At Death's Door (24 page)

“Later, just as we were putting out the light, we heard a cry. It was from Ben's room. He'd had a heart attack, a severe one. I got him to bed while Roderick rang the doctor in Cimènes. He was very quick, but not quick enough. Ben died as he came into the room.”

“It was devastating—totally unexpected, and coming on top of everything else . . .”

“Otherwise, Roderick would have realized,” insisted Caroline. “The doctor said one or two odd things:
‘Votre
père est bien respecté à Cimènes'
—things like that. Roderick thought he was just being a little flowery—and in fact Ben
was
well thought of as a writer in France. Then, as he was leaving the house, promising to send up the death certificate for us to fill in the personal details, he said:
‘C'était un bon garçon, Monsieur Quantick.'
Roderick didn't twig immediately . . .”

“It was the way he said it: Contick.”

“—and by the time he did twig, the doctor had got into his car and driven away.”

“Then we realized: Caroline's father had been on his books, but he had never actually been to see him. The doctor was young and had recently taken over the practice. He knew of Rupert Quantick, the rich Englishman, and where he lived, but he'd never met him. When the certificate came up next day, it certified the death of Rupert Quantick.”

“It was one of those times—a time of decision. Becky was somehow upset by the death, some sense she has of disaster; Father woke up rambling worse than ever, and then someone rang up from my father's firm in Birmingham to say he'd heard the Fraud Squad would be flying out to Nice before the end of the week and would be coming to Cimènes to interview him.”

“It seemed like pure impulse at the time,” said Roderick. “I said: ‘They'll be wasting their time. Caroline's father died last night.'

“The rest followed like a dream. We filled up the missing entries on the death certificate with Rupert Quantick's details, and we buried Ben as him. There were just us and Becky at the funeral. Then we drove Rupert home to England. There was no problem at all. There were the four of us in the car, one a handicapped child, one a sick old man. The passport official just flicked through Ben's passport, glanced into the car—one old man is very like another—and that was that.”

“It's funny, isn't it?” said Caroline. “Babies and old people are very much alike.”

“So we brought him here, and without realizing it, he began his life as Benedict Cotterel,” said Roderick. “We knew, of course, that he wouldn't be able to cope on his own. We moved in and sold our cottage. At first he could go out sometimes into the garden, play a little with Becky. But before long even that became impossible. We took over the administration of his affairs—Ben's affairs—and he took to his bed and lived permanently in some other, some half-real, world. Then it was safe to have help looking after him.”

“His, my father's, little business empire collapsed, and all his assets were seized to pay his debts. His yacht, his early Wedgwood, his silver, his pictures . . .”

“The Gainsborough that turned out not to be a Gainsborough at all,” put in Roderick wryly.

“So typical of Dad. I was glad that I didn't profit at all by his ‘death.' There's a sort of ironic humor, I suppose, in hearing him leave all those things to friends and relatives—things that are long gone. When he dies, he will die as Benedict Cotterel, and then this house will come to Isobel, and most of the rest will come to us.”

“Wasn't Isobel a problem?” asked Cordelia.

“We thought she would be,” said Roderick. “Our hearts were in our mouths the first time she said she was coming. Then we realized she hadn't seen him since the late fifties. And in fact she always refuses to go upstairs and see him. She's just interested in keeping an eye on ‘her' property.”

“The doctor here was no danger,” said Caroline. “Ben had bought the house, but he'd never lived here. The doctor has treated him throughout as Ben Cotterel. He feels rather proud of having such a distinguished patient.”

“When he dies, he will be buried as Benedict Cotterel. Big funeral, no doubt—all the great and good in the
literary world, representatives of the Arts Council, Margaret Drabble . . .”

“The
old
Rupert Quantick, my father as I knew him as a child, would have thought that a tremendous joke,” said Caroline.

“Then Isobel can have this place, we'll find ourselves a smaller house, and life will go on as before.”

“You won't reveal the truth, then?”

“We've talked about it. I don't suppose anything very dreadful would happen to us. But I think we'll only do it, if at all, when Becky is dead. There will be an immense fuss, and she responds very badly to any disruption in her routine.” Caroline paused. “I've hated living this lie, but somehow it's around our necks now, like the albatross. Maybe it would be best just to leave a statement with our wills.”

