Deadheads

'None?' said Dalziel disbelievingly.

'Nothing that I could offer in evidence,' said the solicitor firmly.

'But suspicions?'

'Ah, suspicions! Suspicions are only malicious guesses, aren't they? There had been a will. I had left it with Mrs Aldermann after she had called me in to discuss the possibility of changing it substantially in favour of her niece. She died. There was no will to be found. Why should I be suspicious rather than accept that in all likelihood the old lady had torn it up prior to getting me to draft a new one?'

‘Because,' said Dalziel gently, 'because you buggers are like us buggers, you're bred up to be suspicious. Instead of which you're sitting there all sweetness and light and Christian understanding! You weren't having a bit on the side with Mrs Highsmith, by any chance, were you?'

'Mr Dalziel! How dare you?' cried Masson, scandalized.

'It's not impossible,' protested Dalziel. 'She's a very attractive woman. You were a vigorous young man, well, in the prime of life, twenty years ago.'

'I was, I was,' said Masson, suddenly smiling. 'I could tell you a tale . . . but I won't. And I certainly wouldn't have dreamt of bending my sense of duty in the interests of a mere personal relationship!'

'But you did suspect that it wasn't Mrs Aldermann who'd got rid of the will, didn't you?' pressed Dalziel. 'So why did you sit on your arse and say nowt? Why?'

'All right, I'll tell you why,' said Masson with sudden passion. 'Because justice was best served by doing nothing. Because I was absolutely certain that three years earlier, Florence Aldermann had deliberately and maliciously destroyed her husband's will, that's why!'

Dalziel finished his whisky in his surprise and had to pour himself another.

'But why should she?' he wondered. 'This chap, Eddie Aldermann, wasn't the kind to disinherit his wife from what I've heard of him.'

'Of course he wasn't. He was the fairest, the kindest, of men. I drew up his will, of course. In it he left the bulk of his estate to his wife. But he also left a substantial legacy to Mrs Highsmith to be held in trust for her son, Patrick, till he came of age. It was this that so offended Mrs Aldermann, I suspect. Oh yes, there was no doubt in my mind but that she destroyed the will. Unfortunately I had just suffered a bereavement myself, my wife. And I had gone to Australia on a six-month visit to my daughter there. I didn't know anything of all this till I came back. No will! I was furious. But I was uncertain what to do. There were constraints upon me, you see. After all, I might have been wrong. It wasn't until she herself was struck down two years later and Mrs Highsmith came to Rosemont to take care of her that I learned that the allowance Eddie had always made her had been discontinued. Then I was sure! But it began to look as if things might be regularized without my intervention. There was all this talk of Mrs Highsmith staying on permanently, and of a new will. I was determined that justice would be done in this one, and to Mrs Aldermann's credit it must be said that she'd come to a much truer estimate of her niece's worth. It takes a brush with death to put things in perspective sometimes, Mr Dalziel.'

Dalziel rubbed his huge hand across his huge face.

'Look,' he said in his kindliest tones, 'I still can't see why you let it pass. I mean, I can see why someone else might do it, but I know you, Mr Masson, I know how you've always gone on about the letter of the law being as important as the spirit, and I can't see how, on what you've told me, you could convince yourself you were right to say nothing if you thought Penny Highsmith had removed that will. Why not take it to the law and try to sort out things there?'

Masson laughed. It was an unexpected sound, high and clear and girlish.

'It was because I could have done that and won very easily that I did what I did, Mr Dalziel,' he cried. 'That was the whole point! But I'd promised Eddie, you see. And also there'd have been a very great scandal. Things in those days weren't quite so free as now. This way achieved the same, the right, the proper result, without any of that.'

'You've lost me,' said Dalziel. 'What result? What did you promise Eddie Aldermann?'

Masson shook his head. 'A promise is a promise.'

'To a dead man. Listen, you've bent your principles a good way, just bend them a little more. If you don't, I'll just have to go on probing. People will start talking, I don't know what about yet, but they will. And I'll probe till I find out. You've given me a direction, Masson. I'll keep going till I get there.'

No one could view the menacing thrust of Dalziel's huge head and the determined clamp of the jaws without believing him.

'All right. But no further!'

'Than necessary,' said Dalziel, uncompromising now he knew he'd won.

'Patrick's father,' said Masson.

'Yes?'

'Patrick Highsmith's father.'

'Yes! said Dalziel, there already, but determined to make Masson say it.

'Patrick Highsmith's father was Eddie Aldermann.'

3

 

WILL SCARLET

(Modern shrub.Wide-spreading, bright red blooms, long-lasting, with a musky scent.)

Saturday had started well for Dick Elgood. At eleven o'clock he had been sitting in his office in the otherwise empty Perfecta building waiting for a visitor.

The man, who arrived dead on time, wore dark glasses and a light grey hat. These were simple measures to cut down the possibility of recognition, matters of habit rather than fear though there were certainly people in this