Fatal Inheritance Page 12

  ‘But surely their paths must have crossed? The Riviera is not such a big place, after all.’

  ‘They moved in very different circles. Whelan has a reputation for being antisocial and waspish and I don’t think he’s endeared himself to the society hostesses along the coast. The few occasions they ran into each other, I think they managed to be civil, but I don’t suppose there were many pleasantries exchanged. My father was a very charming man – much more so than either of his sons, I’m afraid – but he didn’t suffer fools gladly.’

  Eve is surprised to hear the arrogant Noel Lester admit so freely to a character flaw. Every time she thinks she has him neatly boxed up, he says or does something that forces her to revise her assessment.

  ‘So why did Robin Whelan agree to meet us when you telephoned him last night?’

  Noel shrugs. ‘Curiosity, I presume. He’s a writer, isn’t he? Aren’t they supposed to be fascinated by mysteries and intrigue?’

  Whelan lives on Cap Ferrat, a pine-clad peninsula that juts out into the sea between Nice and Monaco further along the coast. More elevated and dramatic than Cap d’Antibes, the ambience here also feels different. Muffled. There is a sense of stillness and calm, the windy roads semi-deserted, the tiled roofs of enormous villas just visible above the gates and walls that preserve their privacy.

  ‘It’s spectacular, isn’t it?’ says Eve.

  Noel makes a snorting noise. ‘It’s deathly. Everyone in their luxury homes behind their high gates. Living here would be like being slowly suffocated with a mink pillow.’

  While he stops the car to consult a map he keeps in the glove compartment, Eve gazes out of her window where a gap between two walled villas reveals a view of the navy blue Mediterranean far below them and in the distance a dark green shape rising up out of the water. She wants to ask Noel if this is Cap d’Antibes, but won’t risk showing her ignorance if it turns out to be something else entirely.

  Finally they pull up outside a pair of sleek black gates set into a sheer white wall. Eve prepares to get out to look for a bell, but before she even has her hand on the chrome handle, the gates swing open as if the house has been waiting for them.

  Noel turns to her, his eyebrows raised. When he smiles it’s as if he is a different person entirely and Eve finds herself feeling once again wrong-footed by him.

  A long drive lined with palm trees takes them through gardens of exotic plants, many of which Eve has never seen before. There are cacti as fat as pillar boxes that rise into the air almost as high as the palms, and others with three prongs like enormous spiked forks.

  The house reveals itself initially as a smooth white wall rising steeply up, the white line of its clean flat roof dazzling against the sky. Eve is shocked by the brutality of this one eyeless wall. But as they park the car and walk around the building, she realizes that this is the side of the house and that the front curves in a wave of white stucco and glass, almost like the prow of a ship. Following the shape of the curve is a decked terrace with a swimming pool cut into it. There are no chairs outside, no umbrellas. Nothing to spoil the stark lines of the house.

  Eve has never seen a building like this. So much unbroken whiteness and glass. But while she can see it is objectively beautiful, it leaves her feeling strangely cold. This is not a home, like Villa La Perle is a home. Living here would be like living inside a priceless work of art that you could admire but not love.

  ‘You’ve come to the wrong side.’

  The voice is high-pitched and sharp.

  Eve turns and sees a small, childlike man dressed entirely in bone-coloured linen standing with his arms folded by the wall around which they have just walked.

  ‘This is clearly the back. The front is the other way.’

  ‘So sorry,’ says Eve and starts hurrying back towards him, but he holds up a hand.

  ‘You’re here now, so we might as well go in this way.’

  Robin Whelan turns and leads them across the terrace and into the house through a metal-framed glass door. Inside, everything is open, with shafts of sunlight slanting across the space from all the high-level windows, cutting across floors made of black waxed stone.

  They follow him to a sunken level dominated by a white marble fireplace, where two long black leather sofas face each other across a low glass-topped table.

  ‘Sit.’

