Thomas Cook - Instruments of Night

DAVIES: You are here because I allow you to be here.

GROSSMAN: But your wife DAVIES: My wife does not run Riverwood. I do.

“I remember Grossman suddenly became quite defensive,” Miss Davies went on. “He began to make excuses, apologies. He seemed to be quite… frightened.”

Graves heard the tone of Grossman’s voice grow fearful. It took on Sykes’ childlike whimper.

GROSSMAN: Please… I did not wish to… cause you… to bring trouble.

DAVIES: You are here to paint my wife’s portrait. Nothing else.

GROSSMAN: But I have not… done DAVIES: You are not here to become intimate with anyone at Riverwood.

GROSSMAN: It’s only that… I am… lonely DAVIES: This conversation is over.

“That was it,” Allison Davies told Graves. “My father left it at that. A warning. When they’d finished talking, Grossman went upstairs. My father walked out to the flower garden.” Something caught in her mind. “Faye was there. In the garden, I mean. I remember seeing her with him that afternoon. Faye was often with my father, she added thoughtfully. “She was interested in his experiments. My father was more than a businessman, you see. He had scientific interests. Botany, in particular. Cross-fertilizations mostly. Some of the flowers were quite beautiful. Some were rather… grotesque.” A light dimmed behind her eyes. “My father loved Faye.”

Graves could not suppress a dark speculation. “More than he loved you?”

“Perhaps,” Miss Davies answered. She could not wholly conceal the pain of her admission. “They shared things. They had a… bond.”

Graves saw Faye and Warren Davies walking slowly among the strange flowers they had created, Faye’s hand tucked in Warren Davies’ arm, talking quietly, in a mood of deep confidentiality. An idea came to him the way they sometimes came to Slovak, out of nowhere, like a gift. “Is it possible Faye might have heard the rumor about your mother and Grossman?”

“I suppose so,” Miss Davies answered.

“How would she have felt about it?”

“She would have felt sorry for my father,” Miss Davies answered without hesitation.

“Would she have told him about it?”

“Yes, I think she would have,” Miss Davies said. “Out of loyalty.” A shadow passed over her face. “Do you think Faye did that? And that Grossman found out about it? Is that what you’re imagining? That Grossman killed Faye because she told my father about the purported affair with my mother?”

Graves remained silent, merely watching as Miss Davies thought the story through, now moving from imagined motive to actual opportunity.

“My mother was Grossman’s alibi, wasn’t she?” Miss Davies asked. “And if the rumor were true, if they’d actually been lovers, then my mother would certainly have lied for him, wouldn’t she? She would have said that Grossman was with her at the time of Faye’s murder.” The conclusion came to her effortlessly. “It fits together, doesn’t it? As a story, I mean. Both the motive and the opportunity. Faye is killed in an act of revenge by my mother’s lover for having revealed my mother’s affair to my father. After the murder, my mother provides her lover with the perfect alibi. A mutual alibi, actually.” She considered the tale briefly, like someone who’d bought a small painting from a reputable but unfamiliar gallery and was now pondering its authenticity. “Very good, Mr. Graves. A trifle sordid, but very good. All the necessary elements are in place.”

“Except that Grossman and your mother weren’t lovers,” Graves reminded her.

“But they might have been,” Miss Davies said evenly. “And if it works for the story, what difference does it make whether they were or not?”

She was right, of course. All Graves had to do was write it up. And yet he sensed that the “solution” to Faye Harrison’s death had come too quickly, too easily. And that Miss Davies had accepted it too eagerly, had no interest in pursuing other possibilities. Like an explorer who wished to go only so far into the jungle, to leave its deepest terrors uncharted and unknown.

Graves decided to push deeper into the shadows. “When did Grossman leave Riverwood?”

“A few days after Faye’s murder.” She appeared surprised that further questions about Grossman were necessary. “None of us ever saw him again.”

“He just vanished?”

“Well, no. Not exactly. He killed himself. We learned about it a week or so after he left here. It was in New York City. He jumped from the twentieth floor of the Edison Hotel.”

In his mind Graves saw Andre Grossman tumbling from a great height, a tattered scarecrow plunging through space.

“He didn’t leave a note or anything like that. So no one ever knew why he did it.” Miss Davies appeared uninterested in any further inquiry. Grossman’s suicide had been dismissed as a petty tragedy, the inconsequential end of a bit player in a drama of more compelling interest. “My mother said he was depressed. That’s all I ever heard.”

“How did she know that?” Graves asked.

“Because he wrote to her from New York. Just a few letters.” She was clearly unconcerned with their contents. “My mother kept them in a little box. Perhaps they might be helpful to you. Especially as Grossman appears to be our prime suspect now. I’ll have Saunders bring them to you.

With that, she left him.

Portman’s Murder Book rested like a black slab on his desk. For a moment Graves imagined the fat detective moving ponderously through the carved oak doorway of the library to find Grossman at his easel. He saw the artist’s eyes fix on Portman’s silent, staring face, locked in dread of Portman’s questions, perhaps already hiding those very answers that would fall with him from the twentieth floor.

As Portman’s notes made clear, he’d confronted Andre Grossman not in the library, as Graves had imagined it, but in his room on the second floor. The artist had been packing his bags when Portman entered, his clothes strewn across the bed or hung over chairs, books and papers stacked willy-nilly throughout the room. The chaos had heightened the detective’s suspicion, so that in his notes he’d described the scene as having the look of a “speedy getaway.”

As Graves began to reconstruct Portman’s interrogation of Grossman, he found that his imagination had subtly changed things, particularly Grossman’s voice, so that now the painter sounded strained and frightened, a man on the run.

PORTMAN: When you left Riverwood that morning-the day you found Faye’s body, I mean-had you planned to go to Manitou Cave?

GROSSMAN: No. It is just that I was walking. Thinking. I am leaving Riverwood, you see. For this reason, I must make many plans.

PORTMAN: Why are you leaving?

GROSSMAN: Because my work is done. The portrait. Of Mrs. Davies. Finished. There is nothing more for me here. So I go. This is what I was thinking that day. While I walked. The day I found the-Faye.

PORTMAN: And you walked all the way from Riverwood to Manitou Cave?

GROSSMAN: I did, yes.

PORTMAN: You didn’t come by way of the river?

GROSSMAN: No. Not by the river. The trail. It is a long walk.

He had been in the woods for several hours, he told Portman, and as Graves read the detective’s notes, he could sense Grossman’s extreme edginess as he labored to detail his exact movements on the day he’d come upon the corpse of Faye Harrison.

GROSSMAN: I went into the woods just where Faye did. I took the same path. There were many people around. Everywhere people looking for her. Because of this, I went in the other direction. Away from the crowds.

He had not joined the search Warren Davies had organized, Grossman told Portman, because he believed that Faye had run away. That she did not want to be found by anyone.