Heirs and Assigns Read online

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Years ago. They told me he was working here, but we never actually got to meet.’

  ‘That’s surprising, when he was such a good friend. At least he was until he caused that quarrel with your brother. The one that made you leave the family fold.’

  ‘Oh, that again!’ But he was wary, not knowing how much they knew.

  ‘Why did you suddenly come back after all that time?’

  ‘I’ve told you – and it wasn’t to kill my brother.’

  ‘If you want to convince us of that you’ll have to come up with something better than wanting to wish him a happy birthday.’

  He sighed exaggeratedly, but perspiration had sprung up on his upper lip. He wiped it with the back of his hand and fished in his pockets for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and matches. Gilmour obligingly supplied an ashtray.

  ‘Let’s get on to why you both landed up here, in Hinton, you and Murfitt. And don’t expect us to believe it was a coincidence.’

  He puffed furiously, thinking, while Reardon, who had never smoked since the operations on his face, resisted the urge to waft the smoke away. He’d suffered worse in the interests of getting witnesses to talk. And talk Huwie did, at last. Whatever he’d been doing these last days while he’d been away from Bryn Glas had unnerved him, to the point where he now decided he needed to get something off his chest. Once he was started, in a mixture of self-justification and spite towards Murfitt, he was off like a railway train.

  The two had known each other since their schooldays, he repeated, but after that weekend at Bryn Glas which had caused a disruption with his family (glossing it over with fine disregard for the exact truth), they’d hardly seen each other. Then, about six months ago, they had met again by chance, in a London bar. Huwie, then engaged in some unspecified but clearly dodgy business, had hardly recognized Murfitt, who had fallen on his feet and was working in the rarefied world of antiquarian books, well in with a man who was favourably disposed towards him. They had a drink together and Huwie learnt that Murfitt, through his work, had met up with Huwie’s brothers again. The incident of the dog had amazingly either been forgotten, or tacitly not mentioned.

  Murfitt had been in a strange mood. Huwie hadn’t expected him to want to pick up on their old friendship, but after a few more drinks, Murfitt had become confiding about what he was doing, and told him that circumstances had made it necessary for him to go and live in Hinton. In fact, he was trying to persuade Pen to invest some money in setting up a bookshop there. The trouble was, Pen wasn’t inclined to accede.

  ‘Did he give a reason for needing to live here?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask.’ He lit another cigarette from the first and threw the stub into the fire.

  ‘But you managed to come up with something that would finally persuade Pen?’ Reardon caught Gilmour’s eye, and he brought the cloth bag from the safe. At the sight of the diamonds sliding on to the desk, Huwie’s eyes bulged and he turned the colour of putty. ‘I see you know what these are, Mr Llewellyn. Unimpressive, aren’t they, to say what they’re worth?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Who do they belong to?’

  ‘They’re mine.’

  Reardon laughed, braced his hands on the desk and leant back.

  Huwie shifted. His eyes slid to the grey pebbles and stayed fixed, as if mesmerized. ‘I sold them to Pen, as an investment,’ he said at last, ‘but he never paid me for them. He said he wanted to make sure they actually were diamonds first.’

  ‘Huwie, you’ve never owned a diamond in your life. Where did you get these? And where does the murder of Adrian Murfitt come into it?’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ he said desperately. ‘They’d nothing to do with that, nothing.’

  ‘Convince us.’

  He lit another cigarette, this time with hands that shook as he tried to work out a convincing lie. And at last, as if such was beyond him, he gave in. ‘All right. I’ll tell you how it was. You’ll see then I’d nothing to do with killing anybody.’

  He had been doing small-time jobs for a man posing as a South African wine merchant, who was in reality smuggling diamonds into the country. When he had met Murfitt and heard his story, Huwie saw his own chance. He knew Pen could never resist the lure of making a bob or two, and diamonds, like gold, were a good investment, so he convinced his boss to sell the stones to Pen, with some substantial commission in it for himself. It had taken him some time to persuade the man but in the end he had agreed. Huwie arranged to meet Pen in London and the stones were handed over, though Pen had insisted they’d have to be authenticated before money changed hands. In the meantime, in exchange for the opportunity, he’d finally agreed to finance Murfitt’s business in Hinton, and had in fact kept to that part of the bargain. But he had hung on to the diamonds too long and the patience of the man who was selling them had given out. Huwie had come to Bryn Glas to demand the money must be handed over.

