And Theo, the young drone, stout and lethargic, playing with his stocks and shares in his cosy London flat… Inspector Cockrill had known him since his boyhood. ‘You needn’t think, Cockie, that I wanted my father’s money. I’m all right: I got my share of my mother’s money when she died.’
‘Oh, did you?’ said Cockrill. ‘And her other son, Bill?’
‘She left it to my father, to pass on if he thought it was right.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit unfair? He wasn’t Bill’s own father; and it was her money.’
‘I think she’d probably sort of written him off. I mean, it’s easy enough to hop across from America nowadays, isn’t it? But he never came to see her. Though I believe the servants let him know, when she was dying; and they did correspond. In secret; my father would never have allowed it, of course.’
‘Of course!’ said Cockie. He dismissed the matter of money. ‘How well, Theo, did you know your father’s new wife?’
‘Not at all well. I saw her when I came to visit my mother during her illness, and again at the funeral after she died. But of course…’ But of course, his tone admitted, a man didn’t have to know Elizabeth well, to… There was that something…
‘You never contemplated marrying her yourself?’
But Theo, lazy and self-indulgent, was not for the married state. ‘All the same, Inspector, it did make me pretty sick to think of it. I mean, my own father….’
Would Theo, dog in the manger, almost physically revolted by the thought of his adored in the gross arms of his own father—would Theo kill for that? ‘These bottled peaches, Theo. You served them out, I know; but who actually opened them? I mean, had they been unsealed in advance?’
‘No, because they’d have lost the bouquet of the Kirsch. Right up to the last minute, they were sealed.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘Elizabeth can bear me out. We nipped in here on the way to the wedding—I drove her down from London—for me to go to the loo in case I should start hopping in church. And she took a quick dekko just to see that everything looked all right. She’ll tell you the bottles were still sealed up then; you can ask her.’
‘How quick a dekko? Tell me about this visit.’
‘Oh, good heavens, Inspector!—the whole thing took three minutes, we were late and you know what the old man was. We rushed in, I dashed into the cloakroom, when I came out she was standing at the dining-room door, looking in, and she said, “It all looks wonderful,” and what a good job Bill and I had done. Then she went into the cloakroom and we both got into the car and went off again.’
‘Was the tin of cyanide on the hall table then?’
‘Yes, because she said thank goodness Bill seemed to have got it for her and saved her more trouble with Father.’
‘No one else was in the house at this time?’
‘No, Bill had gone on to the church with my father.’
‘O.K. Well, send this Bill to me, will you, Theo? And tell him to bring his passport with him.’
He was ten years older than his step-brother; well into his thirties: blond headed, incisive, tough, an ugly customer probably on a dirty night; but rather an engaging sort of chap for all that. Cockie turned over the pages of the passport. ‘You haven’t been in this country since you were a boy?’
‘No, they shipped me out as a kid, my new papa didn’t want me and my mother doesn’t seem to have put up too much of a fight for me. So I wasn’t all that crazy to come rushing home on visits.’
‘Not even when she died?’
‘At that time I was—prevented,’ he said briefly.
‘By what, if I may ask?’
‘By four stone walls,’ said Step-son Bill, ruefully. ‘Which in my case, Inspector, did a prison make. In other words, I was doing time, sir. I got into a fight with a guy and did six months for him. I only got out a few weeks ago.’
‘A fight about what?’
‘About my wife, if you have to know,’ he said, sullenly, ‘I was bumming around, I admit it, and I guess he got her on the rebound. Well, bum or not, I took and chucked her out and that was the end of her. And I took and pulled him in, and that was the end of him—in the role of seducer, anyway.’
‘You divorced your wife?’
‘Yeh, I divorced her.’ He looked at Inspector Cockrill and the hard, bright eyes had suddenly a look almost of despair. ‘I think now I made some pretty bad mistakes,’ he said.
‘At any rate, having got out, you learned that your stepfather was marrying the nurse; that your mother’s money was in jeopardy, perhaps? So you came across hot foot, to look the lady over?’