Jasmine said quietly, ‘I think we’d better go straight up and see them, Nigel.’
Charles Head went first. He said, ‘I left a message for Campbell Straker. He’s at a dinner. He’ll ring as soon as he gets in.’ He paused and added, ‘In case any medical information is required.’
Nigel stopped, holding the banister. It was Jasmine who replied, ‘Thanks, Charles, for all you’ve done.’
Two policemen, one an inspector, were sitting uncomfortably by the marble fireplace in the big drawing room on the first floor. Sir Hugh Brown, the lawyer, faced them.
It was a room for receptions, so large that it was seldom used by the family who had a smaller sitting room elsewhere in the house. In spite of its curtains, pictures and the flowers in vases it still gave the impression of being part of a public building, not a private home. To Jasmine it seemed chilly, although the evening had been warm. She and Nigel sat side by side, near the solicitor. Charles Head pulled a chair away from the big table by the windows and brought it over. The police inspector offered his condolences to Nigel and Jasmine, but the story he told, closely attended to by Sir Hugh, who occasionally cut in asking questions in his clear voice, was not in the least consoling.
The policemen waiting at the hospital until the doctor had finished his examination already knew that they had on their hands the body of an important man, a baronet and chairman of a multi-million-pound conglomerate. The news that Sir Bernard had apparently been attacked before his death drew their complete attention. And, of course, there would have to be an inquest.
Nigel, frozen with horror, coughed, found his voice and agreed. ‘Of course there must. And a full investigation. We must find out who did this.’ Jasmine noted that as her husband spoke Hugh Brown stiffened in his chair. He attempted to persuade the police that an inquest would be unnecessary. The hospital doctor who had seen Sir Bernard when he was brought in had given the opinion that the stab wounds on his body could not have killed him. The police inspector told the solicitor that Sir Bernard had been attacked, the attack had probably contributed towards his death. It was their duty to try to find the perpetrator. Sir Hugh tried further arguments but at that moment Sir Bernard’s doctor rang. He had not seen his patient for several months. An inquest was therefore inevitable.
The inquest proved only what the hospital doctor had suspected, that the stab wounds had not been serious enough to cause death. They had been inflicted before Sir Bernard died of a coronary attack, which must have killed him almost instantly.
Forensic investigation suggested that he or another person had washed the blood from his body, using soap. As there were no fibres in the wounds he must have been naked from the waist up when the attacker stabbed him, with a small knife, possibly a penknife, a weapon no one with any serious intent to kill would use. Charles Head put much effort into news management of the inquest results. Speculation died down.
Meanwhile, no one in the short suburban street where the body had been found seemed to be able to help with information. Some had been out that evening; many more, on a hot night, had been in their back gardens until it was time to go to bed. Sir Bernard’s Rolls-Royce was still in the garage at Bedford Square, but his Rover was discovered parked in a street near Hampstead Heath. No one there remembered seeing it before; no one in Colindale recognised it.
The investigation was reasonably thorough, but Nigel, who had initially wanted to find out what had happened and see the perpetrator punished, was urged not to push for more work by the police. He quickly saw the possibility of more undesirable publicity for his family and the company. There was no point in doing anything which would attract more attention. In addition, he himself began to veer away from wanting details of the death of his father. The answer might be disturbing. In his mind’s eye he saw those washed, gaping, penknife stabs in his father’s flesh, and winced.
The situation as it stood was serious enough already. Sir Bernard’s untimely death had prevented him from putting everything in Nigel’s name as he had proposed. A third of the companies making up Samco were, in one way or another, stalled as far as major decisions were concerned. No one could vote Sir Bernard’s shares, or execute business in the companies where he had been sole controller until his will was probated or a temporary legal arrangement had been made. it had not taken long for nervous shareholders to take in this fact that it could not be business as usual at Samco. Shares in companies Sir Bernard had controlled completely, or as a major shareholder, dropped fast and showed no signs of reaching a plateau. Nigel sought to gain rapid executive powers over the affected companies but the law of the land, often flexible where money is concerned, is rigid when it comes to matters of death and inheritance. The board of Samco met and conferred and decided to decide nothing immediately. Either Sim had to be found to take possession of his inheritance, or Nigel would have to seek executive powers within the company. This would take time and those powers were bound to be severely limited.