  ‘And you killed him because he was still refusing to pay, then took his keys to search for the diamonds.’

  ‘No! It was nothing like that! If you really want to know what happened …’

  ‘We do, Huwie. We do indeed.’

  ‘All right. That night, when we’d had supper, Gerald went upstairs with Pen, and the other guests left a few minutes later. We – my dear family and I, that is – were understandably a bit nonplussed at what we’d just learnt about old Pen getting married, as you might imagine. We stood around talking, but there didn’t seem much point in it and after a bit we all went up to bed. I undressed but I knew I wouldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs into the dining room for a nightcap. I left the door open and didn’t switch the light on – I could see well enough with the light from the hall.’

  ‘And you saw – what?’

  ‘I poured myself a scotch and then I heard Fairlie saying goodnight to Pen before he came down the stairs. I stayed where I was – I’d already drunk a lot that night and I didn’t need his disapproval. Just as he got downstairs, Mrs Knightly came into the hall and they spoke. After a moment or two, she went back into the kitchen, but he didn’t leave … he went into her room, the housekeeper’s room. I thought that damned odd until I heard him speaking to someone, but it was nothing to do with me so I went back upstairs. I heard Fairlie’s car drive away a few minutes later.’

  ‘Did you recognize the voice?’

  ‘Yes, I did, after a bit. It was Murfitt. I couldn’t think what the hell he was doing in the house but I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.’

  ‘So you waited until you thought Pen would be asleep, after which you went along to his room to get the keys to his safe. But he was still awake, you argued and in the course of it, you killed him.’

  At that he jumped up and banged his fist on the desk. ‘What have I told you? I did not kill him.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  He stayed where he was, glaring, but then sank down like a deflated balloon. ‘I did go to his room, I’ll admit it, but it was hours later, around three o’clock. I wanted to make sure he was asleep, but when I went in – well, he was already dead, wasn’t he?’

  ‘But you still took the keys?’

  ‘And a fat lot of good they did me – and I did return them, later on.’

  Reardon eyed him. ‘You went into the room and searched it with your brother lying dead. You did nothing about it and left him, left someone else to find him in the morning?’

  ‘He was dead, for God’s sake! What sort of a fool do you think I am, letting myself in for being the last person to see him alive? I could see there’d been a struggle and who was going to believe me? Not my family, not you lot, I’d have been a ready-made murderer as far as everybody was concerned!’

  For so long it had been there, always at the back of Ida’s mind, the knowledge that when Pen died, her financial situation would improve. ‘When’ he died, the ‘when’ always somewhere hazily in the unimagined future. Hypothetical, spec
ulative, what if, a sort of pipe dream you didn’t really dare to pray would come soon – because that would actually have meant Pen dying. Life without Pen, his faults notwithstanding, wasn’t to be contemplated. It was only now he’d gone that she saw how much she was going to miss him, how much it already hurt. All the times he’d come to her rescue, financially and otherwise, came back to her, reproaching her a hundredfold. Especially how good he’d always been with Verity. Too late now to confide her worry about the child to him, even if it would have meant one of his brisk, sometimes abrasive and unwelcome strictures on her own inadequacies.

  She pinned a smile on her face and climbed the stairs to her daughter’s room, ready to congratulate Verity on her own legacy, the money Pen had left her.

  She found her curled up like a foetus on her bed, white as milk, her face contorted with pain, clutching her belly. Ida hurried to the bedside and tried to take her hand, but it was clenched and unreachable. ‘Vee, what is it? Whatever’s the matter?’

  Verity groaned and curled up tighter as another spasm of pain caught her. When it subsided she said, through gritted teeth, ‘I’m losing a baby, that’s all.’

