A Murder in Mayfair (29 page)

“I see.”

“You owe your damned existence to the police,” she said, not in a mood of reminiscence, but one of anger. “They kept such a close watch on me after the murder that I couldn't do anything about you.”

“Nice,” I commented.

“Everyone has abortions these days! I was punished because I couldn't have what every chit of a girl has now. It's your fault! You're to blame!”

“I do seem to have had a variety of possible fates,” I said, declining to take this point of view up. “Extinction, adoption, or becoming the acknowledged son of a lord, though admittedly only one with a courtesy title.”

“The situation got rather messy after you were conceived,” my mother admitted, still waving the knife but holding it as firmly and menacingly as ever. “Being the acknowledged son of a lord wasn't on the cards for very long after he put you in me.” She paused, remembering back, and with anger. “That stiff-necked prig bored me. God,
how
he bored me! He was passionate, he was besotted, and any girl can take a lot of that, but he was so damned
righteous.
As long as I wanted to keep the marriage option open I had to be so good, so domestic, so loving to his brats. The appeal of that role wore very thin.”

“So I heard from his daughter.”

“Dull little Caroline. What's she doing now?”

“A fashion buyer. Quite a glamorous job.”

The news seemed to inflame her. Her face showed a mixture of surprise and hate. I realized that my becoming a minister had probably inflamed her in the same way. I had done the sort of thing she had wanted to do. People she despised being successful stirred up resentment at the ruin of her own hopes,
augmented her collection of grievances. However, she swallowed, and with a dismissive gesture of her left hand put Caroline aside and reverted to herself.

“I'm a connoisseur of emotions,” she said, throwing her head back in a ludicrous gesture of conceit. “It's been my great strength and great joy. It's been what has marked me off from other people. They operate within a tiny spectrum. I operate over the whole range.”

“Really?” I said, raising my eyebrows again. “I'd have thought it was quite narrow. You like having the power to hurt, annoy, disturb. You enjoy creating disorder. I'd have thought the psychology books would have had a quite simple word that pinned down your particular mental disorder.”

“Disorder? It is not a disorder! It is an intellectual distinction.”

“What you will. It's in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.”

“Are you trying to annoy me?” She waved her deadly wand closer to my face. I shrugged.

“From what you've said about your plans I've nothing to lose.”

She smiled on being reminded of them, and regained some of her equilibrium, or what passed for it in her.

“Actually my great strength has been understanding other people's more outré emotions, and responding to them. When I had my business I catered for every taste under the sun—I or one of my girls or boys. Whatever the preference was, we could accommodate the customer. It was a house of great resort, especially for the gentlemen. And I'm not using the word ‘gentlemen' as any vulgar madam might. The cream of society came to me: men at the top of their professions. Politicians, judges, writers, media people—they all would meet and talk in my establishment. It was really a salon, a drawing room: the conversation was daring and witty, and ranged well beyond
your understanding. When they write a history of London life in the seventies and eighties my house in Kensington should be at the center of it.”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you? Perhaps the author will devote a special chapter to Mme. Labelle's esoteric and high-class knocking shop. When did you change your name to Mrs. Flanders?”

“When the police had become a lot too interested in Mme. Labelle. You
have
found out a lot. You get the allusion?”

“I suppose so.” I decided to continue annoying her, because she seemed to get a spice out of a duel. “Though Moll Flanders wasn't a whore or a madam. That's a vulgar error. She was a serial bigamist.”

She quivered with aggravation at being corrected.

“Smart alec! Pedant!”

“You're an English graduate of long ago. Something we have in common. You should have known that. Bigamy was never in fact your line, was it? You can't be a bigamist until you've first been married.”

“I was never so daft. I've told you why I decided not to have Lord John. If I was bored with him as a lover, it wasn't likely I'd find him very interesting as a husband.”

I chanced my arm with something I'd guessed from Caroline's and Matthew's account of the household.

“And by then Lady John had come into the picture, I suppose.”

She gave another of those annoying moues at my not needing to be told something. But then she grinned evilly: even if she could not announce it as a revelation, she would enjoy talking about it.

“I told you I was a connoisseur of sensations. That was a situation I could relish! She should never have married. A lot of women did at that time who shouldn't have—for security, for
children (though that certainly wasn't
her
motivation), or because they didn't understand their own inclinations. The Revills' marriage was over long before I went to live with them, though I'd have put the final nail in it if it hadn't been. When I heard from Lord John why he thought the marriage had broken down I thought: there could be a bit of fun in this for me! In fact, I knew I'd enjoy having it off with both of them.”

“I said you like creating confusion and disorder,” I said.

“I certainly did that!” she said, with pride and pleasure. “We found it so easy at first, Veronica and me. He was at the Ministry or at the House of Commons most of the time. The children were upstairs in the nursery, playing quite happily on their own. Their snotty little noses went unwiped for a bit. So while they were playing up there, we were playing down below, in bed. It was
too
easy. I think the housekeeper suspected, but she was sort of semidetached in the household anyway.”

Not so semidetached, I thought, that she didn't blush at the recollection of her suspicions when Frieda Brewer was questioning her.

“To spice it up a bit,” my mother went on, “I started telling him the old headache story and going to her bed at nights. He began to get an inkling, but was too much of the gentleman to try to catch us together. His damned codes, his
honor,
really screwed him up, the poor fish. Anyway, at heart he didn't
want
to know, to have his suspicions confirmed.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was wild about me. I was giving him what he'd never had in his life before.”

“Poor man,” I said. That was unwise. It caught her attention, and drew her away from her reminiscences.

