Read A Question of Inheritance Online
Authors: Elizabeth Edmondson
A Question of Inheritance
ALSO BY ELIZABETH EDMONDSON
V
ERY
E
NGLISH
M
YSTERIES
A Man of Some Repute
O
THER
W
ORKS
The Frozen Lake
Voyage of Innocence
The Villa in Italy
The Villa on the Riviera
Devil’s Sonata
Night & Day
Fencing with Death
Finding Philippe
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Edmondson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
ISBN-13: 9781503947856
ISBN-10: 1503947858
Cover design by Lisa Horton
For H.E.S. and Wolfie
Contents
Chapter One
Scene 1
Lord Selchester swerved to avoid a pheasant. ‘There’s a lot of wildlife out today. All determined to rush under the wheels of this automobile.’
‘Say car, not automobile. You’re English now,’ Polly said.
Her sister, Babs, was having none of it. ‘I’m not. I’m American and always will be.’
‘You can’t be Lady Barbara if you’re American,’ Polly said.
‘Who’d want to be English? They must be a race of midgets to drive automobiles as small as this.’
‘They don’t have oil, so gas for cars’ – Polly emphasised the word – ‘costs more than in the States. Smaller vehicles, less fuel.’
Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Augustine Lambert Fitzwarin, formerly Gus Mason, now eighteenth Earl of Selchester, saw his younger daughter push her spectacles up her nose and settle back into her book.
As he steered the automobile – no, Polly was right, car – through the winding roads of the English countryside, he thought of his ancestors making this same journey across the centuries. On horseback, then in carriages. By train and then by car. Travelling from London or back from the fighting fields of France or the searing heat of Jerusalem. Back home, to Selchester. To Selchester Castle.
Ancestors he knew nothing about; ancestors he didn’t even know he had until a few weeks ago.
Forty-two years of being Gus Mason, American citizen: growing up in Virginia, going to college at Notre Dame, falling in love with the ancient world, translating Homer and Vergil, serving in the war – all that made sense. That was familiar; that was who he was. Trips to England over the years, and a year as a visiting fellow of an Oxford college had got him used to English ways, but he’d never dreamed that he’d end up with an English passport, an English title and an English castle.
‘It’s going to be strange,’ he said. ‘For all of us.’
‘You’ll get accustomed to it,’ Polly said.
‘I just hope you won’t resent it as time goes on. Being uprooted like this.’
Polly turned a page with a rustle. ‘Deracinated.’
Barbara gave her father a glowering look. ‘I didn’t need to come. I could have stayed in the States.’
‘Not at seventeen, you couldn’t,’ Polly said.
‘I could have gone away to college. Not come to England, to some mouldy castle. She gazed out of the window. ‘It’s like we’re driving through a cloud,’ she said. ‘England’s just one big cloud. Cloud, rain and fog.’
‘It’s mist,’ her father said.
‘Fog,’ said Polly with certainty. ‘Like in Dickens.’
‘They grew vines in England in Roman times,’ Gus said.
Babs sighed. ‘Please don’t tell me the Romans got to England.’
‘Of course they did,’ Polly said. ‘It’s why it’s called Britain, because the Roman name was Britannia.’
Gus had never been able to arouse in Babs the least spark of interest in Romans or Greeks. ‘The mist and fog would have suited Vergil. Do you remember how foggy it was when we were in Mantua, where he came from?’
‘I remember Mantua perfectly,’ Babs said. ‘I remember how I got bronchitis and nearly expired and Polly had food poisoning.’
‘And Vergil did go off to Rome as soon as he could,’ Polly said. ‘Where it isn’t damp and foggy. Cheer up, Babs, at least Odysseus never came to England. And all the Roman soldiers went home centuries ago.’
‘Talking about people going home, who are those types who are living in the Castle right now?’ Barbara said. ‘I can’t believe they’re still going to be there. Why haven’t they taken themselves off?’
Gus said, ‘I thought I told you.’
‘You did,’ Polly put in. ‘But Babs never listens to anything she doesn’t want to hear.’
‘Freya Wryton is my cousin – our cousin – and she’s been living at the Castle for the last seven years, looking after it. Ever since her uncle, the last Lord Selchester, died.’
‘Why don’t you say “my father”? And he didn’t exactly just die, did he? He was murdered.’ Polly liked precision.
Yes, he had been avoiding the word. It took some getting used to, having a father for the first time in his life. Even a dead one. ‘A man called Hugo Hawksworth has been staying at the Castle as well. With his sister Georgia. She’s about your age, Polly. She’ll be a friend for you.’
