Conflicts of little Avail Read online

  CONFLICTS OF LITTLE AVAIL

  GILL MATHER

  All rights reserved

  © Gill Mather 2017 The right of Gill Mather to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is a work of fiction and except in the case of historical fact and actual place names, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead or to locations or places mentioned in the book is purely coincidental

  CONTENTS

  About the book, About the author

  Chapter 1 Little Avail

  Chapter 2 Fait Accompli

  Chapter 3 A Pub Lunch

  Chapter 4 Injudicious Delving

  Chapter 5 Dirty Tricks

  Epilogue

  CONFLICTS OF LITTLE AVAIL

  CONFLICTS OF LITTLE AVAIL is the third in a series of novellas about Roz Benedict and Guy Attwood, following on from Compromised and Cut Off.

  A surprise gift to Roz from a man who claims to have known her mother years ago proves to have a chequered past. Roz can't resist investigating, but the fruits of her efforts turn out to be less than beneficial.

  Blackmail and bribery ensue and if Roz won't succumb, her own, Guy's and his children's lives look set to be ruined.

  THE AUTHOR Gill (Gillian) Mather has published seven novels on Kindle, the first five being a series of romantic-cum-crime novels set in Colchester around the same fictional law firm and featuring the same main characters over a number of years. The sixth novel As The Clock Struck Ten is a thriller which delves into a murky subject much in the news in recent years. The seventh novel The Unreliable Placebo is humorous.

  All of the works including the three novellas referred to above either are or are shortly to be available on the Suffolk Libraries ebook catalogue. All are now published under the name Gill Mather (for some works the pen name Julie Langham was previously used).

  Gill has been a solicitor for several decades and runs a small practice from her home in Langham, near Colchester. She is a member of writers' group Write Now! which meets fortnightly near Bury St Edmunds, and also a member of the Dedham Players.

  A new novel The Sheds is in preparation and it is quite possible that another Roz and Guy novella will be produced.

  Any feedback may be emailed to [email protected]

  Gillian Mather - January 2017

  Chapter 1 Little Avail

  THE PENDULOUS bags beneath the old man’s watery blue eyes mimicked the earthward direction of the several folds above as did the jowls below which wobbled and trembled as he continued with his description.

  “I’ve been gradually improving it over the years. Adding insulation, installing windows…”

  “Windows? You mean replacement windows?”

  “No. There were no windows at all. The old ones had rotted away completely. They were non-existent by the time I inherited it from my mother. The new ones are double-glazed uVPC. At least it’s not listed. It’d hardly be fair to list it would it.”

  Gordon had already related that the little house was one or two miles from any road, had no vehicular access and was approachable only by footpaths, partly public, the rest who knew. Gordon threw his hands up as he said this and Roz could imagine his underarm wings flapping away beneath the sleeves of the slack jumper which hung limply around him like a shroud. His grey-green skin didn’t help to deflect the impression that he was ‘on the way out’ as he’d put it himself.

  The ownership of much of the land in the vicinity of the house was unknown, including the freehold of the house itself and its garden, though the Lease of the property, which his mother had owned and passed onto Gordon, at least wasn’t in doubt, dating incredibly from sixteen hundred and something. Gordon had waved the original document at Roz. It was incredibly well-preserved.

  “So. I hope you’ll want to take it on and get as much pleasure out of it as I have over the years. I was incredibly fond of your mother you know. When I found out about the dreaded Big C, I racked my brains and suddenly remembered her. It’s taken me some time to track you down. If I hadn’t been so foolish, we might have been married and….well you, my dear, might even have been my daughter, and all this….” he gazed around him and out of the window where the late spring afternoon gloom was gathering, “…well.”

  Roz also glanced round the room and thought about the, to her, large mansion in its extensive grounds, though the interior was gaunt and devoid of most of its normal contents, rather like its owner.

  “I’ve been trying to rid myself of most of my worldly goods, the physical ones at least, since I found out. So as to make things easier for my executors….”

  Two distant nephews apparently whom he’d met at their Christenings but not since.

  “….They’ll get this place and all the cash for their trouble.

  “I’d like to say: take your time, visit the cottage, and see what you think. Unfortunately though I don’t think there is much time. But do visit. Here.”

  Gordon produced a massive ornate key and handed it to Roz, after which he dug about in a pile of paperwork next to his chair. He came up with a large scale ordnance survey map and pored over it with Roz for half a minute. He gestured vaguely to a point somewhere near the upper right-hand corner of the map where the undulations of the North Norfolk coastline could be seen.

  “I’ve written down the TM grid reference,” he said.

  “Er. An address would be handy.”

  “Oh there’s no address. Oh no. But it does have a name. I think it was probably mentioned by name on some of the earlier OS maps, but not the modern ones.”

  “Oh. What is the name?”

  “It’s called Little Avail.”

  “WHAT’S THIS THEN?” Guy laughed as he weighed the key in his hand. “A relic from the Crusades?”

  “Hmm. Doesn’t quite match the image of uVPC windows does it.”

  “And what did you say the house is called?”

  Roz told him again.

  “Very cheerful I must say. Roz, are you sure you really want to take this thing on? It sounds a bit of a millstone.”

