Nest of Vipers

Chapter One

Unexpected Legacy

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(1)

CLAUD RUFFORD, of Cox, Cox, Rufford and Cox, sat impassively on a hard chair watching his client who was walking to and fro, reminding him of one of the larger cats at the London Zoo.

‘So there it is,’ said the client, ‘and how I’m going to get out of it I simply haven’t a clue.’

‘We’ve briefed the best man in Britain,’ said the solicitor. ‘Sir Ferdinand works wonders with a jury.’

‘He’ll need to work miracles,’ said the caged leopard, coming to a halt. ‘I’ve been framed. I know I’ve been framed, but I can’t put a finger on the criminal. I’ve been over and over in my mind—’

‘Sir Ferdinand wants you to write everything down.’

‘What’s the good of that? I’ve already made a statement.’

‘His mother is the Home Office psychiatrist.’

‘Good Lord! I’m not a mental case.’

‘Dame Beatrice is also a noted criminologist. She has solved dozens of cases in her time. Sir Ferdinand believes your story and he thinks that a written account, apart from any statement you may have made to the police, might bring out details which would suggest something to Dame Beatrice. You are a novelist, so the writing shouldn’t present any difficulty from your point of view. I need not advise you not to embroider your account. She can detect a lie or an exaggeration as though it literally stinks.’

‘I’ve been over the whole thing, first with the police and then with you. There is nothing I can add. I’ve told the truth and there’s no more to be said.’

‘Very well, but I think it’s short-sighted of you to ignore advice. And I don’t need to tell you that we’ve very little ammunition at present.’

‘Oh, well, it will help to while away the time, I suppose, if I write an unofficial version.’

‘Good man. I’ll have writing materials sent in. All the details, mind. Treat it as though it was part of your next novel, except that it will be solid fact, not fiction.’

(2)

I have been told to tell you everything, Dame Beatrice, so here goes. It began when I came into money and property by one of those freakish decrees of fortune which make truth so much more unlikely than fiction. I was young, ambitious and, at the time, profoundly dissatisfied with my lot, too poor to marry and hating my bread-and-butter job which did not leave me enough leisure to do the thing I badly wanted to do. Like so many young men who have had a university education, I wanted to write.

One January morning I read a newspaper advertisement of a trip to Madeira by passenger-cargo boat. The fares quoted seemed reasonable so I sent for the brochure, made an assessment of my savings and decided that, by careful budgeting, I could just about afford the lowest price for accommodation on the cruise.

I wrote off at once and secured a berth for the following July. The ship, a vessel of four thousand tons, left from Liverpool carrying a mixed cargo. Eighty passengers were taken and the only amenities on board were one deck tennis court, shuffleboard, deck golf, quoits, a canvas tank big enough to allow one to swim a couple of yards and a small, tatty library, and even this had to be housed in a smoking-room cum bar which also did duty as the only lounge.

In spite of the simplicity, almost the austerity, of the arrangements, I think we enjoyed ourselves. Most of us were young and, except for a middle-aged lady who occupied the so-called de luxe cabin amidships and, on the strength of this, reserved for her exclusive use the only deck-shelter available, I suspect that the others had had to save money for the holiday, just as I had, and needed to watch their holiday spending rather anxiously.

The ship was to stay thirty-six hours off Madeira, but, before we could be taken ashore, the cargo for the port of Funchal had to be landed. We were anchored out in the bay and for some time our amusement was provided by bumboat-men and diving-boys who came out to the ship in their own little craft and touted vociferously for our spare cash.

After they had returned to the quay, our crew let down the passenger ladder so that we could be taken ashore. The water was so calm and clear that, as the diving-boys had demonstrated, you could see a coin lying on the sand at a depth of thirty feet.

I approached the deck steward and asked whether there was time for a swim before we went ashore. He replied that there was about an hour before the ship’s boats would be leaving. He warned me that the water was deeper than it looked. Soon all of us who could swim were in the water, and so was our cabin de luxe passenger, who, although she could manage one or two floundering strokes, was not, in my sense of the words, a swimmer.

