Hot Money

CHAPTER NINE

Malcolm said explosively, "You're bloody rude," and, after a pause, "In what way am I thick? A new will was essential."

"Suppose you died without telling me or anybody else you'd made it, or where it could be found?"

"Oh." He was dismayed, then brightened. "The solicitor would have produced it."

"If he knew you by reputation, if he had any idea of the sums involved, if he heard you were dead, if he were conscientious, and if he knew who to get in touch with. If he were lazy, he might not bother, he's under no obligation. Within a month, unless you boasted a bit about your wealth, he'll have forgotten your will's in his files."

"You seem to know an awful lot about it."

"Joyce worked for years for the Citizens Advice Bureau, do you remember? I used to hear lurid tales of family squabbles because no one knew where to find a will they were sure had been made. And equally lurid tales of family members knowing where the will was and burning it before anyone else could find it, if they didn't like what was in it."

"That's why I left it in safekeeping," Malcolm said. "Precisely because of that."

We reached the far boundary of the field. The stream ran on through the neighbour's land, but we at that point turned back. "What should I do then?" he asked. "Any ideas?"

"Send it to the probate office at Somerset House."

"How do you mean?"

"Joyce told me about it, one time. You put your will in a special envelope they'll send you if you apply for it, then you take it or send it to the central probate office. They register your will there and keep it safe. When anyone dies and any solicitor anywhere applies for probate, the central probate office routinely checks its files. If it has ever registered a will for that person, that's the envelope that will be opened, and that's the will that will be proved."

He thought it over. "Do you mean, if I registered a will with the probate office, and then changed my mind and wrote a new one, it wouldn't be any good?"

"You'd have to retrieve the old will and re-register the new one. Otherwise the old will would be the one adhered to."

"Good God. I didn't know any of this."

"Joyce says not enough people know. She says if people would Only register their wills, they couldn't be pressured into changing them when they're gaga or frightened or on their deathbeds. Or at least, wills made like that would be useless."

"I used to laugh, rathe rat Joyce's voluntary work. Felt indulgent." He sighed. "Seems it had its uses."

The Citizens Advice Bureau, staffed by knowledgeable armies of Joyces, could steer one from the cradle to the grave, from marriage to divorce to probate, from child allowance to old age supplements. I'd not always listened attentively to Joyce's tales, but I'd been taken several times to the Bureau, and I seemed to have absorbed more than I'd realised.

"I kept a copy of my new will," Malcolm said. "I'll show it to you when we go in."

"You don't need to."

"You'd better see it," he said.

I didn't argue. He whistled to the dogs who left the stream reluctantly, and we made our way back to the gate into the garden.

"Just wait out here while I check the house," I said.

He was astonished. "We've only been out for half an hour. And we locked the doors."

"You regularly go out for half an hour at this time. And how many Of the family still have keys to the house?"

He was silent. All of the people who had ever lived there could have kept their keys to the house, and there had never been any need, before now, to change the locks.

"Stay here, then?" I asked, and he nodded sadly.

The kitchen door was still locked. I let myself in and went all through the house again, but it was quiet and undisturbed, and doors that I'd set open at certain angles were still as I'd left them.

I called Malcolm and he came into the kitchen and began getting the food for the dogs.

"Are you going through this checking rigmarole every single time we leave the house?" he said, sounding as if he didn't like it.

"Yes, until we get the locks changed."

He didn't like that either, but expressed his disapproval only in a frown and a rather too vigorous scraping of dog food out of a tin.

"Fill the water bowls," he said rather crossly, and I did that and set them down again on the floor.

"It isn't so easy to change the locks," he said. "They're all mortice locks, as you know, set into the doors. The one on the front door is antique."

The front door keys were six inches long and ornate, and there had never been more than three of them, as far as I knew.

"All right," I said. "If we keep the front door bolted and the keys in your safe, we won't change that one."

