At Death's Door

by Robert Barnard

  But that was not in fact true, was it? The Mason group had all no doubt expected something of that sort, but they had put up a reasonably good front for the guests at the Red Lion. The people who could best have counted on the meeting between Myra and Cordelia ending in a row were the people who knew most about the situation between them. And that, surely, meant the Mason party itself. And of course Roderick and Caroline Cotterel.

  Chapter 16

  “WE’VE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to our chat,” said Daisy Critchley, as if Chief Inspector Meredith had come to discuss arrangements for the horticultural show. She ushered him and Flood through the hall and threw open the door of the sitting room with an air of saying: “Not everyone gets shown in here.”

  “Sit you down,” said the commodore in his hearty old sea-dog voice, gesturing toward a pink plushy armchair in which one sank as into a fleshy, overintimate embrace.

  The Critchleys just remembered to nod at Sergeant Flood, who took an upright chair in which he was a good deal more comfortable than his boss. While the Critchleys fussed around them, offering them drinks that they could not accept and ashtrays that they did not need, the two men had a chance to take in the room. The furniture was all plush and tassel, in lustrous shades, and the room was beset with lampstands and ornaments and Regency stripe. It looked as though the furniture had been bought at an expensive shop at sale time, for the visitor got a subtle sense of none of it cohering, of things having been bought in spite of the colors not being quite right. The room was not large enough to take them all, for the house, on the outskirts of Maudsley, was a dreadful modern parody of Queen Anne, put up by a well-known building chain at the upper end of their design range. Apparently the Critchleys followed the prime minister in their taste for expensive architectural tat.

  “Now,” said Commodore Critchley as he and his wife sank into the sofa, looking like twin fetuses in a womb that they were going to have great trouble getting out of, “we’re at your service, old chap. Where do you want us to start? Night of the murder, or before that?”

  “Because we met one of the . . . participants—no, two—before Dame Myra was killed,” said Daisy Critchley. “We were actually up at the Cotterels’ when Cordelia Mason and her . . . gentleman friend arrived.”

  She gave the impression that she would be eternally grateful to Roderick and Caroline for, as it were, letting them in on the ground floor of the case. Meredith decided to play them with a loose line.

  “What was your impression of the pair?” he asked.

  “Sweet little thing,” said the commodore. “The girl. Doesn’t make the best of herself.”

  “Hardly little,” said Daisy. “Distinctly overweight.”

  “I mean as people,” said Meredith.

  “Nervous, unsure of herself,” said the commodore. “No self-assurance at all. Not what you’d expect in the daughter of an actress. Used to having people round her all the time, or so you’d suppose.”

  “Neurotic, if you want my impression,” said Daisy in her hard, downright fashion. “Fidgeting with her hands the whole time and pulling a handkerchief apart.”

  “And the young man?”

  The commodore screwed up his face and looked at his wife. “Hardly noticed him, tell you the truth. Quiet, dreamy type. Not the sort I’d want any daughter of mine to marry. Not the sort I’d want under my command, come to that. He’ll mooch his life away.”

  “A lot younger than her,” contributed Daisy Critchley. “I don’t think it ever does, do you? It creates confusion about who’s boss.”

  Meredith suppressed a tiny smile. He suspected there was no confusion in the Critchley household as to who was boss. He shifted position in his chair, and the pink monster released one buttock and sucked in another with cannibal relish.

  “I see,” he said. “I suppose you must have had a little chat with them, when you met them at the Cotterels’?”

  “That’s right. About her mother, what we’d seen her in, and so on.”

  “So that when you saw them at the Red Lion, in a party with their mother and her new husband, it seemed natural to go up and introduce yourselves?”

  “That’s right,” said Daisy. “Of course, we’d mentioned to several people that we’d met the great Myra Mason’s daughter.”

