Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave (18 page)

“An old friend!” Martha bent her sardonic gaze on the American girl; Fizzy, alone of them all, had attempted some kind of adjustment of her dress to indicate grief or at least mourning: she had wrapped a scrubby black scarf round her head; the effect was to recall the seventies’ protests against the Vietnam War rather than bereavement in the eighties. All the same, Jemima thought that it revealed a tenderness
in Fizzy which so far no one else, not William, the self-styled bereaved husband, nor Martha, had attempted to exhibit.

“An old friend!” repeated Martha. “Yes, you could put it like that.”

“I don’t want to speak out of turn,” Mrs. Vascoe began with the habitual note of apology in her voice and ended more briskly. “This is all very distasteful under the circumstances. But perhaps you should know now, as you don’t seem to be aware—in short, poor Alice and I were partners. We’d gone into partnership over Fresh Perspectives. The villa, the whole business. I’d been thinking about doing something useful since Harry died; he would have wanted me to do something useful, I know he would. Alice and I discussed it. She needed the capital. You know about that, Mr. Gearhart. That was my fresh start, it is my fresh start.” She gazed firmly round. “If anyone is in control here now, and I don’t want to obtrude too much of course, but I really think, Martha, Mr. Gearhart, it must be”—she paused as if struggling against the apology trying to return to her voice—“well, me.”

“This is not distasteful, as you put it, it’s horrible!” burst out Fizzy. “Poor little Alice, hardly cold yet.” She shuddered. “We don’t even know how she died, and we’re quarrelling over business. Didn’t you care for her at all?”

“It must be obvious even to you, Fizzy, that some of us cared for her a great deal,” Martha countered.

It was suddenly unbearably hot and the happy cries from the far side of the bay—the tourists had come with the noonday sun—were increasingly obtrusive to the tense group on the terrace above.

“How like Alice! Even now we’re all quarrelling over her. I told you it was a mistake.” Surprisingly this bitter exclamation came from Sarah Halliwell. What was more, it was to William Gearhart that she turned as she said it.

“You mean: I shouldn’t have come? I had to come. You know that I had to see you.”

“Hey! Are you guys serious? Is this some kind of love scene you’re gonna play out?” Fizzy was now more truculent than bewildered. Jemima, feeling herself to be the outsider in this increasingly murky discussion, judged it the moment to intervene.

“Shouldn’t we all step back from this a little?” she queried in her most reasonable voice, the one she kept in reserve for battling interviewees in her investigative television series. “We’ve all had a shock, a number of shocks as a matter of fact. Obviously this wasn’t just a normal Fresh Perspective house party, to put it mildly. You two, Sarah and William, obviously know each other; Martha was a close and old
friend
”—she emphasized the word deliberately without looking at the painter—“of Alice. Fizzy, you were a new, newish friend?”

Fizzy nodded strongly.

“Mrs. Vascoe, you were her partner, new, newish partner?”

Mrs. Vascoe inclined her head.

“What is quite obvious to me,” went on Jemima, “if rather too late in the day, is that Alice Garland wasn’t content for me to make up my own mind about the value or otherwise of Fresh Perspectives. She was sufficiently keen on my using some film of it for television to ensure that my visit was in a sense rigged. Mrs. Vascoe, you would talk about your late husband.” Jemima smiled nicely in her direction. “Fizzy, you would talk about your bad marriage.” Another smile, polite, not quite so nice. “Sarah, I’m not sure about you. You mentioned a personal betrayal, perhaps you really were here getting a fresh perspective on things. Yet you clearly know Alice’s estranged husband well.”

But Sarah Halliwell chose neither to confirm nor to deny what Jemima had said.

It was William Gearhart who burst out, with something of a return to his original intemperate manner, “Of course we know each other. And there was a betrayal, a highly personal betrayal But the betrayer was Alice, not me. I’d like to make that absolutely clear. Alice used her knowledge in the gallery, quoted her, got her name involved. When I went up the spout, Sarah lost her job.”

“William,” broke in Sarah, “do we have to have all this out again? And in public? It’s nothing to do with poor Alice’s death. She offered me the trip to make up, I suppose. She was generous, she could be generous. And yes, Jemima, you’re right. Alice did ask us all along to make up a convincing party for you, even though our reasons for a fresh start were, speaking of myself, perfectly genuine ones.”

