Cool Repentance (23 page)

'A maniac loose? That's what they're saying in Larminster, Jemima. Yes, only a maniac would kill a young man and an old woman, and for what? That's what we don't know, Jemima, assuming the two killings are linked. But what is a maniac? You tell me that. Mad or sane, these murderers never much want to be caught by the police, do they? Take X who killed Fitzwilliam, for we'll rule out the chauffeur for the moment. He took good care to cover up, didn't he? Maniac or no maniac. Take X who killed the old lady - the same X as we now think, this X wore gloves and was very careful indeed to leave no traces behind. No clues. Not altogether mad, you see. Not mad enough to be caught. Not so far. Whatever the do-gooders will say when he or she comes to trial.'

Jemima who had no intention of arguing about the definitions of criminal insanity with Detective Inspector Harwood, if she could help it, asked instead: 'So what now? The police never give up. That I do know.'

'They do not.' Matt Harwood sounded quite shocked. 'Hard work, that's what happens next. Hard work. Routine questions. Taking all the statements of the residents in the hotel on the night in question - a good number of them members of the Cartwright family, I understand. Funny - or not so funny - the way they keep recurring, isn't it? They were all here the night Fitzwilliam was killed too. Oh we shall plod on all right. We may be slow, but we are very very sure. We'll get him - or her - in the end.'

'And suppose there is another murder in the meanwhile?' suggested Jemima. 'My instinct tells me
...'
She realized she had gone too far.

Detective Inspector Harwood shot her a look which somehow reminded her of Cy Fredericks - Cy in one of his more chauvinist moods. Matt Harwood's next words also reminded her of Cy Fredericks.

'If your feminine instinct tells you there's going to be another murder, maybe the same useful instinct will tell you who's going to do it and to whom. Then you can go ahead and prevent it.' On which note of jocularity the Detective Inspector departed.

Jemima decided not to attend the First Night of
The Seagull
now that there was no television work to be done. She had seen a superlative performance from Christabel the night before: she doubted it could be matched tonight, especially under the traumatic circumstances of another death striking at the company. She was not sufficiently thrilled by any of the other actors to see them twice outside the line of duty - not even Vic Marcovich whose Trigorin had been very impressive or Anna Maria Packe who had turned in an appealing Masha. It was a pleasure not to have to gaze on the rocks and fisherman's netting further. Besides the First Night
at
the Watchtowe
r would be a morbid occasion, she suspected. She was not surprised to learn that Julian had taken his daughters back to Lark Manor. He himself planned to return later, 'But if not, well, Christabel has Gregory to support her, doesn't she?' he observed to Jemima on his way out of the hotel. Christabel herself had returned to Lark for a short rest, fleeing the confusion of the Royal Stag. Then Gregory had driven her back to the theatre.

But Jemima's famous instinct was letting her down in allowing her to stay in her suite at the Royal Stag, instead of attending the First Night at the Watchtower. For the person who had long sought to destroy Christabel, killing three people in the process, had just chosen that particular occasion to put an end to her once and for all. After some heart searching, the person decided that Christabel should die as she had lived - in the full public eye. So that everyone should see and understand that there was no real forgiveness possible: that no one could ever come back if they had done the things that Christabel had done.

Jemima Shore, as yet unknowing of this decision, sat in her suite and pondered on all the murky circumstances surrounding the cool repentance of Christabel Cartwright. She had just, dazedly, reached a solution -a horrifying solution - when there was an imperative rap on her door.

Jemima came with a jolt out of the dream, nightmare really, into which her own reasonings had plunged her. Automatically she looked at her watch and was further startled to find it was very late.
The Seagull
must be well on its way by now. The door was locked - Mrs Tennant had insisted on that after the murder.

'Who is it?' she called, looking round for the key.

'Miss Shore, I must speak to you. It's desperately urgent. Please let me come in.'

Jemima recognized the voice of Miss Kettering.

