Charters and Caldicott (23 page)

‘Yorkshire Dales,' said the fake Jenny. ‘A poor thing, but mine own.'

‘I don't think it can be,' said Caldicott icily. ‘It's signed Meg Wrigley.'

Charters turned to face her with his scorn. ‘Perhaps one of your many pseudonyms.'

Meg was contrite. ‘I'm sorry. You have every reason to be angry.'

‘Angry? Why should we be angry?' Caldicott asked. ‘Total stranger takes the name of our best friend's daughter, tricks us into affording her protection and shelter, all but gets us arrested, in short, makes total Charlies of us – what is there to be angry about?'

‘I truly am sorry. I wish there were something I could do to make it up to you
and
Margaret.'

Charters frowned unforgivingly. ‘There is, my girl. Explain yourself.'

‘Never mind that,' said Wrigley. ‘Get the letter.'

Meg ignored him, eager to rehabilitate herself in Charters' and Caldicott's eyes. ‘I'm as close a friend of Jenny's as you were of her father's. We were at school together in Switzerland.'

‘Very likely,' said Caldicott.

‘It's true!'

‘How do you expect us to swallow that?' asked Charters. ‘We don't even have proof that the girl is still alive.'

‘Oh, she's alive all right – just. You know her father threw her out? She went to San Francisco and began drifting across America. One day she was driving to some commune or other with a bunch she'd got mixed up with, all of them high as kites – they met a truck coming the other way. Three of them died instantly. Jenny wasn't so lucky. She's been living for the past year in a private sanatorium in upstate New York, almost completely paralysed.'

Caldicott shook his head sadly. ‘Poor girl,' Charters murmured.

‘All right – we've had the two minutes' silence,' said Wrigley. ‘Now let's have that letter.'

Meg turned to him. ‘Do you really think they're going to show us where the will is hidden when they don't even know why Jenny wants us to have it, why I deceived them, how this whole nightmare started?'

‘Your wife has a point there, Wrigley,' said Caldicott.

‘How much
do
you know?' asked Meg.

Charters and Caldicott answered simultaneously: ‘A great deal,' and ‘Not a lot.'

Charters nodded to Caldicott to continue. ‘Only what we've learned from Darrell.'

Charters felt this didn't do them justice. ‘Plus what we've deduced ourselves.'

‘It started in Hong Kong,' said Meg. ‘Dad had given me the money to take myself off on a kind of flying world cruise while I sorted out what to do about my failing marriage.'

‘They don't need to know about that,' said Wrigley.

‘I wish I'd known it wasn't his to give, then none of this would have happened.'

‘You didn't know because you didn't want to know. Daddy could do no wrong! The sun shone out of his backside!'

Charters glared. ‘That's enough of that, Wrigley!'

‘Jenny's father took me out to dinner. He told me how popular Birdade had become with the Chinese, just from the few crates we were exporting to Hong Kong. He was convinced there was an enormous market for us, just waiting to be tapped.'

‘Shrewd fellow, Jock. Knew how many beans make five,' said Caldicott.

‘Well, I wasn't much interested at first. We're such a tiny company we don't have the capacity to expand on that scale. But then he mentioned the Zazz Corporation and how
they
were trying to break into China. He thought Josh Darrell would leap at the idea of taking us over. And so then I
was
interested. I cabled Dad – not knowing, of course, that he lived in terror of an outsider examining the books. My husband arrived on the next plane.'

‘With the object of blocking Jock's bright idea by hook or by crook,' said Caldicott.

‘Or murder,' said Charters grimly.

Meg looked shamefaced. ‘There was no murder. I'm afraid I had to pretend it wasn't a straightforward heart attack for the same reason I pretended I was being followed. So you would take me under your wing.'

‘Yes, we rather fell for that, didn't we?' said Caldicott.

‘Never mind going on,' said Wrigley. ‘The old man'll be home any minute. Are you going to get that letter or shall I?'

Meg stood up. ‘Is there anything you'd like. Coffee?'

‘This isn't a café.'

‘There
is
one thing you might rustle up, since you ask,' said Caldicott, brightening. ‘Mrs Mottram's pigskin suitcase.'

Margaret repaired to the semi-darkness of the Wild West bar to recruit her strength with a gin and tonic before setting out in search of Charters and Caldicott.

