A New Lease of Death (17 page)

11

From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us.

The Litany

ANGELA PRIMERO LIVED
in a flat at Oswestry Mansions, Baron’s Court. She was twenty-six years old and the elder of Mrs Primero’s granddaughters. That was all Charles Archery knew about her – that and her telephone number which he had easily found. He rang her up and asked if he could see her on the following morning. Thinking better of his original plan, he said he represented the
Sunday Planet
, and the death of Alice Flower having brought once more into prominence Mrs Primero’s murder, his newspaper were running a feature on the fate of the other people concerned in the case. He was rather pleased with that. It had the ring of verisimilitude.

Miss Primero had a grim voice for so young a
woman
. It was gravelly, abrupt, almost masculine. She would be glad to see him, but he did realize, didn’t he, that her recollection of her grandmother was slight? Just a few childhood memories were what he wanted, Miss Primero, little touches to add colour to his story.

She opened the door to him so quickly that he wondered if she had been waiting behind it. Her appearance surprised him for he had kept a picture of her brother in his mind and he had therefore expected someone small and dark with regular features. He had seen a photograph of the grandmother too, and though the old face was both wizened and blurred by age, there were still to be seen vestiges of an aquiline beauty and a strong resemblance to Roger.

The girl whose flat this was had a strong plain face with bad skin and a big prognathous jaw. Her hair was a dull flat brown. She wore a neat dark blue frock bought at a chain store and her figure, though over-large, was good.

‘Mr Bowman?’

Charles was pleased with the name he had invented for himself. He gave her a pleasant smile.

‘How do you do, Miss Primero?’

She showed him into a small very sparsely furnished sitting room. He could not help adding to the mystery by contrasting this with the library at Forby Hall. Here there were no books, no flowers, and the only ornaments were framed photographs, half a dozen perhaps, of a young blonde girl and a baby.

She followed his gaze towards the studio portrait of the same girl that hung above the fireplace. ‘My
sister
,’ she said. Her ugly face softened and she smiled. As she spoke there came from the next room a thin wail and the murmur of a voice. ‘She’s in my bedroom now, changing the baby’s napkin. She always comes over on Saturday mornings.’

Charles wondered what Angela Primero did for a living. A typist perhaps, or a clerk? The whole set-up seemed too scanty and poor. The furniture was brightly coloured but it looked cheap and flimsy. In front of the hearth was a rug woven out of woollen rags. Needy nothing trimmed in jollity …

‘Please sit down,’ said Angela Primero.

The little orange chair creaked as it took his weight. A far cry, he thought, from the brother’s voluptuous black leather. From the floor above he could hear music playing and someone pushing a vacuum cleaner.

‘What do you want me to tell you?’

There was a packet of Weights on the mantelpiece. She took one and handed them to him. He shook his head.

‘First, what you remember of your grandmother.’

‘Not much. I told you.’ Her speech was brusque and rough. ‘We went there to tea a few times. It was a big dark house and I remember I was afraid to go to the bathroom alone. The maid used to have to take me.’ She gave a staccato, humourless laugh and it was an effort to remember she was only twenty-six. ‘I never even saw Painter if that’s what you mean. There was a child across the road we used to play with sometimes and I believe Painter had a daughter. I asked about her once but my grandmother said
she
was common, we weren’t to have anything to do with her.’

Charles clenched his hands. He felt a sudden desperate longing for Tess, both for himself, and also to set her beside this girl who had been taught to despise her.

The door opened and the girl in the photographs came in. Angela Primero jumped up at once and took the baby from her arms. Charles’s knowledge of babies was vague. He thought this one might be about six months old. It looked small and uninteresting.

‘This is Mr Bowman, darling. My sister, Isabel Fairest.’

Mrs Fairest was only a year younger than her sister, but she looked no more than eighteen. She was very small and thin with a pinkish-white face and enormous pale blue eyes. Charles thought she looked like a pretty rabbit. Her hair was a bright gingery gold.

Roger’s hair and eyes were black, Angela’s hair brown and her eyes hazel. None of them was in the least like either of the others. There was more to genetics than met the eye, Charles thought.

