Assassins at Ospreys (18 page)

Suddenly the lid opened and Ingrid was blinded by light –

An electric torch had been flashed into her face. She moaned – it burnt her eyes. She felt the tape being removed from her mouth, roughly and painfully peeled off, the handkerchief pulled out. Air! She coughed and gasped. Bright spots swam before her eyes. Then, in negative black and white, she saw something familiar. Wasn’t that the holly tree in front of Millbrook, the house she and Beatrice had shared for thirty years? Of course it was. The holly reached up to her bedroom window – why, she had trimmed it only last week!

Then she saw where she was. In the boot of a car – not in a coffin. She opened her mouth wide – not to scream but to breathe. She filled her lungs with air. Had help come? Earlier on she had been praying to Mighty God Rook –

No. Ingrid couldn’t make out the features of the face looking down at her, but she knew very well who it was. It was –
him
. I will have you for assault and illegal constraint, she wanted to shout but the next moment she smelled bitter almonds. She tried to bite the hateful fingers that were pushing the lump of cyanide into her mouth – how she would have liked to crunch them off! – but failed. She snarled – she felt her chin being pushed upwards. She heard her teeth click. She felt the cyanide gliding down her tongue, like a boat down a sluggish river, sinking deep into her throat. She gasped again – choked – gurgled –

Then, in the couple of seconds she had to live, Ingrid saw why she had been kept alive so far and brought to Millbrook House. It was one of those instant flashes of intuition.

The plan was that her death be made to look like suicide. It was
her
cyanide, she knew. The cyanide she kept in a phial in her room. Her cupboard had been raided. Suicide – wasn’t that what loopy people like her did when they reached the end of the line? The police were meant to assume that it was
she
who had killed the priest – that he had tried to protect Ralph, that they had had a fight – and she had stabbed him. No doubt they would discover the fruit knife in her pocket – it would be suitably smeared in the priest’s blood. They would assume she had panicked and bolted – that she had been hiding. She would be found stretched out on her bed beside her daughter’s photos –

One last gasp – one last convulsion – and she was still.

27
Esquire of the Body

Ingrid’s face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on her killer.

Ingrid’s body was dragged through the front door of the house and up the stairs, to the room which she had once occupied. There were a lot of photographs in silver frames on the bedside table. Several showed the two dogs Ingrid had once loved but had eventually had put down – these had black ribbons across the left corner. The majority of the photos were of similar-looking little girls. About six or seven years old – smiling faces – dimpled chins – blonde curls. That was what her daughter
would
have been like, Ingrid had felt certain. Six photographs showed the same girl in a playground; that had been her
best
Claire; Ingrid had found her after hours of searching, and taken photos of her without the mother noticing. She had seriously considered abducting the girl and bringing her up as her own – but there had been too many people around.

The body was laid on the bed. The hands and the feet were unbound. An open phial which contained traces of cyanide was placed between the fingers of her right hand. For a moment the killer hesitated – she
was
right-handed, wasn’t she? The blonde wig was still on Ingrid’s head but it was a rag now, covered in congealed mud; blades of grass and dead leaves stuck out of it. Ingrid’s face was badly bruised – it was black and blue and no longer looked anything like Beatrice’s, he was pleased to note. The nose seemed broken, one of the eyes terribly swollen. The lips too. Well, the police would assume that Ingrid Delmar had sustained her injuries in her fight with the priest. The fruit knife, covered in the priest’s blood, would be discovered in her pocket.

He stood looking round the room. Sea-green walls, very faded, bordered with a pattern of roses on a black back-ground. On the dressing table, beside a bowl of dead flowers, so black it was impossible to say what they had been when fresh, lay a book. He picked it up and held it in his gloved hand. George Trevelyan.
On Reincarnation
and Other Psychic Matters
. He leafed through it. A sort of erudite madness, from what he could see. The book was covered in dust, like the rest of the dressing table. What was it Ingrid had wanted to believe? That her unborn daughter might have come back as some other little girl? He wiped his gloves with his handkerchief.