  Whelan gestures to the nearest sofa before positioning himself in the one facing it. In all this time he has not once shaken their hands or asked for introductions.

  Now that she has a chance to examine him properly, Eve can see that he must be getting on for sixty, but with that babyish look some men acquire in later age. He has yellow hair of a shade that cannot be natural and a round, sun-tanned face with flat features. His eyes are strangely colourless and they fix upon Noel with a kind of greedy intensity.

  ‘I can see the resemblance,’ he says, unsmiling.

  Next to Eve, Noel clears his throat. There are at least two feet of black sofa between them; nevertheless she can sense the tension in his body, the way he is holding himself stiffly upright, rather than sinking down into the leather.

  ‘As I told you on the telephone last night, my father, Guy Lester, recently died and we – that is, Mrs Forrester here and I – were hoping you might be able to answer some questions we have about his early life.’

  Whelan sits back and hooks one of his short legs over the knee of the other. He is wearing a cream silk cravat and his tiny feet are shod in what must surely be custom-made shoes of soft white leather.

  ‘As I told you, Mr Lester, your father took issue with some things I wrote in my first book. He was a man used to being the centre of attention and he became convinced the book was about him. Nothing I could say would convince him otherwise. So we weren’t exactly intimate over the last few decades.’

  Whelan lingers over the word ‘intimate’, lifting one of his small, pudgy hands to smooth back his hair. From the corner of her eye, Eve sees Noel dig his own fingers into his leg, the ridge of his knuckles pale and taut.

  ‘We’re actually interested in the period before that,’ she says, trying to move the conversation on, ‘while Guy Lester was still living in England with his young family. There are reports that something happened that caused him to leave the country very suddenly. We were hoping that might be something you could shed some light on.’

  Now, finally, Robin Whelan turns his pale, colourless eyes to her. She feels them travel over her. She is wearing her brown skirt with her yellow blouse and she sees them through his eyes. The clothes of a woman who has gone uncomplimented for a long time.

  ‘So this is the cat who has been set amongst the Lester pigeons.’ He raises his eyebrows, which are so perfectly arched Eve suspects they must be plucked. His smile does not travel to his eyes, which remain coolly fixed on her. ‘I have to hand it to Guy, I had no idea he had such a gift for melodrama. All this cloak-and-dagger mystery. Maybe he is the one who ought to have been writing fiction.’

  Eve swallows. They have not been offered even a glass of water since they arrived and she is suddenly conscious of being thirsty.

  ‘You’re wondering if the key to the mystery lies in Guy’s past. A scandalous affair, perhaps, that might have produced this young lady and had him banished from the land? Is your mother perchance a member of the royal family, my dear? Someone whose compromising would have been of sufficient import to get a wealthy, well-connected young man exiled from his life?’

  Eve pictures her mother sitting in silence in her front parlour on the sofa with its cover to protect it from dirt, her dark brown hair curled and set tight by the hard rollers she sleeps in at night. Her clothes are blue or brown or occasionally beige, and always with a high neck constricting her throat. She rarely reads or listens to the radio, and does not keep a journal, or knit, or undertake any of the activities with which other women in her situation keep themselves busy. Instead she looks out of the window at the street, waiting for her daughter to ret
urn from school or work, fermenting the day’s grievances – a breakfast bowl left unwashed or a ladder discovered in a stocking left drying over the bath. Or something not to do with Eve at all – a perceived slight from the woman who works in the post office, the crying of a neighbour’s baby that kept her awake all night so that now her nerves are shredded. All this is channelled while Eve’s mother sits unmoving, no outside distraction permitted to dilute it, so that when Eve comes through the door, the power of her mother’s discontent comes funnelling to meet her.

  ‘She wasn’t always so hard to please,’ Eve’s father whispered to her once, coming to find her in her bedroom where she’d been banished after some misdemeanour. ‘She had a disappointment in her youth that affected her badly. Changed something in the balance of her. You know.’

