A Splash of Red (22 page)

'Ah, then no car. He looks angry. He does not say so. I know it. He thinks, the car should be there all the time. He goes out, himself, I cannot stop him. He moves very quickly that man, and looks for a taxi. He comes back and puts her in it. Face of thunder. Both Sir Richard and the lady. He comes back, sits here. "No reason to waste an excellent meal, Stavros," he says. But he eats and drinks nothing. Later he says: "I'm afraid I'm not feeling very well, Stavros." He reads a magazine, a book maybe. Very calm. When the car comes back he is no longer angry. He waits reading until about two-thirty, and then his car takes him away.'

'To number ten Downing Street', concluded Jemima thoughtfully. 'And you told all this to the police, just as you told me.' Stavros smiled and flung his hands open.

'I told it, yes, most of it. But I am a businessman. I do not tell them about the tears of Lady Lionnel. That is private to Sir Richard. Besides they are not interested in her, only in him. And the fact that he is here from twelve-forty-five to two-thirty. To that I swear and so do Nicky and Spyros.' He indicated two further melancholy men, younger and thinner, but in somewhat the same mould as Stavros. 'Sir Richard Lionnel, he too is a businessman. It is a pleasure to see him here. He know what he wants - we give it to him. The other lady - please forgive me, Miss Shore - your guest. What does
she
want?' Jemima left hastily,
before she should be drawn into discussing the political-gastronomic ideals of Isabelle Mancini. She also paid the bill in cash: despite Stavros' evident desire to make that another present 'for a lovely lady'.

Jemima remained thoughtful on her journey to see Chloe's daily woman. She was haunted by a feeling that she had received an odd and valuable piece of information in the course of her visit to 'The Little Athens'. It was as though an insignificant chip in a jig-saw had been handed to her; if she could only place it correctly, the whole pattern might become clearer.

Jemima enlivened the walk to Tottenham Court Road tube station by re-running her conve
rsations with both Isabelle
and Stavros through her mind like a tape.

As she came to Stavros' revelations, she realized that the striking piece of information she had received concerned the precipitate departure of Lady Lionnel - the Medea of Parrot Park - from 'The Little Athens' at about
1
.30
- back to the station. An item of information as yet unknown to the police, who had contented themselves with establishing Sir Richard Lionnel's alibi - lunch with his wife - with the aid of Stavros and his waiters.

That needed further quiet thought. Lady Lionnel? It was odd to think that this Medea who unquestionably had a motive for wishing Chloe removed from her husband's path, had also been vouchsafed an opportunity to effect this removal.

Something else - less obvious perhaps - some remark of Isabelle or Stavros - continued to haunt her.

She was still re-running the scene in her mind when she reached Tottenham Court Road station and bought a copy of the
London Evening Post.
A recent photograph showed Kevin John's face, anguished, pop-eyed, slightly reproachful, staring out at her from the front page. His huge eyes with their improbably starry eyelashes, seemed to be imploring her help.

Jemima shivered and turned down the steps to the moving staircase. The text accompanying the report was short: there was after all very little to be said. There was however a short interview with one Miss Kim Lee Ho, who described herself as the 'steady girl-friend' of the accused, and was also temporarily lodging with Kevin John's artistic patron, Crispin Creed, the owner of the Aiglon Gallery.

A joint photograph was provided. Inspecting it with interest, Jemima could see a dark pretty Oriental-looking girl; her small figure was almost masked by the robust presence of Creed, a man whose affectionate nickname of Creeping Croesus had been earned by a combination of inherited wealth and commercial perception. This then was the
submissive girl of Eastern origin to whom Chloe had so casually referred. Jemima was vaguely pleased that Kevin John had some feminine support. It made her feel less guilty in the face of those reproachful eyes. Kim Lee Ho, who give or take her Oriental ancestry, had a certain disquieting resemblance to Chloe herself, was described in the evening paper as a model - whether artist's model or fashion model was unspecified. Chloe, despite her photogenic looks, had always rejected the fashion offers which had come her way, even when poor and out of work after Cambridge. 'I'm a model nothing,' she used to say.

