A Splash of Red (23 page)

Jemima arranged to leave behind her own keys to the Adelaide Square office suite. The efficient Miss Aaronson possessing several spare sets, would arrange their collection.

It was a pity that Tiger would have to make two moves in rapid succession - for Tiger would be coming back with Jemima to Holland Park Mansions. It was as though he had been pre-ordained to replace Colette. No one else showed the slightest interest in the fierce golden cat. Mr Stover, on being consulted on the telephone, had revealed the existence of a rival Stover pet, Nipper, a terrier of great age and uncertain health—' although where cats are concerned, he's still pretty much on the ball, I can tell you that'. Mr Stover obviously regarded the possible incursion of Tiger into his dog's declining years—' mind you, he's not called Nipper for nothing' - as symbolic of the whole catastrophic confusion wrought in his own existence by the death of Chloe. Jemima was left to reflect that Mr Stover and Nipper were no exception to the oft-quoted rule that over the years pets and their masters grew to resemble each other.

Jemima did not flatter herself that she had in any sense won Tiger's affections - Colette had been from the first a far more domesticated animal - but she recognized their alliance as inevitable. And that kind of recognition was often more binding than a sentimental attachment.

Fortunately Tiger had already shown himself to be a survivor where moves were concerned. He had adapted himself to Bloomsbury after Fulham; carefully treated he would survive the short-term stay in Montagu Square, the final move to Holland Park.

Fulham and Tiger: Jemima caught her breath suddenly at the memory of Adam Adamson and Tiger on that day of their first acquaintance. Had she not sensed something strange even then about Tiger's eager disappearance into the third-floor flat? It was obviously explained by the fact that to Tiger Adam was a familiar figure. Adam had not exactly lied to Jemima in this respect: indeed, throughout their conversations he had shown a remarkable, Jesuitical regard for avoiding the direct lie, while not telling the whole truth.

He had not actually denied knowing Tiger, only: 'Nice cat
...
it wanted to come in' - followed by compliments about her own appearance. No wonder Tiger, accidentally excluded from the upper flat, had peregrinated towards the least hostile terrain.

Jemima however still believed that Adam had been genuinely puzzled over Chloe's true identity. Was it possible that he could have been fooled by the pose of Dollie Stover? On consideration it was: Chloe, the mistress of deceit, had presumably conducted her carnal encounters with Adam elsewhere than in her Fulham house - in his own former dwelling, whatever kind of revivified pad that might have been. Adam's menacing comment about Chloe and her deception—' I hate being lied to' - was, she would swear, genuine.

Perhaps their carnal encounters within Adelaide Square itself had taken place on the third floor? And literally so, in view of its lack of furniture, Jemima reflected wryly; her slight sense of crossness was almost proprietary, but since all proprietary feelings about Adam Adamson were so clearly a mistake, she dismissed the whole train of thought as unworthy of her. Back to the question of Adam and the penthouse: by keeping him ignorant of her lease of the top floor, Chloe would have run no danger of him ferreting out the incriminating copies of her own works, those exquisite tell-tale photographs on the back.

Besides, now that Jemima - far too late - was coining to some new understanding of Chloe's character, she had an intuition that the encounters in the empty flat, with her own immaculate penthouse above, and Sir Richard's secure opulence below, would have given Chloe exactly that rich spice of danger she sought.

As Jemima waited for Pompey to bring her back the keys to Chloe's flat, in order that she might pack up her remaining belongings over the weekend, she continued to ponder on the subject of Adam. Adam -'my former angel' - Adam, presumably the father of the unsought child, Adam with his fertile youth and impetuosity giving Chloe the child which she had either avoided receiving or refused to accept from two husbands and at least one steady - ridiculous word in the context -lover in the shape of Kevin John. There had been at least one abortion, possibly two, in Chloe's past, hadn't there?

