Inheritance Read online

  He would take it.

  The buzzer rang.

  9

  A NDY WENT DOWNSTAIRS TO tussle with the lock. Minutes later he swung open the front door. But not Sophie.

  Someone for Jerome perhaps - a cantankerous rapper from St Lucia who rented the ground-floor flat.

  Black hair, he saw, and a pale face and defiant brown eyes.

  'Hello,' collapsing her umbrella.

  A reedy female voice interrupted through the intercom, climbing over the sound of rock music. ' Who was it you wanted?'

  'All right, Marina,' Andy turned and shouted back. 'It's for me.'

  'Sorry - thought it might be Sophie.' Marina had a stud on her tongue and looked like Marilyn Manson, her god.

  The music cut out. Leaving Andy to face the person standing there.

  'I gave you a lift,' she said. 'Jeanine Pyke.'

  She had on her raincoat, buttoned to the chin, and was wearing blue gumboots as if she had been striding towards him through a puddle of ink.

  He released the breath that had been caught in his throat. 'I remember.'

  'What's your name? We never introduced ourselves.' The words came sharp and unexpected.

  'Andrew,' he said.

  'Just Andrew?'

  'Andrew Larkham.'

  She knew where he lived. She had hunted him down.

  'Hello, hello, who ith it?'

  'It's okay, I've got it, Jerome.'

  'Yo, Andy, that you, man? Shit. I hoped it was the man to fix the daw.'

  'No, it's a friend of mine.'

  'I'll get on to Conrad again,' said Jerome, who had lost a couple of spaces in his teeth after a New Year's Eve deal went sour - since when there had been a noticeable upgrade in his security consciousness.

  'Whatever you decide, Jerome, I'm behind you.'

  He turned once more to the young woman. Her sudden appearance sobering him back to how he felt after he crawled out of bed that morning to answer the doorbell.

  'I didn't know which bell you were,' she said, and stepped past.

  Andy followed her up. She was waiting for him in his kitchen.

  'Can I take your coat?' he asked.

  'No.'

  'A drink? I have a bottle of wine somewhere.'

  'I'm not staying.'

  Hands on hips, she stared at him. 'So, Andrew Larkham . . .' in an aggressive way that reminded him of his sister. 'Who are you?'

  Her question flashed quivering through the air, a living brown trout that she tossed at him.

  'Who am I?'

  'That's what I asked.'

  Andy looked away. The cramped kitchen had the aspect of his general mood since Monday evening. It required no fortune-teller to read his prospects in the coffee grounds fermenting in the sink. This was his life.

  He felt a pinch of terror in his gut. 'Hey, why don't we go into the next room and talk there?'

  She turned and strode into his bedroom.

  'No, no, the living room's that way!' Andy cried, although not before she had taken a long hard look at his piled-up duvet, and he had a flash of Sophie's legs and his entwined.

  She cast her eyes to the ceiling. The lightning cracks in the paintwork, as if someone had gouged it with black fingernails. The gaping chunks in the plaster. The ominous music. Before Andy guided her across the corridor.

  He raced ahead to turn off the television. She swept her eyes over the packets of aspirin scattered on the mantelpiece, the torn-open envelopes, the row of spent joss sticks.

  Her gaze dropped to the floor, sucked into a chaos of slashed cushions (' If you feel angry, hit a pillow or cushion ' - R. Challis ). But she kept her thoughts to herself. His flat was a dump where filth combined with sadness to produce an odour like a hung pheasant. Andy had the wit not to explain that he had been reading self-help manuals.

  'Sorry about the mess,' he said.

  She pivoted, unsure where to sit - so he cleared Sophie's chair, the one he still thought of as hers, that he had bought in a Habitat sale two years before and not got around to covering. Clumsily, he gathered up an armful of Vogues and Marie Claires that Sophie had left last time she was over, several weeks ago now, since she did not as a rule like to sleep here.

  'There you are,' he said.

  Taking a step, she tripped over something.

  'Oh, that's where you got to . . .' he said in a tender way, and lunged forward to pick it up, in the process kicking over the cup of tea that he had made that morning before he telephoned Vamplew.

