Cavalier Case (24 page)

The costume. Love and the costume. Why should a costume, any costume, be such a giveaway? The ghost's costume—that was the line of thought to follow—let us say it was the ghost's costume. Why strike down Nell for finding it? Once again, the film of the possible suspects was unreeled before her mind's eye. She considered them all, envisaged them all physically. The smell. Jemima suddenly remembered the smell, that was what Nell had said originally in her rather confused phrase: "I recognised it and I didn't recognise it." Jemima stopped the film.

Could it be? Was it possible?

It could be. And as to being possible, Jemima had learnt from previous investigations that where primitive emotions were concerned, anything was possible. She ran everything—the whole film—through her mind again for one last time. Then other things fell into place too. As Jemima pulled back the heavy shutters to go out on her balcony in the first morning light, she was surprised to find that in spite of everything her first feeling was of an unbearable sadness. It was only after that, that she was filled with anger.

And she still had to figure out how to bring the murderer to book—for there was no doubt now that just as there had been an unreal ghost as opposed to a real one, there had been a real, not an accidental murderer. Twice over, probably, and a third attempted murder. But this was a clever, resourceful person with a position to lose, who would do anything to protect the truth from discovery, and understood perfectly well the art of bluff. How could she go to the police—the agreeable Detective Inspector Spain, let alone Pompey—with such suspicions? As yet they were converted into certainties only by the nocturnal processes of a logical mind, coupled with an instinctive nature.

She needed proof. Proof from Nell. At the Cavalier Celebration, she would get proof from Nell, if it killed her. The familiar careless cliche made her draw back. Jemima rephrased it: I must get proof so that no one else is killed. She had been right in her instinct. Obsession of a sort did run through the whole thing.

At Lackland Court that same evening, obsession could also be said to be running through the whole thing. But this was, in contrast, the comparatively harmless obsession of all present, spectators, performers, directors and all, with the weather. Would there or would there not be a thunderstorm? The heat was oppressive. The air was very still. 

The horses which would be used in the Celebration had been borrowed from hunting neighbours and amiable local riding-schools. To Jemima's nervous eyes, they looked enormous: she had not ridden since she was a teenager in West Germany during her father's last Army posting when she had had ambitions to be a show-jumper. Horses, unlike policemen, seemed to have grown bigger and older since those Dortmund days.

The horses were grouped together at the north side of the house; this facade would not be used for the Celebration since it was about the only place where there had been some ugly later renovation of the brickwork. The spectators' stands, on the other hand, were grouped in the forecourt, while the spectators themselves wandered, wine glasses in hand, in the gardens to the south and west, waiting for the light to fade. There was a big grey horse for Decimus (but then Zena was an accomplished rider), a nice-looking bay for Charlotte which looked rather high for her (but then she also rode a great deal) and a fat skewbald pony for Nell. Jemima's own horse was another lighter bay, about the same size of Charlotte's, with a beautiful flowing flaxen mane. It was allegedly "so quiet you'll need a whip to get it to move at all, let alone canter"; for some reason Jemima was not reassured by these words.

Jemima's horse—actually a mare called Jilly, for reasons it took a sudden flick of the flowing flaxen mane to work out—belonged to Marcus. He himself was already seated on the biggest horse of all, a vast sweating blackish animal, heavily built like his master but far more magnificent; it was apparently his own hunter. Otherwise the horses stood sweating, champing, occasionally stamping, blowing their nostrils angrily at the flies which persecuted them, swishing thick coarse tails with equal ferocity.

The horses were tense, not only with the heat and the flies. Perhaps the seventeenth-century bridles and saddles with which they were lumbered also contributed: research by David, greeted with rapture by Gawain, contradicted by Zena, finalised by Rupert Durham. The spectators moved happily about the gardens where rival local gardeners expressed public enchantment at witnessing "so much colour for late August" and private delight at seeing "weeds like it was a conservation area." They were probably not at all tense except for those repeated speculations about the thunderstorm.

"We could get seriously wet," Adriana informed Dan Lackland with great earnestness.

