Fifty-two
Proud took time out for lunch in a small café near Wishaw Cross, then followed the directions which the solicitor had given him. In less than three minutes he found himself driving into the retirement community. He parked in an area signed ‘Visitors’, climbed out and looked around.
When it was a family home, Thorny Grove would have been an imposing mansion, in its surroundings, although in Edinburgh terms it was only a little above modest. Still, it looked large enough to have formed half a dozen apartments, with an attic flat above, and its gardens were large enough to have accommodated a further six small red-roofed bungalows. Number three was closest to the main building and to a block of garages; as he approached, Herbert Ward was waiting for him at the front door. He was a small, bald man, stocky like his granddaughter, and with the same inquisitive eyes.
‘Sir James Proud?’ His accent was gruff, and a bit like Bob Skinner’s: Lanarkshire with the rough corners knocked off and polished.
‘Yes, sir; it’s good of you to see me.’
The old man ushered him inside, and into a small but expensively furnished living room. ‘Not at all. I can’t watch the racing channel all the time: bad for me. Take a seat. Can I offer you a drink?’
‘No, thank you; I’m driving.’
‘Of course you are. Sorry, I’m a member of the “just the one won’t hurt” generation. How about tea?’
‘Really, I’m fine.’
‘If you say so. Now, to what do I owe the courtesy?’
‘It’s a complicated story, but I’m trying to trace a seventy-year-old woman named Annabelle Gentle.’
‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid. I haven’t had much to do with the ladies since my wife died six years ago.’
‘I didn’t expect you to know of her, but the connection is with a man named Claude Bothwell, to whom she was engaged to be married over forty years ago.’
‘Good God!’ the old lawyer exclaimed. ‘So she ditched him eventually, did she?’
‘You remember him?’
‘I recall his existence, but little about him physically. We met on only one occasion, after he and Ethel were married when they came into the office to make joint wills. That was a joke: he had nothing, while she had the modest fortune that she’d inherited from her parents.’
‘They died in a boating accident, I’m informed.’
‘You could call it that. They were in Cannes for the winter and they went on a cruise on some sort of yacht: a storm got up, the thing rolled over and everyone on board was drowned.’
‘And Ethel inherited.’
‘She was an only child. To explain my family background, Sir James, I come from the professional side, and Ethel came from the moneyed side. . through her mother. Uncle Bert didn’t make his money, he married it. The Marshalls, Aunt Meg’s family, owned the steelworks. Bert worked there and became general manager, then managing director, after they were married. Aunt Meg was a frightful snob, and Cousin Ethel took after her. I never did like the wee shrew.’
‘When did Bothwell come on the scene? Had they known each other long, before they were married?’
‘No, only a few months, weeks even; that was part of the scandal. He showed up in Wishaw the year after Uncle Bert and Aunt Meg died, to take a job in the High School. He was a lodger in a house in Caley Drive, hardly Ethel’s social scene, but they met at a Coronation party organised by the parish church. After that they were seen together a lot: Green’s Playhouse was a favourite haunt as I recall, and she had never been seen at the cinema before. She was about ten years older than him, so you can imagine the talk. . or maybe you can’t, being from the next generation.’ Proud smiled: he liked to be made to feel like a youngster. ‘Next thing anybody knew, they were married. Nobody was invited, not even my mother and father, her closest living relatives. We wouldn’t have known about it in advance, but for a wee paragraph in the Wishaw Press reporting the posting of their names in the registrar’s.’
‘Did you see much of them after that?’
‘Hardly anything; I was busy with work and my family and, like I said, I didn’t like the woman anyway, so our paths never crossed.’
‘How did they come to leave town?’
‘Abruptly, just about sums it up. Ethel came into the office one day, about three years after their marriage, and instructed me to put Thorny Grove on the market. She told me that she and Claude had had enough of Wishaw and were selling up and moving, as she put it, “to more acceptable surroundings”. I wished her all the best and did as she asked. The house sold for what was a hell of a lot of money at the time.’
‘Did you ask her where they were going?’
Bert Ward nodded. ‘That I did. She told me that Claude wanted to go somewhere he could use his French properly. The world was theirs to explore, Sir James. With the sale of the house, Ethel was worth tidily over a hundred thousand, easily more than a million in today’s terms. I’ve often wondered what happened to them, but it’s never kept me awake at night.’
‘Someone must still think of her. Your granddaughter’s name is Ethel, after all.’
‘That’s pure coincidence. She was named after her maternal grandmother.’ He frowned. ‘No, I suppose I’ve always assumed, if for no other reason than the fact that her will’s still gathering dust up there in Church Road, that she’s still alive, sitting in an olive grove or a vineyard in the South of France, cracking the whip over Claude. However, from what you say, if she is still cracking the whip, it’s not over him. Where did he wind up?’
‘Glasgow,’ Proud told him, ‘teaching in Jordanhill School, a year later. . at least that’s where he surfaced next.’
‘She must have binned him bloody quick, then. Maybe the outside world worked wonders for her.’
‘It worked wonders for him: he remarried in Glasgow in that same year.’
‘He did what? But he couldn’t possibly have been divorced. Not enough time would have elapsed.’
‘He wasn’t, not in Scotland at any rate. I suppose it’s possible they went to Nevada or Mexico, or some other lax jurisdiction, but it doesn’t seem likely, especially when you consider that he married for a third time in 1961, again with no evidence of divorce.’
‘Good God! I’d never have thought he had it in him. So what you’re saying is that he ditched her, is that it?’
As he looked out of the old man’s window, Sir James Proud was visited by a dark thought, one that he had been pushing to the back of his mind, until finally he had to give it voice. ‘I hope that’s what I’m saying, Mr Ward. I really hope it is.’
The old man caught his meaning at once. ‘You don’t imagine. .’
Proud gave him a strange smile. ‘I have a deputy. His name’s Bob Skinner and he’s from these parts.’
‘I know who you mean: Bill Skinner’s son.’
‘That’s right. Bob and I are very different types in our approaches to police work, but the more I get caught up in this thing, the more I find myself thinking like him.’
Fifty-three
For all its ugliness, Bandit Mackenzie liked the Fettes building. He had spent most of his service out in the sticks of Glasgow and North Lanarkshire; his spell at the centre of affairs in Edinburgh, in his role as head of the Drugs Squad, had been stimulating. The Leith posting reminded him of Cumbernauld, which had been by no means the highlight of his career.
He had to ask the doorkeeper for directions to McIlhenney’s new office. It was three floors up in the main office wing; he climbed the stair with a frown on his face.
The detective superintendent was standing in the doorway, waiting for him. ‘Hello, Bandit,’ he said, as he ushered him into the room. ‘That was a hell of a long half-hour.’