At Death's Door (14 page)

“Yes. Not something one normally talks about in detail. It must have been about ten to ten, or a bit before.”

“Which, er, cubicle were you in?”

“The middle one. There are three, and I was in the second along. It has a . . . well . . . a nasty piece of graffiti scrawled on the door. A male organ with a rude message underneath. I expect it's a sign of growing old, but women's loos would
never
have had that sort of thing in a respectable pub in my younger days. Is it a change for the better? I really can't persuade myself that it is. Anyway, that's where I was.”

“And then the shot came?”

“That's right. I looked at my watch not long after, when I'd absorbed the implications, and it said eight minutes to ten. I
knew
, you see, that it was a shot, and I knew it came from directly above me. There were no open windows anywhere in the ladies' loo, and I could
feel
the sound, the impact, from above me. Does that sound silly?”

“Not at all.”

“So I sat there thinking: Whose room would that be? And of course everyone staying at the hotel had registered Dame Myra and noted which was her room. I'd seen her going in and out more than once. As soon as I got my ‘architect's eye' working, I realized her room was directly above me.”

“And you thought you ought to say something?”

Mrs. Goodison looked troubled.

“Yes.
Please
don't think I'm prejudging things or trying to put ideas into your head, but you see, earlier in the evening— Well, I'd better explain in detail. I was sitting reading in the bar for most of the evening. It had seemed a pleasant place, and it's nicer than shutting oneself up in one's room; one can have a drink, and there are people
round one to look at now and again. I enjoy sizing people up, listening to them. But I don't actually want to
talk
, not if I've got a good book. Well, there was this silly woman—”

“Do you know her name?”

“I'm afraid not. And ignore that ‘silly.' I barely spoke to the woman. I was merely reacting to the way she dressed. Anyway, she sat at my table before dinner, when there were very few seats left in the bar. She hadn't intruded, as I'd feared, but I'd observed her from behind my book, as I like to. She was very much taken up with Myra Mason and her family at a table nearby. Noticing everything that was to be noticed. Well, there was nothing very remarkable about that; practically everyone in the bar was conscious that there was a celebrity in our midst. Anyway, after dinner—no, wait. I did notice during dinner that this woman went up to Dame Myra's table.”

“And spoke to her?”

“Yes, spoke to all of them. Rather nervously, I suspected, as if she wasn't sure of her reception.”

“And was it an amicable encounter?”

“I think so. . . . No sign of anything else that I saw. Though the woman, as I say, was standing tensely, fluttering her hands, and so on—jerky might be the best word. Well, after dinner, she was sitting at a table near mine. There were fewer in the bar by now, so she could have a table to herself. She still seemed rather jumpy. Then twice she got up and went into the hotel part of the building, and after the second time, I saw her talking to Dame Myra's husband and his group. When she came back to her seat, she leaned over to me at my table and said—do you want her exact words?”

“If you can remember them.”

Pamela Goodison screwed up her eyes. “Let me see. ‘It's really rather awful. There's a terrible row going on
upstairs between Dame Myra and her daughter. And her husband won't do anything about it.' ”

“What did you say?”

“Something soothing about it not being unknown for parents and children to quarrel. And she said: ‘But this is
violent.
They are fighting. It's awful for me. Because in a way I'm connected with them.' Obviously I was supposed to ask how she was connected, but I knew that
that
would have spoiled the rest of my evening, so I made a few sympathetic clucking noises, said I was sure it would all blow over, and went back to my book.”

“I see. And you remembered that conversation when you heard the shot.”

“Yes. But there was no row while I was in the loo, and I'm
not
suggest—”

Meredith put up his hand.

“And I'm not suggestible, Mrs. Goodison. I don't jump to conclusions. Please give me credit for that. Anyway, this lady effectively made sure that the whole bar knew about the quarrel upstairs.”

“That was certainly the effect. Whether it was the intention, I don't know. But if she was connected with the Masons by some
family
link, it certainly seems an odd way to behave.”

“One more point, Mrs. Goodison. While you were . . . there in the toilets—”

“Yes? Oh, dear, this is the best-documented trip to the loo of my whole life.”

“Did you hear anything else? Anyone running down the stairs? Any of the doors slamming? Things like that.”

Mrs. Goodison wrinkled her forehead. “That's very difficult to say. A shot one remembers, but normal hotel noises one would hardly even register. And would one hear them in there? The stairs are well-carpeted . . . Wait. I was of course more conscious
after
the shot. While I was
trying to work out which room it had been in. I
think
I heard the fire-escape door shut—I wouldn't swear to it, but I think so. But it's not something I could take my oath on in court—”

• • •

It all tallied precisely, as Inspector Meredith had known it would. Mrs. Goodison was a first-rate witness, the witness of any policeman's dreams. On the door of the central cubicle of the ladies' lavatories there was a crudely drawn penis with “T
HERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE
B
RITISH BANGER
” scrawled underneath. There were several other examples of similar wit here and there around the little cubicle, including lesbian and feminist wit: “N
ICE GIRLS DO IT TOGETHER
” and “T
HERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH MEN THAT CASTRATION DOESN'T CURE
.” It was all pretty much on a level with a men's lavatory, but Meredith was sure that Mrs. Goodison was right: Twenty or thirty years ago the door would have been bare.

Where she had been sitting was directly under Myra Mason's room—directly under the door of it, where the report would have been loudest. Here there would be the least likelihood of confusing it with a backfiring car outside.

It was as he was emerging (with that slightly furtive air that was inevitable) from the ladies' lavatories that Meredith was stopped.

“Excuse me. You are the policeman on the Myra Mason case, aren't you?”

