At Death's Door (18 page)

“What?” he asked in his pale echo of a voice. “What, Caroline? Who?”

Caroline bent over him. “It's Mr. Meredith, Father. A visitor to see you.”

“Who? Who?”

“Mr. Meredith,” said Caroline brightly.

“I'm a policeman,” said Meredith.

He sensed rather than saw the younger Cotterels stiffen.

“Policeman?” The voice gained a little more force but rose in pitch. “Policeman?” He turned to Caroline, a dribble of saliva running from the corner of his mouth. “What's a policeman . . . ?”

The voice faded, as if he had a question in his mind that he could not quite formulate. Caroline bent over again and wiped his mouth. “Don't worry, Father. He's just here to look at security.”

“What? At what?”

“Security. You know, stopping burglars getting in and things like that.”

The old head nodded twice from side to side, then closed its eyes. Caroline looked at Meredith, her eyebrows raised to ask if he needed to see any more. The policeman turned to go from the room.

“Well,” he said at the bottom of the stairs, “I'm sure I won't need to trouble the old man again.”

“You can talk to his doctor,” said Roderick.

“I shall do that, of course. I'm sorry all this has had to be so unpleasant, but in the circumstances there's not much else I can do.”

“We quite understand,” said Caroline. “The fact that we find the notion of Ben nipping off to the Red Lion to kill one of his former girlfriends ludicrous and distressing doesn't mean you have to. You've never seen him before. But if you remember his age—eighty-six—and talk to his doctor, you'll see that it just isn't on.”

“I really do see that already,” said Meredith, letting Caroline open up the front door for him. “Now I just have to talk to Pat McLaughlin.”

“Is that his name?” said Caroline. “I don't think I've ever heard it before. Anyway, they're back.”

Standing on the gravel drive, they looked down toward the lawn, at the end of which, by their tent, Cordelia and Pat were lying on their stomachs, reading. Meredith turned, thanked Roderick and Caroline for being so helpful and understanding, then waited until they had gone inside and shut the front door.

He did not go at once down the garden. He stood there, Sergeant Flood waiting respectfully beside him (because he knew such moods in his superior), and let the impressions of the interview flow through his mind. At some time during the visit—before he had gone upstairs—something had clicked. There had been a . . . a reverberation, a message for him that something was not quite right, or maybe that something needed looking into. It hadn't been something falling into place but rather the reverse. . . . Some piece that had seemed to have a place but had suddenly become questionable. . . . Gone. He could not place it. But it would come back. They always did.

And then there had been the Cotterels, stiffening up, up there in the bedroom. When he had said he was a policeman.
He was going to have to talk to Ben Cotterel's doctor. Unfortunately two people stiffening up was not evidence.

He squared his shoulders, grinned at Sergeant Flood, and started down the garden to talk to Pat.

T
HE COTTERELS
heard from Pat next morning what had been said in his talk with the chief inspector. He and Cordelia were loading up the Volksie to set out for a day-long picnic on the Downs. When Caroline, with Becky, went out to them, they said they were going to take advantage of the fine weather. One might have guessed they were still in the middle of a perfectly ordinary holiday.

“How did it go with the police yesterday?” Caroline asked Pat.

He shrugged, his blue eyes, as so often, rather distant, as if this were some affair not really his.

“All right. Not much I could tell him, really. Granville and I went into the bar after dinner and drank beer. I didn't find him all that interesting, but a little knot of people began gathering round us, because of the Myra Mason connection, I suppose. He seemed rather to like having an audience, so I just slipped out. That was long before the shooting.”

“And you came back here?”

“That's right.”

“Drove?”

“Of course. Cordelia doesn't drive. I knew she'd be quite happy walking home.”

Caroline realized she had begun to sound rather like a police inquisitor herself, but she said: “Was the inspector happy with that?”

Pat shrugged again. “He had to be. It was the truth. In the nature of things you can't expect everyone to have an alibi.”

“True,” said Caroline. “We don't have watertight alibis ourselves. They say it's the ones with perfect alibis who are the most suspicious.” She looked toward the Rectory gates, now largely unpicketed by reporters. “At least the press rabble seems to have moved on elsewhere.”

