Death of a Gossip (11 page)

‘I think a murderer could look like anyone,’ said the policeman placidly. ‘Now this Lady Jane, it strikes me she went to a lot of work to find out about the people who were
going to be at the fishing school. How did she know who was going?’

‘Oh, that’s easy. Heather sent us all a list of names and addresses. The idea is that we can get in touch with anyone in our area and maybe travel up with them. That’s how
Jeremy came to travel up with Daphne. He didn’t know her before.’ Alice blushed furiously and buried her nose in her cup.

‘Yes, and she must have found out about me and my family after she came,’ said Hamish. ‘She had only to ask a few people in the village. You can’t keep anything secret in
the Highlands.’

‘I wish she had never come,’ said Alice passionately. ‘She’s ruined my life.’

‘Indeed! And how is that?’

The rain was falling more steadily and the cluttered kitchen was peaceful and warm. Alice had a longing to unburden herself.

‘If a young man was interested in a girl,’ she said, not looking at him, ‘would you think that young man might go off that girl if he found out she had done something …
well, against the law, when she was a kid?’

‘It depends on the young man. Now if you’re talking about Mr Jeremy Blythe . . .’

‘You
noticed.
He
is
rather sweet on me.’ Alice removed her hat and tossed back her fluffy hair in what she fondly thought was a
femme-fataleish
sort of way.

‘It depends on the crime,’ said Hamish. ‘Now if you’d poisoned your mother or . . .’

‘No, nothing like that,’ said Alice. ‘Look, when I was about Charlie’s age, I threw a brick through Mr Jenkins’ window for a dare. Mr Jenkins was a nasty old man
who lived in our street. The other girls egged me on. Well, he got me charged and taken to court. All I got was a warning and Mum had to pay for the window and the local paper put a couple of lines
about it at the bottom of one of their pages. I mean, it was a silly little thing, really, but would a man like Jeremy mind? You see, he’s awfully ambitious and … and … well, he
plans to stand for Parliament, and . . . and . . . oh, do you know now I’ve told you, I realize I’ve been worrying about nothing. I should have told
him.
In fact, I’d
better before anyone else does. How he’ll laugh!’

‘If it’s that unimportant,’ said Hamish, pouring himself more tea, ‘then I am thinking that there is no need whateffer to tell anyone at all. In my opinion, Miss Wilson,
Mr Blythe is something of a snob and would not normally be interested in you were he not on holiday . . .’

Alice leapt to her feet.
‘You’re
the snob,’ she said. ‘And rude, too. I’ll show you. I’ll tell Jeremy right now and when I’m Mrs Blythe, you can
eat your words.’

‘As you please.’ Hamish shrugged. Alice rushed out of the house and slammed the kitchen door with a bang. Hamish cursed himself for being clumsy. Alice reminded him of Ann Grant, a
young girl brought up in Lochdubh, only passably pretty. She had been seen around one of the flashier holiday guests two summers ago, driving with him everywhere in his car, and gossiping about the
grand wedding she would have. But the holidaymaker had left and Ann had gone about ill and red-eyed. She had been packed off suddenly to a relative in Glasgow. The village gossips said she had gone
to have an abortion and was now walking the streets. But Hamish had heard through
his
relatives that she was working as a typist in a Glasgow office and had said she never wanted to see
Lochdubh or her family again. If her family hadn’t been so common, she said, then her beau would have married her.

Snobbery is a terrible thing, thought Hamish dismally. It can almost kill young girls. Would they kill because of it? That was a question well worth turning over.

Alice ran all the way back to the hotel and straight up to Jeremy’s room. She pounded on the door until a muffled voice shouted, ‘The door’s open. I’m
in the bathroom.’

She pushed open the door. Perhaps the murder had made her a little crazy or perhaps Alice had lived in a fantasy world for too long, but she justified her next action by persuading herself that
they were going to be married, or would be married if she established a basis of intimacy. She strolled casually into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said.

Jeremy hastily floated a large sponge over himself to act as a fig leaf and asked carefully, without looking at her, ‘Have you been drinking? I know we’re all shattered by this
murder business but . . .’

Alice came down to reality with a bump. ‘I’ll wait for you in the bedroom,’ she gasped. ‘I’ve got something I
must
tell you.’

