A Splash of Red (13 page)

Jemima therefore contented herself for the time being with telling Pompey that Valentine had had a rendezvous with Chloe, and that Chloe had not kept it. On the subject of Lionnel generally, she kept her peace. Here was an area where Pompey possibly had something to tell her.

He did. Or rather, he was able to confirm a substantial part of the Brighton story out of Sir Richard Lionnel's own statement.

'She was his mistress. Oh, yes.' Doleful shake.
'And
he didn't know she was pregnant, so he says. He also swore, by the way, that
she
didn't know; he thought the old man was making it up, had got the wrong end of the stick.' Pompey coughed. 'This is before the report from the mortuary confirmed that she
was
pregnant, of course!' Another cough and a shake. 'Yes, a very adventurous young lady. Because you see, Jemima, if Sir Richard Lionnel's statement is to be believed, and we have no reason at this point to doubt his word, he could not be the father of her child.'

'I've just been working that out for myself,' Jemima said slowly. 'Three months pregnant. And the programme on which they met was at the beginning of June - I'll fill you in on that if Lionnel hasn't. Certainly not earlier, because I was in Japan until the second week of May, and Chloe's book -
Fallen Child
- must have been published at the end of the month. The programme came after that. She only moved here in June. She was already pregnant then. It wasn't visible, even the night she died, except - yes, maybe the figure just a little fuller.'

'Fallen Child,
eh?' The title seemed to confirm Pompey's gloomiest supposition about the late Chloe Fontaine. 'Well, she was certainly fallen, poor lady. In the old-fashioned sense of the word,' he added gallantly, as if Jemima were far too young to have heard the expression.

'And to the last I always found something rather childlike about her -' Jemima hesitated, recalling their last conversation. Chloe framed in the window, the waif-like face and the newly rounded bosom, which at the time had seemed to indicate increased voluptuousness, but was now revealed as something far more vulnerable.

'You've called her adventurous, Pompey. She was, obviously. But she was also greedy, greedy like a child. Grabbing at things, people, experiences. I see it much more clearly now, now that she's no longer here to charm and woo me - Chloe wooed everyone, you know. This last grab, at Lionnel I mean, it must have been terrible for her when she found out she was pregnant. A child with child. Perhaps that's why she panicked.'

'Someone panicked, not necessarily the deceased. She didn't cut her own throat with a kitchen knife, you know. No question of that. This was a swift and quite expert piece of work. The stabs came after and were extra to requirements. Sign of a lover, more likely than not, all that frenzy.'

'I was referring to her future. Did Lionnel give any indication—'

'Said they were off to France. Taking the ferry and driving down to the South. Quite open about it. That they were spending the weekend in London because he had to be at number ten - quite open about that, too. Still, it's a very good alibi. The second best alibi in the world you might call it, the best being only half a mile away up the road.'

'D'you think the Queen's actually at home on a Saturday?'

Dubious shake and Pompey continued: 'He left this flat at ten o'clock and returned at
six
-fifteen according to his statement. It will be checked, of course. Unexpectedly free at lunch so telephoned Miss Fontaine at twelve-thirty. No answer. Rather surprised. Still it was a lovely day - she might have been in the gardens. The first-floor flat, as you see, does have a balcony, but she would have heard the telephone from there. Went to a restaurant in Soho. Ate his lunch. Telephoned again at two. No answer - by that time of course she was probably dead. We think she was killed between one and two o'clock. Shortly after you left the house. Back to his meeting and arrived here soon after six to find the police. That's all except he doesn't remember the name of the restaurant, something Greek was all he gave us, but that's no problem. We shall find it.'

'He's certainly highly recognizable.' There was something confusing to Jemima about her own relief that Lionnel was in the clear; was it for his own or for Chloe's sake - her last love not her killer - that she was pleased?

'But did Lionnel make any statement about their future?' Jemima ventured. 'I know this sounds a trifling question, Pompey, but it might be relevant in piecing together Chloe's past if I knew when she was telling the truth and when she wasn't.' It was also relevant to the past of her friend and publisher Valentine Brighton.

