Touch and Go

She ran along the passage, the noise of crying children behind closed doors following her up the worn stairs. Once in her own apartment she didn’t stop. She threw the holdall on the settee which also served as her bed, took out the caps and aprons and chucked them into the cupboard. She wouldn’t be wanting them again, that was for sure. She packed a suitcase with the few clothes she had, sweaters, blouses and skirts, a couple of dowdy dresses, underwear and shoes.

Frantic now, she stripped herself of her uniform and bundled that too into the cupboard. She emptied out the magazine and books, leaving them scattered on the floor. It made the holdall lighter, but not by much. She saw the little case lying snug at the bottom but left it undisturbed. One quick look had been enough …

Just after she’d called the doctor—it would be ten minutes before he got there—she’d locked her bedroom door, put the case on a chair and sprung the old-fashioned catches, one on either side. When she raised the lid she had seen the little boxes and the names on them. With fumbling fingers she’d opened the ones on the top. The rubies had glowed at her, even in the pale early morning light, warm against their gold settings, rings, bracelets, brooches … There were larger boxes further down nestling on a bed of thick envelopes. She looked no further. She closed the suitcase, and put it carefully along the bottom of her holdall. Then she had straightened her cap, smoothed her apron and returned to the sickroom in readiness for the doctor.

Now she stuffed her washbag and a towel on the top along with clean nightclothes. Her other nightdresses she left on a chair. She dressed herself in the one good woollen suit she possessed, and stood still for a brief moment, quivering … Had she forgotten anything? Did it matter?

By now she was almost out of breath. No time to sit and take stock. She remembered to unpin the nurse’s watch from her discarded uniform. Nearly two hours gone already! How soon would they find out and come after her? That Mrs Hermanos, she would know … The quarrel in the kitchen, José had been shouting something about the ‘jools’ … They knew they were there, it was only a matter of time. The agency had her address, they’d soon be in touch with the precinct police … She must hurry, hurry. She should have called the cab first, then she could have been away quicker.

She dashed for the bathroom.

Keep your head, she told herself. Remember your training.

She began to feel calmer. She opened the door on to the landing, and stood for a moment listening. There was only the sound of squabbling infants. She went back inside, picked up the phone with a steady hand and made the call to a private cab service—not the one she normally used. She said it was urgent; they wouldn’t be long coming. She’d be better to wait in the apartment till she saw it in the street below. Although her neighbours on the other floors were used to her sudden departures when she was called out on cases, there was no need to call attention to herself this time.

She grabbed her short waterproof coat from the old wardrobe with the broken swinging door, put her suitcase and the holdall on the settee, and pushed her hair up under a knitted cap. Only then did she sit down to wait.

The minutes ticked on. She’d put the watch in her pocket but she could still hear it. Had she thought of everything? No need to check her handbag; when on resident duty she always carried all her personal papers in it, and sufficient money for emergencies. She could ignore her bank account, there was never much in it anyway.

In a fever of impatience she got up and went to the window. Now surely was the time to stop and think, time even to go back. She’d made a mistake … She’d never meant to … She could explain …

She’d said that to her father once when he’d yelled at her: ‘If I catch you stealing again, I’ll belt you black and blue …’ ‘I wasn’t stealing … she gave me the things …’ she’d blubbered then, but he’d belted her just the same.

Not this time, she told herself savagely, this time I’m not running away with nothing. This is my one chance. She thought of the red and gold treasures, snug in their little boxes … She saw the taxi-cab, heard the driver hoot. She gathered up her luggage, threw her coat over her arm and walked out of the apartment without a backward glance. No regrets. It was just a place she had been holed up in. By now she should have been able to afford better with all that money from her private nursing … Money down the drain, she thought with a sudden flash of resentment, for all the good it had done … Well, she would be rid of them too. There would be no going back.

As she was driven away she saw that the tree on the scrubby patch at the corner was budding green. Spring was coming; it must be a good omen.

CHAPTER 1

It was spring too, in another town, another country. Lennox Kemp looked out of his office window through the gold lettering that said Gillorns, Solicitors, and saw that the darling buds of May were having a hard time of it. He sympathized; he too had just been shaken by a rough wind, presaging change.

