A Splash of Red

  But Sir Richard, if disappointed or even quite simply amazed by the array of people he found before him in the white sitting room, now with its balcony windows drawn right back, remained impeturbable. He greeted each person in turn with great urbanity as though welcoming directors to a board meeting of uncertain temper. Isabelle Mancini found the article on his wife and Parrot Park in Taffeta enthusiastically recalled - 'the best photographs of Francesca ever taken - what was the girl's name?' Laura Barrymore, who it transpired had acted as editorial assistant on this feature, got a polite salute but no more, which led Jemima to suppose that she was one of the few members of the female sex Sir Richard did not find personally fascinating. Laura, visibly pulling herself together after Isabelle's assault, managed a sketchy imitation of her former gracious manner.

  The encounter which had caused Jemima most anxiety in anticipation was that between Sir Richard and Kevin John. But once again a diversion robbed it of its full flavour. It had to be faced that the ugly look had returned to Kevin John's face, making him more bull-like and less overtly handsome in his decayed film-star fashion. Also he loosened the tie at his neck, an automatic gesture which Jemima did not like the look of, and there was a knotted vein beating at the corner of his temple. But at this moment Laura Barrymore, someone with an obvious gift for choosing the dramatic moment for her appearance --and in this case her disappearance - gave a shriek, and clutched her gilded throat.

  'Isabelle - Adam - together?' she cried through a series of sobs in which her accent became more and more refined like that of the transformed Eliza Doolittle. 'This is utterly intolerable.' And throwing out her long arms, so that her tight golden bracelets flashed, she fled down the penthouse stairs and out of sight. This time, after an interval of slightly stunned silence during which the others present looked mainly at their toes or, in the case of Sir Richard Lionnel, out of the window, the front door was heard opening and shutting.

  Isabelle was the first to break the silence. 'Idiot gir-r-rl!' she exclaimed. 'Where will she go? Dressed up like that at lunchtime, after all I have taught her.' But there was a gleam of satisfaction in her eye. Isabelle smelt victory. Jemima thought the expensive suitcases would soon be making the return journey from Adelaide Square.

  'Why don't the rest of you all sit down?' Jemima spoke with determination before the spell of their silence could be broken. At this, she was faintly amused to see that the four remaining participants in the mystery conference reacted exactly according to character. Kevin John relapsed rather than sat back into the large white armchair he had previously occupied.

  Sir Richard Lionnel ushered Isabelle towards the white sofa, helped her to sit down with a certain solicitousness, and then, remarking politely: 'Thank you, I myself prefer to stand', took up his station with his back to the balcony. He had already lit one of his black cigarettes, which he was smoking rapidly, flicking the ash in the direction of the grey and white plants. Whether by choice or chance, he was situated so that his expression could not be checked.

  Adam Adamson, without saying a word, sat down exactly where he had been standing, not far from the doorway; he descended cross-legged as though he were a piece of furniture which had been neatly folded up to save space. Then he murmured sotto voce: 'Speak, goddess.'

  Jemima seated herself beside the sitting-room cupboard, in an oatmeal swivel-backed office chair which she had never occupied. It was - had been - Chloe's writing chair. In her brief interlude of peace in the flat, Jemima had instinctively avoided it. Now it seemed the right place from which to speak in her capacity of recording, if not avenging, angel.

  'First of all, this is a story of love,' Jemima began, without further preamble. 'Love and of course later on death. But primarily a story of love. I thought we were dealing with hatred, and all the time we were dealing with love. Until I got that emphasis right, thanks to a chance remark by one of you quite recently, I never began to understand the truth about the death of Chloe Fontaine. Oddly enough the police - Detective Chief Inspector Portsmouth - got that right from the first. All the stabs. He said to me: "sign of a lover, more likely than not".'

  At this point Sir Richard Lionnel threw away his black Sobranie and immediately lit another one.

  'Miss Shore, if I understand you right' - he spoke still with urbanity, but the impatience was not totally disguised; the drags on his cigarette were also faster - 'you have asked us all here on a Saturday morning to tell us about the death of poor Chloe Fontaine. If that is so, aren't you rather pre-empting the work of the police? And possibly, if I may say so, rather embarrassing our friend here?'

