Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow (5 page)

“What do you mean,” Peter interrupted, his eyes narrowing, “I ‘could do the same’?”

Aubrey stared at him, at first in surprise and then in dismay. “Oh—do you mean that you didn’t know—Oh, my dear boy, I assure you I meant nothing whatever! It was only a slip of the tongue, I mean to say—”

Edgar Stone gave a startling bark of laughter. “That’s torn it, Cyril!” he said happily. “In your usual bumbling manner, you’ve given away the deep dark secret little Mrs. Tyler and I have been keeping. I should never have told you about that incident, should I?”

Peter looked at Emily in amazement. She was glaring at Stone with cold scorn.

“
I
wouldn’t have told anyone,” she said. “If I could wipe it from my memory I would. It was the most disgusting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“My God,” Peter breathed. “Are you saying he tried—”

“This has got to stop!” Dorothy bellowed, rising with some difficulty from her chair. “I declare this party over. I’ve never witnessed such appalling behavior, and as for you and this outrageous blunder you’ve made, Cyril Aubrey—”

“Edgar,” young Gemma broke in, her voice trembling, “you didn’t really come on to Peter’s wife, did you?”

“You sick sadist,” Peter said, giving up the struggle for self-control. “I knew what a goat you were, but you will not insult my wife and get away with it!”

He stepped toward Stone while Emily begged, “No, Peter, don’t make it worse! It was only once, and I got rid of him easily!” Quin grabbed his arm to stop him.

Edgar Stone was obviously having the time of his life.

“What a stimulating evening!” he said. “But I believe Dorothy’s correct, our revels now had better be ended.” He walked to a sofa loaded with coats and purses, took a bowler hat from the pile, and put it on at a jaunty angle.

“Come along, my dear fellows,” Aubrey pleaded, “let bygones—I mean to say, you’re going to have to work together, aren’t you? Any animosity will make it most difficult. Do put all this behind you!”

Edgar turned and looked at Peter. “Do you know, Tyler, I find it hard to see how we
can
work together, after the way you addressed me just now. Yes—when I become head at the end of term, I’m afraid I shall have to demand your resignation—for the sake of staff morale.”

He gave one of his little mocking bows, and left us.

Everyone had had enough, and the gathering broke up pretty quickly. Though left alone, Gemma repulsed Tom’s attempt to escort her. Poor Aubrey stood there watching us go like a child who’s been sent to Coventry for misbehavior. Quin and Emily went out on either side of Peter, talking to him earnestly, and the Barbie trailed behind them.

When I reached the street I almost had another collision, this time with Dorothy Shipton. She’d started up the street, then hurried back when I emerged from the entranceway.

“I say, are you hungry?” she demanded. “I’m starving! Mercy’s known for the paucity of food at its do’s. Besides which, I’m a bit unnerved by all that happened—and I’d rather not go back to my empty house just yet.” When I admitted to a certain hollowness, she went on, “Fancy a doner kebab, then?”

“I’ve no idea what that is,” I admitted.

She led me quickly up St. Aldate’s to a small square beside a Gothic church where several undergraduates stood around eating from Styrofoam boxes, dripping red sauce on the paving stones. A large white van stood there, humming loudly and emitting rank fumes. The top half of one side was open, and in the bright lights inside two Arab men were cooking on a grill. I saw a column of pressed lamb turning on an upright spit, as I’d seen before in Greek restaurants in New York.

A doner kebab turned out to be the same kind of pita sandwich Americans call a gyro, only instead of yogurt sauce, the lamb strips, lettuce, and tomatoes were topped with mayonnaisy coleslaw and a thin “chili” sauce with a definite bite.

“The kebab vans are a sort of Oxford tradition,” Dorothy told me as we sat on a low stone wall to eat. “They come out when the sun goes down and stay open until the wee hours of the morning.”

Sitting in front of an ancient church, looking across the street at Wren’s great Tom Tower looming over Christ Church College, eating a Middle-Eastern sandwich while buses roared past, I got a distinctly Alice-in-Wonderland feeling, although Dorothy didn’t seem to notice the incongruities.

