To the Hilt (19 page)

I found it less easy to understand Desmond Finch. He stood there glaring at me, thin, aggressive, flashing his large silver-rimmed glasses in sharp little head movements, his Adam’s apple actively jumping in his neck. I had no reason to doubt the general assessment I’d been given that he was efficient and energetic in his job, but I believed also in the evaluation that he would act only if given directions. It seemed plain that he danced to Patsy’s instructions: plain also that he’d made no objective overview on the brewery’s troubles, in spite of his own whole career being bound up in its financial health.

A limited man, I thought. Shortsighted mentally as well as optically. A voice baying in the pack. Not one to sink the teeth in first.

And Oliver Grantchester? He’d never liked me; I’d never liked him.

There he balefully stood, bulky, going bald, Ivan’s legal adviser from way back, consulted, wise—and enchanted by Patsy to the extent that his manner to me was always of suspicion, distrust and obstruction.

Ivan said weakly, “Couldn’t you have got a better deal for the brewery, Alexander?”

I smiled grimly. “I’m sick of the brewery,” I said. “Ivan, let Patsy loose on the creditors. I don’t give a damn about the fact that she’ll ruin her inheritance. Why should I care? The brewery is yours. It’s rescued; it has problems that are basically solved, but which you can muck up in a moment. I’m a painter and I’m going back to my own work, and goodbye ... a heartfelt goodbye to you all.”

Ivan said miserably, “Alexander ...”

“For you,” I said to him plainly, “I’ve taken risks that I’ll take again, and I’ve begged and persuaded and bargained to save your good name. Because you sent me the chalice”—and I glanced at Patsy and Surtees, who stared as if transfixed—“I got beaten beyond a joke. And I’ve had enough. I’ll do anything on earth for my mother, but that’s where it now ends. Do what you like, Ivan. Just count me out.”

My mother said, barely audibly, “Oh no ...
please,
Alexander,” and Ivan looked exhaustedly strained.

Grantchester said heavily, “Ivan tells us he gave you his codicil for safekeeping. He now sees that this was a mistake. So hand it over.”

Into the silence that followed I said, “Ivan?”

His eyes looked deep in their sockets. I understood the impossibility he faced. His faith in me was a disloyalty to his daughter; a disloyalty I had no right to coerce, even if I could.

“I’ll get it,” I said, letting him off. “It’s upstairs.”

I went up and fetched the sealed envelope, and returning, put it into his hands.

“I’ll take it,” Grantchester said authoritatively, but Ivan put the envelope on his knees and folded his hands on it, and shook his head.

“I’ll keep it here, Oliver,” he said.

“But ...”

“Then I can tear it up if I change my mind.”

I smiled into Ivan’s troubled eyes and without weight said I would be upstairs for an hour or two more if he wanted me.

“He doesn’t want you,” Surtees said spitefully. “None of us do.”

I shrugged and left them and, shaking my head to my mother’s pleading eyes, went back upstairs, looking out of the window and waiting.

They went on shouting, downstairs, but finally the angry voices came out of Ivan’s study and descended to street level and left by the front door. When all was quiet I went out of my room and onto the stairs, and found Ivan on the landing below me, looking up. He made a gesture towards his study, a flip of the hand that was unmistakably an invitation, so I went down and followed him into his room, and sat opposite him in my usual chair.

My mother, looking as frail as her husband, stood beside Ivan, touching him as if to give him strength.

He said to me, “Did you mean it, that you’ve had enough?”

For answer I asked, “Did you cancel the powers of attorney?”

“I ... I don’t know what to do.”

“No, he didn’t,” my mother said. “Ivan, tell Alexander... beg Alexander to go on acting for you.” To me she said, “Don’t leave us.”

I had so recently vowed I would do anything on earth for my mother. So small a thing, to stay and field a few insults. I wilted inside from disinclination.

“What did you mean about being beaten?” Ivan said.

“That black eye I had last week ...”

He frowned. “Keith Robbiston said you were hurt.”

I told them about the robbers. “I didn’t want to worry you when you were so ill ... so I didn’t tell you.”

“Oh my God,” he said, “I’ve done so much harm.”