"There's always that possibility with rain," agreed Dan. "Don't worry, Adriana, I personally will give you a rub-down." Temporarily, Dan seemed more cheerful. It was perhaps the fact that Adriana, returned browner, plumper and bonnier than ever from her villa on the Bosphorus, had bought twenty of the best tickets, which prompted this offer of special service.

But the tension among the cast about the forecast of thunder was almost palpable. Darkness was finally beginning to fall. Soon the ticket-holders would be urged to take their seats like so many crows making their way to the rooky wood—in this case the wooden stands in the forecourt. Some of them quite high up, all of them rather rickety. Jane Manfred frowned as the delicate spindly heel of her shoe got stuck between two boards and had to be rescued in a gallant manner hy Dan, who then, with mock chivalry, kissed the hem of her dark red chiffon dress. At this the frown lifted. 

The Celebration depended on darkness for its skillful execution so that each window could be illuminated in turn, according to the narrative, while the characters arrived at their destination, spotlit briefly on horseback. In the first half of the Celebration the story of the Meredith family would be told up to the point of Decimus' mortal wounding at the Battle of Taynford in 1645: his marriage to Olivia, his romance with Lady Isabella; followed by his return on a kind of bier from the battle, his death scene—old Dame Alice (enacted by the much younger Alix) at his bedside; the abduction of the body by Lady Isabella's men; the distraught grief of Olivia. In the second half battle would commence: the siege of Lackland Court three years later by courtesy of many enthusiastic extras, more horses, and a good deal of recorded noise and gunfire. One climax was destined to be the death of Sir Bartleby Potter (a.k.a. Marcus Meredith). He was supposed to fall heavily from his horse whilst besieging the house, impaled by something or other flung from the battlements. At the tennis court Jemima had been privately worried that Marcus could not manage such a feat without doing some further damage to himself. It was Zena who airily reassured her.

"Oh, Markie's much stronger than any of us," she threw off. "Has been ever since he was a child. It's often the way with people, don't you find? They compensate. He's not even disabled, really, is he? Poor Marcus." Zena changed the subject to her future—mimed—romantic involvement with Jemima. A conversation took place between the two women which, despite the fact it was punctuated with slightly hysterical giggles, might have seriously disconcerted one Cherry Bronson. Then Rupert Durham put an end to it by insisting on demonstrating (on Zena) exactly how Jemima the famed courtesan should receive Decimus' first kiss. They had certainly moved a long way from that Victorian picture of Olivia, eyes cast down, receiving her husband's kisses as though she would die on the spot. Lady Isabella was supposed to display a good deal of seventeenth (or late twentieth) century enthusiasm.

Even the roof was going to be used. That had been the subject of some awkward debate in view of Haygarth's really quite recent death. Gawain, in a green velvet suit which was mistaken by several of the cast for seventeenth-century costume, and otherwise called to mind his sobriquet of the Green Nightmare, had been frivolously obstinate on the subject: "Oh, darlings, only a
butler
fell." This remark was thought to be in bad taste by absolutely everyone. Furthermore such an observation was definitely not the way to preserve Lady Manfred's now rather fragile patronage. (Shortly after the revelation of Gawain's plans for the Decimus skeleton, she had been seen lunching with John Steff at Le Caprice; generally felt to be a public warning.) 

But then Rupert Durham backed Gawain up, casually but quite firmly: "Lead from the rooftops—a vital part of siege warfare. We'll have the country women melting it down."

"Why only the women?" asked the blond girl in seventeenth-century hot pants armed with a pitchfork, not for the first time. She was in fact yet another member of the Smith family: Jo, sister to Cathy, Penny and Dave. Rupert Durham ignored her.

Then the noise began. An extremely loud, quite unexpected and very frightening noise. But it was not, as everybody first thought, the long-heralded thunderstorm but the peculiarly loud rolling thundery sound of repeated salvos being fired from big guns, guns which gave the impression of being remarkably close. The audience, only just settled in their seats—Adriana, in fact, still standing up trying to reorganise the entire placement of her twenty-strong party at the last minute—were so unnerved that several of them started to scream. Somebody put up an enormous golfing umbrella on the assumption— incorrect—that heavy drops of rain must be now falling. The next boom and the next did at least bring home to the majority of the spectators that this was a deliberate if startling prologue to the Cavalier Celebration; the equivalent to the
trois coups
of the French theatre. But there was a good deal of anger about at the shock of it all.

