A Splash of Red

  'So why were you meeting?'

  They stood amidst the vast deities, one or two sufficiently markedly feline to remind her of Tiger, now prowling perhaps on the roofs of Bloomsbury.

  'I intended to give Chloe some good advice.'

  'An odd choice of venue.'

  'Not my choice, I can assure you. I needed to catch my wayward author before she set off on her secret trip and this was the only rendezvous she would consider. Don't ask me why.'

  'But I must ask you why. And for that matter - what secret trip? To the Camargue, I take it.'

  'Ah. You knew then. I thought—' For an instant a look akin to surprise or even possibly apprehension marked Valentine's normally bland face. 'I thought she kept it a secret from you,' he finished. It caused her to remark once again on his uncharacteristic pallor.

  'In a sense she did. She told me she was going on a solitary mission, researching an article for Taffeta and it was only when that turned out to be a fabrication—'

  'Taffeta? This time there was no mistaking the surprise. 'What an extraordinary choice of alibi.' Valentine gave a wry laugh. 'But how absolutely typical of Chloe, for reasons you probably won't appreciate, and if I get my way, never will.'

  Jemima reflected that she already had a pretty good idea what those reasons might be, thanks to the ladylike indiscretion of Laura Barrymore, but she felt less interested in boasting of her involuntary detective work than getting to the bottom, once and for all, of Chloe's holiday plans. She also felt no particular need to obtrude on Valentine exactly how her discovery of Chloe's mendacity had come about: the Stovers' vigil was no concern of his. Yet, a vague feeling of hurt possessed her that Chloe had chosen to tell the truth - whatever it might be - to Valentine, a friend of far more recent standing, and concealed it in an elaborate tale about Taffeta from her old friend Jemima. It encouraged her to press Valentine further. Her hurt was slowly turning to anger, an anger further fuelled by recollection of the hours of the day already wasted on Chloe's complicated intrigue, to say nothing of Kevin John Athlone's assault.

  'Where was she really off to? You'd better let me know. There's been quite enough lying already.'

  Valentine considered, or appeared to consider. Jemima suspected that in such a deliberate man, the decision to confide in her had probably already been taken. 'She's off to the Camargue all right, but not until Monday, I gather. She's spending the weekend in London.

  Then she's going to the Camargue with her latest lover. You know Chloe. You must have guessed that part of it at least.'

  'But she specifically swore she wasn't! "Not my new angel." Why the lie? Why not tell me? Why the need for the cover-up?'

  'Dearest Jemima, you're her alibi, don't you see?'

  'Yes, I should bloody well think I am her alibi!' Jemima burst out. 'I seem to be her alibi for the whole world this morning. But what's the point of the secrecy to me?’

  'Jemima Shore, Investigator,' said Valentine brightly.

  'Investigator nothing. I've been her alibi enough times in the past, I can assure you; all through those two marriages. She could have trusted me. We've been friends for years; nothing about Chloe could shock me now. We're both adults, to put it mildly.'

  'She could have trusted you. It was her lover who couldn't.'

  'Did he need to know I was in the secret? It would have made things so much easier for her, as it happens, if she had trusted me.' And the Stovers, Jemima added mentally. 'It's all so unlike Chloe, not the intrigue itself, but the lies surrounding it.'

  'This whole affair is all very unlike Chloe,' Valentine commented. 'Besides she - he, if you like - needed your innocence. In case the Press got wind of it. You are Press yourself in a kind of way. You could convince them quite genuinely that you didn't know where she was.'

  'Oh, Isis and Osiris!' exclaimed Jemima with a groan. 'I'm going to sit down.' They sat on a stone bench, hard and rather uncomfortable.

  'Mind you, I'm still not quite sure you wouldn't have been sufficiently fascinated by her new involvement to investigate it just a little,' continued Valentine. 'I could see quite a programme shaping up there. The intricate ways of love: A Woman's Choice, exquisite lady novelist and - well, no, perhaps I had better not tell you.'

