‘Mrs Rosalind Jennings?’
‘Yes. What time is it?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
‘Do I know you?’
Not a good start. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve woken you. I’m Alex Tanner, I’m a journalist and I’m calling from England. How is your husband?’
‘If you’ve got up at six in the morning to ask me about Magnus’s piles, you must be deranged,’ said the voice, amused. It was an attractive voice, light and clear, with the accent of its class and generation: not the contemporary drawl, but clipped, with neutral vowels. Like Barty’s.
I was relieved. Few people died of piles, and Rosalind didn’t sound unduly preoccupied by Magnus’s condition. ‘I haven’t. I spoke to someone at this number the day before yesterday. She said your husband was in hospital. I got the impression it was serious.’
‘I suppose it is, for Magnus. I’m sorry, Miss Tanner, I don’t talk to journalists, though come to think of it you’re the first journalist who’s ever wanted to talk to me.’
I was encouraged. People who don’t talk to journalists don’t talk to journalists full stop. They certainly don’t hang around explaining their principles and situation. Female members of the upper classes find it almost impossible to sever communication abruptly, anyway, having been trained from birth as conversational geisha. ‘Miss Potter asked me to call you. I’m not exactly a journalist, I’m a television researcher, but at the moment I’m working on a piece for the Observer on the Sherwin murder. Miss Potter said you might be able to help with background.’ I had to keep her on the line. She’d talk if I could interest her. ‘Miss Potter feels it’s very important that the truth be told, so the family isn’t hurt, and I want my piece to be as accurate as possible, and naturally you’d be a good source.’
‘I’m surprised Miss P. mentioned my name.We’re not on speakers, or didn’t she tell you?’
‘Speakers?’
‘Speaking terms. She hasn’t said a word to me in thirty years.’
‘I gathered there was a disagreement,’ I said blandly.
‘I expect you did . . . Are you going to print this?’
‘Not unless it’s to do with the murder.’
‘Not as far as I know. Look, Miss Tanner—’
‘Call me Alex—’
‘I didn’t kill my uncle, and I don’t know who did.’ She didn’t sound defensive: merely uninterested.
‘Would it be fair to say that as far as you know, Lord Sherwin was shot by his wife?’ That’s what Patrick had said she thought; a way of checking on his reliability as well as her reaction.
‘I suppose so, but I don’t want to be quoted. I don’t know. I have no evidence: I didn’t then and I don’t now. Does it matter?’
It is very hard to lie over the telephone. Great liars can. I can. I didn’t think Rosalind could, and I believed her, so I moved on.
‘Why was it exactly that you and Miss Potter came back to England when you did? Whose idea was it?’
‘Partly Rollo’s, I think. So I could do the season and so on. But Laura really wanted a governess for the children – governesses never stayed, apparently.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Not sure. Partly my uncle’s tendency to make passes, plus my aunt’s malicious indifference. It can’t have been any fun teaching Charlotte, either. She looked like a little blonde angel but she could needle at weak spots like nobody’s business. She liked to be in charge.’
I wanted to check Stephanie’s reliability, so I said at random, ‘Stephanie Forsythe tells me you were very fond of your grandfather—’
‘She’s helping you, too?’ she said, surprised.
‘—and that when you arrived from Kenya, he’d arranged a welcoming committee.’
Silence. Then: ‘Good Lord. I’d forgotten . . . yes, of course. He made a banner. It said WELCOME MY BABY DARLING. He always called me his “baby darling”. He was – a nice, nice man. The welcome went all wrong, because of the rat. Things he organised had a way of going wrong . . .’
I decided to ignore the rat. It was intriguing, but this was long-distance and I could pursue it with Miss Potter.
Casually, I slipped in, ‘Patrick Revill tells me you and he had an affair, that summer.’
She laughed. ‘Good Lord. I haven’t thought of him for years. How is he?’
‘Old. Poor Lonely.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said with impersonal sympathy. ‘When I first saw him he was so attractive. Absolutely to die for . . . What does Patrick and me have to do with the murder? Does it matter?’
