When he came into the Venturers’ Club that Saturday afternoon, he had the look of a man going slumming. Also, he was very slightly drunk – not drunk enough to have lost caution, but drunk enough to want to tell someone, anyone, about something he was proud of. At ten to three in the dead London weekend, there was only me.
Through the dingy windows of the bar I saw his Rolls and his chauffeur waiting. I don’t know how I was so sure they were both his, and not just hired. Twelve years after being called to the Bar I still couldn’t have dreamed of having a Rolls and a chauffeur myself, whether I’d hired them or whether I’d bought them. I just did know, that’s all.
I knew it from the way he walked and from the way he talked to the barman, as well as from the clothes he wore and the gold-strapped Omega watch and the little-finger ring on his immaculately manicured hand. I knew it, too, from the self-assurance with which he ordered champagne. Members of the Venturers’ didn’t do that very often, they couldn’t afford to. But I’d had enough experience of the Courts to know when people can’t really afford to buy champagne and when they can. He could.
As we were alone there, of course he asked me to join him, and of course I did. After all, we had been up at Oxford together, even though we’d completely lost touch since.
He was good about the courtesies, I’ll say that for him.
We’d been at the same College; he’d been reading medicine while I’d been reading law. In the eighteen years since then I suppose his income as a brain surgeon had been on average twenty times mine as a barrister.
It occurred to me to wonder why he hadn’t got his knighthood yet; and then I remembered. A year or so previously he’d retired; brain surgeons, I thought, must earn a hell of a lot of money to be able to retire in such obvious prosperity at the age of forty or thereabouts.
He said to me, ‘You remember Harvester?’
I said yes, of course I did – though but for the fact of Harvester’s death two years ago and the particularly nasty circumstances which led up to it, I’m not sure that I should have done, much. Harvester had been contemporary at Oxford with me and with – well, let’s call him ‘X’. I mean the distinguished medical man I’ve been talking about so far. And the reason I mightn’t otherwise have remembered Harvester was that even as an undergraduate he’d been a shy, retiring man who didn’t make many friends, or acquaintances, either, for that matter.
Of the friends, ‘X’ had certainly been the most important.
‘I was always a bit brash, dear boy,’ ‘X’ said now. ‘Pushing, you know; quite the opposite type to him. Can’t think why he should have taken to me, but somehow he did. And somehow,’ he smiled affably at me over the rim of his glass, ‘I took to him, too.’
Money? Had it been money? ‘X’ had been an undergraduate no better off than I had been. Harvester, on the other hand, had inherited three million at the age of twenty-one.
‘We kept in touch,’ ‘X’ told me. ‘Even after we went down from Oxford, we kept in touch quite a lot. He’d have financed me in the early stages – offered to, in fact – but there wasn’t any real need. By the way, did you ever meet his wife?’
I said no.
‘Wretched business, really, her dying bringing that ghastly boy into the world.’
I said yes.
He poured more champagne for us both, then leaned back comfortably in his chair.
‘Nasty piece of work, that boy was,’ he said. ‘Spoilt, of course, but there was something wrong in his heredity, too. Must have come from the mother, because Harvester himself wasn’t any fool.’ The faintest flicker of a smile appeared on his face. ‘Not until after the boy had tried to brain him, I mean. After that, of course, his skull was in such a mess that no one could have expected him to think clearly.’
I said, ‘You treated him yourself, did you?’
‘Good Lord, no. Sir Henry did all the operating and so forth. I was just flagged in as consultant. Never touched him myself, thank God.’
I put my glass down carefully. ‘Why “thank God”?’ I asked.
‘Too tricky, dear boy. Look, you know the circumstances?’
I did know them. Harvester’s teenage son had made a deliberate, cold-blooded attempt on his father’s life, purely for the sake of getting his hands on his father’s money, and had messed it up in every conceivable way. For one thing, Harvester hadn’t died; not then, anyway. On top of that, the boy’s attempts to cover up his guilt had been so babyish that the C.I.D. laboratories had disposed of them conclusively inside twenty-four hours.
‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘one’s quite thankful that poor old Harvester was in that coma for six months, so that he never knew his son had been arrested, tried and convicted for attempted murder, and popped into prison.’
‘Never knew?’
‘X’ smiled again, a little pityingly this time.
‘My dear boy, even after he was conscious again, we wouldn’t have dreamed of telling him. He was still very bad, you understand. He lingered on and lingered on. But we all knew it was a hopeless case. He was fairly clear-headed sometimes, but you couldn’t rely on it. He didn’t say anything about the boy, and even if he’d wanted to, in the state he was in we couldn’t possibly have let a copper with a notebook squat down by the side of his bed and pester him with questions.’
It was then, I think, that a premonition stealthily began to scratch at my spine. I’d never done much criminal practice. On the other hand, to get to be a barrister you do have to know a bit about criminal law, and it wouldn’t be in human nature not to be specially interested in murder. And there were one or two things about the law relating to murder which I was now dimly beginning to remember.
‘X’ sighed. ‘Yes, he lingered on, and the months went by, and … Well, anyway, poor old Harvester. Such a nice chap. He—’
‘Wait!’ I interrupted abruptly. ‘As it happened, I was out of the country when Harvester died. After his son tried to kill him with that poker, just how long did he last?’
‘More champagne? No? Ah well, I suppose it’s closing time, anyway. And I must get back down to Sussex. Incidentally, dear boy, I’ve got rather a nice place down there; small, but pleasant. Why not come down sometime and stay for a weekend? For longer, if you like. I’m one of the idle rich now, you know. So there’s always a party of some kind going on.’
