A Splash of Red

by Antonia Fraser

  Jemima went on, wrenching her thoughts back: 'But Chloe too had the right to use these same gardens. A right on the whole, she didn't exercise - too busy elsewhere, a cynic might say. Until one fine day, one fine night rather, Chloe forgot the keys to number seventy-three ... We shall never know the circumstances under which she forgot them, as a result of which she climbed into the square gardens (the key to the square was with the flat keys). She had the idea of sleeping out there, it was after all summer, and it was very hot. But it is tempting, is it not, to think she sought her own fate? Perhaps her story to me afterwards wasn't true; perhaps she didn't forget her keys - Chloe in that respect was the reverse of careless; perhaps after a dull evening out, she glimpsed Valentine lurking and the spirit of devilry took over; it's not important - and, I repeat, we shall never know. They're both dead now.'

  'What is important is the fact that that night, that fine wild summer's night, evidently inspired something new in Valentine, extinguished some long-held fear, conquered some inhibition, lit the vital fire so long laid. And Valentine - the resident lover, the lover with the key, became the lover in the gardens.

  'They had what Chloe afterwards called "a casual encounter" - a surprising one, short-lived, because she by this time was utterly determined to marry you, Sir Richard. It was also a carnal encounter. A very brief one. That short duration must have caused Valentine enough pain in itself, but cruellest of all was the fact that Chloe continued to tell him, her erstwhile lover for at least one passionate night, all about her plans for Richard Lionnel.

  'It was at this point that Valentine's Chloe-watching took a desperate turn. First he discovered a route up to this flat by the fire escape, at the back of the building. Again, was this discovery choice or chance? He told me the latter. But it's not important. What is important is that he also found a loose brick in the back wall, or loose enough, Sir Richard, with due respect to Lionnel Estates, for him to prise it away.

  'He did so. He probed further. He was confronted by a picture. Or rather the back of a picture whose front he knew well. This picture was called "A Splash of Red".' Kevin John gave a kind of groan.

  'It hung in her bedroom. He'd often seen it, as we see it now.' Jemima uncrossed her dark legs in their scarlet sandals and walked unhurriedly towards the bedroom doors. She opened them in the same deliberate fashion. The painting stared down at them, the violence of the subject matter made more shocking by the fact that the bedroom itself was now empty - clean, white, virginal - except for the white-shrouded bed.

  Isabelle shuddered. She said something which sounded like: 'R-r-repulsive.' She might have been referring to Valentine's behaviour.

  Jemima continued: 'In this picture Valentine cut a hole. To put it bluntly, a spy-hole.' She did not look to see if Kevin John, or for that matter Richard Lionnel, winced. 'And so Chloe-watching took on another dimension. Did she know? In this case I think it unlikely, but once again, we'll never know.

  'I'll pass over speculation and cut to Saturday, the fatal Saturday of her death. Several things happened on and around that day, leading up to her murder, and I'll try and put them in order, so that you, like me, can understand the tragic progression. On Friday evening Chloe installed me in the penthouse flat as caretaker and cat-sitter in her absence; this was primarily because Lionnel was worried that the Press would pick up his affair with Chloe, and she had the brilliant idea that I, of all people, being a member of the media, would be able to fend them off. I was of course quite innocent myself as to the true nature of her holiday. Then Chloe herself departed to spend the weekend - the weekend only - on the first floor while you, Sir Richard, took in your Downing Street meetings.

  'In the meantime I received two telephone calls, or rather two types of telephone call: the first came from Chloe's parents, who had expected to see her in Folkestone and never received the letter putting off the visit. The second came from Valentine and I think were obsessional calls no longer directed necessarily towards Chloe, or even towards me who received them; they were the measure of the madness which was now enveloping him.

