Stephanie by Winston Graham
‘You mean this Locke girl?’ said Somerdale.
‘Yes, but she wasn’t the only one. And he treated his first wife very badly.’
‘I know James Locke,’ said Somerdale. ‘A good feller, with a great war record.’
‘He came to see me after his daughter’s death,’ Peter Brune said. ‘I felt a bit guilty about the whole affair because Stephanie first met Colton here; but I simply couldn’t help him by giving him a sort of insight into their affair, which was what he seemed to want. After that weekend when they met I never saw them together.’
‘He’s taken it very badly.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Worrel.
‘When I was twelve,’ Peter said, ‘my mother took me to Aberystwyth. We stayed at a small hotel on the front. There was an accident on the beach. A crowd of youngsters larking in the water and one was missing. The father of the missing lad called at every hotel in the town, asking if by any chance his son had been taken in and was safe. I remember him well: he was a big man in a dark blue suit and he carried a white handkerchief in his right hand and the hand and the handkerchief were pressed not to his eyes but to his heart. He had the same look as Locke had when he came to call on me.’
The meal continued in silence.
‘Colton’s first wife lives in Corfu, doesn’t she?’ Henry asked, more or less as an aside to Peter Brune.
‘That’s where I met them. It’s some years ago. They were struggling to make a living out of a small hotel, but you know Corfu is very seasonal. You have to make enough in five months to live for twelve.’
‘That was a delightful holiday Catherine and I spent with you in September the year before last,’ boomed Crichton.
‘Thank you.’ Brune glanced good-humouredly round the table. ‘You will all be welcome in your turn, if you so fancy it. I invited Henry and his wife last May but it didn’t fit into their plans.’
Henry laughed. ‘ Well, it’s a pleasure to look forward to!’
‘This is a damned good wine,’ said Somerdale. ‘Gruaud-Larose, did you say?’
‘Yes, a ’66.’ Brune looked at Dr Crichton. ‘I’ve ordered a dozen cases for the college cellars.’
‘You spoil us,’ said Crichton. ‘But you must help us to drink it.’
In such affability the meal was concluded. It was Peter Brune’s fancy to follow college tradition and move into the drawing room for port and coffee and petit fours.
As they moved out, Henry said in an aside to his host: ‘Locke was very unsatisfied with the verdict on his daughter, you know, and was convinced Colton could have told him more as to how and why it had happened. I believe Locke was thinking of going to Corfu to find Colton’s first wife to see if she could give him more details about Colton’s roots. I suppose now – I suppose with Colton dead he will have given up the idea.’
‘Don’t think it would have helped him,’ said Brune. ‘Elena, Errol’s first wife, was bribed to allow Errol custody of their daughter. I think to find the roots of anything Errol did you only have to scratch the surface. He did what he pleased so long as it profited him; there were no hidden motives; he served himself.’
‘I suppose you didn’t actually stay at his hotel, did you?’
‘God, no. It was – adequate, but very much geared to the package deal. Almost every hotel in Corfu – with perhaps one exception – is so geared, from luxury to bare boards. No, I met him at a man’s house – a man called Mr Erasmus. He has – or had – a villa on Corfu near Lefkimi. Very rich man. The Coltons were there.’
‘Presumably not a Greek.’
‘A ship-owner, I was told, though ship-owning can cover a multitude of sins. Curious thing, nobody seemed to know his first name – unless Erasmus was his first name. Everybody calls him Mr Erasmus – even his girlfriends.’
‘I take it you didn’t like him.’
‘Well, not sufficiently to return the invitation! I haven’t seen him for years, so he may have left.’
‘Ever hear of a man called Apostoleris?’ Henry asked.
Peter shook his head. ‘Should I have?’
Henry laughed. ‘ He was an EOKA terrorist in the late fifties. The photograph of this man Smith in the papers reminds me of him. The split eyebrow particularly. Whatever the motive for the murders, it’s clear that Colton was keeping peculiar company.’
They seated themselves round the fire and sipped their coffee and admired the port. Alistair Crichton told the story of a visit he had paid to a noble house in Cornwall, where a ’67 port had been served and his hostess had inquired of her husband if it wasn’t perhaps a bit over the hill? Alistair had declared it very fine, and anyway wasn’t it early for a nineteen sixty-seven port to be over the hill by nineteen eighty-three? To which his host had replied quietly that what they were drinking had been put down in eighteen sixty-seven.
Dinner broke up at midnight.
As they were leaving Peter Brune said to Henry: ‘If your friend Locke does go to Corfu, tell him to get in touch with me. I can open a lot of doors for him.’
‘Thank you, I’ll tell him. But I imagine with Colton dead there’ll be less chance than ever of his being able to turn up anything that might be useful about his daughter. It was always a forlorn hope anyway. Stephanie never went there.’
IV
On the Friday Naresh Prasad, an Indian of no fixed address, appeared in court on suspicion of being in illegal possession of one hundred grams of heroin and was remanded in police custody.
