Cool Repentance (13 page)

'And the question of motive brings me to you, Miss Shore.'

'Me?'

'Well, you've a reputation for these things, investigations I mean. I know all about you from my little brother Gary in London - not so little these days, two inches taller than me, Gary Harwood, if three stones lighter, the one who looks like Elvis, or so the girls tell me, and works for Pompey of the Yard. Jemima Shore Investigator . . . and not only on the telly. Am I right or am I wrong?'

'Ah.' Over the years it was true that Jemima had enjoyed a pleasant working relationship with Pompey of the Yard, Detective Superintendent Portsmouth as he had become, formerly Detective Chief Inspector John Portsmouth of the Bloomsbury Division; her relationship with his dashing sidekick while in Bloomsbury, Detective Constable Gary Harwood, had had its pleasant moments too. Her connection with Pompey had begun when she had interviewed him on television in connection with an appeal for a missing child. Subsequently there had been investigations - she was not too modest to admit it - where the confidence of the public in the familiar appearance of a telly star, combined with Jemima's own intelligence and curiosity, had enabled her to solve certain cases which had baffled the more conventional workings of the police.

‘I
spoke to Gary this evening, as a matter of fact. Nothing official. What's happening in the Third Test, you know the sort of thing.' She did. 'And he said "That Jemima Shore, give her enough rope and—"'

'Go on,' Jemima prompted him sweetly.

'"Give her enough rope, Matt," he said, "and you can watch the Test to your heart's content - because she'll solve your case for you.'" 'Ah,' said Jemima Shore again.

'What I need to know, Jemima, is this.' After these combined mentions of Pompey, Gary Harwood and cricket, their friendship was clearly progressing. 'Who
wanted
him out of the way? What's going on here? It doesn't make sense. No debts. We've checked that. No obvious clues. No vicious ex-girlfriends for example. We've checked that too. No romances in the cast - not gay either so far as we know. A girl in his flat in London who seemed devoted to him, very upset at his death, anyway she had an alibi although we didn't quite put it like that, at the theatre with her sister. Professional rivalry? That director, the nervous one, who's taken over - he doesn't look a murderer for my money and anyway if his wife's story -
and
her lover's by the way - is to be believed, he was busy telephoning about his asthma all through the night! Theatrical people. I ask you.' Detective Inspector Harwood shook his massive head.

Jemima thought back to a certain conversation with Christabel Cartwright in Flora's Kitchen.

'On the stage, I'll be safe.' And so she was safe - up to the present time. But Filly was dead, and so was Nat Fitzwilliam. These could no longer be forbidden thoughts. She had to talk to someone about Christabel. And that led her to Gregory Rowan, Gregory who had made no secret of his hostility to Megalith Television on her arrival at Larmouth, but was now suspiciously amiable.

'I'd like to help you, Matt—' said Jemima with her angelic smile, the one she kept for ravishing television viewers when she was discussing importantly boring topics like the Common Market. 'Unofficially, of course.'

'My money's on the playwright,' added Matt Harwood suddenly and rather unexpectedly. 'Had a row with Fitzwilliam over his production of his play. Left for home about eleven o'clock to go for a
swim!
Then went 
straight back to his cottage.
Swimming.
What kind of an alibi is that? Still, I dare say you will tell me that playwrights never do want to kill directors over productions of their plays.'

Jemima saw no reason to tell him any such thing. But since she had no wish to lower his opinion of theatrical people still further, she merely agreed aloud that it would be a wise move for him to talk further with Gregory Rowan. Privately she decided to go and call on Gregory herself in the cottage in the woods. She thought she would go alone. She did not mention this plan to Detective Inspector Harwood.

10

A Real Killer

'Let me help.'

Gregory Rowan put out his arm, an arm so darkly tanned and knotted with muscles that it might have belonged to a sailor, and gripped Jemima by the elbow. She trod water desperately. For a moment he supported her altogether.

'It's the current,' she gulped, 'I'd no idea. I'm quite a strong swimmer. And it's very cold.'

He could just as easily have pulled her under: they were alone, far out from the shore; the beach was deserted. But that was a mad thought, produced by panic. He had saved her, not pulled her down.

Afterwards he said: 'You see. Nobody takes this current seriously. That poor girl - you probably see now how easily it can happen. Anyway you're a beautiful swimmer. You just needed a little help. Even you.' Gregory smiled. 'Even Jemima Shore Investigator.'

Jemima smiled too. 'I was out of my depth.' They were back at his cottage and she was smoking a cigarette, which had Gregory but known it, was another sign that she had felt, even for one moment, out of her depth. So far as she could recall, she had not smoked one cigarette that year.

She had first begun to feel out of her depth when Gregory had greeted her unexpected arrival at Old Keeper's Lodge - in fact a cottage - with extraordinary cordiality. Unlike Detective Inspector Harwood, she was not herself inclined to 'put her money on the playwright'. It was to talk about Christabel that Jemima had decided to pay her surprise visit to the cottage - Christabel and her friends, Christabel and her enemies. In order to find out who might have had reason to kill Nat Fitzwilliam - possibly because of what he saw from the Watchtower concerning the death of Filly - it was necessary to go back to the beginning and find out what was or had been frightening Christabel. Gregory was her best potential source of information about the past at Lark Manor: but she did not expect the interview (she used the word automatically) to go very easily.

On the other hand she did not herself rate Gregory as a suspect. Or if by any chance Gregory had killed Nat, Jemima could hardly believe that it was for the reason that Matt Harwood proposed. Fitzwilliam's contempt for
Widow Capet
had been much discussed; phrases like 'this middle-class, middle-brow and middle-aged hit' had been quoted, the latter being a remark Nat had chosen to make to Old Nicola of all people, with the predictable result that it had received a wide circulation. Nevertheless if Jemima judged Gregory's character right, this kind of behaviour in a young director was more likely to inspire Gregory to verbal attack in public than murder in private; even if the death of Nat had resulted in the restoration of the original director and sympathetic interpreter of Gregory's works, Boy Greville.

