The Curious Incident at Claridge's

by R. T. Raichev

Payne turned round and walked to the door. I will have to think of something else now, he thought gloomily.

  35

  The Sting

  Some thirty-five minutes later Madden produced his mobile phone and dialled a number he had never called before.

  A man’s voice answered.

  Madden’s expression did not change. He said, ‘I am ringing in connection with the murder you committed on the morning of 23rd June.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I saw you.’

  ‘Is that some sort of a joke?’

  ‘I saw you kill Sir Seymour Tradescant. He was in his bath. You drowned him.’

  There was a pause. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘One of the stewards at Mayholme Manor. At the time of the murder I happened to be in Sir Seymour Tradescant’s room. I had concealed myself behind the window curtains.’ Madden spoke slowly. ‘You came out of the bathroom. Your gloves were dripping with water. You were wearing a steward’s habit. The front of the habit was wet too. It was ten minutes past eight.’

  ‘Sorry—you must have got the wrong number.’

  It was at this point, Madden reflected, that the man should have rung off if he was innocent, if he really believed he was the victim of a hoax. Only he didn’t ring off.

  A little smile hovered round the edges of Madden’s lips. ‘You walked across the room fast and went out. You were seen by another steward downstairs. He didn’t see your face, but I did.’

  ‘How did you get my phone number?’

  ‘That’s not important. I know your name. I also know your address.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘An arrangement?’

  ‘What kind of an arrangement.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘How boring. How much?’

  ‘Five thousand pounds. No, seven.’

  ‘I haven’t got so much.’

  ‘Your girlfriend has money.’

  ‘All right. Where?’

  ‘Claridge’s—at three?’

  ‘Claridge’s?’

  ‘It’s in Brook Street,’ Madden said. ‘Off New Bond Street.’

  ‘I know where Claridge’s is. Won’t it be better if we meet somewhere outside? In some park?’

  ‘No. Claridge’s. I will wait five minutes and if you are not there, I will call the police and tell them what I saw,’ Madden said.

  ‘No need to take that line. Very well. Where will you be? How will I recognize you?’

  ‘In the foyer. Don’t worry about recognizing me. I know what you look like. Make sure you have the money. Cash. Hope your scar has healed. Can’t stand blood,’ Madden added as an afterthought.

  36

  To Fear a Painted Devil

  It was now twenty-five minutes past three in the afternoon and another summer day of unparalleled loveliness.

  Major Payne and Antonia had had what he called a ‘Proustian’ luncheon: asparagus, boeuf en daube, strawberries and cream cheese. They were now sitting in striped deckchairs under a large striped umbrella, having coffee. Their garden looked at its best, embaumé with roses and honeysuckle, clematis, lilies and wild snow-white convolvulus. Bees buzzed, excited by the variety of scents.

  Major Payne was wearing a white Panama hat, smoking his pipe and doing the Times crossword puzzle. Antonia had dispatched her proofs and was reading a book. Antonia’s cat Dupin had just climbed to the very top of the ancient maple tree in pursuit of a crow. The maple tree had been one of the special ‘features’ that came with the house.

  ‘Paints one’s relatives in waterproof material … Second letter “I”.’ Payne looked up. ‘Any idea?’

  ‘How many letters?’

  ‘One … two … Seven. Relatives is “kin”, I suppose …’

  ‘You paint in oils … Oh, that’s very easy. Oilskin,’ said Antonia. She picked up the coffee pot. ‘Would you like more coffee?’

  ‘Of course.’ Payne penned in the word. ‘What about this one? Um. Deadly danger in Eden—not entirely unexpected.’

  ‘Hugh.’ Antonia had shaded her eyes and was gazing across the garden towards the french windows, which the sun’s rays had turned to pale brass. ‘I think there is someone in the drawing room.’

  The next moment they saw a woman’s figure come through the window. Very tall and buxom, with a narrow waist. The woman’s face was deeply tanned, almost the colour of mahogany. Her glossy jet-black hair fell in waves and reached down to her waist and she wore a broad-brimmed hat. Enormous golden earrings hung from her earlobes. Her lipstick was a light shade of purple. She was wearing large sunglasses in golden frames. She was dressed in a shimmering silk tunic of fluorescent green and magenta red trousers. She wore high-heeled sandals. Her appearance was exaggeratedly outlandish, histrionic, somewhat grotesque.