  That, Meredith knew, was certainly correct. The Critchleys had talked of that first meeting both in the Red Lion, which was their local, and in other hostelries with a middle-class clientele in a twenty-five-mile radius of Maudsley. Just as, since the murder, they had driven around the same establishments again, giving an account of their involvement in the deed that all the tabloids were shrieking about. It was not boasting exactly, or drinking out on the topic, since presumably they had no need to cadge drinks. Rather it was, or so it seemed, a need to establish their connection with the notable or the notorious, their small but vital place in events that were thrilling the nation. It was a near universal urge, capitalized on by reporters and television interviewers. And the Critchleys were, of course, retired people with time on their hands.

  “—so that when we saw them there together, we just had to go over and pay our small tribute.”

  “I see.”

  Meredith knew that the imminent arrival of Dame Myra had been well advertised in advance in Red Lion circles. He had no doubt that the Critchley presence there during her stay was no accident.

  “And was she gracious?”

  “Oh, perfectly,” said the commodore expansively. “We felt a little bit pushy, of course, but actors are used to fans, aren’t they? Fans are their raison d’être, in a way.”

  “I just wondered, because Dame Myra has been known to be difficult.”

  The commodore shook his head airily. “Not with us, I assure you.”

  “Then you had dinner at the Red Lion?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you dine there often?”

  “Actually it was the first time,” said Daisy, outfacing Meredith’s obvious implication. “But we’d been promising ourselves a meal there for ages.”

  “And was your table near the Myra Mason table?”

  “No,” said Daisy, managing to keep the regret out of her voice.

  Meredith shifted position in his chair again and wondered if next time he would go down for the last time.

  “Now,” he said, “when the Myra Mason party finished their dinner—”

  “We’d already had ours,” said Daisy rather quickly. “Had less to talk about, I suppose, and the service was first-rate. We were already back in the bar when Granville Ashe came in with Pat. They came to sit next to us.”

  There was a tiny emphasis on the pronouns. Daisy knew they were being accused of tuft hunting.

  “I see. And you all got talking?”

  “That’s right,” said the commodore. “Though the boy—Pat—didn’t say much. But Ashe himself was very friendly, even affable, wasn’t he, dear?”

  “Awfully nice. Something of a raconteur, and quite the gentleman, too,” confirmed Daisy.

  “Had some damned good stories to tell. Don’t know a lot about the theater, but I like to hear a good backstage yarn. He’d been all over, this Ashe feller, from the West End to Pitlochry, from local reps to TV series, so he had a real fund of stories. Thoroughly enjoyed talking to him.”

  “And quite a little crowd gathered, I believe?”

  “That’s right. Everyone enjoys a greenroom gossip, a peep behind the scenes. And I think the word got around that something was happening upstairs after that damnfool sister of Cotterel’s came up and blabbed her story.”

  “Ah—you’d met her before?”

  “Briefly,” said Daisy. “In the Red Lion, in fact, on one of her earlier visits.” Her lips tightened, if that was possible. “We were not impressed.”

  “Anyway, that added spice to the situation,” resumed Commodore Critchley. “So that by the end there was quite a little group around us.”

  “Pat McLaughlin having by this time gone?”


  The commodore thought—the responsible captain of men, making sure he got his facts right.

  “Let me see. He went soon after the sister came down with her story. I know, because he wasn’t there when I bought the next round of beer.”

  “You bought the next round. I see. And were there any more rounds? Did Granville Ashe buy the round after that?”

  The Critchleys looked at each other with that perfect understanding born of the long bondage of married life.

  “We knew you’d ask that. Naturally we talked it over. I bought the next round and the round after that. Ashe offered, but I insisted. He was entertaining us, after all. I think everyone who was round our table will back us up: Granville Ashe never left his seat, not even to go to the loo.”

  “You went to the lavatories yourself?”

  “I went there, but Daisy was still at the table.” He looked at his lady wife, and she nodded agreement. “He never left his seat—not until he went up to find the body.”

