“Right. He was a born amasser, he didn’t want things to disintegrate after he was gone, either. There’s a long list of minor legacies to staff, not one of ‘em interesting to us, you wouldn’t consider killing a mouse for the amounts he considered a due reward for service. Mind you, he paid good wages living, I don’t think it’s meanness, it’s just this empire-building tendency of his. But the residue of his property, after payment of these flea-bites, is left to, did I hear you make a guess?”
“You did not,” said George. “My mind’s a blank. He didn’t, by any chance, think of the possibility of grandchildren, and leave it in trust for them?”
“Not a hope. The whole dynasty is cancelled, he’s making a new and surprising start. The name is Katherine Morris, George. And what, if anything, do you make of that?”
CHAPTER IV.
AND WHAT DID George make of it? Just plain spite? A reaction towards Kitty Norris simply because Leslie had veered off from her and married someone else? A way of hitting Leslie as hard as possible by so pointedly deflecting his expectations into the lap of the girl he wouldn’t marry? Not a gesture of consolation to Kitty, Armiger wasn’t quite as clumsy as that, surely, even when he was angry. Or was there more to it than met the eye? Plainly this represented a move to amalgamate Armiger’s Ales and Norris’s Beers and vest the lot in Kitty after his death; but might it not be intended primarily as a move in a game which was to be played with Armiger very much alive and in shrewd command of his forces? Kitty would be welcome to the show after he was dead, provided he ran it while he was alive. His naming her as his heiress might well be an earnest of good faith designed to bring off a deal which had so far eluded him, and the deal could only be the acquisition of Norris’s to add to his own barony here and now. After all, with Leslie out of the picture Armiger was making no sacrifice in declaring his intention of leaving everything he had to Kitty, since he had no other close relatives, and he couldn’t take his fortune with him. He had to dispose of it somehow; how better than by buying a present gain with it, while he was here to enjoy it?
Supposing there existed a tentative proposition for a merger, thought George, and Miss Norris’s manager was holding off, as he understandably might, for once the two firms were joined there wasn’t much doubt who would turn out to be the boss, wouldn’t such a disposition for the future strengthen Armiger’s hand considerably? What had he to lose, in any case? If he failed to get what he wanted this will was as easily revoked as the previous one. It was at least worth a try. What Armiger wanted he usually got, hence the ferocity and finality of his reaction on the one occasion when he failed in his aims.
George got out his car and sat behind the wheel, and thought out his next move without haste. A rum set-up, when you came to think of it, old Norris making Armiger’s right-hand man trustee for his daughter, but the three men had been fairly close friends, and nobody had ever questioned Shelley’s integrity; it seemed to work well enough in practice. He didn’t know whether the trust was wound up now that the girl was of age, or not. There were a lot of relevant things he didn’t know, and on the face of it he had very little right so far to inquire into them. There was only one person he had a perfect right to see about Kitty Norris’s movements and affairs, and that was Kitty Norris. She had been at The Jolly Barmaid last night, she had been with Armiger, he had spoken to her, among others, just before he went off happily to display his latest garish toy; and sooner or later George would have to see her. It might as well be sooner, he decided, and started the car.
Kitty had a flat in Comerbourne, not far from the main shopping centre, but tucked away in a quiet street in the lee of the parish church, and therefore clear of the business traffic which made the town bedlam all through the day. Even there, however, parking was a problem, and George had to take his Morris a good way past the house in order to find a vacant space into which he could insert it. He was lucky, the red Karmann-Ghia was there at the kerb, so Kitty was in. It was nearly noon when she opened the door to him, in a sweater and skirt and a pair of flat, childish sandals, and gazed at him for a moment with nothing in her eyes but patient bewilderment, waiting for him to state his business.
“My name is Felse,” said George. “I’m a police officer, Miss Norris.” The bewilderment vanished so promptly, she stepped back from the doorway so instantly, that he knew she knew. “You’ve heard already about Mr. Armiger?”
“Mr. Shelley telephoned me,” she said. “Come in, Mr. Felse.”
She was looking at him, he noticed, with a certain grave curiosity which he thought was not all for his office but partly for himself, and he was human enough and male enough to be flattered and disarmed by her attention. Some people cannot look directly at you in conversation even when they have nothing to hide; Kitty, he thought, would look straight at you even if she had a guilty secret to hide, because it was the way she was made, and she wouldn’t be able to help it.
“I’m making investigations into Mr. Armiger’s death, and there are points on which I think you may be able to help me, if you will. I promise not to keep you very long.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said, leading him into a big, pastel-coloured room, lofty and unexpectedly sunlit, for she lived on the fourth floor, and the buildings opposite were lower, and showed her only their roofs. “Please sit down, Mr. Felse. May I get you a drink?” She turned and looked at him with a small, wry smile. “It sounds like a Raymond Chandler gambit, doesn’t it? But I was just going to have a sherry, actually. And after all, you’re not a private eye, are you?”
“More of a public one,” said George. It wasn’t going as he’d expected, but he was content to let it wander; it might arrive somewhere very interesting if he let well alone.
“I hope you like it dry,” said Kitty deprecatingly. “It’s all
I’ve got.” The hand that proffered the glass was not quite steady, he saw, but there was every excuse for that tremor.
“Thanks, I do. I’m afraid it must have been a great shock to you, Miss Norris, Mr. Armiger’s death.”
“Yes,” she said in a low voice, and sat down directly in front of him and looked straight at him, just as he’d forseen she would have to do. “Mr. Shelley and Miss Hamilton both rang up to tell me,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it. You know what I mean. He was so alive. Whether you liked him or not, whether you approved of him or not, there he was, and you couldn’t imagine the world without him. And there were things about him that were admirable, you know. He was brave. He came up with nothing, and he took on the world to get where he got. And even when he had so much he wasn’t afraid. People often learn to be afraid when they have a lot to lose, but he was never afraid of anything. And he could be generous, too, sometimes. And good fun. If you were a child he wasn’t afraid or ashamed to play with you like a child, even though there was really nothing childish left in him. I suppose it was because children made good playthings for him, because we were satisfied with lots of action, and never made difficulties of principle for him like grown-ups do. It was very easy to get on with him then. And very hard afterwards.” She looked down into her glass, and for the first time George saw, as Dominic had seen, the essential sadness of her face, and like Dominic was dumbfounded and engaged by it, inextricably caught into the mystery of her loneliness and withdrawal.
She moved, he thought, as though her course was set, and her own volition had nothing to do with it, having aligned itself long ago with some other influence which was disposing of her. Not Armiger’s influence, or she could not have talked of him like that. Perhaps not any man’s, only a tide of events in which she felt herself to be caught, and which she had to trust because she had no alternative.