Jemima was a little hazy about the details: Chloe's marriage to Lance breaking up, impossible to bring a child into the world under such circumstances, Chloe desperately writing her second novel, trying to support herself financially as a meagre-selling novelist, impossible to take on the burden of single parenthood. Jemima, not closely involved herself, knew that Chloe had always had plenty of excuses to offer - and goodness knows Jemima herself did not believe dogmatically in unwanted children coming into the world, having investigated too many of the resultant miseries. At the same time Jemima had always suspected that Chloe's deep-seated reason for avoiding motherhood was her unwillingness to tolerate the arrival of a child in her life while she herself remained in so many respects wilfully childish and irresponsible.

That left open the question of the carelessness .
..
the lethal carelessness which had lead to at least two, possibly three pregnancies. What precautions had Chloe taken? One had to assume that she had not been on the Pill, or at least not regularly. It was certainly true that there were plenty of medical reasons to be quoted against the continuous long
-
term use of the Pill for any woman. Jemima herself had quoted them - as ever giving both sides of the question - in that programme about the Pill, to which Pompey had alluded. Yet Jemima wondered once again at the surprising contrasts evinced by Chloe's character; the neatness and domesticity of her surroundings, the meticulous care of her writing, versus the dangerous abandon of her private life, carried surely to excess in her reckless attitudes to the question of her own fertility.

It did not affect matters that on this occasion Chloe had tried to turn her pregnancy to good account as part of her intrigue to get Sir Richard Lionnel - hitherto childless - to marry her. Chloe had gone to her death without knowing how that particular plot was always doomed to fail. She died, with her stepfather on his way to London as a kind of angry witness to the confrontation. Jemima was glad that at least all three parties had been spared that dreadful moment when Chloe would have been denounced as a liar, and furthermore a promiscuous one. Lionnel had to live with the knowledge now; he clearly did not find it easy. Yes, dangerous abandon had certainly been what Chloe had displayed.

Dangerous abandon - the thought suddenly struck Jemima that if Adam was Chloe's former angel, that left the identity of her casual -carnal? - acquaintance from the square gardens still unknown. Was there some mystery to be unravelled there? Or was the whole episode of that nocturnal spree as unimportant to the world now as it had been to Chloe at the time?

That certainly was the point of view taken by Pompey. He was in a joyous mood. He had rounded off a hardworking Friday, which began with the formal charging of Kevin John with murder at the police station, by having 'a jar with the lads', as he put it, of a mildly celebratory nature. And he seemed to regard his visit to Jemima as a further postponement of his return to Mrs Portsmouth and the intellectual principles of gardening.

'The lover in the gardens!' he exclaimed, shaking his head repeatedly like a mechanical toy - a fox perhaps, in a man's suit - which had just been wound up. 'Sounds like a Sunday newspaper headline to me. No my dear, Athlone did it. No question about that now. His second statement was a great deal more to the point, as well it might be. You see, your squatter friend made a statement saying he had seen him leaving the building between one-thirty and two; looked out from the third-floor balcony where he happened to be,
not
minding his own business, still it's convenient for us that he was. Described him exactly. Not only does he have his own little alibi for that period, as I told you, but
his
story was confirmed by a very different kind of witness.

'One Flora Elizabeth Powell, fifty-eight, spinster, who came into the station in response to our enquiries and made a voluntary statement. No, my dear, not a hysterical spinster, just a hard-working citizen, employed in a local caff on the early shift who was on her way home, some time after one-fifteen when she knocked off work in Great Russell Street and two-five pin when she noticed a local clock in Hammersmith, where she lives, and reaches by tube, when she saw him coming out of a house in Adelaide Square. Can pinpoint the house of course: "It's the lovely modern block, isn't it? Which the Queen Mother declared open the other day. I saw the crowds. I couldn't quite get to see her, but my friend said she looked lovely." Never mind the fact that the crowds she saw were demonstrators
against
the building.' Pompey chuckled. 'And the Queen Mother was at University College round the corner. Flora Elizabeth is our witness all right. Very particular about the blue
T
-shirt. Better still, she remembers seeing someone in a white shirt - that's the squatter of course - on the upper balcony. Came out with it on her own accord; couldn't have made that up; didn't know we were interested, you see. Remarked that she was happy to think the building declared open by the Queen Mother was already occupied, not like that Centre Point, since it might have worried the Queen Mother to know -but I'll spare you the rest.'

