Bodies from the Library 4, page 16
Dickinson shrugged. ‘Well—we must talk to the steward; it could be quite natural, it could be exceedingly odd. But we shall never be able to check now where the poison was; the glasses might have told us, even if the plate didn’t.’ He turned to the little crowd of constables and various experts who stood at a respectful distance waiting for a signal from the great man from Scotland Yard,
‘I want fingerprints and photographs—I can’t have too many; you can really let yourselves go—money no object!’ Under his breath he said to Trickett: ‘Do they know their stuff?’
‘They’re the Taddlecombe police,’ said Trickett, reverently; for dang it all! Taddlecombe is a town of twenty thousand souls!
The house-party sat over a listless luncheon, at which Gloria had not appeared; and only Truda showed no sign of the terrible time through which they had all passed. Her rich hair shone, as glowing and smooth as the coat of a chestnut, rounding her shapely head; her brown hands were still against the dull white of her frock, her eyes were kindly, sympathetic, sorrowful, but looked out steadfastly and without fear,
No so the rest of the party. Mr Thoms was a wreck of the fat, jolly man who had chivvied them all from that table only a little more than twenty-four hours ago; the heavy pouches under his eyes were dark with lack of sleep and his fat fingers rapped on the table a ceaseless tattoo.
Stone looked really tired and grey; and for the first time she realized that he was no longer a young man. Roy and Julian were silent, looking down at their plates as though ashamed of their hearty appetites, yet longing to eat; she thought that both of them avoided the eyes of their fellows. Jenny was puffy and tear-stained after a fresh bout of weeping, Miss Pye a mass of nervous irritation, and Tiggy looked white and frightened, a ghost of a child.
Gloria, in her room, was surreptitiously reading a novel, but even her face was lined with worry. She had paid her tribute to Geoffrey in that outburst of tears that had followed his death; but it was impossible to cry for more than an hour or two. She stuffed the novel hastily under her pillow as Evan knocked at the door; and called in a trembling voice: ‘Come in!’
He came in hesitantly, and stood by the bed, holding her languid hand in his.
‘I didn’t sleep all night, Gloria, thinking of you and wondering if you were unhappy and—and lying awake too. You look terribly washed out. I hope you’re not feeling too bad’
‘No, I’m all right, Evan dear. I haven’t slept, of course; but didn’t exactly expect to!’
She lay back against her pillows and a perfectly genuine tear made a tiny trail down her face.
Evan gave a sort of groan, and fell on his knees by her bed. ‘Don’t cry, Gloria; don’t cry! I—I can’t bear to see it … It’s been a shock to you, of course, but you’ll get over it. You—you didn’t love Geoffrey; he was only a drag on you … Don’t let it upset you too much.’ He turned his head aside, his fists closed, his nails digging into the palms of his hands.
‘It—it seems wrong to say so just at the moment, Gloria, but—but one day, Gloria, you and I …’
‘You’re so sweet, Evan dear,’ said Gloria, putting out a hand to his sparse brown hair and giving it a little, loving tug. She looked at him with something of real affection in her eyes.
‘We can’t talk about these things, as you say, with poor darling Geoffrey lying—lying dead, and having died in such extraordinary—such utterly fantastic circumstances; because, honestly, Evan, I simply can’t understand what happened. But—well, later on, when everything is settled, we’ll think about it again …’ She left the air warm with unspoken promises.
The love and service of any man was too good to be refused, and for twenty years this man had kept alive his love for her. She watched him go with a smile; if anything went wrong between herself and Thom-Thom—and there were dangerous and difficult days ahead—the devotion of even a secretary might come in useful. She did not know that this thought was in her mind; hedged about by vanity from recognition of her nature as it really was, she only knew that Evan was honest and true and dependable and a dear—if rather dull; and that marriage with Thom-Thom, if she could attain it, was the irresistible prize; and that, if Thom-Thom failed her, she might reward Evan. Unless, of course, in the meantime someone else came along. She started to read again.
Meanwhile Jenny wept drearily in her bedroom with Miss Pye in blubbering attendance, imploring her to control herself or she would be ill. ‘It was so dreadful—so dreadful,’ sobbed Jenny, and would not be consoled.
