At Death's Door (22 page)

“That's the thing about these independent women,” said Meredith, thinking this was a topic on which the
Telegraph-reading
landlord would probably have highly traditional views. “When it comes to the nitty-gritty, they're as dependent on a man as anybody else.”

“That's right.”

“No sign of a new husband in the offing?”

The landlord laughed. “She won't be without a man for long, not our Pamela, that's the general opinion in here. Some of the things she used to get up to while he was away you wouldn't credit. Mind you, she's quieter now she's getting on a bit. As to husbands, I don't know. It's always more difficult for a woman, isn't it? At least it is once they get past the forty mark. Not that she isn't an attractive woman still, mind.”

“Very much so, when I saw her.”

“That's not to say she can pull in a husband, though, is it? She had a younger chap hanging around for a while not so long ago. Fair-haired, slightly poncey type, actorish.”

“Probably was an actor.”

“Oh, he was. One of our regulars had seen him in something down Guildford way—something Shakespearean, I think he said. Perfectly nice bloke, but you felt if you blew too hard he'd disappear. We thought they might get together permanently—it happens these days once in a while, doesn't it? Younger blokes and older women. But I haven't seen him around lately, so I expect he took fright.
That's the problem with these very positive women, isn't it? They put men off, because they always take the lead. Men don't go for that sort of thing.”

Some men do, thought Meredith.

“Yes, sir, what can I get you?”

As the landlord bustled away to serve another customer, Meredith hugged himself on his discoveries. It has all been a performance! Those archetypally middle-class clothes, the string of pearls, the travel luggage and the reading matter—all a meticulously built up piece of role-playing. Helped, no doubt, by the roles she had herself played on stage and television in her time. He realized now that his uneasiness about the shot—his toying with the idea that it was some kind of blind to conceal the real time of the murder—was really a subconscious sense of the staginess of it all: the fact of Mrs. Goodison's having been immediately below the bedroom when the shot was fired, the scene—what other word was there?—of her publicly persuading Ashe to go and investigate, the discovery of the murder: pure Agatha Christie first-act curtain.

And above all, the too perfect assumption of the role of the country gentlewoman. The person who never, in any respect, clashes with expectation, always conforms to type, is not a person at all but a performance.

The question was, what to do now? Not talk to Pamela Goodison, that was for sure. She was going to prove a very tough nut to crack. That was clear from the landlord's description of her. Guildford seemed to be a place ripe for investigation. Someone at the theater would surely know about Ashe's affairs. Possibly whatever there was between them had started when she was acting there. He had a comfortable sense that Ashe was certainly not going to prove as tough a nut as his mistress—a very soft nut indeed, probably. But what he wanted was to have the affair well documented before he confronted
Mrs. Goodison with the fact that he had penetrated behind her facade.

“So you'll have to find another man to supervise your renovation,” said the landlord, coming back.

“That's right, I will.”

“Clever bloke, but none too stable, I always thought. Same goes for his wife.”

“Don't think I'll go over and offer condolences,” said Meredith, finishing his pint. “It'd seem funny, two years after the event.”

“Would rather. Fancy your thinking her the quiet, genteel type! She really had you fooled!”

But Meredith was impressed, some days later, when he knocked on the door of number 37, after extensive investigations at Guildford and elsewhere on the theatrical circuit, to find the door opened to him by an impeccably genteel Pamela Goodison. Sensible skirt and blouse, delicate, understated makeup, tactfully permed hair. This was caution! This was foresight! She had anticipated the possibility of further police interest in her. The performance was beautifully maintained during the tea and biscuits she served him in the sitting room and throughout the long and grueling inquisition he subjected her to afterward. Even when he drove her in the police car down to Cottingham, she remained her cool self: well-bred, ineradicably genteel.

It was much, much later, after many hours of questioning, that she screamed at him a series of short, hard epithets that are seldom heard on polite lips in the Home Counties.

