Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

My Aunt Gloria’s Legacy by David Williams

The following story by David Williams is, as far as we know, the last story he wrote before his death in 2002. Like all his fiction, it is elegantly written and full of his sharp but kindly observations of his fellow men. The last Williams novel, Practise to Deceive, was published by Allison & Busby (U.K.) in 2003, and features series character DCI Merlin Parry. Not published in the U.S., but it can be purchased on the Web.

I have made the decision to do away with Aunt Gloria twice in my life. The first time was when I was eight years old, but the execution was baulked. The second was quite recently. I am now thirty-six, which I mention to demonstrate just how long the period was when, despite a continued smouldering stern resentment, I succeeded in stemming a justified and singular murderous urge.

I mean, I have never ever wanted to liquidate anyone else.

Despite my initial failure, it would be unfair to dismiss the seriousness of my intention that first time. I wasn’t a particularly precocious or rebellious child, and certainly not, in the ordinary way, even remotely a homicidal one. I was certainly curious and inventive. At that age, understandably, I might well have lacked the tutored ingenuity and facility to pull off the deed.

I do still clearly remember what precipitated and justified my resolve at the time. Aunt Gloria had grossly insulted my mother, whom I adored. Like Sir Lancelot, my then favourite fictional character, I took an affront to my fair lady as a challenge.

To explain the circumstances: I had taken it upon myself to dye the curtains of the dormer window in the garret bedroom I always occupied when we visited Uncle Wilfred and Aunt Gloria. Their substantial country house was near Stratford-upon-Avon, in the pretty Shakespeare country, and twenty miles south of Uncle Wilfred’s factory in the industrial area that centres on Birmingham. The curtains were small, like the window they covered. They were also fairly old and faded. It had seemed to me that turning them from a boring pale green into a vivid, unmissable scarlet would be a service to my hosts as well as a pleasing surprise.

I had bought the packet of dye on impulse for sixpence in the local village shop. A specific use for my purchase had not suggested itself to me until I was on the way home. In any event, at the moment of revelation it seemed an admirable purpose, and a small price to pay for such a desirable transformation — as well as a good deed deserving gratitude.

After all, it had been my sixpence.

The instructions on the packet of dye seemed simple enough. All you needed besides hot water was a bucket and a pair of rubber gloves. The first accessory I borrowed from Uncle Wilfred’s garage, the second, more stealthily, from the kitchen. Fortunately, my aunt’s daily help had small hands.

It was simply unfortunate that my juvenile effort inadvertently and often patchily altered the hue of many other things besides the curtains. These included two towels in the small bathroom on the same floor as my room; a section of the newish, light-blue carpet in the corridor; the yellow coverlet on my bed; a surprisingly large section of wallpaper; inexplicably, bits of the corridor ceiling, as well as the fronts of the shirt and short grey trousers I had on at the start; and, after I had discarded those, my bare chest and my underpants. The exercise had been completed without interruption on a sunny July afternoon when my aunt was hosting a tennis party on the other side of the house. I had been relying on the sunshine to dry the curtains quickly outside my window, which it did, but not before they had turned the terra cotta tiles there what I have to admit was a hideous and permanent shade of vermilion.

For my own part, I was hurt beyond measure when my furious aunt later bawled me out to a degree quite disproportionate to the size of my mistake — which, after all, had begun as a well-intentioned good deed. But much worse than that was my later overhearing the outrageously scathing words she addressed to my saintly mother on the subject.

“Digby is an uncontrolled, ill-mannered little horror,” she asserted: The actual words are implanted in my mind. “It’s entirely your fault, Phyllis, for indulging him in every possible way. You should keep him under control. Not only do you demean yourself by giving him free rein, you let down the memory of our dear Arnold.” I should explain that Arnold Betcher was my dead father.

“You simply have to pull yourself together,” she went on mercilessly, “behave like a responsible mother, not a scared, scatterbrained, wimpish shopgirl.” By now she had reduced my sensitive mother to floods of tears. Her weeping had been clearly audible through the closed double doors to the drawing room before I threw them open dramatically and rushed to her side, shouting to my aunt to stop being such a bitch.

