‘Where have you been? I’ve been trying to contact you,’ Caroline said.
The siblings met at a restaurant. Caroline knew she would be paying.
‘I was occupied,’ Ralph said.
‘You didn’t pay for the hotel. I phoned them.’
‘Did you pay?’
‘Hell, I did. What sort of trouble are you in?’
‘Money trouble, the usual.’
‘Where are you staying?’ Caroline could see that her brother was looking the worse for wear and that he had a tired, faraway look about him.
‘A cheap hotel. It’s not much good.’
‘Why? You could always check into somewhere better.’
‘The deal in Spain has gone all wrong. It’s left me in a predicament.’
‘You’re hiding out. Why?’
‘Some people want their money. The sort of people who don’t take no for an answer.’
‘I need your help,’ Caroline said. ‘Dundas has got us over a barrel.’
‘Didn’t you figure that out when he was reading the will?’
‘I wanted the five million first.’
‘You signed the clause at the bottom, no contesting the will?’
‘It’s not enforceable. The tests of our father’s sanity are invalid. We can dispute that.’
‘Caroline, supposing I agree to go in with you, what’s in it for me?’
‘Two hundred thousand pounds today, and forty per cent of whatever we find.’
‘Assuming the will is invalidated, and we become the sole beneficiaries?’
‘We’ll never find it all. Dundas will have covered his tracks well. That’s why we need you,’ Caroline said.
She called the waiter over. ‘Another bottle of wine, please,’ she said. This was a time to celebrate.
‘We? You and Desmond?’
‘Regardless of what you and he may think of each other, he realises that he’s not up to what’s required.’
‘And I am?’
‘You know the tricks, what Dundas could have done. Where the titles to the properties are, the bank accounts.’
‘It will cost.’
‘I’ve offered you two hundred thousand pounds.’
‘We’ll need a top-notch computer hacker, someone to go through Dundas’s office, check the files, take copies.’
‘Illegal?’
‘Do you think he’ll respond to a legal demand?’
‘We need to know before we force him. How much for the additional help?’
‘Probably another three hundred thousand pounds.’
Caroline was suspicious. He was her brother, and she knew him better than anyone else. Give the man an inch, he would take a mile, and then disappear, brother or no brother. ‘You want me to give you more money?’ she said.
‘Not this time. Our father owes us a lot more than a pittance. I’ll play it by the book, but I need your assurance that you’ll help out if I can’t fend off the money lenders.’
‘Violent?’
‘I was desperate. I had no option. But now, with you and me, we’ll deal with Dundas. Our father was crazy, you know that?’
‘I know it. Our mother up there in that room. Have you seen the body?’ Caroline said.
‘I’m not sure if I want to.’
‘I have. It’s ghoulish. Whether it was her death or not that turned him, there’s no way to know. And are we sure he was making the decisions all these years, with Dundas implementing them?’
‘How can we be? How can anyone be?’
‘We’ll never know. The will, we are assuming, is genuine.’
‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but whatever you do, don’t dispute it for now. You, Caroline, need to be with Dundas. He must never know of our meeting here today.’
‘Agreed. I’ll transfer the money to your account when I have the details. Play this fair, and we’ll deal with that bastard Dundas and his scheming daughter.’
Chapter 10
Homicide still wrestled with where Molly Dempster fitted into the investigation. There was no reason to believe that she was involved in her employer’s death or that of his wife, but she had spent more time in the house than any person other than Gilbert.
Isaac and Larry found her at her house. There were signs of her new-found wealth: the two men at the front of the house painting the windows and the door, another man tending to the garden.
‘I had to do something,’ Molly said. ‘Mr Lawrence gave me the money to look after myself.’
She seemed to be unaffected by the wealth of her lifelong employer and spoke of him and his children in a loving, almost childlike manner, as though they were her family. Not unusual, he supposed, as checks into the woman had revealed a life of modest means: no man in her life, no pets, nothing.
Inside the house, also being subjected to modest renovations, Molly Dempster sat in the small living room. Isaac and Larry sat nearby. A tray of tea and biscuits on a table in front of all three.
‘Miss Dempster, for all those years you were in that house with Mrs Lawrence upstairs,’ Isaac said. He had helped himself to a cup of tea and a biscuit. Larry, conscious of the need to keep his weight down, only had a cup of tea.
‘I know. Somehow, I find it romantic, but then I was always the first to cry if there was a love story on the television, you know the type, where one of them dies young, the other left on their own.’
‘Do you understand why Mr Lawrence would have wanted his wife there?’
‘Oh, yes. They never wanted to be apart, neither of them. If he was late coming home, or she was, the other one would be fretting.’
‘But what concerns us is that you were there twice a week, and Mrs Lawrence was buried in the cellar. After that, Mr Lawrence had to prepare his wife’s
