The Death of Corinne Read online

  ‘Perhaps they’ve gone for a walk – in the garden,’ Provost suggested. ‘It’s a lovely morning.’

  Lady Grylls glanced across at the window, blinking at the bright sunlight that turned her white lace curtains golden. ‘So it is,’ she agreed. ‘Looks like spring’s come at last . . . About forty-five years ago there was quite a craze for something called “rhymes of impending disasters” – remember them, Provost?’

  ‘I am afraid not, m’lady. Before my time.’ Provost cleared his throat. ‘I am forty-four.’

  ‘Goodness, I thought you were thirty-six.’

  ‘That’s Shirley’s age, m’lady.’

  ‘Of course – she was younger than you. I keep forgetting. You don’t think that was the reason why she –’ Lady Grylls broke off. ‘I remember I was supervising the children – it was somebody’s birthday party, John’s or Patricia’s, I think – and I encouraged them to write as many rhymes of impending disasters as they could think of. Peverel – my nephew, you know – wrote something on the lines of “Aunt Nellie’s mislaid her glasses and thinks the burglar’s making passes”. He accompanied it with a silly drawing of a simpering fat woman being manhandled by a masked marauder. He must have been eight or nine . . . A puerile squib, you’d no doubt say, but, as it happened, I had mislaid my glasses, just before the party started, actually, so I was disproportionately upset by the whole thing . . . I don’t suppose I ever forgave Peverel.’

  ‘No, m’lady.’

  ‘Have you forgiven Shirley? I mean for leaving you and all that?’

  ‘I don’t know, m’lady . . . I don’t think so.’

  ‘You must forgive her. I must try to forgive Peverel too. But we must forgive ourselves first . . . Have you ever taken dope, Provost?’

  ‘Once or twice, m’lady. In my younger days.’

  ‘I too snorted cocaine once or twice – at a London nightclub called Ludovigo’s. Many years ago. I never became a dope fiend, mind – nothing like that boy of yours.’

  ‘No, m’lady.’

  ‘I was with a Frenchman. He made me do it. I didn’t really like it, but I was potty about him –’ Lady Grylls broke off. ‘I don’t know what the matter with me is this morning. I am in a bloody peculiar mood. Impending disasters – whatever gave me the idea of impending disasters? I suppose it’s age . . . Age, with his stealing steps – it claws you closely in his clutch.’

  ‘I don’t think Age has “clawed you in his clutch”, m’lady – not yet. If I may say so.’

  ‘You may say so. Sweet of you . . . Bobo Markham says I don’t look a day older than fifty-eight, which of course is complete nonsense . . . See where they are, will you, Provost? I mean Corinne and that terrible woman. Scour the garden. When you find them, check if they need anything, apart from croissants and coffee, that is. You’ve got the kippers for Corinne, haven’t you? She seems to like kippers. Tell them I’ll see them at brekkers.’

  For some reason Lady Grylls’s vague stirrings of anxiety intensified. It would be most peculiar if her two visitors had really gone out so early in the morning, she thought, all by themselves, considering the preposterous safety checks Maginot had insisted on the night before! Unless Andrew was with them? It would make more sense if Andrew was accompanying them. She called Provost back and asked him, but his answer failed to reassure her: Mr Jonson was in his room, shaving. Mr Jonson had no idea where Miss Coreille and the old Frenchwoman were.

  ‘No idea, eh?’ Something isn’t right, Lady Grylls thought.

  That was an understatement. Things were very wrong indeed. When Provost, after a fruitless search of the garden, eventually noticed that the door of the greenhouse was gaping open and went in, he found a dead body lying there.

  She had been bleeding profusely from a wound in the throat. There was so much blood, it made him sick.

  That and the shock.

  23

  Bodies

  At several minutes after eight o’clock Antonia came down to breakfast, alone. (Hugh wanted to sleep in.) Apart from Nicholas, the dining room was empty. The boy was placing covered dishes on the sideboard. She wished him a good morning and received the usual indistinct reply. Nicholas looked as though he had had very little sleep the night before, though his hair was as spiky as ever. A long way from the powdered be-wigged footmen of yesteryear, Antonia reflected, amused.

