Enter Pale Death (38 page)

The anger was heating in Dorcas’s eyes. She curled her fingers into fists and Joe feared she might launch herself at him in fury. With a mighty effort at control she finally spoke. “It was ‘The Happy Prince,’ ” she said.

“What was that?”

“The story he asked me to read him. By Oscar Wilde. Since we’re dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s and attributing the hairs. Alex sees himself as the young hero. It all ends in death and disaster. I’m sure you know it.”

“There once was the statue of a rich young prince who had never experienced true happiness?” Joe remembered. “That one? Not one of my favourites.”

“Yes. The Prince asked a passing swallow to take the ruby from his sword hilt, the sapphires from his eyes and the gold-leaf from his body to give to the poor.”

“We all have our fantasies,” Joe said, uncertainly. “I was Rob Roy for many a year.”

“Well it’s more than a fantasy for Alex. He’s giving up everything to go off, doubtless in sandals, begging bowl in hand, to Africa to try to do some good or find his paradise.”

“Oh, dear. That may not be the best thing for Africa. Couldn’t you talk him out of it?”

“Arrogant toss pot! I encouraged him. There’s nothing for him here in Suffolk!”

“Watch it, Dorcas! The helpful swallow died too, as far as I remember.”

“Leave me now, Joe. I’ll talk to you when we’re back in Surrey. If I can go on dodging your suspicions and you let me get that far, that is.”

Unsure of himself and doubly unsure of her, Joe started to do as she asked. He paused at the door and looked back at her. Left to herself, she suddenly seemed small and dejected, a girl unhappy and out of place. Still his responsibility? No longer, he felt. It hadn’t escaped him—her frequent and unconscious use of “we” instead of “I.” But, now, the second person making up the pronoun was not Joe Sandilands. It was to Truelove she looked for support; his needs were paramount. Joe stopped his thoughts right there. If the details he’d gleaned from his examination of the household and estate records in Mrs. Bolton’s office had told him anything, it had sounded a warning that Dorcas must be carried, kicking and screaming if necessary, out of Truelove’s orbit as soon as he could manage it. Joe couldn’t leave her in this troubled house surrounded by these scheming people. He knew what he had to say.

“I’ve got a car on hand, Dorcas. Why don’t we grab our bags and just make a run for it? We could be back at Lydia’s in time
for supper.” He was about to add a joking reference to cherry ice cream but remembered Adelaide Hartest’s advice to avoid nostalgia. “I don’t like or trust any of these people you’re involved with. I believe they wish you harm and I’m going to take you, by the scruff of your neck if you make a fuss, right away from here. We could do what I know you’ve always wanted to do—chase about the Continent hunting down your French family. We can hire an open-topped car and be on the road to Provence in no time.” Too late, he realised that it was nostalgia that had him by the throat and was shaking desperate clichés from him. “The warm south, pitchers of red wine, cicadas, violet evening skies, battlements if you hanker for them still—I know just the battlements. We’ll meet up with your painter friends … fast-talking rogues—poseurs the lot of them—but entertaining poseurs. They make you laugh, Dorcas. It’s a long time since I heard you laugh. A smile would be a start …”

A smile would have triggered it. Even a weak and watery one would have justified a lunge towards her. He’d have sunk to his knees and seized her hands. He’d have thrown away his uncertainty, his reserve, and blurted that this time they would travel with a marriage license and to hell with everything else.

She looked back at him stonily, unable to respond to his emotion.

Joe controlled his desperation and said more soberly, “We’ve no worthy part to play here, Dorcas, you and I.”

At last a smile but the comment that accompanied it was barbed. “Part? I thought you were playing Major Domo perfectly, Joe. How ever would we manage without you?”

Disgust with himself and anger with Dorcas provoked a brusque response. “Time, perhaps, to let you find out!” He began to walk to the door.

A stifled gasp made him look back. The familiar face was wearing an unfamiliar expression—saddened and disbelieving.
But it was the expression of a girl who’s just been given the news that her favourite dog has to be put down, Joe judged, distressing enough, but hardly the emotion of a girl whose lover is leaving.

They stared at each other in silence for an uncomfortable moment as seven years of intimacy crumbled between them. Joe resisted the urge to stride back and seize her in a comforting hug. This girl, suddenly a stranger, might well have screamed for help. He began to speak to her urgently, confidingly, appealing to a quality he knew she still possessed: her enquiring intelligence.