“Nothing to do with Alice’s death?” hissed Fizzy. “That’s for the police to say, I think. How do we know it
was
an accident? You were out and about last night, Sarah Halliwell. I saw you all right when I took my dip. I saw the light in your cottage, saw it come on, you were there moving about. Who’s to say you didn’t go up to the house, lure poor little Alice down to the shore …” She broke off, even Fizzy aware that she might, just might, be going too far.

“I have no intention of denying that I left my cottage last night.” Sarah spoke proudly. “As a matter of fact, I visited William’s cottage. I reasoned with him. I tried to persuade him to leave in the morning. There was nothing to be gained from being here. The past was the past: there was nothing more either of us could do about it. Right, William?”

“Perfectly right. Why not add that we spent the night together? That we made love, if you prefer to put it that way. So unless Fizzy is going to accuse us
both
of lying, and
both
of murdering Alice, I think this delightful young woman must really accept—”

“Are you patronizing me? I don’t buy that,” Fizzy threatened him. But the word “murder,” mentioned for the first time, cast a new and frightful shadow on all of them.

It was the re-emergence of Irini, weeping once more now that there was temporarily no need for her executive qualities and expostulating in Greek—the word Nikos could be heard repeatedly—which put an end to the whole distressing scene.

“Poor Irini, and still more poor Nikos,” sighed Sarah at the end of it all. “Nikos is wondering what is going to happen to him, or rather what is going to happen to the business.”

Mrs. Vascoe smiled eagerly. “Oh, please, do assure them, Sarah, I wish I knew some Greek, I’ve been boning up, but I don’t know enough yet to say something as important as this. So you must assure them on my behalf that of course the business will go on, of course Irini won’t lose her job! Hardly. She’s the mainstay. As for Nikos, I’m not quite clear exactly what he does, but whatever arrangement Alice had made with him, I’ll surely honour that. Harry taught me to have everything very clear from the start, and I certainly mean to get everything clear from now on—”

Sarah was looking at her with some embarrassment; then she silently raised an eyebrow in William’s direction. He nodded.

“Mrs. Vascoe, this is going to be quite embarrassing, I fear. But the business which Irini is worrying about, Nikos’s business with Alice, is the one Fizzy mentioned to you. Rather too blithely, I’m afraid, under the circumstances. We have reason to believe that Alice was shipping out certain antiquities—vases—using Nikos.” She stopped.

“Now you listen here”—Fizzy, belligerent once more. “Alice may no longer be here to protect herself, but that’s no reason why the whole of this should be dumped on her.
What about you, Martha? It was your idea: Alice told me that. There were some odd things going on up at your cottage, I know it. Some restoring, painting up. I took a look one day. Jemima, I wanted to talk to you about that, last night. You went away.”

Irini said something very fierce in Greek to Sarah and threw her hands up in the air once more. Then she stalked off the terrace back in the direction of the kitchen.

“What did she say, Sarah?” asked Mrs. Vascoe. “I don’t know what to think. What would Harry think? Is it true?”

“She says she wishes Kiria Alice had never tried to make the Villa Elia into a business, never involved Nikos in business; she says Kiria Alice and Kirie William were happy once together when they built the villa.”

“I was happy. Alice was never really happy. She could never leave anything or anyone alone. No sooner did we build that villa than she saw how it could be used. The gallery too, that could be used.”

On that sad little speech, spoken at last with resignation rather than rage, William Gearhart turned away. His slumped figure could be seen wandering back in the direction of his cottage. After a moment Sarah shrugged her shoulders and followed him. It was a signal for the rest of the party to disperse, Fizzy allowing herself one Parthian shot: “When the police start to ask the real questions, there’ll be some explaining to do.”

A long swim must be in order, thought Jemima, in the late afternoon. There was no sign of the doctor, nor the local policeman, no kind of official had come near them since the last incursion. Were they all to spend another night together then? Under the general unhappy umbrella of the stricken villa? That seemed to be the general plan, or
rather, in the general lack of plan (no outside touring office to assist them: Alice had
been
the office), there did not appear to be any alternative. To remove oneself to a hotel—always supposing one was to be found empty in the high tourist season—might be tactless under the circumstances.

