At Death's Door (23 page)

“Based on the quarrel between Myra and Cordelia?” asked Caroline.

“To a degree, yes. They must have been pretty sure from the beginning that something would come up there. Granville had met Cordelia as a child, remember, and had no doubt heard rumors of Myra's treatment of her later. But if it hadn't, something—some row or other—would have come up elsewhere. That was part of Myra Mason's life-style.”

“So once the will was made and signed, all he had to do was foment things in the subtlest possible way?”

“That's right. I gather they went down to the local in Pelstock more than Myra had been accustomed to. Natural enough, now there was a husband to consider, and easy enough to get Myra to agree to, once she knew that Pat and Cordelia had left the area. But Granville knew, of course, that that was one place where they were likely to hear news of you, Miss Mason. It was all done in the most indirect way—just as, once he was here, he professed himself quite willing to act as peacemaker but implied there had to be a raging row before the peace processes could operate.”

“Perfectly reasonable, if you knew Myra,” said Roderick.

“Yes, and if you knew the long-standing nature of her daughter's grievances. But in fact he had got the message through to Pamela Goodison—of where they'd be and when, and of the likelihood of a blowup.”

“I feel a bit like a pawn,” said Cordelia.

“In fact, you were the most important piece,” said Meredith. “Though in the event you turned out to be next to useless.”

“After that, I presume, he left all the planning to Mrs. Goodison,” said Caroline.

“The real decisions, yes. Once Myra's plans for the evening were known, he communicated them to her. She told him to stick to the bar, have plenty of witnesses—that's why he went to sit next to the Critchleys, known toadies—wait for her to give the sign, and to stay put when he heard the shot. And she told him to make sure that when he went to Myra's room, he was to spend a minimum of time there. All of which he did, because that gave him the alibi he had insisted upon from the outset.”

“It was a good plan,” said Caroline, “a clever plan. If Cordelia hadn't been put in the clear, it would have worked.”

“To a degree,” said Meredith. “I don't see that we could have got much of a case together for the courts, but in any event, Miss Mason would be the chief suspect and would remain under suspicion for the rest of her life. That was the only thing that went wrong. Otherwise, the thing went perfectly: She reconnoitered the ladies' lavatories to provide circumstantial backup for her story, and at what she judged to be the best moment, she simply left the bar as if to go to the lavatory and went up and shot her.”

“How did she get in?” asked Roderick.

“The door was not locked, but earlier she had borrowed Granville's key, so there was no problem. When she switched on the light, Myra struggled up in the bed, unable to think
why
this woman, whom she'd been watching, should be in her room. Then Mrs. Goodison shot her. She dropped the gun and went coolly off down the main stairs, though she later mentioned the fire escape to throw us off the scent. The finding of the body went like a dream—or like a well-crafted mystery play—and the whole bar came to the door to provide witnesses for Granville's story.”

“Do you think they were seriously rattled by Cordelia's being seen on the beach?”

“Concerned, anyway. I don't think Pamela Goodison rattles easily. But there was Granville Ashe's attempt to make Cordelia accept part of her mother's fortune—an offer, I suspect, that would have turned out to be considerably less generous than it seemed at first sight had she accepted. They still had Pat and collusion between the two as a possibility to suggest. But collusion was a notion that they did not want to draw attention to. So they started nudging me in the direction of your sister, sir.”

“Isobel? Poor old Isobel? Whatever reason could she have for killing Myra?”

“That was the question. One I gave some thought to—thanks to them. Mrs. Goodison had been handed her
on a plate by Isobel's sitting next to her on the night of the murder and confiding in her her connection with the Mason family. So Mrs. Goodison played that card even on our first conversation—realizing that she might need someone to fall back upon. By the time I came to talk to Ashe, he was playing it more openly.”

Meredith looked seriously at Roderick. “Do you realize your sister's on drugs, sir?”

“On drugs? Good Lord! No, I never suspected—though I suppose it would explain some things.”

“I don't know how long she's been on them or how deeply she is into them, but certainly she needs help, sir. What about her immediate family?”

