The Skull Beneath the Skin (25 page)

Roma said: “You sound as though you don’t want it solved.”

“Without having strong feelings on the matter, I should prefer to have it solved. It would be tedious to spend the rest of one’s life as a suspected murderer.”

“It’ll bring in the summer tourists though, won’t it? People love blood and horror. You’ll be able to show the scene of the crime—for an extra twenty pence, of course.”

Ambrose said easily: “I don’t pander to sensationalism. That’s why summer visitors don’t get shown the crypt. And this is a murder in poor taste.”

“But aren’t all murders in poor taste?”

“Not necessarily. It would make a good parlour game, classifying the classical murder cases according to their degree of tastelessness. But this one strikes me as particularly bizarre, extravagant, theatrical.”

Roma had drained her first cup of tea and was pouring a second. “Well that’s appropriate enough.” She added: “It’s odd that we’ve been left here alone, isn’t it? I thought that there’d be a plainclothes underling sitting in and taking a note of all our indiscretions.”

“The police know the limit of their territory and of their powers. I’ve given them the use of the business room and, naturally, they’ve locked the two guest rooms. But this is still my house and my library and they come in here by invitation. Until they decide to charge someone, we’re all entitled to be treated as innocent. Even Ralston, presumably, although as husband he has to be elevated to chief suspect. Poor George! If he really loved her this must be hell for him.”

Roma said: “My guess is he’d stopped loving her six months
after the wedding. He must have known by then that she wasn’t capable of fidelity.”

Ambrose asked: “He never showed the least sign, did he?”

“Not to me, but then I hardly ever saw them. And what could he do, faced with that particular insubordination? You can hardly deal with an unfaithful wife as if she were a recalcitrant subaltern. But I don’t suppose he liked it. But if he didn’t kill her and I don’t for one moment believe that he did, he’s probably not entirely ungrateful to whoever did. The money will come in useful to subsidize that Fascist organization he runs. The Union of British Patriots, U.B.P. Wouldn’t you know from the name that it’s a Fascist front?”

Ambrose smiled: “Well, I wouldn’t expect it to be full of Trots and International Socialists certainly. It’s harmless enough. A
Boys’ Own Paper
mentality and a geriatric army.”

Roma slammed down her cup and began again her restless pacing. “My God, you’re good at deceiving yourselves, aren’t you? It’s nasty, it’s embarrassing and most unforgivable of all, the people concerned actually take themselves seriously. They really believe in their dangerous nonsense. So let’s all laugh at it, and perhaps it will go away. When the chips are down, who do you think this geriatric army are going to be defending? The poor bloody proles? Not likely!”

“I rather hope they’ll be defending me.”

“Oh, they will, Ambrose, they will! You and the multinational corporations, the establishment, the press barons. Clarissa’s money will do its bit towards keeping the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.”

Ambrose said mischievously: “But don’t you get some of the money? And won’t it come in useful to you?”

“Of course, money always does. But it isn’t important. I’ll be glad enough of it, I suppose, when it actually comes, but
I don’t need it. It certainly isn’t important enough to kill for. Come to that, I don’t know what is.”

“Oh, come on, Roma, don’t be naive! A cursory read of the daily papers will tell you what people find important enough to kill for. Dangerous and destructive emotions, to begin with. Love, for example.”

Munter was at the door. He coughed, rather, thought Cordelia, like a stock butler in a play, and said: “The pathologist, Dr. Ellis-Jones, has arrived, sir.”

Ambrose looked for a moment distracted as if wondering whether he was expected formally to greet the newcomer. He said: “I’d better come, I suppose. Do the police know he’s here?”

“Not yet, sir. I thought it right to inform you first.”

“Where is he, the pathologist?”

“In the great hall, sir.”

“Well, we can’t keep him waiting. You’d better take him to Chief Inspector Grogan. I suppose there are things he may need. Hot water, for example.”

He looked vaguely around as if expecting a jug and basin to materialize from the air. Munter disappeared.

Ivo murmured: “You make it sound like childbirth.”

Roma swung round, her tone was a mixture of the peevish and appalled. “But surely he’s not going to do the post-mortem here!” They all looked at Cordelia. She thought that Ambrose must surely know the procedure, but he too gazed at her with a look of bland, almost amused inquiry. She said: “No. He’ll just do a preliminary examination at what they call the scene-of-crime. He’ll take the temperature of the body, try to estimate the time of death. Then they’ll take her away. They don’t like to move the body until the forensic pathologist has seen it and certified that life is extinct.”

