The Skull Beneath the Skin (27 page)

“No, never.”

“And she had no enemies as far as you know.”

“None that she told me of.”

“And you yourself can throw no light on why and by whom she was killed?”

“No.”

It must, she thought, feel like this to be in the witness box, the careful questions, the even more careful answers, the longing to be released.

He said: “Thank you, Miss Gray. You’ve been helpful. Not, perhaps, as helpful as I’d hoped. But helpful. And it’s early days yet. We shall be talking again.”

After Cordelia had left, Grogan relaxed in his chair:

“Well, what do you think of her?”

Buckley hesitated, uncertain whether his chief wanted an assessment of the last interviewee as a woman or as a suspect. He said cautiously: “She’s attractive. Like a cat.” Since this evoked no immediate response he added: “Self-contained and dignified.”

He was rather pleased with the description. It had, he thought, a certain cleverness while committing him to nothing. Grogan began doodling on the blank sheet in front of him, a complicated mathematical design of triangles, squares and precisely interlacing circles spread over the page and reminding Buckley of the more obscure of his school geometry problems. He found it difficult not to fix his eyes obsessively on isosceles triangles and bisecting arcs. He said: “Do you think she did it, sir?”

Grogan began filling in his design.

“If she did, it was during those fifty-odd minutes when she claims she was taking the sun on the bottom step of the
terrace, conveniently out of sight and sound. She had time and opportunity. We’ve only her word that she locked her bedroom door or that Miss Lisle actually locked hers. And even if both doors and the communicating one were locked, Gray is probably the only person Lisle would have let in. She knew where the marble was kept. She was up and about early this morning when Gorringe first discovered that it was missing. She has a locked cabinet in her room where she could have kept it safely hidden. And we know that the final message, like the one typed on the back of the woodcut, was typed on Gorringe’s machine. Gray can type and she had access to the business room where it’s kept. She’s intelligent, and she can keep her head even when I’m trying to needle her into losing it. If she did have a hand in it, my guess is that it was as Ralston’s accomplice. His explanation of why she was called in sounded contrived. Did you notice how she and Ralston gave almost identical accounts of his visit to Kingly Street, what he said, what she said? It was so neat it could have been rehearsed. It probably was.”

But Buckley could think of an objection and he voiced it.

“Sir George was a soldier. He’s used to getting his facts right. And she has a good memory, particularly for important events. And that visit was important. He probably paid well, and it could have led to other jobs. The fact that they gave the same account, got the details right, speaks as much for innocence as guilt.”

“According to both of them, that’s the first time they met. If they are conspirators, they must have got together before then. Whatever there is between them, it shouldn’t be too difficult to grub it out.”

“They’re an unlikely couple. I mean, it’s difficult to see what they have in common.”

“Politics rather than bed I imagine. Although, when it comes to sex, nothing is too bizarre to be ruled out. Police work teaches you that if nothing else. She could have taken a fancy to being Lady Ralston. There must be easier ways of getting money than running a detective agency. And Ralston will have money, remember. His wife’s, to be specific. And I don’t suppose that will come before it’s needed. He must be spending a packet on that organization of his—the U.B.P. or whatever they call it. And that’s an odd business if you like. I suppose you can argue a case for an amateur force trained and ready to support the civil power in an emergency, but isn’t that what General Walker has in hand? So what exactly do George Ralston and his geriatric conspirators think they’re up to?”

As Buckley didn’t know the answer and had, in fact, hardly heard of the Union of British Patriots, he wisely kept silent. Then he said: “Did you believe Gray when she said that Sir George thought that she was confessing?”

“What Miss Gray thought she saw in Sir George’s face isn’t evidence. And no doubt he did look amazed if he thought he heard her confessing to a murder he’d done himself.”

