Murder At Wittenham Park (4 page)

“Daddy,” she was saying, as they approached the Oxford bypass, “are you sure you explained? I mean, sharing a room with you would not be my idea of a fun weekend.”

“Nor mine, as a matter of fact.”

“So what did you tell them?”

“What should I have? That I'm a redundant insurance adjuster of fifty-two, who would have opted out of the weekend if his daughter hadn't railroaded him?”

“What did that counsellor say?” Jemma was shepherding her father through the traumas of a redundancy that had come within months of his second wife's leaving him. “He said you must go on with whatever you've planned. Don't let anyone know you're upset. Come on, Daddy, you'll enjoy the weekend, and it's not as though we're completely broke.”

“No thanks to Pauline.”

“She's off the payroll. Forget her.” Jemma never had liked her stepmother much. “At least you got the American Express card back.”

“Eventually. Anyway, I did not tell Lord Gilroy that I was out of work. I told him I had a journalist daughter who was an Agatha Christie freak—”

“Daddy! I've never read any of her.”

“—and who,” Savage persisted, “is absolutely fascinated by the whole idea.”

“So he expects me to write about it? You're a pig. Why should I?”

“All the best frauds originate in telling someone what he or she wants to hear. Lord Gilroy wants publicity.”

“Really, Daddy!” Sometimes Jemma was astonished at her father's innocence. “If I'd known, I might have got it for free. Except that my mag isn't interested in hypothetical crimes.”

“You want real blood all over the floor?”

“You know we do.”

“Or blondes in black leather with whips?”

“Daddy, please!
Crime and Punishment
is a monthly review of interpretative analysis and holistic vision, devoted to improving understanding of the criminal mind. So there.”

“Talking of which,” Jim remarked, “Lord Gilroy has quite an unusual handwriting. If I was assessing a claim from him I'd go through every detail with a fine-tooth comb.”

“I bet you would. With a very fine-tooth comb. Whatever that is.” She smiled, teasing him about the cliché, yet remembering his reputation as an assessor whom it was hard to fool. Her father had the memory of an elephant, coupled with great persistence.

The relationship between the two of them had always been close, and his wife Pauline's precipitate departure had strengthened it. Not that they were physically alike—“Thank goodness,” Jemma would say, “no way would I want his nose”—except in a few characteristics. And intellectually he was contemplative, she intuitive; although that distinction was blurred because his job had necessitated a degree of intuition.

What she most admired about her father was his evenhandedness. He was slow to reach decisions, but when he reached them they were reasoned and dispassionate. This made him seem a rather dry character, yet underneath he was giving and warm, with occasional sparks of unexpected humour.

This air of detachment was reinforced by his appearance. To look at, Jim Savage was an unobtrusive middle-aged man, with a good head of a hair and a waistline kept trim by golf and tennis. Today he was wearing dark slacks and an open-neck shirt under a blue sweater. He could have passed for a civil servant on holiday, except that he had deep-set pale-blue eyes which disconcerted people when he asked questions. Many years of assessing insurance claims had made him very good at asking questions.

By contrast Jemma dressed with easy style, adorned her basically mousy hair with blonde streaks, had only a very diminutive version of the Savage nose, and kept her figure without noticeably taking any exercise. “Lucky me, I have the right metabolism” she would say cheerfully as she bubbled her way through parties. But she had the same pale eyes as her father, and journalism was rapidly teaching her to see through other people's façades too.

“So why don't you trust Lord Gilroy? she asked.

“There was something smarmy about the letter he wrote. You know, after I sent the deposit.” Savage remembered the personal letter from Gilroy. The notepaper was headed with a stag rearing up out of a coronet, apparently trapped by its hooves. This crest was embossed on the paper, not merely printed, which displayed class. But the text was studded with gushing phrases like “delighted to know” and “assure you this will be a weekend to remember.”

“What I fail to see,” Jim went on, “is how he's going to get away with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they can hardly steal the plot of one of Christie's books. Someone will know the ending.”

“He must have thought of that. He's probably changing it.”

