Stephanie (15 page)

‘What?'

‘She didn't actually say she would take her own life … but I suppose her general threats may have included that. I'm afraid I didn't take them seriously. I thought she was too young and volatile and – fond of life …'

‘When did you last see the deceased?'

‘On the Sunday evening. I went to Sir Anthony Maidment's birthday party, and soon after I arrived Stephanie came across and spoke to me. She told me that she understood my position, and she promised to stay, as she called it, in the background of my life if I would agree to go on seeing her just once a week, at least for the next few months while she tried, as she said, to get over it.' Errol's glance for the first time travelled round the court, looking at the intent faces. ‘Believe me, I would very much have wanted to do as she asked, for I could see how distressed she was – and I was very, very fond of her. This was no callous throwing over of someone one didn't care about. But my wife had stipulated a complete break, if we were to avoid a divorce … I told Stephanie this. Her face went very pale and I thought she was going to burst into tears. But she didn't. She simply muttered something about she would make me “ sorry for this” and then turned on her heel and walked away.'

‘What did you suppose she meant?'

‘I thought she meant she might go to see my wife and make trouble that way. Certainly I never thought she would contemplate what – what it seems she did do.'

‘We have yet to decide that, Mr Colton …'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘So when was the last time you saw her?'

‘Well, then, at the party. I suppose I saw her three or four times during the course of the evening but I didn't speak to her again.'

‘Did you think she had been drinking?'

‘Not when she spoke to me. After that I tried to avoid her and certainly didn't notice whether she was drinking heavily or not. Most of us, of course, were taking the occasional glass of champagne.'

‘What did you do when you left?'

‘Drove straight home.'

‘And arrived there?'

‘I didn't really check. I was feeling pretty upset about everything. It took me forty minutes going, so probably it would take less on the return, the roads being emptier.'

‘And when did you first hear of the tragedy?'

‘About three o'clock Monday afternoon. The police had rung my wife, and she rang me at my office.'

‘Did the dead girl ever complain to you about sleeplessness or depression?'

‘In that last quarrel on the previous Wednesday she said she couldn't sleep because of – of me and what she called my cruelty. I never heard her complain of it before.'

After a moment's pause Mr Webster got up. ‘ May I ask, Mr Colton, the nature of your business in India?'

Errol's eyebrows wrinkled. ‘My group is negotiating for the development of tourist facilities in India.'

‘And Miss Locke went with you purely as a companion.'

‘Of course.'

‘Was there any event that occurred in India which could have affected her adversely – any shock, any temporary illness, say?'

‘Nothing at all, so far as I know. We both kept in good health.'

‘And when did you have this “crisis of conscience” you refer to? While you were there?'

‘No, no. At least, not until the last day or so. It was really when I came home and found my wife determined that I should make an immediate decision …'

‘You decided your girlfriend was the more easily jettisoned.'

‘I must protest,' said Colton's lawyer, who had been very quiet until now. ‘It is unwarranted to make such a remark.'

‘All I can say now,' said Errol, ‘is that I'm deeply grieved at this outcome.'

‘Thank you, Mr Colton.'

There was a pause and a stirring. The coroner shifted in his chair.

He said: ‘This is one of the most distressing and depressing cases I have had to listen to. A young woman on the threshold of her life, a person of good birth, good health, high spirits and integrity, takes her own life, either by accident or design, with an overdose of sleeping pills. That it was by design would seem the obvious conclusion, were it not for the absence of a suicide note and the unanimous testimony of her friends, who all say it would be quite contrary to her nature to do this. She had been drinking, we know from the testimony. Could she then have been in so confused a state of mind as to take a few sleeping pills, determined to forget her former lover, and then to have taken more later – even only a few minutes later – the first few not having had the desired effect? Could her confused state of mind have made her unaware that so little time had passed between taking one dosage and another? It seems on the face of it unlikely; but it is not impossible. It is not impossible that she drank more gin after she returned home – indeed, the empty bottle under the bed confirms the likelihood of this. So it is not inconceivable that she did not take her own life. I shall adjourn this inquest pending a more detailed report from the pathologist.'

