A Pack of Lies (13 page)

The reflection, close to, looked pensive, thoughtful — very charming but perhaps a little too solemn. Her smile (when she chose to use it) was indeed Eustacia’s trump card. Let’s practise that. The reflection bared its pretty teeth, but it was a poor semblance of a smile. Eustacia tried again. ‘Oh no! That will never do, Eustacia! That smile is downright menacing!’ She raised her hands into the waltz position and pressed the flats of her palms to the cool glass of the mirror to savour that imagined moment of triumph. Her reflection, of course, stepped up to the selfsame imaginary dance. Eustacia closed her eyes.

She could almost hear the music, as though down a long corridor or through a wall. She could almost feel the coolness of the poet’s cheek against hers; his lips against her mouth; his heart beating against hers; his hands enfolding hers — cold. Oh! — cold!

Opening her eyes was strangely upsetting, for although she knew she was feeling fear — acute fear — the reflection of her face (pressed so close that the eyelashes were brushing the glass) showed no expression of fright. It wore only that triumphant, dazzling smile of hers — that trump card, that winning stroke.

And there was no cloud of breath.

As she tried to pull away, the hands gripping hers closed tighter, pulling her bodily against the cold, hard glass, against the yielding, soft, water-cold reflection. It received her and pulled her through a miasma of silver, like a drowning person sucked face down into a weirpool. She had a sensation of the silver closing over her — more like mercury now than water — and of her assailant rolling her, as a crocodile rolls its prey, beneath its body and into some deep, lightless cleft before leaving go and rising to the surface once more. Her hands were empty. Her cheek was no longer pressed to its cold reflection. Her heartbeat no longer rebounded against her ribs. In fact, her heart did not seem to be beating at all. And she was cold, cold, cold, and without air to breathe. She opened her mouth to cry out, but it filled up with molten and transparent silence.

The bedroom appeared cloudy and dim and distant, as though she were seeing it through a dirty window. Her sash still lay on the bed, but there was no reaching it — no more chance of reaching it than a skater who, once fallen through the ice, sees it congeal and refreeze overhead, blotting out the sky . . .

‘Where is that girl?’ said Mrs Dare. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr de Courcy. I can’t think what’s making Eustacia so late down to dinner.’

‘Perhaps you should go up and fetch her, Molly,’ said her husband. ‘She’s probably day-dreaming again.’

But Mrs Dare had got no further than the hall doorway before the girl appeared on the turning of the stair. ‘Where have you been, Eustacia! Hobbs is waiting to serve dinner and Mr de Courcy is here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but nothing more. In fact she remained almost silent throughout dinner, only venturing to ask Mr de Courcy if he were happy in his rented house. Her mother resolved to ask later if Eustacia were
feeling ill, for she did not seem quite her pert, haughty self. She
looked
well enough, however: her hair parted on the other side for a change was most fetching. ‘Eustacia, dear, have you hurt your hand?’

‘No, Mater.’

‘It’s just that you’re holding your spoon in your left . . .’

‘I beg your pardon, Mater. I didn’t realize it was incorrect. I do hope Mr de Courcy will not think me uncouth.’

Mr de Courcy did not. Mr de Courcy found it a most agreeable change to get away from effusive, witty women who chafed themselves against him at the least opportunity and made eyes at him across their dinner plates. After dinner, he ventured to show the pretty, quiet Miss Dare his new volume of poetry, although he was rather disconcerted to see that she apparently read backwards, running her finger along the lines from right to left. As is the way of modest or timid girls, she kept her eyes lowered a good deal. Only once did he catch them out in watching him, and then he choked on his coffee. For it seemed that a reflection stood in her eyes . . . of himself, yes, though not in the setting of the drawing room where they now sat, but in a vast bedroom complete with old-fashioned four-poster bed. A fine sweat broke out on his forehead.

A week later, news of the elopement shook the neighbourhood harder than an earthquake. The rented house on the edge of the park stood empty. The mysterious, the glamorous Mr de Courcy had disappeared.

The banker’s pretty daughter was gone, too. As her distracted parents said, over and over again, they would willingly have agreed to a marriage if only they had been asked. But no, Eustacia had simply expressed the desire to step across the park and return to Mr de Courcy his book of poetry. And by nightfall neither was to be found for all the searching in the world. The
poet had not even stopped to pack his clothes or personal belongings.

