Assassins at Ospreys Read online

  ‘Have you ever seen anyone actually reading the Illustrated London News? I haven’t,’ said Antonia. ‘Not even at the Military Club. Isn’t that interesting?’

  ‘You are right. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I don’t think I have even seen it sold anywhere. It’s one of those strange publications that are mentioned a lot in books –’ Payne broke off. ‘Good lord. Not Victorian Gothic.’

  Ospreys loomed before them in sharp, ink-black silhouette, all turrets and spikes against the dark sky. The lancet windows of armorial stained glass were unlit and the house looked rather eerie in the pale moonlight.

  Surely, Antonia reflected, they wouldn’t turn off all the lights when somebody was as gravely ill as Ralph Renshawe, would they? It wasn’t that late either. Had there been a power cut? But, if that were the case, they would use candles or some of the brass-and-wrought-iron gasoliers one associated with this kind of place. Wouldn’t a house like Ospreys have its own electricity generator?

  Antonia got out of the car first and Payne followed, leaving the headlights on. Antonia gave an involuntary shudder at the sight of their distorted shadows dancing across the avenue. There was not a breath of wind. Intense, uncanny quiet. The house was white with hoar frost. They caught a glimpse of frozen fairylike trees on either side of the drive, their skeletal branches pointing upwards.

  ‘A haunt of ancient peace,’ Payne whispered.

  ‘There are always legends hanging about these old houses,’ said Antonia as though to give herself courage. ‘They are not difficult to invent and cost nothing.’

  Pipe in mouth, Major Payne walked up to the front door and pressed the bell button.

  Antonia stood behind him They seemed to be passing through what appeared to be the early stages of a cliché-ridden horror film. (The kind Moira Montano had made?) A time-eaten and grotesque mansion with a dark history, long deserted through superstitious fears, tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate part of Oxfordshire. Gaping gates and gloomy gables. A creepy creaking noise, which was probably caused by the frozen trees, but might prove to be something much more sinister . . . Would the front door turn out to have been left unlocked?

  She didn’t hear the bell ring and no one answered the door. Major Payne pushed the bell button again.

  ‘Not a single light . . . What’s happened?’ Antonia said. ‘Where is everybody? They couldn’t have suddenly gone away, just like that, could they?’

  ‘They might have. Or they might be dead,’ Payne said in a sepulchral voice. ‘You heard what the old biddy said – the secret house of death.’

  ‘How many people actually live here?’

  ‘No idea. The letter didn’t say. There are bound to be nurses and people.’ Payne stomped his feet. ‘It’s freezing!’

  ‘They said it’s going to get warmer tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it.’

  ‘Shall we go?’ Antonia drew back from the door. It was indeed unbearably cold. She had thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her coat. She longed to be back in the safety of the car, sipping hot coffee from the thermos, listening to Vivaldi on the CD player.

  She looked up. No stars, only the florin-like moon. No sign of any ospreys flapping their wings . . . The secret house of death . . . It might be interesting to find out why it had been given that name – what exactly had taken place – was there any truth in the gruesome story?

  Payne pushed the bell once more, then he reached out and rattled the door knocker. He got hold of the door handle –

  Antonia said again, ‘Let’s go.’ She felt the beginnings of a sore throat.

  ‘Good lord,’ she heard her husband whisper. ‘It’s open.’

  Antonia blinked. ‘What? The door is open?’

  ‘Yes . . . Look . . . What’s this muck?’ He stood looking down at his hand. ‘The door handle – it’s covered in some-thing sticky – like jelly – urgh!’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Antonia said.

  He muttered an oath. ‘I am not joking –’

  Antonia experienced a disconcerting sense of unreality. ‘Don’t tell me it’s blood.’

  ‘I don’t know. Golly. It might be blood . . . Yes . . . Looks black . . . Someone seems to have had an accident . . .’

  ‘Hugh, are you serious?’ Her hand had gone up to her heart.

  For what seemed a long time he stood as though petrified. Suddenly he laughed. ‘No, I’m not. There’s no blood. The door is not open.’ He turned round and grinned at Antonia. ‘Only joking. There’s nothing.’

