Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow (13 page)

“If I had been able to persuade her to go to London with me…” Geoffrey was saying.

“She made her own decision, old man,” Cyril told him. “She always did. Stone was on the scene by then, if you remember. Now, if you’ll hand me your glass, Mrs.—er, Catherine. The college port is excellent, you really must sample it.”

“Thank you, but I’ve had enough. I’m not used to three bottles of wine at one meal! If you’ll just point the way to the bathrooms?”

They all turned puzzled faces to me as I rose.

“I’m afraid we have no bathing facilities in this building,” Cyril said, genuinely apologetic. “Of course, if you’d like one of the scouts to accompany you back to the SCR, there are baths in the corridors—”

“No, no,” I laughed. “I don’t want to take a bath! I just mean the—well, the restroom.” Their faces showed no greater comprehension.

“Do you mean a bedroom?” Cyril ventured. “You feel a need to lie down?”

“She wants the toilet,” Dorothy finally decided. She stood up too. “I’ll accompany you there, my dear. If we were more cosmopolitan, not so lost in the days of good Queen Bess, I’m sure we’d understand these American euphemisms.”

She led the way to a stone corridor and an oak door with a sign that said, sure enough, T
OILET
.

“You know, it’s a shock for an American, the first time you see one of those signs,” I said. “That’s a rude word in America. It’s hard for us to bring ourselves to say it. This is the first time I’ve had to ask.”

“Extraordinary.”

She was waiting while I ran a comb through my hair, deploring my flushed cheeks. I was relieved to feel the mellow mood receding. I looked at her plain, honest face in the mirror and was suddenly moved to ask, “Dorothy, what happened to Simon?”

“Oh, Simon.” She looked away uncomfortably. “Child was born with Down syndrome, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know. It must have been so hard for Perdita!”

“She loved him all the more. Quit her work and devoted herself to him, got involved with organizations to help other parents, push legislation and the like. Simon, and children like him, became her life. But he died at the age of five. By then they were back at Mercy. Aubrey had set up this program, and Edgar had asked to be included on the staff.” She shook her head sadly. “We all tried to help her through it, but she couldn’t cope with her grief. Or her bitterness toward Edgar.”

“Why was she bitter? She goes around saying he
killed
Simon. Could that be true?”

She took a deep breath. “I said Perdita loved the boy. Well, Edgar hated him. Any sort of physical or mental imperfection disgusted him, and he made no attempt to disguise his feelings. He wanted her to put the child in an institution. They had blazing rows over it, as well as over his infidelities. But obviously, she never imagined he’d—One day, when Perdita was out of the house for a few hours, Simon choked on his food, and Edgar deliberately didn’t call the St. John’s Ambulance until it was too late to save him. Perdita was never the same again.”

“He was a real monster, wasn’t he?” I mused. “And yet she stayed with him! I would have been long gone, wouldn’t you?”

“We all urged her to leave him, but it was as if the recrimination, the flailing at him, was all that kept her engaged with life. Do you know what I mean? I think really she stayed to punish him—since her abuse was the only punishment he was going to receive. He denied any responsibility for Simon’s death, of course, and there was never any question of legal action, but we all knew he’d let the child die. She kept it before him, before everyone. To leave would have been to let him go unpunished. At any rate, that’s my theory. And he, of course, got sadistic pleasure from tormenting her. So they lived for years locked in this death grip, and now it’s been broken I wonder how she’ll be able to stand alone.”

“You couldn’t live that way indefinitely,” I said, talking more to myself than to her. “Sooner or later you’d have to move from words to action.”

She didn’t seem to have heard me. “Aubrey’s quite right, dwelling on these things will only ruin our evening. Shall we rejoin them? I believe a savoury is still to come.”

