At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

“I say already suspected, because she never actually told me. What I imagined was that as soon as this business of the book blew over, Myra could be persuaded into making a will that was more equitable and, well, more fitting. No question of that now. Let me make this quite clear; as far as I am concerned, there’s no way of seeing this will as anything other than unjust.”

  Cordelia frowned. “Unjust?”

  “Of course it’s unjust. You’re her daughter, and I’m her husband of three weeks. So I wanted to see you straight away and make it clear that this will is not all right with me, and we’re going to have to get together—us or our solicitors—and work something out.”

  “You mean you want to give me part of what you inherit from Myra?”

  “Well . . . put bluntly, yes.”

  “But I don’t want anything.” She looked at Pat. “We don’t want anything, do we?”

  Pat shook his head, firmly and unhesitatingly.

  “Look, Cordelia,” said Granville persuasively, “you may feel like that now, and twenty-odd is the right age to be idealistic and otherworldly, but I assure you that you’d regret it in a few years’ time if you refused. It’s simply a question of justice. You’re Myra’s daughter, and you . . . well, you put up with a lot, we all know that. It’s right you should have part of what she left.”

  Cordelia smiled. “It’s very nice of you. Sort of quixotic. But I don’t think the idea of justice comes into inheritance, do you? It’s just a lottery. I mean, there’s no justice in the eldest son getting most, but he generally does. Pat and I don’t want any big sum of money suddenly falling on us. In fact, we’d rather not have too much.”

  “Much rather,” said Pat decisively.

  “And there’s also the question of inclination. I wouldn’t want to inherit anything from Myra. I hated her. Everyone here knows that. Even if she’d left me anything in her will, I’d refuse to accept it. It would be . . . distasteful. So please don’t press me.”

  Granville turned to Roderick and Caroline. “You try to make her see sense.”

  “It’s her decision,” said Roderick slowly. “But I do think, Cordelia, that you might regret it later on.”

  “No. If I took anything, I’d regret it later on.”

  Granville looked at her helplessly. “Something personal. Some of her jewels. She has some quite beautiful things.”

  “Still less anything personal,” said Cordelia. “Though you’re quite right about the jewels. Some of them cost the earth. That necklace from Louis, for example. He moved heaven and earth to get it back when they split up, but he hadn’t a hope.”

  “Would you accept it?”

  “Good God! A memento of Louis! About the last thing I’d want,” said Cordelia, shuddering. She stood up. “I’d much rather not talk about it anymore. Please get it into your head that I don’t want anything and I won’t accept anything.” She paused at the door. “Oh, except for the books I made of her cuttings. I would like those.”

  “They weren’t the sort of thing I was thinking of at all,” said Granville.

  Chapter 14

  RODERICK AND CAROLINE spent the morning of Wednesday doing odd jobs around the house. It was Mrs. Spriggs’s morning for giving the downstairs “a good clean through,” so they got down to doing little things that they’d said for years needed doing, though they’d never cared enough before actually to do them. In reality, they (and indeed Mrs. Spriggs, who was voraciously interested) were just waiting for Meredith.

  They had discussed in bed the night before whether or not they should come clean with him, disburden themselves of the whole story, but they had decided there was now no greater reason than before to do so. That decision nevertheless hung over them like a black-edged cloud.

  Cordelia did not come up to work on the Cotterel papers. That was natural enough, in the joy of her release from suspicion. But they did wonder whether she would in fact want to work on them again, whether her project had been laid to rest. Probably not, in view of her request to Granville of the night before. About eleven they saw her and Pat going off, towels over their shoulders, laughing happily.

  “We told Pat that Meredith wanted him to be available today,” said Roderick. “Do you think we should call them back?”

  “It’s their responsibility,” said Caroline. “I don’t think we should try to mother-hen them.” Later she said: “Odd to think that three weeks ago, if someone had mentioned Cordelia Mason, we would have been hard put to think who was meant.”

