The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  “Chip it off and then replaster it? Sounds a mite cockeyed!”

  “Not so much as you might think. You have to do that with frescoes. Paint on to the wet plaster, to make it more durable.”

  Grigsby gave her a sharp look. “She did it herself? Then she couldn’t have been any weakling.”

  “Well, I don’t think she was, if it comes to that, even though she was only little. Artists have to be quite strong, you know, if they’re doing that kind of work. But she’d only to plaster a bit at a time. You draw the whole design on the wall first. Then you chip away the bit you want to work on, re-plaster it and paint it while the plaster’s still wet. That’s what makes it last so long – provided conditions are right. But there was talk of maybe putting another fireplace surround in that room, which would fit in better with the new decorations than the old-fashioned thing they’d just pulled out, so she agreed with my mother that she’d do a temporary job. Paint on to the dry plaster on the chimney breast – that’s a technique called fresco secco - and redo it later if necessary.”

  “You’re very knowledgeable, Mrs Tempest. You an artist, too?” She didn’t look like his conception of what an artist should be like. With her comfortably plump figure and her warm, hazel eyes, Daisy Tempest looked more like his sensible, trustworthy Aunt Nellie – though a good deal sharper than that old dear.

  “Heavens, no, I just used to help her. I was very young, thought it was all so glamorous and different. And it was certainly great fun. But something I do remember … that morning, the day Mama couldn’t be found, Rose was having difficulty with that fireplace wall. She’d plastered it up the night before, hoping it would be dry and smooth enough to paint the next morning, but in actual fact she was very surprised that it was neither. She seemed to think she hadn’t been careful enough the day before.”

  “So it’s possible someone else re-plastered the chimney breast during the night?”

  Daisy said slowly, “Yes, that was what I was thinking.”

  “Have you any idea where we can get in touch with Miss Jessamy?”

  The sisters exchanged a look. “No one’s heard of her for years,” Harriet said. “Not since she left Charnley.” And then she added, “Inspector, where are the other garnets?”

  Grigsby regarded her. “What others, Miss Jardine?”

  “It was a matching set – what’s known as a parure – there was a bracelet and earrings and a sort of comb to fix in the hair, as well as the necklace. My father had given them to my mother for her birthday. She was wearing the whole set that night – and none of them were found among her things afterwards.”

  “You can be sure of that?”

  “Oh, yes. My father made some remark about them being the only jewellery she’d taken with her.”

  “I can tell you they weren’t in the valise. There was only what you saw – spare underclothing, hairbrush and so on.”

  Grigsby thought: garnets, a bracelet and earrings, missing. Jewellery of relatively little intrinsic value, not worth killing for – especially when other jewellery – several rings, one of them an engagement ring with a cluster of what looked to Grigsby like very fine diamonds – had been left on the body. But worth thinking about, although the circumstances of the murder suggested more than killing for what could be snatched. Daisy Tempest had voiced this when she’d protested, “What on earth could anyone have wanted to murder Mama for? She never had a wrong word with anyone!” Grigsby had heard what she said. It was what most people felt when their loved ones were killed, not understanding that there didn’t always have to be a recognisable or sensible reason. He’d known a throat cut for the price of a packet of fags, or a face smashed in with a broken bottle for a pint of red biddy. Or a person knifed because some mad devil just didn’t like the look of their face.

  After questioning them for some little time more, making sure that Fairchild had noted down all the relevant details, he said that was all for the present and let them go.

  Fifteen minutes later, having seen the car containing the family off the premises, Fairchild returned.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “Obvious, isn’t it?” the sergeant said. “Their mother and this Iskander they said she’d met in Egypt had had an affair there, then when he pops up on the scene all those years later, she doesn’t want anything more to do with him. He’s browned off, kills her and scarpers.”

  “Or her husband finds out, kills ’em both, and then later remorse – or else fear of being found out – causes him to top himself.”

  “In which case,” responded Fairchild brightly, “there’s another body somewhere here at Charnley.”