‘May I join you, Mrs Mottram?' Inspector Snow materialised beside her, flicked imaginary dust off the adjacent saddle-shaped stool and sat down.

Margaret managed to hide her surprise. ‘We must stop meeting like this, Inspector. Would you like a drink?'

‘Not while I'm on duty. Oh, go on then. A Virgin Mary while I'm waiting.'

The barman looked blank. ‘That's a Bloody Mary without the vodka,' Margaret translated. ‘And I'll have a gin and tonic without the tonic. Waiting for what?'

‘My opposite number to arrive with a warrant. It's all got to be done by the book, you know.'

‘Of course it has,' said Margaret, suppressing a smile.

‘So where are they? Your wandering boys.'

‘Watching the Test Match, if I know them. They're not in the hotel.'

‘I only hope they
are
watching the Test Match, out of harm's way. They were over at Norton and West earlier this morning, I know that much.'

‘You have your spies everywhere.'

‘No, I don't. Sergeant Tipper's just checked with their receptionist. She said they'd been and gone.' Snow began to arrange a dish of olives on sticks in a sunburst pattern. ‘Which is one load off my mind, I must say. That's not far off a maniac they're tangling with.'

‘Gordon Wrigley?'

Snow looked surprised. ‘How did you work that out? Intuition?'

‘Something like that. How did you work it out? Inspiration?'

‘Perspiration.' Even the mention of the word made Snow reach for a cocktail napkin and wipe his hands. ‘I'm a meticulous man, Mrs Mottram.'

‘So I've noticed.' Margaret pointed to one of the olives. ‘Shouldn't that be at nine o'clock?'

Snow made the necessary adjustment to the straying olive. ‘Matching fingerprints, breaking alibis, comparing statements, collating descriptions, putting hairs and fag-ends and buttons in plastic envelopes, comparing pictures of Mrs Wrigley with descriptions of a young lady seen leaving your house with a pigskin suitcase.'

‘Oh, my pigskin suitcase!' said Margaret, her voice unnaturally high. ‘It's all right, Inspector, I don't want to prefer charges.'

‘Checking, double-checking, treble-checking... hard slog, that's what detective work's all about, Mrs Mottram, not chasing round the country like, well, like...'

‘Blue-arsed flies,' said Margaret, to save him the embarrassment. ‘Still, it's a hobby for them, isn't it?'

‘Playing Sherlock Holmes at their age is a riskier hobby than hang-gliding, Mrs Mottram.'

‘Would you say Sherlock Holmes? I think they're both Dr Watsons.'

‘That's even riskier. They're very old friends of yours, aren't they?'

‘Caldicott is,' said Margaret, with a reminiscent smile. ‘I think Charters simply tolerates me.'

‘You don't know how near you came to having to identifying the pair of them on a mortuary slab.'

Margaret shivered.

Charters completed his protracted and careful study of Jock Beevers' letter and handed it to Caldicott with a significant grunt and a meaningful look. Caldicott glanced blankly through the letter and returned it.

‘Now look here, Wrigley, you're quite right,' said Charters. ‘This letter should lead us to the will.'

‘What?' said Caldicott, slow to take his cue. Then he remembered Charters's grimaces. ‘Oh, absolutely. You see, it's in code.'

Wrigley sighed. ‘You don't say.'

‘However, that will is meant to be in our trust,' said Charters, ‘Mrs Wrigley, if we're to place it in your hands, I'm afraid we shall require a fuller explanation than you have volunteered so far.'

‘Hear jolly hear,' said Caldicott. ‘Now you said this started as Jenny's idea. Does that mean she asked you to find the will!'

‘Find it and destroy it – so that the previous will would become valid.'

‘Whereupon, so a little bird tells me, she and Helen Appleyard would have carved up the estate between them. Well that seems incentive enough.'

‘That
wasn't
the incentive. She was only thinking of me.'

‘Brings tears to your eyes, doesn't it?' said Wrigley. ‘You've done
her
enough favours.'

Meg followed what seemed to be normal practice and ignored him. ‘After Colonel Beevers' funeral I flew to New York to see Jenny. They'd been close to one another once and I thought she'd need a shoulder to cry on. By now, Gordon had told me the trouble my father was in if Josh Darrell took us over. I poured out the whole story to Jenny and she had what seemed, up there in the Adirondack Mountains, a wonderfully simple idea.'