Buckley thought about the girl who had just left them; saw again that gentle, uplifted face, the immense and resolute eyes, the delicate hands folded like a child’s in her lap. She was keeping something back, of course; but didn’t they all? That didn’t make her a murderess. And the idea of her and Ralston together was ludicrous and disgusting. Surely the Chief hadn’t yet reached the age when he needed to start believing that pathetic old lie with which the middle-aged and the elderly deceived themselves, that the young find them physically attractive? What they can do, the old goats, he told himself, is to buy youth and sex with money and power and prestige. But he didn’t believe that Sir George Ralston was in that market or
that Cordelia Gray could be bought. He said stolidly: “I can’t see Miss Gray as a murderess.”

“It takes an effort of the imagination I grant you. But that’s probably what Mr. Blandy thought of Miss Blandy. Or L’Angelier of Miss Madeleine Smith, come to that, before she so unkindly handed him his cocoa and arsenic through the basement railings.”

“Wasn’t there a verdict of not proven in that case, sir?”

“A fainthearted Glasgow jury who should have known better and probably did. But we’re theorizing in advance of facts. We need the p.m. result and we need to know what, if anything, was in that tea. Doc Ellis-Jones will probably get her on the slab tomorrow, Sunday or no Sunday. Once he’s got his hands on the body he’s quick enough at his butchering, I’ll say that for him.”

“And the lab, sir. How long are they likely to take?”

“God knows. It’s not as if we’ve any idea what they’re supposed to be looking for. There isn’t an unlimited number of drugs which can put you out, or kill you, within a short time and with no obvious signs on the body. But there are enough to keep them busy for the next few days if this is the only murder on the stocks. We may get a clue from the p.m. of course. Meanwhile we get on with the London end. How well did any of these people know each other before they arrived on the island this weekend? What, if anything, do the Met know about Cordelia Gray and her agency? What did Simon Lessing really feel about his benefactress and how, exactly, did his father die? Is Miss Tolgarth quite the devoted dressercum-family retainer that we’re supposed to believe? What sort of money is Sir George spending on his toy soldiers? How much exactly is Roma Lisle going to get under the will and how badly does she need it? And that’s just for starters.”

And none of it, thought Buckley, was the kind of information people came running to give you with happy smiles. It meant talking to bank managers, lawyers, friends, acquaintances and colleagues of the suspects, most of whom would know to a word just how far they needed to go. In theory everyone wanted murderers caught, just as in theory they all approved of hostels for the mentally ill in the community, provided they weren’t built at the bottom of their garden. It would be simpler for the police as well as reassuring to the house party at the castle if they did discover those convenient young burglars hiding terrified somewhere on the island. But he didn’t believe that they existed and nor, he suspected, did anyone else. And it would be a tamely disappointing ending to the case. What glory would there be in pulling in a couple of terrified local villains who’d killed on impulse and wouldn’t have the nous even to keep their mouths shut until they got a brief. There was an intelligence at work here. The case was exactly the kind of challenge he enjoyed and which police work so seldom provided.

“There are facts. There are suppositions. There are beliefs. Learn to keep them separate, Sergeant. All men die: fact. Death may not be the end: supposition. There’s pie in the sky when you die: belief. Lisle was murdered: fact. She received anonymous communications: fact. Other people were there when they arrived. They threatened her life: supposition. They were a bloody sight more likely to put her off her stroke as an actress. They terrified her: supposition. That’s what her husband tells us and what she told Miss Gray. But she was an actress, remember. The thing about actresses is that they act. Suppose she and her husband concocted the whole scheme, threatening messages, apparent terror and distress, breakdown in the middle of a play, calling in a private eye, the lot.”

“I don’t see why, sir.”

“Nor do I, yet. Would any actress willingly humiliate herself on stage? God knows. Actors are an alien breed to me.”

“If she knew that she was finished as an actress, could she and her husband have concocted the messages to provide a public excuse for failure?”

“Over-ingenious and unnecessary. Why not just pretend that her health has failed? And she didn’t make the messages public. On the contrary, she seems to have taken care to prevent the news getting out. Would any actress wish her public to know that someone hated her that much? Don’t they crave to be loved by all the world? No, I was thinking of something rather more subtle. Ralston somehow persuades her into pretending that her life is threatened, and then kills her, having, as it were, seduced her into conniving at her own murder. My God, that would be neat. Too neat, perhaps.”

“But why take the risk of calling in Miss Gray?”