A musty smell hung on the air. Heaven knew when the room had been cleaned and aired last . . . Was there any-thing else he needed to do? He had already disposed of the knitting needle. The police would never find it . . . Earlier on he had managed to burn his bloodied clothes as well as the shirt and jumper he had taken from Ralph Renshawe’s wardrobe. He had done it in the back yard. He had made sure the clothes had been reduced to ashes, then scattered the ashes over the river . . . He remembered Ralph’s eyes following him as he had walked across the room. Ralph – his former rival in love! Of course Ralph had had no idea as to who he was. Ralph had nodded and mouthed his thanks. Not a word had passed between them. At one point both of them had looked at the clock. They had had the same thought in mind, the same purpose – that nothing should interfere with the signing of the will.

He had dropped Robin Renshawe’s card in the garden; he had found it in the priest’s wallet. The more false leads the police had to follow, the more hares to chase after, the better. Though of course, inevitably, it was all going to culminate here, in this room. That was how it had to be. He didn’t turn off the light. Casting one final glance at Ingrid’s body, he left the room.

He descended the stairs and went out of the house with-out locking the front door.

He got back into his car.

He sat trying to collect his thoughts. Suddenly he felt empty – anticlimactic.

It would be up to Beatrice to discover the body and inform the police. Whenever she and Payne came back.
If
they came back . . . They were bound to notice the light in Ingrid’s room . . . It might be quite late – midnight or even in the small hours of the morning . . .
Would
they come back? They might decide to spend the night at an hotel – or at Payne’s pied-à-terre. Fellows like Payne always kept a pieds-à-terre . . . Payne’s wife clearly had no idea of what was going on, preoccupied as she was with her writing, inventing murders and victims and alibis. Shouldn’t he write to Antonia Darcy and apprise her of her husband’s infidelity? Anonymously – signed ‘Well-wisher’? No – what would be the point? It wouldn’t change a thing – too late.

He stared in front of him into the gathering darkness. He had prepared an alibi for himself. Now what
was
it? He frowned. He needed to concentrate. He gripped the wheel between his gloved hands and shut his eyes. No, he didn’t need an alibi. No one would ever suspect him. Why should they? He would need to clean the boot though – dispose of the handkerchief and the paper with the house plan –

Colville groaned. He had felt the beginnings of a depression, the powerful daemon he had never been able to understand, counter or control. It started as usual with the familiar sinking sensation – thoughts of futility and pointlessness – a nameless dread nagging at his mind, like some ancient curse. What had Bee said the last time he had complained?
By no means let the black dog pounce! It’s all a
question of silly biochemistry, darling – one of those rogue
enzymes
. Bee hadn’t been exactly helpful. The truth was she had never understood him – she hadn’t even tried.

What good would all this money be to him without Bee’s love? Even if she stayed with him, for appearances’ sake, she’d continue to sneak out to meet Payne. Of course she would. Colville clearly lacked that significant It in the boudoir department . . . Love trysts . . . Secret and not so-secret assignations . . . Bee would expect him to condone her ways – she regarded him as a mere blind, doting dullard . . . He took Payne’s pouch out of his pocket and stared down at it.

Then another thought struck him. If Bee did leave him for Payne, which she probably would do in the end, he’d get nothing . . . not a penny. He could never tell Bee what he had done . . . All his efforts – to keep Bee and Payne in state! He examined his bruised knuckles. The risks he had taken – the danger he had put himself in – so that those two could enjoy a life of plutocratic leisure –

He started the car. He had no idea where he was going.

‘Oh, but you
must
come in and have a bite to eat,’ Beatrice said when they delivered her at Millbrook House shortly after ten that evening. ‘
Please
. . . I feel a wreck. I look a wreck, don’t I?’ Opening her eyes wide, she turned to Antonia. ‘Don’t I?’

‘Not really,’ Antonia said.

‘Oh, I can’t get Len on his mobile . . . I could do with some company.’ Beatrice shot Payne a sidelong glance, but Antonia no longer minded. Earlier on Beatrice had been saying how absolutely thrilling she found that young man’s South African accent. She meant Greg. It wasn’t at all ‘common’, nothing like the way Australians, say, spoke – it sounded warm and unusual and well,
sexy
. She had given a laugh and made a funny face – her ‘duck face’, she informed them.

At one point she and Greg had started talking about tattoos and she had confided in him that
she too had one
. She would have shown it to him, she said coyly, if
only
she didn’t have to remove her stocking. They had stood in the kitchen at Ospreys, drinking brandy. Greg had opened one of Ralph Renshawe’s bottles of Armagnac. They had all needed a drink. Father Lillie-Lysander’s body had been taken away. The police had gone.

