Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  The front door was open and a figure stood on the steps. As soon as the car stopped, Arthur jumped out, ran round, flung open the door of the car and then dashed straight up to the man on the steps as if they were both expected to welcome her to the house. Hannie got out of the car, bewildered, and walked up to join them. Seeming to ignore Arthur, who had just whispered something in his ear, the elderly man took her courteously into the house. In the silence Hannie heard Arthur start the car and drive away. As she walked over the marble floor of the hall, under huge ceilings, she felt a peculiar tingle in the soles of her purple leather boots. She followed the servant stolidly into the empty drawing room, where he left her. The wooden floor was well polished. A great spotted gilt mirror hung over an ornate marble fireplace and lamps stood on low tables. At the end of the room two huge bow windows looked out on the bay. Hannie stood staring into the darkness, just able to make out the glitter of the water as the moon wove in and out of the clouds. Once upon a time, she thought, some old Corrington, or the like, had been able to stand here in the early morning watching his slaves loading his sugar or his cotton aboard schooners bound for Liverpool. What did the owners see today? Holiday craft, tourists with dark glasses and cameras, flowered shirts, big hats, buying souvenirs from the shops around the harbour. Or did they, she wondered, look out through binoculars to the left, towards the white shores of the tempting little island of Beauregard?

  Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour passed. Hannie, guessing that the old trick of making the subject wait was being played, sat down and relaxed, making her mind a blank and letting her muscles go as limp as possible. The man or woman who makes the other wait, whether in a drawing room or a prison cell, gains control. The counter-move was to relax and make the time work for you. When the manservant came back into the room, he thought she was asleep and coughed politely. ‘What’s your name?’ she said immediately.

  ‘Robert, madam,’ he replied. ‘Mrs Corrington apologizes for the delay and says she will be with you shortly.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Hannie and waited another five minutes.

  Finally, a party of three people came into the room. ‘So sorry,’ said Julie Corrington, in her high, soft voice. ‘Sorry to have left you by yourself for so long.’ Two men were helping her into the room. The one with his arm round her waist was surely her stepson, Victor. He was tall, overweight, and pale. The man on the other side, holding her upper arm, was shorter, a calm-faced, square-jawed man, with gold spectacles. He had brown hair and his eyes, when he glanced at Hannie, were cold, intelligent, and, she decided, far from sentimental.

  But it was Julie Corrington, small, dark and heavily made-up, especially round her very blue eyes, who riveted Hannie’s attention. She wore a long, dark red dress and as the two men assisted her to a brocade sofa, Hannie saw she was shod in very small, high-heeled soft cream shoes. Now she leaned against the corner of the sofa, one white arm ending in a white hand covered in rings extended along the edge. ‘I’m pleased you decided to visit me, Mrs Bennett. Not before time. But luckily you’re here now. Let me introduce my son, Victor—’ and she indicated the big man standing by the sofa. ‘And this is my business adviser, Mr Brown.’ The calm man in gold glasses was sitting between herself and Hannie. She turned to her son. ‘Do sit down, Victor, dear. There’s no need to hover. Mr Brown will pour us all a drink, I’m sure. What would you like?’ she asked Hannie.

  ‘Some whisky,’ Hannie said vaguely. ‘Just a small one.’

  ‘With ginger—soda?’ Mr Brown said, from the drinks table near the wall.

  ‘Er—ginger,’ Hannie said. She decided to be as confused as possible since her only way of robbing the house was to be in it overnight. She needed to be disarming enough to be invited to stay. In the meanwhile she understood why Julie Corrington, small and soft-voiced, had arrested her attention—she was the same age, and had the same style as her mother, even down to the little, useless feet. Julie Corrington was her mother, manipulating, disguising power by the appearance of weakness. But here it was more frightening—the victims weren’t just her own family. Hannie suddenly imagined the soft beringed hands torching the Fevriers’ wooden house on the island, burning them up as their pigs squealed from the stone pen; saw Regius and the others arriving the next day to a pile of smoking ruins, and heard Julie Corrington ask softly, ‘Well, my dear, what have you come to tell me?’ Hannie, glancing at her and for a moment into the cold eyes of Mr Brown thought, ‘Better get this one right or you could wind up in the bay with heavy weights tied to your feet.’

