Murder at Maddingley Grange (11 page)

He remembered vividly the precise moment when he had been shocked into an understanding of his natural place in the general scheme of things. He had always pestered his mother for stories about her childhood and when he was eight his father had what was to be the first of several heart attacks. He needed rest, and Mrs. Gillette turned out the spare bedroom so that she could sleep there. A cardboard box in the back of the wardrobe had been full of copies of the
Daily Herald
, old football pools and
Woman's Weekly
magazines. Arthur had opened one of these and become immediately enthralled.

Everything was at once recognizable, almost familiar. The models with their smooth water-waved hair and drooping stockinette dresses. The cookers, elevated onto little mottled legs, even the advertisements. (Beecham's Pills! Worth a Guinea a Box!) Arthur loved the knitting patterns too: everything so thin and spare and neat, not like the great hairy things people wore today. He had been especially enamored of a multicolored fair isle beret, and an aunt had knitted it up for him. It used to sit on the side of his head like a confetti pancake and was his pride and joy until one evening some rough boys threw it into a pond.

That same aunt always said he was some sort of throwback, and last year when there had been an evening of past-lives regression at the Corn Exchange Phillip had urged him to go, but it had not been a success. When he had “come to,” the regressors had opined that, from his meanderings, it seemed pretty clear that he had been one of that great army following Hannibal across the Alps, probably in some menial capacity. Maybe howdah maintenance.

Now, still in his dream, Arthur started to burrow into the haybox to make a hollow for the cake. But no sooner had he put it in, than the all-clear sounded. A strange clanging noise instead of the usual wail. Then there were doors opening, the murmur of conversation, doors closing. He sat up, wide awake. There were sounds directly beneath his open window. Ice cubes chinked, a woman laughed and the chatter started up again. He was late at the watering hole!

Quickly Mr. Gillette sprang up and got into his evening suit (the Fifty Shilling Tailor). He was a bit worried about the ribbed petersham lapels which in some lights had a faintly greenish tinge, but his panne-velvet waistcoat, real silk socks and
thé dansant
patent-leather shoes looked splendid. He smoothed his hair with bay rum, tweezed a couple of stray whiskers from his nose and gave his moplike moustache a quick groom. Then he pinned the long silk ribbon of his monocle to his lapel and gripped it in his left eye. The monocle was made of plain glass and was a new acquisition bought especially for the weekend with the idea of injecting a musical comedy note. Keeping it in place wasn't as easy as he'd imagined and could only be accomplished by pushing the cheekbone up really hard. This closed the lid and distorted the face, giving the effect of a mild stroke. Perhaps he should have practiced more.

He hesitated about his ukelele, long stemmed, the palish vellum brown in the center with much strumming. Should he take it down? Surely that wouldn't look too pushy? A country house party was after all the ideal venue for his medley of songs with string accompaniment. And he couldn't help noticing that one of the other guests also had a music case. Perhaps they could get together? Gilly saw himself casually producing the uke as coffee was being cleared away.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your pleasure a little ditty entitled ‘She Was Only a Colonel's Daughter but She Knew What Reggy Meant.'” Yes—it should definitely go down.

Almost ready, Gilly produced a foulard handkerchief, sprinkled it with a few drops of 4711 and tucked it into his sleeve. Then, casually humming “You're the Cream in My Coffee,” he opened the top drawer of his dressing table and took out a gun.

In the candlelight the table looked very lovely. Four little posies of jasmine, pansies and stephanotis were ringed with waxy camellia leaves and linked together by prettily knotted silk ribbons. The flames of the apricot candles trembled slightly although the eight glass doors, now running with rain, were tightly closed. Everyone, with the exception of Rosemary Saville, had come to rest where their cards indicated. She demurring, “I can sit next to Mummy anytime,” had changed places with Martin.

The first course, a jellied consommé with lemon and tarragon, had been served by Bennet reasonably efficiently although it was perceived by more than one person that she touched the edge of the table in each instance with her right hand before depositing the bowls in their little beds of chipped ice more or less on the place setting with her left. Laurie, sitting in the carver's chair, did not mark Bennet's sleight of hand. She would hardly have noticed if the maid had gone around upturning the bowls on the residents' heads. For Laurie, since her visit to the Reynolds room to check on the well-being of Mr. Gillette, had been in a positive turmoil of alarmed anticipation. Finding the door unlatched she had knocked softly and receiving no reply pushed it a little. It was then that she had seen the missing guest, reflected in the mirror, slip a gun into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket.

Quickly she withdrew to stand quaking on the landing before pussyfooting away and flying down the stairs. Imagining their next move in the seconds before what she assumed would be her divulgation, Laurie's mind created an assortment of scenarios: Simon would secretly inform the others and they would overwhelm Gilly and disarm him. Or at dinner Laurie (how innocently she had placed herself next to a gangster) might upset a glass of wine and insist that Gaunt take the Gillette jacket away to be cleaned and pressed.

But about this she then had second thoughts. Might not the ploy backfire? Cornered, Mr. Gillette could be dangerous. Laurie saw him using the revolver impossibly, like a machine gun, mowing them all down. Or perhaps he would take a hostage (guess who?) and hold her like a shield, cold metal pressing against her temple, trigger finger jumpily vindictive. But in the event none of these alarming vignettes had been realized. Once back on the terrace she had been compelled to stand hopelessly, silently by watching Simon make a meal of arranging Rosemary's scarf before leading her away.

Now, handing an untouched bowl of dissolving caramel-colored gelatin back to Bennet, Laurie, in spite of a constant and vigilant determination to look anywhere but at the left-hand side of Mr. Gillette's dinner jacket, found her eyes being slowly dragged to that very spot. There it was. That ominous outline. That threatening bulge. She was amazed that no one else around the table had noticed it. To add to her concern he had brought down a music case now resting discreetly by the side of his chair. Laurie thought they would all be lucky if it did not contain a sawed-off shotgun.