  “Walled up as well?” Grigsby rubbed his nose. “I’m full of good ideas, me, but pulling the whole bloody place down just on the offchance of that isn’t one of ’em. Actually, I’m not sure anything is that obvious about this case. Except that when a good looker like she was is strangled, you can bet your life there’s sex lurking in the background. The murder of a man’s wife, followed by his suicide, generally means only one thing. You’ve got that list the Jardine ladies left?”

  Fairchild flourished it. “The ones I’ve starred are the family, and those guests who stayed overnight. The ones who are still with us, that is. And most of them are, it seems. Apart from the son who was killed in 1915, and this woman Rose Jessamy–”

  “Let’s have a butcher’s.”

  Fairchild passed the list over. Grigsby shifted to take it, and his chair creaked ominously. His little eyes screwed up even more narrowly as he read, running his finger down the names: “The three Jardine daughters. The son, Marcus. The Egyptian - and who’s this Sacheverell?”

  “Long time friend of the family. Almost like a son, I gather.”

  “Talk to him. And what about the servants?”

  “There was the lady’s maid, Mrs Jardine’s maid, that is, but she left soon after her mistress disappeared and no one’s heard of her since. Housekeeper and butler long dead, ditto chauffeur. I’ll see if I can dredge up any more. Oh, and there was this Lord Wycombe staying as a house guest as well. Apparently, he’s quite famous, some sort of art historian or such-like, must be knocking ninety by now but he’s still alive and kicking. Rum do, that – he married the middle Jardine girl, old enough to be her father. I’ve also starred a Mrs Millie Kaplan – Lady Glendinning as she was at that time – who wasn’t an overnight guest.”

  “Why her in particular?”

  “Apparently she was a great friend of the deceased – and she was with her on that Nile cruise when they met Iskander.”

  Grigsby tapped his teeth with his pencil. Harriet Jardine had told him there was some sort of diary written by her mother when she’d been in Egypt, at least a decade before her murder. She’d seemed to think the diary, and some notebooks of her own – doubtless full of some schoolgirlish outpourings - could give some sort of clue as to why Beatrice had been murdered. Grigsby had been quick to nip her idea of the Egyptian as murderer in the bud. It might come to that – his convenient disappearance the morning after the murder was suspicious and would need accounting for – but if he had murdered her, was it feasible he could have hidden the body where it was found? The Gladstone bag found with the dead woman, containing her missing clothing, suggested to Grigsby that someone had set up the idea they had run off together. He always preferred to go the simplest route first in any investigation - and this time he had a gut feeling that the culprit would be found nearer home. On the other hand, he was by no means convinced that Harriet Jardine would let go of the idea that these diaries meant something – and the last thing he wanted was her conducting enquiries on her own account, so maybe he’d better let Fairchild take a look at that journal of her mother’s. But not until they’d exhausted other lines of enquiry.

  11

  The year was beginning to creep towards autumn, with a sharp nip to the nights, and back in her cottage at Garvingden, Harriet knelt to put a match to the paper and logs in the grate. Spic
y apple logs from a tree in the garden which had blown down in the March gales.

  Nina sniffed appreciatively as they caught hold. “Mmm, lovely!”

  “They won’t last out the winter,” Harriet said, “but I’ve managed to get a couple of hundredweight of coal delivered as well. Tom Stretton – he’s the verger – sawed the tree up for me. That’s another advantage of living here – where in London would you find someone to do things like that?”

  Harriet’s new enthusiasm for burying herself out here, away from everything, was something Nina couldn’t share with her, apple logs and other country delights notwithstanding. She murmured, “Where in London would you need to, with electric fires and all? The country might have its charms, but-” She’d been going to add that whoever said it was ‘a kind of healthy grave’ had her on his side, but in the circumstances, she felt that anything to do with graves was better not mentioned.

  The rural life wasn’t for her, but all the same, she’d been determined not to leave Harriet alone that night after their return from Charnley. Guy had seconded the idea, feeling less nervous of being driven home by Daisy, now that she was showing every sign of having got over the initial effects of shock. They had already left, on their way to break the news to Vita.

