A Murder in Mayfair (30 page)

“Did it frighten you?”

“Of course not. It amused me.”

“It excited you, I should think. The outraged aristocrat was more your type than the gentle moralist.”

“Maybe, maybe,” she said impatiently. She was back in the
past, and didn't like being interrupted or contradicted. “The next thing I heard was her laughter. She hardly ever laughed, and only to wound. I joined in from the door. The bedside light came on, and he stood there, naked, seeing us both—
me too
—taking the piss out of him. That was the moment he snapped. The next thing I knew he'd thrown himself on Veronica and his hands were round her throat.”

“Didn'tyou try to stop him?”

“I might have done, but it was over as soon as it started. Sometimes it is. Don't suppose you knew that. I didn't. The technical term for it is vagal inhibition, and even the police admitted that was what must have happened. She was dead within seconds.”

Something struck me, a hope.

“Are you sure? Are you sure she wasn't still alive when he left the house, and you finished her off?”

She stared at me, her face eaten up with contempt.

“Haven't you been listening? Are you as dim as your brother? Can you imagine any reason I would have for wanting her dead? You're just a simpleminded fool, wanting to cling to the idea that your father is not a murderer. That cow's death destroyed all my political ambitions—that and your birth. Oh no, he killed her. The police admitted, but only after days and weeks of questioning me and testing my story, that he might not have intended to kill her, that if things had gone normally with an attempted strangulation he would probably have given up long before she was dead. It was not much more than a moment of rage on his part, but it was enough to kill her.”

I clung to my shadow of an idea.

“The police kept on at you for a long time, by the sound of it.”

“Of course they did. I was the only witness. At first they thought it was some kind of plot between John and me—lovers
against the wife. I told them at first it was just a row between John and Veronica, which grew so heated he tried to strangle her. It was spur-of-the-moment stuff and they knew it. They wanted to know how come a row between those two had finished up in my bedroom. Then the forensic people discovered that Veronica had not just been in my bedroom, but had slept, or lain, in my bed. That really got them going! In the end they got most of it out of me.”

“And in the meanwhile Tony and I were growing, growing, growing in your womb.”

She threw me a glance of hatred.

“Like parasites on a tree. Eventually they conceded I'd had nothing to do with the murder, and they left their tail off. I'd been living in a bed-sitter under an assumed name, with a copper at the front door and a copper at the back and a copper's sister-in-law as my landlady. When I finally managed to get to the abortionist I'd intended to use at the time of the murder he said it could only be done with potential damage to myself. He wasn't going to take the risk, and I sure as hell wasn't going to either.
So you lived.
”

She said it like a threat. I ignored that, and nodded. She wasn't Veronica's murderer. I had really only toyed with the idea as a way of prolonging the discussion.

“You can't expect me to be sorry to have lived.”

“Pits is! And I'll make him even sorrier before long. You won't be so smug and self-satisfied about your successful career when I've finished with you either.”

She looked at me and started fingering the knife. I could only cast around desperately for something to delay the final confrontation.

“And did you never see Lord John again?”

“Never. I soon stopped laughing, when I saw her lying there on the bed and not moving. I'd always felt a bond with Veronica.
There was no morality nonsense about hen I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both bent over and examined her. He just said ‘My God!' in that stifled aristocratic way of his. Then he rushed out of the bedroom. I was trying resuscitation, but I could hear him putting on clothes in his room. Then I heard him rush downstairs and slam the front door. I thought he was going to the police. Getting any life back into Veronica was hopeless, and I suddenly thought: What if he tries to shift it all off on me? So I rang the police myself, wanting at least to start with a few Brownie points. And I've never seen him or heard his voice to this day. . . . Oh, but I'd like to! I've scores to settle with him, too. And I will settle them. You're going to tell me where he is.”

Caressing the knife she took a step toward me, her eyes flaring with rage and a sort of lust. Her love for herself, her sensual feeling for her own primacy and prowess, was almost erotic in its intensity.

“He's where you can never find him,” I said.

“I can find him. You've seen him, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I shall. You
liked
him, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Weaklings together.
Where?”

“In a sort of retreat.”

She laughed harshly.

“A monastery! I might have known. There was always a monk lurking there, a passionate monk! That's my speciality: the secret self that every man keeps hidden from the world, but which I can unlock. That was the brilliant thing about my establishment: winkling away at that secret of the inner soul.”

“You're off-beam as usual,” I said. “He's not a monk. He lives quite alone.”

“Better and better,” she said, licking her lips.

“In any case, you can't put any blame on him. You said yourself that what happened was virtually an accident.”

“He killed her. Whether he intended to or not he killed her, and that ruined my life.”

“And I ruined your life,” I said, as if it were a litany, “and Tony ruined you life. Why don't you face it:
you
ruined your life.”

“No!”

It was bawled out. That was her core dishonesty, the thing that she had never faced up to, that her delusions were a refuge from.

“You planned your whole life, step by step. And you blew the plans one by one. That's why you have to thrash around and blame other people. That's one of the forms your madness takes.”

“I am not mad!”

“Once you got the job in Upper Brook Street,” I said, “you began to make plans. Lord John was the first in your sights, and he made easy game: a frustrated, sad man whose marriage had been empty and was now in ruins. You soon realized Lord John was never going to fly high in politics, but you were well in by then with him and his wife—they took you to parties, places where people of their kind were seen and did business. You met people who were at the top of all sorts of concerns and walks of life, or who were getting there. Lots of avenues were opening to you. And then you blew it.”

“I didn't,” she snarled. “I was just having a little fun.”

