The Skull Beneath the Skin (35 page)

They rejoined Sir George. He had already helped himself to sole and was eating with a stolid determination but with no evident enjoyment. Cordelia pondered on Munter. She thought it unlikely that he had guessed her secret or that he would have altered his plans if he had. It was more possible that with the castle full of guests he had felt the time unpropitious for the reception of his loot; too many people about, too much extra work, the possibility that he would find it difficult to slip away unnoticed. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to get a message to his confederates or the message had gone astray. Or had there been an unexpected arrival on the island, someone he feared particularly, or someone who might have known of the Devil’s Kettle, might even have visited it? There was only one person who fitted that bill: Sir George.

The meal seemed endless. Cordelia sensed that they all wished it over but that no one wanted to appear to hurry or to be the first to leave. Perhaps that was why they appeared to be eating with deliberate slowness. She wondered whether it was the absence of staff that made the occasion so portentous; they might be the remnants of some deserted and soon to be beleaguered garrison stoically eating their last meal with traditional ceremony, ears tuned for the first distant shouts of the barbarians. They ate and drank but were silent. The six candles in their branched entwined stems seemed to burn less brightly than on their first evening so that their features, half shadowed, were sharpened into caricatures of their daytime selves. Pale, etiolated hands reached out to the fruit bowl, to furred and flushed peaches, the curved shininess of bananas, apples burnished so that they looked as artificial as Ambrose’s candlelit skin.

The French windows had been shut against the chill of the autumn night and a thin wood fire crackled in the immense grate. But surely those fitfully leaping flames couldn’t account for the oppressive heat of the room? It seemed to Cordelia that it was getting hotter by the minute, that the heat of the day had been trapped and thickened, making it difficult to breathe, intensifying the smell of the food so that she felt faintly nauseous. And in her imagination the room itself changed; the Orpens splurged and spread into amorphous colours so that the walls appeared to be hung with crude tapestries and the elegantly stuccoed roof raised smoked hammer beams to a black infinity, open to an everlastingly starless sky. She shivered despite the heat and reached for her wine glass as if the physical feel of cool glass could strengthen her hold on reality. Perhaps only now were the full horror of Clarissa’s death and the strain of the police interrogation taking their physical toll.

One candle wavered as if blown by an invisible breath, flickered, and went out. Simon gave a gasp, then a long terrified moan. Hands, half lifted to mouths, became motionless. They turned in a single movement and stared at the window. Silhouetted against the moonlight reared an immense form, its black arms flailing, hurling itself against the window. Its anger came to them faintly, something between a wail and a bellow. As they gazed in fascinated horror it suddenly ceased its frantic beating and was for a moment still, quietly looking in at their faces. The gaping mouth, raw as a wound, seemed to suck at the window. Two gigantic palms, fingers splayed, imprinted themselves on the glass. The pressed, distorted features dissolved against the window into a mess of slowly draining flesh. Then the creature gathered its strength and heaved. The doors gave, and Munter, wild-eyed, almost fell into the room. The night air rushed cool and sweet over their faces and the distant
sighing of the waves became a surging tide of sound as if the swaying figure had been borne in on them by the force of a violent storm, bringing the sea with him.

No one spoke. Ambrose got to his feet and moved forward. Munter brushed him aside and shambled up to Sir George until their faces almost touched. Sir George stayed in his seat. Not a muscle moved. Then Munter spoke, throwing back his head and almost howling the words: “Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!”

Cordelia wondered when Sir George would move, whether he would wait until Munter’s fingers were actually at his throat. But Ambrose had moved behind and had seized the shuddering arms. At first the contact seemed to calm Munter. Then he gave a violent wrench. Ambrose said breathlessly: “Could one of you help?”

Ivo had begun peeling a peach. He seemed totally unconcerned. He said: “I’d be no use in this particular emergency, I’m afraid.”

Simon got up and grasped the man’s other arm. At his touch Munter’s belligerency left him. His knees buckled and Ambrose and Simon moved closer, supporting his sagging weight between them. He tried to focus his eyes on the boy, then slurred out a few words, guttural, unintelligible, sounding hardly English. But his final words were clear enough.

