Cobweb

by Margaret Duffy

  Sixteen

  Du Norde, it emerged, was at home nursing a broken nose having been released, again, on police bail. There had been witnesses to his part in the attack on Patrick, in particular the woman who had phoned the police and her husband. Unfortunately in his case, it is not illegal to be an associate of a criminal, so any shady connection du Norde might have had with Brocklebank would have to be investigated. We also discovered on visiting Woodhill police station that Knightly had already departed on gardening leave – causing some chuckles, as he apparently lived in a fifth-floor flat – and a super had been sent in from the Met to sort everything out.

  Patrick phoned du Norde, aware that any personal visit at this stage would make him open to accusations of police intimidation by someone who would relish making trouble. He made no mention of recent events, merely requesting the information. I could make no sense of the strange honking noises I could overhear on the other end of the line, but Patrick seemed to be coping with the tirade and said nothing but ‘Thank you,’ at the end of the call.

  ‘He’s going to bring charges of assault against you,’ he said. ‘As you probably noticed, I ignored that remark.’

  ‘And Fiona?’

  ‘One Fiona Kettering-Huxley. She lives at Sunbury-on-Thames and in no circumstances are we to call round tonight, as she and her husband Quentin are throwing a big bash, as it’s their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.’

  ‘Perfect,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. Let’s party!’

  ‘I can just see that great big booby sitting at home with his nose stuffed full of cotton wool, sulking because he’s not been invited.’

  ‘You know, you really are quite nasty sometimes,’ Patrick reproved me. Then he barked with laughter.

  We had an address, of sorts, but no directions and ended up by slowly driving past large houses with gardens that backed on to the river, looking for more lights and parked cars than might be normally expected. Ending up with three possibilities, we chose the least likely to call at and ask first on the grounds that it appeared to be a muted and tasteful affair – something told me that Fiona was neither – the other two having distant beat music. We did not intend, necessarily, to announce our presence for a while.

  ‘The Kettering-Huxley’s live at the green-and-white house with the white Roller,’ Patrick reported when he returned. ‘Personally, I’d prefer to get myself into the do here – a string quartet thrown in for good measure.’

  ‘They’re probably disinfecting the doormat right now,’ I told him.

  ‘No, they weren’t like that at all – charming, in fact.’

  By this time it was quite late, just before eleven. There was just room to park one more car in front of the house, but we ended up beneath one of the trees that overhung it, a giant willow, its graceful branches enveloping the vehicle in splendid camouflage. At either side of the building there were gates in the same style as those at the entrance – wrought iron with gold-painted finials – all of which were open. The thumping music and the sound of voices flowed towards us on a light breeze, bringing with it that reedy, muddy, river smell.

  Passing the white Rolls-Royce, we walked down the left-hand side of the house, the lights in every room we went by blazing, the beat getting ever louder, and emerged into the garden. Here the sound, muffled before by buildings and trees, really hit us. I could feel the ground jumping under my feet. And the group? Was it Ragin’ Rats? Roast Hog and the Wombats? I had not the first clue.

  On the lawn, the boundaries of which were impossible to determine, was a large marquee connected by a short covered walkway to a conservatory, dazzling strobe lights inside the tent throwing the shadows of the crowd within, some dancing, on to the canvas sides. Twenty or so other people, couples and a woman cuddling a bottle for company, swayed and jigged outside on the grass, which was strewn with burst balloons and the remains of party poppers. Quite a few souls were flopped on to seats, some asleep, or perhaps dead drunk.

  ‘It’s like a bloody battlefield,’ Patrick observed, of necessity, loudly.

  For our day in London we were quite respectably attired, the author, for once as she usually lives in trousers, in a summery floral dress. A waiter must have thought we fitted the scene, for he hurried forward with a tray with glasses of champagne, safely circumnavigating a couple who suddenly emerged from nowhere and who were seemingly not of this world at all. Purely in order to blend in with the proceedings we helped ourselves to a drink – purely.

