Feelings of Fear (20 page)

Inspector Rogers came over to Mary. “Your husband died in spring last year, leaving you and your daughter almost penniless.”

Then he went up to Caitlin. “The lease on your pottery studio has just run out, and unless you can find a new one, you'll be going out of business.”

Lastly, he approached Michael. “You're separated from your wife,
sir, and she's threatening to divorce you. You're certainly going to need all the funds you can lay your hands on.”

Inspector Rogers returned to the center of the room. “To be frank with you, however, there is no evidence that links any of you directly with the contamination of the turkey. It could have been any one of you, or it could have been some of you, or all of you, in concert.

“There is also the legal problem that nobody ate any of the poisoned turkey except for the cat; and that it is unlikely that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that whoever poisoned it was specifically intending to kill Mr Chesterton. It isn't as if the turkey was set out on a plate that was solely intended for him.

“For that reason I am obliged to let you all go about your business, but I must caution you that our investigations will continue and that you should stay in the country until further notice.”

“By the way,” said Mary, as they gathered up their coats. “Do you have any idea who
is
going to inherit?”

“Well – this is the funny part,” said Inspector Rogers, taking out his handkerchief again and trying to find a dry bit. “The whole estate was supposed to go to Tarquin. All eleven million of it. He would have been the richest cat in the country.”

“What!” Kenneth exploded. “Eleven million to a
cat
! It's insane!”

“It's legal, I'm afraid,” said Inspector Rogers. “Didn't you read about that woman who gave two million to her spaniel?”

“But Tarquin's dead. Who gets the money now?”

“Let's see … something called the British Blue Protection League.”

“Bloody cats again,” grumbled Kenneth. “I hate bloody cats.”

Mandy and her mother drove back to their semi-detached house overlooking Ealing Common in West London and her mother asked her if she wanted to go out for a curry because she had nothing in the house.

Mandy flopped back on the sagging corduroy sofa and said, “No. I'd rather be hungry.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because I'm never going to be hungry again, ever; and I want to remember what it's like.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about Uncle Philip's inheritance.”

“I still don't understand you.”

“Uncle Philip never believed that any of you loved him, did he? He always thought you were after his money.”

“He was right, wasn't he? We didn't, and we were.”

“But he knew that Tarquin loved him, and that Tarquin never wanted anything but warmth and food and his bony old lap to sit in.”

“So?”

“So none of you used your brains, did you? If you want a cantankerous old man like that to feel good towards you, you don't pretend to like him for what he is, because he won't believe you. In fact he'll be even more suspicious of you than ever. No – you make sure that you win the confidence of somebody he trusts. Or, in Uncle Philip's case,
something
they trust, which was Tarquin.

“I started to make a fuss of Tarquin because there was nothing else to do at Polesden View. But Tarquin began to trust me, and Uncle Philip began to trust me, too. He gave me bits of money and sweets and he told me that he was going to leave all his inheritance to Tarquin, just to show you how greedy and insincere you all were.”

“You
knew
about him giving his inheritance to Tarquin? And you didn't tell us?”

“If I'd told you, you would never have gone down to see him at Christmas, would you, and he wouldn't have trusted me any more.”

“But we suffered all of those horrible, horrible Christmases, and you
knew?
”

Mandy smiled. “We called it our secret, Uncle Philip and me.”

“But what was the point, when the money was all going to go to that stupid cat?”

“Oh, mum! The point was that even the brainiest cats can't look after themselves, can they? Cats can't open bank accounts. They can't even open tins of catfood. When their owners die, cats have to have people to look after them … people that their owners trust. And when cats die, they have to leave their money to somebody, don't they?”

Mandy went to the bookcase and tugged out a file. She opened it up so that Mary could see the first page. In official-looking letters, she had typed British Blue Protection League: Annual Accounts. The column under “credits” was still blank.

“I put Uncle Philip in touch with them. He never realized it was only me.”

“
You
poisoned the turkey,” Mary whispered.

