The words were spoken softly but carried authority, and he 163

turned to greet a woman whose appearance was in perfect harmony with her voice. Grace Aubrey was tall and elegant, with an intelligence in her face that the lines of age had only served to intensify.

Unusually for a woman in her sixties, and perhaps only because of the hour, she wore her hair long and loose, making it easy for Penrose to imagine how she had looked in her youth, before the deep browns were tinged with grey. Without question, she was still beautiful and – despite his professional instinct to question appearances – Penrose found it hard to reconcile the Aubreys’ visual com-patibility with their reputed marital differences.

‘You know, after the war he could hardly bear to look at it any more,’ she said, her eyes still on the painting. ‘I suppose it’s not right to mourn such a thing when so many people didn’t come back at all, but it seems to me that the loss of a sense of beauty is as tragic as the loss of life.’ She sat down at one end of the settee and invited Penrose to take the other, brushing his condolences efficiently aside.

‘This has come as a great shock to me, Inspector, but I’m not going to waste your time by pretending that relations between my husband and I were anything other than habitual. I’m sorry he’s dead, of course I am. We all hope for the privilege of hanging on until our last natural moment, and no human being should die as he did – your sergeant was very diligent in his efforts to spare my feelings, by the way, but I can’t imagine any poison being painless.

That said, it would be ridiculous to claim a grief which I simply don’t feel.’

Penrose doubted that anyone had ever had cause to think Grace Aubrey ridiculous. ‘When did you last speak to your husband?’ he asked, confident now that he would be told everything he needed to know with a frankness which was refreshing, if a little disconcerting.

‘This morning, at breakfast. He left for work as usual at about half past nine. I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t come home by the time I went to bed. He often stays out late, either working or socialising, so I didn’t expect to see him until tomorrow morning.’

‘And you didn’t speak on the telephone?’

164

‘No. We led very separate lives, Inspector. There was little enough to talk about when we were in each other’s company, and certainly nothing important enough to warrant a telephone call.’

‘How long had you been married?’

‘It would have been forty-one years next month, although we stopped marking anniversaries a lifetime ago.’

‘That’s a long time to stay together if you were both unhappy.’

‘Are you married, Inspector?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. The idea that you stay together if you’re happy and part if you’re not tends to be one held by single people. It wasn’t as straightforward as that. I can’t speak for Bernard, but I don’t remember ever actually being unhappy. We were both privileged to start off with, and he always worked hard to make sure we stayed that way, so we never wanted for anything, materially speaking.

And it wasn’t that we didn’t get on – it’s just that we never created that spark of joy in each other’s lives that makes everything else irrelevant. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but any of the pleasures that I did take from our life together would not have been lessened had he not been there to share them.’ She looked down at her hands, and gently touched her wedding ring. ‘I was a little harsh on you just then, Inspector. I’m sorry, and perhaps you’re right; perhaps if we had been unhappy rather than merely bored we might have separated and looked for happiness elsewhere. But when you’re neither one thing nor the other, time slips away before you realise that there might be something more.’

Guessing that Aubrey’s widow would despise any form of pre-varication, Penrose decided to make his questions as direct as possible. ‘Were you always faithful to each other?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘You seem very sure. Can you speak so certainly for your husband?’

‘I can afford to be sure, if only for the simple reason that I wouldn’t have minded if he had strayed. There would have been no need for him to lie about it. I might even have been relieved, although of course you never know when jealousy will strike. No, 165

we were both too lazy to have an affair.’ She took a cigarette from the silver box on the table beside her and paused to light it.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘A son, Joseph. He lives in Gloucestershire. He and Bernard were never very close – they were far too much alike to get on well, and Bernard always resented the fact that Joe didn’t want anything to do with his precious theatres. And thank God he didn’t, bearing in mind what’s happened to his father.’

‘Did he have enemies, then?’

‘Clearly he did, Inspector. I would have thought that much was obvious.’

‘But specifically within the theatre? You seem to blame his work for his death.’

‘Bernard was a powerful man. He made careers and he destroyed them. His decisions were invariably right but often ruthless, and he made them with no thought for sentiment or even loyalty. And he was found poisoned in the private area of his theatre.

You’re the detective, of course, but the evidence does seem to point in that direction.’

Penrose resisted the temptation to return the charge of seeing things too simply. ‘I believe your husband’s death is connected to another murder which took place on Friday. Does the name Elspeth Simmons mean anything to you?’

She thought for a moment. ‘The girl who was killed at King’s Cross? I read about it in the paper tonight but I’d never heard of her before that. What makes you think Bernard’s death had anything to do with hers?’

‘She was involved with one of his employees – a young man named Hedley White. I gather your husband thought a lot of him and was very upset at the news of Miss Simmons’s death.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry – I can’t really help you there. He did talk fondly about Hedley – I remember because it’s an unusual name – and he was certainly a great believer in giving young people a chance, but I can’t be more specific than that.’

‘Had you noticed any change in his behaviour recently?’ Penrose asked, although he was rapidly coming to believe that Grace 166

Aubrey knew too little about her husband’s life to be able to throw much light on his death. ‘At the risk of being too straightforward, had he been unhappy?’

She smiled at him with a growing respect. ‘At the risk of being pedantic, I’d say angry rather than unhappy. He always had a short temper, but it was usually soon over. Lately, he often seemed worried or frustrated.’

‘Do you have any idea why?’

‘When Bernard was angry, it was usually because he couldn’t get his own way over something, but don’t ask me what.’

‘I know it’s unlikely, bearing in mind the manner of his death, but can you imagine anything that might have led Bernard to take his own life?’

‘No. Absolutely nothing. He had no great faith to prevent him from doing it, but after all he went through in the war and all the lives he saw snatched away before they were ever really begun, he scorned suicide as the coward’s way out. That was something he never was – a coward – and he despised it in other people. He had a bleak view of the world and he could be very hard on himself at times, usually because of things he hadn’t done that he thought he should have, but he always claimed that the greatest punishment for any sin was to go on living.’

Penrose wondered if the sin for which Bernard Aubrey had felt the need to repent went back as far as the war. He asked as much, and was rewarded once again with a look of approval.