A Beautiful Blue Death (31 page)

“Oh, Charles—Venice! Did you ever go?”

“No,” he said. “Only Rome.”

“It’s wonderful. And Florence, Siena—how vividly I remember it!”

He smiled as he listened to her tell him about the places she had gone when she was young and married, but really he was thinking about something else entirely: how he thought her more beautiful now than he had even at her wedding, when she had been only twenty and radiant.

Soon Edmund came down, looking significantly cleaner and happier. He looked at the map of Persia, too, and commented that perhaps his brother would actually go this time.

There was a knock on the door just after Lenox carefully folded the map and put it back in the old umbrella stand. He met Graham at the door and offered to open it himself, expecting McConnell or Exeter.

Instead, covered in a thin layer of snow, eyes bloodshot, Claude Barnard stood on his doorstep.

“Mr. Lenox? May I have a word?”

“Why, yes,” Lenox said, taken entirely aback. “Graham, please show Mr. Barnard into the back parlor. I’ll join you momentarily,” he said to Claude.

He quickly went back to the library. “Claude Barnard is here,” he said, giving them no time to respond. “Jane, you stay here, or go home if you’d rather. Edmund, you come stand by the door to the back parlor, if you please. In case he attempts any violence, I shall give the old call.” This was a bird call they used to have when they were children. It could mean “Look!” or “Here I am!” or “Help!”

“Yes, of course,” said Edmund. “Of course.”

“I would ask you to sit in, but he may be volatile.”

“All the more reason, Charles.”

“No. I absolutely forbid it, if you’ll allow me.”

Edmund shrugged. Within minutes, Lenox had entered the back parlor and Edmund was stationed by the door.

Lenox paused for a moment when he went in. It was a small room, rarely used, filled with mistakes: a poorly designed chair, an uncomfortable desk, a mediocre painting. Its only saving grace was a small window, looking out onto the small garden by the house. That was where Claude stood, smoking a cigarette, his hands in his jacket pockets.

He looked sorrowful—and leaner by a noticeable measure even in the last two or three days. He didn’t hear Lenox enter,
and for a moment Lenox watched, saddened. He felt very little pity, to be sure, but all the young man’s charm had become melancholy.

“Mr. Barnard?” Lenox said at last.

Claude turned. “Oh, hello, Mr. Lenox. Cold day, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” There was a silence. “Would you like to sit?”

Claude nodded, and the two men sat in ugly horsehair armchairs facing each other.

“I’m afraid I can’t compliment your taste, Mr. Lenox.”

“I rarely come into this room.”

“Ah—yes.”

“How may I help you, Mr. Barnard?”

Claude laughed bitterly. “Help me. Well, well.”

“Shall I put it another way? What would you like to say to me?”

“I feel as if I live in a dream, Mr. Lenox. Everything has gone so—so wrong.”

“Yes, it has,” said Lenox.

Claude looked up sharply. “I’m not certain that you know.”

“On the contrary, I know it all.”

Now the young man’s look changed to astonishment. “All of it? Surely not.”

“Yes, I assure you.”

“Will you tell me?”

“You and your cousin Eustace murdered Prudence Smith and Jack Soames in order to realize the benefit of your shares in the Pacific Trust.”

Claude shook his head. “Yes, I see you do.” He sighed. “My last solace was to come to you of my own will, and now I don’t even have that.”

“On the contrary,” said Mr. Lenox. “You did. You might easily be across the channel. But that is by no means an exoneration.”

“Exoneration? I tell you—” He broke off and lit another cigarette. After a moment, he spoke again. “Yes: I come to you of
my own free will. I’ve no doubt I’ll hang. Anything but living a moment longer in this nightmare.”

“Eustace was the instigator.”

“Eustace… Eustace. You wouldn’t think it, Mr. Lenox, but behind those tedious opinions and miserable manners he can be the most persuasive fellow in the world.”

“You had better begin at the beginning,” said Lenox.

He took a puff of his cigarette. “If you know it all, I don’t see why I should humiliate myself in recounting it.”

Lenox heard the edge of stubbornness in Claude’s voice, and instead of lecturing him, said softly, almost shrewdly, “It starts with your uncle, doesn’t it.”

