Too Many Cousins Read online

  It was a coincidence, for that matter, that Mr. Tuke should have had that talk with Parmiter not long before his meeting with Mile Boulanger; or, conversely, that he should meet her when he did. Cecile herself might be classed as the most striking coincidence of all. For Harvey had known of her for some time. She was a very confidential clerk at the headquarters in London of the Fighting French Navy, soon to become once more the navy of a liberated France. Mrs. Tuke, who was French, and who held high rank in the Service Feminin de la Flotte, the equivalent of the W.R.N.S., often mentioned her valuable assistant. Mr. Tuke, however, had never met Mlle Boulanger until the Sunday immediately following his lesson in the methods of an obituarist.

  Yvette Tuke had just returned from France. Apart from her rank in the Service Feminin, one is not a Garay of the famous Clos Garay for nothing. To oblige a daughter of one of the greater Burgundies, strings had been pulled and urgent duties discovered, and Yvette had got herself conveyed by air to a newly freed Paris, and from Paris to Dijon, where after four anxious years she was able to spend four hours with her parents. She had used this mission to learn all she could about the relatives of exiles who would have to wait some time longer before they could even revisit France. Mile Boulanger had an aunt and some cousins in the Cote d’Or, and it was for news of them that she called that Sunday afternoon—it was the 20th of August— at the Tukes’ flat in Westminster, Mrs. Tuke having flown back only the evening before.

  It might be described as yet another coincidence that Mr. Tuke was just beginning his holiday. However, since the day was Sunday, and his wife had been away in that France which was almost as much his country as hers, he would no doubt have been at home in any case when the visitor was announced.

  There was at a first glance nothing particularly French about Cecile Boulanger, except her navy blue uniform with its cross of Lorraine and the letters F.N.F.L. in gold on her round cap. As was to appear, she was half English, and she spoke that language idiomatically and with scarcely a trace of accent. At a second glance, her dark good looks, if one excepted a short nose, showed her Latin strain. Her hair was almost black, her brown eyes large and liquid. Her mouth was a little pinched and fretful, and Harvey put her down as capable and conscientious, rather fussy, and without much sense of humour. He estimated her age, correctly enough, at the middle or late thirties. He had then no reason, however, to feel any special interest in Mile Boulanger; and, having been introduced, he left her with his wife and retired to his study.

  It was a quarter of an hour later that his wife came in to him.

  “Tea is in,” she said. “And Cecile wants your advice.”

  “What about?” Harvey asked suspiciously.

  “She will tell you. The police know about it, and they say it was an accident. But I think Cecile is frightened.”

  When Harvey re-entered the drawing-room, Mile Boulanger was sitting bolt upright, her eyes on the door. With her little round sailor’s cap removed from her severely waved hair, she appeared older. Her look seemed to search Mr. Tuke’s dark and devilish face rather anxiously. Being neither vain nor self-conscious, he did not always realise how formidable his satanic features sometimes appeared to strangers. Cecile Boulanger was perhaps already regretting her impulse to confide in this somewhat terrifying personage.

  Mrs. Tuke, reading her thoughts, rested a hand lightly on her shoulder as she passed on her way to the table where a silver spirit-stove heated a gleaming kettle, which was singing briskly. Harvey sank into a chair beside the guest. “What is the trouble, Mile Boulanger?” he asked.

  Cecile was still eyeing him warily.

  “It seems rather silly now,” she said.

  “Perhaps we can make it seem sillier, and then it will altogether cease to trouble.”

  The kettle emitted a jet of steam. Mrs. Tuke, her charming face set in a little frown of concentration, ladled tea from a rosewood caddy. Then she looked up.

  “Cecile thinks somebody tried to kill her,” she announced in her direct way.

  “Dear me,” said Harvey. “Why?”

  Mile Boulanger twisted her hands together. “It was perhaps only an accident after all,” she said.

  “I meant, why should anybody wish to kill you?”

  “Oh, that is such a long story.”

  “All the same, let us have it.”

  She still hesitated in a way which seemed rather odd in one who had the air of being normally very self-sufficient. Then, encouraged by a little nod from Mrs. Tuke, she took the plunge.

