The Wilt Inheritance (12 page)

Mrs Bale nodded. ‘Tell her to use the second gate instead of the main one. It’s painted black and will put her on to the road to the back of the house.’

Wilt relayed all this to Eva when he got through to her mobile. ‘It’s the one the family use and far less dangerous,’ he told her. ‘The alternative is for you all to come by train and I’ll ask them to provide a taxi.’

As usual Eva objected.

‘Anyone would think I couldn’t drive very well,’ she grumbled.

Wilt sighed. Eva always objected to taking his advice. Not that she did drive that well come to think of it.

‘I’m not saying that. But I wouldn’t come down that awful track through the woods myself, and with the girls in the car it would be very unwise, to put it mildly.’

In the end she agreed and, to Wilt’s relief, changed the subject.

‘Have you met Edward yet?’

‘No. Apparently he’s gone off somewhere on his own. I have to say, Eva, he does sound very strange. Might even be an actual idiot. I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ll be able to do anything with him.’

‘You’ve got to do something with him.’ Eva had neglected to tell her husband about the bonus payable if Edward got through the exam, thinking it would leave her with something of a trump card to play should Wilt show any signs of not wanting to see the job through. ‘I’m sure you’ll feel differently once you’ve met him.’

‘God knows when that will be if he spends all day out in the woods playing silly buggers. And it does seem as though Sir George – who might not be Sir George after all, but that’s too long a story for now – really does hate him. Anyway must go as I’m not paying for this call.’

Wilt rang off and turned round – to find himself face to face with a grossly overweight man in his sixties who looked as though he was surprised to find a stranger using the telephone.

‘Am I to assume you are my step-son’s tutor?’ he
enquired in a tone of voice Wilt associated with the one occasion he had been fined for exceeding the speed limit.

‘Yes,’ he mumbled. ‘I was just telling my wife that I had arrived safely. Mrs Bale said you wouldn’t mind. I take it you are Sir George?’

‘I am indeed. What’s your name?’

‘Wilt. Henry Wilt.’

‘Well, that’s all right. I had been led to believe you were arriving later in the week. My wife tends to be so infernally scatterbrained that half the time she doesn’t know what day of the week it is.’

He led the way into his study and indicated a chair for Wilt to sit in while he busied himself with a decanter and glasses arranged on a silver tray.

‘I always have a brandy after a morning in court,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you’d care to join me?’

‘I think I’d prefer something less strong,’ said Wilt. ‘Perhaps a beer.’

‘Just as you like, though I fancy you’ll change your mind when you meet my step-son.’

‘Not the easiest of boys?’ Wilt enquired as Sir George half-filled a balloon glass from the decanter and then produced a bottle of beer, an opener plus glass for Wilt before lowering himself heavily into a large leather armchair.

‘One of the most damnably difficult youths I’ve ever met. I’m not surprised my wife’s first husband chose to commit suicide. Had I known Clarissa had
a ghastly son like Eddie, I would never have married her. And that’s no overstatement. Worse still, the woman bosses me about far too much for my liking.’

Wilt said nothing. If the Hall was a disconcerting place, the people living in it were just as peculiar.

‘If you can get Eddie-Gawd-Help-Us into any college in Cambridge you’ll be a miracle worker. We had difficulty getting him into a minor public school, and keeping him there required what I can only call bribery.’

‘Your wife said something about Porterhouse. I gather you went there?’ said Wilt.

Sir George turned up his nose in horror.

‘I told you she was a complete scatterbrain – I was at Peterhouse. The last thing I’d want to do is inflict the mindless creature on my old college. Not that there’s the slightest chance of getting the brute into any college. More likely to get a place in Pentonville.’

‘You mean, the prison?’ said Wilt, beginning to regret he hadn’t accepted the brandy after all.

‘I should imagine he’ll end up there in any case. Best place for him, in fact. The public would be a lot safer by far.’

‘Someone mentioned that he likes to throw things.’

‘Throw things? He’s a bloody maniac, that boy. The times I’ve had to bail him out when he’s half killed some poor bugger or other … No, I’m afraid you’ve rather got your hands full with Eddie, old chap.’

