She had spent the previous night trying to think of some way of making her uncle’s stay so uncomfortable he’d be only too pleased to take leave of the place. She’d tried phoning his room in the middle of the night and had listened to him curse the bastard who’d woken him. She repeated this at 3 a.m. but by the third time she tried it it was clear that he’d disconnected the telephone.
Having spent such a broken night herself, she wasn’t best pleased to be woken by a phone call from the hotel manager at 6 a.m. reporting that her uncle appeared to have locked himself in his suite. The maid who brought him his breakfast early each morning had knocked repeatedly, without success, and his phone appeared to have been pulled out of the wall whenever Reception tried ringing it.
“Can’t you just let yourself in?” demanded Lady Clarissa, feeling a trifle guilty at the thought of Uncle Harold tugging the phone out of the wall in the early hours.
“He must have put the bolt across because the master key doesn’t work,” explained the manager.
“Well, can’t you go in through the window or the fire escape?”
“There’s no fire escape to that room, and the window is locked with the curtains drawn. No, there’s only one thing for it and that’s to break down the door. I wanted to make sure first that you knew you would have to pay for a replacement.”
“Of course I do, you stupid man!” cried Lady Clarissa, and slammed the phone down, starting to feel a little alarmed at the thought of what her night-time phone calls might have done to her uncle.
After what seemed a very long time but was actually only a matter of minutes the phone rang again. Clarissa eagerly answered it.
“I’m extremely sorry to have to tell you that the Colonel is no longer with us, Lady Clarissa,” the manager informed her.
“He isn’t? You mean, he’s left? Where’s he gone?” she asked with some relief.
“I’m sorry to say…” The manager hesitated. Telling the niece of a guest that her uncle had probably died of alcohol poisoning wasn’t a pleasant task, but Clarissa spoke again before he could think of a tactful way of breaking the news.
“I imagine you are. I can’t say that I am. He was costing me a fortune! And where is he now?”
“By ‘left us’ I meant that…Well, actually he…er…died. In his sleep.”
“Died?”
“Yes. Quite peacefully, of course,” the manager lied. In fact the Colonel had been found face down on the rug, purple-faced and with one fist still raised as if in anger. He assumed the poor chap had been hopping over to the en-suite bathroom since neither his stick nor his false leg was anywhere near, although it was odd that he’d somehow pulled the phone out of the wall as he fell.
As if that were not a bad enough start to Lady Clarissa’s morning, to make matters worse she had had to drive herself down to Ipford because the man who ran the garage had caught summer ‘flu.
By the time she arrived at the hotel she felt very out of sorts but had at least resigned herself to the old man’s demise. She wouldn’t have a convenient reason to come to Ipford any more but neither would Uncle Harold be able to carry on fleecing her. She went to the hotel manager’s office and found his lounge suit augmented by a black armband.
He saluted as Lady Clarissa walked in and she quickly took out a handkerchief to hide her delight and feign tears.
“Oh, poor Uncle,” she sobbed. “I had so hoped that getting him out of that awful nursing home and into this delightful hotel would raise his spirits.”
For a moment the manager almost reversed the expression, to say that in his opinion it was precisely because the old man had raised so many spirits, in the form of large and exceedingly strong whiskies, that he’d died.
Instead he merely offered her his condolences but Clarissa wasn’t really listening, too busy considering what she was going to do now. Of one thing she was certain: Uncle Harold wasn’t going to waste any more of her money by being buried in Kenya. But nor could she bring herself to think of him being cremated or, as he had so aptly put it, ‘incinerated’, after all that he had said about it. He might have been a nasty old man at the end but he was still family and she ought to do right by him.
“Is my late uncle still in his room?” she asked. “I’d like to have a last look at him.”
The manager said he quite understood and took her up in the lift, discreetly tucking the final bill, to which he had already added the cost of a new door, into her bag.
“I’ll leave you to spend a few private moments with him,” he told her, and hurried away down the stairs.
Lady Clarissa stopped sniffing and went into the room. From the strong smell of whisky it was clear that, although her phone calls had no doubt been a little unsettling, there were other reasons too for Uncle Harold’s abrupt demise. He was lying on the bed with a sheet over him but, strangely, seemed to have one fist raised. She tried pushing it back down but unfortunately rigor had set in and the more she pushed the harder it sprang back. Clarissa gave up for fear of snapping it off and leaving him with only one arm to match his one leg.
She turned her attention away from her uncle’s corpse and started looking around the suite for the ‘bugs’ he’d told her the hotel manager had installed, to film her having sex with the man from the garage. She knew they must be exceedingly small and were almost certainly hidden in obscure places, but there really was nothing to be seen of them. She went round the sitting room several times and even climbed on to the dressing table in the bedroom to get a closer look at the ceiling rose and coving. In the end she was convinced that there weren’t any to be found and realised that the old devil had been bluffing her. With a silent curse, she went down in the lift and bearded the manager.
“The Colonel told me you had installed hidden video cameras in that suite. I want to know if there’s any truth in his story?”