“Now, I do want to apologize for my colleague’s appalling behavior,” she said in her gruff way. “Edgar Stone has always been a difficult man, and his treatment of his wife is quite beyond the pale. His faults have increased as he’s aged, until I really think he’s become unbalanced. God knows what’s going to happen to our little faculty.” She shook her head.

“Why did Mercy College ever hire such a man?” I asked.

“Ah, well, he used to have some reputation as a scholar. And then, this Elizabethan staff has been a cohesive group for a long time. We were all undergraduates together at Magdalen, you see, although it was really the OUDS that made us such a close-knit group. Oh, I’m sorry,” she went on, seeing my blank look, “that’s the Oxford University Dramatic Society. We all acted in its productions.” She pulled out a packet of tissues and gave me one, and we both concentrated for a minute on removing the runny red sauce from our hands and faces. Then she went on. “Perdita was actually a wonderful actress, and a brilliant scholar as well, quite different from the poor creature you’ve just seen. All the men were in love with her, especially Geoffrey Pidgeon, who seemed to have won her until Edgar suddenly made a dead set at her. He can be very charming, although you wouldn’t guess that from tonight’s exhibition. He still has great success with young women. He’s been causing a ridiculous scandal with that little graduate assistant. But I only meant to say, I wish you’d seen us in more civilized form.”

“I wasn’t so civilized myself,” I said sheepishly.

We finished our sandwiches and then she stood up, saying, “Well, I shan’t keep you longer, although going home is not pleasant for me. My dear friend of thirty years died less than a year ago, and since she’s been gone I don’t seem able to get used to being alone.” Tears filled her eyes, and she wiped them away angrily with the back of her hand. “Stupid of me!”

“Not at all. I understand,” I said softly. “It takes time.”

“Sorry. Behaving like a sentimental fool.”

She had insisted on paying for the kebabs, so it wasn’t until I had almost reached the road to Far Wychwood, my lips still tingling from the chili sauce, that I noticed my purse wasn’t on the car seat beside me. I pulled over and looked on the floor and the back seat, but finally I had to admit it must still be on that sofa in the Senior Common Room.

One more memory failure, I thought as I turned the car around and headed back into Oxford—one more disquieting reminder of my age.

When I drove back past the house Tom had pointed out as the Stones’, a woman was almost running down the path, and as she came through the gate I was astounded to see that it was Quin’s girlfriend. She was carrying a tote bag with a picture of Big Ben on it, and she looked strangely agitated, casting glances over her shoulder at the house, where only one downstairs window showed a light.

What reason could
she
have to go to Edgar Stone’s house? Not a single one came to me, unless—but that was ridiculous. Had Quin actually got himself involved with some sort of nymphomaniac, who would make an assignation with another man the first time she met him? What kind of craziness was going on here?

The porter at Mercy College unlocked the Senior Common Room and helped me to find my purse, which had fallen down beside the sofa. I was retracing my path within about half an hour from the time I’d started back.

I heard the screaming before I got to the Stones’ house, and then the siren as I pulled up by the curb. There was light streaming out of the open front doorway now, and a light on upstairs as well as down. A woman was screaming inside the house, people were emerging from their houses up and down the street to see what was happening. And, most bewildering of all, I recognized my son-in-law’s car parked at the curb, just ahead of mine.

The siren got so loud it hurt my ears as two black-and-white police cars swung into the street and pulled up beside my car. I was followed by three constables as I ran into the house. I saw a staircase at the end of a short hallway and Perdita Stone, dressed only in a silky gray nightgown, backing slowly up the stairs. Her eyes were very wide, her long black hair loose and wild, her hands pressed to her mouth as if in a futile attempt to hold the screams back.

The police ran through the open door of the lighted room on my right, and I followed them. Edgar Stone was huddled on the floor in a corner, staring without blinking, a white telephone lying beside him, disconnected from the wall. A large, gold letter-opener stuck out of his chest, and his shirt, the flowered carpet around him, and the white telephone gleamed with his blood.

