‘The final provocation as she saw it, I suppose.’
‘Was there any truth in them?’
‘No.’
‘You have no plans to marry somebody else?’
‘If I did, divorce would be easier to arrange than murder.’
‘But Consuela’s religion would preclude divorce.’
‘Not if I took the blame. For God’s sake, Staddon, face up to what’s happened. Consuela tried to murder me because she hates me. Rosemary got in the way. And now Consuela has to answer for what she did. It’s as simple as that. I don’t know why you’ve chosen to involve yourself in this – and I don’t want to know – but take my advice: give it up. If you don’t—’ He broke off and looked past me. ‘What is it?’
When I turned round, it was to see John Gleasure standing a few feet away. I had not heard him come in and nor, presumably, had Victor. His hair was thinner than I remembered, but still jet-black and oiled down. He wore dark trousers, a white shirt and tie and a striped waistcoat. His expression was studiously blank and he had evidently managed with aplomb the transition from obliging footman to deferential valet. ‘I was unaware that you had returned until Major Turnbull alerted me, sir. I thought I should ascertain whether you required anything.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Remember me, Gleasure?’ I put in.
‘Of course, Mr Staddon. What a pleasant surprise to see you again after all these years.’ But his face betrayed neither pleasure nor surprise.
‘Staddon here doesn’t believe my wife’s a murderer, Gleasure,’ said Victor abruptly. ‘He’ll probably ask your opinion before he’s done, so we may as well hear it now.’
‘I wouldn’t venture to express an opinion, sir.’
‘Force yourself.’
Victor’s heavy-handedness would have disconcerted many a servant, but not Gleasure. ‘Mr Staddon’s disbelief is understandable, but the facts permit of no alternative. Will that be all, sir?’
‘Will it, Staddon?’
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
Gleasure turned and left, closing the French windows behind him. As soon as they had clicked shut, Victor said: ‘I hope you really mean that will be all, Staddon. I don’t expect to hear anything of this kind from you again.’
‘I can’t give you any undertakings.’
‘Can’t you indeed?’ He stepped closer. ‘I haven’t heard of any new buildings lately that you’ve designed. Retired from architecture, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Or just finding commissions hard to come by after the scandal over the Thornton fire? They made you the scapegoat, didn’t they? And your wife is old Thornton’s daughter, isn’t she? That must have made it all particularly difficult for you. I should guess your marriage has never been the same since.’ I glared at him and instantly knew it was the response he had wanted. He smiled broadly. ‘Bad form to poke your nose into another fellow’s private affairs, isn’t it?’ The smile vanished. ‘Now you know how it feels.’
Before I could reply, the garden-door opened and Angela came in, flushed about the cheeks and wreathed in smiles. Turnbull limped in behind her, grinning like one of his own statues. ‘Major Turnbull has a simply lovely house, Geoffrey,’ Angela announced.
‘Regrettably, I shan’t have the opportunity to admire it.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Turnbull. ‘I’ve invited you both to dinner on Wednesday night. And your wife has graciously accepted. I trust there’s no difficulty.’
‘No.’ I glanced triumphantly at Victor. ‘None at all.’
We took our leave via the garden. Angela said nothing as we walked down past the pond and already I could sense an iciness between us with which I was all too familiar. The discovery of my real reason for coming to Nice had hurt her deeply and had shamed me too, if the truth be told. But she would not admit as much. She had acknowledged our rifts over the years with silence rather than words and this latest was no exception.
Jacinta was waiting on the path ahead of us. She smiled as we approached and bade us both goodbye, insisting on the formality of a handshake. Only when her tiny hand was enclosed in mine did I understand why, for it was then that she pressed a tightly folded piece of paper into my palm and signalled, by a slight compression of her lips, that I should keep its transmission a secret.
This was not difficult, given Angela’s refusal to look at me. I tucked it into my pocket and walked on. When I glanced back from the top of the steps that led to the gate, Jacinta had vanished.
