REPEATED SIGHTINGS OF THE majestic gothic spires of King’s College Chapel cannot dull their impact. As the visitor to Cambridge ambles south from St. John’s Street into Trinity, Trinity into King’s Parade, the Chapel never fails to catch the eye unawares, often bringing the stroller to a standstill, reminding him of his ant-like status in the grand design. The enormous structure stretches forever overhead, in summer piercing blue sky, in winter blending into the gray, its carved stone spiraling into an ever more elaborate frenzy of fifteenth-century devotion.
St. Just could never pass the Chapel without thinking of the slow, painstaking decades it had taken a series of medieval stonemasons to fashion it, their names now lost to history. He doubted such a prayer to heaven and mankind could be reproduced in this pre-fabricated, jerry-built century. Whoever had built the horror that was Ruthven’s office wouldn’t have had a clue.
At this time of year, the tag end of full Michaelmas term, Cambridge had been largely depleted of students, and the few pedestrians joining him as he neared Trumpington Street, judging by their clothing, were non-natives of England. He imagined they were mostly graduate students, far from home, shivering, trapped here by penury and distance to work on dissertations on obscure topics that few outside their tutors-and often, including their tutors-would ever read. A man of African descent who appeared to be in his thirties passed St. Just, muttering something under his breath about nuclei.
St. Just turned to cut through Market Square, filled this morning with vendors offering Christmas ornaments, sprigs of holly and mistletoe and pots of poinsettias, and handmade toys and sweaters. He paused by a tray of small, gaily painted wooden trains, wondering if they would make a suitable gift for Sergeant Fear’s baby, due in mere weeks. He felt somehow that Fear’s wife would question the safety of the red and yellow paint, or worry that the baby would swallow the caboose whole. It was difficult on the whole to know what to buy a child in these days of highly educated mothers. A safe room, perhaps.
The offices of Quentin Coffield, Esq., were located down a cobblestone alleyway that snaked out near the right wall of the Cavendish Laboratory. They occupied the first and second floors of a squat, beamed Tudor building, whitewashed and bow-fronted, with dormer windows that seemed to date from a later period; on the ground floor was a shop catering to the tourist trade, selling sweatshirts, T-shirts, and coffee mugs bearing the heraldic emblems of the University and of its various colleges. A sign over narrow wooden stairs to the left of the shop announced he was entering the premises of Coffield, Grant, Crisp, and Barley. St. Just wondered how they all four could fit into the cramped space which revealed itself as he gained the first floor and stooped to enter the dark-beamed doorway.
The young assistant sitting in the antechamber behind a small oak desk was, he imagined, a moonlighting law student. She wore the severe black suit and starched white shirt that was becoming the uniform of young professional women everywhere, her hair tied back in a sleek knot by a stretchy black fabric that looked like a man’s sock. All that was missing to complete the dress-for-success effect were the official black robes and a powdered periwig.
She peered at him suspiciously over thick, horn-rimmed glasses, an accessory making a comeback among the young, he’d noticed, the difference being that she wore them without a trace of the irony he found so touching among most of the students with whom he came in contact. This one would be head of chambers one day, he thought. That, or a hanging judge.
“You would be Detective Chief Inspector St. Just, would you not?” She might have been interrogating a witness in the box.
Perversely, he considered denying it. Instead, he settled for briefly flashing his warrant card and a smile.
“Mr. Coffield is, of course, expecting you,” she said. “Shocking business, this.”
“You knew Sir Adrian, did you?”
“Only in a manner of speaking. I just fill in here during the vacs, you know.” As I fast-forward my way to the Inns of Court, finished St. Just for her silently. “But Sir Adrian was a frequent visitor. Mr. Coffield used to jest that he saw Sir Adrian more frequently than he saw his own wife.” She broke into a wide grin, then, recovering herself, pressed her lips into a stern line. He supposed laughing at the boss’s jokes was Chapter Four in whatever manual she was reading to help propel herself to the top. He just had time to note she had a lovely smile that he felt might take her even further than the starchy black suit might. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, he judged.
“When did you see Sir Adrian last?”
“It couldn’t have been even a week.” She flipped open a calendar diary, running a polished nail over the appointments list. “Here it is. Wednesday.”
Just after his wedding then.
“I gather Sir Adrian made rather a habit of rewriting his will,” he said.
He immediately saw he had overstepped her bounds. Smiling approvingly at Mr. Coffield’s little quips was one thing; betraying client confidentiality was another. Or perhaps her legal training was already teaching her that to say nothing whatsoever to the police was always the best policy.
“Now, that I wouldn’t know.” Slapping shut the calendar, she said, “Let me just see if Mr. Coffield is available.”
