Corpse in a Gilded Cage (10 page)

‘Well, fancy Dad,' began Joan, fussing over to the dresser and pouring a cup. ‘It's
not
like him—'

But she got no further. She was interrupted by the children, who ran back into the kitchen, their faces screwed up with fear.

‘Mum! Mum!'

‘God in heaven, you little mongrels, I'll—'

‘No, Mum. Come quickly! Grandma! You've got to come! It's—'

‘What is it, Karen?' asked Lady Joan, in her practised infants' teacher voice. ‘Tell us quietly now—'

‘No. Come. Come quickly,' insisted Karen.

First Joan, then Digby, then the rest of them got up and followed the children out of the kitchen. Through the long cold winding passageway they trailed, uncertain and a little apprehensive, then out of the baize door that led down a further oak-lined passage, then finally out into the Great Hall. All of them had crossed the Hall that day—down the stairs and across it, and down those passageways to the kitchen. But none of them
had seen what the children pointed to. The Countess looked in that direction, gasped, then screamed.

‘Oh, my God! Perce!'

For in the dark little niche made by the stairwell, hunched on his side by the marble by Bernini that Digby had priced on his arrival, lay the body of the Earl. He was in his dressing-gown, and from below it there protruded the bottoms of his pyjamas. His head was tucked into the dark, cobwebby recesses of the wooden panelling, and he was not stirring.

‘Oh Dad!' said Joan, going over to him, but stopping some way from him as if he were something a dog had left on a pavement. ‘We must get a doctor.'

But no doctor was going to help the Earl now. As Digby strode to the telephone in the Drawing-Room the others stood back, the Countess sobbing, the rest of them staring, at a loss for words. Above their heads, brought there by the scream, could be seen the figures of Sam and Chokey, gazing down on the scene beneath. And everyone there, above and around, knew that the Earl was very, very dead—beyond the help of country doctor or Harley Street specialist. Just as 1936 had been the year in which Britain had three kings, so this seemed destined to be the year in which it had four Earls of Ellesmere.

Four to date, that is.

Chetton Hall, with its immensely long and varied history, could not in the nature of things have remained innocent of policemen. The fourth Earl, it is true, after his celebrated attack on his wife's lover, had given himself up, with an air of triumphant self-satisfaction, to a brother magistrate, so the Bow Street Runners had not been needed. But later on, after Sir Robert Peel had established his splendid force, there had been visits from the police, and visits above stairs at that: there had been the involvement of the Hon. Frederick Spender in the Gladwyn Street scandal of 1891, when he was only saved from public prosecution by his threats to implicate the elder son of the Prince of Wales; there was the unfortunate way the seventh Earl's name was drawn into the Tranby Croft affair, and the matter of the
wife of the eighth Earl's curious financial involvement with a fraudulent medium. But in all these matters the police had approached Chetton delicately, even hesitantly: would you be so kind, they had seemed to be saying, to subscribe for the moment to the polite fiction that all are equal before the law? No heroine of musical comedy was ever wooed with more tremulous earnestness than was Chetton on these occasions.

This time it was more like a gang rape.

First came a small advance contingent of the law; then came a gang of specialists; then arrived a whole army of supernumeraries. Why so many had been thought necessary by the Chief Constable was not clear: perhaps he thought that Chetton was still swarming with servants and hangers-on, as in the palmy days; perhaps he merely remembered its size. When Chief Superintendent Hickory stomped heavily into the house he quickly sized up the position, and told Sergeant Medway to place this Gilbert and Sullivan chorus of policemen at vital positions around the house and grounds, until the nature and size of the problem could be established.

