Killing a Unicorn

by Marjorie Eccles

  As the taxi neared the front door, he noticed that, despite the lights, there was no discernible movement behind the downstairs windows, and almost simultaneously, he saw the police car parked outside.

  ‘What the –?’ The taxi braked noisily on the gravel, and he prepared to jump out.

  ‘Oh, Jon,’ Jilly breathed, ‘you don’t think –?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said shortly, with a swift glance at the taxi driver. ‘The police wouldn’t be bothering themselves with a missing suitcase.’ She gave him a quick, odd look.

  He spoke more sharply than he had intended, for Jilly had been on the verge of tears all the way from the airport and he was terrified of them starting up again, for whatever reason. He’d never seen her cry before, and had he thought about it, he might seriously have doubted if she ever could. She was so self-contained she could go all day without even speaking unless she was spoken to — not sulking, a condition unknown to Jilly, or miserable, the occasional smile in his direction indicating she was happy enough. Not that she was always so quiet, far from it! When the occasion demanded, Jilly could talk for England. And never had he had need to question her loyalty. Remembering that instantly dispersed his irritation with her. But … Bibi! Why had that casual mention of her set her off? He was still baffled by her outburst.

  The taxi driver went round to the boot and Jonathan took care of his cello, shrouded in canvas over its case, and deposited it on the front steps. By the time he’d finished, the driver and Jilly had dealt with the rest of the luggage. He gave the man a large tip and slammed the taxi door decisively, sketching a salute to send him on his way and to discourage any more speculative glances towards the police car.

  Jilly bent to breathe in the waves of violet-scented heliotrope coming from the giant lead urns either side of the front door, great masses of dark purple blossoms standing above a trailing froth of pink verbena. Jonathan raised his hand to the iron knocker, shaped like a Celtic cross, but Alyssa was in the hall by then and had flung open the door. She stood, framed in the aperture, her arms stretched wide, before enveloping him in a vast hug. ‘Jonathan, my darling boy, how late you are! In all this, it had almost slipped my mind we were still waiting for you, it’s all so dreadful! But thank God you are here, at last!’ At once deflating him and wrapping him in her warm love. His mother, ever the same, wearing black, as she invariably did in the evenings. She was heavily made up and a lot of gold jewellery decorated her person. Over the top, as usual, but he was so used to this that it barely registered.

  With slightly less enthusiasm, she planted an air kiss in the region of Jilly’s pale cheek. ‘Jilly!’

  ‘Sorry we’re so late,’ Jilly said politely. ‘We’ve had the most appalling things happen.’

  ‘You, too?’

  They had stepped directly into the huge hall that was carried up two storeys. Despite the long window, stretching upwards and disappearing into the darkness above, and several more horizontal ones, oddly placed and too small to be of much use other than as decorative elements, it was a dim place, even in daylight, with a great deal of stonework and wooden panelling, unpredictable corners and a huge, inglenooked fireplace at its far end. Seen from the outside, the house had presence, and inside it was replete with the fine, aesthetic ideals fashionable at the time of its building, when medieval simplicity was being extolled above the excesses of the Victorians. Untouched by ill-conceived restoration as the house and its interior were, it was sometimes visited by architectural historians.

  Mementoes of Judge Calvert were everywhere, notably in a dark and forbidding portrait dominating the wall above the fireplace, with below it a Biblical quotation, writ large in Gothic lettering across the width of the wide chimney breast: ‘GOD IS A RIGHTEOUS JUDGE, STRONG AND PATIENT.’ God in this case, presumably, being His Honour, the family had long ago decided. His robes and wig were displayed in a glass case set into an alcove next to a passage that led eventually to a downstairs cloakroom, but since Conrad’s death Alyssa had had the alcove screened by a heavy tapestry curtain. She said she could manage to ignore the portrait from her chair by the fire, since it was placed so high, but she didn’t want to be reminded of the old tyrant every time she went to the loo. The judge’s unforgiving spirit brooded over everything, so no one had ever dared to remove the portrait, and most of his original furniture remained, too — enormously heavy, plain oak tables and straight-backed, wooden bench-seats set in draughty alcoves. The windows were curtainless. Architectural gem though it might be, it wasn’t a comfortable house to live in.

