Child's Play (13 page)

'There is no such thing as a free consultation,' she said icily. 'Billy said if I had large funds, it might be worthwhile trying to throw the whole thing over on the grounds of Gwen's incompetence, but it was very risky and as I don't have large funds, I'd need to get someone to act for an extremely large percentage, and frankly he himself wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. But he also made the point that Goodenough's advisers must have made, that any action on my - or Huby's - part could drag on for ages, and might, just might, succeed.'

'So it's a real bargaining counter?'

'Indeed. I rang Goodenough back in mid-afternoon and discovered that he'd set off for deepest Yorkshire. I just had time to catch the next train myself. I've come with positively nothing to wear!'

Lomas looked at his mother's immaculate turnout and smiled admiringly.

'But why have you come?' he asked.

'Because I knew he would be seeing that awful man Huby and I was worried in case he settled for a large Scotch and a fiver and ruined the market. I phoned him as soon as I arrived, and sure enough, Goodenough had been round. But I needn't have worried. I'd forgotten how hard-nosed about "brass" they are up here! Huby's low peasant cunning had produced the same answer as my sophisticated intelligence - wait and see. So we've joined forces. A matched pair is always worth far more than merely double a broken set. I invited Huby to consult with me here this morning. Meanwhile I discovered that Goodenough was staying here too, so after we had worked out our strategy, I thought we might as well

confront him with it as soon as possible. Frankly, I'd rather do it alone, but Huby doesn't seem to trust me to look after his interests.'

'Oh, I can't imagine why!' cried Lomas. 'You who are so good at looking after other people's interests!'

He saw his mother's expression harden and realized he'd gone too far in his filial mockery. He did not doubt she would soon strike back.

'I've had practice looking after yours,' she said.

'And don't think I don't appreciate it, Mother. I need looking after. Oh, I am Fortune's fool!'

'And that, if I recall aright, is one of Romeo's lines,' said Mrs Windibanks. 'Spoken after you in your minor role are dead and left with nothing to do but snooze in your dressing-room till the curtain-calls, always assuming there are any curtain-calls!'

Lomas shook his head in reluctant admiration.

'Oh, you don't hang about, do you, Mother?' he mocked. 'One, two, and the third in your bosom. Ah!'

He affected to stab himself with a fork and flipped back in his chair, eyes closed. When he opened them he found John Huby and a bearded stranger looking down at him with a waiter bobbing anxiously in the background.

'Rod, stop playing the fool,' ordered Mrs Windibanks. 'Mr Goodenough, may I present my son. Rod, this is Andrew Goodenough from CLAWS.'

'PAWS,' corrected the Scot. 'I'm pleased to meet you, Mr Windibanks.'

'Lomas, actually. Stage name, but I'm used to answering to it now.'

'Indeed. Mrs Windibanks, I didn't expect to find you up here too, but it falls very handy to have you and Mr Huby together. Can we talk for a moment?'

It amused Rod to see Goodenough adroitly remove the initiative from his mother.

But she's a bonny wee counter-puncher, he thought. She'll have another thou out of you for that, Mr Secretary!

'I'm just about to have my lunch,' said Mrs Windibanks. 'Perhaps in the lounge in, say, forty-five minutes?'

'I'd prefer now,' said Goodenough. 'I have a busy afternoon. And I'm driving across to Ilkley later.'

'To see the WFE woman? You have my sympathy. I gather she's as mad as a hatter. But how thorough you are, Mr Goodenough. Never a step forward without making sure your back's well covered.'

'If it's inconvenient, however, I'll get in touch when we're both back in London,' continued Goodenough, as if Mrs Windibanks had never spoken.

'I can't be hanging around here all bloody day,' exclaimed John Huby. 'I've got a pub to look after.'

Carefully Stephanie Windibanks folded her napkin and set it down.

'Very well,' she said. 'Rod, darling, do order and start without me. I shall have a slice of rare beef and a tossed green salad.'