Well, Beatrice couldn’t help herself. She was that sort of woman. Still, they needed to talk to her seriously before long. What would be the best way to break the news to her? Beatrice wouldn’t have hysterics, would she? Antonia couldn’t bear the thought of a scene. They would probably end up staying the night at Millbrook House. (Where
was
Ingrid’s body? What had he done with the body?)

‘Heaven knows where Len has gone . . . He seems to have had a bonfire earlier on, can you smell it?’ Beatrice had opened her door but seemed reluctant to leave the car. ‘Such a pleasant,
Christmassy
kind of smell . . . I am sure that’s our back garden . . . Why are you so quiet? You look as though you know something I don’t. Don’t tell me I am imagining things. I saw you whispering, just before we left Ospreys . . . What is it? Why are you looking at me like that? You are frightening me!’

Antonia pretended she hadn’t heard. Keeping Beatrice in the dark afforded her an unworthy frisson of sadistic pleasure. ‘It’s getting colder,’ she said. ‘ The weather’s turning, have you noticed?’

‘All right.’ Major Payne cleared his throat. ‘Beatrice, there’s something you should know –’

Beatrice interrupted. ‘Oh my God, look –
look.
The light’s on in Ingrid’s room!’ She pointed. ‘Ingrid seems to be back . . . Now you simply
must
come in . . . You can’t possibly leave me alone with her. We may have to call the police and you can do that so much better than me.’

28
The Taj Mahal Necklace

Four weeks later it was Christmas and they had Major Payne’s aunt staying with them. Lady Grylls had recovered from her cataract operation, but she still wore a piratical patch across her right eye – because she fancied herself in it rather than out of any real necessity, Antonia suspected – and was eager for entertainment. Lady Grylls loved stories of mystery, mayhem and murder, so, with the Christmas pudding and the black coffee, they told her this one. The whole lamentable affair in which greed, revenge, despair and madness all played a part.

‘Colville gave every appearance of a man who stands on his feet, representing solidity and permanence, but he became a double murderer,’ Major Payne said. ‘Well, he wasn’t a particularly effectual landlord. His business had been going to the dogs. He needed money badly and, having this magnificent windfall come to his wife, he wasn’t going to allow it to be snatched away, just like that. What was hers was going to be his. They had a joint bank account. We are talking about a fabulous fortune here. Big money.’

‘How big?’ Lady Grylls asked. She liked details in a story.

‘Very big. Thirty-five million pounds. Well, money is a great catalyst. He decided to follow Ingrid moments after he’d seen her through the window and snapped her with his Polaroid. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. He saw her make for the bus stop. He had no doubt she’d get on the number 19 bus, which would take her to Ospreys. Maybe he saw her get on the bus. His one and only concern was that Ralph Renshawe should be alive at eleven o’clock and sign the will which made Beatrice his sole beneficiary.’

‘I love reconstructions like that.’ Lady Grylls helped her-self to more cream. ‘It’s almost as though you were there. You are terribly clever.’

‘Not at all. Much of this is pure speculation, darling, so we may be well off the mark about an awful lot of things . . . I wouldn’t presume to know exactly what went on in Colville’s mind, but it is doubtful whether he had a plan as such, not when he set out. His idea was to stop Ingrid inflicting any harm on Ralph Renshawe. Intervene, if necessary. So he ran out of the house, got into his car and drove to Ospreys.’

Lady Grylls frowned. ‘Why didn’t he alert the nurse over the blower if he was so concerned? He could have phoned Ospreys and saved himself the trouble. Or rung the front doorbell when he got there – and explained to her what was happening?’

‘He could have, but he didn’t. Good point, darling,’ said Major Payne. ‘My only explanation is that Colville was in some peculiar mental state that day, that he wasn’t thinking straight – worried silly about money, his tenants, the forthcoming court case and heaven knows what else. He had been under a lot of pressure.’

‘The front doorbell was out of order – Colville might have tried ringing it,’ Antonia put in.

Payne stroked his jaw. ‘He might have feared it would delay things if he started explaining the situation to the nurse. On the other hand, he might have been looking for an excuse to deal with Ingrid in his own terms – he seemed to have hated her as much as she hated him. Too fanciful? He phoned a policeman friend of his and told him how concerned he was about Ingrid, but that was
after
he had put her in his car boot. Anyhow, he got to the house and walked round to the back. He knew Renshawe occupied a room on the ground floor that looked out on the back gar-den and the wishing well –’

‘How did he know that? And why didn’t the nurse hear his car?’

