Hot Money Part 16

If he knew you by reputation, if he had any idea of the sums involved, if he heard you were dead, if he were conscientious, and if he knew who to get in touch with. If he were lazy, he might not bother, he's under no obligation. Within a month, unless you boasted a bit about your wealth, he'll have forgotten your will's in his files.'

'You seem to know an awful lot about it.'

'Joyce worked for years for the Citizens Advice Bureau, do you remember? I used to hear lurid tales of family squabbles because no one knew where to find a will they were sure had been made. And equally lurid tales of family members knowing where the will was and burning it before anyone else could find it, if they didn't like what was in it.'

'That's why I left it in safekeeping,' Malcolm said. 'Precisely because of that.'

We reached the far boundary of the field. The stream ran on through the neighbour's land, but we at that point turned back.

'What should I do then?' he asked. 'Any ideas?'

'Send it to the probate office at Somerset House.'

'How do you mean?'

'Joyce told me about it, one time. You put your will in a special envelope they'll send you if you apply for it, then you take it or send it to the central probate office. They register your will there and keep it safe. When anyone dies and any solicitor anywhere applies for probate, the central probate office routinely checks its files. If it has ever registered a will for that person, that's die envelope that will be opened, and that's the will that will be proved.'

He thought it over. 'Do you mean, if I registered a will with the probate office, and then changed my mind and wrote a new one, it wouldn't be any good?'

'You'd have to retrieve the old will and re-register the new one. Otherwise the old will would be the one adhered to.'

'Good G.o.d. I didn't know any of this.'

'Joyce says not enough people know. She says if people would only register their wills, they couldn't be pressured into changing them when they're gaga or frightened or on their deathbeds. Or at least, wills made like that would be useless.'

'I used to laugh, rather, at Joyce's voluntary work. Felt indulgent.' He sighed. 'Seems it had its uses.'

The Citizens Advice Bureau, staffed by knowledgeable armies of Joyces, could steer one from the cradle to the grave, from marriage to divorce to probate, from child allowance to old age supplements. I'd not always listened attentively to Joyce's tales, but I'd been taken several times to the Bureau, and I seemed to have absorbed more than I'd realised.

'I kept a copy of my new will,' Malcolm said. 'I'll show it to you when we go in.'

'You don't need to.'

'You'd better see it,' he said.

I didn't argue. He whistled to the dogs who left the stream reluctantly, and we made our way back to the gate into the garden.

'Just wait out here while I check the house,' I said.

He was astonished. 'We've only been out for half an hour. And we locked the doors.'

'You regularly go out for half an hour at this time. And how many of the family still have keys to the house?'

He was silent. All of the people who had ever lived there could have kept their keys to the house, and there had never been any need, before now, to change the locks.

'Stay here, then?' I asked, and he nodded sadly.

The kitchen door was still locked. I let myself in and went all through the house again, but it was quiet and undisturbed, and doors that I'd set open at certain angles were still as I'd left them.

I called Malcolm and he came into the kitchen and began getting the food for the dogs.

'Are you going through this checking rigmarole every single time we leave the house?' he said, sounding as if he didn't like it.

'Yes, until we get the locks changed.'

He didn't like that either, but expressed his disapproval only in a frown and a rather too vigorous sc.r.a.ping of dog food out of a tin.

'Fill the water bowls,' he said rather crossly, and I did that and set them down again on the floor.

'It isn't so easy to change the locks,' he said. 'They're all mortice locks, as you know, set into the doors. The one on the front door is antique.'

The front door keys were six inches long and ornate, and there had never been more than three of them, as far as I knew.

'All right,' I said, if we keep the front door bolted and the keys in your safe, we won't change that one.'

A little pacified, he put the filled dinner bowls on the floor, wiped his fingers and said it was time for a noggin. I bolted the kitchen door on the inside and then followed him through the hall to the office, where he poured scotch into two gla.s.ses and asked if I wanted to desecrate mine with ice. I said yes and went back to the kitchen to fetch some. When I returned, he had taken some sheets of paper from his open briefcase and was reading them.

'Here you are. Here's my will,' he said, and pa.s.sed the papers over.

He had made the will, I reflected, before he had telephoned me to put an end to our quarrel, and I expected not to figure in it in consequence, but I'd done him an injustice. Sitting in an armchair and sipping the whisky, I read through all the minor bequests to people like Arthur Bellbrook, and all the lawyerly gobbledegook 'upon trust' and without commas, and came finally to the plain language.

'To each of my three divorced wives Vivien Joyce and Alicia I bequeath the sum of five hundred thousand pounds.

'My son Robin being provided for I direct that the residue of my estate shall be divided equally among my children Donald Lucy Thomas Gervase Ian Ferdinand and Serena.'

A long clause followed with provisions for 'if any of my children shall pre-decease me', leaving 'his or her share' to the grandchildren.

Finally came two short sentences: I bequeath to my son Ian the piece of thin wire to be found on my desk. He knows what he can do with 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 doc.u.ment 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, to... er... 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 d.a.m.n things grow overnight.'

I pulled my socks over the bottoms of my trousers and a.s.sayed 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 h.e.l.l.'

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.'

1 stepped into the small brick room which was barefy 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 ringers 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, Til 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. busy about the golf club. Cannot pinpoint any times.

HELEN:.

working at home making Henley souvenirs. working at home making Henley souvenirs.

LUCY:.

reading, walking, writing, meditating. reading, walking, writing, meditating.

EDWIN:.

housework, shopping for groceries, going to public library. housework, shopping for groceries, going to public library.

THOMAS:.