  They lunched off bread and cheese. Mrs. Spriggs had to leave to feed her children from school, though clearly if she’d had her way, they would have gone hungry. When Meredith arrived, with Sergeant Flood, they were just settling Becky in front of the television for an Australian soap.

  “Just come and stand around for a minute or two,” said Caroline to the newcomers. “When she’s used to your being here she’ll watch the television quite quietly. . . . Who’s that actor? I’ve seen him before.”

  “Picnic at Hanging Rock, I think,” said Roderick. “Or maybe The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.”

  “Poor man. I hope he made this soap before them and hasn’t been reduced to it.”

  “Can’t be much work in Australia for actors,” said Meredith.

  “Except the beer commercials,” said Sergeant Flood.

  Caroline nodded to them, and they all moved quietly away to the far end of the room.

  “It’s terrible just to sit her in front of the television,” said Caroline, “but sometimes it’s the only way. She likes seeing faces that she recognizes. Now she’s got used to your being here, she won’t worry us.”

  They settled down into a group of sofa and armchairs that Caroline had arranged specially. Flood got out his notebook and made some preliminary jottings.

  “I’m sorry we’re late,” said Meredith. “I’ve had to talk to the Red Lion landlord and some of his guests who wanted to get away. Now—if we can just get the boring stuff out of the way. Such as what you were doing on Monday evening.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Roderick. “We’ve thought about that. I was in and out of the study—my study, that is—in the earlier part of the evening. In and out because Becky was in here.”

  “I was gardening,” said Caroline. “A little neglected patch, down at the end, near the new housing estate. I’m trying to grow wild flowers there, but they seem to be more trouble than ordinary garden flowers. Someone from the estate may well have seen me down there, and I was back and forwards to the toolshed. I came back in when the light began to fail, just after nine.”

  “And then we discovered we were out of milk,” said Roderick. “Becky is absolutely miserable if she doesn’t have her Ovaltine before bedtime, so I drove into the village, where there’s a corner shop that stays open till ten in summer for the tourists and campers.”

  “I see. So you will have been there—when? Ten past nine? Later?”

  “Quarter, twenty past, I should think.”

  “You went straight there and came straight back?”

  “Yes. I can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes.”

  “Right. And you stayed here, Mrs. Cotterel—naturally, with your daughter and the old gentleman to look after.”

  “Yes, I was here. We certainly don’t leave Becky alone if we can help it, but Roderick’s father can be left in the evening. He usually falls asleep around seven. He’s so feeble that there’s nothing he can really do, no harm he can come to.”

  “I see,” said Meredith. Something I must check, he thought. He said: “Now, I’d better get this right: the old gentleman had an affair, many years ago, with Myra Mason.”

  “That’s right. In the late fifties, early sixties. Cordelia is the result. It made quite a scandal at the time—at least the breakup of the affair did.”

  “The scandal being of Myra Mason’s making?”

  “Yes. She didn’t go quietly. You might take the view there was no reason why she should,” said Roderick.


  “I have vague memories of the scandal. Would I be right in saying that the public was interested less because Myra Mason was a famous actress than because Benedict Cotterel was a famous novelist?”

  “That’s pretty much right. Myra was then still at the beginning of her career. Avid for any sort of publicity, if you put the worst construction on it. Just a bad manager of her private life, if you took the kindlier view. Anyway, there was one of those short-lived tabloid stinks, because my father was a very well known, slightly up-market novelist. If the truth were told, Fleet Street had probably known for years that he was something of a philanderer and had been waiting for dirt they could print without fear of a libel action. Myra handed it to them on a plate. The fact that she was a very beautiful woman didn’t make the story any less attractive to them.”

  “I see. Will you pardon my ignorance if I ask what sort of a writer your father was . . . is?”