16

Death of a Seagull

Ketty's sharp tapping interrupted a very long train of thought in Jemima. It had been punctuated - unpleasantly - by bursts of music from a radio played much too loudly in the room above. Pop music. Somewhat against her will Jemima recognized the tunes because they had once been so colossally popular that it had been impossible to avoid contact with their demanding monotonous beat. One of these tunes which she recognized was 'Cool Repentance'.

Was it the Iron Boy record being played? She could pick up - could not really fail to pick up whether she liked it or not - the repeated long-drawn-out first syllable 'coo-oo-ool, oh so cool repentance', but she could not recognize the voice of the singer. Some of the other Iron Boy hits were played, including 'Daring Darling' and 'Iron Boy' itself,
but
then she could also hear some of the Rolling Stones' numbers. During the brief pauses, however, when she could hear the disc jockey talking, Jemima found it was 'Cool Repentance' which stayed beating in her head and would not go away.

It was not a soothing experience. Lying back on the chintz-covered chaise-longue in the sitting-room, Jemima contemplated asking Mrs Tennant to have the offending radio turned down: on reflection she decided that the unfortunate manageress had endured enough for one day. Then it occurred to her that the chambermaid Marie had been installed in the empty room above her to recuperate. Marie too had had an unpleasant experience. If pop music on the hotel-room radio contributed to her recovery, then perhaps she should be allowed to play it. Even loud.

Feeling virtuously fair-minded - and also rather cross - Jemima set her mind back to work, to the tune of the loud beats coming from above. It was a question of the past, and of things in their proper order.

Where had it all begun? It had begun, properly, with the moment when Christabel had confided her fears to Jemima: how she would only be safe again back on stage, 'with the eyes of the world upon me
...
Oh, Jemima, I've been so terribly, terribly frightened
...
Locked away at Lark. It's so dangerous
...'
Then Gregory had arrived with Ketty and the girls. So Jemima had never really discovered where the mysterious danger lay, beyond the fact that it was clearly somewhere close at hand - connected with Lark Manor itself.

After that there had been the picnic. She passed certain images back through her mind, as though replaying the key moments of a television programme. Christabel, with Nat Fitzwilliam at her feet, the young man talking away, the older woman's attention wandering. Jemima had spotted an oddly upset glance in the direction of Gregory, himself chatting cheerfully away to Filumena Lennox.

Gregory, who had tried to warn Jemima off originally at their first bizarre encounter on the sea-shore: 'Why don't you just chuck this programme?
...
Have you thought of its effect on people with something to hide?' He had pretended that he had been trying to protect Christabel's privacy. Had it after all been Gregory himself who had something to hide? Was it possible that it was Gregory whom Christabel had feared all along?

Gregory had been in Larminster on the night of Nat's death - had no subsequent alibi beyond swimming as Matt Harwood had scornfully told her - and it was certainly feasible for Gregory to have entered the Royal Stag last night, since security, under Mrs Tennant's easy-going eye, was lax to non-existent. In many ways Gregory fitted the bill very well - all too well for Jemima, since she discovered in herself considerable reluctance to postulate Gregory's guilt (she hoped that this reluctance could be attributed to instinct - the right kind of instinct).

Gregory had disliked Nat Fitzwilliam: he had made no secret of the fact. Gregory was a successful playwright, with no visible dependants, who had plenty of money to spare to support Old Nicola in her chosen retirement. So far, so good. Or rather, so bad.

But all of this had to be based on a foundation-stone of hatred - hatred not of Nat, nor yet of Nicola, but of Christabel. Was it really possible for Gregory Rowan to hate Christabel Cartwright? Hate her so much that he had planned to drown her? And in so doing had tragically and mistakenly put an end to the life of a young girl - a girl with whom he had been openly flirting only an hour before?

