"Oh dear," she said. "I seem to have exposed a nerve. I'm sorry."
He sighed with frustration. "You're still patronizing me."
She opened her car door. "Perhaps it would be better if I left, otherwise I might be tempted to return the insult."
He looked amused. "Water off a duck's back," he said amiably. "I've been insulted by professionals."
"I'm not surprised," she said, slipping in behind the wheel. "I can't be the only person who gets pissed off when you decide to throw your weight about. You don't even know for sure that Mathilda was murdered, but we're all supposed to wave our arms in the air and panic. What possible difference can it make to anyone if I choose to satisfy myself that Mrs. Lascelles hasn't disqualified herself from a cut of the will by topping the old lady who made it?"
"It could make a lot of difference to you," he said mildly. "You could end up dead."
She was intensely scornful. "Why?"
"Have you made a will, Dr. Blakeney?"
"Yes."
"In favour of your husband?"
She nodded.
"So, if you die tomorrow, he gets everything, including, presumably, what Mrs. Gillespie has left you."
She started the car. "Are you suggesting Jack is planning to murder me?"
"Not necessarily." He looked thoughtful. "I'm rather more interested in the fact that he is-potentially-a very eligible husband. Assuming, of course, you die before you can change your will. It's worth considering, don't you think?"
Sarah glared at him through the window. "And you say Mathilda was evil-minded?" Furiously, she ground into gear. "Compared with you she was a novice. Juliet to your lago. And if you don't understand the analogy, then I suggest you bone up on some Shakespeare." She released the clutch with a jerk and showered his legs with gravel as she drove away.
"Are you busy, Mr. Blakeney, or can you spare me a few minutes?" Cooper propped himself against the door-jamb of the summer-house and lit a cigarette.
Jack eyed him for a moment, then went back to his painting. "If I said I was busy would you go away?"
"No."
With a shrug, Jack clamped the brush between his teeth and took a coarser one from the jar on the easel, using it to create texture in the soft paint he had just applied. Cooper smoked in silence, watching him. "Okay," said Jack at last, flipping the brushes into turpentine and swinging round to face the Sergeant. "What's up?"
"Who was lago?"
Jack grinned. "You didn't come here to ask me that."
"You're quite right, but I'd still like to know."
"He's a character from Othello. A Machiavelli who manipulated people's emotions in order to destroy them."
"Was Othello the black bloke?"
Jack nodded. "lago drove him into such a frenzy of jealousy that Othello murdered his wife Desdemona and then killed himself when he learnt that everything lago had said about her was a lie. It's a story of obsessive passion and trusts betrayed. You should read it."
"Maybe I will. What did lago do to make Othello jealous?"
"He exploited Othello's emotional insecurity by telling him Desdemona was having an affair with a younger, more attractive man. Othello believed him because it was what he was most afraid of." He stretched his long legs in front of him. "Before Othello fell on his sword he described himself as 'one that lov'd not wisely but too well.' It gets misused these days by people who know the quote but don't know the story. They interpret 'lov'd not wisely' as referring to a poor choice of companion, but Othello was actually acknowledging his own foolishness in not trusting the woman he adored. He just couldn't believe the adoration was mutual."
Cooper ground his cigarette under the heel of his shoe. "Topical stuff then," he murmured, glancing towards the sleeping-bag. "Your wife's not loving too wisely at the moment, but then you're hardly encouraging her to do anything else. You're being a little cruel, aren't you, sir?"
Jack's liking for the man grew. "Not half as cruel as I ought to be. Why did you want to know about lago?"
"Your wife mentioned him, said I was lago to Mrs. Gillespie's Juliet." He smiled his amiable smile. "Mind, I'd just suggested that if she were to die an untimely death you would make an eligible catch for someone else." He took out another cigarette, examined it then put it back again. "But I don't see Mrs. Gillespie as Juliet. King Lear, perhaps, assuming I'm right and King Lear was the one whose daughter turned on him."
