ahead. Then she directed the nursing staff never to let this Nadine Patterson in again. As it was, the woman never came back.’
‘She’d got what she came for,’ Harrigan said. ‘Can you describe her?’
‘I only met her once when she came to collect the legal papers. She was tall, very stylish, red hair, attractive. Very distant. Barely polite and only at first. You see, I don’t want to be harsh, but the woman who made the assessment that Amelie was mentally competent, when she clearly wasn’t, was a single woman who wasn’t particularly young or pretty or interesting.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Oh yes. Kylie was a local girl. She went to school here. I knew her father very well, he was a local vet for many years. I’m a widower; my wife died eight years ago. Unusual these days, I know. Most people divorce. We always kept dogs, we used to show them. I still do. Scottie dogs.’
He glanced at two photographs on his desk; one that Harrigan guessed was of his wife, and another showing three Scottie dogs sitting on cushions, all wearing tartan ribbons around their necks.
‘It was virtually the day after Amelie had signed the deed of gift. I was driving into Penrith, I had to be in court that afternoon. I realised I was beside Kylie in the traffic. I don’t think she saw me. She pulled ahead and turned in to a motel. She had a passenger with her, and as I drove past I saw her getting out of the car with a man.’
‘Do you have a description of this man?’
‘Not really. I only saw him from the back.’
‘What about the make of the car?’
‘It was her car. I recognised it. Actually it was her work car. Apparently she was supposed to be working that day.’
‘Your suggestion is this woman, Kylie Sutcliffe, was persuaded to make an assessment favourable to Nadine Patterson for the purposes of coercing Dr Santos into making this gift?’
‘I realise it’s a long bow to draw. But at the time I was angry. That anger must have shown when this Miss Patterson came to collect her papers. I told her I’d seen Kylie, and made some sarcastic comment that I hoped Kylie had been in a more serious frame of mind when she’d made her assessment of Amelie than when I saw her in Penrith carrying on with some man when she should have been at work. That woman looked at me and said, “I don’t think you saw that,” and walked out. I have to say I felt quite chilled. Then a day later, the following night in fact-it was winter, I got home after dark-’ He stopped for some moments. ‘My dogs. All three of them. They were dead. And they hadn’t died very pleasantly either.’
He couldn’t speak. Harrigan waited in silence.
‘I have three new dogs now. That’s them there-Penelope, Telemachus and Odysseus. But they’re not allowed out unless I’m there to watch them. I used to have a dog flap for them. Not any more.’
‘Your belief is that this Nadine Patterson killed your dogs?’
‘I’m not a fanciful man. I’ve thought over the brief encounter I had with this Patterson woman any number of times and I’m convinced I humiliated her by what I said. That’s what I saw in her face that day and, yes, I’m also convinced that she did kill my dogs and that’s why.’
‘You’re saying that whoever Kylie Sutcliffe was with, it was possibly Nadine Patterson’s lover.’
‘I’m unable to reach any other conclusion. I also have to say that I can’t see why anyone would be interested in Kylie if Nadine Patterson was there.’ He shrugged. ‘She was an arrogant woman. Arrogant and angry. And presumably vengeful.’
‘Did you ever speak to Kylie Sutcliffe about any of this?’
‘That’s another point. Not long after I saw her that day, she resigned her job at short notice and went to London with her boyfriend. I haven’t seen her in four years and neither has anyone else.’
‘What about her father?’
‘He’s dead now, and she never got along very well with her mother. I assume she’s communicating with her. I haven’t heard anything one way or the other. And then, of course, there was this mysterious letter to Mr Frank Wells. I’d executed Amelie’s will but I refused to act in the matter of the dispute over the probate. That was between Mr Wells and Medicine International. By then I wanted nothing to do with it.’
Harrigan glanced around the office. It was well ordered, like Lambert’s desk where the papers were laid out in neat piles. Nothing about him suggested a man given to flights of fancy or paranoia. Instead, everything Harrigan had heard spoke of someone who liked stability in his life; a man who probably still grieved for his wife and was deeply attached to his dogs.
‘Is this the first time you’ve given this information to anyone?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Lambert replied.
‘Dr Santos was a rich woman. Can I ask about the extent of her estate?’
‘Certainly. She was the only child of wealthy parents, the sole heir to their estate, which was substantial. I doubt she spent much money on herself. Most of it she invested over her lifetime, very shrewdly. Including the house at Blackheath, there were three properties, two of which were still owned by her when she died. Her surgery, which was at Turramurra, and a house at Duffys Forest, which was where she lived in Sydney. Both of those properties went to Medicine International in accordance with her will. Her bequest to them was well in excess of some millions of dollars even after the deed of gift had been paid.’
‘Do you know who owns those properties now?’
‘No, I don’t. At the time, Medicine International advised me they intended selling on both properties and realising the capital. But those sales would have occurred after probate was declared, which meant they were handled by the charity’s own lawyers. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘Would this Nadine Patterson have known the contents of Dr Santos’s will?’
‘However she found it out, yes, she very definitely did. She made a number of comments during our meeting indicating that.’
‘Dr Santos seemed to live in isolated locations,’ Harrigan said.
‘She used to love to ride; it was her great pleasure. I think it was her only recreation. That’s why she lived at Duffys Forest. She could keep her horses there.’
‘What about the house at Blackheath? Is it still owned by the Shillingworth Trust?’
‘So far as I know. I can tell you it’s not lived in. I have that much information. The second trustee was a David Tate. You could check with him, whoever he might be. I have sometimes wondered if he was the man I saw with Kylie Sutcliffe that day.’
‘Do you know who the beneficiaries were?’
‘Yes, I insisted we establish that the trust was properly legally constituted, which it certainly was. It was a discretionary trust, which meant of course that the return to beneficiaries was at the discretion of the trustees. The beneficiary was a company, Cheshire Nominees. That’s where I gave up. There seemed no point in pursuing the matter further. I had no idea where it might take me.’
‘Could you give me the addresses of all Dr Santos’s properties, including the Blackheath house?’ Harrigan asked.
‘I have no problem with that. Do you intend to visit them?’
‘I’ll take a look at them. I’m interested in knowing who owns them now and what’s happened to them.’
Lambert glanced at the photograph of his dogs; then he opened a desk drawer and handed Harrigan a set of keys.
‘You might need these,’ he said. ‘When Amelie was sent to hospital, the nurse who found her also locked up her house. When the deed of gift was made, the nursing home gave me the keys to hand on to Miss Patterson.’ Lambert looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I was about to give them to her when we had our verbal encounter, if I can describe it in that way. Her response so shocked me that I completely forgot to hand them over. Anyway, she’d already walked out of my office. I didn’t want to meet with her again so I sent them on to her at the Shillingworth Trust. They came back undelivered. Not known at this address.’
‘You didn’t hand them over and she didn’t ask for them,’ Harrigan said.
‘No. Which would suggest she already had a set. I’m sure she did. Amelie would almost certainly have had a spare set somewhere in the house.’
‘An easy house to break into then?’
‘It was generally said by the nurses who visited her that Amelie had no sense of security whatsoever,’