That did it, of course, not least because I was supposed to be confined to my room until Uncle Wilfred came home. When he did, he made far less of the curtain incident than his wife had done, though my calling her a bitch got me six hard whacks on my bottom with a slipper, plus my having to make a formal apology to my aunt, which was received with even less grace than I showed when offering it.

Despite the whacks, it really wasn’t Uncle Wilfred I had it in for next day when I dug the sizable hole on the narrow path which led down steeply between the overgrown rhododendrons at the bottom of their garden. This was where Aunt Gloria walked her bad-tempered, overfed Pekingese after breakfast on most mornings. I covered my excavation with a lattice of twigs disguised by grass cuttings. My expectation was that Aunt Gloria would step into the hole, break her neck, and, being unable to summon help, expire from loss of blood, or pneumonia, or starvation before her absence was noticed and her decomposing body discovered.

It was an outrageously improbable scenario, of course, but it was a brave knight’s stalwart intention that counted, after all.

Unfortunately, Aunt Gloria didn’t take her walk on the succeeding two days because it rained. Early on the third morning, the boy from next-door fell into the hole when we were playing hide-and-seek in the garden. He hurt his ankle and face and had to be ferried by Ogden, the decrepit gardener, in a wheelbarrow back up to the house, dazed and with a blackening eye and a bleeding lip. I took consolation from the fact that my plan had worked in principle, albeit against the wrong target.

“Danged squirrels digging up everything again, Mrs. Betcher,” Ogden complained to Aunt Gloria after the other boy’s mother had taken him away. I dearly wanted to inform the old fool that squirrels didn’t make holes that big, but naturally held my tongue.

The school-holiday visit to our only Betcher family relatives (my aunt and uncle had no children) ended the following day. I made no further attempt to exterminate Aunt Gloria on that occasion. Indeed, until late last summer, I never felt the same totally irresistible urge to get rid of her again. But that childhood effort to do so, I suppose, endured in my mind still as a sort of dark fairy tale — and endure it did.

My father had perished in a car accident. Driving while drunk, he had hit a tree. I was three at the time. His passing was deeply mourned by my mother, who never remarried. His memory was respected by Uncle Wilfred, who, for reasons that will become clear, for a time unfairly blamed himself for not having done enough to help and inspire his half-brother to make more of life, especially since in terms of inheritance, their father had treated Arnold as a less deserving, lower-grade offspring. More surprisingly, Aunt Gloria seemed desolated by my father’s demise, though according to contemporaries, she had shown him a good deal less affection in life than she did after he’d departed from it. Certainly she exhibited reducing concern for his grieving widow. An inveterate snob, my aunt was given to insisting, intentionally once in my hearing when I was eighteen, that my father had made “a quite unsuitable marriage to a little copy-typist who had driven him to drink.” I came to the conclusion then that my “well-born,” childless Aunt Gloria resented my mother, first, for having “married above her station,” and, secondly, for having been blessed with child — the last cause for bitterness embracing me as well. She was also incredibly mean with money.

Uncle Wilfred had been twenty-six when my father was born. Father was the only child of my grandfather’s late second marriage, as Wilfred had been of the first. Since Grandfather himself expired five years later, the older son increasingly grew to be a father figure to his only sibling. It was Wilfred who was to inherit the family business from my grandfather, whose will had made adequate and specific material provision for my Grandma Emma, his second wife, and “any progeny from our union,” under the terms of the couple’s marriage settlement. A later codicil to the will also looked to Wilfred “to care for Arnold’s general well-being until he is eighteen,” at which time he was to come into the income from a GBP10,000 trust fund my grandfather had set up for him, it seems as an afterthought.

It was pretty decent of Uncle Wilfred to have observed Grand-father’s wishes about my father’s situation until he came to his majority, especially as there had been nothing obligatory in the loose way those wishes had been expressed. Meantime, my Grandma Emma seems to have spent most of her settlement on herself rather than on her son. For instance, but for Wilfred’s generosity, Father would not have been sent to one of England’s most expensive private boarding schools, though it seems he lacked the intelligence, and probably the ambition, to benefit from the standard of tuition offered. Uncle also gave my father an allowance until, in 1953, he came into the income from the trust fund which would have produced around GBP600 a year — then just enough for a young bachelor to live on, but not lavishly.

