The Skull Beneath the Skin (31 page)

Grogan pulled one of the messages from his file and pushed it over the desk.

“That’s a sample. Recognize it?”

“No, sir. It’s a quotation, isn’t it? Is it Shakespeare?”

“You tell me, lad. You’re the one at Melhurst. But you’ve never seen one of these before?”

“No, never.”

“Right then. Suppose you tell us exactly what you did between one o’clock today and two-forty-five.”

Lessing looked down at his hands, seemed to become aware of his nervous methodical stretching, and grasped both sides of his chair as if to prevent himself from springing to his feet. But he gave his account lucidly and with growing confidence. He had decided to swim before the play and had gone straight to his room after lunch where he had put on his swimming-trunks under his jeans and shirt. He had taken his jersey and towel and made his way across the lawn to the shore. He had walked on the beach for about an hour because Clarissa had warned him not to swim too soon after his meal. He had then returned to the small cove just beyond the terrace and had entered the water at about two o’clock or shortly after, leaving his clothes, towel and wrist-watch on the shore. He had seen no one during either his walk or his swim, but Sir George had told him that he had watched him coming ashore through his binoculars when he himself was returning to the castle after his bird-watching. Here he again glanced round at his stepfather as if inviting corroboration and again got no response.

Grogan said: “So Sir George Ralston has told us. And what then?”

“Well, nothing really, sir. I was on my way back to the castle when Mr. Gorringe saw me and came to meet me. He told me about Clarissa.”

The last few words were almost a whisper. Grogan bent his ruddy head forward and asked softly: “And what exactly did he tell you?”

“That she was dead, sir. Murdered.”

“And did he explain how?”

Again the whisper.

“No, sir.”

“But you asked, presumably? You betrayed some natural curiosity?”

“I asked him what had happened, how she had died. He said that no one could be sure until after the post-mortem.”

“He’s right. There’s nothing you need to know except the fact that she is dead, and that it must have been homicide. And now, Mr. Lessing, what can you tell us about the arm of the dead princess?”

Buckley thought that Sir George gave an exclamation of protest; but he still didn’t interrupt. The boy looked from face to face as if the police had gone mad. No one spoke. Then he said: “You mean, in the church? We visited the crypt to see the skulls this morning. But Mr. Gorringe didn’t say anything about a dead princess.”

“It wasn’t in the church.”

“You mean, it’s a mummified arm? I don’t understand.”

“It’s a marble hand, a limb to be accurate. A baby’s limb. Someone has taken it from Mr. Gorringe’s display case, the one outside this door, and we’d rather like to know who and when.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen it, sir. I’m sorry.”

Grogan had completed his kitchen garden and was separating it from the lawn by a trellis and archway. He looked up at Lessing and said: “My officers and I will be back here tomorrow. We’ll probably be around for a day or two. If there’s anything that occurs to you, anything that you remember which is the least unusual or likely to help, however small and unimportant it seems, I want you to get in touch. Understand?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Grogan nodded and the boy got to his feet, glanced for the last time at the still back of Sir George and went out. Buckley almost expected him to turn at the door and ask whether he’d got the job.

Sir George turned at last: “He’s due back at school on Monday morning before midday. Special leave. I take it he can go.”

Grogan said: “It would be helpful to us, sir, if he could stay until Tuesday morning. It’s just a question of convenience. If anything does occur to him or to us it would be helpful to be able to clear it up quickly. But obviously he can go early on Monday if you think it important.”

Sir George hesitated.

“Don’t suppose a day will make much odds. Better for him, though, to be away from here, back at work. I’ll get in touch with the school tomorrow or Monday. He’ll need leave later for the funeral, but I suppose it’s too early yet to think about that.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

Sir George was almost at the door when Grogan called softly: “There’s one other thing, sir, which I have to ask. Your relationship with your wife. Would you say that yours was a happy marriage?”

The slim upright figure paused for a second, hand on the doorknob. Then Sir George turned to face them. His face was twitching violently, like that of a man afflicted with a nervous spasm. Then he controlled himself.

“I find that question offensive, Chief Inspector.”

Grogan’s voice was still gentle, dangerously gentle. “In a murder investigation, we sometimes have to ask questions which people find offensive.”

“It’s meaningless unless you ask both parties. Too late
for that now. Not sure that my wife had the capacity for happiness.”

“And you, sir?”

He answered with great simplicity.

“I loved her.”

After he had gone, Grogan said with sudden vehemence: “Let’s pack up and get out of this place. It’s getting claustrophobic. What time is the launch expected with Roper and Badgett?”

