Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 123, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 751 & 752, March/April 2004

The Fourth Way by Neil Schofield

A former finalist in the EQMM Readers Award competition, Neil Schofield has a distinctive, offbeat sense of humor and style, and an eye for quirks of character. Once a writer for corporate videos and events, Mr. Schofield now devotes his time to fiction. He lives in Le Havre, France, far enough from his native England that he’s found a clear perspective from which to view and write about it.

Grace Westmacott had received a letter and Madge Best was reading it. Madge was large, anxious, in her fifties, and unused to reading letters, but she had plucked up the courage to open it at last, sitting in the window of the large sitting room.

The letter was impressive, written on heavy bond paper. The letterhead was even more impressive. Madge began to read it carefully, as she always did: Start at the top and carry on down the page until you reach the bottom, then stop.

The letterhead read: “Sniving, Preacle & Biles, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.”

There was an address, and a very respectable one, too, in London Wall, where, she knew, lots of large firms of City lawyers lived and had their being.

But there was more. Because Sniving, Preacle, and presumably even Biles could also boast that they were in the happy position of “incorporating Upshot, Wassail, Pervious, Crust & Co.”

Not only that; at some point they had become “successors to Draggett, Nawkish, Merriment, Wigg & Partners.”

Madge had the feeling that her eyeballs were steaming up on the insides, if that were possible.

And if anyone succeeded in getting through these serried ranks, they could call on the real heavy-hitters: their “New York Agents: Rugspell, Faintly, Mouseman & Biddlebaum Associates, Inc.”

She let the letter drop to the Persian carpet.

“Inc.,” she said loudly, “oh, yes, Inc.! And well might they be. No, really, I may not know much, but I know what is what, and you can’t tell a sausage by its overcoat.”

She went to the drinks table and poured herself two large glasses of Tio Pepe, in quick succession. She eyed the letter lying white and threatening on the floor. What did they want, all these people? She had the feeling of being surrounded by a host of chattering dwarfs all nipping her legs and biting her feet with their tiny, sharp, pointy teeth.

The thing was, this letter was not welcome. Not at all. It was the first letter one had received for ever such a long time. She thought briefly about going upstairs and asking Grace about this and then decided no. She would handle this on her own, as she had handled all the other tasks and duties that were incumbent on her as head of this household. Current head.

She poured a third glass of sherry and walked over to the letter. She picked it up and deliberately kept her eyes away from the letterhead. She didn’t want to go through all that again. She read, instead, the bit that started “Dear Mrs. Westmacott.”

Dear Mrs. Westmacott, it said,

It is my solemn duty to inform you that as agents of the executors of the will of a certain party, now deceased, and after exhaustive enquiries undertaken with the authority of the said executors, we have positively identified you as legatee under the testament of the said defunct, whose identity, however, we must for the moment withhold.

In order to apprise you of the circumstances surrounding the inheritance, I should like to call upon you at 7 P.M., Thursday the 12th. You do not, according to our enquiries, seem to have a telephone, listed or otherwise. (Quite right. That was one of the first things she had done away with.) If the above appointment is not convenient, please feel free to telephone me at the following number. There followed a number which differed, she noticed, from the number on the letterhead.

I would impress upon you, Mrs. Westmacott, that this matter is, at this date, extremely delicate, and would ask that you speak of it to no one, including the members of your immediate entourage, if any.

I cannot overemphasize the capital necessity for confidentiality.

I look forward to meeting you on the 12th, should I not hear from you in the interim.

Yours sincerely,

And it was signed: Benjamin Twohig.

Try as she might, she could find no mention of a Twohig in the dread letterhead. So presumably, Benjamin was entombed in the “Partners” of the ill-fated Merriments and Wiggs, or enmeshed in the “Co.” of Upshots and Perviouses. She hoped he wasn’t an “Associate” of Mouseman. She had never trusted Americans.

