Presently, the tour completed, we returned to the drawing room and Mrs Tuckerton rang for tea. It was brought in by the seedy-looking manservant. There was a vast Victorian silver teapot which could have done with a clean.
Mrs Tuckerton sighed as he left the room.
'Servants are really impossible nowadays,' she said. 'After my husband died, the married couple he had had for nearly twenty years insisted on leaving. They said they were retiring, but I heard afterwards that they took another post. A very highly paid one. I think it's absurd, myself, to pay these high wages. When you think what servants' board and lodging costs – to say nothing of their laundry.'
Yes, I thought, mean. The pale eyes, the tight mouth – avarice was there.
There was no difficulty in getting Mrs Tuckerton to talk. She liked talking. She liked, in particular, talking about herself. Presently, by listening with close attention, and uttering an encouraging word now and then, I knew a good deal about Mrs Tuckerton. I knew, too, more than she was conscious of telling me. I knew that she had married Thomas Tuckerton, a widower, five years ago. She had been 'much, much younger than he was.' She had met him at a big seaside hotel where she had been a bridge hostess. She was not aware that that last fact had slipped out. He had had a daughter at school near there – 'so difficult for a man to know what to do with a girl when he takes her out.
'Poor Thomas, he was so lonely… his first wife had died some years back and he missed her very much.'
Mrs Tuckerton's picture of herself continued. A gracious kindly woman taking pity on this aging lonely man. His deteriorating health and her devotion.
'Though, of course, in the last stages of his illness I couldn't really have any friends of my own.'
Had there been, I wondered, some men friends whom Thomas Tuckerton had thought undesirable? It might explain the terms of his will.
Ginger had looked up the terms of his will for me at Somerset House.
Bequests to old servants, to a couple of godchildren, and then provision for his wife – sufficient, but not unduly generous. A sum in trust, the income to be enjoyed during her lifetime. The residue of his estate, which ran into a sum of six figures, to his daughter Thomasina Ann, to be hers absolutely at the age of twenty-one, or on her marriage. If she died before twenty-one unmarried, the money was to go to her stepmother. There had been, it seemed, no other members of the family.
The prize, I thought, had been a big one. And Mrs Tuckerton liked money… it stuck out all over her. She had never had any money of her own, I was sure, till she married her elderly widower. And then, perhaps, it had gone to her head. Hampered, in her life with an invalid husband, she had looked forward to the time when she would be free, still young, and rich beyond her wildest dreams.
The will, perhaps, had been a disappointment. She had dreamed of something better than a moderate income. She had looked forward to expensive travel, to luxury cruises, to clothes, jewels – or possibly to the sheer pleasure of money itself – mounting up in the bank.
Instead the girl was to have all that money! The girl was to be a wealthy heiress. The girl who, very likely, had disliked her stepmother and shown it with the careless ruthlessness of youth. The girl was to be the rich one – unless…
Unless…? Was that enough? Could I really believe that the blonde-haired meretricious creature talking platitudes so glibly, was capable of seeking out the Pale Horse, and arranging for a young girl to die?
No, I couldn't believe it…
Nevertheless, I must do my stuff. I said, rather abruptly:
'I believe, you know, I met your daughter – stepdaughter – once?'
She looked at me in mild surprise, though without much interest.
'Thomasina? Did you?'
'Yes, in Chelsea!'
'Oh, Chelsea! Yes, it would be…' She sighed. 'These girls nowadays. So difficult. One doesn't seem to have any control over them. It upset her father very much. I couldn't do anything about it, of course. She never listened to anything I said.' She sighed again. 'She was nearly grown-up you know, when we married. A stepmother -' she shook her head.
'Always a difficult position,' I said sympathetically.
'I made allowances – did my best in every way.'
'I'm sure you did.'
'But it was absolutely no use. Of course Tom wouldn't allow her to be actually rude to me, but she sailed as near the wind as she could. She really made life quite impossible. In a way it was a relief to me when she insisted on leaving home, but I could quite understand how Tom felt about it. She got in with a most undesirable set.'
'I – rather gathered that,' I said.
'Poor Thomasina.' said Mrs Tuckerton. She adjusted a stray lock of blonde hair. Then she looked at me. 'Oh, but perhaps you don't know. She died about a month ago. Encephalitis – very sudden. It's a disease that attacks young people, I believe – so sad.'
'I did know she was dead,' I said.
I got up.
'Thank you, Mrs Tuckerton, very much indeed for showing me your house.' I shook hands.
Then as I moved away, I turned back.
'By the way,' I said. 'I think you know the Pale Horse, don't you?'
There wasn't any doubt of the reaction. Panic, sheer panic, showed in those pale eyes. Beneath the makeup, her face was suddenly white and afraid.
Her voice came shrill and high:
'Pale Horse? What do you mean by the Pale Horse? I don't know anything about the Pale Horse.'
I let mild surprise show in my eyes.
'Oh, my mistake. There's a very interesting old pub, in Much Deeping. I was down there the other day and was taken to see it. It's been charmingly converted, keeping all the atmosphere. I certainly thought your name was mentioned – but perhaps it was your stepdaughter who had been down there – or someone else of the same name.' I paused. 'The place has got – quite a reputation.'
I enjoyed my exit line. In one of the mirrors on the wall I saw Mrs Tuckerton's face reflected. She was staring after me. She was very, very frightened and I saw just how she would look in years to come. It was not a pleasant sight.
Chapter 14
I
'So now we're quite sure,' said Ginger.
'We were sure before.'
'Yes – reasonably so. But this does clinch it.'
I was silent for a moment or two. I was visualizing Mrs Tuckerton journeying to Birmingham. Entering the Municipal Square Buildings – meeting Mr Bradley. Her nervous apprehension… his reassuring bonhomie. His skilful underlining of the lack of risk. (He would have had to underline that very hard with Mrs Tuckerton.) I could see her going away, not committing herself. Letting the idea take root in her mind. Perhaps she went to see her stepdaughter, or her stepdaughter came home for a weekend. There could have been talk, hints of marriage. And all the time the thought of the money – not just a little money, not a miserly pittance – but lots of money, big money, money that enabled you to do everything you had ever wanted! And all going to this degenerate, ill- mannered girl, slouching about in the coffee bars of Chelsea in her jeans and her sloppy jumpers, with her undesirable degenerate friends. Why should a girl like that, a girl who was no good and would never be any good, have all that beautiful money?