‘It does to Miss Potter. She doesn’t believe it.’
‘Oh yes she—’ began Rosalind, remembered who I was, stopped.
I pursued. ‘You thought she knew? About you and Patrick?’
‘She must have done,’ said Rosalind, ‘otherwise why . . .’
She stopped again and I ground my teeth with frustration. I had to fill the silence, stop her ringing off, but I mustn’t derail her. Did Miss Potter think Rosalind had done the murder? Was that her secret? If so, what had Patrick to do with it? Oh shit. When in doubt, state the obvious. ‘She would have disapproved,’ I said.
‘Of course. That’s why.’
I was beginning to get the point.‘That’s why she stopped speaking to you?’
She let out her breath in a long sigh. She had the habit of honesty, to be expected in a pupil of Miss P.’s. Lucky Rosalind, who had lived so protected that she could afford to retain it. ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t make sense otherwise.’
I plugged on. She agreed that Rollo had been talking about divorce before the murder, and Laura resisting it, but said she knew of no special other woman, and that Laura wouldn’t accept it. I asked about a motive. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said. ‘My aunt liked her own way.’
‘Enough to kill for it?’
‘I can’t imagine wanting anything enough to lull for it,’ she said. I could but I didn’t say so. I never argue with the “unimaginable” brigade. I was, foolishly, disappointed that Rosalind had joined it: I had thought better of her. Perhaps it was the smugness of marriage and middle age. I took the next question from my list. ‘What was your uncle like?’
‘He was kind to me. He was attractive. A bit thoughtless, but a nice man. The older I get, the nicer I think he was.’
‘How did Lady Sherwin see him?’
‘I really can’t . . . Other people’s marriages are a mystery, aren’t they?’
‘What can you remember of the night Rollo died?’
‘Sorry. Nothing useful. He was cross with Laura at the beginning because she didn’t come down early enough. She was sulking about the ball being held in her house. Later, he danced with me twice: he was exactly his usual self. Carelessly kind. Very charming. He had a lovely voice. That’s it.’
I looked at my notes. ‘Why do you think Lady Sherwin married Bloom?’
‘He spoilt her. He adored her: she could do no wrong. Buckets of love, admiration and approval. She was nicer, with him. He didn’t expect her to be anything but beautiful. My wife the delicate aristocrat, that sort of thing. She was very idle.’
‘Right. By the way—’ my conscience stirred, just a little. ‘Have you kept up with Charlotte at all?’
‘Not much.’
‘But you know her daughter Toad?’
‘Poor Toad, of course.’
‘Any idea where she is now?’
Silence. She was thinking. ‘Penelope said she was in India or somewhere. Gap Year. But she wasn’t born when Rollo was shot – what ...’
‘Never mind.’ I’d been absorbing her description of Laura while I made my guilt inquiry about Toad. Now with her attention distracted, I’d try again. ‘Mrs Jennings, hand on heart, do you honestly think the Laura you knew would have done anything as energetic and decisive as shooting her husband?’
‘Come to think of it . . . But there was no one else, surely? Who else? No, I really mustn’t speculate.’
It was no use pressing her and I wanted to keep the option of ringing back, if anything specific came up. ‘I’ll be seeing Miss Potter later today. Do you have any message for her?’
Long silence. ‘Do you think she’d want one?’
‘Yes. Yesterday, she looked at a photograph of you and said you must have been very lonely, that summer before the murder. She feels sorry about letting you down.’
‘Oh, she shouldn’t do that . . . If she really didn’t know about me and Patrick, I can’t imagine why she hasn’t spoken to me since, but she must have had a reason. She was terrific, really. She brought me up. I was very fond of her. If you think she’d like a message, send her my love.’
I thanked her and rang off. If I needed her again I could always use the pretext of a real or imagined response from Miss Potter.
By then it was six twenty-five and we had been talking for twenty-three minutes. I worked out the British Telecom rate for twenty-eight minutes (never raise it to a round number), logged it in my expenses sheet, made more coffee and reflected.