A little pacified, he put the filled dinner bowls on the floor, wiped his fingers and said it was time for a noggin. I bolted the kitchen door on the inside and then followed him through the hall to the office, where he poured scotch into two glasses and asked if I wanted to desecrate mine with ice. I said yes and went back to the kitchen to fetch some. When I returned, he had taken some sheets of paper from his open briefcase and was reading them.

"Here you are. Here's my will," he said, and passed the papers over.

He had made the will, I reflected, before he had telephoned me to put an end to our quarrel, and I expected not to figure in it in consequence, but I'd done him an injustice. Sitting in an armchair and sipping the whisky, I read through all the minor bequests to people like Arthur Bellbrook, and all the lawyerly gobbledegook "upon trust" and without commas, and came finally to the plain language.

"To each of my three divorced wives Vivien Joyce and Alicia I bequeath the sum of five hundred thousand pounds.

"My son Robin being provided for I direct that the residue of my estate shall be divided equally among my children Donald Lucy Thomas Gervase Ian Ferdinand and Serena."

A long clause followed with provisions for "if any of my children shall pre-decease me", leaving "his or her share" to the grandchildren.

Finally came two short sentences:

"I bequeath to my son Ian the piece of thin wire to be found on my desk. He knows what he can do with it."

Surprised and more moved than I could say, I looked up from the last page and saw the smile in Malcolm's eyes deepen to a throaty chuckle.

"The lawyer chap thought the last sentence quite obscene. He said I shouldn't put that sort of thing in a will."

I laughed. "I didn't expect to be in your will at all."

"Well…" He shrugged. "I'd never have left you out. I've regretted for a long while… hitting you… everything."

"Guess I deserved it."

"Yes, at the time."

I turned back to the beginning of the document and re-read one of the preliminary paragraphs. In it, he had named me as his sole executor, when I was only his fifth child.

"Why me?" I said.

"Don't you want to?"

"Yes. I'm honoured."

"The lawyer said to name someone I trusted." He smiled lopsidedly. "You got elected."

He stretched out an arm and picked up from his desk a leather pot holding pens and pencils. From it, he pulled a wire about ten inches long and about double the thickness, of the sort used by florists for stiffening flower stalks.

"If this one should get lost," he said, "just find another."

"Yes. All right."

"Good." He put the wire back in the pot and the pot back in the desk.

"By the time you pop off," I said, "the price of gold might have risen out of sight and all I'd find in the wall would be spiders."

"Yeah, too bad."

I felt more at one with him than at any time since he'd telephoned, and perhaps he with me. I hoped it would be a very long time before I would have to execute his will.

"Gervase," I said, "suggests that you should distribute some of your money now, toer… reduce the estate tax."

"Does he? And what do you think?"

"I think," I said, "that giving it to the family instead of to scholarships and film companies and so on might save your life."

The blue eyes opened wide. "That's immoral."

"Pragmatic."

"I'll think about it."

We dined on the caviar, but the fun seemed to have gone out of it.

"Let's have shepherd's pie tomorrow," Malcolm said. "There's plenty in the freezer."

We spent the next two days uneventfully at Quantum being careful, but with no proof that care was needed.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, out with the dogs and having made certain that Arthur Bellbrook had gone home, we walked round behind the kitchen wall and came to the treasure house.

A veritable sea of nettles guarded the door. Malcolm looked at them blankly. "The damn things grow overnight."

I pulled my socks over the bottoms of my trousers and assayed the traverse; stamped down an area by the bottom of the door and with fingers all the same stinging felt along to one end of the wooden sill and with some effort tugged it out. Malcolm leaned forward and gave me the piece of wire, and watched while I stood up and located the almost invisible hole. The wire slid through the tiny tube built into the mortar and, under pressure, the latch inside operated as smoothly as it had when I'd installed it. The wire dislodged a metal rod out of a slot, allowing the latch to spring open.

"I oiled it," Malcolm said. "The first time I tried, it was as rusty as hell."

I pushed the edge of the heavy narrow door and it opened inwards, its crenellated edges disengaging from the brick courses on each side with faint grating noises but with no pieces breaking off.