  ‘What’s wrong, Ma?’ asked Jonathan immediately. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Oh come in, come in, it’s just too terrible! I can’t even bear to think of it. Jane will tell you, won’t you, Jane?’

  He heard what sounded suspiciously like a shake in his mother’s voice and looked more carefully at her. Under the make-up, under all the bravura, he saw her suddenly as she was, an elderly woman who’d had all the stuffing knocked out of her, looking her age, rather tatty round the edges, it had to be said. There was surely more grey in her black hair than he remembered. When he’d kissed her, her skin had felt soft, powdery, yielding, like the marshmallows he’d hated as a child. Against her too-bright lipstick, her teeth appeared yellow. Her shoulders sagged, she looked as if some vital spark within her had been extinguished, and for the first time in his life he had the prescience that one day she would not be there. He touched her hand gently and, as if sensing his thoughts, she smiled shakily, and almost visibly made an effort to pull herself together. But it was Jane Arrow who spoke.

  ‘Well, I suppose someone will have to tell them,’ she answered Alyssa in clipped tones and, with her usual directness, came straight to the point. ‘Jonathan, it’s Bibi. There’s been an accident, and I’m afraid she’s dead.’

  She stood in Alyssa’s shadow, five foot nothing, a drab little wren beside a large black crow, a diminutive figure in a Liberty print blouse and a beige cotton skirt, her straight pepper-and-salt hair drawn back unbecomingly at either side by tortoiseshell slides, showing no emotion other than to press her lips firmly together, whether in sorrow or disapproval of Bibi’s unseemly act it wasn’t possible to tell.

  Jilly gave a huge, choking gasp, and subsided on to a window seat as if her legs wouldn’t hold her. Jonathan didn’t feel too good, either. Every drop of blood felt to be pumping away from his heart. He lowered himself down beside her and a long, slow look passed between them. He put his arm round her shoulder. ‘Those damn sleeping pills?’ he asked his mother, slowly and with a great effort.

  Bibi. Dead? It wasn’t possible. Not Bibi. He felt a heavy weight of guilt, as if that stupid, pointless quarrel about her, erupting out of nowhere, had been somehow to blame. But then, beneath the guilt, something lifted.

  ‘No, no, not sleeping pills,’ Miss Arrow said softly, ‘I’m afraid she drowned.’

  ‘Drowned?’ This was so totally unexpected he had difficulty in taking it in. Jilly stiffened beside him. ‘How? Where?’ His voice sounded as dry and gravelly as it felt.

  He noticed Jane Arrow’s face working. He’d always had the impression that there wasn’t much love lost between her and Bibi, and he was surprised at what he took to be this belated show of emotion, until she put her finger to her lips and he realized his mistake. He saw that she was trying to tell him something. Almost before he grasped that she was attempting to warn him of the presence of someone else in the room, that someone had risen from one of the two high-backed settles by the great fireplace, the one with its back to the door, and turned to face the newcomers.

  He was a big, unsmiling man with grizzled dark hair, dark-complexioned, a shave-twice-a-day man to judge by the shadow across his jaw. He came forward and extended a large hand with dark hairs springing from the back. ‘DI Crouch, I’m in charge of the investigation. And Sergeant Colville,’ he added as an afterthought, in an accent that originated somewhere south of the Thames, indicating with a jerk of th
e head a young woman with a frizz of dark hair who had also come forward. ‘You are …?’

  ‘This is my youngest son, Jonathan Calvert,’ Alyssa announced proudly.

  The name brought no flicker of recognition. The detective merely nodded brusquely. Either he was no music lover, or he’d made the connection earlier and decided not to be impressed. ‘Forgive me for being obtuse,’ said Jonathan, ‘but you did say investigation?’

