Drowned Lives

45

By that time, I didn’t need Caroline Longden to lay any more guilt on me. I’d gone past that stage. There’s only so much blame anyone can take.

But had Great-Uncle Samuel really been so concerned about me? I frowned as I thought about what Caroline was telling me.

‘But then,’ I said, ‘your father pulled his backing from our start-up, just when we needed the money most. I’m facing bankruptcy now, did you know that? All because Samuel withdrew his funding. I can only think he did that because I told him I didn’t have time to help him with the book. He forced me into accepting the terms of his will. No doubt if he’d lived a bit longer he would have made me a similar proposition himself. He wanted to make absolutely sure that I needed the money so badly I couldn’t turn it down.’

Caroline looked suddenly uneasy. She drew her bow across the strings of her cello, releasing a couple of sharp, discordant notes.

‘It wasn’t Dad who withdrew the funding,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘He would never have done that. I wouldn’t want you to think that he would, whatever else you think. Once he’d decided to support something, he stuck to it. And you were family, after all. He would never have let you down like that.’

‘What then?’

‘It was me. As soon as we began to look at my father’s estate, I persuaded Mr Elsworth that, as joint executors, we could pull out of the deal.’

‘So you did it to punish me?’

‘If you like.’

‘But it didn’t work, Caroline — it only made me more determined to complete the book.’

‘The book, the book! You’re as obsessed as Dad was. That’s all I ever heard from him in the past few years, “the book”.’

‘It was close to his heart.’

‘Oh yes. He never stinted on things that were close to his heart. The trouble was that anything that came by and interested him could become close to his heart very quickly. Charities and appeals, boat clubs and restoration schemes. Do you realise how much those waterways restorations cost?’

‘I’ve a pretty good idea.’

‘Dad poured his money into them, all over the country. I only found out about most of them when I started to go through his papers and his bank accounts for probate. The Ogley and Huddlesford Canal seems to have been a particular pet project.’

‘There was a good reason for that. He wanted it to open again because he felt he helped to close it.’

‘How could he have done that?’

‘When he took the transport business from his maltings and brewery away from the waterways to the roads, he dealt a death blow to the Ogley and Huddlesford. That was the last big contract on the canal, and it put many small carriers out of business. Traffic declined so rapidly after that, the canal had already fallen into disuse by the end of the 1950s.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘How did you find out?’

‘By asking the questions that I never asked about my family before.’

‘He never talked to me about it,’ said Caroline sadly.

I saw that I wasn’t the only one who’d suffered from a breakdown of communication within the family. ‘It was one of the things he was trying to put right, in his own way, before he died. You might call it conscience, I suppose. But he had the money, so he decided to put it to use.’

Caroline sighed and caressed her cello. ‘But he didn’t have the money. Not really.’

‘Of course he did. He was rolling in it, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Chris. A lot of the money has gone. When Mr Elsworth and I went through the accounts, we discovered there wasn’t anything like as much as we thought. Not by a long way. Poor Dad. He used to be so clever with money. He made big killings on the stock exchange in the 1970s and ’80s. But in the last ten years it’s all gone.’

‘All? Not all, surely?’

‘He stopped keeping track of his investments. He might have thought he still had a lot of money tied up in shares, but they were the wrong shares for the 1990s. Almost all of them were manufacturing companies, heavy industry. They were what he knew best, but in this country they were already dying in the 80s, weren’t they? We haven’t worked out the full value yet, but it’s pitifully small. And he gave so much away. You’d be amazed at some of the things he spent his money on. In the end, he was totally indiscriminate in what he did with it. You weren’t the only lost cause he left a legacy to, either. There was all the money he spent on the woman...’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t really mean to tell you all this, Chris.’

I stared at her, my mind whirling with a confusion of thoughts. ‘Does that mean that the fifty thousand pounds—?’

Caroline flushed angrily. She raised her hands, and for a startled moment I thought she was going to attack me with her bow. ‘I was right! That’s all you’re thinking about — yourself. Well, don’t worry — there’ll be enough in the estate for your little windfall. The specific legacies come first, Mr Elsworth says. Your fifty thousand pounds will be there for you all right, though I’ll probably have to sell Ash Lodge to provide it. After that, there’ll be precious little left. Dad was so concerned about setting up your scheme and pouring money into his other projects that he left me nothing. So I hope that makes you happy.’

