A Question of Inheritance (19 page)

‘In the dining room, along with Georgia and Lady Babs. They’ve taken over the dining table and they’ve got long strips of paper laid out all over it. They carried off a roll of lining paper they found in a cupboard and that’s what they’re using. Don’t ask me what they’re up to, because I don’t know. I just told them was to be no scratching the table, because that table’s murder to get scratches off.’

Intrigued, Freya, Hugo and Gus went along to the dining room, which was a hive of activity. Leo was there, consulting a large leather-bound volume and Polly was sitting beside him. There was a big pile of books between them. She looked up as they came in. ‘Hi, Pops. You’ll never guess what we’re doing.’

‘A spot of decorating?’

Polly looked at him severely. ‘Don’t be frivolous. I’ll tell you exactly what we doing; we’re drawing up a family tree. I asked Freya this morning she said she thought there was one somewhere in a Bible but when we looked it’s all very dull. Just names and things, doesn’t tell you about anything, and so I thought since they’re your ancestors, Pops, and ours too, you ought to know about them.’ Then she said to Freya: ‘You’re just the person we need. You’ve been writing a history of Selchester, you must know all about it.’

This could be awkward. ‘So far I’ve only covered a small part of the family history. It takes a lot of time to go through family letters and records as they’re often hard to decipher.’

Polly looked at Freya disapprovingly. ‘Georgia and Mrs Partridge say you tap away at that typewriter for hours and hours on end. You write reams and reams of stuff and that has to be more than going through a few letters and so on. You must have the whole thing at your fingertips. You’ve been at it for years.’

Freya said, ‘I’m sure your father will tell you that it doesn’t quite work like that.’

Leo came to her rescue. ‘History does take many different forms, Polly.’

‘A family tree sounds interesting,’ Gus said. He moved over to the table and saw that Babs was drawing the stem and the branches of a large oak tree with numerous branches. ‘This looks as though it’s going to be very decorative, Babs.’

She muttered under her breath, ‘It’ll amuse the kids. Take their minds off things.’

Freya, watching her clever fingers, knew that Babs was, in fact, enjoying herself.

Babs stood back and said, ‘I can put in the faces from those portraits upstairs and maybe there are more portraits elsewhere. In books? Family drawings and photos?’

‘I’m sure there are,’ Freya said.

‘Polly and Georgia can add information about them. Father Leo says he’ll help.’

‘Hugo’s the one who’ll be most use to you,’ Leo said. ‘He read History at university and I daresay he’s used to old records.’

Polly said, ‘I’m starting with the Fitzwarins right from the beginning. I can tell you, Pops, they were a fairly wild bunch. Always pushing and shoving to get their hands on the Castle and the Earldom. All kinds of mischief they got up to. And you’re not the only one to come in from outside and not brought up in the Castle, in case you had any thoughts that way.’ She pointed to the book. ‘There are heaps of them who didn’t expect to inherit or simply inherited in some doubtful way. Like when Henry IV banished one of the barons, as we were then, and gave the title to his nephew. The nephew had the original Earl killed in France because he thought he might come back and claim the title. Not very familial.’

Freya said, ‘You’ll find quite a lot of lively family history there. Polly’s right; our Fitzwarin ancestors were a violent and lawless lot.’

Polly said disapprovingly, ‘A lot of them were apostates. It’s quite shocking the way they gave up being Catholic. I thought all these old families were recusants and stuck to the true faith through thick and thin.’

Leo said, ‘They did that for a reason, Polly. If you look you’ll see it’s the eldest son who apostatises. Until the late eighteenth century, Catholics couldn’t own property and they couldn’t sit in Parliament until 1829. So if they wanted to keep the Castle in the family, then at the time of his inheritance the eldest son had couldn’t be a Catholic. So he became a member of the Church of England, and once he’d inherited lands and titles he reconverted.’

Georgia said admiringly, ‘I never knew that. And they let them get away with it?’

‘It was easier in some times than others. But the Selchesters were by and large true to their faith.’

‘You’d think,’ Georgia said, ‘that there’d be a priest hole or two in the Castle.’

