Murder at Maddingley Grange (16 page)

“Terry's not like that.”

“Will you listen? So they get a man who can look the part. Put people off their guard. This time he's playing silly buggers in a blazer; next he'll be something else again. He's the real detective here, take it from me.”

Violet looked impressed. “Perhaps that song was in code?”

“It weren't in bloody tune, that's for sure.”

Violet returned to the Dew of Youth routine. “Trust your mother to pick up a ghost.”

“I'm not surprised. I got a whiff of something meself. Just before we went out on the terrace.”

“Did you?”

“Something dry and miserable.” Fred took off his slippers. “She's right about the fruit. I'd have said black currants though, more than raspberries.”

“Perhaps he liked fruit gums. Whoever he was. Anyway— you tell her to keep it to herself. People get upset.”

“You tell her.”

“She's your mother.”

“So you keep saying.”

“And she's to stop breaking the cups. I don't think Laurel liked it.”

“She'll have to lump it then, won't she? With what we're paying they can go out and buy a china shop. Anyway—it weren't no bigger than a mouse's tit.”

“Make sure you tell her when you go in to say good night.”

“I've been in to say good night.”

“No, you haven't. You've not stirred from this room since we came upstairs.” Fred gave a martyred sigh. “Go on, then. It's only across the landing.”

“You're a hard woman, Violet.” Fred put on his slippers, saying, “And to think when I married you you were a ninety-eight-pound bundle of giggly fluff.”

Mother was sitting bolt upright in bed, regarding her empty cookie tin with some chagrin. “You polished off all that lot?” She looked demure, innocent, outraged. “On top of that cheese? You'll be skating about in the middle of the night like Charley's Aunt. How d'you feel?”

“Lovely.”

“You'll get lovely,” said Fred automatically. “And you're to stop chucking the crockery about. Showing us all up.”

“It's the Romany way.”

“Well, it ain't the Hannaford way and they don't like it, so pack it in. And keep quiet about roaming Harry. Or whatever it is. A low profile. You got that?”

Fred brushed his mother's leathery whiskered cheek with his lips and pictured, as he sometimes did at moments like this, an idealized replacement. A sweet old lady smelling of lavender with skin like a crumpled rose petal, kind blue eyes, snowy curls and a gentle smile. He looked down at the snarled hair on the pillow and said: “Behave yourself. All right?”

Mother raised eyebrows like the whiskers of an elderly prawn, bruised at this undeserved chiding.

“Settle down then.”

Mother settled, pulling in an errant fold of her voluminous nightdress and, in no time at all, was snoring fit to wake the dead.

Mrs. Saville stood, high, wide and handsome, in duchesse satin, setting the alarm on her traveling clock. In spite of the superb dinner and apparently smooth running of the household, she did not trust either of the domestics to appear on the dot of eight-thirty with the Earl Grey and ginger nuts to dislodge her from slumber. She replaced the clock on the dressing table and regarded herself complacently in the long glass.

“Did I ever tell you, dear, that your grandfather once remarked on what a splendid figurehead I would make?”

“Several times, Mummy.” He was right too, thought Rosemary, casting her eye over the massive shoulders and victorious profile. The sight of these thrusting toward him through the swell must have caused the stoutest-hearted pirate to leap over the side. If her mother had been around at the time of the
Marie Celeste
, there would have been no mystery worth mentioning. She further noticed about her parent a quite unpleasant liveliness. Rosemary stretched her lips wide in a simulated yawn. Usually when you did this the people yawned at yawned back. Mrs. Saville's jaw remained stubbornly unoccluded. Just to underline her drift, Rosemary said: “Gosh—I'm tired.”

“Well, I'm not. I doubt if I shall sleep a wink.”

“But…” In the doorway of her adjoining room Rosemary gaped in dismay. “You always sleep like a log.”

“The thought of that appalling family next door will be more than enough to keep me awake, thank you. As for that disgusting old woman, you heard what she said on the terrace…nothing more than a gypsy.”

“I asked her when we were coming upstairs if she really had got Romany blood and she looked very mysterious and tapped her nose and said, ‘I got all sorts, dear—in a little cupboard under the stairs.'” Rosemary giggled.

“You won't be laughing when you wake up tomorrow to find your inheritance has been stolen in the night.” Mrs. Saville took her jewel box from the dressing table, locked it, put it away in a drawer and locked that.

“I'm sure they're not dishonest, Mummy. Just…colorful.”

“Nonsense. People of that ilk have no respect for the property of others. And did you see that disgusting thing he had around his neck?” she went on, leaping as nimbly from the theoretical to the concrete as might the Spanish ibex. “A man who wears a tie that lights up in the dark is a man whose depravity knows no bounds.”

“It didn't actually light—”

“Don't argue, Rosemary.”

Rosemary went to bed and lay listening to her mother holding forth on the iniquitous fluidity of the present English class structure when the maid expected a day off every week as a matter of course and Jack sat down with his master. Soothed by the familiar drone, and quite against her best intentions, Rosemary drifted off to sleep.