‘She will not. I choose my own friends, thank you, and they won’t be whiny English girls.’
‘Haven’t they got homes to go to?’ Babs said. ‘If we’ve got to live there, we don’t want a lot of strangers in residence.’
‘I don’t formally take over from the trustees until everything is sorted out on the legal front.’
Letters Patent. Hassles about giving up his American citizenship in order to take up the title. And the money. He’d been left speechless when the lawyers – solicitors, he must remember to call them that – told him the size of his inheritance. And the likely tax bill. ‘Freya says they’ll move out after Christmas.’
‘There’s a housekeeper,’ Polly said. ‘Bet she’ll be like Mrs Danvers in
Rebecca
. Sinister, resenting you being the lost heir and wanting to push you over the banisters. Bet she’ll annoy the hell out of all of us.’
‘Mind your language, please, Polly.’
‘The English say anything, look at Shakespeare.’
‘You aren’t Shakespeare.’
Polly went back to her book.
Scene 2
The motorcyclist, glad to reach his destination after a long, cold ride from London, slowed down as he came to the open gates of Thorn Hall, and stopped in front of the red-and-white pole that barred his way. He took no notice of the large sign on the gatepost that said, ‘HM Government, Department of Statistics, Private, Keep Out’. He knew the Victorian pile didn’t house a single statistician.
Thorn Hall had been a secret establishment during the war, known locally as the ‘Hush-Hush’. The removal of War Office signs and the apparent arrival of another government department didn’t fool the town for a moment. They might not be able to give a name to the Service, but they all knew that what went on at the Hall was to do with Intelligence.
Just as they knew that top-secret nuclear research went on at what was known locally as the ‘Atomic’, a government scientific establishment, a few miles outside Selchester.
Selchester was used to secrets.
The man on duty at Thorn Hall came out of his hut and greeted the courier from London. ‘Late today, Phil.’ He took his pass and stamped it.
‘There’s nasty weather blowing up from the east,’ Phil said. ‘I shan’t hang about.’ He kicked his motorbike back into life and roared off towards the house, ignoring the speed signs and only slowing down to take the curve round the small lake.
He propped the motorbike up in front of the main entrance to the house, extracted a buff-coloured box from one of the panniers and clumped in through the front door. He went up the marble staircase to the first floor, where Mrs Tempest, secretary to Sir Bernard, head of station, had her office.
‘Morning, Mrs T. Not much today. Just a couple of things for Sir Bernard and Mr Hawksworth.’
He took the envelope she handed him in return. ‘Ta. Shan’t be up again until after Christmas. Have a merry one.’
Then he headed for the canteen to have tea and something to eat before starting back to London.
Scene 3
In a small room two floors and a wing away from Sir Bernard’s spacious quarters, Hugo Hawksworth was sitting at his desk. He pushed back his chair and rubbed his calf hard, grimacing as he did so. His leg, scarred by a bullet, cramped when he sat too long. Then he went back to the folder that lay open in front of him.
Rather to his surprise, Hugo was enjoying the job that Sir Bernard had asked him to do. Ever since Burgess and Maclean had vanished in 1951, the Service, certain they were in Moscow, had been nervous that there could be others of their kind still among them. Soviet agents rising up the ranks, taking on more sensitive and senior posts.
‘Investigate,’ Sir Bernard had instructed him. ‘You’re good at that. Go backwards and forwards in the records. Look for anomalies. Missions that failed. Agents who behaved out of character. Anything that might indicate the presence of other traitors in the Service.’
‘Is there any point going back that far?’ Hugo asked. ‘Burgess and Maclean were up to mischief now, not back then.’
‘The seeds of treachery were sown in the thirties. Mostly in Cambridge, which was a hotbed of communism, as you well know.’ Sir Bernard had taken his degree at Edinburgh University. ‘There’ll be others of their kind still in the Service, rising up the ranks, getting promoted, having access to really sensitive material. We have to be watchful, Hugo. Take nothing and no one for granted. Good war record, impeccable background, successful missions: don’t trust any of it. Let suspicion be your watchword.’
So Hugo, amused as always by Sir Bernard in commanding mode, had hidden a grin and gone off to find Mrs Clutton, the Archivist who worked as his assistant.
She, as always, had been one step ahead of him, and several files were already on his desk, flagged with her comments and notes. Her mind was a miracle of minutiae with everything indexed and cross-referenced on cards stored in narrow wooden drawers in her office. Her capacious memory linked people and places and events in a way that Hugo found extraordinary. Mrs Clutton could probably do his job better than he did, he reflected, as he opened the first of the files.
