Help the Poor Struggler (19 page)

“You mean, that as long as Jessica Ashcroft is alive, no one gets anything?”

Mr. Mack shook his head. “James Ashcroft wanted everything to go to Jessie. She can, of course, when she comes of age, honor those bequests immediately. Until that time, Robert is executor of the will and receives a fair allowance —”

“What's ‘fair'?”

“I believe in the neighborhood of five thousand pounds a year.”

Jury shook his head. “That'd be a slum for Ashcroft. It certainly wouldn't do much by way of supporting his habit. No, no, Mr. Mack —” The solicitor's eyes had widened. “— not drugs. Motorcars. Vintage, classic, antique.”

“Ah, yes. Well, Robert has access to Jessica's money, you see. All he need do is apply to me. If I think the expense suitable, I let him have it. You're quite right, those cars of his are pricey. But a drop in the bucket when we're talking millions of pounds. James and Robert were extremely close. Even when Robert went to Australia, they wrote to one another regularly. Those letters, you see, were paramount in establishing authenticity. Why are you suspicious of Robert Ashcroft, anyway?”

“No reason, except for the convenient arrangement of the household. Even the relations who came to the funeral hadn't seen him in a long time, if at all.”

“Yes, that's true. When that much money and property's at stake, odd lots of relations come crawling out of the woodwork, some of them hoping to break a will unfair to them. Claiming what they consider their ‘fair share,' or claiming the one who gets the lion's share isn't really the lion.” Mr. Mack allowed himself a little purse-lipped smile.

“So the brother James more or less allowed Robert
carte blanche?”

Mack frowned. “Yes. And I frankly don't approve of open-ended arrangements like that. Messy.” He squared a cigarette box and adjusted the alignment of the bronze cat. “But James had the devil's own trust in Robert.” There was another fussy
little smile. “Not the best way of putting it, perhaps. But the other relations, by blood or by marriage, were rather a sorry lot. So far as I could see, they had absolutely no claim on the money, not to say upon James's affections. But he was — I advised him to do so — smart enough to leave small sums to the ones whom he felt would be the troublemakers.”

“I'd like to see a copy of that will, Mr. Mack.”

Mr. Mack rocked back in his chair. “Is that really necessary?”

Jury smiled. “I'd like to see it, necessary or not. The will's been probated. Public property now.”

“Hmm. Very well. Miss Chivers can make you up a copy.” He punched his intercom and gave his secretary directions.

“And I'd also like to see those letters.”

“The ones from James? Well, Robert has them, of course.” Mr. Mack frowned. “Are you suggesting an analysis of the handwriting?”

“Something like that, yes.” Jury thought, really, that the Ashcroft solicitors would have done it themselves. He rose to go. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Mack.”

On the way out he collected the copy of the Ashcroft will and another appraising glance from Miss Chivers.

 • • • 

Mr. Mack's office was in The City. Jury made his way to the Aldgate tube stop, wondering what was bothering him. Something he'd seen? Something he'd heard? James Ashcroft's will was thick. There was a great deal of property. The will had been signed by Ashcroft, witnessed by Mack and two other solicitors. One of the names was George Thorne.

George Thorne. Again.

Jury changed at Baker Street to get the Northern line and, as he waited for his train, looked over the tiled wall of the platform, where the profile of Sherlock Holmes had been wonderfully contrived during the station's renovation. It was a hard act to follow.

“So sad it is,” said Mrs. Wasserman, who lived alone in the basement flat of the building in Islington. Jury's own flat was on the second floor, but he had stopped off to see how she was doing. To admit him, she had had to throw two bolts, release a chain, and turn the deadlock. There were grilles over her windows, too. Mrs. Wasserman could have slept with ease in the middle of the Brixton riots. But Mrs. Wasserman was never at ease, except when the superintendent was around who mercifully (for her) lived upstairs.

They were eating her homemade strudel and drinking coffee and she was talking about the case Jury was on. “I know you don't discuss,” she said, “but it frightens me to death to see these children —” Unable to bring it out, she stopped, shook her head, drank her coffee. “I know you don't say, of course you can't, but this person, he must be crazy.” And she made a tiny circle round her ear to demonstrate craziness.