  ‘Any unexplained death always has to be looked into.’ This time it was the sergeant who answered. She was thin and sallow, wearing a dark grey trouser suit whose colour did nothing for her. But her tone was coolly sympathetic, in a detached, official way, which was more than Jonathan would have been willing to say for the other officer.

  ‘Even if it was an accident?’

  ‘We-ell -’ she began.

  ‘Just a minute, Sergeant, let me deal with this,’ the inspector interrupted officiously. ‘Ms Morgan was found in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, near your brother’s house, The Watersplash,’ he went on, irritating Jonathan with that euphemistic Ms so that he almost missed the implications of what had been said. A combination of last night’s concert — any concert invariably wired him up so that he couldn’t sleep and was left feeling drained the next day — plus a sweltering journey during which Jilly’s normally efficient travelling arrangements had met with nothing but frustrations and delays, including a suitcase failing to turn up on the carousel at Heathrow, had not conspired to leave his brain at its most lucid.

  ‘What happened? Did she slip on those rocks, then?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like. Seemed at first she might’ve fallen from that rickety bridge, but we can’t detect any signs of recent damage. Very unsafe, though, something like that.’

  The knot in Jonathan’s guts was tightening, as though he’d eaten something bad. Ignoring the disapproval, he said, ‘So why the investigation?’

  The DI didn’t seem to feel the repeated question worthy of an answer. He had small grey eyes, opaque as clay marbles, and his hard stare deliberately gave nothing away, as if to project the image of the hard-nosed copper who’d seen it all before. Jonathan tried to dismiss this as play-acting, a need to intimidate and overwhelm, but he couldn’t help feeling that behind it all lurked the sense of a very real aggression. The inspector was, at a guess, just the wrong side of fifty, retirement looming, and making the most of the nearest thing to drama the local force could have had in years. The acme of excitement in Felsborough nick must be rounding up drunk and disorderlies. ‘As my sergeant said,’ he replied at last, ‘we have to make sure that’s how it happened. There are certain things that need to be explained.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, it was a bit careless, at the least unwise, wouldn’t you say, taking a dangerous path like that one down by the waterfall, if she was going down to your brother’s house at The Watersplash, as it seems likely? She’d recently broken her ankle, hadn’t she? Couldn’t walk easily yet, not even with her walking stick?’

  ‘That wouldn’t necessarily have stopped Bibi! Anyway, dangerous is relative. If you know the path, as she did, there’s nothing to it. It’s not Mount Everest. And with her dodgy ankle, it’s more likely the stick would’ve helped, rather than hindered.’

  ‘Maybe so.’ He paused to look Jonathan up and down. ‘We haven’t found the stick yet, by the way, but we shall.’

  ‘I should hope so! I said you should never have allowed her to use it, Alyssa!’

  Crouch’s gaze swivelled towards Miss Arrow. His eyes narrowed, perhaps not yet able to place her in the scheme of things. Jonathan thought he’d better not make the mistake of thinking her diminutive size bore any relation to her effectiveness. ‘That was the Judge’s walking stick, you know!’ she declared. Jane was a fiercer defendant of all that appertained to the Judge than any of the family were. Given her own predilections, she probably admired his authoritarianism.

  ‘Oh? Which judge was that?’ asked Crouch, ill-advisedly, earning himself a severe look from Jane.

  ‘Judge Calvert, of course! It was his malacca cane, with a silver knob and an inscribed band, which they gave him when he retired from the circuit and was appointed to the High Court,’ she said, nodding, almost genuflecting, towards the forbidding portrait of the man over the fireplace. Crouch followed her gaze with a sardonic amusement he didn’t trouble to hide. He had obviously met judges like that before. Clearly, he thought the walking stick had been given in gratitude for seeing the end of him.