  But Eve didn’t know. Couldn’t remember a time before. When her mother’s balance was different.

  ‘No, my mother is not royalty,’ she tells Robin Whelan, enjoying how icy her voice sounds here in this cold house. But then she spoils the effect by adding, ‘And besides, she would never … That is, she is not the kind of person …’

  Whelan is watching her with a new alertness and she has the sensation of being absorbed by him, perhaps to be regurgitated in the pages of his next novel.

  ‘Look, can you help us or not?’ The well of Noel’s politeness has, it seems, run dry.

  Whelan reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out a slim, silver cigarette box, from which he extracts a long cigarette and a lighter. He does not offer either to his guests.

  ‘How well did you know your father, Mr Lester?’ He leans back against the black leather cushion and inhales deeply from his cigarette.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what kind of relationship did you have with him? Were you close? Buddies, as our American friends might say? Did you play golf together and share confidences? Or was he one of those forbidding sorts of papas who set impossible standards and criticize your attempts to attain them? I suspect the former. Guy had a decent enough intellect and a certain drive to succeed, but he was held back by his insatiable need to be liked, for people to think he was a good fellow. He could never bear for anyone to have a bad word to say about him. That’s a tremendous handicap in life, I think.’

  He flicks ash into a silver ashtray on the glass-topped table. His eyes have not left Noel.

  ‘We had our arguments over the years, our ups and downs,’ Noel replies eventually. ‘But we got on pretty well overall. We respected each other.’

  ‘How very heart-warming. But then I suppose you are the same type, you and he. Heroic war records and all that sort of derring-do. Guy was a very lucky man, though of course I always knew he would be. He had that sort of charmed life. Well, except for …’

  Whelan breaks off to take another drag of his cigarette and Eve waits, impatient, for him to resume, but instead he stays silent, surveying them both with his dishcloth eyes.

  She understands that he is waiting for them to beg and plead. He wishes to orchestrate the conversation, to manipulate their reactions. She resolves not to give him the satisfaction.

  But, of course, she cannot stay quiet.

  ‘Except for?’ she queries, regretting her interjection even while she is making it. Where is your self-control, Eve? asks her mother’s voice in her ear.

  ‘Except for whatever catastrophic event happened to cause him to flee the country, never to return.’

  He does not know. All of a sudden it seems clear he is only stringing them along for his own gratification.

  Evidently Noel has reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Well, if you have nothing to add, we won’t waste any more of your time, Mr Whelan.’

  He has a way of speaking that can imbue even words that seem perfectly appropriate and polite on the surface with an undercurrent of rudeness.

  Noel gets up, causing the sofa cushion to spring up underneath Eve.

  Whelan watches him through narrowed eyes, as if weighing up his desire to continue toying with them against whatever concession he will need to make to keep them here. Eve suspects he is enjoying their discomfort and his own power too much to want them to leave.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to your father, it’s true,’ he says at last. ‘We were not much in contact after my book came out, as I’ve said. However, there were certain rumours flying around at the time. Unproven, of course.’

  Noel sits back down. Together they stare at Robin Whelan across the table, through the fug of cigarette smoke that swirls around his head.

  ‘We understand that,’ says Eve, trying to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘Nevertheless we should like to hear them.’

  ‘Well,’ says Whelan eventually, his flat features coming into focus once again, eyes fixed on Noel. ‘The way I understand it, your father had to leave the country because he’d broken the law. There was a court martial. All very hush-hush. I think he might even have served some time in prison. Good heavens, one hates to think what might have happened to him in there, a handsome man like that. But if he did, it wasn’t for more than a few months. Your grandfather was a very generous donor to Lloyd George’s lot, don’t forget. After that he had to make himself scarce. You and your brother were very small then. And from what I heard, your poor mother never really got over having to leave everything she knew behind.’