“Lucky the old girl's dead. She'd have a fit. Not the kind of person you could take liberties with.”

Years ago, when he had been investigating an arson claim in Devon, Savage's senior had taken him to Agatha Christie's house for tea. He had been left with three abiding impressions: of the house's glorious views over a river estuary; of the lady's collection of ornamental teapots from canal barges, all of a kind, yet each one different; and of her strong sense of propriety, coupled with humour. He was pretty certain the sense of humour would not extend to her stories' being altered.

“I suppose there's nothing much anyone can do about it, now she's gone,” he observed.

“D'you think they allocate the parts before they've even met us?” Jemma asked. “And who else will be there?”

“He didn't say.”

They had reached a turn off the A-40 road signed “Wittenham.” “Well, we'll know soon enough,” Savage said “Let's hope they don't make me the murderer.”

“Why should it be a him?” Jemma demanded. “There you go. Sexism again.”

*   *   *

“F
INISHED
!” Dee Gilroy exclaimed triumphantly, rising from a desk in the library and crossing towards the high Gothic windows, scanning her notes. “In the nick of time. You're lucky to have such an inventive wife, not to mention devoted.” She looked aggravatedly at her spouse. “You might say something, for God's sake, when I've just saved our reputation. What would be the point of all this”—she gestured around the Gothic splendour of the library, its solid furniture rearranged for the benefit of their guests, with teacups, plates and cakes set out on a vast side-table—“what earthly point would be there if I hadn't concocted a simply brilliant murder.”

“You're a genius, sweetheart,” Gilroy managed to say. “Only you could have done it.” He hesitated, uncertain whether he was supposed to have second sight. “That's to say, what have you done?”

Dee Dee gave a tiny moue, vexed at his wanting explanations on top of assurances, then over-handed the final sheet of paper on which she had listed the cast in her rounded American handwriting.

“Even Agatha…” She cut herself short. “No. This is nothing to do with the wretched woman, but it is a family set-up her fans would like. A perfectly beastly family called Sketchley. I shall be Mrs. Louise Sketchley, an extremely rich widow, who is a pain in the butt to everyone and won't hand over the boodle. Not a cent. She has two grasping sons; they can be played by these fellows McMountdown and Chancemain.”

“And she gets murdered?” Gilroy suggested.

“How else am I going to get out of playing games all weekend with these odious people? Of course she gets murdered. First thing in the morning. Before breakfast. You can have breakfast with them, darling.”

“And who murders her?”

For a moment Dee Dee's confidence faltered. “Well, we have options. If you want to keep Welch occupied all the time, and out of our hair, then he ought to do it.”

“Any reason?”

“He's her brother and he's lost everything on Lloyds.”

“Getting a bit close to home, aren't we, darling? Anyway, how do you know Welch hasn't?”

“Alternatively”—Dee Dee wasn't giving up at this stage—“it's done by his wife. The actress could play her. Wouldn't that be brilliant? She's determined to save her husband.”

“Must be the only person in the world who is,” Gilroy commented. “But don't we have to write clues? And character descriptions? I mean, we're supposed to hand those out after tea.”

“All done.” Dee waved a sheaf of further notes. All I have to do is get them on the word processor. While you entertain everyone.”

Gilroy's none-too-agile mind fumbled with another problem. Remembering the plot that they had not been allowed to use, he recalled all sorts of minor characters, like the doctor, the local policeman and the detective.

“So who's the sleuth?” he demanded.

“Obviously this insurance-assessor man. And his daughter can be…” Dee Dee faltered. She had never realized how hard it was to construct a murder plot. “She can be a reporter.”

“Which she is anyway. At least she won't forget her role.”

“She's the only one who isn't after Louise Sketchley's loot.”

At the risk of wrecking his marriage, Gilroy asked the crucial question. “How is Mrs. Sketchley killed?”

“Poisoned. A good old-fashioned British murder.”

“So it's a murderess?”

“How do you know?”