She sat nervously on the bed by the window, fidgeting with the curtain cord and wishing she hadn’t been so
bold.

Jeremy came out with a white towel knotted around his waist and drying his hair with another.

Alice turned her face away and twisted a handkerchief nervously in her hands.

‘Now
you look like your usual self,’ said Jeremy. ‘For a moment there I thought you were going to rape me.’

‘Don’t make fun of me,’ said Alice, wishing he wouldn’t look so amused, so
detached.
What if Macbeth should prove to be right?

But if they were married, it might come out. Better tell him now. And so Alice did, simply plunging into her story at the beginning and charging on until the end.

As she talked, she was back there in that dusty court on that hot summer’s day with the tar melting on the roads outside. She could still remember her mother, crying with shame. She could
remember her own sick feeling of disgrace.

When she finished, she looked at Jeremy awkwardly. He was studying her face in an intent, serious way. Jeremy was actually wondering whether to share his own guilty secret and at the same time
noticing how Alice’s schoolgirlish blouse was strained against her small, high breasts. God, it had been ages since … Then there was all this fear and worry about the murder. Yes, he
knew why Alice had dreaded Lady Jane printing that bit of childhood nonsense. Hadn’t he himself gone through hell to try to shut her mouth? He glanced at the clock. Eight-thirty Too early for
a drink but not too early for that other tranquillizer.

He sat down beside Alice on the bed and drew her against his still-damp body. ‘You don’t mind?’ whispered Alice.

‘Of course not,’ he said, stroking her hair. She smelled of nervous sweat, sharp and acrid, mixed with lavender talcum powder. He put a hand on one little breast and began to stroke
it.

Alice shivered against him. She was not a virgin, having lost that through curiosity and drink two years ago in the back of a car after a party with a man whose name she could not remember. It
had been a painful and degrading experience, but he had been a heavy, vulgar sort of man.

Women’s Lib has a long way to go before it gets
inside
girls like Alice. As his lips began to move against her own, her one thought was, ‘If I sleep with him, he’ll have
to marry me.’

As they lay stretched out on the bed, pressed together, as Alice’s clothes were removed, she had an idiotic wish that Jeremy might have been wearing some sort of status symbol, his gold
wrist watch, say. For when the all-too-brief fore-play was over and she was rammed into the bed by the panting, struggling weight of this man, it all seemed as painful and degrading as that time in
the back of the car. She wished he’d hurry up and get it over with. There was that terrible tyranny of the orgasm. What
was
it? He was obviously waiting for something to happen to her.
She had read about women shrieking in ecstasy, but if she shrieked, she might bring people rushing in, thinking there had been another murder.

His silence was punctuated by grunts, not words of love. At last, just when she thought she could not bear it any longer, he collapsed on top of her. She let out a long sigh of relief, and
Jeremy kissed her ear and said, ‘It was good for you too,’ mistaking her sigh for one of satisfaction.

‘I love you, Jeremy,’ whispered Alice, winding her arms around him and hugging that vision of sports car, expensive clothes, good accent, and Member of Parliament.

‘Do you?’ He propped himself up on one elbow. ‘That’s nice.’ He kissed her nose and then smacked her on the bottom. ‘Better get dressed. Gosh, I’m
hungry.’

Alice scooped up her clothes and scuttled into the bathroom. After she had showered and dressed, she felt better. Love in the morning. How sophisticated. How deliciously decadent.

She was just putting on lipstick when Jeremy shouted through the door, ‘I’ll see you in the dining room. Don’t be long.’

Alice’s hand jerked nervously, and she smeared lipstick over her cheek. She scrubbed it off with a tissue and then ran out, hoping to catch him, but he had already left.

When she went out into the corridor, two maids were stuffing dirty sheets into a hamper and they looked at her curiously. ‘Good morning,’ said Alice, staring at both of them hard as
if challenging them to voice their evil thoughts.

The fishing party was grouped around one large table in the far corner as if the management had decided to put them in quarantine. The Roths were there and Daphne, the major and Jeremy. Charlie
would be having breakfast with his aunt, but where were the Cartwrights?