By the time Sir George had finished his second
brandy, while continuing his diatribe against his step-son, Wilt’s feelings had undergone a radical change. From initially appreciating the man’s problem, he had begun to feel slightly shocked by his appalling attitude towards his step-son. Although, from experience, he did know just how difficult boys could be. He was half tempted to share with Sir George his own experience with apprentices in the Liberal Studies classes at the now defunct Fenland College of Arts and Technology.

In his early years there Wilt had been faced every day with rooms full of blank-faced youths who saw no point in reading Candide or The Lord of the Flies, as part of their cultural hinterland and it had been Wilt’s task to try to show them how literature could equip them with life skills. Nowadays they were all called Communications students and weren’t asked to think or discuss anything, merely to sit in front of computers and, as far as he could see, practise manipulating the machines at greater and greater speed. Most of the time they played violent virtual games on them or pored over their Facebook pages, uploading vile and ridiculous photographs of one another. The quads had told him that Social Networking sites were ‘cool’, to which Wilt had retorted that he preferred it when social networking meant looking at someone’s face and not a bloody screen.

In fact, when he thought about it, Wilt felt extremely bitter about the way things had changed. Although,
as annoying and badly behaved as the quads were, he hoped he wasn’t ever as vile about them as Sir George Gadsley was being about his step-son. For whatever reason, he obviously loathed the boy.

In other circumstances Wilt would have asked more questions, but he was living in the arrogant old fellow’s house and had to earn enough money from him to keep the quads at that damned school or else get hell from Eva.

All the same, he felt a bit guilty.

After a third brandy Sir George said he was going out to lunch and told Wilt that Mrs Bale would give him something to eat in the kitchen. Wilt duly noted the implication. He didn’t care. The kitchen would be fine by him. He was glad to be out of the way.

Lady Clarissa had had another extremely trying day. She had cancelled her plan to drive down to Ipford at the weekend when, despite her begging and pleading, Uncle Harold had adamantly refused to leave the Black Bear and move into less expensive accommodation. It meant she couldn’t possibly stay there too, not least because he’d taken over the suite she usually stayed in. Besides which the bill he was running up was astronomical and she’d rather not draw it to George’s attention right now. The wretched Colonel had been doing himself exceedingly well at the hotel. His consumption of malt whisky before lunch and during the afternoon, often followed by a second bottle in the evening, was costing a small fortune.

She had spent the previous night trying to think of some way of making her uncle’s stay so uncomfortable he’d be only too pleased to take leave of the place. She’d tried phoning his room in the middle of the night and had listened to him curse the bastard who’d woken him. She repeated this at 3 a.m. but by the third time she tried it it was clear that he’d disconnected the telephone.

Having spent such a broken night herself, she wasn’t best pleased to be woken by a phone call from the hotel manager at 6 a.m. reporting that her uncle appeared to have locked himself in his suite. The maid who brought him his breakfast early each morning had knocked repeatedly, without success, and his phone appeared to have been pulled out of the wall whenever Reception tried ringing it.

‘Can’t you just let yourself in?’ demanded Lady Clarissa, feeling a trifle guilty at the thought of Uncle Harold tugging the phone out of the wall in the early hours.

‘He must have put the bolt across because the master key doesn’t work,’ explained the manager.

‘Well, can’t you go in through the window or the fire escape?’

‘There’s no fire escape to that room, and the window is locked with the curtains drawn. No, there’s only one thing for it and that’s to break down the door. I wanted to make sure first that you knew you would have to pay for a replacement.’

‘Of course I do, you stupid man!’ cried Lady Clarissa,
and slammed the phone down, starting to feel a little alarmed at the thought of what her night-time phone calls might have done to her uncle.

After what seemed a very long time but was actually only a matter of minutes the phone rang again. Clarissa eagerly answered it.

‘I’m extremely sorry to have to tell you that the Colonel is no longer with us, Lady Clarissa,’ the manager informed her.

‘He isn’t? You mean, he’s left? Where’s he gone?’ she asked with some relief.

‘I’m sorry to say …’ The manager hesitated. Telling the niece of a guest that her uncle had probably died of alcohol poisoning wasn’t a pleasant task, but Clarissa spoke again before he could think of a tactful way of breaking the news.