  'Because, you see, Valentine had taken vengeance into his own hands and had tipped off Lady Lionnel in Sussex about her husband's secret little holiday with the pretty lady writer. There can be no question that that information was passed on deliberately. Whereupon Lady Lionnel insisted on coming up to London to confront her husband. And Valentine, he too was in London. He was here, not to warn Chloe as he pretended to me, but to gloat. You, Sir Richard, tried to warn her. But Valentine, the watcher, wanted to observe in his twisted way, his darling, his loved one, receiving her come-uppance at the hands of the woman he had deliberately set upon her.

  'Unfortunately it is now, quite independently, that Chloe has her inspiration about her parents. If the wife can stage a scene, so can the mistress. She's pinning everything on this holiday, but so far Sir Richard isn't rising to the bait - just invoking the name of his notoriously jealous wife. However, Chloe knows that her stepfather is still quite strong-minded enough in his late seventies to express himself forcibly on the subject of pregnancy and marriage to the highest in the land - in this case exemplified by you, Sir Richard. She had planned to tell you about her pregnancy while you're both abroad, but now this seems a better way to do it, more difficult for you to back out, a gambler's throw, perhaps, but then Chloe in her personal life was ever a gambler.'

  Sir Richard did not react, merely drew on his black cigarette. Against the light his expression remained unreadable. Jemima passed swiftly on: 'Chloe has written to her parents with a view to a visit and breaking the news to them personally. But Sir Richard's weekend session at number ten changes all that. She puts off her trip to Folkestone. Then she telephones her parents to invite them to London instead and discovers to her horror that her second letter putting off her visit hasn't arrived. In fact her first letter, confirming her visit, has arrived only that morning. She hasn't thought about them for so long, or written or visited them - hasn't needed them, you might say - that the normally careful Chloe has failed to note their change of postal address. They're so worried that they've already telephoned me to check up. Still, the dramatic news that Chloe is pregnant overrides everything. Her mother's too frail, but her step-father agrees to come up on Saturday afternoon.'

  Isabelle gave a gasp.

  'Mais c’est incroyable,' she exclaimed. 'She 'ated babies. Books not babies, 'ow many times 'ave I 'eard 'er say it?'

  'Not this baby, Isabelle. Because she thought it would help her in her plan. But it's now that there's a hitch. One thing she doesn't know about - you, Kevin John, you who have erupted back into her life like the splash of red you are - only she doesn't know it yet.

  'Kevin John, quite unknown to Chloe, had made an early-morning appearance in the penthouse and found me there. We'll draw a veil over that. He came back again at lunchtime. This was the fatal return. For this was the return which Valentine unexpectedly witnessed. Yes, Kevin John, he saw you. Through the hole in the picture. The hole he had made to spy on Chloe.'

  A reference to his own picture did at least penetrate Kevin John's consciousness. His fists clenched again and he swivelled his blue eyes in that direction. Then he delivered a stream of obscenities about the late Lord Brighton, which left Sir Richard unmoved, caused Adam to yawn, and provoked Isabelle to murmur something Gallic and disgusted.

  'You, Kevin John,' went on Jemima, 'the force of sexuality, of violence, all he could never be, all of which he confidently believed had been rejected from Chloe's life; Sir Richard - security - that he could understand. But your kind of rampant sexuality, never. It cracked something in him, to see you there, sent him mad. It was you who came back, Kevin John, just as the police thought, except you didn't kill her. You're so fatally at home, aren't you, or so he thought, with a razor in your hand. So she'd lied, lied all along, the one thing she never did to him, swore she never did. "I always tell the truth to Valentine, he can't resist that" - her own words to me.

 
'Never mind that Valentine wrongs Chloe. It's actually your razor, Sir Richard. She hasn't gone back to you, Kevin John. Far from it. She's not even present. Later, when she does return, she calls you a drunken slob, in effect throws you out. Valentine doesn't know that, for at this point he leaves, goes away, back into the gardens where you, Sir Richard, later spot him watching the house. Yes, it's Valentine Brighton you saw, Sir Richard, your country neighbour, the friend of your wife, the trouble-maker. From him, and his gossiping malicious mother, you flinch away.

