The Scold's Bridle (18 page)

"Do lionesses have beards?" she murmured.

"It was a figure of speech."

"I gathered that." She observed him with fond amusement. "Wise or not, Sergeant, it was instructive. I've had my anxieties laid to rest and, as any doctor will tell you, that's the best panacea there is."

He looked pleased for her. "You've sorted things out with your husband?"

She shook her head. "Jack's a life sentence not an anxiety." Her dark eyes gleamed with mischief. "Perhaps I should have paid a little more attention when my mother was making her predictions for our future."

"Marry in haste, repent at leisure?" he suggested.

"More along the lines of 'She who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.' Which I, of course, countered with 'The devil has all the best tunes.' " She made a wry face. "But try forgetting 'Hey, Jude' or 'Twenty-four hours from Tulsa.' Like Jack they have a nasty habit of lingering in the memory."

He chuckled. "I'm more of a 'White Christmas' man myself, but I know what you mean." He glanced towards the house. "So, if it's not your husband who's set your mind at rest it must be Mrs. Lascelles. Does that mean she's decided to accept the terms of the will?"

Again Sarah shook her head. "No. She's convinced me she didn't kill her mother."

"And how did she manage to do that?" He looked very sceptical.

"Feminine intuition, Sergeant. You'd probably call it naivety."

"I would." He patted her arm in an avuncular way. "You really must learn not to be so patronizing, Doctor. You'll see things in a different light if you do."

"Patronizing?" echoed Sarah in surprise.

"We can always call it something else. Intellectual snobbery or self-righteousness, perhaps. They cloak themselves just as happily under the guise of naivety but, of course, naivety sounds so much less threatening. You're a very decided woman, Dr. Blakeney, and you rush in where angels fear to tread, not out of foolishness but out of an overweening confidence that you know best. I am investigating a murder here." He smiled grimly. "I don't pretend that I would ever have liked Mrs. Gillespie because I'm rather inclined to accept the established view that she was an evil-minded old bitch who got her kicks out of hurting people. However, that did not give anyone the right to strike her down prematurely. But the point I want to stress to you is that whoever killed her was clever. Mrs. Gillespie made enemies right, left and centre, and knew it; she was a bully; she was cruel; and she trod rough-shod over other people's sensibilities. Yet, someone got so close to her that they were able to deck her out in a diabolical headdress and then take her semi-conscious to the bath where they slit her wrists. Whoever this person was is not going to make you a free gift of their involvement. To the contrary, in fact, they will make you a free gift of their non-involvement, and your absurd assumption that you can tell intuitively who is or who is not guilty from a simple conversation is intellectual arrogance of the worst kind. If it was so damned easy-forgive my French-to tell murderers from the rest of society, do you not think by now that we'd have locked them up and confined unlawful killing to the oddities page of the history textbooks?"

"Oh dear," she said. "I seem to have exposed a nerve. I'm sorry."

He sighed with frustration. "You're still patronizing me."

She opened her car door. "Perhaps it would be better if I left, otherwise I might be tempted to return the insult."

He looked amused. "Water off a duck's back," he said amiably. "I've been insulted by professionals."

"I'm not surprised," she said, slipping in behind the wheel. "I can't be the only person who gets pissed off when you decide to throw your weight about. You don't even know for sure that Mathilda was murdered, but we're all supposed to wave our arms in the air and panic. What possible difference can it make to anyone if I choose to satisfy myself that Mrs. Lascelles hasn't disqualified herself from a cut of the will by topping the old lady who made it?"

"It could make a lot of difference to you," he said mildly. "You could end up dead."

She was intensely scornful. "Why?"

"Have you made a will, Dr. Blakeney?"

"Yes."

"In favour of your husband?"

She nodded.

"So, if you die tomorrow, he gets everything, including, presumably, what Mrs. Gillespie has left you."

She started the car. "Are you suggesting Jack is planning to murder me?"

"Not necessarily." He looked thoughtful. "I'm rather more interested in the fact that he is-potentially-a very eligible husband. Assuming, of course, you die before you can change your will. It's worth considering, don't you think?"