"Daughters," Jack corrected him. "There were two of them, or two who turned on him, at least. The third tried to save him." He rubbed his unshaven jaw. "So you've got your knife into Joanna, have you? Assuming I've followed your reasoning correctly, then Joanna killed her mother to inherit the funds, found to her horror that Mathilda had changed her will in the meantime, so immediately made eyes at me to get me away from Sarah with a view to topping Sarah at the first opportune moment and then hitching herself to me." He chuckled. "Or perhaps you think we're in it together. That's one hell of a conspiracy theory."
"Stranger things have happened, sir."
He eased his stiff shoulders. "On the whole I prefer Joanna's interpretation. It's more rational."
"She's accusing your wife."
"I know. It's a neat little package, too. The only flaw in it is that Sarah would never have done it, but I can't blame Joanna for getting that wrong. She can't see past her own jealousy."
Cooper frowned. "Jealousy over you?"
"God no." Jack gave a rumble of laughter. "She doesn't even like me very much. She thinks I'm a homosexual because she can't account for my irreverence in any other way." His eyes gleamed at Cooper's expression, but he didn't elaborate. "Jealousy over her mother, of course. She was quite happy loathing and being loathed by Mathilda until she discovered she had a rival. Jealousy has far more to do with ownership than it has with love."
"Are you saying she knew about your wife's relationship with her mother before her mother died?"
"No. If she had, she would probably have done something about it." He scraped his stubble again, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. "But it's too late now, and that can only make the jealousy worse. She'll start to forget her mother's faults, fantasize about the relationship she imagines Sarah had with Mathilda and torment herself over her own missed opportunities. Let's face it, we all want to believe that our mothers love us. It's supposed to be the one relationship we can depend on."
Cooper lit another cigarette and stared thoughtfully at the glowing tip. "You say Mrs. Lascelles is jealous of your wife's intimacy with Mrs. Gillespie. Why isn't she jealous of her daughter? According to the young lady herself she got on with her grandmother like a house on fire."
"Do you believe her?"
"There's no evidence to the contrary. The housemistress at her boarding school says Mrs. Gillespie wrote regularly and always seemed very affectionate whenever she went there. Far more affectionate and interested, apparently, than Mrs. Lascelles who puts in infrequent appearances and shows little or no interest in how her daughter's doing."
"All that says to me is that Mathilda was a magnificent hypocrite. You can't ignore her snobbery, you know, not without distorting the picture. Southcliffe is an expensive girls' boarding school. Mathilda would never have let the side down in a place like that. She always talked about 'people of her sort' and regretted the lack of them in Fontwell."
The Sergeant shook his head in disbelief. "That doesn't square with what you told me before. You called her one of life's great individuals. Now you're saying she was pandering to the upper classes in order to make herself socially acceptable."
"Hardly. She was a Cavendish and inordinately proud of the fact. They were bigwigs round here for years. Her father, Sir William Cavendish, bought his knighthood by doing a stint as the local MP. She was already socially acceptable, as you put it, and didn't need to pander to anyone." He frowned in recollection. "No, what made her extraordinary, despite all the trappings of class and respectability which she played up to and tossed about in public to keep the
proles in their place, was that privately she seethed with contradictions. Perhaps her uncle's sexual abuse had something to do with it, but I think the truth is she was born into the wrong generation and lived the wrong life. She had the intellectual capacity to do anything she wanted, but her social conditioning was such that she allowed herself to be confined in the one role she wasn't suited for, namely marriage and motherhood. It's tragic really. She spent most of her life at war with herself and crippled her daughter and granddaughter in the process. She couldn't bear to see their rebellions succeed where hers hadn't."
"Did she tell you all this?"
"Not in so many words. I gleaned it from things she said and then put it into the portrait. But it's all true. She wanted a complete explanation of that painting, down to the last colour nuance and the last brush stroke, so"-he shrugged-"I gave her one, much along the lines of what I've just told you, and at the end she said there was only one thing wrong, and it was wrong because it was missing. But she wouldn't tell me what it was." He paused in reflection. "Presumably it had something to do with her uncle's abuse of her. I didn't know about that. I only knew of her father's abuse with the scold's bridle."