After a stilted lunch in Beaulieu, we motored back to Nice. By now, Angela was as I had too often known her before: cold, distant, uncommunicative and faintly scornful. I thought – as I have sometimes thought since – that if she had permitted herself to be angry, if she had allowed herself to rage or strike out at me, our marriage would not have descended into a slough of suppressed resentment. But we cannot change our natures. And so, helplessly, we wallowed where we were.
As soon as we reached the hotel, Angela announced that she had a headache and was in need of sleep. Leaving her to it, I went down to the bar, ordered a stiff whisky and retired to a window table. Filtered November sunlight on rich wood panelling had a soothing effect and the whisky burned away some of the humiliation Victor had inflicted on me. I took out Jacinta’s note. It was written on a sheet of the thinnest paper in a minute hand.
Dear Mr Staddon,
I am glad you came. Now you have seen it all for yourself. She does not behave like a governess, does she? I sometimes think she behaves more like a wife. That is a terrible thought, I know. It makes me want my mother back, safe and well. It makes me want to cry. But I will not.
I have thought of a way to check up on Miss Imogen Roebuck. But I cannot do it. You will have to. I have found out who she worked for before coming to us. She came in March this year, when Miss Sillifant left. It seems so long ago, but it is only eight months.
Colonel and Mrs Browning of Jorum House, Blake Street, York. That was the name on the letter. If you could speak to them, they might tell you why she left. They might also tell you what she is really like. I do not know, you see. I do not think any of us knows. I do not think she lets us.
Do not try to speak to me about this when you next come to the villa. It is too dangerous. Notes are better. You can read them in secret, then burn them!
Yours truly,
Jacinta Caswell.
Obediently, I tore up the note and threw it on the fire. Then I ordered another whisky and thought over what she had written. Faithful, indefatigable Jacinta had reminded me of what I should have concentrated on all along. However convincingly Victor had answered my accusations, there was undoubtedly something amiss in his relationship with Miss Roebuck. At times, it had seemed that he was taking instructions from her, awaiting and following her prompting. In such an arrogant man, this deference to an employee was incredible, unless, as Jacinta had implied, her status as governess had become a lie.
Jacinta was right. Miss Roebuck’s character and career should be probed in search of the truth. But how? I could hardly depart abruptly for York without explanations and, even if I did, the journey might be wasted.
Suddenly, the answer came to me. I hurried out to the concierge and booked a telephone call to England, to be taken in the reception kiosk rather than my room. Ten minutes later, I found myself talking to Imry Renshaw on a crackling line.
‘Imry?’
‘That really you, Geoff?’
‘Yes. I’m in Nice.’
‘You should give it up, you know, and come home.’
‘I have a favour to ask.’
‘What is it?’
‘You won’t like it.’
‘But I’ll do it anyway. Isn’t that what you mean?’
‘I suppose it is.’
‘Fire away, then. What do you want your old crock of a friend to do that you can’t?’
Angela chose to break her silence over dinner that evening in the Negresco’s restaurant, where hovering waite
rs and the proximity of other diners precluded any raising of voices. She was at her most elegant and remote, clad in her finest evening-gown, smoking a cigarette in a holder and looking everywhere but at me.
‘You have often done things I found difficult to forgive, Geoffrey, but with this latest deception you have surpassed yourself. What amazes me is that you can ever have thought it would go undiscovered.’
‘Perhaps I didn’t.’
‘Your client in Malvern was as fictitious as your wish for a holiday. That is perfectly clear to me now. You are determined to hound poor Mr Caswell in the misguided belief that, by so doing, you will help his wife. Your loyalty to this murderous creature is, of course, no great mystery to me. It stems, I presume, from an adulterous liaison during your building of Clouds Frome. Major Turnbull let slip that—’
‘He let nothing slip! Anything Turnbull said was deliberate.’
‘Major Turnbull is a gallant and courteous gentleman. It is, indeed, only to spare his feelings that I am prepared to honour our acceptance of his dinner invitation. What I wish to say to you is this. Your affair with Mrs Caswell is of no interest to me. It occurred before we even met. But I do not care to have it brought to my attention in such a way. Your behaviour has been outrageous and I must ask for your assurance that it will not continue. You must abandon this absurd and tasteless crusade.’