  “Was, I’m afraid. No question of his ever writing again. I’m afraid we often think of him in the past tense. Well, it’s not an easy question to answer. His first novel was published in 1927, you see, and his last nearly forty years later. The first was very lush, romantic, a young man’s novel. In the thirties they became darker, more political—my father was very much part of the left-wing political scene, along with Orwell, Auden, and the rest. After the war they became sharper, more satirical—Ben always liked to say that comedy was much more difficult than serious stuff, and much more profound. There were a lot of travel books after the war, too, and even one about architecture. He always wrote wonderfully about places. About 1952 he stopped writing fiction except for some short stories, and The Vixen, his revenge on Myra.”

  “I always say that was unworthy of him,” put in Caroline. “He may not have been a kind man, but he was usually a just one. The Vixen is very unjustly weighted—against Myra.”

  “Old men get selfish—self-absorbed,” said Roderick. “If I had to sum up the fiction, I’d say they were generally about intelligent, aware people, in contemporary situations and dilemmas, with usually a strong love or sex interest.”

  “They sold well?”

  “Very well. Penguin once published ten of his books simultaneously. He wasn’t a mass-market writer, and he started to look a little out-of-date with the coming of the Angry Young Men, but he did have a large, literate following. We lived well.”

  “Ah, yes. You said he was a philanderer. What about his family life?”

  “Oh, when I said we lived well, I meant the three of us left behind lived well—and he, too, on his own. All through our early childhood he was more away than at home. Early in the war he moved out for good.”

  “So there was no question of the affair with Myra Mason breaking up his marriage?”

  “Good Lord, no,” said Roderick, laughing. “It’d been broken up for years. Though there was never an actual divorce.”

  “And is your mother still alive?”

  “She died in 1968,” said Caroline. “I’m afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree, Inspector.”

  “I have very few trees, Mrs. Cotterel, and I have to bark up each of them.” Meredith settled back in his chair. “What I’m trying to get is a picture of Dame Myra’s emotional life. Would I be right in thinking your father went into the affair in a rather detached, ironic way—an amusement for an aging man, a bit of not-too-serious dalliance.”

  “Yes . . . Yes, I think that would be fair,” said Roderick.

  “And that she took it much more seriously.”

  “Yes—though not, I think, if you mean that she was seriously in love with him. She was passionate, pushy, monomaniacal, but all for herself and her own career. That, anyhow, is how I read the situation.”

  “You met them together?”

  “Yes. All the time it was as if Myra was battering her head against a rock. She could do nothing, because my father did not take her seriously and wasn’t in love with her.”

  “I see . . . Would your sister have met them, too, at the time?”

  “Isobel? Oh, no. No, she had very little contact with our father.”

  “Ah! Why was that, sir?”

  “They just drifted apart, I suppose. That wasn’t difficult, since we saw him so little during our childhood. She wanted to go and live with him in London soon after she left school, but he wasn’t having any. I think that when that happened, she just shrugged him off. If he didn’t want anything to do with her, she didn’t want anything to do with him.”

  “And yet she comes to see him here?”

  “Well—” Roderick and Caroline looked at each other. “Not really. She never bothers to go up and see him.”

  “She just comes to see you.”

  “Yes . . . Yes, she mainly comes to see us.”

  “I see. Well, I’ll be talking to your sister—”

  “Will you? I don’t see what she can have to do with it.”

  “Nor do I, sir. Still, she overheard the quarrel between Dame Myra and her daughter. And in fact I’ll be talking to everyone who was in the Red Lion that night—I or one of my men. Now, I’m going to make a request that I hope you don’t find offensive. I wonder if I could see your father.”

  “Oh.” Roderick looked at Caroline. “I don’t see why not.”

  “No,” said Caroline. “Would it be all right if only one of you came? He tends to find new faces confusing.”

  “Yes, that would be quite all right. I’ll tell you why I ask. I took a copy of The Vixen home with me last night. Got it from the Cottingham library. I’ve only been able to skim through it, but it is pretty devastating.”

  “I know,” said Caroline. “I find it a really distasteful book.”

  “So if one is looking for motive . . .”

