A murder in mayfair, p.22
A Murder in Mayfair, page 22
It was the face I saw first. The hall was lit by wall lamps, and one just beside the sitting room door illumined it. The face was raddled, the cheeks all faded pouches, but the lips were newly painted with a gash of scarlet for a mouth, and the whole was haloed by a mop of dyed red hair, the curls seeming out of control, like a shrubbery gone wild. Below the face were slack chins, and below that a body that was a heavy mass of flesh. But it was what that bulging mass was clad in that was the most grotesque sight: a shiny satin frock, something that must have been enormously sexy a quarter of a century ago, now many sizes too small for her, emphasizing her grossness and restricting her movements.
My mother had brought her wardrobe with her.
As I looked at her the gash of red in the center of her face expanded into a horrible smile of anticipated and longed-for revenge. To drive home the desire, her hand came round from behind her back: in it was a fearsome knife—the sort of knife a professional chef would use: long, razor-sharp, deadly. As she pointed it in my direction she saw my eyes widen, and her smile became still more full of relish.
“Yes. Not a toy knife this time. A real slicer. You’ll feel this going in, won’t you?”
The accent was genteel: a chilling, ruling-class tone with not a trace of Australian left. I started toward her, but the knife hand sprung forward, and when I hesitated she gestured commandingly toward my father’s old chair. I sank back in it gratefully, as if given a reprieve and an opportunity. She read my thoughts, or imagined she did.
“Oh, you haven’t reached your time yet. That would be too easy. Relax. It will come. I am a woman who makes things happen. All you can do is wait for what’s coming.”
The arrogance of her voice, tinged with madness, unnerved me. Anything I could say would have sounded feeble, but perhaps not quite as feeble as what I did say.
“What do you want?”
She laughed, contemptuously, as if my cliché was symptomatic of the quality of my mind.
“Nothing you can give me and still live,” she said. She poked her horrible face forward, its ravenous eyes glinting. “I want your death.”
I worked hard to regain my habitual coolness, to treat her as I would treat any other disturbed person I might encounter.
“You’ve been working up to my death for some time,” I said, my voice emerging, against the odds, as calm and matter-of-fact. She seemed flattered.
“Yes, I have. Have you felt it? That nice, satisfying, upward curve toward that. At what point did you sense where it was to end? First there were little pinpricks, humorous gestures, then a brick thrown, then a stab wound. . . . Finally there will be that slashing attack that will leave you gasping and bleeding and dying.”
“That will leave a great hole in your life. Nothing left to live for.”
Her eyes glinted. She had faced that.
“I will find something. Someone. But you had to be first. I’ve been meditating it for months. Everything leads up to your death, so it has to be. It’s the end of your road. You’ll die in the boring little suburban dump those boring little suburban people brought you to.”
“Maybe boring people make rather good parents. I’ve no quarrel with what you did when I was born.”
For reply she shrugged her fat shoulders, bursting out of their shiny prison. Whether or not I had a quarrel with her, her gesture said, was quite immaterial.
“Why?” I asked. She laughed.
“For being born,” she said.
Argument with such a proposition seemed useless, but the conversation had to be prolonged.
“You haven’t killed Tony.”
“Pits?” She sneered, revealing brilliant white teeth, the only good sound things left in her body. “Pits is hardly worth killing. An afterthought, something that popped out unexpectedly and made a bit of money for me. Someone who has a life that’s hardly worth snuffing out. I shall need Pits after—”
She looked at me, greedy relish again lighting up her eyes.
“If you can find him,” I said.
That brought her up short for a moment.
“I thought you must have spirited him away somewhere. I haven’t seen him in any of his usual haunts.” She brandished her murderous weapon and laughed. “I shall find him! No one can hide from me.”
The madness was becoming more manifest by the second. Being confronted by homicidal lunacy must be one of the most unnerving experiences possible. You know that reasoned argument can have no effect, but it is almost impossible to think up an alternative to it. In desperation I tried surprise.
“Sir John has managed to hide from you pretty effectively,” I said. The effect was extraordinary. For a moment I thought she was going to kill me there and then. The body stiffened, the hand gripped the knife more firmly. Everything spoke of outrage, that I should know such a fact.
“He’s alive?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I thought you knew everything.”
Her mouth twisted with rage.
“Where? Where is he living?”
“Somewhere safe from you.”
“Tell me where your father is!”
My heart thumping I tried a trick. I swung my eyes round to the picture of my parents on the sideboard, and her eye involuntarily followed them. But I was saved from springing and wrestling with her by the phone ringing. I sat back in the chair, my heart thumping, grateful not to have been a dead hero. Surely that was George?
“Shall I answer it?”
She shook her head.
“Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I’m mad? People have—but they’ve learned. And don’t play games about who your father is.”
“That’s my father,” I insisted. “I’m sure you’re aware he is in a nursing home.”
“I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about your real father. The man whose prick made you.”
“How nicely you put it! By the way I’ve never understood how you came to get pregnant.”
She spat on the carpet.