‘Don’t know,’ shrugged Daphne. ‘ I think they jolly well ought to be here handing out refunds. Pass the marmalade, Jeremy darling.’

Alice frowned. It was time to stake her claim. She slid into a chair beside Jeremy and took his hand under the table, gave it a squeeze, and smiled at him in an intimate way.

‘I need both hands to eat, Alice,’ said Jeremy crossly. Alice snatched her hand away and Daphne giggled.

Heather and John Cartwright were sitting in Hamish’s cluttered kitchen, eating bacon baps and drinking tea. They had explained they were ‘just passing’.

It was Heather who had had the impulse to talk to Hamish. Hamish was a good sounding board because he
was
the law, and although he could hardly be described as a strong arm of it, he was
in a position to overhear how the investigation was proceeding.

‘I just hope this won’t break the fishing school,’ said John gloomily.

‘I should not think so,’ said Hamish, turning bacon deftly in the pan. ‘Provided, of course, the murderer is found. It will be in the way of being an added
attraction.’

‘I was shocked when Blair told me she was really that awful columnist woman.’

Hamish stood very still, his back to them as he worked at the stove. ‘And you did not know this before?’ he asked.

There was a little silence, and then John said, ‘Of course not. Had we known then we should not have allowed her to come.’

‘Aye, but did you not know after she had arrived?’ asked Hamish.

Again that silence. Hamish turned round, the bacon slice in one hand.

‘No, we did not,’ said Heather emphatically.

Hamish carefully and slowly lifted the bacon from the pan and put it on a plate. He turned off the gas. He lifted his cup of tea from beside the stove and came and joined Heather and John at the
table.

‘I happen to know that you had a letter from Austria. You see, you threw it out of the window, hoping it would land in the loch. The tide was out and the boy Charlie picked it up because
the stamp attracted his attention. I would not normally read anyone else’s mail, but when it comes to murder, well, I don’t have that many fine scruples. It was from a couple of friends
of yours in Austria who ran a ski resort until Lady Jane came on holiday’

‘You have no right to read private mail,’ shouted John.

Hamish looked at him stolidly.

Heather put a hand on John’s arm. ‘It’s no use,’ she said wearily. ‘We did know. We were frightened. This school is our life. Years of hard work have gone into
building it up. We thought she was going to take it away from us.’

‘But the couple at the ski resort turned out to be married to other people, not each other,’ pointed out Hamish. ‘They said the publicity by Lady Jane ruined them only because
Mr Bergen, the ski resort owner, had not been paying alimony for years. You are surely both not in that sort of position. When you found out, would it not have been better to try to tell the
school, openly and in front of her, what she did for a living?’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ said John wretchedly. ‘You may as well know that I saw Jane on the night she was murdered. I went up to her room after dinner.’

‘And . . .?’

‘And she just laughed at me. She said this sort of fly fishing in these waters was like grouse shooting or deer stalking – a sport for the rich. She said she was about to prove that
the sort of people who went on these holidays were social climbers who deserved to be cut down to size.’

‘Deary me,’ said Hamish, stirring his tea, ‘was she a Communist?’

‘I don’t think she was a member of the Communist Party, if that’s what you mean,’ said John. ‘She seemed to want to make people writhe. She was like a blackmailer
who enjoys power. In Scotland they would say she was just agin everything.’

‘Did she say she was out to ruin the fishing school?’

‘Not in so many words. But that’s what she was setting out to do.’

‘What exactly did you say?’

‘I said that I had worked hard to build up this school and I begged her not to harm it. She laughed at me and told me to get out. I said … I said .. .’

‘Yes?’ prompted Hamish gently.

‘You’d better tell him,’ said Heather.

‘I told her I would kill her,’ whispered John. ‘I shouted it. I’ll have to tell Blair – I think Jeremy heard me.’

‘Mr Blythe? Why would he hear you? Is his room next to hers?’

‘No, he was out in the corridor when I left.’

‘What will we do, Mr Macbeth?’ pleaded Heather.

‘I think you should tell Mr Blair. If there’s one thing that makes a detective like Blair suspicious, or any detective for that matter, it’s finding out someone’s been
hiding something. The pair of you have got nothing awful in your past that Lady Jane was about to expose?’