  She stood staring at him. ‘It isn’t funny, Hugh,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe you did this.’

  ‘Sorry, my love,’ he said.

  She turned round and walked silently back towards the car. He followed sheepishly, stroking his jaw. She got into the back seat and slammed the door.

  He tried to talk to her, to cajole her to sit beside him, but she remained silent. He put on the Vivaldi concerto. ‘Konzert für Zwei Violinen, Streichorchester und Basso continuo,’ he announced in comically execrable German as he started the car. He was trying to make her laugh.

  She pursed her lips and shut her eyes. She decided she wouldn’t speak to him. Her thoughts went back to the dark forbidding house they were leaving behind. Had any-thing happened? What if – what if Ospreys wasn’t empty? What if there were people inside – Ralph and the nurse – lying dead, their throats slit? What if Ingrid had killed them?

  On an impulse, Antonia took out her mobile phone and dialled 999.

  When the police phoned her two hours later, Antonia was sitting in bed alone, reading.

  ‘Yes, madam. We did gain access into the house and checked all the rooms. There is nothing suspicious. Nothing’s been disturbed. There is no one in the house. We did check very carefully, yes. Perhaps the people have gone away. We do realize that Mr Renshawe is a very sick man, yes . . . We’ll check the hospitals . . . Thanks for call-ing us.’

  Though nothing in the policeman’s voice suggested it, Antonia couldn’t help feeling a little foolish . . . Well, better safe than sorry.

  Where had Ralph and the nurse gone?

  11

  The Heat of the Day

  For once the weather forecasts had got it absolutely right and global warming was blamed for it. The next morning at around half past nine the weather started undergoing a remarkable change. As temperatures rose, the packed ice underfoot cracked, puddles unfroze, icicles melted and slithered down rooftops, frost patterns on windows dis-solved. A wave of unseasonable warmth, unknown in the British Isles for at least seventy-five years, was crossing the south – it felt as though someone had left open the door of a gargantuan oven. Scarves and heavy coats were discarded, radiators turned down and then off, windows flew open. The sun had come out and the rooks once more circled over Ospreys, shrieking in great excitement.

  Ingrid Delmar stood gazing up at them with eyes that were swollen and red with crying, listening to the rooks’ savage chant. Her face was dry now but her tears earlier on had dug rivulets into the Beatrice make-up. The sun looked like some malign, jubilant eye – no, like one of those ill-fated fabulous diamonds people killed to obtain. (As a child she had been enchanted by The Moonstone and become quite obsessed with those sinister Brahmins.) She felt the sun’s million rays of dazzling brilliant energy beat mercilessly upon the Beatrice wig. She had a headache – a throbbing sensation in her temples, like miniature drums. There was a ringing in her ears, as though she had descended to the very bottom of the ocean. Her whole brain hurt. She would have liked to take it out of her skull and put it through the wash!

  She had had a sleepless night. Only at dawn had she managed to doze off. She had had a dream.

  She saw herself trapped in the cross-section of some giant frosted wasps’ nest, among walls layered with shelves of bluish ice, which her fall seemed to have shattered. It was extremely cold and she was shivering. All round her feet lay the frozen bodies of giant wasps – as big as sparrows. Realizatio
n had then come to her – these were the wasps she had destroyed with cyanide last August.

  It was November but today it felt like August. Freak weather – and they said it would be like that for some time. She regarded this as a portent. She was a great believer in omens and auguries. Anything could happen in such weather. Strange days lay ahead, of that Ingrid had no doubt. Strange things were about to happen. She had a picture of herself growing feathers and transmogrifying into a rook, flapping her wings and taking off – flying up, then down, then up again and diving down once more, her sharp beak poised to strike at the treacherous eyes of the enemy.

  ‘Those to whom evil is done,’ Ingrid said aloud, ‘do evil in return.’

  Bee was as guilty as Ralph Renshawe. Bee had ruined her life. But for Bee, Ingrid would have given birth to a healthy child. Her little girl would have been with her now . . .