The manager gasped. “He told you that? What utter nonsense. It’s against the law and more than my…I mean, I’d have been insane to do anything like that. I’d have lost my job if such a story got out. And what on earth for?”
“Oh, I’m just telling you that’s what he said. Not that I believed him, of course.”
“I should hope not. He must have been exceedingly drunk at the time. I hadn’t wanted to say it before now but I think that your uncle probably killed himself with the amount he drank every day.”
Lady Clarissa was still dubious but there was nothing to be gained from starting an argument.
“I suppose he was suffering from some sort of persecution complex. I just thought you ought to know what he told me. I do apologise for mentioning it.”
And leaving the flabbergasted manager still muttering angrily to himself, she went back to the car and rang directory enquiries for the number of an undertaker.
Finding a firm nearby, she went round to make arrangements for the Colonel’s funeral.
“You can send the body to me at Sandystones Hall, Fenfield,” she told the undertaker. “We will be conducting a private committal in the Estate cemetery. I’ll pay you for the coffin and transportation costs now. No, there’ll be no flowers required nor any sort of ceremony. The Colonel was not a popular man.” And having written out a cheque, she gave it to the owner.
“Blimey, we get some extraordinary customers,” he told his assistant after she had left. “Fancy having a burial ground on your own estate. No flowers, no ceremony, and from the way she spoke it sounds as though there will be no mourners either. Still, she must be rolling in money. Paid up without a murmur.”
In the street Clarissa changed her mind about not bothering further with her uncle’s alleged bugging of her room. The hotel manager had seemed wholly convincing in his denials that it had taken place, but to make sure she decided she ought to see her uncle’s solicitor. The Colonel had once or twice mentioned the man’s name. It would be as well to check the old devil’s will while she was here.
∗
She went back to the hotel and asked for the num
ber of the solicitor’s firm. She then rang and asked the receptionist for an appointment with Mr Ramsdyke.
“Are you a present client of Mr Ramsdyke’s?”
“How can I be present if I’m here?”
“Here where?”
“Here, not there, you stupid girl. Tell Mr Ramsdyke that I am Lady Clarissa Gadsley, wife of Sir George, the magistrate, and that if you do not fix me an appointment to see him immediately, you will both have cause to regret it.”
Twenty minutes later she was shown into Mr Ramsdyke’s office and offered a seat.
“I’ll come straight to the point,” she told the man with a grey moustache sitting behind the desk. “My uncle, Colonel Harold Rumble, has died. I presume he left his will with you.”
“Colonel Harold Rumble? How do you spell the name?”
“Like ‘grumble’ without the ‘g’.”
“Nobody of that name…” Mr Ramsdyke began, and then hesitated. “Now that I come to think of it, someone called Grumble did consult us a year or two ago. I think it was about suing a motorist…or was it a boarding house? I remember he didn’t seem at all well and I advised him then to make a will. Did your uncle have a wooden leg?”
“Yes, that’s right. And what I came to see you about was his will. He’s just died.”
Mr Ramsdyke’s face fell as he realised he wasn’t about to acquire two wealthy new clients. “In that case, he must have died intestate because he rejected my suggestion. Unless, of course, he went to another firm of solicitors. Although he claimed to have nothing to leave.”
“Nothing stored in boxes?” Lady Clarissa persisted. “For you to keep in your strongroom?”
“Good gracious, no,” said Mr Ramsdyke. “As a matter of fact, we don’t have a strongroom as such. Safes, yes, but actual room, no. Though we do have lots of room for new clients…” he added in a last pitch for Lady Clarissa’s business.
“Frankly, I’m surprised you have any clients at all,” she said, rising to her feet and banging the door loudly behind her.
Lady Clarissa left the solicitor’s office with mixed feelings. On the one hand, her uncle had evidently made something of a fool out of her. But on the other, he’d very conveniently drunk himself to death, very rapidly. Wonderfully consoled by this thought, she collected her car and began to drive back to Sandystones Hall.
16
Down at St Barnaby’s School, the Headmistress still had no idea who had clambered up to her bedroom to plant the condom and pants in her double bed. When she’d crept round the dormitories to check on them, the Wilt quads weren’t giggling but were apparently fast asleep. They had been her first suspects but she still had no evidence. She had questioned the prefects, though for obvious reasons hadn’t gone into too much detail, merely stating that a prank had taken place in her house. The prefects were as puzzled as she was.
“Something’s up,” one of them said. “It’s probably to do with her husband. He’s always drunk when he comes back from wherever he’s been away to.”
“But she asked about the girls in the dormitories,” said another.
“Could be he’s tried to sleep with one of them.”
“He’d be mad to do that!”
“Anything’s possible. He always gets so drunk when he goes to Horsham on business.”
In the end they concluded that they really had no idea what the Headmistress had been so agitated about, although they rather suspected the ghastly Wilt girls were involved in it somewhere.
