A Splash of Red (31 page)

'Bloody harmless, was he?' exploded Kevin John. 'If I hadn't been
such a' - more obscenities followed, applied equally to Kevin John himself and to Valentine Brighton - 'I'd have spotted what he was up to. Yes, I saw him in the gardens, lurking in the bushes, he was just the type, wasn't he? Not even a pansy, just a neuter. Impossible, yes I damn well did think it was impossible that
he
should be anybody's lover let alone banging away like that in the middle of central London—'

'Then Valentine can't bear it any longer,' continued Jemima, thinking it prudent to cut short this tirade. 'He rushes back into the building. Runs up the front staircase this time. The front door of the penthouse is still open. Chloe's surprised. She's still in her white petticoat. Why?

'Now the answer to that one is in fact very simple, although for a long time I didn't spot it. Like you, Kevin John, like Valentine himself, I thought she must be having a rendezvous in the penthouse with a lover, and that baffled me. The police of course thought she indulged in some kind of love scene with you, Kevin John. Or at least the preliminaries to it.

'Then suddenly it came to me. When does a woman take off her clothes? Down to her petticoat. In the daytime. The reason is obvious. Not to receive a lover but to change them! She was in her own flat, wasn't she? She knew I was out. She'd come up to the flat simply to
change
her clothes. And why did she change? Why, quite simply to receive her stepfather suitably dressed for the occasion, for the confrontation. You all remember how meticulous Chloe was about that kind of thing - neat, the right clothes for the occasion.

'You see, she only had holiday clothes downstairs with her. She wouldn't have wandered up the staircase in her petticoat. She came up here and merely took off her dress beside the sitting-room cupboard, where she had stored her London clothes to make room for mine in the bedroom.

'At this point, before she has a chance to choose a dress the cat escapes and, frightened of the traffic outside, she dashes after it, all the way down to the basement, just as she told you, Kevin John. Which means she misses you coming up the stairs; you're by now in the bedroom; she returns, is about to put on another dress, when you, Kevin John, surprise her. Being Chloe she has already hung up the dress she has removed. But the cupboard, which she had locked the previous evening in my presence, is still open.

'After your departure, Valentine rushes in. We'll never know exactly what happened then, since they're both dead. Perhaps she taunted him, teased him, flirted with him a little in her provocative way, not realizing the seriousness of the situation, of his madness. I think it more than
likely she taunted him with her pregnancy: babies, as he once told me, horrified him. It was her, Chloe, that he wanted.

'And so he killed her, killed her with one of your long sharp knives, Isabelle.' Isabelle gave a gasp and the tears started to flow again. 'The knives you gave her, before she cut your friendship to pieces.'

'Cruel, poor little Chloe,' whispered Isabelle.

'One stroke killed her: he was strong, expert, a sportsman, brought up in the country even though he had rejected it. The other stabs were for passion and love, and pain and frustration, and perhaps for all the other people she had loved and, in his tortured mind, betrayed him with.'

'He left her. He left her dead in the bedroom, so that we know she must have led him in there, gone willingly. But it was no part of his plan to be discovered. No, it was now that the cold, detached, clever part of his mind took over. No scandal for Valentine Brighton - above all, no scandal which would break his mother's heart. Those last words of his to me in the Reading Room - "Poor Mummy, how will she bear it?" - not about his voyeurism after all, but the horror of her only son being a murderer. So away with the prints, the evidence, and even when you, Kevin John, are arrested, he still feels no compunction, no desire to protect you from the consequences of his own deed. For he summons me to the Reading Room again explicitly to reveal your presence at the scene of her death.'

'But I'm jumping ahead. After he's killed her, the madness leaves him, he has to establish an alibi and fast. So he goes to the British Library, where he knows he'll find me. In fact he strikes lucky, sees me in the street on the way from the Pizza Perfecta, and tails me. It's easy then to sit down, deliberately clear the seat next to his (despite the fact its officially occupied) and rely on me discovering him, theoretically asleep. Then he talks of Lady Lionnel, of warning Chloe. He looked terrible then, ghastly. No wonder. He had just killed the one person -
other than his mother - that he felt anything for in the world, and he knew he was sending me back to find her lacerated corpse.'

