An Uncommon Murder

by Anabel Donald

  ‘Four,’ he said.‘There were four.You should do your homework.’

  ‘Four, sorry. Did you meet them?’

  ‘I sometimes saw them out riding. The youngest one was still on a leading-rein.’ We were back with the grouse moor voice.

  ‘A leading-rein?’

  ‘To keep the pony from running away. She couldn’t control it yet. Her grandfather walked along beside her and broke into a run when the pony cantered. I often thought he’d have a heart attack. Dangerous to exert yourself at his age. Come to think of it, I’m probably coming up to his age now. I must take care of myself!’

  He twinkled at me, and I stepped up my responsive admiration to a hundred-watt admiring glow. Revill was a good way older, now, I thought, and did the calculation. Farrell had been just seventy at the time of the murder: Revill forty-eight, which meant he was now pushing eighty.

  He was going on. ‘The youngest girl was a lovely little thing, like her mother. They all were.’ He stopped talking and turned his head away from me, still looking out of the window. It seemed he had, briefly, forgotten his profile. ‘Good weather, that summer I was playing Antony. Some of the best work I’ve ever done. Care to see the reviews?’ I didn’t, of course, though I would have, but he made no move to fetch them. ‘It was the turning-point, the beginning of the end. You don’t know it at the time, but you can feel it. A kind of chill in the air, this won’t last, it’s going.’

  ‘What, particularly?’

  ‘You don’t want to be bothered with the meanderings of an old man.’ Like most self-evident statements of the kind, it expected denial. I denied it. ‘My career, I suppose. Not that I haven’t done very good work since. My Lear. Did you see my Lear?’ I shook my head. ‘Not surprised. Bit out of the way, Nottingham Rep. Not exactly the RSC. More than my career, though. Things running through my fingers, running away, time running away. And my marriage, and the children. Haven’t seen them all that much since. They never call or come to see me; they didn’t like the other wives, and their mother put them against me. How often do you see your father?’

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  ‘Killed by the Mau Mau, was he?’

  I assumed I’d misheard. ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘Forget it. Funny how you remember things, just little things, that happened years ago.’

  I sat looking at my notes. The Mau Mau. Rosalind: it had to be. She’d have told the story, probably, boasting of it, perhaps: Rosalind the sensationally orphaned, tragic heroine. ‘So you knew Rosalind,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. I knew Rosalind, but I’m not going to talk about her.’

  I shifted my weight on the springless sofa. I had to see Rosalind next, if I could track her down. I wondered if what Revill was giving me was memory or fantasy, and if it would turn out to be worth spending Barty’s money and my time on taking him to the pub.

  Chapter Six

  I pursued Revill about Rosalind, of course: I changed the subject, looked at his cuttings, said how well thought of he had been, looked at some of his fan letters, oohed and aahed about how much he had been lusted after, and took him to a pub for lunch. He drank Scotch, I drank Perrier water, and by the end I was sure he’d been screwing Rosalind that summer. He didn’t claim it directly but his nudges and winks were broad enough to reach the back row of the balcony. The more he drank the more sentimental he became about her youth and beauty, her eagerness, their magic summer together. As I listened, I began to feel for her. He said Laura disliked her and treated her badly. I thought she sounded lonely; it couldn’t have been easy, joining the Ashtons Hall ménage. Revill hadn’t been a well-chosen refuge. He made me feel sick, and not just because he was so clearly past his sell-by date.

  If his gossip did come from Rosalind, it was promising and I got some good quotes. He confirmed Lemaire’s description of the Sherwins’ marriage as rocky, adding that for some weeks before the murder Rollo had been talking divorce. Annoyingly, I got the impression that he hadn’t seen Rosalind after the murder, so his assumption that Laura had done it was based on his own deductions.

  I shook him off when he started repeating himself for the third time, and headed home.

  When I got back to the flat in mid-afternoon the plumber had gone leaving an awesome bill and the central heating rumbling at full blast. There was a message on the answering machine from Miss Potter. She had found her scrapbook of photographs and newspaper cuttings about the case. She’d be in for the rest of the day. Would I be interested in calling round to pick it up? Was I ever. If I had good photographs, more than half the job was done. I rang back and arranged to go round after I’d seen Toad’s friend, Lally.

