The Teleios Ring by Adam Loxley

Author:Adam Loxley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

‘Neil, this is ridiculous, you must know where she worked!’

Chris was standing in the dining room, hands on hips and shaking his head in despair as Neil continued to sift through the contents of the bureau which were spread out in an ever increasing pile across the table. The pair of them had spent most of the morning systematically going through all the paperwork and with Chris’s help, Neil had finally finished writing to all the various banks and institutions to notify them about the death. Aunt Hilary had turned out to be something of an astute investor and because of the limit on saver’s compensation had wisely spread her nest-egg across four separate bank accounts. There were also three different credit cards, two life-assurance policies, some premium bonds and national savings certificates, plus a small number of shares that she had bought some years ago in one of the utility companies. All in all, the process of informing everybody had turned out to be more involved than Neil had ever imagined but it was the process of notifying her ex-employer about her pension that was really causing the difficulty.

‘I keep telling you Chris, I haven’t a clue where she worked. I can see the pension amount being paid into her bank account every month but I can’t tell who it’s being paid from and I can’t find any paperwork at all relating to who she worked for.’ Neil held up the bank statement as though it was primary evidence in some sort of courtroom drama and then went back to shuffling through the documents, more for effect than with any hope of actually finding anything. He’d been through it all three or four times now and he knew that there was nothing there.

‘Well, don’t you remember?’ asked Chris, still in the same high-pitched, incredulous voice that was starting to get on Neil’s nerves. ‘She must have talked about who she worked for, surely?’

Neil stopped what he was doing and gave Chris a very tired and frustrated look across the table. ‘Chris, she retired nearly twenty years ago. I must have been about eleven or twelve at the time. I was at boarding school. She was a secretary. That’s all I know because that’s all I remember. By the time I’d got to an age where I would have taken any notice, she’d already retired.’

Chris held his hands up, gesturing to Neil that he didn’t want to get into an argument. ‘Okay, okay. I believe you. It just seems strange to me, that’s all. Anyway, it has to be the Civil Service. If she retired twenty years ago then she could only have been about fifty-five and as far as I know, the only people that can afford to retire that early are civil servants. If she’d worked for them all her life she probably retired on a full pension.’

Neil started to tidy up the papers on the table, obviously satisfied that there wasn’t any point in trying to look through them any longer.

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