Assassins at Ospreys

28

The Taj Mahal Necklace

Four weeks later it was Christmas and they had Major Payne’s aunt staying with them. Lady Grylls had recovered from her cataract operation, but she still wore a piratical patch across her right eye – because she fancied herself in it rather than out of any real necessity, Antonia suspected – and was eager for entertainment. Lady Grylls loved stories of mystery, mayhem and murder, so, with the Christmas pudding and the black coffee, they told her this one. The whole lamentable affair in which greed, revenge, despair and madness all played a part.

‘Colville gave every appearance of a man who stands on his feet, representing solidity and permanence, but he became a double murderer,’ Major Payne said. ‘Well, he wasn’t a particularly effectual landlord. His business had been going to the dogs. He needed money badly and, having this magnificent windfall come to his wife, he wasn’t going to allow it to be snatched away, just like that. What was hers was going to be his. They had a joint bank account. We are talking about a fabulous fortune here. Big money.’

‘How big?’ Lady Grylls asked. She liked details in a story.

‘Very big. Thirty-five million pounds. Well, money is a great catalyst. He decided to follow Ingrid moments after he’d seen her through the window and snapped her with his Polaroid. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. He saw her make for the bus stop. He had no doubt she’d get on the number 19 bus, which would take her to Ospreys. Maybe he saw her get on the bus. His one and only concern was that Ralph Renshawe should be alive at eleven o’clock and sign the will which made Beatrice his sole beneficiary.’

‘I love reconstructions like that.’ Lady Grylls helped her-self to more cream. ‘It’s almost as though you were there. You are terribly clever.’

‘Not at all. Much of this is pure speculation, darling, so we may be well off the mark about an awful lot of things… I wouldn’t presume to know exactly what went on in Colville’s mind, but it is doubtful whether he had a plan as such, not when he set out. His idea was to stop Ingrid inflicting any harm on Ralph Renshawe. Intervene, if necessary. So he ran out of the house, got into his car and drove to Ospreys.’

Lady Grylls frowned. ‘Why didn’t he alert the nurse over the blower if he was so concerned? He could have phoned Ospreys and saved himself the trouble. Or rung the front doorbell when he got there – and explained to her what was happening?’

‘He could have, but he didn’t. Good point, darling,’ said Major Payne. ‘My only explanation is that Colville was in some peculiar mental state that day, that he wasn’t thinking straight – worried silly about money, his tenants, the forthcoming court case and heaven knows what else. He had been under a lot of pressure.’

‘The front doorbell was out of order – Colville might have tried ringing it,’ Antonia put in.

Payne stroked his jaw. ‘He might have feared it would delay things if he started explaining the situation to the nurse. On the other hand, he might have been looking for an excuse to deal with Ingrid in his own terms – he seemed to have hated her as much as she hated him. Too fanciful? He phoned a policeman friend of his and told him how concerned he was about Ingrid, but that was after he had put her in his car boot. Anyhow, he got to the house and walked round to the back. He knew Renshawe occupied a room on the ground floor that looked out on the back gar-den and the wishing well -’

‘How did he know that? And why didn’t the nurse hear his car?’

‘The nurse was in the kitchen, which is in a different part of the house. I don’t imagine you can hear much from there. Colville had a rough drawing of Renshawe’s part of the house in his pocket. The police believe it was done by Ingrid – they found her fingerprints on it – and Colville chanced upon it somehow.’ Major Payne took a sip of coffee. ‘Colville saw the french windows were open. It was a very warm day, remember. He went closer and looked in. Well, it was Ingrid he had come to protect Ralph against, but what he saw was Ralph’s father confessor holding a pillow over Ralph’s face, pressing it down, clearly smothering him -’

‘I can’t quite imagine a C. of E. clergyman doing that kind of thing, can you?’ Lady Grylls said.

Antonia took up the tale. ‘Colville ran into the room and pulled Father Lillie-Lysander away. He probably resisted and Colville wrestled him down – against the knitting needle, as it happened. Colville was much bigger and stronger. The knitting needle had been on Ralph’s bedside table and Ralph had managed to get hold of it and was holding it aloft, but of course he was too feeble to put it to any effective use.’

‘So the padre got skewered?’

‘So the padre, as you so picturesquely put it, darling, got skewered,’ Major Payne said. ‘I don’t believe Colville intended it to happen that way, but there it was. Colville started dragging the priest’s body through the french windows, across the terrace in the direction of the well. It was at that point Ingrid appeared on the scene.’

‘It is almost as though you were there,’ Lady Grylls said again.

‘I imagine she taunted him – threatened to tell the police…’

‘Ingrid’s face was badly bruised, so were Colville’s knuckles,’ Antonia said thoughtfully. ‘Which suggests that Colville dealt her several blows with his fist. She fell to the ground, hit her head – passed out. Which allowed him to drag the priest’s body to the well. He also managed to cover the blood trail with dead leaves… Then he got Ingrid round the house to his car. He bound and gagged her -’

‘He gagged her with Beatrice’s handkerchief. He had kept it next to his heart,’ said Payne. ‘The handkerchief was later found in the boot of Colville’s car. It bore an imprint of Ingrid’s teeth. They also found hairs from her blonde wig. And bloodstains. It was Ingrid’s blood.’

‘At some point Colville forced Ingrid to swallow a lump of cyanide, arranged her body in her room and made it look like suicide. That’s where we found her,’ Antonia said, giving a slight shudder at the memory.

There was a pause.

‘We used to know some people called Colville,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘I am sure they were called Colville. We met them in the South of France. Stayed at the same hotel – the good old Palais Maeterlinck. D’you remember it, Hughie?’ ‘Of course I do. The good old Palais Maeterlinck.’