Mandy nodded. “And I opened the larder door, so that Tarquin could get in.”

“You couldn't have known that Uncle Philip would have a stroke.”

“No … that was something of a bonus, wasn't it?”

“My God,” said Mary. “I can hardly believe it. Eleven million pounds.”

“Not until he dies, of course. But we can wait, can't we? It'll give us time to think what we're going to spend it on. You know what I've really always wanted? A dog.”

“
T
he girls here are very young,” said Baubay, taking a last deep drag at his cigarette and flicking it out of the Pontiac's window. “But let me tell you, they'll do
anything.
”

Vincent frowned across the street at the large Gothic-revival house. It wasn't at all what he had expected a brothel to look like. It was heavily overshadowed by three giant dark-green elms, but he could see turrets and spires and decorated gables, and balconies where net curtains suggestively billowed in the summer breeze. The outside walls were painted a burned orange color, and there was something strange and other-worldly about the whole place, as if he had seen it in a painting, or dreamed it.

“I'm not so sure about this,” he told Baubay. “I never visited a bordello before.”

“Bordello!” Baubay piffed. “This is simply a very amenable place where guys like us can meet beautiful and willing young women, discuss the state of the economy, have a bottle of champagne or two, play Trivial Pursuit, and if we feel like it, get laid.”

“Sounds like a bordello to me,” said Vincent, trying to make a joke of it.

“You're not going to chicken out on me, are you? Don't say you're going to chicken out. Come on, Vincent, I've driven over eighty miles for this, and I'm not going back to Montreal without at least one game of hide the salami.”

“It's just that I feel like – I don't know. I feel like I'm being unfaithful.”

“Bullshit! How can you be unfaithful to a woman who walked
out on you? How can you be unfaithful when she was screwing a
crotté
like Michael Saperstein?”

“I don't know, but it just feels that way. Come on, Baubay, I never looked at another woman for eleven years. Well, I
looked,
but I didn't do anything about it.”

“So – after all those years of sainthood, you deserve to indulge yourself a little. You won't regret it, believe me. You'll be coming back for more. Hey – with your tongue dragging on the sidewalk.”

“I don't know. Is there a restaurant or anything around here? Maybe I'll have some lunch and wait for you.”

Baubay unfastened his seatbelt and took his keys out of the ignition. “Absolutely emphatically no you are not. How do you expect me to enjoy fornicating with some ripe young teenager while all the time I know that you're sitting alone in some dreary diner eating Salisbury steak? What kind of friend would that make me? You're not backing out of this, Vincent. You're coming to meet Madame Leduc whether you like it or not.”

“Well, I'll
meet
her, OK?” Vincent agreed. “But whether I do anything else—”

Baubay took him by the elbow as if he were a blind man and propelled him to the opposite sidewalk. The morning was glazed and warm and there was hardly any traffic. The house stood in the older part of St Michel-des-Monts, in a street which was still respectable but which was suffering from obvious neglect. The house next door was empty, its windows shuttered and its front door boarded up, its garden a tangle of weeds and wild poppies. Behind the houses, through a blueish haze, Vincent could see the mountains of Mont Blanc, Mont Tremblant, and beyond.

They climbed the stone steps to the front door and Baubay gave a smart, enthusiastic knock. The door was painted a sun-faded blue, and the paint had cracked like the surface of an old master. The knocker was bronze, and cast in the shape of a snarling wolf's head.

“See that?” said Baubay. “That was supposed to keep evil spirits at bay. They're quite rare, now.”

They waited and waited and eventually Baubay knocked again. After a while they heard a door open and piano music, Mozart, and
a woman's voice. Vincent felt butterflies in his stomach, and he had a ridiculous childish urge to run away. Baubay winked at him and said, “This'll be Madame Leduc now.”

