The Scold's Bridle (36 page)

"Serves her right," said Charlie unsympathetically. "What a corrupt lot they all were, and they say it's only recently the country started going to pot. You say she went to see Mrs. Gillespie on the morning of the murder. What else did Mrs. Gillespie tell her?"

"Murder?" queried Cooper with a touch of irony. "Don't tell me you agree with me at last?"

"Get on with it, you old rogue," said Jones impatiently. "I'm on the edge of my seat here."

"Mrs. Gillespie began by being very cool and composed, told Mrs. Marriott that the whole matter was out of her hands and that she wasn't prepared to pay the sort of money James was demanding from her. As far as she was concerned she didn't care any more what people said or thought about her. There had never been any doubt that Gerald committed suicide and if Jane wanted to own up to stealing drugs from her father, that was her affair. Mathilda would deny knowing anything about them." He opened his notebook. "I'm more sinned against than sinning,' " she said and advised Mrs. Marriott that, in the matter of the baby, things would get worse before they got better. She went on to say that Mrs. Marriott was a fool for keeping her husband in the dark all these years. They had a terrible row during which Mrs. Marriott accused Mrs. Gillespie of ruining the lives of everyone she had ever had contact with, at which point Mrs. Gillespie ordered her out of the house with the words: "James has been reading my private papers and knows where the child is. It's quite pointless to keep quiet any longer." She then told Mrs. Marriott it was a boy and that she'd put it up for adoption." He closed the notebook. "My bet is the 'private papers' were the diaries and things were going to get worse because Mrs. Gillespie had made up her mind to acknowledge her illegitimate child and spike James's guns." He rubbed his jaw wearily. "Not that that scenario really makes a great deal more sense than it did before. We'd more or less decided that whoever was reading the diaries was the same person who stole them and murdered the old lady, and I still say James Gillespie wouldn't have drawn our attention to the diaries if he was the guilty party. The psychology's all wrong. And what motive did he have for killing her? She was far more valuable alive as a blackmail victim. Let's face it, it wasn't just the business of the baby he could hold over her, it was her uncle's murder as well."

"But he probably couldn't prove that, not so long afterwards, and you're making too many assumptions," said Charlie slowly. " 'I'm more sinned against than sinning,' " he echoed. "That's a line from
King Lear
."

"So?"

"King Lear went mad and took to wandering in the fields near Dover with a crown of weeds on his head because his daughters had deprived him of his kingdom and his authority."

Cooper groaned. "I thought it was Ophelia who had the crown of weeds."

"Hers were coronet weeds," corrected Jones with idle pedantry. "It was Lear who wore the crown." He thought of the epitaph on the Fontwell tombstone. "By God, Tommy, there's a lovely symmetry about this case. Jack Blakeney's been using a Stanley knife to clean inscriptions in Fontwell."

Cooper scowled at him. "How many pints have you had?"

Charlie leaned forward again, his keen eyes scouring Cooper's face. "I studied
King Lear
at school. It's a hell of a play. All about the nature of love, the abuse of power, and the ultimate frailties of the human spirit."

"Just like
Hamlet
then," said Cooper sourly. "
Othello
, too, if it comes to that."

"Of course. They were all tragedies with death the inevitable consequence. King Lear's mistake was to misinterpret the nature of love. He gave more weight to words than to deeds and partitioned his kingdom between two of his daughters, Goneril and Regan, whom he believed loved him but who, in reality, despised him. He was a tired old man who wanted to relinquish the burdens of state and live the rest of his life in peace and tranquility. But he was also extremely arrogant and contemptuous of anyone's opinions but his own. His rash assumption that he knew what love was sowed the seeds of his family's destruction." He grinned. "Not bad, eh? Damn nearly verbatim from an essay I wrote in the sixth form. And I loathed the flaming play at the time. It's taken me thirty years to see its merits."

"I came up with
King Lear
a few days ago," remarked Cooper, "but I still don't see a connection. If she'd divided her estate between Mrs. Lascelles and Miss Lascelles there'd have been a parallel then."