Lady Manfred was certainly furious (it turned out to be her golfing umbrella) and she was furious once again with Gawain. But then it emerged that Gawain himself was furious, actually purple with wrath in his vivid green velvet suit, since, far from having organised the cannonade, he was complaining that this unsolicited prologue was effectively drowning the long steady drum rolls "and the whole seventeenth-century bit" with which he had intended the performance to begin. 

The dog Kylie was either furious or frightened, since it bounded from Zena's side with a long howl, hurtled round the corner towards the stands, bolted through their midst to the enormous alarm of all and sundry ("Is it a Rottweiler?" cried Adriana) and vanished.

It turned out that Dan Lackland had privately organised the salvos with an Army friend. He was unrepentant. "None fired at my birth, alas, so I thought it would be amusing to have some now."

"If only we could have had something like that when Dessie was born!" put in Charlotte, with the intention, apparently, of defusing the situation.

"Dessie's not a bloody little prince!" hissed Nell, who was rapidly recovering her spirits.

It was at this point that the noise and violent weeping was heard coming from the audience. Phrases, incoherent but unfortunately not inaudible, wafted across the murmuring ranks of spectators: "More killings," "it never stops," "this horrible family" were some of them. 

It was only when Dan said curtly to Marcus: "You go to her, old boy, you're the one who said she should be allowed to come with Nell, you handle her. Tell her to shut up or get out. I mean it," that Jemima understood the hysterical voice to be that of Babs Meredith.

"If Mum goes, I go," said Nell bravely to her father. But Dan, much as Rupert Durham had ignored Jo Smith, the feminist pitchforker, behaved as if she had not spoken.

It was not an auspicious start to the spectacle. Nevertheless, when everything had, roughly speaking, calmed down, some pretty seventeenth-century music had come and gone, and Rupert's exquisitely sonorous voice had embarked on the earliest known Decirnus poem from his special podium in the forecourt, some measure of order was for the time being restored.

It was convenient to the narrative that the first Decimus poem celebrated his home in childhood: "Young pilgrim was I in thy nurturing arms"—although it was typical of Rupert, being Rupert, that he actually recited "in
those
nurturing arms" (less harmonious to Jemima) since he specialised in discovering subtly different versions of well-known poems and then imposing them on the rest of the world. Young pilgrim . . . Zena must have taken the title of her prize winning historical novel from the line.

But Jemima had more urgent matters to consider than seventeenth-century texts and titles and for that matter, Lady Isabella herself. Part of her plan—the entrapment via Nell she had tentatively devised— was to get free from the main body of the cast and extras where they lurked, somewhat awkwardly, Cavaliers and pitchforkers, on the north side of the house, awaiting their cues. She needed mobility and she needed invisibility—of a sort; what she did not need was the extremely visible sunflower-yellow dress of Lady Isabella, not the dress and not the vivid billowing grass green cloak.

Cautiously, she dismounted. Jilly, who had reacted a great deal less violently to the unexpected gunfire than most of the other horses—so perhaps her docility was not so legendary after all—stood patiently by. Jemima, unhooking her long skirts, handed the reins to one of the extras; she thought it was Cathy Smith, but in the semi-darkness could not be quite sure.

"I'm desperate, I have to go," she murmured: "Hold my horse." The remark, she realised, had a quaint "hold the front page" ring to it. On the other hand, since Dan Lackland, unlike Jane Manfred, had generously allowed Lackland Court itself—or at any rate the back quarters—to be used for the cast to dress, undress, make-up, wash, use the lavatories and so forth, it provided the best excuse for slipping away.

The next part of her plan was to find Alix Carstairs, who, playing an inhabitant of the big house, did not need to arrive by horseback. She would appear at a window, and then nurse the dying Decimus on the front steps,as a substitute for the great hall. She must be somewhere inside. To Jemima's relief, Alix was sitting alone indoors in the furthest backstairs room, beyond that ground floor room where Nell had been found. The one thing which worried Jemima was the time scale of all this—and then there was the forecast thunderscorm.