A Game of Consequences

by Shelley Smith

  ‘Are you suggesting that it caused the outbreak?’ Dr. Evans inquired.

  ‘No, sir. Only that it may have been a contributory cause. I am reliably informed that the wiring at Upperdown was very old and faulty. I simply regarded it as a duty to remind the general public of the dangers inherent in such common substances as Sodium Chlorate.’

  The deceased’s husband was then called to the witness-box. The coroner in his dry impatient way seemed to think it incredible that anyone could be so stupid as to leave the bedroom door open behind him when he ran downstairs, particularly as the window was open too. Could he not have realised that he was creating an updraught by so doing? And then to leave the front door open as well! It was hard to believe it was not his intention to want the fire to spread as quickly as possible. It was almost unbelievable that a man of Mr. Eskdale’s intelligence could behave so stupidly, the coroner commented with some acidity.

  Eskdale stood there upright and motionless, bearing these comments with a sombre face, remarking simply that his only thought had been to act with all possible speed to save his wife’s life.

  ‘Why was the front door locked, if you were coming down later?’

  ‘I suppose because my wife was not expecting me. She did not know what time I would arrive.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I thought I had already explained that my wife suddenly decided to return to England and there was only the one seat available on the plane. I took a later flight and a different route. Since my wife had already left, she could not possibly know when I would get back. Obviously she supposed it would be impossible for me to get down that night.’

  ‘You didn’t telephone her from the airport to let her know you were back?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I should have thought that was the obvious thing to do.’

  ‘Possibly. But it didn’t occur to me.’

  ‘Which, as it turned out, was a pity, I think you’ll agree.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when you finally got to her, you found her insensible from drink?’

  ‘I have already said so.’

  ‘Was your wife in the habit of drinking heavily?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no secret about that.’

  ‘When you found you couldn’t rouse her and that the telephone line was apparently dead, knowing that the house was on fire, why did you not drag her downstairs when you went down before the staircase became ablaze?’

  The courtroom was very still. Eskdale’s face whitened. After a moment, he said:

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It would have been possible, would it not?’

  Eskdale regarded his hands on the ledge of the box.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’

  ‘Her life could have been saved then?’

  To this there was no reply and Eskdale made none.

  But in the body of the hall people turned to look at one another with aghast or knowing glances.

  Eskdale returned to his place and another witness took the stand: a tall woman in a deep-brimmed grey hat, who gave her name as Deirdre Desborough, the desceased’s daughter. What she wished to tell the court was that the cousin with whom her mother and her mother’s husband had been staying in Bermuda had related to her the circumstances of her mother’s sudden departure.

  In brief, there had been a violent quarrel between husband and wife over another woman, after which her mother caught the first plane back to England with the alleged intention of divorcing him. When he subsequently learnt of this from his hostess, he at once took off after her. Saying, in fact, according to her cousin, Mrs. Wingate, that it was a ‘matter of life and death’.

  This statement produced a pregnant pause, while the significance of the words was absorbed. Miss Desborough then went on to say that Mrs. Francis Wingate would be sending a sworn affidavit to the court in confirmation.

  The Inquest was then adjourned for a period of one month to enable further inquiries to be made. The court rose.

  Eskdale could hardly believe his ears. Deirdre’s evidence had almost stunned him. He had thought little of the fact that she had not acknowledged his friendly, sympathetic, heartbroken letter telling her of Rory’s tragic death, but her appearance in the witness-box had come as a complete surprise and he was knocked sideways by the savage implications of her remarks. Is she mad? he thought. What is she trying to do to me? Why is she crucifying me? Is this her way of getting back at me for marrying Rory? But I would never have married her anyway.

  He went after her and caught her in the car park.

  ‘I’d like a word with you, Deirdre, if you don’t mind,’ he said in an icy voice, and gripped her elbow hard.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say to you. Let go.’

  ‘When you’ve answered me. I want to know what you’re up to.’

  Her narrow eyes met his with cold hatred:

  ‘All I want is to see justice done.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean, if anything?’

  ‘It was my mother who died.’

  ‘And what you want is to get your hands on her money?’

  ‘No. Only to stop you getting it.’

  ‘And what makes you imagine you’ll be able to do that?’

  ‘Because I think you killed her.’

  ‘You’ll have some difficulty proving that, because there is no proof. You really are a stupid bitch,’ he observed with a kind of pitying contempt, and walked away.

  All the same, one way and another, things were not easy for Jeremy. People talked. The police continued with their inquiries. Everything seemed to be hanging in mid-air. Probate clearly was going to be a lengthy business, it always was; but both the life assurance and the insurance company seemed strangely reluctant to pay up, and that was worrying. Altogether it was an uncomfortable time for Eskdale, as though he had bitten off something he could neither swallow nor spit out. He could not be quite sure where he stood nor what exactly was going on behind the scenes.

  *

  On the terrace of the large white villa overlooking Cap Martin, the Ransome family were lazily breakfasting on croissants and coffee, when Dinah announced that she’d had a letter from Emmeline.