‘That’s wonderful news,’ he lied to his secretary.

Elvira beamed at him. She looked in splendid health. He should have noticed.

‘Great, isn’t it? After all these years.’

‘I didn’t even know you were trying …’ That didn’t seem the right thing to say. ‘I mean, of course, I’m delighted for you and Bill.’

‘He’s over the moon.… What do you mean, Mr Kemp, you didn’t know we were trying? Just because I’m over thirty doesn’t stop me having my first child.’

Kemp hastily put aside his own feelings. That was the worst of getting middle-aged, you got irritable at the mere thought of disruption to routine. He got up, walked round his desk and planted a kiss on her freckled forehead. The colour could still run fast up into her ginger hair the way it had done all the years he’d known her from the gauche girl with ladylike aspirations at McCready’s Detective Agency down in Walthamstow to the self-assured person she had become now, working for him in Newtown.

‘This calls for a drink, Elvira. It’s something to celebrate.’

‘Oh, Mr Kemp, it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning …’

‘Blow that. I need it for shock.’ He opened the cabinet and took out the sherry and glasses normally reserved for late clients requiring help to unwind.

‘Well, just a little one, then.’ She seated herself primly on the edge of a chair and put her notebook down on the desk.

‘Here’s to you, and Bill. When’s it due?’

‘Not for ages yet. Christmastime. And I’ll go on working right up to the last minute.’

‘Indeed you won’t. I’m not having you running around humping great files up and down the stairs.’

Elvira grinned.

‘You’re quite out of date, Mr Kemp. Everybody these days goes on working when they’re pregnant. I’ll be here at least till November so you don’t have to worry.’

‘Who’s worried? Anyway, it’s high time you had some assistance. I should have had someone in to help you ages ago now we’ve got so much work …’ He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘It’s just that I’ve got so used to having you around, Elvira.’

‘I’ll be around for a while yet,’ she reassured him. ‘But it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we did get someone in, someone I could train. It’s no good just making do with temps because—’ Elvira hesitated—‘I’m afraid I won’t be coming back afterwards. I know lots of women do but me and Bill, well, we don’t think like that. We’ve waited so long to start a family …’

Kemp looked at her with affection. Even when he first knew her, Elvira had been an old-fashioned girl for all that she’d been a child of the swinging ’sixties.

‘Of course I wouldn’t expect you to come back. The baby’s going to be the most important thing in your life from now on, and that’s the way it ought to be.’

Elvira picked up their glasses. ‘I’ll just get these washed,’ she said, ‘before your eleven-thirty appointment arrives.’ She was apt to get a little embarrassed when the relationship between herself and her boss verged on the personal. ‘And perhaps next month we might start putting an ad in the dailies … They have special days now for legal secretaries. Unless you want to promote someone in the office?’

Kemp shook his head. ‘It’s not fair to pinch other people’s secretaries. I’ll leave it to you, Elvira, to pick your successor. But, please—not a dolly-bird!’

‘I told you you were out of date, Mr Kemp. They’re all career women nowadays.’

Left to himself, Kemp contemplated the idea of a career woman, and was not cheered. He would miss Elvira. She was a link with the past although she was never the one to speak of it. Well, he would just have to get used to the fact of her going.

It was not the only shock he was to receive in that month of May to jog him into remembrance of things past. The letter he received a few days later from New York told him baldly of the death of his former wife, Muriel. She had been Mrs Leo Probert when she died, and the solicitors who had been acting for her went on to say that it had been inoperable cancer from which she had suffered for over two years.

For a moment Lennox Kemp could read no further. He was shaken by a sense of unspeakable sadness. As if she was there in the room, he could see her face with its halo of golden hair brushed up in the fashion of twenty years ago, hear her high, sweet, schoolgirl voice, her tinkling laugh … He got up, pushed back his chair roughly, and went over to the window. The solid blocks of Newtown misted before his eyes, and he saw instead the green canopy of the Forest which had lain at their door, and he was walking with her down a glade between the hornbeams on a summer’s evening in another world, another time.