Whether the clearness of the water deceived her as to its depth, whether she did not realise that water deep enough to float a ship, even one of our tonnage, was too deep for her to be able to put her feet down when she was tired, I do not know. Suddenly she panicked, and got a mouthful of water as she submerged. However, I had no difficulty in getting her back to the safety of the ship’s ladder, on to which she was hauled by one of the sailors.

I thought no more of the matter, but after we had returned from the shore excursion she sought me out and thanked me – for ‘saving her life’. I replied modestly and sincerely that I had done nothing of the kind. I was the manager of my local swimming pool and accustomed to keeping an eye on people in the water. That, I supposed, was the end of it, for she took no more notice of me for the remainder of the cruise, although the purser, issuing tickets for the shore excursion at Lisbon on the return voyage, did tell me that she had asked for my home address and that he hoped it had been all right to let her have it.

‘Not that I should have dreamed of it, had the situation been reversed, of course,’ he said.

‘You mean if I’d been a blushing maiden and she a lascivious old man? Glad to hear it,’ I retorted.

So that was that – or so I thought – for I heard nothing more until, nearly five years later, the letter came from her lawyers. I had been left a considerable house standing in its own grounds and a very substantial sum of money.

My first thought, when I had recovered from the shock of discovering that I had become a landed proprietor and a wealthy man, was that now I should have to marry Niobe. It came as a surprise to me to discover that I no longer wanted to do this. I had come to take our six-year understanding for granted. It seemed to satisfy both of us, although we had never lived together in the accepted sense. Perhaps I had better explain this.

When I left the university with an undistinguished honours degree I tried for work in a publisher’s office and then with a literary agency, but found no takers. I was not at all keen on working in an ordinary commercial office, the Civil Service or a bank, let alone becoming a schoolmaster, so I answered an advertisement for superintending and managing a municipal swimming pool. As I held the A.S.A. gold medal and had swum the Channel (although in nothing like record time) they gave me the job.

Niobe Nutley, some few years older than myself, was my opposite number on the women’s side and we soon established an easy, comradely relationship. The work was hard and the hours long. I did not much care for the job and the money was nothing much, but, of course, I could swim free of charge every day, which at least was something.

I got digs with a landlady who mothered me, so that I was given plenty to eat, a decent, clean, comfortable bed and no embargo was placed on female or, indeed, any other visitors. I was an orphan, so I was unembarrassed by parental visits or the need to go home at holiday times, and my most frequent guest was Niobe, so we drifted into an understanding that, as soon as my finances warranted such a step, we would marry.

How this arrangement came about I hardly know. She was a good comrade and a loyal second-in-command at the pool, but if there ever had been the beginnings of a passionate relationship between us, I cannot remember when it was. The years came and went – six of them altogether – and any first fine careless rapture must soon have passed. All the same, until my unexpected rise to affluence came about, the mirage of our ultimately getting married was still on the horizon. It was with that perceptiveness which nature, I suppose, has given to women and which is often miscalled their intuition, that, when I told her of my good fortune, Niobe said, living up to her name and becoming tearful:

‘So now you won’t want me any more.’

I was completely disconcerted by this, for it brought home to me the realisation that she was right. If this seems the reaction of a heel, I’m sorry, but it must be remembered that she and I had had nothing but the most undemanding kind of relationship for at least five years. We had never slept together and, owing to the nature of our jobs, we had never, even at the warmest period of our friendship, spent a holiday together. One or other of us always had to be on duty at the pool, for a deputy could never be placed in full control of the swimming. That was in our contract and the agreement had to be honoured.

Recovering from my surprise at finding that she had hit a nasty smash, with almost uncanny accuracy, straight at my head, unchivalrously I lobbed the ball back into her court.

‘You mean that you don’t want me any more,’ I said. My excuse for saying this was that, now it had come to the crunch, I hoped that maybe she had stuck to me so long merely for the sake of Auld Lang Syne and might be as glad as I was to get out of the entanglement. I had great hopes that for at least the past three years her feelings for me had become as tepid as mine for her and that she was relieved to find a way of escape.

