Assassins at Ospreys Read online

  ‘Thank you.’ Beatrice leant towards Payne. ‘What is an X-Acto knife? I’ve been wondering. Is it an army kind of knife?’

  Payne admitted he had no idea.

  ‘Ingrid once went so far as to try a beam in her room to see if it would be strong enough to support a noose. And on another occasion she considered driving off a cliff.’

  ‘People who talk so much about killing themselves never do it,’ Colville said a shade regretfully. ‘Did you show Miss Darcy the letter?’

  ‘I haven’t yet. I was about to. Would you be an angel and turn on the lights?’

  Again Colville did as asked. ‘Better hurry up and do it before she comes back.’ He glanced at the clock on the mantel. ‘Remember what happened the other day?’

  ‘I certainly do.’ Beatrice took a sip of tea and grimaced. ‘Darling – sugar. Why is it that you always forget?’ She looked at Antonia and said gravely, ‘I owe you an apology, Antonia. May I call you Antonia?’

  ‘Of course you may.’

  ‘And you must call me Bee. Well, I have a confession to make, Antonia. I detest fibbing, I really do – but I did tell you a fib the other day when I spoke to you on the phone.’ ‘About the letter?’

  ‘Yes.’ Beatrice picked up one of the two books that lay on the little table beside her. From between its pages she drew out an envelope. ‘I meant to tell you the truth – but Ingrid came into the room just then, so I couldn’t. I didn’t want her to know who the letter was from, so I told you I didn’t know the man from Adam.’

  ‘You said his name was Ralph.’

  ‘Yes. Ralph Renshawe.’ Beatrice pronounced ‘Ralph’ over-emphatically as Rafe. ‘Many years ago he and I were engaged to be married. I was extremely young. Practically a child. It turns out he lives at a big house not so very far from here, can you imagine? A place called Ospreys. It’s a listed house. There is a wishing well in the back garden that goes back to the seventeenth century, apparently. I read a piece about it in Homes and Gardens. We’ve been practically neighbours all this time and neither of us the wiser! Life is so strange. Anyhow. I want you to read the letter. I rely on your wise counsel.’ She handed it over to Antonia. Payne moved closer. He thought he detected a slight medicinal smell emanating from the envelope.

  The letter was written in a faint, shaky, hardly legible hand. It began:

  This is a communication from the past you never expected and almost certainly did not want. I hope you will read it. And before you rip it up and drop it in the bin, I must tell you that I am dying. This is the literal truth: I have been given a month at the most. I do not deserve any sympathy and I do not expect any . . .

  It was not a long letter. Eventually Antonia looked up.

  ‘What do you think?’ Beatrice held her hand at her bosom. ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it?’

  Antonia said slowly, ‘You and Ralph Renshawe were engaged to be married. He was driving you in his car. There was an accident. It was entirely his fault. He had been drinking. You had a head-on collision with another car. He wasn’t hurt but you were. Your injuries were extremely serious. You became paralysed from the waist down. You spent a very long time in hospital.’

  ‘Six months,’ Beatrice whispered.

  ‘Ralph visited you only once, then disappeared. You never saw him again. That happened thirty years ago. He went to Nova Scotia, then to Calgary, where he married a very rich woman –’

  ‘He married an oil heiress,’ Colville said stiffly. ‘There was something about it in the paper – years ago. She must have left him all her money. The price tag put on Ospreys was just over eight million pounds.’

  ‘Len knows all about houses. If you are interested in buying or renting a house, he is your man,’ Beatrice said. ‘All right, darling, I won’t embarrass you, I promise. Oh, how I wish we weren’t so worried about money! Sorry, darling!’ Colville had harrumphed again. ‘Well, nobody believes me when I say we are as poor as the proverbial church mice.’

  She really was most indiscreet. Must be a nightmare, being married to her, Antonia thought, shooting a sym-pathetic glance at Colville.

  ‘I suppose appearances can be jolly deceptive,’ Payne murmured, glancing round the comfortable room with its crackling cosy fire.

  Beatrice laughed exuberantly once more – as though he had made some risqué joke. ‘Honestly,’ she breathed. ‘I am afraid Daddy’s money is running out – and poor Len’s come an ugly cropper in his business dealings –’

  ‘Bee,’ Colville said warningly.