But there we were. A letter. And what was to be done about it, that was the question. The thing was, you see, that she didn’t quite know how to handle this. This was totally unexpected. She’d handled all the rest of it, plugged all the holes she could think of, made the arrangements necessary to keep at bay all the multitudes of people who want to see one, talk to one, get one to sign things, buy things, borrow things. All that was taken care of.

So, what were the options? She could ring the number in the letter and tell this Twohig that she wasn’t interested, to stay away and never contact her again. But was that really likely? Would anyone really do that, when large inheritances were being talked of? And Twohig might not be put off so easily as that. He might be a sticker.

All right, then, she could ignore the letter completely. But he’d turn up, wouldn’t he? Unless he heard from her, he’d turn up. She could turn all the lights out and pretend not to be there, and then he’d go away. But, horrors, he might not. He might go nosing around. The nearest village was a long way away, but even so, he might stir things up. Ask questions. And that she couldn’t have. She might lose all this, and she’d worked so hard for it.

She walked slowly round the sitting room, touching things. There were, it was true, a lot of things to touch. It was a large room, with large windows, and it was filled to bursting with stuff. Things that Grace Westmacott had brought back with her from her frequent travels with her husband, the minor diplomat, who had been sent, it seemed, to just about every flea-bitten outpost of the Empire. And everywhere they went, they brought back stuff. There were African masks and wooden sculptures; there were wooden chests from Southeast Asia that smelt of camphor when you opened them; there were clocks and mirrors, and there were whole tribes of totally useless gewgaws, scrimshaw, and what-nots. In particular, there were lots and lots of Benares brass knickknacks: trays and bowls and boxes and long-spouted coffeepots and a huge brass ashtray standing on a pedestal with a massively heavy base. God knows why they’d brought that back, because the Westmacotts had never smoked, to her certain knowledge.

And the photographs! There seemed to be hundreds of them, all featuring Mr. Westmacott, small, stern, bespectacled, and severely moustachioed, in various tropical garbs, but always with Grace, large and sternly imperial at his side, and usually surrounded by hordes of Indians, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and lots and lots of Africans of assorted persuasions, including, she noticed, a bunch of Pygmies.

When Grace Westmacott had first brought Madge into this cluttered room for their first and only interview, she had almost had an attack of claustrophobia, there was so much stuff. It was strange, because the house itself was in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest village. Madge had a hell of a time getting a taxi to bring her out here, along all the flooded country lanes, through all the sodden fields with just the occasional dripping cow for interest. And out of all that empty, damp nowhere, you came into what looked like a museum of the Third World.

But then she had come to like it. It was comforting, all this dark solidity. It made her think of her grandmother’s house. Madge’s grandmother had had a room very much like this one. Even to the dark, heavy, velvet curtains over the great windows and another on a curtain rail over the door to keep out the draughts. And a big fireplace. It was very agreeable sitting in there, sipping a glass of sherry and chatting.

Grace had employed Madge on the spot, without even taking up any of the references she had brought along. She appeared to like Madge. Perhaps that was because they were both tall, about the same size, and with the same sort of calm features. Grace clearly felt comfortable having an echo of herself around the place, dancing attendance.

At the end of the interview, Madge had thought, for a pleasant few minutes, that this was somewhere she could settle down and take things easy. After thirty years of nursing ungrateful old biddies and being paid a pittance for her trouble, having sacrificed her own chances for a home and a husband and family of her own, perhaps at last this was somewhere she could duck down behind the parapet, wait it out, go on building her tiny savings until her pension was due, and then — well, then she’d see.

For some euphoric moments, she had allowed herself to imagine cosy evenings in this room in front of a roaring log fire, with Grace Westmacott doing tapestry and herself reading something pleasant and improving.

But Grace had soon made it clear that this room was not for her. A housekeeper and paid companion, which is what she had advertised for, was just what the name implied, and not a bosom buddy. Madge’s domain was to be at the top of the house, a tiny bedroom coupled with what Grace Westmacott was pleased to call a sitting room, but which was actually little better than a box room. And which was connected by an ancient and intricate system of bells to Grace’s bedroom, the sitting room, the kitchen — everywhere, in fact, so that Grace could summon Madge at any hour of the day or night when she had a malaise.