  Also, sinister.

  Payne rose to his feet. He cast a discerning eye over her. Larger than life. Carmen Jones meets Carmen Miranda? With a dash of the ’70s thrown in? Highly conspicuous. He didn’t think the conspicuousness was accidental. Deadly danger in Eden, eh? His gaze remained fixed on the woman’s leather bag that was slung casually over her right shoulder.

  They had been expecting a phone call. Not a visit.

  ‘Your front door was open. I rang the bell but you didn’t seem to hear,’ the woman said, speaking with an accent he could not quite place. ‘I do hope you don’t mind? I know it isn’t the done thing—’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Payne said. ‘You are absolutely right. I don’t think we have ever met, have we?’ He was standing beside his deckchair, his hands in his trouser pockets, feeling oddly vulnerable. That bag. She’s got something. It’s the way she clutches at it.

  ‘I needed to talk to Antonia. To both of you, in fact.’ The woman smiled. ‘I would like to know why you have been poking your noses into my affairs and trying to cause mischief.’

  ‘Lady Tradescant,’ Major Payne murmured. ‘Why the masquerade?’

  ‘I like experimenting with things,’ Penelope Tradescant said lightly. ‘Hangover from my modelling days.’

  ‘It seems more like an attempt to change your whole appearance beyond the possibility of recognition.’

  ‘Do you really think so? Major Payne, isn’t it? You seem to have caught the sun since I last saw you at Claridge’s. Of course I only saw you for a split second. It suits you, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ Antonia waved towards the third deckchair. The afternoon was still warm but she suddenly felt chilled. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder and that craves wary walking. It was the disconcerting feeling of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar—as well as horribly menacing. Antonia decided not to offer her coffee.

  Penelope sat down. She held her bag on her knees.

  ‘You insinuated yourself into my house under false colours. You came pretending to be the representative of a jewel firm. What were you hoping to find out? You listened outside the door, didn’t you? While I talked to those two charming policemen.’

  Penelope was gazing in Antonia’s direction but it was Payne who spoke. ‘Murder is a serious business. Sometimes we employ unorthodox methods.’

  ‘Murder? What murder?’

  ‘There were two murders. Your housekeeper, who was also your mother, and your rich old husband.’

  ‘Mrs Mowbray’s death was either an accident or suicide,’ said Penelope. ‘It hasn’t yet been established which. I don’t think it ever will be. But perhaps you know something I don’t? Please enlighten me.’

  I hate doing this, Payne thought. He cleared his throat.

  ‘You had been considering getting rid of your rich old husband for some time. You knew that it had to be done soon—before he changed his will and left his not inconsiderable fortune to Mayholme Manor. The opportunity presented itself on the morning Sir Seymour ordered your mother out of the house. Your mother had been blackmailing you over your affair with your brother. You are a fast and efficient thinker. You hit on the idea
of killing your husband and making it look as though the housekeeper had done it as one final act of revenge—before committing suicide. Two birds with one stone. You pushed Mrs Mowbray out of the top window of your house. Sir Seymour’s infected toe suggested to you the manner in which he was to be dispatched—’

  ‘Poor Seymour. That infected toe gave him hell.’

  ‘Sir Seymour had been taking antibiotics—one capsule every six hours. The course was nearly over,’ Payne went on. ‘There were only two capsules left. They were inside the silver snuff-box, which Sir Seymour carried in his pocket. You managed to get hold of a bottle of nicotine. Also of an antibiotic capsule, the kind Sir Seymour had been prescribed. You filled the capsule with a deadly dose of nicotine. You then placed the nicotine bottle inside your mother’s cupboard for the police to find. For some reason you never got an opportunity of effecting the substitution at home. Maybe Sir Seymour never let the box out of his sight?’

  ‘My dear Major Payne. You sound like one of those impossible oracles. And you look so infuriatingly pleased with yourself! As if you have just clean bowled an opening batsman facing your first ball!’

