by Anne Morice
“So have I, but I take my own judgement into account as well.”
“Yes, I suppose one would be bound to.”
“I was prepared for the worst with Alice, but in fact she was perfectly friendly and amiable. Streets ahead of Edna in every way. I agree that wouldn’t be hard, but it was different from anything I had expected.”
“Led by Tilly to expect?”
“Yes, and by Camilla and Vi and Marge and a whole lot more. In other words, everyone who belongs in the Tilly league, but doesn’t know Alice particularly well. And Alice made one extremely acute remark. She said that although a particular suggestion might have come from Camilla it was more likely to have been inspired by Tilly. Now, we all know how clever Tilly is in that way, but I’d taken it for granted that she used the talent constructively, to build people up, in fact. It had never occurred to me before that there might also be a destructive element in it. You see where all this is leading, of course?”
“Oh, of course,” he replied, more from the desire to silence me, I daresay, than from conviction.
“It is leading straight back to Richelieu,” I said, dashing these forlorn hopes.
“Oh, God!”
“Because if you are correct in maintaining that no one could wield a dark and evil power during their lifetime and simultaneously acquire a reputation for being harmless and kind, then, despite appearances, Alice must be a jealous vindictive woman, who spends her time manufacturing grievances which have no basis, in which case we have nothing to worry about.”
“I am not in the least worried.”
“Maybe not, but I am. I’ve always believed that though Tilly may be a fond and foolish old woman in some ways, she hadn’t a deceitful or unkind thought in her head. I’d hate to have to change my mind about that, but now along comes Alice, who, conversely, doesn’t appear to be nearly so black as she’s been painted, with the news that Tilly is a scheming harpy, pushing Edna into her grave and cutting her off from the one person who truly had her welfare at heart. When you add the fact that Tilly had a slap up motive, well, it makes you think, doesn’t it!”
“If you’re referring to Edna’s new will, I don’t see that it gave her any better motive than Ferdy or Camilla. They both stood to lose just as much or more by it.”
“We all know that now, but we didn’t when Edna was alive. The only one who probably knew about both wills was Tilly. The key to the drawer where it was kept turns up in one of Edna’s bags, oh what a surprise! But I bet you fifty thousand pounds that Tilly could have laid her hands on it any time she wanted to.”
“And jolly good luck to her, if she did! I consider Edna behaved disgracefully in cutting her out. And, incidentally, since Tilly had become so indispensable to her, why was she to be cut out? Have you found the answer to that one yet?”
“No, but there are various possibilities, including the one that Alice’s verdict was right and Edna had finally begun to see this for herself, without any prompting, or that Alice had succeeded in getting the message across. So that still leaves the question open as to which of those two was the eminence grise and which the blanche. One thing we do know is that if anyone was impersonating Edna, out of malice or for a more sinister purpose, it’s unlikely to have been Alice. Her best bet was obviously to keep her sister in good fettle until the new will had been made legal.”
“No, you’re quite wrong there,” Toby said, getting up and moving towards the door. “I’m going for my walk now. The five minutes were up hours ago.”
“All the same, you might at least tell me before you go why I’m quite wrong there.”
“In the first place, there’s no guarantee that Alice knew anything about a new will, but was simply anxious to get her hands on her original share before she was too old to enjoy it. Secondly, if she did know, she could have been under the impression that it had already been signed, in which case it would have been imperative to work fast, before Edna could change her mind yet again and start revoking that one.”
“Which brings us back to where we started?”
“It’s too bad, I agree, but something tells me you won’t easily persuade either of those two to open up their hearts to you on this subject, and unfortunately it is now too late for Edna to do so.”
“And that’s where you’re quite wrong there,” I said with a faint lilt of triumph, which soared a note or two higher when I saw that he was no longer in quite such a hurry to leave.
“What can you mean, Tessa?”
“I don’t exactly know how it is to be done,” I admitted, “but I do know that the possibility exists. Off you go for your walk now and perhaps I’ll have hit on the answer by the time you get back.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
An hour or two later, at noon to be precise, I entered the premises of Ladye Fayre, which is the name of Storhampton’s grandest hairdressing salon, for my regular daily comb-out.
I do not normally go to such lengths to keep my appearance up to the mark, but there was a scene, supposedly of a public performance of our play within a play, where, with off stage passions running high and mutiny breaking out all over, the actor who played my adoring husband in the interior play, if I may so describe it, and my implacable enemy in the exterior one, was required to lose his temper with me, in wholly unscripted fashion. This led to his walking off at the end of the scene and slamming the door behind him, a contingency which had not been allowed for by the amateur set constructors and stage management, with the result that a chunk of scenery fell down, part of it on my head.
I had complained about this several times, but the director had pointed out that as the joke always went down like a high explosive bomb, giving rise, to quote a well known source, to such hilarity and mirth, it would be a crime to drop it and that I could always overcome the personal inconvenience by wearing a wig. However, I was equally opposed to that suggestion and hence my daily appointment with Ladye Fayre.