Sarah glared at him through the window. "And you say Mathilda was evil-minded?" Furiously, she ground into gear. "Compared with you she was a novice. Juliet to your lago. And if you don't understand the analogy, then I suggest you bone up on some Shakespeare." She released the clutch with a jerk and showered his legs with gravel as she drove away.

"Are you busy, Mr. Blakeney, or can you spare me a few minutes?" Cooper propped himself against the door-jamb of the summer-house and lit a cigarette.

Jack eyed him for a moment, then went back to his painting. "If I said I was busy would you go away?"

"No."

With a shrug, Jack clamped the brush between his teeth and took a coarser one from the jar on the easel, using it to create texture in the soft paint he had just applied. Cooper smoked in silence, watching him. "Okay," said Jack at last, flipping the brushes into turpentine and swinging round to face the Sergeant. "What's up?"

"Who was lago?"

Jack grinned. "You didn't come here to ask me that."

"You're quite right, but I'd still like to know."

"He's a character from
Othello
. A Machiavelli who manipulated people's emotions in order to destroy them."

"Was Othello the black bloke?"

Jack nodded. "lago drove him into such a frenzy of jealousy that Othello murdered his wife Desdemona and then killed himself when he learnt that everything lago had said about her was a lie. It's a story of obsessive passion and trusts betrayed. You should read it."

"Maybe I will. What did lago do to make Othello jealous?"

"He exploited Othello's emotional insecurity by telling him Desdemona was having an affair with a younger, more attractive man. Othello believed him because it was what he was most afraid of." He stretched his long legs in front of him. "Before Othello fell on his sword he described himself as 'one that lov'd not wisely but too well.' It gets misused these days by people who know the quote but don't know the story. They interpret 'lov'd not wisely' as referring to a poor choice of companion, but Othello was actually acknowledging his own foolishness in not trusting the woman he adored. He just couldn't believe the adoration was mutual."

Cooper ground his cigarette under the heel of his shoe. "Topical stuff then," he murmured, glancing towards the sleeping-bag. "Your wife's not loving too wisely at the moment, but then you're hardly encouraging her to do anything else. You're being a little cruel, aren't you, sir?"

Jack's liking for the man grew. "Not half as cruel as I ought to be. Why did you want to know about lago?"

"Your wife mentioned him, said I was lago to Mrs. Gillespie's Juliet." He smiled his amiable smile. "Mind, I'd just suggested that if she were to die an untimely death you would make an eligible catch for someone else." He took out another cigarette, examined it then put it back again. "But I don't see Mrs. Gillespie as Juliet. King Lear, perhaps, assuming I'm right and King Lear was the one whose daughter turned on him."

"Daughters," Jack corrected him. "There were two of them, or two who turned on him, at least. The third tried to save him." He rubbed his unshaven jaw. "So you've got your knife into Joanna, have you? Assuming I've followed your reasoning correctly, then Joanna killed her mother to inherit the funds, found to her horror that Mathilda had changed her will in the meantime, so immediately made eyes at me to get me away from Sarah with a view to topping Sarah at the first opportune moment and then hitching herself to me." He chuckled. "Or perhaps you think we're in it together. That's one hell of a conspiracy theory."

"Stranger things have happened, sir."

He eased his stiff shoulders. "On the whole I prefer Joanna's interpretation. It's more rational."

"She's accusing your wife."

"I know. It's a neat little package, too. The only flaw in it is that Sarah would never have done it, but I can't blame Joanna for getting that wrong. She can't see past her own jealousy."

Cooper frowned. "Jealousy over you?"

"God no." Jack gave a rumble of laughter. "She doesn't even like me very much. She thinks I'm a homosexual because she can't account for my irreverence in any other way." His eyes gleamed at Cooper's expression, but he didn't elaborate. "Jealousy over her mother, of course. She was quite happy loathing and being loathed by Mathilda until she discovered she had a rival. Jealousy has far more to do with ownership than it has with love."

"Are you saying she knew about your wife's relationship with her mother before her mother died?"

