A Splash of Red (24 page)

The answer's a candle by the way. Appropriate to Chloe, a flame, snuffed out. But why, Pompey, why?'

'Now that's very s
harp of you, Jemima,' said Pompe
y approvingly. 'Because that's the first thing he said to us about her. "The C-blank" ' -cough - ' "wasn't even dressed." He objected particularly, you know, to her parading round the building in her petticoat. Thought it unseemly, or as he put it, effing disgusting'.

'And then?'

'He
says they had a flaming row. I can't recall the precise colourful phrase he used to describe it. She, the deceased, absolutely refused to explain her presence in the penthouse beyond telling him, Athlone that is, that she had borrowed the first-floor flat from "a friend" - identity not revealed - in order to have some working peace for this anthology she's supposed to be editing. She had returned to the top floor to fetch some forgotten necessity for her work like a notebook; cat slips out; she goes to rescue cat, leaving keys in the door. They're her own keys, having given you, Jemima, the second set.'

'Pretty thin story,' commented Jemima gloomily. 'Except for the bit about the cat. That's probably true. Tiger did that to me. A restless type, I fear, like his former owner. If the cat went down to the basement, that would give Kevin John time to get up the staircase without passing Chloe on the way.'

'Athlone thought the story was pretty thin, too.' Pompey sounded equally gloomy. 'He wasn't too interested in the subject of the cat, one way or the other; but he was interested in the identity of the helpful "friend" who had lent her the first-floor flat. Thought it was certain to be male, and a lover.

'Hence the row,' he went on. 'She tells him to get out of the flat. Taxes him with following her about, harassing her, when everything is over between them. He accuses her of having a rendezvous upstairs and wants to know when and with whom. Then she really insults him, goes for him, past present and to come. Never loved him in the first place, you know what ladies can be like' - cough. 'Anyway at those words, it all changes. He drops the knife. He just leaves. Leaves her there.'

Jemima let out her breath. Pompey went implacably on: 'After that he sticks to his original statement. Had a few more drinks. Decided much later to drop in the flowers. For you or her, that's not quite clear.

Probably for you: he'd promised you flowers. Admits to being pretty drunk by now. Climbs the scaffolding, deposits the pot plant. Opens the door from inside - it's shut but not doubled locked. Bangs on the first-floor door. No answer. Goes on down to the hall. There he collapses. Has some vague idea of waiting for her to come back, or emerge from the first-floor flat. He may trap her new lover. That's not quite clear. Collapses anyway. The next thing he knows, you're standing over him.'

'And he never looks in the bedroom? On that second visit?' 'So he says. We, of course,' said Pompey gently, 'think he killed her on the first.'

On Saturday evening, Jemima found it took more determination than she had expected to mount the stairs to the penthouse flat again. Yet it had to be done, before she could shake the dust of No. 73 from her feet. She opened the door of the office suite. The stairs stretched upwards as though pointing to her duty; seeing how they curved out of sight towards the top floor gave her an odd presentiment that the end of the Chloe story was likewise still hidden. Yet the clues which pointed to any killer other than Kevin John were so extremely slender that only instinct - and natural obstinacy - prevented Jemima from abandoning her consideration of the case altogether, in favour of Pompey's rational certainties. Pompey for example was convinced that Kevin John had returned via the scaffolding only in order to clear away all incriminating traces of his earlier presence - which was certainly more logical than his own explanation.

Jemima let herself into the penthouse flat, using both keys. She was not a nervous person; nevertheless the atmosphere seemed to her not so much silent as sepulchral. That was the right word: the penthouse was now like a tomb for all Chloe's hopes and works and plans and lies and plots.

The murder charge arising from Chloe's death meant that no burial order had yet been given for her poor little body, once the giver and receiver of many strange pleasures, lacerated first by her murderer, then by the pathologists. Frozen in death, it remained waiting for the possible trial of her murderer. In the meantime would there be some kind of memorial service?

The obvious arranger of all such matters would have been Chloe's publisher, Valentine, especially since Chloe had no literary agent, preferring to trust herself entirely to what she had termed Valentine's 'aristocratic but mercenary mercies - still, in his own way, he can be an angel you know - I hardly need
more
mercenary mercies from an agent'. But Valentine was dead.

In the meantime this flat, until it was dismantled by the combined offices of Miss Katy Aaronson and the Stovers - certainly more the former than the latter - remained Chloe's true sepulchre.

The images of Chloe were everywhere. Lying flat on their backs, faces of Chloe, under her parasol, on her swing, the provocative
Fallen Child
pictures, stared up at the white ceiling from the jackets of her books. They were ranged round the pale carpet. Had the police stacked them so? Presumably. Other belongings were neatly piled and sorted. Everything was immaculate. The comparison to the hideous dust and mayhem which had possessed the flat a week ago was inevitable; Jemima did not find it particularly comforting. But she had to admit that the police had cleaned up after themselves most professionally.

The flat, if clean, was airless. Putting off the moment when she must open the white louvred double doors to the bedroom - for that gesture reminded her too clearly of the past horror - Jemima concentrated on pushing back the balcony windows. They were not locked; but the lock itself was not conspicuous and whoever shut them - the police? Katy Aaronson? - might have thought they were self-locking.

Something soft and furry caressed her legs. Tiger, on his noiseless pads, had followed her up the stairs. He put his golden paws up on the scaffolding to the left of the balcony, and sniffed delicately. Jemima rejoiced constantly in the inquisitive tendencies of cats; it reminded her that her own curiosity was in the natural order of things.