In a sense, it was probably a pity that my father had any private income at all because, again according to contemporaries, being at heart just an engaging, good-looking playboy, he did no more than dabble with various jobs in the surety that when he failed in them he always had the trust income to fall back upon. One of his early jobs had been as a trainee salesman with the family firm. This had been created for him by my uncle, and it seems my father had failed at it miserably. At least he’d had the grace to resign his position rather than to further embarrass my uncle.

In 1961, when my parents married, far from being a lowly “copy-typist” (though that was one notch higher than “shopgirl” in my aunt’s social order), my mother had been private secretary to an important company director. This was the kind of responsible post she continued to fill, up to, and for thirty years after, my father’s death. She told me often what a charming, engaging, and entertaining man he was, that really his true vocation should have been in the creative arts — in music, acting, writing, or design (although I believe this was wishful thinking on her part) — and that he had only taken to drinking “a little too much” through frustrations stemming from his lack of career progress. She had adored him in his lifetime — and with added fervour after it when the causes of his failures would have been easier for her to disguise.

There was no doubt that it was my mother’s income that enabled the couple to live as well as they did at their pretty Victorian cottage in a country town twenty or so miles northwest of Uncle Wilfred’s mansion. After she became pregnant with me, though, it seems Father determined to take his responsibilities as a husband and future parent more seriously. As Mother admitted to me years later, he had gone to Uncle Wilfred desperately begging to be given another chance with the firm, and promising faithfully to justify the opportunity. Uncle had accepted his word, but because his half-brother’s previous attempts to become a salesman had proved so abysmal, this time he was put into the personnel department. It was unfortunate that three years later he proved to be a failure there as well.

The company manufactured metal components for the automotive industry. Uncle Wilfred was a graduate engineer and a business high-flyer. Under his direction, the organisation had grown hugely, so much so that it became an attractive takeover target, and in 1962 was merged with the market leader. Brilliant Wilfred was made chief executive of the much enlarged company and had risen to be chairman before his death from heart failure — which happened without warning in 1977 — relatively early for someone of his age. Grandma Emma was called to her reward, as my mother put it, in the same year at the French Riviera apartment where she had lived for many years, having severed relations with the family. I hope her heavenly reward was better than the one she left her relatives on earth. This was precisely nothing after her properties were sold and her debts paid.

This left only me, my mother, and Aunt Gloria — if you exclude her Pekingese, not the same one, but it was just as bad-tempered as the previous two.

Surprisingly, Uncle Wilfred had died legally intestate — meaning that he left no will. Probably this was because he had been too busy, or had not seen the need for a will at sixty-eight — something which could also have been stoked by a surreptitious but overweening belief in his own indestructibility, a common syndrome in ageing ex-whiz kids. Whatever the reason or reasons for his overlooking my continued existence, he left me without benefit or prospect of benefit from his life’s work.

In other words, Aunt Gloria got the lot.

I had never been involved with my uncle’s company — nor ever needed to be. After my father’s death, and definitely after the curtain-dyeing episode, my mother and I had seen less and less of the older Betcher couple. As time went on, my mother had grown in self-confidence and independence. In a sense, this played into the hands of Aunt Gloria, who was no doubt glad when we withdrew voluntarily from the scene. I suspect Uncle Wilfred had been too busy to notice, or that he left arrangements for family socialising to his wife, so that when there wasn’t any he assumed that this was how we wanted it. While it is possible that things might have been different if the original firm had survived, after it was subsumed, as it were, into a much larger public company, any sentimental, tribal attachments had withered on the bough.

The gift of a modest block of shares in the now mammoth corporation would not have seriously upset my mother’s principles, certainly if they had been left to me. We still had the income from the trust fund. This had grown over the years, but not nearly so much as the fund itself could have done if Grandfather had not specified that the capital could only be invested in government funds with a safe but unexciting yield. No matter: I had done well in the local state schools, entered architectural college at eighteen, and graduated, with no debts, five years later. It was not until then, of course, that I was able even to think about trying to repay my mother for looking after my every need since my father’s death, chiefly out of her own salary. In fact, she wouldn’t take a penny of my earnings, but at least I never had to accept any more of hers.

