Scold's Bridle

'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.'