“I told him I couldn’t have children, after a botched abortion I’d had in Sydney. The abortion was true, the rest wasn’t. I made out it was the tragedy of my life.”
“I see. So I don’t have to feel I was unwanted.”
Her eyes widened in scorn.
“I didn’t want you! I had other plans. I was going to be a person to reckon with—as I became! Oh no, you were just a counter. I would have used you if I’d wanted him to marry me. I was in a situation full of possibilities and I didn’t want to make up my mind till I had a full hand of cards. I knew I could get rid of you if I decided I could do better.”
“I see.”
“You owe your damned existence to the police,” she said, not in a mood of reminiscence, but one of anger. “They kept such a close watch on me after the murder that I couldn’t do anything about you.”
“Nice,” I commented.
“Everyone has abortions these days! I was punished because I couldn’t have what every chit of a girl has now. It’s your fault! You’re to blame!”
“I do seem to have had a variety of possible fates,” I said, declining to take this point of view up. “Extinction, adoption, or becoming the acknowledged son of a lord, though admittedly only one with a courtesy title.”
“The situation got rather messy after you were conceived,” my mother admitted, still waving the knife but holding it as firmly and menacingly as ever. “Being the acknowledged son of a lord wasn’t on the cards for very long after he put you in me.” She paused, remembering back, and with anger. “That stiff-necked prig bored me. God, how he bored me! He was passionate, he was besotted, and any girl can take a lot of that, but he was so damned righteous. As long as I wanted to keep the marriage option open I had to be so good, so domestic, so loving to his brats. The appeal of that role wore very thin.”
“So I heard from his daughter.”
“Dull little Caroline. What’s she doing now?”
“A fashion buyer. Quite a glamorous job.”
The news seemed to inflame her. Her face showed a mixture of surprise and hate. I realized that my becoming a minister had probably inflamed her in the same way. I had done the sort of thing she had wanted to do. People she despised being successful stirred up resentment at the ruin of her own hopes, augmented her collection of grievances. However, she swallowed, and with a dismissive gesture of her left hand put Caroline aside and reverted to herself.
“I’m a connoisseur of emotions,” she said, throwing her head back in a ludicrous gesture of conceit. “It’s been my great strength and great joy. It’s been what has marked me off from other people. They operate within a tiny spectrum. I operate over the whole range.”
“Really?” I said, raising my eyebrows again. “I’d have thought it was quite narrow. You like having the power to hurt, annoy, disturb. You enjoy creating disorder. I’d have thought the psychology books would have had a quite simple word that pinned down your particular mental disorder.”
“Disorder? It is not a disorder! It is an intellectual distinction.”
“What you will. It’s in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.”
“Are you trying to annoy me?” She waved her deadly wand closer to my face. I shrugged.
“From what you’ve said about your plans I’ve nothing to lose.”
She smiled on being reminded of them, and regained some of her equilibrium, or what passed for it in her.
“Actually my great strength has been understanding other people’s more outré emotions, and responding to them. When I had my business I catered for every taste under the sun—I or one of my girls or boys. Whatever the preference was, we could accommodate the customer. It was a house of great resort, especially for the gentlemen. And I’m not using the word ‘gentlemen’ as any vulgar madam might. The cream of society came to me: men at the top of their professions. Politicians, judges, writers, media people—they all would meet and talk in my establishment. It was really a salon, a drawing room: the conversation was daring and witty, and ranged well beyond your understanding. When they write a history of London life in the seventies and eighties my house in Kensington should be at the center of it.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Perhaps the author will devote a special chapter to Mme. Labelle’s esoteric and high-class knocking shop. When did you change your name to Mrs. Flanders?”
“When the police had become a lot too interested in Mme. Labelle. You have found out a lot. You get the allusion?”
“I suppose so.” I decided to continue annoying her, because she seemed to get a spice out of a duel. “Though Moll Flanders wasn’t a whore or a madam. That’s a vulgar error. She was a serial bigamist.”
She quivered with aggravation at being corrected.
“Smart alec! Pedant!”
“You’re an English graduate of long ago. Something we have in common. You should have known that. Bigamy was never in fact your line, was it? You can’t be a bigamist until you’ve first been married.”
“I was never so daft. I’ve told you why I decided not to have Lord John. If I was bored with him as a lover, it wasn’t likely I’d find him very interesting as a husband.”
I chanced my arm with something I’d guessed from Caroline’s and Matthew’s account of the household.
“And by then Lady John had come into the picture, I suppose.”
She gave another of those annoying moues at my not needing to be told something. But then she grinned evilly: even if she could not announce it as a revelation, she would enjoy talking about it.
“I told you I was a connoisseur of sensations. That was a situation I could relish! She should never have married. A lot of women did at that time who shouldn’t have—for security, for children (though that certainly wasn’t her motivation), or because they didn’t understand their own inclinations. The Revills’ marriage was over long before I went to live with them, though I’d have put the final nail in it if it hadn’t been. When I heard from Lord John why he thought the marriage had broken down I thought: there could be a bit of fun in this for me! In fact, I knew I’d enjoy having it off with both of them.”