Julian and Truda sat in the little back garden out of sight of the curious stares of the local inhabitants. ‘At least now this ghastly business about the action won’t come off,’ they said, and eyed each other unhappily.
Roy, by the telephone in Mr Thoms’s study, irritably wrangled with Trunks, who would not get him through to the BBC. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t you understand? I’m an artist, an artist, and I’m due for a show tomorrow morning. You must get the call through. For the lord’s sake, do try again …’
Mr Thoms stood with his back to him, staring out of the window across the bay, and wondering when he could, in decency, speak to Gloria.
Downstairs, Tiggy, on her fairy cycle, pedalled madly through the french window of the drawing-room out on to the terrace, and back through the second window and round again.
Mr Dickinson, with Trickett cumbering at his side, came up the steps and paused for a moment to look out to where the Cariad nosed at her moorings across the bay. ‘It’s very lovely. Talk about peace …!’ he said.
There was a piercing scream and something hit him violently in the rear. He found himself sitting in the ruins of a miniature bicycle with a small girl of repellent aspect glaring at him across the wreckage. Trickett, leaning back against the balustrade, grinned.
Dickinson hoisted himself gingerly out of the mass of pedals and handlebars and slowly rotating wheels and turned upon his assailant. ‘And what the devil do you think you’re doing, crashing into me like that? You might have knocked me over into the harbour.’
‘What about what you’ve done to my fairy cycle?’ said Tiggy calmly, lugging the battered machine into her arms and pushing the front wheel up into his face.
Dickinson could not repress a grin. ‘Well, of all the infernal cheek!’ To Trickett he murmured, ‘I take it this is one of the prostrate relatives?’
‘It’s not very bad really,’ said Trickett, still laughing. He squatted down on the stone terrace with Tiggy earnestly squatting beside him, and wrenched with expert fingers at the tiny frame. ‘There you are, puss; it’s as good as new!’
‘It is new,’ said Tiggy, pedalling unsteadily off without further acknowledgment. Two minutes later, however, she was round again and continued as though there had been no interval; ‘Thom-Thom gave it to me. It’s blue.’
‘You don’t say so,’ said Dickinson.
‘One of the girls at school has got one and it isn’t blue,’ went on Tiggy, unruffled. ‘I should think she’ll be jolly sick when I come back with this one.’
‘I should think so indeed,’ agreed Dickinson, gravely.
Tiggy abandoned her fairy cycle and with it all ill-feeling, and thrust her arm through Dickinson’s. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘Adolf Hitler,’ said Dickinson, regarding her with repulsion. ‘Who are you? Are you Charlotte Winson?’
‘Yes, I am, but I’m really called Tiggy because my little eyes go twinkle, twinkle, twinkle,’ said Tiggy gaily, and added in gabbling recitative: ‘And Mrs Tiggy Winkle’s eyes went twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, and her nose went snuffle, snuffle, snuffle, and she ironed out pocket handkersniffs for henny-pennies. Isn’t it sweeeet?’
She went out into the centre of the terrace, and there performed a couple of somersaults with an air of great unconcern. After a moment she struggled to her feet with an ample display of cotton knickers and, coming quietly to Dickinson’s side, put an arm round his waist and said disarmingly: ‘I’m only showing off.’
‘Good lord, this is frightful,’ said Mr Dickinson wildly to Trickett. ‘Has the damn child fallen in love with me?’
‘Yes, I have,’ said Tiggy uncompromisingly. ‘I love you better than anybody else in the world. Better than Thom-Thom and better than Evan and better than Roy; but I don’t love you better than mummy.’ She paused a moment: ‘My daddy’s dead.’
‘Yes, we know,’ said Trickett kindly.
‘We think he was poisoned,’ said Tiggy in a chatty, off-hand voice.
Trickett was slightly shocked. ‘Perhaps he ate something that upset him.’
‘No, because we ate all the same things, so if there’d been anything wrong with them we’d have died, too. He ate a egg sambwidge, but then I ate the other one,’ said Tiggy, nodding a wise yellow head, ‘and he ate a bit of pie, but Roy or Julian—I forget who it was, but one of the boys—ate another piece after that. And he ate some salad, but I finished up what he left on his plate, and I’m all right, aren’t I?’
‘You are indeed,’ said Mr Dickinson.