  ‘Broken the law?’ says Noel sharply, and Eve knows without needing to ask that he is relieved that this might not, after all, turn out to be about some tawdry love affair. ‘What was this crime? Something to do with gambling? It would not surprise me. My younger brother has inherited that particular family gene. Not embezzlement, surely, although he did give up his role in the family business rather suddenly.’

  ‘Cold, cold, cold,’ says Whelan in a sing-song voice. His mouth twitches at the corners.

  ‘Well, what then?’ Noel has lost his patience. His voice carries the low rumble of anger.

  Whelan rests his cigarette on the lip of the ashtray, adjusts the knot of his cravat with dainty fingers. Only when he is quite satisfied does he sit back, his gaze flicking from one to the other, giving Eve the unpleasant sensation of being studied, like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  ‘He murdered someone.’

  13

  THE JOURNEY BACK to Antibes is undertaken in almost unbroken silence as they each try to digest what they have just heard, so Eve is surprised when Noel parks the car at Villa La Perle instead of merely dropping her off as she’d expected.

  They find Sully on the lower terrace. He has brought his typewriter out and is sitting at the table under the eucalyptus tree. As they walk over, he tears a piece of paper from the machine and crumples it in his hand.

  ‘You are a piece of shit,’ he tells it.

  ‘I don’t suppose it thinks much of you either,’ says Noel, startling the American, who had thought himself entirely alone.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he says once he has recovered. He turns his chair around and draws up two more for her and Noel, so close that they are all sitting knee to knee, then lights up a cigarette and leans in. ‘So, how was that snake, Whelan? Did you have to pick your way over that black floor of his to avoid stepping on dried-up coils of his shed skin? I expect he said something about me with that forked tongue of his. I hope you mentioned Hitchcock has just bought my last book. It’s been so long since Robin Whelan last delivered something worth publishing, he probably gave it to his editor in scroll form.’

  They fill Sully in on the strange conversation they had in Whelan’s cool mausoleum of a house on Cap Ferrat. For once the American seems lost for words.

  ‘Murder? Guy?’ Then: ‘Do you believe it? I wouldn’t put it past Whelan to make something like that up just to get a reaction from you.’

  Noel shrugs. He has been inside to raid the bar and is busy pouring gin into three tall glasses, which he tops with a grudging splash of tonic. A persistent fly buzzes around his hand as he pours and he
flicks out his fingers.

  ‘I definitely had the impression Whelan got a thrill out of telling me,’ he says, pressing a drink into Eve’s hand, ignoring her attempts to decline. ‘Which makes me believe there must be some truth in it. But I just can’t believe Guy would ever have killed anyone deliberately. Not in peacetime, anyway. And surely a rich daddy wouldn’t get him off a murder charge, no matter how much money he’d poured into the coffers of the powers that be? But then again, it has to be something pretty damned bad for Guy to have moved us all out of the country and then stayed away for so long.’

  ‘And do you think this could have something to do with him leaving you a share in the house?’ Sully asks Eve.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eve says, making a face as the gin burns the back of her throat. ‘It has thrown up more questions than it has answered.’

  The shrill of the doorbell sounds from the house, setting the long, drooping eucalyptus leaves trembling overhead.

  Eve looks at Sully, who shakes his head in a ‘no idea’ way.

  They hear voices coming from inside the house. The sound of heels clicking on the stairs.

  Mrs Finch appears in the doorway in a gaudily patterned wrap dress, two spots of colour in her cheeks. ‘You have a visitor, Mr Sullivan,’ she says, flustered.

  She steps aside to reveal Gloria Hayes standing behind her, wearing high-waisted navy blue shorts that cling to her bottom and an off-the-shoulder blouse. She has a spotted bandana holding back her thick, red hair and white sandals with a substantial heel.

  ‘Mr Sullivan, I am sorry to say you are quite the hardest man to track down. I’ve had to turn into a regular Hercule Poirot.’

  In her lilting southern accent, she pronounces it Hurcle Poro.