Roma Lisle said: “What a lot of curious information you
have acquired for a girl who calls herself a secretary-companion. But of course, I forgot. Ambrose tells us that you’re a private eye. So perhaps you’ll explain why we’ve all had to have our fingerprints taken. I found it particularly offensive, the way they take hold of your fingers and press them down on the pad. It wouldn’t be so repulsive if you were allowed to do it yourself.”

Cordelia said: “Didn’t the police explain the reason? If they find any prints in Clarissa’s room they want to be able to eliminate ours.”

“Or identify them. And what else are they doing, apart from grilling George? God knows they’ve brought enough men with them.”

“Some of them are probably scientific officers from the forensic science laboratory. Or they may be what are called scene-of-crime officers. They’ll collect the scientific evidence, samples of blood and body fluids. They’ll take away the bedclothes and the cup and saucer. And they’ll analyse the dregs of tea to find out if she was poisoned. She could have been drugged before she was killed. She was lying very peaceably on her back.”

Roma said: “It didn’t need a drug for Clarissa to lie peaceably on her back.”

Then she saw their faces. Her own went scarlet and she cried: “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that I can’t really believe it; I can’t picture her lying there, battered to death. I haven’t that kind of imagination. She was alive. Now she’s dead. I didn’t like her and she didn’t like me. Death can’t alter that for either of us.”

She almost stumbled to the door.

“I’m going for a walk. I’ve got to get out of this place. If Grogan wants me he can come and find me.”

Ambrose refilled the teapot and poured himself another cup; then seated himself leisurely next to Cordelia.

“That’s what surprises me about political commitment. Her cousin, the woman she was practically brought up with, is messily done to death and will shortly be carted off to be scientifically carved up by a Home Office pathologist. She’s shocked, obviously. But basically she cares as little as if she’d been told that Clarissa was inconvenienced by a mild attack of fibrositis. But one mention of poor Ralston’s Union of British Patriots and she’s hysterical with outrage.”

Ivo said: “She’s frightened.”

“That’s obvious, but what of? Not that pathetic bunch of amateur warriors?”

“They frighten me occasionally. I suppose she was right about the money and Ralston will get most of it. How much is that?”

“My dear Ivo, I don’t know. Clarissa never confided the details of her personal finances, we weren’t that close.”

“I rather thought you were.”

“And even if we had been, I doubt whether she would have told. That’s one surprising fact about Clarissa. You won’t believe this but it’s true. She loved to gossip, but she could keep a secret when she wanted to. Clarissa liked hoarding, and that included nuggets of useful information.”

Ivo said lightly: “How unexpected, and how very dangerous.”

Cordelia looked at them, at Ambrose’s bright malicious eyes, at Ivo’s barely covered skeleton angularly disposed in his chair, at the long bony hands drooping from wrists which looked too thin and brittle to hold them, at the putty-coloured face with its jutting bones turned upwards to the stuccoed ceiling. She was seized with a confusion of feelings; anger, a deep unfocused pity and a less familiar emotion which she
recognized as envy. They were so secure in their sardonic, half-humorous detachment. Could anything really touch their hearts or nerves except the possibility of their own pain? And even physical pain, that universal leveller, they would meet with wry disgust or derisive contempt. Wasn’t that how Ivo was facing his own death? Why should she expect them to grieve because a woman neither of them had greatly liked was lying upstairs with her face smashed in? And yet it wasn’t necessary to affirm Donne’s overworked aphorism to feel that something was owed to a death, that something in their relationships, in the castle itself, in the very air they breathed, had been touched and subtly altered. Suddenly she felt very alone and very young. She was aware of Ambrose looking at her. As if he had read her thoughts he said: “Part of the horror of murder is that it does the dead out of their rights. I don’t suppose anyone in this room is personally desolated by Clarissa’s death. But if she’d died a natural death, at least we’d be mourning her in the sense that we’d be thinking of her with that confused mixture of regret, sentimentality and sympathetic interest which is the normal tribute to the recently dead. As it is, all we’re thinking of is ourselves. Well, aren’t we? Aren’t we?”

Ivo said: “I don’t think Cordelia is.”

The library enclosed them again in its silence. But their ears were abnormally alert to every creak and three heads jerked upwards simultaneously at the sound of muffled footfalls across the hall and the distant thud, faint but unmistakable, of a closing door. Ivo said quietly: “I think they’re taking her away.”

