I nodded. "That seems to be about the figure."
"How much a year would that amount of capital yield, Mr Strachan?"
I glanced at the figures on the slip before me. "Invested in trustee stocks, as at present, about £1550 a year, gross income. Then income tax has to be deducted. You would have about nine hundred a year to spend, Miss Paget."
"Oh…" There was a long silence; she sat staring at the desk in front of her. Then she looked up at me, and smiled. "It takes a bit of getting used to," she remarked. "I mean, I've always worked for my living, Mr Strachan. I've never thought that I'd do anything else unless I married, and that's only a different sort of work. But this means that I need never work again-unless I want to."
She had hit the nail on the head with her last sentence. "That's exactly it," I replied. "unless you want to."
"I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have to go to the office," she said. "I haven't got any other life…"
"Then I should go on going to the office," I observed.
She laughed. "I suppose that's the only thing to do."
I leaned back in my chair. "I'm an old man now, Miss Paget. I've made plenty of mistakes in my time and I've learned one thing from them, that it's never very wise to do anything in a great hurry. I take it that this legacy will mean a considerable change in your circumstances. If I may offer my advice, I should continue in your present employment for the time, at any rate, and I should refrain from talking about your legacy in the office just yet. For one thing, it will be some months before you get possession even of the income from the estate. First we have to obtain legal proof of the death of your brother, and then we have to obtain the confirmation of the executors in Scotland and realize a portion of the securities to meet estate and succession duties. Tell me, what are you doing with this firm Pack and Levy?"
"I'm a shorthand typist," she said. "I'm working now as secretary to Mr Pack."
"Where do you live, Miss Paget?"
She said, "I've got a bed-sitting-room at No 43 Campion Road, just off Ealing Common. It's quite convenient, but of course I have a lot of my meals out. There's a Lyons just round the corner."
I thought for a minute. "Have you got many friends in Ealing? How long have you been there?"
"I don't know very many people," she replied. "One or two families, people who work in the firm, you know. I've been there over two years now, ever since I was repatriated. I was out in Malaya, you know, Mr Strachan, and I was a sort of prisoner of war for three and a half years. Then when I got home I got this job with Pack and Levy."
I made a note of her address upon my pad. "Well, Miss Paget," I said, "I should go on just as usual for the time being. I will consult the War Office on Monday morning and obtain this evidence about your brother as quickly as I can. Tell me his name, and number, and unit." She did so, and I wrote them down. "As soon as I get that, I shall submit the will for probate. When that is proved, then the trust commences and continues till the year 1956, when you will inherit absolutely."
She looked up at me. "Tell me about this trust," she asked. "I'm afraid I'm not very good at legal matters."
I nodded. "Of course not. Well, you'll find it all in legal language in the copy of the will which I shall give you, but what it means is this, Miss Paget. Your uncle, when he made this will, had a very poor opinion of the ability of women to manage their own money. I'm sorry to have to say such a thing, but it is better for you to know the whole of the facts."
She laughed. "Please don't apologize for him, Mr Strachan. Go on."
"At first, he was quite unwilling that you should inherit the capital of the estate till you were forty years old," I said. "I contested that view, but I was unable to get him to agree to any less period than the present arrangement in the will. Now, the object of a trust is this: The testator appoints trustees-in this case, myself and my partner-who undertake to do their best to preserve the capital intact and hand it over to the legatee-to you-when the trust expires."
"I see. Uncle Douglas was afraid that I might spend the fifty-three thousand all at once."
I nodded. "That was in his mind. He did not know you, of course, Miss Paget, so there was nothing personal about it. He felt that in general women were less fit than men to handle large sums of money at an early age."
She said quietly, "He may have been right." She thought for a minute, and then she said, "So you're going to look after the money for me till I'm thirty-five and give me the interest to spend in the meantime? Nine hundred a year?"
"If you wish us to conduct your income-tax affairs for you, that would be about the figure," I said. "We can arrange the payments in any way that you prefer, as a quarterly or a monthly cheque, for example. You would get a formal statement of account half-yearly."
She asked curiously, "How do you get paid for doing all this for me, Mr Strachan?"
I smiled. "That is a very prudent question, Miss Paget. You will find a clause in the will, No 8, I think, which entitles us to charge for our professional services against the income from the trust. Of course, if you get into any legal trouble we should be glad to act for you and help you in any way we could. In that case we should charge you on the normal scale of fees."
She said unexpectedly, "I couldn't ask for anybody better." And then she glanced at me, and said mischievously, "I made some enquiries about this firm yesterday."
"Oh… I hope they were satisfactory?"
"Very." She did not tell me then what she told me later, that her informant had described us as, 'as solid as the Bank of England, and as sticky as treacle'. "I know I'm going to be in very good hands, Mr Strachan."
I inclined my head. "I hope so. I am afraid that at times you may find this trust irksome, Miss Paget; I can assure you that I shall do my utmost to prevent it from becoming so. You will see in the will that the testator gave certain powers to the trustees to realize capital for the benefit of the legatee in cases where they were satisfied that it would be genuinely for her advantage."
"You mean, if I really needed a lot of money-for an operation or something-you could let me have it, if you approved?"
She was quick, that girl. "I think that is a very good example. In case of illness, if the income were insufficient, I should certainly realize some of your capital for your benefit."
She smiled at me, and said, "It's rather like being a ward in Chancery, or something."
I was a little touched by the comparison. I said, "I should feel very much honoured if you care to look at it that way, Miss Paget. Inevitably this legacy is going to make an upset in your condition of life, and if I can do anything to help you in the transition I should be only too pleased." I handed her her copy of the will. "Well, there is the will, and I suggest you take it away and read it quietly by yourself. I'll keep the certificates for the time being. After you've thought things over for a day or two I am sure that there will be a great many questions to which you will want answers. Would you like to come and see me again?"