  “Right!” said Meredith briskly. “That’s quite clear. I should say that I or one of my men have taken statements from other people in the bar, virtually everyone who was there, and they pretty well all bear out what you’ve just said. Now, let’s get to the sound of the shot.”

  “As we now know it was,” said Daisy. “At the time we all assumed it was a car.”

  “Quite. But whatever it was, you must all have jumped and looked around you when it happened,” said Meredith. They both nodded. “Did you notice anyone missing from the bar who had been there previously?”

  They both thought and shook their heads.

  “No,” said Commodore Critchley finally. “I can’t pretend to notice what I didn’t. There was this little crowd around the table. I doubt if we could have seen through it to the rest of the bar.”

  “So what happened? You decided it must be a car backfiring and went back to theatrical reminiscences?”

  “For a minute or two. But then this woman came in, as I’m sure you know, and was very insistent that it was a shot.” The commodore coughed. “Don’t need to go into how she knew. Embarrassing for the poor woman. Anyway, finally Ashe was convinced—or convinced he ought to go up and investigate, though I think he still thought she’d got a bee in her bonnet. He went to the door, we followed, and so did most of the others in the bar.”

  “I know it sounds pretty bad form, Chief Inspector,” said Daisy, giving a charmless smile, “but by then a real tension had grown up about what was happening upstairs.”

  “So pretty much the whole bar was collecting around that door?”

  “Well, yes, I’d say it was,” said Critchley.

  “And the door was open?”

  “Yes.” The commodore made a rather shamefaced admission. “Matter of fact, I think I held it open myself.”

  Meredith struggled to his feet from the suctioning embrace of the plush armchair.

  “Could we reenact it, at your sitting-room door here?” he asked. They went over, Flood standing a little aside, as if he knew his place in that household. Meredith took command. “Granville Ashe goes through the door into the hotel section, and you are all on this side, still in the bar. Would you be Ashe, Commodore? Walk upstairs and show us approximately what occurred, timing it as near as you can estimate to the timings on the night of the murder.”

  “I’ll try,” said the commodore, looking self-conscious. “Of course no one was using a stopwatch.” He walked through the door, shoulders squared, and up the stairs. At the top he paused, opened a door, and shouted, “Door!” The second hand on Meredith’s watch ticked around ten, twelve seconds, and then the commodore was heard to run cumbersomely downstairs.

  “Call the police!” he shouted in the manner of all bad amateur actors.

  They all stood around the door somewhat awkwardly.

  “That was about it, Inspector,” said Critchley.

  “There was a faint click when he switched the light on,” said Daisy. “But there was no shot. And surely he couldn’t have used a silencer?”

  “No, there’s no question of a silencer,” said Meredith. “All I’m doing is checking every little thing to see that all the accounts tally with each other. Now, can you remember who was around the door listening?”

  Again they looked at each other, rather as if the commodore were asking permission to speak first.

  “The landlord. The woman who’d insisted it was a shot. Hartley, the greengrocer. The chap who keeps the post office. Cotterel’s sister . . .”

  “Ah, she was there.”

  “Oh, yes. She was very interested.”

  “Was she in the bar when the shot rang out?”

  “We wouldn’t know that,” said Daisy Critchley. “She wasn’t in the group around Granville Ashe, so we couldn’t see through it to see who else was sitting in the bar.”

  “When did you first become conscious of her?”

  “Oh, when the woman was trying to force Ashe to go up and investigate,” said the Commodore. “We were sitting with our backs to the wall and the window, you see. At some point she joined the group, and I could see her face. She was watching the woman and Granville Ashe almost hungrily. Sort of licking her lips at the prospect of some excitement.”

  “Ghoul!” said Daisy Critchley. “Some people have no shame, do they?”

  Chapter 17

  CHIEF INSPECTOR MEREDITH let himself in by the front door and went straight through to the kitchen. His wife, he knew, would be out. She had long ago found that being a policeman’s wife and being a teacher did not go together, and she had given up her full-time job without too many regrets. But she did value her evening classes, where she coached adults through to ordinary and advanced-level history exams. With adults one didn’t have to lower one’s expectations the whole time, she said. Meredith opened the fridge and took out the plate she had left for him: a crab salad. Where had she found that excellent dressed crab?