  ‘What?’ Ida sprang away from the bed, as if stung by a hornet. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  The pain momentarily easing, Verity struggled to a half-sitting position. ‘Ridiculous, why? That’s what can happen, can’t it, when you—’ She moaned again.

  ‘When you sleep with a man? Verity? Who? When? Where?’

  ‘Ironic, isn’t it? All this money Uncle Pen’s left me, and now I’m not going to need it, when I’ve been so desperate for it. If he hadn’t died, you’d never have known. He would have helped me before it came to this, I know he would.’

  Despite being rigid with shock, Ida said sharply, ‘Stop that. I won’t listen to that sort of talk.’ Verity was quite beyond her understanding, most of the time. But this was something she very well understood. Her racing mind fastened on ways out. ‘Pay attention,’ she snapped. ‘I know what I’m talking about. I lost three babies before you were born.’

  Verity shot up straight, nearly knocking her head on the low, sloping ceiling. ‘You did what? I didn’t know that!’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Vee.’ Not only about the failed pregnancies, but also about the serially adulterous husband and why he’d absconded, for which Verity, knowing nothing of what her idolized, charming father could really be like, had always blamed her mother. Ida had never disillusioned her, unable to destroy her dreams. ‘It’s of no consequence now,’ she went on, dry and brisk, ‘and you’ve been a very silly girl, but first let’s be certain you really are pregnant.’

  Questions came next, a list bombarded her: Have you been sick? Have you seen a doctor? What about this, that and the other? And above all, how long?

  ‘Seven weeks,’ said Verity.

  ‘Seven weeks?’ Ida breathed again. ‘Well, then. There can be all sorts of reasons to account for that. Stress, worry, anything … we must get Gerald Fairlie to have a look at you.’

  ‘No!’ The cry was so sharp, coming with another pain to double her up, that Ida’s antennae bristled. Then her hand went to her mouth.

  ‘Merciful God, that’s not who it is, Vee?’ she almost whispered. ‘Gerald Fairlie?’

  ‘Are you out of your mind, Mother?’ Verity began to laugh hysterically. ‘Gerald?’

  Then who? But Ida knew that was a question which wouldn’t be answered, even if she asked it. And her mind refused even to consider that man with the dog, whom Verity had swerved to avoid on the day she, Ida, had arrived here. The man who had now been murdered.

  In any case, by now she was almost certain Verity had been worrying herself sick over nothing. She longed to rock her silly child in her arms, as she had when she was a baby. But the most she could produce without embarrassment was a brusque injunction: ‘Come along now, this won’t do. You don’t need me to tell you’ve been stupid, bottling it up and making things worse. But you soon won’t need me to tell you you’ve been worrying yourself over nothing, just you see.’

  ‘Are we expected to believe him?’ Gilmour asked.

  ‘Against everything that’s saying I shouldn’t, I’m sorry to say I do. To a point. Huwie Llewellyn’s an even bigger fool than he appears if he expects us to believe that twaddle about the diamonds.’ Reardon picked up the four stones, rolled them in his palm like dice and then tossed them back on to the desk. ‘If his Mr Big isn’t laughing his head off at having fooled him, or fobbed him off, whatever, while he does a probable disappearing act, I’ll eat those nice new socks I’ve just been given. Somebody like that, entrusting Huwie to negotiate that sort of deal? And Pen Llewellyn going along with it? Come on! Why did he think Pen wasn’t paying up?’

  Gilmour frowned. ‘OK, so Pen knew these were only bits of any old stone—’

  ‘Which we’ll assume they are until we know different.’

  ‘Yet he still agreed to set Murfitt up with the bookshop. Who then goes and kills him. What sort of sense does that make?’

  ‘We don’t know he did, do we?’

  ‘Then what was he doing here that night? OK, he didn’t stay, as he sometimes did. Mrs Knightly let him out after the others had gone – but if he was the same man Mrs Ramsey thought she saw, he’d still have had time to slip upstairs and kill Pen before he left.’

  ‘True,’ Reardon replied. ‘But in that case, who killed him?’

  ‘Somebody we don’t know about yet. Somebody who has no connection to Pen?’ The suggestion hung on the air like a wet blanket.