Mrs Fairest sat down. She didn’t cross her legs but sat with her hands in her lap like a little girl. It was difficult to imagine her married, impossible to think of her as having given birth to a child.

Her sister scarcely took her eyes off her. When she did it was to coo at the baby. Mrs Fairest had a small soft voice, tinged with cockney.

‘Don’t let him tire you, darling. Put him down in his cot.’

‘You know I love holding him, darling. Isn’t he gorgeous? Have you got a smile for your auntie? You know your auntie, don’t you, even if you haven’t seen her for a whole week?’

Mrs Fairest got up and stood behind her sister’s chair. They both gurgled over the baby, stroking its cheeks and curling its fingers round their own. It was obvious that they were devoted to each other, but whereas Angela’s love was maternal to both sister and nephew, Isabel showed a clinging dependence on the older girl. Charles felt that they had forgotten he was there and he wondered how Mr Fairest fitted into the picture. He coughed.

‘About your early life, Miss Primero …?’

‘Oh, yes. (Mustn’t cry, sweetie. He’s got wind, darling.) I really can’t remember any more about my grandmother. My mother married again when I was sixteen. This is the sort of thing you want, is it?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Well, as I say, my mother married again and she and my stepfather wanted us to go out to Australia with them. (Up it comes! There, that’s better.) But I didn’t want to go. Isabel and I were still at school. My mother hung it out for a couple of years and then they went without us. Well, it was their life, wasn’t it? I wanted to go to training college but I gave that up. Isabel and I had the house, didn’t we, darling? And we both went out to work. (Is he going to have a little sleep, then?)’

It was an ordinary enough tale, fragmentary and very clipped. Charles felt that there was far more
to
it. The hardship and the privation had been left out. Money might have changed it all but she had never mentioned money. She had never mentioned her brother either.

‘Isabel got married two years ago. Her husband’s in the Post Office. I’m a secretary in a newspaper office.’ She raised her eyebrows, unsmiling. ‘I’ll have to ask them if they’ve ever heard of you.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Charles with a suavity he didn’t feel. He must get on to the subject of the money but he didn’t know how to. Mrs Fairest brought a carry-cot in from the other room, they placed the baby in it, bending tenderly over him and cooing. Although it was nearly noon neither of them had mentioned a drink or even coffee. Charles belonged to a generation that has accustomed itself to almost hourly snacks, cups of this, glasses of that, bits and pieces from the refrigerator. So, surely, did they. He thought wistfully of Roger’s hospitality. Mrs Fairest glanced up and said softly:

‘I do like coming here. It’s so quiet.’ Above them the vacuum cleaner continued to whirr. ‘My husband and me, we’ve only got one room. It’s nice and big but it’s awfully noisy at weekends.’

Charles knew it was impertinent but he had to say it.

‘I’m surprised your grandmother didn’t leave you anything.’

Angelo Primero shrugged. She tucked the blanket round the baby and stood up. ‘That’s life,’ she said in a hard voice.

‘Shall I tell him, darling?’ Isabel Fairest touched
her
arm and looked timidly into her face, waiting for guidance.

‘What’s the point? It’s of no interest to him.’ She stared at Charles and then said intelligently, ‘You can’t put that sort of thing in newspapers. It’s libel.’

Damn, damn, damn! Why hadn’t he said he was from the Inland Revenue? Then they could have got on to money at once.

‘But I think people ought to know,’ said Mrs Fairest, showing more spirit than he had thought her capable of. ‘I do, darling. I always have, ever since I understood about it. I think people ought to know how he’s treated us.’

Charles put his notebook away ostentatiously.

‘This is off the record, Mrs Fairest.’

‘You see, darling? He won’t say anything. I don’t care if he does. People ought to know about Roger.’

The name was out. They were all breathing rather heavily. Charles was the first to get himself under control. He managed a calm smile.