"You built it well," Malcolm said. "Good mortar."

"You told me how to mix the mortar, if you remember."

I stepped into the small brick room which was barely four feet across at the far end and about eight feet long, narrowing in a wedge-shape towards the door which was set into one of the long walls. The wider end wall was stacked to waist height with flat wooden boxes like those used for chateau-bottled wines. In front, there were two large cardboard boxes with heavily taped-down tops. I stepped further in and tried to open one of the wine-type boxes, but those were nailed shut. I turned round and took a couple of steps back and stood in the doorway, looking out.

"Gold at the back, treasures in front," Malcolm said, watching me with interest.

"I'll take your word for it."

The air in the triangular room smelled faintly musty. There was no ventilation, as I'd told Arthur Bellbrook, and no damp course, either. I reset the rod into the latch on the inside as it wouldn't shut unless one did, and stepped outside. My teenage design limitations meant that one had to go down on one's knees to close the door the last few inches, hooking one's fingers into a hollow under the bottom row of bricks and pulling hard. The door and walls fitted together again like pieces of jigsaw, and the latch inside clicked into place. I replaced the sill under the door, kicking it home, and tried to encourage the crushed nettles to stand up again.

"They'll be flourishing again by morning," Malcolm said. "Rotten things."

"Those cardboard boxes are too big to come out through the door," I observed, rubbing stings on my hands and wrists.

"Oh, sure. I took them in empty and flat, then set them up, and filled them bit by bit."

"You could take those things out again now."

There was a pause, then he said, "I'll wait. As things are at present, they might as well stay there."

I nodded. He whistled to the dogs and we went on with the walk. We had given up referring explicitly to fear of the family, but it still hung around us like grief. On our return from the field, Malcolm waited outside without comment until I checked through the house, and prosaically began feeding the dogs on my report of all clear.

Neither of us discussed how long all the precautions were going to have to go on. Norman West's latest report had been as inconclusive as his first, and by Wednesday evening the pitiful summary I'd been making of his results read as follows:

DONALD: busy about the golf club. Cannot pinpoint any times. HELEN: working at home making Henley souvenirs. LUCY: reading, walking, writing, meditating. EDWIN: housework, shopping for groceries, going to public library. THOMAS: looking for new job, suffering headaches. BERENICE: housekeeping, looking after children, uncooperative. GERVASE: commuting to London, in and out of his office, home late. URSULA: looking after daughters, unhappy. FERDINAND: on statistics course, no attendance records. DEBS: photo-session vouched for on Newmarket Sales day. SERENA: teaching aerobics mornings and most evenings, shopping for clothes afternoons. VIVIEN: pottering about, can't remember. ALICIA: probably the same, unhelpful. JOYCE: playing bridge.

All one could say, I thought, was that no one had made any effort to produce alibis for either relevant time. Only Debs had a firm one, which had been arranged and vouched for by others. All the rest of the family had been moving about without timing their exits and entrances: normal behaviour for innocent people.

Only Joyce and I lived beyond half an hour's drive from Quantum. All of the others, from Donald at Henley to Gervase at Maidenhead, from Thomas near Reading to Lucy near Marlow, from Ferdinand in Wokingham to Serena in Bracknell, and even Vivien in Twyford and Alicia near Windsor, all of them seemed to have put down roots in a ring round the parent house like thistledown blown on the wind and reseeding.

The police had remarked on it when investigating Moira's murder, and had checked school runs and train timetables until they'd been giddy. They had apparently caught no one lying, but that seemed to me inconclusive in a family which had had a lot of practice in misrepresentation. The fact had been, and still was, that anybody could have got to Quantum and home again without being missed.

I spent a short part of that Wednesday wandering around Moira's greenhouse, thinking about her death.

