The Scold's Bridle (28 page)

"Who else knew about it?"

"I don't know."

"Did you tell anyone?"

Sarah shook her head. "I can't remember. I may have mentioned it in the surgery. It was ages ago, anyway. She started responding very well to the new medication I gave her and the situation didn't recur. I only remembered it when I came round the back this afternoon and saw the flowerpots."

Cooper took a couple of polythene bags out of his pocket and used one to inch the key off the table into the other. "And why did you come round the back, Dr. Blakeney? Did Mrs. Lascelles refuse to let you in at the front?"

For the first time Sarah glanced at Joanna. "I don't know about refusing. She may not have heard the bell."

"But it was obviously something very urgent you needed to discuss with her or you wouldn't have been so determined to get in. Would you care to let me in on what that was? Presumably it concerns Ruth." He was too old and experienced a hand to miss the look of relief on Joanna's face.

"Sure," said Sarah lightly. "You know my views on education. We were discussing Ruth's future schooling."

She was lying, Cooper thought, and he was startled by the fluency with which she did it. With an inward sigh, he made a mental note to review everything she had told him. He had believed her to be an honest, if naive, woman, but the naivety, he realized now, was all on his side. There was no fool like an old fool, he thought bitterly.

But then silly old Tommy had fallen a little in love.

Earlier that afternoon, a tall, distinguished-looking man was shown into Paul Duggan's office in Poole. He gave his name as James Gillespie and calmly produced his passport and his marriage certificate to Mathilda Beryl Gillespie to prove it. Aware that he had dropped something of a bombshell, he lowered himself on to a vacant chair and clasped his hands around the handle of his walking-stick, studying Duggan with amusement from beneath a pair of exuberant white eyebrows. "Bit of a shock, eh?" he said. Even from the other side of the desk, the smell of whiskey on his breath was powerful.

The younger man examined the passport carefully, then placed it on the blotting-pad in front of him. "Unexpected, certainly," he said dryly. "I had assumed Mrs. Gillespie was a widow. She never mentioned a husband or," he laid a careful stress upon the next syllable, "
ex-husband
still living."

"Husband," grunted the other forcefully. "She wouldn't. It suited her better to be thought a widow."

"Why did you never divorce?"

"Never saw the need."

"This passport was issued in Hong Kong."

"Naturally. Out there forty years. Worked in various banks. Came back when I realized it was no place to end my days. Too much fear now. Peking's unpredictable. Uncomfortable for a man of my age." He spoke in clipped staccato sentences like someone in a hurry or someone impatient with social niceties.

"So why have you come to see me?" Duggan watched him curiously. He was striking to look at, certainly, with a mane of white hair and an olive complexion, etched with deep lines around his eyes and mouth, but closer examination revealed an underlying poverty beneath the superficial air of prosperity. His clothes had once been good, but time and usage had taken their toll and both the suit and the camel-hair coat were wearing thin.

"Should have thought it was obvious. Now she's dead-reclaiming what's mine."

"How did you know she was dead?"

"Ways and means," said the other.

"How did you know I was her executor?"

"Ways and means," said the other again.

Duggan's curiosity was intense. "And what is it that you wish to reclaim?"

The old man took a wallet from his inside pocket, removed some folded sheets of very thin paper and spread them on the desk. "This is an inventory of my father's estate. It was divided equally amongst his three children on his death forty-seven years ago. My share was those items marked with the initials JG. You will find, I think, that at least seven of them appear on your inventory of Mathilda's estate. They are not hers. They never were hers. I now wish to recover them."

Thoughtfully, Duggan read through the documents. "Precisely which seven items are you referring to, Mr. Gillespie?"

The huge white eyebrows came together in a ferocious scowl. "Don't trifle with me, Mr. Duggan. I refer, of course, to the clocks. The two Thomas Tompions, the Knibbs, the seventeenth-century mahogany long case, the Louis XVI Lyre clock, the eighteenth-century 'pendule d'officer' and the crucifix clock. My father and grandfather were collectors."

Duggan steepled his hands over the inventory. "May I ask why you think any of these things appear on the inventory of Mrs. Gillespie's estate?"

"Are you telling me they don't?"

The solicitor avoided a direct answer. "If I understood you correctly you've been absent from this country for forty years. How could you possibly know what might or might not have been in your wife's possession the day she died?"

The old man snorted. "Those clocks were the only things of value I had, and Mathilda went to a great deal of trouble to steal them from me. She certainly wouldn't have sold them."

"How could your wife steal them if you were still married?"

"Tricked me out of them, then, but it was still theft."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

Gillespie removed an airmail letter from his wallet and handed it across the desk. "Self-explanatory, I think."

Duggan unfolded the letter and read the terse lines. The address was Cedar House and the date was April 1961.

Dear James,

I am sorry to have to tell you that during a burglary here over Christmas much of value was stolen, including your collection of clocks. I have today received a cheque in settlement from the insurance company and I enclose their invoice, showing that they sent me a total of Ł23,500.I also enclose a cheque for Ł12,000 which was the insured value of your seven clocks. You bought my silence by leaving the clocks with me, and I am reimbursing you only because I fear you might return one day to claim them. You would be very angry, I think, to discover I'd cheated you a second time. I trust this means we will not need to communicate again.

