heels a bit.’
‘I love Lizzie’s idea of public relations,’ Kate said, replacing the file she’d been working on in the in-tray and picking up her notebook. ‘If she means it, of course. She’s just as likely to bollock me for keeping whoever it is waiting.’ She swigged the too-hot coffee. ‘Why the raincoat, Derek? They’re forecasting sun all day; twenty three degrees, no more than thirty minutes out in the sun without your SPF fifteen and pop your hay-fever pills.’;
‘I’d rather trust my instincts,’ Derek said, opening the Mail.
The middle-aged woman waiting in Reception raised Kate’s hackles immediately, but not, she hoped, too visibly. ‘Mrs Duncton?’
‘Oh,’ she said, making no effort to get up, though Kate knew from experience that the chairs were not designed to encourage sitting, ‘I expected someone – you know …’
Kate did know. Punters wanted avuncular men, not young women dressed with more regard for the weather than for sobriety. Punters wanted Sergeant George Dixon of Dock Green, not Sergeant Kate Power of Kings Heath.
Smiling politely and bending to shake hands, she introduced herself, adding, ‘Inspector King has asked me to speak to you. Would you like to come upstairs? Let’s get you a visitor’s pass. Oh, I need your first name, too.’
‘Maeve.’ She didn’t ask Kate to use it.
She couldn’t work out if the woman was nervous or plain clumsy: whatever she did with the clip fastening, the label slipped off either her suit jacket or the co-ordinating blouse. Mrs Duncton had dressed well to meet Sergeant Dixon. Leather bag, leather sandals. Discreet gold jewellery and some make-up.
The label fell to the floor again. At last Kate did the sensible thing and, picking it up, leaned forward herself to clip it on. ‘There,’ she smiled.
‘Are you sure it won’t tear my blouse?’ The woman peered at it, turning her mouth down at the corners and pulling her neck into four double-chins.
‘I’m sure it won’t.’ Kate crossed her fingers behind her back. With the other hand she summoned the lift. When one eventually arrived – how long could you keep small-talk going with a complete stranger – the doors opened to release her former boss, Superintendent Rod Neville, who nodded at her impersonally and strode off, the handsome personification of authority and busy-ness. It was clear whom Mrs Duncton would have preferred to talk to.
But punters didn’t get detective superintendents; they shouldn’t really have got a detective sergeant. Still, she’d got one now, and was entitled to some courtesy. A smile, at least, as Kate held back the lift door to usher her into a corridor and thence to a meeting room far too large for her immediate purpose. She sat Mrs Duncton at the corner of the conference table, and drew up a chair for herself. Then she pulled herself up short: Come on, Kate: what about a bit of PR from you? She offered tea or coffee: Mrs Duncton wanted neither.
‘It’s about my mother’s will,’ she said. ‘It’s a forgery.’
Taken aback by the sudden announcement, Kate asked foolishly, ‘In what sense?’
‘What do you mean, “in what sense?” Someone’s forged it. And not just someone. I know who and I know why.’
Kate looked at her. ‘So whom are you accusing, Mrs Duncton? And why do you allege he or she did it?’ She kept her voice as neutral as possible.
‘Max Cornfield. He was her handyman for years. And he did it to get his hands on her money.’
‘And your mother’s name was –?’
‘Sylvia Barr.’
‘And she lived –?’
Mrs Duncton gave an address in a very smart road in the smart suburb of Edgbaston.
‘When did she pass away?’
‘In June. And then we found this wil
l. And it’s a forgery. Here.’ Mrs Duncton reached inside her shopping bag for a pink card envelope folder. She extracted a single sheet of paper, which she laid with something of a flourish on the table.
The paper was a photocopy of a hand-written document, purporting to be the last will and testament of Sylvia Hermione Barr. It was signed in a different hand by Mrs Barr, and by two witnesses, neither of whom, for some reason, lived in the UK. One lived in Berlin, the other in Portugal. The will left everything Mrs Barr possessed to Max Cornfield.
‘Why do you think this is a forgery?’
