The Death of Corinne

by R. T. Raichev

  ‘Stop calling her the Merchant,’ Antonia said. She was annoyed by his flippancy. They didn’t have to stand around with bowed heads and whisper and put on a show of respect they did not feel, but it was poor taste, making someone who had died a horribly violent death appear ridiculous.

  ‘I stand corrected . . . We can assume that Mrs Eleanor Merchant went to the body and flashed her torch on it. I don’t suppose Maginot’s face meant much to her, but one thing Mrs Eleanor Merchant must have become aware of at once – namely, that she’d never be able to get Corinne now, not after what she’d done. She must have realized she’d lost the game. So – she turns the gun on herself and pulls the trigger. She probably meant to kill herself all along, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Well, she bought only a one-way ticket . . . Her son had killed himself . . . A suicidal streak might have been in her blood,’ Antonia said thoughtfully. She found she was standing by the bamboo table. There was a book on it: Who’s Who in EastEnders, also a magazine: Vogue.

  ‘What did you do last night?’ Payne asked Jonson. ‘I mean, after you checked the bedrooms?’

  Jonson said that he had gone to bed. He had fallen asleep almost at once. He had been dog-tired. Jonson spoke haltingly. ‘It was about midnight. Maître Maginot said she’d call me on her mobile if she noticed anything suspicious, only she didn’t, so – so I assumed everything was fine and that she’d come back to the house and gone to bed herself. I heard no noise. Nothing. No shots.’

  ‘No one would have heard any shots. The gun’s got a silencer,’ Payne said.

  ‘I never thought Eleanor Merchant could be anywhere near the house.’ Jonson shook his head. ‘I didn’t think she could be in England . . . I didn’t think it possible . . .’

  There was a pause. ‘That phone call last night,’ Payne said. ‘The American woman who rang while we were having coffee. She introduced herself as a – chat-show hostess? She wanted to talk to Corinne. What did Provost say her name was?’

  ‘Thora – no, Tricia – Tricia Swindon,’ Jonson said. ‘Some such name.’

  ‘And she rang off as soon as she heard Maginot’s voice? That must have been Eleanor Merchant.’

  A muffled noise was heard from the doorway. Nicholas was standing there furtively, looking in, his hand cupped over his nose.

  ‘I told you to go away,’ Jonson called out to him. The boy disappeared, this time for good. They saw him through the window, walking across the lawn towards the house. Jonson said, ‘It must have been Eleanor Merchant who phoned, yes. On her mobile. Heaven knows what she’d been hoping to achieve.’

  ‘She probably didn’t know herself,’ Payne said astutely.

  Antonia was looking down at the cover of the magazine, at the picture of the super-thin model and the Siamese cat. For some reason she found herself thinking of the photo she had found in Jonson’s case once more . . . Corinne Coreille had been snapped sitting at her dressing table – she had taken time off from applying her make-up to stroke a kitten . . . A kitten, yes. A live kitten. The kitten seemed to have jumped on the table . . . There was no kipper on the table – Jonson had made that up. He had been about to say ‘kitten’ but had changed his mind . . . Nicholas on the other hand kept sneezing because he was allergic to plants . . . Now, why did she think there was a connection between the two? An association of ideas . . .

  Antonia frowned. Something was stirring at the back of her mind. A memory was about to surface – it was something both Lady Grylls and Peverel had mentioned . . . Hope I am not getting unhinged, she thought, casting a glance at Eleanor Merchant’s body and immediately looking away.

  ‘That kitten in the photograph,’ she said aloud. ‘Where did it come from?’

  Jonson stared at her. He looked like a man who was waking up from a dream. ‘It was a stray – one of the gardeners had found it and brought it into the house. Mademoiselle Coreille apparently took a fancy to it.’ He spoke mechanically. ‘I understand Maître Maginot and Mademoiselle Coreille had an argument about it. Maître Maginot objected strongly –’ He broke off. ‘How do you know there’s a kitten in the photograph?’

  ‘You told us,’ Antonia said.

  ‘I didn’t –’ Suddenly Jonson looked terrified.

