Выбрать главу

"But he probably couldn't prove that, not so long afterwards, and you're making too many assumptions," said Charlie slowly. " 'I'm more sinned against than sinning,' " he echoed. "That's a line from King Lear."

"So?"

"King Lear went mad and took to wandering in the fields near Dover with a crown of weeds on his head because his daughters had deprived him of his kingdom and his authority."

Cooper groaned. "I thought it was Ophelia who had the crown of weeds."

"Hers were coronet weeds," corrected Jones with idle pedantry. "It was Lear who wore the crown." He thought of the epitaph on the Fontwell tombstone. "By God, Tommy, there's a lovely symmetry about this case. Jack Blakeney's been using a Stanley knife to clean inscriptions in Fontwell."

Cooper scowled at him. "How many pints have you had?"

Charlie leaned forward again, his keen eyes scouring Cooper's face. "I studied King Lear at school. It's a hell of a play. All about the nature of love, the abuse of power, and the ultimate frailties of the human spirit."

"Just like Hamlet then," said Cooper sourly. "Othello, too, if it comes to that."

"Of course. They were all tragedies with death the inevitable consequence. King Lear's mistake was to misinterpret the nature of love. He gave more weight to words than to deeds and partitioned his kingdom between two of his daughters, Goneril and Regan, whom he believed loved him but who, in reality, despised him. He was a tired old man who wanted to relinquish the burdens of state and live the rest of his life in peace and tranquility. But he was also extremely arrogant and contemptuous of anyone's opinions but his own. His rash assumption that he knew what love was sowed the seeds of his family's destruction." He grinned. "Not bad, eh? Damn nearly verbatim from an essay I wrote in the sixth form. And I loathed the flaming play at the time. It's taken me thirty years to see its merits."

"I came up with King Lear a few days ago," remarked Cooper, "but I still don't see a connection. If she'd divided her estate between Mrs. Lascelles and Miss Lascelles there'd have been a parallel then."

"You're missing the point, Tommy. King Lear was the most tragic of all Shakespeare's plays and Mrs. Gillespie knew her Shakespeare. Dammit, man, she thought everything he wrote was gospel. There was a third child, don't forget, who was turned off without a penny." He surged to his feet. "I want Jack Blakeney in the nick in half an hour. Be a good fellow and bring him in. Tell him your boss wants to talk to him about Mrs. Gillespie's adopted son."

What neither of them knew was that Jack Blakeney had been arrested at Mill House, half an hour previously, following the Orloffs' 999 call and Joanna Lascelles's hysterical assertions that he had not only tried to kill her but had admitted killing her mother.

The Inspector learnt of it as soon as he arrived back from lunch. Cooper was informed by radio and ordered to return post haste. He took time out, however, to sit for five minutes in depressed disillusion in a deserted country lane. His hands were shaking too much to drive with any competence, and he knew, with the awful certainty of defeat, that his time was over. He had lost whatever it was that had made him a good policeman. Oh, he had always known what his superiors said about him, but he had also known they were wrong. His forte had been his ability to make accurate judgements about the people he dealt with, and whatever anyone said to the contrary, he was usually right. But he had never allowed his sympathies for an offender and an offender's family to stand in the way of an arrest. Nor had he seen any validity in allowing police work to dehumanize him or destroy the tolerance that he, privately, believed was the one thing that set man above the animals.

With a heavy heart, he fired the engine and set off back to Learmouth. He had misjudged both the Blakeneys. Worse, he simply couldn't begin to follow Charlie Jones's flights of fancy over King Lear or comprehend the awful symmetry behind inscriptions and Stanley knives. Hadn't Mr. Spede told him that the Stanley knife on the bathroom floor was the one from the kitchen drawer? The crown he thought he understood. Whoever had decked out Mrs. Gillespie in nettles had seen the symbolic connection between her and King Lear. How then had Ophelia come to lead them up the garden path? Coronet weeds, he recalled, and Dr. Blakeney's reference to them in the bathroom.

An intense sadness squeezed about his heart. Poor Tommy Cooper. He was, after all, just an absurd and rather dirty old man, entertaining fantasies about a woman who was young enough to be his daughter.

An hour later, Inspector Jones pulled out the chair opposite Jack and sat down, switching on the tape recorder and registering date, time and who was present. He rubbed his hands in anticipation of a challenge. "Well, well, Mr. Blakeney, I've been looking forward to this." He beamed across at Cooper who was sitting with his back to the wall, staring at the floor. "The Sergeant's whetted my appetite with what he's told me about you, not to mention the reports of your contretemps with the police in Bournemouth and this latest little fracas at Cedar House."

Jack linked his hands behind his head and smiled wolfishly. "Then I hope you won't be disappointed, Inspector."

"I'm sure I won't." He steepled his fingers on the table in front of him. "We'll leave Mrs. Lascelles and the Bournemouth incident to one side for the moment because I'm more interested in your relationship with Mrs. Gillespie." He looked very pleased with himself. "I've deciphered the floral crown that she was wearing in her bath. Not Ophelia at all, but King Lear. I've just been looking it up. Act IV, Scene IV where Cordelia describes him as 'Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flow'rs.' And then Scene VI, a stage direction. 'Enter Lear, fantastically dressed with weeds.' Am I right, Mr. Blakeney?"

"It did occur to me that Ophelia was a very unlikely interpretation. I guessed Lear when Sarah described the scene to me."

"And Lear certainly makes more sense."

Jack cocked his irritating eyebrow. "Does it?"

"Oh, yes." He rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation. "It goes something like this, I think. Lear had two vile daughters, Goneril and Regan, and one loving daughter, Cordelia. Cordelia he banished because she refused to flatter him with hollow words; Goneril and Regan he rewarded because they were deceitful enough to tell lies in order to get their share of his wealth. For Goneril and Regan, read Joanna and Ruth Lascelles. For Cordelia, read the son Mrs. Gillespie put up for adoption, i.e. the one she banished who never received a penny from her." He held Jack's gaze. "Now, in the play, Cordelia comes back to rescue her father from the brutality her sisters are inflicting upon him, and I think it happened in real life, too, though purely figuratively speaking of course. Neither Joanna nor Ruth were brutal to Mrs. Gillespie, merely desperately disappointing." He tapped his forefingers together. "Cordelia, the adopted son whom Mathilda had long since given up on, reappears miraculously to remind her that love does still exist for her, that she is not as embittered as she thought she was and that, ultimately, she has produced at least one person who has qualities she could be proud of. How am I doing, Mr. Blakeney?"

"Imaginatively."

Charlie gave a low laugh. "The only question is, who is Cordelia?"

Jack didn't answer.

"And did he come looking for his mother or was it pure chance that brought him here? Who recognized whom, I wonder?"