A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(148)
“This is damn odd,” and shifted the first paper to one side so that he could see the one under it. Then he went to the next, then the one after that. He finally looked up.
“What?” St. James asked.
“These should be wet-signed,” Debiere said. “Every one of them. But not one is.”
“What d’you mean?”
Debiere pointed to the plans. “When these’re complete, the architect stamps them. Then he signs his name over that stamp.”
“Is that a formality?”
“No. It’s essential. It’s how you tell the plans are legitimate. You can’t get them approved by planning or building commissions if they’re not stamped, and you sure as hell can’t find a contractor willing to take on the job, either.”
“So if they aren’t legitimate, what else might they be?” St. James asked the architect.
Debiere looked from St. James to the plans. And then back to St. James once again. “Stolen,” he replied.
They were silent, each of them contemplating the documents, the schematics, and the drawings that lay across the workbench. Outside the shed, a door slammed and a voice cried out, “Daddy! Mum’s made you short bread as well.”
Debiere roused himself at this. His forehead creased as he apparently tried to comprehend what seemed so patently incomprehensible: a large gathering of islanders and others at Le Reposoir, a gala event, a surprising announcement, a mass of fireworks to mark the occasion, the presence of everyone important on Guernsey, the coverage in the paper and on island television.
His sons were shouting “Daddy! Daddy! Come in for tea!” but Debiere didn’t seem to hear them. He murmured, “What did he intend to do, then?”
The answer to that question, St. James thought, might go far to shedding more light on the murder. Finding a solicitor—Margaret Chamberlain refused to think of or call them advocates because she didn’t intend to employ one for longer than it took to strong-arm her former husband’s beneficiaries out of their inheritances—turned out to be a simple matter. After leaving the Range Rover in the car park of a hotel on Ann’s Place, she and her son walked down one slope and up another. Their route took them past the Royal Court House, which assured Margaret that lawyers were going to be quite easy to come by in this part of town. At least Adrian had known that much. On her own, she would have been reduced to the telephone directory and a street map of St. Peter Port. She would have had to ring and do her importuning without having seen the situation into which her phone call was received. This way, however, she had no need to ring at all. She could storm the citadel of her choosing, satisfactorily on the controlling end of employing a legal mind to do her bidding.
The offices of Gibbs, Grierson, and Godfrey ended up as her selection. The alliteration was an annoyance, but the front door was imposing and the lettering on the brass plate outside was of a stark nature that suggested a ruthlessness which Margaret’s mission required. Without an appointment, then, she entered with her son and requested to see one of the eponymous members of the organisation. As she made her request, she stifled her desire to tell Adrian to stand up straight, assuring herself it was enough that he had—for her benefit and protection—earlier arm-wrestled that little hooligan Paul Fielder into submission.
As luck would have it, none of the founders were in their offices on this afternoon. One of them had apparently died four years earlier and the other two were out on some sort of quasi-important lawyerly business, according to their clerk. But one of the junior advocates would be able to see Mrs. Chamberlain and Mr. Brouard.
How junior? Margaret wanted to know.
It was a loose term only, she was assured.
The junior advocate turned out to be junior in title alone. She was otherwise a middle-aged woman called Juditha Crown—“Ms. Crown,”
she told them—with a fat mole beneath her left eye and a mild case of halitosis that appeared to have been brought on by a half-eaten salami sandwich which sat on a paper plate on her desk. As Adrian slouched nearby, Margaret disclosed the reason for their call: a son cheated out of his inheritance and an inheritance that was absent at least three-quarters of the property it should have comprised. That, Ms. Crown informed them with an archness that Margaret found a little too condescending for her liking, was highly unlikely, Mrs. Chamberlain. Had Mr. Chamberlain—
Mr. Brouard, Margaret interrupted. Mr. Guy Brouard of Le Reposoir, Parish of St. Martin’s. She was his former wife, and this was their son, Adrian Brouard, she announced to Ms. Crown and added pointedly, Mr. Guy Brouard’s eldest and his only male heir.
Margaret was gratified to see Juditha Crown sit up and take notice of this, if only metaphorically. The lawyer’s eyelashes quivered behind her gold-framed spectacles. She gazed upon Adrian with heightened interest. It was a moment during which Margaret found she could finally feel grateful for Guy’s relentless pursuit of personal accomplishment. If nothing else, he had name recognition and, by association, so did his son. Margaret laid out the situation for Ms. Crown: an estate divided in half, with two daughters and a son sharing the first half of it and two relative strangers —strangers, mind you, in the person of two local teenagers practically unknown to the family—sharing the other half equally between them. Something needed to be done about this.
Ms. Crown nodded sagely and waited for Margaret to continue. When Margaret didn’t, Ms. Crown asked if there was a current wife involved. No? Well, then—and here she folded her hands on the desk top and formed her lips into a glacially polite smile—there didn’t seem to be anything irregular about the will. The laws of Guernsey dictated the manner in which property could be bequeathed. Half of it had to go by law to the legal progeny of the testator. In cases where there was no surviving spouse, the other half could be dispersed according to the whimsy of the deceased. This was apparently what the gentleman in question had done.