At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

  The question was, what to do now? Not talk to Pamela Goodison, that was for sure. She was going to prove a very tough nut to crack. That was clear from the landlord’s description of her. Guildford seemed to be a place ripe for investigation. Someone at the theater would surely know about Ashe’s affairs. Possibly whatever there was between them had started when she was acting there. He had a comfortable sense that Ashe was certainly not going to prove as tough a nut as his mistress—a very soft nut indeed, probably. But what he wanted was to have the affair well documented before he confronted Mrs. Goodison with the fact that he had penetrated behind her facade.

  “So you’ll have to find another man to supervise your renovation,” said the landlord, coming back.

  “That’s right, I will.”

  “Clever bloke, but none too stable, I always thought. Same goes for his wife.”

  “Don’t think I’ll go over and offer condolences,” said Meredith, finishing his pint. “It’d seem funny, two years after the event.”

  “Would rather. Fancy your thinking her the quiet, genteel type! She really had you fooled!”

  But Meredith was impressed, some days later, when he knocked on the door of number 37, after extensive investigations at Guildford and elsewhere on the theatrical circuit, to find the door opened to him by an impeccably genteel Pamela Goodison. Sensible skirt and blouse, delicate, understated makeup, tactfully permed hair. This was caution! This was foresight! She had anticipated the possibility of further police interest in her. The performance was beautifully maintained during the tea and biscuits she served him in the sitting room and throughout the long and grueling inquisition he subjected her to afterward. Even when he drove her in the police car down to Cottingham, she remained her cool self: well-bred, ineradicably genteel.

  It was much, much later, after many hours of questioning, that she screamed at him a series of short, hard epithets that are seldom heard on polite lips in the Home Counties.

  Chapter 19

  WHEN MEREDITH CALLED at the Old Rectory two days after his second meeting with Pamela Goodison, he said: “I thought I ought to fill you in a little, clear a few things up.”

  Caroline nodded nervously, called Roderick, and they all went into the sitting room.

  “Is Miss Mason around?” Meredith asked. “She’s really the most closely involved of all.”

  Pat had gone off earlier for an evening swim, but Cordelia could be seen down by the tent, reading in the fading light. She had been avoiding the Cotterels recently and had done no further research on her book. Roderick went down to fetch her, and Caroline turned on the television for Becky.

  “I’d better settle her down in front of it,” she said, smiling almost propitiatingly at Meredith. “I suppose this is going to take some time.”

  It was a summer blockbuster—a version of a steamy Faulkner novel starring actors from American soaps who wanted to take their clothes off in something classy. Caroline wrinkled her nose and switched over to something that Becky would enjoy more.

  “That’s what gave me the idea,” said Meredith, nodding toward the screen as Roderick and Cordelia came into the room. “Last time I came here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have noticed how people who watch a lot of television spend hours discussing what they’ve seen the actors in before? You know: ‘Was she the one who played Caligula’s sister in I, Claudius, or was she one of the nurses in Shroud for a Nightingale?’ ”

  “That’s true,” said Caroline. “People are doing it all the time. I suppose we do it ourselves.”

  “You were doing it when I was here last. The television regulars become kinds of friends, but rather vaguely remembered. You see them in so many series, you mix them up. What struck me, though it hadn’t come to the surface, was how many people in the bar that evening had said—either to me or to one of my men—that they thought they’d seen Mrs. Goodison before. Most of them said it in passing and weren’t worried about it; maybe she lived not far away or had stayed there before or had passed through.”

  “So you had to establish that she hadn’t?”

  “In an offhand way she’d done that herself. She’d said the bar ‘had seemed a pleasant place,’ as if she had only encountered it the evening of the murder. Eventually the landlord checked his records and found she had never stayed there before. How to account for the feeling in so many disparate people that they’d seen her before? I remembered a colleague who had cheerily greeted a friend in Harrod’s, and puzzled for twenty minutes over who it could be. Eventually he realized it was one of the stars of Emmerdale Farm.”

  “You mean there’s no clear boundary anymore between real life and screen life?” asked Roderick.

  “I don’t think there is. And thinking of television, and noting how people argue about what they’ve seen people in, everything fading into everything else . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s difficult to put it into words, but I wondered whether the people who thought they’d seen her before, and I in a different way, hadn’t been reacting to a television performance in a prestige production. To put it bluntly, I began to wonder if I hadn’t been too easily fooled, and if Mrs. Goodison was not altogether too perfect a type.”

  “We none of us met her,” said Roderick. “But even if we had, I don’t suppose we would have realized that where we’d seen her before had been on television. You expect life and television to be two quite separate things—like having a friend you always see when you go to Manchester and then unexpectedly meeting him in Paris. It disorientates you.”

  “Let’s sit down,” whispered Caroline, nodding toward Becky, who was raptly watching a wildlife program. She led them to the other end of the sitting room. They sat around in the little group of chairs, Cordelia clearly feeling rather awkward, the two Cotterels watchful, and hoping it did not show. Only Meredith appeared completely relaxed.