  As far as cricketing metaphors went, that wasn’t too bad. Payne picked up his pipe and started filling it with tobacco from his pouch. ‘It was only at Claridge’s that you managed to swap the capsules. Unfortunately, you were seen. Captain Jesty had been spying on you from behind a potted palm and he saw exactly what you did.’

  She gave an exasperated sigh. ‘I made it abundantly clear to that tedious man that it was the other way round.’

  ‘Jesty was smitten by you. He was unable to tear his eyes off you. When you realized that there had been a witness to the switch, you lost your poise and for a moment you looked the picture of guilt. I can testify to it since I was there too. I rarely have occasion to doubt the evidence of my eyes. What happened next was very interesting.’ Payne stroked his jaw with his forefinger. ‘Very interesting indeed.’

  ‘What happened next, Major Payne?’

  ‘You got into the taxi with your husband and accompanied him on what was to be his last journey to Mayholme Manor. In the course of your journey you managed to get hold of the snuff-box. Did you pick his pocket? Or perhaps you simply asked him to hand the snuff-box over, so that you could admire its filigree? A rather magnificent seventeenth-century snuff-box, isn’t it? You had the antibiotic capsule ready and you contrived to put it back into the snuff-box—having extracted the lethal capsule first.’

  ‘So that’s what I did!’ Penelope clapped her hands. ‘I had no idea.’

  Payne lit his pipe. ‘You must have felt great relief. I can imagine the thoughts that passed through your mind. Your husband would not die, there’d be nothing in the papers about it, and the intrusive stranger with the snub nose and the silly moustache would not be reporting to the police the suspicious incident he had witnessed at Claridge’s. What you did not foresee was that Captain Jesty would try to blackmail you into becoming his paramour.’

  ‘A paramour … Do you always use such quaint words?’

  ‘You agreed to meet Jesty and the very next day the two of you had lunch at Quaglino’s. By the end of that lunch, Jesty’s infatuation had transcended into a full-blown obsession. Dangerous things, obsessions. Get in the way of rational thinking. Jesty poured his heart out to you. He told you he adored you. He thought you were a goddess. He wanted to be your slave. You made it clear you were not interested. You remained distant and unresponsive. You turned down his advances. You made nonsense of his blackmail attempts by presenting him with an entirely different and, I dare say, rather convincing version of what had taken place at Claridge’s.’

  ‘I told him that he had misread the situation completely.’

  ‘You told him you never wanted to see him again. You looked as though you despised him. You informed him you were leaving for the South of France.’ Major Payne paused. ‘I bumped into Jesty outside Mayholme Manor later that same day. He was in a terrible state. He looked ill. We had a drink together but it didn’t help him much. He said he wanted to die. He had fallen in love with you. Life wouldn’t be worth living if he couldn’t have you, there’d be no point for him to go on. But then—out of the blue—you phoned him.’

  37

  The Deadly Joker

  Penelope Tradescant shook her head. ‘I never phoned Captain Jesty.’

  ‘I saw his face light up. He looked incredulous at first, then delighted. No. “Delighted” is too mild a word. He was transported with joy. He started saying your name—but broke off after the first syllable. Pe. I think that some preservation instinct impelled him to pretend it was not you but someone else. Maybe something in your voice alerted him to the dangerous enterprise you had in mind for him?’

  ‘What dangerous enterprise?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to insist that Jesty possesses a sixth sense, or that he might have had some sort of prevision—I will leave that kind of thing to your patroness Bettina. Still, it is curious. I asked Jesty whether it was you on the phone. He shook his head. He assumed a crestfallen expression. He said it was one of his old girlfriends. His oldest squeeze. Petunia. Same first syllable as your name, see?’

  ‘Your ingenuity leaves me gasping.’

  ‘It is Jesty’s ingenuity one should be gasping at. Jesty managed to put on a jolly convincing show for my benefit. He played the vapid lady-killer to perfection. Pill, darling, what a beast he had been, mea culpa, darling, and so on. You were probably surprised, but I am sure you realized soon enough there must have been a good reason for the charade. You told him you wanted to see him. You invited him over to Half Moon Street that night, didn’t you?’

