No Cooperation from the Cat (6 page)

But you learn to recognise your own breed of cat—and these weren’t actors. Given the circumstances, I had the uneasy feeling that I could make a good guess at their identities. I don’t imagine you go in for the daily close shave in Arctic temperatures.

“Who are you?” one of them demanded.

“Just what I was about to ask you,” I countered, giving no indication of how much I had surmised. “
I
happen to live here.”

“Excuse my friend.” The other one had a charming smile and knew how to use it. “We’ve been out of touch with civilisation for too long. It takes some of us more time to adjust than others.”

I gave him a show of a smile back and waited.

“We’re sorry to intrude,” he apologised, “but it is most urgent that we see Miss Lambert. We understand she’s here.”

“Miss Lambert?” I said blankly.

“Jocasta Lambert,” the other one snarled. “Stop trying to play games with us. We know she’s here!”

There was an ominous silence from behind me and then I caught the faint snick of a bolt as Jocasta took refuge in her favourite retreat. What a good thing Evangeline hadn’t decided she wanted to take a long leisurely bath.

“You still—” I drew myself up to my full height, which left the top of my head somewhere below the level of their noses. “You still have not had the courtesy to introduce yourselves.”

“You’re right.” Another charming smile accompanied by a slight grovel. “I do apologise. I’m Tom—”

“Mother!” Martha charged down the hallway. She had a carving knife in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other. “Who are these people? What do they want?”

“I’m still trying to find out, dear.” I was happy to see that her mood had not improved one bit. If anything, it had worsened. “They don’t seem too anxious to identify themselves.”

“Oh, don’t they?” Martha swung on them, the light glinting off the sharp blades of her impromptu weapons. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing here? How dare you force your way into our home! Don’t just stand there, Mother—call the police!”

“No, no.” They both took a step backwards. “Please, it’s all right, I promise you. We just—”

“Who
are
you?” Martha flourished the carving knife just a little too close for the comfort of the charmer. His smile was cutting no ice with her.

“What’s going on here?” Evangeline joined the fray, suddenly in our midst—and carrying the heavy brass dolphin candlestick which, as we joked when she bought it at an antiques fair, would make a perfect blunt instrument. She swung it menacingly as she strode up to stand beside us.

The two men looked from one to the other of us and retreated a few more steps. The unsociable one muttered something under his breath. I was sure I caught the words “monstrous regiment.”

“We—we just wanted to have a few words with Jocasta. But obviously,” the charming smile turned craven, “we’ve come at an inopportune time. We’ll come back later—”

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Evangeline moved swiftly to block their exit. “Name, rank, and serial number!” she snapped. “Now!”

They looked at each other as though they really were prisoners of war. “Look, you’re taking this the wrong way—”

“
Now!
” Martha echoed. The meat cleaver swished through the air, but didn’t quite connect with the door, I was glad to see. The situation with our landlord was delicate enough at the moment without upsetting him further.

“I apologise most sincerely—” He spoke directly to me, probably because I seemed the least threatening, being the only resident facing him who wasn’t armed. “We’ve obviously gone about this the wrong way. You see, we’re friends of Banquo Fitzfothergill. In fact, we were on the expedition with him. I’m Tom Hampton, official photographer for the expedition—”

“And I’m Mick Quinlan, nursemaid, dogsbody, and general handyman,” the other said morosely. “
Now
can we speak with Jocasta?”

“Cook, dog handler, troubleshooter, and general keeper-up of our morale,” Tom corrected. “Old Mick always undersells himself. We’d have been lost without him.”

He
kept up anyone’s morale? I looked at the gloom-laden face. Things must have been pretty bad if
he
could cheer anyone up.

“And he’s right,” Tom continued. “We really need to talk to Jocasta urgently. For Banquo’s sake,” he added, as though we cared as much about Banquo as they did.

“She isn’t here,” Evangeline said quickly. “If you’d had the courtesy to telephone first to make an appointment, we could have told you that and saved you an unnecessary trip.” She still wasn’t relaxing her grip on the brass dolphin, I noticed. I hoped neither of the men were going to call her bluff and try to get past her. I can’t stand the sight of any blood that isn’t Kensington Gore.

