At Death's Door (12 page)

“Excuse me, Mr.—”

He had been interrupted again. It was the woman who had been reading Margaret Drabble. An English gentlewoman—in jumper and skirt, pearls around her neck, and discreetly made up. She seemed painfully shy in this situation, but insistent, as if doing a duty. Granville smiled charmingly.

“Yes?”

“I don't like to interrupt, but that shot—”

“Oh!” Granville's face cleared with enlightenment. “That wasn't a shot. Just an old banger passing down the road.”

“No.” She stuck to her guns. “I was—well, I was in the loo. I'm sure I could hear much better than you in here. It was a shot, and it came from directly over my head.”

“Oh, I'm sure you're mistaken.”

“Mr.—er—”

“Ashe.”

“Mr. Ashe, my husband was an architect, and I have a very good sense of the geography of buildings. I'm sure that the room directly above the ladies' lavatory is your wife's room.”

Her very shyness made her urgency impressive. The bar was quiet now, and people had come over to listen. Granville looked into the sea of faces. Standing out was Isobel's—hungry, excited, a little drunk. About all the faces there was a voracious quality that was disturbing. Granville paused, irresolute.

“I'm sure you're wrong. But perhaps I'd better just go up and see—”

“
Please
do.”

The scene had taken on the quality of one of those theatrical occasions that Granville had been talking about. He felt surrounded by a tense, watchful, wolfish crowd. He tried to defuse the situation by being conspicuously casual.

“Keep my place,” he said. “I'll just nip up and poke my head around the door.”

But it was a measure of the woman's convincingness that as he walked through the door leading into the back part of the Red Lion, they all, quietly, surged toward it. Someone—it was the commodore—held the door open a little so that they could hear. They heard his footsteps, not hurrying, going up the stairs. Straining, they heard him quietly turn the doorknob. Then, after a moment, they heard the click of the light switch.

There was a moment's silence.

Then they heard his feet running, stumbling down the stairs, and he broke into the bar, his face ashen.

“Get the police! Ring for the police! Myra's been shot!”

I
N THE POLICE CAR
taking her to Cottingham, Cordelia was very quiet. Cottingham was the nearest town of any size, and it was a journey of ten miles or so. Occasionally she looked out at the darkened landscape, now merely a rolling, lowering mass, but mostly she sat silently gazing down at her hands, nervously working in her lap. The fact was, she was ashamed.

The policemen had come straight to the front door of the Rectory and had asked for her by name. Roderick had brought them into the sitting room, and the senior man had introduced himself as Chief Inspector Meredith and the younger one as Sergeant Flood. The inspector had said that he was sorry to have to tell her that her mother was dead, and Cordelia had said, “Dead?” in the manner of second-rate plays—so often a better mirror of life than good ones. The inspector had asked if it was true that Cordelia had been at the Red Lion earlier in the evening and then if it was true that she had had a quarrel with her mother. When Cordelia had nodded, unhesitatingly, he
had asked her to come over to the station at Cottingham for questioning. Cordelia, who had shown no emotion beyond surprise at the death of her mother, immediately agreed.

Chief Inspector Meredith had also asked her to bring a nightdress and basic toilet requirements. That augured ill, thought Roderick and Caroline, but Cordelia had merely said she would fetch them from the tent. Meredith had not allowed this, nor would he let Roderick or Caroline go and get them. Sergeant Flood had gone down the lawn, and they had all stood around waiting for him to return, in an awkward silence broken only by Meredith's murmurs of apology. Pat, in pajamas, was with Flood when he came back, but Cordelia was allowed only to kiss him briefly before she was hustled into the police car and driven away.

“Don't worry, I didn't do it,” she had called.

No one, at that point, had said anything about murder, but they hadn't needed to.

