A Splash of Red

by Antonia Fraser

  'The police knew. I told them,' contributed Adam in a tone of mock helpfulness. 'You particularly" instructed me to tell them everything.'

  Yes, thought Jemima, not the killing type indeed; although there might be something to be said about Adam Adamson along the lines of not loving wisely but too often. And too precipitately. Still, as Miss Barrymore had so aptly observed, it was nothing to do with her. Adam's alibi, in its full irony, was now revealed; and the future of Isabelle Mancini and Laura Barrymore was even less her concern than that of Adam and Laura.

  For her, another chase was on. The fox was Sir Richard Lionnel.

  Adam Adamson went to the door, and towel-clad as he was, swept it open with style.

  At this point Jemima observed with some surprise that the third-floor flat, the dark-blue subterranean cave, bore more rather than fewer signs of occupation than when she was last inside it. The image of the writhing white furniture had not been totally illusory. There were two new white plastic shapes on the dark floor; pushed together they might serve as some form of armchair or even sofa. Recently, however, they had been pushed widely apart; Jemima had a mental image that this had been effected by the athletic coupling of Adam and Laura.

  There were other new traces of domesticity including a small table and some lamps. Yet by any reasonable calculations Adam should have given the place a wide berth once he had made his statement to the police. That had taken place on Sunday morning. A week ago. Even the most ardent revivifier might have twitched his cloak and passed on to fresh squares and buildings new after an experience like that.

  Disregarding Laura Barrymore, who was now coldly buffing a long and glittering pearlized nail, Jemima said abruptly to Adam: 'You come and go as you please. Revivifying - squatting - whatever you call it. That's not quite the picture I get. You live here. That furniture wasn't here before. Explain if only to satisfy my curiosity. Then we'll both go out of each other's lives.'

  'Why shouldn't he be here?' Laura Barrymore had glided to the position she seemed to prefer, which was just behind Adam's shoulder, her small snake's head clearly visible above it. 'It's his flat, isn't it?'

  'Oh come now,' Jemima spoke coldly - the interjections of this grass-green Lamia were beginning to irritate her. 'To call it actually his - isn't that carrying revivification rather too far? Does Isabelle plan an article on the subject in Taffeta?. "Back to Adam - modern style" with photographs?' These remarks, Jemima realized the moment she had uttered them, were not exactly those of the all-wise goddess she wished at this moment to personify. Adam clearly shared her opinion.

  'I realize now to the full the difficulties presented by life upon Olympus,' he remarked plaintively.

  Jemima smiled, her own sense of the absurd restored. 'How do you cast yourself then?' she could not resist asking. 'Please don't suggest Dionysus. No one I assure you is going to tear you into pieces...'

  'Something in disguise,' he said gently. 'A minor god in a minor disguise. Perhaps I should reintroduce myself. We are all sons of Adam, as I told you, but I am also the son of Aaron. Adam Adamson by choice, preferring the old Adam to the old Aaron, but Adam Aaronson by birth.'

  'Ah!' A short pause. 'Adam, brother of Katy. The brilliant one who dropped out from Cambridge.'

  'Where he was studying architecture. The same.' 'How much of the rest of it was lies?'

  'It depends on one's attitude to the truth. I first had the idea of revivifying this building from listening to my sister. She's an admirable girl, but no lover of the arts, to be frank. Listening to her endless disquisitions on the subject of Sir Richard Lionnel - she's madly in love with him of course - she and Francesca Lionnel have an unspoken alliance to fend off the rest - and thinking him only slightly less monstrous than his own building, I started to demonstrate. Katy didn't like it: she never really likes anything I do, ever since I got a scholarship to Cambridge and then dropped out, the scholarship she wasn't allowed to take. But she loves me all the same - in spite of everything - Adam, the baby brother, the only son, the boy. There's family life for you. You have a family?'

  Jemima shook her head.

