At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

  Meredith could see, as plain as plain, that that was not true.

  “I see,” he said noncommittally. “Now, how long did this quarrel last? When did you both go to your mother’s bedroom, and when did you leave it?”

  “I really don’t know . . . Wait. We went up there after dinner. Mother looked at her watch and said we two had something to discuss and the men could do what they wanted. I looked at the clock in the dining room at the same time. I don’t know if it was right, but it said about a quarter or ten to eight.”

  “And when you left the bedroom?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. We’d just had a row. You don’t look at your watch in those circumstances.”

  “I suppose not. But when you left, your mother was still alive?”

  “Of course she was. Very much so. Livid with rage.”

  “What did you do after you left her room?”

  “Went out of the Red Lion by the back entrance. Then I walked it off.”

  “Where?”

  “On the cliffs for a bit. Then I walked down to the beach. The sea is very soothing.”

  “Did anybody see you?”

  “I don’t know . . . I think there were one or two people on the beach. When it began to get really dark, I walked up again and took the road to the Rectory.”

  “And you never went back to the Red Lion or to your mother’s room?”

  “No. I never wanted to see her again.”

  Meredith shifted in his chair. Cordelia had the air of an honest witness. Almost too honest for her own good.

  “Tell me—one of the witnesses from the Red Lion, hearing the row from outside in the corridor, said that it actually involved physical violence. Is that so?”

  Cordelia looked down at her lap. Her hands were once more doing that intricate working together, as if she were doing crochet work without needles or thread.

  “Yes . . . That was bad, wasn’t it? I went in intending to stay perfectly cool, and then I let that happen.”

  “Why did it?”

  “She knows how to needle me. Myra certainly understood that.” Meredith waited, and eventually Cordelia said: “It was something silly she said about my father. She knows she can needle me by talking about my father.”

  Meredith nodded. He was old enough to remember, dimly, the fuss in the gutter newspapers about pretty little Myra Mason’s baby by the elderly novelist. It had been, he would guess, in the early sixties—just one scandal in the era of scandals.

  “Ah, yes, tell me about that, will you? Your father is Ben Cotterel, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” said Cordelia quickly.

  “Who lives at the Rectory, where I . . . came for you tonight.”

  “Roderick is his son. Pat and I are camping on the lawn.”

  “I believe I’ve heard that the old man is . . . not what he was.”

  “Yes. I went up to see him. He’s senile.”

  “I see. That must have been very distressing for you.”

  “In a way. But he didn’t seem unhappy. . . . In a way it was for the best, because I couldn’t have coped with any big emotional scene, and at his age nor could he, even if his mind had been stronger. What I’ve always loved have been his books. I’ve been proud to be the daughter of a great novelist.”

  “I remember a little about the affair. Was this another case of your mother sailing into a love affair and falling flat on her face?”

  “Oh yes!” Cordelia shot him a brief, relishing smile. “I was going to use it to open my memoir of her. That was quite different from the Louis business. With Ben it was pure shortsighted self-aggrandizement. Here was this great novelist, tired of writing fiction, maybe written out or just bored with life, whom she thought she could galvanize into writing a great play for her. Remember, she was not well-known then, merely promising. He was going to write a great play, with of course a great part for her.”

  “And it didn’t work out like that?”

  “Not at all. What she got out of it was me, and The Vixen.”

  “That’s a novel, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, with her as the central character—a ruthless, predatory, humorless monster. Though ultimately the character is funny, or funny, too, because of her total lack of self-knowledge and because she is so young. One thinks of monsters of that sort as mature or old, but here was a full-fledged horror still in her early twenties. Miriam, the Myra figure in the book, lives in a sort of self-made bubble. She can’t have real relationships because she hasn’t the slightest understanding of how other people think or feel.”

  “He wrote the book just after the relationship ended, did he? Wasn’t that rather unnecessarily cruel?”

  “I suppose so. I know my father wasn’t perfect. Roderick saw them together, and he had the impression that Ben was studying Myra, like some sort of specimen, intending all along to use her. I realize that’s not nice. . . . But Myra did that all the time, too, you know. She created a lot of roles purely from the outside—gestures, walks, speech mannerisms. She used to hit on people similar to the character she was to play and milk them for all they were worth.”

  Meredith was amused by her apparent readiness to admit her father’s faults, coupled with the more pressing urge to emphasize that her mother was much worse.

  “So your mother had good reason to hate your father?”

  “Oh, very good reason.”

  “And perhaps your father to hate your mother?”

  “Do you think so? I’ve found no evidence that he did. Essentially he won. He played with her for some months, then got a book out of her.”

  “She certainly threw mud at him in the gutter press.”

  Cordelia shrugged. “Ben was above being harmed by the gutter press. I’ve read his letters. I don’t have the impression he minded.”

  “I’m just looking for possible motives.”

  “If you knew—” Cordelia stopped. “If you knew how feeble he is, and how feebleminded, you wouldn’t even bother to consider a motive for him.”

  Meredith nodded. “Maybe not. What was it your mother said about him that started the fighting?”

  “Do I have to say?”

  “I think so.”

