Stephanie by Winston Graham
‘How?’
‘That is what I have come to ask you.’
Arden helped himself to the tartare sauce. He had delicate, manicured hands that touched everything lightly. ‘Tell me what other reasons you have for suspecting Colton. You say that Stephanie did not actually link him with her talk about drugs?’
‘They were the two subjects uppermost in her mind the whole time she was with me. I don’t think they could have been separate. Clearly she did not want to “ give him away” to me in so many words.’
‘This is all suspicion so far, James.’
‘Yes. Quite. I have been to see the people in the flat above Stephanie’s. Of course, they have been interviewed by the police, but they seem to have heard nothing in the night at all. They did not even hear her come back.’
‘I expect most of the places you go, the police will have been there before you,’ Arden said gently.
‘I have also seen the people in the flat below Stephanie’s. They were away for the weekend. He’s a Fellow of All Souls, and she teaches part time at the Dragon School. They have a cottage in Wales and were visiting it.’
‘Indeed.’
‘They were away’, James said, ‘because a neighbour in Wales telephoned them to say that an arsonist had set fire to a nearby cottage and had tried to force a way into theirs. When they got down the neighbour said he had never telephoned them. Nor was there any damage.’
‘A hoax by the Welsh Nationalists,’ said Sir Humphrey.
‘Possibly. From their flat, unlike the top flat, it is easy to see people climbing the outside staircase to Stephanie’s flat. There might have been a purpose in the hoax.’
‘Indeed …’
‘Also when I saw Errol Colton recently I asked him why, if he wanted to break with Stephanie and presumably wanted to avoid her, he had gone to the Maidment party when he knew he was sure to meet her. He said that Lady Maidment was a friend and a client of his and that he thought it necessary to be there. Last Tuesday I saw her son, whose party this was, and put this to him. He said Colton had never met his mother and that he had been invited at the last moment because another friend had told them he would like him to be asked …’
Arden grunted. ‘ Go on.’
‘I have been to see both the doctors concerned. This chap who prescribed the sleeping pills, Hillsborough; it’s a partnership, father and son; this was the son Stephanie saw. He was not pleased with my visit. He seemed to think it reflected on his professional competence.’
‘What did you ask him?’
‘Not more than the usual things. I don’t believe Stephanie ever needed sleeping pills, because all her life she was a heavy sleeper. She could stay up like a night owl, but the minute she put her head on a pillow she was out like a light. I was able to discover that he did know Stephanie from an earlier and a later visit – so it was no one using her name. But why was this prescription made up by Boots in Piccadilly Circus when she was living in Oxford and hardly went to London at all?’
There was a pause while someone greeted them as he sat down at the next table.
‘Then I went to see the other man, an Indian called Arun Jiva. He’s a doctor in his own country and is doing postgraduate work at Oxford. Altogether an odd character; stiff and old-fashioned; chip on his shoulder, I should think. A very serious, dedicated sort of person. Hostile, thinking, I suppose, that I wanted to involve him. He simply repeated what he said at the inquest: that he had known Stephanie some time as he’s attached to St Martin’s, that he gave her a lift because her battery was flat and that he left her at the door. Last week my son-in-law picked up Stephanie’s Mini and took it to a garage where they told him it looked as if her battery had been stolen and an old one put in in its place.’
‘It can happen.’
‘Oh indeed. But it’s the accumulation of little untoward circumstances that gradually mount up. I went to see Sir Peter Brune, whom Stephanie had asked about his clinic, and also a social worker who had taken her round various squats the week before. Both confirmed that she seemed concerned about drugs as being in some way related to her own life.’
‘So you think what, James? Can we have it quite clear?’
‘I believe when she came back from the Maidment party she was forced to swallow the pills – perhaps physically – I don’t know. Or tricked into taking them. They were administered to her somehow.That’s why I’m standing you this lunch, to ask you to determine how it could have been done.’
The wry last sentence did not detract from the purposeful tones.
Arden half laughed. ‘I think on those conditions I might prefer to pay for myself …’
They ate for almost five minutes in silence. James clearly was not going to utter another word.
Eventually Humphrey Arden put down his knife and fork. ‘I know Felix Ehrmann pretty well. He was in line for my job when I retired but for some reason they chose Jackson instead. So you can be assured that the PM was done with the utmost thoroughness. Nothing would be left to chance. Any bruises on any part of her body would be noted and reported. Any minute puncture of the skin which might indicate a needle. Saliva, contents of stomach, bladder, even hair – they would all be under the microscope. Then her clothes; the least sign of anything exceptional … her shoes, her car. The fact that this looked like a straightforward case of a jilted lover’s suicide would not be allowed to be the excuse for a slipshod inquiry. I assure you.’
‘You’re not drinking your wine.’
‘I will.’
It was in this club, James thought, at this table that I was lunching with Henry Gaveston while they were conveying the corpse of my daughter to hospital and inquiring as to her next of kin. Then I drove home contentedly enough, until I saw the police car …
He said: ‘You tell me it’s not on.’