Three years ago I was made a full partner in a successful architectural practice in Birmingham after winning an international architectural competition for the design of a new town centre. As a result of that, I was headhunted to run the in-house design department of an international construction company with headquarters in London, with the promise of a seat on the board.

My mother was over the moon at all this — and so was Jenny Lagden, the woman who had just agreed to marry me. Blond, pretty, vivacious Jenny, eight years younger than me, was a talented actress who was close to making it onto London’s West End stage, while playing lead roles with good touring companies and showy supporting parts in TV dramas. In short, things were looking good for me — which is why, perhaps, I was greedy to make them even better.

It was a Sunday morning in mid September when I was driving Jenny from London to my mother’s. We were to spend the night with her. Mother had recently retired, but still lived in the house where she had brought me up. On a whim, more or less, I decided to make a diversion and drop in on Aunt Gloria. I didn’t telephone ahead because I wasn’t going to give my aunt the chance to make an excuse not to see us. She and I hadn’t met for over a decade, and I thought it was time to heal the rift. There were other reasons, too, one of them not quite so virtuous nor even so charitable as the others. Of course I wanted to show off Jenny, and perhaps to demonstrate to her that there was a stately home in the family. Then, to be absolutely honest, I also wanted to waken my immensely wealthy aunt to the fact that she had a successful nephew shortly to be wed, who deserved a wholesome wedding present or at least a place in her will.

Nor, all things considered, am I ashamed of that last aspiration — even if my mother would have been. Aunt Gloria was now in her eighties, and I felt it would be a pity if I allowed myself to be passed over from receiving a family legacy simply because I hadn’t troubled to remind her, in person, of my continued existence. We exchanged Christmas cards every year, but that was the current extent of our relationship.

Turning into the drive, my first impression was how much smaller the house was than I remembered. Even so, it was still a substantial, well-maintained Victorian pile with a large garden in a very desirable commuter area. At today’s prices, I figured it had to be worth close on two million pounds.

The person who answered the door was not my aunt. It was a younger, tallish woman, aged around sixty, who greeted us with a polite, enquiring smile. Slim, with dark, short, well-shaped hair, she was dressed conservatively in a white blouse under an oatmeal-coloured cardigan, and a flared tweed skirt. There was a short string of small matching pearls around her neck. What I noticed most about her, though, were the intelligent blue eyes — and the steely assessment, tinged perhaps with apprehension, that they were making of the two people standing before her.

When we introduced ourselves, the woman stiffened for a moment before offering her hand. “I thought I recognised a family likeness, Mr. Betcher. Well now, I thought we might never meet,” she said in a softly modulated, cultured voice and accent. “Do come in. Your aunt is on the terrace. I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you. We were taking coffee outside in the sunshine.” She led us from the hall into the drawing room — through the double doors I recalled so well — and from there to the stone-flagged, south-facing terrace.

Unlike the house, Aunt Gloria had not worn well. She had shrunk, as most older people do, of course, but had also lost a good deal of weight. Her face was unduly wizened, and there was a walking stick propped against her chair. But she recognised me instantly, and her tone was firm as she proffered, less affably than the occasion merited: “So, as I expected, Digby, you hadn’t intended to abandon me permanently. Even so, you’ve left it quite late” — the last sentence came as she was studying Jenny.

The “tinge” of guilt I had felt about my underlying purpose in making the visit ratcheted up to “strong sense” after what I took to be the implication of my aunt’s words. Inwardly I cursed the wretched woman as a cynic — which, on reflection, I suppose made me a hypocrite.

She had shaken hands with me from her brightly cushioned raffia chair, but there had been no kissing. After repeating the performance with Jenny, she motioned us to sit. The other woman, now identified as a Mrs. Claire Amhurst, had left to find extra cups and to replenish the contents of the silver coffee pot. In her absence, my aunt explained that Mrs. Amhurst was a widow who had accepted to be her companion more than a year earlier. “The arrangement works very well,” she enlarged woodenly. “As you would expect, of course, between ladies with similar educated tastes, values, and... and religious beliefs.” There was special emphasis on the last two words. I had never been aware that my aunt was at all religious, and as for her educated tastes, she was one of the most uninformed women I had ever known. “Are you an architect, too, Miss, er... Miss Lagden?” she continued. We had already explained that we intended to marry.

