The Death of Corinne Read online

  ‘The favoured reading of Americans in Europe,’ Antonia said with a smile.

  ‘Eleanor Merchant has created a website devoted to the memory of her son,’ Payne said. ‘An internet shrine of sorts.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I told you they were good,’ Lady Grylls said again.

  ‘I had no idea . . . Are there any photos of Eleanor Merchant?’ Jonson asked.

  ‘Yes – several, apparently – we haven’t seen anything, actually,’ Payne admitted. ‘My cousin told us about it. I don’t suppose the photos will be much good to you since in all of them Eleanor Merchant is in some kind of outrageous fancy dress. Her son as well.’

  ‘Why do queers always have neurotic mothers?’ Lady Grylls said. ‘Have you noticed?’

  ‘Would you be able to show us Eleanor Merchant’s letters?’ Antonia turned to Jonson. ‘Or would that be a breach of confidentiality?’

  ‘It would be nothing of the sort,’ Lady Grylls said firmly. ‘It’s not as though any one of us is going to spill the beans to Maginot, is it? Besides, this is my house. Can we see the death threats first? I’ve never seen death threats in my life.’

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jonson picked up his briefcase and placed it across his knees.

  12

  In the Teeth of the Evidence

  ‘Nothing special,’ Lady Grylls declared several moments later, when he had obligingly spread the photocopies of the anonymous messages on the table before her. ‘You crazy bitch. Prepare to die. She wrote the same thing three times. You crazy bitch. Prepare to die. You crazy –’ Lady Grylls tapped her lips with her fingers in a feigned yawn. ‘Goodness, how tedious . . . Are these the letters?’

  ‘Yes. First – second – third,’ Jonson said, arranging them in order.

  There was a pause as they read the first letter. ‘She clearly felt the overwhelming need to unburden herself . . . Her shrink couldn’t have been doing his job very well,’ Major Payne murmured after a while.

  ‘Very interesting,’ Antonia said. ‘Sad too, in a way.’

  ‘Do you think so? I don’t lack compassion, but I find it hard to be sympathetic to the Mrs Venableses of this world.’

  ‘Totally potty,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘She calls Corinne a witch but it is she who sticks pins in the doll and asks Corinne if it hurts! Who is Mrs Venables, Hughie?’

  ‘A monstrous matriarch whose son Sebastian dies an outlandish death. It’s a play.’

  ‘She calls Corinne a crazy bitch, but it is more than clear she is the crazy one. I believe there is a word for it . . . Transference? When you attribute your demons to somebody else? I say, that’s the same phrase as in the death threats!’ Lady Grylls cried with an air of discovery. ‘Crazy bitch. You do see – don’t you?’ She pushed her glasses up her nose.

  ‘We do, darling.’

  ‘It’s certainly suggestive,’ Jonson said non-committally.

  ‘Suggestive? My good man – it’s what they call a clincher! It proves beyond doubt that the blasted American woman wrote the death threats as well. You need look no further. She’s your pigeon.’

  ‘That would be the obvious conclusion, yes.’

  What is the matter, Corinne? Why don’t you answer? (The second letter began.) It is now more than a month since I wrote to you. Airmail letters take no more than four days to get to Europe. I did check. I sent the letter to Fabiola, your record company in France, by registered mail, same as my first. You must have received it, so why don’t you answer? I wouldn’t have minded a postcard, with just a few words of acknowledgement and some expression of sympathy, perhaps? Is that too much to ask?

  You couldn’t have been busy. If you had been, it would have said so on your official website. (I check your Agenda every day, twice.) You have had only one concert and that was last November. It is January now. You can’t pretend you never received my letters. I wouldn’t believe you if you said you didn’t.

  Last night after I went to bed and turned off the light, I heard a voice whispering in my ear. I’d been expecting to hear from Griff, but it wasn’t his voice. It was a woman’s voice. (It sounded uncannily like mine!) It was very interesting, what the voice said. ‘Remember the singing mermaids that lured poor Odysseus’ sailors to their doom?’

  The letter ended abruptly, with a squiggle and the initials E.M.

  ‘Why isn’t this person in a loony bin?’ Lady Grylls scowled at Jonson as though expecting him to provide an immediate answer.