It turned out that Grace had lots of malaises, and what she needed was not so much a paid companion but an insomniac army of major-domos, footmen, servants, nurses, and dogsbodies. She would call from her bedroom at four o’clock in the morning when she couldn’t sleep and needed a warm milky drink and her drops. She would call from the sitting room just as Madge was settling down to watch her tiny television, to ask her to find her tapestry, which was sitting right there three feet away from her on the sideboard, goddammit. She would call at any time on any whim, and after two or three months of this, Madge began to think she would chuck it in because Grace Westmacott was a pain in the bum.

But then one day while trudging up to the bedroom at ten in the morning with Grace’s breakfast, she thought of the drops. Grace was under doctor’s orders and the doctor had prescribed medicine to keep her calm — and, she suspected, to keep her from pestering the doctor. The medicine was in the form of drops to be taken in warm water. Every morning, after she had taken away the breakfast things, Madge had to re-uptrudge with the tray carrying a glass of warmed water, the little bottle, and a spoon.

While Grace, the great lump, lay in her peignoir on the bed, Madge would drip the prescribed number of drops into the glass and stir it. Grace would take it with a weary sigh, down it, and that was that.

The next morning, very daringly, Madge had doubled the dose. And to her delight, Grace had kept to her room all day, only leaving it to visit the bathroom. Madge had spent the whole of that wonderful, secret day in the forbidden sitting room, sitting on the sofas, looking out of the windows, even taking a dangerous glass of sherry. But she needn’t have worried. Grace hadn’t emerged until the next day, wearing a slightly puzzled air as though she wasn’t quite sure who she was. And then Madge knew she had the answer. Of course, she didn’t dare double the dose every day to begin with; God knew what was in the stuff. Every other day would be enough.

But two days after that, she did it again. And again Grace stayed up there in her room. Madge had looked in halfway through the day, ostensibly to ask about lunch, but Grace was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, and clearly didn’t want to be bothered with lunch. So Madge had spent a fruitful day wandering round the house, and especially examining the contents of the large bureau in what she supposed the late Mr. Westmacott had called his study. There she found out everything she needed to know. And in the evening she sat in front of a roaring log fire in the sitting room and did a little planning. There was very little to plan, actually. Because, in fact, hardly anybody came to the house. Grace Westmacott seemed to be almost completely alone in the world.

There were deliverymen, of course, who brought the groceries, oil for the central heating; there were the men who came to read the meters and so on, but she already knew them and they never came in the house.

There was the doctor, but on his last visit he had made it clear, just by the way he spoke, that he was sick to death of Grace Westmacott.

The only real potential spoke in the wheel was the firm of solicitors who guarded and watched over the tiny trust account which Grace lived on. But they were far away in London. All they did was pay the household bills that Grace sent to them, and transfer a monthly sum into her current account at Lloyd’s Bank in Welding. At the end of each financial year, they sent an account of income from investments and property and disbursements, together with the current total of the Westmacott fortune, which, Madge remarked, was hardly substantial. It was enough to maintain Grace and the house, but there was no room for frivolous overspending. Mr. Westmacott seemed to have brought home a lot of native artifacts from his travels, but not much bacon.

And then, finally, there was Cousin Fulbright, the only relative Grace Westmacott appeared to have in the world: a distant cousin who came to visit every two weeks or so. He was a seedy little man, who always wore the same dusty charcoal-grey suit and a brown trilby far too jaunty for a man his age. Madge was always banished to her garret on Cousin Fulbright days, so they had never met face-to-face. As far as she knew, Fulbright wasn’t even aware of her existence. She had peeped from her window more than once to watch him arrive and leave. There’s a man on his uppers, she thought, and, indeed, the heels of his shoes were worn away almost completely. Madge didn’t know what went on during the conversations he had with Grace, but from the state of him she could guess. And she suspected that her ratlike existence on these occasions was due to Grace’s reluctance to reveal that she could afford a housekeeper. The hallway always smelt vaguely of gin after Fulbright’s visits.