  She helped herself to scrambled eggs. She thought she could smell kippers. She frowned. Kippers were in some way important, though at the moment she couldn’t think how . . . The coffee was excellent. It was a wonderful morning: beautifully still, crisp and cold, the slanting sunbeams shining in streaks like the haloes of saints. An hour earlier she had stood at her bedroom window, watching the mist rise from the valley beyond the garden. The mist had gathered, rolled, crept up the field and within several minutes had gently lapped the house. Nothing had stirred. There had been a stillness. An absolute silence, in fact.

  Later Antonia was to reflect that the weather had been like the dresses of Hitchcock’s heroines: dramatic and tempestuous in the neutral scenes, quiet and understated in the action sequences.

  Suddenly she heard the front door bang, then the sound of running feet and Provost staggered in. He looked dread- fully pale and wild-eyed. He gestured towards the window, his mouth opening and closing.

  Eventually he managed to speak. ‘She’s there – something terrible – in the greenhouse. Please, come with me – she is dead –’

  ‘Oh my God – Corinne?’ Antonia rose at once. No, that’s impossible, she thought.

  As they crossed the hall, Provost muttered, ‘Police – ambulance – we must – she is dead – so much blood!’ He led the way out. Antonia and Nicholas followed. Unless she had imagined it, Nicholas had perked up as soon as the word ‘blood’ had been uttered. They moved rapidly across the broad swathe of lawn, through the wet grass that badly needed mowing, in the direction of the greenhouse.

  They walked past a tiny ornamental pond with goldfish and rushes. The hedgerows had all burst into green. Her nostrils twitched at the strong earth smell, a smell of freshness of spring and flowers. A time of hope and reawakening . . . Pigeons were cooing somewhere. A couple of blackbirds flew up, flapping their wings, startled by a branch snapping. She didn’t quite know whether she was treading on air or land. Her hands were clenched in fists . . . Her thoughts were chaotic and inconsequential . . . There had been a grim and rather surreal inevitability about it all . . . Jonson had failed in his duty of protecting Corinne Coreille’s life . . . This kind of thing simply didn’t happen . . . It was a scene from her next novel . . . For some reason Provost had made it all up . . . Provost was the killer . . . No, the butler was never the killer . . . Why was she wearing such a smart twin-set and pearls? . . . Any moment now she would hear the director shout, ‘Cut!’ . . . That photograph . . . The photograph she had found in Jonson’s case . . . It showed Corinne sitting in front of her dressing table, making her face up . . . Well, there was something about that scene that was wrong . . .

  No kipper, she thought. That was it. Jonson had said there was a kipper on a plate on the dressing table – but there wasn’t. He had made that up. He had blushed. He had been about to say something different – and she knew very well what, since she had spotted it.

  The greenhouse was Gothic in structure and it had clearly seen better days. Once no doubt it had been the kind of place where Cecily and Gwendolen might have reclined among the greenery, sipped pale China tea and bantered, but no more. It had a bleak and disused air about it . . . Now it had become a house of death . . . The windows were blood-red with the rays of the early morning sun . . .

  They went in.

  The body lay very close by the greenhouse door and they nearly fell over it. Provost gave a warning cry. Nicholas whistled. Though Antonia had been prepared for it – though she had seen a dead body before – she started shaking as soon as her eyes fell on it.

  ‘But that’s Maître Maginot,’ she whispered. Sh
e felt rather nauseous but she also experienced sudden relief.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Provost said. ‘The old Frenchwoman. That’s her. Oh my God.’

  ‘She’s been shot,’ Nicholas said, pointing a forefinger at Maître Maginot’s neck. He sounded gleeful, excited. ‘At close range. At very close range. I can tell. I’ve seen pictures of dead bodies on the internet. There’s a website. Violentdeath.com,’ he rambled.

  ‘You shouldn’t be looking at such pictures, Nicholas,’ Antonia reprimanded him. Her voice sounded high, absurdly schoolmistressy. Displacement activity, she thought. We are in a state of shock.

