"I'll take your job," he said without enthusiasm, radiating minimum confidence, and I glanced at Malcolm to see if he really thought this was the best we could do in detectives, signs of intelligence or not. Malcolm appeared to have no doubts, howeverand spent the next five minutes discussing fees which seemed ominously moderate to me.
"And I'll need a list," West said finally, "of the people you want checked. Names and addresses and normal habits."
Malcolm showed unexpected discomfort, as if checking that amorphous entity "the family" was different from checking each individual separately, and it was I who found a piece of Savoy writing paper to draw up the list.
"OK," I said, "first of all there's Vivien, my father's first wife. Mrs Vivien Pembroke."
"Not her," Malcolm objected. "It's ridiculous."
"Everyone," I said firmly. "No exceptions. That makes it fair on everyone… because there are going to be some extremely angry relations when they all realise what's happening."
"They won't find out," Malcolm said.
Fat chance, I thought.
To West, I said, "They all telephone each other all the time, not by any means always out of friendship but quite often out of spite. They won't gang up against you because they seldom form alliances among themselves. Some of them are pretty good liars. Don't believe everything they say about each other."
"Ian!" Malcolm said protestingly.
"I'm one of them, and I know," I Said.
After Vivien's name on the list I wrote the names of her children: Donald
Lucy
Thomas
"Thomas," I said, "is married to Berenice." I added her name beside his. "He is easy to deal with, she is not."
"She's a five-star cow," Malcolm said.
West merely nodded.
"Lucy," I Said, "married a man called Edwin Bugg. She didn't like that surname, and persuaded him to change it to hers, and she is consequently herself a Mrs Pembroke."
West nodded.
"Lucy is a poet," I said. "People who know about poetry say her stuff is the real thing. She makes a big production of un worldliness which Edwin, I think, has grown to find tiresome."
"Huh," Malcolm said. "Edwin's an out-and-out materialist, always tapping me for a loan."
"Do you give them to him?" I said interestedly.
"Not often. He never pays me back."
"Short of money, are they?" West asked.
"Edwin Bugg," Malcolm said, "married Lucy years ago because he thought she was an heiress, and they've scraped along ever since on the small income she gets from a trust fund I set up for her. Edwin's never done a stake of work in his parasitic life and I can't stand the fellow."
"They have one teenage schoolboy son," I said, smiling, "who asked me the last time I saw him how to set about emigrating to Australia."
West looked at the list and said to Malcolm, "What about Donald, your eldest?"
"Donald," said his father, "married a replica of his mother, beautiful and brainless. A girl called Helen. They live an utterly boring virtuous life in Henley-on-Thames and are still billing and cooing like newlyweds although Donald must be nearly forty-five, I suppose."
No one commented. Malcolm himself, rising sixty-nine, could bill and coo with the best, and with a suppressed shiver I found myself thinking for the first time about the sixth marriage, because certainly, in the future, if Malcolm survived, there would be one. He had never in the past lived long alone. He liked rows better than solitude.
"Children?" Norman West asked into the pause.
"Three," Malcolm said. "Pompous little asses."
West glanced at me questioningly, and yawned.
"Are you too tired to take all this in?" I asked.
"No, go ahead."
"Two of Donald's children are too young to drive a car. The eldest, a girl at art school, is five foot two and fragile, and I cannot imagine her being physically capable of knocking Malcolm out and carrying his body from garden to garage and inserting him into Moira's car."
"She hasn't the courage either," Malcolm said.
"You can't say that," I disagreed. "Courage can pop up anywhere and surprise you."
West gave me a noncommittal look. "Well," he said, taking the list himself and adding to it, "this is what we have so far. Wife number one: Vivien Pembroke. Her children: Donald (44), wife Helen, three offspring. Lucy, husband Edwin (ne Bugg), school-age son. Thomas, wife Berenice…?"
"Two young daughters."
"Two young daughters," he repeated, writing.