To begin with, she did a little test. She went down to the doctor’s with the old prescription for the medicine. She said to the doctor, “I know it’s not usual, but perhaps you could give me another prescription.”

The doctor had looked at her. “She seems to have gone through it quite quickly. She is sticking to the dose?”

She sighed and said, “Well, yes, but I found her the other night pouring it into a plant pot. I don’t know how long that’s been going on. If you think you ought to see her...?” She left a long, inviting pause.

The doctor sighed in his turn. “No need for that. I’ll give you a refillable prescription. But keep an eye on her. If she shows any signs of dependence I’d like to know. This isn’t something you can play about with. I’ll pop up and see her, say in three months.” Which, as they both knew, meant never.

Good.

The next thing was the bank. The following day, she went up to Grace’s bedroom. Grace was lying in her now usual position staring at the ceiling.

She said, “Mrs. Westmacott, I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’re running short of petty cash. I’ve brought the cash book for you to see.”

Grace waved a weary hand. “I haven’t the energy. Just go and get some money from the bank.”

“I’ll need something from you,” Madge said, “an authority. Something to say I’m entitled to draw money from your account.”

In the end, she had brought a sheet of writing paper and Grace had scrawled an authority entitling her housekeeper, who would be armed with proof of identity, to draw on her account. And then she signed a cheque for the housekeeping money.

The bank manager had absolutely no problem in honouring the instructions of his valued client, asked after her kindly, and counted out the notes personally.

So that was that. As simple as could be.

Cousin Fulbright was even simpler. Three days before his next scheduled visit, she dug out his address from Grace’s thin address book, tucked fifty pounds in an envelope with a note “signed” by Grace, and sent it off. It was as she had thought. That was all he came for, so he didn’t come. She followed the same routine every fortnight after that, and she had never seen Cousin Fulbright since.

She didn’t intend, of course — not at the beginning, anyway — that Grace should live a vegetable life. The trouble was, it was so easy. She counted out the drops in the morning, doubled the dose, and added one for luck, and knew that for the rest of the day, she would be free to do whatever she liked: wander the house, do a little light housekeeping, potter about the garden, and in the evening, rest tranquilly in what was now her sitting room, in front of the fire, while Grace lived her dream existence upstairs.

The best part was that the drops seemed to have diminished Grace’s appetite. She didn’t eat half of what she had eaten at the start. So the trays that Madge carried upstairs grew lighter and lighter. In fact, at one point Madge became alarmed at the state Grace was getting into, thin as a rake, her skin almost transparent. She slackened off the dose for a while after that, and fed her up a bit. But then the bloody woman perked up and started to become her usual gritty self, and Madge had reinstated the regime. She seemed now to have found exactly the right dosage, enough to keep Grace docile and sleepy, but not enough to send her into some sort of anorexic spiral.

She had also closely studied the photographs in the sitting room. It really was quite amazing, the resemblance between them. She understood why Grace had accepted her just like that. They could have been sisters. They were both large, with vaguely the same sort of broad, plain face. She had begun to experiment with her hair and had found exactly the style that Grace affected: a sort of chignon that had gone out in the early 1900s, but that Grace had clung on to.

One morning, when Grace had lapsed into her dreamy post-breakfast existence, Madge had gone into her dressing room and picked out a couple of Grace’s dresses: a long black velour number and a day dress in a flowered print.

That evening she put on the print dress and regarded herself in the sitting-room mirror. The resemblance was total. And not just for her, either. She went down next day to the bank, and happened to pass the doctor, who was just coming out of the village pharmacy. He looked at her, nodded, looked again, and said, “Glad to see you looking well again, Mrs. Westmacott.”

She had stopped the dressing-up in public after that, because you never knew.