‘And he drank some of the iced coffee, ‘but we’d all been drinking it,’ continued Tiggy, faithfully paraphrasing the conversations of the grown-ups during the past twenty-four hours, ‘and Evan drank some more from the jug afterwards. And he drank some sherry, but Thom-Thom tasted it first to see if it was all right—and it was, because Thom-Thom is.’
‘Didn’t he drink anything but the sherry?’
‘No, because beer in the middle of the day makes you sleepy, and spirits warps your judgment,’ recited Tiggy solemnly. ‘That’s what Thom-Thom says, and daddy said he’d better play up to the old buffer. What’s a buffer?’
‘A thing a train bonks into at the station,’ said Dickinson. Over the fair pigtails he commented to Trickett: ‘What the kid says is true, you know. Everything the man ate was sampled just before or just afterwards. You don’t think by any chance this may all end in a mare’s nest? Not poison at all, I mean?’
A man appeared on the quay below the terrace, waving up to attract their attention. ‘Is that your chap, Trickett, with the results of the post-mortem?’
Trickett’s backside waggled a confirmation as he hooked himself over the balustrade to speak to the man. He stood up again and turned round. Tiggy, watching open-mouthed, saw that his fat, round face was grave. ‘Yes. Cyanide!’ he said.
One by one the household was summoned. Dickinson patiently interviewed them in the dining-room, giving away nothing himself, patiently extracting every detail of the scene in the saloon of the yacht, fishing meanwhile for underlying motive beneath the straight narrative. Mr Thoms, Gloria, Roy, Jenny, Julian …
Truda, restlessly pacing the house as Julian remained longer and longer closeted in the dining-room, came at last to Mr Thoms’s study where Evan Stone sat at his desk. ‘I’m sorry, Evan; have I disturbed you? I’m so fed up waiting for Julian that I thought—I thought I’d have a look at Mr Thoms’s trophies,’ said Truda, nervously fingering the silver vases and cups. She added, hardly changing her voice, but with a look of concern in her eyes; ‘You don’t seem a bit well, Evan. Are you all right?’
Evan put his head down in his hands. ‘I think I’m just tired,’ he said.
‘Did you have a rotten night? Your leg keeps you awake, doesn’t it?’
‘It does usually; but last night—it wasn’t that.’ He must talk to somebody; and he had known Truda Deane since she was almost a child, and had loved her always. He said: ‘This is all rather a special hell for me, Trudie, you know.’
‘I know, darling,’ said Truda.
‘He looked so—sort of surprised, Trudie! Sort of pained and surprised … It made him look dreadfully young and—well, somehow, vulnerable; and he wasn’t a vulnerable person, really not at all.’
‘No,’ said Truda. ‘He was like a—well, he was like a smooth, polished stone; emotion just skidded off the surface of him. You couldn’t touch him; not really.’
He gave her a grateful look for her ready comprehension, her translation of what his hesitant speech could not put into words. ‘It made it just that much worse, to see him beaten at last. God knows I didn’t like Winson; I think I hated him—but I can’t forget the look on his face as he lay there dead … It was almost—well, almost ludicrous; that’s what makes it so horrible—’
Truda leaned against the window seat, turning her head to look out over the smiling sea, away from the sight of his face, from the pain and weariness and horror in his eyes. She said, knowing even as she spoke that words were vain: ‘Try not to remember it, Evan dear,’ and added the age-old comfortless words of comfort: ‘After all, it can’t do him any good, to distress yourself—’
He seemed hardly to hear her; at any rate, he took no notice; but after a while he said, in his groping way: ‘You see—I mean, I suppose you understand about me and Gloria, Trudie? Everybody knows, of course; everybody‘s known for years. Even in the old days at Haverstock Hill—even in those days, Truda, though you were a child, almost—I suppose you knew—?’
‘We all knew you were keen on Gloria, Evan, as Jenny would say; but so many people were! And then when poor John Sandells died, she married Geoffrey—’
‘Yes, she did, but—but now Geoffrey’s dead, Trudie. He’s murdered! And what seems so ghastly is that I should benefit by his murder!’
Truda stared at him. ‘That you should benefit?’