‘I imagine you are. I can’t say that I am. He was costing me a fortune! And where is he now?’

‘By “left us” I meant that … Well, actually he … er … died. In his sleep.’

‘Died?’

‘Yes. Quite peacefully, of course,’ the manager lied. In fact the Colonel had been found face down on the rug, purple-faced and with one fist still raised as if in anger. He assumed the poor chap had been hopping over to the en-suite bathroom since neither his stick nor his false leg was anywhere near, although it was odd that he’d somehow pulled the phone out of the wall as he fell.

As if that were not a bad enough start to Lady Clarissa’s morning, to make matters worse she had had to drive herself down to Ipford because the man who ran the garage had caught summer ’flu.

By the time she arrived at the hotel she felt very out of sorts but had at least resigned herself to the old man’s demise. She wouldn’t have a convenient reason to come to Ipford any more but neither would Uncle Harold be able to carry on fleecing her. She went to the hotel manager’s office and found his lounge suit augmented by a black armband.

He saluted as Lady Clarissa walked in and she quickly took out a handkerchief to hide her delight and feign tears.

‘Oh, poor Uncle,’ she sobbed. ‘I had so hoped that getting him out of that awful nursing home and into this delightful hotel would raise his spirits.’

For a moment the manager almost reversed the expression, to say that in his opinion it was precisely because the old man had raised so many spirits, in the form of large and exceedingly strong whiskies, that he’d died.

Instead he merely offered her his condolences but Clarissa wasn’t really listening, too busy considering what she was going to do now. Of one thing she was certain: Uncle Harold wasn’t going to waste any more of her money by being buried in Kenya. But nor could she bring herself to think of him being cremated or, as he had so aptly put it, ‘incinerated’, after all that
he had said about it. He might have been a nasty old man at the end but he was still family and she ought to do right by him.

‘Is my late uncle still in his room?’ she asked. ‘I’d like to have a last look at him.’

The manager said he quite understood and took her up in the lift, discreetly tucking the final bill, to which he had already added the cost of a new door, into her bag.

‘I’ll leave you to spend a few private moments with him,’ he told her, and hurried away down the stairs.

Lady Clarissa stopped sniffing and went into the room. From the strong smell of whisky it was clear that, although her phone calls had no doubt been a little unsettling, there were other reasons too for Uncle Harold’s abrupt demise. He was lying on the bed with a sheet over him but, strangely, seemed to have one fist raised. She tried pushing it back down but unfortunately rigor had set in and the more she pushed the harder it sprang back. Clarissa gave up for fear of snapping it off and leaving him with only one arm to match his one leg.

She turned her attention away from her uncle’s corpse and started looking around the suite for the ‘bugs’ he’d told her the hotel manager had installed, to film her having sex with the man from the garage. She knew they must be exceedingly small and were almost certainly hidden in obscure places, but there really was nothing to be seen of them. She went round
the sitting room several times and even climbed on to the dressing table in the bedroom to get a closer look at the ceiling rose and coving. In the end she was convinced that there weren’t any to be found and realised that the old devil had been bluffing her. With a silent curse, she went down in the lift and bearded the manager.

‘The Colonel told me you had installed hidden video cameras in that suite. I want to know if there’s any truth in his story?’

The manager gasped. ‘He told you that? What utter nonsense. It’s against the law and more than my … I mean, I’d have been insane to do anything like that. I’d have lost my job if such a story got out. And what on earth for?’

‘Oh, I’m just telling you that’s what he said. Not that I believed him, of course.’

‘I should hope not. He must have been exceedingly drunk at the time. I hadn’t wanted to say it before now but I think that your uncle probably killed himself with the amount he drank every day.’

Lady Clarissa was still dubious but there was nothing to be gained from starting an argument.

‘I suppose he was suffering from some sort of persecution complex. I just thought you ought to know what he told me. I do apologise for mentioning it.’

And leaving the flabbergasted manager still muttering angrily to himself, she went back to the car and rang directory enquiries for the number of an undertaker.
Finding a firm nearby, she went round to make arrangements for the Colonel’s funeral.