  ‘Why not?’ Nicholas challenged her. Then he sneezed. ‘I am allergic to plants,’ he mumbled.

  ‘What plants?’ Antonia felt the urge to laugh. I mustn’t get hysterical, she thought.

  ‘Don’t know which ones – it always happens when I come in here.’

  Maître Maginot lay sprawled on her back, the black beret still incongruously on her head. The terrible deformed face under the beret was the colour of tallow, which, Antonia reflected, was also the colour of tripe. It might have been one of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors wax effigies lying there . . . They drank tripe soup in France, didn’t they? The moment she thought that, Antonia feared she might disgrace herself and be sick. Maître Maginot’s face was frozen in a ferocious grimace: her eyes were bulging. Her lips were parted – her teeth bared –

  The wound was a terrible gaping black hole in the side of Maître Maginot’s throat. It was evident she had bled profusely from it. Her clothes were saturated with blood and there was more blood on the ground around her. The blood was dry and was of a dark brownish hue. It was clear she had been dead for some time, several hours probably. Her mobile phone stuck out of a pocket in her breeches. A torch lay beside her right hand, which was gloved. Maître Maginot’s left hand was bare and Antonia found herself staring at it, at the scarlet nails.

  She noticed something very curious – a freakish detail, one might call it. She knew that was important – she couldn’t say how – in the same way as the absence of the kipper from Corinne’s dressing table was important . . . Was she thinking straight? She hoped she wasn’t losing her mind!

  ‘We must call the police,’ she said.

  ‘Dad’s gone back to the house,’ Nicholas said. ‘He’s gonna do it.’

  Antonia looked round the greenhouse. She saw lots of potted plants, empty pots and blue-and-white Chinese containers and censers. Garden tools. A garden bench, a bamboo table and a chair. A mobile phone lay on the floor beside the chair. A second mobile?

  The next moment she felt Nicholas tugging at her arm. ‘Miss – look! There’s a leg over there. Look. Over there. It’s another body!’

  Antonia started up, though not too violently. She was getting anaesthetized, she supposed. Her first thought was that the boy had imagined it, but when she followed his pointing finger, she saw he hadn’t. There was a leg there all right, exactly as he had said – a woman’s leg in a torn stocking – the foot in a flat shoe. The leg was sticking from behind two large potted palms. There was a woman’s body lying there all right. Nicholas started walking towards it, but sneezed twice in quick succession and went back. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  Antonia moved like one in a trance. Inside the greenhouse it was freezing cold, colder than outside. For obvious reasons, it made her think of a mortuary. Morgue, in French. Les cadavres sont dans la morgue. No French grammar book would include a sentence like that. She imagined that there was a metallic smell of blood in the air . . . She stumbled on something – the niblick. Maître Maginot had been brandishing the niblick the night before – when Antonia and Hugh had met her on the stairs. Maître Maginot had been on her way out – she had intended to check the grounds. She had been on her own – unwisely, as it turned out – it had cost her her life –

  Antonia’s eyes were fixed on the leg in the flat shoe. Her next thoughts ran as follows: Corinne – so they got her after all – poor Corinne – Corinne and Ruse – mother and daughter – both dead – is there a new pattern emerging?

  But it wasn’t Corinne Coreille’s body that lay behind the palms.

  It was the body of a stranger: a middle-aged woman in an extremely dirty mink stole, wearing yellow gloves. She too lay on her back, in a pool of frozen blood, and, like Maître Maginot, she had been shot. Antonia gasped. This was much worse than the wound inflicted on Maginot! Part of the woman’s head, just above the right temple, was missing – it had been blasted off. The woman’s mouth was covered in bright red lipstick and it was gaping open. Her eyes were open too; they were round and glassy and staring. Rather foolish, Antonia thought. No, not foolish – demented.

  The next moment Antonia noticed the gun. The gun was clutched in the woman’s right hand. She bent over and looked at it without touching. A Colt .357 Magnum. The gun’s muzzle was pointing upwards. It nearly touched the woman’s chin. It looked as though she had done it herself – as though she had blown her brains out on purpose, of her own free will, in one final act of desperation.