A furious phone call from Ms Young, who had finally made it to Inverness, only added to Mrs Collinson’s bewilderment. Ms Young told her she was staying in Scotland and resigning from her teaching post forthwith. The Headmistress knew her to be an excellent teacher, almost certainly the best in the school. She couldn’t afford to lose her.
“But why? If it’s a matter of your salary, I’d be happy to increase it substantially.”
“My decision has nothing to do with what I earn and everything to do with those four fiendish girls! I can’t prove it, but I swear they tampered with my car to such an extent that I missed my cousin’s wedding. I could well have been killed in an awful accident in the Dartford Tunnel.”
“Good gracious me, how dreadful! And you’re certain they were responsible?”
“I told you, I haven’t any direct evidence but, yes, I am certain they were responsible. Ever since they came to the school, they’ve created havoc time and time again. Surely you must realise that? They ought to be expelled.”
The Headmistress hesitated. What Ms Young had just said was perfectly true. Until the Wilt quads had come to St Barnaby’s there had been no serious trouble in the school, only a few minor quarrels and the occasional fight: matters she could deal with easily and certainly nothing that warranted expulsion.
“You may well be right,” she admitted. “But unless we have definite proof, I don’t see how we can expel them. If we can find that proof and they go, will you return? Naturally with the increase in salary I’ve already mentioned.”
Ms Young said she’d consider it and put the phone down. Left to herself, the Headmistress tried to think what to do next. She could not expel the quads without good reason, and in spite of her growing suspicion that they had been responsible for putting those revolting objects in her bed, couldn’t for the life of her imagine where they had obtained the things. At the same time she was determined to retain the services of Ms Young. She would have to find a way of getting the wretched girls out of the school without officially expelling them. But how on earth could she do it? She’d already written to Mrs Wilt to warn her that unless her daughters changed their behaviour and used less disgusting language she would be forced to ask her to remove them from the school.
She decided to prepare a further letter, to be sent straightaway, and would also hand a copy to whichever Wilt came to collect their delinquent offspring, saying that owing to increased overheads the school was having to raise its fees substantially again.
Surely that ought persuade the parents to take them away, she thought sitting back in her chair with a smile.
She was certain the Wilt family were already having a hard time meeting the quads’ school fees. They’d entered the girls for every scholarship the school offered – even the one for single parents, with Mrs Wilt arguing that her husband was so useless she may as well be on her own. They’d won nothing, of course, although there had been something of a near miss when Penelope’s drawing of her three sisters in minute anatomical detail in the Life Studies class had hugely impressed one of the school governors. Fortunately the man had had to stand down in some disgrace when he was later arrested and charged with lewd behaviour after exposing himself in the local park.
What a ghastly handful those girls were! Goodness knows what the father must be like, to have sired not one devilish daughter but four of them.
∗
Up at Sandystones Hall Wilt was oblivious to the fulminations of his daughters’ headmistress. He was finding that he was having a more interesting – if peculiar – time than he’d expected. He’d risen on the first morning to find that Sir George was in court all day and Lady Clarissa was confined to her room with what Mrs Bale described as a ‘general poorliness’, which he rather suspected had something to do with drink. And once again the elusive Edward was nowhere to be found. As a result Wilt was able to explore the house and grounds, happy in the knowledge that he would not have to spend the day listening to his host grumbling about his step-son whom he called ‘the blithering idiot’ – or indeed himself attempting to teach the blithering idiot A-level history. Instead Sir George had lent Wilt an old bicycle and told him that, for all he cared, Wilt could go into town and have dinner in a restaurant.
“I don’t want to be disturbed when you come back either,” he’d said, to Wilt’s delight. This was slightly diminished when Sir George added that Wilt may well come across the little bastard Edward skulking somewhere on the Estate, and to look out for low-flying missiles i
f he did.
So in fact Wilt was enjoying what amounted to a holiday, and had decided to start it by exploring the house more fully. It proved to be even more peculiar than the ancestral portraits on the staircase and the enormous beds had led him to expect. In search of something interesting to read that evening – having tired of the causes of the First World War – he went into the library. It was a big room lined with the shelves around all four walls. These were filled with dusty old books which didn’t look as though they had been opened for years.
But it was the furniture that held his attention. It was all Indian, and not the contemporary sort manufactured in Birmingham or some sheet-metal works in the Midlands, which he’d occasionally seen in suburban houses and pretentious high-street stores. This was authentic nineteenth-century furniture: dark teak sideboards, lots of highly ornamented fretwork screens, and even rattan or bamboo extending chairs, which Mrs Bale helpfully told him later were known as Bombay Fornicators because they could be pulled out so far that one (or two) could lie down on them.
A whole host of miniature carved elephants and other animals cluttered the floor between chairs and screens, so much so that Wilt felt he had wandered into a museum of Imperial relics. This odd menagerie was as visually unsettling as the exterior of the Hall.
He turned away and desperately searched the bookshelves for something light to read, but military history seemed to be this family’s obsession, with an emphasis on the 1757 struggle between the British and the French.