Beatrice had kept her hand at her throat. She was tugging at her pearls as though they were choking her. And then it suddenly came to Antonia, what it was she had seen at Millbrook that was of importance.
Of course. It was the Polaroid photograph of Ingrid dressed up as Beatrice. The photograph held the clue.
That ridiculous necklace with the Taj Mahals – Ingrid was wearing it in the photo – the photo had been taken on the morning of the 26th – two days ago. That was when Ingrid had disappeared. Well, Ingrid hadn’t been found yet – but when Antonia and Hugh arrived at Millbrook House earlier in the afternoon, the necklace – the unique Taj Mahal necklace – had been adorning Bee’s neck…
That, Antonia reflected, could mean only one thing.
‘I haven’t the foggiest what happened. I must have fallen asleep. I could hear the clacking of his rosary beads. It was a hypnotic kind of sound. Then – nothing. Total oblivion,’ Ralph Renshawe told Inspector Hopper. His head lay on the pillow and he spoke in a halting, breathless voice, quite different from the voice in which he had spoken to Beatrice Ardleigh earlier on.
‘Please try to remember. It is extremely important.’
‘I had a rather frightening sort of dream. A nightmare, you may say. I often have nightmares. Only moments ago I imagined I heard the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe. I am a very ill man.’ Renshawe’s eyes were half-closed, but he was watching his interlocutor covertly. ‘When I woke up, I saw I was covered in blood. I smelled it first. A metal-lic kind of smell, slightly fishy. At first I thought I was still dreaming – that it was part of the nightmare, but then I touched it and realized the blood was real.’
‘And Father Lillie-Lysander?’
‘Gone. Vanished. He wasn’t in the room any longer. His rosary was on my bedside table.’
Inspector Hopper leant forward. ‘Father Lillie-Lysander’s car was found in your garage, Mr Renshawe. We believe he died in this room. Your sheets were covered in his blood. We found bloodstains on the terrace outside and on the garden path. Father Lillie-Lysander’s body was dragged out of here through the french windows, down the terrace steps, across the garden and pushed into the well.’
The old man cackled. ‘You don’t think it was me who did the dragging? I mean – look at me.’
‘I never for a moment thought it was you. Somebody else dragged him out.’ Inspector Hopper took out the card Major Payne had given him. ‘Robin Renshawe. That’s your nephew, isn’t it? Was it your nephew who helped you?’
‘Robin wouldn’t try to help me. Quite the reverse.’ Ralph Renshawe shut his eyes. ‘You keep getting things wrong. Please, go away.’
‘Was it your nurse? The woman who left your employ so hurriedly – Nurse Wilkes?’ No answer came. ‘Who helped you?’ Hopper persisted. ‘Whoever it was, you must have seen him.’
There was a pause. Ralph Renshawe’s eyes remained shut but he started speaking deliriously. ‘Who helped me? You want to know who helped me? I do know who helped me. Oh yes. It’s all coming back to me. I’d never seen my saviour before, but you see, I recognized my saviour at once.’
The inspector leant forward, pen poised over notebook. ‘Who was it? Would you describe him, sir?’
‘Him? Oh no, it wasn’t a man.’
‘A woman? Who was she?’
‘What a literal mind you have.’ Ralph Renshawe sighed. ‘They have no gender.’
Hopper blinked. ‘No -?’
‘I thought you knew. Don’t you read your Bible?’
‘What’s the Bible got to do with it?’ Hopper frowned. Was Ralph Renshawe really off his rocker or was he playing games with him?
‘It’s all in the Bible,’ Ralph Renshawe said. ‘You want to know who my saviour was? It was an angel, inspector -’ ‘An angel!’
Ralph Renshawe drew back a little, a pained expression on his face. ‘Be kind enough to moderate your voice, inspector. Yes, an angel – but not a common or garden one. Oh no. It was my guardian angel. My guardian angel came to me in my hour of need.’
‘What need?’
‘Sorry – didn’t I say? Do forgive me. I keep falling prey to fugues and fancies. The monstrous monsignor attempted to murder me.’
‘Father Lillie-Lysander tried to kill you?’
‘Is that a better way of saying it?’ Ralph Renshawe frowned in a puzzled manner. ‘Well, I prayed for help and my prayer was answered. I was helped in my hour of need, inspector, exactly as the Bible promises. You want me to describe my guardian angel? Smooth-faced, seemingly delicate but in fact exceptionally strong, with golden hair and golden crown and golden wings, bran-dishing a sword, exuding goodness and mercy, but also breathing fire -’
26
Strong Poison
The discovery of Father Lillie-Lysander’s body in the grounds of Ospreys was announced later that evening on the ten o’clock news. He had been murdered – stabbed to death. The camera lingered on the theatrically Gothic pile with its absurd gables and turrets, then swept across the wildly overgrown garden, parts of which looked distinctly un-English due to the late Moira Montano’s now dilapidated pink conservatory, ragged palms, fantastical grotto benches and clumps of bamboo; it all brought to mind a decayed Mediterranean film set.
The camera came to rest on a rook perched on the edge of the seventeenth-century wishing well. The rook – rather a large specimen – gazed straight at the camera, flapped its wings and crowed. There was no perceptible change in the newscaster’s voice when he said that the priest’s body had been at the bottom of the well. It had been a particularly brutal attack. At the time of discovery, the body had been in the early stages of decomposition. The perpetrator was unknown and the motive for the crime remained unclear. The police were conducting an investigation and they were anxious to speak to Miss Ingrid Delmar.
‘Good lord, that’s not Ospreys, is it?’ Sir Marcus Laud said, peering at the TV screen.
‘It is Ospreys,’ Lady Laud said.
She was thirty years younger than her husband and his fourth wife. She had reappeared soon after he had got rid of Ospreys and since then they had been leading a life of unadulterated bliss in South Kensington. Sitting on the floor beside his chair, resting her auburn head against his knee, the fourth Lady Laud – who had read English at Oxford and was something of an expert on Kipling – sighed and once more she told the story of what had made her run away that day.
She had been aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of her brain. She had then been plunged into overwhelming gloom. Her amazed soul, she said, dropped gulf by gulf into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated. Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, until she found herself in a state of absolute panic. She hadn’t seen any ghosts or heard any voices – nothing like that, but, nevertheless, she had felt the overpowering urge to be as far away from Ospreys as possible. And again Sir Marcus – who had never read Kipling’s story ‘The House Surgeon’ – said comfortably that he wasn’t the least bit surprised. It was that sort of place.
(The truth was of course quite different and much more prosaic, and it had something to do with an unexpected phone call from a past lover who had suggested that they have one last month of passion in the Caribbean.)
The conversation then turned to Moira Montano.
‘In one of her films she comes out of a lake on a freezing cold night and hovers above the surface,’ Sir Marcus said. ‘There’s a chap in a boat and for some reason he’s got stuck in the middle of the lake. She is beautiful as a dream. Golden hair, enormous green eyes, a wide red mouth, but when she smiles at the chap, her teeth show white and pointed, sharp as needles – as many teeth as a strange fish.’
In Knightsbridge, reclining so far back in his chair that he was horizontal in front of his TV set, his arms crossed behind his head, Robin Renshawe too watched the broad-cast. A glass and a whisky bottle stood on the table before him. He had started by mixing himself whisky sours with grenadine, fresh lime and crushed ice, but had ended up drinking it neat. The ice cubes in the bucket had all melted. He was rather drunk; he was on the point of reaching that highly desirable state in which relaxation and irresponsibility mingle.