  An expensive-looking handbag made of crocodile skin lay beside the body. It had burst open and most of its contents were scattered around. It seemed the woman had been searching for something in a frantic manner. (The gun?) Antonia saw banknotes and tissues, a handkerchief, a powder compact, a carving knife, a purse, some newspaper cuttings, a passport –

  She heard Nicholas call out, ‘Is the gun there?’

  ‘Yes.’ The gun had a silencer, she noticed.

  Antonia picked up the passport gingerly, holding it at the corner between her thumb and index finger. She knew she shouldn’t have done it, yet had been unable to help herself.

  It was an American passport, as Antonia had known it would be. Opening it, she saw a folded plane ticket . . . Boston–Paris . . . One way . . . Hadn’t she intended to go back? The face that stared back at her from the photograph was interesting; it could even be called pretty, in a freakish kind of way – blonde hair swept back – light blue eyes open wide in a parody of earnestness – lips curved up in a knowing smile.

  Antonia read the name without any particular surprise: Eleanor Merchant.

  24

  Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir

  Jonson and Major Payne appeared at the door. Neither of them spoke. Jonson was fully dressed. Payne was wearing his trousers, pyjama top and dressing gown.

  Antonia’s eyes fixed on Jonson. He looked unwell – troubled. His face was extremely pale and a little puffy, with dark circles round his eyes. His hair was uncombed. He seemed to have aged overnight. She saw him shut and open his eyes several times, then shake his head, the way people did when they imagined they might be dreaming. He then spoke and made it clear to the boy Nicholas that he wanted him out of the greenhouse that very minute. At first Nicholas pretended he hadn’t understood, but eventually he obeyed, though with sulky ill grace.

  For several moments Hugh and Jonson stood silently, looking down at the bodies of the two women. The scene could be described as terrifying, yet with every second that elapsed, it seemed more and more unreal . . . Antonia was put in mind of the time they had done The Duchess of Malfi back at school and the fun they had had, splashing red paint about and over each other.

  She showed them the passport.

  It was Payne who broke the silence. ‘The Merchant. Incredible. So she did manage to get here after all!’

  Jonson passed his hand over his face and Antonia heard him take a deep breath. ‘Yes . . . It is – incredible . . .’

  ‘It looks as though Maginot found the Merchant lurking here and the Merchant shot her,’ Payne said. ‘After which she proceeded to blow her own brains out . . . Maginot intended to check all the outbuildings last night, didn’t she?’ He turned towards Jonson. ‘Did you know Maginot was coming to the greenhouse?’

  ‘Not to the greenhouse, specifically. I knew she was checking the grounds. I did insist I do the outside and she the inside, but she said no.’ Jonson
spoke haltingly. ‘She asked me to go around the house – check all the rooms . . . The lofts and the cellars . . . It – it should have been the other way round, but she wouldn’t be swayed – she got angry when I suggested it.’

  ‘She looked exalted,’ Payne murmured. ‘Unstoppable. Bursting with confidence. Dangerously bellicose –’

  ‘Vive la guerre,’ Antonia said.

  ‘Quite – the way she brandished Uncle Rory’s niblick. Not that it helped her –’

  Antonia reflected that no one was pretending to be in any way saddened by the deaths. Shocked and unsettled and sickened, yes, but no more than that. They had never known Eleanor Merchant, but the picture that had emerged from her letters gave one a strong dose of the shudders. Maître Maginot, while alive, hadn’t invited any warm feelings either. Contrary to what John Donne wrote, not every death diminishes us – there are deaths that simply don’t, Antonia thought.

  She saw her husband’s eyes travel from the gun clutched in Eleanor Merchant’s hand to the torch that lay beside Eleanor’s body. He then looked at Maître Maginot’s body and back at Eleanor’s. He seemed to be trying to estimate the distance between the two bodies. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, it does look as though Maginot discovered the skulking Merchant, who panicked, whipped out her gun and shot her. I don’t suppose the Merchant had any idea as to who it was she had shot –’