  From her perplexed look, Jeanine could not fathom what the furry brown object was that Andy held up in a small, sad gesture of triumph.

  'Just something from Portobello,' caught between his relief that he had found it and embarrassment that he should care, and put the velvet duck-billed platypus on the mantelpiece. (' Cuddle a pet or soft toy ' - R. Challis .)

  'So,' rubbing hands before the empty fireplace, 'what was it again you wanted to talk about?' And turned.

  She was staring at the manuscript that Andy had left on top of the television.

  'Avoid grinning and don't stare at her cleavage,' she said.

  He stopped. Able - suddenly - to make out every word that Marilyn Manson belted through the ceiling. 'I'm sorry?'

  'That's what the caption says.' She contemplated the photograph. 'What is it?'

  'A book I'm editing.'

  'Lie for the moment,' she read aloud.

  'A typo,' he said, and relieved her of the manuscript. 'It should be "live for the moment".'

  Whether it was the photograph or the music or the carrion smell, there came into her face the kind of look that only extreme disturbance can produce.

  She folded her arms. She was not going to sit.

  'I'm still waiting for you to tell me who you are.'

  Andy felt his blood-pressure rising. He had no idea who this girl was in his flat, but one thing was clear. If he was going to be the man in the car ad, he had to get Jeanine Pyke out of here.

  He met her stare and tried to hold it. 'Who are you ?' he countered. He would punish her for despising him.

  'I'm his daughter,' her voice flaming with emotion, 'but who the fuck are you? Maral Bernhard, I can understand. I'd have understood if he had left it to a donkey sanctuary. But you - why you ?'

  'His daughter?' he swallowed. He would never have guessed it from her attitude in her car. But if anyone should inherit from Christopher Madigan, it was the man's own flesh and blood. Not someone who had never heard of him until 3.21 p.m. the previous Monday.

  'I understand that you and Maral have divvied it up. All because I wasn't there at the final prayer.'

  Andy nodded and reached to the mantelpiece for support. 'Your father's conditions did come as a surprise. To each of us, I think.' He searched himself. It was not a lie. He could speak on behalf of both Attenders. He felt.

  'Why were you at my father's funeral?'

  She was looking at him. Her eyes had the silver-brown colour of meteorite. An expression that did not properly belong to this world, but came hurtling from an asteroid belt.

  Had Andy not consumed three pints of Tisbury pale ale followed by half an egg-filled baked potato, he might have better gathered his thoughts. He opened his mouth. 'Why was I at your father's funeral . . . ?' trying to smile her question away.

  He remembered the fate of Alfonse Daudet, struck down in the middle of a sentence. Even so, he could not go on.

  'Yes?' she said. She was waiting.

  A car went by, siren blaring.

  His life as a multi-millionaire was minutes old and already it was drawing to a close. But he was anxious to cling to it for a few seconds more. He had not yet come to terms with having to observe the vision that had only recently been granted him - viz. Andy Larkham as Selfish Slut - roar off.

  He was aware that his breath had speeded up. Stirring deep within, he felt a resurgent energy. He felt it swirling up his throat. Then, in the voice of an exaggerated tough guy - the voice of an Attender: 'W
hy weren't you there?'

  She winced. 'None of your business.'

  ' None of your business .' With grotesque haughtiness he mimicked her. 'You barge in here uninvited and have the gall to ask me why I was at your father's funeral when you didn't bother to be there yourself - you , his own daughter .'

  She looked momentarily crushed by his powerful new character. 'I'm sorry, I just wanted to know why he made you his heir.'

  He picked up Enid Tansley's manuscript and tapped it on the top of the television to tidy it.

  'Because,' he heard himself say, locking eyes with her, 'I was a friend of your father's.' That is what he said. That is the answer that escaped from his larynx. It was not merely that he was one of his Attenders which stimulated Andy to speak up for Madigan. The same feeling had come over him in the chapel. An inexplicable kinship to a person he had never met.

