‘Is it her handkerchief?’
‘Of course it isn’t. Moon has never been to the Villa Byzantine. She has no idea where the Villa Byzantine is!’
‘You can’t be certain of that.’
‘It’s just one of those idiotic coincidences that the initials on the blood-drenched handkerchief should be the same as Moon’s. You must see that. I can’t say I like Moon, but I believe in being fair. I’ve never seen Moon use a handkerchief, Payne. She hates handkerchiefs.’
Payne gave a little smile. ‘She thinks handkerchiefs are “uncool”?’
‘She thinks handkerchiefs are “dumb”. She only uses tissues.’ Morland spoke impatiently. ‘She likes things rough. You saw her. Can you imagine her holding a silk handkerchief to her nose?’
‘Did you actually see the handkerchief, Morland?’
‘I did. The inspector showed it to me. It’s their Exhibit A. It’s made of silk. Very fine silk. Gossamer thin. Impossibly “ladylike”. Moon would never use a hankie like that. Not her style, Payne.’
‘Was there any blood on her clothes when the police arrested her?’
‘No. Of course the police took her clothes away. They propose to run tests.’
‘She wasn’t wearing the blood-bespattered shinel?’
‘As it happens, she wasn’t.’
‘She may have got rid of her bloodied clothes and then bought new ones,’ Payne said thoughtfully.
‘They were the same clothes I bought her last week. Bomber jacket, jeans, sports top, trainers. She had been pestering her mother, saying all her clothes were rubbish. She said she needed new clothes. Poor Stella asked me if I would take Moon shopping, which I did. I took her to Oxford Street. Shop called Top Girl, some such name.’
‘Back to this morning – did you actually see Stella leave your flat?’
‘No. I saw her at breakfast, briefly, then had to rush off. Had an important board meeting to attend. Stella seemed all right. A bit quiet, perhaps. She said she had a headache. She was never at her best in the morning, but then who is? I never saw Moon.’
‘How did Moon spend her morning? Did she say?’
‘She said she left soon after her mother. At about eleven. She said she got on the tube and went to Tottenham Court Road. She wanted to look at the CDs at Virgin Megastores. Something like that.’
‘She might have followed her mother instead… All the way to the Villa Byzantine…’
‘If she’d wanted to kill her mother, she’d have done it in a different way. That’s what she said. Not with a samurai sword and most certainly not at the Villa Byzantine. She said she wasn’t a fool. Nor was she a psycho.’
‘I never thought she was a fool,’ Payne said.
There was a pause. Morland glanced at his watch. ‘Well, at least I’ll know I’ve done my best. Thank you very much for listening to me, Payne. Awfully decent of you.’
‘Try to get some sleep tonight.’
‘Perhaps – perhaps you could look into the matter? If that’s the right way of putting it?’ Morland rose to his feet. ‘You said you had an aunt in St John’s Wood, didn’t you? Sorry. That’s neither here nor there.’
‘I might look into it,’ said Payne cautiously, ‘though I can’t promise anything.’
‘I must admit I don’t have much faith in the Law. Nothing but a bunch of bureaucrats. Somebody did behead Stella and it wasn’t Moon,’ Morland said firmly. ‘I do hope you have a crack at finding the true culprit.’
After Morland had gone, Major Payne produced his pipe.
The true culprit, eh? He had to admit he enjoyed being flummoxed by intricate riddles, though perhaps this one wouldn’t prove so terribly intricate.
The idea of a teenage girl committing matricide, while indubitably shocking, was not unique. Teenagers delighted in delinquent demeanour. Teenagers enjoyed perpetrating outrages. They had their ears pierced and studs inserted into their tongues. They made no attempt to control their emotions. They tended to bear grudges. They ‘experimented’ with things, namely sex and drugs. They listened to the most appalling music imaginable – hardly music. Teenagers could be violent and indeed often were violent. He remembered the sense of danger he’d had the moment he’d clapped eyes on Stella’s daughter…
Well, Stella’s daughter seemed indicated – she was the most obvious suspect – but there were questions that needed answering.
Not so long ago Payne had bumped into the Prime Minister at a private gathering in Notting Hill and been told to expect an OBE – for elevating the powers of rational thinking to the point where they became positively shamanistic. The PM had spoken off the cuff and he hadn’t been entirely serious of course. (He and Payne had gone to the same school and, as it happened, they could both trace their ancestry back to William IV, so the waggishness had most certainly not been de trop.) Payne knew that if he did get an OBE, it would be principally in recognition of his intelligence work in Afghanistan in the eighties.
Reaching out for the tobacco jar, Payne started filling his pipe. Questions, yes. How did Stella enter the Villa Byzantine? Had the front door been left unlocked, perhaps? Had she been instructed to go in and wait? Could Tancred Vane have set a trap for her? Was the monogrammed blood-soaked handkerchief so conveniently left on the scene of the crime a bona fide clue or a plant? As a device – if this had been a detective story – it would have been considered awfully passe.
He struck a match and held it to his pipe. A samurai sword was the kind of weapon Stella’s daughter would have chosen. The girl was loopy. She seemed to identify with some highly dangerous comic strip character, who went about under the sobriquet of Wild Thing. Moon liked beheadings, she had said so herself. She clearly despised her mother. At Melisande’s party she had done her best to make Stella look a fool… Though, of course, so had Melisande…
What if the handkerchief was part of somebody’s plan? Perhaps the intention was to incriminate Moon and use her as a scapegoat? Well, in that case, Payne reflected, we are looking for somebody with no particular knowledge or understanding of young people. Someone elderly and hopelessly old-fashioned? The kind of person who didn’t see that a rough teenage girl would be unlikely to have an elegant silk handkerchief in her possession. A woman rather than a man – yes – a woman – an unmarried woman of a certain age? An elderly spinster…
That was an ingenious theory, actually. The culprit was an unmarried elderly lady who was behind the times and had no idea at all what Moon was like, only knew her initials. One could buy initialled handkerchiefs – or have them specially made. Had the murder of Stella Markoff been carefully premeditated, then?
But did such an unmarried elderly lady exist?
It couldn’t be the mysterious Miss Hope – could it?
Payne smiled at the idea.
8
Hide My Eyes
It was the following day.
Tancred Vane sat at the desk in his study, writing.
When a monarchy is gone, there is a sudden emptiness, an eerie silence – as the crowned head rests on the sandy ground of the executioner’s pit – or on a Cote d’Azur beach.
The Cote d’Azur had at one time been the favoured exile destination of deposed kings. Well, he reflected, modern readers seemed to like it when royalty were treated with irreverent flippancy.
His phone rang.
‘Tancred?’
‘Oh, Miss Hope – Catherine! At last! Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick!’
‘Have you? My dear boy!’
‘Why didn’t you come yesterday? What happened?’
‘I am so sorry. Something cropped up. I got a phone call from my niece – no, you don’t want to know! Too tedious for words!’
‘I tried phoning you – several times!’
‘Didn’t charge the damned object – mislaid the – what do you call that thing? The charger. Goodness. Mobile phones indeed. Whatever next? I am afraid I am hopelessly old-fashioned. I am quite the wrong age for that sort of nonsense. Lamentably behind the times! So sorry. The truth of the matter is I have been extremely preoccupied.’