The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  Later still: ‘He is here. He frightens me to the depths of my being. I look at those cold, light eyes and I believe he is quite capable of killing me if I do not do as he wants. But if I do, I shall be held up to ridicule, and as for my husband …

  ‘Amory frightens me, too. For all we have been married these five-and-twenty years I do not believe I truly understand him. Beneath his reserve, I know there is a depth of passion I can no longer arouse. I have tried, God knows I have tried, but all too often he puts me aside when I move towards him, as if I had suggested something shameful. Without physical connection, what is there to hold him to me? It maddens me to distraction, for I am still attractive to other men. I have not yet, like Millie, lost my looks. Yet it is only by the reassurances of men like Kit, like Iskander eleven years ago, and in a sense by Myles, that I am able to keep the fear at bay. There are times when I wonder if Amory suspects, times when I am sure he does, for what else can explain his indifference to me?’

  Another entry, different ink: ‘Oh, God, what am I to do? If Iskander forces me to tell the truth, Amory will see it as a humiliation to himself, which is the one thing above all others that he cannot stand.’

  The next page was written in such haste, or distress, every stroke of the headlong writing expressing frustration and fear, that it was barely decipherable. ‘Valery Iskander is no longer the eager boy who danced attendance on me and stroked my hands and told me foolish, allegorical stories of princesses and crocodiles and how the sand obscures the shape of whatever lies beneath it. Perhaps not so foolish, at that. Perhaps he was saying how lies can obscure the reality. It was pleasant then to encourage his admiration, and rather daring, though of course nothing could have come of an association with him. I wonder that I never saw under that soft exterior and wide smile, a purpose which to me, at least, is terrifying. What madness came over me in Luxor? I can only feel that I was driven to it by that terrifying experience in the temple – whether it was real or whether I did indeed imagine that hand — that flesh and blood hand – cupping my breast. But I cannot excuse what I did later, in the garden of the hotel. I was made mad by Myles’ stubborn refusal to admit there was anything more between us than a temporary desire which we should fight. I would have done anything to break his resistance — and at least my histrionics succeeded. His chivalry overcame his scruples when I rushed into his arms. Later, he came to my room for the first time.

  ‘I know that his regard for Amory has always held him back from committing himself to me wholeheartedly. But it has always been more than that. He never speaks about his ambivalence towards women in general, which I recognise but unlike most women care nothing about, for on the few occasions we are able to be together, his passion for me is as strong as mine for him.’

  Several things about Myles that Harriet had begun to consider ever since Kit’s letter suddenly seemed to make sense. She wondered how much Vita had ever known.

  The last entry merely said ‘Iskander. What am I to do?’

  Squeamish as she felt about doing so, having regard to the intimate nature of the contents, and how it would implicate Wycombe, Harriet knew she must hand the papers over to the police, though she would wait before giving them to Grigsby until Tom came back with Iskander’s written testimony of what had happened the night before he left Charnley. In a call from Egypt Tom had confirmed that Iskander had indeed harboured resentments over the Luxor affair, but had not sought revenge. But, she thought –

  The shrill sound of the telephone made her jump a mile. When she lifted it, the measured tones of Oscar Schulman came over the line. “Can you come up to London immediately? Your sister needs you — I think you should be with her, Harriet.”

  “Oscar? What’s happened?”

  “It’s Wycombe,” he said.

  Oblivion. Oblivion is all that matters now. Then at last it will be finished.

  The water feels shockingly cold as you go in, far colder than you’d imagined it would, despite the clothes you’re wearing, though why did you take your shoes off, you old fool? Reflex action, probably, but they would have helped, filled with water and dragged you down. Instead, there’s this unspeakable slime underfoot, so disgusting it almost makes you turn back, squelching up through your toes, and there’s waterweed twisting itself obscenely around your legs, sharp stones that threaten to cut your feet to ribbons, though you can hardly feel that for the cold – and anyway, what does it matter now? The water will soon come to your waist – chest – chin – into your mouth and nose, until your ears are filled with a great, ceaseless roaring. And then – nothing.