Laurie was tired and had looked forward to going to bed, yet now the evening was finally over she found herself strangely unable to go through even the simplest preretirement rituals. Still consumed with anxiety she drifted in a directionless manner in and out of the bathroom and round and round the bedroom furniture, watched by Auguste's ultramarine
Parisian
. Eventually Laurie settled by the window seat. She slipped off her high heels, knelt on the padded tapestry cushions, opened the casement and leaned out.

The rain had stopped and the moon was radiantly bright, the sky calm and spangled with stars. She took slow, deep breaths, hoping to bring her heart, still cavorting around in her breast, under some sort of control. From the terrace rose the sweet living fragrance of pinks and madonna lilies mingling with the dense smell of warm earth. Laurie, who had never seen herself as a sentimental person, stared up at the great limitless arc of the heavens and found she was on the verge of tears.

She sat on. Gradually her heart became still and images of Mr. Gillette acting out his murderous caprice faded, leaving her, more or less, tranquil. She felt very strange. The evening that had just passed was gradually assuming the quality of a dream. Everything vivid and real, but in an unreal way without anchor or true focus. Had there really been a white staring face pressed up against the glass? Had Mrs. Gibbs truly spoken with a savage and terrible clairvoyance while Sheila Gregory screamed back at her in fear? Had a presence been conjured up from beyond the grave?

Picturing the scene now, the participants all standing around in fancy dress, Laurie found herself regarding them as so many waxworks. So unlike the silent trees and shrubs and inky waters of the moat, all of which, though unmoving, seemed to be possessed of a vibrant, guarded energy. She heard a sound. Two doves, silver in the moonlight and croodling tenderly to each other, waddled across the rain-washed flagstones.

Laurie, overcome by an intense wave of emotion, closed the window and made her way to the bathroom. She washed her face and was disconcerted to find when she had finished that it still showed traces of rouge and lipstick. Owning no cleansing cream or lotion, she lathered up more soap and, after two further scrubs and rinses, all the hateful stuff seemed to have gone. She determined not to put it on again, thirties or no thirties, Simon or no Simon.

She cleaned her teeth and was just turning away from the glass when she was struck by the extraordinary vivacity of her complexion. She peered closer. Her cheeks were blooming and her eyes, seeming very wide apart, sparkled and shone with an almost unnatural brilliance. Regarding this transformation with some surprise, Laurie became aware that although, as far as she could recall, it was for her a unique phenomenon, somewhere in the not too distant past she had observed another in precisely this rather remarkable condition. She stood and thought a bit, then suddenly excessively tired, removed her slinky dress, put on her baggy striped pajamas, climbed into bed and fell fast asleep.

The little white square of paper from Simon's bowler hat, which, having no pocket, she had tucked into her neck halter, fell unnoticed to the floor. Had Laurie troubled to read it she might have slept less well. For the paper made it plain that it was she who had been cast as Mad Betty stroke Black Tom, village gossip and soothsayer. And that Simon's comforting explanation of Mrs. Gibbs's clairvoyance could not have been further from the mark.

All was not well behind the green baize door. Whimperings, thumpings, groans and muffled cries could be heard. Ben, stripped for action, was sluicing his brother's head under a gushing stream of icy water.

“Aaarrgghh…” A clogged, choking gasp as Gordon struggled to come up for air. Ben tightened the muscles of his sinewy arms and forced the older man's shoulders farther into the water.

“You bastard!” he shouted. “What did you tell me? Ay? What did you promise?”

“Orrguhhaamoo…”

“No. Booze. This. Time.” Ben punctuated the four words by rhythmically clunking the butler's forehead against the basin's edge. Gordon's legs skidded and skated under him. “You gin-sodden fart-arsed crapulous louse-ridden bug-eared dick-head!”

“Guggle…uggle…”

Suddenly Ben let his brother go. He watched as the dripping head and shoulders slowly rose from the basin. Ben crossed to the bed and slumped down, seemingly in despair. Gordon's nose and mouth were full of water. He spouted, then snorted, then spouted again. There was a bright hard clanging in his head like the merry chatter of a tenor bell, and his eyes stung. He tested his legs and found them wanting.

“Look at you. You're so drunk you can't stand up.”

Gordon pondered this harsh conclusion. It seemed to him, accurate though it might be in some respects (he certainly could not imagine letting go of the basin's edge in anything like the near future), there was buried somewhere in its severe judgmental structure a misapprehension as to the precise disposition of cause and effect. Motivated by a gathering sense of injustice, he peered through a fog of alcoholic fumes at the nearly naked figure across the room. And in a flash the truth of the matter came to him.

“I could stanup perfly 'fore you knock me out.”

“Bullshit! If I hadn't caught the tray when you came zipping past that curtain, you'd have been through the kitchen, out the door and sharpening your teeth on the gravel.”