The constables had already mobbed the only other person in the room. I saw my son-in-law, Peter, standing beside the dead man. Our eyes met for a moment as the police, shouting their legal formula, pinned his arms back and began to handcuff him.

In case, afterward also, in riper years he chance to be set on fire with this coveting of love, he ought to be good and circumspect, and heedful that he beguile not himself to be led willfully into the wretchedness that in young men deserveth more to be pitied than blamed and contrariwise in old men, more to be blamed than pitied.

—Thomas Hoby, “The Courtier”

I
was well acquainted with the Oxford City Police Headquarters, having been interviewed there after one of my narrow escapes. Not only that, I was acquainted with a detective sergeant who worked there, my friend Fiona’s husband. So when Peter, Perdita Stone, and I were ushered through the entrance by that pack of constables, I immediately started throwing his name around.

“I want to see John Bennett,” I told the officer behind the reception desk. “There’s been some terrible mistake, these people have actually put handcuffs on my son-in-law! Why they’d think
he
could possibly have—”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Perdita was babbling hysterically. The officers had prevailed on her to put on some shoes and a coat, but below it her nightgown fluttered around her ankles. “I woke up because there was noise downstairs, and he was
dead
. He looked more horrible than Simon did, much more!”

Peter was the only one who said nothing at all. He stared straight ahead, pale but stoical.

“I said, I want to see John Bennett,” I reiterated. The burly desk sergeant was ignoring me, talking to one of the constables who had brought us in. The calm impersonal attitude of all these uniformed people was maddening. “I
said
—”

“Yes, Madame, I did hear what you said, there’s no need to shout,” said the desk sergeant firmly. “D.S. Bennett’s not in the building at present.”

“Somebody has to tell me what we’re doing here, and why my son-in-law, a respected lecturer at Mercy College, is being treated like Jack the Ripper!”

“You and the victim’s wife are here as material witnesses. Mr. Peter Tyler is at present our prime suspect in a murder investigation, as I’m sure the officers informed him at the scene. That’s all I can tell you, Madame. Things would go a lot easier if you’d take a seat and wait until someone’s ready to interview you.”

“I’m going home,” Perdita cried out, “back to Tyneford. We were happy there. Let go of me,” she commanded the female constable who held her arm. “I want to go home!”

“I’m going to call my daughter,” I told them, “not only is she Peter’s wife, she’s also Mrs. Stone’s therapist, and it looks like you’re going to need her.”

Nobody objected. Perdita had started slapping at the constable, fighting to free herself. The desk sergeant sent another officer down the corridor at a brisk trot as I went over to the public phone. When Emily answered I tried to explain, but it wasn’t easy.

“I’m at the police station, darling. Your patient Mrs. Stone is giving them a hard time, and Peter—it’s outrageous, and I told them so, but they think he murdered Edgar Stone!”

A gasp, a few seconds’ silence, then she said, “
Murdered?”

“Yes, somebody stabbed him, it was awful, there was blood all over! Of course there’s no way Peter could have done such a thing, but they say he’s their prime suspect, can you imagine? You have to come right down.”

“Wait a minute—what are
you
doing there?”

I blew out my breath in exasperation. “Does it matter at this point?”

My heart sank as I heard Quin’s voice in the background asking what was wrong. Now
he
would be sticking his nose in!

“I’ll be right there,” she said and hung up.

When I turned back I saw Perdita Stone sitting off to one side, still talking feverishly, her hand in that of a middle-aged woman wearing the same kind of power suit my daughter wore. She was listening quietly, stroking the hand, occasionally putting in a few words. I figured she must be their resident therapist, letting the poor woman ramble on to calm her down.

Peter was gone.

“Where have you taken my son-in-law?” I demanded of the desk sergeant. “I won’t have him interrogated until John Bennett is here to do it!”

