An Expert in Murder (23 page)

gets on with it. How is Hedley, by the way? I didn’t realise until Josephine told me tonight that it was his girlfriend who was killed yesterday. I can’t believe I met her at the station and didn’t make the connection. He’ll be devastated. He was so in love with her, you know, it was really very sweet. And of course Bernie had become like a father to him over the last few months. It’ll feel like his whole world has collapsed when he finds out what’s happened now.’

‘Actually, we’re having a bit of trouble getting hold of Mr White,’ Penrose said, with an edge in his voice which was lost on neither Lydia nor Marta. ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea where he might be, do you?’

‘I haven’t seen him since the matinee,’ Lydia said, and Penrose was interested to note that her tone had lost some of its warmth.

‘If I had, I’d have no qualms about telling you. He wouldn’t do anything wrong, Archie. He’s just a boy.’

Fallowfield spoke up for the first time. ‘He had done something wrong, though, hadn’t he, Miss? The stage doorman says he was supposed to report to Mr Aubrey after the matinee this afternoon for some sort of disciplinary, but he never showed up. Do you know what that was about?’

‘I’ve really no idea, Sergeant, but I can’t imagine it was a matter for the police.’ She accepted the cigarette that Marta held out to her, and paused while it was lit. ‘He shares digs with Rafe Swinburne over the river. If he’s not there, I’ve no idea where you’ll find him, but I just hope he’s all right.’

‘Rafe Swinburne – you mentioned him earlier,’ Penrose said.

‘Why is Terry so keen on him?’

‘Well, partly out of sheer stubbornness. He hates Fleming so much that anyone who has some talent and fits the same sort of roles would be preferable. And Swinburne is talented – he’s made quite a success of things in
Sheppey
at Wyndham’s, helped along no doubt by his looks. Johnny’s a fool for a pretty face.’

At the mention of Wyndham’s Theatre, Penrose looked across at Fallowfield. ‘And does Rafe Swinburne want to take this role as much as John Terry wants to give it to him?’

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‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. He’s very ambitious. I’ve seen him work the room a couple of times now, and he certainly knows how to pull out all the stops.’

Marta made no attempt to disguise the contempt in her voice.

‘Has the world really come to that, Inspector? Are we all so shal-low now that we’ll kill for a part in a play? Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned motives that people used to murder for? At least they were a little more convincing.’

Protective Marta might be, but Penrose was beginning to lose patience with her sarcasm. He stood up, aware that Aubrey’s widow would be waiting for him. ‘My officers will be in the theatre for the rest of the night,’ he said. ‘You’re all welcome to stay here as long as you want to, but I’d be grateful if you didn’t go anywhere else in the building. When you’re ready to leave, the constable at stage door will call for a car to take you home.’ He reserved a smile for Josephine on his way out of the room, and paused at the door. ‘Last year, I had to investigate the murder of a young woman in Pimlico,’ he said, looking back at Marta. ‘She was a secretary in a large firm of solicitors, and she was strangled because she was allocated a desk that somebody else wanted. Not a very old-fashioned motive, I agree, Miss Fox, but I’m sure it seemed convincing enough to the woman who hanged for it.’

Penrose heard four bolts being shot back from their sockets and the jangle of keys in a lock before a maid opened the front door to admit him to the imposing house on Queen Anne’s Gate. What a shame, he thought, that Bernard Aubrey hadn’t shown the same concern for security in his theatres as he clearly had at home.

‘Mrs Aubrey’s upstairs, Sir,’ the woman said, with a balance of civility and economy born of many years in domestic service. ‘I’ll show you to the drawing room, and she’ll join you shortly.’

The room in which Penrose was asked to wait was of similar proportions to Aubrey’s office at the theatre and showed the same exquisite taste in its décor and furnishings, but the signs of everyday living which had personalised his study were entirely absent from the domestic space that he had shared with his wife. It was, 162

in fact, the sort of room in which no object was permitted to serve the purpose for which it had been created: the sofa – an elegant Chesterfield – was attractive but uninviting; the fireplace was beautifully polished but far too clean to have known much warmth; and the handful of books in a corner cabinet seemed chosen more to offset the light browns of the walnut than to entertain.