  Cordelia looked down at the table, then said slowly: “She said . . . she said he quite likely wasn’t my father. She said that she’d had it off with a Cameron Highlander on the train coming down, the weekend I was conceived.”

  “I see.” Meredith did see the hurting accuracy of the hit. This girl had cherished the idea of her father more than anything in the world. “‘That must really have upset you.”

  “It seemed like she wanted to take my father away from me. Of course I realized later, when I was walking it off, that it was just Myra being Myra.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a very typical tactic. She knew I thought she was a lousy mother, she knew I worshiped my father, ergo she had to think of the most effective way of robbing me of him. Knowing her, the incident with the Cameron Highlander did occur at some time. She just remembered it, switched it in time, and used it to stick the knife in me.”

  “You’re probably right. Tell me, how did the—the interview between you and your mother end?”

  “Well, as you know, I threw myself on her, at her throat, and she was grabbing at my arms, trying to get me away, and we fell to the floor—” She stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “I suppose I just lost the urge, ran out of steam. Or suddenly saw how sordid and ridiculous it all was. I simply let go, got up, and she scrambled up, too. We looked at each other, and I said . . . something. What was it? Oh, yes, I said: ‘You do have a great gift of bringing out the worst in everyone, Mother.’ Then I went to the door and said: ‘I hope I never have to see you again.’ And then I left.”

  “What was your mother doing?”

  “Just standing there, red and blotchy, very unattractive, looking at me with rage.”

  “And you didn’t go back?”

&nb
sp; “No. I got my wish. I never saw her again.”

  Chapter 11

  THE NEXT MORNING was a terrible time for Roderick and Caroline, the more so because nothing was happening that involved them. After breakfast they rang the police station at Cottingham and were told that Chief Inspector Meredith had talked to Cordelia the night before and that she was being held there for further talks, once the inspector had completed his work at the Red Lion, which was where he was at that moment. No, they couldn’t say anything about when she would be released.

  They felt completely helpless. The whole matter was in other hands, and God knew what the outcome would be. Roderick took Becky down the lawn to look in the tent, but he found that Pat had gone.

  “He must have gone to the village early,” he said to Caroline. “Probably to go to the Red Lion or to pick up any gossip that’s going.”

  So there was nothing to do but wait. They played ball in the garden with Becky and tried not to let any of their worry get through to her.

  Pat came back about half past ten. He was carrying a plastic bag laden with goods, for he had gone from shop to shop, intent on gleaning information from customers or shopkeepers but forced in all conscience to buy, as well.

  “I rang the police from the call-box,” he said, coming across the garden toward them. “They’re not saying when they will let her go.”

  “We know. We rang them, too. We should have known they’d give nothing away. Did you find anything out?”

  Pat slung his bag into the tent, and they all went and sat on the garden seat.

  “The greengrocer had the most news. I’d forgotten he was actually there, in the Saloon Bar. I wasted time before that at the butcher’s and the general store. You can imagine what it was like. Everyone went very quiet as soon as they saw me come in. They’d obviously decided already that Cordelia did it. Most of their information, when they unclammed, was punk: They said that Cordelia had been arrested, they said she’d shot her mother at the climax of a row, and so on. I hadn’t got the full story then, so I couldn’t contradict them with any confidence, but when I said I was sure that Myra was still alive when Cordelia left the Red Lion, they all got this obstinate look in their eyes, and I could tell they didn’t believe me and would go on spreading their punk information.”

  “What about Mr. Allenby—the greengrocer?” asked Caroline.

  “The whole of Maudsley’s turning vegetarian for the day,” said Pat dryly. “He’s making a great thing of it. But presumably what he is giving out is accurate. When he says the row was long over when Myra was shot, people believe him, where they think I’m lying to shield Cordelia. He says Granville was in the bar all evening telling theatrical stories and getting quite a little group around him. Didn’t even go out for a call of nature. The shot was heard about ten to ten. They all thought it was a car backfiring.”

  “Fair enough,” said Roderick. “I can never distinguish the two.”

  “No. But then this woman came in and said she’d been in the loo and that the shot had been directly over her head. She was very insistent it had come from Myra’s room, and rather reluctantly—because I don’t think anyone really believed her—Granville went up to have a look. The whole bar was waiting at the door into the hotel section. They heard him open the door of his and Myra’s room, find her dead, and rush down the stairs again. The landlord summoned the police at once.”

  They were all silent for a moment. They were all thinking of ways by which Granville Ashe could have done it. “It takes no time to shoot someone,” “There are such things as silencers—” those were the sort of thoughts that were muddling around in their heads.

  “I really am not going to start trying to find someone guilty,” said Roderick firmly. “He seemed a perfectly pleasant young man, and I wouldn’t have thought he’d have it in him, anyway.”

  He saw from the looks on the other two faces that they had all been thinking along the same lines.

  “Anyway,” said Pat, “if there’s one thing that’s clear about Myra, it is that she had plenty of enemies.”

  • • •

  Meredith sat in the rather spare little hotel bedroom and talked to the woman who had insisted that what she had heard had been a shot.

