She also keeps saying that she doesn’t understand what Maurice likes about Derek. Well, if she really doesn’t, then it’s hardly for me to tell her — but she must be even more naive than she accuses me of being.
Anyway, now Maurice and Derek are going on holiday together. Derek has a friend, apparently, who has a flat in the south of France and has offered him the use of it for the next three weeks or so. He’s invited Maurice to drive down there with him, with plenty of stops on the way to look at cathedrals and eat nice meals, and Maurice, as you’d expect, is enchanted at the idea. And they leave tomorrow.
Daphne, of course, doesn’t know. Maurice has told her that he’s going on retreat, and allowed her to imagine that this means he’s going to stay in some kind of monastery and spend his time in prayer and meditation.
I don’t want you to think that I’m worried about it, because I’m not. I’m quite sure everything Daphne says about Derek is complete piffle, and there’s no reason to feel at all worried about Maurice going on holiday with him. Apart from the gravestone.
You see, I was walking through the churchyard yesterday, and for no particular reason I happened to stop and look at the gravestone of Derek’s great-grandfather — the one he’d been looking for when we first met him, on the day of Isabella’s funeral. It doesn’t take much looking for, actually — it’s quite close to the pathway up to the church door, and the inscription is very clear — Jeremiah Arkwright Died 26 February 1927 Aged 52 Years.
I found myself thinking it was a little odd that it didn’t say anything about his children. Gravestones don’t always, of course, but usually they do — Dearly Loved Father of Charles and Alice or something like that. Unless, of course, they’re for someone who didn’t have any children.
But if Jeremiah Arkwright didn’t have any children, then he can’t have had any grandchildren. And in that case, Derek can’t be his great-grandson, can he? And if he isn’t, why should he say he was?
It’s ridiculous, but I’d somehow feel much happier if I could be sure that Jeremiah Arkwright had at least one son. Do you happen to know of any way of finding out?
Yours with much love,
Reg
“So Julia’s gone chasing off to the Probate Registry,” said Cantrip, taking the chair beside me at the round oak table, “with a view to looking up this Jeremiah Arkwright character and seeing if there were any little Arkwrights. So she probably won’t be here for a bit. And Selena’s still telephoning the builders to try and find out when they’re going to come back and finish. And Ragwort’s just going to go to the bar to buy us a bottle of Nierstein, aren’t you, Ragwort? Which all works out quite nicely, because what you want to hear about is how I got on in Scotland, and they’ve already heard about it.”
Cantrip’s host in Scotland had been Lord Invercrackett, the father of a young man who had been at Cambridge with Cantrip and the owner of several thousand acres of grouse moor in the beautiful county of Perthshire. He had arranged the shooting party chiefly for the purpose of securing the goodwill of Edgar Albany, in the hope of being offered a nonexecutive directorship of Renfrews’ Bank; nonexecutive directorships, I gather, are nowadays the principal means whereby the impoverished aristocracy may supplement their meagre incomes.
It followed that the interrogation of Albany was a task of more than usual delicacy.
“Because at Invercrackett House they do the best breakfast I’ve ever had, with six different kinds of homemade marmalade, so I didn’t want to do anything to stymie the old boy’s directorship and not get asked back. So I had to be jolly subtle.”
“As I recall,” I said, “your intention was to bring the conversation with Edgar Albany round to a point where you could mention Parsons Haver.”
“Just sort of casually. Yes, that’s right.”
“And if, at the mention of the place, he gave a guilty start, you could reasonably conclude that he had recently committed a murder there. It sounded, if I may say so, like a most discreet and subtle strategy.”
“Yes,” said Cantrip. “Yes, that’s what I thought. …Hilary, have you ever tried bringing a conversation round to a point where you can just sort of casually mention Parsons Haver?”
I admitted that I had not.
“I went down to breakfast on the first morning and there was Albany tucking into kidneys and scrambled eggs and reading the
“Still, the party was due to last three days, so I thought I’d still got plenty of time. The trouble was, though, that when you’re actually out on the moors, you’re not really close enough to anyone to have a conversation, so I didn’t get another chance until teatime. But the only thing anyone was talking about at tea was what the shooting was like at Invercrackett compared with what it was like at other places, and it would have sounded a bit silly to start talking about what the shooting was like at Parsons Haver, because so far as I know there isn’t any. And the only thing anyone was talking about at dinner was finance, and if you can think of anything that happens in Parsons Haver that has a special impact on interest rates, I’ll buy the next three bottles.
“So I decided what I’d better do was think of something interesting to say about Parsons Haver and work out what sort of conversation I could say it in. But I stayed awake for hours trying to think of something interesting about Parsons Haver and I just couldn’t think of anything.”
“But my dear Cantrip,” said Ragwort, having now returned from his errand at the bar, “there are any number of interesting things to be said about Parsons Haver. It has on several occasions played a significant part in our country’s history, and the Norman tower of St. Ethel’s is described by Pevsner as one of the finest in the country.”
“Well,” said Cantrip, “if your mate Pevsner had been there, he could have said that, but he wasn’t. The only thing I could think of that I knew about the place was that it was on the way to Brighton. So I decided what I’d better do was start talking to Albany about how we got from London to Invercrackett, and that could lead on to talking about how you could get from London to other places, and that could lead on to talking about how you got from London to Brighton. And then I could just sort of casually mention that I’d heard one of the best ways was through Parsons Haver.”
I said that that sounded most ingenious.
“Well, it would have been, except that I couldn’t get Albany to cooperate. Every time I started talking to him he’d sort of move away and start talking to someone else. The trouble was, you see, his List of People I Want To Be Friends With didn’t exactly have my name at the top. On the first day I’d shot quite a lot more birds than he had and he’d been a bit miffed about it. After that old Invercrackett tipped me the wink to miss a few more, because the whole idea was to put Albany in a good mood.
“So on the second day I kept my bag down to six brace, which ought to have been safe, but Albany only got five. He started off by missing one or two shots that ought to have been easy and got shirty about it, and the shirtier he got the more he missed. He tried to make out it was his loader’s fault — he kept shouting at the poor chap and calling him a bloody fool — but we could all see it wasn’t. And the upshot was that by the end of the day we still weren’t bosom pals.
“And that night I had this awful dream, where Albany was actually asking me the best way from London to Brighton, and I knew it was tremendously important to give the right answer and I simply couldn’t remember what it was.
“By teatime on the third day I’d more or less given up. I wasn’t even trying to chat him up anymore, just wandering round the terrace eating a ham sandwich and admiring the rhododendrons. And then a chap I’d got quite matey with called out to ask me if I’d like a spot of fishing before dinner, and I saw that Albany was standing quite close to him. And quick as a flash, without even thinking about it, I shouted back, ‘Sorry, I’d better stay in, I’m expecting a phone call from someone in Parsons Haver.’ ”
“And did this produce any reaction from Albany?”
“Oh, absolutely. He gave a sort of yell and jumped about three feet in the air, as if he was practising for some kind of Highland war dance.”
“Dear me,” I said, “that does certainly sound as if the name had some significance for him.”
“Yes,” said Cantrip, “that’s what I thought. But it turned out he’d just been stung by a bee, so I suppose it’s a