  He studied his nails. They were, frankly, rather dirty. 'A very good friend,' he heard himself add in a tone that impressed even him. 'And now I'm going to have to ask you, please, to leave.'

  10

  T HE S HIP ' S LANTERN OUTSIDE Marlow was run by Nigel, an affable Sandhurst type and friend of minor royalty.

  In a corner, egged on by an ecstatic crowd, a small-chinned man with a pot belly was singing 'If I Had a Hammer'.

  'This looks all right,' David said.

  'Karaoke?' Andy frowned. He remembered the place when it had pickled eggs in jars.

  David had booked a table in the adjoining restaurant, a room of panelled oak warmed by a log fire. A Latvian waitress lit candles and informed them, with a discreet jerk of her biro, that the person at the end of a long refectory table was 'Princess Tizzy'.

  Their eyes caught each other and formed a chain of suspicion. David peered over the top of the menu at a girl with butterscotch hair, a ping-pong bat of a nose and the kind of peachy English voice to which, were he a woman, Rian Goodman might have aspired. Ten faces held onto her words with the attention of people clinging with their eyebrows to something that had begun to crumble.

  'Last time we were here,' David recalled over an avalanche of polite laughter, 'was to celebrate you getting a job in publishing.'

  Presently, he put down the menu and looked across the table at Andy. 'So have you decided?'

  'I think I'll have the roast beef.'

  'No, you oaf. About whether to take the money.'

  'I'm afraid there's been a new development.'

  'Oh?'

  'Madigan has a daughter.'

  Sparing few details, Andy described over lunch how Jeanine had stormed into his flat.

  David gave him a concerned look. 'What did you tell her?'

  Andy licked his lip. 'I said that I was a friend of her father's.'

  'Andy?' David said, seeing his face.

  'All right, I said I was a good friend of her father's.'

  'Remind me what we know about her father?'

  'Not a thing.'

  'You've Googled him?'

  'Right away. There's nothing.'

  David stroked his beard. 'Where's there's a will, there's usually a relative. But why didn't he in the ordinary way leave anything to her?'

  'I don't know.'

  'And what's he done in his life that only one other person should show up at his funeral?'

  'Exactly,' Andy said. 'Why would a man give away his wealth on the whim of whoever turned up, making it possible to exclude his own child?'

  'If you ask me, it's definitely a loyalty test. A crude and yet efficient reward for some sort of loyalty.'

  'Even though it's only for ten minutes?'

  David was pondering it over. 'Has it crossed your mind that Jeanine could be a heist? A girl at Vamplew's office who overheard something, and because of some last-minute cock-up arrived at the funeral later than you? It would explain why in her car Jeanine was reluctant to ask you anything about her father - she didn't know herself.'

  Andy was unpersuaded. David had been listening to too much Robert Altman. He pushed his plate away. 'I bet you anything that Jeanine is Madigan's daughter.'

  'Okay, say she is. But let's get this straight. As of this moment, you, Andy Larkham, stand to inherit seventeen million pounds from a dead man of whom you and Google have never heard - just so long as the will is not contested. But you have now learned of the existence of someone who has every reason to contest it. Namely, this man's daughter.'

  'That's about the sum of it.'

  'The question is: How to stop her litigating and taking off with your money?'

  'I agree.'

  'It seems to me your one hope is to convince Jeanine that you actually were a good mate of her old man - and therefore every bit as entitled as Mrs Bernhard to benefit from his munificence.' David rotated on his padded stool. 'By the way, who do we think Mrs Bernhard is?'

  'My first thought is that she was Madigan's housekeeper.'

  'Then we may have to discount that possibility,' David said. 'Your powers of deduction have been, to date, abysmal. Whoever she is, I would say that she is of less concern to you than Jeanine. Right now, you must do everything you can to stop Jeanine contesting the will.'

  'But how do I ward off a claim?'

  'How indeed?'

  Behind them a log slumped, sending up a comet trail of sparks.

  'Do stop scratching that beard,' Andy said with uncharacteristic impatience.