  She was, he decided, a perfect specimen of the English gentlewoman, a type that hardly seemed to have changed since his childhood. In spite of what must have been a quite horrendous evening and night, she was cool, rational, and polite. She wore a well-cut blouse and skirt, had pearls around her neck, and generally seemed as sensible and well-spoken a person as ever was chairman of a Women’s Institute branch or president of a local flower club. Meredith felt he had been meeting women like this all his life when he had been making public relations speeches to do-gooding organizations. If he had not been able to see her quiet but expensive luggage on the rack, her dressing gown hanging on a hook on the door, the little pile of books on her bedside table, he would have been able to make a very good guess at the sort of things she would buy, the sort of things she would wear, and the sort of things she would read.

  She gave her name and address as Pamela Goodison, of 37, Fairview Road, London, SW20. She said she was a widow.

  “When my husband was alive, we always used to go abroad in summer. I know I shouldn’t think of ‘abroad’ as being full of men waiting to rob or seduce single ladies of a certain age—and really I don’t—but still I find I don’t want to travel on the Continent on my own. So since my widowhood I generally go to favorite parts of Britain, staying a night here, two nights there, then driving on. It’s pleasant and varied, and keeping on the move prevents one becoming the ‘person on her own’ whom everyone takes pity on and makes conversation with.”

  “Someone said your husband was an architect.”

  “Yes. That’s partly the point. You see, we used to go around viewing houses together. Sometimes houses that Charles would decide to buy, restore, and redecorate, then sell at a profit. Sometimes houses he was investigating for clients. So over the years I have acquired a very good feel for the shape of a house. What is on each floor and how it all fits together.”

  “Let’s go over exactly what happened last night. Now you . . . went to the toilet.”

  Mrs. Goodison smiled, but with a faint, gentlewomanly embarrassment.

  “Yes. Not something one normally talks about in detail. It must have been about ten to ten, or a bit before.”

  “Which, er, cubicle were you in?”

  “The middle one. There are three, and I was in the second along. It has a . . . well . . . a nasty piece of graffiti scrawled on the door. A male organ with a rude message underneath. I expect it’s a sign of growing old, but women’s loos would never have had that sort of thing in a respectable pub in my younger days. Is it a change for the better? I really can’t persuade myself that it is. Anyway, that’s where I was.”

  “And then the shot came?”

  “That’s right. I looked at my watch not long after, when I’d absorbed the implications, and it said eight minutes to ten. I knew, you see, that it was a shot, and I knew it came from directly above me. There were no open windows anywhere in the ladies’ loo, and I could feel the sound, the impact, from above me. Does that sound silly?”

  “Not at all.”

  “So I sat there thinking: Whose room would that be? And of course everyone staying at the hotel had registered Dame Myra and noted which was her room. I’d seen her going in and out more than once. As soon as I got my ‘architect’s eye’ working, I realized her room was directly above me.”

  “And you thought you ought to say something?”

  Mrs. Goodison looked troubled.

  “Yes. Please don’t think I’m prejudging things or trying to put ideas into your head, but you see, earlier in the evening— Well, I’d better explain in detail. I was sitting reading in the bar for most of the evening. It had seemed a pleasant place, and it’s nicer than shutting oneself up in one’s room; one can have a drink, and there are people
round one to look at now and again. I enjoy sizing people up, listening to them. But I don’t actually want to talk, not if I’ve got a good book. Well, there was this silly woman—”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “I’m afraid not. And ignore that ‘silly.’ I barely spoke to the woman. I was merely reacting to the way she dressed. Anyway, she sat at my table before dinner, when there were very few seats left in the bar. She hadn’t intruded, as I’d feared, but I’d observed her from behind my book, as I like to. She was very much taken up with Myra Mason and her family at a table nearby. Noticing everything that was to be noticed. Well, there was nothing very remarkable about that; practically everyone in the bar was conscious that there was a celebrity in our midst. Anyway, after dinner—no, wait. I did notice during dinner that this woman went up to Dame Myra’s table.”

  “And spoke to her?”

  “Yes, spoke to all of them. Rather nervously, I suspected, as if she wasn’t sure of her reception.”

  “And was it an amicable encounter?”

  “I think so. . . . No sign of anything else that I saw. Though the woman, as I say, was standing tensely, fluttering her hands, and so on—jerky might be the best word. Well, after dinner, she was sitting at a table near mine. There were fewer in the bar by now, so she could have a table to herself. She still seemed rather jumpy. Then twice she got up and went into the hotel part of the building, and after the second time, I saw her talking to Dame Myra’s husband and his group. When she came back to her seat, she leaned over to me at my table and said—do you want her exact words?”

  “If you can remember them.”

  Pamela Goodison screwed up her eyes. “Let me see. ‘It’s really rather awful. There’s a terrible row going on upstairs between Dame Myra and her daughter. And her husband won’t do anything about it.’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “Something soothing about it not being unknown for parents and children to quarrel. And she said: ‘But this is violent. They are fighting. It’s awful for me. Because in a way I’m connected with them.’ Obviously I was supposed to ask how she was connected, but I knew that that would have spoiled the rest of my evening, so I made a few sympathetic clucking noises, said I was sure it would all blow over, and went back to my book.”