  Will there be last minute regrets, causing you to panic and fight helplessly, too late, against what you have chosen to do?

  It’s not too late to turn back, even now.

  But that would defeat the object, go against all you decided to do, years ago, if matters reached this point. Yes, there will certainly be a struggle. A few violent moments when that primitive urge to hold on to life causes you to fight, despite yourself. Courage! The moments will pass. Soon, soon, it will be over. Everything. Over. Done with. All that.

  And then there will be nothing left except this useless old body that will sink into the stinking mud at the bottom, where it rightly belongs, along with the frogs and toads or whatever other pondlife lives here. Where it ought to be left to rot and disintegrate, though you know that will not happen. You’ve read about people who drown. Fish will nibble at your flesh and your eyes, the skin on your hands will wrinkle like that of the washerwoman who used to come once a week to boil linen in the copper and scrub shirt-collars and cuffs against the rubbing board in the steaming tubs. Then gases will fill your body and bring it to the surface, where it will float quietly on the still water, bloated and obscene, until, sooner or later, some unfortunate soul finds it.

  But you will at last be absolved of guilt. Maybe I shall at last be forgiven.

  Linus Grigsby was not a happy man. He sat in the pub, alone, a pile of unread notes in front of him, staring down into his beer, leaving his pork pie lunch as yet untouched, and contemplated choices he wished he didn’t have to make, which of several jobs was to be given priority: certain developments that morning concerning a warehouse job in Wapping and a consignment of stolen sugar, or the publican who’d been attacked and robbed late last night, on his way to deposit his day’s takings in a safe-deposit. Interesting rumours had also reached Grigsby that one of his old enemies had recently extended his criminal activities by entering the West End pornography business. They were all cases more demanding of his immediate attention – not to say more to his inclination – than the Jardine affair. Yet he was uneasy with leaving that one, unsatisfactory as it continued to be, simmering indefinitely on the back burner. For one thing, the Press had got their teeth into it, and scenting scandal, however old, and there not being much in the way of juicy news at the moment, they were prepared to prod it back into life. Society stories – even minor society – were always newsworthy, and this one had the added fillip of gruesome overtones by way of the corpse being mummified, and a hint of salacious sex – for had not Beatrice Jardine, exemplar of white, upper class xenophobia, been assumed to have run away with an Egyptian? The Press were not about to let go this titbit, in fact they were all set to have a field day. And although the investigation was yet in its infancy, several letters to The Times had already been brought to Grigsby’s attention, pertinently demanding whether justice was not being allowed to lapse, hinting that questions should be asked in high places and alerting the powers that be to the dangers of letting the matter slide into oblivion.

  But Grigsby had a nasty feeling that part of the problem lay within himself. However he might hate unfinished business, and however much he might privately think the solution was clear as day, the result of the old eternal triangle, he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that something, somewhere was escaping him. He’d had a clear picture in his own mind from the beginning of what had happened on the night of June 21st 1910: t
o wit, Amory Jardine surprising his wife in flagrante delicto with her lover, and killing, first her, then, later, himself. Nothing so far had given him cause to think otherwise – except for the question of why Jardine hadn’t killed the lover also while he was at it. But there it was, a niggle that remained at the back of his mind.

  He sighed and turned to the notes. It was all there, in his own confident, sprawling handwriting and in Fairchild’s neatly typed pages, all of it pointing to the fact that the clue to the murder lay in the nature of the victim herself. On the surface she’d led an apparently blameless life – though not when you came down to it. For one thing – why had everyone been so willing to believe, when she had disappeared, that she had bolted with the Egyptian? It came back, every time, to Valery Akhmet Iskander. Grigsby groaned at the thought of what interviewing him at second hand, through the Cairo police, would entail, because of course he couldn’t envisage his superintendent giving sanction to any suggestion that Grigsby should go out there himself. Knowing only too well, from his service days in Italy and various other war zones, the wild and woolly excitability that in his opinion stood for competence in most foreign police forces, Grigsby couldn’t imagine faring any better with the Egyptian authorities. He thought, though, that he might have to brace himself for doing battle with them in the end. There was no getting away from the fact that Iskander had left Charnley in suspiciously hasty circumstances and, Grigsby asked himself, what had the fellow been doing, staying there in the first place? The Jardines had been nothing if not conventional in their choice of friends and associates and no satisfactory explanation for such an unusual house guest had yet been put forward.

