Cursed Inheritance (14 page)

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She nodded.

‘Do you know anything about him?’

She looked at him curiously, as though she was surprised by the sudden question. ‘He was described in contemporary documents as a gentleman of Devon but that’s all I can remember.’

Neil followed her to the trench where the armour was being unearthed with painstaking concentration. Hannah stood beside him, watching and, after a decent interval of ten minutes or so, he summoned the courage to ask if he could look at the archives. Hannah led the way to the large wooden building on the edge of the site. This was no glori-fied garden shed. This was a permanent research facility housing archives, conservation laboratories, computer rooms and even an exhibition space. Neil entered this veri-table palace of archaeology with envy. What he wouldn’t give for something like this back home.

Hannah knew exactly where to look for Edmund Selbiwood. As she had said, he was indeed a gentleman of Devon and his place of abode in England was listed in the old records as Potwoolstan Hall near to the town of Neston.

Neil was silent as he made his way back to the trench where he was working. He was racking his brains, trying to recall where he had heard the name Potwoolstan Hall before.

He had contemplated asking Hannah out for a meal that evening, but with Chuck’s offer of the use of his pick;.up, he would be otherwise occupied. At least the snippet of interesting knowledge he had just gleaned would give him something to tell Max Selbiwood. If and when he found him.

As she walked up the drive to the hall, Emma Oldchester was shaking. She wondered why they insisted on their guests parking so far away. Perhaps they thought arriving on foot, dragging your suitcase behind you, was some sort of preparation, a lesson in humility. Like someone going the last few hundred yards of a pilgrimage barefoot or on tom, bleeding knees. Her wheeled suitcase trundled behind her like an

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obedient dog until she rounded the corner. When she caught her first full view of the Hall she halted suddenly and let the handle drop but she was hardly aware of the thud as the case toppled over behind her. She was here at last. This was it. The killing ground. The place of her nightmares.

She stood there, frozen with terror. It was just as she remembered it. The crows sitting in the tall trees shrieking their coarse, mocking derision; the solid stone house with its gables and dark windows. The ancient oak front door. There had been a back door too. There had been two crows: one nailed to the front door and one to the back. She would never forget the blood and the bedraggled black feathers. Witchcraft. Evil. She could still sense it, smell it.

She forced herself to pick up the case. ‘I will fear no evil,’ she whispered under her breath. ‘Even though 1 walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 1 will fear no evil.’ Her heart was pounding as she walked forwards.

She stumbled the last few yards to the front door. Once it had always been kept closed but now it stood open, welcoming. She wavered on the threshold, her mouth dry and her palms damp with sweat.

A man appeared in the hallway. He wore a white jacket and he was smiling, showing a set of even white teeth. His arms were outstretched in welcome.

‘Ms Oldchester? Emma? I’m Jeremy Elsham, the facilitator.’ His voice was deep and resonant. A hypnotic voice. ‘Welcome … welcome.’ He took her hand in both of his and held it for a full half minute as he gazed into her eyes.

‘You are afraid,’ he said in velvet tones. ‘You have lived with this fear for a long time. That’s why you~ve come to us.’

She gave a small nod and felt tears prick her eyes. It was as if he knew, as if he could see into her mind. He put his arms around her and drew her towards him until her cheek was pressed to the crisp cloth of his white jacket. He smelled of cleanliness with a whiff of expensive aftershave. He smelled good. He held her and she stood there stiffly as he moved his hands slowly up and down her back.

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‘I sense that you’ve suffered a great tragedy in your life,’ he whispered in her ear.

Emma felt his warm breath on the side of her face and experienced a feeling of helplessness, as though she were drowning in honey.

He planted a small, almost reverent, kiss on her forehead. ‘We can help you, Emma. We can release you from the prison of your past and … ‘

‘Jeremy.’ The voice was female. Calm but with an unmistakable touch of anger.

Jeremy Elsham released Emma from his grasp and turned round slowly. He was smiling with his mouth. But his eyes were expressionless.