Pompey chuckled again. 'What does feminine instinct say to all that?'

'My feminine instinct has nothing to
say.
It never does. It just nags at me in the watches of the night. I don't doubt you. I don't doubt either of them for that matter - my squatter and your spinster can hardly be in league to fool us,' said Jemima rather wearily. 'It's just that I like the loose ends being tied up. The identity of the lover in the gardens - I love the headline, by the way - continues to intrigue me, although I dare say you're right and it's not important. Tell me at any rate, before I read it in the newspapers of the trial, about Athlone's second statement.'

'He admitted it. To being there, that is. Still utterly denied killing her. But that's par for the course.' Pompey shook gently, as if confirmed once again in his low - but not necessarily contemptuous - view of human nature. 'He came back at lunchtime - to apologize to you. Felt he'd behaved like a cad - well he had, hadn't he? All that violence towards a woman,' said Pompey in stern parenthesis. 'He was surprised to find the penthouse door open
with
the keys in the lock.'

^‘
Open?’

'Exactly. Listen, this is his statement, not mine. In he goes. No one there - not you, and not at this point, his ex-mistress, Chloe Fontaine. He decides, believe it or not, to have another go at finding a razor.'

'I do believe that!' exclaimed Jemima. 'That razor was obsessing him. He left Dixie in the pub saying he was going to find a razor.'

'Believe that if you like. It's immaterial to our case. But a rational woman like you, Jemima - in the daylight hours' - a gallant shake -'may find the rest of it a little more diffic
ult to accept. Athlone
finds a razor - right?'

'The same razor, we assume, which is later found beside Chloe's bed—'

'Exactly. In some drawer or other. His prints were all over the bathroom and bedroom anyway - except in those areas wiped clean by the murderer - as a result of the morning's search for that same razor. He decides to shave. And not before time— This was clearly the reproving voice of Pompey speaking. 'But he's still pretty angry, he's drunk a good deal of whisky, feeling not only angry but violent as he himself tells us. At this point his eye lights on the picture - "The Red Paintpot", whatever it's called. He decides suddenly that she, the deceased that is, is not worthy of "my effing work of genius". His exact words.' Pompey paused. 'Except he didn't say effing.'

'So, listen to this.' Pompey's tone was now more portentous. 'He takes a kitchen knife, yes, the same knife we assume to be the murder weapon - for he remembers deliberately choosing the biggest of the knives available. He goes back into the bedroom. He proposes to massacre the aforesaid work of art. Again his own words. He is going to slash it to effing pieces and throw them over the balcony to feed the lions of Bloomsbury.'

Pompey leaned back. He gave the impression of being rather pleased with his imitation of Kevin John, which did not however in Jemima's opinion contain any of the sheer craziness of the original; there was too much devilry, too little dash in Pompey's delivery.

'But before he can carry out this felonious plan - it's not his property' - Pompey shook - 'although it's not exactly like desecrating the Mona Lisa, is it, not exactly - he's disturbed.'

'Disturbed? By whom?'

'By her, of course. The recently deceased Miss Chloe Fontaine. I'm anticipating her state somewhat, it's fair to say. So there he is, razor in one hand and effing great kitchen knife, to borrow his phrase, in the other.'

'And there she is,' cried Jemima, 'in a white petticoat, I suppose. It reminds me of that nursery riddle:

Ninny nanny petticoat

In a white petticoat

The longer she goes

The shorter she grows.