‘Not really, no.’
‘You mean in these days of refined techniques there is no way of killing a girl and making it look like suicide which the pathologist cannot detect?’
‘No ways certainly that a man like Errol would have access to.’
‘How do we know what means he had access to? If I’m right in supposing he takes drugs or brings drugs into the country he cannot be working alone. All the things I have told you – the discrepancies and the deceptions – all speak of a concerted effort of some sort.’
‘Provided one is not making too much of them.’
‘Yes,’ James said. ‘All right. I’m a fanciful old man trying to concoct a murder out of a simple tragic suicide – trying to rid myself of the stigma and of a paternal guilt. We all know of the murderer’s mother who says, “My son couldn’t have done that!” Well, I’m in her position saying, “My daughter couldn’t have done that.” Whereas, of course, nobody ever fully understands any other human being, however much they think they do. Well … let’s leave it at that. Would you like Stilton?’
They finished their meal and went downstairs for coffee and drank a glass each of the ’63 port. They talked of mundane things. James had resigned from the committee of the Chelsea Flower Show. For the moment, he said, he couldn’t whip up an interest in anything. In anything, that is, except his one preoccupation.
‘It won’t bring her back,’ said Arden.
‘No, but I want to know how she went.’
With the port Humphrey seemed a little ill at ease. The bar was noisy, and he screwed in his hearing aid a couple of times to adjust to it. He coughed and talked at random. Then he said he should be going.
‘Don’t come to the door. I know what a painful business it is. But thanks for the lunch. I’ll return it within the month, if you’ll come.’
‘I’ll come.’
Sir Humphrey tramped away and James sat silently by himself for a few minutes. It would take him an hour and a half to get home. Dreary driving, most of it. And more dreary today because he had pretty well come to the end of the road. At first there had seemed so many inquiries to make. Supported by his unalterable conviction
So go home and cultivate your garden and write genteel articles about acid soils and shrub roses and F2 petunias. And forget that you have lost a daughter – that all that freshness and youth and prettiness and intelligence has been wiped off the earth by a few flat pink pills. A life hardly begun, only just blossoming, with half a century of human existence gone to waste, turned already by disintegrating processes into putrefaction and horror. Stephanie was dead. She could no longer – ever – wake in the morning and see the sun, and smell the air, and know what it was to be alive.
Well, there was no hurry to get home. No one was waiting there for him except the faithful and good-tempered and thoughtful Mary Aldershot. The correct thing now was to get drunk. He would get drunk and then sleep it off in the library before driving home.
He beckoned the barman. ‘Would you bring me another ’63 port.’
‘Yes, sir.’
As the barman retreated James saw Sir Humphrey Arden lumbering back. He was looking his age. What had the old boy forgotten? (Humphrey was five years older than James.)
‘Did I see you order another of the ’63? I think I’ll stay for another glass myself. There’s too little of it left.’
The barman, it seemed by intuition, brought two glasses. Humphrey paid him and sipped.
‘There was a case,’ he said. ‘I honestly don’t think it is germane – but there were similarities … distinct similarities. I don’t know if I’m right in telling you this – not because it is in any way secret but because it won’t really help you and it may only set you off on tracks that it can’t really benefit you to pursue.’
‘Go on,’ said James.
‘Well, just before I retired, it must be about five years ago, there was this doctor in Edinburgh …’
Chapter Five
I
Henry Gaveston, MC, having shut up his two enormous Alsatians – which were an important contribution to the safety of his house – went down on his creaky knees to peer under his twenty-five-year-old Alvis Grey Lady to make sure no bomb had been placed there while he was at lunch, then started it and drove the fifty-odd miles to James Locke’s house near Andover. It would have been easier from St Martin’s, where as usual he had spent the morning, but he had decided to eat at home since Fred, his servant and bodyguard, would, he knew, in the absence of Mrs Gaveston, have prepared his lunch.
He found James as usual in his garden but tending some seedlings with a functional rather than a loving care. James had lost weight since his daughter died, and his face had narrowed into new lines.
Henry walked beside the electric chair as they returned to the house. When they got in and were sipping single malt whisky he said: ‘ I’ve pulled all the strings I can but the results are not deafening. Errol was born in June 1945. His mother was from Newcastle, the daughter of a Greek importer called Lascou, his father was from London and became a rubber planter in Malaysia – came home during the war, having lost most of his money and lived in what used to be called “ reduced circumstances” until he died in 1960. Mother, we think, is still alive, but Errol and she never got on. Errol went to Lockfield School and Reading University. He was sent down for “dishonesty” but there seems to be no record more specific. In 1966 he went into the travel agency business, first as a courier, then as a partner in a small firm. Later he started his own firm, which went bankrupt, leaving holidaymakers stranded. In 1969 he bought a hotel in Corfu, and the same year he married Elena Mavrogodatos; their daughter was born the following year. At some stage Errol spent a month in a Greek jail for being in possession of cocaine …’
‘Ah,’ said James.