“Listen Dorcas! You’ve always been my equal in ‘sleuthing’ as you call it. Join me in one last combined effort will you? Working together, we can flush out the person really responsible for Lavinia’s death. You do want to know, don’t you? You
have
to know!” He waited for her reluctant nod before he continued. “It will involve trickery, lies, floods of tears and possibly fisticuffs. How about it? What do you say?”

“Not sure about the tears, but all the rest I can manage,” she said dubiously. “And I’ll do anything I can to clear James’s name. I told you—that’s why I’ve come back here to this terrible place. I would much rather have worked it out for myself without benefit of your conjuring tricks but … Oh, go on, Joe.”

Joe went on, eager but uncertain, his plan evolving as he talked. It sounded ridiculous to his ears but Dorcas began suddenly to smile and the smile widened. “Same old Joe!” she said. “Still the Fusilier! If in doubt stage a controlled explosion!”

Finally: “It’ll never work. And, if it does, you’ll be thrown out of whatever clubs you’re still a member of. You’ll lose your job and they’ll cut off your buttons with a ceremonial sabre.”

“Lucky if it’s just my buttons,” he said, managing a rueful grin.

CHAPTER 22

All he could do was get on with his job. Finish, point an accusing finger, pose for the camera and leave. He’d had enough. In fact he rather thought he’d talked himself into a solitary dash down into France, where he’d always found a balm for his emotional abrasions. Just one more piece of evidence and he could be reasonably sure he knew who had tricked Lavinia Truelove into walking into her death in the stable.

All was quiet in the telephone room. Sunday lunch time in the outside world. He was surprised there was even an operator on duty.

“A trunk call please, Miss, to a London number … Julia! Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you on a—”

“Joe! At last! Ralph was just wondering where you’d got to. Here he comes. Don’t keep him talking—he was just about to carve the leg of lamb and we’ve got my mother-in-law for lunch.”

There was a clunk as Superintendent Cottingham seized the telephone. “I managed! Not easy—you know what these highfalutin lawyers are like. Upshot is—no surprises. Lavinia Truelove’s last will and testament turns out to have been her first and only will and testament. Drawn up at the time of her marriage, on lines agreed by her father, it has remained gathering dust on a shelf, unaltered since the day she signed it. No attempt was ever made
to look at it again. She retained control of what I’ll call her ‘resources’—sounds more modern than ‘marriage settlement.’ ”

“These resources, Ralph? Any indication …?”

“I tried to find out how much we were contemplating. I gave their discreet Mr. Brewer a choice of ‘plentiful/comfortable/adequate.’ He picked ‘plentiful.’ Throughout her married life she spent freely, to the advantage of the Truelove estate, apparently. Nothing we didn’t know in all this. No dramatic changes in her will of the kind we favour, like—all to my lover, Vicenzo, the second footman, or to Pets’ Paradise, or the Communist Party. Nothing of the sort. ‘Everything of which I die possessed’ etcetera goes to husband, James. Full stop.”

“So James finds himself in undisputed sole possession of the plentiful resources. Hmm … Ah, well. Rather dashes one of my theories to the ground. I’ve been going through the account books. All the same—that’s something we needed to know. Another piece of the jigsaw. One more piece of blue sky but the picture builds.”

Joe must have sounded despondent. Ralph hurried on, in a voice trying to suppress a triumphant chortle: “But there is something more. Perhaps even the four corner pieces? Something old Brewer let slip right at the end when he shouldn’t have. Something in response to a remark I made with a dash of low cunning as I thanked him and signed off. That’s when pompous prats let their defences down, I find. Right when they think they’re getting shot of you and you’ve sportingly admitted defeat. That’s the moment! What I do is think of my best judgement on the situation and then I completely reverse it, however ludicrous it may seem. I make a throw-away remark on these lines, assuming the bloke I’m conning is in the know, as am I.”

“I think I follow. Not trying some mind trick out on
me
are you, Ralph?”

“Never! Usually I get a stunned silence while they work it out
and the length of that can be revealing. Other times I get an outraged denial and correction. Even better. But just occasionally, I get a wondering agreement and a spluttering: ‘Now how the devil did you know that? Our Police are getting to be a force to be reckoned with!’ This was one of those occasions. It’s word for word the response I got from Mr. Brewer when I flew a very chancy kite in his face!… Just finishing, darling!… Now—listen to this, Joe!”