“Nothing that isn’t being put right.”

I poured brandy into two glasses standing ready on a nearby silver tray and handed one to Ivan, one to my mother. They both drank without protest, as if I’d given them medicine.

I said to Ivan, “If you just leave things as they are, the brewery should be out of debt in three years. I know some of the terms are hard. They have to be. The debts are truly enormous. Mrs. Morden has done a marvelous job, but she says the future depends greatly on keeping the services of your present brewmaster and on the managing energies of Desmond Finch. Desmond Finch wouldn’t take a diamond-studded suggestion from me, but he’s used to following your instructions, so that’s what you have to do, Ivan. Go back to the brewery and instruct him.”

My stepfather nodded with resolution. And how long, I morosely considered, would that resolution last?

The telephone rang. Ivan’s hand asked me to answer it, so I did.

A confident voice said, “This is Detective Constable Thompson of the Leicestershire police. I want to speak to Sir Ivan Westering.”

Ivan of course wanted me to deal with whatever it was. I explained that Sir Ivan was recovering from a heart attack, and offered my services.

“And you are, sir?”

“His son.” Well, near enough.

After a pause a different voice, just as confident, identified himself as Detective Chief Inspector Reynolds.

“What is this about?” I asked.

The voice inquired whether Sir Ivan knew anyone named Norman Quorn.

“Yes, he does.”

The voice impersonally explained. I listened blankly. The Leicestershire police had for two weeks been trying to identify a body that they now had reason to believe was that of a Mr. Norman Quorn. The Chief Inspector wanted Sir Ivan Westering, as Mr. Quorn’s long-term employer, to assist in making a positive identification, yes or no.

With shortened breath, I said, “Doesn’t he have any relations?”

“Only his sister, sir, and she is ... distressed. The body is partly decomposed. The sister gave us Sir Ivan’s name. So we would be grateful, sir ...”

“He isn’t well,” I said.

“Perhaps
you,
then ...”

“I didn’t know him.” I thought briefly. “I’ll tell my father. Give me a number to phone you back.” He told me a number, which I wrote out of habit on the bottom of a box of tissues. “Right,” I said, “five minutes.”

As unemotionally as possible I gave Ivan the news.

“Norman!” he said disbelievingly. “Dead?”

“They want to know for sure. They ask you to go.”

“I’ll go with you,” my mother said.

I phoned the Chief Inspector, told him I would be driving, and wrote his directions on the bottom of the tissue box.

In the end four of us went to Leicestershire in Ivan’s Rover (retrieved from an underground garage), Ivan and my mother in the back with Wilfred sitting in the front beside me, a box of heart-attack remedies on his lap. Wilfred read out the directions on the tissue box so that fairly early in the afternoon we arrived at a featureless building in Leicester that housed a mortuary and investigating laboratories.

The detective chief inspector met us, shook hands with Ivan and my mother and me and was impressed into solicitude by Wilfred’s presence and medical precautions. Ivan, though in suit and tie, looked almost grayer than in his robe.

Inside the building, in a small reception area that doubled as waiting room, a large weeping woman was being comforted in the arms of an equally large uniformed policewoman. The Chief Inspector indicated that we should wait there while he took Ivan to see the body, but Ivan clutched my arm and wouldn’t go without me, so, shrugging, the senior policeman settled for taking me, too.

We were all then issued disposable gowns, with gloves, overshoes and masks for our noses and mouths. Dead bodies, it seemed, could infect the living.

I hadn’t been in such a place before, but it was curiously familiar from pictures. We went down a passage into a white-painted room that was clean, brightly lit, not very large and smelled not unpleasantly of disinfectant. On a high center table, under a white cover, lay a long quiet shape.

Ivan’s hand shook on my arm but civic duty won the day. He looked steadily at the white face revealed when a gowned and masked mortuary attendant pulled back one end of the covering sheet, and he said without wavering, “Yes, that’s Norman.”

“Norman Quorn?”

“Yes, Chief Inspector. Norman Quorn.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I said, “What did he die of?”