‘I don’t want you any more?’ she asked, wiping her eyes on a used bath towel she had been about to toss into the bin. ‘Well—’ she put on the affected American drawl which she thought funny but which secretly irritated me very much – ‘I guess I never figured on being a rich man’s wife. Anyway, what do you plan to do now?’

I had already made up my mind about this.

‘I shall give in my notice at the pool,’ I said, ‘and as soon as I have worked out my month I shall go to Paris and write my novel.’

‘Won’t you live in the house this woman has left you?’

‘No. It is far too large. Unfortunately it needs a great deal done to it before I have any hope of selling it, but all that can wait.’

‘I don’t want to go to Paris,’ said Niobe. I suppose I looked taken aback. It had not occurred to me to suggest that she should accompany me. That would be no way to break our liaison.

‘Oh, I see,’ she added at once. ‘No doubt I should be in the way.’

‘It isn’t that,’ I said, ‘but, well, I shall be pretty busy with my writing, you know. I mean, there wouldn’t be shopping and the opera and the Folies and all that sort of thing. It wouldn’t be any fun for you. Besides, there’s your job. One of us has to stay here in charge of the pool. You wouldn’t want to – what I mean is that I shall only be gone for a year. I don’t intend to live permanently in Paris.’

‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ve told you I don’t want to go with you. No need for all these excuses. Anyway, if all I hear about Paris is true, you’ll want to feel perfectly free to go all Montmartre there, so perhaps you’d better have this back.’

She took off the ring I had given her five years previously. At the pool she did not wear it on her engagement finger, but on the forefinger of her left hand.

‘Oh, come, now!’ I said, nonplussed by her definite reaction. ‘No need for histrionics. A year is only a year. I shall be back again almost before you know I’ve gone. We can make all our arrangements then.’

‘Very well,’ she said. It was clear to me that she had herself in hand, for she put the ring back, but this time on to her right hand. There was not going to be any fuss. She smiled brightly at me, but added, to my dismay, ‘Just so long as you don’t plan to be shut of me altogether. Why don’t you take me to see this ducal mansion of yours? It’s good for the poor to see how a rich man lives.’

‘I’m not going to live there, I tell you,’ I said, exasperated by what seemed a volte-face on her part, ‘and I can’t take you to see it until I’ve worked out my notice and we can use your half day.’

‘Don’t you want me to see it?’

‘Yes, of course I do, if you’d like to. Not that you’ll think much of it in its present state. It will take thousands to do it up. I wonder really whether it wouldn’t be better to let it maunder into total decay rather than spend all that money on it and then perhaps not be able to sell it.’

(3)

When I had visited my acquisition in company with my benefactor’s lawyer, I had not been surprised when, as we went in through the great iron gates, he said:

‘Of course, Mrs Dupont-Jacobson never lived here after her husband died. She thought the house was unlucky. A superstitious woman in some ways.’

Paint was peeling off the window-frames, a once-ornate portico was battered and damaged and some of the downstair windows were broken. The whole place was grimy and neglected. All the same, a certain grandeur still clung to it in its decay and it was possible to see that, in its day, it had been a fine, generously-built house.

‘A lot will have to be done before I can sell it,’ I said. I had made the same remark to Niobe earlier, and I made it again as she and I stood on its front lawn. She made a statement which the lawyer, perhaps, had been too tactful to utter.

‘You’ll never sell a place this size, Chelion, however much you do to it,’ she said.

‘A school, perhaps, or a nursing-home might buy it,’ I hazarded.

‘I doubt whether it’s suitable for either. I suppose you’ve got a key? Let’s go inside,’ she said.

The interior of the house told the same story as the outside had done. The whole place needed not so much redecorating as renovating. There was a noble staircase with cobwebbed banisters and a grimy sidewall on which had been painted a trompe l’oeuil effect in imitation of the banisters themselves, but which was now picked out with a coat of depressing dark brown, peeling paint, and the whole mansion had the same depressing effect on me.

