Stephanie by Winston Graham
James had not shown the photograph to the sergeant. Nor had he mentioned the name of Errol Colton.
He drove to St Martin’s and asked for Henry. The porter said he was sorry the Bursar had just left. He was, he believed, going home.
Very well, thought James, he would follow. This was a matter for consultation, if not consultation with the police. It was also possibly a matter for confrontation, but that could follow.
He stopped at the Randolph for a whisky and a sandwich, and took his road map in with him, since he had not before driven to Henry’s house from the direction of Oxford. It was straightforward enough. Go out through Headington, take the A40 for a bit and then fork left; then a sharp left turn before you got to Thame. As he was folding the map he saw the village of Upper Kimble marked – only a few miles further on, north of Princes Risborough – where someone else lived.
Where he might call later this evening or sometime tomorrow.
The sun was coming out now, what was left of it as the day ended. It was in motorists’ eyes as they came towards him. His own screen badly needed cleaning, but he was not in a mood to be concerned with trifles.
As he left Oxford he passed a group of students striding along, talking and laughing, scarves flying, and among them was a blonde girl who reminded him of Stephanie. She was there, flashing a smile at someone and then she was gone. As quickly as Stephanie had gone.
His mind flickered back to a holiday they had all had together in 1977 – not the last but the best. The children had got over the defection of their mother, and he had not yet had that disastrous operation which, instead of curing his lameness, had made him so much more lame. They had gone with Evelyn Gaveston and young Charles Gaveston, Henry being then on active service in Ulster.
They had spent three weeks at the Hotel Voile D’Or at Cap Ferrat. James had hired a large motorboat and they had swum and water-skied and dived and eaten and drunk and laughed together, both at one another and with one another. He and Evelyn had amusedly agreed that while the boy was too young to be permanently affected, the holiday had done the girls no moral good at all. The adulation of the French boys had been heady, and lying on rocks like mermaids in scanty bikinis surrounded by admiring young men had predisposed neither of them to a return to school uniform with grey stockings and red cloth skirts and round red hats and flat-heeled shoes. It had unsettled the fourteen-year-old Stephanie more than the seventeen-year-old Teresa, partly because Stephanie, as the better looking and as a dazzling natural blonde, had been the object of the greater admiration. Latin boys automatically fell in love with blondes.
Parties for the young, held in the evenings of the sun-soaked days, were known as Booms. Largely innocent but inevitably with strong sexual undertones, these had led the girls into a new and riotous and Gallic world from which they had emerged with a view of life that would never be the same again.
Would it all have been different, he wondered, if Janet had lived – and stayed? She had always in her rather tired elegant way been the disciplinarian. He felt he had failed as a father, even though to some extent he had succeeded as a companion. It would have been better to bring his daughters up on principles that went beyond the strictures of writing and speaking good grammar. Children didn’t always learn by example – they needed precept too.
At the root of it perhaps was his long-held dislike of interfering with another person’s life. He had always felt that children should grow up to learn from their own mistakes … Well and good, but what if an early mistake proved fatal?
He was almost in Thame. It was the next turning to the left; he’d forgotten the name of the village, but anyway you didn’t go there. Henry’s house came first on the side road.
Then he saw a garage entrance and on impulse drew in to a space beyond it and came to a stop while the traffic swished past. He sat and thought it out. When he left Oxford he had intended to talk over all these new developments with Henry. But after only these few minutes on the road he had come to the conclusion that this was not between him and Henry at all.
He drove on.
Partridge Manor had begun life as a square and compact house; but long before Errol bought it someone had added a wing and stables and a clock-tower so that it had an impressive appearance of no architectural merit. You approached it down a long gravel drive overgrown with laurels and larches. In his time Errol had developed the back of the house, with a tennis court and croquet lawn, but had been content to leave the front untended except for the most ordinary maintenance.
When James drove up that cold May evening a few birds were singing, and the last of the sun was striking fire from the tops of the larches. There was an early light in an upstairs room. Someone was in. Perhaps everybody was in and had not yet bothered to switch on. He pulled the bell. Even after so few steps he already wanted to sit down.
A long wait. The garages attached to the house were not visible from here, so he could not see if the cars were out. He pulled the bell again.
No reply. His ankles were like fire, he hadn’t stood on them so much for a couple of years. The doctor told him he should lose weight; but surely he would need to lose a couple of stone before it had any significant effect on his walking.
And in fact what else was there to lose weight for if it meant depriving oneself of one of the few pleasures left in life? It was not in any case that he overate, only that he was forced to underexercise.
There was definitely a hght on upstairs, though he could not now see it from the porch. He was getting more than physically tired of waiting outside front doors.
He tried the door. It opened onto the wide hall. He took two clumsy steps in. The light was visible on the landing above. He thought to call out and then decided he would not. The house was very quiet. He shut the door behind him.
Someone must be in. An unlocked front door was a commonplace in an occupied house; but people like the Coltons would never all go out and leave it unlocked.