Some said he had taken the girl to Italy (as was the wont of romantic poets in that particular decade). Others said that he had interests in South American gold and had taken ship to Buenos Aires. The only positive last sighting was at six p.m. that day, when Teddy Pickles had passed by the poet’s house. Hearing the sound of waltz-time, he had looked up and seen de Courcy beyond the lighted window of an upstairs room, dancing with a young woman — ‘Except they were dancing sort of inside out, if you get my meaning: her right hand and his left hand up here — so — as if she was leading.’

Mrs Dare became very nervy and despondent after her daughter’s elopement. She slept badly and woke her husband up almost every night with talk of the same nightmare. Eustacia, she said, came knocking on the far side of the bedroom mirror, pressing her face against the glass until it was all pressed out of shape, and clawing at the glass and calling and calling, but in a voice that couldn’t be heard. So Mr Dare sold the mirror — ‘It was always an ugly, fussy great thing’ — and after that the dreams stopped.

‘I take comfort in one thing,’ Mrs Dare told her husband.

‘What’s that, dear?’

‘Well, I used to feel, when Eustacia was younger, I mean? well, I couldn’t quite find it in me to
like
her as a mother ought. She could be such a very vain, superior child, always thinking herself too good for ordinary folk. But somehow in those last few days we had together — after the poet came to dinner, I mean — I didn’t find any trouble in liking her. No trouble at all, in fact. Quite the opposite.’

* * *

Everyone had moved away from the mirror, as though the floorboards might crumble like earth beneath them and tumble them into the mirror’s watery, speckled reflections to drown there.

Uncle Clive was the first to break the silence: ‘Tosh!’ he said. ‘Tosh and bosh! Never heard such rubbish in all my life. That’ll be one hundred pounds, sir.’

‘I don’t want it,’ said a disembodied voice from the far side of the bed, and Angela’s white face, blindfolded with the dark glasses, peeped into view, as blind and wiffling as a mole. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want the poxy mirror. Look at it! It’s all speckled. It makes me look as if I’ve got spots.’ (But she did not look into the mirror when she said it.)

‘Oh that can be resilvered easily,’ said Uncle Clive through clenched teeth. ‘Call it ninety.’

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ said the girl, peering at him murderously.

Her father put away his wallet, and her mother sighed deeply. They tottered out of the shop, their daughter snarling and snapping between them like some Rottweiler guard dog they could not control. ‘We bought it as a puppy,’ said their apologetic, glancing faces as they passed by the shop window, ‘and look what it grew up into.’

‘Oh wonderful!’ Uncle Clive exploded into his flat accent, blunt as a mallet. ‘Well, you’re fired, for a start. I never did like the look of you.’

‘Now, now, Clive,’ said Mrs Povey. ‘I don’t suppose they would have bought it, even without Mr Berkshire’s story.’

‘Oh no? Oh no?’ Fury boiled like sulphur in Uncle Clive’s eyes and his red ears strained to part company with his grazed and trembling head.

‘Furniture ought to go where it’s wanted,’ said MCC, almost to himself and with a sad, resigned smile. ‘And so should I.’

Chapter Nine

The Roll-Top Desk:
A Question of Whodunnit

Ailsa would have thrown a tantrum except that she knew from the story that MCC would not like it. She was furiously angry that he, of all people, should give in to Uncle Clive’s miserable temper. She decided to show her disgust by saying nothing at all, snatching up the book currently lying open on the
chaise longue
and starting studiously to read it. To some it might have looked like sulking, but fortunately any such unkind thought was banished by the darting blue flash of a whirling lamp as a police car drew up outside the shop.

Three officers came in — only two of them in uniform. They made the door look as small as a cat flap, and they filled the shop like bears lurking in a telephone box, and everything they looked at they seemed to be memorizing. No ‘Good morning’. No introductions.

‘Gentlemen, Madam, we are led to believe you may be in receipt of stolen property. You won’t mind if we look around, will you?’

Uncle Clive had walked backwards into the living room. Mrs Povey began to laugh shrilly and deny everything. Like lions selecting the tastiest Christian to eat, the constables closed in on the dark-eyed, black-haired man who emerged from the maze of furniture as though he had just finished dressing for cricket. ‘And who might you be sir?’

‘Me? Berkshire’s the name. I work here. What seems to be the trouble?’

‘And what’s your home address? Can you produce some kind of identity, sir? A driving licence? Chequebook? Pay-slip?’

‘Library tickets!’