The offices of Coffield, Etc., apparently not running to the modern convenience of an intercom, she squeezed her slight frame out from behind the crowded confines of the desk and walked the few steps over to a door at right. Knocking, she peeked her head in and announced his arrival. The answer apparently being in the affirmative, she turned and waved him in. As he thanked her, he was again rewarded by a smile as brief as summer.
The man who rose to greet him was somewhat a surprise, much younger than St. Just could have imagined to have his name listed first in the roster of his lawyerly colleagues. Perhaps thirty-five, no more than forty, with a full mane of dark blonde hair sweeping across a high forehead in accepted Hugh Grant, matinee-idol fashion. In spite of his comparative youth there was a hard glint to Coffield’s eyes as he rapidly took the measure of his visitor. He waved him wordlessly into a leather chair before his massive polished desk. St. Just thought a person could have hidden several large torsos in its side drawers alone, if he were of a mind.
He wasn’t sure he was going to like Mr. Coffield, who had pushed aside his coffee and now sat anticipating St. Just’s first question in a studiedly dispassionate way. Far too polished by half, he thought. He also noticed Coffield didn’t bother with the formality of offering refreshments, one upholder of the law to another. Nor did he offer any of the requisite expressions of regret at Sir Adrian’s “passing.” A small thing, but it bothered St. Just nonetheless. Coffield’s manner seemed to say that the sooner the police could be gotten rid of the sooner he, Coffield, could return to more urgent business. And just what could be more important than murder?
Mentally steeling himself, St. Just sat down, causing the old leather chair to creak in protest.
“You were Sir Adrian’s solicitor, I take it?”
Coffield nodded regally, straightening a pen against a sheaf of papers on his desk.
“For the past three years, yes.”
“I see. I’d gathered from the family you’d handled his affairs for rather longer than that.”
“They’d be thinking of my father, I expect. Passed away three years ago, which is when I took his place in the firm.”
“But you are fully conversant with his affairs? Sir Adrian’s, I mean?”
Here Coffield hesitated. “To a large extent. My father was meticulous in his record keeping-one has to be in this line of work, of course. I gather he and Sir Adrian went back donkey’s years together, which helps explain-in part-the voluminous nature of the files on Sir Adrian.” Here he gestured to a wall to his left, filled with neatly labeled legal boxes. A disproportionately large number bore the name Beauclerk-Fisk.
“I see. And the nature of Sir Adrian’s business with your father?”
“My father was an expert on wills, probate, death duties.” He allowed himself a small smile, visibly expanding. “As am I, even though I read Greats at King’s College. I wanted an academic career, you see. My father convinced me not to be such a fool. Thank God-I think. Being the last word on Plato really doesn’t pay all that well.”
“I was at Peterhouse, myself. It was positively stiff at the time with students reading law.”
Coffield barely troubled to conceal his surprise. How-why- would anyone go from Peterhouse to a career in the local police force? St. Just felt it would be pushing rudeness to counter-productivity to explain he had felt his passion for law and order would be better served in investigating crime than in exculpating it as a barrister. And to be a solicitor had struck him as the very height of boredom.
“I gather Sir Adrian was-a frequent customer?”
At this Coffield laughed. It was nearly as unexpected as the smile of his severe little assistant out there in the reception area. Perhaps knowledge of the old university tie had softened him a bit.
“Our best customer. One might think it was in the nature of a game he liked to play, this constant fiddling with his will. He did like to torment his family with it, or at least use it as a stick. But he was, I always thought, deadly serious about this ‘game.’ He was determined that no one who had won his disfavor would be permitted to gain from the sweat of his brow, as he liked to put it. Unfortunately, that left almost no one to leave anything to. At one point-this was probably the first will I made out for him-he’d left the bulk of his estate to some home for wayward girls. Rather as a joke, I think.” He shrugged, palms upward, in a “Who knows?” gesture.
“Personally, I was amazed to learn there was such a thing in this day and age,” Coffield went on. “It was a convent school in London. St. Drudmilla’s or some such, I believe. But he couldn’t be talked out of it. He believed in his heart of hearts-as we all do, I daresay-that he would live forever, so he could put anything he damned well liked in his will and it wouldn’t matter. At the same time, as I say, he was quite serious about it all. Worried, would be a better word. I think it really tormented him that-well, that his family had turned out the way it had. That he had no one he trusted or liked enough to leave it all to. Rather sad, when you think of it.”
But Mr. Coffield didn’t look sad, thought St. Just. Puzzled, yes, but not sad.
“You didn’t like him?” he asked.
“It was neither here nor there whether I did, and after our first encounters I gave up trying. For his part, he was confident I was competent to draw up something airtight and incontestable and that’s all he cared about. But no, I can’t say I did-like him, that is. My father-well, he spoke of him infrequently, but he indicated once that Sir Adrian had greatly changed over the years. That success had changed him, is what I suppose he meant.”
