Cavalier Case (21 page)

Jemima ascended the narrow spiral staircase. As she reached the roof, her thoughts should by rights have been with Haygarth—in what frame of mind had he taken his last journey, pursuing what chimera of noise, or perhaps after all intent on self-destruction? But the theatrical splendour, Lackland Court and its gardens laid out before her eyes in the moonlight, with the moon itself, almost full, high above the sixteenth-century obelisks and turreted chimney pots, momentarily drove all other thoughts out of her mind.

She stepped forward, put out a hand to steady herself—and found herself touching something warm and moving which was actually, she realised an instant later, a human face . . .

Jemima screamed. She then stepped backwards as though to seek again the sanctuary of the narrow staircase. But the door banged shut in her back as it had done when she first inspected the roof with Nell, either in the wind—there was far more wind up here on the roof—or perhaps someone coming from below had shut it behind her, shut her off up here, shut her off with...at the mercy of . . . Now the thing crouching beneath her on the roof rose up high above her, towered over her blackly. She saw a white hand stretched out towards her. As in her dream, she knew that it was mutilated, that it was—

"Darling, don't be frightened, darling, it's me, Dan," said the owner of Lackland Court in his most soothing voice, drawing the shuddering Jemima into his arms and holding her. He hugged her thus for a while in silence until her involuntary shudderings had finally come to an end. All the same Jemima still clung to him.

"I must say you gave me quite a fright too." Dan still spoke in that easy soothing voice, and still maintained his arms tightly round Jemima. "For a moment I really thought you were the Decimus Ghost come to get me."

After that it seemed quite natural to let Dan's soothing quasi-paternal embrace turn into something more passionate, and in this, her mood heightened by her previous fear, Jemima's response was certainly quite as whole-hearted as Dan's. They began to kiss, hungrily like starving people.

"Oh God, how I want you," she thought he said at one point, as kisses gave way to more urgent embraces, his voice muffled in her hair. All Jemima could think—without speaking because there was no need for words—was: I want you too—now.

Afterwards Jemima knew perfectly well that she would never have resisted Dan at the last moment—it was not in her nature to do so, any more than it was in his to draw back. Where they had been lazily, slowly, sensually in tune that hot afternoon in her flat, now they were as one in a far more violent rhythm of possession and surrender. Much more difficult to know was what the final outcome of it all would have been. Regret? Embarrassment? After all her good resolutions? Or a new twist to the Cavalier Case, with sex becoming as prominent as history and sport?

Like the contents of the Home Secretary's speech, the question of Jemima's regret or otherwise was never to be resolved. A loud shout from down below caused them both to freeze. The door to the staircase, Jemima realised, had fallen open again.

"Dan! For Christ's sake, Dan, where are you?" It was Marcus. He sounded either very angry or very frightened or both. He seemed to be at the end of the gallery or at the head of the stairs.

"Dan!" Marcus shouted again. "Where are you?"

Dan released Jemima, pulling at his clothes as though to knot some non-existent tie; he was in fact wearing an open-neck dark shirt and dark trousers. He stood a little way apart from her and called out in a loud, perfectly measured voice: "I'm up here, Markie, on the roof. Getting some air. What's the matter, old man?" But Jemima was still close enough to him to realize that Dan, for all his measured voice, was panting, even trembling, much as she had been earlier.

The gallery below flooded with light. 

"Its Nell, Little Nell." Marcus' voice came up hoarsely from below. "There's been an accident, the most ghastly accident. Dan, you must come."

It was extraordinary how coolly Dan still managed to speak, although Jemima could feel that he had not stopped trembling when he put his hand out to her again, this time as though seeking reassurance.

"How bad is it?"

"Very bad, I'm afraid." Marcus had reached the bottom of the staircase; Jemima could see him gazing upwards at them both.

"I'll come at once." As Dan went rapidly, lithely down the spiral without making a sound, Jemima realised that Dan was wearing dark rubber-soled trainer shoes.

Death Rehearsal

"She'll live. In fact she'll recover almost completely, they think. She's conscious now and ever since she recovered consciousness, began to recognise people, she's got better all the time."