  ‘I’m starving,’ I said, having to repeat myself, almost shouting, before Patrick heard what I was saying, the music having upped it to plane-crash decibel level.

  ‘Woman, you’ve been eating your head off all day,’ he bellowed in his best parade-ground voice.

  Unsurprisingly, the waiter overheard. ‘The buffet’s indoors, madam,’ he shouted. ‘Please help yourselves – hardly anyone else has.’

  ‘You’re trying to embarrass me and raiding the nosh is not ethical,’ I yelled to Patrick when we had strolled away for a short distance.

  ‘Yes, but you should know me by now, and it’s quite ethical to go indoors to search out the hostess in order to ask her a few questions,’ he bawled back.

  ‘What, and our bounden duty to fortify ourselves on the way so we’re in top professional form when we find her?’ I shrieked.

  ‘You have it in one!’ he roared, taking my arm and quick-marching me towards the house.

  Wide French doors on the conservatory stood open and we went in without going too close to the entrance to the marquee as, at this stage, we did not really want anyone to see us. It was not my sort of conservatory at all, being carpeted and lavishly furnished. The lush-looking plants, including orchids, were made of silk. I found myself comparing it with the interior of Brocklebank’s country-manor hotel and have a theory that only the bad or incurably lazy can’t, or won’t, nurture living plants, but this is probably quite, quite wrong.

  We went through another set of French doors. The buffet was laid out on long tables in a room within, more waiting staff hovering hopefully. The spread was truly awesome: cold meats, whole salmon, lobsters on beds of ice and other seafood, every kind of salad, cornucopias that had hardly been touched. A man and woman, who had just replenished their glasses from a large bowl that contained what looked like punch, gave us haughty looks and went outside.

  ‘Is Mrs Kettering-Huxley indoors, do you know?’ Patrick asked the room at large, having closed the inside doors after them to make some kind of conversation possible.

  ‘She’s probably in the marquee,’ someone answered. ‘Something to eat, sir?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Patrick said absently. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know if Mrs Kettering-Huxley’s sister’s here too? – Mrs Honor Giddings?’

  They did not.

  At which point the doors he had just closed sort of fell open again and a woman tottered in, bringing a huge blast of Ragin’ Rats, or whatever, with her.

  ‘Fiona, darling!’ Patrick crowed, rushing forward to steady her before she fell flat on her face.

  The woman – fair, fat, fifty and remarkably like her sister in facial features – stared at him and then, after a pause, slurred, ‘I’m looking for Quentin. But you’re not him, are you? He’s uglier than you’ – she struggled to focus her gaze – ‘much uglier.’

  I went forward and shut the doors again. Ye gods, it was turning into one of those farces performed in village halls.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake have something to eat!’ Fiona cried, gazing about. ‘It’s all spoiling and although I’m bloody rich I can’t bear it when good food goes to waste. It’s Adrian’s fault. The idiot brought what he referred to as recreational goodies with him and now just about everyone’s spiffed, spliffed, splatted – I don’t know what the hell it’s called – snorting this and smoking that and no one’s eating.’ She put both arms around Patrick’s neck and gazed up into his eyes. ‘I do like a drink, you lovely man, but I don’t do d
rugs and I’m going to chuck Adrian in the river when I find him. Get me some bubbly, there’s a good boy.’

  Patrick glanced around swiftly and then steered our hostess through a doorway into what turned out to be a dining room. Lowering her reverently on to a Chesterfield, he gave her the drink that I had just obtained from one of the serving staff, causing a few smiles as I popped a tiny vol au vent into my mouth at the same time. It seemed important to get some food inside Fiona too before she passed out completely – and this was not just cold-bloodedly wanting her to stay awake so she could be questioned. I was feeling sorry for her – her special night ruined by the odious Adrian and her undeserving guests.

  In the end I fetched supper for all three of us, giving Fiona things she could manage with her fingers, and for a few minutes she did not say anything, hungrily eating. Outside, the music thumped on.

  ‘God, I feel better for that,’ Fiona said at last. ‘Who did you say you were?’ she asked Patrick, squinting at him.

