Cat Among the Herrings (18 page)

‘He certainly did,’ said Mr Morton. ‘Came to our office. Tried to stab Mr Pagham. Darren disarmed him.’

‘Your Darren?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thin Darren?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I didn’t think he had it in him.’

‘He caught me off guard,’ said Whitelace huffily.

‘So where was Professor Plum on the day Robin was killed?’ Elsie demanded.

‘How should I know?’ asked Whitelace. ‘He’s an imaginary character.’

‘All right. Let’s say he did
exactly
what you did that day. Where would he have been?’

‘At the hospital in Chichester, taking his wife to chemotherapy.’

‘Really? All day?’

‘Yes. We had a long wait. We arrived around nine, but we didn’t get away until mid-afternoon.’

‘The hospital would vouch for that?’

‘For me, yes. I don’t know about Professor Plum. He could have been anywhere.’

Elsie looked at the piece of paper in front of her. I noticed that quite a lot was now crossed out.

‘So is that it?’ asked Whitelace.

‘Yes,’ said Elsie, folding the paper away.

Whitelace turned to us. ‘I bet it’s not,’ he said. ‘That’s the sort of trick they use – make you think Plum’s got a watertight alibi, then at the last minute you discover he could have got away for an hour and killed Mr Black.’

‘And could he?’

‘What?’

‘Get away.’

‘Me or Plum?’

‘You.’

‘No, of course not. I told you. I couldn’t have left Jean on her own.’

‘Right. That’s it for Plum, then,’ said Elsie. ‘So, we turn to Colonel Mustard.’

‘Am I Colonel Mustard too?’ asked Tom.

‘I suppose so.’

‘I could be,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘I don’t really want to be Mrs White. She seems simply to be an adjunct of Mr White, who is a bit dull anyway. Trust me on that, I know him well. Could I be Colonel Mustard?’

‘No, you couldn’t,’ said Elsie. ‘So, Colonel Mustard is an old friend of Mr Black’s. He’s sailed with him. He’s dined with him. But Black has reneged on a deal to build a wind farm.’

‘Thank God,’ said Whitelace.

‘Colonel Mustard is furious,’ said Elsie. ‘He’s ruined, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Anyway, he visits Black and then drugs him, puts him in a sailing boat and pushes him off.’

Tom glared at Elsie. ‘The business deal was fairly insignificant,’ he said. ‘More to the point, my father was a very good friend of Robin’s. And he was so upset at his
death that he didn’t even attend the funeral. Look, Elsie, I’m not at all happy with this. If you’re going to accuse somebody it’s better to do it to his face.’

‘Well, you’re Colonel Mustard,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘You are apparently two characters while some of us are only half a character. So, you’ll just have to answer for him. Would anyone like to accuse me of being half the murderer?’

‘No,’ said Elsie. ‘We wouldn’t. Now let’s turn to Tom Green and Sophie Scarlet.’

‘Sophie can’t possibly have done it,’ said Tom. ‘She was with me all day.’

‘And Tom was with me,’ said Sophie.

‘How touching,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘Don’t they make a lovely couple? Does this end with their getting married? Agatha Christie always ends with a wedding, if possible.’

‘I don’t do that sort of ending,’ said Elsie. ‘But therein lies their motive. I think they were genuinely in love. Colonel Gittings split them up. And why? Because Tom had stolen Sophie from Robin. So Robin talked to the colonel and the colonel made Tom drop her. But neither of the two lovers ever forgave Robin. So they got together again in secret. Of course, whenever they met in public they had to pretend they hated each other – hence their improbably not speaking at the funeral. But they were working hand in glove. They hatched a plot by which one of them went to the museum – not a likely place for a date, after all – and the second one crept back to the village to kill Robin. Then the first one – whichever the first one is – provided a false alibi, even to the extent of eating two lunches.’

‘Two lunches? That’s improbable,’ said Mrs Morton.

‘No it isn’t,’ said Elsie. ‘It absolutely depends what’s on the menu. Say they had egg and chips and burger and chips for example and you couldn’t make up your mind—’

‘If I thought you really suspected Sophie,’ Tom interrupted, ‘I would admit to the murder myself. But it was neither of us. We were at the museum all day. I remember every moment of it.’

‘Do you?’ asked Sophie.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Tom.

‘You see,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘It’s all going to end with a wedding. I think that’s lovely. I just hope there’s no silly misunderstanding that gets in the way. You often get that when the writer wants to pad the story out.’