She didn’t deserve to end like that, he thought fiercely, not Muriel. She had been so beautiful, so much in love with life, reaching out for its highest peaks and the fast-running excitements that buoyed her up in hopes that would not wait …

For all she had made him suffer, the ruin of his early career, his forced penance on the wrong side of the law, the long years’ endurance, he would never have wished her such ill-fortune as had now befallen her. She had been only a year younger than himself.

His hands were still shaking when he took up the letter again, and read on:

‘You may wonder why we have contacted you since there has been no communication, to our knowledge, between yourself and our late client for many years. Something has arisen, however, which we as executors of the deceased’s estate find it necessary to bring to your notice. It is, in our judgement, too delicate a matter to be dealt with by correspondence. One of our partners is travelling to London early next month and we are suggesting that he call upon you at the first opportunity to discuss the situation. By that time it is hoped that our Mr Van Gryson will be in possession of all the available information, and he will be able to speak with you in the fullest confidence of your own discretion.’

Kemp read the paragraph once more. He recognized the form of words lawyers tend to use when they want to convey something of importance without actually saying anything at all. He noted that Mr Van Gryson was fairly high up in the list of counsellors attached to the firm; if he was coming all the way to London it either spoke volumes for the ‘delicacy’ of the matter or, more probably, fat fees for the executorship. Perhaps both. Muriel appeared to have died rich.

Kemp lifted the phone and cancelled all interruptions for the next thirty minutes. Emotions could wait—there would be time enough for those—now he had to think.

No mention of Mr Probert. Leo Probert had been a well-heeled gentleman of sporting instincts when Muriel had married him, but he had not been young. He was a middle-aged American on vacation in London when she met him. He offered escape, and a dazzling future when he whisked her off to Las Vegas where he owned casinos, giving her the entrée to that greater gambling world she had just begun to taste the sweets of, the sugar already on her teeth.

Kemp sighed. One could moralize on that, and denounce sugar as poison to the system, medically and on principle, letting Muriel’s addiction sink her without trace. But the facts were otherwise; she had flourished according to report, someone meeting the Proberts in later years having told Kemp she was still a lovely woman and living in style.

The letter ended with the usual expressions of condolence, in this case mere platitudes since neither the writer nor the recipient were acquainted.

Kemp dictated a reply, as carefully worded as Eikenberg & Lazard’s communication had been to him, and saying no more than that he would look forward to receiving a call from their Mr Van Gryson whenever he was in London.

Speculation at this point as to the reason for such a visit would be unwise. Certainly at one time Muriel had owed her life to him, it might well be that across time and distance she had remembered him in her will. Then why couldn’t her executors simply tell him so without this cloud of secrecy?

Later he would think about Muriel, the light-hearted girl who’d shared that house on the edge of Epping Forest. Now he reflected that to most individuals death was the end of their life’s story; to lawyers it was often just the beginning.

CHAPTER 2

Flaming June had run nearly three weeks towards another hot summer when a hearty American voice on the telephone asked if that was Mr Kemp.

‘Yes, Lennox Kemp speaking.’

‘Dale Van Gryson here. I’ve just arrived from New York.’

‘Kind of you to call so soon, Mr Van Gryson. Your firm told me you would be coming over this month.’

‘Wa-al … Things took longer than we’d anticipated. I’d like to meet with you, Mr Kemp.’

‘And I with you. As it appears to be personal, and doesn’t involve my firm, I would not trouble you to come all the way out to Newtown. Where are you staying?’

‘I’m at the Hilton. It would suit me just fine, Lennox, if we met here. It’s a private matter, as you say, and better discussed in civilized surroundings, eh? Could you come in and have dinner with me tonight?’

‘That would suit me, Mr Van Gryson.’

‘Fine. Fine. And it’s Dale. High time you and I got together on this … I’ll have you paged in the downstairs bar around seven. I’ve gotten myself a pretty decent room in this place where we can talk business afterwards.’