  He told her, exactly.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Sorry,’ Patrick said, ‘but I’ve never been particularly conventional.’

  She gave him a rather lecherous smile. ‘You can come and be unconventional all over me – any time.’

  ‘And Ingrid’s my assistant,’ Patrick went on.

  Yes, I did appreciate that he could hardly wrong-foot the woman at this stage by saying that I was his one and only that he had recently well and truly rogered on a chest of drawers.

  ‘So what does the Serious and Whatsit Whatsit Agency want with me?’ she asked, baffled.

  ‘We’re not satisfied that the person Woodhill police have charged with Jason Giddings’s murder is the right man.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘We’re exploring new lines of enquiry and thought you might be able to clarify a few things about the family.’

  ‘Nest of bloody vipers, you mean. God, what a brood. Is there any more bubbly?’

  ‘I’ll get you some in a minute,’ Patrick promised. ‘I understand you don’t get on with your sister.’

  ‘I never have. But we rubbed along until she played around with a medical colleague and Cedric divorced her. Cedric was an architect, a lovely man – a real gentleman. He was gutted. Oh, God, I do still feel weird after all.’

  ‘But we gathered from his son that the reason for the break-up was another woman in his life.’

  ‘Well, Theo would say that, wouldn’t he?’ Fiona snapped. ‘The bloody mummy’s-boy creep. Not my words – Cedric’s. No, as usual, Theo lied.’ She swayed a little. ‘For God’s sake get me another drink – it’ll do me good.’

  Patrick nodded to me and I played the waitress again.

  ‘Jason couldn’t stand Theo either,’ Fiona was saying when I got back. She thanked me for the drink and then, with a heavy wink, said, ‘I bet your boss-man can’t keep his hands off you, eh?’

  I refrained from calling her a lewd old cow on the grounds that she was three-quarters canned and we had business to do, merely smiling politely.

  ‘After he got over Mummy marrying again Theo seemed to think Jason was his meal ticket for life,’ Fiona rambled on, spilling some of the drink over her Frank Usher sequins. ‘Honor never says – not that we communicate, but … Do you know, I went round to see if I could do anything to help when Jason was murdered; I really thought it was a good opportunity to bury the hatchet and be sisterly and all that crap, and she showed me the door. Seemed to think I’d only turned up so I would get my picture in the papers!’

  ‘What doesn’t Honor say?’ Patrick enquired.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You started to say, “Honor never says – not that we communicate …”.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fiona thought hard. ‘Yes – I know. About Theo. I think he’s in trouble with the law. He has funny peculiar friends. Knocked around at a club place in Woodhill that always seemed to be full of men in shades whispering in corners. Quentin took me there once – never again.’

  ‘Did you like Jason?’ Patrick wanted to know.

  ‘He was AC–DC, wasn’t he? Or, at least in his youth. No, I didn’t like him – bit of a toady, if you ask me – and if the truth were known Honor didn’t either. She once said to me when we were teenagers that if you want to get to the top you have to make sacrifices. As it happened, Jason was the best she could snare. The silly woman should have realized he was real bargain-basement stuff before she tied the knot. He would always have been a shitty little back-bencher.’

  ‘Do you happen to know whom she had the affair with?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s not a lot of point in my telling you, as he was killed two years ago in a car crash. She has a thing about medics – used to collect them like stamps before and, come to think of it, after she met Cedric. He was the odd one out, from that point of view.’

  ‘Is there a chance she didn’t stop collecting after she married Jason?’

  ‘Leopards don’t change their spots, do they?’

  ‘In your certain knowledge?’ I asked.

  Fiona was still having trouble focusing her eyes. ‘Are you allowed to ask questions?’ she said waspishly.

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. She was more like her sister than she knew.

  ‘I have no knowledge of anything. But a friend told me recently she was having it away with someone on the quiet. She said she didn’t know who it was and it was only gossip on a grapevine.’ Fiona swayed again. ‘Look, get me some coffee, would you? I need some badly.’