‘Impersonate her, destroy new will, produce old will, presumably in her possession,' Caldicott summed up. ‘Then what?'

Wrigley answered him. ‘The same stroke I'd already meant to pull with Beevers. Buy Norton and West out of what's coming to her, straighten out the books, sell out to Zazz, and we'd all be laughing.'

‘But how could the poor girl lying in hospital all those thousands of miles away know where the new will might possibly be?' asked Charters.

‘Helen Appleyard,' said Meg.

Charters snorted. ‘Scheming baggage.'

‘Helen kept her in touch with everything that was going on, particularly the fact that Colonel Beevers had sent the only draft of his new will off to England so that “no one could throw a spanner in the works,” as he put it. Helen thought, so therefore Jenny thought, that it must have come to you.'

‘It did,' said Wrigley.

‘But not as directly as you would have liked,' said Caldicott.

‘Helen Appleyard was livid,' Meg continued. ‘She wrote that she'd a good mind to track down the will and burn it. I suppose that's what put the idea into Jenny's head.'

‘The trouble was, it also put the idea into her own stupid head,' said Wrigley. ‘If the silly bitch had kept her nose out of it, she could be sitting at home in Hong Kong waiting for a million quid to drop into her lap.'

Caldicott turned his back on Wrigley and his coarseness. ‘So you came back to England primed as Jenny Beevers, with Jenny's papers, plus cock-and-bull yarn for my consumption, about wanting to see Jock Beevers' diaries. But your nerve failed, so you thought you'd resort to burglary.'

‘I suppose my nerve did fail. You see, on one of my visits to Viceroy Mansions, while I was screwing up the courage to go in and ask for you, I saw someone I recognised coming out. I'd seen her at the funeral.'

‘Helen Appleyard. Fresh from greasing Grimes's itchy palm, I suppose.'

‘I assumed that she must have been to see you. Why, I didn't bother to think – it never occurred to me that she must be after the will, too. I thought that as a friend of Colonel Beevers you must be a friend of hers, too.'

‘Hardly likely.'

‘Her returning like that upset everything. If she
had
spoken to you, if she
had
told you that Jenny Beevers was in a nursing home three thousand miles away, and then I arrived at your door pretending to be Jenny...'

‘You'd have been in the soup sooner rather than later,' Caldicott finished for her. ‘But hang on, according to Grimes, admittedly not a reliable witness, that's precisely what you
did
do.'

‘I had to double-check that you were out, though he'd already told me you were never in on the first Friday of the month.'

‘I'm amazed he doesn't announce my movements on the Residents' Association bulletin board,' said Caldicott crossly.

‘You know how I got the key. This time Gordon was waiting for me outside. He went up to your flat first.'

‘Yes. I've been puzzling about that.'

‘I must say there's one thing I've been puzzling over, Mrs Mottram,' said Inspector Snow, consulting his notebook.

‘Aren't I supposed to say that?'

‘Come again?'

‘“But there's one thing I don't understand, Inspector. If the 3.17 from Bodmin was running forty minutes late that day, how could the murderer have hidden in the library before the butler came in with the sherry tray at 6.30?”'

Snow discreetly but firmly moved Margaret's gin glass out of her reach. ‘You read a lot of detective stories, do you?'

‘All the time.'

‘Then tell me this. Wrigley's wife wasn't a party to any of these murders, I'm convinced of that. He was alone with Helen Appleyard when he killed her.'

‘I'm sure you're right. She steals pigskin suitcases but wouldn't stoop to murder.'

‘Then why did Wrigley go up to Mr Caldicott's flat ahead of her? Obviously to check there was nobody on the premises – a cleaning-lady, say – before she let herself in with the key she'd just pocketed. But why make a double-act of it? Why couldn't she have just marched up and rung the doorbell herself, and if anyone answered, claimed she was selling encyclopedias?'

‘Oh, that's easy-peasy,' said Margaret, rocking back dangerously on her bar stool. ‘If Mrs-Duggins-what-does
had
answered the door she'd have got a good look at her. Now, if she didn't get her hands on that will – which indeed she didn't – and had to fall back on passing herself off as Jenny Beevers – which indeed she did – she couldn't run the risk of Mrs-Duggins-what-does blurting out, “That ain't no Miss Jenny Beevers, Mr Caldicott – that's the lady what came round selling encyclopedias”.'