At Death's Door (20 page)

There was a tiny emphasis on the pronouns. Daisy knew they were being accused of tuft hunting.

“I see. And you all got talking?”

“That's right,” said the commodore. “Though the boy—Pat—didn't say much. But Ashe himself was very friendly, even affable, wasn't he, dear?”

“Awfully nice. Something of a raconteur, and quite the gentleman, too,” confirmed Daisy.

“Had some damned good stories to tell. Don't know a lot about the theater, but I like to hear a good backstage yarn. He'd been all over, this Ashe feller, from the West End to Pitlochry, from local reps to TV series, so he had a real fund of stories. Thoroughly enjoyed talking to him.”

“And quite a little crowd gathered, I believe?”

“That's right. Everyone enjoys a greenroom gossip, a peep behind the scenes. And I think the word got around that something was happening upstairs after that damnfool sister of Cotterel's came up and blabbed her story.”

“Ah—you'd met her before?”

“Briefly,” said Daisy. “In the Red Lion, in fact, on one of her earlier visits.” Her lips tightened, if that was possible. “We were not impressed.”

“Anyway, that added spice to the situation,” resumed Commodore Critchley. “So that by the end there was quite a little group around us.”

“Pat McLaughlin having by this time gone?”

The commodore thought—the responsible captain of men, making sure he got his facts right.

“Let me see. He went soon after the sister came down with her story. I know, because he wasn't there when I bought the next round of beer.”

“You bought the next round. I see. And were there any more rounds? Did Granville Ashe buy the round after that?”

The Critchleys looked at each other with that perfect understanding born of the long bondage of married life.

“We knew you'd ask that. Naturally we talked it over. I bought the next round
and
the round after that. Ashe offered, but I insisted. He was entertaining us, after all. I think everyone who was round our table will back us up: Granville Ashe never left his seat, not even to go to the loo.”

“You went to the lavatories yourself?”

“
I
went there, but Daisy was still at the table.” He looked at his lady wife, and she nodded agreement. “He never left his seat—not until he went up to find the body.”

“Right!” said Meredith briskly. “That's quite clear. I should say that I or one of my men have taken statements from other people in the bar, virtually everyone who was there, and they pretty well all bear out what you've just said. Now, let's get to the sound of the shot.”

“As we now know it was,” said Daisy. “At the time we all assumed it was a car.”

“Quite. But whatever it was, you must all have jumped and looked around you when it happened,” said Meredith. They both nodded. “Did you notice anyone missing from the bar who had been there previously?”

They both thought and shook their heads.

“No,” said Commodore Critchley finally. “I can't pretend to notice what I didn't. There was this little crowd around the table. I doubt if we could have seen through it to the rest of the bar.”

“So what happened? You decided it must be a car backfiring and went back to theatrical reminiscences?”

“For a minute or two. But then this woman came in, as I'm sure you know, and was very insistent that it was a shot.” The commodore coughed. “Don't need to go into how she knew. Embarrassing for the poor woman. Anyway, finally Ashe was convinced—or convinced he ought to go up and investigate, though I think he still thought
she'd got a bee in her bonnet. He went to the door, we followed, and so did most of the others in the bar.”

“I know it sounds pretty bad form, Chief Inspector,” said Daisy, giving a charmless smile, “but by then a real tension had grown up about what was happening upstairs.”

“So pretty much the whole bar was collecting around that door?”

“Well, yes, I'd say it was,” said Critchley.

“And the door was open?”

“Yes.” The commodore made a rather shamefaced admission. “Matter of fact, I think I held it open myself.”

Meredith struggled to his feet from the suctioning embrace of the plush armchair.

“Could we reenact it, at your sitting-room door here?” he asked. They went over, Flood standing a little aside, as if he knew his place in that household. Meredith took command. “Granville Ashe goes through the door into the hotel section, and you are all on this side, still in the bar. Would you be Ashe, Commodore? Walk upstairs and show us approximately what occurred, timing it as near as you can estimate to the timings on the night of the murder.”