An upstair room in the shape of a double cube with what must have been a wonderfully ornate Jacobean ceiling before smoke from the enormous open fireplace had blackened its coloured splendours opened into an ante-chamber which, like the other rooms on the first floor, had hideous Victorian wallpaper and a nasty little iron fire-grate which ruined its otherwise spacious attractiveness. As well as this, cracked and broken windows had allowed the elements to do their worst, apparently for years, and water seemed to have come through the ceiling. The other rooms were similarly affected.

We tried the second floor, climbed to the attics and, when we had descended to the ground floor again, explored what must have been the housekeeper’s room, the butler’s pantry and the servants’ hall. We inspected the enormous kitchen and its scullery and then returned to the entrance hall with its stone screen and the dado made up of the coats of arms of previous owners.

‘I’d have to spend thousands,’ I said again, ‘even to make it habitable.’

‘I know exactly what I should do with it if it were mine,’ said Niobe.

‘Pull it down and sell the park for building land? I doubt whether I’d be allowed to do that.’ I was glad to find her ready to talk rationally about the house and what I was to do with it. She had maintained what I took to be a grim silence up to this point. She had not even lived up to her name and wept. She was much given to tears when things went wrong.

‘No, I don’t think you would be allowed to sell the park for building plots,’ she went on. ‘There would be planning permission to get, and all sorts of involvements, I expect, and you never were much of an organiser, were you? No, I can tell you what to do with it, Chelion. In fact, I could do it all for you while you’re in Paris. I don’t want to stay on at the pool. It won’t be the same without you.’

I was afraid she was going to turn tearful at this, so I said hastily. ‘Well, you can’t expect me to go on with a job like that, now I’ve no necessity to earn a living, but tell me what you’ve got in mind, however crazy it is.’

‘You’d have to pay me a salary, of course,’ she said, ‘but I’d be satisfied with the same money as I’m getting at the pool.’

‘Let’s hear this crack-brained scheme of yours.’ But, when she outlined what it was, I said, ‘Good Lord! That will never work!’

‘Of course it will work. You’ll get masses of tenants in no time. There will be a waiting-list. Elderly people who’ve sold up houses which are too big for them will give anything for accommodation they can rent instead of having to buy. There is the park for them to walk or sit about in, a lake you can stock with fish, a seaside town and its shops close at hand—’

‘Only close at hand if you’ve got a car. Elderly people may not be prepared to drive.’

‘Well, get a car. Get two cars, one self-drive and the other chauffeur-driven and charge car-hire prices. They would more than cover the chauffeur’s wages.’

‘Each flat would need its own kitchen and bathroom.’

‘I know that. Look, why don’t you leave everything to me, as I’ve suggested? I’m sure I can manage. I’ll be able to give a good account of my stewardship, I promise you. Now we’ve – how does it go? – said goodbye for ever, cancelled all our vows, done our best and worst and parted, and all that, there could be so easy a relationship between us.’

‘Oh, look here,’ I said, ‘what vows have we cancelled?’

‘Don’t be silly, Chelion. Will you let me do as I suggest?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I’d have to put a ceiling on what I could allow you to spend, though, you know. I’m no Soames Forsyte to be employing an architect for whom the sky’s the limit.’

‘I’ll get plenty of estimates and then, when we reach your ceiling price – although I hope you won’t be niggardly – I shall stop the work. If necessary, we’ll finish it ourselves when you come back.’

‘You can count me out on that score. Interior decorating is well beyond my scope. I’ve always known it. Oh, well, get your estimates and then we’ll see,’ I promised. After all, I owed her something for having been engaged to her during the years when, I suppose, she could have found somebody who would have married her, and I was grateful, too, for the calm way she had accepted the break-up. She must have read some of my thoughts, not an unusual state of affairs, because our friendship, if such it can be called, had lasted so long. She said, without bitterness:

‘You need not think you have wasted the best years of my life.’ She said it with a lop-sided smile. ‘Nothing of the kind. Life begins at thirty, Chelion.’

‘Not for a woman,’ I thought. On impulse I kissed her, but met with no response. What is more, she remained dry-eyed.