  ‘Oh, but you did.’ I can bluff too, Antonia thought, though she felt rather sorry for him. ‘Kipper’, he had said to avoid saying ‘kitten’. A silly lie – he’d been unable to think of another word. He was a poor liar.

  ‘We must be getting back to the house,’ Payne said, looking at his watch. ‘I expect the police will be here any moment now and they will be cross if they find the three of us cooped up with the bodies.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonson said. ‘Yes.’ Without another word, he turned round and left the greenhouse.

  ‘I touched Eleanor’s passport,’ Antonia said.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ Payne said.

  ‘I held it very lightly – by the corners.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve as good as signed it with your full name. There’s no escape from the old DNA. If the police decided the Merchant didn’t do it after all, you’d be their next prime suspect, d’you realize?’

  Antonia cast one last glance at the bodies. The good ended happily and the bad ended unhappily, she thought absurdly.

  ‘What was Corinne’s reaction to the news?’ Antonia asked a few moments later as they were walking across the lawn towards the house.

  ‘I don’t know if she’s been told anything yet. Somehow, I don’t expect her to have hysterics – do you?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘You’d never believe this, but it’s like in that damned French song Antonia was talking about yesterday morning. The one she heard in a dream,’ Lady Grylls said as soon as she saw them. ‘What was it called? “Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir”.’

  ‘What do you mean, darling?’ Payne frowned.

  ‘Corinne’s disappeared – and no one’s seen her go. She is nowhere to be found. Her bags have gone too.’

  25

  The Unexpected Guest

  They had come upon her in the hall, tending to Provost who gave every impression of being in a very bad way indeed. He was sitting on a spindle-legged gilt chair, staring before him. Lady Grylls had made him a cup of tea. She seemed to have emptied almost the whole contents of the silver sugar bowl into the tea; she kept urging him to drink it. The air was filled with the old-fashioned smell of valerian. There was a bottle of brandy on a salver on a small round table, also, inexplicably, a thermometer.

  Provost was clad in the black-and-yellow striped waistcoat à la Maxim’s but his stiff gleaming-white collar had been removed and it too could be seen on the salver. Lady Grylls was wearing a dressing gown and she had also put an elaborate choker with a large ruby clasp around her neck. She was smoking another purple-filtered Balkan Sobranie cigarette. The morning light, filtered through the fanlight, filled the hall with the murky yellow tones of a sepia print and, Payne thought, it made it look rather like a scene out of some quaint Edwardian farce on the twin subjects of noblesse oblige and the feudal spirit. (Lady Grylls Pulls It Off? Baroness to the Rescue?) The mundane conclusion of course was that murder made people act irrationally.

  ‘His legs buckled under him like one of those collapsible card tables. Good thing I was here to catch him as he fell . . . He can’t cope with things like that. He’s a weak man . . . Peverel’s here,’ Lady Grylls went on with evident distaste. ‘As though we haven’t got enough to think about.’

  Payne’s brows went up. ‘Peverel? I thought he wasn’t coming back?’

  ‘Well, he has. He drove all the way down from London. Must have started at some unearthly hour. He’s in the dining room, drinking coffee. He looks like a funeral director, quite unlike himself. He seems to know about it already –’ Lady Grylls broke off. ‘Provost says Maginot has been shot – is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’ Payne then told her to prepare for another shock. ‘Maître Maginot’s body isn’t the on
ly one in the greenhouse, darling. Eleanor Merchant is there too – shot as well . . . It looks as though she killed Maginot and then committed suicide.’

  ‘You don’t mean that, do you, Hughie?’

  He said he did. He swore he wasn’t making it up.

  ‘That’s a pretty kettle of fish,’ Lady Grylls said after a pause. ‘So that’s what Peverel meant when he said there were two of them. I thought I’d misheard. Goodness. That woman came all this way from America to shoot herself in my greenhouse. Incidentally, do you remember that awful weepy, Love Story? When was it made, can you tell me?’

  Major Payne blinked. ‘Sorry, darling? What love story?’

  ‘Love Story. The film. When was it made?’