In the afternoon a grim-faced Irini did reappear: she visited Jemima’s cottage and was on her way to the others. Nikos had been, she learnt, up at the police station, but was now back. There was nothing sinister about his presence there, Jemima understood. So far. She did not know what the ramifications of Alice’s death would be for Nikos—his friends—and their presumably illegal smuggling business. The message Irini brought to her, written in careful English, was that officialdom would return to the Villa Elia tomorrow.

Another night together! Not dinner together, surely? That would be too much. But no, Irini was going up to the village: there was nothing for her to do here but mourn; Irini mimed sorrow. Another note, written in much less good but still comprehensible English, indicated that Irini’s sister would prepare a cold supper and leave it for them all as usual on the terrace. After that it was up to the individuals concerned to eat it there, or carry it away to their separate cottages.

A long swim was definitely in order. Picking her way carefully along the pretty but stony beach, Jemima avoided the spot where Alice’s body had been found. It was marked—by Nikos? by Nikos at Irini’s orders? by the police? by Fizzy?—by a little cairn of stones.

Once she was in the sea, Jemima floated out easily into the bay. The water grew deep within a few yards of the shore; the swell was gentle but commanding, the water almost chilly. (Even in high summer the Corfu water,
unlike that of the rest of Greece, remained coolish and thus invigorating.) Jemima turned on her back and looked back at the villa itself, the cliffs and headlands, the extensive olive-spattered territories of the Villa Elia. The little cairn remained a marker and a monument which she had to admit could not be ignored.

How peaceful and clean everything looked now, washed in the late afternoon sun! Yet it was this very shore which on the night of Alice’s death—without any knowledge of what was occurring—had seemed to Jemima so abruptly menacing, cries heard, lights perhaps flickering, a boat maybe seen. Had it been her instinct that something evil was afoot? A fatal accident: that was after all a far more likely explanation. Why had William, and Fizzy too, seemed to jump to the conclusion that there was something unnatural, as well as tragic, about what had happened?

Fresh starts, fresh perspectives. Lapped by the water, gazing up at the villa itself (blue shutters now firmly closed against sun—or tragedy), Jemima began to meditate anew on the so-called theme of the Villa Elia holidays.

Supposing Alice had been killed? Presumably they would know for sure in the morning. Had she been killed to prevent her making a fresh start? Or in revenge by those incapable of making one? Fizzy might come into the first category, or even Martha, locked in their jealousy of each other; William and Sarah in the second. Mrs. Vascoe, on the other hand, if as innocent as she seemed about Alice’s secret smuggling ventures, had no motive to wish the dead woman ill. But if Mrs. Vascoe was a somewhat deeper character than she appeared—not altogether improbable, since she had surprised them all with her news of the partnership—then she might have got hold of some inkling of Alice’s business-within-a-business. And she might not have liked what she found out, the misuse of her money, the
misuse of the late Harry’s money … Under these circumstances, even meek little Betsy Vascoe might find it in her nature to behave less like an apologetic mouse and more like an enraged rat.

Jemima watched as a figure, a woman, walked along the shore and paused by the small cairn, her head bowed. From her figure, so much more substantial than that of the rest of the female guests, Jemima guessed she was looking at Fizzy. She saw the black scarf fluttering round her head. At this distance, Fizzy looked both fine and dignified.

Fizzy? No, Fizzy could not have desired Alice’s death. Fizzy had manifestly hero-worshipped Alice. Jemima remembered the embarrassing spectacle of some of Fizzy’s enthusiasms; how graceful Alice Garland had dealt with them, used them as it now seemed. Surely Fizzy could never have wished for any harm to come to Alice, her model of all a woman should be, practical, helpful, businesslike … Jemima recalled Fizzy’s frequent outbursts of praise.

Martha, then? How could Martha have desired Alice’s death? Other words rang in Jemima’s ears: Martha’s words. “My Alice.” And then Fizzy’s further exclamation: “All our pasts are crying out to haunt us.” The figure of Fizzy, head still bowed, had by now walked away from the cairn, and vanished among the olive trees.

A fresh perspective … wait. Jemima saw suddenly how you might look at the whole matter from another angle; she began instinctively to swim back for the shore with a practised crawl that was very different from the reflective way she had been floating, and looking up at the villa. Then she realized that there was in fact no hurry for what she had to do. She swam more slowly, floating again. Night would fall and with it the gentle cloak of warm darkness which would cover all things and make them, at least for the time being, acceptable.