  “Well, to begin with, Mr. Tuke, a few months ago a cousin of mine was killed in the blackout. He was run over. Everybody said it was an accident. He was an Englishman—I am half English—and an officer in the army. I didn’t know him very well, but I had dinner with him sometimes, and I liked him. He was always kind——”

  “We may as well have his name,” Mr. Tuke said.

  “Yes, of course. It was Dresser. Sydney Dresser.”

  Yvette looked sharply at her husband. Mile Boulanger, though she was watching him closely, detected no change in his enigmatic face; but his wife knew that the name meant something to him.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Sydney was killed in March,” Cecile continued, more at her ease now the plunge was taken. “The next thing that happened was what Mrs. Tuke spoke of. My accident. . . . It was on the 10th of April. I live in Pimlico, and I’d been to one of the cinemas near Victoria Station. When I came out it was after nine, and quite dark. I walked down Wilton Road. At the crossing at Warwick Way a convoy of lorries was going by—heavy traffic uses Warwick Way to get to Vauxhall Bridge—and I had to wait on the pavement. There was a little crowd there. Suddenly someone gave me a terrific push in the back. I was knocked right out into the road, and almost fell under one of the lorries. I don’t know how I saved myself.”

  She shuddered at the recollection. Harvey rose to hand her a cup of tea.

  “I take it you didn’t know who pushed you?”

  “No. And it was so dark—there was no moon, and it was before double summer-time began—the people there were just blurs.”

  “You referred to the affair as an accident. Did you think it was one at the time?”

  Mile Boulanger sipped her tea. “Yes, of course,” she said. “Well, I thought it must be, naturally. I thought somebody must have stumbled against me. Though none of the people who were there, beside me, apologised. A man said, quite crossly, ‘You oughtn’t to have tried that on, miss. Gave me a turn, it did’—as if it was my fault. Of course, it happened very quickly, and then the last of the lorries went by, and we all crossed the road. I was feeling very angry,” Cecile added, with a tight little smile. “I suppose because I’d been frightened.”

  “And very naturally,” Harvey said. “Have one of these things with jam on them. What, by the way, has made you alter your mind about the accidental nature of the episode?” Mile Boulanger took a jam tart abstractedly, her eyes on his face. Mrs. Tuke was watching him too, having an idea that he suspected what had caused Cecile to alter her mind. But the latter appeared to have no inkling of this.

  “Spmething that happened a fortnight ago,” she said. “Another cousin of mine has been killed—by accident.”

  “Your family is having a run of bad luck. Who was this other cousin?”

  “A Mrs. Porteous. Blanche Porteous. She was a schoolteacher, and she took poison by mistake. Or they say so.”

  “But you are not so sure?”

  Cecile Boulanger’s rather thick dark eyebrows contracted in a frown of worry and perplexity.

  “Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she exclaimed fretfully. “It would never have occurred to me that it was anything but an accident if it hadn’t been for what happened to me. And to Sydney. That was how he was killed. By a lorry, or a van. Of course, I don’t really mean that he was pushed. I just don’t know. But now. . . . I mean, three of us, in a few months, killed or nearly killed, by accidents. . . .” She shrugged, and went on m
ore quietly: “Well, Mr. Tuke, one half of me, the English half, I suppose, tells me not to be a fool. Accidents are happening every day. But then the. other half, the French half, says I ought to think clearly and logically about it, and not be casual and woolly. And when I do think it out like that, it seems very queer. . . . ”

  Mile Boulanger’s French half, Harvey reflected, would think it queerer still if it knew that not two, but three other members of her family had met with fatal accidents in those few months. But apparently Gecile had not yet learnt of the death of Raymond Shearsby. The possibility that he was not her relation occurred to Mr. Tuke, and was dismissed. There was a limit to one’s acceptance of coincidences. Altogether it seemed that the thorough-going methods of his club acquaintance, Parmiter, had in this instance unearthed a story which at least called for inquiry.

  “So we come back,” was all Harvey said, “to the question I asked in the beginning. Why should anyone want to kill you and your cousins, Mile Boulanger?”

  “We are heirs to a large sum of money,” Gecile replied.

