The inheritance, p.19
The Inheritance, page 19
‘Are you saying that someone put heroin on your pillow?’
‘In my bathroom, actually, but yes, someone had placed it there, along with all the paraphernalia I needed: a baggy, a needle and syringe, a lighter, even a bloody silver spoon. That’s a laugh, isn’t it? Born with a silver spoon in his mouth – they say that, don’t they?’
‘They do,’ she agreed.
‘Seeing it there made it far harder to resist, though I did try. It’s one thing to get in your car, drive to the city and cruise round taking a massive risk until you find that one dealer you might actually know well enough to score from. You can tell yourself it isn’t worth it, but when it’s on a plate for you like that, it feels like a banquet for a starving man. I couldn’t help myself.’ He took another gulp of his beer. ‘If the maid hadn’t found me, I’d have been a goner.’
‘Who do you think gave you the drugs?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘It’s obvious who stood to gain the most from your disinheritance,’ she remarked. ‘And that was Freddie.’
‘He was most probably behind the idea,’ Oliver agreed.
This did not seem like the same thing to Sarah. ‘But you don’t think he planted the drugs in your bathroom personally?’
‘He made sure he was well away from Cragsmoor that day, so it was all very deniable.’
‘Did you accuse him anyway?’
‘I did, but funnily enough he denied it, and strangely no one sided with the man who had just overdosed on heroin. They all thought I had made it up. They said I must have had the H on me.’
‘So, if Freddie was behind the idea to plant drugs in your bathroom, who actually placed them there?’
‘No idea,’ he said quickly. ‘Could have been anyone.’
‘Hardly. I think you could have narrowed it down to only a few people with access to your room.’
‘People used to come and go a lot more back then,’ he said evasively.
‘But surely it was only a few servants or family members that could have done it?’ she suggested. ‘A servant would have been risking a lot, for what? A few pounds from Freddie, perhaps?’ He didn’t argue that point. ‘But a family member could have gained a lot from the removal of a man whose judgement had been weakened by drugs, especially as no one knew at that point what a disaster Freddie was going to be as the heir to the estate.’
‘Yes, he did rather fuck everything up, didn’t he?’ He seemed quietly amused by that.
‘Was Sephy there when you overdosed?’
‘No.’
‘Which leaves Lucy.’
‘I can’t remember if Lucy was around.’
‘But we’ve already established that Lucy picked you up from the airport and my aunt said she stayed with you when you first came out of rehab.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, as if he really couldn’t recall.
‘An overdose when you were already in the last chance saloon would have been just what was needed to push your father over the edge and get you disinherited, but it almost went very wrong, didn’t it? You nearly died.’
‘Technically, I was dead,’ he said, ‘for a while.’
‘Then you must have been incredibly angry afterwards,’ she probed, ‘towards the person who gave you the drugs. So, who was it, do you reckon? A servant or Lucy?’
‘No bloody idea.’
‘Oh, come on, Oliver, you must have.’
‘Even if I had my suspicions, I didn’t have any proof.’
‘You don’t need proof to harbour a grudge, and that overdose put you in the wilderness for years. When your father died, Freddie inherited everything instead of you. When your legal bid to overturn the will dragged on, you started to run out of money, which is why you were at the house that day when Lucy disappeared. You were trying to come to some sort of compromise with Freddie and your other siblings. Am I right?’
‘I was trying to be reasonable.’
‘And you were waiting in your old room, having a drink on your own, when you looked down and saw Lucy? The woman you must have suspected of being Freddie’s accomplice. The one who might very well have planted the drugs that almost killed you.’
‘I never said that.’
‘You had to have considered it, though. It would have been quite the betrayal. She had the opportunity and the motive to get you disinherited. Maybe Freddie put her up to it then made himself scarce.’
‘You think that’s what happened?’ he asked her.
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘but it doesn’t really matter what I think, only what you thought at the time. You were at a very low ebb then, Oliver, weren’t you? You were back in your family home at Cragsmoor, a place that should have been yours by rights, you must have been feeling very resentful and then you spotted Lucy looking like she hadn’t got a care in the world. Is that what happened?’
‘That doesn’t mean I did anything about it, except pour myself another drink. Sometimes shit just happens and you have to deal with it.’
‘Did you deal with it by killing Lucy?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Lucy and I didn’t get along, that’s no secret, but I didn’t kill her. I wouldn’t kill my father’s daughter over a scrap of land and some money. In any case, by that stage, I wasn’t in the best shape physically. Climbing the bloody stairs was tricky. Do you think I could have run after a young woman and overpowered her? No chance.’
‘Who did it, then?’
‘I don’t know. No one does. Nobody even knows if she was killed.’
‘The direction she was heading in when you saw her would have taken her towards the path to the beach.’
‘That’s right. She went there often. She liked to swim.’
‘Was she swimming that day?’
‘I seem to recall she mentioned earlier that she planned to go for a swim that afternoon, yes.’
‘You gave the police a description of what she was wearing – blue denim jeans, white top, green jacket?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And she didn’t have anything with her? No bag or anything?’
