His wife’s phone ringing in the dead of night and her returning to bed in the early hours were events only half-acknowledged at the time and already forgotten, leaving her presence there now a inexplicable surprise,
‘Have you been fired or what?’ he issued lazily.
‘No, I quit. I told them my husband missed me too much in the mornings.’
‘Too true,’ he might have said had not some impulse even in his half-awake mind known it to be too close to what was better left unspoken. Instead he went with, ‘The maid can manage the kids’; and taking a slurred swig from his bedside glass of water, pulled the duvet over the pair of them.
‘It is such terribly sad news about Mr Prove’s death.’
Raine Rossiter said this, thought Grey, as if he’d died choking on a pretzel. In the warm light of morning the horror of last night seemed a long way away.
‘You think it might be the same person responsible? Well, I wish you all speed in finding them.’
‘Indeed,’ he concurred.
‘Now, to the documents. I know you are more than authorised to see these, Inspector, though it does give me a shiver to bring such papers out of the office.’
As the solicitor spoke her sidekick Andrea opened the legal box, handing Grey the records as cued.
‘Firstly, you asked about the will of Stella’s aunt.’
Grey was passed what looked like a prop in a Dickensian dramatisation, a scroll bound in ribbon and which once unfurled was written in calligraphic script and sealed with a wax stamp at the top.
‘This was written many years before she died. You’ll see she was as thorough as her niece in managing her affairs. She had no children, nor Stella siblings, and so all went to Stella. The amount of liquid assets isn’t mentioned there, but I can tell you that as well as the flat already paid for, Stella inherited something like fifty thousand pounds, which only increased as various policies and investments matured.’
‘Hence how she got by on tutoring.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Next, the deeds of that first flat, and the paperwork of its transfer in accordance with the terms of the will; and here those of it’s later sale enabling Stella to buy the flat on the second floor. You’ll notice the prices of each were not too different, enabling her to move without recourse to the bulk of her savings…’
Grey was no legal man himself, but could see nothing obviously wrong in the procession of documents passing before him; though he wondered why the women were going into such detail.
‘Here are the deeds for the second flat, and also invoices for the moving of her furniture, the transfer of insurance policies…’ On and on it went. ‘The bill of works for the GPO rerouting her phoneline; and then of course the deeds for Charlie’s flat, the costs of which, as we told you yesterday, Stella was covering for him in an act of benevolence.’
‘Of course, I’ve no problem with that. I’ve had it confirmed by friends that she was touched by his story.’
‘So, if there was anything else..? I’d be glad to get these back and locked up again as soon as possible. Of course we can arrange to have copies made of anything you may need, with promises made of their confidential keeping of course.’
Andrea was already gathering the papers back up into the box when it clicked in Grey’s mind what they were doing,
‘Hold up. Put those down a second.’
Andrea, crestfallen, loosed her grip on the papers.
‘Now, I’ve hardly had a chance to think of our first meeting since yesterday, and was up half the night dealing with other matters; but something niggled me after we spoke and it’s only just come back to me now seeing all this paperwork; this superfluous paperwork, for the most important document is the one you haven’t bought here to show me and which you haven’t even mentioned. The will is fine, Stella’s flats are fine, but Charlie’s…’
‘But Inspector, the deeds.’ Raine looked nervously at Andrea as the latter passed that last document back to the Inspector.
‘And what will these tell me,’ he continued, ‘given a chance to look at them properly? That the flat exists, and that someone — Stella, the Trust or even Charlie — have the leasehold? But what you haven’t brought me are the documents of the sale or the transfer of ownership; and is that because you don’t want me to see them, or that they don’t exist?’
He saw the pain in Raine’s eyes, and deeply regretted causing it; yet her lack of answer meant he must go on, albeit in a calmer tone,
‘The issue that niggled me, I see now, wasn’t with Stella’s own moves and manoeuvrings around the building or even with the fact that she was also paying Charlie’s way, but that what she was paying was his Trust subscriptions, rent, service charge to the building’s owners possibly… and nothing more.
‘Your words yesterday, what were they? “He was given — given — a flat to rent”. But given it by whom? The Trust don’t own the building, the landlords do. The Trust only own Rachel Sowton’s flat and another they use for cooking and laundry. The Cedars is a community of private tenants; so how did Stella and your father have a flat to rent to Charlie?’
Seeing her flinch at the mention of the elder Rossiter, Grey recognised that he was the source of his daughter’s discomfort.
‘Now, this trick you’ve just attempted of blinding me with paper only confirms there is something hidden here. So please, tell me what troubles you.’
‘There was a tenant, Miss Wood, who died — quite conveniently, you might say, though I wouldn’t — just before the whole Charlie Prove saga. She had signed the Trust agreement, but hardly lived to see it enacted. I’d met her when I visited the Cedars with my father: she was a lovely old lady, had a thumb that had deformed and couldn’t straighten. She’d lived there for years, treated the Cedars as her world, her community. She was an embodiment of the Trust spirit before the Trust was even formed; and so it seems quite natural that when she died it turned out that she had left her flat and all in it “for the benefit and continuation of the Cedars Trust”.’
‘You remember the exact phrase?’
‘How could I forget it, with the difficulty my father had of interpreting it? This was at the very start of the Trust, before we began making sure everyone had a clearly written will, that a list of closest relations was kept updated, and had had the proviso added to the tenants’ contract that in the event of a death the Trust would handle the sale of a tenant’s flat if we didn’t hear otherwise from the family.
‘Yet Miss Wood had no beneficiary: no husband, children, siblings — her brother had died in the War, would you believe. My father found himself in the situation of having on his hands a flat within the Cedars that no one owned; yet neither in all professional honesty was he able to interpret the phrase “for the benefit and continuation of the Cedars Trust” as meaning “ willed to the Cedars Trust”.
‘What should he have done?’
‘He should have referred it to the Treasury as bona vacantia.’
‘Which means?’
‘ Vacant goods — it’s the legal term for ownerless property.’
‘What then?’
‘Then various processes are entered into which might have take years; and which if the state still couldn’t find an inheritor could have ended in a public auction with the proceeds going to the Treasury, which is the last thing anyone would have wanted…’
‘…because you’d have lost control of the flat?’
‘…because then no one would have benefited; just some dodgy landlord somewhere probably, wanting to put three students in there, and going against all our rules of tenant acceptability. How would that have honoured Miss Woods’ wishes?’
‘So, Stella bullied your father into instead renting the place to Charlie, when he was never even sure it was the Trust’s to rent?’
‘It was a chartable act — the rent barely covered our costs of collecting it. Nor could you say it wasn’t the solution closest to Mrs Woods’ intentions. Nor could you even say that had we argued the case then the Treasury Solicitor wouldn’t have awarded us the leasehold.’