Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave (17 page)

Sarah, who alone among the guests understood modern Greek, was listening to the shouts from the shore.

“He’s saying—it’s a
body
! Someone’s in the water! He’s saying—Kiria? No, I don’t believe it!” Sarah swayed slightly and gripped one of the big terracotta pots at the edge of the terrace for support.

“Alice! He’s telling his mother that it’s
Alice
lying down there. There are injuries—her head. Something about the rocks!”

But it was the weeping, the terrible weeping and the stream of passionate but incomprehensible Greek lamentation from Irini, that brought it home to them all that Alice Garland was actually dead.

Irini raised her fists and looked up at the sky: the unclouded blue, the famous blue sky of Corfu, blue, Alice Garland’s favourite colour, the theme of the Villa Elia, seemed to mock her. Too much blue in a house making for a heartless atmosphere, as Jemima’s decorator friend Daisy had told her. Jemima had seen Alice herself as ruthless maybe in business, heartless perhaps in her private life (although she had greeted her disgraced husband’s unexpected arrival with some generosity, pleading for his temporary acceptance in her little speech). Now Alice Garland was no longer in a position to be either ruthless or forgiving; only in a certain literal sense was she also heartless, for at some point in the small hours of the night, her heart had stopped beating.

“Little Alice!” began Fizzy in a voice of almost childish bewilderment; her heavy features crumpled and Jemima had the impression she was about to cry. “Why, no, you’ve gotta be joking.” The words were in themselves ludicrous; yet at the same time what was happening, the macabre scene on the shore below them, was still so incredible to them all that it did cross Jemima’s mind that maybe some hideous kind of practical joke was being played.

The arrival of William Gearhart on the terrace at this moment brought her back to a sense of reality—unwelcome reality. Irini, cries temporarily abandoned, was heading towards the path, apron askew, arms still outstretched. So far as Jemima knew, none of them had seen William since
lunchtime the day before. Certainly she had not, and as for the others, that was something that could be checked, if not at the present moment.

William looked urbane and rested. The face was still rather flushed, perhaps, but the impression given this morning was of the flush of health, not the unhealthily ruddy hue of too much drink too often consumed. William was wearing a clean white tennis shirt and dark blue swimming trunks, despite the fact that he had arrived with no luggage: the shirt was slightly strained over his broad chest. Stock supplies at the villa? His own clothes left over from happier (and slimmer) times?

“Good morning, all.” He not only looked, he sounded urbane. “I’m all ready for a fresh start this morning, a very fresh start except for the heat. My God, I’d forgotten the sheer delicious aroma of all those shrubs we planted—sage? I’m hopeless about names—as you make your way up the path. Fresh coffee now requested for a fresh start. Irini–” He stopped. “What’s going on here? Irini, that’s a hell of a racket. You all look as if someone had just died.” The words faltered as he took in the shocked expression on Sarah’s face.

Irini halted in mid-flight and grabbed William’s hand.

“Kirie”–and she jabbered at him in Greek with gestures towards the shore. Someone had joined Nikos down there, another man, presumably Greek. Together they were lifting the body from the pebbles where Nikos had originally laid it and were heading, slowly, for the villa path.

“You poor thing!” said Mrs. Vascoe swiftly, before anyone else could interrupt. “I’m afraid this is going to be a terrible shock to you. But you see, we think there’s been some kind of accident. Your wife—”

“
Alice!
No, I don’t believe it.” They were the words which Sarah Halliwell had spoken only a short while
before. But William Gearhart, unlike Sarah, did not sway and needed no terracotta pot to support him. Nor was his voice low and gentle.

He began to shout, or perhaps rave might have been a better word. In his own way, William was almost as incomprehensible as Irini had been, or at least for the first few rapid sentences which he shouted at them. Then the words, to his appalled hearers—Fizzy, Sarah, Mrs. Vascoe and Jemima—did begin to make a certain grisly sense.