  ‘When was it –? Early seventies . . . 1970, at a guess. ‘

  ‘1970. I thought as much.’ Lady Grylls nodded. ‘In 1970 Corinne was twenty-two. I knew she was talking bosh. You see . . .’ She then told them about the extraordinary conversation she had had with Corinne the night before. ‘And she said that she remembered her mother’s voice! That was the other rum thing. It didn’t make sense. There was nothing memorable about Ruse’s voice, but Corinne spoke as though it had been something quite exceptional.’

  Antonia and Payne found Peverel in the dining room, standing by the fireplace, a large white coffee cup in hand. He was wearing a black coat with a velvet collar and a long white silk scarf. He did look solemn and – not sad, exactly, Antonia thought, but preoccupied, in a pensive mood. ‘I thought you were the police,’ he said, glancing at the clock. ‘They are always late, aren’t they?’

  It was then that the possible importance of something Lady Grylls had said dawned on Antonia. She asked, ‘How do you know what happened?’

  He shrugged – took another sip of coffee. He was drinking it black. There was a faraway look in his eyes. For some reason Antonia had the idea that he was reflecting on the past.

  ‘How did you know there was a second body there?’ she persisted.

  He gave a little smile. ‘That boy told me. Nicholas.’

  There had been a brief pause and a scowl, as though he had had to think about it – or was Antonia imagining it?

  ‘I thought you had no intention of coming back,’ Payne said.

  ‘I discovered I’d left something behind. I came to collect it.’

  ‘What a bore for you. Must have been something very important. ‘

  ‘Oh, it is. It is.’ Peverel took another sip of coffee. ‘Terribly important.’ He gave no more details. ‘In your kind of detective story, Antonia,’ he went on, ‘the police always blunder in the dark, don’t they, and it is invariably the gifted amateur detective who gets to the truth?’

  ‘It’s a convention . . . Part of the game . . . One of the genre’s requirements.’ Antonia frowned: there had been an odd intensity about Peverel’s voice. ‘Readers still seem to like it, though of course everybody knows it’s got nothing to do with real life.’

  ‘Real life . . . Oh, how I wish –’ Peverel broke off. He put down the coffee cup and looked towards the window.

  There was a pause. Antonia’s eyes remained fixed on him. How he wished – what? That the police did blunder in the dark not only in detective stories, but in real life as well – that the police never got to the truth?

  Now that was interesting – extremely interesting.

  (What was the truth?)

  The next moment they heard a siren.

  26

  An Inspector Calls

  The police took control of the situation briskly and efficiently. They told everybody to stay inside the house, they then cordoned off the greenhouse. Antonia watched them do it from the drawing-room window. She wondered how long it would be before the bodies were taken away in body bags. Some half an hour later a police inspector called Lyttleton came to the house and said he would like to take a statement from each one of them. Lady Grylls suggested he use her late husband’s study on the first floor.

  The study was panelled in dark oak and across the windows there were crimson plush curtains. The small fireplace was suitable for burning coal and it was surrounded by painted tiles depicting a hunt: a lot of horsemen in scarlet coats frantically chasing after bushy-tailed foxes which appeared oddly nonchalant. An ancient leopard skin lay on the floor in front of the fireplace. The mahogany bookcase contained mainly game books bound in red morocco leather, garden catalogues and a number of stamp albums: as a young man the late Lord Grylls had been an ardent stamp collector.

  The walls were adorned with several indifferent pastoral landscapes and two huge Wootton pieces. An oil portrait of Lord Grylls in the Robes and Star of the Order of the Garter hung above the fireplace. Lord Grylls’s pale puffy face, placid expression and blond hair put Antonia in mind of portraits of George IV’s brothers by Liotard. The desk was well worn and massive and it rather dwarfed Inspector Lyttleton who seemed to live up (or should it be ‘down’?) to his name.

  Antonia was the last to be questioned. What was Miss Darcy’s occupation? She was a detective story writer! Really? Well, well. The inspector leant back in his chair and gazed at her with interest. He was in his late forties or early fifties and looked benevolent, though Antonia was convinced that was just an act. Had he read any of her books? he wondered. She had written only two, Antonia said. She was sitting beside a small table and she put her hands under it and held them on her lap – like a well-behaved child at a party, she thought nervously . . . What were her books called? She told him. No, he didn’t think he had read them. ‘I must make a note of your name,’ he said. ‘Crime writers usually get almost everything wrong, mind. Even those who do “research” . . . ‘ He gave a superior little smile and went on to say that in his experience those crime writers who did ‘research’ were the worst.

