A Splash of Red

by Antonia Fraser

  It was essential to cope with the problem he presented - and at once. Jemima took another delicate step forward.

  The next thing she knew there was a noise, an eruption rather like a mountain in blast, and Kevin John had uncurled himself off the bed, bounded forward, and was clasping her in both shirt-clad arms.

  Slightly corpulent as he might be, he was astonishingly muscular. There was no escape. Jemima stood there mutely while Kevin John gave her two quick succulent kisses on the cheek with his rubbery lips.

  Then he panted: 'You'll save me, sweetheart, won't you? You'll save me?'

  He did not let go of her hands. He continued to stare at her. The blue of his eyes was even more amazing than she had remembered; the numerous red veins in the eyeballs were bright and clear as though running through white marble. His long, ridiculously long black eyelashes fluttered slightly; but his gaze itself did not falter. Coquetry was absent; on this occasion Kevin John Athlone was in deadly earnest.

  Alcohol, the pungent disgusting smell of stale alcohol, a great quantity of it, came reeking towards her on his breath as on that fatal Saturday morning a week ago. Only the new formality of his clothing was a present reminder of all that was tragic which had happened in between.

  'And if you won't save me, Jemima Shore, Investigator,' said Kevin John, puffing slightly as he spoke, but in no way slackening his grasp, 'I'll keep you here till you do.' From the severity of his tone, the new sound of purpose, Jemima had to assume that the flutter of his lashes which accompanied his words was purely automatic. She also wondered exactly how drunk Kevin John really was, despite the odour of alcohol palpitating from him with every breath exhaled.

  'A hostage,' he added, 'in case there's any doubt about my intentions. A hostage to misfortune - mine.' He smiled in what was obviously intended to be a winning manner; this time the flutter of his lashes was deliberate; nevertheless it was all a cold parody of the flirtatiousness which he normally exhibited to the female sex. 'I've an idea, sweetheart, that nothing too bad can happen to me while I've got you here.'

  A surge of fury filled Jemima. The memory of her previous sympathies for Kevin John merely enraged her further. She wrenched her hands free from his. She particularly disliked the notion of physical imprisonment, both in theory and practice, when it was allied to injustice.

  'How the hell did you get in here?' were the first words she managed to say.

  'I knew you were living here. I thought you would help me. You're famous for helping people.' The threatening note beneath the wheedling was still more marked. 'So back up the scaffolding I came. Window not locked again.'

  'I'm not living here—' Jemima broke off. She did not propose to give him any more information than he had already. 'Anyway I thought you were in Brixton. For God's sake, don't tell me you've been fool enough to escape.'

  Kevin John gave a dreadful leer, into which he appeared determined to inject as much boyish innocence as he could muster.

  'Now would I do a thing like that?' he cried. 'Not your Kevin John. No, sweetheart, for me it was the jolly old Judge-in-Chambers.' He pronounced the words proudly and with enormous care. 'The jolly old High Court judge his very self. Saturday afternoon and all, when you would have thought all decent judges were at the races or denouncing vandalism at football matches ... but not my judge. The merry old soul sat up all night, I mean sat up all the afternoon to receive the application of my solicitor, the well-known Red, Punch Fredericks, God bless him and all other Reds, - and what did he say? He said: Yes. Kevin John Athlone shall go free. On bail, of course, but Creeping Croesus was very handsome about that, as well he might. Anyway, out I popped from Brixton. It was just like the prisoners' chorus in Fidelio. And I was singing a pretty merry song myself, I can tell you. Now that is no place for a gentleman and an artist

  Reluctantly, Jemima came to the conclusion that Kevin John, in his circumlocutory fashion, must be speaking the truth. His temporary release seemed to have been secured by the energetic action of Punch Fredericks, rightly classed by Pompey as belonging to the bail-for-everyone school. A receptive High Court judge had done the rest. As far as Jemima could make out, Kevin John had merely been requested to surrender his passport: Crispin Creed had been required to go surety for some vast sum, and also put up with Kevin John as his official house guest in Chelsea.

  Jemima suspected rather cynically that Creed was animated by more than philanthropy in coming to the aid of an artist in which his Gallery had such a large stake. She only hoped that he would find the bargain worthwhile.

  These thoughts were rudely interrupted as Kevin John suddenly pounced upon her. He shoved Jemima down hard upon the white bed, and felt deftly in the skirts of her thin silk jersey dress. From the hidden pocket he took first the keys of the first-floor flat which he rejected, then the keys of the penthouse. He held them up.

  'So! I recognize these. The keys of the kingdom! Our kingdom. No departure for either of us until you've solved the problem of the day. In short, who killed Chloe Fontaine?'

  So saying, with that light athletic walk which his figure belied, Kevin John headed for the front door of the flat. He shut and double-locked it. Then he held up the keys once more.

  'Shall I make you beg for them? On second thoughts not. There is no need, is there, for that kind of game between us? With your brains and my assistance, you should easily find the answer to the conundrum. Don't discount my assistance, will you? My charms are a snare; I'm not nearly as witless as I look. I shall lend you plenty of help, my celebrated hostage.'