“I'll try,” said the commodore, looking self-conscious. “Of course no one was using a stopwatch.” He walked through the door, shoulders squared, and up the stairs. At the top he paused, opened a door, and shouted, “Door!” The second hand on Meredith's watch ticked around ten, twelve seconds, and then the commodore was heard to run cumbersomely downstairs.

“Call the police!” he shouted in the manner of all bad amateur actors.

They all stood around the door somewhat awkwardly.

“That was about it, Inspector,” said Critchley.

“There was a faint click when he switched the light on,” said Daisy. “But there was no shot. And surely he couldn't have used a silencer?”

“No, there's no question of a silencer,” said Meredith. “All I'm doing is checking every little thing to see that all the accounts tally with each other. Now, can you remember who was around the door listening?”

Again they looked at each other, rather as if the commodore were asking permission to speak first.

“The landlord. The woman who'd insisted it was a shot. Hartley, the greengrocer. The chap who keeps the post office. Cotterel's sister . . .”

“Ah, she was there.”

“Oh, yes. She was very interested.”

“Was she in the bar when the shot rang out?”

“We wouldn't know that,” said Daisy Critchley. “She wasn't in the group around Granville Ashe, so we couldn't see through it to see who else was sitting in the bar.”

“When did you first become conscious of her?”

“Oh, when the woman was trying to force Ashe to go up and investigate,” said the Commodore. “We were sitting with our backs to the wall and the window, you see. At some point she joined the group, and I could see her face. She was watching the woman and Granville Ashe almost hungrily. Sort of licking her lips at the prospect of some excitement.”

“Ghoul!” said Daisy Critchley. “Some people have no shame, do they?”

C
HIEF INSPECTOR MEREDITH
let himself in by the front door and went straight through to the kitchen. His wife, he knew, would be out. She had long ago found that being a policeman's wife and being a teacher did not go together, and she had given up her full-time job without too many regrets. But she did value her evening classes, where she coached adults through to ordinary and advanced-level history exams. With adults one didn't have to lower one's expectations the whole time, she said. Meredith opened the fridge and took out the plate she had left for him: a crab salad. Where had she found that excellent dressed crab?

There were voices raised in the living room, but not in anger. He opened a can of beer, got a knife and fork, and went through. The children greeted him and then went on with what they were doing. It was their usual way. A policeman's family grew to be that bit blasé about whether he was around or not. If they did not, they regularly suffered everything from minor disappointment to heartbreak.
Meredith could only feel glad—and grateful to his wife—that his brood had turned out as well as they had. The eldest had left the nest, and her marriage still left feelings in him that he ashamedly recognized as something close to resentment. Three were left: Mark, nineteen, Eleanor, a year younger, and Cathy, the baby at fifteen. Tonight they were engaged in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Meredith stood for a few minutes, marveling at what they knew and what they did not know, and fetched his briefcase from the hall. A working dinner. How many working meals, he wondered, had he eaten in the course of his police career?

“That's nonsense! Julius Caesar
can't
have been born in 1
B.C.
!” he heard Eleanor cry, her voice thick with grievance. “He came to Britain in 55
B.C.
He'd have had to have lived backwards!”

Oh, God, the makers have given another wrong answer! he thought. He waited. Let them squabble for a bit, then go off and find a book to look it up in.

“Well, that's what it says here!”

“It can't be right. Mark, didn't Julius Caesar come to Britain in 55
B.C.
?”

“I
thought
he did,” said Mark slowly. “It couldn't have been 55
A.D.
, could it? I mean, by that time the Roman Empire had come to Nero and Caligula and all those people. What's the best place to look it up?”

Meredith breathed out and forked in some delicious crab. They had been well trained. A historian's children should always know where to look things up.

