Fault in the Structure

CHAPTER 3

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A place of security in times of insecurity

The Stone House just outside the village of Wandles Parva on the edge of the New Forest belonged wholly to the eighteenth century. All the rooms in it were spacious, high-ceilinged and airy. The most pleasant room of all, thought Sir Ferdinand, meeting his mother, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, at the conclusion of his visit to Wayneflete College, was the drawing-room.

It had two doorways, one leading in from the hall, the other to an ante-room. Both doors were augmented by six plain panels: two, small and square, at the top of the door, four, rectangular and beautifully proportioned, below. Both doorways were topped by broken pediments evolved from an earlier style, that of Renaissance architecture.

In the drawing-room, as in every room in the house with the exception of the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, there were bookcases. These were low and long and placed on either side of the elegant fireplace in the drawing-room, taller and more sombre in the dining-room, and lining all the available wall-space in the library.

The bedrooms were stocked with lighter matter; poetry, essays, humorous literature and novels for the most part. In the small study where Laura Gavin, Dame Beatrice’s secretary and close friend, carried out such duties as answering letters and typing from Dame Beatrice’s manuscripts, the books were on law and forensic medicine; and here, too, were volumes for general reference, encyclopaedias, atlases, motoring and yachting manuals, guide books, year books, dictionaries both English and foreign.

Ferdinand was being given tea in the drawing-room and he had turned the conversation on to his recent visit to Wayneflete College. Having greeted him and announced that she did not care for tea, Laura Gavin, the secretary, had slipped away and left the mother and son together.

‘So did you guarantee the forty thousand pounds?’ Dame Beatrice enquired, at the end of her son’s narration.

‘No, mother,’ Sir Ferdinand replied. ‘A most unexpected thing has happened. Perhaps I should say that two unexpected things have happened. All that I’ve told you so far is, so to speak, stale news, so I’ll come to the reason for my being here. I need your advice.’

‘Intriguing.’

‘My profession has aggravated and extended what has always been a suspicious mind. However, my cousin Harry suffers no such disadvantage, so I want to know whether you think, when I come to enumerate them, that his unusual suspicions are justified; if you decide that they are, I’d like to know what you think I ought to do about them. Harry is neither doctor nor lawyer, but he has a great fund of commonsense.’

‘More and more intriguing! Would you take it amiss if I ventured upon a little wild guesswork?’

‘I know something about your kind of guesswork. It’s usually founded upon a brilliant series of deductions. Please go ahead.’

‘I can scarcely bear to wait for the full details which I trust you are about to supply, but my suggestion is that, since you have not needed to guarantee a replacement of the forty thousand pounds of embezzled money, old Sir Anthony must either have paid the debt out of his own pocket, or else he has died and the money has been repaid out of his estate. That is if I am correct in assuming that Mr Lawrence managed to become so much persona grata to the old gentleman as to be nominated as his heir.’

‘You must be clairvoyante, mother.’

‘That is not so flattering an observation as your previous attempt. It is true, then? Sir Anthony is dead?’

‘True as true can be.’

‘So what is the advice I have to give?’

‘Well, everything turns upon this suspicious mind to which I make claim and which gives me cause to think that Harry may be right, although I fail to see what anybody can do about it. The facts are these: a fortune, which was to come to this minor for whom Sir Anthony’s cousin and Lawrence himself were trustees, was left for the youth to enjoy at such time as he should come of age. No actual year was mentioned in the Will. I have seen a copy of the testator’s intentions and the words at such time as he shall come of age are plainly given. Well, of course, when the Will was made, the recognised date for a minor to come of age, unless otherwise stated, was on his or her twenty-first birthday.’

‘Ah, yes, I see. A comparatively recent change in the law could have made a difference of three years to the heir presumptive.’

‘Exactly. It is now recognised that youths and young women come of age at eighteen instead of at twenty-one. Old Sir Anthony’s cousin, the other trustee, had told Lawrence, it seems, that the testator expected his heir to inherit at the age of twenty-one, but the heir himself, not unnaturally, wanted the letter of the law to be observed, and confidently expected to come into his money as soon as he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. There was a legal wrangle and, owing to the wording of the Will, the trustees lost their appeal, although there is no doubt in my mind that their contention was right and that the testator had been thinking in terms of his son’s twenty-first birthday and not his eighteenth.’

‘If Lawrence was able to embezzle forty thousand pounds, the fortune must be a considerable one,’

‘Yes, indeed. Well, the youth claimed his legal rights, the auditors were called in and that is how Harry came to be mixed up in the business, for it was his firm which did the audit. Well, I don’t need to stress the result of the auditor’s findings. Instead of having three more years in which to make good the deficit or, as I think, make his arrangements to leave the country, Lawrence found himself in a most equivocal position.’

‘But what is Harry’s problem?’

‘Frankly, mother, Harry believes that old Sir Anthony was murdered.’

‘Evidence? Has Harry anything to go on?’

‘That’s the devil of it. So far, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence he could offer. The death certificate was