'Come with me and see pre-revolutionary Paris.' Jemima had overheard his offer. Most of the rest of the picnic must have heard it too. Gregory of all people had not expected Filly - rather than Christabel - to be wearing the magpie hat. For
it
was Gregory who had tried to persuade Filly to swim and, as he thought, failed. He had strode away towards the west cliff to swim by himself - wearing nothing but a pair of tennis shoes, no doubt. Or had he? Was this what Nat had seen through his binoculars? At one point it had seemed that Nat must have focused on something connected with Mr Blagge and his boat; now Mr Blagge's boating expedition had turned out to be quite innocent - just what it purported to be, a rescue expedition in choppy waters, at his wife's suggestion. So what had Nat seen - not seen - through his binoculars? 'I saw nothing where I should have seen something.' Gregory not under the west cliff at all
...
for Gregory was by now cutting through the waters to the east like a black shark .
..
Was this - 'just a little discrepancy between text and sub-text' - what Nat had tried to discuss 'several times with the person concerned' receiving an answer, which 'wasn't satisfactory either'. Old Nicola too, she had glimpsed something as she sat on the beach - an unknown 'helper' or 'cuddler' there in the water close to Filly; she had never referred to the incident again - was it Gregory Old Nicola had observed?

Another image flashed on to her personal screen: Gregory in his cottage, telling her with perfect good-humour: 'It sounds ridiculous but at first I felt quite violent
...
She only showed one pang of emotion and that was when we had to tell her her dog Mango had died
...
For one terrible moment, I wanted to do her some frightful physical injury. I almost wanted to kill her for all the suffering she had caused . . .'

'Coo-oo-ool, oh so cool repentance' beat and wailed and rocked above her for the second time: that really must be Iron Boy singing it. She thought: was it really possible for anyone to come back as Christabel had done, abandoned first by Iron Boy, then by the world, and not arouse devastating murderous passions in the injured?

Jemima began to list them to herself. First of all, her children, but was Regina really for all her literary allusions to be classed as a potential matricide? A modern version of Electra, perhaps, with Christabel as Clytemnestra? She decided to hold on that one and passed on to Regina's sister. Blanche had evidently been most resentful of her mother when Jemima first visited Lark and theoretically the Nina incident should not have helped their relationship; yet she had the impression that mother and daughter had seemed much closer lately. Jemima thought of Blanche, over-heated in her Annie Hall outfit on the night of her birthday, and in any case physically most ill-suited to such a parody of masculine clothing: she had certainly improved since then.

Jemima decided to hold on Regina and Blanche and pass on to the rest of the Lark Manor circle. Jemima was patiently reviewing the various characters involved: the Blagges
...
after all, no. Ketty - in love with Julian Cartwright, said Gregory, hating Christabel's return which had demoted her in the household
...
yes, perhaps
...
All of a sudden the music above her head came to an abrupt halt.

Footsteps were heard instead. Then voices. Then a door banged.

Evidently Mrs Tennant had come to claim Marie, or at any rate restore peace to her hotel.

The shock of the sudden silence, for one instant quite as shocking as the endlessly reverberating noise had been, had a most surprising effect on Jemima. It was as though she had suddenly seen everything exactly reversed: silence was shocking, noise the norm
...
She began, with rising excitement, to look at all her own images from exactly the opposite point of view, to ask herself a whole new set of questions, questions which she knew at last were getting close to the heart of the mystery.

Cool repentance
...
but was it really possible in any couple for a wife to be quite so bad, a husband quite so good, as Christabel and Julian Cartwright seemed respectively to the outside world? Was Christabel really so complacently composed, Julian really so doggedly adoring as they appeared in public? Had she really felt no shame at what she had done to him, her loving husband of so many years, the younger man who had married her when Gregory would not? More to the point, was a man, any man, really going to accept such flagrant behaviour and for so many years. She thought - nostalgically, as she lay on the chintz chaise-longue -of Spike. Chauvinist Spike who had not been able to understand Julian's husbandly meekness: 'I'd give her a proper going-over.' In vain Jemima had responded: 'It would drive me quite mad to have to come back to Lark as penitent Magdalen.' Suppose that secretly
...