“I expect so, Mrs. Wasserman. We don't know the motive.”

“Motive? Who says motive? Crazies don't
have
them, Mr. Jury.” Her smile was slight and forgiving, as if she couldn't expect this novice policeman to know everything, could she?

Indeed she was right on that count. “Psychotics do have motives, even if the motives are irrational and obscure. Or displaced.”

“What is that,
displaced?”
She was suspicious of psychoanalytic jargon.

“Just that the killer's actual object isn't the person he kills.”

She thought this over, chewing her strudel. “What a hideous waste of time.” Mournfully, she glanced up at him. “The papers, Mr. Jury, are full of it.”

Jury knew about the papers. And he also knew he had described, without consciously meaning to, Mrs. Wasserman's
own phobia. How old had she been during the Second World War? Fifteen, sixteen perhaps. Whatever horrors she had suffered then had gone underground, submerged in her mind, but bonded to that scrap of memory she could stand — the Stranger who followed her, whose step behind her she could pick out of a hundred footsteps, whose description Jury had taken down in his notebook time and time again, knowing there was no such person. And it was Jury who had helped her with the locks, the chains, the bolts. Mrs. Wasserman could have written the book on agoraphobia.

Jury looked at her windows, grilles and shutters. He looked at her door, locked and bolted. “You bolt the door —” He really hadn't meant to say it aloud.

“Pardon? Of course I bolt the door.” Her large breasts shook with laughter.
“You,
of all people! You helped me with the bolts.” Then she grew concerned. “It's sleep you need, Mr. Jury. You never get enough. Sometimes it is not until two or three in the morning you get in.”

Jury only half-heard her. His eye was still fixed on that impregnable door. “But what, exactly, does it keep out?”

She seemed puzzled, suspicious even — in the way one is suspicious that a dear friend might be going off the rails. “Why, Him, of course. As you know.”

And she went back calmly to eating her strudel.

I
T
was five miles on the other side of Dorchester, in Winterbourne Abbas, that it hit him — what had seemed insignificant at the time. Jury pulled into a petrol station, asked for a phone and was told there was one in the Little Chef next door.

The restaurant was almost antiseptically clean, right down to the starched uniforms of the waitresses. Jury asked for a coffee, said he'd be back in a moment. He put in a call to the Devon-Cornwall headquarters and was told that the divisional commander was in Wynchcoombe.

It was TDC Coogan in the mobile unit there who told Jury (testily, he thought) that Macalvie had taken Sergeant Wiggins and gone to the Poor Struggler to make “inquiries.” Jury smiled. Although Betty Coogan didn't believe it, Macalvie probably was doing just that. She gave him the number.

 • • • 

Jury could hear Elvis Presley in the background singing “Hound Dog” after someone answered the telephone at the Poor Struggler. Not Freddie, probably the regular who happened to be nearest the phone.

“Don't know him, mate. Mac-who?”

Jury could almost hear the phone being wrenched from the other's hand, along with a brief exchange that had Macalvie working the old Macalvie charm, complete with expletives. “Macalvie here.” And he turned away to shout to Freddie to turn the damned music down or he'd have her license. “Macalvie,” he said again.

“What are you doing there, Macalvie?”

“Oh, it's you.” There was the usual lack of enthusiasm for New Scotland Yard. “Talking to your friend. The one passing himself off as a bloody earl. Seems okay, though.”

Macalvie always seemed to like the very people Jury was sure he'd hate. He cut across the latest Macalvie theory by telling him what he'd learned from Mr. Mack.

“
Thorne?
He was one of the Ashcroft bunch. When? I mean for how long?”

“I don't know. Get one of your men to give him a call. Wiggins there?”

“Yeah, sure.” Macalvie seemed to be carrying Wiggins around in his pocket. “For God's sakes, I should have known about Thorne.”

“Why? You're not a mind reader.”

There was a small pause, as if Macalvie were debating this point. “Yeah. What do you want to tell Wiggins?”

“Just let me talk to him.”

“It's a secret between you two?”

“No. I want to check something. Stop pouting and put him on.”