“Poor sod. God, but she was a bitch that one.”

No one else spoke. Together Ambrose and Simon urged him to the door. He gave no further trouble but went as obediently as a disciplined child.

After they had left, the two men and Cordelia sat in silence for a minute. Then Sir George got up and closed the French windows. The noise of the sea became muted and the wildly flickering candles steadied and burned with a clear flame.
Returning to the table he selected an apple and said: “Extraordinary fellow! I was at Sandhurst with a chap who drank like that. Sober for months at a time, then paralytic for a week. Torpedoed in the Med in the winter of ’42. Foul weather. Picked up from a raft three days later. Only one of the party to survive. He said that it was because he was pickled in whisky. D’you suppose Gorringe lets Munter have the key to his cellar?”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Ivo sounded amused.

Sir George said: “Extraordinary arrangement, a butler who can’t be trusted with the keys. Still, I suppose he has other uses. Devoted to Gorringe obviously.”

Ivo asked: “What happened to him, your friend I mean?”

“Fell in his own swimming pool and drowned. The shallow end. Drunk at the time, of course.”

It seemed a long time before Ambrose and Simon reappeared. Cordelia was struck with the boy’s pallor. Surely coping with a drunken man couldn’t have been so horrifying an experience. Ambrose said: “We’ve put him to bed. Let’s hope he stays there. I must apologize for the performance. I’ve never known Munter to behave before in such a spectacular way. Will someone please pass the fruit bowl?”

After dinner they gathered in the drawing room. Mrs. Munter had not appeared and they poured their own coffee from the glass percolator on the sideboard. Ambrose opened the French windows and one by one, as if drawn by the sea, they walked out on the terrace. The moon was full, silvering a wide swath to the horizon, and a few high stars pinpricked the blue-black of the night sky. The tide was running strongly. They could hear it slapping against the stones of the quay and the distant whisper of the spent waves hissing on the shingle beach. The only other sound was the muted footfalls of their walking feet. Here in this peace, thought Cordelia, it
would be easy to believe that nothing mattered, not death, nor life, nor human violence, nor any pain. The mental picture of that splodge of battered flesh and congealed blood which had been Clarissa’s face, scored as she thought forever on her mind, became unreal, something she had imagined in a different dimension of time. The disorientation was so strong that she had to fight against it, to tell herself why she was here and what it was she had to do. She came out of her trance to hear Ambrose’s voice.

He was speaking to Simon. “You may as well play if you want to, I don’t suppose a half hour of music would offend anyone’s susceptibilities. There must be something appropriate between a music-hall medley and the ‘Dead March’ from
Saul.”

Without replying, Simon went over to the piano. Cordelia followed him into the drawing room and watched while he sat, head bowed, silently contemplating the keys. Then, suddenly, hunching his shoulders, he brought down his hands and began playing with quiet intensity and she recognized the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Ambrose called from the terrace: “Trite but appropriate.”

He played well. The notes sang into the silent air. Cordelia thought it interesting that he should play so much better with Clarissa dead than he had when she was alive.

When he had finished the movement she asked: “What’s going to happen, about your music I mean?”

“Sir George has told me not to worry, that I can stay on at Melhurst for a final year and then go to the Royal College or the Academy if I can get in.”

“When did he tell you this?”

“When he came to my room after Clarissa was found.”

That was a remarkably quick decision, thought Cordelia, given the circumstances. She would have expected Sir George
to have had other things on his mind just then than Simon’s career. The boy must have guessed her thoughts.

He looked up and said quickly: “I asked him what would happen to me now and he said that I wasn’t to worry, that nothing would change, that I could go back to school and then on to the Royal College. I was frightened and shocked and I think he was trying to reassure me.”

But not so shocked that he hadn’t thought first of himself. She told herself that the criticism was unworthy and tried to put it out of her mind. It had, after all, been a natural childish reaction to tragedy. What will happen to me? How will this affect my life? Wasn’t that what everyone wanted to know? He had at least been honest in asking it aloud. She said: “I’m glad, if that’s what you want.”