“She won't get help from them.”

“Do they have money?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That would be a start. She needs to be got into a clinic. But my immediate point is that that made her at least a conceivable suspect: some imagined wrong from the past, muddled by a brain not fully in control into a monstrous grievance. No doubt if that failed, some further trail could be laid. Maybe against you or your wife, sir—or even against your father . . .”

“I assure you, Inspector, that you wouldn't have got far with
that
.”

“No . . . Anyway, as luck would have it, I heard my kids having one of those ‘who was in what?' arguments about television programs, and suddenly things began to click into place. Now we've got it all laid out like a map. It was a simple, old-fashioned murder for gain. They were going to live in Spain, you know, once the publicity had died down and the money came through. Whether they would have lived happily ever after, though, is another matter. I suspect he would have found that he was going from one tartar to another. But—who knows?—maybe
that was what he wanted. He apparently had had a series of affairs with women of much stronger personality than his own.”

“How do you know all this, Inspector?” asked Caroline.

“Oh, he broke. That was inevitable. He was the weak link in her chain all along. Even if he hadn't, we'd have made a case against them: her deceptions, evidence of their relationship. But as it is, the whole thing's watertight.”

Meredith stood up and gave a quick, awkward nod to all three of them.

“Well, that's it. I thought you were owed some explanation—Miss Mason because she is the nearest relative, and . . . well, to tell you the truth, Mr. and Mrs. Cotterel, I felt a bit guilty about entertaining those absurd suspicions about the distinguished old gentleman upstairs.”

If there was a stiffening of the people around him, Meredith did not notice.

“It
was
rather an imaginative idea,” said Caroline, walking to the door. “More like a Gothic novel than real life.”

“Yes,” agreed Cordelia with a nervous laugh. “Rather like Mrs. Rochester roaming about the house at night and setting fire to things.”

“I'll tell you what confused me,” said Meredith, stopping at the door. He had a vague feeling that they were trying to get rid of him, but he was probably mistaken, and he did want to clear this niggling little uncertainty up. “When you took me up to see the old gentleman, I heard him making his will, as he thinks, and I heard him leave something or other to his sister. Then I learned that Benedict Cotterel was an only child. That's what struck me as funny—as hard to understand.”

Roderick knew how Caroline, even as she lived a lie, and had for years, hated actually to utter one. He weighed in quickly with the lie he had prepared.

“You forget my father is a writer, Inspector. He doesn't only have his own past, he has the past of the characters he has lived with, lived
in.
It's a bit pathetic, really, almost grotesque, but sometimes, even now, he becomes characters from his own books—leaves things to other characters in those books.”

“Well!” marveled Meredith, smiling in relief at a niggling worry clarified. “That explains it! That's something I never would have thought of.”

“It's not unlike Myra,” contributed Cordelia in a rather unsure voice. “She sometimes
became
the character she was preparing to act. I welcomed it as a rule; they were often pleasanter than her real self.”

Meredith had got to the front door and went happily through it, taking out his car keys.

“I feel like a real bumpkin not to have thought of that. Especially as I've investigated the death of a writer before. That was a crime writer, though. Perhaps they don't go so deep. Well, thank you for all your help. You'll be glad to be seeing the last of me, I imagine. But I'm used to folk feeling that.”

He raised his hand cheerily in farewell and drove his car down the gravel lane toward the gate. He could not have felt the long released breath as he drove away.

“Well,” said Cordelia awkwardly, “I'll be going to meet Pat—”

“No!” said Caroline. “We can't simply leave it there, and I don't believe you want to.”

“You're wrong. I do want to. It's really not important to me anymore,” said Cordelia, an edge of panic coming into her voice. “I don't want to quarrel with you. I don't want a scene—I've had enough of scenes to last a lifetime. I know that's not my father upstairs. That's all that matters.”

“Did it never occur to you to wonder who the old man up there was?”

“Not really. I just knew it wasn't Ben.”