‘Ms Oldchester? Welcome to Potwoolstan Hall.’ The woman with the collagen lips spoke in a curt, businesslike manner.

‘This is my wife, Pandora,’ Jeremy Elsham said smoothly. ‘She’ll show you to your room. We don’t lock doors here. Locked doors are a symbol of locked minds.’

Emma turned her wide-eyed gaze on Pandora and sensed the woman’s disapproval. But the fact that she’d found her in Jeremy’s arms was hardly her fault. She had assumed that it was just the way he greeted all the Beings. As she followed Pandora up the staircase, she had an uneasy feeling that the past might not be the only thing she would have to wrestle with at Potwoolstan Hall.

At least her meeting with Jeremy and Pandora had distracted her from her surroundings. In fact, her encounter with Jeremy had left her rather dazed. The way he had held her close had excited her in a way she didn’t quite understand.

When she was halfway up the stairs she stopped and looked back over her shoulder into the spacious entrance hall. Apart from the dark, Jacobean staircase, it had changed beyond all recognition and bore no resemblance to the doll’s house she had so painstakingly constructed. Then it had been a place full of gloom, blood and shadows but now it was modem and light. If Emma had been taken into

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the building blindfold, she wouldn’t have recognised it. She wondered what the drawing room and the kitchen looked like now and whether the events still remained there somehow, recorded in the bricks and plaster. Surely it was unthinkable that such violent actions would leave no trace behind. Surely the place was haunted by the ghosts of the dead crying out for vengeance.

She was about to follow Pandora when she spotted somebody crossing the hall below. She closed her eyes for a second and opened them again and when she glanced down into the hall again that face from the past had disappeared.

As she followed Pandora to her room, her mouth was dry and she was beginning to shake. Perhaps it had been a ghost she saw. A ghost who had aged with the years.

Wesley flicked through Jack Wright’s statement. Wright had made a great show of cooperation, emphasising Mr Smith’s plausibility and his own horror that stolen goods had passed through his hands. But at the same time he had told them very little.

It was, however, a fairly trivial matter compared with murder and it was only Patrick Evans’s connection with Potwoolstan Hall - whatever that connection was - that made him take any interest at all in the disappearance of Mrs Jeffries’s money and ring.

He was starting to build up a picture of what had happened at Potwoolstan Hall on that March day back in 1985.

The Hall was owned by a family called Harford. Great-great-grandfather Ebenezer Harford had made his fortune from brewing in the nineteenth century, owning four thriving breweries in Devon and Cornwall and accumulating enough wealth to purchase Potwoolstan Hall, a farily modest late Tudor manor house in a spectacular setting near the banks of the River Trad. The place had been built by the Selbiwood family, who had suffered a slow descent into genteel poverty some years before and were forced to sell their ancestral home to make ends meet. Thus the brewer became lord of the

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manor and he made improvements to the old place that would have been way beyond the Selbiwoods’ shallow pockets.

The Hall, with its Victorian conveniences, had been handed from father to son and had been inherited by Edward Harford in 1968. Edward lived at the Hall with his wife Mary and his three children Jack, Catriona and Arbel, the youngest and the only one of the three to have been adopted. Edward had sold the Harford breweries to a large national brewer for a handsome sum in the late 1970s, staying on as a director.

To the outside world, the Harfords had it all. But then in 1985 tragedy stuck. Edward Harford was fifty-four when he died and his wife, Mary a year older. The twins, Jack and Catriona were aged twenty-five: Catriona was engaged to be married to Nigel Armley, a naval officer, and Jack was working for the large brewer that now owned the family firm. Jack and Catriona had both been sent away to boarding school but now lived at home, as did the youngest child, Arbel. Reading between the lines of the detailed report it seemed that Arbel was the rebel, the one who liked to do her own thing. In fact this had probably saved her life. She had been staying in London when her family was murdered and she had discovered the bodies when she returned home to Devon the next day for a family party to celebrate Mary Harford’s birthday. If Arbel hadn’t been in London, if she’d been the home-loving type, she would almost certainly have died with the rest of her immediate family.

