Unnatural death
of Miss Dawson’s death. That it should have occurred so suddenly and
under circumstances somewhat mysterious, is certainly interesting.
You say further that you would be glad of my opinion on Miss Agatha
Dawson’s mental condition at the time when I last saw her. It was
perfectly clear and competent—in so far as she was ever competent to
deal with business. She was in no way gifted to grapple with legal
problems, and I had extreme difficulty in getting her to understand
what the trouble was with regard to the new Property Act. Having been
brought up all her life to the idea that property went of right to the
next of kin, she found it inconceivable that this state of things
should ever alter. She assured me that the law would never permit the
Government to pass such an Act. When I had reluctantly persuaded her
that it would, she was quite sure that no court would be wicked enough
to interpret the Act so as to give the money to anybody but Miss
Whittaker, when she was clearly the proper person to have it. “Why
should the Duchy of Lancaster have any right to it?” she kept on
saying. “I don’t even know the Duke of Lancaster.” She was not a
particularly sensible woman, and in the end I was not at all sure that
I had made her comprehend the situation—quite apart from the dislike
she had of pursuing the subject. However, there is no doubt that she
was then quite _compos mentis_. My reason for urging her to make the
will before her final operation was, of course, that I feared she
might subsequently lose the use of her faculties, or—which comes to
the same thing from a business point of view—might have to be kept
continually under the influence of opiates.
Trusting that you will find here the information you require,
I remain,
Yours faithfully,
Thos. Probyn.
Mr. Murbles read this letter through twice, very thoughtfully. To even
his cautious mind, the thing began to look like the makings of a case.
In his neat, elderly hand, he wrote a little note to Detective-Inspector
Parker, begging him to call at Staple Inn at his earliest convenience.
Mr. Parker, however, was experiencing nothing at that moment but
inconvenience. He had been calling on solicitors for two whole days, and
his soul sickened at the sight of a brass plate. He glanced at the long
list in his hand, and distastefully counted up the scores of names that
still remained unticked.
Parker was one of those methodical, painstaking people whom the world
could so ill spare. When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an
understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and
soul-destroying was done by Parker. He sometimes felt that it was
irritating of Wimsey to take this so much for granted. He felt so now.
It was a hot day. The pavements were dusty. Pieces of paper blew about
the streets. Buses were grilling outside and stuffy inside. The Express
Dairy, where Parker was eating a hurried lunch, seemed full of the
odours of fried plaice and boiling tea-urns. Wimsey, he knew, was
lunching at his club, before running down with Freddy Arbuthnot to see
the New Zealanders at somewhere or other. He had seen him—a vision of
exquisite pale grey, ambling gently along Pall Mall. Damn Wimsey! Why
couldn’t he have let Miss Dawson rest quietly in her grave? There she
was, doing no harm to anybody—and Wimsey must insist on prying into her
affairs and bringing the inquiry to such a point that Parker simply had
to take official notice of it. Oh well! he supposed he must go on with
these infernal solicitors.
He was proceeding on a system of his own, which might or might not prove
fruitful. He had reviewed the subject of the new Property Act, and
decided that if and when Miss Whittaker had become aware of its possible
effect on her own expectations, she would at once consider taking legal
advice.
Her first thought would no doubt be to consult a solicitor in
Leahampton, and unless she already had the idea of foul play in her
mind, there was nothing to deter her from doing so. Accordingly,
Parker’s first move had been to run down to Leahampton and interview the
three firms of solicitors there. All three were able to reply quite
positively that they had never received such an inquiry from Miss
Whittaker, or from anybody, during the year 1925. One solicitor,
indeed—the senior partner of Hodgson & Hodgson, to whom Miss Dawson had
entrusted her affairs after her quarrel with Mr. Probyn—looked a little
oddly at Parker when he heard the question.
“I assure you, Inspector,” he said, “that if the point had been brought
to my notice in such a way, I should certainly have remembered it, in
the light of subsequent events.”
“The matter never crossed your mind, I suppose,” said Parker, “when the
question arose of winding up the estate and proving Miss Whittaker’s
claim to inherit?”
“I can’t say it did. Had there been any question of searching for
next-of-kin it might—I don’t say it would—have occurred to me. But I had
a very clear history of the family connections from Mr. Probyn, the
death took place nearly two months before the Act came into force, and
the formalities all went through more or less automatically. In fact, I
never thought about the Act one way or another in that connection.”
Parker said he was not surprised to hear it, and favoured Mr. Hodgson
with Mr. Towkington’s learned opinion on the subject, which interested
Mr. Hodgson very much. And that was all he got at Leahampton, except
that he fluttered Miss Climpson very much by calling upon her and
hearing all about her interview with Vera Findlater. Miss Climpson
walked to the station with him, in the hope that they might meet Miss
Whittaker—“I am sure you would be _interested_ to _see_ her”—but they
were unlucky. On the whole, thought Parker, it might be just as well.