A policeman, too. He had looked up Benedict Cotterel in the new
Oxford Companion to English Literature
the night before and had found a generous, short appreciation rather along the lines of his son's account. Today he had sent a constable to the police library to get a photocopy of his
Who's Who
entry, which he now took out from his briefcase
and laid before him on the table. As he ate, he skimmed through the relevant details.

C
OTTEREL
, Benedict Arthur, novelist, travel, and miscellaneous writer.
b
. 9 February 1901, only child of Frederick Arthur Cotterel, tobacconist and newsagent of Romford, and of Mary Esther Cotterel, née Smith. Worked for East Anglian Insurance Co., and for the
Daily Herald
, until the publication of his first novel,
The Scent of Roses
, in 1927.

There followed a list of his novels and other major writings, two honorary degrees from a British and an American university, and one literary prize (not one Meredith had heard of, but then Cotterel wrote novels before the Booker or the Trask were thought of). He belonged to no club and had apparently never accepted any honors from the state—or perhaps had never been offered any. The absence of writers from the various Honours Lists is one of the few signs that writers are still viewed, by politicians at least, as dangerous, unmalleable people.

The marriages were there, early on in the entry: “
m.
1st 1924, Florence Urquhard, divorced 1926; 2nd 1934, Patricia Ellen Haynes (1915-1968); one s. one d.”

The entry concluded in traditional fashion: “Interests: architecture, walking in remote places, Italian history. Address: The Old Rectory, Maudsley, Sussex.”

And that was it. Nothing much there of interest. Except, of course, that “only child”. . . .

He finished off his salad. His children had discovered that Julius Caesar had been born around 100
B.C.
, not 1
B.C.
, and had gained a healthy glow at having bested the compilers of the Trivial Pursuit questions. Now they were settled back into their game. Meredith took from his briefcase a handwritten list that Cordelia had sent over to him
of men with whom her mother had been associated. It was neat, annotated, and very long. Meredith blanched. That would be a matter involving a great deal of legwork. He put it aside and took up the papers that summarized the physical evidence about Myra's death. He scanned them slowly, pondering, hoping that this time the report would tell him more than when he had skimmed through it at the station.

The medical evidence was rather more precise than usual, the police doctor having been on the scene so soon after the killing. Myra was murdered sometime between 9:30 and 10:15, which meant effectively between 9:30 and 9:55, when the body had been discovered. The time of the shot, 9:50, seemed an eminently likely time to the police doctor. Death had been instantaneous.

The Webley and Scott that had fired the shot was not to be found in police records, was probably of service issue, but had certainly been in use more recently than the war. It was well cared for, and there was no question of a silencer having been fitted and then removed.

Meredith had known, regretfully, that a silencer was a red herring. Silencers simply did not figure in domestic killings, and Granville Ashe had not had time to remove such a thing. He was out of it altogether. The shot heard in the bar, almost certainly, was the shot that had killed Myra Mason. And Granville had not fired it. On the other hand, whoever had fired the shot had presumably dropped the gun to avoid incriminating themselves if it was found on them. That would argue that they had stayed in the Red Lion.

It was a pity about Granville, because financially Myra was certainly worth killing. There was the flat in Hampstead, bought in 1964—with the profits, Meredith guessed, of her newspaper revelations. Then the area where it was situated had not been particularly fashionable, being at
the Finchley end and thus relatively cheap. Now fashion had crept up to it, or desirability, and it had profited by London property values, which had spiraled into madness. Then it had been the modest flat of an aspiring actress. Now it was worth a bomb.

The house in Pelstock was large (five bedrooms, three reception, in addition to a housekeeper's flat). The grounds were extensive, and Myra had acquired three adjacent fields, currently rented out to local farmers but likely to be released soon as building land. She had an extensive holding of stocks and shares, an extremely healthy bank balance, and a large collection of jewelry, both modern and antique. She had about fifteen turn-of-the-century English paintings, bought for a song but currently teetering back into fashion.