“Please, call me Jenny,” my fiancée responded brightly. “No, I’m not an architect. Not clever enough for that. I’m an actress.”

There was a distinct drawing in of breath as my aunt digested what appeared for her to be undisguisedly unwholesome tidings. “Indeed. We seldom go to the theatre,” was her limited verbal response. I took it that “we” meant herself and her companion, not “we” in the way Queen Victoria always turned herself into a crowd, but I wouldn’t have put it past Aunt Gloria to have assumed regal appendages in her dotage.

“Jenny’s a very fine actress,” I put in defensively, adding unnecessarily, “She’s often on the TV.”

Before Aunt Gloria had the opportunity to tell us that “we” seldom watched television, her companion had reappeared.

It was Mrs. Amhurst who enquired whether we could stay for lunch. We refused politely, explaining that we were, genuinely as it happened, engaged to lunch with my mother. But I was intrigued to note that the invitation had come unprompted from Mrs. Amhurst, and without instigation or clearance from her employer — unless the two had been operating some especially subtle method of secret communication, and I doubted that. It did appear, though, in this and other contexts, that whilst Mrs. Amhurst was overly solicitous for my aunt’s every pleasure and whim, it was the companion who made the decisions, both small and large — such as whether my aunt should keep her hat on against the sun, or as in the matter of the luncheon invitation. It seemed that my aunt was very much under the other’s control.

Aunt Gloria had shown no dismay about our need to depart quite soon, and while she took the opportunity at the mention of my mother to enquire after her health, her concern did not extend beyond that cursory politeness. Her interest in my life and Jenny’s, and in our future together, was similarly scant — except Mrs. Amhurst tried to make the going here, too, most particularly where Jenny was concerned. Mrs. Amhurst had been distantly related to a prominent but now deceased actor with whom Jenny had appeared, in minor roles, during a short season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their exchanges on this subject proved thoroughly engaging, until my aunt rudely interrupted them with a dissertation about her wretched dog’s arthritis. The episode clearly irritated Jenny, whose normal disposition is warm and tolerant.

Just ahead of our departure, Mrs. Amhurst had absented herself again, unprompted, but I assumed out of good manners, on the pretext of removing the tray of coffee things. In her warmest yet comment on any thing or any body, my aunt then broke into a voluble commendation of her companion.

“Her presence here has given me a new savour for life,” she pronounced earnestly. “With her beside me I’m good for many years yet, to be cared for with unlimited affection.” She sniffed, long and pointedly, looking from me to Jenny, then back again. “Claire Amhurst’s dedication to me has to be experienced to be appreciated,” she continued. “Nothing is too much trouble for her if it brings me comfort. Such sacrifice is quite exceptional in today’s selfish world... She’s a treasure I rate above riches.”

“I’m so glad for you, Aunt, very glad,” I offered, wondering if the last comment was a way of self-excusing the fact that she was overpaying her companion: That would have been typical of her established skinflint ways.

“Good,” she replied. “And I’m glad you young people are making such a success of your lives, I hope spiritually as well as materially. Mrs. Amhurst hadn’t enjoyed many material benefits before she came to me. She had to nurse a very sick husband for many years before he died. Such dedication. He’d been a poor country parson before that.” She paused, shaking her head while she allowed us to ponder on the likely privations of life in the vicarage. “So that she will never need to want again, I’ve made her, in effect, my heir. After I’m gone she’ll not be too old to enjoy life fully for the first time.” There was another pause during which, despite the bombshell, I tried to appear objectively unaffected. “Although the... the family has chosen to neglect me all these years,” she went on, “I’ve still left you a modest legacy in my will, Digby. You must accept, even so, that our fortune is nothing, relatively speaking, to what it was in your uncle’s day. Taxes and living costs have soared so mercilessly.” Aunt Gloria had lost none of her directness — nor her exasperating way of rewriting history. “Of course,” she ended, “I took into account that you still enjoy the benefit of your grandfather’s trust fund, which he generously set aside for your father and his progeny, at the unselfish instigation of my dear husband and myself.” She hadn’t been able to resist this last invented and unprovable assertion.

