through the window, walking across the lawn towards the house. Jonson said, ‘It must have been Eleanor Merchant who phoned, yes. On her mobile. Heaven knows what she’d been hoping to achieve.’
‘She probably didn’t know herself,’ Payne said astutely.
Antonia was looking down at the cover of the magazine, at the picture of the super-thin model and the Siamese cat. For some reason she found herself thinking of the photo she had found in Jonson’s case once more… Corinne Coreille had been snapped sitting at her dressing table – she had taken time off from applying her make-up to stroke a kitten… A kitten, yes. A live kitten. The kitten seemed to have jumped on the table… There was no kipper on the table – Jonson had made that up. He had been about to say ‘kitten’ but had changed his mind… Nicholas on the other hand kept sneezing because he was allergic to plants… Now, why did she think there was a connection between the two? An association of ideas…
Antonia frowned. Something was stirring at the back of her mind. A memory was about to surface – it was something both Lady Grylls and Peverel had mentioned… Hope I am not getting unhinged, she thought, casting a glance at Eleanor Merchant’s body and immediately looking away.
‘That kitten in the photograph,’ she said aloud. ‘Where did it come from?’
Jonson stared at her. He looked like a man who was waking up from a dream. ‘It was a stray – one of the gardeners had found it and brought it into the house. Mademoiselle Coreille apparently took a fancy to it.’ He spoke mechanically. ‘I understand Maitre Maginot and Mademoiselle Coreille had an argument about it. Maitre Maginot objected strongly -’ He broke off. ‘How do you know there’s a kitten in the photograph?’
‘You told us,’ Antonia said.
‘I didn’t -’ Suddenly Jonson looked terrified.
‘Oh, but you did.’ I can bluff too, Antonia thought, though she felt rather sorry for him. ‘Kipper’, he had said to avoid saying ‘kitten’. A silly lie – he’d been unable to think of another word. He was a poor liar.
‘We must be getting back to the house,’ Payne said, looking at his watch. ‘I expect the police will be here any moment now and they will be cross if they find the three of us cooped up with the bodies.’
‘Yes,’ Jonson said. ‘Yes.’ Without another word, he turned round and left the greenhouse.
‘I touched Eleanor’s passport,’ Antonia said.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ Payne said.
‘I held it very lightly – by the corners.’
‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve as good as signed it with your full name. There’s no escape from the old DNA. If the police decided the Merchant didn’t do it after all, you’d be their next prime suspect, d’you realize?’
Antonia cast one last glance at the bodies. The good ended happily and the bad ended unhappily, she thought absurdly.
‘What was Corinne’s reaction to the news?’ Antonia asked a few moments later as they were walking across the lawn towards the house.
‘I don’t know if she’s been told anything yet. Somehow, I don’t expect her to have hysterics – do you?’
‘No…’
‘You’d never believe this, but it’s like in that damned French song Antonia was talking about yesterday morning. The one she heard in a dream,’ Lady Grylls said as soon as she saw them. ‘What was it called? “Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir”.’
‘What do you mean, darling?’ Payne frowned.
‘Corinne’s disappeared – and no one’s seen her go. She is nowhere to be found. Her bags have gone too.’
25
The Unexpected Guest
They had come upon her in the hall, tending to Provost who gave every impression of being in a very bad way indeed. He was sitting on a spindle-legged gilt chair, staring before him. Lady Grylls had made him a cup of tea. She seemed to have emptied almost the whole contents of the silver sugar bowl into the tea; she kept urging him to drink it. The air was filled with the old-fashioned smell of valerian. There was a bottle of brandy on a salver on a small round table, also, inexplicably, a thermometer.
Provost was clad in the black-and-yellow striped waistcoat a la Maxim’s but his stiff gleaming-white collar had been removed and it too could be seen on the salver. Lady Grylls was wearing a dressing gown and she had also put an elaborate choker with a large ruby clasp around her neck. She was smoking another purple-filtered Balkan Sobranie cigarette. The morning light, filtered through the fanlight, filled the hall with the murky yellow tones of a sepia print and, Payne thought, it made it look rather like a scene out of some quaint Edwardian farce on the twin subjects of noblesse oblige and the feudal spirit. (Lady Grylls Pulls It Off? Baroness to the Rescue?) The mundane conclusion of course was that murder made people act irrationally.
‘His legs buckled under him like one of those collapsible card tables. Good thing I was here to catch him as he fell… He can’t cope with things like that. He’s a weak man… Peverel’s here,’ Lady Grylls went on with evident distaste. ‘As though we haven’t got enough to think about.’
Payne’s brows went up. ‘Peverel? I thought he wasn’t coming back?’
‘Well, he has. He drove all the way down from London. Must have started at some unearthly hour. He’s in the dining room, drinking coffee. He looks like a funeral director, quite unlike himself. He seems to know about it already -’ Lady Grylls broke off. ‘Provost says Maginot has been shot – is that correct?’
‘Yes.’ Payne then told her to prepare for another shock. ‘Maitre Maginot’s body isn’t the only one in the greenhouse, darling. Eleanor Merchant is there too – shot as well… It looks as though she killed Maginot and then committed suicide.’
‘You don’t mean that, do you, Hughie?’
He said he did. He swore he wasn’t making it up.
‘That’s a pretty kettle of fish,’ Lady Grylls said after a pause. ‘So that’s what Peverel meant when he said there were two of them. I thought I’d misheard. Goodness. That woman came all this way from America to shoot herself in my greenhouse. Incidentally, do you remember that awful weepy, Love Story? When was it made, can you tell me?’
Major Payne blinked. ‘Sorry, darling? What love story?’
‘Love Story. The film. When was it made?’
‘When was it -? Early seventies… 1970, at a guess. ’
‘1970. I thought as much.’ Lady Grylls nodded. ‘In 1970 Corinne was twenty-two. I knew she was talking bosh. You see…’ She then told them about the extraordinary conversation she had had with Corinne the night before. ‘And she said that she remembered her mother’s voice! That was the other rum thing. It didn’t make sense. There was nothing memorable about Ruse’s voice, but Corinne spoke as though it had been something quite exceptional.’
Antonia and Payne found Peverel in the dining room, standing by the fireplace, a large white coffee cup in hand. He was wearing a black coat with a velvet collar and a long white silk scarf. He did look solemn and – not sad, exactly, Antonia thought, but preoccupied, in a pensive mood. ‘I thought you were the police,’ he said, glancing at the clock. ‘They are always late, aren’t they?’
It was then that the possible importance of something Lady Grylls had said dawned on Antonia. She asked, ‘How do you know what happened?’
He shrugged – took another sip of coffee. He was drinking it black. There was a faraway look in his eyes. For some reason Antonia had the idea that he was reflecting on the past.
‘How did you know there was a second body there?’ she persisted.
He gave a little smile. ‘That boy told me. Nicholas.’
There had been a brief pause and a scowl, as though he had had to think about it – or was Antonia imagining it?
‘I thought you had no intention of coming back,’ Payne said.
‘I discovered I’d left something behind. I came to collect it.’
‘What a bore for you. Must have been something very important. ’