‘What about Catarina?’ asked Martina, pointing a wine glass in her direction. ‘Which character is she playing?’

‘She’s not,’ said Elsie.

‘Why not? She’s the one who’s collected the money, after all. The family money.
My
family’s money. The money that was none of her damned business. She breezes in, snares Robin. Gets him to leave her everything. Then Robin dies. Where was Catarina Green on the day?’

‘We’ve already used Green,’ said Mrs Morton.

‘It’s a common name,’ said Martina.

‘You say I common?’ demanded Catarina.

‘Where
were
you, Catarina?’ Martina repeated. ‘We’ve all provided alibis so far. For some reason nobody’s got you to produce one yet.’

‘I was shopping,’ said Catarina.

‘Do you have proof of that?’

‘Robin is mean. Not give me enough money. I buy some small things – not worth keep receipt.’

‘It’s Catarina who asked me to investigate,’ I said. ‘Why would she do that if she had killed Robin? She was already in the clear.’

‘Because she didn’t kill Robin herself. She got Bogdan and Vladislav to do it. But she knows that her two stooges will get themselves arrested sooner or later and may spill the beans. So, she sets up this enquiry to frame somebody else in the village. Fortunately, she comes across two idiots willing to do just that – a talentless and largely unknown crime writer and his agent.’

‘She’s not my agent,’ I said.

‘Otherwise, fair comment,’ said Elsie.

‘Well, you’re not going to frame me,’ said Martina.

‘Nor me,’ said Tom, ‘and certainly not my father.’

‘Quite,’ said Sophie. ‘Certainly not daddy.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Tom.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. Elsie was right. It was your father who split us up. That’s the way he operates. I bet you said nothing.’

Tom looked at her.

‘And don’t say what you are planning to say about my mother,’ Sophie added.

‘How do you know I’m planning to say anything?’ asked Tom.

‘Because I know you, Tom Gittings,’ said Sophie. ‘To think I might have—’

‘Green,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘He’s called Tom Green. I was afraid this was the way things were going but if this is to be a convincing lovers’ tiff, then you’d better get each others’ names right.’

‘Might have what?’ asked Tom.

Sophie opened her mouth, then closed it again and shook her head.

‘Might have what?’ repeated Tom.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Sophie. ‘I’m going. You can get a taxi home, Martina, unless you want to come now.’

‘It’s just getting interesting,’ said Martina.

‘Right,’ said Sophie. ‘Thank you for inviting me, Ethelred. I hope you all enjoy the rest of the evening.’

We all turned to watch her go. Nobody spoke at all until the front door had slammed.

‘Well, Tom,’ said Mrs Morton, ‘if you need any of us to tell you whether to follow her, then the answer is probably that you shouldn’t.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tom. ‘Let me know the result tomorrow, Ethelred.’

We watched a second (and I suppose, since he was also Colonel Mustard, third) suspect escape.

‘I think it may work out for them,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘It did for us.’

‘Under slightly different circumstances,’ said Mr Morton, thoughtfully.

‘Yes, slightly different,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘You never were much of a runner.’

I surveyed the room. Whitelace was asleep in his chair, snoring gently. Martina was checking her phone for texts. The Mortons had started a discussion, about two hours too late, as to which of them should have abstained from wine in order to drive home. Catarina had gone to the loo.

‘Well, that was a great success,’ I said to Elsie. ‘We’re no closer to knowing who the murderer is.’

‘Maybe you should interrogate Mr and Mrs White,’ said Mrs Morton.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Morton. ‘Otherwise, why are we here?’

‘Oh, Ethelred thought there was something odd about some lease having gone missing in 1848,’ said Elsie. ‘I was going to let him question you on it, but I forgot.’

‘The lease is interesting,’ said Mr Morton. ‘I’ve never known such a fuss about what is really just a piece of history.’

‘Sorry if I got you into trouble,’ I said.

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ said Morton.

‘He’s always shooting his mouth off,’ said Mrs Morton. ‘One day he’ll get into a real mess.’

‘But not this time,’ said Morton, ‘because whatever the big secret is, I failed to reveal it to you. At least two of the partners presumably know – one representing the Gittings family and one representing the Paghams. But nobody has ever told me. I can’t help feeling that if we knew what was in the lease – and why we advised against a tribunal – we’d know a lot more about the feud, and why it all still matters now.’