  She had overheard Bee’s confession only moments after entering the hall. Bee had been talking in her highest and silliest voice, her ‘society’ voice, trying to impress her visitors – that writer woman and her husband. Ingrid hadn’t been able to believe her ears. The truth – at long last the truth had come out. The whole truth. Bee had lied to her. It was to absolute strangers that Beatrice had decided to unburden herself, to make her confession. In a split second the scales had fallen from Ingrid’s eyes and she had seen Bee as she was, with her mask off.

  If Ingrid had come back two minutes later, she would have missed the confession. Or two minutes earlier for that matter. Or if the sitting-room door had been closed. Or if Bee had been whispering. Or if they had been playing music, say, one of the interloper’s sentimental tunes or his dreary drums. However, Fate – or was it Mighty God Rook? – had decreed differently. That she had been meant to learn the truth, Ingrid had no doubt.

  She stood watching as a rook descended and perched on the edge of the ancient well. The rook looked at her fearlessly and crowed twice. She stretched her fingers towards it. It was a particularly large specimen. The rook didn’t fly away – it seemed to like her! It tilted its head to one side, crowed again and flapped its wings. Ingrid’s eyes started swimming with tears. I am starved of love, she thought. Her parents – precious, self-obsessed, narcissistically verbose academics – had barely acknowledged her existence. Her boyfriend had hated her. Her little girl had been snatched away from her. Her best friend had turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing –

  Ingrid blew her nose. She had a job to do, things to see to. Important things. Matters of life and death.

  Bee was going to be punished in a very special kind of way. Bee would be made to suffer for a crime she had not committed. Ingrid nodded to herself and ran her tongue across her lips. Bee was going to be held responsible for the violent murder of Ralph Renshawe. That, Ingrid reflected, would be so much better than killing Bee – or cutting off Bee’s lower lip and thus rendering her pretty mouth unkissable.

  Back to Plan A then, as originally conceived. In her bag Ingrid carried Bee’s address book. It was covered with Beatrice’s fingerprints and of course it had Beatrice’s name written on the front page. Ingrid had wrapped the address book up in a clean silk handkerchief and she had been careful not to leave any of her own fingerprints on it. She also carried an exceptionally sharp small knife with a silver handle. Bee had used it to sharpen a pencil. Bee’s fingerprints were all over the knife. It was Bee’s scent the police would smell in the room. Ce Soir Je T’Aime. Ingrid had dabbed several drops of it behind her ears.

  This should provide the police with enough evidence.

  She would start with the eyes. She wanted to hear Ralph Renshawe squeal like a hare caught in a trap. She’d leave him one eye so that he could see what was happening to the rest of him. Her only concern was that he might get a heart attack and die after the first cut, but that was some-thing she couldn’t do much about.

  Despite the increasing heat, Ingrid did not take off her gloves but she saw the birthmark across the palm of her right hand very clearly in her mind. The blood-red naevus. Had she always been meant to be a killer, like Cain?

  She must wear her gloves all the time. She mustn’t leave any of her own fingerprints. She smiled grimly. She had all the instincts of the successful criminal. She was perfectly capable of committing the perfect murder. She remembered how, in the month Bee got married, she managed to get hold of some cyanide, which she handled very care-fully with rubber gloves. Several lumps she used to destroy the wasps’ nest in the garden, but the rest of the cyanide she put in a phial and kept at the back of her cupboard. She had toyed with the idea of poisoning the interloper. Well, she’d been unwilling to share Bee with anyone then, least of all with that big lumbering fool.

  When Bee was charged with the murder of Ralph Renshawe and put away, the interloper would have a nervous breakdown. The interloper was so besotted with his beloved beautiful Bee, he wouldn’t be able to live with-out her. His existence would become insupportable, so he would probably kill himself.

  No loose ends. It would be like one of those meticulously worked-out endings Antonia Darcy specialized in. Ingrid had read Antonia Darcy’s first novel, at Bee’s recommendation, and had hated it. Ingenious yes, work of genius, most decidedly no. Ingrid had no doubt that each one of Antonia Darcy’s books was a mere commercially motivated replica of its predecessor. Variations on a tried, if tired, lucrative theme. Well-bred characters sitting beside cosy fires, drinking tea, deliberating who-dunit ad nauseam.