‘The nurse was in the kitchen, which is in a different part of the house. I don’t imagine you can hear much from there. Colville had a rough drawing of Renshawe’s part of the house in his pocket. The police believe it was done by Ingrid – they found her fingerprints on it – and Colville chanced upon it somehow.’ Major Payne took a sip of coffee. ‘Colville saw the french windows were open. It was a very warm day, remember. He went closer and looked in. Well, it was Ingrid he had come to protect Ralph against, but what he saw was Ralph’s father confessor holding a pillow over Ralph’s face, pressing it down, clearly smothering him –’

‘I can’t quite imagine a C. of E. clergyman doing that kind of thing, can you?’ Lady Grylls said.

Antonia took up the tale. ‘Colville ran into the room and pulled Father Lillie-Lysander away. He probably resisted and Colville wrestled him down – against the knitting needle, as it happened. Colville was much bigger and stronger. The knitting needle had been on Ralph’s bedside table and Ralph had managed to get hold of it and was holding it aloft, but of course he was too feeble to put it to any effective use.’

‘So the padre got skewered?’

‘So the padre, as you so picturesquely put it, darling, got skewered,’ Major Payne said. ‘I don’t believe Colville
intended
it to happen that way, but there it was. Colville started dragging the priest’s body through the french windows, across the terrace in the direction of the well. It was at that point Ingrid appeared on the scene.’

‘It is almost as though you were there,’ Lady Grylls said again.

‘I imagine she taunted him – threatened to tell the police . . .’

‘Ingrid’s face was badly bruised, so were Colville’s knuckles,’ Antonia said thoughtfully. ‘Which suggests that Colville dealt her several blows with his fist. She fell to the ground, hit her head – passed out. Which allowed him to drag the priest’s body to the well. He also managed to cover the blood trail with dead leaves . . . Then he got Ingrid round the house to his car. He bound and gagged her –’

‘He gagged her with Beatrice’s handkerchief. He had kept it next to his heart,’ said Payne. ‘The handkerchief was later found in the boot of Colville’s car. It bore an imprint of Ingrid’s teeth. They also found hairs from her blonde wig. And bloodstains. It was Ingrid’s blood.’

‘At some point Colville forced Ingrid to swallow a lump of cyanide, arranged her body in her room and made it look like suicide. That’s where we found her,’ Antonia said, giving a slight shudder at the memory.

There was a pause.

‘We used to know some people called Colville,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘I am sure they were called Colville. We met them in the South of France. Stayed at the same hotel – the good old Palais Maeterlinck. D’you remember it, Hughie?’ ‘Of course I do. The good old Palais Maeterlinck.’

‘They kept having spats – all on account of Mrs Colville spending too much time in the arms of some gigolo or other. She insisted he was teaching her the cha-cha-cha. Must have been 1956 or ’57.’

‘One doesn’t dance the cha-cha-cha in anybody’s arms. You do it in line,’ Antonia pointed out.

‘
Precisely,
my dear. That was the bone of contention.
Forward, back, cha-cha-cha, back, forward, cha-cha-cha. Two,
three, cha-cha-cha. Hey, hey, I can do this cha-cha-cha, it’s
easy cha-cha-cha!
’ Lady Grylls sang out and wiggled her shoulders. ‘Ah those were the days.’ She helped herself to another slice of Christmas pudding. ‘Now then, at which point did you puzzle out it was Colville?’

‘I remembered the Taj Mahal necklace,’ Antonia explained. ‘Beatrice had it on that day, when we went to Millbrook House. It had been a present from Colville. He had had it specially made for her when they got engaged. On the morning she disappeared, Ingrid had put on the necklace as part of the Beatrice get-up. It could be seen in the Polaroid photo Colville took of her. There was only
one
Taj Mahal necklace. Yet, Beatrice was wearing it two days later at the height of the search for Ingrid! How
did
the Taj Mahal necklace find its way to Bee’s neck? Bee couldn’t have had anything to do with it – on the fatal morning she was in Oxford.’

‘You think it was Colville who brought it back to the house?’

