‘Then why is he under arrest?’ asked Dame Beatrice innocently.
‘Well, Evesham thinks it’s just a ruse, you know.’
‘A ruse?’
‘Oh, my dear Mrs Farintosh, the police are up to all kinds of tricks these days. Evesham says that the real murderer thinks he is perfectly safe and so he’ll do some stupid thing or other and give the game away. Poor Chelion – such a nice, modest, unassuming fellow and so much liked by everybody – is just a stool-pigeon, Evesham says.’
‘Your husband appears to have given a great deal of thought to the matter.’
‘Well, of course, he was there with Chelion and that sinister man Latimer Targe when they found her body, you know. Targe made off at once on the excuse of telephoning the doctor and the police, but I always think there is something very underhand and unpleasant about a man who earns his living by wallowing in crime.’
‘Oh? How does Mr Targe do that?’
‘He looks up and writes up real-life murder cases, but, of course, a person of your education and breeding – it’s easy to tell the real sort when you meet them, isn’t it? – would never dream of touching his books.’
‘Risqué?’ asked Dame Beatrice in a low and horrified tone.
‘Worse, my dear. After all, sex is a perfectly natural thing, whatever strange antics it may get up to, as I try to explain in my novels. Not that I could ever approve or countenance the path pursued by those two young women who left us just about the time of Miss Minnie’s death.’
‘Oh, dear me! You found their conduct shocking?’
‘Yes, indeed. Such strange goings-on! I believe the Greeks had a word for it, but I simply call it unhealthy. And the names they choose to be known by! Billie, for instance. Why could she not write under the name of Wilhelmina, which must have been how she was christened, if indeed she was christened at all. And the other one, Elysée, when of course her real name is simple, undistinguished Elsie! I wonder she did not call herself Desirée and have done with it.’
‘So you got rid of them?’
‘My dear, I had to insist that Miss Nutley did. They were a most undesirable pair. Besides, Evesham had begun making what used to be called sheep’s eyes at Elysée. Never, Mrs Farintosh, be persuaded to marry a man younger than yourself.’
‘I was not so persuaded and the chance is unlikely to be presented to me now.’
‘Ah, well, I spoke rhetorically. I made that mistake and have regretted it for years. My marriage, Mrs Farintosh, has not been a happy or an easy one.’
Dame Beatrice said she was sorry to hear it, but she supposed that nobody’s life was a bed of roses.
‘You may wonder,’ Constance went rightly ignoring this deplorable cliché, ‘why I write the kind of novels I do. With my undoubted talents I could have done anything, simply anything I chose, Mrs Farintosh.’
Dame Beatrice said that Thomas Gray had been so right, so very right.
‘Thomas Gray? You mean Gray of Gray’s Elegy?’
Yes, Dame Beatrice had meant Gray of Gray’s Elegy. (It sounded like some owner of a stately home open to the public at fifty pence a time, she thought.) She quoted:
‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’
Constance Kent did not appear to be flattered.
‘That is hardly me,’ she said. ‘I certainly was not “born to blush unseen”.’
‘Ah,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘perhaps, then, you see yourself as:
Some village Whitehouse who, with dauntless breast,
The pornographic tyranny withstood;
Some mute inglorious Joan of Arc may rest,
Some Corday guiltless of foul Marat’s blood.’
‘I don’t recollect that Gray wrote those words,’ said Constance, looking puzzled.
Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw. ‘I was attempting to rescue the poet from the charge of being a male chauvinist pig,’ she said.
‘Oh, dear! I am not a Women’s Libber, Mrs Farintosh, and that,’ said Constance, looking happier, ‘brings me back to Kennett and Barnes.’
‘You said you got rid of them.’
‘I got the idea from a letter which was actually sent to me myself – anonymously, of course. Well, you know, all is grist which comes to a novelist’s mill, so although the letter was very unpleasant both in content and in the unpleasant words it used, I thought Why Not?’
‘Why not what?’
‘Write one myself, of course. I was stuck in the fourth chapter of my Split Summer – Split being that place on the Dalmatian coast, so it was rather a clever title, I thought – but somehow I had come to a full stop. Then came this letter. It horrified me at first, but then I suddenly saw how to open up my book. I am, of course, a purist where my work is concerned, so I wanted to find out for myself what effect an anonymous letter was likely to have on the recipient.’
‘But I thought you knew the effect such a letter had on the recipient. You say you yourself had received one.’
‘I am hardly a typical case. I knew that the statements and accusations contained in my letter were lies. The letter I wrote to these two misguided girls was the truth.’
‘May I ask—?’
‘What was in the letter I myself received? Certainly. I have nothing to hide. The letter accused me of having trapped Evesham into marrying me and it enquired, in a most disagreeable way, how I had managed it. My reply, I should explain, was only tit for tat. I knew where my letter came from. Kennett and Barnes wrote it.’
‘What made you decide that it came from those two girls?’
‘Oh, my dear! They were quite, quite abnormal.’
‘You destroyed the letter, I suppose.’
‘You may be sure I did! Even if I had not, I would not dream of showing it to you. However, I retaliated in kind and – talk about killing two birds with one stone! – my novel suddenly took fire again and those two embarrassing and dangerous young women lost their nerve and spent no time at all in packing their bags and leaving. I told Miss Nutley what I had done and she undertook to see that they got the anonymous letter.’
‘You were going to tell me what makes you write your novels.’
‘Oh, that, yes. Well, for one thing, I want to leave the world a better place than it was when I entered it. I am a moral reformer, Mrs Farintosh.’
‘A moral reformer?’
‘My dearest wish is to do good.’
‘Robert Louis Stevenson thought it was more necessary to be good.’
‘Oh, well, I suppose one takes “being good” for granted. I am sure I have nothing with which to reproach myself.’
‘Stevenson went further. Not only did he think he had to be good; he thought he had no duty to make his neighbour good, but to make him happy, if that were possible.’
‘I have made thousands happy in my time,’ said Constance complacently. ‘It is my aim to brighten the drab lives of other women. Deprived of happiness myself, I also write by way of compensation, I suppose, for my unfulfilled, unsatisfactory married life.’ The story of Constance Kent’s unhappy, unsatisfactory married life lasted for the ensuing hour, but Dame Beatrice, listening patiently to the garbled and, she was sure, highly-exaggerated history of Constance Kent’s wrongs, felt that the time had not been wasted. At least the author of one of the anonymous letters was now known, and the letter itself reason enough to explain, perhaps, the abrupt departure of Billie and Elysée. Later on, she decided, she would ask Constance Kent to reproduce the document.
(4)
As though Constance Kent had set a fashion, two more invitations had been pushed under Dame Beatrice’s sitting-room door while she was at lunch. One was from Mandrake Shard suggesting tea for two at a little place he knew not far from Weston Pipers. As the other invitation was for cocktails with Polly Hempseed and Cassie McHaig at six in the evening, she was able to accept both. She had expected, from Piper’s written description, that Mandrake Shard would be a small man, but, even so, she was slightly taken aback when he knocked gently on her door at half-past three that afternoon. She was accustomed to be dwarfed by Laura and by Laura’s husband and tall son, and by her own son, Sir Ferdinand Lestrange. She found it almost a unique experience to find herself playing giantess to a man whose height she estimated at well under five feet.