  But as to murdering his hostess … For one thing, the padre, Sacheverell, had seen her in a compromising situation on the balcony of her room with Wycombe at about twelve-thirty, near as dammit, if he was to be believed.

  Myles Randolph, Lord Wycombe. He was the wild card, able to be given any value the holder pleases. The family friend, the valued uncle. Grigsby had known other ‘uncles’ like that. Beatrice Jardine’s daughter, Vita, however, had sworn that she and her young man had heard sounds coming from the unoccupied room where the corpse had eventually been found only half an hour later than Sacheverell had seen the lovers together on her balcony. Moreover, Beatrice had been alive at about 2 a.m. when Vita had heard her maid, Hallam, saying goodnight to her. This established parameters for the time of death, but didn’t necessarily, in Grigsby’s book, exonerate Wycombe. There was nothing to prevent him having gone back after that and killing her.

  He pushed the file away impatiently. If Wycombe hadn’t killed her, then who else – apart from the husband, still odds-on favourite with Grigsby – was left as a suspect? Out of the people staying there that night were only realistically left Rose Jessamy and Kit Sacheverell himself, and despite the reservations he’d voiced to Tom Verrier, he didn’t lay much on the theory of that young woman as murderess.

  The interview with Sacheverell, the padre, Father Christopher as he apparently wished to be known, had got them nowhere, apart from establishing that he’d slept at Charnley that night and for some reason left the next morning by the earliest possible train, walking several miles across country to catch a main line train not subject to the vagaries of Sunday timetables as was the branch line that served Charnley. It was not inconceivable. A few miles would have been nothing to him. He had, after all, been a young and presumably fit man. But Grigsby had sensed something behind that abrupt departure that wasn’t being revealed. As a suspect, he’d had means and opportunity, but as for motive? He’d been a great favourite of Beatrice Jardine’s, apparently. She had been a surrogate mother to him. As likely to suspect the dead son, Marcus. Yet Grigsby had been left wondering.

  Were they, after all, left with Rose Jessamy as a suspect? Means and opportunity, yes, but again no motive. Those missing garnets still bothered Grigsby, but he couldn’t fairly see her strangling Beatrice for them – and she had, in fact, every reason to wish to keep her employer alive. She had the best means and opportunity of disposing of the body, but anyone reasonably handy and familiar with her techniques could have hit upon that hiding place.

  Which brought another niggle: as Harriet Jardine had pointed out, her mother was no light weight, and unless she’d been murdered in situ, it would have needed at least two people to manhandle her body into the west wing.

  With a sigh, Grigsby took another swig of beer. He pulled his plate towards him, bit succulently into his pork pie and chewed, staring down at the foam sliding down the sides of his pint glass. He speared a pickled onion and popped it in to join the pie. Half a mo’, he thought all at once, galvanised, his masticating halted – how about this, how about the maid, saying goodnight to her mistress –

  The pub door burst open and Fairchild hurried in, a look of controlled excitement on his patrician features. Grigsby swallowed the onion, whole. “What the hell?”

  “Wait for it, Guv. They’ve found another body at Charnley.”

  He didn’t get the reaction he expected. “Not another mummy?” Grigsby asked flatly, when he could.

  “No, this time it’s a floater. In the lake.”

  “She left a letter, Mrs Kaplan,” said Fairchild later. “With her handbag and shoes, by the edge of the lake. The missing garnets were in the bag, too.”