The thirties weren’t so long ago, but those pre-war years seemed to belong to another age, when viewed from 1953. Hugo found it fascinating to look through the papers in those buff files. Letters, telegrams, secret messages from embassies. Photographs of places, some of them reduced to ruins during the war. Photographs of people, strangers smiling into the camera or caught unawares. Typed reports on flimsy paper, handwritten notes; all the paraphernalia meticulously preserved and filed by Mrs Clutton.
For three weeks, Hugo had been following the trail of a man whose failure to succeed in his pre-war missions was, he was now fairly certain, due to nothing more than an extraordinary degree of incompetence. Victor Emerson was unquestionably the kind of man who should never have been let loose in the field, and Hugo wondered why he ever had. On paper, he seemed all right. He was fit enough, and had passed all those tests that Hugo once had. He’d played rugby at school and for his college at Cambridge and seemed altogether an admirable recruit at the time that he joined the Service.
But everything he touched went wrong. Buses crashed while he was travelling on them to meetings that then never took place. People he was due to talk to were rushed to hospital with appendicitis or broken limbs. He’d been snowbound on the wrong side of a border in a region where snow was a rarity. He’d lost his passport, had his wallet stolen, been arrested in mistake for another man.
Hugo picked up Emerson’s photograph and looked at it thoughtfully. He knew him slightly, and remembered him as being an extremely civilised person. He had a passion for art and knew a great deal about it. There must have been some streak of romanticism in him, a feeling that he was going to be a Bulldog Drummond, which accounted for him ever making his way into the Service in the first place. Hugo flipped through more of his record, although he now knew it almost off by heart.
In fact, there was no point in wondering why the man had ever joined the Service. The reason was obvious: it was the same reason that Hugo and so many others had been recruited. They came from the right background. They had the right connections. And until Burgess and Maclean defected, ripping apart these cosy assumptions, this was considered to be the best kind of screening there was. If you were ‘one of us’, you would not betray your country.
Yet those two had, and the chances were that others had also, and were doing so at the moment.
But not Victor Emerson. Hugo felt sure of that.
Scene 4
The telephone rang on Hugo’s desk and he reached out to lift the receiver. Mrs Tempest’s clear, clipped voice came down the line. Sir Bernard wanted to see Hugo. ‘At once, please, Mr Hawksworth, if you wouldn’t mind.’
Hugo, deep in pre-war Vienna, resented the interruption, but he wasn’t going to say so to Mrs Tempest. He closed Emerson’s file, got to his feet, bent over to give his calf another rub, pulled on his jacket, straightened his tie, grabbed his stick and limped off down the corridor for the five-minute walk to the other wing.
Mrs Tempest, installed at her desk in the room next to Sir Bernard’s, looked up and nodded at him through her open door. He knocked once on the oak door at the end of the corridor. Sir Bernard called out his usual, ‘Come’, and Hugo went in.
Sir Bernard was smoking a pipe. This told Hugo that he’d been thinking. Hugo sometimes wondered if Sir Bernard liked to think of himself as a Sherlock Holmes, mulling with intellectual vigour over a one-pipe problem. He’d never look the part, though; there was nothing hawk-nosed or eagle-eyed about Sir Bernard.
Sir Bernard looked at him over the top of his glasses and came straight to the point. ‘Something has come up that I need you to look into. A request from London, arrived this morning.’
‘Is it urgent?’ Requests from London were, in Hugo’s opinion, nearly always bureaucratic, trivial and time wasting.
Something of what he was thinking must have shown in his face, because Sir Bernard gave him a sharp look and said, ‘You’re too inclined to go your own way, Hawksworth. I like to see initiative in my team, but when word comes down to look at something in particular, I expect you to focus on it. I don’t know what else you have on your desk right now, but I want you to give this priority.’
‘Of course. What is it?’
Sir Bernard tapped the file in front of him with an authoritative finger. ‘It’s outside the area you’ve been working on, as it relates to the post-war period.’ Sir Bernard sucked at his pipe. He wasn’t an efficient smoker and he inhaled a lungful of smoke that sent him into a paroxysm of coughing.
Hugo waited for him to recover. When Sir Bernard had got back his breath and savoir faire, and the red colour was fading from his face, he said, ‘Did you ever come across a man called Zherdev in Berlin? Anywhere? Aleksandr Zherdev?’ He pulled a grainy photo from the file and flicked it over to Hugo.