Yours, Mathilda.

Duggan's amiable face looked up in bewilderment. "I still don't understand."

"They weren't stolen, were they?"

"But she gave you twelve thousand pounds for them. That was a small fortune in 1961."

"It was fraud. She told me the clocks were stolen when they weren't. I accepted the money in good faith. Never occurred to me she was lying." He tapped his walking-stick angrily on the floor. "Two ways of looking at it. One, she stole the clocks herself and defrauded the insurance company. A crime, in my book. Two other things were stolen to the value of twenty-three and a half thousand and she saw an opportunity to take the clocks off me. Also a crime. They were my property." His ancient mouth turned down at the corners. "She knew their value, knew they'd be the best asset she had. Been to Sotheby's myself. Rough estimate, of course, with only descriptions in the inventory to go by, but we're talking over a hundred thousand at auction, probably a great deal more. I want them back, sir."

Duggan considered for a moment. "I don't think the situation is quite as clear-cut as you seem to think, Mr. Gillespie. There's a burden of proof here. First, you have to show that Mrs. Gillespie deliberately defrauded you; second, you have to show that the clocks in Mrs. Gillespie's estate are the precise clocks that were left to you by your father."

"You've read both inventories. What else could they be?"

For the moment, Duggan avoided the question of how James Gillespie knew there was an inventory of Mathilda's estate or what was on it. Once broached, it was going to be a very unpleasant can of worms. "Similar clocks," he said bluntly. "Maybe even the same clocks, but you will have to prove she didn't buy them back at a later stage. Let's say the collection was stolen, and she passed on the compensation to you as she was supposed to. Let's say, then, that she set out to replace the collection because she had developed an interest in horology. She could quite legitimately have used her own money to buy similar clocks at auction. In those circumstances, you would have no claim on them at all. There is also the undeniable fact that you had a duty, encumbent on you as the owner, to establish to your satisfaction that the money you were paid in 1961 represented a full and fair settlement by the insurance company for the theft of your goods. In accepting twelve thousand pounds, Mr. Gillespie, you effectively did that. You abandoned the clocks to sail to Hong Kong, accepted handsome compensation for them without a murmur, and only wish to reclaim them now because after forty years you believe they might have been worth hanging on to. I will admit that this is a grey area, which will require Counsel's opinion, but off the top of my head, I'd say you haven't a leg to stand on. It's an old saying, but a true one. Possession is nine tenths of the law."

Gillespie was not so easily intimidated. "Read her diaries," he growled. "They'll prove she stole them off me. Couldn't resist boasting to herself, that was Mathilda's trouble. Put every damn thing on those miserable pages, then read them over and over again to remind herself how clever she was. Wouldn't have left out a triumph iike this. Read the diaries."

The younger man kept his face deliberately impassive. "I will. As a matter of interest, do you know where she kept them? It'll save me the trouble of looking for them."

"Top shelf of the library. Disguised as the works of Willy Shakespeare." He took a card from his wallet. "You're a solicitor, Mr. Duggan, so I'm trusting you to be honest. That's where I'm staying. Expect to hear from you on this in a couple of days or so. Grateful if you'd treat it as a matter of urgency." He levered himself to his feet with his walking-stick.

"I'd much prefer to deal through your solicitor, Mr. Gillespie."

"I don't have one, sir." He spoke with a touching dignity. "My pension won't allow it. I am relying on you being a gentleman. Presumably they still exist in this wretched country. Precious little else does." He made his way to the door. "Perhaps you think I treated Mathilda badly by deserting her and the child. Perhaps you think I deserved to be stolen from. Read the diaries She'll tell you herself what really happened."

Duggan waited until the door had closed, then reached for the telephone and dialled Learmouth Police Station.

The information about Mathilda's diaries was telephoned through to Cooper as he was about to leave Cedar House. He replaced the receiver with a frown. He'd been over that house from top to bottom, and he was as sure as he could be that there were no handwritten diaries in the library or anywhere else. "Sorry, ladies, I shall have to trespass on your time a little longer. Will you come with me, please?"

Puzzled, Joanna and Sarah followed him across the hall and into the library.

"What are you looking for?" asked Joanna as he stood staring at the top shelf.

He reached up and tapped the thick mahogany ledge that ran, like its fellows, across the width of the wall. "Do either of you see the collected works of William Shakespeare up here?"

"They're all over the place," said Joanna dismissively. "Which particular edition are you looking for?"

"The one that's supposed to be on this shelf." He glanced at her. "Your mother's diaries. I'm told she kept them on the top shelf, disguised as the works of William Shakespeare."

Joanna looked genuinely surprised. "What diaries?"

"Our information is that she kept a record of everything that happened to her."

"I didn't know."

"The informant was very positive."

Joanna gestured helplessly. "I didn't know," she said again.

"Who's your informant?" asked Sarah curiously.

Cooper was watching Joanna as he spoke. "James Gillespie," he said. "Mrs. Lascelles's step-father."

This time the look of surprise lacked conviction. It was left to Sarah to make the obvious response. "I thought he abandoned Mathilda years ago," she said thoughtfully. "How would he know whether she kept diaries or not? Anyway, he's in Hong Kong, or that's what my receptionist told me."