EQMM 2008-11 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Novelette: WHEN THERE’S A WILL by by Judith Cutler

Here with another entry in her series featuring antiques dealers Tripp and Townend is Britain’s Judith Cutler. The author of several acclaimed series at nov-el length, Ms. Cutler has pro-vided EQMM with many short stories over the years, ranging in setting from several histor-ical periods to the present day. Her novel Still Waters—the third in her Fran Harman series—was published in the U.K. in March (Allison and Busby).

Why Wally Moore should have taken it into his thick head to bid against Griff for aVictorian dressing case, goodness knows. Wally’s a jewellery man.

And why Griff should have chosen to join battle was beyond me, too. I knew he’d never seen eye to eye with Wally, so it’s possible he was driven by malice—though in his case it was rarely pure and never simple. Meanwhile, as the two raised the stakes of their tiff, the estate of Marguerite Fairborn, deceased, was rubbing its hands in glee at the prospect of its growing profits.

Were any of her beneficiaries present? I looked around the cluttered drawing room of a worthy Edwardian house set in a jungle of a garden. The room’s windows were too small and the mullions far too heavy to give me any pleasure in it. From the day it was built the place had been passed down through the same family, so there should have been rich pickings. I wondered why there weren’t—why was nothing passed down from generation to generation as an heirloom?

They’d certainly not been keen on china. Apart from everyday stuff even a charity shop would have sniffed at, there were just a couple of quite hideous vases, and an epergne even I might have used as target practice.

What I had my eye on was a rather pretty pot cupboard by Waring & Gillow, part of an Edwardian mahogany bedroom suite—dressing table, marble-topped washstand, and huge double wardrobe so bleached by the sun that it would take a fellow restorer hours of work to bring back its original colour. For some reason, the auctioneers had split the suite into separate lots. I couldn’t understand it, because usually the sum of the individual parts is nothing like the value of a complete set.

As for mourners, I could see no red snuffly noses or surreptitiously dabbed eyes. Didn’t anyone care enough to come? Or, to use Griff’s words, had the line died out? Griff was trying to educate me to his Oxbridge standard, but since I’d not so much dropped out of school as never dropped in in the first place, he had his work cut out. But he and I toiled together, with very rarely a cross word between us, just as if he were a dear loving grandfather bent on educating a dim, stroppy, but cherished, grandchild. And I loved him as much as if he were.

Apart from a crop of familiar faces from the trade, there were a couple of good-looking young men not far from us, one of them fiddling with a mobile phone with enough functions to make your eyes water.

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