There was a pause. The policeman and the mortuary attendant exchanged eyebrow signals that I hadn’t the code to read, and the policeman also looked assessingly at Ivan’s physical state, and at mine, and came to a decision.

“I’ll take you back to your wife, sir,” he said to Ivan, and offered his arm instead of mine, neatly leaving me behind alone to hear the answer to my question.

The mortuary attendant first of all identified himself as the pathologist who had carried out the original postmortem.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be.” He casually pulled down his mask, revealing a young face, competent.

“So ... what did he die of?” I asked.

“We’re not sure.” He shrugged. “There are no obvious causes of death. No gunshots, no stab wounds, no fractures of the skull, no signs of strangulation, no household poisons. No evidence of murder. He had been dead about two weeks when he was discovered. He didn’t die where he was found, which was in a rubbish dump. I saw him in situ. He had been placed there after death.”

“Well ...” I frowned. “Was he simply ill? Heart attack? Stroke? Pneumonia?”

“More likely one of the first two, though we can’t know for sure. But there is an abnormality ...” He hesitated. “We showed it to his sister, and she fainted.”

“I’m not his sister.”

“No.”

He stripped back the sheet as far as the body’s waist, showing the dark discolorations of decomposition and the efforts made to tidy up the radical postmortem incisions. I thought it no wonder the sister had fainted, and hoped I wouldn’t copy her.

“Look at his back,” the pathologist instructed, and with his gloved hands gripped the shoulders and half rolled the body towards him.

There were about a dozen or more rows of darker marks in the darkened flesh, and flecks of white.

The pathologist eased the body flat again.

“Those white bits—did you see them?—are his ribs.”

I felt nauseous, and swallowed.

The pathologist said, “Those darker marks are burns.”

“Burns?”

“Yes. The skin and flesh have been burned away in a few places down to the ribs. He must have fallen into something very hot when he died. Something like a grating. People fall on electric fires in that way. Terrible burns, sometimes. This is like that. Any thoughts?”

My chief thought was how soon I could leave the mortuary.

“He was wearing a nylon shirt,” the pathologist said chattily, “and there were man-made fibers in the lining and cloth of his suit jacket. They melted to some extent into his skin.”

In another minute, I thought, I would vomit.

I said, “Could he have died from the burns?”

“I don’t think so. As you saw, the burns extended only from below his shoulder blades to his waist. Severe local burns, but not lethal, I don’t think. It’s most likely they occurred just after death, or anyway at about the same time. I would guess he had a stroke, fell unconscious on the fire and died.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” the pathologist said with satisfaction, “now that we have a positive identification we can have an inquest. The coroner’s verdict will be ‘cause of death unknown’ and the poor man can have a decent burial. I’ll be glad to get him out of here, to be honest.”

I left him with relief and, stripping off the protective clothing, rejoined the group in the entrance area.

“Please tell us,” I said to the Chief Inspector, “where exactly you found Mr. Quorn.”

Instead of directly answering he explained that the still-quietly weeping woman was Norman Quorn’s sister. My mother had taken over from the policewoman the role of comforter although, true to form, she looked as if she would prefer saying, “Pull yourself together” to “There, there.”

“Mr. Quorn,” the Chief Inspector told us conversationally, “was found by council workers who went to clear away a decaying rubbish dump left behind on a farmer’s land when a band of travelers moved on. We made lengthy inquiries among the travelers at their next place, but drew a total blank. We spent a great deal of time on it. The travelers pointed out that they were all much younger—we had told them the unknown body was elderly ...”

“Sixty-five,” the sister sobbed.

“On the other hand, these travelers were accustomed to cook on homemade barbecues of brick supports with metal rods across, and there were signs that perhaps Mr. Quom had overbalanced backwards onto something like that. None of their new barbecues matched Mr. Quorn’s burns, but it was all inconclusive. There are absolutely no indications at all of foul play. So now that we have your identifications, we can close the case. I’m sorry, but it isn’t always possible to determine how things happened, and unless any other facts turn up ...”

He left the sentence unfinished. Neither Ivan nor my mother told him that the brewery’s funds had vanished with the Finance Director, and nor did I. Ivan would have to think it through, and decide.