  'How wise. To return to the sad story of this benighted building: at which point my late and lightsome friend, Miss Dollie Stover as was, quite coincidentally persuaded me to move in. From the street to the third floor. One of her reckless gestures, I suppose. Slipped me a key. She also seemed to dislike both the decor of the third floor - good thinking - and the woman who was responsible for it. A woman with a ridiculous name. Bunny something or other. I was her secret vengeance on this Bunny.'

  'Binnie,' murmured Jemima.

  'Nothing loath, I took the hint. I didn't reveal my connections. Nor for that matter did she reveal hers. We both as it were pulled the thickly woven expensive wool carpet of fantasy over each other's eyes. She, the mistress of the tycoon, posing as the skittish little-girl-loose; me, the brother of the tycoon's assistant posing as the squatter-in-danger-of-the-law.' At this point Laura Barrymore attempted to put one long serpentine arm round Adam's neck. Laura entière à sa proie attachée, thought Jemima. But Adam disengaged himself with a brisk movement and said: 'Not round the neck, I can't bear being strangled by women.'

  It did not sound as if he was altogether joking. Then he went on: 'After I spoke to the police, Katy fixed it for me. Made it legitimate. That's her secret aim in life, 1 suppose, and this time I let her have her way. This is my flat now. The Lion's Den is now Adam's Garden of Eden: you see, Sir Richard did not care for the decor for some odd reason.'

  'Isn't it funny, Katy Aaronson and I were at school together?' Laura put in suddenly, with a return to her gracious manner. 'Quite a coincidence.'

  But Jemima did not care to stay and examine the coincidence. She did not think Adam would linger very long in Miss Barrymore's snakelike embrace; she had probably served her purpose, as Katy Aaronson had in a sense served hers. Unlike Chloe Fontaine, nee Dollie Stover, formerly of Folkestone, Adam Adamson ne Aaronson, formerly of Highgate, was a survivor.

  Back on the first floor, Jemima knew the first telephone call she had to make.

  'Sir Richard,' she began in her most formal manner. 'This is Jemima Shore, Investigator.' To her surprise he had answered the telephone himself. Perhaps by Sunday Sir Richard was bored in the country. It was certainly the impression given by his alacrity in answering her call.

  'I would like you to talk to me; to come up to London and talk to me.' Whatever the rival claims of the minister and Lady Manfred - or the Medea-like Lady Lionnel - Sir Richard showed no hesitation in accepting her invitation. Nor did he hesitate when she named Chloe's penthouse flat as their rendezvous.

  'You have the keys?'

  'Yes, the police gave them to me so I could pack up my things.'

  Jemima did not think it necessary to add that she had recently repossessed herself of them, having found them lying untouched in the gutter of Adelaide Square where they had fallen from on high, hurled by Kevin John.

  With some strange feeling of the relentless pursuit of coincidence, Jemima found the rendezvous fixed for one o'clock. Or between one and two, depending on the traffic. Sunday. Eight days since Chloe had died.

  She put down the receiver; she thought to make two other telephone calls. The first was to Stavros, already at 'The Little Athens'. The second call was to Isabelle Mancini.

  She did not call Pompey.

  Then she went for the last time onto the balcony of the first floor and gazed into the gardens. At this level the trees were more like barricades than floating galleons with the tops of their masts visible. The over-high parapet was like another barricade. It was odd how depopulated the gardens remained: in the other Bloomsbury gardens roundabout people desported themselves, lay on the dry and yellowing grass, looked upwards and imagined themselves on a perpetual bank holiday in the country. The bars which surrounded the gardens of Adelaide Square - a virtual cage with two gates, one at either end - constituted an effective discouragement. One could not readily i
magine a passer-by climbing the railings.

  Yet someone had climbed them - two people in fact. Chloe Fontaine had climbed them one hot summer's night, locked out without her keys including her own resident's key to the enclosure. And there she had on her own admission indulged in a carnal encounter with someone described by Pompey in his vein of wit, as a Sunday newspaper headline: The Lover in the Gardens. As Jemima gazed towards the forbidding railings and slightly depressing late summer shrubs, other memories floated back to her, not only Chloe's voice from the past -'Still it was an interesting experience . . . rather a surprise altogether' -but other murmurs, from the people linked to Chloe in her life, now cruelly linked to each other by her death - for as long as the identity of her own murderer should be unknown. Once it was known, then the links would be broken.

