Murder at Maddingley Grange, page 22
At least steps had been taken to inform the proper authorities. Martin had noticed the van going down the drive while he was searching a clump of bamboo on the far side of the lake. Now, negotiating a giant turtle of mixed parentage (box, yew and golden privet), Martin, consumed with worry as he was, yet found himself able to reflect with a small part of his mind on the extreme peculiarity of his position.
He had never thought himself a fickle person. Off with the old and on with the new was a concept quite alien to his nature. If asked his opinion on such a way of going on he would have described it as tawdry in the extreme. Yet here he was, only twenty-four hours ago engaged to one girl, now, thanks to Rosemary’s apostasy, disengaged and with his thoughts already warmly turning toward another.
Martin’s relationships with the opposite sex had been modest both in number and in the degree of their intensity. He had meandered into one or two rather static relationships that had petered out in an atmosphere of mild goodwill on both sides, and then he had met Rosemary. Like most people, Martin admired or envied in others qualities that were plainly absent in himself. So he was attracted by Rosemary’s forthright bounciness, not seeing how close it was to bossiness, itself a mere scold away from bullying.
But in none of these previous relationships had he felt that sweet protective urge or easy warmth of heart he experienced now when thinking of Laurie. It seemed to Martin hardly possible that he had exchanged no more than a few sentences with the girl, and half of those while under the impression that she was someone else. He attempted to consider these emotions coolly but failed. He felt excited but aware that the excitement had a still calm center. He sat down on a stone, tongue-extending griffin and pondered.
Was this then, this tranquil disturbance and extraordinary tendresse, love? The experience of which peerless poets and lesser lyricists alike had sung? “Some enchanted evening…It is the moon and Juliet is the sun…Unforgettable, that’s what you are…Whoever loved that loved not at first sight…?”
Martin sprang up and walked on, overwhelmed and astonished by this marvelous new perception. That it was true he had no doubt. His heart tightened, his blood fizzed, his stomach swooped and his bones were all bendy. But when had it happened? As they had first spoken when he got off the bus? When she had brought up his tray so imaginatively decorated by that lovely marigold? Or just now when he had longed to offer comfort as she sat, white-faced and wretched, in the sitting room? The time was unimportant. The fact, shining with a sock-in-the-eye, klieg-light brilliance, was all. “I am in love,” murmured Martin and held the realization, like a glowing jewel, in the forefront of his mind as he strolled on.
Strangely enough, now that he had put a name to his condition (so common, so unique), the urgent need to clap eyes on his treasure lessened. It seemed enough for now that he could re-create her in his imagination. Picture her elegant in patterned silk, stunning in lamé, shy and pretty in her old blue frock. Each vision seemed to Martin to approach the very pinnacle of perfection. And, with the unclouded percipience of lovers everywhere, he knew that she was as good and kind and clever as she was beautiful.
She would not make the drearily predictable remark if he told her that he traveled in glass houses that he must be careful not to throw any stones. Or scoff at his ambition to one day design and stock his own conservatories for individual clients right down to the last flower and fern. Or laugh (as Rosemary had) if he confessed that occasionally, when the day had been especially dark, he still took Teddy to bed.
Mooning thus, Martin almost didn’t notice the entrance that led to the kitchen garden. Not wishing to leave any part of the grounds unchecked he went in, closing the gate with great care behind him. Pausing only to reflect that, no doubt due to love’s benign intervention, his headache had entirely disappeared, he started to look round.
Plainly the garden was uninhabited but Martin, his horticulturist’s soul charmed by the neatness of the vegetable beds, could not resist it. The herb wheel he found especially appealing. He admired the greenhouse, very sensibly semi-whitewashed against the heat (the staff here obviously knew their stuff), and with the zealous curiosity of the expert, was driven to have a peep inside.
He realized it was occupied as he went up the path and heard something fall. This realization was compounded by the fact that, as he stooped to enter, someone hit him a terrific blow across the head.
Martin’s last two conscious thoughts as he plummeted into darkness were: “I am being murdered” and “I shall never see her again.”
Both of these perceptions were rapidly confounded. In no time at all he became aware that his name was being urgently spoken. Also that a little light rain was falling on his face. As he struggled to sit up, his headache returned with a vengeance. The rain appeared to come from a watering can held by his beloved girl, as did the anguished name-calling.
Now she put the can aside and fell to her knees, crying:
“Darling, darling, darling. Oh, darling—are you all right? Speak to me, darling.”
Martin, not a whit bored by all this repetition, gave her a woozy smile. “My darling…” he began (who was he to improve upon such dialogue?) “I think I’m all right. Darling.”
“Oh!” Scarlet-faced, Laurie scrambled to her feet, and rather more slowly and hanging on to the shelving, Martin did the same. “You must sit down,” she continued, taking his arm and leading him to a sort of stool which she set upright and onto which he gratefully sank. Then she stood, rather as she had that morning in his room, looking at him with that same strange mixture of ingenuousness, excitement and alarm.