Was it possible, could it be possible, that Evan in his blind devotion could really believe that now Geoffrey was dead, Gloria would turn to him? Would give her charms to dear, dull Evan Stone with his secretarial salary, when Edgar Thoms held out plump hands, dripping with the wealth and luxury that was all her mean little soul desired? She could not believe it; and yet … She knew that Gloria, not dreaming that Geoffrey would soon be dead, was perfectly capable of making vague half-admissions of affection for the man who might, at some time or other, prove useful; who might, as well as not, be kept tied to her.
She looked at him, shocked and pitying; but knew that this was not the moment for even the gentlest whisper that he must not cling to such hopes. She said, playing for time: ‘Well, never mind, Evan. A lot of time must pass before Gloria’s out of mourning’ (Gloria? Mourning!) ‘and you’ll feel better about it all and be able to see straight again. I mean, after all, it’s not as if you murdered Geoffrey Winson so as to be able to marry his wife!’
‘No,’ he said. ‘God knows that’s true!’ He got up from the table and came and stood beside her in the bow window, put a hand on her arm for a moment in his quiet, undemonstrative way. ‘Thank you, Trudie; you’re always such a clear-sighted person. It’s always good to talk to you.’ And, turning his back on the room, looking out over the shining bay, he said: ‘I’m glad that out of all this horror and wretchedness, there is one gleam of brightness. You and Julian will be free now of the frightful threat of the breach of promise action—’
She stared at him, as though a ghost had suddenly opened the door of her mind and walked in; and turned and rushed out of the room.
The Daunton ‘Britain Is Grateful week’ went relentlessly on. The quay was left deserted of all but stolid policemen, keeping an eye on the incomings and outgoings of the party; which, since they had been, to all intents and purposes, forbidden to leave the house, were few.
Jenny came down the steps with Roy, and in silence they walked along the quay in the evening light, kicking an occasional pebble in front of them, gloomily. Thom-Thom had sent to London for mourning clothes for the widow and her children, and placed his well-filled coupon book at Gloria’s disposal.
In the meantime, Jenny was clad in a georgette frock of her mother’s which she had long ago passed on to Miss Pye, who had let it out in a dozen different places, and home-dyed it black. Poor Jenny had gathered it in again at the waist with a piece of tape, hidden in its turn by a white cloth belt, which had not been designed for wear with georgette, and she carried a white handbag to show that it was ‘meant’.
She looked a pathetic and incongruous figure’, though she was unaware of it, and her shining brown eyes were troubled by other things. She walked along gravely by the young man’s side, not attempting as in other more carefree days to cling, irritatingly but adoringly, to his arm.
‘Thank heaven to be out in the open, anyway,’ said Roy, at last. ‘I hate being stuck in the house.’
‘When do you think they will let you go home to the BBC?’
‘You talk as though I literally dwelt at Broadcasting House,’ said Roy, crossly. ‘As to when they let me go back, I can go this minute if I choose. The police have no power whatsoever to keep me here.’
‘Then why don’t you go?’ asked Jenny innocently.
‘Because it would give a damn bad impression and they’ve as much as said so. What did that chap Dickinson say to you?’ asked Roy, changing to a more off-hand tone. ‘You were in with him for hours.’
‘Oh, he didn’t say much,’ said Jenny, also very off-hand.
‘You—er—you didn’t come to my room on Tuesday night by any chance, did you?’ asked Roy, carelessly. ‘I mean, I thought you might have, like you said you would, to go on talking about that breach of promise case, and all that business. I—I shouldn’t have heard you; I slept like a log that night—’
‘Good lord, no!’ said Jenny, tremendously surprised. ‘Of course, I didn’t come. I mean, you said you’d talk to me about it next day.’
‘Oh. I thought you might have. I mean, you did say that the next day we should be sailing and then I was going back to town, and we wouldn’t have a chance. And you did say you’d come.’
‘Well, I—I decided not to bother,’ said Jenny. ‘Anyway I was nowhere near your room,’ she spoke emphatically and glanced quickly at him.
Roy wondered who had been there that night. Someone had dropped a small, rather grubby handkerchief; it hadn’t been there—well, it hadn’t been there at midnight; and at half-past twelve, it had. Between twelve and half-past, someone had come at least to his door; and there had dropped that handkerchief and come away. If it hadn’t been Jenny …? He glanced at her face. She looked very odd. ‘You look very odd,’ he said.
