Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (13 page)

‘Just as well I didn’t wash it up,’ said Stella. ‘But with all the fuss….’

It was a Sunday. Ricky and Frederick sat wretchedly side by side on the sofa. ‘I’d have sworn she’d taken nothing.’

‘So would I,’ said Frederick.

‘You examined her carefully?’

‘Well—we were both prepared, you see, to believe she’d taken nothing. I know the type,’ said Ricky, ‘and they never have taken anything; and Stella had seen her pulling up her stocking when she was pretending to be half unconscious. And if she had taken the stuff—well, it must have been getting on for an hour before we saw her, and she’d have been showing symptoms long before that.’

‘I quite agree,’ said Frederick. He added slowly: ‘Of course, Ricky, we were basing the whole thing on the assumption that if she’d taken anything it would have been before she left the hospital—which is what she said. But—suppose she’d taken it just before she walked in here? She’d have been at such an early stage that we’d have been justified in doing nothing?’

‘I’d have thought there’d be something, even so,’ said Ricky. (Silly blind fool! thought Stella—can’t he ever leave well alone…?)

‘I must confess,’ said Frederick, looking back, ‘that when she went up to bed I did think she seemed over-excited. I said so to you, Stella, didn’t I?—and flushed and not flopping about as she had been. But… Well, I suppose it was the stocking episode—I was so convinced that it was all an act….’ He broke off wretchedly, conscious of a failure and of the dire consequence of that failure to a human life.

When Ricky was uncertain and floundering, Stella could feel only irritation and a sort of contempt. Now, with Frederick so unwontedly at a loss, she was filled with a sense of protectiveness. She pointed out: ‘I’d just given her strong black coffee for that very purpose—to wake her up.’

‘You let her put herself to bed, Mrs. Harrison?’

‘She wouldn’t let me help her; we just left her to it.’

‘She said she was—exhausted was the word,’ said Frederick, thoughtfully. ‘And that she’d been through a strain. So—once again, you see: one accepted it as natural. But I suppose it was in fact symptomatic—flushed, excited….’

‘And she was breathing very heavily,’ said Ricky. ‘I ought to have gone in….’ These men! They seemed bent upon making themselves look inept fools and worse. ‘I went in,’ said Stella. ‘She was snoring, yes; she just seemed heavily asleep.’

And so on, and so on—question and answer, but quiet, amicable, just talking it over….Times, places, words said, words unspoken. The story of the call to Matron, a passing reference to the ‘crush’ of the young lady on the doctor. ‘No doubt you get lots of that kind of thing?’

‘Doctors do,’ said Ricky, briefly.

‘And there was a boy friend in the case anyway?’

All unsuspicious, friendly—safe. Uniforms roaming about the house, meanwhile, yes: but what was there to find? Chief Inspector Cockrill closed the notebook in which he had been making what appeared to be random scratchings of an indecipherable nature and rose to his feet. ‘Perhaps Mrs. Harrison would show me over the house and let me get my bearings.’ And on the way upstairs he said, toiling after her, ‘All this must have been unpleasant for you?’

‘Horrible. But I’d never seen the girl before and I can’t say I fell in love with her. I don’t pretend to be personally all that upset.’ (Play it carefully!)

‘At least she won’t be able to make scenes about the doctor any more. I hear she was always creating, up at the hospital.’

She shrugged. ‘Everyone knew it was really the boy friend who was responsible for the child.’

He seemed to pause for a moment. He said quickly: ‘There was never any other suggestion, I suppose?’

She could have cut out her tongue; but anyway Ricky was sure to have come blurting out with it some time. She took the bull by the horns. ‘I dare say she was all for pretending my husband was the father; but of course she had no hope of being believed.’

They had come to the landing. He stood there, facing her, small for a policeman, elderly, a crest of grey hair crowning a splendid head. ‘All the same, you must have been worried? Mud sticks. If she’d gone round saying this kind of thing—’

‘She couldn’t go round saying it if she was dead.’

‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Chief Inspector Cockrill.

She lost a little of her poise. ‘Anyway we all knew it was this young man at the hospital.’

‘Oh, you knew that, did you?’

‘Matron told me when I rang her up.’

‘But that would be quite towards the end of the evening? By that time,’ he said, his bright, dark eyes oh hers, ‘you’d have had time to get pretty worked up about it all?’