‘No bag or anything,’ he repeated facetiously.
‘And her costume?’
‘What?’ He had almost finished the beer by now and was holding the nearly empty glass in his hand and frowning at it in a not-too-subtle way.
‘I’ll get you another pint in a minute,’ she told him, ‘but I was wondering about her costume.’ When he looked confused, she said, ‘You said she definitely didn’t have a bag with her.’
‘Oh,’ was all he said in response.
‘I suppose she could have worn it under her clothes,’ offered Sarah. ‘That’s probably what I would have done. She probably wouldn’t have wanted to get changed on the beach.’
‘Yes, yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what she would have done. More modest.’ She could tell he was grateful for the answer she had provided. There was definitely something off about this.
‘But still, no towel.’
‘Huh?’
‘Surely, if she was going off for a swim, regardless of whether she was wearing her costume or not, she would have taken a towel.’
‘Maybe she did?’ he offered weakly.
‘Well no, because you already said she wasn’t carrying one. No bag or anything, remember?’
He stared at her as if he had belatedly realized she was capable of trapping him. ‘I did say that, didn’t I?’ he said with an exaggerated tone of incredulity. ‘Perhaps I didn’t see a towel and she had one all along? Who can say? I mean, I noticed Lucy walking away but I didn’t give it much thought because it didn’t seem all that important at the time. How was I to know I would never see her again?’
‘You were the only witness who was on their own, weren’t you?’ she asked him, while wondering to herself if he could be lying about seeing Lucy heading towards the path at the rear of the house or even seeing her at all. His story about the sighting would have corroborated the other witnesses’ accounts if he had not been so vague on timing, but was this because he had been drinking or was it deliberate on his part? If he had really seen Lucy from an upstairs window, then he was less likely to have been the killer, but what if he wasn’t really sitting alone in his room for all that time? Could Oliver have slipped out and followed her somehow or intercepted her before she took the path to the beach? ‘Sephy and Freddie were in the kitchen with Toby and his nanny, right?’
‘Apparently so, but of course I wasn’t there. You’ll have to ask them about that.’
‘I have,’ she explained, ‘though not Toby, obviously. He’s too high profile these days and your former nanny is dead, of course.’
‘Dead!’ He reacted sharply to that. ‘When did that happen?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, confused now, ‘I was told she died years ago.’
‘What? No! She sent me a birthday card two months ago. She never forgets. Margaret’s not dead, unless it happened recently.’
‘Then I apologize. I was misinformed about that.’ It had been the retired detective who had told her he thought Margaret had been dead for a while, but it seemed this information was false. ‘She must be very old.’
‘In her eighties,’ Oliver said. ‘She’s not that much older than me. I think Father went for her because she was young and pretty back then. Wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘Does she live nearby?’
‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘and I want you to leave her alone.’
Sarah smiled. ‘Of course. Same again?’
He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Perhaps he was weighing up whether it was safe to drink more in her presence, but his greed for beer and whiskey outweighed his caution. ‘Why the fuck not?’ he announced jovially, as if this was a rare day off.
When Sarah returned with more drinks, he immediately reached for his new pint and took an enormous gulp as if it was much needed. The whiskey that accompanied it went down quickly too.
‘You dropped your legal case against the will just weeks after Lucy disappeared?’
‘I was left with no choice,’ he argued.
‘What happened?’
‘My lawyer informed me that mounting a very public legal case involving money was not a good look for a heroin user whose sister had just vanished. He suspected no one would be particularly sympathetic towards an addict whose family had kicked him out then experienced a very public tragedy. He urged me to drop the case and make a statement in support of my brother as the de facto head of the family. He also said he could not continue to represent me.’
‘No wonder you gave in.’
‘I was also being blackmailed by the family.’
‘What could they blackmail you with, Oliver? You were already disgraced and very publicly disinherited. What’s worse than that? Except perhaps murder?’
‘Murder?’ He sounded outraged. ‘I told you I didn’t kill Lucy. It wasn’t anything that I had done. It was about the money.’
‘What money?’
‘When I was kicked out of the family home I had nowhere to go, so Father arranged for me to live in the cottage. At least I had a roof over my head and some income from the trust fund, which continued to pay out, but when the lawsuit dragged on, Freddie threatened to kick me out of the cottage and stop the trust fund. He said my drug addiction could be cited to stop all funds from any source linked to the family, on the grounds that I would spend it on something that could kill me. Ironically, I had been clean for over a year by then and he knew it. I came to the house that day for a meeting with Freddie to see if we could work out some sort of compromise, but the bastard knew he had a winning hand. That’s why he kept me waiting, so I stayed upstairs in my old room and had a few drinks. Freddie saw me eventually but he didn’t budge. In the end, I had to back down or I would have been penniless as well as homeless. It was game, set and match. I almost admired his ruthlessness. The little bastard.’