‘But that’s all. About six years ago he sold the hotel in Corfu and divorced his wife. He returned to England, and started another travel agency. He contrived to bring his daughter with him. At this stage his affairs became prosperous. It’s not known how he financed himself in London but my friends are working on that. In 1979 he divorced his first wife and married Suzanne Fredericks, whose mother is French. He now heads a group called Sunflower Travel PLC. There are four other directors, who may be genuine, but if anything crooked is involved those will just be nominees. He has no police record in Britain – unless it is under another name, but there is certainly no suggestion of this. He is a keen and talented photographer, and while still at Reading University won a Daily Mail prize for the best photograph of the year. He has an exhibition at the Megson Gallery next month.’
James tapped his fingers on the crook of his stick. ‘It’s a detailed report. I’m very grateful.’
‘It adds up to the shadowy entrepreneurial character you might suppose, doesn’t it. A chap who makes money quickly and loses it quickly and wouldn’t object to a shady deal if he thought he could get away with it. But nothing actually criminal.’
‘Is there more?’
‘No, I wish there were. The only possibly suspicious circumstance is his quick prosperity at about the time he returned to England. But this might have a perfectly innocent explanation.’
‘Or it might not.’
‘Quite. But so far we really only have Stephanie’s conversations with you two weeks before she died – which might be significant or of little significance at all.’
‘In other words, what interpretation I have put on them. And my judgment may be warped by bereavement. Is that what you are trying to say?’
Henry got up and refilled his own and James’s glass.
‘My dear old friend, I so wish I could help you more. Ever since this happened I’ve been trying to say this to you, that I feel a deep sense of responsibility and guilt, that your daughter, Stephanie, the daughter of my oldest friend, a student at the college of which I am Bursar … someone I should have taken special pains – to see for her welfare – that this should have happened … I wake most nights and stay awake wondering what I might have done.’
James said: ‘I can’t see that you can blame yourself over this dirty business. If she’d been taking dope, you or someone would have noticed it. But she was not. She was living high, and nothing else. How could you know, or anyone know, that it was going to end this way?’
James finished his second whisky. Henry frowned, looking over the pleasant room, his face showing an uncertainty that was rare.
He said: ‘ Humphrey Arden telephoned me.’
James grimaced. ‘Good God, what an old boy network!’
‘Well, he told me what you had talked about. He was worried about the whole thing.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, he seems to regret having told you of some doctor in Edinburgh who killed his wife, there being a few – a few similarities between that and Stephanie’s death. He’s afraid that you may jump to hasty conclusions.’
‘I’m too old and disabled’, said James, ‘to be able to jump anywhere. But I certainly intend to see both doctors in the case again sometime soon.’
‘D’you think that’s wise? What can you gain? Even in the remote possibility that one or other of them had been involved in anything shady in this matter, the last thing they would do would be to talk about it. To you or to anyone. Whatever the truth, you will be up against the blankest of walls.’
James moved the more painful of his ankles. ‘When I went to see Jeremy Hillsborough he was the most aggressive of all the people I met. And curt. As if I were intruding on his time. As for Arun Jiva, I went to see him for a second time last week and he wouldn’t open the door. When I got into my car I saw him peering through
Henry took his pipe out of his Norfolk jacket, began to fill it. ‘Don’t you think maybe the best course is to accept what has happened? Losing anyone one is deeply attached to is a very destructive and tragic thing. If it is one’s father or one’s mother it can – it has to be – rationalised, looked on as the normal progression of nature – however bitterly one may resent it.’
‘As Dylan Thomas did.’
‘What? Yes … But losing a son or a daughter is an inversion of the natural process, a perversion; an insult to the fitness of things … Nevertheless one has to try to live through it. Your other daughter, Teresa, is shortly to have a baby, your first grandchild. I wish you could try to accept what has happened – obviously you’ll never forget it, but if you could look to the future … I know it’s the bitterest of pills, but it can’t do your health any good to try to prove the unprovable, to keep on and on with fruitless inquiries, leading nowhere.’
James fixed his friend with a blue stare. ‘Are you trying to put me off doing anything more?’
‘I am. I am, because I want to save you from the futility, the disappointment, the fatigue and the – the heartbreak of it all.’
James wheeled his way across to the window, swivelled in his chair.
‘Did you say you had the names of the other directors of that company Colton controls – this Sunflower Travel group?’
Gaveston pursed his lips, took a notebook out. ‘Nothing but the names. Colton is MD. The others are Timothy Lockyer, Arthur Browning, Angelo Smith and Katrina Ellis.’
‘Angelo Smith. Did I tell you when I called on Errol there was another man there who put his head round the door waiting for me to be gone? An unagreeable character who looked as if he might be playing the villain in an inexpensive movie. Errol addressed him as Angelo.’
‘Well, yes. But why not? If someone called Angelo Smith is a director of his company, it’s not unnatural that he should be visiting Errol, is it?’