  Jemima put out a hand. Afterwards she was not quite sure what she had intended. Was it to grab - or perhaps simply possess - the keys from this unwelcome invader?

  Kevin John stepped back one pace. 'One last thing to encourage you.' The broad sitting-room window was open. Without looking behind him, he tossed the keys upwards and outwards in a great arc. They swung heavily through the air, tinkled against the edge of the scaffolding, and touched something else, probably the low concrete parapet. Then, before Jemima's eyes, they vanished from sight downwards.

  'Now we're all locked in for the night, as the old lady said in the ghost story,' observed Kevin John conversationally. 'No, no, you don't—' As Jemima lunged in the direction of the balcony, Kevin John neatly fielded her with his broad strong grasp. 'No maidenly cries for help, if you please. When you've solved the problem, Jemima Shore, Investigator, we'll telephone the police together. Till then - silence.' He put his finger to his stretched smiling lips.

  The first few hours of Jemima's imprisonment at the hands of Kevin John passed very slowly. The manifest absurdity of her situation, kept like some latter-day Rapunzel in the concrete tower, did nothing to reconcile her to it.

  Rapunzel was the wrong fairy story to bear in mind. Jemima Shore was not being asked to let down her rippling corn-coloured hair for any likely prince to climb up it. The appropriate fairy story was that of the unfortunate peasant girl married off by her father to the king on the boastful (and erroneous) grounds that she could spin common straw into gold. Once wed, so far as Jemima could remember, the wretched girl had been shut up by her royal husband into a tower room well stocked with straw and told: 'Spin!'

  In much the same way Kevin John seemed utterly convinced that if only he kept Jemima incarcerated long enough, she too would spin the few straws of evidence at her disposal into the gold of liberation.

  The time also passed slowly because for the first few hours of her imprisonment, Jemima refused to listen to Kevin John's harangues and protestations. Nor would she discuss the case.

  Kevin John let her sit down on the sofa. He shut the balcony window but - Jemima noted - did not lock it. Perhaps he too imagined the catch was, as it appeared to be, self-locking.

  'I don't want anyone else coming up the route I took,' he remarked casually. Jemima did not deign to answer.

  Kevin John took one of the large white armchairs and placed it opposite her, with his back to the balcony. He gazed at her wit
h his curiously unwinking blue stare.

  'He'll fall asleep,' thought Jemima scoffingly, 'and then I'll grab the telephone. The police will break the lock.' She was not carrying Pompey's private number with her since all her personal possessions, including - how foolish! - her handbag, were still in the first-floor flat. However under the circumstances, 999 would do just as well.

  But Kevin John did not go to sleep. For some time he kept up a long self-pitying monologue on the subject of his relations with Chloe. He referred entirely to the past. The events of the last week were ignored as though they had not taken place: or perhaps he was hoping to tease Jemima into posing some pertinent questions. As it was, she did not respond. And not only was there self-pity; there was a perpetual air of self-justification in all he said.

  'Beat her up!' he said at one point. 'Of course I beat her up. For one thing she was a' - obscenity - 'a Jezebel, a miner of good men's lives. And for another, mark you, she liked it.'

  Jemima, thinking that in some twisted way that was probably true -Chloe had both hated and been fascinated by the violence she produced in Kevin John - still would not answer.

  But in the event it was Jemima who fell asleep, not Kevin John.

  When she woke up, the sitting room was lit by candle-light - one short thick white candle in an opaque holder was standing on the glass table. It was dark outside except for the glow of the street lights. Kevin John was bending over her, or as it turned out, he was bending over the table itself, depositing a tray. It contained a bottle of wine, opened, two glasses, some digestive biscuits, and a large plate of sardines.

  'Nothing for me to cook for our candlelight supper. Pity: I'm a wonderful cook. Almost as good as Chloe - was. But I've done my best. Not many provisions you've allowed yourself, by the way, something less than perfect as a housekeeper, aren't you? Do your television fans know? Fridge turned off as well. Warm wine—'

  While he was talking, Jemima made a quickly planned dive and succeeded in grabbing the little white telephone. She was frantically dialling the second digit as Kevin John disentangled himself from the tray by dropping it and sprang towards her. In the melee the bottle of wine rolled over and liquid started flowing fast along the glass table, then splashing off it onto the carpet. Biscuits and sardines were mashed together into the thick pile.

  Neither gesture - neither her lunge nor his counter-spring had any point. Kevin John wrenched the receiver out of her hand and listened to it; then it dawned on him that there was no dialling tone.

  It was Jemima who said bitterly: 'Cut off. This flat is empty, you know.' Momentarily she became reckless as to what information she gave Kevin John.

  'Then you - what are you doing here?' It was his first visible moment of uncertainty.

  'Packing up. I moved downstairs after - after she was killed.' 'It was luck, then, me finding you up here.'

  Jemima favoured him with her ironic smile, not the lovely open smile which made the public adore her on television, but the other smile, the one which made government spokesmen, for example, with weak cases to defend slightly uncomfortable in retrospect. 'That Shore woman, not all sugar and spice, is she?' they would murmur questioningly in the direction of their wives once the interview had been shown.

  'Luck, indeed.'