“Did you know, Laurel, that the first helicopter was invented in the thirties?” She pulled her gaze upward and met those boiled-gooseberry eyes. How thick and white his skin was; how pale and drained of color his hair. He looked as if he had just been reclaimed from the sea. She shook her head. “It really was the most topping time.” Then, after complimenting her on her costume—“It is real lamé, isn't it?”—he lowered his voice. “I think Rosemary's is nylon. I mean—what is the point if the fabric's not authentic?”

Laurie glued a smile to her lips, then, looking up, connected directly with Simon, who appeared very cross. Rightly construing this to be a comment on the fact that, although hostess, she had not spoken a single word since sitting down, Laurie added a look of bright attention to the smile and attempted to tune in to the various threads of chatter.

At her end of the table Derek was dominant, lecturing to an audience, largely engaged elsewhere, on the history of detective fiction. He had just finished assessing “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His wife was looking terminally bored. Martin was talking to Mrs. Saville with an air of desperate vivacity.

The pheasant was served and with it the Mouton-Rothschild. Gaunt filled the glasses with exquisite precision. The napkin, carried over his arm for the purpose of catching drips, remained spotless. Fred, crying: “Long life to the baby,” took a swig, swallowed, paused, stared at Simon and replaced his glass with tremendous care on the table.

“Bloody hell, Simon…Where the devil did you find this?”

“In the cellar.” Simon's tone implied, where else?

“It's marvelous, man…” Fred drank some more. Slowly this time, holding it in his mouth as carefully as a proud retriever with a warm game bird. “It's…it's bloody marvelous.” A further swallow. “I don't believe this…I simply don't believe it. Violet?”

“It is nice,” Violet agreed. “Plenty of body and just enough tar. That's been down there for a good few years.”

“I suppose you realize, Simon, that what we're drinking is worth the price of the whole weekend?” Simon, who hadn't, said yes, of course he did. “Look at them all,” continued Fred. “Chucking it down like thirsty hosses. Some folk got no idea. You behave yourself.” This last was addressed to Mother, whose hooked nose, on receipt of the fumes arising from the complicated bouquet in her glass, had started to wrinkle and twitch alarmingly.

“And you shut your cakehole,” she snapped back. ‘There's more in the air than meets the eye. I've smelled this pong before. Something fruity's coming through.”

“I expect the answer is a lemon, Mrs. Gibbs.” Simon winked down the table at Sheila Gregory, who flashed back a sultry smile.

“Don't mock, Simon,” remonstrated Fred. “She can see things and pick things up where the rest of us are blind.”

Laurie missed all this. Although nodding at Derek's encyclopedic narrative and being exposed on her right to a positively exuberant amount of detail regarding the first Baby Austin, she still found most of her attention keenly drawn to the back of Martin Lewis's head.

She saw this whenever he spoke to Rosemary Saville, which he was doing quite a lot of the time, and could view it, she had discovered over the last twenty minutes, with only the mildest degree of discomfort. On the other hand, when he turned to Rosemary's mother, presenting to Laurie a three-quarter profile, the strange nauseated feeling she had experienced on the terrace returned. Fortunately, an inexplicably sharp perception where his intentions were concerned meant she was able to turn aside the moment his eye attempted to catch her own and thus avoid direct conversation. She listened though. At the moment he was addressing Mrs. Saville and had just completed a dissertation on the charming habits and demeanor of the Sealyham. Then, pausing barely to draw breath, he was off on a voyage round the Orient.

“Were you aware, Mrs. Saville, that in nineteenth-century China there was a concubine, Yung-Kei-Fie, who pretended to be drunk when she danced before the Emperor? One of her kisses was said to be worth a thousand camels.”

“No, I wasn't,” replied the recipient. “And now I am I can't say—”

“Or that the famous Samurai warrior Husan Fo was rumored to have sired four hundred sons before he was twenty-one?” He received a look to steal the marrow from a bone but plowed valiantly on. “And—you won't believe this—”

“I would believe anything,” cut in Mrs. Saville firmly, “of the Chinese.”

“Oh.”

“As far as I'm concerned, Mr. Lewis, East is East and West is West. Any intermingling between the two is quite against the dictates of Nature and much to be deplored.” Having thus disposed of the Yellow Peril, Mrs. Saville gave Martin a smile like a bunched fist and helped herself to some more carrots. “Rather an other-ranks vegetable, I usually feel,” she boomed across at Laurie, “but these are quite delicious. Do I detect a flavor of mint?”

“Mint and a little honey.”

Laurie, finding the suddenly disconsolate lines of Martin's profile quite unbearable, retuned into Derek's didactic which, despite gales of indifference all round, was still going with quite a swing.

“I
can't
believe none of you has heard of Wilkie Collins.” He sounded querulous. “I mean—
The Moonstone
is where it all began.” He glared around the table. Most of the guests, engaged in murmurous discourse, ignored him. “Everyone!” Derek pinged the side of his claret glass with his fork. “I say— everyone?” Laurie expected him to cry: “Hands up, all those who haven't heard of Wilkie Collins.”

Conversation petered out. People gave Derek their undivided attention with the exception of Mother, who was still on the consommé, mopping up the last rivulets with a piece of bread. Bennet, waiting with an expression of almost contemptuous resignation behind the old lady's chair, whipped the bowl away the moment her attention was distracted and replaced it with a helping of pheasant.

“If you're not familiar with
The Moonstone
, what about
The Woman in White?”

“Anybody's for a packet of Players,” called down Fred.

“Poe, then?”