by Susan Moody
‘Excellent, excellent.’ He tipped his glass at me. ‘You seemed fairly sound on the subject when we last spoke.’
‘Mmm.’ I willed him to make the connection with the miniatures we’d discussed on my last visit. And, bless him, he did.
‘It’ll be interesting to see if any of those missing Palliser miniatures comes up,’ he said.
‘It will indeed. I shall be keeping an eye out. Not that I’ve seen them, only read descriptions of a few.’
He stirred in his chair. ‘I’m fairly sure m’wife had a file on them, now I come to think of it. I’ll see if I can look it out for you. She was a good friend of the Honourable Clio Palliser, as I may have mentioned before.’
Just the opening I had been hoping for. ‘I imagine the two of them spent a lot of time together.’
‘Yes, they did. Back and forth between the two houses all the time, actually.’
‘Through the woods, I suppose.’
‘That’s right. M’wife often walked the dogs that way – big dogs, need a good stretch of the legs – and stopped in for a coffee with Clio. Though, mind you, once Clio had shut herself up in that study of hers, it was pretty hard to winkle her out of it. If she hadn’t married that art student fellow and popped the two boys out so quickly, I reckon she would have been very happy indeed to stay put in Oxford, join the academic community there. Much more suitable for her, too. Frankly, I don’t think the poor girl was cut out for motherhood.’
‘As I understood, she left university unexpectedly early, before the summer term was over, and married the artist almost immediately.’
Forshawe looked shrewdly at me and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Want my honest opinion? She was already up the spout when the wedding took place.’
‘Interesting,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure what bearing it might have on anything. ‘Where did the art student come from in the first place?’
‘I don’t really know the answer to that. One minute he wasn’t here, the next he was carving Green Men all over the shop, stained glass windows and that sort of thing.’
‘Apparently it’s not a Green Man,’ I said. ‘It’s Cronus.’
Desmond clapped his hands together delightedly. ‘Oh, wonderful! That’s exactly what Jenny – m’wife – said. “It’s a portrait of Gerald, only he’s too thick to see it. Devouring his children, just like Cronus.” All a bit above my head, I’m afraid.’
I was fairly sure it was not. ‘But how did he get here? Where did he come from?’
Forshawe screwed his face up in a questioning way. ‘Was he a friend of Piers …? That’s Clio’s eldest brother. Or did Gerald recruit him from the local College of Art? I can’t really remember. If I ever knew. M’wife was always chattering away about something or other, and I’m afraid I didn’t always pay close attention.’
‘Was Sir Gerald pleased when Clio got it together with the student?’
‘Remarkably sanguine. I remember thinking so at the time. I’d have expected him to fly into one of his famous rages about it. I’m sure he aimed higher for his daughter than an impoverished art student. We went to the wedding, and although you felt there were certain tensions simmering beneath the surface, everybody conducted themselves in a perfectly civil way.’
‘And then one day he just upped and left.’
‘That’s right. By then Sir Gerald had gone upwards or, more likely, downwards, and the younger son had died several years earlier in that ski accident, not to mention Piers getting himself murdered. So it did rather leave Clio in the lurch. Not exactly gentlemanly behaviour, I felt at the time.’
‘I wonder where he is now.’
‘Who knows? I seem to remember someone mentioning that he’d gone to Australia, but I may be mixing him up with one of m’great-nephews.’
There was another piece of information I needed to try to establish. ‘And did your wife take the dogs out that evening? The evening when everything –’ I tried to adopt the same ironically dispassionate tone as Forshawe’s – ‘went pear-shaped?’
‘Yes, indeed. She always did, come rain, come shine. Come snow, even.’
‘Even in the dark?’
‘Definitely.’
‘And she wasn’t scared?’
‘Scared? It’s not a word that was in Jenny’s vocabulary.’ He laughed, throwing back his head to display his long yellowish teeth. ‘By God, I’d like to see the man who tried to take on Jenny: she’d have him on the floor howling for mercy within seconds.’ He stared at me thoughtfully. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’m sure the police interviewed her at the time, but I just wondered if she’d seen anything. Some stranger hanging round. A car she didn’t recognize. That sort of thing.’