“What risk? She could hardly discover that the letters were faked, not in one short weekend. A very short weekend as far as Lisle was concerned. Employing Gray gave the final artistic touch to the whole plan.”

“I still think he’d have been taking a risk.”

“That’s because we’ve seen the girl. She’s intelligent and she knows her job. But Ralston wasn’t to know that. Who was she, after all? The proprietor of a one-woman detective agency, apparently. After Lisle first met her at the house of that friend of hers—Mrs. Fortescue wasn’t it?—she probably suggested to Ralston that they call her in. That’s why she never bothered to interview the girl herself. Why trouble when the whole thing was a ploy?”

“It’s ingenious, sir, but it still begs the question why Lisle should have connived in it all. I mean, what possible reason
could Ralston give to persuade her to pretend that her life was threatened?”

“What, indeed, Sergeant? Like Miss Gray, I’m in danger of being too clever for my own good. But one thing I’m sure of. The murderer spent the day under this roof. And I’ve a choice bunch of suspects. Sir George Ralston, baronet, something of a war hero and darling of the geriatric Right. A distinguished theatre critic, one even I have actually heard of. Seriously ill too, by the look of him, which means that he’ll probably die on me under the gentlest interrogation. Interrogation. Odd how one dislikes that word. Too many echoes of the Gestapo and K.G.B., I suppose. A best-selling novelist who not only owns the island but happens to be friendly with the Cottringhams who have the ear of the Lord Lieutenant, the Chief Constable, the M.P. and anyone else who matters in the County. A respectable bookseller ex-schoolteacher who’s probably a member of the civil rights and women’s lib lobbies and who will protest to her M.P. about police harassment if I raise my voice to her. And a school kid—and sensitive with it. I suppose I should be grateful that he’s not a juvenile.”

“And a butler, sir.”

“Thank you for reminding me, Sergeant. We mustn’t forget the butler. I regard the butler as a gratuitous insult on the part of fate. So let’s give the gentry in the library a respite and hear what Munter has to tell us.”

Buckley noted with irritation that Munter, invited by Grogan to sit, managed in the mere act of lowering his buttocks on to the chair to suggest both that it was unseemly for him to seat himself in the business room and that Grogan had committed a social solecism in inviting him to do so. He couldn’t remember ever having seen the man in Speymouth; his was certainly not an appearance one was likely to forget. Watching Munter’s strong and lugubrious face on which the unease proper to his present situation was noticeably absent he found himself prepared to disbelieve everything he heard. It seemed to him suspicious that a man should want to make himself more grotesque than nature had intended and if this was Munter’s way of cocking a snook at the world he had better not try it on with the police.

Basically conforming and ambitious, Buckley had no resentment of those wealthier than himself; he had every intention of eventually joining them. But he despised and distrusted those who chose to earn their living by pandering to the rich and suspected that Grogan shared this prejudice. He
watched them both with a wary and critical eye and wished that he was taking a more active part in the interrogation. Never had his chief’s insistence that he sit silent unless invited to speak, watch carefully and take unobtrusive shorthand notes seemed more restrictive and demeaning. Morbidly sensitive to any nuance of condescension he felt that the glance Munter casually gave him conveyed a slight surprise that he should have been allowed into the house.

Grogan, seated at the desk, leaned back in his chair so strongly that its back creaked, twirled round to face Munter and splayed his legs wide as if to assert his right to feel perfectly at home. He said: “Suppose you begin by telling us who you are, where you came from and what precisely is your job here.”

“My duties, sir, have never been precisely defined. This is not altogether an orthodox household. But I am in charge of all the domestic arrangements and supervise the two other members of staff, my wife and Oldfield, who is the gardener, handyman and boatman. Any additional help necessary when Mr. Gorringe is entertaining or has house guests is obtained on a temporary basis from the mainland. I look after the silver and the wine and wait at table. The cooking is generally shared. My wife is the pastry cook and Mr. Ambrose himself occasionally cooks a meal. He is fond of preparing savouries.”

“Very tasty, I’m sure. And how long have you been part of this unorthodox household?”