  The third letter in contrast was startlingly amiable – cheerful and girlish. To Antonia’s way of thinking it was the spookiest of the three. Eleanor Merchant appeared to have been on some kind of a ‘high’ when she wrote it.

  Dear Corinne, I haven’t heard from you yet, but I want you to know that I am not in the least mad at you. I am not! I am sorry I lost my temper last time. Perhaps it wasn’t your fault. Perhaps you didn’t receive any of my letters. Well, letters do get lost in the post – even registered ones!! In fact I think I know what must have happened: the person at Fabiola didn’t pass them on to you! They simply forgot!! You should have them sacked!

  I have a surprise for you. I am flying to Paris next week. Yes! I have already booked my plane ticket, a week from today. I have started brushing up my French by re-reading Maupassant’s short ‘contes’ in the original, though of course your English is perfect.

  There have been developments. They have changed my medication and I feel much more positive about things. More importantly, most importantly, Griff has been trying to get through to me. I heard his voice this morning, only it was so muffled, it was hard to make out what he was saying. He sounded as though he were speaking through a cushion, or had filled his mouth with cotton wool. I am sure it is only a question of time before we manage to establish proper contact. In the manner of a demanding film director, I keep rehearsing our reunion in my mind, striving to make it more moving, more triumphant. I am full of hope. I await my reunion with Griff with a girl’s ardour. This world has its impossible limitations but the idea no longer troubles me. A whole new dimension has opened up! The realization has put a smile on my face. It felt as though I had been watching a conjuror make dozens of gaudy umbrellas explode out of a small box!

  You and I shall meet soon. There are all sorts of questions I would like to put to you. I know that what you did was very, very wrong, but I am prepared to give you a chance, so that you could explain yourself. Au revoir. A bientôt!

  ‘Prozac?’ Antonia said thoughtfully. ‘Morphine?’

  Payne pointed to the dates. ‘Eleanor Merchant’s last letter from America was written on 25th February. She said she’d be flying to Paris in a week’s time . . . 4th March? All the envelopes that contained the death threats have Paris stamps – 5th March, 8th March, 11th March . . . They’ve been written at three-day intervals.’

  ‘That’s what they call irrefutable evidence. It’s her. Eleanor Merchant.’ Lady Grylls leant towards Jonson and tapped his arm. ‘You’d be a fool if you went looking for anybody else. You’d be wasting your time.’

  ‘You are probably right, Lady Grylls, but I do need to collate the evidence, sequence it and assess it properly.’

  ‘You’d be wasting your time,’ she repeated.

  ‘How did the death threats reach Corinne?’ Major Payne asked.

  ‘Through Fabiola, that’s Mademoiselle Coreille’s record company – same as the letters.’

  ‘It’s her,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘Eleanor. What do you think, my dear? She compares Corinne to the singing mermaids and so on. Hasn’t it been said that obvious solutions are usually the correct ones?’

  Antonia agreed that that was so. The other, also rather obvious possibility – she went on after a moment’s hesitation, rather apologetically – was that somebody was using Eleanor Merchant as a scapegoat. Eleanor had written the letters all right, but she might be no more than a harmless lunatic while it was another person – the real killer – who had sent the death threats to Corinne. Ele
anor Merchant was being set up – as the killer prepared to strike.

  ‘I wouldn’t call Eleanor Merchant harmless,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘But if you are right, then it’s got to be somebody who is familiar with Eleanor Merchant’s letters!’

  ‘Someone who’s close to Corinne – who has had access to her private papers – who knows about Eleanor Merchant’s letters.’ Major Payne paused. ‘A member of Corinne’s coterie – of her inner circle?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s such a thing as an inner circle,’ Jonson said. ‘There’s only Maître Maginot.’

  ‘Ah. The ruthless, manipulative, cunning, power-mad Maître.’ Lady Grylls gave a portentous nod. ‘I completely forgot about her.’

  ‘Darling, you are attributing to her qualities normally associated with the conclaves of the Mafia capi . . . Well, it might be the chambermaid who was so unceremoniously sacked for selling stories to the press,’ Payne went on. ‘Emilie. Emilie, you must agree, has a goodish reason for seeking revenge, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Emilie left in December. Eleanor Merchant’s first letter arrived a month later, in January,’ Antonia pointed out.