And well he might, thought Kemp when the meeting arrangements had been completed; Eikenberg & Lazard would be paying—and presumably out of the estate of the late Mrs Muriel Probert.

Dale Van Gryson turned out to be as hearty as his voice. He was a large, loose-limbed man with the kind of shoulders that moved separately from the rest of his body as if he could as easily freewheel through a public house brawl as a crowded cocktail-party.

Kemp watched him lope across the carpet of the lounge, and knew him instantly, the wide, welcoming smile, the open palms; the type of outgoing American who would sell you anything from Christian Science to long-range missiles.

Kemp had risen from his seat anyway on hearing his name paged, and now found his hands grasped fervently in the manner of one white man finding another in a jungle. Indeed, Stanley and Livingstone were models of Victorian restraint by comparison, he reflected, as he allowed himself to be piloted to a secluded table.

While drinks were being ordered and brought, Dale Van Gryson continued to demonstrate his joy at meeting Kemp as though he had searched the earth for just such a one as he. There seemed little need to respond save for a muttered, ‘Likewise …’

‘You visit London often, Mr Van Gryson?’ He eventually managed to interpose the question.

‘Dale, please … Once or twice a year on business. I just love your city.’ It was the bestowal of an accolade as well as a hint of part-ownership. The only bit of London Kemp might lay some claim to was the lower end of Walthamstow and he didn’t think Van Gryson would care much for it, but he guessed the other man was being expansive to some purpose.

Over dinner they continued to discuss London, and the weather in the streets. They took a stroll through recent Anglo-American politics, probing at the undergrowth of their own political inclinations without either of them breaching the confidence of the ballot-box, like a couple of devils at an ecumenical conference. They talked of the courts and laws of their particular countries, and the rise in the crime figures, of education and the training of the young. Van Gryson made it known that he had a boy and girl already well set up in careers, they having had the inestimable benefit of a good home and strict upbringing. Kemp had nothing in this respect to offer in return, so confined himself to opinions of a general nature, making sure he had washed and rinsed them out first.

He was vastly amused by the whole charade, and well aware of what was going on. Van Gryson was engaged in the practice of a technique used by head-hunters the world over: getting to know the essence of your man before you swallow him up. Whatever revelation was to come anent the estate of the late Mrs Probert, Van Gryson had been sent to sound him out as to his lifestyle, his character and his likely acceptance or rejection of some dubious proposition which the American would get around to in due course—probably at the cheese-and-biscuits stage.

Kemp wasn’t in the least worried. Many people, most of them a good deal less brash than Van Gryson, had in the past tried to discover the inner man of Lennox Kemp, what fuelled his thinking, what made him tick. For all his innocuous outward appearance—chubby verging on plain plump, rather vacant grey eyes and receding hair—his was a secretive, even subversive nature, sceptical to the point of cynicism about the motives and actions of others but reserved in judgement of them. He had found life for the most part to be unfair, and considered that perhaps that was what it was meant to be, though he would not tell a client so, and would do his utmost to achieve justice for them if it was deserved. He had his sentimental side too, vague romantic notions of good and evil, which at times evaded his logic and thrust him into situations where instinct had to come to the rescue of intellect.

Trying to keep at distance his companion’s egregious bonhomie, Kemp began to wonder if this might not turn out to be just such a situation.

Van Gryson had a well-used face across which the expressions chased themselves so freely they tended to catch up with each other before the eyes had time to adjust. In fact his eyes were averted, scanning the contents of the sweets trolley, when he finally spoke of the matter he had come so far to discuss and his voice was suitably muted.

‘Divorce is a sad time,’ he observed sententiously, ‘for all concerned … But of course it must be nearly twenty years since yours. And I understand that you and your ex-wife … May I call her Muriel?’

Call her what you like, thought Kemp, as he nodded. She’s dead and can’t hear you. In fact the friendly American habit of latching on to first names did seem vaguely obscene in the circumstances.

‘I understand,’ Dale went on as he acknowledged a plate of baked Alaska, ‘that Muriel and you parted on amicable terms?’

‘We did,’ said Kemp shortly, giving all his attention to his fruit salad.