Wesley read on. He wanted to get a clear picture of what had happened on that fateful day. And he wanted the main players clear in his head. He wanted to know what had driven the Harfords’ housekeeper, Martha Wallace, to wipe out the entire family like that. Was it some catastrophic event? Or was it a slow drip, drip of resentment that had ended in fury?

A month before the murders, Mary Harford had discovered that some of her jewellery was missing. He smiled to himself. Funny that history should repeat itself in the same place. But then jewellery was high value and portable - irresistible to the light-fingered. And coincidences happen more often than most

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people think. The most obvious suspect was the housekeeper, Martba Wallace, who had been experiencing financial difficulties and suddenly appeared to have come into money.

Wesley flicked through the papers, wanting to fmd out more about Martha Wallace: her backgroun~; the type of woman she was. And what had made her kill the family she worked for. At last he found the information.he was looking for. Martha was thirty-five years old and even though she came originally from the Manchester area, she had relatives in the south-west. She was the widow of an able seaman, based at Plymouth, who had died in an accident aboard his ship and she had a seven-year-old daughter who lived with her in the staff flat at Potwoolstan Hall. Martha had worked in a hotel before her marriage and it had been Catriona Harford’s fiance Nigel Armley, the naval officer, who had recommended her for the job of housekeeper at the Hall as her late husband had been under his command.

Wesley looked at the photograph that had been attached to her file with a paperclip; a snap of a smiling woman, fair-haired and a little plump, wearing a low-waisted floral summer dress, a style fashionable in the 1980s. She was smiling at the camera, screwing her eyes up against the sun. She had a wide, generous mouth, wavy hair and freckles. Wesley turned the photograph over. Her name was written on the back: Martha Elizabeth Wallace. He studied the face. It was an open face, a healthy country face that might have belonged to some laughing Victorian milkmaid. To Wesley Peterson, it hardly looked like the face of a thief or a mass murderer. But then appearances can often deceive.

He read on. There was a report in the file of the police investigation into the theft of a sapphire necklace and a diamond brooch. Mrs Mary Harford had called in the local police and had virtually accused Martha of stealing them on the grounds that she had been buying herself new clothes and her daughter had new toys. When interviewed, Martha, understandably, was very upset at the accusations and explained that she had inherited the money from a recently

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deceased uncle in Manchester. She had paid off her debts and treated herself and her seven-year-old daughter to a few little luxuries. This story checked out and her innocence was established, but the ready accusation soured relations between Martha and her employer.

The only other member of the Hall’s indoor staff was an eighteen-year-old girl called Brenda Varney who came in to help with the cleaning each morning. Brenda was a girl who talked big and she boasted that one day she’d escape her humdrum life to make it as a actress or a model. When she failed to report for work a couple of weeks after the theft of the jewellery, nobody was really surprised. And when a Tradmouth jeweller reported that a girl answering Brenda’s description had tried to sell Mary Harford’s stolen jewellery, the police went to pick her up. Only they were too late. Brenda had left home, seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, and all efforts to trace her and the jewellery failed. This was the week before the Harfords were killed. But the police didn’t link the two events at the time.

The strangest aspect of the case was the fact that dead crows had been nailed to the front door and the kitchen door. It was possible that someone had wanted to unnerve or frighten the occupants of the Hall with a spot of amateur witchcraft. But would Martha really nail such an unpleasant and unhygienic object to the door of her own kitchen, her domain? But if Martha hadn’t done it, then who had?

Wesley scratched his head. In the weeks leading up to the murder of the Harford family it seemed that the only unusual event that had occurred was the theft of Mary Harford’s jewellery from the box she kept on her dressing table. He found himself wondering about Martha Wallace’s behaviour at that time. Statements said that she had been quiet, that she had been brooding and resentful and had said little to the family. But then, Wesley thought, most people wouldn’t be happy about being falsely accused of theft by their employer. He was sure that if Martha Wallace had had somewhere to go, she would have walked out on the Harfords there and