  Then I had a long bath in HOT WATER. Another simple, intense pleasure, though not cheap.

  Lally surprised me. She wasn’t blonde. She was black, a person of colour. Her head sprouted beaded, tiny plaits. Otherwise, she was exactly what I expected: tall, slender, long-legged, self-possessed and superficially friendly. The wine bar was crowded but she found us a table once we’d met at the bar and I’d got us drinks. ‘So,’ she said, ‘Annabel Chancellor tells me you’re looking for Toad. You know she’s on her Gap Year, travelling in the East. How can I help?’

  She disconcerted me. She spoke the upper-class dialect I disliked, the arrogant clenched-teeth drawl. If I shut my eyes, I could have been talking to any of Barty’s assistants. If I opened them, there was an Afro-Caribbean wearing her impeccable street credentials with her skin. ‘Have you heard from her since she went abroad?’ I said.

  ‘Two postcards so far. Both from India,’ she drawled.

  ‘And you’re sure she’s OK? Not worried about her at all?’ I fished.

  ‘Of course not. Why should I be?’

  If I hadn’t had my eyes shut, listening to her, I might not have picked it up; it was a noisy wine bar. As it was, I couldn’t miss it, much as I wanted to. Her voice was tight. She was lying.

  I nearly swore aloud. I had hoped for absolute confirmation that Toad was meandering through Asia, pouring Daddy’s money into open sewers and gaining experience with yak-drivers. I had no time to waste looking for a Toad who might be a voluntary Lucanette, gone underground in the upper classes. Neither, on the other hand, could I resist a puzzle, however insignificant. I kept talking while I thought. ‘When did the last one arrive?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘What did what say?’

  ‘The postcard.’

  ‘The usual. Having a lovely time, wish you were here, that sort of thing. Why are you so interested?’

  I explained about Miss Potter and the postcards. She said she remembered Toad mentioning Miss Potter, the old governess who lived in the lodge. Nice old person, Toad had said. Always kind to her. The suggestion was that Toad needed it, that kindness to Toad was unusual. And this time Lally wasn’t lying: she sounded, suddenly, worried.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said, tearing a page out of my notebook and scribbling on it. ‘Here’s my name and telephone number. Miss Potter is really bothered about this. Anything I find out about Toad will be absolutely between me and Miss Potter – no parents included. So if you or any of your friends hear from her – another postcard, maybe – give me a ring, all right? Ask around a bit. I’ll be in later tonight, and the answering machine will take a message if I’m not.’

  ‘Tonight? I won’t have had another postcard by tonight!’ Lally was shaken by my urgency, as I had meant her to be.

  ‘Some of your friends might. Or they might know something. In confidence, OK?’ I left before she spoke again. I wanted to leave her to stew. She might look sophisticated but she was young, she’d probably been cottonwooled from birth, and according to Annabel’s ex-housemistress, she was a decent sort. She’d ring. I only hoped she’d ring to confide that Toad was shacked up somewhere with an unsuitable boyfriend, preferably somewhere in London so I could winkle her out to parade for Miss Potter.

  That is what I hoped. I think, even a
t that stage, it wasn’t what I expected. I suppose it was partly out of guilt that I stopped off at a library on the way to see Miss Potter, and looked Ludovic Mayfield up in Who’s Who.

  I made notes on the entry. Father a judge. Famous prep school (unusual to name a prep school in a Who’s Who entry); Eton; Christ Church, Oxford; Sandhurst; Life Guards (not the Bondi beach kind, the smart regiment); barrister, Lincoln’s Inn. Married Charlotte Sherwin, of late Rollo, Lord Sherwin. MP for West Warwickshire. Minor government posts. Long list of clubs. By this time I guessed his interests were snobbery, misogyny and bread-roll throwing – that’s mostly what you learn in all those male institutions – but he gave them as ‘reading’ (John Buchan and Dornford Yates?) and ‘walking’ (around Euston station for the rent-boys?).