  CHAPTER III

  PERHAPS it was the French half of Gecile Boulanger that animated her dark eyes and tightened her rather thin lips as she uttered the words, “a large sum of money”. But even among the casual and woolly English, money is at the root of ninety-nine per cent, of crime, and, with such a motive declared at the outset, this sequence of fatalities in her family took on an even more suggestive aspect. Mr. Tuke, who had been lying back in his chair, sat up, crossed his legs, and put the tips of his fingers together, a sort of forensic attitude which meant that his interest was aroused.

  “As you speak of cousins in the present tense,” he remarked, “I take it that there are more of you.”

  “There were six,” Gecile said.

  “Of whom, to your knowledge, two have recently died?” She nodded, giving him a curious look, as though her undoubtedly sharp wits were slightly puzzled by the qualifying clause.

  “What is the exact relationship between you?” Harvey went on. “And how do you come to be heirs to a large sum of money? In fact, tell me all about your family.”

  “Give Cecile some more tea, Harvey, and something to eat, before she begins/’ Yvette put in. “These proces of yours are rather exhausting.”

  The guest’s cup and plate were replenished, and Harvey resumed his attentive attitude. Fortified by a bite into a tomato sandwich, Gecile took up her tale.

  “I had better give you a sort of family tree,” she said. “It will explain how the money comes into it.”

  “By all means make it clear. May I smoke a cigar?”

  “Please do. I used to wish my father smoked them, but he could not smoke at all, because of his profession.” Mile Boulanger finished her sandwich, and continued: “It all begins with my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Rutland Shearsby.”

  Again Yvette noted an all but imperceptible shade of expression on her husband’s face which implied that this name held some meaning for him. He was lighting a Larranaga with his usual care, rotating it between his lips so that the flame of the match was evenly applied. Cecile Boulanger was drinking tea. She put down her cup and resumed her tale.

  She used to think of her maternal great-grandfather, she said rather surprisingly, as a sort of Mr. Dombey. Rutland Shearsby had been, in fact, an importer of oriental goods, and Cecile remembered an old daguerrotype of him in which he was shown with a bald head and whiskers, wearing a low waistcoat and a stiff white shirt with two immense black studs in it. She had known him in his later days, when she was a schoolgirl and he was an octogenarian. When he died in 1926 he was ninety-two. He lived in an immense house in Lancaster Gate—a dreadful house, said Gecile, like a prison. It was gone now, ecrase by a bomb. It had become an emergency water tank.

  The oriental importer had three children—Martin, Alice (Mile Boulanger’s grandmother), and Deverel. His wife died before Gecile herself was born. And it was after Mrs. Rutland Shearsby’s death that the trouble began. In 1902, at the age of sixty-eight, the widower married again.

  He knew quite well what he was doing, Gecile said in reply to a question by Mr. Tuke. He had only retired from business three years before, and was still very active and full of interests. There was nothing the matter with his mind for another ten or twelve years. “Though you might say,” Mile Boulanger remarked acidly, “that his mind must have been failing, because the woman was only twenty-nine. But that sort of weakness seems to be rather common. Old men and young women, I mean.” It was not, however, the disparity in years, or even a second marriage as such, that perturbed the family. It was the lady herself. She had been the importer’s housekeeper. And, as Cecile said, one did not have lady housekeepers in those days.

  “Was there any addition to the family as a result of this second marriage?” Harvey asked at this point.

  “No, thank goodness,” said Cecile.

  “Did you know the lady?”

  “Oh, of course. I saw her several times while greatgrandfather was still alive. She is not dead yet, you know.” Harvey’s eyebrows lifted. “Indeed? Though of course, she will still be relatively young.”

  “She is seventy-one.”

  “A mere child. And I suppose your great-grandfather, having married her, drew up a new will which is bearing rather hardly on his descendants of your generation?” Cecile gave him a sharp look, and smiled unmirthfully. “You would think of that, naturally. You are a lawyer.”

  “The story also seems to be developing along familiar fictional lines. The unjust will is an essential feature of the step-relation theme. Though a step-great-grandmother is in every sense a novel variation to me.”

  “We are finding it rather hackneyed,” Cecile said bitterly. “But you are right about the will, of course. I’ll try to explain it. The lawyers made it sound difficult——”

  She stopped, a little confused. Mrs. Tuke smiled. “What are we for?” said Harvey. “Go on.”