And suddenly it wasn’t so easy and friendly after all and, showing him the room where the girl had died, the bathroom she had briefly visited, she knew that it hadn’t really been easy and friendly, not any of the time. Hysteria rose in her, his hand on the banister as he followed her back down the stairs seemed like a great spider, hairless and horrible, creeping down after her to fasten itself upon her very life. She crushed down the panic, forced herself to quietness; but her head seemed stuffed with warm cotton-wool, nothing was clear, she could not remember, could not correlate, could not calculate….

And in the hall Ricky came up to her, drawing her out of earshot. ‘Stella—I’m sure there’s some morphia gone from the surgery.’

‘Nonsense!’ she said sharply. ‘There can’t be.’ They would be asking this question soon; he must, he must, give calm, reassuring answers.

‘Suppose she helped herself while she was alone in the room?’

‘She never was alone in the room, Ricky. I didn’t leave her, not for a second; and then you and Frederick were there. Besides, the key—’

‘A nurse would know whereabouts to look for the key. We all have some convenient hidey-hole.’

‘But I tell you, Ricky, she wasn’t left alone. Do stop muttering or they’ll get suspicious. Later if you like, we’ll add up the book if that’ll make you any happier—’

But not Ricky! Ricky must go forward painfully to the Inspector and say that as he’s just been saying to his wife, he has a wretched feeling that there ought to be more morphia….‘You see, Stella,’ he said over their heads to her, ‘whatever she’d taken must be accounted for somehow. If she got it from here, we mustn’t let the blame fall somewhere else.’

There was an altercation at the surgery door. Someone was insisting that her child had been knocked down by a car just outside, she wasn’t going to carry him round to any other doctor’s, not if she knew it ‘You go ahead,’ said Cockrill, seeing Ricky’s stricken face as the mother seemed about to be turned from the door by the policeman posted there. ‘I’ll just take your poisons book and be skimming through it.’ And he sat down with it on his knee, turning the pages earnestly like a child with a picture book. Frederick, comfortably sure that all was well with it, went out to help with the screaming child. After a while, the Inspector looked up. ‘Both partners would have access to this book, Mrs. Harrison?’

‘Of course,’ said Stella.

‘I see they use a ball point pen.’

‘We keep one marking the page in the book.’

‘M’m. Useful things,’ he said: ‘except that one never has a refill when one wants one. I see in this case they’ve changed to blue. Up to a week ago, it was black.’

So that was it! In the dim light, last night, she had not been able to see what in daylight was perfectly evident: that the two, rather smudgy, grey-blue colours in fact were different. Figures, on pages chosen at random, two months back, three months, six months back—standing out clearly as having been altered in a different coloured ink….

She began to talk rapidly and feverishly. ‘Do you mean that there’s been an alteration in the figures?’

‘What gives you that idea?’ he said.

‘Well, I mean… You’re suggesting that they’ve been altered in the new blue ink. But….Well, that shows,’ she said, desperately, ‘that my husband wouldn’t have done such a thing, none of us would: I mean, we’d know about the change of colour, wouldn’t we? So it must have been the girl. She must have taken the dose from the poison cupboard and altered the figures in the book—’

‘Why?’ said Inspector Cockrill.

‘Why? Why alter the figures, you mean? Well, she wouldn’t want to get my husband into trouble, I suppose. She was in love with him, after all.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe she was in love with him?’

‘Well, I seem to have been wrong, don’t I? Because, after all, we didn’t think she would really commit suicide, but she has, hasn’t she? I mean, a nurse would know—poison cupboards aren’t really all that inaccessible, Inspector, not in everyday life. It’s only the patients who’d have a job knowing where to find the little key—’

‘You don’t give your husband a reassuring reputation, Mrs. Harrison. Would the book be close to the cupboard?’

‘Yes, and with the pen marking the place. At least that’s where it was—’

‘Last night?’ said the Inspector.

‘That’s where it would have been last night; because you see obviously the girl noticed it, and just picked up the book and altered the figures, far back where they wouldn’t be noticed—’

‘How do you know it was far back?’