“Sir!” Wiggins was probably standing at attention.

Jury sighed. “As you were, Sergeant. Listen: when we were in the Rileys' flat, or as we were leaving, that is, you noticed a framed document above the mantel —”

“That's right. Mrs. Riley was a nurse. Had been, I mean.”

“What name was on it?” Wiggins was not always spot-on when it came to sifting facts down to a solution, but he could
usually be counted on to remember the facts themselves. A master of minutiae.

There was a silence on the other end of the telephone. Wiggins was thinking; Jury let him. Jury also thought he heard paper crackle. Opening another packet of Fisherman's Friends, probably. “Elizabeth Allan, sir.”

“That's what I thought, Wiggins. Thanks. And thank Plant for his letter. I got it this morning.” Jury hung up. He paid for his coffee but didn't bother drinking it.

“What's me being a nurse got to do with it?” asked Beth Riley. “What's it to do with Simon?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe a lot,” said Jury, replenishing her glass with the bottle of Jameson's he'd the foresight to bring along. The glass in her hand welcomed the bottle in Jury's. She sat in the same cabbage rose chair she had the first time Jury had visited their lodgings. The husband wasn't here today, and she seemed to be trying to make up her mind whether she was flattered or a little frightened that it was she whom the superintendent wanted to see. “So given you were nurse to Lady Ashcroft before she died, and also her cousin, you knew Jessica and Robert Ashcroft.”

Her answer was surly. “Yes. Not all that well. Jessica was only a baby, and the brother — I'd seen him at the Eaton Square house in London off and on. That was before Barbara got so sick she needed someone all the time.”

“Is he much changed?”

“Changed? That's an odd question. Though I guess ten years in Australia's enough to change anyone.”

“I mean, did he appear as you remembered him?”

Again, she frowned. “Well, yes — wait a tic.” She leaned toward Jury, the flashy rhinestone brooch winking in the light of the lamp. “Are you telling me that's
not
Robert Ashcroft?”
Obviously, no news could have pleased her more. Mrs. Riley had been the most adamant of the relatives who questioned James Ashcroft's will.

“No,” said Jury, watching her hope dissipate along with the John Jameson's. He calculated that somewhere during the third drink she'd reach the confessional stage. “No, I'm stumbling in the dark, hoping I'll fall over the right answer.” He smiled.

Beth Riley, cushioned by cabbage rose pillows and Jameson's, gave him a once-over that strongly suggested she wouldn't mind being what he fell over. Once again, she held out her glass. Self-pity would take over pretty soon, he knew. He was happy to help it along. He poured her a third drink and looked at the display over the mantel: the nursing degree with its gold seal, the family photographs, the mahogany-backed coat-of-arms. The same coat-of-arms, emblazoned here, that Jury had seen on the writing-paper, the note that Plant had sent him. It was the crest, the curlew embellished as carefully as some monk's Biblical illumination.

“They're none of us perfect,” said Beth. “I made a mess of things, marrying as I did. Oh, not that Al's not a good
provider . . .”

Jury wanted to steer clear of Riley's good points, which were certain to end with the bad. He was interested in facts, not in her soul-searching, the whys and wherefores of her marriage. “What was — or is — your relation to the Ashcroft family, Mrs. Riley?”

“You can call me Beth.” Over the rim of her glass she looked at him coyly.

Jury assumed he'd damned well
better
call her Beth if he wanted information. He smiled a warm, insincere smile. “Beth. Your relation with the Ashcrofts?”

“To hear
him
talk — that Robert — I'd no more to do with them than the horses in the stableyard.”

(Jury thought that Robert was probably right.)

“I was cousin to Barbara.
First
cousin.” She made sure he understood that it was no fly-by-night relationship. “We were both born in County Waterford. I came to England when I was small, long before Barbara.” She said it as if this gave her some proprietarial right over the country which Barbara lacked. “But I hardly ever saw them until she got sick. Just trust that kind of people to want your help, and then not to remember how much help you gave.”

“But Ashcroft certainly did remember, Beth. You'd come into a sizable sum.” He paused. “If anything happened to Jessica Ashcroft.”