At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

  Oddly enough, Cordelia—who had been open to the point of ingenuousness with him and quite relaxed—became awkward when faced with Roderick and Caroline. However, she thanked them for coming to fetch her, then embraced Pat and started into a good old confab with him. Meredith noted these things, remembered his feeling of a slight tension the night before, then passed on to other work on the case. There was enough of that, in all conscience.

  The Cotterels said they had the car out the back, in the station yard. They’d been allowed in there to avoid reporters and photographers. The story had broken on Fleet Street (or the various unappetizing locations replacing it) and was predictably about to become the week’s sensation, replacing sexually abused children and a hot-air balloon trip across the Atlantic. Fleet Street liked variety. They got themselves into the car without incident, but they had to drive past the front of the station, and here the massed newshounds recognized Cordelia. The clicks of their cameras sounded like a demented abacus.

  In the car on the way home Cordelia chatted away, mostly to Pat. Caroline asked whether she had been well treated, and Cordelia waxed quite enthusiastic about Meredith.

  “Really very sweet and gentle. The nice kind of Welshman, not the rugby-football hearty type. I should think he’s a dogged soul who will worry away at the case until it’s eventually solved. . . . If you care about that.” She turned back to Pat. “Do you know, I realized in that police station that I don’t really care who killed Mother. I don’t hope he gets away with it, I don’t hope he gets caught, I just don’t care. I wonder if there’s something wrong with me.”

  Roderick and Caroline left them to it. It was their liberation, after all, their relief. But Caroline did say to Cordelia: “I must say I admire you. You took it all so coolly. Almost nonchalantly. I should have been terrified, however innocent.”

  “Somehow I never thought I was going to be accused of it,” said Cordelia reflectively. “Silly, really, when you think how many people have been wrongly convicted of murder. Evans, and probably the Carl Bridgewater people, and the pub bombers. And I suppose I took it coolly because I knew that one phase of my life was over. Such a relief. No more need to struggle against her or gain petty revenges on her for the way she treated me years and years ago. I can be me instead of Myra’s child.”

  Outside the Rectory gates there was another little knot of reporters aiming their lethal weapons at Cordelia in the backseat.

  “I shall never get used to it,” said Caroline.

  “I’ve had it all my life,” said Cordelia. “In a mild sort of way.”

  Roderick pulled the car up just outside the front door, and they got out onto the gravel driveway. Pat had bought a chilled bottle of champagne at the Maudsley off-license, and he marched off down to the tent to open it. Cordelia, though, lingered, suddenly awkward again.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” she said, her hands working feverishly. “For what I said last night. You’ve got to remember I’m Myra’s child: I’ve never learned to behave.”

  “That’s quite—”

  “And I see why you did it. It was for Becky, wasn’t it? So the royalties would continue for her lifetime, to assure her future after you’re both dead. I should have thought of that.” As Roderick opened his mouth to comment, Cordelia brushed him aside with a gesture. “Sorry. I really am sorry. I won’t mention it again. Nobody knows. Even Pat doesn’t know.”

  And she turned from them and ran down to the tent.

  Chapter 13

  “WHY DID YOU MARRY HER?”

  Chief Inspector Meredith had not intended to ask the question, at least not bluntly in that way. He had intended to touch on it obliquely, hope to capture straws in the wind. For there was no guarantee that the answer would be the truth or that the man would even be self-aware enough to formulate an answer. Why people marry whom they do is often enough a mystery to themselves as well as to their friends.

  Yet Granville Ashe sat there in the interview room, open, appealing, frank in a fairly lightweight kind of way, and somehow the question had popped out. It was a case of the human factor intervening, as, in Meredith’s experience, it so often did in the course of an interview.

  Granville was wearing his only suit, or the only one he had brought with him; it was darkish, but far from mourning, and he also had on the blue-and-purple-striped tie. He was a little sad in mien—bewildered, shocked still, but making no claims to overwhelming grief. At Meredith’s question he scratched his ear.

