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

'Roderick had an elder sister, and we were able to get in touch with her but she didn't know. She's nearly ninety and said she had always been confused over which girl was which. As I said, Elspeth and Kirsty are identical twins so I suppose you can understand that. And Roderick and Phillipa were both the children of older parents, so it's not surprising that both sets of grandparents are now dead.'

Maggie gave Asvina a sympathetic smile. 'Yes, I think I can see now what you meant when you said it was a complicated matter.'

'And that's not the half of it,' Asvina replied. 'You see, Alison Macallan has now formally decided to contest the will too.'

'Can she do that?' Jimmy asked, breaking his silence, a silence that Maggie had noted with some anxiety.

'Yes, of course,' Asvina said, 'although whether she will be successful is another matter altogether. When they split up you see, the Commodore changed the terms of his will rather rapidly to exclude her from inheriting anything. But it's normal for a spouse to have rights over the estate of their deceased partner whatever the state of the relationship at the time of death, so a family court may feel that the will is very unfair to her. That's just my opinion, but it wouldn't surprise me if they looked at her case with some sympathy.'

'And do you think it's harsh?' Maggie asked Asvina.

'I think so, and it's made more complicated by the fact that since she and the Commodore split up, she's been living in a gate cottage owned by the estate, near the village.'

'Lochmorehead,' Jimmy said morosely.

Maggie gave him a quizzical look but made no comment. Instead she said, 'So don't tell me Asvina. Mrs Macallan could be evicted, if whichever twin inherits the place doesn't want her around?'

Asvina nodded. 'Yes, that's a distinct possibility. So as you can imagine, she's rather sore about the whole thing. That's understating it actually. In fact, she's absolutely livid, mad as hell. The whole thing's a bit of a mess.'

'And you want us to sort it all out is what I'm guessing?'

'Yes please,' Asvina said, laughing. 'Shouldn't be too difficult. No seriously, I know it's going to be quite a challenge to say the least. But I think the mission is quite straightforward to define if not execute. You either need to somehow find out which of the twins was born first- and god knows how you're going to do that - or you need to broker some sort of a settlement between them, which will probably have to include the estranged wife too.'

Maggie raised an eyebrow. 'Bloody hell Asvina, even by your standards this is a challenging one. But of course, we'll do our best, won't we Jimmy?'

'What?'

She shot him an admonishing glance. He was staring at the floor, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.

'We'll do our best, won't we Jimmy?'

'Aye, sorry boss,' he said, forcing a half-smile. 'Aye we will.'

'Great,' Asvina said briskly. 'That's it all arranged then. Brilliant.' Furrowing her brow, she gave her watch an extended look, a look Maggie calculated had cost her friend about thirty quid. 'So if you don't mind guys, I've got some folks coming to see me in a couple of minutes.' Politely but firmly, she ushered them towards the door. 'Keep me informed of progress if you would.'

In the lift on the way down, Maggie had tried to make conversation with Jimmy, which shouldn't have been exactly difficult given how much they now had to talk about. But he seemed distracted and disengaged, his mind elsewhere, his answers terse to the point of rudeness. And it was so completely unlike the Jimmy she had come to love that she now knew, if she hadn't before, that there was something badly wrong.

'Jimmy,' she said quietly. 'What is it? Is there something you're not telling me?'

He gave her a half-smile. 'Look, I'm sorry Maggie, it's just all come as a bit of a shock. You see those twins, Elspeth and Kirsty Macallan. My wife Flora was at school with them, and with that woman who was murdered four years ago too, Morag Robertson. The damn place is cursed I tell you. And now it seems I'm bloody well going back there.'

Chapter 3

DI Frank Stewart smiled as the high-tech vending machine delivered him, as ordered, a steaming Americano fortified with double Espresso. He picked it up and then with a jaunty step schlepped over to the adjacent machine, swiped his debit card across the contactless reader, then punched in the code number he knew off by heart. Six-one-six, sending a Twix King-size tumbling into the receptacle below. Things were looking decidedly up at this moment in time, that was his opinion, mainly because his sleepy wee department had, much to his surprise, gone viral. At least, that was the term his mate Eleanor Campbell had used to describe the sudden and unexpected explosion of interest from across the whole UK policing community. And it was all down to his boss Jill Smart, who had recently spoken at a national police leadership conference up in Birmingham.

'We've got this small department,' she had told an assembly of a couple of hundred of her Detective Chief Inspector colleagues, 'hidden away in a dump of an office just off the Uxbridge Road. We call it 12B, I've no idea where that name came from, but that's what it's called. It's been up and running for a couple of years now, and we in the Met find it's a very handy facility for the sort of matter that doesn't quite fit into our conventional teams. Cold cases, early-stage investigations and the like.' Very handy for tidying away big embarrassing screw-ups too, was what she hadn't gone on to say, although everyone in the room took it as read. And since every force in the