  Reardon picked up Mr Harper’s letter and flapped it. ‘They all benefit from Pen’s death. Even Carey Brewster. And Jack Douglas, who has an ambivalent attitude towards Pen, to say the least, suppose his mother had known what he could expect, for instance, and told him? He left that night with her, Carey and Mrs Ramsey, but there was nothing to stop him coming back and doing the job later. Mrs Douglas has a key she uses to let herself in.’ He let a few moments pass. ‘But maybe we shouldn’t be looking at those likely to gain, rather anyone who’d lose. Not financially, but maybe in some other way. Someone like … Fairlie?’

  Fairlie?

  There had never remotely been any reason to suspect him; he had no motive, he didn’t profit from the will, he and Pen were supposed to be the best of friends and were apparently on good terms that night, and besides, Pen had been alive when he left. ‘That would have meant he had to have a key as well – and that he came back and finished him off … unless …’

  He broke off, tracing a pattern on the desk with his forefinger. ‘Look …’ he began again, after Reardon had let several minutes pass. ‘This may sound ridiculous, but what about … well, smoke and mirrors? What the eye doesn’t see … He didn’t need to come back, did he?’

  ‘Good lad!’ Reardon said approvingly, and Gilmour sighed. He might have known he wouldn’t have got there first. ‘You’re right. He was heard to say goodnight to Pen before closing his door … Verity’s room was only a few steps away – I suppose Fairlie spoke loudly enough to hope someone would hear, and Huwie, downstairs in a room just off the hall, certainly did, and Mrs Knightly. There was no reason why Murfitt, too, shouldn’t have heard. But which of them heard Pen reply? They wouldn’t, would they, if Fairlie was speaking to a dead man?’

  It was possible. ‘Yes, but why should he, of all people, want to kill Pen? Unless … unless he knew something dire about his health that no one else did and … helped him to die?’

  ‘Well, from my first conversation with Fairlie, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility, if he thought it necessary. But I don’t think so, Joe. Much more likely some argument sprang up and it was done in the heat of the moment. If it was premeditated, as a doctor he’d surely have chosen a more subtle way of dispatching him, wouldn’t he?’

  Gilmour thought it over. ‘Something to lose, you said?’

  ‘The penny dropped when I saw this.’ Reardon took out of his wallet the snaps
hot of Murfitt in his previous incarnation which Everard Forster had lent him. ‘Compare this with the photos on Fairlie’s piano of his father and there’s not much doubt the reason he came to Hinton was to stake his claim.’

  Gilmour whistled as he looked at the photo. ‘You’re right. But how does Pen’s murder fit into this?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, but in view of what happened to Murfitt, we’d better work on the assumption that it does.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Carey reached Fairlie House at that grey, melancholy hour between daylight and darkness – entre chien et loup – when even the familiar feels threatening and frightening. The bare winter branches of the elms behind the house stood black against a cold, greenish sky, a band of gold still visible at its rim. The evening star, hanging above the gravestones in the churchyard where generations of Fairlies slept, only added to the sense of loneliness.

  She’d timed it correctly: Gerald himself was assisting the last of his patients out of the door and down the steps, sending old Mrs Garson on her on her way with a smile. Myra could be heard, clashing about in the dispensary. He greeted Carey in surprise but led her into the house without question.

  Inside was scarcely warmer than outside and the fire in the back room was low. He put more coal on and Carey said, ‘I have a letter I’d like you to read, one sent to my mother.’

  He took it from her. His expression didn’t change as he read it. She waited but he still said nothing. ‘Is it true?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘Isn’t that immaterial? You believe what it says, don’t you?’ he said flatly.

  She drew in a breath. That Adrian Murfitt was Gerald’s half brother? What else could Huwie’s letter mean, if it was to be believed? He’d told Muriel that Adrian had proof positive of that. She wished Gerald would light the lamps; she couldn’t read his face properly with only the flickering light from the replenished fire. But he seemed not to notice how dark the shadowy room was. He sat, unmoving, and even when she spoke again, he didn’t answer. Her heart began to beat rather fast and she made a hesitant move to go, but he motioned her to stay.