‘There’s supposed to be one,’ Freya said. ‘Tom and Sonia and I used to spend hours searching for it, but we never found it. Wherever it is, it’s hidden so well that it’s completely lost. It is mentioned in some of the records, though. It was known as The Room That Has No Ears.’

Gus said, ‘That’s quaint.’

‘It makes sense,’ Hugo said. ‘If it was more than a priest hole, if it were a secret chapel where a priest could hold Mass then it would be essential that nobody could overhear them. They would have been careful about the household, the servants and so on, but even so those were difficult times for Catholic families, as Leo said.’

‘And a lot of them came to sticky ends,’ Polly said. ‘You’d be amazed, Pops, how many of our ancestors were murdered or killed in battle.’

Georgia said, ‘To be fair, that was in the olden days.’

Polly came back swiftly, ‘Well, my grandfather didn’t exactly die in his bed, did he?’

Freya said, ‘No, but his father did. With great pomp and ceremony from what I gather. All the family gathered about his bed. Mind you, his dying words were, “Damn you all.”’

Polly was shocked. ‘That’s no attitude to take with him into the next life. Whatever did the priest say?’

‘I think the priest had momentary deafness,’ Freya said. ‘Officially he died fortified by the rites of Holy Church, so that was all right.’

Polly said, ‘Are they all here in the Castle?’

‘Ghosts, you mean?’ Georgia said.

Gus said quickly, ‘I’d rather you didn’t talk about ghosts, Georgia. Your Uncle Leo will tell you that there are no such things.’

‘I meant their remains.’

‘Many of our forebears do lie in the Castle vaults, Polly. And that’s where they stay,’ said Freya.

Georgia said, ‘Not your grandfather though. He was buried in Oxford, wasn’t he, Freya? Lady Sonia didn’t want him here in the Castle.’

Scene 3

Gus and Hugo left them to it and adjourned to the library, calling in at the kitchen on the way to ask Mrs Partridge if they could have some coffee.

‘You go along, my lord, and I’ll bring it to you there.’

‘Do you think I’ll ever get used to being called “my lord”?’ Gus said as they walked through the Great Hall.

‘You aren’t the first person to have inherited a title unexpectedly. Give it few months and you won’t notice it.’

Gus wanted to see the old drawings and engravings of the Castle. Hugo went across to the far corner where a deep cabinet with slender shelves housed albums of prints and photos.

Meanwhile, Gus was cruising along the shelves. He extracted a small black book from two leather volumes of poetry and said, ‘This looks as though it doesn’t belong here.’

As Hugo looked round to see what Gus was talking about, there was a slight sound from the gallery above his head.

Was someone moving about up there? Maybe it was just the sunlight filtered by branches outside the window which had given him that impression. Yet instinct, training and experience told him that somebody was there.

The gallery ran round three sides of the library and was accessed by a wooden spiral staircase within the library and another staircase outside. The library was arranged in sections marked with antique busts placed on pillars, and these busts were level with the gallery railing.

Hugo’s eye swept along the line of classical emperors and ancient worthies. It stopped at Cicero. Was there a slender shadow along one edge of the base? At that very moment, the marble bust toppled over and crashed to the floor.

Gus and Hugo were there in a flash, looking down at Cicero, who now had a broken Roman nose. Bits of marble lay strewn around.

‘Stay right here, Gus,’ Hugo said, and he limped over to the spiral staircase. It was awkward, with his leg, but he made it up to the gallery. There was nobody there. He hadn’t expected there to be. He walked along the gallery till he came to the pillar on which Cicero had stood.

He leaned over the railing and said to Gus, ‘I can’t see any reason why it should have fallen. It’s lucky that neither of us was underneath it.’

The door opened and Leo came in. He looked at Gus, at the broken bust and then up at the gallery. Hugo beckoned to him and, moving much more nimbly than his nephew, he went up the spiral staircase to join him. Hugo pointed silently to the plinth on top of the pillar.

‘Did you see anyone?’ Leo said.