“English wives always poison their husbands. Either that or they grab a kitchen knife in the middle of a row. Odd how there always seems to be knife handy at the time.”

“Actually,” Dee Dee said, “it'll be Mrs. Sketchley's brother, played by Welch, and her companion, who get in cahoots to kill her. So everything depends on noticing who drinks what in the evening and who is around the bedrooms at the time.”

“Which is?”

“Sometime between midnight and seven-thirty
A.M
. There'll be lots of to-ing and fro-ing during the night.”

“Well, darling, if you're going to get all that typed up you'd better get your skates on. What time are they due?”

“We said tea-time.” Dee Dee consulted a tiny jewel-encrusted watch, a memento of the days before Gregorian D. Gregorian invoked the salvation of Chapter Eleven. “It's half past three now. Any moment, I should think.”

Alerted to the imminence of this, Gilroy looked out of the windows, across the broad lawns and towards the lake. On the far side a bright green shape was progressing slowly through the park, driving across the grass, far from the road. It stopped and two people got out, spreading what might have been a map in front of them. They began pointing in various directions.

“My God,” Gilroy cried out. “If that bastard's staking out my land, I'll murder him.”

3

T
HE MOMENT
the butler ushered Jemma and Jim into the Gothic library at Wittenham Park they knew the weekend was starting badly. A small group of people were standing in constrained attitudes at the far end of the gloomily cavernous room. Among them a ruddy-faced, coarse-looking man was confronting a younger, more slenderly built one, whom Jemma recognized as Lord Gilroy, having seen his photograph in a magazine. The coarse man was speaking so vehemently that the butler was obliged to pause and wait.

“First it was bloody Agatha Christie and now you say it ain't,” the man was almost shouting at Lord Gilroy “You've sold us—”

“M'lord, m'lady.” This denunciation of his employer was too much for the butler, who cleared his throat and intervened loudly. He was elderly, with a lugubriously pallid, haughty face, which fitted well with his black jacket and rigidly pressed pin-stripe trousers, and was known by his surname, Dodgson, as though his station in life disqualified him from the luxury of a first name. But he had a penetratingly nasal voice of a timbre which, given a chance, could bring down ceilings.

“M'lord!” he screeched again, then realized that in the stress of the moment he had forgotten the names of the guests he was about to announce. The procedure had only been adopted for this weekend as a piece of showbiz, to make the clients feel they were getting full value. There was a lingering silence. The coarse man stopped in mid-sentence. Everyone turned towards the butler, who was now gasping like a landed fish. Jemma whispered in his ear and he wound himself into top gear again. “M'lord, m'lady. Mr. James Savage and Miss Jemma Savage.”

Jemma noticed a tall blonde woman wince at the butler's ineptitude and glance accusingly at Lord Gilroy, before advancing to meet them, stretching out her hand in welcome.

“I am Deirdre Gilroy,” she said in a cordial yet cool New England voice. “How nice that you could come.” There was a distinct implication that any new arrival must be preferable to the people already here. They all shook hands. “Let me introduce you to my husband.”

Lord Gilroy seemed abashed. “You're the Agatha Christie buffs, aren't you?” he inquired. “Well, I'm afraid that for legal reasons we've had to alter the plot. Can't use Christie.”

“False pretences,” the coarse man began again aggressively. “That's what it is. Not what we paid for.”

“This is Mr. Welch,” Gilroy said, distaste articulate in every syllable, “who is a property developer, and his wife Adrienne.”

“Pleased to meet you, I'm sure.” Adrienne was anxious to smooth over the clash of personalities. She'd spent a lot of money on new clothes for this weekend and intended to enjoy it.

“Mr. George Welch?” Jim Savage asked politely, but with an abstracted look in his eyes, which Jemma knew well. Her father had a million-megabyte memory and something about the property developer was being downloaded from it.

“And why shouldn't I be George Welch? Heard about me, 'ave you?”

“Everyone in the property business has.”

Jemma guessed that his memory must have brought up something fairly discreditable about Welch. But Welch himself took the two-sided remark as a compliment.