The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by James P. D

Author:James, P. D. [James, P. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Crime
ISBN: 9781524708085
Amazon: 1524708089
Goodreads: 30151343
Publisher: Books on Tape
Published: 2016-10-06T07:00:00+00:00

The Boxdale Inheritance

“You see, my dear Adam,” explained the Canon gently, as he walked with Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh under the vicarage elms, “useful as the legacy would be to us, I wouldn’t feel happy in accepting it if Great Aunt Allie came by her money in the first place by wrongful means.”

What the Canon meant was that he and his wife wouldn’t be happy to inherit Great Aunt Allie’s fifty thousand pounds if, sixty-seven years earlier, she had poisoned her elderly husband with arsenic in order to get it. As Great Aunt Allie had been accused and acquitted of just that charge in a 1902 trial which, for her Hampshire neighbours, had rivalled the Coronation as a public spectacle, the Canon’s scruples were not altogether irrelevant. Admittedly, thought Dalgliesh, most people faced with the prospect of fifty thousand pounds would be happy to subscribe to the commonly held convention that, once an English Court has pronounced its verdict, the final truth of the matter had been established once and for all. There may possibly be a higher judicature in the next world but hardly in this. And so Hubert Boxdale would normally be happy to believe. But, faced with the prospect of an unexpected fortune, his scrupulous conscience was troubled. The gentle but obstinate voice went on:

“Apart from the moral principle of accepting tainted money, it wouldn’t bring us happiness. I often think of that poor woman, driven restlessly round Europe in her search for peace, of that lonely life and unhappy death.”

Dalgliesh recalled that Great Aunt Allie had moved in a predictable pattern with her retinue of servants, current lover and general hangers-on from one luxury Riviera hotel to the next, with stays in Paris or Rome as the mood suited her. He was not sure that this orderly programme of comfort and entertainment could be described as being restlessly driven round Europe or that the old lady had been primarily in search of peace. She had died, he recalled, by falling overboard from a millionaire’s yacht during a rather wild party given by him to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday. It was perhaps not an edifying death by the Canon’s standards but Dalgliesh doubted whether she had, in fact, been unhappy at the time. Great Aunt Allie (it was impossible to think of her by any other name), if she had been capable of coherent thought, would probably have pronounced it a very good way to go.

But this was hardly a point of view he could put forward comfortably to his present companion.

Canon Hubert Boxdale was Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh’s godfather. Dalgliesh’s father had been his Oxford contemporary and lifelong friend. He had been an admirable godfather: affectionate, uncensorious, genuinely concerned. In Dalgliesh’s childhood, he had always been mindful of birthdays and imaginative about a small boy’s preoccupations and desires.

Dalgliesh was very fond of him and privately thought him one of the few really good men he had known. It was only surprising that the Canon had managed to live

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