  ‘I never phoned Captain Jesty,’ she said again.

  ‘His story, after he rang off, was that Petunia—a Mrs Luscombe-Lunt—had asked him round to her place. He said he didn’t really want to go, he didn’t feel like it, but would do it for old times’ sake. He then flew into the night. Well, on that occasion he managed to pull the wool over my eyes. At that point I had no idea that it couldn’t possibly have been Mrs Luscombe-Lunt who phoned him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Petunia Luscombe-Lunt couldn’t have phoned him for the simple reason that she was dead. Jesty wasn’t aware of the fact. That’s where he slipped up. He hadn’t seen Petunia for some time. The poor woman had perished about ten days earlier, on 12th June, in an accident in the Alps. I read about her memorial service in The Times a couple of days later, entirely by chance. That, you see, was when I had my very first inkling of the truth.’

  ‘What you believe to be the truth,’ she corrected him.

  ‘This whole awful business starts and ends with you, Lady Tradescant,’ Payne said. ‘Jesty did your murder for you, at your request. He went and drowned your husband. He shaved off his moustache first. He thought he would be too conspicuous otherwise. Only he did it a little too rashly and cut himself. He had a nasty little scar on his upper lip on the morning of the murder. It probably got infected because it turned a vicious kind of red. It could be spotted from a distance. Like the mark of Cain.’

  ‘This is actually terribly amusing.’

  ‘You managed to assess Jesty’s possibilities pretty accurately. You saw his murderous potential. You and he are a bit alike. More than a bit. Amoral, unprincipled, callous, single-minded, reckless. Am I missing something? I believe you are the cleverer of the two, but we must give Jesty his due. He played the part of the embittered jilted suitor to perfection.’

  ‘Immoral? Impulsive? Well versed in the art of dissimulation? Evil?’

  ‘Evil,’ Payne echoed. ‘It is the kind of word that conveys the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous and diffuse, as applied to love. In fact it nearly misses being an anagram of love, have you noticed? Everybody seems to believe they know what “evil” means but none could have defined it with any degree of precision …’

  ‘I must say I have never before met a metaphysical Major!’r />
  ‘My aunt has always been extremely interested in the lethal and erotic possibilities of the set-up known as folie à deux.’ Payne stroked his jaw with his forefinger. ‘She would be thrilled if I told her that the murder of Sir Seymour Tradescant was the direct consequence of a folie à deux.’

  ‘I fear the sun might have proved a little bit too strong for your poor head.’

  ‘Jesty made it clear that he was mad about you and would do anything for you—anything—if only you were to favour him. Well, you were brought together at the right psychological moment. The failed murder of your husband was still very much on your mind. You were angry with the “spoiler”. I don’t think you are the kind of person who gives up easily. You had a brainwave. Why not use the spoiler—he owes it to me—he seems right for the job—why not make him do it?’

  ‘I think your cat wants to join us.’ Penelope Tradescant was looking in the direction of the maple tree. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘It’s a he,’ Antonia said. ‘His name is Dupin.’

  ‘Well, you were right about Jesty. He was the right man for the job. Vic Levant is also very much in love with you,’ Major Payne went on, ‘but somehow I don’t think he would have agreed to kill your husband.’

  Penelope frowned. ‘What do you know about Vic?’

  ‘Apart from the fact that he comes from Canada, that he is the son of your late housekeeper, that he is your brother and, until recently, your lover, nothing at all. I don’t doubt you were fond of him, but with Jesty on the scene, Vic had to go. You had already decided that Jesty was your man. Perhaps his Casanova credentials played their part too?’

  ‘I believe Captain Jesty was with you the morning I paid you a visit,’ Antonia said, ‘but he didn’t stay to be introduced. The door slamming—remember?’

  ‘Is that all the evidence you could produce that links me to Captain Jesty? A slammed door? A shaved moustache?’ Penelope Tradescant laughed. It was a very attractive laugh.

  ‘Vic saw Captain Jesty going into your house. He would certainly recognize photos of him. Minus the moustache. Vic commented on Captain Jesty’s shining upper lip,’ Antonia said.