‘Well, I
will
tell you. If you put it in the paper and I have to go to prison for it, I don’t care! Granny Rose left ten thousand pounds and we should all have had a share, but we didn’t. Roger – that’s our brother – he got it all. I don’t quite know why but Angela knows the ins and outs of it. My mother had a friend who was a solicitor where Roger worked and he said we could try and fight it, but Mother wouldn’t on account of it being awful to have a court case against your own son. We were just little
kids
, you see, and we didn’t know anything about it. Mother said Roger would help us – it was his moral duty, even if it wasn’t legally – but he never did. He kept putting it off and then Mother quarrelled with him. We’ve never seen him since I was ten and Angela was eleven. I wouldn’t know him now if I saw him in the street.’

It was a puzzling story. They were all Mrs Primero’s grandchildren, all equally entitled to inherit in the event of there being no will. And there had been no will.

‘I don’t want to see all this in your paper, you know,’ Angela Primero said suddenly. She would have made a good teacher, he thought, reflecting on waste, for she was tender with little children, but stern when she had to be.

‘I won’t publish any of it,’ Charles said with perfect truth.

‘You’d better not, that’s all. The fact is, we couldn’t fight it. We wouldn’t have stood a chance. In law Roger was perfectly entitled to it all. Mind you, it would have been another story if my grandmother had died a month later.’

‘I don’t quite follow you,’ said Charles, by now unbearably excited.

‘Have you ever seen my brother?’

Charles nodded, then changed it to a shake of the head. She looked at him suspiciously. Then she made a dramatic gesture. She took her sister by the shoulders and pushed her forward for his inspection.

‘He’s little and dark,’ she said. ‘Look at Isabel,
look
at me. We don’t look alike, do we? We don’t look like sisters because we aren’t sisters and Roger isn’t our brother. Oh, Roger is my parents’ child all right and Mrs Primero was his grandmother. My mother couldn’t have any more children. They waited eleven years and when they knew it was no good they adopted me. A year later they took Isabel as well.’

‘But … I …’ Charles stammered. ‘You were legally adopted, weren’t you?’

Angela Primero had recovered her composure. She put her arm round her sister who had begun to cry.

‘We were legally adopted all right. That didn’t make any difference. Adopted children can’t inherit when the dead person has died without making a will – or they couldn’t in September 1950. They can now. They were making this Act at the time and it became law on October 1st, 1950. Just our luck, wasn’t it?’

The photograph in the estate agent’s window made Victor’s Piece look deceptively attractive. Perhaps the agent had long given up hope of its being sold for anything but its site value, for Archery, enquiring tentatively, was greeted with almost fawning exuberance. He emerged with an order to view, a bunch of keys and permission to go over the house whenever he chose.

No bus was in sight. He walked back to the stop by The Olive and Dove and waited in the shade. Presently he pulled the order to view out
of
his pocket and scanned it. ‘Splendid property of character,’ he read, ‘that only needs an imaginative owner to give it a new lease of life …’ There was no mention of the old tragedy, no hint that violent death had once been its tenant.

Two Sewingbury buses came and one marked Kingsmarkham Station. He was still reading, contrasting the agent’s euphemisms with the description in his transcript, when the silver car pulled into the kerb.

‘Mr Archery!’

He turned. The sun blazed back from the arched wings and the glittering screen. Imogen Ide’s hair made an even brighter silver-gold flash against the dazzling metal.

‘I’m on my way to Stowerton. Would you like a lift?’

He was suddenly ridiculously happy. Everything went, his pity for Charles, his grief for Alice Flower, his sense of helplessness against the juggernaut machinery of the law. An absurd dangerous joy possessed him and without stopping to analyse it, he went up to the car. Its bodywork was as hot as fire, a shivering silver blaze against his hand.

‘My son took my car,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to Stowerton, just to a place this side of it, a house called Victor’s Piece.’

She raised her eyebrows very slightly at this and he supposed she knew the story just as everyone else did, for she was looking at him strangely. He got in beside her, his heart beating. The continual rhythmic thudding in his left side was so intense as to be
physically
painful and he wished it would stop before it made him wince or press his hand to his breast.

‘You haven’t got Dog with you today,’ he said.

She moved back into the traffic. ‘Too hot for him,’ she said. ‘Surely you’re not thinking of buying Victor’s Piece?’

His heart had quietened. ‘Why, do you know it?’

‘It used to belong to a relative of my husband’s.’