On this occasion there was a customer occupying the chair next to mine, whose vaguely familiar features beneath the heavy rollers turned out on closer inspection to be those of Helena Plowman. For some strange reason, my initial reaction was to assume that she had been planted there in answer to some unspoken prayer and while Mr. Percy was teasing away at my hair a small elusive memory was also doing some teasing in the regions just below it. However, before I had succeeded in nailing it down Helena had been led away and was by then incarcerated and incommunicado, under the dryer.
At this point, I tried to dismiss the memory as of no special consequence, but it responded by taking a firmer grip on me than ever and all the time I was removing the nylon overall, bringing out money for the bill and agreeing with Mrs. Percy that it did look as though we were in for another scorcher and who’d want to go to Spain in a summer like this, I was also hearing Robin’s voice, when in one of our discussions about Edna he had reminded me that, with only one reservation, involving a conspiracy, anyone who could not have impersonated her doppelgänger on even a single appearance must be absolved from all the others too. I finally allowed it to rule me and left a note for Helena at the reception desk, inviting her to join me for a Special Lunch at the Jolly Angler as soon as she could get away.
“My dear, this is very civil of you,” she said, sitting down fifteen minutes later at the table I had procured in the window.
She was wearing the identical pleated shirtwaister as on the previous occasion, except that this one was cream instead of toffee-coloured and she looked so pristine and immaculate that if I had not known better I should have suspected her of having been home to change in the interval.
“Not at all,” I replied. “I hate lunching alone and, besides, I owe you one.”
Needless to say, neither of these arguments had influenced me in the slightest; nor had the invitation been extended in order to gain a first hand report on the ups and downs, rewards and losses, heartbreaks etcetera of the Festival, although I encouraged her to unburden herself on these topics, believing
that my objective would be more easily achieved after a little preliminary softening up.
Perhaps I overdid it, because half way through the flabby fish she said:
“Well now, Tessa, you’re very patient, but I can’t seriously believe that you’re interested in all these facts and figures, which make up my life at the moment. Tell me about yourself. How’s everything going?”
“Pretty fair, thank you. Mustn’t grumble. Your hair’s looking a treat, by the way.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said in a rather flustered way, instinctively raising a hand to pat or twiddle, then recollecting herself and dropping it like a hot coal. “I think they do it quite well. Not exactly Dover Street standards, naturally, but they do take trouble and I’ve trained them not to keep me waiting, which is a great asset.”
“Do you always go there?”
“Oh yes, always,” she replied without hesitation. “It’s so convenient, for one thing. Besides, there isn’t another place in Storhampton where one could go, as far as I know. Is there?”
“No, but Tilly was raving about somewhere in Stourbury and, just to prove how marvellous and utterly superior it was, she told me that you patronised it.”
Helena opened her mouth, then leant back in her chair and stared at me in a very unnerving way. I could not decide whether her look expressed annoyance, incredulity or even some quite different emotion because, as always when she was concentrating, the squint appeared and made her expression as inscrutable as a Buddhist monk’s.
“In fact,” I galloped on before she had a chance to shut me up, “it was having just met you there which set her off on it. I remember so well because I had been to Stourbury races with Vi and Marge and we had to collect Tilly at a bus stop. There was a bit of panic on because it was the afternoon Mrs. Mortimer was taken ill, only none of us knew it at the time, only that she was missing. Tilly was saying that she’d been to the hairdressers and met you there, and what a coincidence and so on and so forth. You know how she rattles on?”
Helena had been picking away with a finger-nail at a tiny hole in the tablecloth, while I rattled on myself, and now laughed in a very unamused way:
“I do indeed! She’s a great talker, but unfortunately for me no one could ever accuse her of straying from the truth. Be sure your sins will find you out, Tessa!”
“Oh, what a pity!”
“The fact is,” Helena said, looking at me squarely at last, “I’m going a bit grey here and there and I don’t terribly like it to be known. Something to do with hating to grow old, I suppose. So I have it tinted three or four times a year. My one small, secret vanity, you might say.”
“But why secret?” I asked, completely nonplussed.
“Oh well, you know what a hotbed of gossip this place is? If I had it done locally, no one would allow me a single natural hair on my head. It would be all over the town in no time that I was completely grey and a thorough old fake. It was unlucky for me that Tilly happened to have an appointment at the same time as mine. She hasn’t a spiteful thought in her head, but, as you say, she is rather a chatterbox. I suppose I could have warned her not to give me away, but that might have sounded as though there were something to be ashamed of, which I don’t consider there is. I mean, look how I’ve come clean with you, Tessa! And, incidentally, I know I can trust you not to pass it on?”
At one moment during this rather self-contradictory confession, I began to experience the sensation of a thunderous great wave gathering force somewhere just behind me and, by the time she had finished speaking, I could have sworn it had actually swept over me, knocking me off my feet and leaving me washed up and gasping on the beach.