The greenhouse was invisible from the house, as Arthur Bellbrook had said, set on a side lawn which was bordered with shrubs. I wondered whether Moira had been alarmed to see her killer approach. Probably not. Quite likely, she had herself arranged the meeting, stating time and place. Malcolm had once mentioned that she didn't like casual callers, preferring them to telephone first. Perhaps it had been an unforeseen killing, an opportunity seized. Perhaps there had been a quarrel. Perhaps a request denied. Perhaps one of Moira's specials in acid-sweet triumphs, like picking Arthur Bellbrook's vegetables.

Moira in possession of Quantum, about to take half of everything Malcolm owned. Moira smugly satisfied, oblivious to her danger. I doubted if she had believed in her nightmare death even while it was happening.

Malcolm spent the day reading the Financial Times and making phone calls: yen, it appeared from snatches I overheard, were behaving gruesomely from Malcolm's point of view.

Although making calls outward, neither of us was keen to answer inward calls since that morning, when Malcolm had been drenched by a shower of recriminations from Vivien, all on the subject of meanness. He had listened with wry pain and given me a resume once Vivien had run out of steam.

"One of the cats in the village told her we were here, so now the whole family will know," he said gloomily. "She says Donald is bankrupt, Lucy is starving and Thomas got the sack and can't deal with unemployment. Is it all true? It can't be. She says I should give them twenty thousand pounds each immediately."

"It wouldn't hurt," I said. "It's Gervase's idea watered down."

"But I don't believe in it."

I explained about Donald's school fees crisis, Lucy's crumbling certainties, Thomas with Berenice chipping away at his foundations. He said their troubles lay in their own characters, which was true enough. He said if he gave those three a hand-out, he would have to do it for us all, or there would be a shooting civil war among Vivien, Joyce and Alicia. He made a joke of it, but he was stubborn. He had provided for us through our trust funds. The rest was up to us. He hadn't changed his mind. He'd thought over Vivien's suggestion, and the answer was no.

He telephoned back to Vivien and to her fury told her so. I could hear her voice calling him wicked, mean, cruel, vindictive, petty, sadistic, tyrannical and evil. He took offence, shouted at her to shut up, shut up, and finally slammed down the receiver while she was still in full flood.

All Vivien had achieved, I thought, was to make him dig his toes in further.

I thought him pig-headed, I thought him asking to be murdered. I looked at the unrelenting blue eyes daring me to argue, and wondered if he thought giving in would be weakness, if he thought baling out his children would diminish his own self-respect.

I said nothing at all. I was in a bad position to plead for the others, as I stood to gain myself. I hoped for many reasons that he would be able to change his mind, but it had to come from inside. I went out to Moira's greenhouse to give him time to calm down, and when I returned neither of us mentioned what had passed.

On the dogs' walk that afternoon, I reminded him that I was due to ride at Cheltenham the following day, and asked if he had any cronies in that direction with whom he could spend the time.

"I'd like to see you ride again," he said. He constantly surprised me. "What if the family come too?" "I'll dress up as another chef."

I didn't know that it was wise, but again he had his own way, and I persuaded myself he would come to no harm on a racecourse. When we got there, I introduced him to George and Jo who congratulated him on Blue Clancy and took him off to lunch.

I looked around apprehensively all afternoon for brothers, sisters, mother and step-mothers, but saw none. The day was cold and windy with everyone turning up collars and hunching shoulders to keep warm, with hats on every head, felt, tweed, wool and fur. If anyone had wanted to hide inside their clothes, the weather was great for it.

Park Railings gave me a splendid ride and finished fourth, less tired than his jockey, who hadn't sat on a horse for six days. George and Jo were pleased enough, and Malcolm, who had been down the track with them to watch one of the other steeplechases from beside one of the jumps, was thoughtful.

"I didn't realise you went so fast," he said, going home. "Such speed over those jumps."

"About thirty miles an hour."

"I suppose I could buy a steeple chaser he said, "if you'd ride it."

"You'd better not. It would be favouritism."

"Huh."