So there we were, and where was the harm? Grace lived quite happily upstairs, Madge lived ecstatically downstairs. And nobody knew or cared. After two months Madge had gone to Buckshot, ten miles away, and had opened a savings account at the Bicester & Beccles Building Society, using Grace’s name, birth certificate, and passport. Just as an in-case. After that she paid in small sums every week, small amounts that she took as a commission off the top of the housekeeping. It didn’t seem very much, until she realised that she could increase the housekeeping by a little if she wanted to, and the next time she signed the cheque, she doubled the amount and put the overage in her own account. As a bonus, and this was the real reason for opening the account in the first place, there was the occasional small dividend cheque from one or other of the piddling investments the late Mr. W. had made. Very daringly, because she knew that she was now crossing a certain line, she paid them into her Grace’s account.

So the little savings account was growing, not very quickly, but it was growing. Still, it was a long way from what she would need in the retirement which loomed every day worryingly larger on the horizon.

And now, six months later, and after all that hard work, here was this letter. Apart from the upheaval it represented, it also irritated her. Grace Westmacott, who had done nothing in her life apart from following, doglike, behind her husband wherever he went, and who now lived the life of Riley, this woman was now apparently coming into an inheritance. There was no justice. None at all.

And why was there so much secrecy about this famous inheritance? Benjamin Twohig hadn’t even given the name of the dear departed. That wasn’t normal, was it? The only time she’d received a letter like this, it had been headed, “re: Arnold Butterworth, Deceased,” and had talked about “your late uncle.” There was none of that here. Just talk about confidentiality and not telling anyone.

Over her fourth Tio Pepe, Madge thought about all this, considered briefly ringing Benjamin Twohig to cancel the visit, and then decided against that. She smelled something, something not quite on the up-and-up about this, and she was by way of being an expert.

So, on Thursday the 12th, she gave Grace a couple of extra drops in the morning and some more in the afternoon, because Grace was by this time far from being able to keep track, and by the time 7 P.M. came round, the house was silent as the grave and she was ready for him. She had picked out a nice burgundy satin dress that both she and Grace looked very good in. She had laid out the sherry and the glasses on the table by the window, because this sounded like a meeting that could well run on and she had become accustomed to taking a little sherry before dinner. Before almost everything, in fact. She hoped Mr. Twohig liked Tio Pepe.

When he arrived, signalled by a 750cc roar up the drive, Mr. Twohig was quite a revelation. She hadn’t quite known what to expect, but she had a blurry idea of a tall, cadaverous, elderly man in a black three-piece suit with a wing collar and pince-nez who would address her as “My dear Mrs. Westmacott.” That idea was already beginning to fade even before she opened the door. Wing collars did not go with Yamahas.

In the flesh, Benjamin Twohig turned out to be a tall, ginger-haired, raw-boned youth of about twenty-five with enormous hands and ears and a very prominent Adam’s apple. Taking off his motorcycle leathers, he revealed a suit that looked a bit shiny and short in the arms and was definitely off-the-peg, and he didn’t really address her as anything. He looked round the sitting room when she showed him in, and said, “Nice house you got here. Bit remote, but nice.”

“Thank you,” said Madge. “I like it.” Which was true. Especially the remote bit.

Benjamin Twohig sat down on the one sofa, and placed his crash helmet and gauntlets beside him on the floor. Madge had planned to sit on the other sofa, so that they faced each other across the long, carved Chinese coffee table. She had arranged it like this because he might need somewhere to lay out his papers. But Mr. Twohig didn’t seem to have any papers. She also noticed that he was wearing white socks with his business suit. Without knowing why, she had always felt a kind of pity for men who wore white socks with a dark suit.

Before she sat down, Madge said, “I can offer you some sherry, if you like. If it isn’t too early.”

“Never too early for a drop of sherry,” said Benjamin, rubbing his large hands together. So Madge went and poured two glasses and brought them to the table. They toasted each other silently and sipped, although Mr. Twohig gulped rather more than was conventional. His Adam’s apple rose and plunged.

Madge said, “I’m afraid I’m not very used to this sort of thing, Mr. Twohig. I don’t really know what it’s all about, to be quite honest.”