‘Angela—’
‘I do not wish to discuss it. What I have said is what must be.’
‘I can’t abandon it. You don’t understand. Consuela Caswell—’
‘Is a name I do not wish to hear mentioned.’
‘You may have to hear it.’
‘No, Geoffrey. If you are not prepared to comply with my request, I shall move to a single room. And when we return to England …’
‘Yes?’
There was colour in her cheeks now. The mask of self-control had slipped. She stooped slightly and lowered her voice. ‘I will not let you shame me by leading a tawdry and vulgar campaign on behalf of a former lover turned murderess. Is that clear?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘You agree to drop it, then?’
In my mind’s eye I saw Jacinta’s trusting, fretful face. I saw the high stone walls of Gloucester Gaol and imagined Imry packing a bag for the morning train to York. ‘No,’ I heard myself say. ‘You must do what you think best, Angela. You must act according to your conscience. That’s what I’m doing, you see. At long last. For the first time. And I won’t stop.’
Chapter Eight
OF THE DINNER party at the Villa d’Abricot I retain only a jumble of competing recollections: glimpses, snatches, passing images behind which the truth hovered, close at hand but out of sight. Turnbull had invited an American couple who were neighbours of his and they, in their innocence, no doubt think of it to this day as an unremarkable and civilized gathering. To the rest of us, however, bearing our burdens of secrecy and suspicion, it was an arena of unresolved conflict.
The boundaries of this arena were set by our outwardly genial host, Major Royston Turnbull. He took me on a tour of the house before dinner, his chest puffing out with pride as he revealed room after room filled with antique tapestries, oriental rugs, marquetry furniture, exotic statuary and fine porcelain. I began to understand then that there was more to him than the cynicism and bombast I had so far detected. He was an unapologetic sensualist, glorying in the tactile richness of his possessions: the smoothness of a table-top, the curve of a chair-leg, the delicacy of a glaze, the binding of a book. He would happily describe in detail how he had acquired such articles and always, I noticed, he claimed to have had the better of the bargain; he had never been cheated, never even outmanoeuvred. His vanity required him to believe this, of course, yet, strangely, I found myself believing it as well.
To Turnbull, human relations were no different from his hoard of objets d’art. They too were designed for his sensual gratification. He of all those who sat at the candlelit dinner table was most at ease, most in his element, because to him nothing could seem more agreeable than to watch and listen as his friends and acquaintances fenced and parried behind a screen of polite conversation.
Faces, expressions, casts of eye and twitches of mouth, are what remain now uppermost in my memory: Angela responding to Turnbull’s blatant attentions with equally blatant encouragement – her moues and nods and purrs of pleasure; Victor saying little, but clenching his jaw and darting venomous looks at me; Miss Roebuck’s cautious, indirect glances leavened by an imminent but never present smile; and Turnbull himself, grinning broadly, eyes half-closed, absorbed in his enjoyment of the occasion he had created.
For Imogen Roebuck to be among the dinner guests was, in its way, the most significant event of the evening. Turnbull had explained her attendance casually – ‘I don’t know enough decorative and intelligent females to let one go to waste just because she’s a governess’ – but I noticed that her status was not specified when she was introduced to his American neighbours. Here then was further evidence to support Jacinta’s suspicions.
Miss Roebuck sat to my left, with Turnbull to my right at the head of the table. Angela sat opposite me, with Victor to her right. Thus I had little opportunity to look directly at Miss Roebuck, whilst her tone of voice, as she moved adroitly from one topic to another, betrayed only studied neutrality. She questioned me about my career. She sought my views on Cubist art and German inflation. She even asked my opinion of the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Always she led and I followed. The disquieting impression crept upon me that I was dealing with somebody who possessed far greater mental agility than me, somebody who could anticipate and pre-empt every attempt of mine to learn what she did not wish me to. And before us, paraded where it could not be ignored, was my wife’s hostility, transmuted into a grinning, gulping enthusiasm for every word or glance that Turnbull spared her.