  They stood up, and Roderick said: “The Vixen is more motive for Myra to kill Ben, I should have thought. Ben in most ways won the victory. The picture of the young Myra in that book is quite unforgettable.”

  “I suppose so. But there is hatred there. . . .”

  “Do you think so?” Roderick raised his eyebrows. “I disagree. I don’t think there was, on Ben’s side. I believe he . . . played with her but mainly delighted in revealing her outrageous egotism. Anyway, this is a silly conversation. As you’ll see, the question of my father killing Myra simply doesn’t arise.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, sir,” said Meredith. “I’m just trying to clear the ground.”

  Sergeant Flood waited in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, his notebook tucked into the back pocket of his trousers. As the three of them proceeded quietly up the wide stairway, an old voice made itself heard:

  “And to my sister Dorothy . . . sister Dorothy . . . I leave my . . . my yacht . . .”

  “Oh, dear,” said Caroline, darting on ahead. “He’s at his will-making again. . . . You’ve got visitors, Father.”

  By the time Meredith got to the door of the room, the tape recorder had been switched off and the old man plumped up in his bed. He looked to Meredith a very old man indeed, and a bewildered one. Something about him suggested that he had once been very active minded and now could by no means comprehend that his mind was no longer his servant.

  “What?” he asked in his pale echo of a voice. “What, Caroline? Who?”

  Caroline bent over him. “It’s Mr. Meredith, Father. A visitor to see you.”

  “Who? Who?”

  “Mr. Meredith,” said Caroline brightly.

  “I’m a policeman,” said Meredith.

  He sensed rather than saw the younger Cotterels stiffen.

  “Policeman?” The voice gained a little more force but rose in pitch. “Policeman?” He turned to Caroline, a dribble of saliva running from the corner of his mouth. “What’s a policeman . . . ?”

  The voice faded, as if he had a question in his mind that he could not quite formulate. Caroline bent over again and wiped his mouth. “Don’t worry, Father. He’s just here to look at security.”

  “What? At what?”

 
; “Security. You know, stopping burglars getting in and things like that.”

  The old head nodded twice from side to side, then closed its eyes. Caroline looked at Meredith, her eyebrows raised to ask if he needed to see any more. The policeman turned to go from the room.

  “Well,” he said at the bottom of the stairs, “I’m sure I won’t need to trouble the old man again.”

  “You can talk to his doctor,” said Roderick.

  “I shall do that, of course. I’m sorry all this has had to be so unpleasant, but in the circumstances there’s not much else I can do.”

  “We quite understand,” said Caroline. “The fact that we find the notion of Ben nipping off to the Red Lion to kill one of his former girlfriends ludicrous and distressing doesn’t mean you have to. You’ve never seen him before. But if you remember his age—eighty-six—and talk to his doctor, you’ll see that it just isn’t on.”

  “I really do see that already,” said Meredith, letting Caroline open up the front door for him. “Now I just have to talk to Pat McLaughlin.”

  “Is that his name?” said Caroline. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before. Anyway, they’re back.”

  Standing on the gravel drive, they looked down toward the lawn, at the end of which, by their tent, Cordelia and Pat were lying on their stomachs, reading. Meredith turned, thanked Roderick and Caroline for being so helpful and understanding, then waited until they had gone inside and shut the front door.

  He did not go at once down the garden. He stood there, Sergeant Flood waiting respectfully beside him (because he knew such moods in his superior), and let the impressions of the interview flow through his mind. At some time during the visit—before he had gone upstairs—something had clicked. There had been a . . . a reverberation, a message for him that something was not quite right, or maybe that something needed looking into. It hadn’t been something falling into place but rather the reverse. . . . Some piece that had seemed to have a place but had suddenly become questionable. . . . Gone. He could not place it. But it would come back. They always did.

  And then there had been the Cotterels, stiffening up, up there in the bedroom. When he had said he was a policeman. He was going to have to talk to Ben Cotterel’s doctor. Unfortunately two people stiffening up was not evidence.