At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

  “I see. And you remembered that conversation when you heard the shot.”

  “Yes. But there was no row while I was in the loo, and I’m not suggest—”

  Meredith put up his hand.

  “And I’m not suggestible, Mrs. Goodison. I don’t jump to conclusions. Please give me credit for that. Anyway, this lady effectively made sure that the whole bar knew about the quarrel upstairs.”

  “That was certainly the effect. Whether it was the intention, I don’t know. But if she was connected with the Masons by some family link, it certainly seems an odd way to behave.”

  “One more point, Mrs. Goodison. While you were . . . there in the toilets—”

  “Yes? Oh, dear, this is the best-documented trip to the loo of my whole life.”

  “Did you hear anything else? Anyone running down the stairs? Any of the doors slamming? Things like that.”

  Mrs. Goodison wrinkled her forehead. “That’s very difficult to say. A shot one remembers, but normal hotel noises one would hardly even register. And would one hear them in there? The stairs are well-carpeted . . . Wait. I was of course more conscious after the shot. While I was trying to work out which room it had been in. I think I heard the fire-escape door shut—I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think so. But it’s not something I could take my oath on in court—”

  • • •

  It all tallied precisely, as Inspector Meredith had known it would. Mrs. Goodison was a first-rate witness, the witness of any policeman’s dreams. On the door of the central cubicle of the ladies’ lavatories there was a crudely drawn penis with “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE BRITISH BANGER” scrawled underneath. There were several other examples of similar wit here and there around the little cubicle, including lesbian and feminist wit: “NICE GIRLS DO IT TOGETHER” and “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH MEN THAT CASTRATION DOESN’T CURE.” It was all pretty much on a level with a men’s lavatory, but Meredith was sure that Mrs. Goodison was right: Twenty or thirty years ago the door would have been bare.

  Where she had been sitting was directly under Myra Mason’s room—directly under the door of it, where the report would have been loudest. Here there would be the least likelihood of confusing it with a backfiring car outside.

  It was as he was emerging (with that slightly furtive air that was inevitable) from the ladies’ lavatories that Meredith was stopped.

  “Excuse me. You are the policeman on the Myra Mason case, aren’t you?”

  It was a whole family, one that had clearly waited for him at the bottom of the stairs. Both father and mother were fresh faced, healthy types, sensibly dressed for outdoors, with modest English tans. They had two girls and a little boy dressed in down-to-earth, dirtiable clothes.

  Meredith nodded.

  “You see we heard about the shooting, inevitably, when we got back last night, and now we’ve heard all the people talking in the village.” The father stopped.

  “We’re worried, you see,” the wife took up, “because people say the daughter has been arrested.”

  “People say all sorts of things,” said Meredith. “That’s not in fact the case.”

  “Oh, I am glad. We had to come and see you, though, because in fact we saw her.”

  “Saw Cordelia Mason? Where?”

  “Down on the beach. We were all down there. We had a late swim, and we’d been collecting shells.”

  “When did you see her?”

  “That’s easy. When the light failed. We were about to start up the cliff path. We let the children stay up late on holiday, you see, but this was really late. Say half past nine.”

  “We’d seen her earlier in the bar,” said the husband. “When they all four were sitting there, before dinner. There’s no question that it was her. She’s a big girl, and one noticed her. She was walking on the beach—looking very thoughtful, maybe unhappy. She started up the cliff path after us.”

  “How long after you?”

  “Two or three minutes. We saw her beneath us.”

  “And when did you get back here?”

  “Just before ten. It was absolute bedlam in here.”

  “And there is only the one path up?”

  “Just the one. And she didn’t pass us on the way. We’re really glad she is not under arrest.” He looked at his wife, both of them glad they’d done their duty. “If anybody’s in the clear, she is.”

  Chapter 12

  THE RED LION AT MAUDSLEY had been modernized ten years before Myra’s death there, but it had not been made luxurious. It was not that sort of hotel. Its clientele in the spring and summer months were mainly walkers, or middle-class couples in cars, many of them elderly. There were also families who wanted the sea without all the horrors of the British seaside. They had money to spend but not to chuck around. Those who had money to chuck around—usually company money, other people’s money—went to classier establishments in large towns.

  Myra Mason’s room—or, rather, the Ashes’ room—had a bathroom annex, but so did most of the other rooms, and its superiority to them consisted mainly in its being slightly larger and having a little extra furniture: two armchairs instead of one, an occasional table on which room-service meals could be set out, and an elaborate dressing table that Myra had made good use of. It was still fairly basic: The wallpaper seemed to have been chosen at random, and the picture over the bed was any old Spanish street corner in any old Spanish town. Any individuality the room had had been given it by Myra herself.

  The body of Myra was no longer there. It had lain back against the pillow on the left-hand side of the bed, with a hole through the temple. The bullet had gone through the bedhead and into the wall behind. From its position it was clear that Myra had been lying on her back—thinking? meditating revenge on her daughter?—had struggled upward when her murderer had come into the room, and had sunk back when she had been shot. There had been on her face an expression that Meredith found difficult to define: surprise, bewilderment—neither word quite summed it up. Puzzlement perhaps came nearest. Not so much “Why are you shooting me?” (as it might be, if, say, her new husband had appeared in the doorway with a gun in his hand) as “Who are you?” or “What are you doing here?” But expressions on dead faces, Meredith knew, could be misleading or worse; trick reactions of muscles could render them farcically inappropriate comments on the actual circumstances of death.