He nodded. His eyes were very blue, Madge noticed.

“Quite right,” he said. “No reason why you should.”

“In your letter you spoke about a deceased relative. I must admit, I was a little puzzled. Who is this relative?”

She was thinking: Perhaps Fulbright. He didn’t look like a man with untold riches, but there were such things as eccentric millionaires. You read about it. Yes, that was probably it.

“Well,” Benjamin said, “as to the identity of the defunct, I’m not in a position to tell you. Not as yet.”

“Why ever not?” Madge said.

“It’s just the way these things work,” he said, finishing off the last of his Tio Pepe and then, to her astonishment, rising and going to the table by the window and helping himself to another. Madge was aghast. This was not the sort of behaviour she had expected. She had been right, there was something very definitely not right about Benjamin Twohig.

He came back and sat down again.

She said, in her firmest tone, “Now, Mr. Twohig, I have never heard of Sniving, Preacle, and Biles, but I take them to be a firm of integrity—”

He interrupted her. “Sniving’s?” he said. “Oh, I don’t work for them.”

“But,” she waved the letter at him, “what about this?”

“That was to get your attention,” he said, smiling. He had a large gap between the two central front teeth, she noticed. “There’s nothing like a nice juicy letterhead to make people sit up and take notice. No, we do some work for them from time to time. I’m in and out of their place quite a bit, so sometimes I snaffle a bit of their paper. That’s all.”

He reached out and took the letter from her. He folded it and tucked it into his pocket. Madge was confused.

“We? Who’s we?” she asked.

“The firm I work for.”

“And what business might they be in, pray?” she said tartly, becoming more and more irritated by the minute.

“Confidential Enquiries,” he said.

“What sort of confidential enquiries?”

“The sort that other people won’t do,” he said. “Or can’t do. Quite specialised, you see.”

“I really do not know what you’re talking about.”

He nodded. “All right,” he said. “Give you an example. Let’s suppose some old geezer dies, and in his will, made donkey’s years before, he leaves all his great fortune to his brothers and sisters and their heirs and assigns — that’s legal jargon,” he added. “Trouble is, when he dies, all his brothers and sisters are already dead, and their children, if they had any, are dead. And it was a big family with lots of to-ings and fro-ings, people moving, emigrating, dying in far-flung places, all that. It’s a right old mishmash sometimes, you wouldn’t believe. So the lawyers administering the estate have got a bit of a job on, trying to track down the rightful heirs. If there are any. And that’s where we come in.”

“Your firm tracks down these heirs. And then you go and find them and tell them the good news.”

“Ah.” He raised a bony finger. “Not just like that. See, mostly the heir doesn’t realise that they are an heir. We’re the only ones that know who was the defunct and who and where the lawyers are who have the great fortune waiting.”

She was beginning to see.

“So you only tell them for a price, is that it?”

“For a percentage.”

“But that’s absolutely outrageous!”

“Only a little bit. And there’s a lot of firms doing it, believe you me.” He was grinning now, letting her in on something.

“And people accept this?”

“Dead right, they do. Sign the contract straight off, most of them. Some of them think about it for a bit, but not for very long.”

“But couldn’t they simply go off and find out for themselves?”

“Ah, no. See, these things are complicated. Even for experts, it takes months sometimes to track people down. You’ve got to be a cross between a private detective and a genealogist. No, they have to accept it, because quite frankly they haven’t a hope in hell of finding out who’s left them money. Usually it’s such a remote relative that they don’t even know they had a great-great-uncle William.” He grinned again. “And no, it wasn’t your great-great-uncle William, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“And what happens if they don’t accept this, this — deal of yours?”

“Well, if no one claims the estate, eventually the government gets it. And that’s such a waste, don’t you think?”

“So,” Madge said slowly, “you have information about a legacy to which I am entitled.”

“A substantial legacy.”

“How substantial is substantial?”

“Very. In the low seven figures.”

She had no idea what this meant. She actually had to work out the zeros.