He tried the handle of the door leading to the small sitting room where he had seen Errol before. The room was unlit and empty.
Up the stairs? He had climbed enough stairs for one day. This was like a retake of his visit to Caxton Street. To save his legs and to make less noise he sat on every second stair and levered himself up with his hands. But with two sticks it was impossible not to make the occasional noise, and someone would surely have heard if anyone was there. At the end of a short passage a door was ajar, and the light came from there. He pulled himself up by the banister, turned the corner and hobbled to the room.
This was a big room overlooking the front of the house, and the walls were even more full of photographs than the room downstairs. In addition to the normal lights, two Anglepoise spotlights focused on a work table which was spread with loose photographs. There was also a half-full glass of a pale brown liquid that looked like whisky, and a cigarette end smouldered in an ashtray. But no one there.
James stood by the table and looked at the photographs. Two more of Stephanie, one standing bareheaded in slacks and a jersey against some Gothic arch, the other walking across a quadrangle with books under her arm. Her happy carefree expression stabbed him like a poisoned knife. Others were of churches, Christian but foreign, he was inclined to think Indian. A number of a primitive fishing vessel on a palm-fringed beach. Another of an attractive bungalow with a frangipani tree flowering in the garden. At the end of the table was a big black folder about two feet square. On the outside was written in white paint: Exhibition of Photographs by Errol Colton, Megson’s Gallery, 1–25 June 1984.
James raised his head and listened. House totally quiet. No one might ever have lived in it. The servants, he presumed, were day servants or hired for special occasions.
He opened the folder and began to look through it. No doubt that Errol was a first-rate photographer. Subtle gradations of light and shade illuminated every picture. James went through the seventy photographs rather quickly to see if the man would have had the cold tactl
James put the paper back. Then he turned to number 22.
It was of a house, surrounded by tall pencil trees. Stone-built, large, with a portico and big windows. Certainly not a new place, might be eighty or ninety years old, not English though the style was English; just possibly Scottish, but more probably Mediterranean, especially because of the trees. He looked up 49. It was of the same house.
What had clearly attracted Errol Colton were the wonderful storm clouds that provided a backdrop for the house and its trees. They were angry and rent, and a halo of sun lit the ragged edges like a vision of judgment – a photographer’s dream. They were among the most effective pictures in the portfolio.
James cleared his throat and looked round the empty room. A lavatory flushed. So there was someone in after all.
The pictures were loosely attached to the dark brown pages by strips of sellotape. Gently James detached the two photographs. They were too big to go flat in a pocket so he folded them and slid them into his inside breast pocket.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
It was Errol Colton, in a conventional blue suit and tie. His eccentric eyebrows were contracted with annoyance, his face flushed, as if he had been drinking.
There had been antagonism between the two men – natural in the circumstances – at the first meeting, but it had been contained within the confines of a formal conversation with other people close by. It was not so in this case.
‘I called to see you,’ James said. ‘No one answered the door.’
‘Trespassing. I’m sorry my wife isn’t here to greet you. She’s gone to Stratford to see Lear. It’s not my favourite play so I let her take her cousin.’
‘I came in,’ said James.
‘I never really enjoy seeing Gloucester having his eyes gouged out, do you?’
‘I prefer it off stage.’ James drew a chair forward and sat in it. One of his sticks clattered to the floor.
‘So you can get upstairs if you want to,’ Errol said.
James said: ‘ I suppose you know that Arun Jiva has left the country.’
‘Who? Dr Jiva? No, why? What is it to you?’
‘He appears to have gone back to India. I wondered what it was to you?’
‘He’s a casual friend, as you know.’
‘And Nari Prasad?’
Errol took up his whisky. ‘Never heard of him.’
‘He seems to have heard of you. Jiva gave him your name today, and a bogus ambulance came to take him away. I happened to be there …’
‘Just as you happen to be here, eh?’
‘No, here I came with intent.’
‘To do what?’
‘To ask you a few more questions about my daughter’s death.’
‘For Christ’s sake!’
‘Also I would like to know about the bogus ambulance, whether you really wanted to help this young Indian or whether you wanted to put him away.’
Errol’s face continued to stay flushed. He was on some sort of high. He put his whisky down and went to the door, took a whistle from his pocket and blew it. He came back into the room. There was silence.
James said: ‘You’re a good photographer.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Even this one is good in its own way.’ James pulled out the photograph taken on the balcony at Goa.
Enrol smiled at it. ‘Ah, that. I sent it to her. Not a picture, I agree, to gladden a father’s heart.’
‘I didn’t find it in her flat. It was in Dr Jiva’s house.’
A flicker of genuine surprise crossed Errol’s face. He drained his whisky. ‘ She was evidently even more of a little tart than I thought she was.’
James gripped one of his sticks and Errol backed away. ‘Well you asked for it,’ he said, ‘you asked for the truth, coming here like a thief, breaking into my house! I’m sorry your daughter died but there’s nothing more to be done about it –’ He stopped.