  As though hardly knowing where to begin, she pointed to her face, where a bruise had developed. ‘See this? I can hardly believe it myself, but when I came in, there were four men in my room. They’d emptied all the drawers and ripped my case to pieces—I got in a panic. I started hitting them—I can’t remember what happened except that eventually I was in the chair with one of them hitting me and asking me for a letter. At the time I couldn’t even understand what he was talking about. Then some men I’d met casually that evening’—and here she tried to give the impression that she had let herself be picked up by them—‘suddenly turned up and got rid of them. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t.’

  Mr Brown came over and took her empty glass. He refilled it. Hannie took it and drank deeply. Julie Corrington said, ‘How appalling. Did the police give you any idea who they were?’

  ‘Police?’ Hannie said. ‘I didn’t want the police involved. You hear such things about the foreign police and getting into trouble abroad. Besides, have you seen them? That’s to say—I don’t want to be rude—but they’re not exactly the sort of police I’m used to—’ She trailed off, as if embarrassed.

  ‘I do see what you mean,’ Julie said soothingly.

  ‘Gang of louts,’ said Victor Corrington, getting up and helping himself to another brandy. ‘No better than the men they’re supposed to be catching. Sorry, does anyone want topping up?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Victor,’ his mother told him silkily.

  ‘Terrible experience for you,’ he said to Hannie.

  ‘I just told the man from the hotel to get rid of them,’ Hannie said to Julie Corrington. ‘I’ll buy a new suitcase and claim it on the insurance when I get back. Forget all about it—that’s all I want to do.’

  The attentive Mr Brown again took her empty glass and refilled it while Julie Corrington pretended not to notice. Hannie was worried about Mr Brown. The men he had hired to rob her room could have reported back to him already. If so, they would have told him her reactions had not been those of a normal woman tourist. And her performance here would be pointless. Nevertheless, she took a drink from her glass and said self-consciously, ‘I hope I’m not getting drunk.’

  ‘You’ve had a shock,’ Julie Corrington told her. ‘Really, this island’s gone to pieces, with all the tourism. It causes the most frightful problems.’ She looked at Hannie from a little ivory face, through big, forget-me-not eyes and asked, ‘But how did you come by the letter? What made you think it was mine?’

  Hannie launched gladly into her tale. ‘I took a boat out, you see. I had the idea I wanted to do something a little bit daring—I hadn’t slept well that night—I expect I wasn’t thinking straight. Now I wish I hadn’t gone because I went astray somehow and landed on this island, and there was a man there fishing who sort of latched on to me—I could hardly understand what he was saying—but he told me to wait on the beach, so I did, mostly because I’d been trying to ask him if he’d take me back in the boat to St Colombe. But he hadn’t seemed to understand what I was saying, so I thought I’d wait for him to come back and try to make him see what I wanted. And the next thing was he appeared on the beach with this tall, black woman, who he said was his daughter, and she asked me to take a letter back to England and deliver it to the Queen. Of all people! When I said why didn’t they post it to her, it’d get there quicker, they said all the mail in and out of St Colombe was tampered with by the po
stmaster. Well, quite honestly, I didn’t believe it. In fact I thought they were just simple people who lived on this island and had gone a bit cuckoo. I felt quite sorry for them really. They looked quite poor, and the woman didn’t have any shoes on—and anyway I wanted to get away because there I was stuck on this island with a couple of people who might not be in their right minds—so I said yes.’ Hannie paused, took another drink and said, ‘Anyway, much as I wanted to get away, I didn’t like to agree to anything which might get me into trouble, so I just said all right, as long as there isn’t anything in this letter which the customs might not like when I go through—I mean, the tour people were pretty quick to warn us about agreeing to deliver packages for people on the island to other people they said were their relations in England.’

  She looked at Julie Corrington who assured her, ‘You were very sensible.’