“I'm sorry I thought you'd done it to prolong the royalties,” said Cordelia awkwardly. “Even though I did think it was Becky you were concerned about.”

“The royalties will last out
all
our times,” said Roderick quietly. “The doctors say Becky can't live much beyond thirty-five. What we fear most is that we should both die first. I'm afraid that would devastate her, however much money there was around to pay for her looking-after.”

“There's Pat coming from his swim,” said Cordelia hurriedly. Through the window, in the last light, they could see the beanpole figure with the towel over his shoulders. Cordelia hurried to the front door and hailed him, and they stood together, he with his arm around her shoulders, under the outside light, looking oddly fragile, yet indissolubly united.

“We plan to move on the day after tomorrow,” said Cordelia.

“We shall miss you,” said Caroline truthfully. “You won't be doing any more research?”

“No . . . The book's a washout. . . . You may as well know that I'm pregnant. I realized a few days ago, just before Mother was killed. When I spent the night in the station cells, I kept saying to myself: ‘God might do this to
me
, but He wouldn't do it to my baby.' It kept me going. And He didn't! But I think now it's time to forget. I don't want to stain the beginning of a life with all the grievances and misery of my past. Turn around and start again—that's the best plan.”

“I think you're very wise.”

“Maybe I'll publish the account of Myra's acting career. An unblemished record of artistic success.”

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,”
said Roderick.

“Yes. Though that saying doesn't make much sense in modern times, does it? It's only
after
their death that you
can
say how rotten they were.” She flashed at them her brilliant smile, and Caroline realized that she had hardly seen it since Cordelia had heard the news that her mother was coming to Maudsley. “I'm not going to start sentimentalizing Mother, you see,” she went on. “But don't worry, I won't change my mind about the book. Someone, some day, will write the truth about her, but it won't be me. From me there will be nothing but praise, endless applause. Happy ending!”

She and Pat, closely entwined, began their walk down the lawn to their tent. Then she turned and called back to them: “But I don't promise that one day, when I'm much older, I won't want to write about Ben!”

Roderick and Caroline turned off the light and went back into the house.

“That will be
four
people, now, who know,” said Roderick.

“Yes. But I don't worry about Pat. I can't think of anyone less likely to volunteer other people's secrets. Apart from the talk about Myra's death, I really don't think I've
heard him say more than a couple of hundred words since he came here. Still, he'll be a good father.”

“Very good,” said Roderick. “Happy ending.”

He went into the kitchen to prepare Becky's good-night Ovaltine, and Caroline went into the living room, switched off the television, and began getting her ready for bed.

• • •

Upstairs, in the large bedroom that looked out to sea, the old man, unusually, had awakened. Poised unsurely between the vague dreams of his night and the vague dreams of his day, he extricated his old hand from the bedclothes and directed it shakily toward the tape recorder by his bed. When the reassuring whirring sound started, he cleared his throat.

“To my dear sister Dorothy Quantick, I leave my Gainsborough portrait of Sir Samuel . . . of Sir Samuel Etterick . . . To my dear friend William Harrison, I bequeath . . . I bequeath . . .”

The voice faded into nothing, the old man's eyes closed, and he sank once more into sleep.

On the bedside table the machine whirred on.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Skeleton in the Grass

The Cherry Blossom Corpse

Bodies

Political Suicide

Fête Fatale

Out of the Blackout

Corpse in a Gilded Cage

School for Murder

The Case of the Missing Brontë

A Little Local Murder

Death and the Princess

Death by Sheer Torture

Death in a Cold Climate

Death of a Perfect Mother

Death of a Literary Widow

Death of a Mystery Writer

Robert Barnard (1936-2013) was awarded the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Nero Wolfe Award, as well as the Agatha and Macavity awards. An eight-time Edgar nominee, he was a member of Britain's distinguished Detection Club, and, in May 2003, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement in mystery writing. His most recent novel,
Charitable Body
, was published by Scribner in 2012.

Copyright © 1988 by Robert Barnard

First American Edition, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photcopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Simon and Schuster, Inc.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Christopher Lin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnard, Robert.

At death's door.

I. Title.

PR6052.A665A94   1988   823′.914   88-11387

ISBN 0-684-19001-X

ISBN 978-1-4767-3724-9 (eBook)