Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

‘Old Mount has handled the family affairs ever since I can remember.’

‘You’d better see him as soon as possible,’ advised Dave. ‘There’ll be a will and other legal stuff to be handled.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, if you’re here when the superintendent arrives you might be kept hanging around for hours. You’d better pop off now and do whatever you have to. I’ll give your statement to the super and if he wants to see you he can do it later. But do me a favour and phone in in a couple of hours to let us know where you are.’

As I drove into Totnes I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was not yet nine o’clock. The day that ordinary people live was only just beginning, but I felt I’d lived a lifetime in the past three hours. I hadn’t really started to think properly, but somewhere deep inside me I felt the first stirring of rage tentatively growing beneath the grief. That a man could be shot to death in his own home with such a barbarous weapon was a monstrous, almost inconceivable, perversion of normal life. In the quiet Devon countryside a veil had been briefly twitched aside to reveal another world, a more primitive world in which sudden death was a shocking commonplace. I felt outraged that such a world should intrude on me and mine.

My meeting with Elizabeth was difficult. When I told her she became suddenly still and motionless with a frozen face. At first, I thought she was that type of Englishwoman to whom the exhibition of any emotion is the utmost in bad taste, but after five minutes she broke down in a paroxysm of tears and was led away by her mother. I felt very sorry for her. Both she and Bob were late starters in the Marriage Stakes and now the race had been scratched. I didn’t know her very well but enough to know that she would have made Bob a fine wife.

Mr. Mount, of course, took it more calmly, death being part of the stock-in-trade, as it were, of a solicitor. But he was perturbed about the manner of death. Sudden death was no stranger to him, and if Bob had broken his neck chasing a fox that would have been in the tradition and acceptable. This was different; this was the first murder in Totnes within living memory.

And so he was shaken but recovered himself rapidly, buttressing his cracking world with the firm assurance of the law. ‘There is, of course, a will,’ he said. ‘Your brother was having talks with me about the new will. You may — or may not — know that on marriage all previous wills are automatically voided, so there had to be a new will. However, we had not got to the point of signing, and so the previous existing will is the document we have to consider.’

His face creased into a thin, legal smile. ‘I don’t think there is any point in beating about the bush, Jemmy. Apart from one or two small bequests to members of the farm staff and personal friends, you are the sole beneficiary. Hay Tree Farm is yours now — or it will be on probate. There will, of course, be death duties, but farm land gets forty-five per cent relief on valuation.’ He made a note. ‘I must see your brother’s bank manager for details of his accounts.’

‘I can give you most of that,’ I said. ‘I was Bob’s accountant. In fact, I have all the information here. I was working on a suggested scheme for the farm — that’s why I came down this weekend.’

‘That will be very helpful,’ said Mount. He pondered. ‘I would say that the farm, on valuation, will prove to be worth something like £125,000. That is not counting live and dead stock, of course.’

My head jerked up. ‘My God! So much?’

He gave me an amused look. ‘When a farm has been in the same family for as long as yours the cash value of the land tends to be ignored — it ceases to be regarded as invested capital. Land values have greatly appreciated in recent years, Jemmy; and you have 500 acres of prime land on red soil. At auction it would fetch not less than £250 an acre. When you add the stock, taking into account the admirable dairy herd Bob built up and the amount of modernization he has done, then I would say that the valuation for the purposes of probate will be not much less than £170,000.’

I accepted this incredible thing he was telling me. Mount was a country solicitor and knew as much about local farm values as any hard-eyed unillusioned farmer looking over his neighbour’s fields. He said, ‘If you sold it you would have a sizeable fortune, Jemmy.’

I shook my head. ‘I couldn’t sell it.’

He nodded understandingly. ‘No,’ he said reflectively. ‘I don’t suppose you could. It would be as though the Queen were to sell Buckingham Palace to a property developer. But what do you intend to do? Run it yourself?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said a little desperately. ‘I haven’t thought about it’

‘There’ll be time to think about it,’ he said consolingly. ‘One way would be to appoint a land agent. But your brother had a high opinion of Jack Edgecombe. You might do worse than make him farm manager; he can run the farming side, of which you know nothing — and you can operate the business side, of which he knows nothing. I don’t think it would be necessary to interrupt your present career.’

‘I’ll think about that,’ I said.

‘Tell me,’ said Mount. ‘You said you had a scheme for the farm. Could I ask what it is?’

I said, ‘The Government experimental farms have been using computers to work out maximum utilization of farm resources. Well, I have access to a computer and I put in all the data on Hay Tree Farm and programmed it to produce optimum profit.’

Mount smiled tolerantly. ‘Your farm has been well worked for four hundred years. I doubt if you could find a better way of working it than the ways that are traditional in this area.’

I had come across this attitude many times before and I thought I knew how to handle it. ‘Traditional ways are good ways, but nobody would say they are perfect. If you take all the variables involved in even a smallish farm — the right mix of arable and pasture, what animals to keep, how many animals and when to keep them, what feedstuffs to plant and what to buy — if you take all those variables and put them in permutation and combination you come up with a matrix of several million choices.

‘Traditional ways have evolved to a pretty high level and it isn’t worth a farmer’s while to improve them. He’d have to be a smart mathematician and it would probably take him fifty years of calculation. But a computer can do it in fifteen minutes. In the case of Hay Tree Farm the difference between the traditional good way and the best way is fifteen per cent net increase on profits.’

‘You surprise me,’ said Mount interestedly. ‘We will have to talk about this — but at a more appropriate time.’

It was a subject on which I could have talked for hours but, as he said, the time wasn’t appropriate. I said, ‘Did Bob ever talk to you about that tray?’

‘Indeed he did,’ said Mount. ‘He brought it here, to this office, straight from the museum, and we discussed the insurance. It is a very valuable piece.’

‘How valuable?’

‘Now that is hard to say. We weighed it and, if the gold is pure, the intrinsic value will be about £2,500. But mere is also the artistic value to take into account — it’s very beautiful — and the antiquarian value. Do you know anything of its history?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s just been something that’s been around the house ever since I can remember.’

‘It will have to be valued as part of the estate,’ said Mount. ‘Sotheby’s might be best, I think.’ He made another note. ‘We will have to go very deeply into your brother’s affairs. I hope there will be enough... er... loose money... available to pay the death duties. It would be a pity to have to sell off a part of the farm. Would you have any objection to selling the tray if it proved necessary?’