  ‘Does Corinne employ a large staff?’ Payne turned to Jonson.

  ‘No, not that large. Two maids, a secretary, a gardener, two security guards. They have very little contact with Mademoiselle Coreille . . . As it happens, they are all rather young. In their twenties. I understand some of them hadn’t even heard of Corinne Coreille when they went for their interviews. It is Maître Maginot who does the interviewing. She deals with references, conducts all the character checks, draws up the contracts and so on.’

  There was a pause. ‘Why only young people?’ Antonia said.

  ‘Fear of age? The cult of youth?’ Payne stroked his jaw with a thoughtful forefinger. ‘All in keeping with Corinne’s unchanging appearance? Perhaps they don’t want people who are old enough to remember Corinne in her prime?’

  ‘I think you just said something very interesting –’ Antonia broke off and frowned. ‘I don’t know in what way exactly it is interesting . . .’

  ‘I am sure it will come to you in due course. The little grey cells, they will not fail you.’ Lady Grylls tapped her forehead significantly.

  Antonia saw Jonson run his hand across his face. She remembered how deeply he had flushed earlier on. Once more she wondered about what it was he knew.

  13

  Vendetta

  The library, Major Payne reflected, was as he remembered it. It hadn’t changed one little bit. The oak panelling, the Gothic fan tracery ceiling by Wyatville, the sagging leather armchairs, the pictures of horses and dogs. Talking of the pictures, his aunt had said that there was nothing there she could not sell to a wandering sheikh for something as pathetic as a fifty-pound note. If a wandering sheikh had anything as pitiful as fifty-pound notes on his person, Major Payne had riposted – but he knew that that was a fanciful exaggeration. Some of the pictures were genuine Stubbses and Landseers. They all hung as they had done for some hundred and fifty years, on chains, from original gold lion masks.

  Payne recalled the fascination the lion masks had held for him when, as a boy, he had been left to stay with his aunt and uncle. The smell hadn’t changed either. Ancient paper, dust, stale cigar smoke, musty pot pourri, leather. The windows were wet with rain and the wind howled in the Adam fireplace. The mantelpiece was decorated by a bronze of a hawkish Wellington on horseback and a bowl of chrysanthemums that had been defunct for quite some time – not from last autumn surely?

  It was getting dark. He turned on two table lamps and stood looking at the rows and rows of books in dark mahogany cases built into the walls, the leather and vellum of their bindings cracked and scarred by age or neglect. Some books, on the other hand, looked as good as new. The Encyclopaedia Britannica – two sets of it, an Edwardian one and a 1960 edition, neither of them showing signs of ever having been opened. There were some uncut first editions, which must be valuable . . . Black Beauty, The Country House in our Heritage, Greyfriars Bobby, Where’s Master? by Caesar. Caesar was a dog, of course, one that had belonged to Edward VII. Caesar had walked immediately behind the gun carriage at the King’s funeral in 1910 and every now and then he had raised his head and howled disconsolately. That poignant passage, Payne remembered, had reduced him to tears when he had read the book as a boy. He had actually believed that it was Caesar who had written the book!

  Detective novels: ancient green Penguins from the late ’40s and early ’50s. Ronald Knox, John Wade, E.C. Bentley. Did anyone read them nowadays? Forgotten biographies. The Regent and his Daughter by Dormer Creston. A very prettily bound almanac of poems, circa 1835, with a lyre engraved on the cover. Maupassant’s complete short stories –

  That was the book he had been looking for. A bee in my bonnet, he thought. ‘Oh hello,’ he said as Antonia entered.

  ‘Perhaps I could help your aunt tidy up the library. I don’t think I have yet lost my expertise,’ she said. Until a couple of months before, Antonia had worked as a librarian at the Military Club in St James’s Street in London, but after the success of her second detective novel she had given up her job to write full time.

  ‘You mean cataloguing and dusting and things?’ He went on to say it would be the kind of labour Hercules would have bridled at.