  Yet the expression remained with him: Who are you? What on earth is happening? Is this a joke?

  The body had gone, and the gun had gone. It had been dropped on the carpeted floor not far from the door. He would be getting a report on that, too, before long. Guns had not loomed very large in Meredith’s criminal investigations hitherto; by no means as large as if he had been an American policeman or one active in one of the larger British cities. Two questions occurred to him: The murderer had left the gun rather than taken it with him. Less potentially incriminating that way, presumably. But what did that tell him about the murderer?

  And then there was the question of a silencer.

  This was a question that had never come up in Meredith’s experience, but it intrigued him. He knew enough about them to know that Granville Ashe, on going up to the room he had shared with his wife, could not have shot her with a revolver that had a silencer attached, removed the silencer, then rushed downstairs. The time factor, so far as he had grasped it from the testimony of all the people waiting at the door downstairs, rendered this an impossible supposition. But was there some other possibility? That Dame Myra had been shot earlier with a silencer and the shot Mrs. Goodison heard had been a mere blind, to establish an alibi, maybe? No—that wouldn’t work. Someone had to be in the room, making the noise.

  Meredith shrugged off the temptation to go up blind alleys and turned his attention to what this drab, characterless hotel bedroom actually told him.

  The wardrobe was less full than he might have imagined, but then, he had no evidence that Myra had intended to stay beyond a few days. A very smart woolen
suit, a severely cut skirt, and four really beautiful dresses—simple, shapely, of subtle, not readily definable colors. A lady who was conscious of her appearance, but cleverly rather than ostentatiously so. Expensive clothes, nevertheless. Much more so than her husband’s, which took up as much space in the wardrobe and which were never more than goodish. Granville was better, though, at leisure wear—pleasant, sporty, light clothes, suitable for summer days near the sea. Nothing Myra had could remotely have been described as informal. Meredith guessed that she had never had a lot of time for leisure.

  This was confirmed by some of the personal things around the room. Whereas Mrs. Goodison had brought books with her, Myra had brought scripts. There were no books at all, at least not ones for leisure reading. Instead, there was one of this year’s new plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Shaw’s Getting Married, a new translation of a Strindberg, an Edward Bond script, and The Cherry Orchard. It was the Ayckbourn or the Strindberg that she had been reading before she died—both of them were facedown on her bedside table. Meredith glanced at them. The Strindberg was The Father. A suitable play for a woman in a rage? he wondered. The Ayckbourn was apparently a middle-class comedy with a strong central role for a middle-aged woman. All the plays were heavily marked in red—words underlined in the main woman’s part, little lines suggestive of possible intonations, pauses marked in. Myra, as everyone agreed, was a professional.

  There was no great quantity of jewelry. Why should there be for a few days in the country? Beside the bed was a necklace—presumably one that Myra had been wearing earlier in the evening, taken off when she had put on her nightdress and carelessly left there rather than put in the little leather-covered box that held the rest of her things. These consisted of five other pieces: a necklace of pearls, two brooches, and two rings. Few but good seemed to be the motto here, as with the clothes. One brooch in particular, a Victorian setting of a diamond—large, sparkling, decidedly ostentatious—surrounded by sapphires, seemed a very valuable piece indeed, unless Meredith’s eyes were playing him false. Dame Myra, he remembered, had had many admirers—many lovers, he corrected himself, scorning euphemism—and her jewelry was probably in the main gifts from them. No doubt she had earned plenty of money herself over the years, but he guessed that for a woman like her jewelry would be something she would expect to have bestowed on her.

  The main sign of lavishness, of conspicuous consumption, was on the dressing table. Here there were jars and bottles, sprays and compacts, drops and syringes in great abundance. That the products were expensive was evidenced by the containers, which all looked as if they had been dreamed up by Italian designers and executed in exclusive glass-blowing establishments in Venice. He wondered what she had done with them when they were empty; they were hardly the sort of object one merely threw into the garbage bin. Studying the bottles, Meredith found a preponderance of skin foods and moisturizers, with only a modest supply of lipstick or mascara. The important thing was the well-being of the product rather than the painting of it. It occurred to Meredith that Myra ought to have been a woman of great good sense. Her care of herself, her presentation of herself, were based on admirable criteria. No doubt it was when other people intruded into her world that her judgment deserted her.

  And then there was her notepad. This Meredith had observed on his first visit to the room, in the first minutes of the police operation. It was a memo pad such as one could obtain in any stationer’s—square white paper with a design of flowers printed on the sides. He guessed all the old sheets had been torn off before it had been packed, for all the notes on the top three sheets that had been used seemed to relate to things that had come up since she came to the Red Lion.