  I didn’t like him much but he seemed deeply conventional. A safe father, surely? A father who wouldn’t mistreat his daughter because the club secretary wouldn’t like it.

  When I reached Penelope’s house. Miss Potter was distrait. She kept leaping to her feet, asking about Toad and offering me dry sherry. I noticed she’d started on it already, but she held the glass so precisely I didn’t think she’d got very far. Finally I managed to procure a minuscule cup of coffee and some of her attention. It wasn’t worth worrying her with the details of my interview with Lally, so I told her I expected to have pin-pointed Toad’s whereabouts by next day.

  ‘Really, Alex?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘Really,’ I said firmly. I sort of believed it. She went wittering on about her concern and, to distract her, I recounted the interview with Patrick Revill at some length.

  ‘So Mr Revill definitely knew Rosalind,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t Rosalind tell you he did?’

  ‘No. At the time, Rosalind wasn’t telling me anything. We were hardly talking.’

  ‘Was there a fight?’

  ‘No. It was my decision.’

  ‘Why on earth?’ I flicked through my notes, found the page. ‘You saved her life from the Mau Mau.’

  ‘Just say Mau Mau,’ said Miss Potter. ‘You should not use the definite article.’

  ‘OK, OK. You saved her from a fairly definite Mau Mau machete through the head, and you were effectively a mother to her, surely, for the five years after her parents died, before you came to England.’

  ‘My dear, I can’t expect you to understand. When we left Kenya, everything changed. Everything.’

  ‘How can I understand, if you won’t tell me?’

  ‘My position was entirely different. At home—’

  ‘You mean in Kenya?’

  ‘Yes. I still, then, thought of it as home. At home, I’d been in charge. Of the house, of the staff, of Rosalind.’

  ‘Was there a large staff?’

  ‘Not unduly, for the time and the place. We had a head boy, of course. He was a Somali. There were also two Luo houseboys, the cook and the shamba boys in the compound. It was a large bungalow. Rosalind inherited it after her parents were murdered, but she was then only twelve, far too young to manage a household. At first I feared that her uncle and aunt would wish her to return to England and make her home with them, but I felt her life had been disrupted enough, and Lord Sherwin accepted my offer to remain with her, supervise the household and continue her education.’

  ‘Laura didn’t want her back?’

  ‘Lady Sherwin’s indifference was evident. Rosalind’s grandfather wrote several times, wanting to see her, but he was then, as always, powerless. He had no money, you see. He was Lord Sherwin’s pensioner.’

  ‘Bit strange of Laura not to want to take care of her niece?’

  ‘Lady Sherwin’s aim was, then and always, to ensure her own comfort and convenience. Besides, according to Mrs Sherwin, Rosalind’s mother – you know that the sisters married brothers?’ I nodded, and she went on, ‘According to Mrs Sherwin, Lady Sherwin was not an affectionate sister to her. She was a jealous woman, and Mrs Sherwin was not only the more beautiful of the two but was also Lord Sherwin’s first choice of wife.’

  ‘So Sophie turned down Rollo for the younger son.’ I made a note, accepted a glass of sherry to keep Miss Potter company, and nudged her on. ‘And things were good for you and Rosalind in Kenya.’

  ‘We were very happy. If it had been possible I would have stayed in Kenya for ever I suppose I had become complacent, and forgotten my true position. Coming back to England was a shock. My domain immediately shrank to the schoolroom and two night nurseries, which I renamed bedrooms. I was a governess, not a nanny, and I always felt the job description “nursery governess” to be a contradiction in terms. For myself I chose a room next to what used to be known as the nursery wing, though the house, being a rectangle, has no wings. My immediate predecessor had, for what Mrs Crisp the cook, a deplorable gossip, described as “Reasons”, elected to occupy a corner bedroom at the other end of the corridor, handy for Lord Sherwin’s by way of the back stairs. I was no longer responsible for Rosalind.’

  ‘Sounds grim,’ I said. ‘You’d actually lost your home, hadn’t you, and your status.’