Three people were taking tea at the Randolph Hotel. There had been a group of five to begin with. The solicitor, Mr Alan Webster, Colonel Henry Gaveston, James Locke and Teresa and Thomas Saunders, a defensive group, warding off the press. ‘Tell me, Mr Locke, what were your feelings when you were told of your daughter's death?' ‘Did you know your daughter was in India with this twice-married man?' Taking refuge in the hotel they had talked business for five minutes, then Webster went to pick up his car with a commitment to be in touch again as soon as the date of the readjourned inquest was known.

Henry Gaveston left a moment later, feeling they would prefer to be alone but taking with him a galling sense of guilt that, as Bursar with responsibility for the well-being of the students of St Martin's, he had let his old friend down by not keeping a closer or better eye on his daughter. His was a virulent frustration, knowing that while he and James talked at the Hanover Club about Stephanie's life and prospects Stephanie was already lying dead in the city mortuary. He could only imagine how James was feeling. Soon he must go to see him and bitterly grieve for his own failure; but it did not seem appropriate to say anything more now.

And James sipped at a cup of tea and no one knew what he was feeling for he kept it very quiet. In the days before the inquest he had felt unable to believe anything. Even the identification … She had still looked pretty, so pretty and so pale lying like a broken flower. Only now and then reality broke in. This formal inquiry he had just witnessed had left him unbelieving. But there were ghastly rents in the canopy of disbelief – a sudden material one when the pathologist had been giving his evidence: his knife had cut into her body, dismembering, eviscerating, defiling, with hacksaw, chisel, mallet; James had choked and nearly left the court. And in the evidence of Errol Colton: the true defiling had come from him, through him, by his actions, by his smooth lies …

Eventually unable to bear the silence any longer Teresa plunged in. ‘The police superintendent says they are going to release the flat tomorrow morning, Daddy, so Tom and I can go round. There's absolutely no need to upset yourself further.'

‘I went in yesterday,' James said. There had been surprisingly little of her about, the most poignant things being the mortar board and gown that he had only seen her in once. (And how vividly her youth and blondeness had stood out, emphasised by the subfusc.) She had been uncaring about what she wore: there had only seemed a single rail of clothes.

‘I don't know when we can move things,' Teresa said. ‘Not yet, of course. But there's books.'

‘Take what you want.'

‘And the rest?'

‘Oh …' James put down his cup. ‘Whatever you think … You can bring some home – those that seem personal … There's her room still, more or less untouched. She never liked anyone tampering with it. She never seemed to want to feel she had really left.'

‘I feel the same,' said Teresa.

‘About the lease of the flat,' said Tom. ‘How long does that, run?'

‘It's paid till July. You could tell the estate agents. I imagine they'll know …'

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

James watched people going in and out of the room, undergraduates and their parents and girlfriends; and others not connected with the university, only connected with real life by the prosaic nature of their being alive. Two nineteen- or twenty-year-old girls, sisters probably, good-looking, well dressed, laughing and talking about no doubt the importance of the unimportant. Not Stephanie. Not Stephanie ever again. The peculiar personality, the charm, the talkativeness, the leggy elegance, the quirkiness of mood and mind; his blood, his daughter. Other girls, thousands upon thousands of other girls, all of some value, with one virtue or another, all prized by other parents, other lovers, all busy about private interests of their own, in which he had no part. Not Stephanie ever again.

He said: ‘About the funeral. I was told next week. She'll be buried in Exton Tracey. It will be quite a way to go. Some of her local friends may not be able to make it. But it's the family church.'

‘Of course.'

‘I hope it won't be too far for you, Terry.'