  Jonathan couldn’t quite see the cane’s importance to the police, but he could imagine the fuss Jane would make if it were to be permanently lost, though that seemed unlikely. If it hadn’t turned up anywhere along the edge of the pool, it shouldn’t be beyond the resources of the police to dredge for it. But maybe Bibi had fallen in higher up, and been carried down into the depths of the pool — and then the stream itself would be the obvious place to look - something like a walking stick would surely have got itself wedged into the bank or among the pudding stones on the bed, but he thought it wiser not to suggest this. He didn’t think Crouch was the type to appreciate being told how to do his job.

  ‘You mentioned sleeping pills, just now,’ Crouch was going on, putting Jane’s comments aside and watching Jonathan narrowly. ‘Why did you immediately assume Ms Morgan’s death was due to an overdose?’

  ‘Overdose? Did I say that? I don’t recall.’ Jonathan spoke sharply before he caught a dangerous gleam in the inspector’s eye and decided he’d better not push too far. He shrugged. ‘It’s just that those pills of hers were knockout tablets — instant drowsiness. I know my brother made her promise she’d never take any unless he was around. He always thought she could easily forget she’d taken one and swallow another.’ Especially if she’d had a few drinks. ‘She used to be like a zombie the next day, anyone will tell you.’ In fact, he had a strong notion that Chip had removed the pills altogether.

  Sergeant Colville was writing somet
  That’s what they all say, said the inspector’s expression. And in fairness, could that ever be stated, with complete conviction, of anyone, and especially of Bibi, who had never been a person you could pigeonhole? Jonathan’s eyes automatically sought out Jane Arrow and he sensed straight away that she’d read his thoughts, and that they probably coincided with her own. She was sharp, Jane. Maybe that was why it was always she who seemed to take charge of situations in this house — not Alyssa, with her outspoken opinions and her emotions all on the surface. Jane, as the daughter of a naval officer, had a background of inherited pragmatism. Just what her position was in the household never seemed to have been defined … for years she had ridden daily, sitting uncompromisingly upright on her old-fashioned bicycle, from her house in Middleton Thorpe village to Membery Place, where she performed many of the duties normally associated with a housekeeper, as well as acting as companion, friend, adviser, occasional helper in the nurseries — all without, as far as Jonathan was aware, being paid a penny. He’d always assumed she had independent means, but he sometimes wondered about her motives.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked her. ‘Where’s Chip?’

  ‘He’s in London, supposed to be at some function — but we haven’t been able to locate his secretary to find out where. And Mark’s in Brussels, Francine hasn’t been able to get hold of him, either –’

  ‘Where’s she, then? Where’s Fran?’

  ‘She insisted on going back home,’ Alyssa said. ‘I wanted her to sleep here, but she wouldn�
�t, she thought Mark might ring. She shouldn’t be on her own after a shock like that. Poor Fran!’

  There was some subtext here that he hadn’t yet read. He looked once more at Jane Arrow for enlightenment.

  ‘It was Francine who found her, Jonathan. After she had put Jasie to bed, Bibi looked in, excusing herself from supper, as she had one of her headaches coming on. She was going outside for a breath of air, and then to bed. That, I’m afraid, was the last we saw of her.’

  Alyssa said, ‘Oh dear. We were waiting for you, wondering where on earth you’d got to. We watched television for a bit, had a little aperitif. I — er, I think we may have dozed a little, we’d had a busy day and you know how it is, at our age.’ Jane raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, Jane, we both of us jumped sky high when the telephone rang! But it wasn’t you, Jonathan, it was Fran, in an awful state, the dear girl, to say she’d found Bibi in the waterfall pool.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Jane pressed her lips together at the profanity and, automatically, as if he were still a boy, Jonathan followed up with an apology.

  But for Fran to have come across Bibi, drowned, there, of all places: in the pool with its mossy rocks, the place Fran so dearly loved! It was where he and she had sat together that memorable evening, years ago, when he’d arrived home from Budapest, full of his first major success. He’d gone down to The Watersplash, ostensibly to see the new house, then almost finished, taking a bottle to drink to its completion, though perhaps that hadn’t been his only objective. He’d also been bursting to talk about his concert. Praise was sweet music indeed, in those early days.