“Madame,” he said with forbidding courtesy, “it is not police policy to offer suspects their choice of interviewers. D.S. Bennett is occupied on another investigation and is not expected in tonight.”

“Do you think he’s gone home by now?”

“I have absolutely no idea!”

I hurried back to the phone and called Fiona.

I explained the situation and waited while she expressed the predictable shock and disbelief. Then I asked whether John was home yet. When she said he wasn’t, I implored her to send him over as soon as he got there, and she promised she would.

I turned from the phone and saw a pudgy, bald detective with a little mustache waiting for me. He identified himself as D.S. Parker and asked me to accompany him to one of the rooms down the corridor, a little larger than a walk-in closet, furnished with a metal table and two folding chairs.

“Now, then,” he said when we were seated, “I’d like to hear about what brought you to Mr. Stone’s house and what you saw there.”

He sat back and listened intently as I told my story, nodding dismissively at my protestations about the impossibility of Peter having killed anybody.

“All right, Madame,” he said when I stopped for breath, “that’s very helpful. So you entered the house because you heard Mrs. Stone screaming, and you saw Mr. Tyler standing over the body, is that correct?”

“No, that is not correct,” I answered snippily. “He wasn’t ‘standing over’ him, he was at least a foot away from him. And has anybody noticed there’s no blood on Peter, while everything else in the vicinity is sopping with it?”

“That can happen, depending on the angle of attack,” he said. “Don’t worry, Madame, our technicians will be looking into those things. Did you happen to notice a handkerchief lying on the floor beside the desk?”

“Handkerchief? No,” I said, “but you have to understand, Peter is the most—”

“Or the broken lock on the door into the study?”

“No. How do you know Peter didn’t just come in because of the screaming, like me? And how did your police know to come there, anyway?”

“We had a telephone message, which I can’t discuss with you, I’m sure you’ll understand why.”

“I don’t understand anything! What evidence could you possibly have?”

“Look, I understand your faith in your son-in-law and your desire to help him. Not sure my mother-in-law would react quite the same.” He smiled at his little joke, but I only continued to glare at him. “We’ll be needing to talk to you further, but for tonight you’re free to go home. Now, come along.” He stood up and opened the door. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to help us later.”

I was certainly not going home. I planted myself in one of the hard metal chairs bolted to the wall in the lobby to wait for Emily. Mrs. Stone and the therapist were gone. I set myself to mulling over everything I could about that evening’s events, and suddenly I remembered something crucial that had been knocked out of my mind by the shock. I jumped up and hurried over to the desk sergeant, who looked up from his papers with controlled irritation.

“I just remembered I saw someone else coming out of Edgar Stone’s house this evening! Get that sergeant back, I’ve got to tell him. She must have done it, she’s definitely capable of murder!”

“Who was that?” he asked skeptically.

“This—woman my ex-husband’s traveling around with. She came out of the Stones’ about half an hour before the police and I arrived. And she looked really upset!”

Before he answered, the street door opened and Emily entered with her father. She wore her usual housedress, a caftan bought on her honeymoon in Morocco. Her blonde hair flowed over her shoulders, and her face looked quite bloodless.

“It’s all right, darling,” I said quickly, “I think I can clear him.” I turned to Quin and spoke to him, though it was like hitting myself in the chest. “Where’s your girlfriend?” I demanded.

“Mother, this is not the time to start—” Emily began, but I went right on.

“Where is she? Do you know? Hiding from the police, isn’t she?”

“Kit, for God’s sake calm down!” he answered angrily. “What difference does it make where Janet is? Can’t you get your mind off her even at a time like this?”

“Not when I saw her fleeing from the scene of the crime!”

“What are you talking about? God, you’re in one of those hysterical fits of yours, I should have known—”

“Just tell us where she is right this minute,” I said, deliberately keeping my voice steady to prove him wrong.

“She’s at the hotel,” he finally answered. “She was tired, she wanted to go to bed, and I went to Emily and Peter’s to visit awhile. Peter got a phone call and had to go out, and a little while later you called to say he’s been arrested! Are you going to tell us what’s happened, or do I have to find a cop who’ll tell me?”

