Free Inheritance by Jenny Pattrick Page B

dead. Waxy pale, scarcely breathing. I took her pulse. It was there, fluttering weakly like a trapped moth. The arm was bruised from shoulder to wrist and badly swollen below the elbow. Surely broken.
    Stuart Roper sat slumped in a chair in a corner of the room. He looked dreadful – unshaven, his clothes dirty, face haggard. A rifle was propped against his chair, which I found odd. Had he been threatened? Surely he need not keep discipline with a gun?
    ‘What happened?’ I asked.
    He spoke belligerently. ‘A clump of banana trees came down on her in the storm.’
    ‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘What on earth was she doing out in all that?’ Perhaps I spoke too sharply. Of course I meant ‘How could you have let an old lady go out in a hurricane?’.
    He stood up, facing me like a cornered animal. ‘She had her own reasons I suppose. How would I know? She didn’t say. Why does everyone blame me?’
    There was fierce anger in his words, but something desperate too. I turned back to the old lady; lifted the sheet. No external bleeding, but other parts of herbody were badly bruised too. I suspected broken ribs. What could I do? I had pethedrine with me and could have injected it, but the drug might well stop that tiny heartbeat.
    As I stood, undecided, Gertrude opened her eyes. Her breath came in shuddering rasps. ‘Stuart,’ she whispered.
    He came forward eagerly, touched her hand, quite gently, I thought.
    But Gertrude’s gaze was pure hate. ‘Damn you,’ she croaked, ‘you were supposed to be helping me.’ And then added, mysteriously, ‘Hamish was quite right.’
    Those were her last words, spoken with her last breath.
    Stuart knelt by the bed and cried. He was drunk – we could all smell the whisky on him. I thought at the time he was genuinely grieving; perhaps he was. But looking back now, I would not grace him with fine feelings. I imagine he was crying for himself – his shame.
    It turned out Gertrude had been pinned for six hours under a collapsed clump of banana palms in her back yard while the storm raged and lashed. Being old and weak she could not pull free, but any able-bodied man could have rescued her. By the time a worker found her, she was close to death. Samasoni told me the sorry story. He had no love for the old lady – she was as sparing with her praise as she was with her purse – but he had a certain respect for his boss.
    ‘No way to die,’ he told me sadly. ‘Alone all that time. I heard that banana come down and thought no more of it. Trees were crashing everywhere. But where was the son-in-law? How is it possible he didn’t check on her?’
    Stuart had stayed the night in Gertrude’s house withher. Or, obviously, without her. The stupid – or criminally negligent – fellow had found Gertrude’s supply of imported whisky and drunk himself silly. He was still incoherent when the plantation workers brought her in, dripping wet and bloody, only semi-conscious.
    It soon got out that Stuart Roper had been damned by the old lady’s dying words. Differing and increasingly bizarre versions of Gertrude’s death spread like a plague. Stuart Roper was determined to inherit the plantation so had deliberately left her to die; Stuart had suggested she go out to check on her precious sacks of beans, then shut her out of the house; Stuart had pushed her down the stairs and then disguised his actions by cutting down a banana tree and dumping it on her.
    Drunk and negligent were just as culpable in my book.
    We buried her next to her husband behind the house. Hardly anyone came – the roads were too difficult, and let’s face it, Gertrude had not been loved. John O’Dowd and Jeanie managed to drive up with Hamish and Simone. Poor John wept like a child to see his aunt dead. It was touching – he’d only known her a few weeks, but clearly she meant a great deal to him. Such a shame. Maybe he could have sweetened the old dragon in her last years with a bit of family devotion. All her