  'Beware my aroused curiosity,' said Jemima coldly. 'B for Beware, as well as Brighton. Besides I don't work on that kind of romantic and gossipy trash.'

  'Beware, beware,' repeated Valentine soulfully. 'How often did I beg Chloe to beware ... It was so terribly indiscreet, the whole thing, right there, under everyone's nose. But I'd better say no more.'

  Jemima realized with increasing irritation that not only was he playing a role but he was also enjoying it. 'Valentine, I'm not sure if murder has ever been done in the British Museum, but I am convinced that these sinister Assyrians have seen a thing or two in their time. How cruel their expressions are. Gods crossed with birds. A terrible combination. At least those colossal crouched lions remind me of Tiger. Anyway, unless you tell me who Chloe's lover is, and why she was meeting you in the Reading Room, I shall behave like Ninurta armed with a thunderbolt and drive you, for the demon you are, out of my temple.' She pointed to the label above their heads.

  'There, there. I only did it to annoy, I've every intention of telling you, now that Chloe hasn't turned up. I need your co-operation to get hold of her.'

  'Where is she?' It suddenly seemed more important than anything to know immediately the whereabouts of Chloe Fontaine; more important even than the identity of her lover.

  'Seventy-three Adelaide Square, I think the address is. You would know. First-floor flat, I believe. Piano nobile, they call it, or did before it was wrapped in concrete. She's shacked up there for the weekend with her love, Sir Richard Lionnel. Do you feel like paying a call?'

  7

  Scheherazade

  'I don't believe it!' That was Jemima's first startled exclamation. Afterwards, as she trailed her way back to Adelaide Square and thought over the whole strange encounter with Valentine, she realized that the words had not really been true, even as she spoke them.

  Under the circumstances Jemima felt a certain reluctance to re-enter number 73. The garden in the centre of the square on the contrary looked inviting. The huge trees waved their heads far above her in the sky, level with the penthouse. She remembered that a key to the square was on the ring with the keys of number 73. She entered the garden. It was quite empty, a green enclave; no summer flowers, merely a series of flowerless shrubs planted round the edges of the garden; their function seemed to be those of guardians; to protect the inhabitants of the gardens from prying eyes, rather than anything more elaborate. Here at last was the privacy she craved. A locked garden: no one could get at her here. Where the penthouse and the Reading Room had proved insecure refuges, the square garden would surely remain inviolate.

  Of the benches available, all empty, she chose one which faced the block of number 73. That would, she felt, concentrate the mind wonderfully. In fact, her first impression on sitting down was to be struck anew by the full monstrosity of Sir Richard Lionnel's concrete cuckoo in Robert Adam's neo-classical paradise. Renewed sympathy for the twentieth-century Adam and the Friends of the House filled her. Adam Adamson, the revivifier, was presumably still lurking somewhere within the third-floor flat. Was his surprise at the name Chloe Fontaine now more explicable? The memory had teased Jemima ever since, for she hated pieces of a puzzle which refused to be placed. Could it be that Adam actually knew of the romantic tryst taking place two floors beneath his and intended to make some sinister use of that knowledge? If so, it was odd that Adam was at the same time unaware that Chloe was the tenant of the penthouse flat.

  As she watched and pondered, she saw the front door of the concrete block open and the figure of Adam Adamson emerge. The evening sun touched his curly head and bright jaunty beard and made it look quite fiery. He looked straight in the direction of the gardens, but showed no signs of having seen Jemima; she was in any case partially con
cealed by one of the ubiquitous shrubs. Then he walked in a leisurely manner away in the direction of Tottenham Court Road. He gave the appearance of being a man very much at his ease. He might have been the owner of 73 Adelaide Square instead of a squatter - revivifier. Jemima looked at her little gold watch. It was 5.30. She found she felt rather sorry to think that Adam Adamson had abandoned number 73.