It was more than half an hour before the woman returned with Huby lowering behind her, but no sign of Goodenough.

Lomas was drinking his coffee.

'I've left some wine,' he said. 'To toast your triumph or drown your sorrows. Which is it?'

'Both,' she said tersely.

'Nay, lass, but we'll be all right. I must say, you're a dab hand at sorting out these money matters,' said Huby with reluctant admiration.

'That sounds promising,' said Lomas. 'What's the deal?'

'Five hundred advance payment for our waivers,' said Mrs Windibanks.

'What?'

'Each.'

'Even so,' said Lomas. 'It's not much, is it? I mean, I must confess that in anticipation of your success, I rather went to town on the wine, and I decided on the smoked salmon after all.'

'I said advance payment. Against five per cent of the estate at its present value.'

'Each?'

'Each!'

'Good lord. That must come to, let me see, about seventy thousand pounds. Mother, you're a marvel!'

He rose to embrace her. She pushed him back in his seat.

'Sit still till I finish,' she said sharply.

'Oh dear. There's something else.'

'Nowt to worry about as far as I can see,' said Huby uncertainly.

'But how far can you see, John?' snapped Mrs Windibanks.

'Tell me, what is it?' cried Lomas. 'You're worse than Juliet's nurse!'

His mother fixed him with an angry eye.

'It seems,' she said, 'that some lunatic has appeared in Thackeray's office claiming fairly convincingly to be the missing heir, Alexander Lomas Huby.'

'It'll be nowt, you'll see, we'll get him sorted,' said John Huby grimly.

But Rod Lomas subsided in his chair and waved a limp hand at a distant waiter.

'Oh shit,' he said. 'I think we're going to need another bottle.'

Chapter 11

'Have I done well? Have I done right?'

So Andrew Goodenough addressed the twin
penates
of his Presbyterian upbringing, canniness and conscience, in search of their approval for the deal he had just struck with the wily Windibanks and the horrible Huby.

Obtaining no firm answer, he pragmatically shelved the questions and concentrated his mind on his immediate mission.

He was driving westwards to see Mrs Laetitia Falkingham, founder and perpetual president of Women For Empire. All he knew of WFE he had picked up from Eden Thackeray, whose old-fashioned liberalism had unlocked his lawyer's discretion.

'Pathetic rather than sinister, but none the less deplorable,' he had categorized them. 'Basically a correspondence circle of colonial widows, nostalgic for ayahs and chota pegs, plus a handful of home-grown fascists like Mrs Huby. Their political platform, if so it could be called, is that Enoch Powell's a little soft on immigration, South Africa is an earthly paradise, and the nice, jolly and exceedingly cheap blacks have been lured off the straight and narrow by nasty communists, which is to say trade-unionists and all points left.'

'Large membership?' Goodenough had asked.

'Rapidly declining and no recruitment,' said Thackeray. 'The nasty right prefers less genteel  outlets for its nastinesses. No, until recently I'd have said WFE looked set to die off with Mrs Falkingham.' 'Where would the money have gone, in that case?' wondered Goodenough.

'You mean, could PAWS have got hold of it?' laughed Thackeray. 'I doubt if we shall ever know. It seems that Mrs Falkingham has got herself what sounds like a young and vigorous assistant, name of Brodsworth. Ms Sarah Brodsworth. I fear a new generation of WFE members may be spawned, and they won't be so pathetically ineffectual as the last, not with half a million under their belts.'

Well, that was not his problem, thought Goodenough. If getting PAWS' third of the Huby fortune involved dropping an equal amount into the lap of the loonie Right, that was how it had to be.

A signpost told him he was within a couple of miles of Ilkley. Combining his sole foreknowledge of the place, which was that it had a moor, with what Thackeray had told him, he realized he was expecting Maldive Cottage to be a cross between Wuthering Heights and the Berghof at Berchtesgaden.

The reality was very different.