The front door was opened by a tall, ash-blonde woman with her hair braided on top of her head. She was wearing a long silk negligée in pale aquamarine, trimmed with lace. She must have been forty-five at least, but she was extraordinarily beautiful, with a fine, slightly Nordic-looking face, and eyes that were such a pale, washed-out blue that they were scarcely any color at all. Her negligée was open almost to her waist, revealing a deep cleavage in which a large marcasite crucifix nestled. Judging by the way her breasts swung, she must have been naked underneath.

“François, what a pleasure,” she said. Her accent was faintly Québecois, very precize and refined. “And – how exciting! You've brought your friend with you today.”

“I couldn't keep you all to myself, could I?” asked Baubay. “Violette, this is Vincent Jeffries. He's a very talented man. A great musician. Like, eat your heart out, Johann Sebastian Bach.”

Mme Leduc held out her hand so that it slightly drooped, and Vincent realized that she expected him to kiss it. He did so, and when he lifted his eyes he saw that she was smiling at him in amusement. Baubay said, “Let's go inside. I could do some serious damage to a bottle of cold champagne.”

They stepped into the hallway and Mme Leduc closed the door behind them, blotting out the sunshine. “The tall one and the short one,” she remarked, and then she gave a brittle, tinkling laugh. Baubay laughed too, like a dog barking, and gave her a pat on the bottom. His shortness had never given him any trouble with women, or so he said, and Vincent believed him, because he was always packed with energy and he was quite handsome in a roughly cut, unfinished way, with a square jaw and thick eyebrows and thick black curls. Apart from being taller, Vincent was much thinner and quieter, with blondish combed-back hair and a narrow, rather aquiline face, and a way of peering at people as if they were standing six or seven miles away. When she had first met him, Patricia had said that he looked like Lawrence of Arabia, trying to see through the glitter of a distant mirage. In the end, their marriage had turned out to be the mirage.

“So, you're a great musician, Mr Jeffries?” asked Mme Leduc. “Some of my girls are learning the piano. You will have to give them some pointers.”

“François is exaggerating, as usual,” said Vincent. “I write scores for television commercials – incidental music, links, stuff like that. Do you know the Downhome Donut music? That was mine. Right now François and I are working on a Labatt's beer ad together.”

“You should hear what he's written!” said Baubay. “Is it dramatic? Is it sweeping? Do bears go to the woods to dress up as women?”

They entered a large, high-ceilinged living-room. It probably overlooked the garden, but Vincent couldn't tell because all the windows were tightly covered by bleached white calico blinds, through which the sunlight filtered as softly as the memory of a long-lost summer day. The floor was pale polished hardwood, with antique scatter-rugs, and the furniture was all antique, too, gilded and upholstered in creams and yellows. There were huge mirrors everywhere, which at first gave Vincent the impression that he had walked into a room crowded with fifteen or sixteen girls.

Mme Leduc clapped her hands and called, “
Attention, mes petites!
M. Baubay has arrived and he has brought a friend for us to entertain!”

Immediately, the girls came forward and clustered around them. Now Vincent could see that there were only seven of them, but he still felt overwhelmed, and more than anything else he wished that he were someplace else. He had never been simultaneously so aroused and so embarrassed in his whole life. All of the girls were pretty: two or three of them were almost as beautiful as Mme Leduc. There was a redhead with skin as white as milk, and a long-haired brunette with dark slanting eyes that he could have drowned in. There were three blondes – one bubbly and curly, the other tall and mysterious with hair so long that she could have wrapped herself in it, like a silky curtain. There was another brunette who stood more shyly behind her friends, but she had a face so perfect that Vincent couldn't take his eyes off her.

What struck him most of all, though, was the way in which the girls were dressed. He didn't quite know what he had expected: Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie, maybe, or satin wraps like the
one that Mme Leduc was wearing. But they all wore plain white cotton nightdresses, almost ankle-length, and one of them was even wearing white socks. Vincent supposed that Mme Leduc had wanted them to look younger than they really were, like schoolgirls; but even so none of them could have been older than eighteen or nineteen.