"My grandchildren," Malcolm protested, "are all too young to have murdered anybody."
"Psychopaths start in the nursery," West said laconically. "Any sign in any of them of abnormal violent behaviour? Excessive cruelty, that sort of thing? Obsessive hatreds?"
Malcolm and I both shook our heads but with a touch of uncertainty; his maybe because of something he did know, mine because of all I didn't know, because of all the things that could be hidden.
"Does greed, too, begin in the nursery?" I said.
"I wouldn't say so, would you?" West answered.
I shook my head again. "I'd say it was nastily adult and grows with opportunity. The more there is to grab, the greedier people get."
Malcolm said, only half as a question, "My fortune corrupts… geometrically?"
"You're not alone," I said dryly. "Just think of all those multi- billionaire families where the children have already had millions settled on them and still fight like cats over the pickings when their father dies."
"Bring it down to thousands," West said unexpectedly. "Or to hundreds. I've seen shocking spite over hundreds. And the lawyers rub their hands and syphon off the cream." He sighed, half disillusionment, half weariness. "Wife number two?" he asked, and answered his own question, "Mrs Joyce Pembroke."
"Right," I said. "I'm her son. She had no other children. And I'm not married."
West methodically wrote me down.
"Last Friday evening," I said, "I was at work in a racing stable at five o'clock with about thirty people as witnesses, and last night I was certainly not driving the car that nearly ran us over."
West said stolidly, "I'll write you down as being cleared of primary involvement. That's all I can do with any of your family, Mr Pembroke." He finished the sentence looking at Malcolm who said, "Hired assassin" between his teeth, and West nodded. "If any of them hired a good professional, I doubt if I'll discover it."
"I thought good assassins used rifles," I said.
"Some do. Most don't. They pick their own way. Some use knives. Some garotte. I knew of one who used to wait at traffic lights along his victim's usual route to work. One day, the lights would be red, the victim would stop. The assassin tapped on the window, asking a question… or so it's supposed. The victim wound down the window and the assassin shot him point blank in the head. By the time the lights turned green and the cars behind started tooting their horns, the assassin had long gone."
"Did they ever catch him?" I asked.
West shook his head. "Eight prominent businessmen were killed that way within two years. Then it stopped. No one knows why. My guess is the assassin lost his nerve. It happens in every profession."
I thought of jump jockeys to whom it had happened almost overnight, and I supposed it occurred in stockbrokers also. Any profession, as he said.
"Or someone bumped him off because he knew too much," Malcolm said.
"That too is possible." West looked at the list. "After Mrs Joyce?"
Malcolm said sourly, "The lady you so artfully photographed me with at the instigation of, as you call her, Mrs Joyce."
The West eyebrows slowly rose. "Miss Alicia Sandways? With, if I remember, two little boys?"
"The little boys are now thirty-five and thirty-two," I said.
"Yes." He sighed. "As I said, I recently dug out that file. I didn't realise that… er… Well, so we have wife number three, Mrs Alicia Pembroke. And her children?"
Malcolm said, "The two boys, Gervase and Ferdinand. I formally adopted them when I married their motherand changed their surname to Pembroke. Then we had little Serena," his face softened, "and it was for her I put up with Alicia's tantrums the last few years we were together. Alicia was a great mistress but a rotten wife. Don't ask me why. I indulged her all the time, let her do what she liked with my house, and in the end nothing would please her." He shrugged. "I gave her a generous divorce settlement, but she was very bitter. I wanted to keep little Serena… and Alicia screamed that she supposed I didn't want the boys because they were illegitimate. She fought in the courts for Serena, and she won… She filled all her children's heads with bad feelings for me." The old hurt plainly showed. "Serena did suggest coming back to look after me when Coochie was killed, but it wasn't necessary because Moira was there. When Moira was killed, she offered again. It was kind of Serena. She's a nice girl, really, but Alicia tries to set her against me."