‘They kept having spats – all on account of Mrs Colville spending too much time in the arms of some gigolo or other. She insisted he was teaching her the cha-cha-cha. Must have been 1956 or ’57.’

‘One doesn’t dance the cha-cha-cha in anybody’s arms. You do it in line,’ Antonia pointed out.

‘Precisely, my dear. That was the bone of contention. Forward, back, cha-cha-cha, back, forward, cha-cha-cha. Two, three, cha-cha-cha. Hey, hey, I can do this cha-cha-cha, it’s easy cha-cha-cha!’ Lady Grylls sang out and wiggled her shoulders. ‘Ah those were the days.’ She helped herself to another slice of Christmas pudding. ‘Now then, at which point did you puzzle out it was Colville?’

‘I remembered the Taj Mahal necklace,’ Antonia explained. ‘Beatrice had it on that day, when we went to Millbrook House. It had been a present from Colville. He had had it specially made for her when they got engaged. On the morning she disappeared, Ingrid had put on the necklace as part of the Beatrice get-up. It could be seen in the Polaroid photo Colville took of her. There was only one Taj Mahal necklace. Yet, Beatrice was wearing it two days later at the height of the search for Ingrid! How did the Taj Mahal necklace find its way to Bee’s neck? Bee couldn’t have had anything to do with it – on the fatal morning she was in Oxford.’

‘You think it was Colville who brought it back to the house?’

‘Only Colville could have brought it back to the house. He couldn’t allow Ingrid to wear what was clearly an object of supreme sentimental value to him. So sometime after he knocked her out and put her in the boot of his car, he took the necklace off. He brought it back to the house and replaced it inside his wife’s jewel case. It never occurred to him to consider the implications. Beatrice of course had no idea about any of this, so she took the neck-lace out and put it on. She and Colville had had a row and she wanted him to see her wearing the Taj Mahal necklace when he came back.’

‘What a silly woman. Is she a silly woman?’

‘Not quite. She is a strange mixture -’ Major Payne broke off. He had seen the expression on Antonia’s face.

‘What happened to her?’ Lady Grylls asked.

‘She is seeing Ralph Renshawe’s nurse. A young South African called Greg,’ Antonia said. ‘In fact she has moved in with him at Ospreys. He is twenty years younger than her, but they seem very happy together. We went to see them the other day.’

‘I know her type.’ Lady Grylls nodded. ‘Oh yes. For some reason women like that are always all right in the end. One always thinks – hopes – they’d end up disastrously but they don’t, not always, isn’t that extraordinary? Does she wear palazzo pants? Women like that always wear palazzo pants.’

‘As a matter of fact she does.’ Antonia said. ‘She did wear palazzo pants the other day!’

‘Is Ralph Renshawe still alive then?’

‘Yes. He has had a miraculous recovery. The doctors couldn’t believe it, but it’s not such a completely unknown thing to have happened, not even among seemingly hope-less cases. Beatrice and Greg are looking after him and he seems delighted with the arrangement. Not quite a menage a trois. When he dies, Beatrice will inherit his fortune, but that may not be for a while. He’s left his bed and propels his way round in a rather superior motorized wheelchair. He’s talked to us and told us more things than he told the police, mainly thanks to Beatrice,’ Antonia conceded. ‘Last time we went they were watching a Moira Montano film – they found a trunkful of old reels in the attic and Greg had them transferred on to video.’

‘Ah, Moira Montano. I remember Moira Montano. Hughie’s uncle was mad about Moira Montano,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘She died some bizarre death, I think.’

‘Renshawe’s Christmas present for Beatrice is a fine Rolls, its silver snout professionally inscribed on what might be the left nostril, BEE… Ospreys is jolly unrecognizable now – carpets everywhere, they have removed that gruesome ivy and the garden’s been tidied up. And here’s a curious thing,’ Major Payne went on. ‘It turns out that at some point during her third visit, Renshawe became aware of the fact that the woman who had been visiting him was not Beatrice but Ingrid. He recognized her by her birth-mark – the blood-red naevus on her palm. He had seen it in the aftermath of the crash – when he went up to Ingrid’s car to help her out. It stuck in his memory. He said it had haunted his dreams.’

‘Why didn’t the silly fellow do something about it?’ Lady Grylls cried. ‘He should have called the police straight away.’

‘He should have but he didn’t,’ Antonia said. ‘He decided it would be right if Ingrid killed him. He wanted her to kill him. He had convinced himself that he deserved to die at her hands. As an act of expiation. He was riddled with guilt.’

Lady Grylls sighed. ‘How deliciously complicated.’

They then pulled crackers and read the silly jokes inside them.

‘Why was the computer ill? Because he had a virus!’

‘Why did the monster’s eyes turn green? Because he was jealous! By the way, what happened to Colville?’ Lady Grylls asked.

‘He crashed his car and died. It happened that same night. No one would ever know for certain now, but there’s a suspicion that he might have done it on purpose.’ Major Payne stroked his jaw with a thoughtful forefinger. ‘The Taj Mahal necklace was found in his pocket, ripped apart. And another curious thing. My tobacco pouch was in his other pocket. He had slashed through it several times with a pocket knife. I wonder why he did that.’

‘Do you?’ Antonia said.

‘You don’t mean he thought – that he imagined -’ Payne sat up as realization dawned on him. ‘Golly. The green-eyed monster, eh?’

‘How extraordinary,’ Lady Grylls wheezed. ‘It’s as though I’d known. I mean I’ve got you a new tobacco pouch, Hughie. That’s your Christmas present – I shouldn’t have told you. It was meant to be a surprise. Oh well, too late now. Assassins at Ospreys – wouldn’t that make a jolly good title for your next book, my dear?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Antonia said.

Outside it had started snowing.