As for the death of Filly, Jemima could not of course imagine any reason at all why Gregory should wish to remove her from the Larminster dramatic scene. Filly's death had considerably weakened the cast of
Widow Capet.
Anna Maria Packe was too old to play Paulinot, the jailer's daughter. Emily Jones, who was the right age, was as yet far too weak a stage presence to compete with Christabel as Marie Antoinette in the famous scene between the two women, which even Nat Fitzwilliam had admitted stood most effectively for the Old France versus the New. What might have been memorable theatre with Filly Lennox involved, would now be sadly tame.

And Gregory killing Filly by mistake for Christabel? Ah, there was the rub. There was a great deal about the strange tangled emotional situation at Lark Manor yet to be unravelled. This was one reason why Jemima had not yet shared her suspicions concerning Filly's death with the police, despite the growing warmth of her friendship with Detective Inspector Harwood.

'He wouldn't want to hear it. It's only supposition. After all there's no
proof,'
she told herself, to explain her reluctance, knowing mil well that this was not the true explanation. The truth was that Jemima Shore Investigator, tantalized by the strange situation at Lark Manor - above all by the 'cool repentance' of Christabel Cartwright - wanted first crack at solving the mystery herself.

Gregory's cottage was predictably book-furnished, shelves everywhere, and books also in heaps on the floor and resting on sofas like sleeping cats. Jemima noticed a number of books about Restoration Drama and what looked like an eighteenth-century edition of Rochester's erotic poetry (an admirer had once presented her with something similar). A good many of the books looked as if they came into the valuable category of the very old; others fell into the expensive category of the very new.

The books, whether leather-bound or modern, did not however look dusty. And there was nothing dirty or even shabby about the cottage. The thick woods rising behind Lark Manor had parted to reveal this little patch of green order within the luxuriant chaos of the trees, with a cottage - a Hansel and Gretel type of cottage - in the middle of it. Inside the cottage there was the same feeling of order at work within chaos.

As she looked round, Jemima's eye fell on a large framed photograph of the lady of Lark Manor herself. It must have been taken many years ago: the tw
o solemn-eyed girls at Christabe
l's side, holding up the ends of her wide sash, were mere children. The photograph was not actually on Gregory's desk but facing it. On the desk, however, was another smaller photograph of Christabel in a gold frame. Her hair rippled out of the picture: she smiled into the camera, at Gregory, at Jemima Shore. That photograph too came from some past era. A further quick glance round the room revealed at least one other picture of Christabel, more of a family snapshot than a posed actress's photograph. It included the father of the family, Julian Cartwright.

Jemima thought that the presence of so many large and obvious photographs of Christabel Cartwright ought to make her task of questioning Gregory on the subject rather easy. The fact that none of these photographs was at all recent - all of them must certainly antedate the Iron Boy affair - could also be considered helpful.

At this point Gregory suggested going swimming.

'And then we can talk all you like, Jemima Shore Investigator,' he ended with a slightly ironic smile; but he still showed absolutely no sign of his earlier hostility. 'And you can ask me all the questions you like. Isn't that what you've come for?'

Somehow Gregory's professed willingness to be interrogated, like his friendliness, gave him an advantage. It crossed her mind to wonder which of them was really going to pose the questions and gain the needful information: who, whom? Once they were back in the cottage, after rattling up from the beach in Gregory's large black hearse-like car, she continued to feel out of her depth, and not only because of her recent chilling experience in the water.

The truth was that Gregory exerted some kind of odd influence over her, she had to face that, and had done so since that first abrasive meeting on the beach. Then he had displayed the rare power to rile her - she, Jemima Shore, whose great asset as an interviewer was the fact that she was never riled, no matter what the provocation, using on the contrary her cool composure to rile others where necessary in the cause of her investigations. Now he was persuading her to smoke and drink whisky before lunch, something which was even rarer; many of Jemima's best friends felt that her whole legendary composure could be summed up by the glass of chilled dry white wine she was so fond of drinking.

Spike Thompson, for example, had been able to convert Jemima neither to whisky nor to cigarettes, under far more intimate circumstances: on him she had imposed her own demand of champagne, and, where cigarettes were concerned, had merely watched while Spike had rolled his own choice of smoke; naked and happy she had gazed at the ceiling and smelt the slightly sweet smell of pot drifting by without any inclination to share it.

The thought of Spike suggested to her, irritatingly, that she was possibly rather attracted to Gregory in a tiresome Beatrice and Benedick kind of way, which scarcely fitted her plans for Bridset relaxation. Jemima, being a free woman, made it her practice to do exactly what she pleased in that direction; especially when she was, by her own reckoning, fancy-free - as she was at the present time. Doing what she pleased, she decided, might include an uninhibited Bridset Idyll with an energetic cameraman, but it definitely did not include any kind of involvement with the provoking and doubtless complicated Gregory Rowan.

Nevertheless the ability of Gregory to intrigue and tease and annoy her suggested to Jemima, from experience, that she was not absolutely indifferent to him in the mysterious sphere of sexual attraction. She therefore made a resolution not to allow these tentative thoughts on the subject of his physical attraction to go any further; she backed it up with a further resolution to keep this resolution. She was here to talk about Christabel.

It was therefore rather a pity from the point of view of both these resolutions that conversation about Christabel led at once to the topics of love, infatuation and even, though it was not explicitly stated as such, sex and Gregory Rowan. None of this exactly helped to quell Jemima's personal interest in the subject.