“They've quartered themselves at the Red Lion,” said Pat, getting into the car. “They've decided that's where the action is. We were down there last night, but they kept pestering us, so we came away.”

There had been first a large, then a middle-sized, press contingent outside the Rectory gates since the news of the murder broke. Now there was just one man to snap Pat and Cordelia as they drove out through the gates and down the road toward Maudsley. The police had leaked the news that Dame Myra's daughter had been coming up from the beach at the time of the murder, and the press had concluded that they would have to get their leads elsewhere. The obvious place was the Red Lion, especially to a race of men and women for whom alcohol was a way of life.

Press coverage of the Myra Mason murder had been sensational—front-page stuff every day since it broke. That was inevitable, given Myra's eminence and her private life. The press had a wad of material on her loves, her rivalries, her tantrums, including quite a lot of juicy items
they had hitherto been chary of publishing. Death is a great unlocker of tongues, the libel laws being what they are. Every day, it seemed, was a field day. Former lovers were queuing up in Fleet Street to tell, or rather to sell, “their stories” to the various tabloid muckrakers. The titled lovers were offering themselves to the Sunday
Times.

Coverage of the murder itself was, by comparison, vague. The papers knew the time of the shot and that it had been heard by “a woman” (Mrs. Goodison, doubtless conscious of the ludicrous aspects of her situation, had declined to talk to the press and had in fact moved on as soon as her usefulness to the police had ended), who had come to Dame Myra's husband and insisted that it be investigated. The place where she had been when she heard the shot was variously referred to as the toilet, the lavatory, the loo, the smallest room, and the little girls' room, depending on the class of the reporter or the nature of the newspaper he wrote for.

The latest new item of information in the papers that Roderick and Caroline flicked through at breakfast time had been the make of the gun—a Webley and Scott .38. This piece of information had been released by the police the day before. It was really the only piece of hard news. Otherwise, the papers filled in with contributions from the locals or from the tourists staying or drinking in the Red Lion: descriptions of how they had heard the shot in the bar, how shivers had gone down their spines, dread premonitions weighed them down, and so on, followed up by detailed accounts of how Granville Ashe had gone up to find the body. Isobel had yesterday given one reporter a detailed account of the row in Myra's bedroom that she had heard when she “happened” to go up twice to her own bedroom. Her shivers and her dread premonitions had apparently been even more pronounced than anyone else's. She was, she had told the reporter, psychic, or at any rate fey.

Isobel, in fact, was a surprise visitor that morning. More surprising still, she had walked from the Red Lion. She was, the Cotterels decided, “hyped up.” When she walked into the sitting room, she forgot to do her usual performance of looking around appraisingly to see what outrages or acts of neglect they had perpetrated on “her” property. They decided she must have been unhealthily excited by all the sensation and publicity of the last few days, and in fact, as soon as she had lit up a cigarette, she drew from her bag a copy of the previous day's
Daily Star
, which had the interview with her in it.

“I knew you wouldn't have seen this, so I brought it along,” she announced. “You intellectuals always pretend to despise the popular press.”

“I
do
despise the popular press,” said Roderick. “But actually we have seen it. I drove into Maudsley yesterday to get all the papers.”

“Feeling a bit guilty about it,” Caroline's honesty forced her to admit.

“Still, an interest is natural,” said Roderick. “And the popular papers sometimes get on to things the others have missed, particularly in cases like this. Of course, they've all raked up the business with Father again.”

“Of course, an interest is natural,” said Isobel, dismissing the business with Father with a wave of her hands—hands that in fact were today never still. She gazed at them greedily. “Wasn't it a
fabulous
interview?”

“Very . . . effective,” said Roderick.

“Of course, all the reporters have been in and out of the Red Lion all the time,
buzzing
like bees round a honey pot,” continued his sister with a kind of hectic complacency. “But I kept quiet and didn't say anything. Until this
awfully
nice young man approached me—terribly sweet, an awful flatterer”—her hands fluttered to her face, and the Cotterels had no difficulty imagining the extremes of
flattery to which the young man had resorted—“so anyway, we had this long conversation in my room, and he said he'd
never
known a better interviewee than I was. Which bit did you like best? Did you like the bit where I said I thought it was a judgment on Myra for what she did to Father?”