‘
Only
Colville could have brought it back to the house. He couldn’t allow Ingrid to wear what was clearly an object of supreme sentimental value to him. So sometime after he knocked her out and put her in the boot of his car, he took the necklace off. He brought it back to the house and replaced it inside his wife’s jewel case. It never occurred to him to consider the implications. Beatrice of course had no idea about any of this, so she took the neck-lace out and put it on. She and Colville had had a row and she wanted him to see her wearing the Taj Mahal necklace when he came back.’

‘What a silly woman.
Is
she a silly woman?’

‘Not quite. She is a strange mixture –’ Major Payne broke off. He had seen the expression on Antonia’s face.

‘What happened to her?’ Lady Grylls asked.

‘She is seeing Ralph Renshawe’s nurse. A young South African called Greg,’ Antonia said. ‘In fact she has moved in with him at Ospreys. He is twenty years younger than her, but they seem very happy together. We went to see them the other day.’

‘I know her type.’ Lady Grylls nodded. ‘Oh yes. For some reason women like that are always all right in the end. One always thinks –
hopes
– they’d end up disastrously but they don’t, not always, isn’t that extraordinary? Does she wear palazzo pants? Women like that always wear palazzo pants.’

‘As a matter of fact she does.’ Antonia said. ‘She did wear palazzo pants the other day!’

‘Is Ralph Renshawe still alive then?’

‘Yes. He has had a miraculous recovery. The doctors couldn’t believe it, but it’s not such a completely unknown thing to have happened, not even among seemingly hope-less cases. Beatrice and Greg are looking after him and he seems delighted with the arrangement. Not quite a
ménage
à trois
. When he dies, Beatrice will inherit his fortune, but that may not be for a while. He’s left his bed and propels his way round in a rather superior motorized wheelchair. He’s talked to us and told us more things than he told the police, mainly thanks to Beatrice,’ Antonia conceded. ‘Last time we went they were watching a Moira Montano film – they found a trunkful of old reels in the attic and Greg had them transferred on to video.’

‘Ah, Moira Montano. I remember Moira Montano. Hughie’s uncle was mad about Moira Montano,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘She died some bizarre death, I think.’

‘Renshawe’s Christmas present for Beatrice is a fine Rolls, its silver snout professionally inscribed on what might be the left nostril, BEE . . . Ospreys is jolly unrecognizable now – carpets everywhere, they have removed that gruesome ivy and the garden’s been tidied up. And here’s a curious thing,’ Major Payne went on. ‘It turns out that at some point during her third visit, Renshawe became aware of the fact that the woman who had been visiting him was not Beatrice but Ingrid. He recognized her by her birth-mark – the blood-red naevus on her palm. He had seen it in the aftermath of the crash – when he went up to Ingrid’s car to help her out. It stuck in his memory. He said it had haunted his dreams.’

‘Why didn’t the silly fellow do something about it?’ Lady Grylls cried. ‘He should have called the police straight away.’

‘He should have but he didn’t,’ Antonia said. ‘He decided it would be right if Ingrid killed him. He
wanted
her to kill him. He had convinced himself that he deserved to die at her hands. As an act of expiation. He was riddled with guilt.’

Lady Grylls sighed. ‘How deliciously complicated.’

They then pulled crackers and read the silly jokes inside them.

‘
Why was the computer ill? Because he had a virus!
’

‘
Why did the monster’s eyes turn green? Because he was
jealous!
By the way, what happened to Colville?’ Lady Grylls asked.

‘He crashed his car and died. It happened that same night. No one would ever know for certain now, but there’s a suspicion that he might have done it on purpose.’ Major Payne stroked his jaw with a thoughtful forefinger. ‘The Taj Mahal necklace was found in his pocket, ripped apart. And another curious thing. My tobacco pouch was in his other pocket. He had slashed through it several times with a pocket knife. I wonder why he did that.’

‘Do you?’ Antonia said.

‘You don’t mean he thought – that he imagined –’ Payne sat up as realization dawned on him. ‘Golly. The green-eyed monster, eh?’

‘How extraordinary,’ Lady Grylls wheezed. ‘It’s as though I’d known. I mean I’ve got you a new tobacco pouch, Hughie. That’s your Christmas present – I shouldn’t have told you. It was
meant
to be a surprise. Oh well, too late now.
Assassins at Ospreys –
wouldn’t that make a jolly good title for your next book, my dear?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Antonia said.

Outside it had started snowing.