“I want it. I don’t think she did. I’m not sure I ought to do something she wouldn’t have approved of.”

“You can’t live your life on that basis. You have to make your own decisions. She couldn’t make them for you even when she was alive. It’s silly to expect her to make them now that she’s dead.”

“But it’s her money.”

“I suppose it will be Sir George’s money now. If it doesn’t worry him I don’t see why it need worry you.”

Watching the avid eyes desperately gazing into hers Cordelia felt that she was failing him, that he was looking to her for sympathy, for some reassurance that he could take what he wanted from life and take it without guilt. But wasn’t that what everyone craved? Part of her wanted to respond to his need; but part of her was tempted to say: “You’ve taken so much. Why jib at taking this?” She said: “I suppose if you want to salve your conscience about the money more than you want to be a professional pianist, then you’d better give up now.”

His voice was suddenly humble.

“I’m not all that good, you know. She knew that. She wasn’t a musician, but she knew. Clarissa could smell failure.”

“Oh well, that’s a different issue, whether you’re good enough or not. I think you play very well, but I can’t really judge. I don’t suppose that Clarissa could either. But the people at the colleges of music can. If they think you’re worth accepting, then they must think you have at least a chance of making a career in music. After all, they know what the competition’s like.”

He looked quickly round the room and then said, his voice low: “Do you mind if I talk to you? There are three things I must ask you.”

“We are talking.”

“But not here. Somewhere private.”

“This is private. The others don’t seem likely to come in. Is it going to take long?”

“I want you to tell me what happened to her, how she looked when you found her. I didn’t see her, and I keep lying awake and imagining. If I knew it wouldn’t be so awful. Nothing is as awful as the things I imagine.”

“Didn’t the police tell you? Or Sir George?”

“No one told me. I did ask Ambrose but he wouldn’t say.”

And the police would, of course, have had their own reasons for keeping silent about the details of the murder. But they had interviewed him by now. She didn’t see that it mattered any more whether he knew or not. And she could understand the horror of those nightly imaginings. But there was no way in which she could make the brutal truth sound gentle. She said: “Her face was battered in.”

He was silent. He didn’t ask how or with what. She said: “She was lying quite peacefully on the bed, almost as if she were asleep. I’m sure she didn’t suffer. If it were done by
someone she knew, someone she trusted, she probably didn’t even have time to feel afraid.”

“Could you recognize her face at all?”

“No.”

“The police asked me if I’d taken anything from a display cabinet, a marble hand. Does that mean they think it was the weapon?”

“Yes.”

It was too late now to wish that she’d kept quiet. She said: “It was found by the bed. It was … it looked as if it had been used.”

He whispered, “Thank you,” but so quietly that she had difficulty in hearing him. After a moment she said: “You said there were three things.”

He looked up eagerly as if glad that his mood had been broken. “Yes, it’s Tolly. On Friday when I went swimming while the rest of you toured the castle, she waited for me on the shore. She wanted to persuade me to leave Clarissa and live with her. She said that I could go straight away and that she had a room in her flat I could have until I’d found myself a job. She said that Clarissa might die.”

“Did she say how or why?”

“No. Only that Clarissa thought she was going to die and that people who thought that often did die.” He looked straight at her. “And next day, Clarissa did die. And I don’t know whether I ought to tell the police what happened, about waiting for me, what she said.”

“If Tolly were actually planning to murder Clarissa she’d hardly warn you in advance. She was probably trying to tell you that you couldn’t rely on Clarissa, that she might change her mind about you, that she might not always be there.”

“I think she did know. I think she guessed. Ought I to tell the Chief Inspector? I mean, it is evidence, isn’t it?
Suppose he found out that I’d been keeping something back?”

“Have you told anyone?”

“No. Only you.”

“You must do what you think is right.”

“But I don’t know what’s right! What would you do if you were in my place?”

“I wouldn’t tell. But then I have a reason. If you feel that it’s right to tell, then tell. If it’s any comfort to you, I don’t think the police will arrest Tolly on that evidence alone and they haven’t any other, at least as far as I know.”