On the Saturday James drove his car for the first time since Tuesday. On Wednesday Mary had taken the Peugeot 305 to a car wash, but there was no unobvious way of changing its number plates, its make or its colour.
As was usually the way when he went shopping in his own village, James parked outside each shop in turn and the shopkeeper or one of his assistants would come trotting out to serve him. It saved his ankles. Most times he accepted this as a generous little convenience offered to him as an old and respected customer. Today he had doubts, ‘Morning, Mr Beveridge, we need some decent potatoes, ours are going soft. Yes, whites preferred. Nobody keeps King Edwards nowadays, I suppose? Yes, Cara will do. And some apples. And a couple of ripe avocados.’ By the way, Mr Beveridge, I’m not quite the genteel customer you suppose. Do you know what I did on Tuesday night?
When he got home Mary said that Colonel Gaveston had rung. Was he to ring him back? No, he said he would phone later.
James went out into his garden. In the twenty years since he had planted his main shrubs and trees some had fallen by the wayside, victims of drought or wind or heavy soil; but about seventy per cent remained and had flourished and grown to a splendid maturity. He knew them all and watched over them all. He had two men, a day a week each – Farrant was here this morning – but much of the work James did himself, dropping out of his chair onto a kneeling pad to fish out some troublesome weed or crumble the soil speculatively in his hand around a shrub which was looking sickly.
But again this morning the magic did not work. It had been gone since Stephanie died, and this week even worse than ever. In some ways he would have preferred it if Henry had not dissuaded him from ringing the police and making an outright confession. Then he would not be cowering like a criminal waiting for the knock on the door, the police car, the Black Maria. Would the average person be likely to blame him for what he had done? Certainly the average person, whatever private feelings he or she might have, would, if sitting on a jury, find him guilty of murder, and the average judge would not allow any Old Testament doctrines to prevent him from sentencing the prisoner to life. So there it was.
The gardener ambled towards him, a tall big-boned elderly man, wrinkling his eyes in the sunshine.
‘Morning, Farrant. Sorry I haven’t been out to see you before but there was some shopping to be done. Lovely day.’
‘Yes, sir. A bit still, though, for my loiking. There might be a ground frost tonight.’
James looked up at the sky. One frost, even a
‘Surely not as late as this?’
‘I’ve known it sometoimes, sur. We’re too far from the sea.’ Farrant came from Weymouth.
James forced himself to take an interest in things, to act the part of himself in normal times.
Farrant said: ‘ Did you order more heat, sur, for the furnace, I mean? I did wonder if Harper had been up to some little game.’
Farrant disapproved of the other gardener, Harper, for being young, for being north country, and for wearing his hair long.
‘I think Mrs Aldershot was burning a few things earlier in the week. Saves coke. The stove will burn most things, you know. That’s why we changed it.’
‘Oh, I see, sur. It was just that I wondered you should want so much heat at this toime of the year. I raked it out this morning and there was one or two things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, a brass ring, sur. Such as you might have on a walking stick. And the heel of a shoe.’
‘What have you done with them?’
‘I put ’em in the dustbin.’
‘Good. I’m sure they’re not of value. Look at that cornus kousa. You’d never think it was so sulky when we first put it in.’
The day passed. When Farrant was safely gone James went to the dustbin and took out the things the gardener had mentioned. They went into the compost. Then he gave the furnace another good raking through. Henry did not ring again and James, mindful of earlier warnings, did not ring back.
But Henry turned up on Sunday morning. The big grey Alvis circled the drive and stopped at the door. Henry came up the steps and Mrs Aldershot let him in. His face looked more pinched in the bright morning light, his thin body more ramshackle. His suit looked as if he had slept in it.
Discreetly Mary left them, and Henry said: ‘James, when am I going to bring you good news?’
‘Clearly not today by your looks. Are the police close behind?’
‘No. I’ve heard nothing from them.’
‘Then?’
‘From another quarter. Anne Vincent. Her father brought her back yesterday. She’d had something not far short of a nervous breakdown and had eventually told him the cause.’
Henry took a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and smoothed it out, stared at it as if it might burn him.
‘Anne Vincent had a crush on Stephanie; we all knew that. When she went in that morning and found her lying dead, there was this note on the bedside table. She says she felt she must try to protect Stephanie’s memory and reputation, so she put it in her pocket and said nothing to the police. She said she felt it was better for everyone if the verdict could be an open one. But the responsibility of having done this preyed so much on her mind that she couldn’t sleep for nights on end. So now it has come back to us. I wish I could have kept it from you. But in honesty I can’t.’
James took the note and smoothed it again and read in his daughter’s angular hand:
This is the end. I can’t go on. There’s nothing for me now, now he has gone. I’m deeply, deeply sorry to deliberately bring all this trouble and grief to the people I love and trust, and who love and trust me. But there is no other way out.
Stephanie
Chapter Eleven
I
Detective Inspector Foulsham said: ‘I’m sorry to ask you some of these questions over again, Mrs Colton, but sometimes something new comes out of them. For instance, have you no idea why the photographs were stolen, the whole portfolio that was going to provide the material for his exhibition?’