So Chetton swarmed with policemen. The technical men, of course, centred themselves on and around the Great Entrance Hall: they photographed, observed, took tests. They were men who could reduce the whole complex series of data they noted down about the body and its environs to a neat computer entry—and no doubt before long they would do so. Their voices penetrated distressingly to the Green Drawing-Room, where the family members who had found the body were congregated. Two of the great army of policemen were also there, one at the door to the Hall, one at the door to the Dining-Room. One by one, orchestrated by Sergeant Medway, the rest took up positions: one at the head of Sir Philip's Staircase—a dark, looming man whose eyes went down the magnificent dark carved stairwell, but also along the expanses of the Long Gallery; there was one covering the Main Entrance and courtyard, another in the Dutch Garden; and along the corridors, past the bedrooms, and dotted strategically around the Blenheim Wing there were more and more. It was as if the sheikhs (whom the Earl had not so long ago foreseen as the eventual owners of Chetton) had descended on the place for an OPEC meeting: one would not have been surprised, looking out of the windows, to have seen among the trees and bushes bulky men in dark suits with bulges under their armpits. It was, no doubt, an example of overkill, springing from the fame of the place. But who knew, after all, what a palace of that size might not contain?

Sergeant Medway, for example, was just positioning an extra constable
at the junction where the old house joined the Blenheim Wing when a bedroom door opened, and revealed in the doorway was a naked, and very beautiful, Michele.

‘Who the bleeding hell are you?' she demanded.

Sergeant Medway was a young man of considerable presence of mind, and he revealed nothing of the warm pleasure that the sight of Michele gave him in the midst of those miles of dreary corridors.

‘I'm afraid there's been an accident, Miss. If you'd just put some clothes on I'll escort you d—'

The door banged shut. The Sergeant, raising his eyebrows at his companion, applied his ear to it, but the structural solidity of Chetton defeated him. He, and the constable, waited impatiently.

Downstairs the situation had changed little in the two hours since the body had been found. The Countess was still erupting in watery torrents, dumped ingloriously on the sofa with her daughter perched beside her holding her hand.

‘Haven't even got a comfy chair to sit on!' she wailed, as if this were the last straw. ‘I never thought I'd lack for that when Perce went. And for him to die just when we was going home!'

Joan, as she seemed to have been doing for hours, said some words of soothing import. She did not have much success. Perhaps the Countess registered their tone, and resented being put on a par with a little boy who has trodden on his favourite Dinky Toy.

The only one to have left the room since the police arrived was Dixie. She had gone over—followed by several pairs of suspicious eyes—to talk to the constable on the door, who had beckoned to another of his ilk, who had escorted her out. Now she and he were in a large, distinguished room overlooking the courtyard, a room that had served as the old Earl's study. It was a brown, leathery room of heterogeneous magnificence. There were fish in cases, photographs of college eights, estate books and files, and on the shelves novels by Surtees and Trollope, Desmond Bagley and Dick Francis. On the square, heavy desk was an array of nib and fountain pens, and a line of pipes. There was also a telephone.

‘I wouldn't want to disturb Mum,' Dixie had explained to the constable as he led her there. Dixie had long ago located all the more obvious telephones in the house, and she was certainly not going to use the one in the Drawing-Room, with family ears flapping left, right, and centre. When she realized that the constable escorting her intended to wait in the open doorway she allowed herself—for she had her broad back to him, and had
not registered the mirror over the fireplace—a fearsome expression of displeasure. His presence, conceivably, changed the tone of her conversation. Certainly it accounted for the fact that, as she spoke, she dotted convulsively at her eyes.

‘But it's
true,
Mr Lillywaite. Found this morning under the stairs, cold as a—stone cold. I was there myself when they found him, my own kids it was. It was a
terrible
shock. We're all shaken to the core, knocked over. 'Specially Mum . . . Yes, she's taken it real hard. Naturally. They were very close . . . devoted, as you might say.'

Dixie stopped dabbing at her eyes and put the handkerchief down on the desk.

‘So naturally I feel you ought to be here, Mr Lillywaite. To deal with the police, and that . . . Oh yes, they are. Very much so . . . I couldn't say . . . Oh, and Mr Lillywaite, I was wondering about Phil.'

Dixie paused, and listened hard.

‘But I've heard, from people who know, that they can be a bit flexible about release dates. And you do see my point, that he's needed here . . . Well, he is the heir, isn't he? Everything's his now.'

Dixie was disconcerted by something that sounded like a dry laugh from the other end of the line. Involuntarily she took up her handkerchief, blotched black with mascara. Her mouth slightly open, she listened intently, dabbing furiously at her eyes.