We went thirty miles towards Berkshire and came to a hostelry he liked where we stopped for the late afternoon noggins (Arthur Bellbrook was taking the dogs home with him for the night) and waited lazily until dinner.

We talked about racing, or rather Malcolm asked questions and I answered them. His interest seemed inexhaustible, and I wondered if it would die as fast as it had sprung up. He couldn't wait to find out what Chrysos might do next year.

We ate without hurrying, lingering over coffee, and went on home, pulling up yawning outside the garage, sleepy from fresh air and French wine. "I'll check the house," I said without enthusiasm.

"Oh, don't bother, it's late."

"I'd better check it. Honk the horn if you see something you don't like."

I left him in the car, let myself into the kitchen and switched on the lights. The door to the hall was closed as usual, to keep the dogs, when they were there, from roaming through the house. I opened the door to the hall and switched on the hall lights.

I stopped there briefly, looking round.

Everything looked quiet and peaceful, but my skin began to crawl just the same, and my chest felt tight from suddenly suspended breath.

The door to the office and the door to the sitting-room were not as I had left them. The door to the office was more than half open, the door to the sitting-room all but closed; neither standing at the precise narrow angle at which I'd set them every time we'd been out.

I tried to remember whether I'd actually set the doors before leaving that morning, or whether I'd forgotten. But I HAD set them. I knew I had. I'd picked up my saddle and other gear in the hall after doing it, and shut the hall-to-kitchen door, and locked the outside door, leaving the dogs with Arthur Bellbrook in the garden.

I hadn't until then thought of myself as a coward, but I felt dead afraid of going further into the house. It was so large, so full of dark corners. There were two cellars, and the several unlit attic bedrooms of long-gone domestic servants, and the box room deep with shadows. There were copious cupboards everywhere and big empty wardrobes. I'd been round them all three or four times during the past few days, but not at night, and not with the signals standing at danger.

With an effort, I took a few steps into the hall, listening. I had no weapon. I felt nakedly vulnerable. My heart thumped uncomfortably. The house was silent.

The heavy front door, locked and bolted like a fortress, had not been touched. I went over to the office, reached in with an arm, switched on the light and pushed the half-open door wider.

There was no one in there. Everything was as Malcolm had left it in the morning. The windows shone blackly, like threats. Taking a deep breath, I repeated the procedure with the sitting-room, but also checking the bolts on the french windows, and after that with the dining-room, and the downstairs cloakroom, and then with worse trepidation went down the passage beside the stairs to the big room that had been our playroom when we were children and a billiard room in times long past.

The door was shut. Telling myself to get on with it, I opened the door, switched on the light, pushed the door open.

There was no one there. It wasn't really a relief, because I would have to go on looking. I checked the storeroom opposite, where there were stacks of garden furniture, and also the door at the end of the passage, which led out into the garden: securely bolted on the inside. I went back to the hall and stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking upward.

It was stupid to be so afraid, I thought. It was home, the house I'd been brought up in. One couldn't be frightened by home.

One was.

I swallowed. I went up the stairs. There was no one in my bedroom. No one in five other bedrooms, nor in the box room no one in the bathrooms, no one in the plum and pink lushness of Malcolm's own suite. By the end, I was still as scared as I'd been at the beginning, and I hadn't started on cellars or attics or small hiding places.

I hadn't looked under the beds. Demons could be waiting anywhere to jump out on me, yelling. Giving in, I switched off all the upstairs lights and went cravenly back to the hall.

Everything was still quiet, mocking me.

I was a fool, I thought.

Leaving the hall and kitchen lights on, I went back to Malcolm who started to get out of the car when he saw me coming. I waved him back and slid in beside him, behind the driving wheel.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"Someone may be here."

"What do you mean?"

I explained about the doors.

"You're imagining things."

"No. Someone has used their key."

We hadn't yet been able to have the locks changed, although the carpenter was due to be bringing replacements the following morning. He'd had difficulty finding good new locks to fit into such old doors, he'd said, and had promised them for Thursday, but I'd put him off until Friday because of Cheltenham.