‘No idea whatever. It was only the prints that were stolen. If my husband had wanted to he could have made replacements in a couple of days.’
‘Would you be able to do that for us?’
‘No. He had hundreds of photographs, hundreds of negatives. He didn’t consult me which he was going to choose.’
‘You didn’t look at the portfolio?’
‘No. My husband and I were not on the best of terms.’
‘Because of his involvement with Stephanie Locke?’
‘Of course.’
‘You say you didn’t know that he took drugs?’
‘No idea whatever. He certainly kept it from me.’
‘You didn’t notice any dramatic changes in his moods?’
‘Oh, all the time. He switched on and off according to the company he was in. But he was like that all the years I knew him.’ Suzanne looked dark and sultry for a moment, then shrugged. ‘I suppose if you come to think of it, that may have been the reason why. But I never knew. It would have smelt in the house, surely.’
‘Not in the case of cocaine, which is inhaled like snuff. A substantial quantity, as I’ve said, was found in Mr Smith’s suitcase. When did you say you first met him?’
‘I’d heard of him before, but I hadn’t met him until he came to stay about three weeks ago.’
‘After the death of Stephanie Locke.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But what has that to do with it?’
‘We have found that Angelo Smith was a Greek national, but he seems to have had no passport nor any fixed address.’
‘Well, surely you can trace him through the company, Sunflower Travel?’
‘We’ve been in touch with the secretary, and the other directors. Arthur Browning, Timothy Lockyer and Katrina Ellis are out of the country. The secretary, a Mrs Chaplin, seems to know nothing much about the operation of the company, except that it is trading at a loss.’
Suzanne said curtly: ‘I know very little of my husband’s affairs. I only know that we were comfortably off.’
‘I believe your solicitor came yesterday. This house is in your name?’
‘He told me so.’
‘Were Smith and your husband on good terms?’
‘On the whole, yes. Sometimes Errol seemed irritated by him being around.’
‘How did he explain his coming to stay here?’
‘When he arrived my husband and I were not on speaking terms. Afterwards – he just said Smith was here on business.’
‘Did you ever get the impression that your husband feared for his life?’
‘No. Why should he?’
‘Are there not people he quarrelled with?’
‘None that I know of.’
‘Jealous husbands? Bereaved fathers?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘Were you present when Mr James Locke called?’
‘I was in the house, but I didn’t see him.’
‘That must have been a very unpleasant interview.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Did your husband speak about it afterwards? D’you know if there was an open quarrel?’
‘No. I wouldn’t think so. We had friends in at the time. It was my daughter’s birthday.’
‘I gather that your husband was heavily insured.’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘It must be greatly to your advantage now, that he should have been.’
‘Look, Inspector Foulsham,’ Suzanne said, ‘I was at Stratford with my cousin when my husband was killed. Or don’t you believe that?’
‘Of course, of course.’
‘It wouldn’t have been any advantage to me to have him killed, would it? In spite of his playing around with other women I was fond of him. And probably I shall be much worse off without him. Don’t try to pin a motive on me!’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘And may I ask when I’m going to have the house to myself again?’
‘You already have, madam. I can’t promise this is the last time someone will call, because we have so much to work out – dealing with Mr Colton’s business activities – but we will do our best not to inconvenience you unduly.’
II
‘D’you think she’s as innocent as she sounds, Foulsham?’ the superintendent asked.
‘No, I’m certain she knows somethi
‘But no nearer an arrest?’
‘Afraid not, sir. The clues we have are minimal. We’ve so far picked up about two hundred prints. The wooden banister going up the stairs had been wiped clean, as you know. Two alien prints have been found under the rail, of a first and second finger, where a hand has grasped the rail tightly. They’ve not been matched with anyone yet. Oil spilled on the drive – engine oil on the pebbles – only a few drips, which indicate either a slow leak or that the visitor didn’t stop long. A rubber heel mark on the outside step. A millimetre of fibre under one of Smith’s fingernails; we thought he might have been grasping a coat or jacket, but it seems it came from the carpet he fell on. He didn’t die instantly.’
Superintendent Willis said: ‘You haven’t been to see James Locke again?’
‘No, sir. I rather hope I shall not have to.’
‘You think he is quite innocent?’
‘I don’t think he could have done it himself.’
‘How old is he? Sixty-five? My father was playing cricket at sixty-five.’
‘Oh, it’s not just age …’
‘No, I’m sure. How good is his alibi for the night?’
‘He says after making his statement to Sergeant Evans he went into the Randolph Hotel for a drink, and with his disabled sticker was able to park outside. This is confirmed by the barman, who remembered his lameness. Thereafter he says he drove straight home, arriving home about eight-thirty, and his housekeeper confirms this.’
‘Anybody see him on the road? He probably had to drive through his village, and they’d know his car. It would still be full daylight.’
‘Nothing’s come up so far. His housekeeper looks a reliable sort of woman.’