Free Death at the Chase by Michael Innes

Topf which had been the most notable of Luke’s acquisitions.
    ‘You see, he wants to curate things in a museum,’ Finn went on, ‘and it isn’t a career that leaves you rolling. But the real trouble is that Giles’ father is feeling the wind a bit.’
    ‘I see,’ Judith said, and for a moment cast around for a diversion. It didn’t seem proper that the res angusta domi at King’s Yatter should be familiarly canvassed to virtual strangers in this way. But then she remembered that John was becoming curious about the whole tribe of Ashmores, and she let Finn go on.
    ‘Things not too good in the City,’ Finn amplified. ‘That kind of thing. So Giles’ father feels that, if Giles wants both to marry and to curate he ought to have found somebody well in the mun herself. But, of course, love isn’t like that at all. It isn’t this girl’s fault that she hasn’t got a bean.’
    ‘But perhaps,’ Appleby asked helpfully, ‘she has at least some means of honest earning?’
    ‘Well, yes – she has. Just at the moment she has. She sings, as a matter of fact. A bit of dancing too. At a place in London. You wouldn’t know it.’
    ‘Probably not. So Giles’ present predicament is essentially economic?’
    ‘That’s it!’ Finn seemed to feel that Appleby had penetrated to the heart of an intricate mystery. ‘And that’s where Giles’ uncle – or perhaps it’s his great-uncle – comes in.’
    ‘Martyn Ashmore?’
    ‘Jolly good, sir.’ Finn’s manner positively suggested a small round of applause. ‘That’s where the family mun is. Giles, that’s right?’
    Giles Ashmore nodded. He was attending now, but with an appearance of some gloom.
    ‘So something has to be done. Giles has to bestir himself. Think of all those generations of enterprising Ashmores. That sort of thing.’
    ‘Armour rusting on the walls,’ Bobby Appleby interposed, ‘on the blood of Clifford calls. Seize the lance. Bear me to the heart of France. That right, Giles?’
    Giles Ashmore – whom it appeared customary to attempt to rouse by means of this formula – smiled wanly, and then ventured to speak.
    ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘Must do something. And Uncle Martyn seems the man.’
    ‘Only there’s been a coolness,’ Finn said. ‘Bit of bad blood, and all that. Happens in families, wouldn’t you say? Happened in yours, I expect, Lady Appleby.’
    ‘Uncle Martyn might weigh in with something handsome?’ Appleby asked – rather hastily, since he felt Judith might not reply wholly urbanely to Finn’s last speculation. He was himself beginning to feel Bobby’s friends to be tiresome. Young men forming improbable plans to ‘touch’ a rich relative struck him as a somewhat faded species of comedy. He wondered why Bobby was mixed up in it. Perhaps there lurked in it something more interesting than at present appeared. ‘It is even perhaps relevant,’ he added, ‘that this wealthy kinsman has no obvious heir?’
    ‘All that sort of thing.’ Giles Ashmore nodded without much conviction. ‘Finn says that even if he carved up quite handsomely among the whole crowd of us, it mightn’t be for a dishearteningly long time. I don’t know whether you happen to be aware of it, sir, but the Ashmores are an exceptionally long-lived lot.’
    ‘It is, as a matter of fact, information that has lately come my way.’ Giles, Appleby was thinking, if not eager was at least candid. ‘It would appear that what you have in mind is a gift rather than a bequest?’
    ‘Well, yes. For a start, anyway.’
    There was a moment’s silence. Appleby was aware of Judith as refraining from looking at the clock. Young Mr Ashmore’s mercenary designs would be less depressing, she was probably feeling, if advanced with rather more élan . This seemed also to be Finn’s view, for he now intervened again on a livelier note.
    ‘So the question,’ he said, ‘is ways and means. Good phrase, don’t you think? My father’s an MP, and he’s on