Teresa looked down at her stomach. ‘Lord, no. I'm absolutely fine. And being a distance away may just choke off a few of these revolting paparazzi.'

‘Too much to hope,' said Tom.

‘I only wish,' Teresa said, and then stopped.

James picked up one of his sticks which had slid down beside his chair. ‘Wish what?'

‘Well, obviously …'

‘Don't we all.'

Teresa said: ‘That man! I hope he sleeps badly for the rest of his life.'

‘I doubt if he will … I suppose he's the type of man that impressionable young girls fall for.'

‘Not me,' said Teresa. ‘ I didn't take to him at all! He's over life-size and everything comes too easily. I can't understand. I simply
can't
understand!'

‘What?' Thomas said. ‘I mean what particularly?'

Teresa turned to him. ‘ Maybe you thought you knew my sister. I
did
know her. Well, if you want to go wild about someone and to feel terribly with it and live everything up, it may be a fairly good idea to swan off to India for a couple of weeks with a man like Errol Colton. Great. It's a leaf in the book, a notch on the gun barrel, something to have done and be done with. Then, maybe if he is such a great lover that you can't bear to part with him, it's tough when you come home to become a single underprivileged undergraduate again, swotting for your Finals and he's not around to hold your hand and tell you how wonderful you are! Bad luck. Boo-hoo. But beyond being merely
miserable
… She was always more up and down than I was. But not that far down! Good God, not that far!'

James said quietly: ‘More tea, Tom?'

‘Thank you, no.'

Teresa said: ‘Forgive me for going on about it, Daddy. I know how you must feel, just to talk about it hurts and hurts. And we've all been over this in our minds, over and over ever since we heard … Well, it's done. She's dead and gone. Your daughter and my sister. It's done and there's nothing we can do about it to bring her back. But I can't accept it, how it seems to have happened, not even as a possibility!'

‘Nor can I,' said James. ‘Nor will I.'

It was called the Grove Garden Hotel and it was in Belgrave Road, near Victoria Station. It had been originally a smart town house, but unlike most of the hotels in the street it had not expanded to take in properties on either side. By dividing the upstairs drawing room three extra bedrooms had been created, bringing the total to fifteen. It was owned officially by a Mr and Mrs Daman Subarthi, who offered reduced terms for new arrivals from the subcontinent. White guests were always told the hotel was full and white staff were not engaged.

Naresh Prasad had been there four days. On the first day he had voided sixty-six packets, on the second ten; since then there had been nothing in spite of all the aperients.

At first the pain had gone – such an infinite relief – and he had thought all was well. But on the third day it had come back, not so comprehensively involving the whole abdomen, but down the left side – and just as acute. He would be free of it for a couple of hours, then it would return, gripping and griping until he groaned aloud and rolled backwards and forwards on the narrow iron bed, trying to ease it.

His hosts were waiting to know what they should do with him. Three days was the maximum any traveller of Nari's kind had ever stayed before. They had got seventy-six packets, but the letter he carried stated definitely eighty. But it was not merely the four missing packages (which represented a street value of over a thousand pounds), it was that they could not risk him becoming ill and being taken to some hospital and the remaining packages coming into the possession of the police. He knew too much. Probably he would be too scared to talk, but you never could be sure how a drugs enforcement officer might get round him.

It was possible of course that Nari had voided the four packages earlier somewhere along the way and had passed them on to a confederate in Brussels to make a profit for himself. Or the packages had caused an inflammation of the bowel which had closed on them and would not allow them to pass. A third possibility could not be considered seriously, for if the packages had burst open or leaked the carrier would be dead.

In the meantime he moaned at frequent intervals and would eat nothing. Even the castor oil he sicked up.

Nari had become aware that the people here, even the two women, were not remotely interested in him as a human being and did not care whether he lived or died. He was simply an embarrassment and a danger to them, threatening the possibility of exposure, imprisonment or deportation for them all, the break-up of a safe and profitable house.