Startled, Claude looked up. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I suppose that’s true. Uncle George.” Suddenly, as if spurred on by the possibility of a sympathetic audience, he spoke in a torrent. “You wouldn’t believe it. He’s—he’s positively cruel to the rest of the family, for one thing. Gave us money to save himself from embarrassment, you know, but then he lorded it over all of us, played us against each other. Made our parents enemies. That was the reason Eustace and I first became close. We hated him.”

“Go on,” said Lenox.

“I suppose, objectively, he was good to us—gave us pocket money, paid for university, let us live as we pleased with him. But I can’t explain his constant references, alone or in company, to our indebtedness. It was horrible.”

“And then he gave you money, didn’t he?”

As if realizing he had let on too much, Claude slowed to a sullen pace. “Yes, he gave us a bit of money.”

“And what did you do with it?”

“You know that already, I suppose.”

“You can explain your feelings, though. All I know are the facts.”

Again drawn out, Claude said, “He gave us ten thousand pounds each. When he did that, Eustace came to me.”

“He went to you?”

“We were united in our dislike of our uncle, but I still didn’t like my cousin. Still, he was irresistible. Said he had found a way for us be rich, both of us, and we both knew he was rather brilliant about things of that sort. I think he managed his own family’s budget from the age of six or seven, saved them from that awful cycle of wealth and poverty I went through. Our uncle only sent remittances erratically, you see.” A shadow of childish anger passed over Claude’s face.

Lenox, again subtly urging the lad on, said, “He painted you a picture, then?”

“He convinced me. He said we would never have to work in our lives! And of course he was right. Even if we had accepted the board’s decision and managed well, we could have survived on what we had, not to mention the stock’s growth. But he had filled my head, you see, with these visions of absolute opulence”—Claude stubbed out his cigarette on the open windowsill and ran his hand through his hair—“until ten thousand pounds didn’t cut it anymore.”

“There were debts, I gather.” Lenox offered Claude another cigarette as he said this.

“Why fight it,” Claude said bitterly. “You know already. I had been drinking too much, you see, and I owed for cards, and had bills outstanding that would have forced me to live very stringently. From the ten thousand I would have had, perhaps three or four thousand left. A large sum of money, to be sure, but by no means enough to live on as I wanted to live. Or no—as I wanted to show Uncle Barnard I could live.” Again that shadow of anger across his face. “Even living very cheaply, I would have run through it in five years.”

This was the moment, Lenox knew. Had to be handled carefully. “And Eustace had a solution.…”

Claude paused but then nodded. “At last he convinced me. He said if we got Soames off the board, we would be rich: all of my
worries, my family’s worries, all of Uncle Barnard’s snide comments—gone. One hundred thousand quid apiece at one go.”

“It wasn’t murder at first, was it?”

“No, not at first. To begin with, we merely spread it about that Soames was a drunk and had no money left. We thought perhaps he would be put off the board on the strength of public opinion. I fear we made his life miserable, poor sot.” He looked at Lenox almost defiantly when he said this, but the detective’s face remained impassive. Claude went on in a burst. “It didn’t work—and gradually, you see, Eustace convinced me that our very lives depended on it. As I told you, it was like a dream. I ask you, to murder somebody? I had money enough, all the friends in the world, a rich uncle if an autocratic one—how could I have been brought round? The insanity of it! It only dawned on me after Prue died… and then my life depended on it. I couldn’t go backwards, Eustace kept saying.”

“Go on.”

“No. I’ve said too much. I don’t even know what protection you can give me.” He stood by the window, still smoking.

Lenox murmured, “It must have been difficult, murdering a girl you had known—perhaps even liked.”

“Liked?” said Claude sourly, turning quickly back to Lenox. “I liked her, it’s true.… Do you remember seeing me dine alone, in the upstairs of the Jumpers? I think that moment was when I really saw what had happened. When I woke up. I saw what an insidious, awful person my cousin was—truly was—for the first time. I felt such sorrow, then. It’s no excuse, none; but it’s the truth.”

“What do you mean, you woke up?”

“You see, when I killed Prue, I didn’t really understand it. Eustace gave me some poison or other; he had cadged it from our uncle, plus a bottle of dummy poison that was in the housekeeper’s room.” Lenox nodded to himself. “He’s the one who knows botany—said he used it on plants. I would never
have known. I barely scraped a third at Oxford. She had overheard us talking about Soames, I guess. And she trusted me enough, poor Prue, to confront me.” He stubbed out his second cigarette and accepted another from Lenox. “It didn’t seem real, the poison. I didn’t really connect it with Prue’s death, as strange as that sounds. It was just a little bottle that looked like medicine.”