"You're missing the point, Tommy.
King Lear
was the most tragic of all Shakespeare's plays and Mrs. Gillespie knew her Shakespeare. Dammit, man, she thought everything he wrote was gospel. There was a third child, don't forget, who was turned off without a penny." He surged to his feet. "I want Jack Blakeney in the nick in half an hour. Be a good fellow and bring him in. Tell him your boss wants to talk to him about Mrs. Gillespie's adopted son."

What neither of them knew was that Jack Blakeney had been arrested at Mill House, half an hour previously, following the Orloffs' 999 call and Joanna Lascelles's hysterical assertions that he had not only tried to kill her but had admitted killing her mother.

The Inspector learnt of it as soon as he arrived back from lunch. Cooper was informed by radio and ordered to return post haste. He took time out, however, to sit for five minutes in depressed disillusion in a deserted country lane. His hands were shaking too much to drive with any competence, and he knew, with the awful certainty of defeat, that his time was over. He had lost whatever it was that had made him a good policeman. Oh, he had always known what his superiors said about him, but he had also known they were wrong. His forte had been his ability to make accurate judgements about the people he dealt with, and whatever anyone said to the contrary, he was usually right. But he had never allowed his sympathies for an offender and an offender's family to stand in the way of an arrest. Nor had he seen any validity in allowing police work to dehumanize him or destroy the tolerance that he, privately, believed was the one thing that set man above the animals.

With a heavy heart, he fired the engine and set off back to Learmouth. He had misjudged both the Blakeneys. Worse, he simply couldn't begin to follow Charlie Jones's flights of fancy over
King Lear
or comprehend the awful symmetry behind inscriptions and Stanley knives. Hadn't Mr. Spede told him that the Stanley knife on the bathroom floor was the one from the kitchen drawer? The crown he thought he understood. Whoever had decked out Mrs. Gillespie in nettles had seen the symbolic connection between her and
King Lear
. How then had Ophelia come to lead them up the garden path?
Coronet weeds
, he recalled, and Dr. Blakeney's reference to them in the bathroom.

An intense sadness squeezed about his heart. Poor Tommy Cooper. He was, after all, just an absurd and rather dirty old man, entertaining fantasies about a woman who was young enough to be his daughter.

An hour later, Inspector Jones pulled out the chair opposite Jack and sat down, switching on the tape recorder and registering date, time and who was present. He rubbed his hands in anticipation of a challenge. "Well, well, Mr. Blakeney, I've been looking forward to this." He beamed across at Cooper who was sitting with his back to the wall, staring at the floor. "The Sergeant's whetted my appetite with what he's told me about you, not to mention the reports of your contretemps with the police in Bournemouth and this latest little fracas at Cedar House."

Jack linked his hands behind his head and smiled wolfishly. "Then I hope you won't be disappointed, Inspector."

"I'm sure I won't." He steepled his fingers on the table in front of him. "We'll leave Mrs. Lascelles and the Bournemouth incident to one side for the moment because I'm more interested in your relationship with Mrs. Gillespie." He looked very pleased with himself. "I've deciphered the floral crown that she was wearing in her bath. Not Ophelia at all, but King Lear. I've just been looking it up. Act IV, Scene IV where Cordelia describes him as 'Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flow'rs.' And then Scene VI, a stage direction. 'Enter Lear, fantastically dressed with weeds.' Am I right, Mr. Blakeney?"

"It did occur to me that Ophelia was a very unlikely interpretation. I guessed Lear when Sarah described the scene to me."

"And Lear certainly makes more sense."

Jack cocked his irritating eyebrow. "Does it?"

"Oh, yes." He rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation. "It goes something like this, I think. Lear had two vile daughters, Goneril and Regan, and one loving daughter, Cordelia. Cordelia he banished because she refused to flatter him with hollow words; Goneril and Regan he rewarded because they were deceitful enough to tell lies in order to get their share of his wealth. For Goneril and Regan, read Joanna and Ruth Lascelles. For Cordelia, read the son Mrs. Gillespie put up for adoption, i.e. the one she banished who never received a penny from her." He held Jack's gaze. "Now, in the play, Cordelia comes back to rescue her father from the brutality her sisters are inflicting upon him, and I think it happened in real life, too, though purely figuratively speaking of course. Neither Joanna nor Ruth were
brutal
to Mrs. Gillespie, merely desperately disappointing." He tapped his forefingers together. "Cordelia, the adopted son whom Mathilda had long since given up on, reappears miraculously to remind her that love does still exist for her, that she is not as embittered as she thought she was and that, ultimately, she has produced at least one person who has qualities she could be proud of. How am I doing, Mr. Blakeney?"