  ‘Well, I admit I am scared,’ she declared. ‘Honestly! I think I might end up like some sort of an Emma Bovary of the impoverished squierarchy! I know I am being silly.’

  Antonia went on, ‘Soon after he inherited his late wife’s fortune, Ralph Renshawe came back to England and bought Ospreys. He was then diagnosed with cancer. He has been told it is terminal, inoperable. He is dying. He is consumed by guilt. His reason for writing the letter is to beg your forgiveness.’

  ‘It’s all so – so operatically melodramatic, isn’t it?’ Beatrice rolled up her eyes. ‘I can’t imagine Ralph filled to the brim with remorse and shaking in fear of eternal damnation. I simply can’t. Thirty years ago he was completely different – hard as nails. Now he mentions God in every sentence he writes.’

  ‘He mentions a priest,’ Antonia said.

  ‘Yes. His very own personal padre, it seems.’

  ‘He is a Catholic then?’

  ‘He wasn’t a Catholic when I knew him. He wasn’t any-thing. He looked down on all religions. He said there was no God. Do you think there is God, Hugh?’

  ‘Yes,’ Payne said. ‘Indubitably.’

  ‘When I hear a person of subtle intelligence express such positive views, I feel terribly encouraged. But sometimes I do wonder.’ Beatrice gave a mournful sigh.

  Payne had been examining the envelope. He tapped the letter with his forefinger. ‘Renshawe asks you to visit him. Says it would mean a lot to him if you did.’

  ‘Oh dear, yes. I have no idea what I should do about it. I haven’t written back or anything. I thought you might be able to give me some advice. I am in a quandary. Len thinks I shouldn’t.’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ Colville said. ‘Let him rot. He wrecked your life.’

  Payne looked at him. ‘Did you know him, Colville?’

  ‘I did. Not at all well. Long time ago.’ There was a silence but Colville said no more.

  ‘How does Ingrid come into this?’ Antonia asked with a frown.

  ‘Well, she came into the room that day.’ Beatrice lowered her voice. ‘Just as I’d started telling you about the letter. I couldn’t possibly give you any details with her in the room. I lost my nerve. Ingrid would flip if she knew that Ralph is not only alive but living just round the corner from here as well. She’d go and – I don’t want to think what she might do. I really don’t.’

  ‘She’d kill him, that’s what she’d do,’ said Colville.

  ‘Why should she want to do that?’

  ‘Well, you see, Antonia, I told her that Ralph had left for Nova Scotia, which was true, but I also said he’d died there,’ Beatrice started explaining. ‘I told her I’d read his obituary in the paper. She seemed frightfully disappointed. She said he’d had an easy escape. So much hatred! It can’t be good for her, can it? I read somewhere if you hate too much, you develop cancer. Ingrid still flies into rages at the mere mention of his name! Honestly.’

  She loves that word ‘honestly’, Payne thought. Was there an antigram? He did some quick mental arithmetic. There was. Honestly – on the sly! How very interesting.

  ‘I personally don’t bear Ralph any grudges. I honestly don’t,’ Beatrice went on. ‘I did suffer, I know. I suffered awfully. My life was turned upside down by the accident, but it’s never occurred to me to want to kill him. Not even in my darkest hour.’

  ‘You are easily the nicest person who ever lived,’ Colville said.

  She shook her head resolutely from side to
side. ‘No, I am not.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  No, she is not, Antonia thought. You fool.

  ‘I happen to be well adjusted, that’s all. Ingrid is not. Ingrid has always inhabited an agitated universe. Awful things keep happening to her. Let me give you an example. When she was a girl she had a pet owl called Cassandra and she doted on it, but one day the poor wretched thing swallowed the end of the cord for the window blinds. It was found swinging in the breeze upside-down – hanged! Can you imagine? Ingrid was distraught.’

  ‘I think she killed that bird,’ Colville said. ‘The way she killed those two bitches.’

  ‘Darling!’ Betrice protested. ‘Well, Ingrid is volatile. She was diagnosed as manic-depressive well before she lost her baby. She told me all about it. She said she tended to brood for hours on end on something trivial. She was prescribed all sorts of powerful drugs. Demerol? Then of course she had the nervous breakdown and that was – mega. They feared for her life. She kept harming herself. She wrote a frightfully disturbing poem called “Madrigals for Mad Girls”. She started having delusions. Once she imagined her doctor was Ralph in disguise and she tried to stab him in the eye with the paper knife from his desk. She underwent all sorts of very special treatments and it took her ages to recover.’