  “It wasn’t a whirlwind affair, you know. I’d known her a while back—twelve years ago, when I was a very young actor. I’d got on well with her then.”

  “That hardly seems to have been the general experience. What were the qualities needed to get on with her?”

  Granville grinned. “You had to be self-effacing, not really competitive—which I’m not, as you can see from the progress of my career. You had to be basically a peacemaker, a douser of fires. . . .”

  “This doesn’t seem to have been the type that Dame Myra went for in the past.”

  “Not as lovers. I thought we were talking about getting on with her. No, in her lovers she wanted excitement, constant electricity, and the sort of sexual charge and inventiveness I lay no claims to. But her emotional life had been a series of disasters, and even someone as little self-critical as Myra had to realize that eventually. A small degree of self-knowledge may have come to her at last. I think in a way I represented the peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue.”

  “But that doesn’t answer my question,” insisted Meredith, “of why you married her.”

  “No.” Granville paused thoughtfully. “I thought I could get on with her—and I did, in the short time we were married. I thought she was a great actress, much in demand, and therefore a person with influence. If I had to cling to her coattails to get West End parts, then cling to them I would. She was also not rich, but comfortably off—settled bourgeois prosperity after an eternity of theatrical digs. That, putting it at its lowest, is why I married her. But I also admired her exceedingly. I was astonished when the question came up but also immensely exhilarated.”

  “She brought the question up?”

  “Oh, of course. I wouldn’t have dared. . . .”

  “I imagine you had some doubts about accepting, as well?”

  “Oh, some, naturally. I represented them as being about the difference in our ages, but that wasn’t it at all. There was her temper, her all-absorbing egotism, her demand for absolute loyalty. . . . She has this dresser, you know—the old-fashioned type of theatrical dresser: rod of iron and heart of gold and totally, but totally, loyal to Myra. I’m afraid Myra thought the whole world should be a permanent theatrical dresser. Her theatrical dresser.”

  “And did the daughter enter your calculations about whether to marry her or not?”

  “Cordelia? No. Why should she? The subject never came up before the marriage. I knew she would now be grown up, and I assumed she’d married, or got a job, and they’d drifted apart. It seemed eminently likely.”

  “You’d known Cordelia before?”

  “I’d met her. During our earlier . . . liaison. She was a teenager then. One had to feel sorry for her.”

  “Why?”

  “She was looking for love and never finding it. Myra was the last of the ice-cold mommas, you know. Or at least, she was any and everything. Sometimes there would be demonstrations of affection that weren’t entirely aimed at the press or public. It was a performance, but a private one. At other times—and mostly—there’d be rows, nagging, or simple neglect. She would like to have been able to forget Cordelia entirely. She had been a mistake, a miscalculation. I have the idea that by writing this book, Cordelia was serving final notice on Myra that she would never be able to forget her.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Meredith, settling back in his seat. “Let’s come to the book, and that last evening. What did your wife hope to gain from the meeting with Cordelia?”


  “The suppression of the book. No question of that. She wanted me to act as go-between and peacemaker, and I was certainly willing to be that, but I knew they had to have a face-to-face first. Myra had been incredibly worked up since she heard about the book—she’d had whispers of it first from her dresser. Then, not long after we were married, we were in the pub in Pelstock, and she heard that Cordelia had come here to Maudsley. Then it began to get through to her what sort of a book this was going to be. She was so angry that I knew she had to boil over first, before she could begin to simmer down. So I was saving my energies till after the slanging match. Once that was out of the way, I was sure something could be worked out.”

  “What actually happened last night?”

  “Well, the first part of the evening went perfectly well. Not warm or happy or spontaneous, but all right. Tense, though. One or two little awkwardnesses, as when Myra pretended to be worried that Pat couldn’t support them both on a teacher’s salary. She implied they were one degree up from itinerant tinkers, which, even in this day and age, is something of an exaggeration. It was easy enough to smooth that over.”