‘But I understood that Clio – poor girl – was responsible for what happened to your sister and her boys. I thought that had been established years ago.’
‘Yes, but … I’m interested in puzzles,’ I said, improvising. ‘And I’ve been asking myself what if … what if, after all, somebody else did it?’
‘An intriguing thought, I must admit.’
‘So, as I say, she might have seen something.’
‘I suppose Jenny could have done it.’ He glanced sharply at me then gazed out across the garden. ‘Yes, I can see exactly how she might have done it. Walks the dogs to the Lodge, goes in, sees or hears something that causes her to fly off the handle – you’d need to establish what – does the deed, then comes home, stuffs her bloodstained clothes into the washing machine, goes upstairs and showers, puts clean clothes on and comes down all ready for a glass of G and T with her dear husband, who’s been snoozing by the fire all the time she was gone and wouldn’t have noticed a thing.’
This was so uncannily close to my own speculations that I could feel myself flushing with embarrassment. ‘I really didn’t mean to imply—’
‘Don’t worry, my dear. I can understand your feelings. But I assure you she loved Clio like the daughter we never had. No way she’d have been round there sticking knives into Clio’s children, let alone allowing their mother to take the blame.’ Belatedly, he added: ‘Or your poor sister, of course.’
‘Just as a mental exercise, what might have caused your wife to fly so far off the handle that she could have murdered three people?’
‘Well, you see, that’s where you venture so deeply into the realms of fantasy that you lose me. I absolutely cannot imagine what could enrage Jenny to such a pitch, short of someone dismembering one of the dogs in front of her. Or slashing one of her paintings.’
Not slashing, but possibly defacing … I waited but he didn’t vouchsafe any further information. I longed to ask about the picture his wife had lent Clio, and whether that was the painting disfigured by the boys, but I didn’t have the gall. Nonetheless, as I walked back to Weston Lodge, I wondered how he could be so certain of his wife’s innocence. He’d even produced a logical, and possible, scenario. And what other motive could Jenny Forshawe possibly have for killing anyone?
As I stood on the edge of the woods and watched the sun falling away behind the distant hills, it struck me how many people in this dismal story had tempers so terrible and so easily aroused that they might easily be capable of murder.
‘But in the end, it’s not the how or the who,’ I said to Stonor later, as we sat in the bar of the hotel with a pre-dinner drink, ‘it’s the why. Get the motive and you’ve got the killer.’
‘This is always supposing that, after all, the Honourable Clio wasn’t responsible?’
‘If she was, she’s taken her punishment, although nothing could atone for the crime she committed,’ I said. ‘And if she wasn’t, then it’s worth seeing if we can work out who was. So how did you get on this afternoon? I imagine it was easier for you to make enquiries than it was for me, you being a policeman and all.’
Stonor drank heartily from his beer glass. ‘Even after all this time, everyone seemed to remember what happened quite clearly and was also perfectly willing to talk about i
t. I suppose it’s because the Pallisers were one of the big families round here. Plus Linda was working here then. And there was the timing, of course, the horror of two children being killed so close to Christmas, the third boy getting away only by the skin of his teeth.’
‘Did you learn anything new?’
‘As a matter of fact, I did.’ He leaned towards me, looking back over his shoulder to make sure we weren’t being overheard. An old policeman’s trick? It seemed a little out-of-place among the mainly American clientele currently crowding out the room. ‘You’re not going to believe this, but it turns out that there’s a strong possibility Clio Palliser may have been pregnant when she got married!’
He spoke as though this were mind-boggling news, but since I’d already heard much the same possibility suggested earlier in the day, I was less impressed than I might have been.
‘Desmond Forshawe hinted at the same thing,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ Stonor’s face dropped. ‘Thought you’d find that interesting.’
‘I do.’ I found myself remembering the conversation I’d overheard on the terrace below my bedroom window, the first night of my last visit here. ‘I wonder if that’s why she left Oxford without taking her degree,’ I said slowly. ‘Which would mean that the art student came into her life earlier than we thought.’
‘So she met him at Oxford?’ Stonor ordered us refills by waving at the bartender then pointing at my glass and his own.