Martin, on the other hand, although in great pain, felt uncomplicatedly happy. He knew himself to be loved. Laurie had lavished endearments upon him and held him in her arms. True, this was only after she had knocked him half senseless with some sort of blunt instrument but no doubt all would be explained in the fullness of time. Lack of doubt must be the order of the day if their courtship were to blossom as Martin was determined that it should. Meanwhile, as she was now looking quite shattered and appeared to be tonguetied to boot, it was up to him to make some soothing remark and help reduce all the emotion that was charging so impetuously about. Something light, down-to-earth but unromantic (there would be plenty of time for all that later). Strictly noninflammatory. Perhaps a joke? (I’ve heard of the greenhouse effect but this is ridiculous.) On second thoughts, better not. Such facetiae might only upset her more. Martin looked around for inspiration and spotted the perfect opener. Safe, innocuous, uncontroversial to the point of boredom.
“I say,” he said. “Those tomatoes could do with pinching out.”
His honeysuckle burst into tears. “I’ve been trying to do them,” she sobbed, “ever since Simon suggested this d… dreadful weekend. And there’s so man…man…man…”
“There certainly are,” agreed Martin, looking down the long aisle at the prodigality of Saint Pierres. “What on earth do you do with all the proceeds?”
“My aunt sells them. At the Women’s Institute market.”
“Why don’t we pinch them out now?”
“Could we?”
“I don’t see why not. I’m in no hurry to get back—are you?”
“Oh no,” said Laurie quickly. She smiled at him, then took an old pouched hessian apron from behind the door, wrapped it around herself and started to take out the side shoots from the first plant, dropping the green fronds into the pocket. Martin started on the second. They worked down one side together and gradually the emotional tension lessened until it was nothing more than a quietly interesting simmer.
“Don’t your aunt’s gardeners do this sort of thing?”
“They just come in one day a week while she’s away, to do the rough. I offered to look after everything else.”
“A hell of a lot to do.”
“I don’t mind. I simply love it.” Martin remembered the off-color fingernails. “Simon says I was born on my knees with a trowel in my hand.”
“Me too.”
“Really?” She stopped picking and gazed at him with the warmest interest but without surprise. It seemed to Laurie, now that this great benefaction had fallen from the skies (for had Martin not called her his darling?) that all manner of things would inevitably be well. It would be quite unthinkable that he would not share her grand passion. Soul mates came equipped with all the necessary accoutrements for perfect domestic harmony. She waited happily for more of this captivating inquisition.
“Actually I travel in glass houses…” Martin paused. Laurie gave him an encouraging smile and he continued, laying his hopes and dreams at her feet.
“I’ve always thought,” she said when he had finished, “that there must be all sorts of marvelous plants in China and India that we don’t know about yet. Things perfect for your conservatory. George Forrest couldn’t have found them all. Then there’s the warm parts of Russia…Georgia, you know. Or even Turkistan.”
“We must go and see.”
Laurie dropped some shoots and stumbled picking them up. She had not been prepared for that first usage of the sweetest of all the personal pronouns, or the quick piercing shaft of joy.
“I’m going to Pershore College in September,” she said, when she felt able to speak. “I want eventually to do landscape gardening.”
Martin listened, rapt and amazed. He had not assumed, he had not trusted that their ambitions and interests would, such is the precision of blind Cupid’s aim, so marvelously coincide. To Martin the whole revelatory conversation was like being handed the gift of a ravishingly painted box and, on opening it, finding inside another of greater perfection and inside that, one more lovely still.
His heart brimming with gratitude, he reached out and took her hand. She didn’t look at him but he felt her tremble. Across her brown forearm lay a bar of brilliant orange pollen. He bent his head and blew the powdery dust away. She turned then and he saw that she was crying.
“Dearest…” He put his arms around her. “What is it? Don’t cry. I can’t bear it.”
“Oh, Martin.” Tears sprang from her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She buried her face in his shirt front. “I thought I’d…killed you.…”
“Well, I must say you pack quite a punch.” Then, as she continued to weep, “There, sweet…” He touched the silver glaze of warm tears with his lips and they stood for a moment still and close, locked in a daze of luminous reciprocity. And then he kissed her. It was wonderful. Cool and fresh and sweet, like burying your face in a newly opened rose. So he did it again.
Blissfully, Laurie, eyes closed, kissed him back. And then, as the comets wheeled in planetary splendor and meteors fell and clouds of stardust settled on their closed lids, it happened. Beneath her feet, the powerful shift and glide and click of the earth’s great plates.
“Ohhh…” cried Laurie, releasing herself and stepping back, wide-eyed. “Then it’s true. It does move. It really moves.”
“What’s that, sweetheart?”
“The ground. Simon said it was all due to mass bombardment.”
“Ridiculous.”
Dazzled, uncomprehending, Martin smiled at Laurie; loving her skin, warm and freckled like a ripe apricot, her spice-brown hair and endearingly grubby little paws. More mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Fifty tomato plants awaited pinching out in vain. This state of supernatural bliss, transcending lust and almost even transcending love, was savagely shattered by the sound of a gunshot. Very loud. Crack! Shocked into wakefulness Laurie and Martin turned startled faces toward the garden wall.