  ‘It would be a shame to allow all these books to go to rack and ruin.’ She was standing beside the huge round table. From among the piles of ancient communications from various wine societies and an assortment of seed and plant catalogues, she picked up a book and started leafing through it. ‘Listen to this . . . Nothing can be more unfair or more unjustifiable than a doubtful answer given under the plea of sparing the suitor’s feelings. It raises false hopes. It renders a man restless and unsettled –’

  ‘Golly. That’s exactly how I felt after I proposed to you and you said you’d have to think about it!’ Payne cried. ‘Restless and unsettled sums it up nicely. What book is that?’

  ‘A Victorian book on etiquette . . . Constable, 1895. I thought I might find Jonson and your aunt here. They are going round the house.’

  ‘Ah, the security checks . . . He looks as though he’s taking it all extremely seriously, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He does. What do you make of him?’ Antonia asked.

  ‘Of Jonson? Seems a decent enough chap.’ Payne cocked an eyebrow. ‘You disagree? What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Antonia paused. ‘He is immensely likeable, but I do believe there is something he isn’t telling. Several things, perhaps. It’s the way he talks about Corinne and Maître Maginot – the way his voice and expression change.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s anything to do with Peverel?’

  Antonia stared. ‘Peverel?’

  ‘Jonson said he’d met him in Paris. Which is where Corinne Coreille lives.’

  ‘Yes . . . Your aunt is convinced it was Peverel who took your sister to Corinne’s second concert. He denied it point blank.’

  ‘That was odd, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very odd . . . What’s that book?’

  ‘Maupassant’s short stories.’ Payne was running his finger down the contents page. ‘The Merchant uses the name Saverini on her website.’

  Antonia frowned. ‘What’s that got to do with Maupassant?’

  ‘In her third letter the Merchant writes that she’s been reading Maupassant’s contes. Well, the name Saverini struck a chord the moment I heard it.’ Payne started leafing through the book. ‘I remembered a short story by Maupassant with a character called Saverini in it. The widow Saverini . . . Here it is! It’s called “Vendetta”. I knew I was right!’

  ‘“Vendetta”?’

  ‘“Vendetta”. Rather suggestive, isn’t it? It did occur to me that the Merchant might be identifying with the widow Saverini. The widow Saverini’s son is murdered and she plots an elaborate revenge on the killer. She is single-minded, ruthless, methodical and, although it’s never spelled out for us, mo
re than a little crazy. Maupassant clearly wants us to sympathize with her, which is jolly unsettling . . . Listen to this. Don’t worry, my boy, my poor child. I will avenge you. Do you hear me? It’s your mother’s promise, and your mother always keeps her word. You know that.’

  ‘Why are you putting on an Italian accent? I believe I’ve read it . . . A dog comes into it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does. The widow Saverini proceeds to train her dog to attack an effigy made in the likeness of the killer, who is a local man. She roasts a sausage and sews it inside the effigy. She goads the dog into ripping the effigy apart. Then she does it all over again – another effigy, another sausage and so on – then again. Months pass . . . She starves the dog . . . The whole thing’s impossibly contrived and wildly improbable – but in a funny way, it’s also rather frightening.’

  ‘Obsession is always frightening.’

  ‘The story ends with the dog jumping on the killer and chewing open his throat. The widow Saverini then goes back home and for the first time since her son’s death, she has a good night’s sleep.’ Payne paused. ‘It does suggest that the Merchant has revenge on her mind. Why else call herself Saverini?’

  ‘Why indeed . . . Yes. She is a driven woman. I don’t quite see how she could possibly find out that Corinne was coming to England.’

  ‘I don’t see either. You heard what Jonson said – everybody’s been sworn to secrecy by Maître Maginot and so on.’

  ‘That’s what Jonson said . . . What if –’ She broke off. ‘Just imagine . . .’

  ‘Imagine what?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, nothing . . . Let’s stick to the known facts. Nothing’s happened yet and I hope it stays that way!’

  ‘I think I know what you mean,’ he said slowly.

  ‘No, you don’t. You can’t read my mind.’

  ‘I can –’

  ‘Where does your aunt keep her scrapbooks?’ Antonia had started looking around the library.

  ‘If memory serves me right, they used to be in that mahogany cabinet, over there, by the potted palm. That palm needs watering . . . What do you want the scrapbooks for?’