W
HEN MEREDITH CALLED
at the Old Rectory two days after his second meeting with Pamela Goodison, he said: “I thought I ought to fill you in a little, clear a few things up.”

Caroline nodded nervously, called Roderick, and they all went into the sitting room.

“Is Miss Mason around?” Meredith asked. “She's really the most closely involved of all.”

Pat had gone off earlier for an evening swim, but Cordelia could be seen down by the tent, reading in the fading light. She had been avoiding the Cotterels recently and had done no further research on her book. Roderick went down to fetch her, and Caroline turned on the television for Becky.

“I'd better settle her down in front of it,” she said, smiling almost propitiatingly at Meredith. “I suppose this is going to take some time.”

It was a summer blockbuster—a version of a steamy Faulkner novel starring actors from American soaps who
wanted to take their clothes off in something classy. Caroline wrinkled her nose and switched over to something that Becky would enjoy more.

“That's what gave me the idea,” said Meredith, nodding toward the screen as Roderick and Cordelia came into the room. “Last time I came here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You must have noticed how people who watch a lot of television spend hours discussing what they've seen the actors in before? You know: ‘Was she the one who played Caligula's sister in
I, Claudius,
or was she one of the nurses in
Shroud for a Nightingale
?' ”

“That's true,” said Caroline. “People are doing it all the time. I suppose we do it ourselves.”

“You were doing it when I was here last. The television regulars become kinds of friends, but rather vaguely remembered. You see them in so many series, you mix them up. What struck me, though it hadn't come to the surface, was how many people in the bar that evening had said—either to me or to one of my men—that they thought they'd seen Mrs. Goodison before. Most of them said it in passing and weren't worried about it; maybe she lived not far away or had stayed there before or had passed through.”

“So you had to establish that she hadn't?”

“In an offhand way she'd done that herself. She'd said the bar ‘had seemed a pleasant place,' as if she had only encountered it the evening of the murder. Eventually the landlord checked his records and found she had never stayed there before. How to account for the feeling in so many disparate people that they'd seen her before? I remembered a colleague who had cheerily greeted a friend in Harrod's, and puzzled for twenty minutes over who it could be. Eventually he realized it was one of the stars of
Emmerdale Farm
.”

“You mean there's no clear boundary anymore between real life and screen life?” asked Roderick.

“I don't think there is. And thinking of television, and noting how people argue about what they've seen people in, everything fading into everything else . . .”

“Yes?”

“It's difficult to put it into words, but I wondered whether the people who thought they'd seen her before, and I in a different way, hadn't been reacting to a television performance in a prestige production. To put it bluntly, I began to wonder if I hadn't been too easily fooled, and if Mrs. Goodison was not altogether too perfect a type.”

“We none of us met her,” said Roderick. “But even if we had, I don't suppose we would have realized that where we'd seen her before had been on television. You expect life and television to be two quite separate things—like having a friend you always see when you go to Manchester and then unexpectedly meeting him in Paris. It disorientates you.”

“Let's sit down,” whispered Caroline, nodding toward Becky, who was raptly watching a wildlife program. She led them to the other end of the sitting room. They sat around in the little group of chairs, Cordelia clearly feeling rather awkward, the two Cotterels watchful, and hoping it did not show. Only Meredith appeared completely relaxed.

“Myra Mason noticed her, too,” Meredith resumed. “Much quicker than me, naturally. Now I can piece together—conjecturally, of course—what happened. She was studying plays sent by her agent, in particular a new Alan Ayckbourn one. It's about a middle-class woman who gradually throws off all inhibitions and restraints and becomes an elderly punk, with disastrous results. It wasn't a part she could draw on much of herself for, particularly the respectable, repressed woman of the early scenes, so she did what you, Miss Mason, told me she normally did
in such cases: She started studying someone—her walk, her gestures, her clothes, and so on.”

“And the person she picked on,” contributed Roderick, “was Mrs. Goodison.”