‘No, but I’d swear somebody was up here.’

‘It could have been dislodged for a while without anyone noticing it.’

Hugo said, ‘It’s heavy, but it wouldn’t take too much effort to rock it towards the edge. But I don’t think it could have happened while somebody was flicking a feather duster over it, and I don’t suppose these busts ever get more than that.’

Leo ran his fingers over Caesar’s nearby bald pate. ‘This hasn’t been dusted for some time.’

The others were coming into the library now. Polly said, ‘That was the most awful crash. Are you all right, Pops?’

Georgia said, ‘Golly, look; one of those old Romans has come down.’

Sonia came in, interested but not alarmed, followed by Rupert. She surveyed the scene and said, ‘I always said that those marble busts perched up there were dangerous. I’d get rid of them all if I were you, Gus.’

Freya, who had come in on her heels, knelt beside the marble head. She said to Gus, ‘It’ll be possible to have this repaired. How odd that it should suddenly topple over like this. None of them have ever done that, and they’ve been here for about two hundred years.’

Hugo had been going round from Trajan via Ovid to Horace at the end of the row, methodically checking each bust. He looked down and called out, ‘All the others are perfectly secure. I can’t think why that one fell.’

Polly was holding her father’s arm. ‘You weren’t anywhere near it? It wasn’t intended for you?’

Gus put his arm round her. ‘No, Polly, I’m fine. No one was trying to drop a bust of Cicero on me. I was nowhere near it. I was standing over there, I was looking at a book I’d taken from the shelf that seemed interesting.’ He looked around the library. ‘Where is it? I must have dropped it when the bust came down. See if you can find it, girls, it’s a black book.’

Georgia and Polly hunted for it, going down on hands and knees and peering under chairs. ‘It’s definitely not here,’ Georgia said.

Gus frowned. ‘How odd.’

Leo said, ‘Do you know what it was?’

‘I’d only just opened it. There were drawings of rustic scenes and ruins. And a poem or two written in copperplate.’

Sonia, who’d been watching him intently, let out a long breath. ‘No other writing? Was it a notebook?’

‘It looked to me like a commonplace book, I should think from the last century.’

Sonia said, ‘Whatever it is, it seems to have vanished.’

‘Maybe in the excitement of the moment I flung it away from me and it caught on a shelf or something. It will turn up.’

Mrs Partridge came stalking in. ‘Now what?’ She looked severely at the fallen Cicero. ‘I never could hold with all these marble heads. They take a deal of dusting and do no good to anyone. Now my fine gentleman here has come crashing down and lost his nose. I’ll have to fetch a dustpan and brush.’

Hugo grinned at her. ‘I don’t think you can sweep him up with a dustpan and brush, Mrs P.’

Mrs Partridge gave him a scathing look. ‘No, and I wouldn’t try to, as you very well know, Mr Hugo. There’s a lot of dust come down, and look at the dent it’s made in the parquet. That’ll all have to be put right.’

Between them Gus and Hugo shifted the bust and propped it up against a shelf.

Georgia surveyed it with a look of contempt. ‘Serves him right. They’re always making me read Cicero at school; he writes a lot of rot. Come on, Polly, let’s get back to the family tree.’

Chapter Fourteen

Scene 1

‘Just like it used to be,’ Georgia said happily, as she helped Mrs Partridge lay the table.

Most of the Selchester clan plus Rupert had gone over to dine at Veryan House. Gus willingly, as he felt that he needed to get to know his aunt better. Babs and Polly, who had been intimidated by their great-aunt, with less enthusiasm. Sonia with a kind of resignation. At first she said she wouldn’t go. ‘Let Priscilla shake Gus inside out, which is what she wants to do.’

Rupert, mindful of how influential an MP Lady Priscilla’s husband, Sir Archibald, was, said, ‘Rude not to go, don’t you think?’

Freya was definite; she wasn’t going. ‘No, thank you. When she’s finished with Gus, she’ll start again on me, and I had enough of that on Christmas Day.’

Hugo said, ‘What have you done now?’