After all, though he would like to see Miss Whittaker, he was not
particularly keen on her seeing him, especially in Miss Climpson’s
company. “By the way,” he said to Miss Climpson, “you had better explain
me in some way to Mrs. Budge, or she may be a bit inquisitive.”
“But I _have_,” replied Miss Climpson, with an engaging giggle, “when
Mrs. Budge said there was a Mr. Parker to see me, of course I realised
at _once_ that she mustn’t know _who_ you were, so I said, quite
quickly, ‘Mr. Parker! Oh, that must be my nephew Adolphus.’ You don’t
mind being Adolphus, do you? It’s funny, but that was the _only_ name
that came into my mind at the moment. I can’t _think_ why, for I’ve
never known an Adolphus.”
“Miss Climpson,” said Parker, solemnly, “you are a marvellous woman, and
I wouldn’t mind even if you’d called me Marmaduke.”
So here he was, working out his second line of inquiry. If Miss
Whittaker did not go to a Leahampton solicitor, to whom would she go?
There was Mr. Probyn, of course, but he did not think she would have
selected him. She would not have known him at Crofton, of course—she had
never actually lived with her great-aunts. She had met him the day he
came down to Leahampton to see Miss Dawson. He had not then taken her
into his confidence about the object of his visit, but she must have
known from what her aunt said that it had to do with the making of a
will. In the light of her new knowledge, she would guess that Mr. Probyn
had then had the Act in his mind, and had not thought fit to trust her
with the facts. If she asked him now, he would probably reply that Miss
Dawson’s affairs were no longer in his hands, and refer her to Mr.
Hodgson. And besides, if she asked the question and anything were to
happen—Mr. Probyn might remember it. No, she would not have approached
Mr. Probyn.
What then?
To the person who has anything to conceal—to the person who wants to
lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest—to the person
who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name
above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London.
Where no one knows his neighbour. Where shops do not know their
customers. Where physicians are suddenly called to unknown patients whom
they never see again. Where you may lie dead in your house for months
together unmissed and unnoticed till the gas-inspector comes to look at
the meter. Where strangers are friendly and friends are casual. London,
whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many odd
secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London.
Not that Parker put it that way to himself. He merely thought, “Ten to
one she’d try London. They mostly think they’re safer there.”
Miss Whittaker knew London, of course. She had trained at the Royal
Free. That meant she would know Bloomsbury better than any other
district. For nobody knew better than Parker how rarely Londoners move
out of their own particular little orbit. Unless, of course, she had at
some time during her time at the hospital been recommended to a
solicitor in another quarter, the chances were that she would have gone
to a solicitor in the Bloomsbury or Holborn district.
Unfortunately for Parker, this is a quarter which swarms with
solicitors. Gray’s Inn Road, Gray’s Inn itself, Bedford Row, Holborn,
Lincoln’s Inn—the brass plates grow all about as thick as blackberries.
Which was why Parker was feeling so hot, tired and fed-up that June
afternoon.
With an impatient grunt he pushed away his eggy plate,
paid-at-the-desk-please, and crossed the road towards Bedford Row, which
he had marked down as his portion for the afternoon.
He started at the first solicitor’s he came to, which happened to be the
office of one J. F. Trigg. He was lucky. The youth in the outer office
informed him that Mr. Trigg had just returned from lunch, was
disengaged, and would see him. Would he walk in?
Mr. Trigg was a pleasant, fresh-faced man in his early forties. He
begged Mr. Parker to be seated and asked what he could do for him.
For the thirty-seventh time, Parker started on the opening gambit which
he had devised to suit his purpose.
“I am only temporarily in London, Mr. Trigg, and finding I needed legal
advice, I was recommended to you by a man I met in a restaurant. He did
give me his name, but it has escaped me, and anyway, it’s of no great
importance, is it? The point is this. My wife and I have come up to Town
to see her great-aunt, who is in a very bad way. In fact, she isn’t
expected to live.
“Well, now, the old lady has always been fond of my wife, don’t you see,
and it has always been an understood thing that Mrs. Parker was to come
into her money when she died. It’s quite a tidy bit, and we have been—I
won’t say looking forward to it, but in a kind of mild way counting on
it as something for us to retire upon later on. You understand. There
aren’t any other relations at all, so, though the old lady has often
talked about making a will, we didn’t worry much, one way or the other,
because we took it for granted my wife would come in for anything there
was. But we were talking about it to a friend yesterday, and he took us
rather aback by saying that there was a new law or something, and that
if my wife’s great-aunt hadn’t made a will we shouldn’t get anything at
all. I think he said it would all go to the Crown. I didn’t think that
could be right and told him so, but my wife is a bit nervous—there are
the children to be considered, you see—and she urged me to get legal
advice, because her great-aunt may go off at any minute, and we don’t
know whether there is a will or not. Now, how does a great-niece stand
under the new arrangements?”
“The point has not been made very clear,” said Mr. Trigg, “but my advice