  “Oh. Don’t you?” Roz was disappointed. All the way back from Norwich she’d been imagining the possibilities, building up her enthusiasm. Her optimism overrode the fact that the cottage had no mains services and no legal means of access and that the title was leasehold only, set on land whose freehold owner had ceased no doubt to take any interest in it several centuries earlier as the Lease was granted originally for nine hundred and ninety nine years and the freehold hadn’t been passed down through the generations probably as a result.

  “When did this Gordon inherit the place himself?” Guy wanted to know.

  “I think he said….well….ages ago. Forty years? Something like that.”

  “Is it registered?”

  “I’ve no idea. Don’t solicitors deal with things like that?”

  Guy, who was himself a solicitor, ignored the question and told Roz that quite probably the Lease would have to be registered at the Land Registry when she took it over and that would mean providing evidence of the freehold at the time when the Lease was granted.

  Roz frowned over the photocopy of the Lease Gordon had given her, twelve overlapping A4 pages sellotaped roughly together so that some lines of the document were duplicated and others were missing.

  “Bla bla,” she read, “January (I think it says) in the Year of Our Lord….bla….one thousand six hundred and forty two….”

  She looked up at Guy. “He said something about a tribunal.”

  “Very likely.”

  “What would that do?”

  “I suppose get some sort of order enabling the Lease to b
e registered. Or maybe the freehold to be granted.”

  Roz smiled. “So it can be sorted out then.”

  “Possibly. But that wouldn’t get over the lack of any mains services or legal access. Not to mention what state the place is likely to be in. Though perhaps some right of necessity might be implied. For the access I mean.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Roz, there’s no ‘Oh good’ about it. It’s only pedestrian access, not vehicular and the routes of public footpaths can be altered so it could lose even the bits of legal access it’s actually got now. Is there anything in the Lease?”

  Roz shrugged. “It’s all double Dutch to me.”

  Guy spread out the patchwork of sheets on the sitting room floor, flattening them with his hands. As Roz had done when she read the date, he traced the hand-written lines with a finger, otherwise it was impossible not to lose your place.

  “Nothing,” he said after a time. “Roz. Is it really a good idea to accept this property?”

  “But it’s quite near the sea. Think what fun we could have. And with Andrea wanting to start a family, it’d be perfect for children. And it’s near a village called Goosefeering. I’ve looked it up on the internet. It’s so pretty, with a fine church dating from Norman times.”

  “Many villages have fine Norman churches. There’s lots of villages around here with fine Norman churches.”

  Guy and Roz lived on the outskirts of Lincoln.

  Roz sighed. “Surely in this day and age of self-sufficiency the lack of formal mains services can be overcome.”

  “But the lack of a vehicular access can’t really can it. How would we get this modern equipment, solar panels, wiring, septic tank, etc, to this cottage if it’s two odd miles from a road? By hand cart?”

  Again disappointment clouded Roz’s features. She knew it wasn’t fair because if Guy thought she wanted something, he’d almost certainly have to helplessly relent and she didn’t want to take advantage of him. But when he said: “All right. Let’s just go and take a look at the place then” she couldn’t stop herself from smiling broadly.

  TEEMING HORIZONTAL rain was lashing the offside of the parked car in which they were huddled as they had been for the last hour, coming at them sideways straight off the North Sea, directly from Siberia, or so it seemed.

  Guy wiped the condensation off the windscreen, providing a few minutes of blurred detail of the way ahead until the water droplets re-formed on the cold glass interior, again obscuring their vision of anything more than an inch away.

  “It’s not going to stop, Roz,” said Guy. “I think we’ve got just a few options. We either get out and brave this atrocious weather. Or we go home. Or we could drive back to the village and sit in the pub all afternoon. Or I suppose we could sit here for the rest of the day and night and eventually freeze to death or develop DVT.”

  “Oh, OK. You’re probably right. It won’t stop. We may as well get going then.” She felt for the knob under her passenger seat and pushed the seat back. She twisted her body in the confined space and started to haul boots and anoraks out of the back.

  “Er. Hang on a sec. There were two other viable options as well. I rather favoured the pub one.”

  “OK. We can go there afterwards.”

  Grumbling to himself, Guy pushed back his own seat and took the pair of Wellington boots Roz was flourishing at him. By various contortions, after a few minutes they were both dressed for the outdoors.

  “Have you got the key?”

  Roz felt for it in her coat pocket. “Yes.”

  “Right.” As Guy pushed open the driver’s door against the prevailing wind, what felt like a wave of water sufficient to satisfy the average surfing enthusiast tried to wash into the car interior. Guy hurriedly slammed the door shut.

  “We’d better get out your side,” he said.

  A moment later they were standing squinting alternately at the folded ordnance survey map, safely encased in a transparent plastic sleeve, and the information on a plaque below the public footpath sign. It read: ‘Alternative route to Goosefeering’. They’d chosen this point from which to set off partly because the public footpath seemed, according to the map, to lead vaguely in the direction of the co-ordinates of Little Avail until the path veered off to the left after about three quarters of a mile, and partly because the road they were on came to an abrupt end where they had pulled up and they couldn’t have driven any further even if they’d wanted to. Rather hit and miss as Guy had pointed out but Roz felt instinctively that it was about right and Gordon, in his rambling directions, had mentioned a cul-de-sac.