It was a whole family, one that had clearly waited for him at the bottom of the stairs. Both father and mother were fresh faced, healthy types, sensibly dressed for outdoors, with modest English tans. They had two girls and a little boy dressed in down-to-earth, dirtiable clothes.

Meredith nodded.

“You see we heard about the shooting, inevitably, when
we got back last night, and now we've heard all the people talking in the village.” The father stopped.

“We're worried, you see,” the wife took up, “because people say the daughter has been arrested.”

“People say all sorts of things,” said Meredith. “That's not in fact the case.”

“Oh, I
am
glad. We had to come and see you, though, because in fact we saw her.”

“Saw Cordelia Mason? Where?”

“Down on the beach. We were all down there. We had a late swim, and we'd been collecting shells.”

“When did you see her?”

“That's easy. When the light failed. We were about to start up the cliff path. We let the children stay up late on holiday, you see, but this was really late. Say half past nine.”

“We'd seen her earlier in the bar,” said the husband. “When they all four were sitting there, before dinner. There's no question that it was her. She's a big girl, and one noticed her. She was walking on the beach—looking very thoughtful, maybe unhappy. She started up the cliff path after us.”

“How long after you?”

“Two or three minutes. We saw her beneath us.”

“And when did you get back here?”

“Just before ten. It was absolute bedlam in here.”

“And there is only the one path up?”

“Just the one. And she didn't pass us on the way. We're really glad she is not under arrest.” He looked at his wife, both of them glad they'd done their duty. “If anybody's in the clear, she is.”

T
HE RED LION AT MAUDSLEY
had been modernized ten years before Myra's death there, but it had not been made luxurious. It was not that sort of hotel. Its clientele in the spring and summer months were mainly walkers, or middle-class couples in cars, many of them elderly. There were also families who wanted the sea without all the horrors of the British sea
side.
They had money to spend but not to chuck around. Those who had money to chuck around—usually company money, other people's money—went to classier establishments in large towns.

Myra Mason's room—or, rather, the Ashes' room—had a bathroom annex, but so did most of the other rooms, and its superiority to them consisted mainly in its being slightly larger and having a little extra furniture: two armchairs instead of one, an occasional table on which room-service meals could be set out, and an elaborate dressing table that Myra had made good use of. It was still fairly basic: The wallpaper seemed to have been chosen at random, and the picture over the bed was any old
Spanish street corner in any old Spanish town. Any individuality the room had had been given it by Myra herself.

The body of Myra was no longer there. It had lain back against the pillow on the left-hand side of the bed, with a hole through the temple. The bullet had gone through the bedhead and into the wall behind. From its position it was clear that Myra had been lying on her back—thinking? meditating revenge on her daughter?—had struggled upward when her murderer had come into the room, and had sunk back when she had been shot. There had been on her face an expression that Meredith found difficult to define: surprise, bewilderment—neither word quite summed it up. Puzzlement perhaps came nearest. Not so much “Why are you shooting me?” (as it might be, if, say, her new husband had appeared in the doorway with a gun in his hand) as “Who are you?” or “What are
you
doing
here
?” But expressions on dead faces, Meredith knew, could be misleading or worse; trick reactions of muscles could render them farcically inappropriate comments on the actual circumstances of death.

Yet the expression remained with him: Who are you? What on earth is happening? Is this a joke?

The body had gone, and the gun had gone. It had been dropped on the carpeted floor not far from the door. He would be getting a report on that, too, before long. Guns had not loomed very large in Meredith's criminal investigations hitherto; by no means as large as if he had been an American policeman or one active in one of the larger British cities. Two questions occurred to him: The murderer had left the gun rather than taken it with him. Less potentially incriminating that way, presumably. But what did that tell him about the murderer?

And then there was the question of a silencer.

This was a question that had never come up in Meredith's experience, but it intrigued him. He knew enough
about them to know that Granville Ashe, on going up to the room he had shared with his wife, could not have shot her with a revolver that had a silencer attached, removed the silencer, then rushed downstairs. The time factor, so far as he had grasped it from the testimony of all the people waiting at the door downstairs, rendered this an impossible supposition. But was there some other possibility? That Dame Myra had been shot
earlier
with a silencer and the shot Mrs. Goodison heard had been a mere blind, to establish an alibi, maybe? No—that wouldn't work. Someone had to be in the room, making the noise.

Meredith shrugged off the temptation to go up blind alleys and turned his attention to what this drab, characterless hotel bedroom actually told him.

The wardrobe was less full than he might have imagined, but then, he had no evidence that Myra had intended to stay beyond a few days. A very smart woolen suit, a severely cut skirt, and four really beautiful dresses—simple, shapely, of subtle, not readily definable colors. A lady who was conscious of her appearance, but cleverly rather than ostentatiously so. Expensive clothes, nevertheless. Much more so than her husband's, which took up as much space in the wardrobe and which were never more than goodish. Granville was better, though, at leisure wear—pleasant, sporty, light clothes, suitable for summer days near the sea. Nothing Myra had could remotely have been described as informal. Meredith guessed that she had never had a lot of time for leisure.

This was confirmed by some of the personal things around the room. Whereas Mrs. Goodison had brought books with her, Myra had brought scripts. There were no books at all, at least not ones for leisure reading. Instead, there was one of this year's new plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Shaw's
Getting Married
, a new translation of a Strindberg, an Edward Bond script, and
The Cherry Orchard.
It was the
Ayckbourn or the Strindberg that she had been reading before she died—both of them were facedown on her bedside table. Meredith glanced at them. The Strindberg was
The Father.
A suitable play for a woman in a rage? he wondered. The Ayckbourn was apparently a middle-class comedy with a strong central role for a middle-aged woman. All the plays were heavily marked in red—words underlined in the main woman's part, little lines suggestive of possible intonations, pauses marked in. Myra, as everyone agreed, was a professional.