Buckley looked at his watch.

“It should be here within fifteen minutes.”

Detective Constables Roper and Badgett were to be on duty in the business room, but for one night only. Their presence was almost a formality. No one at the castle had asked for police protection, nor did Grogan believe that they were in need of it. He had few enough officers without wasting manpower. The whole of the island including the secret passage to the Devil’s Kettle had been searched; if anyone still believed in the theory of the casual intruder it was apparent that he wasn’t now on Courcy. Tomorrow the police inquiries on the island would be complete and the investigation moved to an incident room at the Speymouth station. It was likely, thought Buckley, to be a tedious and less than comfortable vigil for Roper and Badgett. Ambrose Gorringe had offered a bedroom and had said that the two officers should ring for Munter if
there was anything they needed. But Grogan’s instructions had been clear.

“You’ll bring your own flasks and sandwiches, lads, and ring for no one. You’ll be beholden to Mr. Gorringe for nothing but his light and heating and the water that flushes his bog.”

He pulled the bellcord. It seemed to Buckley that Munter took his time in coming. Grogan said: “Will you tell Mr. Gorringe that we’re now leaving.”

“Yes, sir. The police launch isn’t yet sighted, sir.”

“I’m aware of that. We shall wait for it on the quay.”

When the man had gone, he said irritably: “What does he think we propose to do? Walk on water?”

Ambrose Gorringe arrived within minutes to see them off his premises with formal courtesy. They might, thought Buckley, have been a couple of dinner guests, if not particularly welcome or agreeable ones. He said nothing about the event that had brought them to Courcy and made no inquiries about the progress of the investigation. Clarissa Lisle’s murder might have been an embarrassing mishap in an otherwise not unsuccessful day.

It was good to be in the air again. The night was extraordinarily balmy for mid-September and there still seemed to rise from the stones of the terrace a genial warmth like the last breath of a summer day. Briefcases in hand, they strolled together along the eastern arm of the quay. Turning to retrace their steps, they could see in the distance a stream of light from the dining-room windows and dark figures moving to and fro on the terrace, joining then parting, pausing and then walking on as if taking part in a stately pavane. It looked to Buckley as if they had plates in their hands. Probably making do with the cold leftover party food he thought, and some irrelevant quotation about baked funeral meats came into
mind. He didn’t blame them for not wanting to sit together round a table, faced with one empty chair.

He and Grogan settled themselves under the canopy of the bandstand to wait for the first lights of the launch. The peace of the night was seductive. Here on the southern shore where the mainland couldn’t be seen it was easy to imagine that the island was totally isolated in a waste of sea, that they were waiting and watching for the masts of some overdue relief ship, and that the figures gliding on the terrace were the ghosts of long-dead settlers, that the castle itself was a shell, hall and library and drawing room open to the sky, the great staircase rising into nothingness, ferns and weeds pushing their way between the broken tiles. He wasn’t normally imaginative, but now he deliberately indulged his tiredness, letting his mind elaborate the fantasy while he sat gently massaging his right wrist.

Grogan’s voice broke harshly into the reverie. Neither the peace nor the beauty had touched him. His thoughts were still on the case. Buckley told himself that he should have known there would be no respite. He remembered the overheard comment of a detective inspector: “Red Rufus treats a murder investigation like a love affair. Gets obsessed with his suspects. Moves into their lives. Lives and breathes with the case, edgy and restless and frustrated, until it climaxes at the arrest.” Buckley wondered if that was one of the reasons for his failed marriage. It must be disconcerting to live with a man who, for most of the night as well as the day, simply wasn’t there. When Grogan spoke his voice was as vigorous as if the inquiry had just begun.

“Miss Roma Lisle, cousin of the deceased, aged forty-five, shopkeeper, ex-schoolmistress, unmarried. What struck you most about the lady, Sergeant?”

Buckley dragged his mind back to the interview with Roma Lisle.

“That she was frightened, sir.”

