To the Hilt (28 page)

“Now,” Oliver Grantchester said, moving along the agenda majestically, “the prize, the King Alfred chalice. Where is it?”

No one answered.

My mother said eventually, almost weakly, “Ivan never sends ... oh dear,
sent
... the real chalice to the races. It’s far too valuable to risk. But he had several smaller replicas made only a few years ago. There must be one or two left. A replica is given to the winning owner each year.”

Desmond Finch made throat-clearing noises and flashed the silver frames of his glasses as he reported that two replicas remained in the locked glass-fronted cabinet in Sir Ivan’s office.

“That’s the trophy settled, then,” Himself said cheerfully, but Patsy told him with spite, “Your precious Alexander stole the real one. Make him give it back. And whatever my father said, the chalice belongs to the brewery. It belongs to
me. ”

“I’m sure,” Himself said with courteous worldliness, “that we can come to a civilized solution to our differences out of court. It would be so unwise, don’t you agree, to hang out the brewery’s private troubles on the public washing line? That’s why your father thought it best to swallow in silence the frightful financial losses. He wouldn’t, I feel sure, want you to discard out of pique the fortune he worked so hard to give you.”

I didn’t look at Patsy. Her hatred of me always drastically interfered with her common sense. I’d taken so many insults from her over the years that it was only for Ivan’s memory that I now cared what happened to the brewery. I wanted to go back to the mountains. It was like a physical ache.

Oliver Grantchester droned on, a committee man to his fingertips. The executors would be doing this and the executors would be doing that, and as my uncle made no protest or suggestion, nor did I.

Tobias finally broke up the session by parking a chewed toothpick and apologizing to my mother that he had a plane to catch: he was off to Paris for the weekend.

“I’ll be back on Monday,” he said to me. “In the office on Tuesday, if you have any brilliant ideas.”

Patsy, overhearing, demanded to know what I could possibly have brilliant ideas about.

“Finding the brewery’s lost millions,” he said, and correctly interpreting and anticipating her automatic denigration, added, “and you should pray, Mrs. Benchmark, that he does have a brilliant idea, because those lost millions are yours, now, don’t you understand? See you,” he finished, lightly punching my arm. “Don’t play on the railway tracks.”

When Tobias had gone, Chris asked me what I wanted him to do.

“Follow Surtees,” I said promptly. “I want to know where he is.”

Chris looked down at his clothes. “He knows what I look like.”

“Go up two floors,” I said. “Turn right up there. You’ll find my room. Take what you need. There’s money on the dressing chest. Take it.”

He nodded and quietly left the room, and only Emily, appearing at my elbow, seemed to notice.

“Are you bedding Christina?” she asked blandly. “She knows you well.”

I nearly laughed but made it a smile. “She’s not my bedmate and never will be.”

“She never takes her eyes off you.”

“How’s Golden Malt?”

“Fine. You’re exasperating.”

“Has Surtees bothered you?”

Emily glanced at him where he stood across the room talking to Grantchester and stabbing the air with a vigorous forefinger. “He hasn’t found the horse. He won’t, either. I’ve driven over to Jimmy Jenkins’s place twice. It’s all quiet there. And actually I think the change of scene is doing the horse good. He was really on his toes two days ago.”

“He’s yours now.”

She blinked hard. “Did you know Ivan was going to do that?”

I nodded. “He told me.”

“I liked him.”

It seemed natural to me to put my arms round her. She hugged me back.

“Jimmy showed me your painting of the jockey,” she said. “He told me you gave him courage.”

I silently kissed her hair. We had said everything we needed to. She stepped back, composed, and comforted my mother.

People gradually left. Himself (positively grinning) patted me on the shoulder, told me he would be in residence in his London home for the following ten days, asserted his intention of going to Cheltenham races and kissed my mother’s cheek affectionately, calling her “my dear, dear Vivienne.”

Emily waved goodbye. Fussy Desmond Finch twittered away. Margaret Morden paid her respects. Oliver Grantchester ponderously closed his briefcase.

Chris Young ran lightly down the stairs, crossed past the open door of the drawing room and left quickly by the front door.