She didn’t, deep down, think that Laura had done it. Increasingly, neither did I. Insubstantial, beautiful, probably anti-Semitic Laura who had chosen to marry an unhandsome, undistinguished Jewish doctor because she wanted to be spoilt. A woman who lay on the sofa and wouldn’t reach out her hand for a magazine if she could get someone else to do it for her.
I was pleased. Stephanie was a good witness. So, making allowances for his vanity, was Patrick, and moreover one who was ready to talk and easy to reach. If Rosalind hadn’t been in Grete . . . Never mind; that was always the way with hurry-up jobs, and if it wasn’t a hurry-up job I wouldn’t have got it.
I also had some ammunition to use on Miss Potter I could insist, once and for all, that she accept the fact of Patrick’s relationship with Rosalind; then, with luck, I’d find out why it had been so important for her not to believe it.
I had time for a long bath before my next scheduled event: the two bus rides that took me to my mother.
It was her birthday so I’d brought her two bars of nut chocolate. She has advanced Alzheimer’s disease. She doesn’t recognize birthdays and she doesn’t recognize me but she still likes chocolate. She ate a whole pound bar as I watched. She’s been in that particular hospital three years now. It’s off the North Circular Road, handy for undertakers and the crematorium. It’s not easy to talk to her I’ve settled for pretending she understands, and I keep talking until she walks away. I reckon when she walks away I’ve visited long enough.
This time she hung around to hear a summary of the Sherwin murder. She liked Rollo’s name and kept repeating it, rollo rollo rollo rollo rollo rollo. Then she changed it, rolo rolo rolo rolo, like the chocolate. I took the hint and gave her the rest of her present, the other pound bar of Cadbury’s Whole Nut and two Mars bars. She grabbed them and shuffled away.
She used to be a pretty woman, my mother, much prettier than me. I remember how she used to look, a little, but as the years and the admissions to hospital, sectioned under the Mental Health Act (‘Do you understand, Alex? It’s better for both of you’ – appreciative nod) ticked past, how she looks now and how she looked then got muddled. The patients in this hospital (it’s not bad, as they go) are allowed their own clothes and I do buy her some, to suit her taste as far as I can remember it. Trouble is, when the clothes go to the laundry they all seem to boil down to the same colour, geriatric mud. She was wearing a summer dress, once bright green, now mud, and a thick mud cardigan I couldn’t identify. It may not have been hers. She’s thin and the clothes hung on her. Her back view was old.
I had a word with the nurse and left a supply of Fun-size Chocolate Bites. The nurses never have anything new to say about my mother but the least I could do was listen. I was all right, I was going to leave the decaying building with its decaying, incontinent inhabitants, and I needn’t come back for another month, or for ever I was lucky and I knew it. I felt lucky on the bus on the way back to the flat. I felt lucky when I stuffed all my clothes into the washing machine. I felt lucky in the bath as I washed away the smell.
Chapter Thirteen
I even felt lucky when I picked up my phone to try Lally at work, found she’d gone sick for a second day on the trot, and headed over to Barty’s office to press Annabel into service. She’d certainly be able to get Lally’s home number from someone. The door was unlocked so I went straight in. Barty was sitting at his desk firing pellets from a rubber band. He seemed to be aiming at the wastepaper basket: there was a circle of screwed-up pieces of paper round it. He looked tired, but he smiled when he saw me.
He was wearing a dark suit and a significant tie, one of those ties that other dark-suited tie-wearers greet with ‘pass, friend, all’s well’. That meant he was going to court, possibly as part of a protracted fight to screen a documentary we’d made two years ago, about the bullying of black recruits in the Army. It didn’t matter to me, I hadn’t worked on a percentage.
‘Suit?’ I said.
‘Court.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘No. Tedious.’
‘OK. Annabel not in yet?’
‘Do you want her?’
‘Doesn’t matter, it’ll keep.’
‘Have a chair. There’s coffee in the pot.’
I took some. ‘I’ve just been to visit my mother,’ I said, surprising myself.
‘Didn’t know you had one.’
‘She’s in a mental hospital. Alzheimer’s.’