  'So who does know you are up here?' He was quick to pick up the point.

  'The police,' replied Jemima smoothly. 'They gave me the keys. A police officer will be along to collect them shortly.' Even to her own ears, the lie did not sound convincing. She did not dare consult her little gold bracelet watch, but she was aware it must be nearly midnight.

  Kevin John snorted. His disbelief was clear.

  For the first time Jemima found herself wondering rather desperately exactly when and by whom she would be missed. Not by Pompey, alas, nor by any member of the police force, or at any rate not for a very long while, longer than she cared to contemplate. The keys to Chloe's flat destined for Miss Katy Aaronson, were to be left downstairs in the office suite.

  Pompey had not taken the Montagu Square number although he could easily ascertain it if he so wished. The trouble was that Pompey and Jemima had made no precise plans for a future meeting, their relationship in general depending on ad hoc consultations on either side. Besides Jemima had a shrewd suspicion that with the arrest of Kevin John, Pompey would be free and thus obliged to spend the weekend taking cuttings for the autumn in his greenhouse under Mrs Portsmouth's direction - for such he had predicted to be his fate.

  'The gardening columns really get going at this time of year,' he had confided to her with gloomy resignation. 'And Mrs Portsmouth gets going with them.'

  Miss Katy Aaronson was happily immured in the bosom of her family in Highgate enjoying the ritual of the Sabbath. Sir Richard Lionnel had picked up the broken threads of his life with astonishing ease and was at his home in the country - how quickly that abortive holiday with Chloe had been forgotten: the waters of fresh official engagements, such as entertaining that peregrinating minister, Lord Manfred, had already closed over his diary.

  Frankly Jemima could not envisage anyone else likely to enquire about her whereabouts with any urgency. It was not that she did not have friends, lovers, admirers in plethora; just that she had taken the fatal decision to disappear in London ... What an absurd ring the words now had in their original meaning!

  Neither she nor Chloe had succeeded in bringing about any kind of effective disappearance. Something - no, someone - had caught up with Chloe in the flat she had pretended to abandon and pinned her down to it for ever like a butterfly in a case. Only in this case the pin had been a long sharp kitchen knife.

  As for Jemima, her disappearance out of her own background, away from Holland Park Mansions and Megalith Television, had only succeeded in plunging her into the far murkier waters of her friend's life. Now Jemima was human enough to wish profoundly that some zany impulse would cause her assistant at Megalith Television, Guthrie Carlyle, to question exactly where she might be, and pursue that thought with his usual executive efficiency. For that matter, when was her secretary, the ebullient Cherry, Flowering Cherry as she was sometimes admiringly known within Megalithic House, due back from Corfu? Jemima, who had so often suffered from Cherry's over-zealous arrangements, was depressed to remember that she was not in fact due back until the end of August, shortly before Jemima would be repossessed of Holland Park Mansions.

  Jemima Shore had finally succeeded, quite inadvertently, in disappearing in London. It would be many days before anyone missed her in earnest and, so far as she knew, many days before anyone came to unlock the penthouse flat. Not that she really expected many days to pass in this ludicrous form of captivity. But Jemima was honest enough to admit that the unpleasant prospect was not absolutely out of the question.

  It seemed even less out of the question the next morning when Jemima awoke into the dawn. An exhausted grey light filled the sitting room, more reminiscent of a long night past than redolent of the promise of day. She squinted at her watch. Close on five o'clock. The candle had guttered to a standstill. Congested wax had spilled onto the glass table. It joined the debris of the crashed tray which Kevin John had not allowed her to clear up the night before.

  She was aware that some noise had caused her awakening. Kevin John was still sitting opposite her - for they had finally fallen asleep as they sat, she rejecting with unrepressed horror the offer of Chloe's bedroom. His eyes were closed; he was emitting gentle half sighs, half snoring sounds which reminded her of how many bottles of wine he had consumed the night before - unaided but also undisturbed by her abstinence. The penthouse was at least well stocked with wine. His sighs, however, were not responsible for her waking.

  It was Tiger, a dark golden blur outside the balcony window, who had roused her with his delicate infant's wail. He looked and sounded reproachful. Jemima guessed he was hungry. Knowing that she could open the balcony window, her first impulse was to let him in and feed him with the remnants of the sardines
from Kevin John's tinned supper. Then she realized that here was a possible opportunity to summon help - supposing there was anyone around to summon at 5 am in Bloomsbury of a Sunday morning.

  A note dropped, perhaps? One thing she did not propose to attempt was a descent via the scaffolding; and she had a gloomy feeling that the kitchen door to the fire escape at the back - poor Valentine Brighton's voyeur's route - would have been well and truly locked by the police.

  'Don't do it, darling,' said Kevin John with only a flicker of his eyelashes to indicate wakefulness. ‘If I'm the bully boy the police say I am, I wouldn't hesitate to cast you off the balcony after the keys would I, rather than let you yodel for help? Wait till you've solved our little problem. Then we'll both celebrate together.'

  He put out his arm, brown, hairy, and very strong-looking, exposed from the sleeve of his white shirt, which was now like his grey trousers in a very crumpled condition.