  ‘That’s nice,’ her father murmured from behind his paper. And a moment later looked up to ask: ‘How did she know where you were?’

  ‘Oh Daddy, you know I sent her some postcards; she c’lects them.’

  ‘Oh. So what does she have to say?’

  ‘She says, “Dear Dinah, There was a big fire where you lived and the lady died. It was awful. There were 8 fire engines. It was the middle of the night. Daddy saw it but Roger and I were asleep. I liked that card you sent me. What is your school like? Your friend, Emmeline.”’

  ‘How dreadful!’ exclaimed her mother.

  ‘Let me see that,’ said her father in a strange voice she hardly recognised as his. He had gone very white. The letter shook in his hand. ‘My God,’ he muttered. ‘Oh, my God!’ He pushed away from his chair and walked into the house, as if the sun was in his eyes, dazzling him. Which it wasn’t. She wanted to go after him to get her letter, but her mother said, ‘Leave your father alone,’ in that special quiet tone of voice which brooks no argument.

  ‘Is he upset about the Roarer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But Tom was rather more than upset. He was sick with horror. He paced up and down the dim salon striped with sunlight through the persiennes, slowly realising the extent to which he had been duped and his own unwitting complicity in the plot.

  He had supposed that he was manipulating Jerry when all the while it had been Jerry who was manipulating him, in a manner so subtle that he had never been aware of it. Aurora had said time and again that Jerry wanted to kill her, and he had taken it as a joke. And now it was too late. There was nothing he could do because he had created the circumstances himself, lightheartedly committing the crime that made the other crime possible. And Jerry was counting on the fact that he could do n
othing. Oh God! Oh God! poor harmless, helpless Rory.

  Dinah wrote:

  Dear Emmeline,

  We have a lovely house here. The sea is lovely. The school here is hateful because they only talk French. I was sorry to hear about the Roarer. Did the fire burn her right up? It must have been horrid. I will now buy a stamp and post this.

  Your friend Dinah.

  Kate said later to Tom in a tentative manner:

  ‘I suppose we should write to Jerry and express our sympathy. Will you do it, or would you rather I did?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Tom said quickly, rather to her surprise. She had expected him to funk it.

  ‘Yes, I think it would be better coming from you,’ she agreed.

  *

  It was at the end of September that Eskdale according to his habitude was absorbing both his first Scotch of the day and the record of yesterday’s events in the Financial Times, when his eye chanced upon the 2-column headline beside a photograph, which ran: Newly Discovered Velázquez Painting Fetches £1,250,000. ‘Bloody mad,’ passed through his mind as he turned to a correspondent’s Nature report on the wheatear. But his eye flickered back to the photograph. The strange thing was that it seemed in some way familiar, as if he had seen it before somewhere at some time and yet could not remember where or when. In a reproduction, no doubt, he thought, and returned to the fascinating account of the wheatears.

  But then it occurred to him, before he had reached the end of the article, that he could hardly have seen a reproduction of the painting if it had been newly discovered.

  He began to scrutinise the picture more attentively with its smudgy blurs of dark and light greys, which gave as much idea of the original as a clumsy translation of a poem into another language’s prose would give.

  All the same, one could see a small dark cloaked figure in 17th century costume in the foreground and a large light-hued animal nearby: both beast and man with the same ugly forbidding expression. It had been just that that Rory had found so disconcerting —

  He sat up, startled, staring straight ahead, rigid as a tailor’s dummy, as the facts reassembled themselves anew in his brain. Then he snatched up the paper again and began reading — first in a jumping jam-packed way and then with slow deliberate care — the two columns of print describing the painting and the sale by auction at Parke Bernet’s in New York.

  Comprehension came flooding up like the dawn. He began to remember. Little insignificant looks and phrases came back to him … Who was it who said: ‘Whereas I was blind, now I see!’?

  The whole plot had been engineered by Tom (who, of course, knew all about pictures and what they were worth) solely to this end. The cunning shit. All this stuff about wanting to help him and Rory had been all cock to enable him to make it appear that the picture had been consumed in the fire along with everything else. Tom must have thought them bloody thick not to recognise their own picture when it came up for sale. But perhaps he hadn’t thought it would fetch such an astonishing figure. Clever of him to get it sold in the States, where he would be unknown. Probably sold under another name too. A million and a quarter, untaxed.

  Eskdale’s heart was beating like a hammer in his throat, choking him so that he could hardly breathe. This must be how people felt when they were about to have a stroke.

  He stood up and pushed open the french windows, trying to steady his heart, calm himself and make his heart slow down. He was not going to have a stroke. Not with a million and a quarter at stake!

  Of course, the obvious thing would be to go to the police — who already suspected Tom of being connected with the burglary. But that was just the point: Jeremy was directly implicated too; it had all been stored away in his name. There were too many links attaching him to the whole rotten affair, and if Tom was pulled down he certainly would not hesitate to pull Jeremy down with him.

  Besides, even if the picture could be traced to Ransome, how was Jeremy to prove it had ever been part of his wife’s estate? There simply was no proof that that lumber-room distasteful painting had been the Velázquez. If it had been so described in Basil’s Probate inventory, Rory would have known about it; it would have been among the articles specified for death duty.

