Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (26 page)

Christo stood utterly immobile but for the terrible trembling; paralyzed with a black, an animal fear. If they should arrest him! Shut him up in a cell! I should go mad, he thought: and knew that, literally, it was true. I should go mad. Shut up there, closed in, helpless, in the dark, alone… He would go mad and he knew that he must pray for nothing less: that madness would be best for him then.

They watched him, terrified: watched Idris, watched the shifty lout with his cocky face, safe in the circle of his convenient alibis, a pack of kids under his thumb. ‘You!’ said Abel, breaking out at him, violently. ‘Everyone knows the sort you are! You got her into trouble; and—knowing she was meeting him, perhaps—you got to the cave first and murdered her.’

The sergeant stood with a light hand on Christo’s wrist. He said coolly: ‘So why did she leave a suicide note?’

‘A note?’ said Idris, in a curious voice. ‘She left a note?’

The note!—which they themselves had written and placed there. ‘Perhaps… Perhaps,’ suggested Abel, ‘she intended to kill herself so she wrote the note. But she couldn’t do it and he found her there and held her head down in the water.’

‘The same could go for him,’ said Idris with a jerk of the chin towards Christo; and now he spoke confidently, subtly jeering.

‘Or the murderer wrote the note himself?’ suggested the sergeant, smoothly. That reaction of Idris’ hadn’t escaped his notice.

‘He’d have had to,’ said Idris, triumphantly. ‘She couldn’t write.’

Couldn’t write? She couldn’t
write
? Rohan hung on to his swinging senses. ‘All the more reason to say that you did it. You killed her, you wrote the note—’ But his voice trailed away in despair.

‘What, me? Knowing that everyone would know she couldn’t write?’ said Idris; and the sergeant unconsciously tightened his grip on Christo’s arm. Throughout all the valley, the Hippies must have been the only people unaware that Mad Megan couldn’t read or write.

So… The girl, pretty and alluring enough, ignorant and foolish….Conceives a passion for one of these free-living young men and conceives indeed. Terrified of her father’s vengeance if she gives away her lover’s name, he takes her down to the cave and there pushes her head under water; fastens up the false note and—with or without the collusion of his friends—arranges to ‘find’ her and duly informs the police. ‘We’ll go along to the station,’ said the sergeant to the constable over Christo’s bent head; and added civilly: ‘You’ll come with us?’

‘He’ll come,’ said the constable, not civilly at all.

Christo made no answer: went with them, dumb.

And dumbly, helplessly, they watched him. The big farm gate swung-to, its post dragging through the dry earth, kicking up a little cloud of dust. Outside, the small, dark police car waited. That alone would be torment, the closed windows and doors.

Along the way, the hedges were milky white; but Corinna would go no more a-Maying down the country lanes. He sat in the rear seat, the sergeant’s hand now light again, on his wrist. He said: ‘Will you have to lock me up?’

‘And do it with pleasure,’ said the constable, not waiting for his sergeant to reply.

‘Now? When we get there? And all through the night?’ He struggled to explain. ‘I get claustrophobia. I can’t bear to be closed in.’

‘You didn’t mind being closed in, in that cave, did you?’ said the constable, only half his attention on the dangerous windings of the narrow country road. ‘You didn’t mind being in there, holding her down, drowning her? You were closed in there; and you’ll be closed in now. Now and for the rest of your life. And God damn you!’

‘Now, now,’ said the sergeant. ‘That’ll be enough!’

‘
You
didn’t know the girl,’ said the constable, savagely. ‘I knew her from a child. Helpless, she was…’

‘Well, well—he isn’t convicted yet….’

Christo did not hear them: already was beyond hearing. Now, tonight, for the rest of his life. But the rest of his life need not matter. He would know little about it by the end of this one coming night, this endless night.

Endless night… Endless night…‘What’s that you’re mumbling now?’ said the constable, forgetting the road altogether, to turn and look back over his shoulder. ‘What’s that about drowning?’

From Herrick. From ‘Corinna’. He mumbled it a little louder. ‘All love, all liking, all delight, Lies drowned with us in endless night.’

And he repeated it, ‘Endless night!’ and put his white face into his hands and abandoned himself to the engulfing dark: to his only defence against it—to witlessness.

Gwennie and Boyo had dashed across the field to catch the last possible glimpse of the car. It was their Hippy, the one they’d seen calling to Megan when she was already dead, lying there by the river, dead and drownded.

Duw, duw—what an escape! If anyone had guessed that they’d gone down to the cave so that Gwennie could show Boyo her chest!

‘W
ELL, FANCY MEETING YOU
again!’ cried the pleasant stranger, all flattering astonishment. (‘And about time too, old girl!’ he thought to himself. Kept him hanging about a solid two hours for this chance encounter.)

Gladys had first met him last week here in the Green Man at the top of the cul-de-sac. She’d been sipping a dry sherry before going home to cope with her ladyship and he’d happened to sit down at the same table. Such a nice man! He’d seemed so much interested in her, thought her far too good to be just a housekeeper, wanted to know all about where she worked and for whom. She’d soon found herself pouring out all her little personal troubles; if Gladys had a fault it was perhaps that she was rather too unreticent about the problems of life with Lady Blatchett. And now here he was again, just dropped in for a quick one and insisted upon her joining him. ‘Well, all right, but I
must
be home on the hour. If I’m not, she locks the door and then she hides the key and by the time she’s had a couple of drinks, she can’t find it again and I’m done for.’

‘Surely there must be other ways you could just nip in? You’ve got the run of the place. You could leave something unlocked…’

‘Unlocked! She goes over every door and window even when I’m there; you never know when she’ll go round, checking. If I wasn’t there…! I tell you,’ said Gladys, ‘the house is like a beleaguered castle.’ Guilelessly she described its inner fortifications. ‘She lives in terror, poor old thing, especially after dark.’