Now, speeding in the car toward Cottingham, there was something in the quality of Cordelia's silence that puzzled Inspector Meredith. He was aware that there was no grief there. Cordelia had pretended to none, and none was perhaps to be expected, from the little he had heard about the relationship from the dead woman's husband. He had had a very sketchy talk with Granville Ashe while the technical experts and the police doctor had been taking over the Red Lion and getting down to their routine business with the body. But, sitting next to Cordelia in the backseat of the car, Meredith got the odd idea that Cordelia was not thinking about the death of her mother at all. He had had a distinct sense of tension, of something unspoken, between her and the Cotterels, and he wondered if it was that that she was thinking of.

He shook off the idea. He was fancying things.

Soon they came to a landscape of bright shop windows and traffic lights. When they drove up at Cottingham Police Station, Cordelia got out of the car quite naturally and stood waiting for the policemen to escort her into the building. While she stood there, a flashbulb went off. The press—albeit only a local stringer, harbinger of the metropolitan hordes—were already on to the story. Cordelia did not react in any way. She was all too used to being photographed, usually with Myra; throughout her childhood she had gotten used to dressing up for the press men—usually in clothes that suggested she was rather younger than she actually was. Meredith and Flood closed in behind her, and she allowed herself to be shunted gently into the station.

It was an old building, built on to accommodate the increase in crime, or paperwork. She waited, along with a drunk and a distraught mother, while Meredith consulted with the duty sergeant about a vacant interview room. She let them lead her down painted brick corridors to a cheerless, bare room with green-painted walls, one high window, and a table and three chairs. Flood took his chair some way apart, flipped his notebook open to a clean page, and began to take notes. Cordelia took the chair on the side of the table, which left her with her back to the door, and sat down without fuss, looking calmly at Meredith.

“I thought we'd begin tonight, but if you're tired or confused, just tell me, and we'll break off,” he said.

Cordelia nodded. He had a nice voice, the slight Welshness giving it a strong hint of music, of remoteness. Altogether he was a reassuring rather than an unsettling presence, for he looked calm, methodical, and unlikely to make mistakes. He was square, stocky, with a kindly face—probably a good father who had played with his children a lot when they were little, watched them at school sports, enjoyed Saturday evenings with his wife in a
pub when he was off duty. Cordelia wondered what it was like to have had a good father.

Meredith had taken the chair on the other side of the table. Now he began clearing his throat.

“Let's get the facts straight first. You agreed you were at the Red Lion in Maudsley earlier this evening and that you went up to the bedroom with your mother and that there you had a quarrel.” Cordelia nodded. “What was the quarrel about?”

“My life,” said Cordelia. Then she pulled herself together. “No, I don't want to be melodramatic. It's quite simple. I've signed a contract with Maxim's, the publishers, to write a book about my mother. It will be a survey of her acting career. . . .”

“Yes?” Meredith raised an eyebrow.

“And a more . . . personal section. It was this that caused the trouble. There are—there
were
—many things in my mother's life that she didn't want discussed.”

“But which you intended to discuss?”

“Yes.”

Meredith thought for a moment that Cordelia was going to elaborate on this, but she fell silent.

“A moment ago you said the quarrel was about your life,” Meredith said gently. “Pardon me if I'm putting it insensitively, but is this book a sort of revenge—revenge for the upbringing you had?”

Cordelia gazed ahead thoughtfully, then sighed. “Yes . . . I suppose I would have put it another way myself, but that's about it.”

“You showed no surprise at the idea that your mother had been murdered—in fact, you assumed it before I told you so.”

“She was the sort of woman whom many people would want to kill.”

“So the thrust of your book about her would have been: marvelous actress, terrible person?”

“Well, that is pretty much the truth about Myra.”

“What is it exactly you have to complain of?”

An air of weariness came over Cordelia. “Neglect, a succession of men, constant abuse and ridicule—”

“Physical brutality?”