All the Fellows family could do was step up the search for Sim and appoint trustees to govern the affairs of the company. Sir Hugh Brown, the family’s and the company’s solicitor, had to be appointed as trustee, but trustees are cautious, appointed not as entrepreneurs but guardians. Nigel, the other trustee, knew his hands would be tightly tied by Sir Hugh’s carefulness. Sir Hugh made this plain. ‘I must stress to you that neither of us is the owner of anything previously belonging to Sir Bernard. We are only custodians, responsible to the law for our actions. In the event of anything going wrong in terms of losses, bad contracts and so forth, we can be held accountable by the estate. As a trustee, and a lawyer to boot, I see it as my responsibility to keep us both out of trouble. By trouble,’ he added, seeing how unwelcome this statement was to Nigel, ‘I mean a possible lawsuit by the estate. You will see this as improbable. Let me assure you it can and does happen.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Nigel, ‘but business involves risks.’
‘The demand is that any risks you take should be justifiable.’
‘What does that mean in practice?’
‘That if anything went wrong you could defend the decision in court.’
Nigel said nothing but his face betrayed dismay, even anger.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sir Hugh.
At his club that evening Sir Hugh met Sir Bernard’s doctor. The two large men sat in leather armchairs in a quiet corner under a portrait of George V, discussing events in the Fellows family. ‘Bad business,’ said Campbell Straker.
Sir Hugh knew that if Sir Bernard had transferred his assets to Nigel earlier the present complications would not have arisen. Keen to avoid any suggestion that he himself had been lacking in forethought he asked, ‘Campbell, Bernard saw you regularly. Did you have any idea he was suffering from a heart condition?’
Campbell Straker shook his head. ‘He had a complete check-up in March. Nothing wrong with him at all. He had the body of a man ten years younger. I know some doctors will urge their patients to get a top-to-toe check every month. Every six months has always seemed enough to me where a relatively young, healthy man like Bernard’s concerned. The check-ups themselves can be mildly stressful, especially to powerful men like Bernard. They’re not used to thoughts of mortality. They often take it hard.’
‘Used to having it all their own way?’ suggested Sir Hugh.
‘Terrifyingly, sometimes,’ said Campbell Straker, who had been reared as a strict Protestant. ‘Bernard’s sort are healthy men, usually, and not introverted. So there’s little standing in their way to blight them but that one fact of life none of us, eventually, can ignore.’
‘So you had no idea …?’
‘Not just I,’ Campbell Straker pointed out. ‘He had thorough tests. But something crept up on him.’
‘And then somebody crept up on him, it would seem,’ Sir Hugh added. Campbell Straker said nothing. ‘Come on, Campbell. You must know something,’ urged the solicitor. ‘What was it – gambling, rent boys—?’
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‘In Colindale?’ queried Campbell Straker. ‘If so, it must have changed a lot since I was last there.’
‘It didn’t necessarily happen in Colindale,’ Sir Hugh said. He appealed, ‘Campbell?’
‘If I knew anything,’ Campbell Straker said firmly, ‘it would not be ethical to disclose it. I hardly need to tell you that,’ he added more jovially, calling, ‘Waiter,’ and snapping his fingers.
‘It isn’t just common curiosity, Campbell,’ Sir Hugh said, as the other man ordered another two whiskies, a single for himself. ‘I’m the family solicitor, and a trustee of the company, for my sins. This matter’s apparently over and done with. But your experience in your own field will have shown you how often matters like this don’t disappear completely, just lie dormant for a bit then crop up again. I’d like to know what I’m dealing with.’
Campbell Straker sighed. He paused as the waiter returned with the drinks. He said, ‘I don’t know what happened. I can guess but that’s hardly good enough. I’m afraid you’ll have to be content not to know. For the time being I should think you’ve got enough on your plate with the search for Bernard’s son. Any results?’