‘Not quite what I had in mind, sir. Your home address, please?’

‘Oh, here. I’m living here, just now.’

‘And before that? Where are you from?’

‘Reading.’

‘Reading as in Berkshire, sir?’ said the constable, correcting MCC’s pronunciation. ‘Whereabouts in Reading, sir?’

‘Oh, around and about. Here and there.’

The constable’s face gave a twitch of pleasure, and he exchanged a knowing look with his colleague, his pencil poised over his notebook like a lucky pin over a treasure map. Here was a sure-fire villain. ‘Your FULL name, if you please, sir.’

Behind them, their plain-clothes inspector, prowling the shop with his hands clasped behind his short gabardine car coat, uttered a cry of triumph and fell on the glass display case balanced on the wash-stand. ‘And how do you account for having this
salmon
in your possession?’

Unperturbed, MCC stepped between the constables and explained to the inspector about the car boot sale at the railway sidings and how he had gone there to buy stock for the shop. ‘Oh yeah?’ said the inspector with a contemptuous twist of the mouth. ‘That’s what they all say: “Picked it up at a jumble sale, Inspector. Can’t remember when or where or who sold it to me.”  ’

MCC was not dismayed. He took a deep breath and said, ‘I purchased this row of books here, the bookcase they are in and that distinguished salmon from an X-registration red Cortina belonging to a stocky man with a Latvian accent and a large sticker in his back
window saying
I ♥ Dobermanns
. These other books I purchased, along with a marquetry writing box (now sold), from a blue two-door converted van registered in Liverpool. The receipts are in the top right-hand drawer of that roll-top desk behind you — although the Latvian gentleman would only go as far as to write “Cash reseeved, Ta, Mickey Mouse” on the back of an envelope, which is why I took the precaution of writing his registration number on the envelope as well.’

The inspector sprang at the desk and rummaged feverishly in the drawer. He asked to use the telephone, and Mrs Povey said yes, of course, and wouldn’t he like some tea; wouldn’t everyone like some tea? So while the detective inspector checked on the Latvian gentleman’s car registration number, his two constables perched themselves uneasily on a horsehair sofa and fumbled with their notebooks with one hand while trying to balance a cup of tea and ginger biscuits in the other. One remembered that he had been half-way through noting down MCC’s name. He was about to ask for it again when MCC, slumped back in the basket chair with his outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, waved his teaspoon in the direction of the gaping desk and said, ‘In fact you might be interested in the history of that roll-top. It was Exhibit Number One in a celebrated court case, you know. A murder.’

The police constables’ teacups rattled on their saucers. Ailsa, who had not read one word of the book in her hand, glanced at its spine. It was called
The Case of the Bloodstained Blotter
.

* * *

‘I shall have to ask — gentlemen, ladies — that nobody leaves the house,’ said Detective Inspector Farrell. ‘A murder has been committed and statements will have to be taken. Sergeant. Be so good as to take notes?’

‘Yes sir.’

Out at sea, the tide was turning, a bitter sleet began to rattle against the windows of the remote Scottish farmhouse where they now sat. The high wind set the electricity wires swinging, straining at their insulators, and the lights in the house flickered. In the next room, Angus Costick had been found slumped over the closed lid of his roll-top writing desk, a paper-knife in his chest and an IOU clutched in his hand.

In the living room, Costick’s houseguests sat aghast and silent. A middle-aged woman, her greying hair fastened in an untidy bun, sobbed quietly into a handkerchief and kept saying, ‘Poor Angus. Poor dear Angus!’

‘Calm yourself, Miss Pyke,’ said the inspector. ‘I’m sure we can clear this matter up in no time at all. After all, the drive was blocked by snow from Friday night until this morning and there were no tracks outside when the police were summoned. So no-one has either come to the house or left it since then. I think we may safely assume that someone in this room is the murderer.’

Miss Pyke gave a sort of a wail and burst into renewed sobbing. The others looked at each other with bulging, startled eyes full of mistrust: Neville Costick (the dead man’s nephew) was a large, shabby man with a whisky glass forever in one hand; Enid Costick was the victim’s daughter; Timothy Gribley (the dead man’s secretary) was a dwarf and one-time circus performer, and Wembley Poole was a business partner of the murdered man. There was also Mrs Beattie the housekeeper, lurking in the background, nervously flicking a duster across the sideboard from time to time. Outside, the undertaker’s van drove away with what remained of Mr Costick.