He had little doubt that, were he to take one down, he would find some of its gilt-edged pages still uncut. The masculine traces of cigarette smoke, so dominant in Aubrey’s office, were replaced here by a faint, violet-scented fragrance; by now, he was not surprised to trace its origin to a vase of irises, dark purple and all in full bloom, and so uniform in their display that only their perfume proved them to be the work of nature rather than man.

Just above the flowers hung an oil painting, and Penrose wondered if it had been chosen out of a spontaneous love for its beauty or merely with a shrewd eye to its future value. From what he knew of the man, Aubrey was capable of either. It was a beach scene, centred, he guessed, on one of those French coastal resorts that had become so fashionable in the second half of the last century. The foreground was dominated by men with elaborate bathing paraphernalia and women sporting crinolines and para-sols – all very different from the easy-going holidaymakers of his own age – and even the children were dressed in the finest of clothes and hats, with no prospect, it seemed, of venturing into the tame sea beyond. Penrose didn’t need to look at the signature to know that the painting was by Eugène Boudin: studying in Cambridge, he had been lucky enough to have the Fitzwilliam’s fine collection of Impressionism on his doorstep and he had always been drawn to these small, quietly beautiful paintings, much preferring them to the louder canvases of Boudin’s more famous con-temporaries.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? It was my husband’s favourite painting. The beach is at Trouville in Normandy, and he used to spend his summer holidays there as a child. Unfortunately, his more recent memories of France were less happy.’

The words were spoken softly but carried authority, and he 163

turned to greet a woman whose appearance was in perfect harmony with her voice. Grace Aubrey was tall and elegant, with an intelligence in her face that the lines of age had only served to intensify.

Unusually for a woman in her sixties, and perhaps only because of the hour, she wore her hair long and loose, making it easy for Penrose to imagine how she had looked in her youth, before the deep browns were tinged with grey. Without question, she was still beautiful and – despite his professional instinct to question appearances – Penrose found it hard to reconcile the Aubreys’ visual com-patibility with their reputed marital differences.

‘You know, after the war he could hardly bear to look at it any more,’ she said, her eyes still on the painting. ‘I suppose it’s not right to mourn such a thing when so many people didn’t come back at all, but it seems to me that the loss of a sense of beauty is as tragic as the loss of life.’ She sat down at one end of the settee and invited Penrose to take the other, brushing his condolences efficiently aside.

‘This has come as a great shock to me, Inspector, but I’m not going to waste your time by pretending that relations between my husband and I were anything other than habitual. I’m sorry he’s dead, of course I am. We all hope for the privilege of hanging on until our last natural moment, and no human being should die as he did – your sergeant was very diligent in his efforts to spare my feelings, by the way, but I can’t imagine any poison being painless.

That said, it would be ridiculous to claim a grief which I simply don’t feel.’

Penrose doubted that anyone had ever had cause to think Grace Aubrey ridiculous. ‘When did you last speak to your husband?’ he asked, confident now that he would be told everything he needed to know with a frankness which was refreshing, if a little disconcerting.

‘This morning, at breakfast. He left for work as usual at about half past nine. I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t come home by the time I went to bed. He often stays out late, either working or socialising, so I didn’t expect to see him until tomorrow morning.’

‘And you didn’t speak on the telephone?’

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‘No. We led very separate lives, Inspector. There was little enough to talk about when we were in each other’s company, and certainly nothing important enough to warrant a telephone call.’

‘How long had you been married?’

‘It would have been forty-one years next month, although we stopped marking anniversaries a lifetime ago.’

‘That’s a long time to stay together if you were both unhappy.’

‘Are you married, Inspector?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. The idea that you stay together if you’re happy and part if you’re not tends to be one held by single people. It wasn’t as straightforward as that. I can’t speak for Bernard, but I don’t remember ever actually being
un
happy. We were both privileged to start off with, and he always worked hard to make sure we stayed that way, so we never wanted for anything, materially speaking.