  'Valentine Brighton waits in the square gardens until he sees you, Kevin John, leaving. From something you said to me earlier, I think you may also have glimpsed him. But you thought he was harmless, "that's impossible" you told me—'

  'Bloody harmless, was he?' exploded Kevin John. 'If I hadn't been such a' - more obscenities followed, applied equally to Kevin John himself and to Valentine Brighton - 'I'd have spotted what he was up to. Yes, I saw him in the gardens, lurking in the bushes, he was just the type, wasn't he? Not even a pansy, just a neuter. Impossible, yes I damn well did think it was impossible that he should be anybody's lover let alone banging away like that in the middle of central London—'

  'Then Valentine can't bear it any longer,' continued Jemima, thinking it prudent to cut short this tirade. 'He rushes back into the building. Runs up the front staircase this time. The front door of the penthouse is still open. Chloe's surprised. She's still in her white petticoat. Why?

  'Now the answer to that one is in fact very simple, although for a long time I didn't spot it. Like you, Kevin John, like Valentine himself, I thought she must be having a rendezvous in the penthouse with a lover, and that baffled me. The police of course thought she indulged in some kind of love scene with you, Kevin John. Or at least the preliminaries to it.

  'Then suddenly it came to me. When does a woman take off her clothes? Down to her petticoat. In the daytime. The reason is obvious. Not to receive a lover but to change them! She was in her own flat, wasn't she? She knew I was out. She'd come up to the flat simply to change her clothes. And why did she change? Why, quite simply to receive her stepfather suitably dressed for the occasion, for the confrontation. You all remember how meticulous Chloe was about that kind of thing - neat, the right clothes for the occasion.

  'You see, she only had holiday clothes downstairs with her. She wouldn't have wandered up the staircase in her petticoat. She came up here and merely took off her dress beside the sitting-room cupboard, where she had stored her London clothes to make room for mine in the bedroom.

  'At this point, before she has a chance to choose a dress the cat escapes and, frightened of the traffic outside, she dashes after it, all the way down to the basement, just as she told you, Kevin John. Which means she misses you coming up the stairs; you're by now in the bedroom; she returns, is about to put on another dress, when you, Kevin John, surprise her. Being Chloe she has already hung up the dress she has removed. But the cupboard, which she had locked the previous evening in my presence, is still open.

  'After your departure, Valentine rushes in. We'll never know exactly what happened then, since they're both dead. Perhaps she taunted him, teased him, flirted with him a little in her provocative way, not realizing the seriousness of the situation, of his madness. I think it more than likely she taunted him with her pregnancy: babies, as he once told me, horrified him. It was her, Chloe, that he wanted.

  'And so he killed her, killed her with one of your long sharp knives, Isabelle.' Isabelle gave a gasp and the tears started to flow again. 'The knives you gave her, before she cut your friendship to pieces.'

  'Cruel, poor little Chloe,' whispered Isabelle.

  'One stroke killed her: he was strong, expert, a sportsman, brought up in the country even though he had rejected it. The other stabs were for passion and love, and pain and frustration, and perhaps for all the other people she had loved and, in his tortured mind, betrayed him with.'

  'He left her. He left her dead in the bedroom, so that we know she must have led him in there, gone willingly. But it was no part of his plan to be discovered. No, it was now that the cold, detached, clever part of his mind took over. No scandal for Valentine Brighton - above all, no scandal which would break his mother's heart. Those last words of his to me in the Reading Room - "Poor Mummy, how will she bear it?" - not about his voyeurism after all, but the horror of her only son being a murderer. So away with the prints, the evidence, and even when you, Kevin John, are arrested, he still feels no compunction, no desire to protect you from the consequences of his own deed. For he summons me to the Reading Room again explicitly to reveal your presence at the scene of her death.'

  'But I'm jumping ahead. After he's killed her, the madness leaves him, he has to establish an alibi and fast. So he goes to the British Library, where he knows he'll find me. In fact he strikes lucky, sees me in the street on the way from the Pizza Perfecta, and tails me. It's easy then to sit down, deliberately clear the seat next to his (despite the fact its officially occupied) and rely on me discovering him, theoretically asleep. Then he talks of Lady Lionnel, of warning Chloe. He looked terrible then, ghastly. No wonder. He had just killed the one person - other than his mother - that he felt anything for in the world, and he knew he was sending me back to find her lacerated corpse.'