  The rook was still there, perched on the well’s edge, looking at her, his head tilted to one side. Mighty God Rook, she whispered and she gave a slight bow. She had no doubt Mighty God Rook knew what was going on in her head. Mighty God Rook approved of what she was about to do.

  Ingrid felt filled with superhuman strength and energy, with the kind of ‘fuel’ that sent rockets blasting across the stratosphere. She started walking fast – broke into a run. She raised her arms a little, like the wings of a bird poised for flight.

  Ospreys’ steeply pitched roof, the gables and pointed arches danced before her eyes. The sun above seemed to grow larger – an enormous orange of tawny gold. She was heading for the back of the house, for the french windows that led into Ralph’s room. She wouldn’t have minded entering the normal way, through the front door, but wanted to avoid any possible opposition from the nurse who might say that Ralph was too ill to see her. Well, Ingrid could easily deal with ten nurses if she had to, but she didn’t want to waste another minute –

  The next moment she stopped short in her tracks.

  ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ she heard someone say.

  What a relief it was that he didn’t have to go to Ospreys after all. Even in normal circumstances Benjamin Saunders was averse to leaving London and his well-established routine. He had never been able to understand his wife’s passion for the country, let alone share it. Most of his wife’s smart friends seemed to live in the country. All the husbands seemed to play golf. Annabel had been talking admiringly about somebody’s husband ‘fitting in ten holes between tea and dinner’. Annabel had been trying to persuade him to take up golf. How little she knew him! Still, Ralph Renshawe was a highly valued client and it would-n’t have done to displease him – even though he was dying, his word was a command. If the appointment hadn’t been cancelled, Saunders would have gone to Ospreys without fail.

  He was sitting at his desk, writing with a silver-topped pen. He was a tall distinguished-looking man of sixty-three, with a long straight nose, prim mouth and a lugubrious expression, wearing an immaculate striped suit and silk tie of a restrained pattern. He had loosened his top shirt button, his only concession to the heat wave. On the wall behind him hung framed traditional cartoons by ‘Spy’ of Victorian legal panjandrums. As one of his clients had observed, Saunders wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Spy cartoon himself.

  The phone call had been received at eight o’clock that morning, just as he had been making reluctant preparations to leave fo
r Oxford. It had been Nurse Wilkes, Ralph Renshawe’s nurse. Ralph wouldn’t be able to see him this morning and would Mr Saunders mind not coming to Ospreys? She was phoning from a hospital in Oxford. There had been a crisis the night before, but everything was under control now. Ralph had suddenly taken a turn for the worse and she had had to call an ambulance.

  She had been sure Ralph wouldn’t make it, but it had proved a false alarm, Nurse Wilkes went on cheerfully. Ralph was in his hospital bed, on a drip – but he was making a super recovery. Ralph was in good spirits too, revived by the vitamin injections they had given him. He had been allowed to sit up for a bit and the first thing he insisted on doing was make a phone call to Beatrice, that was Miss Beatrice Ardleigh, Ralph’s lady friend – wasn’t that nice? Well, the way things were going, she thought they would be back at Ospreys later that afternoon and could Mr Saunders come to Ospreys with the papers tomorrow morning at eleven?

  Benjamin Saunders frowned. Miss Beatrice Ardleigh – who was she? Someone from Ralph Renshawe’s mysterious past? He had the feeling that the reason Ralph Renshawe wanted to see him was something to do with her . . . Another woman . . . Would she be as much trouble as Madame Niratpattanasai?

  12

  The Heiress

  ‘Is – is that Antonia?’

  ‘Oh! Bee! How are you? Is – is everything OK?’ Antonia felt genuine relief to hear Beatrice Ardleigh’s voice.

  ‘Yes, everything is fine. Nothing happened.’

  ‘I am so glad!’

  ‘Well, we didn’t sleep awfully well, but that was my fault entirely – my nerves. I am sensitive as an oyster. Poor Len was up and down, all through the night, bringing me pills and drinks and things. No, we haven’t seen Ingrid. We heard her crying in her room – it was about two in the morning, I think. Broke my heart! But Len didn’t let me speak to her. He can be extremely difficult. I did want to go and give her a hug. I honestly did.’