“But that was exactly it,” I said, seeing that the needling was working. “You've got a trivial mind, a mind that went for present fun rather than future prospects. You were never going to go anywhere significant, not on your own account, and not by clinging to any man's coattails either. You liked trivial power, manipulating people, creating chaos and confusion in their
lives. So you set up this silly, cruel little joke of getting Lord John into bed with his wife.
You
ruined your life.”

“Men ruined my life! You, him, others. Always men!”

“You can't ruin someone's life by being born. A baby has no moral responsibility. Some people never develop one, even when they have apparently grown up. You had quite a nice little business, a high-class brothel that gave every customer what he wanted. Their dreams came true there—their sexual dreams. It was obviously a business you thoroughly enjoyed and were suited to running. But when attitudes became so permissive that your establishment began to lose its function you blew it again by resorting to blackmail. The only possible basis for an enterprise like yours was total discretion. You ruined your own life.”

“No!”

“And you became more and more desperate, madder and madder, and you cast around in your own mind for people to blame. Always other people to blame. Because you're the kind who can never accept responsibility for what they've done, never acknowledge the burden of guilt for what that has meant—for themselves and for others.”

“You should have been a preacher.”

I leaned forward.

“I know where Lord John lives.”

I was fairly sure by now that a rescue force was in place outside the house. That was reassuring, but it didn't create total confidence. There was still that time between them trying to force an entry and actually getting their hands on the madwoman and her knife. There was the reputed strength of mad people, too: I was reasonably strong, reasonably agile, but for how long could I fend her off? Her and that knife?

I had decided my best card would be to get her off balance. In fact I couldn't think of any other card.

“Where
is he?” she whispered.

“That's for me to know and you to find out.”

She came a step forward, the knife held firm and threateningly.

“Where?”

“A cave beside a monastery in northern Greece,” I said. Her eyes glinted, but suspiciously. “A mud hut in the rain forests of South America. A ruined hovel on the edge of a bog in the Republic of Ireland. On the top of a pillar in the Sahara Desert—”

Her face became redder and she waved her weapon.

“Stop playing with me, or else—”

“You've played with people all your life. I must have inherited it from you. I've already told you where he is, as a matter of fact, but you're too
stupid
to understand me.”

I flung the adjective at her. She howled with rage, I prepared to sidestep, but as she hurled herself forward there came first a great ripping sound as the purple satin of her dress split across the shoulders, then a second later a massive concentration of lights, bursting suddenly through the sitting room window, followed by the sound of feet battering at the front door. She stopped, confused, and I threw myself on her, gripping her knife arm with both hands, twisting it round, the satin tearing still further into rags, but she still clutching her hideous weapon with all her strength and pushing it closer and closer to my face, my eyes. It was only as uniformed men burst into the room that it fell useless to the floor and I could push it aside as she threw herself at my throat.

It took three of the policemen to subdue her, and even after they had handcuffed her she was aiming kicks at them with her stumpy legs and spitting in their faces. Bruised and shaken I followed them through the hall and out into the garden, which arc lamps were illuminating as if it were a film set. George
Eakin was standing there with several of the local top police brass. He came forward and put his arm around my shoulder, and together we watched my mother, howling and screaming obscenities, being driven away and out of my life forever.

L
ucy Mariotti was sectioned that night, and very soon certified unfit to plead to any of the charges the police had lined up for use against her. Unfit to plead, unfit to do anything except rail, blame, lament, assail. I was sent regular bulletins on her, though I made no particular inquiries. Unless she was threatening me she was nothing to me. Mother in name, mother by a crass accident of biology, beyond that—nothing. If I were inclined to worry if anything of her had gone into my makeup, I would have concluded that her contribution was balanced by that of my biological father. The local newspapers merely recorded that a woman, released into the community some time ago from a London psychiatric hospital, had been arrested for causing an affray at the home of local MP Colin Pinnock. That seemed to me to get it about right, though at the time what she caused seemed rather more than an affray. At any rate she was now nothing more than “a woman.”

But Tony was more than just a man. He was my brother, and a confused, pathetic, nearly broken individual. Susan and I talked with him about Lucy, made it clear to him that she was now locked away in a secure institution, tried to convince him that there was no danger of her being released back into the
community. But that was the sticking point. It had happened before, and he could not believe it would not happen again. We meditated setting him up in a small flat or bed-sitter, but that overmastering fear of his mother didn't augur well for the experiment succeeding. It suddenly occurred to me that, just as I had made contact with our father, so he should, too. I felt that the serene old man could act as a calming influence—him, his way of life, and the remote place that he led it in.

I am not a sentimentalist about nature. I know it can be as red in tooth and claw on these islands as it is down the Amazon or in the African bush. You only have to watch sparrows fighting over a nut container to know that. But I did sense that peace, quietude, and natural beauty could have a positive influence on a troubled mind. I arranged it through Matthew and Janet as before. They took him with them to Wexford, Matthew reporting that Tony got on well with the children, but seemed somehow bewildered by family life, couldn't take it in or become part of its dynamics. Matthew drove him alone to Kilrose, then left him with our faher.

He is still there. Report says that he is, if not happy, then more contented than he has ever been. He walks, fishes, tends the sheep, goes to town to get provisions. He meets people there, and slowly has made friends with them. His “holiday” has stretched to three months now, and he is welcoming the approach of spring. The seasons always meant a lot to Tony, having been on the streets. Sometimes I feel guilty about my father. Solitude suited him, he flourished in it, it was what temperamentally he was most fitted for. Then I remembered his nagging sense that he had not expiated what he had done, and felt that caring for his emotionally scarred son was part of that expiation.