By the time I’d reached the gate and walked to my car, the sound of music was coming from the window of Caroline’s cottage. It was something I didn’t recognise — a melancholy tune with deep, powerful surges of aggression that made me think uncomfortably of Simon Monks. I looked around the street, expecting to see him waiting for me in the shadows, ready to finish the job that someone had started on board Kestrel.

My long overdue meeting with Caroline Longden had left me feeling anything but happy. One more illusion had been undermined. I’d carried a picture in my mind of Great-Uncle Samuel as a self-made man of means, a canny businessman who’d been one of the most successful of the Buckleys, even though he’d chosen to change his name. Frank had added an image of an earlier Samuel, a mysterious and romantic figure with an unhappy past, attractive to women and very much in love with his new wife.

But now Caroline had painted a different picture — one of an old man with failing abilities who’d become obsessed with trivialities and allowed his fortune to drain away. A man who, in the end, hadn’t been concerned enough about his daughter to safeguard her future.

I regretted that our meeting had ended acrimoniously. It had deprived me of the chance to ask Caroline about the other mystery of her father’s later years — his apparent belief that his wife had been pregnant when she died. For that, there seemed to be no explanation.

I knew that Rachel would be watching for me to arrive home. And for once I was looking forward to having somebody to talk to who’d understand. Talking to Rachel had helped enormously to get things clear in my mind.

So I put the coffee on as soon as I got home to Maybank and left the side door ajar. Then I noticed that the light was flashing on the answerphone. As Rachel stepped through the door with a tentative smile, I was listening to the news from the Old Vicarage nursing home that Godfrey Wheeldon had died the night before, of a stroke.

‘It was very sudden,’ said the disembodied voice on the phone, a person who had identified herself as the chief care officer. ‘But we were concerned that Mr Wheeldon seemed very agitated after he had a visitor yesterday.’ The caller hesitated, and became more cautious, as if measuring exactly what she said. ‘If you happen to know who his visitor was, we’d be very grateful if you could let us know. For some reason, we don’t seem to have kept a record of his name and address, which is our usual procedure.’ It sounded from her tone as though someone would be in trouble for that. ‘And we’d like to let him know about Mr Wheeldon.’ There was a crackly pause, and I thought the message had finished. ‘We wondered if his visitor had brought him bad news. He really was very agitated.’

Rachel went pale when she heard. ‘Poor old man. He sounded very nice from what you told me about him.’

‘He certainly didn’t deserve this.’

‘Do you think somebody did bring him bad news?’

‘Bad news? No, I think somebody went there to frighten him. Maybe they threatened him. But it seems as though they succeeded in frightening him to death. But who was it?’

‘Somebody clever enough to avoid leaving his name and address. Did you have to sign in a visitors’ book when you went?’

‘Of course. That’s how they found me to tell me about Godfrey.’

‘Let’s think logically,’ said Rachel. ‘There must have been somebody else who knew about Godfrey.’

‘Who? Who?’ I demanded.

‘Well, Caroline Longden knew her father had visited him. Didn’t you say she’d phoned the Old Vicarage to tell him Samuel had died?’

I stopped pacing abruptly. ‘You’re right.’

‘But it wasn’t Caroline. It was a man. Could she have sent somebody?’

‘Damn right she could.’ I glared at the wall, my mind working furiously. ‘Or he could have gone on his own initiative. That would be more in character. He’s the sort of bastard that would terrorise an old man and not think twice about it.’

‘I take it you’ve got somebody specific in mind?’

‘You bet. A bloke called Simon Monks. I’m going to love it if I can nail him.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Caroline’s fiancé. The slimiest object you’ve ever seen. I wonder... I wonder if she’s told him about the money.’

‘Which money?’

‘The money that she’s not going to inherit. When they got engaged, he must have thought she was a real catch, an heiress with a wealthy, elderly father. The truth would come as a bit of a shock to him. He must have thought that as soon as Samuel died—’

I stopped dead again.

‘Chris?’ said Rachel. ‘Are you all right?’

But I didn’t hear her. I was seeing a scene in my mind, a familiar scene that I’d lived through many times since that day I sat in the Earl of Lichfield and watched Samuel walk away to his death. I was seeing a car hurtling down the ramp from the multi-storey car park into the junction of Castle Dyke, ploughing down a frail old man and leaving him lying broken in the road.

But now there was a difference. Now I saw a face behind the windscreen of the car. I was picturing the face of Simon Monks. A man who just couldn’t wait for Samuel Longden to die.