Then she observed that the earth in the pots containing the grey-leaved plants and white-flowering geraniums which had pleased Chloe's bleached sense of decoration, was quite hard and dry. What happened to plants when people died? These had been sufficiently loved by Chloe for her to bring them from Fulham to Bloomsbury. Jemima could not imagine the Stovers conveying such plants back to Folkestone, any more than they had welcomed the intrusion of Tiger. She pictured Mr Stover's large crimson roses - Ena Harkness perhaps - bristling at the arrival of these sophisticated urban cousins.

As for Jemima's own taste in such things, she recognized it to be prettier but somewhat less tasteful - pale pink roses in her case, New Dawn and Albertine, ran riot in huge dark green tubs on her own balcony, with purple pansies and gypsophila, daffodils and blue hyacinths in the spring. She certainly felt no impulse to adopt Chloe's primly matched plants, but the Rousseau-like savage Tiger was a different matter. In the end, it was the abandoned side of Chloe's nature which magnetized her.

As if to emphasize his freedom from constraint, Tiger was now
bounding about the balcony and tossing a leaf, a pretended mouse, in his paws; it was a game at once playful and sinister.

The plants in comparison, if not exactly wilted, looked depressingly arid. Jemima sighed. Whatever their ultimate fate it was not her nature to leave them unwatered. One way of getting herself through those bedroom doors was to fling them open, march through and fetch a watering-can from the bathroom - she had a memory of something rather charming and painted, a kind of Marie Antoinette of a watering-can, in the corner there.

Then she would organize her own belongings into a suitcase. It was now about nine o'clock. The air over Adelaide Square was sultry. Scarcely a rustle disturbed the mighty trees. It had been about that hour of the evening that she had looked in vain across the square for Chloe's departing figure. Oppressed by the memory, Jemima turned away and, striding firmly across the thick sitting-room carpet, flung open the bedroom doors.

Then she heard herself scream, and that scream was succeeded by another, and another, and another. The sound seemed to come from outside, so that she was still listening for further screams, even while she stood panting, and now silent.

On Chloe's white bed, motionless beneath his own violent red picture, vast bulging blue eyes staring fixedly towards her, lay Kevin John Athlone.

16

Straw into gold

An instant later, the vast blue eyes shut. Re
lieved of their intense stare, J
emima lost her panic and moved gingerly forward. A rumbling noise -yes, it was really a snore - greeted her astonished ears. Kevin John Athlone, whom she had imagined for one feverish moment to be dead, was actually sleeping. The fixed stare which had greeted her corresponded to nothing so much as a coma, an unseeing coma.

It was an appalling thought, but had he actually escaped from Brixton?

He was wearing a white shirt, two or three buttons undone; a black tie, carelessly half unknotted, still slung round his neck; light grey trousers which belonged to a suit because a matching grey jacket was roughly slung over the back of a nearby cane peacock chair. In the top pocket of the jacket, incongruously neatly folded, was a white handkerchief. Black shoes, demonstrably polished, were disposed near the bed. Kevin John's feet, sticking out across the bed like those of the corpse he somewhat resembled, were still covered in dark socks.

The formality of the sleeping man's attire struck Jemima forcibly since she had not seen him previously in anything save jeans,
T
-shirts, and the most rugged polo-necked jerseys. She presumed they were the same clothes in which he had been remanded at the Magistrates' Court: Crispin Creed was probably responsible for them. In the photograph printed in the evening paper Kevin John had looked heavily handsome, like some debauched film star leaving the divorce courts for the third time. In the flesh he looked younger.

Jemima looked at the sleeping figure with more irritation than horror. Her vague intellectual feelings of the necessity of justice towards an innocent man had quite melted awa
y in his physical presence. And
even the first feeling of dread at her predicament if he
had
escaped from prison, was less strong than her sheer annoyance at the sight of this great snoring bull, lying so inconveniently prone before her.

It was essential to cope with the problem he presented - and at once. Jemima took another delicate step forward.

The next thing she knew there was a noise, an eruption rather like a mountain in blast, and Kevin John had uncurled himself off the bed, bounded forward, and was clasping her in both shirt-clad arms.

Slightly corpulent as he might be, he was astonishingly muscular. There was no escape. Jemima stood there mutely while Kevin John gave her two quick succulent kisses on the cheek with his rubbery lips.

Then he panted: 'You'll save me, sweetheart, won't you? You'll save me?'

He did not let go of her hands. He continued to stare at her. The blue of his eyes was even more amazing than she had remembered; the numerous red veins in the eyeballs were bright and clear as though running through white marble. His long, ridiculously long black eyelashes fluttered slightly; but his gaze itself did not falter. Coquetry was absent; on this occasion Kevin John Athlone was in deadly earnest.

Alcohol, the pungent disgusting smell of stale alcohol, a great quantity of it, came reeking towards her on his breath as on that fatal Saturday morning a week ago. Only the new formality of his clothing was a present reminder of all that was tragic which had happened in between.

'And if you won't save me, Jemima Shore, Investigator,' said Kevin John, puffing slightly as he spoke, but in no way slackening his grasp, 'I'll keep you here till you do.' From the severity of his tone, the new sound of purpose, Jemima had to assume that the flutter of his lashes which accompanied his words was purely automatic. She also wondered exactly how drunk Kevin John really was, despite the odour of alcohol palpitating from him with every breath exhaled.

'A hostage,' he added, 'in case there's any doubt about my intentions. A hostage to misfortune - mine.' He smiled in what was obviously intended to be a winning manner; this time the flutter of his lashes was deliberate; nevertheless it was all a cold parody of the flirtatiousness which he normally exhibited to the female sex. 'I've an idea, sweetheart, that nothing too bad can happen to me while I've got you here.'

A surge of fury filled Jemima. The memory of her previous sympathies for Kevin John merely enraged her further. She wrenched her hands free from his. She particularly disliked the notion of physical imprisonment, both in theory and practice, when it was allied to injustice.