“Who was that?” asked my mother suspiciously, watching through the window as the fleeting back view of cropped light brown hair, loose jacket, rolled-up jeans and too-big sneakers made a fast sloppy shuffle out of sight.

“One of the caterers?” I casually guessed.

She lost interest. “Did you talk to Connie Hall from next door?”

“Yes, I did.”

She looked distressed. “Patsy told me what Connie Hall said about Ivan searching the trash bags.”

Patsy
would.
I said, “Mrs. Hall didn’t want to upset you.”

My mother said unhappily, “I think Patsy has gone down to the kitchen to talk to Lois about it.”

I glanced round the room. Surtees, Xenia, Grantchester still, but no Patsy.

“Let’s go down, then,” I suggested, and moved her with me belowstairs, where Lois was tossing her head and bridling with umbrage at any insinuation that her work wasn’t perfect. Edna stood beside her, nodding rhythmically in support.

The caterers, spread all around the extensive room, were packing away their equipment. I threaded a path through them, my mother following, and fetched up by Patsy’s side in time to hear Lois saying indignantly, “... of course I threw the box away. There were only a couple of tissues left in it, which I used. I gave Sir Ivan a fresh box, what’s wrong with
that?”

“Didn’t you check whether anything was written on the bottom of the box you threw away?”

“Of course not,” Lois said scornfully. “Whoever looks on the bottom of empty tissue boxes?”

“But you must have known my father wrote on the bottom of a tissue box all the time.”

“Why should I know that?”

“You kept moving his notepad onto the desk, out of his reach.”

Patsy was right, of course, but predictably (like most legislation) she achieved the opposite result to that intended. Lois inflated her lungs and stuck out her considerable frontage, her hoity-toity level at boiling-over point.

“Sir Ivan never complained,” she announced with self-righteousness, “and if you’re implying some stupid tissue box gave him a heart attack and that it’s my fault, I’ll ... I’ll ... I’ll ... I’ll consult my lawyer!”

She tossed her head grandly. Everyone knew she didn’t have a lawyer. Even Patsy wasn’t fool enough to point it out.

My mother, looking exhausted, said soothingly, “Of course it wasn’t your fault, Lois.” Turning to go, she stopped and said to me, “I think I’ll go up to my sitting room. Alexander, would you bring me some tea?”

“Of course.”

“Patsy ...” My mother hesitated. “Thank you, dear, for arranging everything so well. I couldn’t have done it. Ivan would have been so pleased.”

She went slowly and desolately out of the kitchen and Patsy spoiled the moment by giving me the grim glare of habit.

“Go on, say it,” she said. “You could have done it better.”

“No, I couldn’t. It was a brilliantly managed funeral, and she’s right, Ivan would have been proud.” I meant it sincerely, which she didn’t believe.

She said bitterly over her shoulder, stalking away, “I can do without your sarcasm,” and Edna, touching my arm, said kindly, “You go on up, I’ll make Lady Westering’s tea.”

Lois, in unspent pique, slammed a few pots together to make a noise. She had been Patsy’s appointee and, I guessed, Patsy’s informant as to my comings and goings in that house, but she was discovering, as everyone did in the end, that Patsy’s beauty and charm were questionable pointers to her core nature.

I followed her up the stairs to where my mother was bidding goodbye on the doorstep to Oliver Grantchester and, after him, to Patsy, Surtees and Xenia.

A taxi cruised past slowly on the road outside. Chris Young didn’t look our way out of the window, but I saw his profile clearly. I wouldn’t have known how to begin to follow Surtees, but when Chris was trying he seldom lost him. Since the dustup in Emily’s stable, Surtees hadn’t often left home without a tail.

I went up to my mother’s sitting room, where she soon joined me, followed by Edna with the tea. When Edna had gone I poured the hot liquid and squeezed lemon slices and handed the tea as she liked it to a woman who looked frail and spent and unable to answer questions.

She told me what I wanted to know, however, without my asking.

“You’re bursting to know if I saw what Ivan wrote on that terrible tissue box. Do you really think he was frantic to find it? I can’t bear it, Alexander. I would have looked for the box, if he’d told me. But we’d kissed goodnight ... he didn’t say anything then about the box.