  She ticked off the remaining inhabitants of number 73 in her mind. Up above, golden Tiger crouched on his balcony. The curtains of the broad first-floor windows, she noticed, were closed; they had scarlet linings, a series of red bars lit up in the evening sun. Within them Richard Lionnel and Chloe were presumably cosily installed, or at least Chloe was. That left the second floor: no blinds as yet, merely large blank windows. And the basement. Tiger's haunt. Goodness knows who may be hanging about there, thought Jemima crossly. After Chloe's behaviour in that place, anything is possible.

  'I don't believe it.' But suddenly, startlingly, she did believe it. It was as though Chloe's whole character and exploits, past and present, were lit from a completely new angle, the red evening sun falling upon them. Chloe had lied to her parents at Cambridge about her sex life - well, all my friends did that, thought Jemima, except me who had no parents. But Chloe had lied throughout her adult life, if you chose to analyse her behaviour in that light (up till now Jemima had not done so).

  Those alibis, those affairs, those passionate plunges into love, marriage, adultery, divorce, and worst of all emotion - a great source of lies, emotion; the whole involvement with Kevin John, so incomprehensible to Jemima; did it not all add up to a cool capacity for concealment as well as a reckless capacity for love? Adultery in Chloe's case had not been the first step to deception but only one of a number of steps.

  There was no doubt, now that her surprise was fading, annoyance was beginning to take over. Jemima Shore had been used and she did not like the feeling. The implication that she, Jemima, had been deliberately chosen - out of all the gullible fools available - to occupy the penthouse flat while Chloe cavorted with her prestigious lover on the first floor - no doubt laughing the while at Jemima's ignorance -well, to say the least of it, it was irritating to Jemima Shore, Investigator.

  Chloe's anxious phrases floated back: 'You're sure you won't be lonely?' 'No noise.' Chloe so beguilingly helpful when Jemima confided her own distress at the death of Colette. 'You need a change of scene. Borrow my new flat while I'm away.' Chloe so carefully establishing that Jemima intended to receive no visitors, was not in the mood for company.

  Chloe had used Jemima as, to be honest, she had been using people all her life. Jemima began to think of both the Stovers and Kevin John in rather a different light. Chloe had come as an upsetting force - 'out of the blue' as Mr Stover had put it - into the Stovers' neat sad lives last week; that much was clear. Chloe, who had ostentatiously abandoned the name of her youth, thus taking from the couple who had brought her up the consolation of her public fame, had first threatened the unvisited Stovers with a visit and then withheld it for reasons of her own which were doubtless connected with her new romance.

  Isabelle Mancini now - the enthusiastic patron of Chloe's work through all the years when Chloe was lovelorn and financially desperate: how had she been repaid except, it seemed, by some fairly ruthless portrait in Chloe's new novel?

  For Kevin John, it was possible to argue that he had been a promising young painter, his violent impulses confined to his canvasses where they properly belonged, until Chloe like Pandora had let out his evil spirits of drink and assault.

  Taking the thought further, Jemima had to admit that she too had been just a little deceived by the precision and irony of Chloe's work. Yet all Chloe's friends, most recently Guthrie Carlyle, were fond of commenting on the contrast between the work and the woman. There was pride involved too: her own. Only yesterday she had been describing Chloe to herself as fundamentally candid. Jemima, who was a professional judge of character, had made a bad mistake about one of her oldest friends. Jemima thought again of that pale bedroom in which hung the scarlet picture. Symbolic of all the violence she intended to eliminate from her life, had been Chloe's breathless comment. Was that not yet another piece of deception?

  'I don't believe it.' But Valentine's story did make a kind of bizarre sense. He had recounted it to her in the British Museum with some relish after his original revelation about Chloe's whereabouts. He related how Chloe, caught up in a passionate but secret love affair with Sir Richard Lionnel, had sought his, Valentine's, advice.

  'Why me?' he had enquired in his airy rhetorical manner. 'Simple. Because I found out about it by chance, sloping round to Adelaide Square one day on a publisher's rounds. Chloe needed a confidant of course and I know Lionnel since he lives near Helmet. More to the point I also know the dread Francesca Lionnel, who's a great buddy of Mummy's but also a first-class candidate for the role of Medea. Already she exudes wronged beauty with every pore, without, so far as I know, anything specific to exude it about. So I can advise on that score. Besides, Chloe is a story-teller. She positively enjoyed telling me all about it.'