The door had opened behind him and a short dark-skinned man came into the room.
‘Angelo,’ Errol snapped. ‘Where the hell were you? This man came clattering into the house. I heard him even when I was on the lavatory and thought it was you. What sort of a minder are you supposed to be?’
‘I hear the noise and think it is you,’ Angelo Smith said. ‘Anyway, he is an old man and can do no harm. Do you wish him put out?’
‘I wish him put out.’
‘I’ll go when I’ve finished what I have to say.’ James found himself shaking with anger. ‘I believe my daughter was murdered and you had some hand in it. I believe you are involved in drug trafficking in some way. And I believe you have a boss, for you haven’t the guts to run an organisation such as this. Who is “the Boss”? That’s what I want to know. Who is –’
Errol had made a sharp jerk of the head to Angelo Smith. ‘ Take this old cripple and throw him out. Don’t break his legs; that would be a pity; just put him out a little roughly and make sure he drives away in his car. Make sure he remembers not to come here again.’
Smith came up quickly behind James and grasped him by his collar. Smith was a strong man and was able to yank James to his feet so that his coat was almost pulled off his shoulders. Then he took a professional grip of James’s right arm, pulled it behind his back. The sticks clattered to the floor. He was frogmarched, choking, to the door and out on to the landing.
‘Do you wish to go downstairs easy or hard?’ Smith asked, breathing between his teeth, for James was a heavy man to handle.
‘Easy,’ said James. He went limp, and Smith relaxed his grip to get a firmer one. James hit him side handed across the upper lip. Smith staggered back with a hand to his face, recovered himself, but turned at the wrong moment. James hit him with a rabbit punch behind the ear. As he reeled against the banisters James helped him over. There was a monumental crash in the dark hall and no more sound at all.
After waiting a few seconds to listen, James turned back towards the room. The door was half-ajar. His legs almost giving way, he staggered back.
‘For Christ’s sake, Angelo, what in the name of hell have you done! …’
Errol had come towards the door, and saw there not Angelo Smith but James Locke.
‘Your friend – has had a fall …’
They stared at each other.
James said: ‘ It has gone very dark – out there – he must have missed his footing …’
Errol took a step back. ‘By Christ, the police will hear of this!’
James said: ‘What was it you said about Stephanie?’
Two more steps and Errol had the table between them.
‘Little tart. That was the expression. Even more of a little tart than I realised.’
Errol turned and pulled open a drawer in the chest behind. Leaning on the table James picked up one of his sticks, shakily raised it.
‘Little tart? You set her up in some way and are responsible for her death!’
Errol came up with a small black pistol. ‘Now, you bastard, keep your distance while I ring for the police. You’ll rot in prison for what you’ve done tonight!’
James threw his stick. It struck Errol a harmless glancing blow on the shoulder. Errol fired. There was no possible way in which James could have avoided the bullet had it been accurate. But Errol was no gunman. The bullet winged past and struck the pilaster of the wall between two photographs.
James was still coming. The table, only really a trestle, collapsed under his weight, and Errol, raising the gun again, was grasped by an iron hand which pulled him across the fallen table, among the photographs and the albums and the sketch books. Errol kicked and struggled to get to his feet. As he came up, James chopped him across the throat.
Chapter Eight
I
And so, my dear Evelyn, this awful tragedy refuses to go away. She was a popular girl who seemed to attract attention wherever she went, and her death continues to cast a shadow over the college, and I believe to some extent over the whole university …
He put his pen down, brushed some tobacco ash off the table, and lifted the phone.
‘Gaveston.’
‘Henry. This is James.’
‘My dear fellow, I was thinking of you.’
‘Perhaps with reason. I have just killed two men.’
‘… What? What d’you mean? What are you talking about?’
‘Just that.’
‘My dear chap, don’t make that sort of joke. Where are you – at home?’
‘No, at Partridge Manor. Errol Colton’s house.’
A brief silence. Gaveston took the telephone away from his ear, considered it, then said: ‘ You can’t be serious.’
‘What?’
‘I said, you can’t be serious.’
‘Oh, but I am. And Colton is one of the two.’
It had been in Henry’s mind to continue his letter to Evelyn telling her of how hardly James had taken his loss and expressing the hope that he wouldn’t pursue too obstinately and to his own detriment his almost paranoid belief that Stephanie had not taken her own life. But in his most pessimistic moments he had not imagined anything like this.
‘James, please just tell me what has happened. Shall I come over?’
‘I should be obliged. I was going to ring the police but thought I would speak to you first. If I ring the police now you should all be here about the same time.’
‘Who is there now? Who is with you?’
‘Nobody. I’m quite alone – except for these two.’
‘God Almighty … There were no witnesses, then?’
‘No.’
‘The – the house is empty? How did you get in?’
‘Just walked. The front door was open.’
Gaveston’s mind was working fast. ‘Who is the other man?’