“Lucky man.” She licked her lips and did a little semicircular walk around the room, waving the long, sharp knife. “I'm going to find him, you know. I know what you're doing, but I
haven't forgotten him.
You
come first, but
he
will come next. Even if I have to alter my plans and play with you a bit before I kill you, I shall get it out of you where he is.”

“Even you can't believe that. A man who knows he's going to die is under the least possible compulsion to tell the truth. I'll lie, and I'll be dead before you can check it out.”

She thought this over.

“Perhaps this is going to be
much
longer drawn out than I planned,” she said at last, injecting a threatening tone to her words, which did not hide an inner uncertainty. “And why not? All the more enjoyment for me.” I registered that no plan seemed to be springing to her mind.

“You were just playing with them, weren't you?” I said. “With Lord John and Veronica. As you want to play with me with that knife. As you've been playing with me since the day I became a minister.”

She laughed.

“I loved listening upstairs to you playing musicals and opera, then playing you things over the phone from my old collection. I had an enormous collection at my establishment. I always tried to please my gentlemen, find out what their tastes were, give them what they wanted. Often I had to plunge deep to find out what they
really
wanted but didn't even know themselves they wanted. That was fun. Then I could play with them.”

“That's it, isn't it? The pleasing them was a preparation to playing with them, and the playing got nastier and nastier.”

“Maybe. They put themselves in my power. I never went after them.”

“But you do nowadays, because it's become a need. Tony never put himself in your power. You went after him.”

“I didn't go after him. We landed in the same institution. That was no great coincidence. There are hardly any asylums left, even in London. They keep you in the home area, so that
relatives can visit. Pits and I were Central London people.” She laughed harshly. “There weren't many keen relatives to visit people in there, but no one had fewer visits than Pits and me.”

“He should never have been in an institution at all.”

She flushed.

“I'm the one who should never have been in an institution! Pits is feebleminded. That's why he was there. They got it right for once. They couldn't have got it more wrong with me.” Her eyes glinted with grievance. “They were leaned on, of course. I was arrested for pestering a government minister. I wasn't pestering him. I was blackmailing him. He must have leaned on the police to have me quietly put away, and the police leaned on the psychiatrists. Mind you, psychiatrists are sadly limited people. They were too stupid to understand a really creative imagination.”

“Your talent for disorder, you mean?” She twisted her mouth.

“I've worked on people all my life. I've made them into my puppets. Twisted them to my will, which was so much more daring than their own. That's a sign of greatness, not of madness. But you can't expect the hoi polloi to understand that.”

“But you deny you twisted Lord John into murdering his wife so that he could marry you?”

“Haven't I told you I'd given up that idea almost as soon as you were conceived?” she almost shouted. “By then I had much bigger plans. I was going round with him and Lady John and meeting all sorts of more exciting and more influential people. They were people whose interest really counted, people who could get my career into liftoff. I'd already made inquiries about an abortion, got the name of a society abortionist. The killing of Veronica was the last thing I wanted at that point. It was an accident.”

“An accident?”

She laughed outright, an ugly, sneering sound.

“Oh, don't get your hopes up. He killed her all right. It was an accident from my point of view. I just wanted to enjoy an extension of my little game—get some added spice out of it. On the surface, as I've said, we were all three very friendly: civilized, modern people. Lots of people in their circle thought I was sleeping with him, but they saw us together and thought it was a mutually acceptable arrangement as far as Veronica was concerned. Nobody realized just how close we all were, all three of us. We went to parties together, to Covent Garden, to the theater. One of the plays we went to—”

“Don't tell me!” I cried. “It was
All's Well That Ends Well.
”

“You're too sharp for your own good,” she spat, stalled.

“Not bad for one who was brought up by boring little people,” I agreed.

“Any fool can get a university education these days,” said my mother scornfully.

My eye thought it caught a light down by the front gate. George? Or George and a police presence? I tried not to look at it, make her aware of it.

“The play with the bed trick,” I said thoughtfully. “The one where the husband thinks he's in bed with the woman he's been leching after, but in fact it's his scorned wife, because the women have got together and arranged a substitution. You wanted to stage a Shakespearean play in modern terms.”

“I told you I collect outré situations,” the witch said, with ludicrous self-satisfaction.

“But surely Veronica took some persuading? If she'd discovered she was a lesbian, why should she go back to sleep with a husband she felt revulsion from?”

“Because one of the things that united us was despising Lord John for the stiff-necked, upstanding, moral sort of prig that he was. She liked the idea of humiliating him more than she disliked
the idea of sleeping with him. The thought of him finding himself in such a ludicrous situation was gloriously funny to both of us.”

I thought.

“But there was a difference from the play, wasn't there?” Her hideous face flickered. She didn't like anyone being a jump ahead of her. It meant she wasn't in total control. “In the play Bertram had not slept with either woman before. Lord John had slept with both.”

With the sudden mood flash of madness she had forgotten me and was back in the past. Her fingers, though, kept their tight grip on the flashing knife. Outside I thought I caught the dimmed lights of cars arriving.

“It was over as soon as it started, wasn't it?” I pressed her. “A great disappointment. He knew practically the moment he got into bed with her that it was his wife in his lover's bed.”

Her voice came, loaded with reminiscence and venom.

“I waited in Veronica's bedroom. I'd told him he'd be welcome in mine that night, after several nights of ‘headaches.' It was nearly midnight when I heard his door open. He slipped down the corridor and into my room—he knew it all so well that he never needed to switch any lights on. I waited a second or two, and then tiptoed down the corridor and stood listening outside my room. He was talking to her, telling her he'd missed her, me as he thought, and he climbed into bed and was starting to go into his routines—how I hate men with routines!—when suddenly I heard a bellow of rage, something I'd never heard from Lord John, never expected to hear.”