  “Myra Mason noticed her, too,” Meredith resumed. “Much quicker than me, naturally. Now I can piece together—conjecturally, of course—what happened. She was studying plays sent by her agent, in particular a new Alan Ayckbourn one. It’s about a middle-class woman who gradually throws off all inhibitions and restraints and becomes an elderly punk, with disastrous results. It wasn’t a part she could draw on much of herself for, particularly the respectable, repressed woman of the early scenes, so she did what you, Miss Mason, told me she normally did in such cases: She started studying someone—her walk, her gestures, her clothes, and so on.”

  “And the person she picked on,” contributed Roderick, “was Mrs. Goodison.”

  “Yes. The perfect middle-class type. But being what she was, an actress, it wouldn’t have taken Myra Mason long to realize that what she was studying was itself an act—not necessarily that of an actress but certainly that of someone to whom the role of middle-aged, upper-middle-class gentlewoman did not come naturally. It wouldn’t have taken her long to realize that she had in fact seen this woman before. Being the professional that she was, she was more able to pin down where she’d seen her than the people in the Red Lion: She was an actress, and she’d seen her on television. Before long she remembered what in: a series called The Oaken Heart and a short play called The Blush, based on a short story by Elizabeth Taylor—the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, of course. I think she was very intrigued by this; hence, the noting of the two pieces down on her notepad. If she mentioned her suspicions to Granville, then she must have sealed her fate; she had to be killed as soon as possible.”

  They all thought for a moment.

  “You are quite sure, are you, that Granville was in it to that extent?” asked Caroline.

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “That when Granville was taken from her by Myra, this Mrs. Goodison determined to get him back and get her revenge on Myra Mason at the same time. Then when she appeared at the Red Lion, Granville was horrified, felt bound to conceal the fact that he knew her, but had nothing to do with the a
ctual murder; that was of her conceiving, her execution.”

  “That would be more consistent with the Granville we know,” put in Roderick.

  “Ah, but you don’t know Granville Ashe at all,” objected Meredith. “You’ve met him, which is rather different. I must admit that I did toy with the notion. He seemed so weak and somehow anonymous. And in the last few days, under questioning, he’s tried to foist that idea on me, too. But it simply doesn’t hold water. If you think about it, the whole setup was designed primarily to give Granville Ashe an alibi. He must have insisted upon that—being the more craven of the two but also the one most obviously open to suspicion. He insisted that for the whole period of time he would be vouched for—and by plenty of people. He never even went to the lavatory, notice.”

  “Is that significant?” asked Roderick. “Why should he?”

  “He was drinking in the bar before dinner, the Mason table at dinner had two bottles of wine, he was drinking beer after dinner, yet he never went for a pee. A good bladder? No doubt—but your average drinker would have gone, would have made himself comfortable. No—the whole scenario was designed to ensure that he had an alibi, a watertight one.”

  “But how long had the plan been hatching?” asked Caroline.

  “Probably in embryo since Myra began showing interest.”

  “Meaning the affair with Mrs. Goodison was never really broken off?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “And the motive?”

  “Oh, money, of course. From the moment Granville saw the London flat and the house in Pelstock, the thought must have been there. What were they, after all? A third-rate actor, used to provincial digs and perpetual shifts to make do, and a woman, used to moderate luxury, who had been left by her husband very much less well off than she had expected. Myra’s two residences would fetch, together, anything up to half a million, quite apart from cash, shares, jewels, and the rest. So when it became clear that Myra was interested in Granville as a husband, that must have crystallized plans no end.”

  “Why was she, I wonder?” mused Caroline. “Interested in him as a husband, I mean.”

  “She wanted someone to leave her money to,” said Cordelia. “I guessed that.”

  “I think that’s right,” said Meredith. “You’ve mentioned her habit of sailing into things without thinking of the consequences. I think that’s what happened in this case. Her daughter had found a man, had left her to live with him, and she had heard rumors of the book about her. Probably that’s what really got her goat—the book. So Cordelia had to be disinherited—but in favor of whom? She suddenly came face-to-face with the realization that she had nobody. Not at all a nice discovery for a woman of her age. Consequently, she clutched at the first straw: a pleasant, undemanding, subservient sort of man.”

  “As she saw him,” observed Roderick.

  “As he is, I’m sure. On the surface. Unfortunately for her, he must be a whole lot of other things underneath the surface. But I doubt if he was the initiator of the plans for the murder. That, I feel sure, was Pamela Goodison’s doing. It has that daredevil quality that people have mentioned in connection with her. It was a brilliant improvization.”

  “Based on the quarrel between Myra and Cordelia?” asked Caroline.

  “To a degree, yes. They must have been pretty sure from the beginning that something would come up there. Granville had met Cordelia as a child, remember, and had no doubt heard rumors of Myra’s treatment of her later. But if it hadn’t, something—some row or other—would have come up elsewhere. That was part of Myra Mason’s life-style.”

  “So once the will was made and signed, all he had to do was foment things in the subtlest possible way?”

  “That’s right. I gather they went down to the local in Pelstock more than Myra had been accustomed to. Natural enough, now there was a husband to consider, and easy enough to get Myra to agree to, once she knew that Pat and Cordelia had left the area. But Granville knew, of course, that that was one place where they were likely to hear news of you, Miss Mason. It was all done in the most indirect way—just as, once he was here, he professed himself quite willing to act as peacemaker but implied there had to be a raging row before the peace processes could operate.”