  “Oh well,” said Guy, “brace yourself. We’d better get a move on or we’ll never make the pub before closing time.”

  They leaned against the gale.

  “Maybe we should lash ourselves together. The visibility can’t be more than a few centimetres,” he yelled at Roz.

  She smiled back feebly, unable to hear him through her anorak hood and the noise of the wind.

  They began their trek, Roz in the lead, heads down, partly sheltered from the driving rain by the hedge to their right. The hedge hadn’t yet thickened up with its summer foliage and its protection was by no means complete. The right sides of their clothing soon became drenched. The patented fabric which was supposed to keep out the elements was apparently no match for the challenges of the weather offered by the North Norfolk coast. They quickened their pace, slipping and sliding occasionally on the soft mud, catching each other and periodically stopping to check where they were, though there was little in the way of landmarks discernible from the map.

  “We must have come three quarters of a mile by now, surely,” Roz said.

  “I don’t know. It’s a bit like swimming in the sea. What feels like a huge distance turns out to be a few yards when you look at the shore. But,” Guy ventured squinting ahead, “if I’m not mistaken, there’s an old milestone up ahead. Let’s see if we can read anything on it.”

  “Where?”

  “That thing there,” he pointed downwards, “that looks like a small gravestone.”

  They trudged towards it. Guy ducked down and peered at it closely. Roz cast about as the public footpath had petered out and there was a hedge in front of them.

  “It says Goosefeering three miles.” He turned ninety degrees to the left and pointed away along the line of the hedge.

  “Three miles! It can’t be. What about the cottage?”

  “Who knows. But it tallies with the ordnance survey map. It shows the public footpath going off to the left. Theoretically, we need to go straight on to get to the cottage.”

  They regarded the tall thick hawthorn hedge directly in their path. A sudden extra-strong gust of wind hurled itself at them through a narrow gap in the hedge to their right nearly knocking them sideways.

  “I s’pose we’d better go that way.” Roz started in that direction, wiping the rain dripping from the end of her nose.

  “Actually Roz. Perhaps we should go back. If we get lost, we could die of exposure out here. I’m not joking. This rain’s not far short of hail.”

  “Can’t we just try a little further. If we don’t try, we’ll never find it.”

  “Well perhaps that’s no bad thing.”

  These conversations were of necessity being bawled into each other’s ears with their hoods temporarily held back by gloved hands. Roz sniffed and got out her handkerchief. Her eyes were watering from the cold, and her nose was running. Guy seemed to be faring better.

  “If we go away without finding it this time, we won’t come back, I know we won’t.” Roz blew her nose loudly.

  Guy, hunched against the wind, walked through the gap in the hedge and turned back to Roz.

  “There’s a band of trees at the end of this hedge. We’ll walk as far as that, and if there’s no indication, I insist we go back.”

  Roz mumbled her agreement.

  They set out again, in single file, Roz at the front as before, beside the hedge which t
his time was to their left so that the wind and rain came straight at them from the right across the open field. It was possible to just about make out a path between the hedge and its verge and the ploughed earth. Along this Roz skidded and stumbled forward blindly as quickly as possible, her hood down and her face turned away from the open field so that, when the trees loomed up before her, she was surprised. She halted and Guy collided with her back, having also kept his head down.

  Steadying each other and holding onto their hoods which the wind was trying to whip off their heads, they moved slowly along by the side of the coppice, searching for a gap or way through the spindly trees. There was none.

  Guy walked a foot or so into the wood to get out of the path of the gale and lent up against the trunk of a tree. He looked at Roz.

  “We have to face it,” he said. “We’re probably miles from the right place. We ought to rest here for a little while and hope this storm dies down and then go back.”

  But Roz wasn’t listening to him. She was walking further into the trees, parting the undergrowth as she went.

  “Roz,” Guy yelled. “It’s not sensible to go blundering about in a wood in this weather. If we get….”

  “I can see it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a clearing up ahead and there’s something in it.”

  Guy sighed and reluctantly withdrew a few yards from the tree. Roz had disappeared.

  “Roz come back.”

  He crashed after her, and by the time he caught her up, they were both standing at the edge of an open area and Roz was fishing about in the small rucksack she’d brought with her, as Guy eyed the cottage. She produced a sepia photograph protected, as was the map, by a plastic sleeve.

  “Gordon gave it to me. This is it.”

  “You’re right.”

  The flint-faced building was surrounded by an overgrown garden and what looked to be a relatively recent picket fence. The plot backed onto more rough woodland to the north. Magically the rain had cleared, the wind had died down and the sun, coming from the south-west over the tops of the scrubby woodland, shone on the open grassy clearing and glinted on the glass of the windows. The uPVC frames, if that was what they were, looked less incongruous than they might have, at least from a distance, being a dark oak effect. And they were Gothic in style and shape with arched detailing. The front door, partly screened by a substantial porch, more like a church porch, was also arched.