“When will she be back?” Abruptly, Mick shifted into troubleshooter mode. It suited him better than that of morale booster. This, I believed.

“How should we know?” Evangeline faced him implacably. “Some frightful women were here yesterday, bullying her. As soon as they left, she took off. No forwarding address and no indication when—or if—we’d ever see her again.”

The performance was worth another Academy Award nomination and I saw acknowledgement of this flicker in the depths of the photographer’s eyes. The troubleshooter seemed to take it seriously, however. He frowned.

“The Graces,” he identified. “They told us—”

“A most unsuitable nickname for them,” Evangeline said. “Any creatures less graceful, I’ve never seen.”

“It’s their surname,” Mick said. “They’re all cousins of Banquo’s on his mother’s side. They—”

“We don’t need the genealogical details, thank you,” Evangeline said crisply. “We have no plans to see any of them again. Ever. And that goes for you, too.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they’re boring me, because they have no business being here, because I’m sick of the sight of them, because—”

“Not you, Evangeline.” I cut her off. “Them. Why is everyone so anxious to talk to Jocasta?” I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear their version of it.

“She worked closely with Melisande. She was the last to see her, to be with her, before—” Tom broke off and took a deep breath. I wondered suddenly what Melisande had been to him.

“Jocasta was there when … it happened,” Tom went on. “The only reliable eyewitness. She has to understand that it’s up to her to tell Banquo what happened—every last detail. She might be able to give him some comfort—” He was trying hard, but didn’t sound as thought he believed it himself. “It’s going to hit Banquo hard when he finds out Melisande is dead.”

“It is
my
understanding”—Evangeline wasn’t buying it, either—“that all of this took place some months ago! Why had no one told the wretched man that he’s a widower long before this? It sounds as though you knew. Why keep it from him?”

They flinched, looked at each other, and Tom lost the mental toss of the coin.

“All sorts of reasons,” he admitted miserably. “Banquo was just starting out on the expedition. We didn’t want to upset him. There was nothing he could do back in England. It was all over. And there were other things to consider: the book deal, the window of opportunity in the weather it might be fatal to miss … It wasn’t just our decision, the Graces told us to keep it from him. No one wanted to upset him…”

“Also,” Mick, the troubleshooter, said, “he was supposed to be solo—and incommunicado. So he’d have no way of knowing then. If he came back and knew all about it, it would be a dead giveaway. As it is, he’s behaving naturally. Sure, it’s going to be a terrible shock to him. But Jocasta is the one who should tell him. Maybe Tom could get a good shot of her breaking the news. It would add a lot of human interest to the book.”

What would he know about humans? Another one to whom the Arctic would seem homelike. Ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit was probably blood temperature for him.

“That’s enough!” I wasn’t the only one sickened. Martha waved the carving knife at them in a fury. “Out! Out! Damned blots!” She threw a defiant look at Evangeline, perhaps hoping she might get away with it because of the slight change in the quotation.

“Stand not upon the order of your going—” No, she knew just what she was doing, but she didn’t care.

“
But go!
” She advanced on them, brandishing both carving knife and cleaver in a way that meant business. I wouldn’t swear to it, but I had the feeling that even Lady Macbeth hadn’t speeded the parting guests quite so vehemently.

“All right! All right!” Tom fought the door open and they both crowded through it.

Mick turned as the door closed behind them and snarled: “We’ll be back.”

I didn’t doubt it.

The door slammed and we all looked at each other, one thought in mind.

“I think—” I voiced it. “It’s high time we had an in-depth conversation with Jocasta.”

Chapter Six

“I won’t tell him!” Jocasta cried. “They can’t make me! Everyone can stop saying they don’t shoot the messenger anymore. I know that. And Banquo would never do such a thing anyway. But … but … he’d hate me forever!” She burst into tears.

She was probably right. Banquo hadn’t struck me as the reasonable forgiving sort.

“Every time he looked at me, he’d remember,” she wailed. “He’d never want to see me again … to speak to me…”

“That’s nothing to complain about.” Evangeline spoke with her usual sweet sympathy. “I could live quite happily if he never spoke to me again—or if I never saw him again. Especially if I never saw him again.”