'He gave us as much as he had to, and he knew he had to, sooner or later. No more, no less. Quite straight. He's a man of the world. No point in fooling around with the police, now, is there? Not for a man in Sir Richard Lionnel's position. Too much to lose. He needs us, doesn't he, to keep the Press off his back—'

'Ah.' Jemima was wondering about the Press, so far - mercifully from her own point of view as well as that of Lionnel - absent. She knew it could hardly last.

Pompey sipped his whisky appreciatively; his whole attitude was one of melancholy but unsurprised regret at the perpetual foolishness of human nature.

Her own
999
call had been sufficiently uninformative to elude the interest of some stray listener-in to the police radio link. Saturday night was a dead time in Fleet Street, with the Sunday papers not only printed but already despatched to the provinces; it needed an emergency to alter the leading stories of the London editions. But on Sunday Scotland Yard would be notified of what had occurred and that notification would reach the Press Bureau. Then the second tornado, that of the Press following that of the police team, would strike. Chloe's murder would certainly be announced on the Sunday evening television news and splashed across the morning papers.

'In so far as that can be done,' continued Pompey, 'and in so far as we want to co-operate, which for the time being, in view of the connection with number ten, and the incomplete nature of our enquiries, perhaps we do. Of course they'll be right on to the fact that he owns the building, particularly as there's been all this fuss about it, but he didn't own her flat, the flat where she was killed. As to the relationship, well, they may suspect, may have heard rumours, but they've got to be very careful about what they print. This is a murder case, Jemima, not your average juicy scandal of adultery in high places.' From Pompey's prim tone, you might have thought that Pompey actually preferred murder to adultery. He added: 'He's made his statement and he's gone back to Sussex.'

'To Lady Lionnel. I wonder what
her
reaction will be?'

Pompey rose to his feet. For all his natural authority he was not a man you would pick out in a crowd - a fact in which he took some pride - and even after Jemima's original television interview, people had not immediately recognized him in the street. Even his age was mysterious; for all his paternal manner, he was probably not so many years older than Jemima herself. Indeed she sometimes darkly suspected that his paternalism - and his chivalry - was a professional ruse to instil confidence, and thus elicit it. Yet when one studied his face closely it had at least one highly memorable feature: a pair of curiously bushy eyebrows rising to tufted points over bright rather small eyes which together gave him the look of an inquisitive fox. Jemima could only suppose that because Pompey did not want to become instantly recognizable in television terms, he had somehow willed himself to remain anonymous. Talking to him face to face she was instantly aware of his presence. Certainly of all the men Jemima had interviewed in depth for television Pompey had adapted most naturally and unselfconsciously to the medium. Television to him had been merely another problem to be solved and he was certainly not going to be surprised or fazed by it.

'Now
that
you can tell me, Jemima, better than I can tell you. You know the old saying - Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Not, I am sure,' he added with another gallant nod, 'that you have ever been scorned.'

'But
was
she scorned?' murmured Jemima. 'Was Lionnel really intending to divorce her and marry Chloe?'

'Ah, now how about a woman's intuition to solve that one?' Pompey's expression was positively humorous. 'Me, as a mere man I shall take myself down to the station to see about the more mundane matter of fingerprints, eliminating those friendly to the environment. That's my next job. Then there's the question of the cleaner; the woman Rosina Whatnot, you say you never met her. My boys will interview her in the morning and take
her
prints. We'll be contacting Lord Brighton in Sussex or at his Bloomsbury flat, and we'll pick up that squatter fellow when he returns, if he returns. Myself, I want to see if my men have raised that bruiser of an artist for me yet.'

So, shaking his head in a fatherly manner, Pompey departed, taking care to leave Jemima the number of his direct line 'in case of need'. The need was unspecified. Jemima guessed that Pompey had chivalrous doubts about leaving her in the gaunt building, with only Tiger, now in a highly restless mood, as company. She herself had no such fears.