Perhaps it was appropriate that it should be Alix Carstairs, in the pinkly chic surroundings of the Plantaganet Club, who broke the news to Jemima. Because it was Alix Carstairs who had also kept Jemima in touch with Nell's progress—or rather lack of it—during the terrible days following her "accident" in the back quarters of Lackland Court.

"Charlotte's been wonderful," added Alix generously. "Wanted to stick by her all the time. And Marcus too. He coped with Babs as well, who's been totally hysterical of course—well, you can hardly blame her for that, poor thing". (Another burst of generosity.) "It was Marcus who kept Babs off Dan's back."

"How is Dan?" Jemima had not seen Dan Lackland again since that forever-interrupted idyll on the roof, except carrying the apparently lifeless form of his daughter across the hall in his arms, before the ambulance came. She heard Marcus say something about not moving her, how it was dangerous to move someone with head injuries, and heard Dan himself hiss back over his shoulder: "I'm not leaving my daughter there lying in a pool of her own blood." Charlotte was at his elbow, trying to calm him; Dan shrugged her off equally fiercely.

"Zena had to cope with Dan. Zena and Jane Manfred between them." Perhaps that too cost Alix something to admit. "I—I've scarcely seen him. He's hardly been here." 

Alix looked extremely strained as she had done once before on the morning when the news of Haygarth's death arrived to disrupt the tennis match. Come to think of it, she had also looked strained and unhappy in advance of her hysterical outburst on the day of the tournament. You simply assumed that someone of Alix's fresh appearance and robust athletic build—she was really quite plump in places, with an unfashionably voluptuous bosom for a tennis player—was naturally good-natured and full of equanimity. It was not necessarily so. At Jemima's original visit to the Planty, Alix had greeted her in quite a hostile manner beneath the conventional politeness due to Jemima's celebrity status. Really, to be the girlfriend of a famous womaniser—frankly, that was Dan's other career—was one worse than being his wife; all the same opportunities for torturing jealousy, none of the comfort of the public position. A further warning, as if she, Jemima, needed one . . .

Of course Alix Carstairs had had to endure a further ordeal beyond the prolonged absence of Dan at his daughter's bedside, with his wife, with his sister, with his ex-wife (as little as possible), with Jane Manfred, in short with anyone except Alix herself. The last days and weeks at the Planty must have been testing in themselves when this latest development of the Cavalier Case—as it was inevitably seen by the Press—brought still greater attention to the club. Stories like MIDNIGHT MERCY DASH DRAMA OF CAVALIER CASE TEENAGER brought comfort to few—except of course the numerous readers of the
Clueless
.

"What happened exactly?" Jemima felt she must ask Alix. Although Marcus Meredith had given her his own account, so far as it went, the next morning at what was a highly subdued breakfast in the Lackland Court dining room: with even young Dessie silent. Jemima had tried to establish if there was anything she could helpfully do, before she left tor London.

"No, no, nothing, nothing," cried Charlotte in visible distress. "Unless you could stop Jane Manfred coming over. She's just rung up—Dan must have rung
her
—"

"I'll settle her," said Zena Meredith grimly, stalking out of the room before Jemima could say anything. Then a pale young girl appeared who proved to be the missing Penny Smith; she took charge of the children. Charlotte went off to the hospital. 

That left Marcus to explain to Jemima how he had stumbled—literally stumbled—over Nell's inert body on one of his nocturnal rambles: "One just can't sleep in the heat, sometimes, can one? Perhaps you find that too?" The question was put quite casually. At the same time Jemima recognised her cue. She too had some explaining to do, to Marcus at least. (She did not think anyone but Marcus had realised that Dan had not been alone on the roof.)

"Oh, absolutely, one sometimes finds one just needs to spring up—" To her annoyance Jemima found she was slipping into Marcus' own faintly ludicrous impersonal style. "And then when one did get up onto the roof, Dan really gave one quite a fright..." She must stop this, she sounded like Princess Anne. "One minute later, one, no, I, no,
we
heard your shout." (That should make everything very, very clear, should it not? What was more, it was the truth, and nothing but the truth; it was not the whole truth—well, not quite—but what had happened between Jemima and Dan during that one minute, it was really not much more, was definitely none of Marcus' business.)