‘It’s not what I’ve done; it’s what I’m not doing. Aunt Priscilla is a great organiser of other people’s lives, and she considers that now that I have to give up my tower here, it’s time for me to leave Selchester and go to London. To make a life for myself.’

‘Preferably,’ Georgia put in, ‘by finding yourself a suitable husband and settling down? Isn’t that what aunts always want their nieces to do?’

Freya laughed. ‘She’s not the only one, because my parents nag me, even from Washington. They send me letters saying how I mustn’t let myself sink into provincial life and what wonderful opportunities are opening up in London.’

Georgia said, ‘That’s what Valerie says to you, Hugo, all those opportunities she goes on about.’

Sonia said, not sounding particularly concerned, ‘Priscilla will be annoyed; an invitation to Veryan House is a equivalent to a royal command.’

Freya said, ‘Tell her I’m starting a cold or something.’

Sonia cast her eyes heavenwards. ‘That would be lying, which would be wrong, wouldn’t it, Father Leo? And lucky you not to be invited, only I happen to know it’s because she plans to have you to dine on your own – what an honour.’

Leo said, ‘I’m keeping out of this, but I have to say I think Freya is wise to stay away. Her reluctance to do what Lady Priscilla wants is bound to end in recriminations and a family argument. Which are always best avoided.’

So there they were having supper in the kitchen. Mrs Partridge had said that she’d get food on the table and then would be off, if they didn’t mind. ‘It’s my evening for whist.’

‘Watch how you bet,’ Georgia said. ‘You know last time you lost three shillings and sixpence.’

Mrs Partridge said, ‘I feel my luck will be in tonight.’

They ate their stew and baked potatoes. Georgia was right, it was like old times. Not so old; it was hard to remember they’d only been at the Castle since September.

It felt like home, that was the trouble.

He’d never imagined that home sweet home might come in the shape of a castle. A London flat, possibly; not this huge, cold and ancient pile. Nor could he have foreseen that three women – Georgia, Freya and Mrs Partridge – were what made it feel like home. As did the presence of Leo, who was feeding a scrap of meat to a pleased Magnus.

When they were eating the excellent trifle Mrs Partridge had left for them, Freya said, ‘We need to talk things over.’

Hugo opened his mouth to suggest that Georgia should remove herself, but she was having none of it.

‘You’ve got that look on your face, Hugo, that means you’re planning to talk about things to do with the murder. You think it might upset me and so I’d better go off and do something else. Well, I won’t. For one thing I intend to have a second helping of pudding. And for another I’m just as interested as you are. And if you’re worried about me being of a nervous disposition, it’d be a lot more worse for my nerves for me to be by myself all in this great big frightening castle while you’re sitting cosily in here discussing interesting things. Besides, I was very helpful last time, when we were solving Lord Selchester’s murder. I shall keep notes and make lists; I’m good at that.’

Hugo admitted defeat. There was no point in trying to reason with Georgia in this mood. And there was some justice in what she’d said. They could wait to talk until she went to bed, but by then the others might be back from Veryan House. So he launched into an account of what they’d discovered about Saul Ingham, aka Sampson.

Georgia unscrewed her fountain pen, wrote ‘Suspects’ at the top of a sheet of paper, underlined the word carefully and then looked round expectantly. ‘Shoot.’

They looked back at her and she said impatiently, ‘Somebody has to have killed Oliver, so we need a list of suspects. Of course, if any outsider could have crept in and done things to the fuses and switches and things, then it could be a long list. Only who’d want to kill Oliver? Nobody knew him.’

‘An accidental murder, perhaps.’

‘Means, motive and opportunity, that’s what we want for whoever the victim was meant to be. You are lucky, Hugo and Freya, to have got into Nightingale Cottage, because I’ve heard that it’s very strange in there. Can we put the man there down as a suspect?’