“You had fought, hadn’t you?”

“Fought?”

“And then you had to keep her quiet long enough to poison her after the fight.” Seeing that Claude meant to protest, Lenox said, a little more sharply, “Come now, the struggle where you were burned.”

“You do know it all, I see. We did fight. In whispers, so as not to be overheard—but she was awfully angry. I did get burned. But in the end I convinced her to stay quiet until I could persuade Eustace to give it up. I said it was just talk.”

“So you tricked her?”

There was a long silence; Lenox knew this was the moment when Claude would either try to flee or break down. Slowly, without moving quickly, he pulled a dusty bottle of rye and two glasses from the hideous wardrobe some aunt or other had left to him. Claude wasn’t the first suspect he had brought into the back room. He poured the rye slowly into two glasses and offered the young man one of them. Claude looked at it, paused for a fraction of a second, then took it and had a sip. With a crack in his voice, he went on.

“It tortured me to do it. I drank heavily that morning. But that wasn’t the real reason I went through with it. That only helped. I was jealous, you see. The thing was that I really liked—nearly loved—that maid.” He laughed, with such incredulity on his face that it almost seemed he was speaking of someone else, some other set of events. Lenox thought of Deck and James, their different reactions. It was obvious that Prue had some quality that
all three of these men had more than loved—they had been obsessed.

No longer needing Lenox’s frequent prompting, Claude went on. “And Eustace—oh, he was clever—he told me that morning about the man from the tavern sneaking into her room. Deck. I don’t know how he figured it out, but I was filled with anger. It ate me up. I went downstairs… I put the poison in her glass of water… lurked in the hallway. Watched her drink it with something like happiness, you know. Then I replaced the candle, put the note there, and left some other bottle I was to leave. And that was it.”

“And once you had done that, you had to help with Soames.”

Claude looked at Lenox with something almost like surprise, as if he had been talking to himself. “It’s true,” he said. “I didn’t have an alibi for the time when Prue died, so I needed the alibi for the second murder. I was contrite but I didn’t want jail, you know, or the gallows.”

Lenox sat back in the chair. It was snowing hard now. Claude was still at the window, and now, with neither of them speaking, there was a deep silence in the night.

“The gallows… no, I suspect not. It occurred to me for a moment that you might be trying to trick me—that really it was you who led Eustace on. But that’s not right, I see. It was essential that
you
commit the bloodless murder, the easier one, the one that didn’t seem real. Your cousin must have known you couldn’t push a knife through a man’s ribs and drove you as far as you could go.” He paused. “No, I don’t think the gallows. Twenty or thirty years in prison, most likely.”

As if smacked back into reality, Claude said, “Thirty years?” He looked shocked.

Lenox nodded. “It’s time to wake up truly now, Claude. It wasn’t all a joke.”

After just a second, Claude made his move. Lenox had been half expecting it, but was still caught off guard. Claude pushed
him out of the way and bolted toward the door. There was no time to make the call; Lenox only gasped out “Edmund!” as loudly as he could. Then he roused himself from the floor (there was still a hint of ache in his body from the beating he had taken) and ran for the door. On the other side of it, Claude was struggling in Edmund’s arms, which were wrapped firmly around him.

M
cConnell had arrived and heard the entire story from Lady Jane. Graham had a note from Exeter saying he was on an excellent trail and had no time to come over. The four friends spoke quietly in the library about Claude, who was now more calmly sitting in the back drawing room, locked in by the door and the windows.

“You had better let him sleep in one of the bedrooms,” said Lady Jane, “and then take him in tomorrow. There’s a blizzard.”

Lenox hesitated at first and asked if he would do the same if Bartholomew Deck had murdered Prue Smith and Jack Soames. But gradually the other three convinced him to do the generous thing. It was the last night Claude would spend comfortably for some years.

So Lenox relented and allowed the young man his hot water bottle and soft bed, locking the guest room door from the outside, and the next morning, though he refused to eat with the lad, had breakfast sent to him upstairs. He could only imagine his guest, sitting in an armchair in the luxurious bedroom, eating the last truly good meal of his early life.