‘I did wonder who the freeholder was.’ I said. ‘I mean, who owns the freehold to the Gittings’ house now. They’d have gained from the advice not to challenge the terms of the lease.’

‘I do,’ said Catarina, coming back into the room. ‘Lawyer says is mine. I say, what is freehold. He says means Colonel Gittings only owns lease. I say, so he pay me rent? They say – not any more. Not now Robin dead. Before they pay big rent. Massive rent. But not now Robin dead. No more rent ever. Thousand-year lease and no rent ever.’

‘This thousand-year lease, when does it date from?’ I said.

‘I too ask that. Dates from 1848.’

And then I saw it. How it had all been done. It was ingenious. Evil, but ingenious.

‘What?’ asked Catarina.

‘I’ve just realised how you can set up a blackmail that will deliver cash at regular intervals for a hundred and fifty years,’ I said.

Catarina nodded. ‘Cool,’ she said.

I drove up to the Gittings’ house and parked the car on the gravel drive. Black clouds scudded across the sky above me. We would be in for a storm very soon.

As before, the door opened a crack. ‘You can clear off, Mr Tressider. I’ve tried to help you and you’ve repaid me with insolence and disloyalty. You’re not welcome here and I’ve told Tom to have nothing more to do with you.’

‘I know you killed Robin Pagham,’ I said. ‘I know how you did it and I know why.’

For a long time two steel-blue eyes observed me. Derek Gittings’ expression did not change. ‘Go to the police, then. They investigate murders, don’t they?’

‘I’d like to talk to you first. I’ve plenty of evidence against you. But it doesn’t incriminate Tom.’

Again, a long unblinking stare, then: ‘Fine. Have it your way. Let’s talk.’

He shuffled ahead of me in his old carpet slippers,
switching on lights as he went. The strawberry thieves still decorated the wallpaper in the study, but there was a new sense of order. Two large black plastic sacks in the corner bulged with waste paper. On the desk was a single pile of letters to be dealt with – the circulars and junk mail had vanished. The bookshelves too seemed to have been pruned and rationalised. But a lot of the defiance had gone out of Derek Gittings. He dropped into his chair, his shoulders hunched, and looked at me. ‘So, where do you want to start?’

‘In 1848,’ I said, brushing away some dog hair before I sat down. ‘Robin’s death makes sense only in the context of the Herring Field murder and what happened immediately afterwards. It explains why he had to die and why his death couldn’t wait.’

Derek Gittings laughed. ‘You’ve got it all worked out, then?’

‘A lot of it. So, to begin at the beginning, the death of John Gittings benefitted one person and one person only – his brother George. George gained the estate and John’s fiancée. The fiancée, Jane Taylor, was what would then have been described as a flighty piece. She was leading both men on – and possibly not just them. I think that John had discovered what had been going on behind his back and arranged to meet George at the Herring Field to have it out with him. George killed him with Lancelot’s knife.’

‘It’s not a new theory,’ said Derek Gittings. ‘I suspect that a lot of people at the time thought Pagham had been stitched up. And a local historian took a look at it a few years back and said he reckoned that George had been the one who had gained. Tom wasn’t giving away any family
secrets when he suggested you might turn it into a book. If he’d known the whole story I doubt he’d have let you go anywhere near it, but he didn’t. He couldn’t have.’

‘But you do know more than that?’

‘If it helps you at all, then yes. What you say is correct. There was apparently a deathbed confession of some sort – thirty years too late to save Lancelot Pagham. George did it all right. And it was much as you describe. George claimed he had met John there to talk things over, they’d argued and then he’d discovered in his pocket a knife he’d found on the green the day before.’

‘So, he hadn’t intended either to kill John or frame Lancelot?’

‘You think not? Well, you’ve read the evidence. Somebody sent the note to Lancelot sending him over to Itchenor on a wild goose chase. And, as you say, the testimony of George’s future wife, at Lancelot’s trial, suggested that there might have been something going on between her and Lancelot. George may have had a good reason for wanting the blame to fall where it did and put a second rival out of the way. His own intervention at the trial appeared to support Lancelot but actually damned him. Very clever, you might say. Maybe even the deathbed confession wasn’t as frank as it might have been, or maybe it’s been edited a bit over the generations. There are some things we’ll never know.’

‘But Perceval Pagham knew George was the killer?’