  “You were interrupted during the early part of the evening, weren’t you?”

  “Interrupted? Oh, you mean . . . Wait—we were interrupted twice. The first was the commodore—Crutchley, or some such name—with whom I finished the evening. Tremendous ‘simple-old-sea-dog’ act and a hard little wife with a tremendous bust. Anyway, that was a straightforward case of intrusion. Anyone in the theater, particularly anyone prominent in the theater, knows about that kind of thing and how to deal with it.”

  “And the other?”

  “Yes. That was a woman who was—let’s get this right—Benedict Cotterel’s daughter and therefore in a sense Cordelia’s half sister. Something she rather insisted upon. I found this intrusion very odd, unaccountable. I mean, it’s not a relationship one would push in the circumstances, is it? And particularly not with someone as formidable as Myra around. But she came over at dinner, made known who she was, and tried to press friendship and hospitality on Cordelia, whom apparently she’d already met. It was all rather embarrassing. Myra, predictably, made her feelings known.”

  “How?”

  “As the woman was going back to her own table, Myra said in a loud voice that Ben had told her that one of his children was a prig, the other a fool.”

  “I see,” said Meredith. “Interesting. Go on with your evening.”

  “Well, at the end of the meal Myra announced that she and Cordelia had something to discuss, and she marched her upstairs. The boy—Pat—came with me into the bar, and we got drinks. We sat near the simple sailor man and his wife, and gradually we got talking. They knew nothing about the theater, of course, but thought it was glamorous to hear behind-the-scenes anecdotes. That’s par for the course with the general public. But then this woman came back.”

  “Cotterel’s daughter?”

  “Yes. Going on about Myra and Cordelia rowing upstairs. Well, that was absolutely what I’d been expecting—quite inevitable, and probably healthy—so I certainly wasn’t going to intervene. More than my life was worth, let alone my marriage. I persuaded Pat to take the same line, and she had to slope off. She was just mischief making, anyway, or sensation seeking. So we went back to theatrical anecdotes, and a little crowd collected around. Pat left after one drink, but I was there until—until we heard the shot.”

  “You didn’t leave at all—to go to the toilets or anything?”

  “No. I realize that could be important, but the crowd around me will back me up on that.”

  “And the Critchleys?”

  Granville’s forehead creased.

  “Oh, dear. Is that important? I think he did, but I simply can’t remember whether she did or not.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, that’s it, really. I went on delving into my repertoire of theatrical disaster stories until we heard the shot. We decided it was a car backfiring, and I went on talking until this very nice, concerned lady came along and said she was sure the shot had come from our bedroom. It all became nightmarish after that. I tried to pooh-pooh the idea, but she was very insistent, and still more people collected around the table, scenting some kind of sensation or disaster—maybe even hoping for one. No—I’m being unfair to most of them, I expect, but I remember being conscious of one face, Ben Cotterel’s daughter, there in the crowd, and avid—do you know what I mean?”

  “I do. Hoping for something terrible.”

  “Yes. Like the people in New York who shout ‘jump’ to suicides.”

  “Had she been in the bar all evening since she told you about the row?”

  “I really hadn’t noticed. Too taken up with my own performance. And in fact I certainly tried to put her out of my mind. She had seemed to me an eminently dislikable woman.”

  “So eventually you felt you had to go up.”

  “Yes. If only to damp down all this sensational expectation that had built up. So I went into the hotel section, and everyone followed me to the door. I went upstairs, got to the landing, and opened the door—”

  “How?”

  “It wasn’t locked, though of course I had a key, anyhow. It was pretty dark in there. I whispered ‘Myra,’ but there was no reply, and so I turned on the light. For a split second I thought she was asleep. . . . Then I saw the hole. It was quite awful, terrible. Then I ran downstairs.”

  Meredith nodded. “Right. Well, that all ties in pretty well with what other people have told me. I must just ask this, Mr. Ashe: I suppose you benefit financially from Dame Myra’s death?”