J
OE REPLACED THE
receiver and instantly reconnected with the operator. He looked anxiously at his watch. Cyril Tate was probably well into his second dry sherry at the Cock in Fleet Street. But no. He was still at headquarters and Joe’s call had him on the line in seconds.

“Of course I’m here! It’s still Ascot weekend down here in the Metropolis. Another hour’s copy to write up before I dash off to the next event—tea with a duchess. Make it quick, Joe.”

Matching Joe’s own urgency, Cyril answered his questions with the curt, pared-down sentences of the airman he had once been and ditched the society commentator’s persiflage. “In the last year? I’m fishing my diary from my pocket as we speak. It takes me back as far as last January.”

Joe heard pages rustle and he pictured Cyril thumbing through his large-sized, heavily scrawled over and full-to-bursting record of social engagements. “February … here we are … You’ll have to depend on my memory for this one. The birthday ball out in Wiltshire of Amanda Seacombe … As well as the many royal cousins clustering round, there was present your person of interest: Dorothy Despond. Attending with her father. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t write down the whole guest list but I’m pretty sure the Trueloves were there. James and Lavinia.”

“Evidence of this? I can’t afford to get it wrong, Cyril. Lives at stake.”

“Make that ‘certain’ then. I can send you the shots if you like. Otherwise a back copy of
Tatler
will confirm. Hang on! Come to think of it … skipping on a bit … Here she is again in March. Literary and Arty jamboree in Hertfordshire.” Cyril flinched at the memory. “One of those god-awful shows where they expect you to roll your sleeves up and paint a watercolour, write an ode and stuff an owl. All in the space of one wet weekend.”

“What was Miss Despond doing there?”

“Leading a snappy little art appreciation group, if you can believe it. Subject: ‘Dada and all the other -isms … How to hold your own conversational end up when all about are losing their marbles’ sort of stuff. James Truelove was not only a fellow guest—he was in the front row, lapping it up! Without the missus, this time. Ho, ho! I see where you’re going with this! You clever old sod! Those two knew each other before the wife died. Good enough, Joe?”

“It’ll do, Cyril. Many thanks!”

“Have I just hammered a nail in some poor sod’s coffin?”

“No, no! But you may just have saved a girl from a fate worse than death—a life with James Truelove. I owe you a pint in the Cock when I get back to civilisation, old mate!”

T
HE PHONE RANG
as he left the room. Joe looked about for Styles, then, thinking it might be his superintendent ringing him back with an afterthought, Joe closed the door and picked up the receiver himself.

“Hello. This is Melsett Hall here,” he said carefully.

A young woman answered. “That’s not Mr. Styles,” she said in a voice slow with suspicion.

“No indeed, Miss. Will you wait until I find him or will you leave a message? I think he’s officiating at the teapot in the east parlour at the moment. Sudden influx of thirsty guests.”

“Who are you?”

Joe explained who he was.

After a long pause, she began to talk. “I’ve only got threepence and I’m ringing from Mrs. Crispin, the grocer’s next door so I’ll have to talk fast. It’s Grace. Grace Aldred.”

“Oh, hullo, Gracie! I was just talking about you with Ben. How are you getting on? Or, more to the point, I ought to ask—how’s your mother doing?”

“Mother? Oh, she’s fine, thank you for asking, sir. She’s back on her Iron Jelloids and her Pink Pills. Look, can you tell Mr. Styles or Mrs. Bolton I’ve decided to come back? There was no need to stay here a whole week. Monday’s my busy day and I ought to be back at Melsett. And now my sister’s here with her two little ’uns … well, it’s a bit crowded and I’ve never got on with my ma. Not like Sarah, they’re thick as thieves those two …”

Joe listened to at least sixpenn’orth of family intrigue and drew his conclusions. He cut her short: “So, you’re packed and ready. What time is the next bus?… Two o’clock … In half an hour … Get on that bus, Grace. What time do you expect it’ll arrive in Melsett?… Right. I’ll come and collect you myself at the bottom of the drive. Don’t worry. I’ll tell those who need to know.”

F
OUR O
’
CLOCK FOUND
Joe lurking in the shade of a chestnut tree at the end of the drive. The bus braked, pulled over and parked. Joe leapt forward to greet the sole descending passenger with a smile and an extended arm. He introduced himself briefly. “From the Hall, Miss Aldred. I’m a friend of Adam Hunnyton. My name’s Joe Sandilands. We spoke on the telephone earlier. Let me take your bag.”