‘He told George he’d seen him, thought he was acting oddly and followed him to the field.’

I thought of the devil’s sudden appearance in the tale of
The Murderer and the Devil
.

‘So, he preferred to blackmail George rather than save his brother?’

‘Again, apparently so. It depends a bit whether he really was a witness or whether he worked it out later, after the trial, and just claimed to have seen it. However he did it, he certainly convinced George that he had the dope.’

‘And Perceval’s price was the Gittings’ estate,’ I said. ‘Bit by bit. How did they come up with the scheme?’

‘Perceval went to George and initially demanded the lot,’ said Derek Gittings. ‘George’s reply was that he could scarcely hand over the whole estate without exciting a great deal of suspicion. He might as well go to the authorities straight away, make a confession and get it over with. Perceval went away and consulted a lawyer – a man named Smallwood – and came back with a plan that he thought was watertight. Perceval was to sell George the Herring Field. In return George was to make over to him the freehold of the Gittings’ estate. Perceval then sold George, for £500, a thousand-year lease. So George got it all back again, minus just the £500 and gained the Herring Field.’

‘That’s the lease that was missing from the file at Chettle and Smallwood?’

‘I have a copy and I assume Robin had a copy. I think my grandfather demanded ours back from the solicitor – he never quite trusted them not to let the cat out of the bag. As young Morton did.’

‘And the lease specified some ground rent?’

Derek Gittings smiled bitterly. ‘Of course it did. That was the whole point of it. I think you’ve already worked it out pretty much, though perhaps not the exact percentages. The ground rent was one quarter of the value of the estate
whenever the current leaseholder died. It was payable to Perceval and his heirs for ever – or rather until the Gittings family was completely ruined.’

‘His heirs being defined as …’

‘Precisely, you mean? “The heirs male of Perceval Pagham and his descendants” was the wording. Believe me, the words are etched on my brain. The eldest son was to inherit first, failing which the second, and so on. No daughters.’

‘And if there were no male descendants?’

‘Generations of lawyers at Chettle and Smallwood have pondered that one. The consensus was that if there were no legal heirs, the lease was still good for the remaining term, but that no ground rent was payable because there was nobody entitled to it.’

‘So, as long as there were Paghams, one quarter of the remaining estate was lost each time the owner died?’

‘Exactly. George died – according to the records – in 1875, so Perceval lived to collect. He’d already put the £500 to good use and bought a small farm. Now he was able to add a substantial chunk of land to it. Then the following year George’s eldest son, John, also died. That was another big slice out of the estate – one quarter of the remaining three-quarters. John had a young son, also called John – maybe guilt made them try to keep the murdered man’s name alive. John Gittings III, as I shall call him, survived until the nineteen thirties, just to spite the Paghams, but further deaths in 1950 and 1984 meant all that was left was the house and a few acres around it. And the Herring Field, of course – that is ours freehold and always will be.’

‘The death in 1875 – there was a story that George was taken away by the devil.’

‘You’ve read
Curious Tales of Old Sussex
?’

‘Yes.’

Gittings laughed. ‘You want to know what happened?’

‘I’m curious.’

‘George had kept the whole story from the rest of the family – for obvious reasons. Maybe he’d hoped there’d be no surviving Paghams to collect by the time he died. But in 1873 or ’74, his son John became seriously ill – cancer, I think. George was getting old. He knew that if he died and John succeeded, then passed away shortly after in his turn, almost half of the estate would vanish just like that. But he had a good chance of outliving John and handing over to John Gittings III direct, thus losing only a quarter. He also had a Plan B, which was that, if he died first, his death was to be concealed until after the elder John had died, limiting the damage to the same amount. At some point there must have been a family gathering at which he revealed to the horrified family what he had done.’

‘And George did die first?’

‘Yes, in 1874. So Plan B went live. The family simply told everyone he was sick and unable to appear in public. And they waited for John to die. But he didn’t.’

‘And people started to ask questions about where George was?’

‘Precisely.’

‘So what then?’

‘I think you know – it’s as you discussed with Tom. Their options were limited. They couldn’t keep George’s corpse around the house indefinitely. According to family
tradition, they buried George in a desolate and lonely place, where there was no chance of it being found. Until Whitelace interfered, I had no idea where, but it transpires it was the Herring Field. I suppose it was obvious, when you think about it.’

‘But the DNA results …’

‘What DNA results?’