“Martha James!” was his recurrent theme. “Martha, Martha James! Why did you come here? Why didn’t you leave her alone? Fatal Martha James! Fatal, fatal, fatal!” he shouted, his face getting redder by the minute; gone was the urbane new-that-morning-man entirely. “Unlucky to me. Unlucky to her. Martha James, where are you? Where are you lurking—? I know you, Martha James, fatal woman, where are you? Come out of your cottage.” And on and on and on in a terrible stream of invective which on grounds of loudness alone could have been heard surely on the other side of the bay.

All the time the sombre little procession, body now wrapped round with some kind of dark towel or blanket or tarpaulin, could be seen winding its way up the path to the villa.

It was, oddly enough, William’s mention of the word cottage, rather than his repeated vituperative evocation of her name, which called to everyone’s attention the fact that Martha James was not actually present.

“She always came late for breakfast, she’s always the last to come,” said Sarah Halliwell when it was evident that for the time being William had worn himself to silence. She only put into words what the company as a whole was thinking.

“Then Martha doesn’t
know
!” exclaimed Fizzy. “Maybe I
should go and tell her. I’d love to do something to
help
,” she muttered pathetically. “This is gonna be such a shock: this terrible accident.”

“Accident! Was it an accident?” To the general horror, William began to shout once more.

“Of course it was, dear Mr. Garland, Mr. Gearhart, rather.” Mrs. Vascoe interposed her calming little voice. “A tragic accident, if your poor wife is indeed dead. As, alas, seems all too likely. What else could it be”—she quivered for a moment—“but an accident?”

“We shall see, I suppose.” But William was subsiding once more; he spoke sombrely rather than with his previous rage.

“I’ll get Martha then,” put in Fizzy swiftly.

It was not necessary. Before Fizzy could move, Martha appeared on the terrace. Jemima noted that she was holding a lighted cigarette in her hand although she did not generally smoke before breakfast. One moment later, Nikos and his companion with their shrouded burden reached the crest of the path.

They all realized at once from the look of her that there was no need to tell Martha anything. She must have watched the procession coming up the path. Her face, like Irini’s, was already streaked with tears. Before the mesmerized eyes of the assembled company—even William still mercifully silent—Martha sank on her knees beside Alice’s body where it had been laid, and bowed her fair head down upon it. Even more shocking was the way she burrowed in the dark covering to produce one white moist hand and some strands of long wet hair.

Martha James proceeded to kiss the hand of the dead girl with passionate abandonment as the tears flowed freely down her cheeks. “My Alice! Little Alice!” After a while she stayed silent and simply bowed herself once more over the corpse.

“Did she mean
that
to you too?” Fizzy spoke with a sort of awe. “But I guess we all loved her,” she added generously.

Then Jemima looked at Martha, looked at her again with new eyes: saw the straight, fairish hair hanging down her back, framing the curiously wizened face with its unexpected crop of lines fanning out beneath the deepening tan; Martha’s girlish hair-style and Martha’s girlish slimness. Girlish from a distance, that is. Yes. But Martha James was not the girl, that was Alice Garland. Jemima looked away from Martha down to Alice’s prostrate form, the pale wet mermaid hair now falling free from its covering in strands; she imagined the pale face beneath.

Martha and Alice: “My Alice! Little Alice!” She thought of William’s uncontrolled railing against Martha, as yet imperfectly understood. Might that hatred have its true origin in the most primitive kind of jealousy and dislike?

Jemima stepped forward and touched Martha on the shoulder.

“I think I understand,” was all she said. Then, putting her arm protectively round Martha’s shoulder, Jemima helped her to her feet and away from the body of the dead girl. She decided to say nothing further for the time being.

“Well,
I
don’t understand.” Fizzy’s voice was loud, indignant, her expression, again childlike, a mixture of misery and crossness. “I don’t understand at all. We’re talking about an accident, aren’t we? Of course we are. But how did she die? I want to know that. Are we getting the doctor? I’ve got a lot of questions to ask.” She glared about her; her lip trembled.

“My dear Fizzy.” Mrs. Vascoe spoke gently. “We all know what you mean, I’m sure. We’ve all got a lot of questions to ask. And for that matter, I expect one or two questions will be asked of us. In the meantime, surely we must all be as cooperative and
self-controlled
as possible.” Mrs. Vascoe put an unmistakable emphasis on the last words.