It had had to be amicable—a lawyer’s word, covering many sins. Muriel had wanted that divorce. She was conventional at heart; she would not have run off with Leo Probert without marriage in view. Her gambling instinct confined itself to games of chance, not real issues.

‘I only met her once,’ Van Gryson said, ‘the first time she came to Eikenbergs—that would be about two years ago. She was a real lady, Lennox, and still beautiful although she was already ill. She’d had a mastectomy out there in Vegas, but they reckoned there were secondaries … and they had to tell her.’

‘I wish I’d known!’ The words were out before he could stop himself but as he spoke Kemp knew they were true. Two years ago he’d been in Cornwall and contemplating marriage to Penelope Marsden. They had talked about Muriel then … He was suddenly struck by the poignancy of people who lose touch with each other, and the loneliness that comes of it.

Van Gryson was shaking his head vehemently. ‘She wanted no one told. She’d come to New York for treatment. She’d rented an apartment on Fifth Avenue where she could be near the hospital where she had to undergo operations, none of which did any good. It sure was a bad time for her … Anyway, she came to us and asked us to handle all her financial affairs for her. Mr Eikenberg and myself she asked to be trustees. You get the picture?’

‘She was putting her affairs in order,’ said Kemp slowly, ‘because she knew she was going to die …’

Dale was crumpling his napkin. He threw it down on the table, and got to his feet.

‘We’ll have the coffee and liqueurs in my room. And I’ll have another bottle of that claret sent up. You’re not going back to Newtown tonight, Lennox.’

Kemp demurred. ‘I rather thought I was.’

‘Nonsense. I’ve already booked you a room.’

My ex-wife must have left rich pickings, Kemp mused as he followed the American from the restaurant. The man wasn’t a time-waster; he must have felt he had accomplished something during dinner. Perhaps he had found Kemp to be a fit and proper person to have a delicate matter laid before him?

If so, then Kemp was determined to get him to come to the point. The first question he asked when they were alone and comfortably settled was:

‘Is there a will?’

‘I’m glad you asked that,’ said Dale in the eager manner of a Prime Minister about to hedge on a tricky question raised by the Opposition of which notice has been given. ‘Mrs Probert made a will that same first day she came to us. It was properly drawn up, and executed in our presence.’

‘And that was her only will?’

Van Gryson side-stepped the question. ‘Don’t you want to know what was in it?’

‘Only if you want to tell me.’

Van Gryson took a small sip of coffee, and a larger one of Grand Marnier. ‘When Muriel came to us she was in a very emotional state of mind. Don’t get me wrong, Lennox … It was understandable. The thing was … You know Mr Probert had died?’

‘No, I didn’t. I’m sure you’re very well aware of the fact that Muriel and I have been out of touch for nearly twenty years. I knew absolutely nothing of her life in America. I gather she had been living in Las Vegas?’

‘When her husband died, you mean? Oh yes, they had a large house there. He owned several of the casinos as well as having franchises in all kinds of things.’

It was clear that the strict upbringing of the Van Gryson offspring, if the father’s influence was anything to go by, would have protected them from the darker underside of American life. Leo Probert was spoken of with some disparagement despite the respect accorded his considerable wealth for all its dubious origins. In a hushed tone Van Gryson described the fortune left as substantial.

‘And it all went to his wife,’ he ended. ‘She got the lot.’

‘That must have been a right turn-up for the book,’ observed Kemp sardonically. Meeting the query in the other man’s eyes, he explained: ‘It’s an English expression. I only meant there must have been a lot of sour faces around. Leo would have had business partners?’

‘He had, and they sure were mad as hell. There was trouble, and I suppose when your Muriel got ill she wasn’t up to handling it.’

‘What sort of trouble?’ asked Kemp sharply.

‘She wasn’t specific. The estate had been settled in her favour by the time she came to us so we’d no part in it. Of course we checked things out with her law firm back in Vegas, and they confirmed everything was hunky-dory for her.’ Dale looked at the expression and didn’t like it much. ‘Except as far as her health was concerned of course,’ he finished, lamely.