“Frightened, defensive, embarrassed and unconvincing. Consider her story. She admits that the woodcut is hers and says that she brought it to Courcy because she thought that Ambrose Gorringe would be interested in it and would be able to advise her about its age and value. As he doesn’t claim to be an authority on early seventeenth-century manuscripts, the hope was optimistic. Still, we needn’t read too much into that. She found the thing, she thought it was interesting and she brought it with her. And now for today. She tells us that she left her cousin’s bedroom at about five minutes past one, went straight to the library and stayed there until half past two when she went up to her room. It’s on the floor immediately above the gallery and she didn’t have to pass Miss Lisle’s room to get to it. She saw and heard no one. During the hour and twenty minutes when she was in the library she was alone. Miss Gray briefly put her head round the door at about twenty past one but didn’t stay. Miss Lisle remained in the library expecting a private business call from her partner which didn’t, in fact, come through. She tells us that she also wrote a letter. Asked to produce it as a small indication of verisimilitude—not that it greatly matters—she blushes with embarrassment and says that she decided not to send it after all and tore it up. When we gently point out that there are no fragments in the library wastepaper basket she becomes even redder and confides that she took the scraps with her when she went to her room and flushed them down the W.C. All very curious. But consider something even odder. She was one of the last people to see her cousin alive; not the last, but one of the last. And she tells us that she followed Miss Lisle up to her room because she
wanted to wish her good luck in the play. All very proper and cousinly. But when we point out that she’d left it rather late to get changed, she tells us that she’d decided to give the performance a miss. Would you care to propound a theory which would explain these intriguing eccentricities of behaviour?”

“She was expecting a telephone call from her lover, sir, not necessarily her partner. When it didn’t come, she decided to write to him. Then she thought better of it and tore up the letter. She retrieved the fragments from the wastepaper basket because she didn’t want us piecing them together and reading her private correspondence, however innocuous.”

“Ingenious, Sergeant. But you see where it leaves us. At the time when, according to her, she took those scraps upstairs she couldn’t have known that the police would he here to poke their inquisitive noses into anyone’s private correspondence, not unless she also knew by then that her cousin was dead.”

“And that last visit to Miss Lisle?”

Grogan said: “My guess is that it was less friendly than she makes out.”

“But why tell us about the letter, sir? She didn’t have to. Why not just say that she spent the time in the library, reading?”

“Because she’s a woman who normally tells the truth. She made no pretence, for example, of liking her cousin or being particularly grieved by her death. If she is going to lie to the police, she prefers to lie as little as possible. That way she has fewer untruths to remember and is able to convince herself that, essentially, she isn’t really lying at all. It’s a sound enough principle as far as it goes. But we shouldn’t read too much into that torn-up letter. She may merely have wanted to save the servants trouble, or have been afraid that they might have been curious enough to piece it together. And if Miss Roma Lisle’s story is less than convincing, she’s not the
only one. Consider the curious reticence of the lady’s maid. It sounds like the chapter heading for one of those snobbish thirties thrillers.”

Buckley thought back over the interview with Rose Tolgarth. Before she had come in, Grogan had said to him: “You question the lady, Sergeant. She may prefer youth to experience. Give her a treat.”

Surprised, Buckley had asked: “At the desk, sir?”

“That would seem the obvious place, unless you intend to prowl round her like a predator.”

Grogan himself had greeted her and invited her to sit with more courtesy than he had shown Cordelia Gray or Roma Lisle. If she were surprised to find herself facing the younger of the two officers she hadn’t shown it. But then, she hadn’t shown anything. She had gazed at him with her remarkable eyes, with their smudgy black irises, as if she were looking into … what, he wondered? Not his soul, since he didn’t believe that he had one, but certainly into some part of his mind which wasn’t intended to be public property. All his questions had been answered politely but with the minimum of words. She had admitted that she knew about the threatening messages but refused to speculate about who might have sent them. That job, she implied, was the responsibility of the police. It was she who had made and taken up Miss Lisle’s tea before she settled for her usual pre-performance rest. The routine was always the same. Miss Lisle drank Lapsang Souchong tea with no milk or sugar but with two thick slices of lemon put into the teapot before the boiling water was poured in. She had made the tea in the usual way in Mr. Munter’s pantry and Mrs. Chambers and Debbie had been with her at the time. She had taken up the tray immediately and at no time had the teapot been out of her sight. Sir George had been in the
bedroom with his wife. She had placed the tea tray on the bedside cabinet and had then gone into the bathroom where there was a certain amount of tidying to be done before Miss Lisle took her bath. She had returned to the bedroom to help her mistress undress and had found Miss Gray there. After Miss Gray had returned to her own room, Sir George had left his wife and she herself had followed almost immediately afterwards. She had spent the afternoon preparing the ladies’ dressing room backstage and helping Mrs. Munter with the arrangements for the party. At two-forty-five she had become concerned in case Miss Gray had forgotten to call Miss Lisle and had gone herself. She had met Sir George, Mr. Gorringe and Miss Gray outside the bedroom and had then learned of Miss Lisle’s death.