“I said you like creating confusion and disorder,” I said.
“I certainly did that!” she said, with pride and pleasure. “We found it so easy at first, Veronica and me. He was at the Ministry or at the House of Commons most of the time. The children were upstairs in the nursery, playing quite happily on their own. Their snotty little noses went unwiped for a bit. So while they were playing up there, we were playing down below, in bed. It was too easy. I think the housekeeper suspected, but she was sort of semidetached in the household anyway.”
Not so semidetached, I thought, that she didn’t blush at the recollection of her suspicions when Frieda Brewer was questioning her.
“To spice it up a bit,” my mother went on, “I started telling him the old headache story and going to her bed at nights. He began to get an inkling, but was too much of the gentleman to try to catch us together. His damned codes, his honor, really screwed him up, the poor fish. Anyway, at heart he didn’t want to know, to have his suspicions confirmed.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was wild about me. I was giving him what he’d never had in his life before.”
“Poor man,” I said. That was unwise. It caught her attention, and drew her away from her reminiscences.
“Lucky man.” She licked her lips and did a little semicircular walk around the room, waving the long, sharp knife. “I’m going to find him, you know. I know what you’re doing, but I haven’t forgotten him. You come first, but he will come next. Even if I have to alter my plans and play with you a bit before I kill you, I shall get it out of you where he is.”
“Even you can’t believe that. A man who knows he’s going to die is under the least possible compulsion to tell the truth. I’ll lie, and I’ll be dead before you can check it out.”
She thought this over.
“Perhaps this is going to be much longer drawn out than I planned,” she said at last, injecting a threatening tone to her words, which did not hide an inner uncertainty. “And why not? All the more enjoyment for me.” I registered that no plan seemed to be springing to her mind.
“You were just playing with them, weren’t you?” I said. “With Lord John and Veronica. As you want to play with me with that knife. As you’ve been playing with me since the day I became a minister.”
She laughed.
“I loved listening upstairs to you playing musicals and opera, then playing you things over the phone from my old collection. I had an enormous collection at my establishment. I always tried to please my gentlemen, find out what their tastes were, give them what they wanted. Often I had to plunge deep to find out what they really wanted but didn’t even know themselves they wanted. That was fun. Then I could play with them.”
“That’s it, isn’t it? The pleasing them was a preparation to playing with them, and the playing got nastier and nastier.”
“Maybe. They put themselves in my power. I never went after them.”
“But you do nowadays, because it’s become a need. Tony never put himself in your power. You went after him.”
“I didn’t go after him. We landed in the same institution. That was no great coincidence. There are hardly any asylums left, even in London. They keep you in the home area, so that relatives can visit. Pits and I were Central London people.” She laughed harshly. “There weren’t many keen relatives to visit people in there, but no one had fewer visits than Pits and me.”
“He should never have been in an institution at all.”
She flushed.
“I’m the one who should never have been in an institution! Pits is feebleminded. That’s why he was there. They got it right for once. They couldn’t have got it more wrong with me.” Her eyes glinted with grievance. “They were leaned on, of course. I was arrested for pestering a government minister. I wasn’t pestering him. I was blackmailing him. He must have leaned on the police to have me quietly put away, and the police leaned on the psychiatrists. Mind you, psychiatrists are sadly limited people. They were too stupid to understand a really creative imagination.”
“Your talent for disorder, you mean?” She twisted her mouth.
“I’ve worked on people all my life. I’ve made them into my puppets. Twisted them to my will, which was so much more daring than their own. That’s a sign of greatness, not of madness. But you can’t expect the hoi polloi to understand that.”
“But you deny you twisted Lord John into murdering his wife so that he could marry you?”
“Haven’t I told you I’d given up that idea almost as soon as you were conceived?” she almost shouted. “By then I had much bigger plans. I was going round with him and Lady John and meeting all sorts of more exciting and more influential people. They were people whose interest really counted, people who could get my career into liftoff. I’d already made inquiries about an abortion, got the name of a society abortionist. The killing of Veronica was the last thing I wanted at that point. It was an accident.”
“An accident?”
She laughed outright, an ugly, sneering sound.
“Oh, don’t get your hopes up. He killed her all right. It was an accident from my point of view. I just wanted to enjoy an extension of my little game—get some added spice out of it. On the surface, as I’ve said, we were all three very friendly: civilized, modern people. Lots of people in their circle thought I was sleeping with him, but they saw us together and thought it was a mutually acceptable arrangement as far as Veronica was concerned. Nobody realized just how close we all were, all three of us. We went to parties together, to Covent Garden, to the theater. One of the plays we went to—”
“Don’t tell me!” I cried. “It was All’s Well That Ends Well.”
“You’re too sharp for your own good,” she spat, stalled.
“Not bad for one who was brought up by boring little people,” I agreed.
“Any fool can get a university education these days,” said my mother scornfully.
