They had taken her up to the bedroom and asked her to look round carefully but without touching anything, and say whether the room was as she would expect to find it, whether there was anything which struck her as unusual. She had shaken her head. Before leaving she had stood for a moment gazing over the chaise longue, the stripped and empty bed with a look which Buckley couldn't fathom. Sadness? Speculation? Resignation? The right word eluded him. Her eyes were open but he thought he saw her lips moving. For a moment he had the extraordinary idea that she might be praying.
Back in the business room he had asked:
'You were happy working for Miss Lisle? You liked each other?'
And that was as tactful a way as he knew of asking whether she had hated her employer enough to bash in her skull. She had replied quietly:
'We are used to each other. My mother was her nurse. She asked me to look after her.'
'And you can't think of a reason why anyone should want to kill her. All one big happy family, were they?'
The attempt at Grogan-like sarcasm had been unsuccessful. She had met it with a brand of her own.
'There's never a good reason for people to kill each other, even in happy families.'
He had had little more success with Mrs Munter. She, too, had been a polite but unrewarding witness, saying as little as possible, resisting all his blandishments to entice her into volubility or indiscretion. Ambrose Gorringe had concealed his secrets, if any, with a spate of apparently artless conjecture. Miss Tolgarth and Mrs Munter had concealed theirs with a silence and obstinacy which just avoided being overtly uncooperative. Buckley thought that Grogan could hardly have selected two more difficult witnesses for him to practise interrogation on. Perhaps that had been the idea. The impression they apparently wanted to convey was that murder, like most of the world's violence, was a male concern from which, as women, they were only too happy to be excluded. From time to time he had found himself staring at them with what he was uncomfortably aware must have been obvious frustration. But human beings weren't like school geometry problems. If you stared at them long enough, they didn't suddenly make sense. He said:
'Miss Tolgarth admits that she didn't leave Miss Lisle until after Sir George had gone and that accords with his evidence. Miss Gray was in her own room so nobody saw her leave. She could have returned to the bathroom, pretended to busy herself with preparations for the bath, come back into the bedroom when Gray had left, and killed her mistress then.'
'The timing would be very tight. Mrs Munter saw her downstairs in the pantry at one twenty.'
'So she says. I got the feeling, sir, that those two are standing together. I got precious little out of either of them, Rose Tolgarth in particular.'
'Except one highly interesting lie. Unless, of course, the lady is less sharp-eyed than I give her credit for.' 'Sir?'
'In the bedroom, Sergeant. Think. You asked her if everything looked as she would expect to find it. Her answer was a nod. But visualize that dressing-table. What among all that female clutter was missing, something which we would have expected to see, given the things which, in fact, we did see?'
But the launch bringing Roper and Badgett had actually touched the quay before Buckley was able to work out the answer to the conundrum.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
And now, at last, the dreadful day was over. Soon after ten o'clock struck, one by one and with brief 'goodnights', they had crept silently to their beds. The casual night-time commonplaces had become unsayable – 'I'm terribly tired. It's been a long day. Sleep well. See you all in the morning,' – all bore a weight of innuendo, tactlessness or bad taste. Two women police officers had moved Cordelia's things from the De Morgan room, a touch of delicacy which would have amused her had she been capable of being amused. The new bedroom was on the same gallery floor but on the other side of Simon and overlooking the rose garden and the pool. As she turned the key in the lock and breathed the stuffy, scented air Cordelia thought that it might not often be used. It was small, dim and cluttered and looked as if Ambrose had furnished it strictly in period for the edification of his summer visitors. The lightness and delicacy which he had achieved in so much of the castle was absent. Every square inch of the walls was covered with pictures and ornaments and the ornate furniture, papier-maché lined with mahogany, seemed to press in on her. dark and threatening. The room felt musty but when she opened wide the window the sound of the sea burst in, no longer soporific and comforting but a steady menacing roar. She lay wondering whether she could summon up the energy to get out of bed and half close the window. But that was her last conscious thought before weariness took over and she felt herself drifting unresistingly down the long stream of tiredness into sleep.
PART FIVE. Terror By Moonlight
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
At nine fifteen Cordelia went into the business room to ring Miss Maudsley, wondering as she lifted the receiver whether the police would be listening in. But monitoring private telephone calls, even from the scene of a murder, counted as phone tapping and for that the consent of the Home Secretary was surely necessary. It was strange how little she.knew about a real police investigation despite Bernie's tutelage. It had already struck her that their legal powers were a great deal less extensive than a reading of detective fiction might suggest. On the other hand, their physical presence was far more frightening and oppressive than she would have believed possible. It was like having mice in the house. They might for a time be both silent and invisible but, once known to be there, it was impossible to ignore their secret and polluting presence. Even here in the business room the force of Inspector Grogan's rebarbative personality still lingered, although all trace of his brief occupation had been cleared away. It seemed to her that the police had left the room tidier than they had found it, and this in itself was sinister. As she dialled the London number it was difficult to believe that the call would go unrecorded.
It was a nuisance that Miss Maudsley in her cheap bed-sitting-room had no private telephone. The single instrument was in the darkest and most inaccessible corner of the hall at Mancroft Mansions and Cordelia knew that she might have to wait for minutes until one of the other residents, driven mad by its insistent ring, came out to silence it, and that she would then be lucky if he understood English and luckier still if he were willing to trudge up four flights to call Miss Maudsley. But this morning her call was answered almost immediately. Miss Maudsley confided that she had bought her usual Sunday paper on the way home from eight o'clock Mass and had been crouching on the bottom step of the stairs wondering whether to ring the castle or to wait for Cordelia's call. She was almost incoherent with anxiety and distress and the brevity of the press report hadn't helped. Cordelia thought how chagrined Clarissa would be to learn that her fame, even after a violent death, didn't justify top billing on a day when a spectacular parliamentary scandal, the death of a pop star from a drug overdose and a particularly brutal terrorist attack in Northern Italy had presented the editor with a surplus of candidates for the front page. Miss Maudsley, her voice breaking, said:
'It says that she was… well… battered to death. I can't believe it. And it's so horrible for you. Her husband, too, of course. That poor woman. But naturally one thinks of the living. I suppose it was some kind of intruder. The paper does say that her jewellery is missing. I do hope that the police won't get any wrong ideas.'
And that, thought Cordelia, was as tactful a way as any of saying that she hoped that Cordelia herself wasn't under suspicion.