‘All the British embassies have already been contacted with no result. Now we’ve got one detective flying all over the world, and another sunning himself in the Caribbean where Sim was last seen. I’m in touch with various dubious characters, some working for themselves, some for HMG—’
‘Tried the Sally Army?’ Campbell Straker suggested unexpectedly. ‘They get some amazing results worldwide. Doesn’t cost so much, either. He could be sleeping under a bridge. You can be just as cut off sleeping rough in London or Edinburgh as you can be in the middle of the Amazon jungle.’
Sir Hugh reflected that nearly everyone he met these days had a theory about where Sim Fellows was to be found, or where he might have died. He said wearily, ‘We’re combing the gaols of the Far East and the doss houses of the East End. I’ve had a man in Colindale for a week, trying to find a connection.’
‘Perhaps an unfortunate one.’
‘Very unfortunate, if it existed. I don’t think it does. But – no stone’s to be left unturned …’
‘A sorry business,’ Campbell Straker said.
Sir Hugh nodded.
To the funeral at Thrawn came twenty of the Fellowses’ family and close friends. A memorial service in London for Sir Bernard was planned for the autumn.
It rained on the day of the funeral, which was held at St Michael’s, Thrawn. Three men had been hired to get rid of the press and stood discreetly among the gravestones.
Sir Bernard’s only sister stood rigidly by the grave with David Elliott, the man she had lived with since her husband, a Catholic, had refused her a divorce in the fifties. Her son, Adam, was on her other side.
She felt little grief for the loss of a brother with whom she had never got on. Jennifer Fellows, Bernard and Elizabeth’s stepmother, had flown in from Lugano, and had been wheeled to the graveside by her maid. Their real mother, Baroness Susan Fellows, now eighty-two and a member of the House of Lords, was ignoring her supplanter and the son of the second marriage, a fifty-year-old executive at the World Bank. In this atmosphere of family tension, loaded with memories of old quarrels, divorces and disinheritings, Sir Bernard’s funeral service took place. No one present could forget the still unanswered question about how Sir Bernard had come to die as he had.
In Thrawn churchyard eight generations of solid and prosperous Fellowses lay. The others, younger sons, ne’er-do-wells, lay all over the world, from Ballarat to Bruges, forgotten, their bodies marked, if they were marked at all, by overgrown, crumbling stones. But here at Thrawn lay Thomas Fellows, founder of the family, farmer turned shipowner, slave- and cotton-trader, and his two wives, Dorcas and Dorothy, and many of their offspring. The rise of the family had been favoured in its early days by a pure water supply in the locality, although later the mortality rate rose due to the fouling of the water by the Fellows weaving sheds. But by that time the strong branch of the family had moved on, to Liverpool and to London.
As the first clods of earth fell on to the coffin, Jennifer Fellows sobbed loudly. Lady Mary stood silent, Nigel’s arm supporting her. Almost everyone at the graveside had a thought of Sir Bernard’s eldest son, Simon, still missing. How could he be alive, Jasmine wondered, and not be here now, at his father’s funeral? She wondered if the tears in Nigel’s eyes were for his father or for his brother. Then she turned her attention to grave Claudia Fellows, in a smart black dress, accompanied by Al Dominick, a dark man who had flown in with her from New York. In a brisk wind, which tossed the trees outside the graveyard about; in a profound country silence, broken only by birdsong, the wind and the sound of the earth as it fell on the coffin, it was particularly horrible to imagine Sim Fellows’s death somewhere else, far from home with foreign voices round him.
There seemed to be too many people in the small parlour at Thrawn Hall, which connected with an equally small dining room by open double doors. Both rooms were sparsely furnished. There were some poor oil paintings by a local artist on the walls. In one corner stood a stopped grandfather clock. Pushed into another was a large television. The windows beyond looked on to a field with an old horse in it. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick was notoriously mean and the funeral lunch, laid out in the parlour on tables ranged against the panelled walls, was meagre, as everyone had known it would be. There was plenty to drink however – David Elliott, a cheerful, thirsty man, had seen to that. The combination of poor food and too much to drink did not help the atmosphere. It might have been improved by the presence of a child, or the knowledge that a Fellows child, too young to attend, was tucked at home somewhere.