The beatified Mrs. Amhurst materialised again at that point, wearing a disarmingly humble expression, possibly a bit of playacting, I thought, if she’d been behind the terrace door listening to the conversation. We left a minute or so later.

I was seized with fury about the glib way in which Aunt Gloria had chosen to as good as disown me, and my mother, too. If that cold and gullible woman had not systematically spurned our company, she could have enjoyed all the family love and goodwill she could ever have wanted. I could not countenance that my aunt had needed to look outside the family for good example when my mother had been exhibiting just that since the time she had married my father. More personally, I was the next natural heir to my grandfather’s fortune. Clearly, I could have accepted things if my aunt and uncle had produced any children, but they hadn’t. For the bulk of what was still my grandfather’s original estate now to be left to a virtual stranger, and conceivably a plausible trickster, passed my understanding. As for Mrs. Amhurst, it was unlikely that anyone in her right mind would lavish affection on my aunt except for an underlying profitable motive — and justifiably so.

In the next few months my anger at the injustice of the situation developed into a fixation that soured my disposition, the quality of my work, and prevented me from sleeping for nights on end. It came to the point that, for the second time in my life, I could think of nothing that gave me satisfaction except the plotting of a deadly vengeance against my unfeeling aunt, born of an ire I easily sublimated as revenge for the offence she had caused by belittling my Guinevere.

It was nearly December before I woke to the acceptance that I had worked myself into a mindless obsession, and, more practically, a pointless one involving a worse than merely juvenile, unhinged, and outrageous remedy. Despite the several methods Ihad devised in the dead of wide-awake nights to “do in” Aunt Gloria — far more refined and foolproof, I should add, than the “squirrel hole” of my untutored youth — the damage to me was done, and, no matter how sweet the revenge, murdering her would not undo it. The true cause of my initial fixation was not highfaluting injustice, but lowest-level filthy lucre, and once I had come to that demeaning truth, the obsession gradually dispersed. It’s a free world, and my aunt was entitled to leave her money to whomsoever she wished — damn her hide.

At least I had a “modest legacy” to anticipate — and I hoped it would be big enough to fund the luxury cruise to historic Greece that my mother had always longed to take, but to which she had never allowed me to treat her. It would be a nice irony if Aunt Gloria could be made to pay for it, even posthumously.

It was during the following February that my mother called me at the office to say that my aunt had died as the result of an accident. She had tripped over her ailing Pekingese, while moving along uneven ground through the rhododendrons. She had broken a hip and, it transpired, her heart had not been able to withstand the rigours of the operation that followed. Poor Aunt Gloria. I was relieved, well, mildly, when it later transpired that the event had taken place a good twenty yards from my early excavation.

My mother went on to explain that it had been Mrs. Amhurst who had telephoned the sad news, and who had also wanted to know if we wished to make the funeral arrangements, or whether we would prefer her or my aunt’s lawyers to do so. She had wanted to call me about this, but had not been able to find my address or telephone number in my aunt’s address book. Aunt Gloria’s Christmas cards had always been addressed to my mother and myself at my mother’s house, no doubt to save money on cards and postage.

I said I’d deal with Mrs. Amhurst, then rang the lady. We agreed that she and my mother should make the funeral arrangements together, referring all expenses to the lawyers, whom I promised to call to regularise the arrangements, since funeral costs are tax deductable. Mrs. Amhurst said she knew that. It was one of the reasons she’d hesitated to do anything without my sanction. I realised then that, of course, as a vicar’s wife and widow she would probably be all too familiar with the legal consequences of a death in the family.

I rang Henry Houghton first thing next morning. I had known him since we were boys: He is three years older than me. His father, Percival, now retired, had been my uncle’s family lawyer. Henry is now the senior partner in the practice in Stratford. Amongst other things, he administers the trust fund of which I have been the beneficiary since my father’s death, so that, perforce, we have been in touch quite frequently over the years.