  'I'm not your friend, you bastard,' said Kevin John thickly. 'She's my friend and my darling, Jemima Shore, Investigator. I asked her to solve the mystery of the universe and she has. As for the police' - he made an extremely rude gesture - 'that's for them, all of them, the long and the short and the tall of them. I need a drink.' He rose heavily to his feet and shambled off to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of wine and one glass which he proceeded to fill, drink down and fill again. No invitations to share the wine were given, and no one present appeared to regret this fact.

  'A story of love,' resumed Jemima as though none of these interruptions had taken place. 'And all of you here, in your different ways, loved Chloe. It's what you properly have in common, it's what links you together, much more than your common implication in her death.'

  Isabelle frowned. 'But Jemima, my darling,' she began in a puzzled voice, "e did it. Ver-r-ry sad. A cr-r-rime of passion - 'oo does not understand it? But 'e did it.' She indicated Kevin John, proceeding at that moment relentlessly to his third glass of wine. "E was drunk, of course; mais quand même.' Isabelle shrugged her shoulders.

  Jemima ignored her. 'That's why it's as well that Laura has left us. Because Laura Barrymore certainly did not love Chloe Fontaine. She would have been the odd one out in our chain, broken the links. But for the rest of you: let us take you first, Sir Richard. No, Isabelle, let me speak. You, Sir Richard, loved her. She fascinated you; she was your romantic type, as you told me yourself, wayward, emotional, unpredictable as she was in everything except her work, the exact opposite to those strong sensible women with whom you take care to surround yourself on the domestic front, your wife, his sister' - she pointed to Adam. 'No, Isabelle, let me go on.

  'She, Chloe, represented danger, didn't she? That was half the point of it all. The penthouse flat in your own building, the secret holiday. Unfortunately Chloe saw things from exactly the other angle. When Chloe decided that you represented for her security, money, protection and the abandoning of the endless struggle to support herself in the world's most precarious livelihood, novel-writing, in favour of ease and luxury, including luxury to write if she so wished - well, you weren't interested were you?'

  'You're right about one thing, Miss Shore,' Sir Richard spoke without emotion. 'In my own way, I did love her. Having said that, as far as I'm concerned there's really no more to be said on this rather distasteful subject, so if you will excuse me—'

  'Ah, but forgive me, there is. Quite a lot more to be said. You see, Chloe - in her own way a very determined woman even if her objectives were sometimes a little ill-defined - had decided that nothing would satisfy her but security, the security of marriage. And that meant obliging you to leave your wife, something you were manifestly loath to do. For one thing, Lady Lionnel is an extremely jealous woman not likely to relinquish her husband of many years' standing without a struggle. Then you, particularly at the present time, had a great deal to fear from scandal, with a grand new job coming up.'

  'No, Sir Richard, it was a delicate operation to make you get a divorce. Chloe knew that. Then, when fate dealt her an unexpected card in the shape of pregnancy, she made the mistake of thinking it was an ace. She thought she could persuade you into marriage by the lever of the child. Whereas in fact the card was not an ace, but the most diabolical kind of joker - for not only was the child not yours, as she herself was well aware, but it
also never could have been yours—'

  From Adam's startled expression, Jemima realized that he had not know Chloe had been pregnant. He looked rather white.

  'She was a liar,' said Lionnel rather gruffly. 'And - well, that's enough. I still loved her.'

  'Yes, you loved her. You loved her enough to come round to Adelaide Square, hot foot, that fatal Saturday. You came to warn her about your wife, didn't you, Sir Richard?'

  'Don't deny it! I saw you, you murdering bastard.'

  For a moment it looked as if Kevin John, having interrupted, might spring at Lionnel. But Jemima went relentlessly on. 'You worried that Lady Lionnel, who had come up from Sussex to "The Little Athens" to confront you, would come here to Adelaide Square and find Chloe. So you hurried round, on the pretence of getting a taxi, hurried round -it's not far, and you had the alibi, it's always difficult to get taxis in the Tottenham Court Road, especially on a Saturday.'