  Granville Ashe grimaced. “I suppose so. I’m going to have to talk to Cordelia about this, because I don’t want injustice to be done. But one thing I haven’t told you—because it sounds awfully fanciful, I suppose—is that, somehow, I almost feel as if one of the reasons Myra married me was precisely to have someone to leave everything to other than Cordelia. Does that sound daft?”

  “Not necessarily. Why do you think that?”

  “Just the way she announced it a few days after we were married. She had been in to see her solicitor in Sudbury. The way she said she’d made a new will was sort of triumphant: ‘That’ll show her’—that kind of tone. They’d been on bad terms, or nonexistent terms, since Cordelia had moved in with Pat. She’d heard those whispers about the book. Apart from Cordelia, Myra had no one to leave whatever she had to, and that in itself must have been rather a desolating thought, particularly at her age. Marrying me was Myra’s revenge. If I’m right, it’s very unjust, and I’m going to have to go and see Cordelia about it. Something’s going to have to be arranged.”

  • • •

  In fact, Granville drove out to see Cordelia that evening. He had spoken to Myra’s solicitor on the phone in the late afternoon, and in their guarded way they had completely understood each other on the subject of the will. Granville had said that it seemed to him damned unfair on the girl, who’d had a pretty raw deal most of her life. The lawyer had said that the sentiment did him credit, but he had urged caution. (When did lawyers urge anything else?) He said that—though Cordelia could always contest it—the will was perfectly legal, it clearly represented Dame Myra’s actual wishes, and it was quite usual for the spouse to be the sole beneficiary, even when there were children. The fact that Myra and Granville Ashe had been married a comparatively short time (what would he have considered a short time? Granville wondered) was neither here nor there. If he felt that there was injustice involved, he could himself make a will in Cordelia’s favor.

  “I am not that much older than Cordelia,” said Granville dryly. “So I don’t think that would fill the bill.”

  The result was that in the evening he drove Myra Mason’s two-year-old Mercedes in the direction of the Rectory. It was by no means the first time he had driven it, but now, being alone and virtually its owner, the drive gave him a distinct feeling of power.

  Caroline and Roderick were surprised to see him
, but they all got through the business of proffering and receiving condolences gracefully. The Cotterels were impressed by Granville’s avoidance of any histrionic extremes of grief. They found him quietly dignified. They settled him into an armchair, well away from Becky and the television, and pressed whiskey on him.

  “My main reaction is one of surprise,” Granville said as he took the glass.

  “Surprise? But presumably—” Caroline caught herself up just as she was going to say something tactless. “I mean, it’s possible Dame Myra had a lot of enemies in the theater, isn’t it?” she emended. “It’s that sort of profession, surely.”

  “Oh, certainly. But this is not the way theatrical feuds usually end. Nor family feuds, either. Frankly, I never for one moment thought that Cordelia did it, and I gather she now has the firmest of alibis.”

  “We never believed she did it, either. Though obviously she and her mother . . . didn’t get along.”

  “And they never would. But it was the sort of relationship that led to stand-up rows, not to murder. By the way, Cordelia is the reason I’m here tonight. I wonder if I might have a word with her?”

  “Surely. She’ll be down in the tent. I’ll get her,” said Roderick, putting down his glass.

  “We’ll leave you alone when she comes,” said Caroline. “I’ve got to put Becky to bed, anyway.”

  “No, please don’t. It’s nothing private. And I’d like to have you here. I find Cordelia rather an odd girl, and it would be nice to have some ordinary people around.”

  In the event, Cordelia brought along Pat, and they all went through the round of condolences again, this time rather awkwardly, since Cordelia and Pat’s view of Myra was known to all present. Eventually they all subsided into chairs, clutching drinks.

  “I had to come and see you, Cordelia,” Granville Ashe began with touching formality, “because I spoke to your mother’s solicitor this afternoon. He confirmed what I already suspected: that your mother had left everything to me.”

  Cordelia nodded.