Sarah left the eldest Woodfell sibling sitting outside the pub with a fresh pint. It had turned cold by now and was threatening rain, but Oliver would have probably continued to sit there in all weathers, as long as he still had a beer. Sarah didn’t know what to make of him. Parts of his story sounded convincing and she believed his explanation about the overdose and the blackmail, but if he did suspect Lucy of leaving drugs in his room for him then surely that would be a motive to kill her. He’d been at rock bottom when he’d gone to Cragsmoor to plead with his brother and Freddie had left him waiting in his old room, where he’d done what he usually did these days – he drank – and then he’d seen Lucy. If he considered her to be the cause of all his problems, then maybe he did kill her. He told Sarah he was too unfit to attack a young woman, but how could she know if that was the truth back then?
It seemed to Sarah that almost every time she tried to rule out a suspect, they ruled themselves back in again by being evasive or through outright lying. Eliminating them from her enquiries wasn’t working. The trouble with the Woodfell siblings and everyone else linked to Lucy’s death was that they all seemed to have something to hide.
Oliver couldn’t necessarily be trusted to tell her the full truth about anything. How could he even remember what he had seen if, on his own admission, he’d had a few drinks? Had he really not noticed Lucy wasn’t carrying a bag or towel or find it strange at the time? To be fair, he wasn’t alone in that. The police never seemed to question it either. If Lucy had walked down to the beach without a towel or a swimming costume, it would give more credence to the theory that she might have been meeting someone instead. Sarah recalled the other path that led away from the beach and carried on all the way to the village. Lucy could have gone that way to avoid suspicion and met somebody there, but who? The captain, perhaps, if he had left London earlier than he claimed, or someone else entirely – and why would she need to keep it a secret from the rest of the family?
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
That same day Sarah got another call from her aunt’s solicitor. Dickie seemed a little uneasy but he went on to tell her about two enquiries he’d received regarding buying Cragsmoor, which he was legally required to inform her about, even though she was unlikely to ever be in a position to sell the place herself. There was also a request from Literary Heritage, a charity that wanted Evelyn’s personal papers for an exhibition they hoped to open, to showcase notable British authors.
‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ she asked when he didn’t conclude their call. ‘And you’ve saved the worst till last?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ and he suggested that she go online to read a news item that had been posted on a tabloid web page that morning, then ring him back if she felt the need. It sounded ominous.
MURDER THEY WROTE!
Author’s ‘Mad Aunty’ leaves entire estate to her but only if she can solve a murder.
Sarah felt sick. Now everyone would know what she was really doing here, including Mrs Jenkins and Patrick, and that she had lied about that to them both.
The article went on to explain the terms of the famous but eccentric Evelyn Moore’s will. It also claimed that Lucy Woodfell, a woman who had disappeared but was believed to have been murdered, was probably Evelyn’s lesbian lover, during an age when coming out was not an option. Grief and torment over her missing soulmate had led Evelyn to write her monster-hit novel The Gallows Tree, which had sold millions of copies in thirty countries.
Her obsession with Lucy had led to her ploughing some of her fortune into buying the ancestral home from the victim’s bankrupt family. Here she had ‘created a shrine’ to her lover and spent decades pining for her, changing nothing. The reporter went on to describe Sarah’s aunt as fearsome and reclusive, with a fortune she was now prepared to leave to her niece, as long as Sarah delivered justice to her auntie from beyond the grave.
The newspaper claimed that Sarah thought her aunt was crazy but was willing to comply with the terms of her will in order to receive her fortune. He then described Sarah as ‘a failed novelist’.
‘Tell me you didn’t leak this, Dickie?’ she asked, as soon as the solicitor answered her irate phone call.
‘Of course not.’
‘Then who did?’
‘I don’t know. You didn’t tell anyone that your inheritance was conditional on solving a murder?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then, regrettably, I have to entertain the notion that it could have been someone from our firm,’ he said with resignation, and she had to admit it was the most likely option, given the detail in the article about her aunt’s legacy and its terms.
‘Can nothing be done about it?’ she asked. It hadn’t quite sunk in yet: she had been named in a derogatory newspaper article that would likely be read by thousands of people online. I’m all-in on this investigation, she thought, and can’t just abandon it, otherwise I would very happily walk away from it right now.
‘I already put a call in to their editor,’ Dickie explained. ‘He was neither helpful nor sympathetic and in no way keen to alter a word. The article has been viewed thousands of times already, so the cat is well and truly out of the bag, I’m afraid.’
‘Is there a case for libel?’
‘A libel action is ruinously expensive and you haven’t inherited that kind of money, yet. You can’t libel the dead, by the way. It’s open season on them once they’re gone, so I assume you mean that they have libelled you in some way.’
‘They said I described my aunt as crazy. I would never do that.’
‘Yes, I suggested as much, but he pointed me in the direction of a YouTube clip where you were doing a talk at a murder mystery event.’
‘But that wasn’t filmed,’ she retorted.
‘Someone did film it,’ he clarified, ‘on their phone, clearly without your knowledge. I’m afraid you described Evelyn as “my lovely, mad aunt”.’