  ‘I still had status,’ she said, defensive and peeved. ‘I was a governess, a very responsible position. The four little girls had been without a governess for months. Charlotte had become undisciplined and fallen behind in her work. She was a very able child, full of energy and force of character, often misdirected. She bullied the younger ones. I was entrusted with an important task.’

  ‘But you were homesick.’

  ‘More sherry?’ She was already refilling her own glass. I shook my head. I hate sherry and I hadn’t managed to choke down my first.

  ‘Yes, I was homesick. So much so that I chose Kenya as our first excursion into Geography.’

  She seemed to expect a reaction.

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  She saw I hadn’t understood. ‘Yes, really, Alex. With four pupils whose education had been deplorably neglected, and whose grasp of the geography of their own country was such that they would have found it a challenge correctly to name the capital of Scotland. I set them to filling in an outline map of Kenya, because I wanted to hear the names. Charlotte spotted it. She asked me why.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That is immaterial,’ she said. As far as I could see, much of what she said was immaterial, but this was her party. I nodded appreciatively.

  Chapter Seven

  I let Miss Potter ramble for a while, hoping for something useful, but the more rope I gave her the further afield she strayed. She still hadn’t satisfactorily answered my question about the rupture in her relationship with Rosalind. Eventually I waited till she drew breath after a description of her experiences as a pre-war undergraduate at University College, London – lots of cocoa and prayer meetings – and approached the question from another angle.‘Look, Miss Potter, obviously Patrick Revill did know Rosalind. He didn’t admit it, but he must have known her well, because when I pinned him down the only person in the house he’d met before the night of the hunt ball was Rosalind, and she must have invited him, or got him a ticket, or whatever you do for hunt balls. He said good morning to Rollo once—’

  ‘Lord Sherwin,’ said Miss Potter reprovingly. I gaped: surely, having his head blown off thirty years ago, Rollo was beyond caring about his style and title? ‘I allowed your first few references to pass, but I do find inaccuracy irritating.’

  ‘Oh, right. Rollo, Lord Sherwin. Revill said good morning to Lord Sherwin once, but he just saw the others in the distance, so the chances are he was at the ball at Rosalind’s invitation.’

  ‘Who did he say had invited him?’

  ‘Lord Sherwin, but I thought he was lying. He knew a lot of details about her, though he claimed he didn’t. He couldn’t resist putting me right. For instance, he knew about her parents and how they died in Kenya, and your part in it. By the way, I wanted to ask you about that.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Two things. One, why didn’t any Mau Ma
u look in the linen chest? If they searched and wrecked the place?’

  ‘Oh, they did,’ she said, pleased and pink, presumably at her recollected resourcefulness. ‘I had covered us with sheets and an eiderdown, and we kept very still. What is your second question?’

  ‘What was the revolver for?’

  ‘Us,’ said Miss Potter. ‘I intended to use it on Rosalind first, then myself.’

  ‘And could you have done that?’

  ‘Certainly. So could you, Alex, presented with my alternatives.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been better to fight?’

  ‘Not against such odds, with the possibility of leaving Rosalind unprotected.’

  I was impressed: it was clear she’d had terrific nerve. Looking at her now I couldn’t imagine it, but that’s often the way. Two years ago I’d worked on a doco about heroes and the main subject, a VC who’d spent his time undercover in Crete, had been a small, shrunken old man who kept saying, ‘I was lucky, I had a good war,’ in a deprecating voice. I couldn’t imagine him ever doing anything more assertive than kicking the cat.

  Miss Potter appeared equally reluctant to dwell on her courage. ‘Mr Revill need not have heard the story from Rosalind. It was common gossip at the time,’ she said briskly.

  ‘Not behind the scenes at Stratford. Revill only knew other actors. Until the evening of the ball he says he never went inside the big house, not even to the kitchen—’

  ‘The servants’ hall.’

  ‘To wherever the cook and the butler and the cleaning women had their teabreaks,’ I said, as uncontentiously as I could. ‘Revill made a big deal of not having been in the house so I didn’t necessarily believe him, but even so he wouldn’t have been on gossip terms with anyone except Rosalind. She must have told him, and my guess is the acquaintanceship was quite close.’