“Yes. The perfect middle-class type. But being what she was, an actress, it wouldn't have taken Myra Mason long to realize that what she was studying was itself an act—not necessarily that of an
actress
but certainly that of someone to whom the role of middle-aged, upper-middle-class gentlewoman did not come naturally. It wouldn't have taken her long to realize that she had in fact seen this woman before. Being the professional that she was, she was more able to pin down where she'd seen her than the people in the Red Lion: She
was
an actress, and she'd seen her on television. Before long she remembered what in: a series called
The Oaken Heart
and a short play called
The Blush
, based on a short story by Elizabeth Taylor—the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, of course. I think she was very intrigued by this; hence, the noting of the two pieces down on her notepad. If she mentioned her suspicions to Granville, then she must have sealed her fate; she had to be killed as soon as possible.”

They all thought for a moment.

“You are quite sure, are you, that Granville was in it to that extent?” asked Caroline.

“What's the alternative?”

“That when Granville was taken from her by Myra, this Mrs. Goodison determined to get him back and get her revenge on Myra Mason at the same time. Then when she appeared at the Red Lion, Granville was horrified, felt bound to conceal the fact that he knew her, but had nothing to do with the actual murder; that was of her conceiving, her execution.”

“That would be more consistent with the Granville we know,” put in Roderick.

“Ah, but you don't
know
Granville Ashe at all,” objected Meredith. “You've met him, which is rather different. I must admit that I did toy with the notion. He seemed so weak and somehow anonymous. And in the last few days, under questioning, he's tried to foist that idea on me, too. But it simply doesn't hold water. If you think about it, the whole setup was designed primarily to give Granville Ashe an alibi. He must have insisted upon that—being the more craven of the two but also the one most obviously open to suspicion. He insisted that for the whole period of time he would be vouched for—and by plenty of people. He never even went to the lavatory, notice.”

“Is that significant?” asked Roderick. “Why should he?”

“He was drinking in the bar before dinner, the Mason table at dinner had two bottles of wine, he was drinking beer after dinner, yet he never went for a pee. A good bladder? No doubt—but your average drinker would have gone, would have made himself comfortable. No—the whole scenario was designed to ensure that he had an alibi, a watertight one.”

“But how long had the plan been hatching?” asked Caroline.

“Probably in embryo since Myra began showing interest.”

“Meaning the affair with Mrs. Goodison was never really broken off?”

“No, I don't think so.”

“And the motive?”

“Oh, money, of course. From the moment Granville saw the London flat and the house in Pelstock, the thought must have been there. What were they, after all? A third-rate actor, used to provincial digs and perpetual shifts to make do, and a woman, used to moderate luxury, who had been left by her husband very much less well off than she had expected. Myra's two residences would fetch, together, anything up to half a million, quite apart from
cash, shares, jewels, and the rest. So when it became clear that Myra was interested in Granville as a
husband
, that must have crystallized plans no end.”

“Why
was
she, I wonder?” mused Caroline. “Interested in him as a husband, I mean.”

“She wanted someone to leave her money to,” said Cordelia. “I guessed that.”

“I think that's right,” said Meredith. “You've mentioned her habit of sailing into things without thinking of the consequences. I think that's what happened in this case. Her daughter had found a man, had left her to live with him, and she had heard rumors of the book about her. Probably that's what really got her goat—the book. So Cordelia had to be disinherited—but in favor of whom? She suddenly came face-to-face with the realization that she had nobody. Not at all a nice discovery for a woman of her age. Consequently, she clutched at the first straw: a pleasant, undemanding, subservient sort of man.”

“As she saw him,” observed Roderick.

“As he
is
, I'm sure. On the surface. Unfortunately for her, he must be a whole lot of other things underneath the surface. But I doubt if he was the initiator of the plans for the murder. That, I feel sure, was Pamela Goodison's doing. It has that daredevil quality that people have mentioned in connection with her. It was a brilliant improvization.”