Ilkley turned out to be a bustling, prosperous and handsome little market town and Maldive Cottage was straight off a biscuit tin lid, with grey Yorkstone walls, red tiles and leaded lights, nestling in an English cottage garden alight with the colours of late summer and early autumn.

He went up the path, raised the lion's head knocker and knocked.

The door opened immediately. A man in his late twenties stood there. He was of medium build with rather short, neatly trimmed fair hair. He wore a well cut grey suit, white shirt and striped tie. He smiled interrogatively, showing strong, even, white teeth. He looked a little like Robert Redford.

'Good day,' said Goodenough. 'Is Mrs Falkingham in?'

'Yes, she is. Would it be Mr Goodenough?'

'That's right.'

'Yes, she mentioned you. Do step in. My name's Vollans, by the way. Henry Vollans.'

Goodenough let himself be ushered into a sitting-room which was as hot as a tropical house at Kew. A huge fire burnt in the open grate and the central heating radiators seemed to be working at full blast too.

'Pretty overpowering, isn't it?' said Vollans, smiling. 'She says that old blood has a high boiling point. She's just gone in search of some photos, by the way.'

'Photos?'

'Yes. I'm afraid it's Memory Lane time. I was just admiring that chap there with the coal scuttle on his head and that started her off.'

The young man gestured at a photograph above the mantelshelf of a man in a white uniform and the feathered headgear of a Colonial governor.

'Mr Falkingham, is it?' inquired Goodenough.

'So I gathered. Tell me, you're from PAWS, aren't you, come to talk about the will? What are the chances of getting something done about it, do you think?'

Goodenough did not answer immediately but concentrated on finding a spot as equidistant as possible from the Scylla of the roaring fire and the Charybdis of the pulsating radiator.

'Forgive me, Mr Vollans,' he said finally. 'But what is your precise relationship with Mrs Falkingham?'

The young man laughed.

'It's a fair cop,' he said. 'You think I'm after the money! Well, I am in a way. I'm a reporter,
Sunday Challenger,
and I just got here five minutes ago, so my relationship with Mrs Falkingham is about as precise as yours.'

'I see. Then you'll forgive me if I do not discuss my

business with you before I've had the chance to discuss it with the lady herself.'

'Fair enough,' said Vollans. 'Have you met this Miss Brodsworth yet? When I rang earlier, I was assured that there would be little purpose in my coming to talk about WFE unless Miss Brodsworth were present.'

'I too,' said Goodenough. 'I was also assured she would be here by now.'

He glanced at his watch, frowning.

'Incidentally, Mr Vollans,' he said. 'I can't quite see what your newspaper's interest might be. Is it the nature of the will, or the nature of the possible beneficiaries that interests you?'

'That's for me to write and you to read,' said Vollans, faintly mocking. 'Ah, here she is.'

The door opened to admit not the little old lady he had somehow imagined but a rather large old lady. Eighty-odd years had certainly ravaged the fabric but not much reduced it.

'Mrs Falkingham, this is Mr Goodenough from PAWS,' said Vollans.

'Mr Goodenough, how nice of you to come. Two visitors in one afternoon. Am I not a lucky old woman? Mr Vollans and I have been having such an interesting talk. I was just telling him how much he reminded me of my husband when he was a young District Officer. It's a shame that fine young men like this should no longer have the chance of a career in the Service, don't you agree, Mr Goodenough?'

'The Service . . .?'

'The Colonial Service, I mean,' she said sharply. 'I have some few photographs here which may interest you. Ah, happy days, happy days at a God-given task which was never easy but from which we in our generation did not shrink, Mr Goodenough. They have tried other ways since then, and you see where it's got them. Well, well, if they learn from their mistakes, as God grant they may, it's a blessing to know that there are still fine young men like Mr Vollans to take up the burden again. Don't you agree?'

Goodenough avoided Vollan's quizzical eye and made a noncommittal sound, possible only to a man brought up to pronounce
loch
correctly.