‘But I don't get you. It was you who told me about the will. What are you trying to say?'

Even the policeman by the door heard Mr Lillywaite's donnish voice as he precisely enunciated:

‘What I am trying to convey is that you are ruined.'

•   •   •

Dixie finished her phone call as best she could, and banged down the receiver. She pursed her lips, glared stonily at the policeman by the door, then marched out of the room, along the passage, through the Great Hall (still dominated by the small, sad, crumpled body, and filled with police technicians), and then into the Drawing-Room. She was observed by them all, but she ignored them, even her mother-in-law, still sobbing on the green sofa. Sam, sitting in a corner, his head in his hands but his eyes open and observant, was not vouchsafed a look. Nor was the only person present standing up, Chokey, who was wandering between the Drawing- and Dining-Rooms, his hands nervously clasping and unclasping. In his shiny, ill-fitting brown suit he looked, as he gazed at the furniture and at the
ornaments and trinkets on them, like a down-at-heel dealer at an auction sale, wondering whether to make an offer for a job lot. Gradually the Countess's sobs subsided to a snuffle, then to nothing. The room was blanketed in silence.

‘Oh my God! It's true, then!'

Trevor's voice came from the Hall. A moment later, accompanied by Sergeant Medway, he and Michele appeared in the doorway. Trevor, unwittingly, had put on a black shirt of fine silk, and it highlighted the pallor on his weak, boyish face. He looked appalled. Michele, too, in a sheath dress the colour of corn, looked as if something had smashed through the carapace of her complacency. But then, both of them had just seen the body for the first time.

‘I didn't believe him,' said Trevor, his voice close to tears, and nodding in the direction of Sergeant Medway. ‘I thought it was a kind of have . . . But there he is . . .'

‘I'm sorry, Trevor. We forgot about you,' said Joan.

Trevor sank down on to a chair by the fireplace, and sat looking straight into the empty grate as if he were about to throw up. Unnoticed by any of them, Sergeant Medway dismissed the constable by the door with a nod, and came and sat down in a dark corner of the room.

‘Poor old bugger,' said Trevor. His mother erupted once more into racking sobs.

‘Please be a bit more considerate, Trevor,' said Lady Joan sharply. ‘Just when Mum was quietening down.'

‘Well, what am I supposed to do? Say “How unfortunate” and get on with my tatting? . . . I just couldn't take it in when they told me . . . and there he was . . . Poor old Dad . . . He was the only one of us that was any good.'

‘Trevor!' protested Joan, more sharply still.

‘Be quiet, Joan,' said the Countess. ‘He's right.'

‘He wouldn't have hurt a fly, Dad wouldn't,' went on Trevor, as if for once he was seeing things straight. ‘Never had a mean thought in his life. And we all sit around thinking what's in it for us.'

‘Speak for yourself, Trevor,' said Digby.

‘Who did it, then?' said Trevor, looking up, his light, clear voice cleaving through the wide space. ‘Who did that to him?'

There was shocked silence. Joan said in prim tones:

‘Nobody has said anything yet about . . . about anything being done to him.'

‘Haven't they? Is that the policeman's annual outing out there, then? You're not going to tell me he just fell. Over banisters that high?'

‘He'd had a skinful,' said Dixie brutally.

‘He'd had no more than the rest of us. Less. Drank beer all evening until the end. Dad wasn't a drinker, but he could hold as much as any of us. One stiff whisky wouldn't make him rolling drunk.'

The Countess sobbed away, but the rest of them looked at Trevor as if he had uttered an obscenity during High Mass. He, for his part, seemed to have been shocked out of his habitual light cynicism. He looked back at them, aggressively, inquiringly.

The atmosphere was broken by Sergeant Medway. Suddenly when he got up they all realized he was among them: a fair young man with a fair little bush of a moustache and piercing blue eyes, someone who very easily faded into the background (as the Chief Superintendent had told him to fade, while he was with the family) but who, once noticed, could be seen to be a young man of force. Notebook in hand, he spoke to them gently but briskly.

‘I'm sorry to interrupt. The Superintendent will want a list of names—of all of you who were in the house last night.'