Sarah nodded strongly. So did William. It was clear that he did not consider the words could possibly apply to him.

There was no telephone at the Villa Elia. Telephones were hard to get in Corfu it seemed (and precarious when they were installed). Jemima remembered with a pang how Alice had spoken merrily on the subject: “One of the many good points of the villa. When you come to film it, you’ll find it so peaceful without a telephone. Not really very awkward once you adjust to it. For urgent calls, you just go up to the village and chance your luck. Now that really is a time-wasting experience. Most people decide to make their fresh start
without
the benefit of the telephone.”

You might have thought, however, that a telephone would be sadly missed in the present unhappy circumstances. But Irini’s force of character and organizational abilities, with Nikos as her aide, and Nikos’s friend as
his
aide, proved able to cope with, under the circumstances, surprising dispatch. Alice’s body was taken to a small room on the ground floor, a bare, cell-like little place, but that seemed right enough. Irini had ceased her keening now that she had something—in fact a great deal—to do.

A doctor arrived, Greek but English-speaking, accompanied by a man who appeared to be the local policeman.

From the doctor it was learned what they perfectly well knew already, but he insisted on pronouncing the news officially—that Alice Garland was dead. But they also learned—the assembled company was once more on the terrace—that Alice had died not from drowning, but from a blow or blows on the side of the head. From a stone? A rock? How many blows? The doctor, having given them this news, was not inclined to elaborate upon it.

In short, and this was the key-point of his announcement: Alice Garland had been dead before she entered the water.

“She fell? Yes, maybe she has fallen. Maybe a big rock has fallen on her. The rocks do fall in this bay. They are loose a bit, do you know. Then she fell in the water. But I think she was dead, then. Already dead, I do not think she did drown. We shall know more.” He paused diplomatically. He means, Jemima supposed, after the autopsy; but he is too delicate to conjure up such a distressing image in our minds.

The policeman spoke limited English, and so that the tenor of his remarks could be clearly understood Sarah Halliwell translated them. The message, although given at some length, causing Sarah to pause once or twice and hesitate for the right official word, was in essence a simple one.

None of the guests was free to leave the villa until further formalities—further questioning was another way of putting it—had taken place.

“He wants our passports, I think: to look at them,” murmured Sarah with a shade of embarrassment. “And he also wants to know the answer to two questions immediately. I’m not sure—I’d better just pass them on.”

“Go on, for God’s sake! Tell us what he’s saying! Don’t start holding things back at this stage.” William Gearhart had been trying to follow the conversation with obvious impatience. It was clear that unlike Alice (who had spoken excellent modern Greek) William knew very little of the language.

“First of all,” said Sarah in a stronger voice, sounding defiant, “he wants to know who is now in charge of this party at the Villa Elia.”

There was a silence which nobody seemed inclined to break.

“And the second question?” inquired William harshly.

“He wants to know who is the next of kin of the unfortunate lady. As he describes her, Alice.”

“I can answer both of those questions. Together.” William exuded a deep breath. “I am, was,
am
, Alice’s lawful husband. She had not so far as I know changed her will, in spite of our—separation. So I inherit the villa. The same goes for her next of kin. I’m still her husband. Legally, which is what counts. So, QED, I’m still her next of kin.”

“Nonsense,” rapped out Martha James sharply. “That’s absolute nonsense, William. Alice
had
changed her will. I know that for a fact. You won’t inherit the villa, and Alice, as you know, had at the moment of her death nothing much else to leave.”

“And I suppose you
will
inherit it? Is that what you’re trying to say?” William’s tone was sarcastic rather than serious.

“Exactly.” Martha dragged on her cigarette. “Quite appropriate, don’t you think? In view of everything.”

“But how could that be?” cried Fizzy in great agitation. “You? You meant nothing to her. You were just her business partner. You were handling those antiques with her. I know all about it. Nikos was shipping them out for her, with the help of some other friends. She wanted to build it up. She lost a lot of money when
you
”—she looked angrily at William—“let her down. People were always letting her down. But
she
was into helping people—like Nikos for example!” Fizzy turned back to Martha. “You were just an old friend, down on your luck, she was helping you to make a fresh start.”