Evidently noticing this, Helena said sharply: “Well, there’s no need to gape at me like a dying fish, Tessa! I’m not the only woman in the world to have her hair tinted, you know.”
“Of course not,” I mumbled. “I wasn’t staring because of that. To tell you the truth, I was wondering why it should bother you so much? I change my own to any colour of the rainbow, any time I feel like it. What does it matter?”
“It matters quite a lot at my age, as you’ll find out one of these days. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll dispense with coffee and get back to my desk. The Festival may be nearly over for some, but there’s still a mass of clearing up to do behind the scenes.”
I was grateful to her for cutting this rather awkward scene short, leaving me to cogitate in peace while I drank my coffee and waited for the bill, for as for having a mass of clearing up to do, she wasn’t the only one.
The first piece of debris to find its way into the mental waste-paper basket was the one which had Tilly’s name on it. Since she had now been provided by an unbiassed witness with an unassailable alibi for the first of the ghostly appearances, there was, according to Robin’s dictum, only the most outlandish and implausible reason for keeping it around to clutter up the issue. No matter how conscientiously I tried to find a way round it, there was simply no possibility of her having spent a full hour, which was the minimum she would have required, at a hairdressers in the centre of the town, if the afternoon’s programme had also included her presence in the centre of the race course between three and four p.m.
Her departure was quickly followed by Ferdy’s. There was no clear cut evidence to dictate his dismissal, but the little I had seen of him during the past few weeks had almost convinced me that he possessed neither the temperament nor guile, far less the will to form and carry out such a plan. Furthermore, if he had gone to the trouble of dressing up and passing himself off as an elderly woman, he would not then have undone all the bad work by maintaining, truthfully or otherwise, on a later occasion that he had seen the so-called phantom too and that there was nothing supernatural about it. Finally, if the first two circumstances had not been present, it would still have been necessary to find him a plausible incentive, since he had proved himself to be immune to the financial one. Had it been otherwise, he had only to have kept quiet about the new will, have destroyed it and thereafter denied all knowledge of its existence.
Bernard and Camilla still hovered on the fringes, since, separately and together, they had had the best of opportunities throughout, though I doubted whether either possessed the daring for such an enterprise. More to the point, Camilla’s frenzied hunt through her grandmother’s papers was ample proof, so far as I was concerned, that she did know of the existence of the new will, which would have made her penniless, but certainly did not know that it was unsigned and invalid. It followed almost inevitably that her hopes would have been centred on keeping Edna alive until such time as she had contrived to work herself back into favour again.
It was a sad ruin of my beautiful theory to be left with, after all the trouble that had gone into constructing it and I still could not bring myself to discard it utterly, for I was stuck with the nagging conviction that no one so prosaic and dull as Edna could have genuinely suffered from or possessed the imagination to invent those strange hallucinations, plus the fact that so many people stood to gain so much by her death. These factors, combined perhaps with the knowledge that an anti-climactic period was about to set in, with the Festival nearly over and the tour not ready to begin, made me resolve to have one last stab at getting to the truth before throwing in the sponge. There was, in addition, the memory of that tidal wave which had so unexpectedly engulfed me while Helena was talking and of the revelation it had seemed to leave behind when it receded; but this dictated an entirely new approach to the problem, and one which required careful thought and planning.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1
My proud announcement that I hoped to hit on a means to acquaint myself with the needs of a dead woman’s heart before Toby returned from his walk had not been all hot air, but I was beginning to regret that he had not set out to tramp to San Francisco and back.
Various methods had come to mind, including the good old stand-by of wanting to build up the characterisation of a part I was preparing fo
r, which had served me on various occasions in the past to obtain information which was not strictly my business, but in the end I discarded them all. Since the only hand which could turn this particular key for me was Ferdy’s, I eventually came to the conclusion that the best hope of getting his co-operation lay in following his own example and approaching the subject by the most direct route available.
I therefore used the interval between performances to go across to the Jolly Angler, where he was often to be found at that hour of the evening, totting up the gains and losses from the current day’s racing results and planning future strategy.
This turned out exactly as I had hoped and when I had bought myself a drink, to save all the rigmarole of his borrowing the money to buy one for me, I asked him if he had any hot tips for the following day.
“There’s a horse called Bitter Aloes at Doncaster, which I rather fancy,” he replied.
“Oh, me too! If you’re backing it, put an extra pound on, will you?” I said, not forgetting to hand over the stake.
“Okay, but what’s so special for you about Bitter Aloes?”
“Only that he did me a big favour about six weeks ago at Stourbury.”
Ferdy was now regarding me with awe, if not actual reverence.
“Twenty-five to one, or was it thirty? You don’t mean to say you backed him, Tessa?”
“That’s right. I’ll tell you another who did too, and that was your stepmother.”
“Well, bully for her! Was that on your advice?”
“No, as a matter of fact I understood her to say that the tip came from you.”