  The identity of that lover - another lover in disguise as Adam had been her, Jemima's, lover, and also Chloe's lover, in disguise - had it perhaps been staring her in the face all along? An identity which gave not only motive but opportunity.

  Certain things for the first time became clear to her. More than ever, Jemima needed to confront Sir Richard Lionnel.

  18

  That fatal Saturday

  As she re-entered the penthouse, Jemima felt all the old dread returning. Yet on this occasion it was tension for the role she knew she had to play rather than fear of the unknown which gripped her. For her, there were to be no more surprises in the short sad tale of the Chloe Mystery, only an unravelling which would also bring sorrow and a new form of tragedy in its wake. All the same, tension and a kind of nervous excitement would not be banished. It was almost as if the flat itself was aware of the strange concourse of people which Jemima, like Hagen in Gotterdämmerung, had summoned to the cause of revenge.

  She herself was no longer the tunic-skirted, bare-footed goddess of the morning's flight. Immaculate in a plain navy-blue dress with white collar and short sleeves, she was deliberately presenting her most unruffled image, what Cy Fredericks of Megalith was apt to term 'your Jemima of Arc bit'. Golden bell of hair carefully controlled, dark stockings on her long legs above the high-heeled scarlet sandals, she smiled grimly at the irony of this single, unavoidable splash of red. Her gold sandals, thongless, were still in the penthouse flat. She did not wish to present herself as the avenging angel, not quite in that lurid light; but her television training had made her automatically select those elements in her small wardrobe which would make up the appropriate passionless appearance.

  Already thus attired, she had called on Adam Adamson on her way up and invited him to attend some kind of mystery conference. Where he was concerned, mystery was, she knew, the right note to strike. Standing at the door of the third-floor flat - now his own domain - he was wearing the same clothes in which he had first waylaid her: white T-shirt, as pristine as Jemima's own dress, and jeans which looked newly washed. Should his cleanliness have made her more suspicious of his credentials as a squatter? On the other hand it had seemed logical that a revivifier should present a clean face to the world, and Adam himself had always rejected the label of squatter.

  'You can bring Laura with you, too, if she's around. And Tiger, for that matter, who seems to have grown attached to you. Though I should warn you that Isabelle Mancini is due to arrive upstairs at any minute. And she's apt to be rather strong on the subject of disloyalty as she sees it.'

  Adam smiled and indicated the floor of the flat with that grandiose wave of the hand he generally used to indicate the works of Sir Richard Lionnel. It looked like a very expensive luggage boutique: suitcases of all shapes and sizes, burgundy-coloured Cartier, Gucci, Hermes, any brand of luggage where initials were apt to be strewn all over the cloth or leather or tapestry, including innumerable small dressing-cases, were spread about.

  'I think I've discovered that for myself,' he said. 'These came round in a taxi with a letter which should by rights have ignited the paper it was written on. Laura tells me that Dollie - Chloe - wanted to make use of Isabelle's love letters. I can only suppose she had never received her written insults else she would have made use of them. This one was definitely worthy of inclusion in some anthology or novel'

  His next words reminded Jemima that Adam, among his other qualities, had always been able to read her thoughts.

  'Not very long, I think,' he went on. 'The luggage, I mean, its stay on this particular floor. Laura should really share a flat with Katy, don't you think? They both, in their different ways, need to strike out. Thank you for the invitation: Laura and Tiger and I will be happy to attend your mystery conference.'

  To Kevin John, Jemima merely said, much more briskly: 'There's going to be a reception. A reception and an explanation. Are you up to it?'

  'Who am I going to receive?' He had greeted her return with a cry of joy and the words: 'I knew you would come back and rescue me.' Then he gazed at her mesmerically with those vast blue eyes, which only the depth of their hue rescued from being cold and even calculating.