She said, "I would. I know there'll be all sorts of things I want to ask about, but I can't think of them now. It's all so sudden."
I turned to my engagement diary. "Well, suppose we meet again about the middle of next week." I stared at the pages. "Of course, you're working. What time do you get off from your office, Miss Paget?"
She said, "Five o'clock."
"Would six o'clock on Wednesday evening suit you, then? I shall hope to have got somewhere with the matter of your brother by that time."
She said, "Well, that's all right for me, Mr Strachan, but isn't it a bit late for you? Don't you want to get home?"
I said absently, "I only go to the club. No, Wednesday at six would suit me very well." I made a note upon my pad, and then I hesitated. "Perhaps if you are doing nothing after that you might like to come on to the club and have dinner in the Ladies Annexe," I said. "I'm afraid it's not a very gay place, but the food is good."
She smiled, and said warmly, "I'd love to do that, Mr Strachan. It's very kind of you to ask me."
I got to my feet. "Very well, then, Miss Paget - six o'clock on Wednesday. And in the meantime, don't do anything in a great hurry. It never pays to be impetuous…"
She went away, and I cleared my desk and took a taxi to the club for lunch. After lunch I had a cup of coffee and slept for ten minutes in a chair before the fire, and when I woke up I thought I ought to get some exercise. So I put on my hat and coat and went out and walked rather aimlessly up St James's Street and along Piccadilly to the Park. As I walked, I wondered how that fresh young woman was spending her weekend. Was she telling her friends all about her good luck, or was she sitting somewhere warm and quiet, nursing and cherishing her own anticipations, or was she on a spending spree already? Or was she out with a young man? She would have plenty of men now to choose from, I thought cynically, and then it struck me that she probably had those already because she was a very marriageable girl. Indeed, considering her appearance and her evident good nature, I was rather surprised that she was not married already.
I had a little talk that evening in the club with a man who is in the Home Office about the procedure for establishing the death of a prisoner of war, and on Monday I had a number of telephone conversations with the War Office and the Home Office about the case. I found, as I had suspected, that there was an extraordinary procedure for proving death which could be invoked, but where a doctor was available who had attended the deceased in the prison camp the normal certification of death was the procedure to adopt. In this instance there was a general practitioner called Ferris in practice at Beckenham who had been a doctor in Camp 206 in the Takunan district on the Burma-Siam railway, and the official at the War Office advised me that this doctor would be in a position to give the normal death certificate.
I rang him up next morning and he was out upon his rounds. I tried to make his wife understand what I wanted but I think it was too complicated for her; she suggested that I should call and see him after the evening surgery, at half past six. I hesitated over that because Beckenham is a good long way out, but I was anxious to get these formalities over quickly for the sake of the girl. So I went out to see this doctor that evening.
He was a cheerful, fresh-faced man not more than thirty-five years old; he had a keen sense of humour, if rather a macabre one at times. He looked as healthy and fit as if he had spent the whole of his life in England in a country practice. I got to him just as he was finishing off the last of his patients, and he had leisure to talk for a little.
"Lieutenant Paget," he said thoughtfully. "Oh yes, I know. Donald Paget-was his name Donald?" I said it was. "Oh, of course, I remember him quite well. Yes, I can write a death certificate. I'd like to do that for him, though I don't suppose it'll do him much good."
"It will help his sister," I remarked. "There is a question of an inheritance, and the shorter we can make the necessary formalities the better for her."
He reached for his pad of forms. "I wonder if she's got as much guts as her brother."
"Was he a good chap?"
He nodded. "Yes," he said. "He was a delicate-looking man, dark and rather pale, you know, but he was a very good type. I think he was a planter in civil life-anyway, he was in the Malay volunteers. He spoke Malay very well, and he got along in Siamese all right. With those languages, of course, he was a very useful man to have in the camp. We used to do a lot of black market with the villagers, the Siamese outside, you know. But quite apart from that, he was the sort of officer the men like. It was a great loss when he went."
"What did he die of?" I asked.
He paused with his pen poised over the paper. "Well, you could take your pick of half a dozen things. I hadn't time to do a post mortem, of course. Between you and me, I don't really know. I think he just died. But he'd recovered from enough to kill a dozen ordinary men, so I don't know that it' really matters what one puts down on the certificate. No legal point depends upon the cause of death, does it?"
"Oh, no," I said. "All I want is the death certified."
He still paused, in recollection. "He had a huge tropical ulcer on his left leg that we were treating, and that was certainly poisoning the whole system. I think if he'd gone on we'd have had to have taken that leg off. He got that because he was one of those chaps who won't report sick while they can walk. Well, while he was in hospital with the ulcer, he got cerebral malaria. We had nothing to treat that damn thing with till we got around to making our own quinine solutions for intravenous injection; we took a frightful risk with that, but there was nothing else to do. We got a lot through it with that, and Paget was one of them. He got over it quite well. That was just before we got the cholera. Cholera went right through the camp-hospital and everything. We couldn't isolate the cases, or anything like that. I never want to see a show like that again. We'd got nothing,
nothing,
not even saline. No drugs to speak of, and no equipment. We were making bed-pans out of old kerosene tins. Paget got that, and would you believe it, he got over cholera. We got some prophylactic injections from the Nips and we gave him those; that may have helped. At least, I think we gave him that-I'm not sure. He was very weak when that left him, of course, and the ulcer wasn't any too good. And about a week after that, he just died in the night. Heart, I fancy. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll put down for Cause of Death-Cholera. There you are, sir. I'm sorry you had to come all this way for it"