The savory was waiting for us when we got back to the table, triangles of white toast spread with anchovy paste and topped with sauteed mushrooms. I knew it was an old British custom to follow the sweet with something like that, though usually only observed at formal dinners nowadays. It tasted better than it sounds, but I wasn’t thinking about food. With the effect of the drinks wearing off, my mind was seized with growing excitement. The three of them chatted about literary matters, occasionally addressing a polite remark to me, getting only brief, distracted answers. By the time the dinner party broke up I was ready to put my new theory before Emily, before Mr. Billingsley, before the Thames Valley Constabulary, if any of them had been available at ten o’clock at night.

I didn’t at all mind being awoken before six the next morning by Muzzle’s serenade. I’d had a hard time getting my brain to shut down the night before, and when the cat went off I jumped out of bed with alacrity.

Feeding Muzzle, letting him out and then back in, showering and dressing and gulping down some underdone toast and scalding coffee brought me only to six-forty, but I couldn’t wait any longer. At least I could be sure Quin and Barbie wouldn’t be out yet, and I had to get started saving Peter right away.

The sun was just up when I pulled into the parking lot at Emily’s apartment building. The rowing crews were out on the river already, the coxswains’ sharp calls punctuating the morning quiet along with the rumble of the first cars going to work. A pair of swans had built a nest beside Folly Bridge this spring, occasioning stories in the local papers, and I saw one of the famous birds sitting on it while the other sailed off down the Isis in search of food.

I used my key to get into the apartment. I knew Archie would be up, and sure enough he came charging out of the kitchen with his piece of Marmite-spread toast, leaving a brown smear on my pants leg when he hugged me. Rose was sitting sleepily at the table in her bathrobe, eating a bowl of cereal.

I answered her greeting and let Archie pull me to the picture window overlooking the river. “Sah, Nana!” he informed me, and I knew he meant the swan on the riverbank. They had a good view of the nest, and it was going to be wonderful for him to watch the birds’ family life from eggs through cygnets. I let him tell me about it for a few minutes, pretending to understand, then I tiptoed to Emily’s bedroom door, putting my finger to my lips as he followed.

I slipped in quietly and tried to wake her with a gentle touch on the shoulder, but Archie scrambled up on the bed yelling, “Mummy! Mummy! Sah!” She woke with a jolt and sat up, blinking her eyes rapidly.

While Archie wrapped his arms around her neck, bouncing on the bed at the same time, she muttered, “Mom? What—what’s—why—”

“Sorry,” I said, “I tried to be quiet, but you know how it is. I couldn’t wait to come and tell you, I’ve learned some things that point to somebody other than Peter, somebody so obvious I can’t believe nobody thought of her before.”

“Her?” Archie had moved on to ransack the dresser drawers, and she was slowly lowering her feet into slippers and reaching for a terry cloth robe at the foot of the bed.

“Mrs. Stone!” I explained. “Come on, let me fix you some breakfast—all right, some coffee anyway, and I’ll tell you what I found out about her.”

A few minutes later, her eyes brighter, her blonde hair hanging disheveled around her shoulders, she sat down at the table in the alcove between living room and kitchen. She said, in her patient-expert voice, “Mrs. Stone has a depressive personality disorder, which appears to be developing into bipolarism. That particular axis is unlikely to result in homicidal behavior, Mother.”

I had asked Rose to supervise Archie’s investigations in the bedroom and restore the place when he’d finished, so I could explain without distraction. I poured boiling water over instant coffee, handed her the mug, and sat down opposite her, trying to repress my excitement.

“You gave me that diagnosis before, but I seem to remember you also saying she was ‘explosive.’ ”

She thought about it for a few minutes. “That’s true. She does exhibit intermittent explosive disorder, although that’s rare in combination with DPD.” She looked up at me with a little more interest. “What’s this new information you’ve got, then?”

“Okay, I had dinner last night with Peter’s colleagues at Mercy College. They started talking about the old days when they were all in the Oxford Drama Society, and what a really good actress Perdita was. Well, I’d been to her house the day before, and I’d kind of wondered if there wasn’t a bit of acting going on, all that now-I’m-happy now-I’m-mad business.”