"No. If she had, she would probably have done something about it." He scraped his stubble again, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. "But it's too late now, and that can only make the jealousy worse. She'll start to forget her mother's faults, fantasize about the relationship she imagines Sarah had with Mathilda and torment herself over her own missed opportunities. Let's face it, we all want to believe that our mothers love us. It's supposed to be the one relationship we can depend on."

Cooper lit another cigarette and stared thoughtfully at the glowing tip. "You say Mrs. Lascelles is jealous of your wife's intimacy with Mrs. Gillespie. Why isn't she jealous of her daughter? According to the young lady herself she got on with her grandmother like a house on fire."

"Do you believe her?"

"There's no evidence to the contrary. The housemistress at her boarding school says Mrs. Gillespie wrote regularly and always seemed very affectionate whenever she went there. Far more affectionate and interested, apparently, than Mrs. Lascelles who puts in infrequent appearances and shows little or no interest in how her daughter's doing."

"All that says to me is that Mathilda was a magnificent hypocrite. You can't ignore her snobbery, you know, not without distorting the picture. Southcliffe is an expensive girls' boarding school. Mathilda would never have let the side down in a place like that. She always talked about 'people of her sort' and regretted the lack of them in Fontwell."

The Sergeant shook his head in disbelief. "That doesn't square with what you told me before. You called her one of life's great individuals. Now you're saying she was pandering to the upper classes in order to make herself socially acceptable."

"Hardly. She was a Cavendish and inordinately proud of the fact. They were bigwigs round here for years. Her father, Sir William Cavendish, bought his knighthood by doing a stint as the local MP. She was already socially acceptable, as you put it, and didn't need to pander to anyone." He frowned in recollection. "No, what made her extraordinary, despite all the trappings of class and respectability which she played up to and tossed about in public to keep the proles in their place, was that privately she seethed with contradictions. Perhaps her uncle's sexual abuse had something to do with it, but I think the truth is she was born into the wrong generation and lived the wrong life. She had the intellectual capacity to do anything she wanted, but her social conditioning was such that she allowed herself to be confined in the one role she wasn't suited for, namely marriage and motherhood. It's tragic really. She spent most of her life at war with herself and crippled her daughter and granddaughter in the process. She couldn't bear to see their rebellions succeed where hers hadn't."

"Did she tell you all this?"

"Not in so many words. I gleaned it from things she said and then put it into the portrait. But it's all true. She wanted a complete explanation of that painting, down to the last colour nuance and the last brush stroke, so"-he shrugged-"I gave her one, much along the lines of what I've just told you, and at the end she said there was only one thing wrong, and it was wrong because it was missing. But she wouldn't tell me what it was." He paused in reflection. "Presumably it had something to do with her uncle's abuse of her. I didn't know about that. I only knew of her father's abuse with the scold's bridle."

But Cooper was more interested in something he had said before. "You can't call Mrs. Lascelle's rebellion a success. She lumbered herself with a worthless heroin addict who then died and left her penniless." His gaze lingered on the portrait.

Jack's dark face split into another grin. "You've led a very sheltered life if you think rebellion is about achieving happiness. It's about anger and resistance and inflicting maximum damage on a hated authority." He lifted a sardonic eyebrow. "On that basis, I'd say Joanna scored a spectacular success. If you're calling her husband worthless now, what on earth do you imagine Mathilda's peers said about him at the time? Don't forget she was a very proud woman."

Cooper drew heavily on his cigarette and looked up towards the house. "Your wife's just been to see Mrs. Lascelles. Did you know?"

Jack shook his head.

"I met her as she was leaving. She told me she's convinced Mrs. Lascelles didn't kill her mother. Would you agree with that?"

"Probably."

"Yet you just told me that Mrs. Lascelles's rebellion was to inflict maximum damage on the object of her hatred. Isn't death the ultimate damage?"

"I was talking about twenty-odd years ago. You're talking about now. Rebellion belongs to the young, Sergeant, not to the middle-aged. It's the middle-aged who're rebelled against because they're the ones who compromise their principles."