  “I’ll go back by train tomorrow,” Nina had said. “You can find me a toothbrush, I suppose, Harriet?”

  “I’m sure I can, but I warn you it’ll mean a bed on the sofa, and you’ll have to get up early to catch the bus into Oxford for the train – there isn’t another bus until noon. I’m nearly out of my petrol ration, so I can’t drive you.”

  “I believe I might just be able to do that small thing.”

  Harriet gave in and squeezed her hand. “It’ll be good to have you here.”

  They ate a makeshift bread and cheese supper, for which neither had much appetite, skirting round the events of the day. The ice was still too thin over those dark waters to venture on it. Nina did her best to lighten the heavy mood the day had brought by keeping off the subject and trying to make Harriet smile with stories of the other inhabitants of the house where she had her bed-sit, minimising its shortcomings and its location, making it sound attractively unconventional. Harriet, who had visited her there, knew that it was not. But she admired the spirit that had prompted the attempt. She watched her step-niece affectionately as she sat casually relaxed, feet tucked under her on the sofa. Narrow, high-cheekboned face, quick, fleeting smile, her dark eyes and her intrinsic elegance an unmistakably Gallic inheritance from her mother. Her hair was loose, a dark tangle where she’d run her fingers through it, and she was thinner than Harriet thought she should be, but having said that, she looked better than she had for some time. She was making an effort with her clothes again, and evidently getting over that disastrous affair, never a match designed in heaven. In a moment of shared intimacy, when the break-up with her lover had finally occurred, Nina had confided in Harriet, and Harriet, who had for a long time suspected something of the sort, had refrained from offering the usual anodyne remarks: time heals, it will pass, knowing from experience such platitudes were hateful just because they were true. She’d listened, and let her cry, and then, when Nina had dried her eyes, she’d opened a bottle of carefully hoarded wine.

  Which seemed like a good idea now, tonight.

  And, true enough, after the first glass, in front of the fire, with the curtains snugly drawn, Charnley didn’t seem such a dangerous topic. “I’m glad I’ve seen the house,” Nina said, thinking how different Harriet’s life here must be in this small cottage, cosy in the leaping firelight, from where she’d started life – that grey, rather forbidding pile of Charnley, with its endless corridors and hotchpotch of rooms. “Though it wasn’t at all as I imagined it to be.”

  “Which was –?”

  “Larger than it actually is, for one thing. And I must admit I thought it would be – more gracious. You know, all white and Palladian, everything in proportion.”

  Harriet smiled wryly. “It was never that. Bits have always been added on here and there over the years, just as the fancy took the owners. And I can’t see they’re doing anything to improve matters now. All the same, it was a comfortable house, happy …” The sap in one of the logs boiled and spluttered. A spark flew out on to the rug and she stamped it out with her foot. “Would it bore you to look at some old photos?”

  “Just the opposite. Now I’ve seen the place, I’d love to see everyone who lived there.”

  Harriet produced an album of faded burgundy leather, and the grey cardboard box file which still held the other photographs that she’d brought home with her the previous day, and came to sit next to Nina on the sofa.

  The pictures had all been taken in that golden era before the First World War – golden at least for the privileged people featured in them. Nina was entranced by the hour-glass figures of willowy ladies in long dresses with sweeping trains and enormous, elaborately-trimmed hats perched on their equally complicated coiffures; by the gentlemen in light-coloured Homburg hats and wing collars; young men in blazers, flannels and boaters or with their hair flattened like patent leather to their skulls with pomade – all taken against a background of smooth lawns and terraces and country houses: Charnley and others like it. At social events, when they were always at their ease – chatting, smiling, simply passing time in a life devoted to the undiluted pursuit of pleasure – barely forty years ago, but light years away from the present. It had taken two world wars, Nina reflected, to bring women of that generation and upbringing to the stage where they could do something worthwhile with their lives, and actually earn their own living. Daisy working in the East End with her unmarried mothers, and Harriet, a teacher of mathematics at a university - who would have thought it, looking at those pictures?