Roderick had long ago decided that with his sister dishonesty was the best policy.

“Striking,” he said. “A case of the mills of God grinding quite exceptionally slowly. I was surprised at your being so indignant on Father's behalf, though.”

Isobel gave a gesture of contempt for the father angle. “Well, of course that was a sort of code for what I
really
meant. We had to talk a bit about Father to make quite clear who I
am.
What I really meant was the awful pain to
us
—to Mother—that the affair caused.”

“Mother was upset by the publicity,” Roderick admitted. “She was beyond being upset by Father's affairs by that stage.”

“We were all terribly bruised by the publicity,” asserted Isobel. Caroline could barely suppress a smile. Isobel had been married by the time the affair became public knowledge and (if her present conduct was anything to go by) had probably dined out on the publicity for weeks. “
Any
way, you've no idea of the excitement the interview has caused. Telephone calls from all
sorts
of people—friends, business associates of Cyril's, even my chiropodist. And Darrell has called to say he's coming to fetch me—which frankly he would
never
have done if he hadn't wanted to get in on all the excitement.”

Darrell was Isobel's only son, whom Roderick had always found a particularly loathsome young man. Isobel's assessment of his character, he felt, was unusually accurate.

“Jolly good,” he said.

“Of course, I can't go till I've talked to the chief inspector,” said Isobel, her eyes sparkling unnaturally with anticipation.
“That's this afternoon at half past three. I'm frightfully looking forward to it. I think he's an awfully attractive man, don't you?”

“And acute,” said Caroline warningly.

“Oh,
naturally.
They'd put their best man on to the murder of Myra Mason, wouldn't they? I expect he'll be
very
interested in what I have to say.”

In the event, Darrell Allick was already at the Red Lion when Roderick drove his sister back there. He recognized his back in the window of the Saloon Bar and turned the car straight round. Chief Inspector Meredith, that afternoon, was less lucky. Darrell drove his mother to the police station at Cottingham and insisted on escorting her in. His attentiveness to her was ostentatious but uncertain, as if he were unsure of how it was done. He was a fleshy, androgynous young man who seemed intent on bridging the gap between the sexes. Meredith, who happened to be talking to the duty sergeant, could hardly forbear a sharp intake of breath to indicate his distaste. When his mother was taken through to the interview room, Darrell sat in the outer office, double chinned and pop-eyed, reading stock market prices in the
Financial Times
and eating chocolate.

In the interview room Isobel Allick's performance was as nervous and gauche as it had been that morning at the Rectory. Perhaps she was unaware of the impression she made, perhaps she could do no other. It was difficult to imagine a manner less calculated to impress a policeman. One thing came forth very clearly: She was enjoying herself.

To calm her and to give himself time to assess her, Meredith took her through a recital of bare facts. Name: Isobel Allick. Date of birth: August 15, 1939. Place of residence: Dalberry House, Mitton, near Stroud. Husband's profession: Company director. Before long, however, Isobel had launched herself into a colorful account of The Quarrel.

“What struck me, you see, hearing the voices the first time I went up—I'm terribly sensitive to atmosphere, preternaturally, so my friends tell me—”

“Yes—I read your interview.”

“Oh,
did
you? Well, as I said to the woman who sat next to me in the bar (she's been here when I've been here before, I think, though she wasn't very forthcoming)—as I said, what struck me was the
violence
in the voices. The sense of a coming storm. You could hear that Cordelia—poor Cordelia!—
hated
her mother, and in Dame Myra's voice there was sheer contempt.” Isobel shuddered. “Contempt! Can you imagine it? For her own daughter! I can hardly bear to think about it. So, as I say, it was this premonition of
violence
that made me so afraid,
forced
me to go up a second time and make sure I was wrong. And then, of course, they were actually fighting! If
only
that husband of hers had taken my warnings seriously.”