“You’re not me,” Jocasta sobbed.

“Thank heaven for that!” Evangeline muttered.

“You don’t understand … you don’t know anything about it.”

“Suppose you tell us,” I said. “Remember, we walked in in the middle of the movie.”

“What movie?” Jocasta looked at me blankly and I realised that the familiar expression of my younger days conveyed nothing to her.

She was of the hard-ticket generation. Too young to have known the days of continuous performance cinemas when one could buy a ticket and walk in at any time. They showed a feature film, cartoons, supporting B film, newsreel, previews, then feature film again, over and over. Not for this generation the extra fun of arriving in the middle of a film and watching the last half hour or so while trying to figure out which might possibly have gone before to bring the characters to this pass. Then the fascination of watching the film start and seeing what had happened, how the characters had developed and what led up to the now-comprehensible ending. It was as good as a course in fiction writing: plot, characterisation, action, and resolution. The current generation would never know what they were missing. Yes, and they used to give away a dish with every ticket, too.

“Movie…?” Jocasta was still wondering.

“Never mind,” I said. “Just tell us what happened. And—” I added carefully, I already knew the answer, but did she? “And why everyone wants you to be the one to carry the can for it.”

“It’s so unfair!” Jocasta might not have been familiar with that expression, either, but she had less trouble grasping it. “I wasn’t even supposed to be there that night. I was doing Melisande a favour after Edytha had let her down. Edytha was supposed to be helping with the demonstration, not me.”

“The Edytha who’s in Ibiza?” It was a silly question, as though Jocasta might know any number of females with that name.

“Yes, but she wasn’t in Ibiza then. She had to rush to Glastonbury. She said it was an emergency.”

“Glastonbury…” Evangeline echoed thoughtfully.

“At the festival?” I asked.

“Wrong time of year.” Jocasta shook her head. “It was something to do with the shop Edytha had there. A burglary, I think.” Her head went on shaking. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. It seems as though everything went out of my head after—”

“Jocasta, sit down.” She was still in shock, I suspected uneasily, either post-traumatic or the original shock lingering.

“Martha, get her some brandy!” Evangeline ordered.

“No, please—” Jocasta flinched, obviously remembering her first encounter with Evangeline’s favourite remedy for everything. “I’m all right. Really, I am—” She spoiled it by bursting into tears again.

Evangeline divided an exceptionally nasty look between Martha and me as she saw that Martha had bypassed the ordinary brandy and taken a bottle of the best cognac from her private stock. Not only that, Martha had filled a snifter well past the halfway mark and held it to Jocasta’s lips, while I put a steadying arm around Jocasta’s shoulders as she sipped at first, then took a deeper draught.

“Slowly…” I warned and Martha withdrew the snifter. “Now tell us about it, Jocasta. Start at the beginning. You had been assigned to work with Melisande on the cookbook and there was no problem with that…?”

“None at all,” Jocasta agreed faintly. “It was a standard nine-to-five job—to start with. Of course, if we had an experiment in the oven, I had to stay a bit later—until it came out and I could see if it had worked properly. But that didn’t happen too often. Melisande liked her free time. And she had other irons in the fire. She had that early-morning radio stint, but at least they patched her in on a telephone line so that she didn’t actually have to be in the studio at some ungodly hour. Then there were the freelance appearances at women’s clubs for talks and … and … demonstrations.” She broke off and lunged for the cognac, taking both Martha and me by surprise.

“Take it easy,” Martha said nervously, as the level in the snifter went down by an alarming degree.

“Just keep going,” Evangeline said. “You’re getting to it.” She reached for the bottle and topped up the glass. “Tell us what happened.”

“I was at home.” Jocasta swallowed and seemed to become a bit unfocussed. “Well, I would be, wouldn’t I? I’d finished for the day, I thought. Then the telephone rang—and it was Edytha. She and Melisande were booked to give a demonstration at a high school in Marylebone, a cooking class, as usual. Only this sudden emergency had come up in Glastonbury and Edytha had to see to it. So they thought it wouldn’t be any problem for me to take her place, since I was already broken in … broken…”