  ‘So they opened the envelope for me,’ Hannie explained. ‘And I read the letter inside, and they told me it was their claim to the island.’ She looked again at Julie Corrington. ‘I’ve got to apologize if I’ve seen anything I shouldn’t. I was just in this predicament, you see. No choice, really.’

  Again, Julie Corrington reassured her. ‘It was all a very long time ago. Such things used to happen here, years ago.’

  ‘Human nature, I suppose,’ Hannie said wisely. She sat for a moment staring into her glass, then rallied herself. ‘That’s it, really. I took the letter and said I’d make sure the Queen got it. The old man showed me where I had to point the boat and I pointed it, and got out. To tell the truth I’d more or less forgotten I’d got the letter until this business with these men. Then I got frightened and remembered your name. I thought the sooner I got it all sorted out the better, so I rang you up from the hotel. I’m sorry it’s so late but, you see, I thought they might come back.’

  Brown spoke for the first time, in a well-modulated New England voice. ‘Very frightening, all of it. You were quite right to come here and I, personally, don’t care about the time.’ He said to Julie Corrington, ‘It’s just as well all this has come to a head. You’ve been too tolerant in the past. I believe I’ve mentioned to you several times that this affair should be resolved straight away, before it came to some kind of crisis. Now see what’s happened—this lady has been inconvenienced, frightened by thugs—and it has to be settled, once and for all. Will you explain to Mrs Bennett, or would you prefer it if I did?’

  ‘I think you can make it clearer,’ Julie Corrington said. ‘But, please, could you pour me a tiny brandy first?’ It was Victor Corrington who poured his mother a tiny brandy and himself a large one. He topped up Hannie’s glass, too. Mr Brown rattled some ice into a glass and poured Coke on it saying, ‘This is all I’m allowed, regrettably.’ He sat down and said to Hannie, ‘The position is simply this. Mrs Corrington’s husband, Mr Edmund Corrington, died four years ago. He owned certain property on this island and on Barbados and, of course, the island of Beauregard. He left a simple will, which he had in fact drawn up before his marriage to Mrs Corrington, and this states that in the event of his death half his entire property, and money of course, should go to his son by his previous marriage, Mr Victor Corrington, and the other half to his future wife, Mrs Corrington. There were slightly altered provisions covering the disposal of the property in the event of there being children of the marriage, but since there are no children, that has nothing to do with us here. The main point is that there is a perfectly valid will, drawn up by Mr Corrington, when in his right mind. I stress his mental state because later, unhappily, it altered.’

  Aha, thought Hannie, relieved to hear there was no will, fraudulent or not, of a later date than the one she had come to steal. So that’s the problem, then—Corrington was out of his mind when he wrote the letter.

  ‘Now, here,’ Mr Brown said, ‘we come to the unfortunate part. It’s a pity it has to be said all over again, but you have a right to hear. Not too long before his death, Mr Corrington became mentally disturbed. At some point during the course of his mental illness he conceived some idea of making restitution for what he saw as a terrible wrong he had done to the woman Sarah Fevrier and her two daughters. As you’ll know,’ he said to Hannie, ‘it’s not uncommon for patients suffering from depression to develop ideas of exaggerated guilt and responsibility for all the terrible things that happen in the world—’

  ‘But they were his children, weren’t they?’ Hannie asked. ‘I mean—forgive me, Mrs Corrington—he did have two children by this woman, didn’t he?’

  ‘So far as we know they were his children,’ Mr Brown said smoothly, but Angelina had shown Hannie her birth certificate and Hannie knew there could be no doubt about the parentage of the two Fevrier daughters. ‘So,’ she said, ‘perhaps he did owe them something.’

  ‘Not an island worth thirty million dollars, over half the value of his estate,’ Mr Brown said. He looked at Hannie, challenging her to dispute the point. Hannie merely said, ‘Oh—I see what you mean.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Brown said, ‘Mrs Corrington won’t mind my telling you, I’m sure, that thinking some moral debt perhaps lay undischarged, she recently made an offer of money to the family.’

  ‘I felt I should show some generosity,’ Julie Corrington murmured.