Angela wore a black velvet dress that she normally reserved for the opera, dramatically low-cut. She had drawn her hair back and encircled her slender neck with a pearl choker. She looked magnificent. But her half-turned face, her sparkling smile, her parted, playful lips, her pale, inviting breasts, quivering as she laughed, were not, I knew, displayed for my benefit. Turnbull’s greedy, heavy-lidded gaze never left her. That for her was success. I saw it and understood it. And so, I sensed, did Miss Roebuck.
At some point, Angela insisted that Turnbull should dine with us at the Negresco before we left Nice. He accepted. Then, upon hearing that we had not yet sampled the delights of the Casino at Monte Carlo, he insisted that we should accompany him there one evening. Angela accepted on my behalf. And so, with bewildering speed, a sequence of social occasions had been arranged at which they could proceed with their flirtation, a flirtation with which Angela clearly hoped to torment me.
But in this regard she had misjudged my mood. More shocking to me than any aspect of her behaviour was how indifferent I felt to it. I was in the grip of an obsession that left me no energy to invest in jealousy. This too, I suspect, Imogen Roebuck realized. This too she coolly stored away in her mental armoury, to be turned against me when the moment was right.
For the present, however, Miss Roebuck showed me only what she wanted me to see: deference, modesty, intelligence and a percipience amounting almost to telepathy. She made it apparent that she could guess my thoughts and, by so doing, issued a warning that she knew exactly what had brought me to the Villa d’Abricot. It was, after all, what had brought her there as well. It was why we were gathered at Turnbull’s laden table. It was the real substance of our every exchange. And yet it was never mentioned.
As for Victor Caswell, he became strangely insubstantial in Miss Roebuck’s presence, stricken into glum and glowering silence. It was as if he were embarrassed by her mental superiority. At times, I felt almost sorry for him, absurd though I knew the sentiment to be.
For this – and for much else that the evening held – let one last image stand. We were leaving and Turnbull had stepped out with us
onto the drive, ostensibly to sample the air but actually to whisper some parting endearment into Angela’s ear as he opened the car door for her. I looked away, quite deliberately, towards the villa. The front door was open and in the brightly lit hallway stood Victor and Miss Roebuck. She was plainly dressed in some costume of coral pink. Her hair was fashionably short. Her features were handsome rather than beautiful. But on her lips was a smile of regal detachment. And Victor was gaping at her, his jaw sagging, his shoulders hunched, his face squirming with some illegible emotion. Then I was sure – if I had not been before – that whatever had happened at Clouds Frome, she, not Victor, had been its instigator.
I did not see Angela during the day following our dinner at the villa. She had carried out her threat to move to a single room and now we communicated only when practical necessity required us to. Assuming that the couturiers of Nice would occupy her happily, I drove to Beaulieu and sat in a bar, wondering if I should try to surprise Miss Roebuck by appearing at the Hotel Bristol when she customarily took morning coffee there with Jacinta.
I was still debating the point when, through the window, I saw John Gleasure entering a chemist’s shop on the other side of the road. Our brief exchange in Victor’s presence three days before had achieved nothing and I had been at a loss to know how I might go about questioning him further. Now, suddenly, the perfect opportunity had presented itself. When he emerged from the chemist’s shop, I was waiting.
To say that he was a changed man when his employer was not watching and listening to him would be an exaggeration. Certainly, however, he was a more relaxed and accommodating version of himself than I had previously encountered. He readily accepted my offer of a drink and needed no prompting to explain that he had been collecting medicine for Victor, whose digestion had yet to make a full recovery from the poisoning. With scarcely more prompting, he recounted finding Victor in agony in his room at Clouds Frome.
‘At one point I thought we were going to lose him, sir, I really did. It’s a great relief to see him looking as well as he does now. The climate here has done him good. And Miss Roebuck’s been a tower of strength.’
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