After expressing his condolences on the phone, Henry sounded a touch hesitant. Assuming this might well be because he had drawn up my aunt’s will and was embarrassed to be speaking to her disinherited heir, I broached the subject myself.

“About Aunt Gloria’s will, Henry,” I said lightly. “I know she’s only left me the small change.”

“Ah, you know the contents of the will, do you?” He responded in a tone that suggested more of concern than relief, something I found rather touching.

I chuckled. “Certainly I do. She thoroughly relished telling me about them not long ago. I assume Mrs. Amhurst knew them, too? That she’s to inherit nearly everything?”

There was a pause from the other end of the line. “Actually, she didn’t know, Digby.”

“You mean until you told her?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that.” He cleared his throat. “I called at the house on my way home last evening. That was after you’d spoken to Mrs. Amhurst on the telephone. I needed to pick up the original copy of the will which I’d sent to your aunt to sign nearly six months ago.”

“You didn’t have it in safekeeping at your office?”

“No... no, we didn’t. We had a copy, of course, but not the signed one which I’ll need to submit eventually to the probate office.” He paused again. Henry never did go in for fast repartee. “The fact is, she never sent it back to me after she’d signed it.”

“Probably because you didn’t enclose a stamped, addressed, legal-sized envelope,” I joked, knowing my aunt’s thriftiness.

“It’s possible you may be right about that, Digby,” Henry responded guardedly. “We normally do send one, but it may have been left out this time. Anyway, she’d put the will in the locked strongbox she kept in her desk. But our standard instructions to clients about how it had to be signed and witnessed, and by whom, and so on, were certainly in the covering letter we sent with it. I can assure you of that.”

“You sound defensive, Henry,” I said. “Has something gone wrong? Was there a special reason why Mrs. Amhurst didn’t know she was the chief beneficiary?”

“Yes. But not the one you think. She mentioned to me, almost in an aside when I arrived, that she knew she couldn’t be a beneficiary because your aunt had asked her to be one of the witnesses, the witnessing signatories, when she signed it.”

I swallowed slowly before commenting as soberly as I could manage: “You mean she knew that no one who witnesses a will may be a beneficiary from it? That otherwise his or her signature invalidates the thing?”

“Renders it null and void, yes. She knew that, even if your aunt didn’t,” Henry responded even more soberly.

“My aunt was a very ignorant woman. And Mrs. Amhurst never mentioned to her that she couldn’t be a beneficiary if she was a signatory?”

“Apparently not. Why should she? She’s a well-mannered person. I took it she felt that the contents of the will were none of her business.”

“And did you tell her—?”

“That your aunt intended her to be a beneficiary? Certainly not,” Henry interrupted, uncharacteristically. “I needed to look into the legal consequences of the new circumstances. I was about to call you when you rang.”

“So what’s the next step with the will, Henry?”

“There isn’t one. As I first assumed, it’s null and void.”

“What if Mrs. Amhurst wants to fight it?”

“No lawyer worth his salt would advise her even to try. There are far too many legal precedents to make it worth even risking the costs involved, especially since there are no other beneficiaries to complain except you. In any case, Mrs. Amhurst has made it clear to me she expected nothing. No, to all intents and purposes your aunt died intestate, like her husband, though for a different reason.” Henry paused before adding, “As her only close relative, you’ll inherit everything, of course.”

“Everything,” I intoned after him.

“That’s what the law of intestacy will confirm, Digby. There’ll be inheritance tax to pay, of course, but what’s left will be... will be quite substantial.”

In the end, the value of what was left was substantial enough for me to provide the admirable Mrs. Amhurst with a handsome source of solid extra income, though I had to fight to make her accept it — my mother was the same. They now share Mother’s house — two merry widows, as they describe themselves, with common tastes. At the moment they’re on their second cruise — an extended tour around South America. It seems that my Aunt Gloria attracted folk with opposite values to her own, and who lived in hopes that by example they might convert her to the right way.

My mother and Mrs. Amhurst never succeeded in this, but I’m glad I spared her life to let them try.

Copyright ©; 2005 by The Estate of David Williams.