But Cooper was more interested in something he had said before. "You can't call Mrs. Lascelle's rebellion a success. She lumbered herself with a worthless heroin addict who then died and left her penniless." His gaze lingered on the portrait.
Jack's dark face split into another grin. "You've led a very sheltered life if you think rebellion is about achieving happiness. It's about anger and resistance and inflicting maximum damage on a hated authority." He lifted a sardonic eyebrow. "On that basis, I'd say Joanna scored a spectacular success. If you're calling her husband worthless now, what on earth do you imagine Mathilda's peers said about him at the time? Don't forget she was a very proud woman."
Cooper drew heavily on his cigarette and looked up towards the house. "Your wife's just been to see Mrs. Lascelles. Did you know?"
Jack shook his head.
"I met her as she was leaving. She told me she's convinced Mrs. Lascelles didn't kill her mother. Would you agree with that?"
"Probably."
"Yet you just told me that Mrs. Lascelles's rebellion was to inflict maximum damage on the object of her hatred. Isn't death the ultimate damage?"
"I was talking about twenty-odd years ago. You're talking about now. Rebellion belongs to the young, Sergeant, not to the middle-aged. It's the middle-aged who're rebelled against because they're the ones who compromise their principles."
"So how is Ruth rebelling?"
Jack studied him lazily from beneath his hooded eyelids. "Why don't you ask her?"
"Because she's not here," said Cooper reasonably, "and you are."
"Ask her mother then. You're being paid to meddle," he cocked his irritating eyebrow again, "and I'm not."
Cooper beamed at him. "I like you, Mr. Blakeney, though God alone knows why. I like your wife, too, if it's of any interest. You're straightforward types who look me in the eye when you talk to me and, believe it or not, that warms my heart because I'm trying to do a job that the people have asked me to do but for which, most of the time, I get called a pig. Now, for all I know, one or other, or both of you together, killed that poor old woman up there, and if I have to arrest you I'll do it, and I shan't let my liking get in the way because I'm an old-fashioned sod who believes that society only works if it's bolstered by rules and regulations which give more freedom than they take away. By the same token, I don't like Mrs. Lascelles or her daughter, and if I was the sort to arrest people I didn't like, I'd have banged them up a couple of weeks ago. They're equally malicious. The one directs her malice against your wife, the other directs hers against her mother, but neither of them has said anything worth listening to. Their accusations are vague and without substance. Ruth says her mother's a whore without principles, and Mrs. Lascelles says your wife's a murderess but when I ask them to prove it, they can't" He tossed his dog-end on to the grass. "The odd thing is that you and Dr. Blakeney, between you, appear to know more about these two women and their relationship with Mrs. Gillespie than they do themselves, but out of some kind of misguided altruism you don't want to talk about it. Perhaps it's not politically correct amongst gilded intellectuals to dabble their fingers in the seamy side of life, but make no mistake, without something more to go on, Mrs. Gillespie's death will remain an unsolved mystery and the only person who will suffer will be Dr. Blakeney because she is the only person who had a known motive. If she is innocent of the murder of her patient, her innocence can only be proved if someone else is charged. Now, tell me honestly, do you think so little of your wife that you'd let her reputation be trampled in the mud for the sake of not wanting to assist the police?"
"My God!" said Jack with genuine enthusiasm. "You're going to have to let me do this portrait of you. Two thousand. Is that what we agreed?"
"You haven't answered my question," said the policeman patiently.
Jack reached for his sketchpad and flicked through to a clean page. "Just stand there for a moment," he murmured, taking a piece of charcoal and making swift lines on the paper. "That was some speech. Is your wife as decent and honourable as you are?"
"You're taking the mickey."