  'Clever of you to work that out, Miss Shore. Stavros, I suppose. I should never have taken the risk of taking a woman of your intelligence to the same restaurant. Do the police know?'

  'Not yet.'

  'But I'm going to tell them,' Kevin John threw in belligerently.

  'On the contrary,' interrupted Jemima. 'Even at the end of this mystery conference, you have nothing to tell them about him. Nothing at all. Because you see, Sir Richard Lionnel did not kill Chloe Fontaine. Shall we say he did not love her enough to kill her?'

  There was a silence while Jemima watched the vein beating in Kevin John's temple.

  'For having reached seventy-three Adelaide Square so rapidly, he veered away,' she continued. 'Yes, Kevin John, he veered away as though he had seen someone he knew. Your own words to me last night - or was it this morning? Having come round to warn her about his wife, having telephoned her first but got no answer (you told the truth about that telephone call to the police, Sir Richard, if not the whole truth), you saw someone you knew, someone dangerous to you, outside the building. At that sight, you veered away. You rushed back to "The Little Athens", getting a taxi on the way. Chloe was never warned, and Lady Lionnel, for all her threats, satisfied with the scene she had made, went back to Sussex. No, Sir Richard, it was not you who came back.'

  'True. All perfectly true.' Sir Richard extended the immaculate white cuffs from his tweed jacket and inspected them gravely, as though confirming them rather than Jemima Shore in the truth of their remarks.

  'Then who did the bastard see?' enquired Kevin John truculently. 'Who are we talking about? Me, by any chance?'

  'No, not you, Kevin John. You didn't kill Chloe Fontaine: a point you've made over and over again - to the police, to me, and to anyone else who would listen, and it's true. Perhaps in the end you didn't love her enough, or desire her enough, to pursue her through to the end. You could leave a new happy life in Devon - Cornwall? sorry - with a new young happy girl, whom Chloe called "submissive", and come up to London on a bender, try and seek her out, the ever elusive she, Chloe, the one that got away, the unsubmissive one.

  'But in the end, when all that was over, when you'd delivered a few blows, when you'd drunk more than a few drinks, you were prepared to go back to Cornwall, weren't you, into the embraces of another, and forget her. In short, when she delivered her final ultimatum - that fatal Saturday—'

  '"Get out of my life, you drunken slob!" That's what she said. She never had a lover as good as me, she knew that.' Kevin John sounded both childish and indignant. 'And now: you drunken slob, that's all I was to her. There's gratitude for you, there's women for you. I used to screw her all night, and at the end of it all - you drunken slob.'

  There was a change of tone. 'Added to which, she'd got away with my best picture, the best damn picture I ever painted.'

  'And you went. The police didn't believe it. But I did. You went. No, Kevin John, you didn't love her enough to kill her.'

  Isabelle Mancini rose and, as though about to sing, settled her flowing grey veilings round her, then clasped her fine strong hands together. Silver bracelets, looser, heavier than the constricting golden serpents which adorned Laura Barrymore, clanked down her arms as she did so and gradually settled like hoops over a fat peg at a fair.

  'Thees is absur-r-rd, dulling.' She sounded hysterical, and there were tears in her eyes. But Adam's swift uprising from the floor forestalled whatever metaphorical aria she would have sung.

  'In case there's any doubt in your mind,' he said in a careful voice, very different from the usual carefree richly embroidered tone he affected, 'I did love her - a little. I find it very easy to love people a little. I love you a little, Jemima Shore, Investigator, for that matter. But more than that at the present time is outside my present capacity.' He spoke as though he had measured himself out like a medicine, and found the vessel destined to receive it not large enough. 'In theory I regret her death, and the death of her unborn child, quite as much as the destruction of the buildings Sir Richard Lionnel has murdered. Whether or not it was anything to do with me, is immaterial since it was a life. In practice I can express myself much more freely about the buildings. You can take it from that, Pallas Athena, that I did not kill Chloe Fontaine.'

