Charles knew it was impertinent but he had to say it. "I'm surprised your grandmother didn't leave you anything."
Angela Primero shrugged. She tucked the blanket round the baby and stood up. "That's life," she said in a hard voice.
"Shall I tell him, darling?" Isabel Fairest touched her arm and looked timidly into her face, waiting for guidance.
"What's the point? It's of no interest to him." She stared at Charles and then said intelligently, "You can't put that sort of thing in newspapers. It's libel."
Damn, damn, damn! Why hadn't he said he was from the Inland Revenue? Then they could have got on to money at once.
"But I think people ought to know," said Mrs. Fairest, showing more spirit than he had thought hex capable of. "I do, darling. I always have, ever since I understood about it. I think people ought to know how he's treated us."
Charles put his notebook away ostentatiously. "This is off the record, Mrs. Fairest."
"You see, darling? He won't say anything. I don't care if he does. People ought to know about Roger."
The name was out. They were all breathing rather heavily. Charles was the first to get himself under control. He managed a calm smile.
"Well, I will tell you. If you put it in the paper and I have to go to prison for it, I don't care! Granny Rose left ten thousand pounds and we should all have had a share, but we didn't. Roger—that's our brother—he got it all. I don't quite know why but Angela knows the ins and outs of it. My mother had a friend who was a solicitor where Roger worked and he said we could try and fight it, but Mother wouldn't on account of it being awful to have a court case against your own son. We were just little kids, you see, and we didn't know anything about it. Mother said Roger would help us—it was his moral duty, even if it wasn't legally—but he never did. He kept putting it off and then Mother quarrelled with him. We've never seen him since I was ten and Angela was eleven. I wouldn't know him now if I saw him in the street."
It was a puzzling story. They were all Mrs. Primero's grandchildren, all equally entitled to inherit in the event of there being no will. And there had been no will.
"I don't want to see all this in your paper, you know," Angela Primero said suddenly. She would have made a good teacher, he thought, reflecting on waste, for she was tender with little children, but stern when she had to be.
"I won't publish any of it," Charles said with perfect truth.
"You'd better not, that's all. The fact is, we couldn't fight it. We wouldn't have stood a chance. In law Roger was perfectly entitled to it all. Mind you, it would have been another story if my grandmother had died a month later."
"I don't quite follow you," said Charles, by now unbearably excited.
"Have you ever seen my brother?"
Charles nodded, then changed it to a shake of the head. She looked at him suspiciously. Then she made a dramatic gesture. She took her sister by the shoulders and pushed her forward for his inspection.
"He's little and dark," she said. "Look at Isabel, look at me. We don't look alike, do we? We don't look like sisters because we aren't sisters and Roger isn't our brother. Oh, Roger is my parents' child all right and Mrs. Primero was his grandmother. My mother couldn't have any more children. They waited eleven years and when they knew it was no good they adopted me. A year later they took Isabel as well."
"But ... I..." Charles stammered. "You were legally adopted, weren't you?"
Angela Primero had recovered her composure. She put her arm round her sister who had begun to cry.
"We were legally adopted all right. That didn't make any difference. Adopted children can't inherit when the dead person has died without making a will—or they couldn't in September 1950. They can now. They were making this Act at the time and it became law on October 1st, 1950. Just our luck, wasn't it?"
The photograph in the estate agent's window made Victor's Piece look deceptively attractive. Perhaps the agent had long given up hope of its being sold for anything but its site value, for Archery, enquiring tentatively, was greeted with almost fawning exuberance. He emerged with an order to view, a bunch of keys and permission to go over the house whenever he chose.
No bus was in sight. He walked back to the stop by the Olive and Dove and waited in the shade. Presently he pulled the order to view out of his pocket and scanned it. "Splendid property of character," he read, "that only needs an imaginative owner to give it a new lease of life..." There was no mention of the old tragedy, no hint that violent death had once been its tenant.
Two Dewingbury buses came and one marked Kingsmarkham Station. He was still reading, contrasting the agent's euphemisms with the description in his transcript, when the silver car pulled into the kerb.
"Mr. Archery!"
He turned. The sun blazed back from the arched wings and the glittering screen. Imogen Ide's hair made an even brighter silver-gold flash against the dazzling metal. "I'm on my way to Stowerton. Would you like a lift?"
He was suddenly ridiculously happy. Everything went, his pity for Charles, his grief for Alice Flower, his sense of helplessness against the juggernaut machinery of the law. An absurd dangerous joy possessed him and without stopping to analyse it, he went up to the car. Its body work was as hot as fire, a shivering silver glaze against his hand.
"My son took my car," he said. "I'm not going to Stowerton, just to a place this side of it, a house called Victor's Piece."
She raised her eyebrows very slightly at this and he supposed she knew the story just as everyone else did, for she was looking at him strangely. He got in beside her, his heart beating. The continual rhythmic thudding in his left side was so intense as to be physically painful and he wished it would stop before it made him wince or press his hand to his breast.
"You haven't got Dog with you today," he said.
She moved back into the traffic. "Too hot for him," she said. "Surely you're not thinking of buying Victor's Piece?"
His heart had quietened. "Why, do you know it?"
"It used to belong to a relative of my husband's."
Ide, he thought, Ide. He couldn't remember hearing what had become of the house after Mrs. Primero's death. Perhaps it had been owned by some Ides before it became an old people's home.
"I have a key and an order to view, but I'm certainly not going to buy. It's just—well..."
"Curiosity?" She could not look at him while she was driving but he felt her thoughts directed on him more powerfully than any eyes. "Are you an amateur of crime?" It would have been natural to have used his name, to end the question with it. But she didn't. It seemed to him that she had omitted it because "Mr. Archery" had suddenly become too formal, his Christian name still too intimate. "You know, I think I'll come over it with you," she said. "I don't have to be in Stowerton until half-past twelve. Let me be your guide, may I?"
Imogen Ide will be my guide ... It was a stupid jingle and it tinkled in his ears on a minor key like an old, half-forgotten madrigal. He said nothing but she must have taken his silence for assent, for instead of dropping him at the entry she slowed and turned into the lane where dark gables showed between the trees.