Barbara Cleverly by Ragtime in Simla Read Free Book Online Page A

Colonial Trading Company. Very rich merchant family and high up the social scale too. This young Lord Conyers had a very remarkable experience. He was a regular soldier attached to an American unit and he was caught in the retreat on the Meuse Argonne a few weeks before the war ended. Blown up and buried alive. He was only discovered two days later and by the advancing Germans. Poor chap! He’d lost his memory completely. No idea who he was or where he was and can you wonder after all he’d been through? He got hauled away by the Germans, who filed him away somewhere in a POW hospital. They didn’t even know his nationality and it was some months before he surfaced again. At last they found out he was British and then by degrees who he was and sent him back to Blighty.’
    ‘That’s a terrible story but, sadly, not uncommon,’ said Joe. ’I expect his sister was overwhelmed to get him back – almost literally – from the dead?’
    Carter hesitated for a moment. ‘Not that simple. In fact his reappearance caused an almighty muddle. You see, while he was mouldering in a German hospital he was posted “missing presumed dead”. His family at that stage consisted of his grandfather and his only sister – parents both died of the flu just after the war and he didn’t even know that. By the time he bobbed to the surface again his grandfather had died and left the considerable family fortune and the business to be shared between his sister Alice and her second cousin. I think she has a fifty-one per cent share in the company, he has forty-nine.’
    ‘I see,’ said Joe. ’And what was the reaction of the two directors? What, in law, was their position?’
    ‘See what you’re driving at,’ said Carter. ’First thing I thought of too. Bad situation. Legal nightmare! Young Conyers seems to have been a decent sort of chap. He wrote to Alice announcing he was still alive and had taken up the family title. He also said he was coming out to see her and would make arrangements for the equitable share-out of the company. He didn’t want to snatch it all straight from under her nose but he was damned if he could see why a remote second cousin should be involved. He was proposing to cut him out completely, take fifty-one per cent for himself and reduce Alice to forty-nine.’
    ‘How do you know all this?’ Joe asked.
    ‘Alice herself told me. She showed me the letter he’d sent her announcing his arrival in Simla.’
    ‘How did she react?’
    ‘Well, after a period of disbelief (only to be expected, of course), apparently with joy. Her friends say she was thrilled to be getting her brother back from the dead. And then I saw her after the shooting and I can say my own impression is that she was devastated. Lost her only close relation twice, so to speak. She was, I’d say, stunned and incredulous.’
    ‘And where was Alice and for that matter her fellow director when the shooting occurred?’
    ‘They were together. They had by this time married, by the way. And, funnily enough, at the precise moment Alice was out shooting. She’s a very good rifle shot but the only target she was hitting at the time was a bull’s-eye on the range at Annandale in view of about a hundred onlookers. She rushed off from the competition to prepare to receive her brother who was expected to come up the cart road in about an hour’s time. And her second cousin was one of the onlookers.’
    ‘So what do you make of the two killings? Are they connected, do you think?’
    ‘Well,’ said Carter slowly, ‘at the moment I’m thinking that the two targets are completely unrelated. I’m guessing that we’re dealing with a madman. Someone killing for fun. Trying out a new rifle, if you like. What possible connection could there be between a forgotten soldier and the flamboyant Monsieur Korsovsky?’
    ‘Beyond the fact that they were both shot in the same place. By the same sort of bullet?’
    ‘Yes. .303, probably a service rifle in both cases. Calcutta will tell us more. They inspected the