The Vivero Letter. Desmond Bagley
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lent it to the museum and it was put on show with the other stuff. Then someone said it was gold, and by God, it was! The people at the museum got worried about it and asked Dave to take it back. It wasn’t insured, you see, and there was a flap on about it might be stolen. It had been reported in the papers complete with photographs, and any wide boy could open the Totnes museum with a hairpin.’
‘I didn’t see the newspaper reports.’
‘It didn’t make the national press,’ said Dave. ‘Just the local papers. Anyway, Bob took it back. Tell me, did he know you were coming down this weekend?’
I nodded. ‘I phoned him on Thursday. I’d worked out a scheme for the farm that I thought he might be interested in.’
‘That might explain it. This discovery only happened about ten days ago. He might have wanted to surprise you with it.’
I looked down at the tray. ‘He did,’ I said bitterly.
‘It must be very valuable just for the gold in it,’ said Dave. ‘Well worth the attention of a thief. And the experts say there’s something special about it to add to the value, but I’m no antiquarian so I can’t tell you what it is.’ He rubbed the back of his head. There’s one thing about all this that really worries me, though. Come and look at this – and don’t touch it.’
He led me across the yard to the other side of the body where a piece of opaque plastic cloth covered something lumpy on the ground. ‘This is what did the damage to your brother.’
He lifted the plastic and I saw a weapon – an antique horse pistol. ‘Who’d want to use a thing like that?’ I said.
‘Nasty, isn’t it?’
I bent down and looked closer and found I was wrong. It wasn’t a horse pistol but a shotgun with the barrels cut very short and the butt cut off to leave only the hand grip. Dave said, ‘What thief in his right mind would go on a job carrying a weapon like that? Just to be found in possession would send him inside for a year. Another thing – there were two of them.’
‘Guns?’
‘No – men. Two, at least. There was a car parked up the farm road. We found tracks in the mud and oil droppings. From what the weather’s been doing we know the car turned in the road after ten o’clock last night. Grierson reckons that this man was shot before midnight, so it’s a hundred quid to a pinch of snuff that the car and the man are connected. It can’t have driven itself away, so that brings another man into the picture.’
‘Or a woman,’ I said.
‘Could be,’ said Dave.
A thought struck me. ‘Where were the Edgecombes last night?’ Jack Edgecombe was Bob’s chief factotum on the farm, and his wife, Madge, did Bob’s housekeeping. They had a small flat in the farmhouse itself; all the other farm workers lived in their own cottages.
‘I checked on that,’ said Dave. ‘They’re over in Jersey on their annual holiday. Your brother was living by himself.’
A uniformed policeman came from the house. ‘Inspector, you’re wanted on the blower.’
Dave excused himself and went away, and I stood and watched what was going on. I wasn’t thinking much of anything; my mind was numbed and small, inconsequential thoughts chased round and round. Dave wasn’t away long and when he came back his face was serious. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. ‘Bob’s dead,’ I said flatly.
He nodded gravely. ‘Ten minutes ago.’
‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘I wasted half an hour outside Honiton; it could have made all the difference.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, whatever you do. It would have made no difference at all, even if you had found him two hours earlier. He was too far gone.’ There was a sudden snap to his voice. ‘It’s a murder case now, Jemmy; and we’ve got a man to look for. We’ve found an abandoned car the other side of Newton Abbot. It may not be the right one, but a check on the tyres will tell us.’
‘Does Elizabeth Horton know of this yet?’
Dave frowned. ‘Who’s she?’
‘Bob’s fiancée.’
‘Oh, God! He was getting married, wasn’t he? No, she knows nothing yet.’
‘I’d better tell her,’ I said.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a farm to run now, and cows don’t milk themselves. Things can run down fast if there isn’t a firm hand on the reins. My advice is to get Jack Edgecombe back here. But don’t you worry about that; I’ll find out where he is and send a telegram.’
‘Thanks, Dave,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that over and above the call of duty?’
‘All part of the service,’ he said with an attempt at lightness. ‘We look after our own. I liked Bob very much, you know.’ He paused. ‘Who was his solicitor?’
‘Old Mount has handled the family affairs ever since I can remember.’
‘You’d better see him as soon as possible,’ advised Dave. ‘There’ll be a will and other legal stuff to be handled.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, if you’re here when the superintendent arrives you might be kept hanging around for hours. You’d better pop off now and do whatever you have to. Ill give your statement to the super and if he wants to see you he can do it later. But do me a favour and phone in in a couple of hours to let us know where you are.’
III
As I drove into Totnes I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was not yet nine o’clock. The day that ordinary people live was only just beginning, but I felt I’d lived a lifetime in the past three hours. I hadn’t really started to think properly, but somewhere deep inside me I felt the first stirring of rage tentatively growing beneath the grief. That a man could be shot to death in his own home with such a barbarous weapon was a monstrous, almost inconceivable, perversion of normal life. In the quiet Devon countryside a veil had been briefly twitched aside to reveal another world, a more primitive world in which sudden death was a shocking commonplace. I felt outraged that such a world should intrude on me and mine.
My meeting with Elizabeth was difficult. When I told her she became suddenly still and motionless with a frozen face. At first, I thought she was that type of Englishwoman to whom the exhibition of any emotion is the utmost in bad taste, but after five minutes she broke down in a paroxysm of tears and was led away by her mother. I felt very sorry for her. Both she and Bob were late starters in the Marriage Stakes and now the race had been scratched. I didn’t know her very well but enough to know that she would have made Bob a fine wife.
Mr Mount, of course, took it more calmly, death being part of the stock-in-trade, as it were, of a solicitor. But he was perturbed about the manner of death. Sudden death was no stranger to him, and if Bob had broken his neck chasing a fox that would have been in the tradition and acceptable. This was different; this was the first murder in Totnes within living memory.
And so he was shaken but recovered himself rapidly, buttressing his cracking world with the firm assurance of the law. ‘There is, of course, a will,’ he said. ‘Your brother was having talks with me about the new will. You may – or may not – know that on marriage all previous wills are automatically voided, so there had to be a new will. However, we had not got to the point of signing, and so the previous existing will is the document we have to consider.’
His face creased into a thin, legal smile. ‘I don’t think there is any point in beating about the bush, Jemmy. Apart from one or two small bequests to members of the farm staff and personal friends, you are the sole beneficiary. Hay Tree Farm is yours now – or it will be on probate. There will, of course, be death duties, but farm land gets forty-five per cent relief on valuation.’ He made a note. ‘I must see your brother’s