  But when I got back from this latest errand she was fast asleep on the Chesterfield, Patrick having just prevented her from pitching on to the floor. We turned her over so she would not choke if she vomited and left, going through the house and exiting through the front door.

  ‘No,’ Patrick said as we were getting into the car. ‘I think I should tell someone where she is and what kind of state she’s in.’

  ‘If you can find someone sober enough to understand a word you’re saying.’

  We went back. All was much as before except that those still vertical were progressing indoors, presumably for something to eat. Moving between them, we went into the marquee. It was a rather splendid affair, the interior lined with draped silky fabric, chandeliers hanging from the ‘ceiling’, massed flowers.

  Patrick went straight over to the hi-fi system, failed to find the off button and yanked out some leads.

  Silence.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for Quentin.’

  ‘You’ve found him,’ said a tall, slim man wearing a bright-red waistcoat. He disentangled himself from a scantily dressed and seemingly sleepwalking maiden, who promptly folded up like an ironing board on to the floor and stayed there. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  There were a couple of other phrases added to these short sentences that I have not included.

  Patrick tied a complicated knot in the leads he was holding and pulled it tight before answering. ‘Passers-by. We came to tell you that some blokes are trying to break into the cars.’

  The predictable consternation broke out and everyone but the girl on the floor and a youth sprawled over a chair ran out, shouting the news. Quentin Kettering-Huxley went to go too, but Patrick detained him with a hand on his arm.

  ‘One moment, please.’

  ‘Let go of me!’

  Patrick produced his ID. ‘You didn’t really want to talk to the law in front of everyone, did you?’

  For this he got another torrent of obscenities.

  ‘The more you swear at me the more awkward I’ll get, and if I become really annoyed you might just find yourself down at the police station,’ Patrick told him. ‘We’ve been talking to your wife in connection with the Jason Giddings murder investigation. I came to tell you that she’s had far too much to drink and is now unconscious on the Chesterfield in your dining room.’ He smiled like a shark, adding, ‘And I’ve just decided that I’d like to ask you a few questions too.’

  Consuming an excess of
alcohol reveals a person’s true character. On the few occasions in my younger days when I overindulged I got a bit out of hand, laughing and crying, whereas my velvet-hand-in-iron-glove husband, who has not quite retired from such lapses, becomes truly maudlin and soppy. This man had had a lot to drink and standing before us, swaying very slightly, his mouth pressed into a hard thin line, white with anger, he did not present a pleasant picture.

  ‘You can fuck off, cop!’ he spat, wrenched himself free and hurried from the tent.

  Patrick went over to the youth, who was showing signs of life, and said, ‘Are you Adrian?’

  ‘God, no, he’s a right bastard,’ said the other weakly but sounding really hurt, peering up at him groggily through a mop of blond hair.

  ‘I’m sorry. Tell me: do you know what Quentin does for a living?’

  ‘Of course. He’s a surgeon – gastro-enterologist or something like that.’

  ‘This is getting quite, quite fascinating,’ I commented as we were making for the car through the crowd of predictably puzzled party-goers.

  ‘I appreciate that your imagination’s running amok with the thought that it’s Quentin who Honor’s having an affair with and one or the other of them killed her husband, but there are plenty of other medics in the sea, you know.’

  ‘It’s the sort of super-bitch thing she’d do,’ I countered.

  ‘I thought you’d come to the conclusion that she wasn’t too bad after all.’

  ‘No, I’d just decided she wasn’t going to be the stinking red herring in my next novel.’

  ‘That’s promotion,’ Patrick sighed. ‘Any ideas, then, how to go about proving all this?’

  Patrick was buttonholed by a large man wearing a tartan suit. ‘Say, where did you say these guys were?’ Like nearly everyone else he was swaying on his feet, a phenomenon that was beginning to make me feel seasick.

  ‘You probably scared them off,’ Patrick said soothingly.

  ‘Well, we sure didn’t scare off Quentin – but he’s high-tailed it away in his limo.’

  ‘Which way did he go?’

  An arm waved. ‘That way, out of town.’