‘Does she know you?’
‘No. It’s her birthday. I took her nut chocolate.’
‘Is that her favourite?’
‘It always was. She scoffs it OK.’
He swivelled his chair round and aimed another pellet at the wastepaper basket. ‘Are you free for dinner tonight?’
‘If you want an update on the Sherwins you don’t have to buy me dinner.’
‘I do want an update, and you can tell me now. You don’t have to be so defensive. Try for some charm of manner, girl. How about “Barty, I’d love to dine with you. What shall I wear?” ’
‘Barty, I’d love to dine with you. What shall I wear?’
‘I’ve always liked you in jeans and those amusing Doc Martens.’
‘Just as well.’
‘But tonight, we’ll go somewhere posh, and you can surprise me.’
He had certainly surprised me. Why Barty asked me to dinner I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to speculate. I wasn’t going to plan what to wear, because I didn’t have much to choose from, and it doesn’t really matter anyway what I wear, it makes so little difference. Polly always says that half the fun of going out with a man is looking forward to it and fantasising, but I disagree. The warm fantasies make the cold reality worse. I’m not going to sit around telling stories about how passionately I’m loved and how my man can’t wait to see me, while I keep one ear wagging at the silent phone.
Meanwhile I briefed Barty. He listened as impassively as my mother and he didn’t even say rollo rollo rollo. When I finished, he grunted. ‘I like the Miss Potter/Rosalind misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘If you clear it up. Miss Potter might talk. You know I never believed Laura was the killer.’
‘For a really solid reason. Because you fancied her.’ He ignored me. ‘And now we’ve got evidence. Miss Potter’s covering for someone, and it wouldn’t be Laura. Miss P.’s a firm believer in law and order and every citizen’s duty to co-operate with the police. I can see her protecting a child, just.’
‘Would Rosalind count as a child? She was seventeen.’
‘She’d always count as a child to Miss Potter. I still count as a child to Miss Potter.’
‘Do you think Rosalind did it?’
‘I think any adolescent can do anything. They’re all barking mad. Don’t you remember being that age?’
‘No reason for her to shoot Rollo.’
‘We don’t know. If she really was having an affair with Patrick Re
vill she must have been a remarkable girl.’
‘Why?’
‘At her age, in that time, that place, that social set, I’d say it was very enterprising, particularly if she managed to keep it under wraps. Lemaire doesn’t mention it, does he? I’d like to meet her.’
‘I’ll make sure to tell her next time we talk,’ I said snifflly. ‘She’s nearly fifty by now, of course.’
‘Where’s she living, exactly?’
‘In Crete, near Chania, with her husband.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Magnus Jennings.’
‘He’s a painter. Quite a good one.’
‘I suppose you know him?’
‘Met him once or twice. You’ve got to stop this, Alex.’
‘Stop what?’
‘Pokering up when I know people. Nobody works in television for over twenty years in a place as small as London without getting some contacts. You’ve plenty of your own. What about Ready Eddy? I’d trade Jennings for him any day. Get on with it, stop feeling sorry for yourself and pay another visit to Patrick.’
‘Not yet. I’ll drop in on Miss Potter, get her up to date on my call to Rosalind. Plus I want you to fix up something for me.’ I wrote down two telephone numbers, tore the page out of my notebook, gave it to him. ‘I want an interview with Charlotte Mayfield. If you set it up I’ll call her and confirm a time. I need her for our piece anyway, and I might be able to get something out of her about Toad. I’d rather see her when I’ve heard from Lally, but I can’t hang around for ever, and I have high hopes of Miss Potter this morning. Charlotte’s next on my list.’
‘Will do. Is she in London?’
‘Dunno. I’ve given you both numbers, London and country.’
‘Good morning, my dear.’ Miss Potter looked deathly. Her face was pinched, her cheeks sunken, her skin tone greyish green. She spilt my coffee, pouring it. I pushed her gently on to a kitchen stool and wiped up the coffee.
‘Did you hit the sherry again?’ I asked.
An Uncommon Murder Page 10