Georgia wrote down all the names. Then she put crosses beside their four names. ‘None of us did it. Gus and his daughters? I can see Babs murdering someone for a philosophical reason, but I don’t think she’d know anything about all the electrics and nor would Polly. Child murderers are interesting, of course, but I don’t think Polly is one. Then there’s his nibs, he knows all about the electrical stuff, and he’s clever, but why on earth would he want to kill Oliver? He’d never set eyes on him until he came here, and he didn’t even invite him. And he wouldn’t go electrocuting himself, he’s not bonkers. So that leaves Hugo’s mysterious stranger who sounds like he was certainly out for blood, even if it was the wrong blood. And Rupert and Sonia.’

Freya had been in a bit of a dream, but she now came to and said, ‘I have someone to add to the list of suspects. At least a kind of suspect; I don’t see how he could have fiddled with the electrics on Christmas Day, but you never know. And he could certainly have been responsible for all those other things that happened to Gus.’

They listened in silence, while Georgia added the name Mr Jenkins to her list.

Leo said, ‘Can we see the sketch?’

Freya had put it in the drawer together with Mrs Partridge’s newspaper. She said to Hugo, ‘I thought of telling Superintendent MacLeod, but it’s going to come better from you.’

‘It’s an interesting face,’ Leo said. ‘Babs has managed to capture the blankness of his expression. This is a man who doesn’t want to be noticed, the kind of man who blends into the background.’

‘He was in Selchester in the autumn,’ Freya said. ‘We thought he might have had something to do with Jason Filbert’s death, but the police said they knew him, he was a private investigator.’

Georgia added a star beside Jenkins. ‘What could he have been investigating in Selchester just before Christmas? He has to go down as a suspect.’

Leo said, ‘Except that he seems to have left Selchester on the 24th.’

‘Laying a false trail,’ Georgia said promptly. ‘Muddying the waters, queering the pitch, that kind of thing.’

‘Or maybe,’ Leo said, ‘he had something to do with what did seem to be attempts on Gus’s life, but nothing to do with Oliver’s murder.’

‘Other than this mysterious Mr Jenkins, who doesn’t seem to have been in the neighbourhood at the time,’ Georgia said, ‘it’s Lady Sonia or Rupert.

Hugo said, with a glance at Freya, ‘Both of whom are the only people who stand to gain in any obvious way from Gus’s death.’

‘Money is always a motive for murder,’ Leo said. ‘Yet neither Lady Sonia nor Rupert are in any way desperate for money – didn’t you say Rupert had recently come into a considerable inheritance of his own? It seems odd that they would want to dispose of the Earl, especially since Lady Sonia is the only one who’d benefit directly.’

Georgia said, ‘I did suggest there might be a maniac out there with a grudge against Earls. Or some unknown enemy who wants to take revenge on any Lord Selchester. There could be an ancient feud and they won’t be content until the line dies out.’ She added practically, ‘Although unless Gus gets married again and has a son, the Earldom will finish with him in any case. So it all seems a bit pointless.’

Freya sighed. ‘It seems awfully cold-blooded to think of Sonia wanting to kill Gus. I know she’s infuriated by his coming into the title, but if she had any murderous intentions, why make her discontent so widely known? She’d be the obvious suspect, especially inviting herself here. Could she be that stupid?’

Hugo said, ‘Whatever Lady Sonia is, she’s not stupid.’

‘I can see her bumping someone off,’ Georgia said, ‘only I think she’d do it in some insidious way. Poison, for instance.’

Freya gave her a sharp look ‘Why do you say that?’

Georgia shrugged. ‘Poison’s supposed to be a woman’s weapon. And it’s detached; you can poison people at arm’s length. You slip something into their tea, so it isn’t the same as bashing them on the head. I suppose wiring up a switch so that somebody gets frazzled is also distant, but it’s sort of contrived, and can you see Lady Sonia messing around with fuses and wiring?’

‘What did Sonia do during the war, Freya?’ Hugo asked. ‘If she worked as a driver in the ATS as a driver or anything like that, she might have acquired skills that would make electrical circuits child’s play to her.’

Freya’s face lightened and she laughed. ‘Need you ask? Nothing like the ATS for Sonia. She married to avoid being called up, and then once she was widowed she managed to get herself a cosy billet in some charitable outfit attached to the Navy. Which meant she came and went very much as she wanted and went on living the life that she was used to. No, Sonia was never one to get her hands dirty.’