She had not, it seemed, been a model employer. Mrs Rosina Cavalieri received a rather hot and fussed Jemima in a small depressing street north of Tottenham Court Road, a neighbourhood with little else to commend it except the convenience of the tube for working in Bloomsbury. Rosina was indeed as Chloe had pointed out and Pompey confirmed, a compulsive talker; her son, Enrico, no more charming than Chloe had predicted, clung to his mother's skirts and regarded Jemima with enormous baleful eyes set in a full white face.

Enrico's distinctly plump figure, however, was immaculately dressed notwithstanding the heat in a white silk shirt which buttoned on to grey silk trousers, white socks and black patent shoes. Despite his tender years, Enrico had an excellent sense of when the conversation was taking an interesting turn, and at this juncture infallibly grabbed his mother, demanding a biscuit, some other comestible, or orange juice. Thanks to these interruptions, it took Jemima longer than she had anticipated to elicit Rosina's impressions of life with Chloe Fontaine.

First, as Pompey had indicated, Rosina was most impressed by 'the grand Sir' - Sir Richard Lionnel. Second, she was not impressed, rather the reverse, by the fact that Chloe had apparently shared her favours with others during the same period. This kind of disloyalty, Rosina made it clear, was unthinkable in the particular society in which Rosina moved. At one point she even clutched the sulkily acquiescent Enrico to her breast, sticky chocolate biscuit and all, to emphasize the point.

With flashing eyes and heaving bosom - indeed, in more ways than her emphasis on loyalty, Rosina bore a general Mediterranean resemblance to Isabelle Mancini - she enquired how such matters as
'ba
mbine'
could be managed with ladies of such wayward tendencies. If her language was not quite so high flown as that of Isabelle, her English accent was an improvement. It was clear what Rosina meant especially as she appealed from time to time to the example of little Enrico, the son indubitably of his father, big Enrico, who would kill anyone, and she, Rosina, would also kill anyone if they suggested . . . This dramatic monologue on the subject of marital fidelity was broken only by the protests of Enrico, who, biscuit finished, struggled free from his mother's arms and demanded 'Orange! orange!'

But Rosina had not expounded in vain. Jemima derived the very definite impression that Rosina, by some means or other - a doctor's letter left carelessly about, a telephone call overheard - had suspected Chloe was pregnant. It was true that Rosina had denied all knowledge of such a distasteful subject to the police - but then Miss Jemima Shore was so very different, wasn't she, to the young male detective who had interviewed Rosina. Handsome as Pompey's protege - the dashing Gary Harwood - might be, he was no substitute for a real-life television star. Miss Shore was so very friendly, so very famous
...
There was an enormous television set in pride of place in the tiny sitting room which presently Enrico insisted on having switched on for his own delectation. Miss Shore, Rosina declared, was like someone she had known all her life, her own sister, for example.

More than prepared to accept this helpful hypothesis, Jemima narrowed her questi
ons to Chloe's other callers, es
pecially those prominent in the period when Chloe had first moved into Adelaide Square, which had coincided with Rosina's arrival to work for her. Since Chloe had been roughly three months pregnant when she died in the first week of August, the father of her child must have been someone she knew long before the move to Adelaide Square towards the end of June; conception had to have taken place at the beginning of May.

Rosina, predictably, was gracious about the 'poor lord', meaning Valentine Brighton, whose sudden death had been brilliantly brought to her attention by Enrico when he recognized Valentine's face on the television news with a shriek. The 'poor lord' had helped Chloe with her move into. Adelaide Square, putting his Rolls at her disposal.

No, Rosina was full of approval for the poor dead Lord Brighton:
'Che gentile! Che simpatico!’
and so on. At any point Jemima expected her to join Isabelle in her cry of 'Swee-e-et boy'. It was an approval which did not however extend to someone she termed the
'studente’
Jemima, despite herself, felt her heart give a little jolt.

'Studente,
there was a
studente’
she probed hoping that Enrico would not choose this moment - there was a commercial break - to demand another orange. She need not have worried: advertisements as well as programmes held Enrico entranced.