"Imaginatively."

Charlie gave a low laugh. "The only question is, who is Cordelia?"

Jack didn't answer.

"And did he come looking for his mother or was it pure chance that brought him here? Who recognized whom, I wonder?"

Again Jack didn't answer, and Charlie's brows snapped together ferociously. "You are not obliged to answer my questions, Mr. Blakeney, but you would be very unwise to forget that I am investigating murder and attempted murder here. Silence won't help you, you know."

Jack shrugged, apparently unmoved by threats. "Even if any of this were true, what does it have to do with Mathilda's death?"

"Dave Hughes told me an interesting story today. He says he watched you clean a gravestone in the cemetery at Fontwell, claims you were obviously so fascinated by it that he went and read it after you'd gone. Do you remember what it says?"

" 'George Fitzgibbon 1789-1833. Did I deserve to be despised, By my creator, good and wise? Since you it was who made me be, Then part of you must die with me.' I looked him up in the parish records. He succumbed to syphilis as a result of loose living. Maria, his wretched wife, died of the same thing four years later and was popped into the ground alongside George, but she didn't get a tombstone because her children refused to pay for one. There's a written epitaph in the record instead and hers is even better. 'George was lusty, coarse and evil, He gave me pox, he's with the devil.' Short, and to the point. George's was ridiculously hypocritical by contrast."

"It all depends who George thought his creator was," said Charlie. "Perhaps it was his mother he wanted to take to hell with him."

Idly Jack traced a triangle on the surface of the table. "Who told you Mathilda had an adopted son? Someone reliable, I hope, because you're building a hell of a castle on their information."

Jones caught Cooper's eye, but ignored the warning frown. As Cooper said, their chances of respecting Jane Mariott's confidences were thin. "Mrs. Jane Marriott, whose husband was the boy's father."

"Ah, well, a
very
reliable source then." He saw the gleam of excitement in the Inspector's eyes and smiled with genuine amusement. "Mathilda was not my mother, Inspector. If she had been I'd have been thrilled. I loved the woman."

Charlie shrugged. "Then Mrs. Gillespie lied about having a son, and it's your wife who's Cordelia. It has to be one or other of you or she wouldn't have made that will. She wasn't going to make Lear's mistake and bequeath her estate to the undeserving daughters."

Jack looked as if he were about to deny it, then shrugged. "I imagine Mathilda told Jane Marriott it was a boy out of spite. She never referred to her by name, always called her that 'prissy creature at the surgery.' It was cruel of her, but then Mathilda was usually cruel. She was a deeply unhappy woman." He paused to collect his thoughts. "She told me about her affair with Paul after I'd finished her portrait. She said there was something missing from the painting, and that that something was guilt. She was absolutely racked with it. Guilt for having given up the baby, guilt for not being able to cope, guilt for blaming the second baby's adoption on Joanna's crying, ultimately, I suppose, guilt for her inability to feel affection." Briefly he fell silent again. "Then Sarah turned up out of the blue and Mathilda recognized her." He saw the look of incredulity on Charlie Jone's face. "Not immediately and not as the baby she'd given away, but gradually as the months went by. There were so many things that matched. Sarah was the right age, her birthday was the same day as the baby's birthday, her parents had lived in the same borough in London where Mathilda's flat was. Most importantly she thought she detected a likeness in Sarah's and Joanna's mannerisms. She said they had the same smile, the same way of inclining their heads, the same trick of looking at you intently while you speak. And from the start Sarah took Mathilda as she found her, of course, the way she takes everyone, and for the first time in years Mathilda felt valued. It was a very potent cocktail. Mathilda was so convinced she'd found her lost daughter that she approached me and commissioned me to paint the portrait." He smiled ruefully. "I thought my luck had changed but all she wanted, of course, was an excuse to find out more about Sarah from the only person available who knew anything of value."