It was only after Pompey had gone that something extraordinary and on the face of it quite illogical about her own attitude to the case struck Jemima. Regardless of what Pompey might discover, why was it that she herself had not immediately concluded that Kevin John Athlone was responsible for the murder?

He was the obvious suspect. And Pompey had taught her in the past that the obvious suspect was very often the right suspect - she accepted the logic of the position, unexciting as it might be to the more tortuous mind. Kevin John had arrived at Adelaide Square that very morning with the avowed intention of doing Chloe some violence and had then proceeded to beat up Jemima. He had later quite gratuitously admitted to shinning up the scaffolding and entering the penthouse itself; depositing a geranium right next to the room where the murder had been committed. He thus had motive - by his own lights - and opportunity. What was more, Kevin John Athlone was certainly strong enough to wield that brutal knife, with the efficient hands of one whose profession was to live by them. Had he not begun life as a sculptor? Jemima had a dim memory of some unwieldy sculptures in Chloe's Fulham house, attributed to Kevin John in youth.

It was true that there were certain inconsistencies in the idea of Kevin John as the murderer. First of all, it had to be faced that the revelation of Chloe's pregnancy did complicate the issue. The obvious theory of Kevin John as the spur-of-the-moment killer need not be abandoned; but it needed expansion. If Kevin John had indeed struck her down, his motive was likely to have been jealous rage at this - to him - highly inflammatory piece of news. The repeated stabbing when Chloe was already dead, or at least visibly dying, did indicate some storm of passion. But if one accepted this as Kevin John's motive, that led to further questions. For example, why had Chloe elected to break the news to Kevin John in the first place? When did she tell him? When, and above all why, had Chloe re-entered the penthouse in her white broderie anglaise petticoat?

The alternative was to accept that Kevin John had murdered Chloe in a fit of rage quite unconnected with her condition. It did not do, as Jemima knew, to insist on neat solutions where murder was concerned. It might just possibly be that the two facts - the murder and the pregnancy - bore absolutely no relation to each other.

At the same time, Jemima was aware that her curious presumption of Kevin John's innocence antedated Pompey's confirmation of Chloe's pregnancy. For the second inconsistency in the theory of Kevin John as murderer centred round his known behaviour during the late afternoon. There was something implausible in the notion of a man who had cruelly slaughtered his ex-mistress settling down for a nap in the hall of the same house where the deed had taken place; having first advertised his forcible entry to her flat, not only by the presence of a glaring pot plant, but also in conversation thereafter with Jemima Shore.

According to Pompey, the bedroom - and the knife handle - had been wiped clean of fingerprints. That showed a deliberation, an instinct for self-preservation, at variance with Kevin John's general behaviour in the last twenty-four hours. Jemima could, unfortunately, believe that Kevin John had flung himself on Chloe like a mad bull, and as it were gored her to death rather as he had uncontrollably beaten up Jemima. But after that, what would have happened? Was it not far more in character for Kevin John to collapse weeping?

'I love her, I love her.' His distraught words in the flat that morning, as he blubbered, virtually round Jemima's neck, now rang in her ears.

She would have expected Kevin John, the fell deed done, to have cried out like Othello: 'O Desdemona, Desdemona O!'

But Chloe's murderer had coolly wiped the kitchen knife handle; had wiped prints from the bedroom; and had donned gloves to clean up his own traces. Jemima told Pompey that Chloe's kitchen gloves were missing; and she could not envisage Kevin John pausing in his path of mayhem to don a pair of kitchen gloves. Rather, like Othello, he would have slaughtered Chloe in a fit of passion; killed first, wept afterwards. Either way, it was difficult to imagine that Kevin John would choose to slump down in the hall of
73
Adelaide Square and fall stertorously asleep.

There was yet another inconsistency - that anonymous and Irish voice issuing threats in the late-night and early-morning telephone calls. Kevin John, despite his name and lineage, had no trace of an Irish accent, but rather an unexpectedly cultured English voice. Jemima had been tempted even at the time to acquit Kevin John of responsibility for these calls, impressed by his denial. If not Kevin John, then who?