  David looked at him. 'She's a woman, a daughter, but money's not the issue. It slightly is, but not really. It's about a whole lot of other things. Her relations with men, most of all. She is angry, not because of the money, but because you may know more about her father. She hasn't seen him for seven years. How come you got ahead of her in his affections?'

  'Then what, David, is your advice?'

  'I think you've got to do two things. You must avoid seeing her again at all costs. Meanwhile, you must find out everything you can about Christopher Madigan - so that if by grotesque chance you do bump into Jeanine again, you can waffle your way out of it. Your only chance to keep these unimaginable riches is to continue with the fiction that you are who you claim to be.'

  At that moment a man with a military bearing approached the table. Printed on his T-shirt were the words IF ASSHOLES COULD FLY THIS PLACE WOULD BE AN AIRPORT .

  'Pudding, anyone?' Nigel barked. 'Specials are over there on the blackboard.'

  'Andy?'

  'After that roast beef, I'm not sure . . .'

  'Go on. I'm putting this on expenses - just as long as you give me the story. It'll make a terrific movie,' he said, and pushed him. He was joking. Andy thought.

  'Then I will have the bread-and-butter pudding.'

  David smiled. 'That's more like it. Welcome back to the Land of Hope and Glory, muchacho . And should anyone ask, you are Mr Robert Altman.'

  The light was failing when they left the Ship's Lantern. In the next room Princess Tizzy was singing 'I Believe in Miracles', a favourite, as she had sung it several times. To their joint relief, the Riley started first time.

  'You okay to drive?' Andy asked.

  'I think,' David said.

  They motored back in a contented mood. David soon stopped waving his hands back and forth - in emulation of the three windscreen wipers that he dubbed The Andrews Sisters - and Andy fixed his eyes sleepily on the road ahead.

  It was pitch-dark when the Riley pulled up outside his flat. David's voice followed Andy to the front door. 'I'll see what I can dig up about Madigan. Meanwhile, you go and see his lawyer again.'

  'Thanks for perking me up,' Andy called back. 'I feel much better.'

  11

  A CROSS THE VASTNESS OF his desk Godfrey Vamplew looked at Andy through his unsettling bifocals. It was the following Tuesday morning.

  Andy began nervously. 'Last Friday, you led me to understand that I shall shortly be very rich.'

  'Once probate is granted,' Vamplew said in a formal voice. 'And subject to any claimants. And depending on your definition of "rich".'
/>   Andy summed up his predicament. Creditors pressing. Insolvency looming. Credit card stopped.

  Vamplew folded his arms. 'And in your judgment a lawyer's letter explaining your monetary expectation might persuade your bank to reconsider its position?'

  'I was hoping you would write me such a letter.'

  Andy's situation was one plainly familiar to Vamplew. 'I don't see why not. I'll get something off this afternoon.'

  Andy risked another question. 'Can you tell me the source of my wealth?'

  Vamplew's overlapping eyes gauged how nervous he was. Andy had considered with David everything from an office-cleaning empire to fruit machines and nappies. At the same time, he was braced for brothels and casinos.

  'I understand that the bulk of my client's estate was initially invested in mining shares. But he took care before he died to transfer these into a spread of insurance policies. He had already given much away to a charitable foundation with which he was connected.'

  Andy's relief was evident in Vamplew's almost-smile. Without quite being able to say why, Andy had the feeling that the lawyer wanted him to have that money. Just looking at Andy, he understood something about him.

  'Is there anything else you can tell me? If I'm to inherit his money, I'd like to learn more about my benefactor. How well did you know him?'

  'I didn't know him at all.'

  Vamplew spoke precisely, but with obvious pleasure. Christopher Madigan had come in one morning last November. He sat where Andy was sitting. Mrs Bernhard had sat outside. 'He didn't wish anyone to overhear our discussion. No one but me was to be involved. And then, if I did agree to act for him, I myself would have to type out the will and any correspondence.'

  'Did he give a reason?'

  'He had decided, after a long association, to change his solicitors because he wished to alter his will.'

  'Why did he come to you?'

  'I was in the papers, which is not often the case, and it caught his eye.'