I’m certain it wasn’t in his mind. He’d been so much better ... calmer ... saying he relied on your strength ... We were truly happy that evening ...”

“Yes.”

“Connie Hall didn’t say anything about Ivan being in the street, not until today.”

“She would have caused you pain if she had.”

She drank the tea and said slowly, reluctantly, “What was written on the tissue box ... I wrote it.”

“My dearest Ma ...”

“I don’t remember what it was. I haven’t given it a thought. I wish I’d known ...”

The cup rattled in its saucer. I took them from her and kneeled beside her.

“I wish he was
here, ”
she said.

I waited through the inconsolable bout of grief. I knew, after four days, that it would sweep through her like a physical disturbance, making her tremble, and then would subside back into a general state of misery.

“Someone telephoned—it was a woman,” she said, “and she wanted to speak to Ivan, and he was in the bathroom or something, and I said he would phone her back, and you know how there was never a notepad beside the phone, so I wrote what she said on the back of the box, like Ivan does, and I told him ... but ...” She stopped, trying to remember, and shook her head. “I didn’t think it was important.”

“It probably wasn’t,” I said.

“But if he went down to the street to find it ...”

“Well ... when did the woman phone? What time of day?”

She thought. “She phoned in the morning, when Ivan was dressing. He did phone her back, but she was out, I think. There was no reply.”

“And Lois was cleaning?”

“Yes. She always comes on Saturday mornings, just to tidy up.” She drank her tea, thinking. “All I wrote on the box was her phone number.”

“And you don’t know who she was?”

She frowned. “I remember that she wouldn’t say.” A few moments passed, then she exclaimed, “She said it was something to do with Leicestershire.”

“Leicestershire?”

“I think so.”

Leicestershire to me at that time meant Norman Quorn, and anything to do with Norman Quorn would have caught Ivan’s attention.

I said slowly, “Do you think it could possibly have been Norman Quorn’s sister, that we met in Leicestershire, at that mortuary?”

“That poor woman! She wouldn’t stop crying.”

She had just seen something pretty frightful, I thought. Enough to make me feel sick. “Could it have been her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you by any chance remember her name?”

My mother looked blank. “No, I don’t.”

I couldn’t remember having heard it at all, though I suppose I must have been told. Perhaps, I speculated, it had been only when he was going to bed that Ivan remembered that he hadn’t phoned back again to Norman Quorn’s sister, and had then discovered that he had lost her phone number, and had gone to look for the box ... and had thought of something to make him frantic.

How could I find Norman Quorn’s sister if I didn’t know her name ... ?

I phoned the brewery.

Total blank. No one even seemed to know he had had a sister at all.

Who else?

Via directory inquiries (because yet another tissue box was long gone) I asked for Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds. Off duty. impossible to be given his home number. Try in the morning.

I sought out and telephoned the mortuary. All they could or would tell me was the name of the mortician to whom they had released the body of Norman Quorn. I phoned the mortician, asking who had arranged cremation and paid the bills. Sir Ivan Westering, I was told, had written them a single check to cover all expenses.

How like him, I thought.

I reached Chief Inspector Reynolds in the morning. He hummed and hahhed and told me to phone him back in ten minutes, and when I did he told me the answers.

Norman Quom’s sister was a Mrs. Audrey Newton, widow, living at 4 Minton Terrace, in the village of Bloxham, Oxfordshire. Telephone number supplied.

I thanked him wholeheartedly. Let him know, he said, if I found anything he should add to his files.

“Like, where did Norman Quorn die?” I asked.

“Exactly like that.”

I promised.

Using the portable phone, as I had for all the calls I’d made from the Park Crescent house, I tried Mrs. Audrey Newton’s number and found her at home. She agreed that yes, nearly a week ago she had tried to talk to Sir Ivan Westering, but he hadn’t called back, and she would have quite understood if he didn’t want to talk to her, but he’d been ever so kind in paying for the cremation, and she’d thought things over, and since her brother couldn’t get into any more trouble, poor man, she had decided to give Sir Ivan something Norman had left with her.