“Pardon me,” the desk sergeant put in, “am I to understand you’re Mrs. Tyler?”

“Yes,” Emily answered, stepping over to him. “Please, could you tell me what’s happened, Officer?”

As he gave her the few facts they were willing to divulge, I turned back to Quin.

“I was driving past the house where the murder happened,” I said in a low voice, “and I saw that woman come running out looking all upset. That was a good while before I went back by and heard Mrs. Stone screaming, and found Peter there with the body. So she’s every bit as likely a suspect as poor Peter—who obviously only went in because he heard the screaming, just like me.”

“Janet? Why would she go to see a guy she’d only met for the first time that evening?”

“I’m supposed to understand the motives of a person like that? But I told this policeman about it, and I’m not leaving until they bring her in and find out what she was doing there.”

“Wait a minute. This is just too convenient
—you,
of all people, were the only one who happened to be passing by when she ran out?”

“Are you calling me a liar? You—the grand champion of liars?”

“Mom, Dad, stop it! Stop it!” Emily said, her voice cracking with strain. “Look, just go away, both of you—I can’t
deal
with your problems right now!”

We both fell silent, shamefaced at having made things worse for her.

“There’s really no reason for you to stay,” the sergeant said quickly, “and it might be better for all concerned if you did go home.”

“Absolutely not! I won’t leave her alone in this mess,” I burst out, and at the same moment Quin said firmly, “I’m here to support my daughter, and I’m going to stay.”

“I’d really rather you both go,” Emily said. “I’m quite capable of handling things, and you two are only complicating them.”

That hurt, but I persisted. “Sergeant, didn’t you hear what I told you about that woman coming out of Stone’s house?”

“Yes, Madame, but we’re going to be concentrating on Mr. Tyler just now. We shan’t be questioning any other witnesses until tomorrow at the soonest.” He still sounded skeptical.

“How can you just wait around, when she might be—”

“That’s enough,” Quin said, tight-lipped. “This is so like you, throwing wild accusations around, going off half-cocked and causing trouble. Man, do I remember thirty years of that!”

While struggling to contain my fury for Emily’s sake, I noticed that she was gone. I looked down the corridor and saw her disappear through the door of one of the interview rooms, D.S. Parker holding it open for her and then shutting it behind himself.

“Listen,” I heard Quin saying, more calmly, “I wasn’t going to let things get like this. I was going to convince you we shouldn’t be enemies, with all the years we’ve got—”

“Oh, right,” I retorted, “as you just told me, thirty years of
that
!”

“But, if you’ll let me finish one sentence,” he snapped, “I’m not going to let you make up fantastic tales to try to get Janet in trouble. One thing I didn’t think you could be was vindictive, but obviously I was wrong.”

“I am
not
making this up! All right—she was carrying a tote bag with a picture of Big Ben on it, and she didn’t have that at the party, so how would I know about it if I hadn’t seen her when I said I did?”

Doubt crossed his face for the first time. “You might have seen her somewhere else.”

“I thought she was in bed at the inn. If I saw her at all, she must have lied to you about where she was going.”

He frowned, unable to refute that. “I’m going back to our room and ask her about it,” he finally said. “She’ll be able to explain everything.”

“Darn right she will, after you’ve coached her! I’ll just come along, and see how she explains everything with me there listening.”

He only shrugged, but I followed when he went out the door, staying a few steps behind so there was no question of my being
with
him. His considerably longer legs strode so fast up St. Aldate’s that by the time we reached St. Giles Street, six long blocks on, I was pretty winded, and when we walked into a very large and obviously expensive hotel a few doors beyond, I had to stop for breath. He didn’t glance back until he reached the staircase, and then he waited, tapping his fingers on the banister, while I glared at him across the luxuriously appointed lobby, holding my side and heaving with each exhalation. After a couple of minutes I crossed to the stairs with what dignity I could and climbed behind him to the next floor.