“You mean millions.” She suddenly had a tight feeling in her chest.

“Yes, but not very many.”

“But to have this information, I have to agree to pay a certain percentage to your firm.”

He nodded.

“And what sort of percentage?”

“Half and half.”

“Fifty percent?”

“That’s it.”

“But that is totally criminal.”

“Is it? What’d you rather have, Mrs. Westmacott, a hundred percent of nothing or fifty percent of a fortune in the low millions?”

She didn’t answer, because the answer was obvious and anyway she was thinking furiously. This was absolutely foolproof. These were people who had never met Grace and whose only interest in her was to give her some money. A lot of money. And there was the account in Buckshot just aching to have a cheque paid into it. There’d be some sort of formalities about proof of identity, of course, but that was just a question of a birth certificate and a passport. And if the doctor was now greeting her as Mrs. Westmacott, well... She realised that Benjamin Twohig was speaking again.

“I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“I was saying, Mrs. Westmacott, that there’s another complication. You see, you’re not the only heir. You are a co-heir. So, after my firm had got their fifty percent, you’d eventually have to split it in half again.”

She thought for a moment, and then smiled. “Well, if it is, as you say, in the millions” (she was having trouble with that word), “that would still leave me with a substantial sum.”

“Yes, but you’d end up with a quarter of the inheritance when you could end up with a lot more.”

“Could?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking, Mrs. Westmacott, that there might be a third way.”

“A third way of what? I don’t understand.”

He was leaning forward now, with his large hands squeezed between his knees, his too-short sleeves riding up his forearms.

“Fifty percent is a lot. I’ve always thought that. It’s too much. So, I’ve thought up a third way.”

Madge looked at his anxious, rigid posture and thought, here it comes. This is it. This is why he’s really here.

“And this third way is something to do with you, I suppose.”

He grinned again, but this time it was a painful rictus. He ran a hand through that red hair.

“I got plans, I have. I don’t want to be running about doing legwork for these sort of people all my life. I’ve got plans. I want to make something of myself. I’m ambitious, I am. All I need is a leg-up, that’s all, just a leg-up. Give me a start.”

Ah.

“So what you’re suggesting is that we have a private — arrangement — between us. Cut out your firm. Is that it?”

“They’re real bastards, you don’t know the half of it. They coin it in, milking people like you; they don’t deserve it.”

“So how much would this third way of yours involve?”

“I’m not greedy. Twenty-five percent. That’s fair, isn’t it? Half of what you’d be giving them.”

“So you want me to sign a contract with you?”

“No, I don’t want anything on paper. What we’d do is open a joint account kind of thing. And then, in the end — and it won’t take long — when it’s all sorted out, I take my share and leave you in peace.”

“And if I don’t agree, you walk out of here without telling me who my rich relation is, and how to get in touch with the lawyers, is that it? So, if I do agree, what about your firm? Is that why you don’t want anything on paper?”

“They’d suspect something, they’d have to suspect something, but they couldn’t do anything. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’d have to drop out of sight, disappear, because they’re a nasty lot. They’d send people after me. And I won’t bother telling you what they’d do if they found me. So obviously, I’d have to hide out somewhere. Here would do.” He looked around.

“Here?”

“Upstairs. I wouldn’t be any bother. You got lots of room. It wouldn’t be for long. And anyway, we’d already be partners in a manner of speaking.”

She felt laughter welling up in her. It was the sheer silliness of his rickety plan. I mean, really, it was ludicrous in its pure cheek. She could see a dozen holes in it, a dozen ways in which she could, if she wanted to, leave him standing there with nothing.

“But what about the other heir?”

“That’s their hard luck. They won’t miss what they’ve never had.”

She thought about it in silence, looking at him carefully. Surely he didn’t seriously imagine that she was going to accept. It was far too complicated, given the circumstances, and the thought of him living upstairs, next door to Grace Westmacott, was just too bizarre for words.