  ‘She never recovered,’ Colville said emphatically. ‘Au contraire.’

  ‘I know she’s been particularly horrid to you, darling, but do try to be fair.’ Beatrice sighed. ‘She still takes anti-depressants – when she remembers, that is. Her room is full of pills. Well, taking care of me seemed to help her. Len is not convinced, but she did get better for a while. She put on weight. She started taking an interest in clothes and flowers and things. We went places. That picture on the mantelpiece – Len, would you be so kind? Thank you, darling. Look at us! Just look at us. We are at Cliveden. Doesn’t Ingrid look in the pink?’

  ‘She certainly seems different from the time I met her,’ Antonia admitted.

  The photograph showed a radiant Beatrice in her wheel-chair, a mink coat draped around her shoulders, clutching a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and a plumper, smiling Ingrid, her eyes a little puffy, in a Yum-Yum haircut and encased in a silk magenta-coloured trouser suit with an embroidered front.

  ‘She looks like an ornament the Astors might have brought back from their travels in the Mysterious East,’ Payne murmured.

  ‘Yes! Doesn’t she just?’ Beatrice leant towards Antonia and whispered, ‘Your husband says such clever things.’

  Colville’s smile, Antonia observed, was beginning to look as if it had been left on his face by an oversight.

  Beatrice had become wistful once more. ‘We had such good times. All right. She’s deteriorated since.’

  ‘Tell them about the bitches,’ Colville prompted.

  ‘Ingrid had two dogs,’ Beatrice began after a pause. ‘A golden retriever and a pit bull – Pip and Taylor – both bitches, as it happens. She had them put down for being “control freaks”. She explained the dogs had been putting her under an awful lot of pressure. The funny thing is that Ingrid is something of a control freak herself. You saw her in Hay-on-Wye, Antonia. You noticed the way she acted? I am infinitely grateful to Ingrid, mind, but sometimes it did feel as though she’d injected me with some paralysing fluid. I am probably being fanciful, but every so often I’d get this most peculiar feeling. How can I explain it? As though I’d been cocooned in an undetectable glaze of fixative. Goodness, that does sound weird, doesn’t it?’

  Payne murmured, ‘Perhaps she did inject you with something?’

  ‘I bet she did,’ said Colville. ‘She gave Bee all sorts of injections – vitamins, painkillers and so on. She had plenty of opportunity to do something to her.’

  ‘Well, there were times when I did feel my power of choice diminishing – my rational judgement about things weakening –’ Beatrice broke off. ‘My main worry at the moment is that Ingrid might do something terrible to Ralph if somehow she were to learn that he isn’t dead but living next door.’

  ‘What’s the connection between Ingrid and Ralph?’ Antonia was frowning. ‘And how did Ingrid and you meet?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I say? I am hopeless at explaining things. Sorry, my dear. It was the accident. The accident brought us together,’ Beatrice said. ‘I was in hospital – bedridden. The worst time of my life! Ingrid paid me a visit. She sat beside my bed and stroked my hand. She said she intended to take care of me. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, it honestly did, at least at the time. I knew at once she was looking for a substitute, but that didn’t really bother me much.’

  ‘A substitute? What substitute?’ Payne looked puzzled.

  ‘For her dead child of course,’ said Beatrice. ‘ She lost her baby, you see. In the accident.’

  8

  Doppelganger

  Payne stared. ‘In the same accident?’

  ‘Yes – she was in the other car. The one we collided with. She was seven months pregnant at the time. She survived but she lost her baby. She had a miscarriage.’

  ‘How terrible,’ Antonia said.

  ‘Oh, it was. Doesn’t bear thinking about!’ Beatrice flapped her hands. ‘It was the most tragic thing. Poor Ingrid was all alone in the world when it happened. She wasn’t married. She hated her parents. She had run away from home. She wasn’t in what is known as a “stable relationship” either. A caring, loving, understanding husband or boyfriend might have helped her recover, but that man – Ingrid’s boyfriend – the child’s father – was no good. He’d never really loved Ingrid.’