  “Oh, those garnets! I found them in her — I found her gloating over them years and years ago. It was how I got her to stay with me all that time. She called it blackmail, but I preferred to think of it as self-preservation.” The old woman suddenly looked a hundred. “Who’s going to look after me now?”

  “Perhaps you’d like to see the letter.”

  “I don’t know that I would.” But all the same, she took it in trembling fingers and began to read.

  ‘The Bible tells us that God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

  ‘This was one of the first things I learned from my religion. That you must take responsibility for your own actions in life. So I make no claim for anyone’s sympathy over what happened to Mrs Beatrice Jardine, except to say that what I did was for the master, Mr Amory Jardine. He had never given me anything much more than a kindly glance, I was simply his wife’s maid, always there, but he was a good man and I couldn’t stand by any longer and see him deceived. Also, I never forgot how he’d helped Fred after that spot of bother he’d been in. Fred was a handful and no mistake, but I was very fond of him. He’d always stuck up for me against my stepfather, who was a sight too free with his fists when he’d had a drop, and he wouldn’t allow his brothers to make me into the family drudge.

  ‘Beatrice was four years older than me, but we played together when we were children. Until Miss grew up and went away and became a society lady, I used to go up to the Big House when I was sent for – though only because I was told to go, not because I wanted to. They said she was lonely – but how could I believe that, living in that beautiful house with a nanny and a governess and dozens of servants, whatever she wanted to eat and cupboards full of toys and nice clothes to wear? She was so pretty, too, with golden ringlets and a pink and white complexion. Whereas I – well, I was only eight years old when it all began, and I still believed in magic, that one day I might be transformed from an ugly duckling into a fairy princess. But being with Miss made me aware that I never would be. I soon learned to read in people’s faces what they thought when they saw us together – and I knew by the way she smiled that she saw it, too, and liked it. But even if the positions had been reversed, if she’d been the plain one and me the beauty, she would still have had the advantage over me, with her money and her upbringing. And her nature, that took it all for granted.

  ‘I never wanted to be a lady’s maid, not to anyone, least of all to Miss. My spirit was too independent for that – even my stepfather couldn’t beat it out of me — but when she offered me the position when she became Mrs Jardine I knew I’d be a fool not to accept. My mother had died, and
the only prospect I could see ahead of me was a lifetime of skivvying for that household of great, hulking, working men – Fred excepted. No one would ever marry me. I’d inherited most of the ugliness of the family (and all its sourness, according to my stepfather). Going into service was the only way I could see out of a life I hated. The difficulty would be in controlling the rebelliousness Nature had endowed me with. But I vowed, with God’s help, I would learn.

  ‘I knew how lucky I was to have the chance. Pampered and lapped in luxury as Madam was, never lifting a finger to help herself, she was no worse than any other ladies of her class and upbringing, I suppose, most of them having less regard for servants than if they were the carpets they trod on. But the position of lady’s maid was easy, compared to that of other servants in the house. One of absolute luxury after what I’d been used to. Washing delicate silk and lace underclothes and blouses by hand, ironing them while they were still damp to bring them back to perfection, was about the most strenuous task I’d be asked to do. There was a lot of sewing, small repairs and alterations and so on. I was even allowed to make some of her simpler clothes, since my mother, who’d been a sewing woman up at the Hall, had taught me from an early age to be handy with a needle. There were plenty of perks, too, especially in the way of cast-offs. Not that I would ever make a fool of myself trying to wear any of Madam’s clothes, should she ever see fit to give any to me (which in fact she never did) but she was generous enough in tossing over to me presents she’d been given that hadn’t pleased her. And half-read books, stockings which only needed a darn or two, silk underclothes that I could make over, an umbrella or a leather handbag she’d grown tired of. When she went up to Mount Street in London, I went with her of course, and on visits to other country houses, where I thought I might meet other women in similar positions, though I never managed to make friends with any. We visited interesting places, here and abroad – the best of which was Egypt, where it all began. That was where I maided for Mrs Kaplan, Lady Glendinning as she was then.