Caroline led her back into the living room, and Roderick shut the door. Cordelia remained standing, still reluctant, and pulling nervily at her handkerchief, as she had done when they had first met.

“I don't want a scene, either,” said Caroline quietly. “There's no reason why there should be one. I just want you to understand what happened, how it came about. How did you find out? Did you listen to the tapes?”

“No,” said Cordelia bluntly. “It was his feet.”

“His
feet
?”

“I went up one day, very quietly, to have another look at my father. You were out on a drive with Becky. He was asleep, but his bedclothes were all disarranged. I went to tuck him in, and I saw he had large feet. The day before I'd read an interview with him, stored downstairs, which had described him as a ‘spry little mannikin' with elegant size-six shoes. The man upstairs was not large, but his feet were certainly size nine or ten. Feet don't grow with old age.”

“No,” said Roderick. “Things shrink, but nothing grows.”

“I slipped off the tape and took it down to the tape recorder in the study. It was very pathetic. I didn't recognize any of the things he was leaving—not from this house, not from what I'd read of his life. Ben never owned a yacht. It just wasn't his sort of thing—was it?”

“Not at all,” said Roderick.

“And the names of the people he was leaving things to—I didn't recognize any of them.”

“You might have recognized one,” said Caroline quietly. “My maiden name was Quantick.”

“Oh—”

Cordelia put her hand to her mouth in sudden understanding.

“Not that he leaves anything to us. He feels, poor lamb, some sort of vague resentment, as if we were responsible for the way he is now. So he leaves things to old friends, family—most of them people long since dead.”

“Then he's—is he
your
father?”

“Yes. Rupert Quantick, my father . . . It's a difficult story to tell, to make clear how we fell into this . . . deception. And of course we have
never
told it before. My father wasn't at all like us—or, for that matter, like Ben. He was a businessman, entrepreneur—very much a man of the world: hearty, gregarious, loving all the good things of life.”

“Too much so,” said Roderick.

“Yes. He was also, I'm afraid, not very honest. He loved making money, and he wasn't too scrupulous about how he came by it.”

“In fact, I think he liked a dishonest buck better than an honest one,” put in Roderick. “There are people like that. There is more zest to the dishonest buck, more spice.”

“He lived his life, he always said, on the windy side of the law,” resumed Caroline. “He loved dodges, slightly crooked wheezes, little fiddles that beat the tax man. They led on, inevitably, to bigger things. Then suddenly the law caught up with him. It was one summer, ten years ago, when we were visiting him in the South of France. He had a villa there, in a little village near Cimènes, and his yacht was moored in the harbor. Maybe it was his life-style that gave him away. Anyway, we could see he was worried. He kept phoning back to England; he couldn't concentrate, didn't want to go sailing or to play golf or any of the things he usually enjoyed.”

“We guessed quite soon that what was worrying him was the police,” said Roderick. “We'd always feared they'd catch up with him in the end. It was difficult to say what
worried us most: the prospect of his going to jail or his inability to concentrate. In the midst of all his worries he would suddenly seem to lose track of things entirely. We even once found him sobbing—an inconceivable thing. He was bewildered by what was happening to him. Anyway, he was so unlike his usual hearty, outgoing self that we were worried, especially as it seemed to get worse rather than better. And then suddenly we realized what it was: the onset of senility.”

“Ben was coming to stay for a couple of days. He'd been walking in the Dolomites—a region he'd always loved and which he'd just written a book about. We were looking forward to it, because we didn't see him often. He'd just bought this house, to be near us, he said. But Ben was congenitally restless, and we didn't believe he'd use it much.”

“He came,” said Roderick, “and he seemed in excellent form. Probably he'd overstrained himself in his walking, but if so, it certainly didn't show. In fact, his spryness showed up the change in Caroline's father. Sometimes Rupert seemed aware of his predicament. We had a splendid meal, and he kept saying, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry . . .' We didn't know how to respond, because we didn't know if he was thinking about a possible jail sentence or his own failing powers. Most of the time he rambled and became pathetic, and finally we put him to bed with a couple of sleeping pills.”