And it wasn’t that we didn’t get on – it’s just that we never created that spark of joy in each other’s lives that makes everything else irrelevant. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but any of the pleasures that I did take from our life together would not have been lessened had he not been there to share them.’ She looked down at her hands, and gently touched her wedding ring. ‘I was a little harsh on you just then, Inspector. I’m sorry, and perhaps you’re right; perhaps if we had been unhappy rather than merely bored we might have separated and looked for happiness elsewhere. But when you’re neither one thing nor the other, time slips away before you realise that there might be something more.’

Guessing that Aubrey’s widow would despise any form of pre-varication, Penrose decided to make his questions as direct as possible. ‘Were you always faithful to each other?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘You seem very sure. Can you speak so certainly for your husband?’

‘I can afford to be sure, if only for the simple reason that I wouldn’t have minded if he had strayed. There would have been no need for him to lie about it. I might even have been relieved, although of course you never know when jealousy will strike. No, 165

we were both too lazy to have an affair.’ She took a cigarette from the silver box on the table beside her and paused to light it.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘A son, Joseph. He lives in Gloucestershire. He and Bernard were never very close – they were far too much alike to get on well, and Bernard always resented the fact that Joe didn’t want anything to do with his precious theatres. And thank God he didn’t, bearing in mind what’s happened to his father.’

‘Did he have enemies, then?’

‘Clearly he did, Inspector. I would have thought that much was obvious.’

‘But specifically within the theatre? You seem to blame his work for his death.’

‘Bernard was a powerful man. He made careers and he destroyed them. His decisions were invariably right but often ruthless, and he made them with no thought for sentiment or even loyalty. And he was found poisoned in the private area of his theatre.

You’re the detective, of course, but the evidence does seem to point in that direction.’

Penrose resisted the temptation to return the charge of seeing things too simply. ‘I believe your husband’s death is connected to another murder which took place on Friday. Does the name Elspeth Simmons mean anything to you?’

She thought for a moment. ‘The girl who was killed at King’s Cross? I read about it in the paper tonight but I’d never heard of her before that. What makes you think Bernard’s death had anything to do with hers?’

‘She was involved with one of his employees – a young man named Hedley White. I gather your husband thought a lot of him and was very upset at the news of Miss Simmons’s death.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t really help you there. He did talk fondly about Hedley – I remember because it’s an unusual name – and he was certainly a great believer in giving young people a chance, but I can’t be more specific than that.’

‘Had you noticed any change in his behaviour recently?’ Penrose asked, although he was rapidly coming to believe that Grace 166

Aubrey knew too little about her husband’s life to be able to throw much light on his death. ‘At the risk of being too straightforward, had he been unhappy?’

She smiled at him with a growing respect. ‘At the risk of being pedantic, I’d say angry rather than unhappy. He always had a short temper, but it was usually soon over. Lately, he often seemed worried or frustrated.’

‘Do you have any idea why?’

‘When Bernard was angry, it was usually because he couldn’t get his own way over something, but don’t ask me what.’

‘I know it’s unlikely, bearing in mind the manner of his death, but can you imagine anything that might have led Bernard to take his own life?’

‘No. Absolutely nothing. He had no great faith to prevent him from doing it, but after all he went through in the war and all the lives he saw snatched away before they were ever really begun, he scorned suicide as the coward’s way out. That was something he never was – a coward – and he despised it in other people. He had a bleak view of the world and he could be very hard on himself at times, usually because of things he hadn’t done that he thought he should have, but he always claimed that the greatest punishment for any sin was to go on living.’

Penrose wondered if the sin for which Bernard Aubrey had felt the need to repent went back as far as the war. He asked as much, and was rewarded once again with a look of approval.

‘What makes you think that, I wonder? You’re right, though.

Bernard had a terrible time, and he came back a very different man. Not broken, you understand, but with a combination of resentment and guilt which ran deeper than the grief we all felt to some extent.’ She lit another cigarette but lodged it almost immediately in the ashtray, where it burned steadily down, forgotten.