“From Myra? Now and then, I suppose. Hairbrush spanking and that sort of thing. That's not important. That sort of pain doesn't last. It's the constant, daily pain for a child of looking to her mother for love and knowing she's nothing to her—a burden, a reminder, something to jeer at or to cuddle for the cameras if the newsmen come. . . . This isn't what I was going to put in the book, by the way.”

“No?”

“It would have sounded too much like whining. The reviewers would have said that all theatrical children get neglected, all actors and actresses have giant egos, and most remarkable people have poor-spirited children who resent them. I can just hear what they would say. They would have let Myra off the hook. . . . I was going to go about it in a more subtle way.”

“What way was that?”

Cordelia leaned forward, now really interested, creatively interested, in what she was saying.

“The more I looked at it—having got away from her at last—the more I saw there was a pattern in her emotional life. She would sail into relationships—for selfish reasons, always, for pure sensual gratification or career advancement or whatever—and then find herself horribly encumbered by the consequences, usually because she had no understanding of other people. It was rather comic, really, or could have been told in a comic way. Myra could never bear to be laughed at.”

“You thought making her a comic butt was a better revenge than making her look a monster?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“Could you give me an example of her tendency to land herself in the soup?”

Cordelia thought. “Well, there was Louis, her first husband. Louis Leconte. She went into that for pure sexual gratification. Louis was a French diplomat and a complete all-round sensualist. He was also a sadist. That turned out to be one of his main forms of sexual gratification.”

“Was this sadism vented on your mother or on you?”

“On me, first.”

“Was there sexual abuse or just physical brutality?”

“Both. Mother didn't know about the sexual abuse. Not then.”

“But she knew about the brutality?”

“Yes. She knew.”

“What did she do about it?”

“She sat back and enjoyed it. No, that was unfair. She stood aside. She took up an attitude of conspicuous unconcern. But I suspect now that she rather enjoyed it. Louis went further than she ever dared to do.”

“I see.” Meredith sighed. He didn't want to ask the next question. “How old were you?”

“I was eight.”

“How long did this go on?”

“About a year. Eventually, Louis turned the brutality on her. That was inevitable, I suppose, because my mother was intolerable to live with, even for quite nice men, and Louis certainly wasn't that. She would arrive for performances with cuts and bruises. She had to weigh the sensual side, which was marvelous, or so she has told me over and over again since, against something which she did not like at all. It was quite a struggle for a while, but eventually she saw sense and sent him packing. It was quite the most spectacular of her breakups. Mostly they went quietly, on a wing and a prayer of thanksgiving.”

“Where is this Louis Leconte now?” asked Meredith, his interest quickened.

“In Père Lachaise. One of his later lovers killed him. . . . She got a very light sentence.”

“I see,” said Meredith regretfully.

He thought for a moment, and Cordelia, too, seemed submerged in memory.

“So that was how you were going to treat her, and that was what the row was all about.”

“Yes.”

“Could you have published?”

“Perhaps not. But a book
exists
, even if it's not published. You know, like Chatterton's poetry, or Hopkins's. I was going to lodge it with a bank.”

“And it could have been published after her death?”

Cordelia saw the trap.

“After her death, and that of most of the other people involved.”

She shot him a smile that said: Don't take me for a fool. Meredith shifted in his chair.

“Point taken. Now can we get back to this row with your mother?”

“It was she who wanted the row. Or at least she wanted the book idea firmly trodden on, and she couldn't think of any other way but bullying to accomplish it. I didn't want any row. I've grown away from her. She's irrelevant to me.”

Meredith could see, as plain as plain, that that was not true.

“I see,” he said noncommittally. “Now, how long did this quarrel last? When did you both go to your mother's bedroom, and when did you leave it?”

“I really don't know . . . Wait. We went up there after dinner. Mother looked at her watch and said we two had something to discuss and the men could do what they
wanted. I looked at the clock in the dining room at the same time. I don't know if it was right, but it said about a quarter or ten to eight.”

“And when you left the bedroom?”