‘Harvester,’ I said.
He emptied the last of the bottle into his own glass, and eyed it complacently without for the moment picking it up.
‘Ah, yes, you were wanting to know exactly when he died. Interesting, that. As it happened, he pegged out just a year and three hours almost to the minute after that bloody son of his wounded him on the head.’
Now I was remembering a lot more about my law studies. Remembering, too, the second trial which Harvester’s son had been dragged from prison to be subjected to, and the verdict. And yet, why was ‘X’ so pleased about it all? There he sat, in the armchair opposite to mine, clever, balding, tight, self-satisfied, fascinated with his own cleverness, obviously longing to tell someone about it, and equally obviously confident that the telling could never put him in any possible sort of danger. Now it was my cue. Even then I knew that I ought just to have got up and left. That I should never have given him the satisfaction of saying the things he wanted said, was waiting for me to say. But, you understand, I still wasn’t sure, and if what I suspected was true, there just might be something I could do about it …
‘A year and three hours,’ I said. ‘Harvester died a year and three hours after the act which killed him. If it had been a year and twenty-five hours, what then?’
‘X’ called for the barman, asking for his overcoat to be brought.
‘Dear boy,’ he murmured, ‘you’re the legal expert, aren’t you? I’m just a simple medical man. The real trouble was, you see, that Harvester knew perfectly well he was going to die, and he didn’t want to die in the nursing-home. He wanted to die in his own bed.’
‘Even though moving him would have been dangerous?’
‘Not just dangerous. Miracles apart, it was pretty certain to be fatal.’
‘And yet you allowed it?’
‘X’ raised his eyebrows.
‘Allowed it, dear boy? I advised very strongly against it. Very strongly indeed. But then, as I told you, I wasn’t in charge of the case. By the way, have you ever met Sir Henry? Nice old boy. Very good at his job, but a bit woolly-minded about other things. Anyway, Sir Henry’s idea was that since there was nothing more anyone could do for Harvester, and since he was bound to hand in his chips within a few weeks regardless, there couldn’t be any real harm in humouring him. Particularly as he’d made that crazy attempt to get up and—’
‘To get up?’
‘X’’s overcoat came. He fished in his wallet, tipped the barman handsomely, and with a charming smile asked him to leave the thing ready in the porter’s lodge downstairs. At once gratified and thoroughly unwilling to show it, the barman nodded curtly and took himself off.
‘Yes, he actually got himself out of bed,’ said ‘X’, shaking his head sadly. ‘God knows how. I can tell you, from the medical point of view it set him back quite a bit. I’d had a few words with him a little before that – it was one of his lucid intervals – but of course he’d seemed quite passive then.’
I said, ‘“A few words”? Anything interesting?’
‘No, no, dear boy. Just the usual placebo. And I oughtn’t to have done it, I realize that now. On account of our being old friends, there’s a chance it may have got him over-excited.’
He shrugged.
‘One just can’t tell. Anyway, it was soon after that that he took it into his head to try and get up. Of course, the nursing staff pushed him back into bed pretty sharpish, but by that time, his cerebral circulation had taken a lot of punishment. It didn’t show at first, so they went ahead with Sir Henry’s idea of shifting him back to his house in Eaton Square. As a result of which he died in the ambulance on the way there.’
Outside I could see the Rolls and the chauffeur still waiting, and I could hear that the London traffic was beginning to build up to its usual Saturday evening flurry.
‘Convenient,’ I said.
‘Convenient, dear boy? Oh, yes, certainly. In this country the murder law requires that a victim shall die within a year and a day of the act which caused his death. Harvester just managed that, didn’t he? So his son was brought out of prison and stuck up in the dock at the Old Bailey and convicted of murder. Not just attempted murder, as it would have been if Harvester had survived a few hours longer.’
‘X’ drained his glass. ‘These legal forms,’ he murmured. ‘Too silly. And in this case, very tragic, too.’ He heaved himself to his feet.
‘Well now, this has been extraordinarily pleasant, but I’m afraid I really do have to be getting down to Sussex. Some silly cocktail-party which my wife has arranged. I—’
‘Just one more thing.’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘Here we are, all alone,’ I said. ‘And there are you, and you haven’t got to the point even yet, have you?’
‘The point, dear boy?’
‘You see, there’s something else about criminal law which I’ve just remembered. A murderer if convicted can’t profit financially or in any other way from his crime.’
‘Quite right, dear boy, quite right. Shocking if he could. What I mean is, he’d be able to inherit and pass the money on to anyone he chose—’
‘Too shocking to contemplate,’ I said. ‘I take it that Harvester’s son is without his fortune?’
‘X’ looked at me with what I can only describe as real pleasure.
‘Very acute, that,’ he said. ‘While I’m lazing away down in the country, believe me I’m still going to be watching your career with a lot of interest and enthusiasm – and a lot of affection, too.
‘Yes, Harvester’s son was his sole heir. No other family, actually. So of course when Harvester died within the year and the day and Harvester’s son was convicted of the killing, all the Harvester fortune went elsewhere, to the residuary legatee, in fact.’
He gave me a light, pleasant wave of the hand, and started to move out of the room.
‘In fact, as there was no other family,’ he said, ‘Harvester in his will named an old friend as residuary legatee. And the old friend got the lot.
‘Don’t forget about coming to see me in Sussex, dear boy, will you? We’re really quite comfortable down there.’