Marcus had little else to tell her at that point and certainly no clues as to how Nell fell and caused that massive injury to her head. Nor, in the days which followed, according to Alix, were any further definite clues discovered. The floors of the back quarters were both uneven and stone-flagged, but an accidental fall in itself would not be enough to cause such major damage. The most likely theory was based on the fact that the cupboards in the room where Nell was found went right up to the ceiling. There was evidence that she had been trying to reach the very highest shelf: a pair of high rickety wooden steps lying on the floor.

In the dark—there was no light bulb in the single ceiling light hanging from a flex—Nell must have overbalanced, failed to save herself, and fallen, bringing the steps crashing down with her. In that way, she would have hit her head on the stone floor with great force; quite apart from all the debris lying about in the room, old croquet mallets, one with the head missing, one with the handle broken in half, and so forth—the detritus of country-house life over years. Then there were all the wicker baskets full of seventeenth-century costumes waiting for the Cavalier Celebration. Some of these had been hired, some lent, some were family costumes. All in all, the room was in chaos.

"Mysterious things, head injuries," ended Alix. Jemima could not but agree.

Leaving Nell's injuries aside, there was the problem—also so far unsolved—of what the girl was doing in the back quarters in the first place. It was fairly clear what Nell was doing up and dressed in the middle of the night: she was running away from Lackland Court to "home," that is, her mother's London flat, on the grounds that she was homesick. A note to that effect had been found pinned to her pillow. There was however much family surprise, reported Alix, that Nell should reach a sudden decision and implement it in this manner— after all, who on earth would have stopped her going home anytime she wanted to go? The truth was: absolutely no one. Alix did not need to amplify the reason.

"But Nell's always been rather hysterical. And a bit of a fantasist. Think of all that stuff about the ghost she told the Press,
she
started the whole thing off and
we're
still living with it. Gets it from Babs, I'm afraid." Alix's new found generosity was waning.

But her trip backstairs? No one could explain that although oddly enough Louisa, Charlotte's elder daughter, did contribute the fact that Nell was always poking about there. "And she chased us out, she was horrid, although it's our house not hers, she told us to go away, she had a secret there I think." 

Emily corroborated her sister's story: "She used to dress up. All by herself. That's rather silly, isn't it? And we weren't supposed to touch all the dressing-up things. But
she
did."

Now Jemima learnt from Alix that even Nell's recent return to consciousness had not resulted in further light being cast on the whole bizarre near-fatal episode. On the contrary, the story was now more baffling than ever. The first thing Nell did was to announce quite firmly, for all her weakened state, that she had absolutely no memory whatsoever of the events leading up to her accident. She did not remember falling and hurting herself. She did not remember going to the back quarters of the house. She did not remember getting out of bed and dressing. She did not even remember writing the note found on her pillow.

When the note was presented to her, Nell looked for a moment puzzled, abstracted and then read out the words: "Homesick for
Mum
," with exactly the same note of amazement as they had been read earlier by her father. Direct if short-lived questioning by Dan, gentle prolonged questioning by Charlotte, tender and even more prolonged questioning from her Aunt Zena—none of this produced results.

"It does happen. It's not all that uncommon with head injuries. The doctors say that. Concussion, etcetera. You remember the past but not the immediate past. She remembers the fete and all about the skeleton being dug up—yuk, Jemima, was that awful? Dan says if it is Decimus, it's got to be properly buried, by the way, by his family, not left at Taynford Grange—but she doesn't remember anything later. Not even getting into bed, let alone getting out of it."

Jemima was at the Plantaganet Club (of which she was now a member) not entirely to keep in touch with the Cavalier Case. She also had an appointment to play tennis with Cherry. Since the disappearance of Cass, Jemima had concentrated on her P.A. as her sounding-board for her thoughts on the Meredith family, Lackland Court and the Cavalier Case in a way which reminded her of successful investigations in the past—the pre-Cass era, in fact. But times changed. And Cherry, Flowering Cherry of Megalith Television, as she had once been known admiringly, for her deliciously well-endowed figure, had changed too, as she quickly reminded Jemima.