The swans, alarmed, had risen from the moat and now appeared with a great whooshing of wings, passing over the greenhouse on their way to the lake. Then, as Laurie and Martin began to run, there was a second shot, followed immediately by a terrible harsh scream.
Chapter Twenty-one
This is how the shooting came about. Simon had returned from the garage with the news that the minibus was out of commission, and was now fielding a salvo of anxious and furious questions.
“But what’s the matter with it?”
“Why won’t it start?”
“Have you run out of petrol?”
“You can’t run out of petrol, Violet, standing in a garage.”
“I say—what a snorter!” Neigh whicker neigh, neigh. Neigh neigh.
“Perhaps it needs a push.”
“If anyone expects me to push, they’re in for a grave disappointment.”
“I’m sure it’s not poor Simon’s fault, Mummy.”
“What on earth are we going to do now?”
“One cock-up after another, as the warden said on visiting day.”
“Rosemary—cover your ears!”
“It’s to stop us getting away. We’re trapped…with a killer.”
“Now, Violet—don’t take on.”
“If we could please discuss this quietly—”
“The grounds never lie.”
“Please…” repeated Simon. He spread his arms and moved his hands up and down like a conductor demanding a shade more andante. People quietened, but briefly.
“Point is, Simon,” said Gilly, “that if we leave things much longer, then it really is going to look peculiar as far as the bobbies are concerned. One of us is going to have to leg it to the nearest phone. I’d be happy to oblige.”
“No doubt you would,” said Fred. “But nobody’s going to leg it anywhere until we get the truth about this intruder sorted out.”
“What difference does that make?”
“I’ll tell you what difference. Simon says he was just an actor—”
“I didn’t actually say that.” Simon hesitated. “And if I misled you I’m sorry. It was only because I felt that one or two people were genuinely frightened. The fact is, I didn’t hire anyone.”
“In that case, and assuming Sheila’s imagination carried her away, that only leaves us lot. So you can see,” Fred answered Gilly, “why nobody can bugger off. That person might well be the murderer.”
“Let two people go then.”
“And who do you think’s going to be daft enough to go out there”—Fred waved at the distant trees—“with somebody who might wring his neck the minute they’re away? If he’s done one murder he won’t hang about when it comes to another.”
“Why don’t you and Violet go then?” asked Rosemary.
“Oh, I couldn’t, duck. My feet aren’t up to it.”
“Why not send the servants?”
‘The servants are useless,” explained Simon patiently. “One’s lame, the other’s half blind.”
“We seem,” said Mrs. Saville, “to have given up on the transport question rather easily. Perhaps the fault is not serious but one that a person with some knowledge of engines could rectify. Perhaps Mr. Gibbs…” Her voice, which had enjoyed a slightly wincing note throughout, as if being lightly brushed by an oily rag, tailed delicately off.
“No, I couldn’t,” said Fred, well aware of why he had come out top in the possible car-mechanic stakes. “I’m about as likely to be able to start that heap of old junk as I am to start fanning me tea with me cap. I got a Testarossa. And two blokes to look after it.”
“They’re so wearing, aren’t they,” mused Mrs. Saville aside to Rosemary, “the nouveau riche?”
“I’m getting sick to death of you, missus. Looking down that great hooter at me and my family. We’re as good as you any day of the week. And I’ll tell you summat else—”
“Sssh.” Simon jumped to his feet. “Listen…”
Ears were strained. The cough of an engine could be clearly heard. The sound opened up and spread when the vehicle moved from the garage, traveled, got fainter and disappeared. This all happened so quickly that people had hardly registered what the noise was before it had faded completely.
“I say!” gasped Gilly. “He’s legged it. The murderer’s got away.”
“But…” Simon was astonished. “I don’t understand…who could—”
“We’re all here,” said Sheila. “That lets us out.”
“We’re not, you know,” Fred contradicted her. “We’re missing young Martin.”
“Martin?” Rosemary laughed unkindly. “He couldn’t murder a poached egg.”
“Where is he, then? And come to that”—Fred winked lewdly across the room at Simon—“where’s your sister?”
“I assume she’s helping in the—” Simon broke off. His expression became deeply apprehensive. He hurried from the room and returned looking even more disturbed. A competent, well-organized man who has had his rug of carefully woven stratagem whipped from under his feet. His face showed a mixture of panic and disbelief. “They’ve gone.”
“Who?”
“The servants. All their clothes, everything.”
“Perhaps you could tell us,” said Mrs. Saville, “how they managed to start the bus when you failed.”
“You must have the number,” said Fred. “On the hire papers. The police will pick them up.”
“When?” cried Simon. “We have no phone. And it will take at least an hour to walk to Madingley.”
“They’ll dump it if they’ve got any sense,” said Violet. “Soon as they get to Oxford.”
“So the mystery’s solved.”
“What?” Simon looked blank.
“The butler did it after all,” continued Rosemary with a snide glance at Sheila. “Or the maid.”
“I never did trust that woman. Her tits were too close together.”
“Fred!”
“No need to get aerated, my duck,” said Fred. “You know me. I speak as I find. You couldn’t have slid a cat’s whisker between them. And did you see those feet? Big as herring boxes.”
“What are you getting at?” asked Simon.