'So that bastard set me up!' shouted Kevin John, brandishing a bottle which was nearly empty. 'He would have testified against me. And all the time he knew I hadn't killed her, because he'd fucking well done her in himself.' There was bewilderment as well as rage in his voice, as though he found such diabolical adult villainy directed towards himself hard to comprehend.

Why pretend, thought Jemima. 'Yes, Valentine hated you,' she said directly to him. 'He was also deranged where you were concerned. He
loved her but he hated you. Afterwards it was you he wanted to kill, extinguish, punish, as he had already punished her.'

'May one enquire how you are going to prove all this?' asked Sir Richard coolly. Of them all he remained the most detached. Adam still looked white, shocked, and as a result, even younger. But Sir Richard was once more inspecting his splendid cuffs with their agate links. 'That policeman of yours, Inspector Portsmouth, isn't it? Is he going to be much impressed by all this analysis. What proof do you have after all? The man's dead. I did see him in the gardens - fair enough - but that's no evidence that he was about to commit a particularly revolting crime.'

'The police
have
to believe her: she's Jemima Shore, Investigator!' Kevin John put the bottle to his lips and drained it, then leaping up, he rushed over to Lionnel. The latter stepped calmly backwards and sideways onto the balcony to avoid his rush.

Kevin John took him by his tweed lapels.

'You adulterous fascist shit. They have to believe her. I'm innocent, innocent, can't you understand that?'

Lionnel, with continuing aplomb, merely plucked Kevin John's fingers from his coat, and stepped further away. He acted sharply but not violently: Jemima was reminded of his treatment of Tiger that Saturday evening - 'cats in their place'. Artists too, it seemed.

'He's not guilty. That's clear,' said Isabelle reprovingly as though Sir Richard had somehow suggested that he was.

'I believe you. It figures. But I hope you can prove it, because -otherwise, well - a dead man. A dead Lord. A dead Lord with, I take it, a live mother. Will the fuzz buy that one? I doubt it.' Adam spoke, not very loudly, but loud enough for Jemima to hear.

'But you saw him there - in the gardens.' Kevin John, wielding the now empty bottle, was still menacing Lionnel; on the balcony, shouting at him, his face red, almost purple, his voice roaring; he looked quite out of control. 'You'll tell the police you saw him.'

'Will I, indeed?' Sir Richard, moving one more pace away, sounded highly remote from the whole affair. 'I'll have to talk to my lawyers about that. Naturally I shall cooperate as and when may be necessary; but otherwise I see no need to be mixed up further in this filthy business.'

He paused. 'Besides, I'm not at all sure that you're
not
guilty - please forgive me, Miss Shore, but I knew poor Valentine Brighton well, and of course Hope Brighton is one of Francesca's closest friends. We're country neighbours, you know what that means, one really gets to know people well, doesn't one, in the country, quite unlike these rather intense
urban
relationships.'

Another pause. Sir Richard had moved; he no longer had his back to the light, so that the expression on his face was once more visible. Afterwards Jemima would always remember that there had been something mocking, malicious, cruel about that expression, as though he was the controlled matador to Kevin John's maddened, helpless bull. For the first time she saw the ruthless tycoon who had torn down the beautiful houses of Adelaide Square and built for profit the modern horror which had become Chloe's tomb, and might become the tomb of Lionnel's own reputation, were he to weaken.

'Charming fellow, Brighton, in my opinion very much one of us,' he went on. "Wouldn't hurt a fly, hated shooting, any kind of blood sports; Francesca, who's much to that way of thinking herself, used to have wonderful talks with him about it. And Chloe, herself, she used to laugh about him. My tame tabby, my other pussy-cat, she used to call him. Whereas our friend here—'

'Is that me you mean?' Kevin John was bellowing.