‘Tom did a DNA test. The body wasn’t an ancestor of his.’

‘I wish he’d asked me before he did it. I could have told him who it was …’ Derek Gittings paused. ‘The tests are sometimes wrong. In this case they must be. It was George. I can promise you that.’

‘So, when was the secret burial?’

‘I’ve no idea. Probably very shortly after he died. It would have been awkward if the body had been found. They may have thought they could just claim he had gone away.’

‘But the rector got the truth out of them?’

‘So it would seem. To prevent a scandal, they reluctantly announced his death, about a year after he had actually died, and held a funeral but with no body.’

‘Then when his grave was opened again to bury his wife, they found it empty.’

‘Is that right? I didn’t know that little detail. John died a few months later and the Paghams got the second chunk of the estate.’

‘But the lease could have been challenged in court, surely? It had been signed under duress. It was in effect a sort of fraud.’

‘Yes, but there was a further clause. If the contents
of the lease were ever made public by the leaseholder or his representatives, then the whole lease was forfeit. It all had to be handed back to the Paghams. That might have been overturnable too, but none of my ancestors felt quite confident enough to make the challenge in open court and risk losing the lot. I knew about that advice back in the fifties not to go to a tribunal. I’d assumed it as the final word on the subject until I heard what Morton had told you. I’d always suspected that if there was ever any conflict of interest between us and the Paghams, Chettle and Smallwood would know which side their bread was buttered on …’

‘So, whatever the case may have been in law, none of the leaseholders
believed
they could tell anyone about the terms of the lease – not even their own family?’

‘Some probably did tell them – George must have done, as I said. Others felt that it was a burden they had to bear alone until they could hand it over to the next generation. I didn’t learn anything until my father was dying. We had a long talk in which he explained it all to me: why there would be very little for me to inherit, why the loss of land over the years hadn’t been down to poor management and gambling debts – the story that was generally believed – but to the steady attrition of an ancient blackmail.’

‘Does Tom know?’

‘Not yet. His turn would have come in due course. I’d better tell him straight away. He needs to know.’

‘So, you were the “old man” Robin was waiting for to die, so that he could collect.’

‘I suppose I must be.’

‘Couldn’t a deal have been struck? There must have been
a point when it would have been worthwhile for everyone if your family had just bought back the freehold?’

‘If the Paghams had been willing to sell. But I think they rather liked taking their revenge for Lancelot’s death a slice at a time. There was no love lost between the families. Actually, I’d tried to do a deal with Robin myself. We knew each other well. We sailed together. He was a friend. I knew he needed cash and he knew I could last another twenty or thirty years before he could collect on the blackmail again. It might not happen in his lifetime, the way he was living it. And there was less and less, as the years had gone by, for the Paghams to collect a quarter of. Tom stood to inherit a small fraction of the original estate. So, to end the feud, I offered Robin the Herring Field, with the prospect of planning permission for a small wind farm – in return for releasing us from the terms of the lease and letting us keep what little remained. I’d done all the research, spoken to all the right people. It wasn’t such a bad deal. And he was a friend.’

‘But he wasn’t interested?’

‘At one stage … but then he decided it wasn’t worth it. I was cross to begin with. I’d expected better of him. Couldn’t we just lay the whole thing to rest after all these years? But then I began to wonder whether I needed to do a deal at all. The Paghams were not lucky with their offspring, as you may have gathered. Cecil Pagham had five boys, four of whom died in the First World War and a daughter who died in the 1919 influenza pandemic. His only surviving son, Gawain, had three children. Two died in the war – one in North Africa, one on D-Day. The third was Roger, Robin’s father, who was much younger than the other two.
For years the whole contract had hung by the slenderest of threads. Just one death would end the whole thing. Robin, as you know, was the last of the line. He showed no sign of marrying and producing legitimate heirs and every sign of killing himself with alcohol or drugs. There was every chance we’d made our last payment, anyway.’

‘Then Robin got engaged to Sophie?’

‘That’s right. Lovely girl. I’d known her for years – she spent family holidays in West Wittering as a child. I almost saw her as one of my own. But totally wrong for a wife-beater like Robin. I knew what he’d done to other girlfriends. I had to stop it.’

‘So you got Tom to intervene?’

‘He’s a good lad. I sang Sophie’s praises to him. Encouraged it in every way possible. Made sure I got them together.’