‘It’s not her writing. It’s Max’s, I’d stake my life on it. I mean, look what she’s left him. Everything.’
Kate read again, more slowly. ‘And nothing, it seems, to anyone else. Apart from yourself, Mrs Duncton, did she have any family?’
‘My brother. Michael.’
‘Michael Barr.’
Mrs Duncton shifted slightly in her chair. ‘Michael Barton, actually.’
‘Son of a different marriage?’ Kate asked.
The shift was more obvious. ‘Not exactly.’
Kate said nothing. The pause deepened. Should she prompt her? Or wait? Sometimes a pause said more than words, and this might just be one of those pauses. She maintained her alert, listening posture, her head cocked slightly to one side, and waited.
‘You’ll be wanting his address,’ Mrs Duncton said. She gave one in Tamworth.
Kate wrote it down, repeating it.
‘And I don’t think I gave you mine.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ She dictated one in Four Oaks, a nice part of Sutton Coldfield.
‘Neither of you lives in Birmingham itself,’ Kate noted.
Mrs Duncton jerked back her head. ‘That’s what it’s like these days. People leave home. Live in different places. You’re not from round here, are you? London, is it? Somewhere in the south, anyway.’
Kate smiled. ‘I lived down there for a couple of years.’
‘Funny how you pick up accents, isn’t it?’
So should she go along with this digression? Why not? Give her some more conversational rope … ‘I never stayed in one place very long,’ Kate said. ‘Goodness knows what I shall sound like at the end of my life.’
‘My mother tried to make sure we didn’t have an accent. Birmingham. Well, it was in the papers the other day, wasn’t it, that people respect Scots but think that if you come from Birmingham you’re stupid. Not that you get a Birmingham accent if you come from Edgbaston. And we were privately educated, of course. Michael went off to boarding school somewhere, and I went to Edgbaston High School. Just five minutes down the road. I used to walk there.’
‘What did you do when you’d left school, Mrs Duncton?’ Had she left home then? And how often had she returned?
‘Oh, training college, that was what they called it in those days.’
‘So you’re a teacher. Goodness, I don’t envy you!’
Another of those fidgets. ‘Actually, I didn’t like it. Not all that much. No, I got my secretarial qualifications, and then I married and we had our family. I wasn’t one of these modern mothers, I stayed at home and raised them myself.’
Kate jotted. There was a lot of history being concealed here, wasn’t there? ‘What about your brother? Michael, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, he went off to university, of course.’
Was there an edge of resentment there? That the boy had been better treated, and thirty-odd years later it still rankled?
‘And what did he do then?’
‘He became a very successful man. A doctor. He’s retired now, of course.’
‘So does Dr Barr—’
‘Dr Barton. I told you.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry. When did he change his name?’
No fidget at all this time. But another jerk of the head. ‘That’s his business.’
Was it indeed? Kate jotted again. ‘Now, tell me about this Mr Cornfield. Was he your mother’s …’ She hoped the hesitation was both delicate and insinuating.
‘He called himself a handyman. Imagine, leaving everything to a handyman!’
Kate smiled: ‘I can imagine leaving a fortune to a good plumber!’
The joke fell flat.
‘No, he forged it. He must have forged it. She was proud of her family, proud of us. She wouldn’t leave it to a stranger. The will’s a forgery, I tell you.’ Her colour had come right up, a pulse going in her neck.
‘So how long had Mr Cornfield worked for her?’
‘What do you mean, how long?’
Oh, yes, there was something there, wasn’t there? ‘A few months? A few years?’
‘Yes, quite some time. Quite some time. But he was only a handyman.’
So what was the real problem? That Cornfield was merely a working man? Or had Cornfield and Mrs Barr been lovers? One way or another, he’d ousted the family in her affections. Clearly she’d have to talk to Cornfield. She looked at his address in the will. The Coach House, at the same address as the deceased. Well, that was a good start.
‘Have you taken any advice, Mrs Duncton?’
‘Advice?’
‘Legal advice. Talked to a solicitor, your mother’s solicitor—’
‘She didn’t have one. She hated the whole tribe, she said.’
‘What about you?’