"We can't stay out here all night," Malcolm protested. "It's bound to be the wind or something that moved the doors. Let's go to bed, I'm whacked."

I looked at my hands. They weren't actually shaking. I thought for a while until Malcolm grew restless.

"I'm getting cold," he said. "Let's go in, for God's sake."

"No… we're not sleeping here."

"What? You can't mean it."

"I'll lock the house, and we'll go and get a room somewhere else."

"At this time of night?"

"Yes." I made to get out of the car and he put a hand on my arm to catch my attention.

"Fetch some pyjamas, then, and washing things."

I hesitated. "No, I don't think it's safe." I didn't say I couldn't face it, but I couldn't.

"Ian, all this is crazy."

"It would be crazier still to be murdered in our beds."

"But just because two doors…"

"Yes. Because."

He seemed to catch some Of MY own uneasiness because he made no more demur, but when I was headed again for the kitchen he called after me, "At least bring my briefcase from the office, will you?"

I made it through the hall again with only a minor tremble in the gut; switched on the office light, fetched his briefcase without incident and set the office door again at its usual precise angle. I did the same to the sitting-room door. Perhaps they would tell us in the morning, I thought, whether or not we had had a visitor who had hidden from my approach.

I went back through the hall, switched the lights off, shut the hall to-kitchen door, let myself out, left the house dark and locked and put the briefcase on the car's back seat.

On the basis that it would be easiest to find a room in London, particularly at midnight, for people without luggage, I drove up the M4 and on Malcolm's instructions pulled up at the Ritz. We might be refugees, he said, but we would be staying in no camp, and he explained to the Ritz that he'd decided to stay overnight in London as he'd been delayed late on business.

"Our name is Watson," I said impulsively, thinking suddenly of Norman West's advice and picking out of the air the first name I could think of. "We will pay with travellers' cheques."

Malcolm opened his mouth, closed it again, and kept blessedly quiet. One could write whatever name one wanted onto travellers' cheques.

The Ritz batted no eyelids, offered us connecting rooms (no double suites available) and promised razors, toothbrushes and a bottle of scotch.

Malcolm had been silent for most of the journey, and so had I, feeling with every heart-calming mile that I had probably over- reacted, that maybe I hadn't set the doors, that if any of the family had let themselves into the house while we were out, they'd been gone long before we returned. We had come back hours later than anyone could have expected, if they were judging the time it would take us to drive from Cheltenham.

I could have sat at the telephone in the house and methodically checked with all the family to make sure they were in their own homes. I hadn't thought of it, and I doubted if I could have done it, feeling as I had.

Malcolm, who held that sleeping pills came a poor second to scotch, put his nightcap theory to the test and was soon softly snoring. I quietly closed the door between our two rooms and climbed between my own sheets, but for a long time lay awake. I was ashamed of my fear in the house which I now thought must have been empty. I had risked my neck without a qualm over big fences that afternoon: I'd been petrified in the house that someone would jump out on me from the dark. The two faces of courage, I thought mordantly: turn one face to the wall.

We went back to Berkshire in the morning and couldn't reach Quantum by car because the whole village, it seemed, was out and blocking the road. Cars and people everywhere: cars parked along the roadsides, people walking in droves towards the house.

"What on earth's going on?" Malcolm said.

"Heaven knows." In the end I had to stop the car, and we finished the last bit of the journey on foot. We had to push through crowds and were unpopular until people recognised Malcolm, and made way for him, and finally we reached the entrance to the drive… and there literally rocked to a stop.

To start with there was a rope stretched across it, barring our way, with a policeman guarding it. In front of the house, there were ambulances, police cars, fire-engines, swarms of people in uniform moving purposefully about.

Malcolm swayed with shock, and I felt unreal, disconnected from my feet. Our eyes told us: our brains couldn't believe.

There was an immense jagged gaping hole in the centre of Quantum.

People standing near us in the gateway, round-eyed, said, "They say it was the gas."