She was frowning. “That’s classic bipolar behavior, Mother. I
do
know something about the subject, and that woman is not acting. She’s very sick.”

I didn’t argue, although I wasn’t convinced. “All right, anyway, they talked about her performances in plays where she did men’s roles, did them so well the audience hadn’t a clue until she took off her wig and
spoke in her normal voice
at the end. You see? If she could imitate a male voice that convincingly, why couldn’t she have practiced imitating her husband’s voice until she could do it well enough to fool 999 and the people who worked with him? After all, it was
her
identification of the voice on the tape the police mostly went by.”

“Well, we all heard it, and it did sound just like him. No, Mother, you’re jumping—”

“Okay, listen to how it adds up: she was alone in the house with her husband that evening, she’s a terrific actress and can do different voices, and she’d hated him for years.”

“She did. She blamed him for the death of their child.” I could see she was beginning, relunctantly, to consider the possibility that I was on to something.

Then there was a knock at the door. As we stared at each other apprehensively, I got that sinking feeling in my stomach and whispered, “No. It couldn’t be.”

But it was. At least, it was Quin, uncharacteristically dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, smiling tentatively at her, as if unsure of his welcome. When he stepped inside and saw me, the smile became an embarrassed grimace.

He said, “Fancy meeting you here,” at the same moment I said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” and jumped up to take refuge in the kitchen.

“Sorry, baby,” I heard him saying as I snatched milk and eggs from the fridge, cursing under my breath. “I never thought your mom would be here so early. I hurried over so I could bounce an idea off you before we see Billingsley again.” He raised his voice. “Come on, Kit, you don’t have to hide in there. See what you think about this.”

“I am making Emily breakfast!” I shouted back indignantly. “If you think I’d hide from
you,
you’re even—even more—Oh, forget it!”

I slammed a measuring bowl down on the counter and made as much noise as I could, beating the eggs and milk, to prove I was cooking.

“Mom, I’m really not hungry,” she said in a resigned sort of way.

“I’m not going to let you get sick from malnutrition,” I called back. “That won’t help Peter, now will it?”

“No use arguing with her,” I heard him say. “You know how she is when she gets her mind set on something. Remember the dancing lessons?”

He laughed, and she tried to. Right, bring up something stupid I’d done, he was always good at that! So I’d thought a girl needed to know ballroom dancing, and dragged her to Arthur Murray’s once a week despite her protests, when she was twelve. How was I supposed to know teenagers didn’t dance that way anymore?

“You must have been the only kid in eighth grade who knew how to polka,” he went on.

“It’s all right, Dad,” she said. “I’ll eat a few bites of whatever she’s making. I just don’t want you and her—you know.”

“Sure, sweetheart, don’t worry. Sit down and I’ll tell you what I started thinking about last night. We ought to get Billingsley, or the police, to look more closely at Mrs. Stone.”

I dropped the skillet with a loud clang.

“Mom, are you all right?” Emily called, and I stepped into the doorway, staring at him. He looked back at me, now wearing his familiar cocky grin.

“See what you think of this, Kit. Perdita Stone never made a secret of hating her husband, in fact she went around telling the world what a bastard he was, how he killed their kid. That had to be a delusion, but she did hate his guts. There’s your motive. The murder weapon was right there in plain view on Stone’s desk all the time, he used it for a letter opener. There’s your means. And she was alone in the house with him that evening until Peter barged in. There’s your opportunity. On top of all that, she’s a real nut case.” I saw Emily flinch. “And that story of hers about sleeping through all the ruckus downstairs, that’s pretty suspicious in itself. Of course, none of that explains the 999 call, which is our biggest problem, but I think we should try to talk the police into getting some better answers out of her than she’s given so far.” He put his head on one side curiously. “What’s the matter? Drop the pan on your foot?”

“
No
, I didn’t drop the—Where exactly did you get this idea? Were you listening at the door or something?”