Georgia said, ‘That sort of leaves Rupert.’

‘The difficulty there,’ Leo said, ‘is that as far as we know, Rupert has nothing to do with Gus. He hadn’t met him and except the connection with Lady Sonia, why should he have any animosity against him? The same applies as it does with Lady Sonia: why come to the Castle and commit a murder where you’ll be a suspect? His only motive is Lady Sonia’s inheritance if – and it’s a big if – he really is going to marry her. And I’m not at all convinced by the engagement or the motive.’

‘We’re forgetting about the other attempts on Gus’s life. Sonia or Rupert weren’t on that liner, and even if you count that one a genuine accident neither Sonia nor Rupert were in Selchester that afternoon in the museum. One or other of them might have been in Oxford; that can be checked.’

‘Hired assassins,’ Georgia said. ‘They paid a hitman to do the job.’

Leo said, ‘You’ve been going to the pictures too much, Georgia. It’s not as easy as you think to find assassins.’

‘London’s full of people shooting each other; all those gangs. Although I don’t suppose Rupert moves in those circles.’

‘What line are the police taking, Hugo?’ Leo asked.

‘Gus, rather than Oliver, as the intended victim.’

Georgia said, ‘Perhaps it was meant to be Oliver all along.’

Freya said, ‘That’s even more improbable. The only person who knew him was Sonia and she claims she hardly knew him at all.’

Georgia, with a sly look at her brother said, ‘Maybe they’d had a love affair. Maybe it was a
crime passionnel
, like in France.’

‘Stop right there, Georgia,’ Hugo said.

Leo took her suggestion more calmly. ‘I think we can discount that. There was nothing in their behaviour to suggest that there’d been any degree of intimacy between them. It’s a difficult thing to conceal; they’d have to both have to be consummate actors to pull that off. Either there’s hostility or there’s some kind of friendly regard. Such liaisons always leave an emotional impression.’

Freya said, ‘Apart from coming to do the inventory in the autumn, when he was only here for a few hours, Oliver has no connection with anyone here or with the Castle or Selchester at all.’

Georgia said, ‘That’s not true.’

They all looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’ Freya said.

Georgia got up, went to a drawer of the dresser, withdrew a large book and plonked it on the table. ‘This is the housekeeper’s book. Of course it hasn’t been kept up for years, but it was still being used when Lord Selchester was alive. So when we were having all these guests for Christmas, Mrs Partridge said she would get out the book and put them in and she showed it to me. The housekeeper used to write which guests were coming, what servants they’d bring with them – maids and valets and things these days – and which rooms they were in. And if they didn’t bring servants, who was going to wait on them. All that kind of information.’ She opened the book. ‘Look, this is way back before the war.’

Freya reached out and took the book. She said in an awed voice, ‘I’d completely forgotten about this. Yes, of course, everything was meticulously recorded.’ She riffled through the pages and put her finger on an entry. ‘There’s me coming back for the holidays. I was in the Peony Room, which was the room I always had. And that Mabel was to wait on me. She was Sonia’s maid and we shared her when I was here for the holidays.’

Hugo took the book from her in his turn, ‘Where does it mention Oliver, Georgia?’

‘Go to the very last entry, in January 1947. There’s a list there of who was invited for the weekend that Lord Selchester was murdered. Only there are lines through most of them since they never came on account of the snow. There you are, second from the bottom. Oliver Seynton. He was going to be put in the Randolf Room.’

There was utter silence for a few moments and then Hugo let out a low whistle. ‘So your uncle did know Oliver, Freya.’

‘And,’ Freya said, ‘since we know he had some hold over those four’ – she pointed to the top names in the list – ‘maybe he did over the rest of them as well.’

Leo looked annoyed. ‘I remember saying at the time that we should find out about the people who were invited and didn’t come. How remiss of us not to have followed up on that. Except that we didn’t need to know about them, as things turned out, because we identified the murderer.’