  “Perfectly reasonable, if you knew Myra,” said Roderick.

  “Yes, and if you knew the long-standing nature of her daughter’s grievances. But in fact he had got the message through to Pamela Goodison—of where they’d be and when, and of the likelihood of a blowup.”

  “I feel a bit like a pawn,” said Cordelia.

  “In fact, you were the most important piece,” said Meredith. “Though in the event you turned out to be next to useless.”

  “After that, I presume, he left all the planning to Mrs. Goodison,” said Caroline.

  “The real decisions, yes. Once Myra’s plans for the evening were known, he communicated them to her. She told him to stick to the bar, have plenty of witnesses—that’s why he went to sit next to the Critchleys, known toadies—wait for her to give the sign, and to stay put when he heard the shot. And she told him to make sure that when he went to Myra’s room, he was to spend a minimum of time there. All of which he did, because that gave him the alibi he had insisted upon from the outset.”

  “It was a good plan,” said Caroline, “a clever plan. If Cordelia hadn’t been put in the clear, it would have worked.”

  “To a degree,” said Meredith. “I don’t see that we could have got much of a case together for the courts, but in any event, Miss Mason would be the chief suspect and would remain under suspicion for the rest of her life. That was the only thing that went wrong. Otherwise, the thing went perfectly: She reconnoitered the ladies’ lavatories to provide circumstantial backup for her story, and at what she judged to be the best moment, she simply left the bar as if to go to the lavatory and went up and shot her.”

  “How did she get in?” asked Roderick.

  “The door was not locked, but earlier she had borrowed Granville’s key, so there was no problem. When she switched on the light, Myra struggled up in the bed, unable to think why this woman, whom she’d been watching, should be in her room. Then Mrs. Goodison shot her. She dropped the gun and went coolly off down the main stairs, though she later mentioned the fire escape to throw us off the scent. The finding of the body went like a dream—or like a well-crafted mystery play—and the whole bar came to the door to provide witnesses for Granville’s story.”

  “Do you think they were seriously rattled by Cordelia’s being seen on the beach?”

  “Concerned, anyway. I don’t think Pamela Goodison rattles easily. But there was Granville Ashe’s attempt to make Cordelia accept part of her mother’s fortune—an offer, I suspect, that would have turned out to be considerably less generous than it seemed at first sight had she accepted. They still had Pat and collusion between the two as a possibility to suggest. But collusion was a notion that they did not want to draw attention to. So they started nudging me in the direction of your sister, sir.”

  “Isobel? Poor old Isobel? Whatever reason could she have for killing Myra?”

  “That was the question. One I gave some thought to—thanks to them. Mrs. Goodison had been handed her on a plate by Isobel’s sitting next to her on the night of the murder and confiding in her her connection with the Mason family. So Mrs. Goodison played that card even on our first conversation—realizing that she might need someone to fall back upon. By the time I came to talk to Ashe, he was playing it more openly.”

  Meredith looked seriously at Roderick. “Do you realize your sister’s on drugs, sir?”

  “On drugs? Good Lord! No, I never suspected—though I suppose it would explain some things.”

  “I don’t know how long she’s been on them or how deeply she is into them, but certainly she needs help, sir. What about her immediate family?”

  “She won’t get help from them.”

  “Do they have money?”

  “Oh, y
es.”

  “That would be a start. She needs to be got into a clinic. But my immediate point is that that made her at least a conceivable suspect: some imagined wrong from the past, muddled by a brain not fully in control into a monstrous grievance. No doubt if that failed, some further trail could be laid. Maybe against you or your wife, sir—or even against your father . . .”

  “I assure you, Inspector, that you wouldn’t have got far with that.”

  “No . . . Anyway, as luck would have it, I heard my kids having one of those ‘who was in what?’ arguments about television programs, and suddenly things began to click into place. Now we’ve got it all laid out like a map. It was a simple, old-fashioned murder for gain. They were going to live in Spain, you know, once the publicity had died down and the money came through. Whether they would have lived happily ever after, though, is another matter. I suspect he would have found that he was going from one tartar to another. But—who knows?—maybe that was what he wanted. He apparently had had a series of affairs with women of much stronger personality than his own.”

  “How do you know all this, Inspector?” asked Caroline.

  “Oh, he broke. That was inevitable. He was the weak link in her chain all along. Even if he hadn’t, we’d have made a case against them: her deceptions, evidence of their relationship. But as it is, the whole thing’s watertight.”

  Meredith stood up and gave a quick, awkward nod to all three of them.

  “Well, that’s it. I thought you were owed some explanation—Miss Mason because she is the nearest relative, and . . . well, to tell you the truth, Mr. and Mrs. Cotterel, I felt a bit guilty about entertaining those absurd suspicions about the distinguished old gentleman upstairs.”

  If there was a stiffening of the people around him, Meredith did not notice.

  “It was rather an imaginative idea,” said Caroline, walking to the door. “More like a Gothic novel than real life.”