‘I took it to a graphologist,’ Mrs Duncton said. ‘To get an expert opinion. Here it is.’ She produced another file, blue this time.
Kate opened it, and ran her eyes quickly down the first page of the report. Graphologist’s report this might be, but any use in a police investigation it was not. It wouldn’t even have been much use as part of a candidate selection procedure, not that she could see. It was full of florid assertions, unburdened by any concrete examples. That didn’t mean it was harmless. Could the writer really be secretive, mean and vicious-tongued? For all she knew the adjectives could have fitted Mrs Barr perfectly. But here was a nugget. ‘The writer is male.’
Kate tapped the folder. ‘May I keep this?’
‘Of course. And the will.’
‘You have the original? Our experts would need to see it.’
Mrs Duncton bit her lip. ‘It’s been lodged for probate already.’
‘No problem. There’s not much the police can’t get hold of if they need to see it.’ She smiled. ‘Tell me, was there much property involved?’
Mrs Duncton flushed again. ‘Oh yes, quite a bit. I mean, her house is on a prime site. And all the contents: she never threw anything away – probably sitting on a gold-mine. And that bastard thinks he’ll get the lot.’ She gathered up her bags and stood up. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, Sergeant. A man who’s capable of forging a helpless old lady’s will is quite capable of killing her.’
Not a bad exit line, and Kate was quite sure Mrs Duncton had meant it as such. She thought, on the whole, she’d let it be just that. She too got to her feet, and courteously opened the door for her. She could somehow see Mrs Duncton regaling Mr Duncton with her account of her morning, repeating her last words again and again for emphasis. She’d told the police her suspicions, hadn’t she? All of them. Yes. All of them. They’d have to act now, wouldn’t they?
And Kate rather supposed they would. Divesting Mrs Duncton of the visitor’s badge, she shook hands and politely saw her off. She’d get ten out of ten for manners, if not for her rank.
What remained to be seen, of course, was the mark she’d get for the case itself. Because she’d got a nasty suspicion that however little she’d taken to Mrs Duncton, she’d got an unavoidable investigation on her hands.
‘There’s something fishy going on, Gaffer,’ she told Lizzie. Could she trust Lizzie’s mood enough to ask her for a cup of what smelt like very good coffee?
‘Fishy enough for us to get involved? You’re sure?’
‘My hope is that there’s a perfectly simple explanation and it’ll take ten minutes’ conversation to sort everything out. But even
to my eye there’s no doubt that whoever signed the will didn’t write it. Someone ought to talk to him.’
‘You,’ Lizzie said. ‘You’ve nothing special on, after all.’
‘There was the job you got me to look at last night,’ Kate pointed out. ‘But I don’t think that’ll come to much.’
Lizzie looked ostentatiously at her watch. ‘Talk me through it at lunch-time. We’ll nip out for half a pint. Half-twelve, in the foyer. OK?’
It was hardly a question.
‘OK, Gaffer.’
One thing they’d have to discuss, of course, was whom she should work with. Derek Baker? No, he had enough on his plate for two, garnished by a fine dollop of stress. One thing was certain, it would be better to let Lizzie make any dispositions rather than provoke any tempests with her own suggestions.
Come on, Kate: what’s happened to your assertiveness?
She meandered into the loo. Graham hadn’t phoned. That was what had happened to her assertiveness. Crazy! Stupid! If you had to give marks out of ten for technical expertise in bed, if you had to give a grade for lover-like behaviour in the matter of flowers and gestures, he wasn’t even a very good lover. No man could be worth this.
Except he is. Love doesn’t come much more painful than this.
And there was an e-mail from him waiting for her when she switched on her computer. Since he was using official police channels, he used official police language. Would anyone be deceived?
Kate:
There are one or two matters I’d like to go over with you before the Simmons trial next week. Could you suggest a couple of convenient times?
Graham Harvey
The worst thing was that he might simply be suggesting precisely that. But at least they’d be in the same room; at least words could be exchanged. She’d better mention his request to Lizzie at lunch-time. And make sure she wasn’t grinning like a monkey with rictus at the time.
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