He moved silently behind one of the curtains and Cordelia followed. Between the wide lawns, frosted by moonlight, four dark and elongated figures, shadowless as phantoms, bent to their task. Behind them paced Sir George, stiff-legged and
erect, as if his sword clanked at his side. The small procession looked like a group of mourners surreptitiously burying their dead according to some esoteric and prohibited rite. Cordelia, drained by shock and tiredness, wished she could feel some personal and appropriate response of pity. But there came into her mind instead a whisper of atavistic horror, images of plague and secret murder, de Courcy’s men disposing of his victims under the cloak of night. It seemed to her that Ivo had stopped breathing. He didn’t speak but she sensed through the contact of his rigid shoulder the intensity of his gaze. Then the curtains parted and Ambrose stood behind them. He said: “She arrived in the morning sun and leaves by moonlight. But I should be out there. Grogan should have told me they were ready to take her away. Really, that man’s behaviour is becoming intolerable!”

And so it was, thought Cordelia, that Clarissa left on her final journey from Courcy Island, on that note of slightly peevish complaint.

An hour later the door opened and Sir George came in. He must have been aware of their inquiring looks, of the question which no one cared to ask. He said: “Grogan was perfectly civil, but I don’t think he’s formed any theories. I suppose he knows his business. That red hair must be a disadvantage—disguise you know.”

Ambrose said gravely, controlling the twitching of his mouth: “I think detection at his level is chiefly desk-work. I don’t suppose he does much lurking in the undergrowth.”

“Must do some fieldwork, keep his hand in. He could dye it I suppose.”

He picked up
The Spectator
and settled himself at the chart table as much at ease as if he were in his London club. The others stood and regarded him in baffled silence. Cordelia
thought: We’re behaving like candidates at an oral examination who’d rather like to know what questions to expect but feel that it would be taking an unfair advantage actually to ask. The same thought must have struck Ivo. He said: “The police aren’t running a competition for their favourite suspect of the year. I confess to some curiosity about their strategy and technique. Reviewing Agatha Christie at the Vaudeville is a poor preparation for the real thing. So how did it go, Ralston?”

Sir George looked up from his journal and appeared to give the question serious thought. “Much as you’d expect. Where exactly was I and what was I doing this afternoon? I told them I was bird-watching on the west cliffs. Told them, too, that I’d seen Simon coming ashore through my binoculars on the way home. Seemed to think that was important. Asked about Clarissa’s money. How much? Who gets it? Grogan wasted twenty minutes asking me about bird life on Courcy. Trying to put me at my ease, I suppose. A bit odd, I thought.”

Ivo said: “Trying to catch you out more likely with cunning traps about the nesting habits of non-existent species. What about this morning? Are we expected to detail every waking moment of the day?”

His voice was carefully casual, but all four of them knew what it was he was asking and the importance of the reply. Sir George took up his journal again. Without looking up he said: “Didn’t say more than I needed. Told them about the visit to the Church and the Devil’s Kettle. Mentioned the drowning but didn’t give names. No point in confusing the investigation with old history. Not their concern.”

Ivo said: “You reassure me. That’s rather the line I propose to take. I’ll have a word with Roma when the opportunity arises and you, Ambrose, might speak to the boy. As Ralston
says, there’s no point in confusing them with old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.”

No one replied, but Sir George suddenly looked up over his journal: “Sorry, I forgot. They want to see you now, Cordelia.”

Cordelia could understand why Ambrose had offered the business room for the use of the police. It was appropriately furnished as an office, it wasn’t too large, and it kept them well out of his way. But as she seated herself in the mahogany and cane chair and faced Chief Inspector Grogan across the desk, she wished that Ambrose had chosen any room other than this private museum of murder. The Staffordshire figures on the wall shelf behind Grogan’s head seemed to have grown, no longer quaintly fashioned antiques but real people, their bland, painted faces glowing and twisting into life. And the framed Victorian broadsheets with their crudely drawn scaffolds and death cells were intrusive in their horror, stark celebrations of the cruelty of man to man. The room itself was smaller than she remembered and she felt herself closeted with her interrogators in frightening and claustrophobic proximity. She was only half aware that there was a uniformed woman police officer sitting almost motionless in the corner by the window, watchful as a chaperone. Did they think that she would faint or accuse Grogan of assaulting her? She wondered briefly
whether it was the same anonymous officer who had helped move her clothes and belongings from the De Morgan room to her new bedroom. She had no doubt that they had been thoroughly examined before being neatly arranged on the bed.