  When Rutland Shearsby married again, his youngest child, Deverel, was dead. Deverel travelled for the firm, and he died in India in 1893. He was married, and the importer settled some money on the widow. The eldest son, Martin, was also in the business, and he became the head of it when his father retired. Alice, the daughter, married Paul Dressed, of Dresser’s Bank at Chelmsford, one of the old private banks. This pair, born respectively in 1860 and 1861, were some dozen years older than their stepmother; and as Mr. Tuke remarked, such a situation called for great tact and forbearance on both sides. Mile Boulanger seemed about to make some comment on this, but contented herself with an expressive shrug and passed on to the terms of her greatgrandfather’s will.

  This, it seemed, was not drawn up at the time of the second marriage. According to Alice Dresser, though the new wife got round her father in some ways, he regarded the marriage as a kind of experiment, so far as the bulk of his fortune was concerned. He needed somebody, and he was used to her, but she was on trial, so to speak. For her part, she was well aware that she might lose everything if she played her cards badly. She was clever, and she waited; nothing was said about a will. She had plenty of time, and she was alone with the old man in that great house in Lancaster Gate. Nobody knew, said Cecile, how she worked on him all those years, being humble and grateful and making herself indispensable, and gradually turning him against his own children and grandchildren. . . .

  “Because,” said Cecile through tight lips, “that is what it came to. All his children, and now another whole generation, have died without getting one penny of the money that ought to have been theirs. . . . ”

  Old Rutland Shearsby, in fact, waited until he was nearly eighty before he made his last will. By the terms of it, after legacies and certain sums to be paid outright to his two surviving children had been deducted, a trust fund was to be created out of the residue of the estate, and of this fund the second Mrs. Shearsby was to draw the income as long as she lived, or until she married again.

  “Which, of cou
rse,” said Cecile, with a short laugh, “she was not such an imbecile as to do. After her death, the fund was to be shared equally between the children, or if they died before her, between their children, and so on. I am not explaining it very well, perhaps. It was all wrapped up in words like residuary and increment and per something. . . . ”

  “Per stirpes?” Harvey suggested.

  “Yes, that is it.”

  “It means that the capital in trust will, after the death of your step-great-grandmother, flow down in three equal shares through the descendants of the testator’s children, assuming that the latter are already deceased. I gather from what you say that the next generation is also extinct, leaving yourself and your surviving cousins to share the residuary estate in the proportion of one third to each branch. How much does the trust fund amount to, by the way?”

  “It will be worth over £200,000,” Gecile said.

  “After payment of death duties?”

  “Yes. I know, because my father made inquiries.” Harvey carefully removed the ash from his cigar. Yvette, by a gesture, invited her guest’s attention to the sandwiches and cakes, but Gecile shook her head. The family fortunes had her in their grip. Her brown eyes searched Harvey’s mephistophelian features, without learning much from them.

  “Now let’s go back,” he said. “Tell me what has happened to the intervening generations.”

  It was, said Cecile, like a fatality. Before old Rutland Shearsby died in 1926, the family business was in difficulties. It had something to do with Japanese competition, and the post-war slump, and then perhaps her great-uncle Martin was not so clever as his father. The latter knew nothing about the trouble. It was kept from him at first, and by the time the firm was in a really bad way his mind had begun to fail. He was nearly ninety. So his money could not be touched; and when he died, and Martin went to his stepmother for help, she refused to give up a penny of her life interest. And as by the terms of the will the interests of the beneficiaries under the trust were inalienable, they could neither sell their shares nor raise money on them. And so in the end, a year or two after the old importer’s death, the business was closed down. Martin Shearsby, a ruined man, died a few years later. And in the meantime disaster had also overtaken his sister and her husband. Dresser’s Bank had long since been absorbed by one of the big joint stock concerns, and Paul Dresser had retired on an ample pension. But he commuted this, and speculated, and lost everything. Alice Dresser applied to her stepmother for aid, as Martin had done, and with the same result. Then she and her husband died, early in the 1930’s; and Martin’s widow following him to the grave soon after, while Mrs. Deverel Shearsby had been dead for years, here was the end of all Rutland Shearsby’s children and their wives.