  'Scheherazade.'

  'Scheherazade in reverse, since I believe the ambition of that lady, being married, was to hold off the evil day of her own death. Chloe's ambition was, as I shall tell you, to achieve the first stage of the process.'

  To herself Jemima commented: I suppose that the original Scheherazade told some pretty tall stories too, as the Arabian Nights wore on. Still, that was self-preservation.

  'You see, dearest Jemima, our Chloe's decided to settle down. She plans to become the second Lady Lionnel.'

  'What? She must be mad!' Several tourists jumped.

  'There I personally entirely agree with you. Marriage - what a ridiculous aim! Babies, children, an establishment, ugh - you know how resolutely I have avoided the former, babies absolutely horrify me, and the latter, of which I do have first-hand experience, is pure purgatory. Why not carpe diem, Accept the free flat and any lolly that's going, the new car - he gave her that, naturally - and enjoy, enjoy . . . I begged her to forget about marriage. But Chloe wilfully didn't agree. A strong sexual attraction - I was assured in terms much stronger than those of Chloe's novels that this is the case. Plus that essential in all Chloe's plans, novelty. Lionnel offers her the earth - a new earth, as she put it to me. On being informed that it was a marriage of true minds, or intended to be such, I offered my help.'

  'The marriage of true minds,' repeated Jemima. 'How on earth did they meet?'

  'It was a media romance. They happened to be on the same television programme—'

  'Good God!' exclaimed Jemima. 'I arranged it. Chloe wanted some publicity for her new book. Some kind of round-table chat to do with industrial sponsorship of the Arts. Isabelle Mancini was the chairman. I knew she would be managing one of her wonderfully poised plugs for Taffeta - somehow she always makes that magazine sound far more socially committed than the New Statesman. As she adores Chloe' - Jemima hesitated and Valentine said nothing - 'I thought she would hardly object if Chloe plugged her new book. I watched most of it to see how she made out. Wait. The lighter. I suppose it was his, Lionnel's. That's where I saw it - on telly.'

  'Afterwards Lionnel whirled her away for dinner at the Mirabelle. Coup de foudre was the expression used; I was far too frightened to enquire any further.'

  'And not a whisper in the Press. No goggling in the gossip columns. No daring speculations by diarists. Perhaps Lionnel fixes them.'

  'On the contrary. He's very worried about it. The Press hate him, serious papers as well as muck-rakers. That kind of gentleman-buccaneer always tots up a number of enemies among the less piratically minded. No, he's particularly keen on silence at the moment because he's hoping to go respectable. I mean really respectable. He's being tipped as the new Chairman of the Committee for Arts and Caring Industry. Now that could be very big indeed in the respectability stakes. You know how keen the Royal Family are on the CARI They may not be cra
zy about the arts or industry separately but they find the combination quite devastating. The mere thought of CARI sends them into ecstasy. Lunch with Prince Philip every other day. The Prince of Wales to breakfast. Jogging with Princess Anne. You know the form.'

  'Hence the Camargue and that Taffeta cover story, I take it. But why the clandestine weekend in London first?'

  'At the last minute Lionnel was called for some meetings at number ten; couldn't of course refuse. He suggested a kind of romantic breakaway in his official suite, attached to the office, since Lady L was hardly likely to rumble him there, so blatant it's actually safe. As for Camargue, Chloe plans that to be a trial honeymoon - Chloe will be doing the trying. She intends trying to persuade Lionnel to commit himself to a divorce after the CARI announcement has been made. Her view is that she's already got her man wriggling on the hook. He says he hasn't felt this way for years, youth returned and all that sort of rot. Now she reckons on landing him in the Camargue. My view,' concluded Valentine in a pious voice, 'is that for something the size of the Lion of Bloomsbury you need a net and not a fishing-rod. But Chloe never understands anything about the animal kingdom. Her novels are full of mistakes in that respect.'