The Ardmore Inheritance, Rob Wyllie [best novels for students TXT] 📗

it was that. So it would definitely be worth spending a few more minutes here. It was mission creep for sure, but the original mission brief was surely now out the window. So that was it decided. Nip upstairs, have a quick sniff round, take a few snaps, then scarper.

But he'd need to be bloody careful not to leave any trace, because there was something he definitely didn't want to add to his impressively poly-mathematical skill-set. Murder suspect.

Chapter 2

It's a rather complicated matter. That's all Asvina had given away to them when she'd phoned with a brief trailer for what was to be their next case. Which meant that it was going to be an absolute bitch, because Miss Rani, London's premier family-law solicitor to the rich and famous, never passed them the nice easy straightforward ones. That wasn't a problem for Maggie, because after all, if the matters were easy and straightforward, Asvina wouldn't need the services of her firm. Bainbridge Associates,Investigation Services to the Legal Profession. That was their tagline, summing up rather neatly what they did. Checking identities, uncovering dodgy bank accounts, verifying personal back-stories. In other words, all the grubby stuff that the fancy twelve-hundred-quid-an-hour lawyers felt was beneath them.

Maggie had arranged to meet Jimmy at the exit of the Docklands Light Railway station in Canary Wharf, just a stone's throw from the gleaming glass palace that housed Addison Redburn, the prestigious law firm where Asvina was a half-a-million-a-year partner. And as usual when he was meeting with Asvina, he'd made a special effort to spruce himself up. Hair washed and tied back in a neat pony-tail, a freshly-pressed blue shirt with a button-down collar, smart black jeans, polished tan cowboy boots. Maggie had known her Scottish assistant barely two years, but already they were like an old married couple and mostly, in a good way. The relationship was characterised by mutual respect and an ability to disagree on how a case should be approached without sulking, which, when she thought about it, perhaps stretched the marriage analogy too far. Maybe she would be best to reserve judgement until they bumped into the mythical seven-year-itch. Then again, her own actual marriage had only made six years, so maybe she was being optimistic in thinking they would still be working together by then.

'Any idea what this is about boss?' he asked, shooting her a smile. 'Although to be honest, I don't really care. It'll just be great to be back in the saddle again.'

He was right, because it had been a while since they'd had a nice big juicy one to get their teeth into. Her little firm was doing ok now, their reputation having spread as a result of cracking a couple of very high-profile investigations in the past year, but much of the recent work had been pretty dull and routine. This one however had every prospect of being anything but.

'Not much. It's a complicated inheritance matter I think, with a ton of money involved. Not exactly sure what it is she wants us to do, but you can imagine it won't be a walk in the park.'

Asvina's PA Mary had met them in the reception atrium where they had been issued with passes then escorted to the high-speed lift that delivered them up to Miss Rani's glass-walled corner office, an impressive south-west facing suite on the second-highest floor, commanding a view in one direction over the river to the picturesque Royal Borough of Greenwich, and towards St Paul's and the City in the other.

She greeted them warmly, embracing Maggie in a suffocating hug then shaking Jimmy's hand.

'Thanks for coming in guys,' she said. 'Mary will be in with the drinks in a moment. But I'm a bit pushed for time so I'll get straight on with it if you don't mind.'

Maggie gave a wry smile. Her best friend was so ridiculously successful that for her, time literally was money. One occasion during an idle moment she and Jimmy had done a rough back-of-a-fag-packet calculation, revealing that Asvina was bringing in not far off a pound a second. So it was understandable she didn't like to waste any of those seconds on non-billable small-talk.

'I don't know if either of you remember the Macallan incident? About six months ago. Up in your neck of the woods Jimmy I think it was.'

'How could I forget?' Jimmy said. 'The Ardmore mystery, that's what the media called it. The father blew his son's head off and then shot himself, but no-one's ever worked out why. So it's that, is it? That's what we're going to be working on?'

Maggie caught the look of disquiet on his face, and she could hear it in his voice too. It seemed he knew something of this matter, although she was puzzled as to what it might be.

'Yes, that's it, and it was the most dreadful family tragedy, wasn't it?' Asvina said. 'And now of course, there's the horribly mundane matter of sorting out the estate, which as you may now have guessed has fallen to our firm, in our role as executors. And hence on to me personally.'

'Well of course we'll be happy to help in any way we can,' Maggie said, at the same time wondering what they were letting themselves in for. 'But I think you said it was a rather complicated matter?'

Asvina nodded. 'Well, yes you could say that. First of all, there was the little matter of establishing whether the document that was vested with us was still valid.'

'There was some doubt about that?' Maggie asked.

'Only in so much that the father, that's Commodore Roderick Macallan, had been having some correspondence with a local solicitor about changing the terms of his will in the months before he took his own life. But in the end, we concluded those discussions were only exploratory, and since they had never been formally written up or witnessed, we took the view that they could be ignored.'

'And that was the complication?' Maggie