  Otherwise her entry was something of an anti-climax after the dramas of her previous arrivals. It was a relief merely to find Kevin John sitting in the white armchair, alive, and even fresh-looking. His hair, which was flopping over his forehead, gave the impression of being newly washed. Not much could be done about his crumpled white shirt and grey trousers, but his tie was fastened, and the jacket of his suit flung over his shoulders with some attempt at style.

  Jemima's first thought was of relief that he was no longer drunk. He did not even smell of alcohol, but, Jemima noticed wryly, of her own Mary Chess sandalwood bath oil which he must have found in the bathroom and poured out in quantities. Her second thought was to be surprised all over again, now he was tidied up, by his amazing good looks, undiminished by Time's rough hand.

  Kevin John had also done some kind of tidying-up job on the flat itself. The mess of sardines and biscuits had been eliminated - quite efficiently; but then Kevin John, who had boasted of being a good cook, was no doubt a good cleaner as well.

  There was one further change. On the floor, Chloe's own novels had been turned over onto their backs. Now all there was to be seen was the title Fallen Child, Fallen Child, over and over again. Jemima wondered if Kevin John, rather than the police, had been responsible for the original montage of accusing helpless photographs which she had found when she re-entered the penthouse. If so, he had repented of the gesture.

  'You are not going to receive anyone,' she told him, 'But through this door will come in a matter of time a small procession. Then we'll have a reception followed by an explanation. As for the guests - why not let their identity remain a surprise? But first I have to test something.'

  Jemima opened the cupboard in the corner of the sitting room, looked in then shut the door again, leaving Kevin John murmuring rather dazedly: 'A party, does she mean there's going to be a party -here? Maybe I should ask Dixie - no, Dixie's a bastard, ask Croesus, Croesus is a good fellow.' He found the word Croesus very difficult to pronounce clearly.

  Shortly after Jemima returned, the door was pushed open and Adam Adamson stood in the doorway. Tiger, a golden familiar, crouched on his shoulder. Laura Barrymore, another golden familiar, followed him. She had obviously dug into her expensive suitcases, since she had changed the bright green cat-suit for a pair of scarlet and black printed tiger-skin trousers and a transparent scarlet chiffon blouse; across this her numerous gold chains and red beads acted as a necessary breast plate. She no longer looked like a serpent, but with her spare curved body and hair now braided, she looked like some blonde Indian warrior.

  Before Laura had time to construct one of her gracious greetings, there was a noise behind her as though of some vessel propelled forward by a series of noisy gusts of wind. Isabelle Mancini, when she appeared, puffing heavily from the effort of the stairs, did indeed resemble some kind of stalwart ship, a trireme perhaps, her flailing arms in their grey draperies representing the oars. She also retained a certain splendid dignity as, chin well forw
ard, black hair strained back, she swept rather than pushed Laura out of the way, ignoring Adam altogether, and entered the penthouse flat.

  Then and only then did Isabelle judge the moment right to give a scream, as though at some monstrous sight, a freak of nature: 'Terr-r— rible child! Tr-r-raitor! What are you doing here? Tell me! Speak! I demand you speak at once! Speak! Talk to me of your disloyalty, your t-r-r-r-eachery . . .' It would never be known whether Laura Barrymore would indeed have spoken on these interesting topics, let alone whether Isabelle Mancini would have drawn breath for long enough for her to be allowed to do so. For at that moment there was a new, and in its own way more dramatic, arrival.

  Sir Richard Lionnel, perhaps because he was the owner of the stairs, positively bounded up them. There was no trace in his energetic manner and fit stride of the gravity with which he had entered the flat a week ago, accompanied by Pompey. His tonsured ring of black curly hair sprang from his head in its devil's horns, and his black eyes snapped and glittered with something which looked very like anticipatory joy.

  I am sorry, Sir Richard, thought Jemima, when she had received him, crossing her dark-stockinged knees discreetly and tugging at her short navy-blue skirt, these red shoes - which it was impossible to underplay - are not a portent. This is not a rendezvous. Nor do I wish to decorate the third-floor flat, or this flat, or any of your dwellings. Nor even live permanently in Montagu Square which no doubt you would offer me.