LATERAL THINKING DRAMA

THERE was a good reason, Inspector Denton thought, why most wills remained confidential. Leonard Harvey had called his family together to inform them of changes he was considering to his last will of testament. Specifically, he informed each of them of how much they were due to receive under the current will, and then gave them until the following morning to justify that amount. If he didn’t like their answer, he would leave their portion to a local charity which looked after homeless cats.

He was dead within ninety minutes, from a potent cocktail of poisons.

The bereaved were still in varying degrees of shock the following morning. Denton’s first interviewee was Harvey’s business partner, Peter Fulton. A few years younger than Harvey, he had come along to the family meeting at Harvey’s express request.

“I tried to talk Len out of it,” Fulton told Denton sadly. “But he was determined to put them on the spot. I can’t help thinking that if I’d done more . . . But Len wanted to see their faces, you see. They didn’t know that there was no way to pass the test. He’d already decided to give it all to the cats no matter what. He just wanted to watch them squirm and try to justify themselves, and then rip up the old will in their faces. An unworthy urge perhaps, but he’s paid a very high price for it now. He was a good friend to me, and I’ll miss him. I stayed at the house until the end of the meeting, but I left immediately afterwards, and went straight to my club. I was there until midnight. Just all a bit too much for me.”

Sheila Harvey was Len’s third wife. Some thirty years his junior, she had taken the events of the previous evening particularly hard. “I just don’t understand,” she said. “I loved Len. Why would he do something like this to me? Was it all some sort of peculiar ruse? What will happen to me now?”

Inspector Denton gradually managed to help her understand that he himself had no answers to any such questions and brought her back to the details of the evening.

“I had no idea what the meeting was about,” she said. “Then he dropped his bombshell, and left us to it. I don’t think I moved from my seat for so much as a moment until David came shouting that Len was dead. That was a little after nine. Gail, the maid, was there in case we needed anything, and she stayed with me. The others were in and out, apart from Mr Fulton, who was gone almost before Len finished. David kept me company for a while. He’s very kind.”

David Harvey was Len’s son by his first wife. Just a few years younger than Sheila, he lived in lavish apartments in the city. “Do? I suppose you could say that I’m an art appreciator, Inspector. I have a passion for beauty. Yes, I was taken aback by father’s declaration. He was an odd bird, though, always given to whimsy and calculated cruelty. A bit like those damned cats, I suppose. I significantly doubt that any answer I could produce would have been sufficient for the old coot – except that one, perhaps. Hm? Maybe a little worried, I suppose, yes. I’ll probably have to talk to a pal and get set up in business of some sort. A bother. After father’s speech, Clare and I went into the billiards room. We had a bit of a catch-up. The butler was there, I think. Anyway, she wanted to get a snack from the kitchen, so I came back to the library to see how poor Sheila was doing. She’s rather lovely, don’t you think? Like a porcelain angel. I sat with her for a while, but she was quite out of it. When I went looking for father, I found him quite dead.”

Clare Davidson was David’s full sister. Two years younger than her brother, she was married to the son of a local papermill baron. “He was a nasty old fool,” she said. “I never liked him, and I most certainly won’t miss him. I’m glad he’s dead, in fact. The only time he paid attention to me was when he had just inflicted some emotional hurt or other. It’s a shame, though – I was looking forward to telling him that I neither needed nor wanted his money, his time, nor anything else to do with him. Once he’d finished his juvenile stunt and doddered off, I had a bit of a chinwag with David, in the billiards room. Then I popped down to the kitchen and shared a couple of glasses of sherry with Mrs Beechwood, the cook. She’s always been the sanest person in this dashed madhouse.”

Afterwards, Inspector Denton went to stroll around the ornamental rose garden, so that he could smoke a pipe and ponder the specifics of the case.

He had been there about ten minutes when an officer bustled up with a report. Analysis suggested that Harvey had ingested the poison some three hours before his death.

Denton immediately brightened: “That clears it all up nicely,” he said.

Who does Denton suspect of being the murderer?

Tip: Timing