  'I know that, Adam.' Jemima thought it unnecessary to add that she also knew, had in a sense witnessed first-hand, the exact nature of his alibi. 'No, be quiet, Kevin John, let me continue.' She turned to Isabelle, down whose cheeks tears were now freely flowing.

  'The fourth person who loved Chloe, was you, Isabelle. Yes, you did love her. I suspect in your heart of hearts you love her still, for all her disloyalty, her treachery in using your letters in her novel, her cruel threat to publish those letters in the anthology Valentine Brighton commissioned. That's because you, with all your concentration on disloyalty, are loyalty itself - I think you gave your warm heart to her and never quite managed to withdraw it.

  'For it was you, Isabelle, who gave me the clue to the true killer of Chloe Fontaine. That day in "The Little Athens", when we talked about Chloe's need for violence, even from those she loved. There was someone you mentioned - do you remember; a fifth person who loved her, but could not by temperament provide that violence? If only he had been able to give her something like that - the violence she craved, you said, "life would have taken a different turn for Chloe". Isabelle, do you remember? You were right. For that person, that lover, did in the end, provoked beyond all endurance, find the violence in him to proceed, the violence she wanted. And in so doing he killed her.'

  'Valentine,' said Isabelle in a sad far-off voice, 'Valentine Brighton. Poor boy.'

  19

  Tell me who to kill'

  'Yes, Valentine Brighton. Valentine: the lover in the gardens.' Peace, a strange resigned calm, had been restored. Jemima and Sir Richard between them had had to restrain Kevin John, who at her words had bounded out of his chair with surprising force considering his condition, fists doubled, his attitude expressing what he scarcely needed to put into words: 'Tell me who to kill.'

  The knowledge, when it penetrated, that Chloe's murderer was beyond his personal vengeance, caused him further furiously expressed anguish. It was some time before all this turmoil subsided.

  'I told you that this was a story of love. Love unrequited, love exploited. Valentine Brighton, inhibited, repressed, the only child of a dominating mother, fatherless from an early age, a classic text-book case perhaps; with a very low sex drive indeed, if any drive at all - that fact was far more important than whatever direction it took - from the first he was utterly fascinated by Chloe Fontaine. You saw the truth of that, Isabelle, with your own knowledge of love.

  'Never mind all his little throwaway pretend-snobbish jokes, the ones that made us all wonder secretly whether they weren't for real, whether he wasn't at heart a great deal more snobbish than he admitted: "Mummy wouldn't like it, Chloe wouldn't go down well with the neighbours" and so forth. Mere persiflage to disguise feelings which were all the more violent because he couldn't express them - physically, th
at is.

  'In the meantime he makes do with his double role of confidant and publisher: confidant while Chloe goes to bed with half London, or so it seems to him, the outsider, the observer. But still in a sense he still possesses her, doesn't he? He's the only one, for example, who knows the truth about her liaison with you, Sir Richard, because he's so safe, or rather Chloe thinks he's so safe, which is rather a different matter.

  'Chloe-watching, for that is what it was, became an obsession with him. And then a mania. For Chloe, courtesy of Sir Richard Lionnel and Lionnel Estates, actually came to live in Bloomsbury, the next-door square to his office, the actual square where he had his own small London flat. And this square, Adelaide Square, has gardens, thick shrubby deserted gardens, to which only residents have the key.

  'Chloe's move to Bloomsbury gives new life to Valentine's passion. It brings death to Chloe.

  'To begin with, Valentine can see so much more of her comings and goings; it's easy for example to observe the entrance to seventy-three Adelaide Square from the gardens; I know, I've done it - I saw you, Adam, on the afternoon of her murder ... As an occupation, Chloe-watching was probably often difficult to resist for a lonely man on a hot summer's evening. I expect he always swore to himself he'd never do it again. We all plan, don't we, to resist our secret self-destructive pleasures the next time?' Jemima thought back to past loves of her own, married loves, telephone numbers dialled without hope or reason and answered, predictably, by wives; houses with lighted windows, and other windows even more hauntingly un-lighted, hopelessly regarded from a taxi at night...