'Yes, my good man, indeed I mean you. Quite the brute, aren't you, with your great fists and muscles, and your obscenities, quite the murdering type, I would have said myself. Do you really think she found that kind of thing attractive just because you're some kind of stud, she, Chloe? Why she loathed it, loathed the memory of all your repulsive violence, the beatings, to say nothing of your endless sexual boasting, she used to tell me about it—'

The virulence with which Sir Richard Lionnel spoke was so unexpected, so outside his usual calm diction, that Jemima was still too startled to react, while Sir Richard continued in the same tone of rising venom: 'I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you didn't do her in after all, poor little thing; anyway it's clear she wouldn't have died, we wouldn't all be in this appalling mess, if it wasn't for your blundering return, you disgusting drunken oaf - take your hands off me—'

Isabelle screamed loudly, but stood immobile in the sitting room wringing her hands. Adam leapt lithely off the floor and darted forward, but even so did not reach the balcony until too late. Jemima too rushed forward. She also was too late.

For Kevin John, at Sir Richard's last words, first hurled the bottle over the balcony, its crash only just audible over the fracas which followed, and then flung himself at the tycoon.

'Murdering type, am I? We'll see about that.' The rest of his words were more or less lost, although afterwards Isabelle was prepared to swear that he had said something like: 'I didn't kill her but I will kill you.' Jemima was less certain.

In the end all any of them knew for certain was that Sir Richard, taken off guard, standing against the concrete parapet which fronted the balcony - that Lionnel fancy, the parapet just slightly too low for safety - was forced back against it, onto it, over it, still with Kevin John shouting and shouting while at his throat. And quite suddenly Lionnel was no longer there. Kevin John was there. Standing, panting, great fists now hanging at his sides. But the substantial figure of Sir Richard Lionnel had vanished.

A strange sound reached their ears as he disappeared, not so much a scream, as a huge sigh or a cry, perhaps merely the sound of his body rushing through the air. The noise of its landing far below was almost extinguished by the hysterical screams of Isabelle Mancini. Nevertheless the disseminated thud indicated that, far below, something heavy had met its end.

20

The last word

'A murdering type', commented Pompey with satisfaction afterwards, when Kevin John Athlone had been charged with the wilful murder of Sir Richard Lionnel - this time there was to be no bail. Even Punch Fredericks did not suggest it. In view of this Pompey was really quite restrained in his private comments on solicitors, who believed in bail-for-everyone - even murderers, and the consequences of their rashness.

'A murdering type. Didn't I say so all along?' It was an echo of the dead man's last - fatally provoking - words.

'But he didn't kill Chloe Fontaine,' retorted Jemima. 'Didn't I say that all along?' Charges against Kevin John for this crime had been withdrawn, a fact which had passed almost unnoticed in the Press, in view of the welter of publicity which had surrounded the death of Sir Richard Lionnel, the Lion of Bloomsbury, hurled - as the Press liked to put it - from the top of his own notorious building.

'How about that for a victory for the feminine instinct?' Jemima added.

'Ah, my dear, always let a woman have the last word.' Pompey shook his head sagely. 'That's what twenty happy years with Mrs Portsmouth has taught me. Above all, never argue about her instincts. Shall we settle for the fact that we were both right?'

'You do have your murderer,' Jemima pointed out. 'Or rather, your alleged murderer. If not precisely for the crime you were investigating.'

'Very true. And I must tell you that sometimes in the watches of the night I wish we did not - or rather I wish we did not have this particular crime. What with enquiries from number ten, very polite mind you, just interested, and Lady Lionnel, now
there's
a terror for you, and the dead man's secretary or whatever she calls herself, another 
terror, and sister, by the way, of your friend the squatter - I don't know what the world is coming to. Give me the Dowager Lady Brighton every time. She may be a terror, but she's a lady too.'