  ‘I never do any extensive research,’ Antonia said and was at once annoyed at herself for sounding defensive. She didn’t write police procedurals, forensic crime or historical crime, she started explaining. He cleared his throat. He did read the odd detective story every now and then, he said, when he was on holiday. Some detective stories were ‘clever’ – nothing like the way crime happened in real life of course. His wife now was a great fan of detective stories – she was always comparing him to fictional detectives. Wasn’t that silly? He shook his head.

  Miss Darcy must find it very odd, being involved in a real-life murder case? Antonia agreed that it was very odd. She didn’t say it had happened to her once before. (He was bound to think that extremely odd and might become suspicious of her.) She then told Lyttleton what she knew about Corinne Coreille and the anonymous death threats constructed with letters cut out of the International Herald Tribune. He knew all about them – Jonson had already shown him the death threats – as well as Eleanor Merchant’s letters. Antonia mentioned the phone calls that had been received at Chalfont. The last time she had seen Maître Maginot? The night before – on the stairs – Maître Maginot had been on her way down. The time? Some minutes after eleven o’clock.

  The inspector was taking laborious notes in a little black notebook. No sergeant, Antonia suddenly thought. How odd. That was what happened in her previous detective novel. She had omitted the sergeant and had been criticized for it by one reviewer . . . Antonia detested police procedurals, thought them tedious in the extreme; in her novels she delayed the appearance of the police for as long as she could, till chapter twenty-five, say, or thereabouts, and then gave them the shortest of shrifts . . . Surely it was irregular for the inspector not to have a sergeant? She meant to ask him, but decided against it . . . She experienced a sense of unreality . . . It was almost as though they were characters in one of her novels . . . He reminded her of her late father a little . . . Was he real – or had he emerged from the depths of her mind?

  She was feeling light-headed . . . She shut her eyes and rubbed at them. Delayed shock . . . Curb your imagination, she told herself.

  She heard him clear his throat.

  ‘I am
sorry!’

  ‘Aimless reverie or profitable reflection?’ Inspector Lyttleton smiled. He then asked her a question. When was the last time she had seen Corinne Coreille? The night before, at dinner. How had Corinne struck her? Antonia described Corinne’s manner as ‘quiet, subdued, neutral’. ‘The most remarkable thing about her was her passivity,’ she said. No, Corinne hadn’t looked particularly anxious. It was Maître Maginot who had shown signs of considerable agitation – especially after the phone call from the woman who had introduced herself as Tricia Swindon.

  Inspector Lyttleton nodded. That call had been made by Eleanor Merchant, he ventured – they had examined her mobile phone; as a matter of fact Eleanor Merchant had made several calls to Chalfont Park. And there was a little mystery – Eleanor Merchant had received a phone call at ten minutes past eleven. ‘Who from?’ Antonia asked, greatly interested.

  ‘The caller’s number was unknown,’ Lyttleton answered. ‘We don’t think it has any bearing on what happened, but of course we are keeping an open mind.’

  Had Antonia heard any suspicious noises during the night? She said no, pointing out that the gun had a silencer, at once regretting it for the inspector looked displeased. He said he wished they hadn’t gone inside the greenhouse at all! The shot that killed Maître Maginot had been fired at a very close range, Inspector Lyttleton said thoughtfully – Eleanor Merchant must have been standing beside the door as Corinne Coreille’s legal adviser entered the greenhouse. Eleanor might have been aware of Maître Maginot’s approach – it looked as though she had been waiting for her . . . Was it possible that Eleanor Merchant had taken Maître Maginot for Corinne? Physically the two women couldn’t have been more different – unless Eleanor was completely unfamiliar with Corinne’s appearance? No, that was not very likely, was it?

  ‘Well, Mrs Merchant seems to have had very serious health issues – judging by the pills we found in her bag. I mean her mental state –’ He cleared his throat. He implied Mrs Merchant’s mental state provided the only explanation necessary for what she had done.