Tactlessly, Bernard’s stepbrother referred to the absence of grandchildren in a jocular remark to Al Dominick which even more unfortunately was overheard by Lady Mary. Claudia’s boyfriend, holding a plate of salad, responded, ‘Right. Well – Claudia and I have no plans. How about you?’ It was Bernard’s stepbrother’s turn to wince. He was homosexual. The sad exchange made everyone who heard it feel uncomfortable, especially Jasmine, and also called to mind Claudia’s possible challenge over the will. David Elliott brought this issue out into the open, saying, ‘Well, then, Claudia. What’s all this about a lawsuit? Some kind of feminist gesture?’
Claudia gave him a hard stare from her beautiful eyes. She was a tall, strong woman with dark hair piled impeccably on her head, secured by a tortoiseshell comb. She had very long, fine legs in black stockings.
‘Is this quite the time—?’ Lady Mary’s sister said clearly in her penetrating voice.
‘I don’t think so,’ Nigel said. ‘We’ll discuss all this later.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ said David Elliott, and began to refill glasses, urging the guests to try the cheese. ‘Local, you know. Almost all this,’ he pointed to the sideboard and tables, ‘comes from our own farm. You must try the blackberry and apple pie. Lady Mary, a little more wine? Or would you like coffee?’
‘Would you like to go and rest, Mary?’ Jasmine asked her. ‘You look all in. Let me take you upstairs.’
Lady Mary nodded and Jasmine supported her up to her bedroom where she sat on the edge of the bed.
‘Can you get Nigel to make arrangements for me to go back to Durham House tonight? I don’t feel like spending tonight in a strange bed. It’s very rude to poor Elizabeth …’
‘Of course. I’ll explain,’ said Jasmine. And waited, for she felt Lady Mary had something else to say. But she, after a pause, leaned back on her pillow in the big wooden bed and closed her eyes.
‘I’ll organise the return to Durham House and I’ll wake you in an hour, if you’re asleep,’ Jasmine said and went out quietly.
Downstairs, grief for Sir Bernard and the contemplation of human mortality inevitable at funerals was being translated into lethargy and discontent. Most were sitting on the unwelcoming furniture when Jasmine entered.
‘Well,’ said Elizabeth Fi
tzpatrick in a harsh tone, on hearing Lady Mary’s plan to go back to Hampshire that day, ‘of course. If that’s what she wants – she must do what she wants.’
David Elliott winked at Jasmine. ‘Escaping from Hardship Hall,’ he muttered.
Elizabeth Fitzpatrick heard the remark and shot him a cold look. ‘Draughty as it is,’ she said, ‘I’m lucky to have salvaged even this from my meagre patrimony.’ At Claudia Fellows’s approach Elliott took his drink to the far window and began to talk to Sir Bernard’s stepbrother. When Sir Bernard’s father died he’d inherited almost everything, and his stepbrother a substantial sum. There’d been nothing for Elizabeth, who’d already had her dowry. She’d made a terrible fuss and her brothers had clubbed together and given her Thrawn Hall for her lifetime and a small income.
‘Well, you can hardly blame me,’ Claudia said to her aunt. ‘You can’t deny it’s unjust.’
‘I’m the last person in the world who would,’ said her aunt. ‘More power to your elbow.’ She looked at Jasmine. ‘Sorry, Jasmine, but there it is.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Jasmine.
‘You’re middle class, of course,’ Elizabeth said to her. Jasmine was not sure how to respond. ‘I’ve read somewhere that the British imposed a law on the Irish making it compulsory for an inheritance to be split up equally among the children,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Over the years this ensured that their landowners stayed weak and powerless because the estates were so small.’
‘So – you’re not really on my side,’ Claudia accused.
‘My dear. It doesn’t matter whose side I’m on. I have no power to alter anything now,’ Elizabeth said craftily. ‘I’m only telling you what I read.’
‘I’ll just look in on Mary,’ announced Lady Margaret.
‘So depressing for those girls, isn’t it?’ Elizabeth said after she’d left the room. ‘I mean, look at their family. Four girls, and then finally the boy. They know most of them wouldn’t have been born if their parents had got a boy first time!’
In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 25