  On the top sheet was “Call from Harley re Mrs. Wilcox. Ring from Pelstock.” On the second sheet was “New tie for G.” and “Cordelia 6:15.” Meredith went over to the wardrobe and looked at Granville’s ties. Some were perhaps a shade flamboyant, a bit airy. One, a stripe in blue and deep purple, looked decidedly more expensive than the rest. Granville, then, rated a new tie. Would he have had to stay married longer to have rated a new suit?

  The Cordelia reference was surely simple. It was the time she and Pat were to come to the Red Lion on the murder night. But the third sheet was puzzling. It read: “Woman for Ayckbourn. TV. Oaken Heart? The Blush?”

  It was the last note on the pad. Had it been written shortly before she was killed?

  • • •

  When he got back to the police station at Cottingham, Meredith rang the Cotterels. He told them he was going to have a brief chat with Cordelia but that after that he would hold her no longer. Would they come and get her, or should he send her back to the Rectory in a police car? They would come and get her. Oh, and would they and Miss Mason’s boyfriend hold themselves in readiness for questioning tomorrow? He had a myriad things to do for the rest of the day, including questioning the husband, but earlyish tomorrow? . . . That was kind of them.

  When Cordelia was brought into the interview room by Sergeant Flood, she assured him she’d slept well and late, had been brought an excellent breakfast, and had generally been well looked after. She had also been brought the papers, she said, but there had naturally been little that was substantial about the death of her mother, so she was still in the dark about many aspects of her killing.

  “So are we,” said Meredith. “But the important thing I should tell you at once is that you were seen on the beach around the time the murder apparently took place. By a family that was down there, one that was staying at the hotel, and had seen you earlier. It seems a watertight alibi. We would like you to stay in this area for the next few days, if you would, but beyond that you’re free to go.”

  Cordelia nodded. There was no expression of joy or relief. Meredith permitted himself to say: “You take it very coolly.”

  “There was always too much emotion in our house,” Cordelia said with a sad smile. “I’ve tried to cultivate coolness—not always successfully.”

  “You’ve certainly not pretended to grief over your mother.”

  “No. There is none. A sort of sadness, maybe. But when you’ve said to yourself so often, ‘I’d like to kill her,’ it’s almost comforting to find that you haven’t.”

  Meredith found her gaucheness rather appealing.

  “I’ve been looking round your mother’s room. There seems to be some rather good jewelry there.”

  “Oh, yes. Mother had some wonderful pieces. She always chose her gifts herself. She had a great deal at home, but she wouldn’t carry much around with her.”

  “There was a splendid diamond-and-sapphire brooch.”

  “That was given her by my father, by Ben Cotterel, shortly before I was born. Yes, it’s beautiful. How typical of Myra to bring it when she came here.”

  “The fact that it’s still in her room seems to prove that robbery was not the motive for the murder.”

  “I suppose so. I never thought it was.”

  “You thought it must be something in her relationships or in her earlier life?”

  “That seemed the most obvious possibility, if you knew Myra and her genius for making enemies.”

  “I was thinking about the men in her life. You’re the obvious one to know most about that. Do you think you could make a list of them for me?”

  Cordelia laughed, a frank, almost happy laugh. “You know not what you ask. The ones I know about would fill two foolscap pages, and there were many I didn’t.”

  “Could you try, anyway? Perhaps you could indicate whether they were short-term relationships or longer ones, whether they lived together, and so on. And perhaps you could indicate whether the men were married at the time of the affair.”

  “I can try. I wouldn’t always know if they were married or not, though often Myra told me; it gave the affair added spice, added éclat. She knew I’d feel sorry for the wives—though really I felt sorriest for the men.”

  “So you’ll give it a try for me?”

  “Yes, I will. B
ut remember, I really only know about the ones from the time I got to the age of noticing. About the earlier ones I know nothing at all.”

  “Except your father,” said Inspector Meredith.

  “Right. Except my father. And the soldier from the Cameron Highlands,” said Cordelia with a nervous laugh.

  • • •

  “I expect your relatives will be waiting to take you back to the Rectory,” said Meredith as he shepherded her from the interview room. “You are of course entirely free now, but I do have your word you will stay in this area for the moment, don’t I?”

  “Certainly.”

  “By the way, there was a note on your mother’s pad: ‘Call from Harley re Mrs. Wilcox.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Harley is—was—Myra’s agent,” said Cordelia promptly. “Harley Clarkson. An address in Soho—Dean Street, I think. I don’t know a Mrs. Wilcox. But could it be a part? There’s a Mrs. Wilcox in Howards End. There’s a bit of an E. M. Forster boom on at the moment. It could be a television adaptation or a film. It’s a terrible book, but Mrs. Wilcox would be a good part. Moneyed but saintly. Not one of the parts that Myra would look inward for!”

  “I see. There was another note. Just two names, or phrases, ‘Oaken Heart’ and ‘The Blush.’ Do they mean anything to you?”

  Cordelia frowned.

  “I don’t think so. Though ‘Oaken Heart’ rings a very vague bell. Could they be other possible parts, offered by Harley Clarkson? Myra was probably looking round for what to do after John Gabriel Borkman.”

  “Possibly. The two things were separated on the name pad. There could have been another call from the agent, I suppose. I’d better contact him and find out. . . . Ah, here are your relatives, and your boyfriend.”