  “Didn’t anyone ever do any work in those days?”

  “My father did. He was an extremely busy lawyer – and Marcus, too.”

  Here was Marcus, with his parents. Among crowds of people, racehorses in the background, Ascot maybe. He was very tall, overtopping his father by half a head, bending to his beautiful mother. An exquisite work of art was Beatrice Jardine, leaning on her frilly parasol, as artificial as a china doll in lace and a pearl choker, her figure corseted into a fashionable Grecian bend, her hat a crown of roses and a sweeping brim, from which an edge of perfect profile showed. As they looked at the picture, both women felt an overwhelming sense of something they could not name. A fleeting sadness, perhaps, for something lost for ever.

  But here was the ‘Three Graces’ photograph. “Well, look at this!” said Nina. “You and Daisy, I can see that – but who is this? Vita? It can’t be!”

  Hardly surprising that she hadn’t at first recognised the pretty, animated girl with the rounded limbs, laughing eyes and the roguish smile as the smart and brittle Vita of the present day, or as the strange, silent woman Nina remembered seeing when she’d been taken down to Stoke Wycombe once, by Daisy. The visit had not been a great success. She’d been fourteen or fifteen, overawed by its grandeur and rather in awe of Lord Wycombe, too, a reserved man who only became animated when he showed them around his art collection, which included some incomprehensible modern paintings from Europe that he called ‘expressionist’, at that time being condemned as decadent by the Nazi regime in Germany, but which he said would be collectors’ items in a few years’ time.

  They were, however, given a splendid tea, at which Vita joined them, though she scarcely seemed to acknowledge the fact that they were there. Daisy later told Nina that the Wycombes had suffered a terrible tragedy, when both their children, two boys aged twelve and fourteen, had died at the same time, in a diphtheria epidemic at their school. After that, Vita had for a long time lost interest in the outside world, and even in her looks, and spent her days sketching and making paintings, the merits of which no one could judge, because they were, like Vita herself, never allowed to see the light of day.

  “Yes, it is Vita. It was taken when we we
re performing a sort of tableau at Mama’s birthday party.” Harriet put the picture down rather abruptly, picked up another, and laughed. “Millie Glendinning, good heavens, at Cousin Kitty’s wedding! That unfortunate hat – who could have forgotten it?” Unfortunate was the kindest thing one could say about it, thought Nina. Excessively large, and with a bird of equally monstrous proportions nesting on it, it dwarfed the small woman beneath it. “She was Mama’s greatest friend, but what we used to call rather fast, I’m afraid.” Harriet sobered as she added, “There was a scandal, and a divorce. Papa never really liked her. Poor Millie. I think the birthday was the last time I ever saw her.”

  There were still more photos. “I’d forgotten how many pictures were taken that evening. And Rose Jessamy was there capturing everyone in her sketchbook, too, though I never saw anything she’d done, and as far as I know she never showed them to anyone – except perhaps Marcus. Poor Marcus, he was rather bowled over by her, I think. But it wasn’t suitable, it could only have ended in tears, even if things hadn’t turned out as they did.”

  The logs settled in the grate, the evening outside grew darker as Harriet leafed through the album. So many people, once alive and confident, so many now dead.

  There were dozens of photographs of Beatrice, eminently photogenic as she had been. That charming smile, that tilt of the chin. And, caught off-guard, that ironic look she had handed down to Harriet, which made Nina think she could never have been a woman easy to understand. Pictures of her alone, and with other people. In one, she was chatting with a man who stuck out a mile among that homogenous crowd of white, upper class males. A dusky skin, a sloping forehead, crinkly dark hair, light eyes and a white, un-English smile. A soft, plumpish man. This, then, was Valery Iskander, the man who had disappeared the next day, seemingly with Beatrice Jardine. Until her body had been found. Not, on that showing, the face of a murderer. But who could tell? ‘One may smile and smile, and be a villain.’