it.'
Surprised and more moved than I could say, I looked up from the last page and saw the smile in Malcolm's eyes deepen to a throaty chuckle.
'The lawyer chap thought the last sentence quite obscene. He said I shouldn't put that sort of thing in a will.'
I laughed. 'I didn't expect to be in your will at all.'
'Well…' He shrugged. 'I'd never have left you out. I've regretted for a long while… hitting you… everything.'
'Guess I deserved it.'
'Yes, at the time.'
I turned back to the beginning of the document and re-read one of the preliminary paragraphs. In it, he had named me as his sole executor, when I was only his fifth child.
'Why me?' I said.
'Don't you want to?'
'Yes. I'm honoured.'
'The lawyer said to name someone I trusted.' He smiled lopsidedly. 'You got elected.'
He stretched out an arm and picked up from his desk a leather pot holding pens and pencils. From it, he pulled a wire about ten inches long and about double the thickness, of the sort used by florists for stiffening flower stalks.
'If this one should get lost,' he said, 'just find another.'
'Yes. All right.'
'Good.' He put the wire back in the pot and the pot back in the desk.
'By the time you pop off,' I said, 'the price of gold might have risen out of sight and all I'd find in the wall would be spiders.'
'Yeah, too bad.'
I felt more at one with him than at any time since he'd telephoned, and perhaps he with me. I hoped it would be a very long time before I would have to execute his will.
'Gervase,' I said, 'suggests that you should distribute some of your money now, toer… reduce the estate tax.'
'Does he? And what do you think?'
'I think,' I said, 'that giving it to the family instead of to scholarships and film companies and so on might save your life.'
The blue eyes opened wide. 'That's immoral.'
'Pragmatic.'
'I'll think about it.'
We dined on the caviar, but the fun seemed to have gone out of it.
'Let's have shepherd's pie tomorrow,' Malcolm said. 'There's plenty in the freezer.'
We spent the next two days uneventfully at Quantum being careful, but with no proof that care was needed.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, out with the dogs and having made certain that Arthur Bellbrook had gone home, we walked round behind the kitchen wall and came to the treasure house.
A veritable sea of nettles guarded the door. Malcolm looked at them blankly. 'The damn things grow overnight.'
I pulled my socks over the bottoms of my trousers and assayed the traverse; stamped down an area by the bottom of the door and with fingers all the same stinging felt along to one end of the wooden sill and with some effort tugged it out. Malcolm leaned forward and gave me the piece of wire, and watched while I stood up and located the almost invisible hole. The wire slid through the tiny tube built into the mortar and, under pressure, the latch inside operated as smoothly as it had when I'd installed it. The wire dislodged a metal rod out of a slot, allowing the latch to spring open.
'I oiled it,' Malcolm said. 'The first time I tried, it was as rusty as hell.'
I pushed the edge of the heavy narrow door and it opened inwards, its crenellated edges disengaging from the brick courses on each side with faint grating noises but with no pieces breaking off.
'You built it well,' Malcolm said. 'Good mortar.'
'You told me how to mix the mortar, if you remember.'
I stepped into the small brick room which was barely four feet across at the far end and about eight feet long, narrowing in a wedge-shape towards the door which was set into one of the long walls. The wider end wall was stacked to waist height with flat wooden boxes like those used for chateau-bottled wines. In front, there were two large cardboard boxes with heavily taped-down tops. I stepped further in and tried to open one of the wine-type boxes, but those were nailed shut. I turned round and took a couple of steps back and stood in the doorway, looking out.
'Gold at the back, treasures in front,' Malcolm said, watching me with interest.
'I'll take your word for it.'
The air in the triangular room smelled faintly musty. There was no ventilation, as I'd told Arthur Bellbrook, and no damp course, either. I reset the rod into the latch on the inside as it wouldn't shut unless one did, and stepped outside. My teenage design limitations meant that one had to go down on one's knees to close the door the last few inches, hooking one's fingers into a hollow under the bottom row of bricks and pulling hard. The door and walls fitted together again like pieces of jigsaw, and the latch inside clicked into place. I replaced the sill under the door, kicking it home, and tried to encourage the crushed nettles to stand up again.
'They'll be flourishing again by morning,' Malcolm said. 'Rotten things.'
'Those cardboard boxes are too big to come out through the door,' I observed, rubbing stings on my hands and wrists.
'Oh, sure. I took them in empty and flat, then set them up, and filled them bit by bit.'
'You could take those things out again now.'
There was a pause, then he said, 'I'll wait. As things are at present, they might as well stay there.'
I nodded. He whistled to the dogs and we went on with the walk. We had given up referring explicitly to fear of the family, but it still hung around us like grief. On our return from the field, Malcolm waited outside without comment until I checked through the house, and prosaically began feeding the dogs on my report of all clear.
Neither of us discussed how long all the precautions were going to have to go on. Norman West's latest report had been as inconclusive as his first, and by Wednesday evening the pitiful summary I'd been making of his results read as follows:
DONALD: busy about the golf club. Cannot pinpoint any times. HELEN: working at home making Henley souvenirs. LUCY: reading, walking, writing, meditating. EDWIN: housework, shopping for groceries, going to public library. THOMAS: looking for new job, suffering headaches. BERENICE: housekeeping, looking after children, uncooperative. GERVASE: commuting to London, in and out of his office, home late. URSULA: looking after daughters, unhappy. FERDINAND: on statistics course, no attendance records. DEBS: photo-session vouched for on Newmarket Sales day. SERENA: teaching aerobics mornings and most evenings, shopping for clothes afternoons. VIVIEN: pottering about, can't remember. ALICIA: probably the same, unhelpful. JOYCE: playing bridge.
All one could say, I thought, was that no one had made any effort to produce alibis for either relevant time. Only Debs had a firm one, which had been arranged and vouched for by others. All the rest of the family had been moving about without timing their exits and entrances: normal behaviour for innocent people.
Only Joyce and I lived beyond half an hour's drive from Quantum. All of the others, from Donald at Henley to Gervase at Maidenhead, from Thomas near Reading to Lucy near Marlow, from Ferdinand in Wokingham to Serena in Bracknell, and even Vivien in Twyford and Alicia near Windsor, all of them seemed to have put down roots in a ring round the parent house like thistledown blown on the wind and reseeding.
The police had remarked on it when investigating Moira's murder, and had checked school runs and train timetables until they'd been giddy. They had apparently caught no one lying, but that seemed to me inconclusive in a family which had had a lot of practice in misrepresentation. The fact had been, and still was, that anybody could have got to Quantum and home again without being missed.
I spent a short part of that Wednesday wandering around Moira's greenhouse, thinking about her death.