‘Or in the Easter vacation. No, we can be reasonably sure that the art student was the father of both boys,’ I said. ‘And you got the last round so these are on my tab,’ I added as the glasses appeared on our table.
‘Thanks. Cheers.’
‘It seems to me we absolutely need to track down this artist. Unless …’ I widened my eyes. ‘Oh my God. It can’t have been Fingal Adair, can it?’
‘Do I know him?’
‘He’s that dour sort of guy who was at the special weekend. You must remember. Fin, who seemed to take a bit of a shine to Maggie Fields, the woman who was doing the inventory on the house. Still is, for all I know. He was madly in love with Clio when she was at university, and she with him.’
‘He wasn’t an art student, was he?’
‘Of course not. He was her history tutor.’
‘And he got her up the duff?’
‘Nicely put, Stonor.’
‘Knocked her up. Got her in the family way. Gave her a bun in the oven, take your choice,’ said Stonor, laughing like a man who was well into his third pint of the evening.
‘Well, they were certainly sleeping together.’ I frowned. ‘But if it was him who made her pregnant, why wouldn’t she have married him, instead of this mysterious art student?’
‘Search me. Anyway, the artist was long gone by the night in question, so I can’t see that he’s got any relevance to anything.’
I nodded. ‘This is true.’
I’d started on a quest that was only semi-serious, almost as an intellectual exercise, to see if there were any alternatives which pointed to Clio not being the murderer of my sister. But as Stonor said, what possible relevance did the vanished artist husband have? Or, for that matter, Fingal Adair? If we went to Oxford and questioned him, he would undoubtedly turn out to have an unbreakable alibi and an entire family to vouch for his presence at the significant time.
Maggie Fields came into the bar. Her too, I thought. I waved at her. She came over with a drink in her hand. ‘Couldn’t keep away, I see,’ she said.
‘And looks like you couldn’t get away.’ I introduced her to Stonor. ‘How’s the job going?’
‘Exhausting. There’s so much stuff here. Not that I’d have it any other way.’
‘Cupboards, drawers, storerooms, attics …?’ I trailed them in front of her like a matador’s scarlet cloak.
‘That’s right. You name it, they’ve got them stashed to overflowing with artefacts,’ she said. ‘Most of them historically interesting, many of them valuable, some of them priceless.’
‘Do you start at the top or the bottom?’
‘Bottom, usually. Funnily enough, the attics are often where you find the least valuable things. Families tend to stow their unwanted possessions up there, not their more precious belongings. So I generally leave those until last.’
‘The broken-backed rocking chair,’ I said.
‘Granny’s chipped teapot,’ added Stonor.
‘That sort of thing. Though, as everyone knows, it’s also where you can stumble across some forgotten treasure.’
Which meant that I could, if I dared, and the opportunity arose, return to the attic I had climbed up to last time I visited Weston Lodge and find out what – if anything – had been hidden there. Better still, I could go right to the top and ask for permission. One of the more surprising things I’ve discovered about myself over the years is a distinct talent for lying through my teeth. But don’t we all do that? Doesn’t everyone occasionally pretend to be happier or richer or healthier than they really are?
I excused myself to Stonor, saying I’d be back shortly. I knocked at the door of David Charteris’s office. ‘Oh, David,’ I said diffidently, when I was standing in front of his desk. ‘You remember about my sister Sabine …’
‘Yes, indeed. Terrible, terrible.’
‘The thing is, after it all happened –’ I twisted my hands nervously – ‘someone sent her possessions back to us in California, where we were living at the time. But there were one or two items missing. And it just occurred to me this morning that possibly they’d been overlooked, stowed away in …’ I took a deep breath. ‘In an attic or somewhere.’
He nodded encouragingly.
‘So I wondered if you would allow me to look here and there, maybe start upstairs, just in case they might still be here?’
‘I can’t see why not,’ he said. ‘You’d better liaise with Ms Fields.’
I produced a shy smile. ‘My father and I have managed without them for all these years, so it’s not that critical, but since I’m here …’
‘I understand completely.’ He got up and came round his desk to take both my hands in his. ‘It’s the very least I can do, considering the fact that she … well, that it was in this house that she …’
‘Thank you,’ I said. Humbly.