"Actually, I'm not." Jack squinted at him briefly before returning to his drawing. "I happen to think the relationship between the police and society is drifting out of balance. The police have forgotten that they are there only by invitation; while society has forgotten that, because it chooses the laws which regulate it, it has a responsibility to uphold them. The relationship should be a mutually supportive one; instead, it is mutually suspicious and mutually antagonistic." He threw Cooper a disarmingly sweet smile. "I am thoroughly enchanted to meet a policeman who seems to share my point of view. And, no, of course I don't think so little of Sarah that I'd allow her reputation to suffer. Is that really likely?"
"You've not been out and about much since you moved in here."
"I never do when I'm working."
"Then perhaps it's time you left. There's a kangaroo court operating in Fontwell and your wife is their favourite target. She's the newcomer, after all, and you've done her no favours by shacking up with the opposition. She's lost a goodly number of patients already."
Jack held the sketchpad at arm's length to look at it. "Yes," he said, "I'm going to enjoy doing you." He started to pack his hold-all. "It's too damn cold here anyway, and I've got enough on Joanna to finish her at home. Will Sarah have me back?"
"I suggest you ask her. I'm not paid to meddle in domestic disputes."
Jack tipped a finger in acknowledgement. "Okay," he said, "the only thing I know about Ruth is what Mathilda told me. I can't vouch for its accuracy, so you'll have to check that for yourself. Mathilda kept a float of fifty pounds locked in a cash-box in her bedside table and opened it up one day because she wanted me to go to the shop and buy some groceries for her. It was empty. I said, perhaps she'd already spent the money and forgotten. She said, no, it's what came of having a thief for a granddaughter." He shrugged. "For all I know she may have been excusing her own memory lapse by slandering Ruth, but she didn't elaborate and I didn't ask. More than that I can't tell you."
"What a disappointing family," said the Sergeant. "No wonder she chose to leave her money elsewhere."
"That's where we part company," said Jack, standing up and stretching towards the ceiling. "They are Mathilda's creations. She had no business passing the buck to Sarah."
I had an appalling shock today. I walked into the surgery, completely unprepared, and found Jane Marriott behind the counter. Why did nobody tell me they were back? Forewarned would have meant forearmed. Jane, of course, knowing our paths must cross, was as cool as ever. "Good morning, Mathilda," she said. "You're looking well." I couldn't speak. It was left to Doctor Dolittle, asinine man, to bray the good news that Jane and Paul have decided to move back to Rossett House following the death of their tenant. I gather
Paul is an invalid-chronic emphysema- and will benefit from the peace and quiet of Fontwell after the rigours of Southampton. But what am I to do about Jane? Will she talk? Worse, will she betray me?
"Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, that sees into the bottom of my grief?"
I would feel less desperate if Ruth had not gone back to school. The house is empty without her. There are too many ghosts here and most of them unlaid. Gerald and my father haunt me mercilessly. There are times, not many, when I regret their deaths. But I have high hopes of Ruth. She is bright for her age. Something good will come of the Cavendishes, I'm sure of it. If not, everything I have done is wasted.
"Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! Mathilda Gillespie is saying her prayers." I have such terrible headaches these days. Perhaps it was never Joanna who was mad, but only I...
*10*
Ruth, summoned out of a chemistry lesson, sidled into the room set aside for Sergeant Cooper by her housemistress and stood with her back to the door. "Why did you have to come back?" she asked him. "It's embarrassing. I've told you everything I know." She was dressed in mufti and, with her hair swept back into a tight bun, she looked more than her seventeen years.
Cooper could appreciate her embarrassment. Any school was a goldfish bowl but a boarding school peculiarly so. "Police investigations are rarely tidy things," he said apologetically. "Too many loose ends for tidiness." He gestured towards a chair. "Sit down, Miss Lascelles."
With a bad grace, she did so, and he caught a brief glimpse of the gawky adolescent beneath the pseudo-sophistication of the outer shell. He lowered his stocky body on to the chair in front of her and studied her gravely but not unkindly.
Scold's Bridle Page 14