  There were voices raised in the living room, but not in anger. He opened a can of beer, got a knife and fork, and went through. The children greeted him and then went on with what they were doing. It was their usual way. A policeman’s family grew to be that bit blasé about whether he was around or not. If they did not, they regularly suffered everything from minor disappointment to heartbreak. Meredith could only feel glad—and grateful to his wife—that his brood had turned out as well as they had. The eldest had left the nest, and her marriage still left feelings in him that he ashamedly recognized as something close to resentment. Three were left: Mark, nineteen, Eleanor, a year younger, and Cathy, the baby at fifteen. Tonight they were engaged in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Meredith stood for a few minutes, marveling at what they knew and what they did not know, and fetched his briefcase from the hall. A working dinner. How many working meals, he wondered, had he eaten in the course of his police career?

  “That’s nonsense! Julius Caesar can’t have been born in 1 B.C.!” he heard Eleanor cry, her voice thick with grievance. “He came to Britain in 55 B.C. He’d have had to have lived backwards!”

  Oh, God, the makers have given another wrong answer! he thought. He waited. Let them squabble for a bit, then go off and find a book to look it up in.

  “Well, that’s what it says here!”

  “It can’t be right. Mark, didn’t Julius Caesar come to Britain in 55 B.C.?”

  “I thought he did,” said Mark slowly. “It couldn’t have been 55 A.D., could it? I mean, by that time the Roman Empire had come to Nero and Caligula and all those people. What’s the best place to look it up?”

  Meredith breathed out and forked in some delicious crab. They had been well trained. A historian’s children should always know where to look things up.

  A policeman, too. He had looked up Benedict Cotterel in the new Oxford Companion to English Literature the night before and had found a generous, short appreciation rather along the lines of his son’s account. Today he had sent a constable to the police library to get a photocopy of his W
ho’s Who entry, which he now took out from his briefcase and laid before him on the table. As he ate, he skimmed through the relevant details.

  COTTEREL, Benedict Arthur, novelist, travel, and miscellaneous writer. b. 9 February 1901, only child of Frederick Arthur Cotterel, tobacconist and newsagent of Romford, and of Mary Esther Cotterel, née Smith. Worked for East Anglian Insurance Co., and for the Daily Herald, until the publication of his first novel, The Scent of Roses, in 1927.

  There followed a list of his novels and other major writings, two honorary degrees from a British and an American university, and one literary prize (not one Meredith had heard of, but then Cotterel wrote novels before the Booker or the Trask were thought of). He belonged to no club and had apparently never accepted any honors from the state—or perhaps had never been offered any. The absence of writers from the various Honours Lists is one of the few signs that writers are still viewed, by politicians at least, as dangerous, unmalleable people.

  The marriages were there, early on in the entry: “m. 1st 1924, Florence Urquhard, divorced 1926; 2nd 1934, Patricia Ellen Haynes (1915-1968); one s. one d.”

  The entry concluded in traditional fashion: “Interests: architecture, walking in remote places, Italian history. Address: The Old Rectory, Maudsley, Sussex.”

  And that was it. Nothing much there of interest. Except, of course, that “only child”. . . .

  He finished off his salad. His children had discovered that Julius Caesar had been born around 100 B.C., not 1 B.C., and had gained a healthy glow at having bested the compilers of the Trivial Pursuit questions. Now they were settled back into their game. Meredith took from his briefcase a handwritten list that Cordelia had sent over to him of men with whom her mother had been associated. It was neat, annotated, and very long. Meredith blanched. That would be a matter involving a great deal of legwork. He put it aside and took up the papers that summarized the physical evidence about Myra’s death. He scanned them slowly, pondering, hoping that this time the report would tell him more than when he had skimmed through it at the station.