He was twisting his large hands together, still looking at her with that pitiful pleading gaze, his eyes fixed on her. Then she noticed that his eyes were never really still. They would rest on her for a certain moment and then slide away quickly to look at something else, then slide back again. She began to be certain that Mr. Benjamin Twohig was not to be trusted. Him and his Third Way. The fact that he was cheating his employers told you that he was dishonest. And imagine being tied up to a man like this, with enormous hands and slithery eyes and that Adam’s apple, with a fortune in a joint account. Why, anything could happen. She could have an accident, it was always happening. And then he’d have it all.

No. It wasn’t on. She was large and anxious, but she wasn’t stupid.

And she knew what she was going to do.

“I’m afraid the answer is no, Mr. Twohig.”

He jumped as though someone had passed a thousand volts through his body.

“Don’t say that. Please, Mrs. Westmacott, please give it some thought.”

“I have. And the answer is no. If you want to walk out of here without telling me any more, then so be it. But I’m afraid that this idiotic idea of yours simply won’t do.”

It was quite simple, she had decided. He hadn’t thought it through properly. There was a Fourth Way. She would go to see Mr. Sniving. Or Mr. Preacle. Or even Mr. Biles. She would engage them as her solicitors. She would tell them the story, and after she had described Mr. Benjamin Twohig, they would certainly be able to identify his firm for her, and from then on, they could conduct the affair for her. That was the thing to do. She would take the Fourth Way.

He must have seen something of this playing on her face. His face twisted in a grimace of desperation.

He said, “Don’t forget the other heir, Mrs. Westmacott. If you’re thinking of going round me, you’d only get half of half of the estate. Twenty-five percent. My way, you get seventy-five percent. And that’s a lot of money. You just can’t imagine what it would mean. You just can’t. Please, please reconsider. I urge you.”

Urge. What a funny word to come out of that curious face.

The thing was, he was banking on her being greedy. But she wasn’t. She was, all right, a little bit dishonest like most people, but not really grasping. After all, a sum in the low millions divided by half and then divided again by half would still leave what would be, for her, a gigantic figure. Enough to buy a nice house somewhere no one would ever find her, in Spain, for example, she’d always liked Spain, and to provide a nice income for the rest of her life. Yes, the Fourth Way was definitely the way to go.

She said, “I’m afraid I can’t offer you any satisfaction. The answer is still no. I can offer you another glass of sherry, if you like, Mr. Twohig. In fact, I’ll have one myself.”

She picked up their glasses, then rose and went to the table by the window. He simply went on sitting there, with his great hands all twisting together.

She felt that laughter bubbling up once more. No, I mean, how lucky can you get, Madge? She really regretted not having someone she could tell about all this. Because they’d never believe it. Perhaps she’d whisper it to Grace one night after her medicine.

You answer a small ad quite by chance, you find yourself in a sweet little situation with lots of side benefits, and now, with the tiniest bit of organisation, you’re looking at a fortune. Out of all the women in the world you could have chosen, what a wonderful piece of luck to have stumbled on Grace Westmacott. Madge, you lucky girl, she thought.

Behind her, Benjamin Twohig said, “You really would have been better off saying yes to my offer, you know, Mrs. Westmacott. Much better off. And now look what you’ve done.” His voice had a whine of resentment in it.

She said, pouring the sherry, “But you see, Mr. Twohig, I really don’t need all the money. It doesn’t worry me about the other heir, you know. I don’t mind sharing.”

She was still thinking: You lucky, lucky girl, as she picked up the glasses and turned, but she didn’t have far to go.

“I tried, Mrs. Westmacott, you have to admit I gave you every chance. I did my best,” Benjamin Twohig was saying in a voice that was still curiously resentful. “I’m sorry about this, but your cousin Fulbright is ever so greedy and he really does mind sharing.”

He had put those black gauntlets back on, he was walking towards her, and he had already started a horribly efficient backswing with that ghastly brass pedestal ashtray.

She had time to think, with total clarity and an odd lack of interest: No, how silly of me. Of course, this is the Fourth Way. And: How surprised Grace will b—