  'So that bastard set me up!' shouted Kevin John, brandishing a bottle which was nearly empty. 'He would have testified against me. And all the time he knew I hadn't killed her, because he'd fucking well done her in himself.' There was bewilderment as well as rage in his voice, as though he found such diabolical adult villainy directed towards himself hard to comprehend.

  Why pretend, thought Jemima. 'Yes, Valentine hated you,' she said directly to him. 'He was also deranged where you were concerned. He loved her but he hated you. Afterwards it was you he wanted to kill, extinguish, punish, as he had already punished her.'

  'May one enquire how you are going to prove all this?' asked Sir Richard coolly. Of them all he remained the most detached. Adam still looked white, shocked, and as a result, even younger. But Sir Richard was once more inspecting his splendid cuffs with their agate links. 'That policeman of yours, Inspector Portsmouth, isn't it? Is he going to be much impressed by all this analysis. What proof do you have after all? The man's dead. I did see him in the gardens - fair enough - but that's no evidence that he was about to commit a particularly revolting crime.'

  'The police have to believe her: she's Jemima Shore, Investigator!' Kevin John put the bottle to his lips and drained it, then leaping up, he rushed over to Lionnel. The latter stepped calmly backwards and sideways onto the balcony to avoid his rush.

  Kevin John took him by his tweed lapels.

  'You adulterous fascist shit. They have to believe her. I'm innocent, innocent, can't you understand that?'

  Lionnel, with continuing aplomb, merely plucked Kevin John's fingers from his coat, and stepped further away. He acted sharply but not violently: Jemima was reminded of his treatment of Tiger that Saturday evening - 'cats in their place'. Artists too, it seemed.

  'He's not guilty. That's clear,' said Isabelle reprovingly as though Sir Richard had somehow suggested that he was.

  'I believe you. It figures. But I hope you can prove it, because -otherwise, well - a dead man. A dead Lord. A dead Lord with, I take it, a live mother. Will the fuzz buy that one? I doubt it.' Adam spoke, not very loudly, but loud enough for Jemima to hear.

  'But you saw him there - in the gardens.' Kevin John, wielding the now empty bottle, was still menacing Lionnel; on the balcony, shouting at him, his face red, almost purple, his voice roaring; he looked quite out of control. 'You'll tell the police you saw him.'

  'Will I, indeed?' Sir Richard, moving one more pace away, sounded highly remote from the whole affair. 'I'll have to talk to my lawyers about that. Naturally I shall cooperate as and when may be necessary; but otherwise I see no need to be mixed up further in this filthy business.'

  He paused. 'Besides, I'm not at all s
ure that you're not guilty - please forgive me, Miss Shore, but I knew poor Valentine Brighton well, and of course Hope Brighton is one of Francesca's closest friends. We're country neighbours, you know what that means, one really gets to know people well, doesn't one, in the country, quite unlike these rather intense urban relationships.'

  Another pause. Sir Richard had moved; he no longer had his back to the light, so that the expression on his face was once more visible. Afterwards Jemima would always remember that there had been something mocking, malicious, cruel about that expression, as though he was the controlled matador to Kevin John's maddened, helpless bull. For the first time she saw the ruthless tycoon who had torn down the beautiful houses of Adelaide Square and built for profit the modern horror which had become Chloe's tomb, and might become the tomb of Lionnel's own reputation, were he to weaken.

  'Charming fellow, Brighton, in my opinion very much one of us,' he went on. "Wouldn't hurt a fly, hated shooting, any kind of blood sports; Francesca, who's much to that way of thinking herself, used to have wonderful talks with him about it. And Chloe, herself, she used to laugh about him. My tame tabby, my other pussy-cat, she used to call him. Whereas our friend here—'