“How did they meet, Sir Adrian and your father?”
“In Paris, he told me. In a café, most likely, while my father was doing the Grand Tour. That would be about ten years after the war, when Sir Adrian was establishing himself as a writer. No doubt hoping to get in with some remnant of the Hemingway/ Fitzgerald crowd. I doubt he had much success at that. Didn’t have a pot to piss in, for one thing, until his marriage, and even then, Sir Adrian was so… competitive, he wasn’t likely to be welcomed by any group of writers, cutthroat as they themselves may have been. My father rather took him under his wing, and may have given him a pound here and there to keep body and soul together. At least Sir Adrian wasn’t entirely ungrateful, we must say that for him. More likely, he saw my father’s potential usefulness. In any event, he maintained the relationship for all the decades that followed, and, of course, became a favored client.”
“I see.” St. Just made a concerted effort not to shift about in the leather chair, which protested like an old saddle with his every movement. “For the moment, let’s go back to your most recent meeting with him. He always visited your offices, did he? You weren’t invited out to the house?”
Again, that brief, harsh laugh. “Tony Blair would have been more welcome. No. It may have been partly that I was regarded more as hired help. But beyond that, I think he liked his little visits here kept secret-until he was willing to announce them to fullest effect himself.”
“Was there any one beneficiary who seemed to be in favor more often than the others?”
“I think Sir Adrian rather regarded Ruthven as a chip off the old block,” Coffield answered obliquely. “For the most part, yes, he had stayed at the top of Sir Adrian’s personal honors list more often than the rest of them. But his last will and testament-his very last-changed all that. The estate was divided equally, this time, among his new wife and his lawful issue, excepting Ruthven-a new wrinkle. The wife gets the use of the house, which is then to pass to George. The staff were well done by, as always. Yes, surprising, what?
Oh, and that secretary chap of his was made literary executor of his most recent manuscript-something about Scotland. The royalties from that were left to his ex-wife. Interesting also, I felt. But it all didn’t matter, in a way. He’d probably have just changed it again, before too long.”
“Given the chance. But… how peculiar. For a start, I didn’t gain the impression he was on the outs with his eldest son.”
“It’s not really peculiar. At least, not by Sir Adrian’s standards, not peculiar at all. He’d done similar things before. The last will but one, his daughter was cut out completely; I forget why. Something about Middle Eastern foie gras. Before that, George, when he got involved with a rock group or something of which I gather Sir Adrian disapproved. It was all quite feudal. They none of them knew at any given time who was in, who was out of favor. And somewhat akin to Russian roulette, as it turns out, for Sir Adrian himself.”
Ignoring the question behind Coffield’s last words, St. Just said, “He sounds like the kind of man who’d enjoy making a tontine.”
Coffield cocked a brow in amused appreciation.
“Quite illegal these days, you know. It creates too much temptation for people to bump each other off in the hope of being the only remaining beneficiary. Sir Adrian sailed very near the wind on that score on several occasions, or tried to. It quite suited his proclivity for promoting fierce competition amongst his heirs. Fortunately, I was able to talk him out of it. As I say, tontine schemes are illegal in this country, although I understand they survive in some limited way in France.”
“Could any of them have gotten hold of a copy of the will?”
“Highly doubtful. Sir Adrian was most particular about that. Of course, I tried to give him a copy in the usual way. He declared he would just burn it like he’d burned all the rest-he didn’t want it lying about for prying eyes to see. No, the will was lodged with us here, on the premises, with a further copy kept at the bank for safekeeping. “
“It’s not impossible someone could have broken in here to have a look?”
Coffield’s reply was chilly. “It’s not completely without the realm of possibility, of course, but I would say it’s highly unlikely. Extremely. We’ve never had a burglary of any kind.”
“I meant no criticism of your care in handling your clients’ affairs,” said St. Just evenly. “But you must see that this will, especially the… peculiar… way Sir Adrian messed about with it, may be vital to solving the case. This marriage, for example-”
“I was the last to know about that, apart from his family. He slipped off to Gretna Green, mind made up on that score. I doubt I could have talked him out of it, even had I been given the opportunity to try.”
“And now, weeks later, his new wife inherits a large share of- What sort of amount are we talking about, Mr. Coffield?” He didn’t expect an answer, and so was all the more surprised when Coffield said:
“Upwards of seventeen million pounds. And that’s just the ready cash.”
Off St. Just’s look, he said equably:
“Sir Adrian was a canny investor. Quite a lot of motive to go around, perhaps you’re thinking. Yes, indeed. Except for Ruthven, of course. Not that any of that matters now. To him.”
“No, Ruthven won’t mind any more, will he?”