  ‘He didn’t care about the child?’

  ‘Not one bit, Antonia. Poor Ingrid, on the other hand, wanted a child more than anything else in the world, so she lied to him that she was on the pill. I don’t think he ever forgave her for it. Oh, it is all so sordid. Anyhow, she got pregnant, which had been her intention all along. It made her extremely happy. She started buying things for the baby – clothes, a cot, a pram, various toys.’ Beatrice pressed her handkerchief against her lips.

  ‘I don’t think you should get upset now, really.’ Colville put a protective arm round her shoulders.

  Beatrice sniffed. ‘She said she’d never been so happy . . . But then the accident happened and she lost the baby. And then – then she was dealt another blow – the doctors told her she couldn’t have any more children. That’s when it happened. She said it felt like a wire snapping inside her brain.’

  ‘She swore she’d kill Renshawe, didn’t she?’ Colville said portentously.

  Beatrice didn’t answer. She had covered her face with her hands.

  There was a pause. ‘Ralph was drunk that night, but he isn’t the only one to blame.’ Beatrice looked from Antonia to Payne, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘I haven’t told you the whole story. You see, it was my fault too.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Colville said robustly. The next moment he looked up. ‘Was that the front door?’

  ‘No, it was my fault. I was tipsy that night. Not as drunk as Ralph was but tipsy nevertheless. We had been drinking at Baudolino’s Bar in Greek Street. We’d had such a marvellous time. Ralph made me laugh. He said such outrageous things! I was very much taken by him, I must admit. How I laughed. I was quite hysterical with it. That’s always a bad sign, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think Ingrid’s back,’ Colville said.

  Beatrice didn’t seem to hear. ‘I didn’t stop Ralph from driving. I should have done, but didn’t. I had actually brought a bottle of champagne with me. We kept drinking from it. I encouraged him to drive fast. If I had been a mature, responsible kind of person, I wouldn’t have allowed Ralph to get into the car, but I wasn’t. I was intent on having a good time. I wanted to please Ralph. We could have taken a cab. Don’t you see? I might have prevented the accident. Only I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you ever tell Ingrid that part of the story?’ Antonia asked after a pause.

  ‘Goodness, no. I gave her a completely different version of
events. How I’d begged Ralph not to drive that night. How I had implored him. How I had wept. How I had tried to hide the car keys. I told Ingrid a pack of whoppers. Well, I am as bad as Ralph. I as good as killed Ingrid’s baby. What’s the matter now, darling?’ Beatrice asked irritably as Colville rose abruptly from his seat. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to check,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I think Ingrid’s come back.’

  Beatrice blinked. ‘Come back?’ Her expression changed and she clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh my God. The door –’ She shook her forefinger. ‘Look! It’s ajar! Oh, Len, why didn’t you shut it?’ She gesticulated frantically.

  Without a word Colville lumbered out of the room.

  Beatrice Ardleigh looked at Antonia with wild eyes. ‘Do you think she might have heard? Was I shouting? I was shouting, wasn’t I? Oh my God.’

  ‘I don’t think you were that loud,’ Antonia tried to reas-sure her.

  ‘I was shouting, Antonia . She must have heard every word I said. She knows now that I lied to her.’

  The next moment Colvillle re-entered the room. He stood by the door and leant against the wall. His ruddy face was visibly paler. His eyes had a dazed look. He appeared to have had a shock of some kind.

  ‘Darling, what is it?’ Beatrice cried. ‘Was it Ingrid?’

  He swallowed. Then he gave an awkward laugh and passed his hand across his face. ‘It must have been, but it looked nothing like her.’ Aware how absurd this sounded, he shook his head.

  ‘What the hell do you mean, Colville?’ Major Payne asked.

  There was a pause. ‘If I didn’t know that at this very moment Bee was here in this very room,’ Colville said hoarsely, ‘I’d have said it was . . . her.’

  ‘You thought it was me? What – what are you talking about?’ Suddenly Beatrice looked terrified.

  ‘It was your doppelganger, Bee. Your double. I saw your double going up the stairs.’ He swallowed. ‘She even smelled like you. She smelled of Ce Soir Je T’Aime.’