  Furthermore — and this was the best reason of all for not bringing the matter of attention of the Law — if it ever could be recovered and returned to its rightful owner, Jeremy, almost the whole of that enormous sum would be taken off him in whopping tax, since now its real worth would be known.

  No, this was a matter he must deal with himself, it was his affair. It was a question of first finding Ransome and then finding some means of prising the money out of him. By fear or by God. Even if he had to kill him to get it!

  It was not going to be easy to trace Ransome if he was in America. It was not going to be all that easy for Jeremy himself to leave the country without the police knowing, since he had been requested to remain until the whole matter had been cleared up or considered closed. Not that that daunted him. He could get away if he wanted to. But it was pointless until he had some idea of his prey’s whereabouts.

  It was while he was working on the problem that a few days later a small girl passing in the narrow lane smiled at him and said ‘Hullo’ in a shy little voice. He gave her an absentminded nod. But a moment later turned back to say: ‘Don’t I know you?’ She made a timid assent and said she had been at Dinah’s birthday party. ‘Yes, of course, I thought I’d seen you somewhere. I expect you miss her, don’t you? Have you heard from her since she went away?’ The child nodded. ‘Oh, that’s nice. Then you know where she is. Perhaps you could tell me, so that I can get in touch with her parents?’ he suggested winningly.

  ‘In France,’ said Emmeline.

  ‘Ah, but where? France is a big place. Could you give me her address?’ Yes, she could. ‘Could you write it down for me on this piece of paper, dear?’ he said, handing her a notebook and pen and watching her slowly and carefully inscribe it on the page, her small white teeth earnestly pressing against her lower lip. ‘There,’ he said, tucking some coins into her little hand, ‘buy yourself some sweeties from me.’ He smiled at her benevolently. He had a feeling that his luck had begun to change at last.

  TEN

  It had been Tom’s intention from the first to make it up to them all for the bad years, the hardship, the grinding anxiety, the loss of self-esteem and all comfort. From now on it would be luxury all the way; life one big holiday, wiping out the years that the locusts had eaten. He wanted to load them with Arabian delights and pleasures.

  He made no plans. They would wander where the whimsy took them. Anywhere in the wide world — except England. He would not return there; not yet, he said, he did not want to be reminded of all he had suffered there.

  ‘But what of the children’s education?’ Kate protested.

  ‘This will give them a better education than any schooling, seeing the world, picking up foreign languages, discovering how other people live.’

  ‘It won’t teach them Arithmetic and History and Science; they won’t learn how to learn, which is the most important thing of all.’

  ‘I’m not sending them to boarding-school, Kate, if that’s what you have in mind. I won’t be parted from them.’

  ‘Then they must go to school where we are.’ On that Kate was adamant. Tom would have liked to have them with them all the time, but their mother insisted they must continue their education at all costs and he had to give in. Which was why they had rented the handsome white villa with the hanging gardens in Roquebrune, discreetly isolated yet within easy run of Monte Carlo and Nice, for the three months of the autumn term. After that they would see.

  It suited Tom ideally; the season was over, the visitors departed, they were unlikely to run into anyone who knew them, yet there remained all the charm and sophistication, luxury and gaiety of the famous region.

  Tom and Kate experienced a freedom they had never known; they gambled and shopped and sunbathed and swam and met amu
sing people and sat in cafés drinking and watching the world go by, without a care in the world. Like young lovers. Like a king and queen who had unexpectedly succeeded to the throne.

  Kate bloomed. They hadn’t a care in the world. Yvette their maid, saw to everything without question. Her 13-year-old daughter, Marie Louise, even took the little girls to and from school with her — a serious-faced reliable child. The parents entrusted her so far as to take the children down to the beach with their goûter of pains-au-chocolat after school. Because, after all, what was there to fear? The bathing was so safe, no rocks, no tides, no storms.

  It must not be thought that Kate and Tom neglected them. Never in this world. They were almost always home some time between five and six until the children went to bed and Tom and Kate went out to their evening’s pleasure, leaving Yvette in charge.

  One day in October (the 17th to be precise — a date they were never likely to forget) the girls were not in when their parents got back, so they drove on down to the beach to look for them, as the most likely place they would be. But though they walked it from end to end and back, there was no sign of them.

  ‘Oh well, they’re probably playing with friends.’

  ‘Children have no sense of time.’

  ‘Anyway, they’re sure to be with Marie Louise.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  On the way back to the villa they saw the slight figure of Marie Louise in her ragged knee-length blue jeans and red cotton sweater, earnestly hitting a tennis ball against a concrete wall with a battered racket. Tom pulled up alongside. She caught the ball when she saw them and said politely:

  ‘’soir, M’sieu, ’dame.’

  ‘Bonsoir, Marie Louise. Sais-tu où sont Biddy et Dinah?’

  Marie Louise shook her head.

  After school had she taken them to the beach or back to the villa? Madame Ransome asked.