they seldom form alliances among themselves. Some of them are pretty good liars. Don’t believe everything they say about each other.’
‘Ian!’ Malcolm said protestingly.
‘I’m one of them, and I know,’ I said.
After Vivien’s name on the list I wrote the names of her children: Donald Lucy Thomas
‘Thomas,’ I said, ‘is married to Berenice.’ I added her name beside his. ‘He is easy to deal with, she is not.’
‘She’s a five-star cow,’ Malcolm said.
West merely nodded.
‘Lucy,’ I said, ‘married a man called Edwin Bugg. She didn’t like that surname, and persuaded him to change it to hers, and she is consequently herself a Mrs Pembroke.’
West nodded.
‘Lucy is a poet,’ I said. ‘People who know about poetry say her stuff is the real thing. She makes a big production of unworldliness which Edwin, I think, has grown to find tiresome.’
‘Huh,’ Malcolm said. ‘Edwin’s an out-and-out materialist, always tapping me for a loan.’
‘Do you give them to him?’ I said interestedly.
‘Not often. He never pays me back.’
‘Short of money, are they?’ West asked.
‘Edwin Bugg,’ Malcolm said, ‘married Lucy years ago because he thought she was an heiress, and they’ve scraped along ever since on the small income she gets from a trust fund I set up for her. Edwin’s never done a stroke of work in his parasitic life and I can’t stand the fellow.’
‘They have one teenage schoolboy son,’ I said, smiling, ‘who asked me the last time I saw him how to set about emigrating to Australia.’
West looked at the list and said to Malcolm, ‘What about Donald, your eldest?’
‘Donald,’ said his father, ‘married a replica of his mother, beautiful and brainless. A girl called Helen. They live an utterly boring virtuous life in Henley-on-Thames and are still billing and cooing like newlyweds although Donald must be nearly forty-five, I suppose.’
No one commented. Malcolm himself, rising sixty-nine, could bill and coo with the best, and with a suppressed shiver I found myself thinking for the first time about the sixth marriage, because certainly, in the future, if Malcolm survived, there would be one. He had never in the past lived long alone. He liked rows better than solitude.
‘Children?’ Norman West asked into the pause.
‘Three,’ Malcolm said. ‘Pompous little asses.’
West glanced at me questioningly, and yawned.
‘Are you too tired to take all this in?’ I asked.
‘No, go ahead.’
‘Two of Donald’s children are too young to drive a car. The eldest, a girl at art school, is five foot two and fragile, and I cannot imagine her being physically capable of knocking Malcolm out and carrying his body from garden to garage and inserting him into Moira’s car.’
‘She hasn’t the courage either,’ Malcolm said.
‘You can’t say that,’ I disagreed. ‘Courage can pop up anywhere and surprise you.’
West gave me a noncommittal look. ‘Well,’ he said, taking the list himself and adding to it, ‘this is what we have so far. Wife number one: Vivien Pembroke. Her children: Donald (44), wife Helen, three offspring. Lucy, husband Edwin (né Bugg), school-age son. Thomas, wife Berenice …?’
‘Two young daughters.’
‘Two young daughters,’ he repeated, writing.
‘My grandchildren,’ Malcolm protested, ‘are all too young to have murdered anybody.’
‘Psychopaths start in the nursery,’ West said laconically. ‘Any sign in any of them of abnormal violent behaviour? Excessive cruelty, that sort of thing? Obsessive hatreds?’
Malcolm and I both shook our heads but with a touch of uncertainty; his maybe because of something he did know, mine because of all I didn’t know, because of all the things that could be hidden.
‘Does greed, too, begin in the nursery?’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t say so, would you?’ West answered.
I shook my head again. ‘I’d say it was nastily adult and grows with opportunity. The more there is to grab, the greedier people get.’
Malcolm said, only half as a question, ‘My fortune corrupts… geometrically?’
‘You’re not alone,’ I said dryly. ‘Just think of all those multi-billionaire families where the children have already had millions settled on them and still fight like cats over the pickings when their father dies.’
‘Bring it down to thousands,’ West said unexpectedly. ‘Or to hundreds. I’ve seen shocking spite over hundreds. And the lawyers rub their hands and syphon off the cream.’ He sighed, half disillusionment, half weariness. ‘Wife number two?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘Mrs Joyce Pembroke.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m her son. She had no other children. And I’m not married.*
West methodically wrote me down.
‘Last Friday evening,’ I said. ‘I was at work in a racing stable at five o’clock with about thirty people as witnesses, and last