  ‘And I disagreed with you,’ Brown said. Turning to Hannie, he said, ‘But then, I’m a man of business, not a woman of sentiment.’ Hannie nodded. She was not nearly as drunk as she was pretending to be, but the whisky was going to her head a little—and this scene was nauseating. But that, too, might work in her favour. She said, ‘I feel quite upset.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Julie Corrington said, ‘that you have to suffer all our family secrets at one go. Please, Mr Brown, do let’s get this over with as quickly as possible. Perhaps you’d like to stay the night here, Mrs Bennett—I’d feel dreadful turning you out of the house at this hour, after that terrible experience at your hotel and this not very pleasant story.’

  So if I don’t give you the letter you can take it, Hannie thought, delightedly. We’ll soon see about that. She said, ‘Well, that’s very nice of you—very nice. I’d love to.’

  ‘Just find Robert and get him to prepare a room,’ Julie Corrington said to Victor. ‘The blue room.’

  Hannie, who had noticed the not-so-new suit worn by the manservant, wondered how he felt about getting rooms ready for guests at three in the morning. As Victor left, Mr Brown said, ‘I’ll finish the story quickly. You must be very tired.’

  They were working well together, he and Julie Corrington, Hannie thought. They’ve decided I might be too sentimental to hand the letter over without taking it to the Queen, so they’re planning to rob me tonight. Tomorrow the house will have been turned over, and the same gang who tried to get the letter before will be blamed. There’ll be a lot of talk about the crime rate on the island and no one will care anyway, because by then, they think, they’ll have what they want.

  Brown continued smoothly, ‘It’s a sad story from now on. Poor Mr Corrington, his mind unfortunately full of guilt and self-reproach, wrote the letter promising the woman the island, persuaded his friends to sign it—presumably they thought he was rational at the time—and then posted it off to Beauregard. Obviously, Mrs Corrington knew nothing of all this. Of course, he never made the will he speaks of in the letter. In this disturbed frame of mind he probably forgot. Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘it’s been impossible to persuade the Fevrier family that he never did it. As you’ll have seen for yourself, the Fevriers are very simple, uneducated people, and they simply don’t believe this. For years now they’ve suffered from the idée fixe that the letter means the island belongs to them. However many times this is explained to them, they never change their views. But, equally, they never proceed with a claim.’ He made a slight gesture with his hands, his open palms towards Hannie. ‘I guess it’s just one of those things simple people use to maintain themselves in rather constricting circumstances. They pretend to be the rightful heirs to s
omething, imagine that their lives would change if only they had their rights—’

  His voice tailed off. He looked confidingly at Hannie who responded, ‘Oh, yes—I do see it now. But,’ she asked helplessly, ‘what am I supposed to do about the letter? I promised them I’d help.’

  Julie Corrington said easily, ‘Well, my dear, I’m sure Mr Brown would say hand it over to him immediately, and he’ll see it properly disposed of. But if you feel you ought to keep your promise to these people, then I say you should do exactly what you said you’d do—take it to Buckingham Palace.’ Her glance at Mr Brown was almost flirtatious.

  Mr Brown said to Hannie, ‘I don’t suppose you know that Sarah Fevrier has already been given land by Edmund Corrington—this was at the time of the births of her children—several acres of land, free and clear, on an island ripe for tourist development. She or her heirs are hardly going to suffer in the future.’

  ‘My goodness,’ said Hannie, impressed. ‘Is that true? They’re going to do quite well out of it, then, in the end? But,’ she added after a pause, ‘I think I ought to do what I promised. After all, if they got a letter from the Queen, or whoever she passed it on to, all signed, sealed and official-looking, they’d feel they’d been properly dealt with, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t go to the end of their days feeling they’d been defrauded.’

  ‘You are so right,’ Julie Corrington agreed. She said to Mr Brown, ‘You must be able to see that Mrs Bennett’s plan is the best idea. After all, don’t they say justice just be seen to be done, or something—’ She trailed off and Mr Brown supplied, ‘Justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done, is the phrase, I think. By all means,’ he said to Hannie, ‘get the letter to Buckingham Palace if you’d prefer it. And now,’ he said, stretching his shoulders, ‘I think I’ll go to bed. It’s been a long day.’