Sometimes I think I’m not a very nice person.
I found Maggie and explained that I’d been given permission to poke around in the attic in the hope of locating some of my late sister’s (non-existent) possessions. ‘I promise not disturb anything. Nor to take anything away without reference to you.’
‘Fine.’ She smiled kindly. ‘I do hope you find them.’
I felt even guiltier.
Twelve
When dinner – pheasant stuffed with walnuts and figs, pumpkin soup, a delicate chestnut sorbet, all locally sourced and seasonal – was over, I told Stonor that I had stuff to do upstairs. I didn’t specify what.
‘Fine,’ he said, jovially. ‘With her agreement, I intend to buy myself and Ms Fields a brandy at the bar. Then we’re going to sit in front of the telly and watch some programme about wildlife in the Amazon Basin.’
‘The Gobi desert, actually.’ Maggie winked at me.
‘Same difference.’ Stonor grinned, a man enjoying himself for all he was worth. From what he told me some weeks back, in recent years he’d led a pent-up kind of existence, so I was glad to see him having such a good time. And even gladder to know that Maggie would not be upstairs in the attic with me, monitoring my movements.
When I got upstairs, the attic appeared not to have been touched since I was last there, except for the strangely clean, dust-free atmosphere. What exactly was I looking for? What fictional object should I come up with, were anyone to question me? But this time I wouldn’t have to skulk behind the racks of dresses: I could breathe freely, since I had permission to be there, even if fraudulently obtained.
I looked carefully around. Where should I start? I opened the trunk
which had contained the photograph albums and removed a couple. There were two or three yellow Kodak wallets sitting haphazardly on top, and I started with those.
I got a shock. The first one contained snaps of my sister, bundled up in winter clothes, flanked by various combinations of the three boys. They were wearing winter coats and scarves in the first few photographs, and Sabine wore a woolly hat which I recognized with a wrench as one I’d given her when she first went off to Edinburgh. The wintry landscapes behind them were recognizably those visible from the front windows of the Weston Lodge Hotel. There were some interior shots: the three boys posed in front of the Christmas tree in the hall; the two sons of the house with their parents; Sabine with the children leaning into her, laughing, with Redmayne and the Hon Clio standing behind them, hands on their shoulders. I’d seen many shots of Clio in the past, though usually they used a stock photograph, as they always did for the Moors Murderers. The one in my hand was the only one where she looked remotely relaxed, even cheerful. I felt a sudden pang for the woman. I’d heard more than once of her complete lack of parenting skills, but here she seemed like any normal mother posed with her family around her, all of them anticipating Christmas.
The place was thick with candles and holly, wreaths of ivy, bunches of mistletoe. Branches of pine lay all along the mantelpiece and on the window sills. Sabine had done all that. In one of the snaps, the big Christmas tree stood against the carved banisters, lights twinkling, presents piled beneath it. And here was the family again, this time with my sister snuggled among them, presumably taken by Gavin since he wasn’t in the shot.
Which led me to believe that this must have been only a day or two before the murders took place, after Jill the housekeeper had gone home to Manchester, otherwise they would surely have called her in to join in. Or so I deduced. The poignancy of it made my eyes wet. All having such fun, and none of them with the slightest inkling that all of them, in their various ways, were on a countdown to doom.
I put the photo wallets at the top of the stairs, ready to take them down to my bedroom for a closer examination. The under-eave storage with the small brass handles was the place I really wanted to investigate, but first I turned round the canvases stacked again the pine panelling. There must have been an unusually large number of Scandinavian paintings in the house, if what I’d been told was correct. Clio had accused her brother Piers of stealing a lot of her paintings; the burglarizing murderer who’d killed him had made off with a load of Danish paintings which must have been the ones her brother had taken. And now here were half a dozen more. Including a painting by the Danish Janus La Cour, which I’d never seen anywhere, had never even seen reproduced. The painter of silence, they called him, because of the tranquillity which pervades his works. Strange … Were they the same paintings Clio claimed had been taken? And if so, how had they found their way back here? But it was years ago, and I hadn’t been around: it was perfectly possible that they’d been recovered and returned to the family home of the man murdered in the execution of the robbery.