'Ahdum,' Rosina pronounced the name with scorn. 'Ah-dum Ahdum: he was a
studente.
A foolish name.' She implied that his youthful status was no excuse.

'Not
then,
Rosina, surely.' Jemima knew that she sounded agitated.

'Not in June. Not when she first came to Adelaide Square. It was later, wasn't it, a week or so before she died that she met the student?'

'But no! It was the end of June like I tell you.' Rosina's indignation rose. 'It was the day after the birthday of Big Enrico, June twenty-six. It was then I tell you. The
studente.
In the empty flat with her, that first day, no furniture, no bed even. They were in the bedroom, all the same. I knew. She just called out: "I'm resting. Come back in an hour!" And later when I do come back, all those stairs again, I pass him. The
studente,
with his little red beard, his
barb a,
you understand? She was running down the stairs and calling: "Ahdum! Ahdum!" Then she saw me and stopped. She said: "Mrs Cavalieri, this is Ahdum, a friend of mine from Fulham. He's been helping me with the move." But the room, it was still empty.'

'What did he say?'

'Ah, he spoke in a funny voice, funny words. He was young, too young for her. He said he liked it here, better than in Fulham, and he might come and live here himself if she asked him. He laughed. They both laughed.'

At this point Enrico, maybe in a jealous rage at the thought of the laughter of others, let out a prolonged and angry bawl. 'Ma-aama!'

'He is tired with our talking,' said Rosina apologetically. 'And the television is tiring - when they are young,' she added hastily in case she seemed to denigrate Jemima's profession. 'Perhaps you will come another day, Miss Shore. I would like to ask m
y neighbour to tea, Mrs Pollonar
i, she likes television
very
much.'

Jemima was left to wend her way home by tube in the Friday rush-hour, missing for the first time in a week the easy passage her Citroen gave her through weary London.

She pondered a world in which not only Kevin John Athlone had lied to the police about his lunchtime movements but Adam Adamson had also lied - if not to the police at least by implication to Jemima Shore. He had definitely allowed her to believe that he had met Chloe for the first time a few days prior to her death. Now it emerged that they had been friends - no, more than that, lovers, long before Chloe moved to Adelaide Square. They had been love
rs in Fulham, Fulham where Chloe
's child had been conceived.

'I suppose the bastard killed her,' Sir Richard had said of the unknown father of Chloe's child. With a heavy heart, Jemima acknowledged that it was a possibility at least worth exploring: and Kevin John's large imploring eyes gazing out at her from the folded front page of the evening paper, called on her mutely to proceed.

15

A white petticoat

Jemima planned to move out of Adelaide Square over the weekend. On Friday evening Miss Katy Aaronson telephoned with the offer of a furnished flat - another penthouse - in Montagu Square. Under the circumstances Jemima decided to take it. She felt she had had enough of Bloomsbury; nor did she particularly wish to approach her own American tenant with a view to shortening the let by a couple of weeks. That way lay the possibility of an unwelcome intimacy with the need to ask a favour. Anonymity in Montagu Square, near Marble Arch, an area without associations, away from friends and strangers alike, if not quite the holiday she had planned, was at least the most dignified way of ending it.

Shortly afterwards a Lionnel chauffeur came round with the keys of the Montagu Square apartment. Miss Katy Aaronson had very politely excused herself from a Saturday rendezvous. She liked to spend the day with her parents in Highgate, starting with a Friday eve-of-the-Sabbath supper.

'And since Sir Richard is generally at Parrot Park on Friday nights -although house guests are invited in time for Saturday lunch, but in any case the housekeeper is at the disposal of Lady Lionnel for those arrangements - and Sir Richard's personal assistant,
Mr
Judah Turpin, has the flat in the old stables, should business matters arise—'

Jemima was happy to cut short this catalogue of undoubtedly admirable arrangements and arrange to arrive at Montagu Square at leisure, at a time of her own choosing, and under her own terms. She rejected the offer of a Lionnel car to convey her. The anonymity of a taxi was another personal choice. Making it clear that at Montagu Square, for the next week, her privacy was to be regarded as sacrosanct,