So, on Thursday the 12th, she gave Grace a couple of extra drops in the morning and some more in the afternoon, because Grace was by this time far from being able to keep track, and by the time 7 P.M. came round, the house was silent as the grave and she was ready for him. She had picked out a nice burgundy satin dress that both she and Grace looked very good in. She had laid out the sherry and the glasses on the table by the window, because this sounded like a meeting that could well run on and she had become accustomed to taking a little sherry before dinner. Before almost everything, in fact. She hoped Mr. Twohig liked Tio Pepe.
When he arrived, signalled by a 750cc roar up the drive, Mr. Twohig was quite a revelation. She hadn’t quite known what to expect, but she had a blurry idea of a tall, cadaverous, elderly man in a black three-piece suit with a wing collar and pince-nez who would address her as “My dear Mrs. Westmacott.” That idea was already beginning to fade even before she opened the door. Wing collars did not go with Yamahas.
In the flesh, Benjamin Twohig turned out to be a tall, ginger-haired, raw-boned youth of about twenty-five with enormous hands and ears and a very prominent Adam’s apple. Taking off his motorcycle leathers, he revealed a suit that looked a bit shiny and short in the arms and was definitely off-the-peg, and he didn’t really address her as anything. He looked round the sitting room when she showed him in, and said, “Nice house you got here. Bit remote, but nice.”
“Thank you,” said Madge. “I like it.” Which was true. Especially the remote bit.
Benjamin Twohig sat down on the one sofa, and placed his crash helmet and gauntlets beside him on the floor. Madge had planned to sit on the other sofa, so that they faced each other across the long, carved Chinese coffee table. She had arranged it like this because he might need somewhere to lay out his papers. But Mr. Twohig didn’t seem to have any papers. She also noticed that he was wearing white socks with his business suit. Without knowing why, she had always felt a kind of pity for men who wore white socks with a dark suit.
Before she sat down, Madge said, “I can offer you some sherry, if you like. If it isn’t too early.”
“Never too early for a drop of sherry,” said Benjamin, rubbing his large hands together. So Madge went and poured two glasses and brought them to the table. They toasted each other silently and sipped, although Mr. Twohig gulped rather more than was conventional. His Adam’s apple rose and plunged.
Madge said, “I’m afraid I’m not very used to this sort of thing, Mr. Twohig. I don’t really know what it’s all about, to be quite honest.”
He nodded. His eyes were very blue, Madge noticed.
“Quite right,” he said. “No reason why you should.”
“In your letter you spoke about a deceased relative. I must admit, I was a little puzzled. Who is this relative?”
She was thinking: Perhaps Fulbright. He didn’t look like a man with untold riches, but there were such things as eccentric millionaires. You read about it. Yes, that was probably it.
“Well,” Benjamin said, “as to the identity of the defunct, I’m not in a position to tell you. Not as yet.”
“Why ever not?” Madge said.
“It’s just the way these things work,” he said, finishing off the last of his Tio Pepe and then, to her astonishment, rising and going to the table by the window and helping himself to another. Madge was aghast. This was not the sort of behaviour she had expected. She had been right, there was something very definitely not right about Benjamin Twohig.
He came back and sat down again.
She said, in her firmest tone, “Now, Mr. Twohig, I have never heard of Sniving, Preacle, and Biles, but I take them to be a firm of integrity—”
He interrupted her. “Sniving’s?” he said. “Oh, I don’t work for them.”
“But,” she waved the letter at him, “what about this?”
“That was to get your attention,” he said, smiling. He had a large gap between the two central front teeth, she noticed. “There’s nothing like a nice juicy letterhead to make people sit up and take notice. No, we do some work for them from time to time. I’m in and out of their place quite a bit, so sometimes I snaffle a bit of their paper. That’s all.”
He reached out and took the letter from her. He folded it and tucked it into his pocket. Madge was confused.
“We? Who’s we?” she asked.
“The firm I work for.”
“And what business might they be in, pray?” she said tartly, becoming more and more irritated by the minute.
“Confidential Enquiries,” he said.
“What sort of confidential enquiries?”
“The sort that other people won’t do,” he said. “Or can’t do. Quite specialised, you see.”
“I really do not know what you’re talking about.”
He nodded. “All right,” he said. “Give you an example. Let’s suppose some old geezer dies, and in his will, made donkey’s years before, he leaves all his great fortune to his brothers and sisters and their heirs and assigns — that’s legal jargon,” he added. “Trouble is, when he dies, all his brothers and sisters are already dead, and their children, if they had any, are dead. And it was a big family with lots of to-ings and fro-ings, people moving, emigrating, dying in far-flung places, all that. It’s a right old mishmash sometimes, you wouldn’t believe. So the lawyers administering the estate have got a bit of a job on, trying to track down the rightful heirs. If there are any. And that’s where we come in.”
“Your firm tracks down these heirs. And then you go and find them and tell them the good news.”
“Ah.” He raised a bony finger. “Not just like that. See, mostly the heir doesn’t realise that they are an heir. We’re the only ones that know who was the defunct and who and where the lawyers are who have the great fortune waiting.”
She was beginning to see.
“So you only tell them for a price, is that it?”
“For a percentage.”
“But that’s absolutely outrageous!”
“Only a little bit. And there’s a lot of firms doing it, believe you me.” He was grinning now, letting her in on something.
“And people accept this?”
“Dead right, they do. Sign the contract straight off, most of them. Some of them think about it for a bit, but not for very long.”
“But couldn’t they simply go off and find out for themselves?”
“Ah, no. See, these things are complicated. Even for experts, it takes months sometimes to track people down. You’ve got to be a cross between a private detective and a genealogist. No, they have to accept it, because quite frankly they haven’t a hope in hell of finding out who’s left them money. Usually it’s such a remote relative that they don’t even know they had a great-great-uncle William.” He grinned again. “And no, it wasn’t your great-great-uncle William, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“And what happens if they don’t accept this, this — deal of yours?”
“Well, if no one claims the estate, eventually the government gets it. And that’s such a waste, don’t you think?”
“So,” Madge said slowly, “you have information about a legacy to which I am entitled.”
“A substantial legacy.”
“How substantial is substantial?”
“Very. In the low seven figures.”
She had no idea what this meant. She actually had to work out the zeros.
“You mean millions.” She suddenly had a tight feeling in her chest.
“Yes, but not very many.”
“But to have this information, I have to agree to pay a certain percentage to your firm.”
He nodded.
“And what sort of percentage?”