‘Well, you were looking far back,’ she said, desperately. But the cotton-wool was clearing away a little. ‘I only mean that the girl had common sense; and she was nursing this phoney romance about my husband, her mind would work in this way. And she’d said, she’d left a note saying, she was going to take morphia—’

‘The note said that she
had
taken morphia.’

‘But we know that she can’t have, or they’d have seen the symptoms. And there was none missing from the hospital so she
must
have taken it from the surgery.’

‘Under your very nose, Mrs. Harrison?’ She was silent, defeated. He insisted: ‘You did tell me earlier, didn’t you, that you’d never left her alone in there for a moment.’

‘I mean… I meant… Not alone in that sense; of course I was in and out….’

But Ricky would let her down. Ricky would blurt out, in that idiotic honesty of his, that she had assured him, when he closely questioned her, that the girl could not possibly have taken the stuff… She thought with dark anger of the harm he had already done: of the dangerous corners, skilfully turned, only to be blocked by his exasperating, innocent candour. And, damn it all, whose fault was all this in the first place? It was his book, after all, his poisons cupboard, his diagnosis, his love affair.

His love affair.

For in fact who knew, who could be so certain, that Ricky was so exquisitely innocent? No smoke without fire? Surely he must have given the bitch some encouragement, to make her so hot after him? And if so—if so, didn’t he deserve everything that was coming to him?—for deceiving her like this, deceiving her with this cheap little, grubby little tart….And if Ricky were out of the way….The memory of Frederick’s arms around her rose up like an incense, hot and heady. He loves me, she thought. All this time, he’s been loving me too and both of us just too—well, just too good, that’s all, to let Ricky down. She remembered the hard, strong arms, his voice when he had called her marvellous….What had he said about her ‘lovely blue eyes….’? He was horrified to see me caught up in this sordid little drama, seeing me humbled by this dreadful girl—and all through Ricky, all because Ricky can’t keep his hands off the nurses, never caring how much he lets me down….

She knew what she must do. She knew that now the truth was out—that murder stalked with unveiled face through their little house and that she must act. What she had done, she had done to save Richard: done for his sake entirely, she insisted to herself, to save him from the consequences of his own sickening sins. Very well then, if anyone was going to have to pay the price, it surely should not be herself? Innocent or guilty, it was he who had brought about this horrible tragedy: innocent or guilty, then, let him pay. She raised her blue eyes to Inspector Cockrill’s bright brown ones.

She said: ‘Inspector—who do you suspect?’

He looked back at her with a sort of glitter. ‘It’s my duty to enquire into things, Madam.’

She bowed her head. ‘What am I to say? Well—no, of course, it isn’t true that I never left the girl alone, I was just trying to….’ And she said, blurting it out, raising miserable blue eyes again: ‘One must protect those one—loves.’

‘You are referring to your husband, Mrs. Harrison?’

‘My husband?’ she said, startled. ‘Yes, of course. But, Inspector—don’t think for one moment that I believe my husband was really the father of this girl’s child…

‘Oh, I don’t, Madam,’ he said, with the faintest possible mocking imitation of her tone.

‘Of course it was upsetting. She threatened to make disgusting scenes at the hospital; as you said, it wasn’t till much later that we knew, when I talked to Matron, that there was nothing really to worry about.’ She added with apparent inconsequence that her husband had gone back to his patient by then.

‘Leaving the sedative tablets for the young lady to take?’

She permitted herself one terrified, upward glance; then lowered her eyes. ‘Six small white tablets. I wondered perhaps if such a large dose could have contributed to her death: quite innocently, of course, naturally—only, if it were administered on top of whatever quantity of morphia it was that she gave herself—’

‘Very ingenious, Madam. But that wouldn’t account for the alterations in the book: would it?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t start calling me Madam,’ said Stella, fluttering. ‘Why suddenly so stiff? You don’t suspect
me
of being a murderer, I suppose?’

‘How could I?’ he said. ‘You had no opportunity, had you?’

‘I gave the girl that coffee….’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing there; we’ve already done a rough check.’

She breathed more freely. ‘Well, but I was alone with her for some time, earlier on.’

‘Only for a few minutes, really. No time for any other teas or coffees, and if you’d given her any pills or powder undisguised, I think she’d have mentioned it. And later one or both of the gentlemen was with her all the time. You didn’t even see her to bed; you came straight down with Mr. Graham.’