In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(31)

Samantha McCallin had learned early into her extended stay at Broughton Manor that her uncle Jeremy didn't discriminate when it came to drink. He imbibed anything with the potential to obliterate his sensibilities quickly. He seemed to like Bombay gin the best, but at a pinch, when the nearest off-licence was closed, he wasn't finicky.

As far as Samantha knew, her uncle had been drinking steadily since adolescence, having taken a brief few years away from booze during his twenties to do drugs instead. Jeremy Britton had been—according to family legend—the once shining star of the Britton clan. But his marriage to a fellow flower-child, who had what Samantha's mother euphemistically and archaically called A Past, had caused him to fall into disfavour with his father. Nonetheless, the laws of primogeniture couldn't prevent Jeremy's inheriting Broughton Manor and all its contents upon his father's death, and the realisation that she'd lived her life as the “good child” for naught—while Jeremy had the time of his life among fellow ingesters of hallucinogenic substances—had planted in the breast of Samantha's mother more seeds of disharmony between her and her brother. That disharmony had only grown throughout the years as Jeremy and his wife produced three children in rapid succession and drank and drugged Broughton Manor into the ground, while in Winchester Jeremy's only sister, Sophie, hired investigators to provide her with periodic reports on her brother's dissolute life and wept, wailed, and gnashed her teeth when she received them.

“Someone's got to do something about him,” she cried, “before he destroys our family's entire history. The way he's carrying on, there'll be nothing left to pass on to anyone.”

Not that Sophie Britton McCallin needed her brother Jeremy's money, which he'd long ago run through anyway. She herself was rolling in it, since her own husband was working himself into an early grave to keep her supply line running.

During that period when Samantha's father had been healthy enough to adhere to a schedule at the family factory that would have felled an ordinary mortal, Samantha herself had ignored her mother's soliloquies on the topic of her brother Jeremy. Those soliloquies changed in both tone and content, however, when Douglas McCallin was felled by prostate cancer. Faced with the grim reality of earthly mortality, his wife had been reborn to a fervent belief in the importance of family ties.

“I want my brother here,” she'd wept in her widow's weeds at the wake. “My only living blood relative. My brother. I want him.”

It was so like Sophie to forget that she had two children herself—not to mention those belonging to her brother—who served as blood relatives. Instead, she seized on a rapprochment with Jeremy as the only solace in her present grief.

Indeed, her grief became so present that it soon was apparent that Sophie had set herself up to outdo Victoria's mourning for Albert. And when she finally saw this, Samantha decided that the only road to peace in Winchester was decisive action. So she'd come to Derbyshire to collect her uncle once she deduced from incoherent phone conversations with the man that he was in no condition to get himself south unaided. And once she'd arrived and had seen his condition for herself, Samantha knew that carting him down to his sister in his present state would probably send Sophie to her grave.

Besides that, Samantha found it a relief to be away from Sophie for a time. The drama of her husband's death had provided her with more fodder than she usually had, and she'd been using it with a gusto that had long left Samantha too exhausted to deal with her.

Not that Samantha didn't mourn her father's passing herself. She did. But she'd long ago seen that Douglas McCallin's first love was the family biscuit factory—not the family itself—and consequently his death seemed more like an extension of his normal working hours than a permanent parting. His life had always been his work. And he'd given it the dedication of a man who'd had the luck to meet his one true love at the age of twenty.

Jeremy, on the other hand, had chosen drink as his bride. On this particular day, he'd started with dry sherry at ten in the morning. During lunch, he'd worked his way through a bottle of something called the Blood of Jupiter, which Samantha assumed from its colour was red wine. And throughout the afternoon, he'd plied himself with one gin and tonic after another. The fact that he was still ambulatory was, to Samantha, remarkable.

He usually spent his days in the parlour, where he shut the curtains and used the ancient eight-millimeter projector to entertain himself with endless meanderings down memory lane. In the months that Samantha had been at Broughton Manor, he'd gone through the Britton family's entire cinematic history at least three times. He always did it the same way: beginning with the earliest films that one Britton or another had shot in 1924 and watching them in chronological order to the point at which there was no Britton with sufficient interest in the family to record their doings. So the pictorial record of fox hunts, fishing expeditions, holidays, pheasant shoots, birthdays, and weddings ended round the time of Julian's fifteenth birthday. Which, according to Samantha's calculations, would have been just the time that Jeremy Britton had fallen from his horse and compressed three vertebrae, for which long-ago injury he religiously plied himself with pain-killers as well as intoxicants.

“He's going to kill himself mixing pills with booze if we don't watch him,” Julian had told her soon after her arrival. “Sam, will you help me? With you here to keep an eye on him, I can get more work done on the estate. I might even be able to put some plans in motion … if you'll help me, that is.”