It was all on account, it seemed, of Lady Blatchett’s Past. She’d done something shady, fiddled a Trust or something; and so all the family money had come to her and now she went in fear of vengeance at the hands of cheated relatives. ‘Especially one of them. “My niece from Scotland”, she calls her. It must have been she who would have had most of the money. She’s built up this niece into some sort of terrible ogre; I really think she believes she’ll be murdered in her bed.’ She supposed, said Gladys, that that was what had turned her to the drinking.

‘A proper old lush she sounds to me. I wonder you stay with her,’ said the sympathetic stranger.

A new look came into Gladys’s sad, middle-aged eyes. ‘I get very good wages. And I’ve got my poor brother, you see. I’m not having him put in any public institution. With his background—living with a lot of patients beneath his proper station…’ She was back on a well-worn hobby-horse. Mr. Smith looked at his watch and warned her that the hour was approaching.

Patsy was waiting for him when he returned from seeing Gladys safely in at the front door of Number 20, down at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. She looked—exhilarated. Her blue eyes were shining, her feather-cap of dusty gold hair seemed to be standing on end with excitement and gaiety. ‘You look somewhat lit,’ he said, climbing into the driving seat of the little car.

‘Oh, Edgar, he’s such a pet! And fallen like a ton of bricks; poor lamb—quite defenceless.’

‘You are speaking of Dr. Fable I take it,’ said Edgar, not quite so pleasant now.

‘At Number 10—slap opposite Lady Blatchett’s. We did agree, dear heart, that I should get to work on him?’

‘Well, you did get to work then? And it went off all right?’

‘Like a bomb. I was the last patient, all as arranged. “Stay and have a glass of sherry, my dear Miss Comfort?” “Hey, hey,” I said, “watch your doctor-patient relationships: they’re slipping!” ’

‘Despite all this wit, however, you stayed for the sherry?’

‘Yes, I stayed. And who else do you think stayed too? The Desiccated Receptionist. Now—wasn’t that a master-stroke? I made her join us; and now I’ve got not one of them eating out of my hand, but two.’ She wriggled down complacently into her seat. ‘So how’s about the housekeeper?’

Edgar retailed his own news. ‘It’s true all right, blast it! The place is like a fortress. Bolts, keys—I heard the very rattle of the chains as the drawbridge went up. And what’s worse, they’ve got it so fixed that once inside you can’t get out again. Self-locking doors and what not. You have to have special keys.’ Though why anyone should want to cage themselves in with thieves and murderers, he couldn’t imagine. ‘I tried advising dear Gladys to leave a few orifices open, but she literally dare not. The old woman lives in terror.’ He dilated upon her reactions to the Niece in Scotland.

‘Oh, well—revenge is sweet, no doubt,’ said Patsy equably. ‘Personally, I’ll be quite contented with Auntie’s pearls.’

‘You’ll have to; anything else she’s got is kept in the bank,’ said Edgar.

Their plan went into operation the following evening. Gladys, patently rattled, answered the front door and beheld the friendly stranger from the Green Man. ‘Do forgive my disturbing you at such an hour—’

‘You shouldn’t be calling here at any hour,’ said Gladys, glancing fearfully back towards the closed drawing-room door.

‘It was only that I mislaid my lighter last night. Sentimental value, you know; I couldn’t bear to lose it. I wondered if by any chance you’d happened to notice—’

‘I noticed nothing,’ said Gladys, beginning to close the door.

‘It’s nowhere in the pub. I suppose…’ He had unconsciously moved a step forward so that she could do nothing without physically pushing him backwards. ‘You couldn’t possibly have picked it up, without thinking, and dropped it with your other things into your handbag?’ In his anxiety, the gentleman had begun, quite unconsciously again, of course, to raise his voice. Gladys glanced back over her shoulder again. ‘No, no, of course: no such thing!’

‘If you wouldn’t mind just looking? So sorry to trouble you.’

‘
Please
keep your voice down; she’ll be coming out into the hall.’ She dithered doubtfully. ‘Well, I’ll just go and make sure.’ She hurried off towards the kitchen, in her agitation never thinking to ask him to wait on the step outside. And extraordinary to relate, what he had suggested must have happened after all; for here at the bottom of her neat leather handbag was a rather cheap silver lighter. He thanked her effusively and went away. She listened for a moment at the drawing-room door, but except for the clinking of glass against bottle, all was peace. Her room was on the second floor; her ladyship never came up so far, couldn’t manage the stairs, these days, and one way and another she’d got it very comfortable and cosy. With an occasional glance down from the top landing to see that all was well, she spent the rest of the evening with her knitting and the television.

Patsy slipped out of the dining-room, once Gladys had gone and went quietly up to the first floor. She located her ladyship’s bedroom—really, the amount Edgar had got out of that housekeeper!—and inspected the others. There were two unused rooms, their keys in the doors. She chose the more remote, went in, locked the door behind her and put herself very comfortably to bed. There’d be the whole night to wait; and who looks into a locked spare room?

At midnight Lady Blatchett, propelled by the patient Gladys, reeled uncertainly up to bed. She would remain there—so Gladys had confided to her sympathetic friend in the pub, (‘She never thinks that
I’ve
got to get up, after waiting up for her till all hours!’)—till lunch-time. Patsy did not hear them. She was snuggled up under the spare-room eiderdown, deep in untroubled slumbers.

At eleven the next morning Gladys, according to custom, inched open the bedroom door and peeked in, before retiring to the kitchen for coffee and a biscuit. Lady Blatchett was still fast asleep and snoring. The pearls were kept under her pillow but in her late evening condition, her ladyship hadn’t been too clever about concealing them: Gladys could see their gentle gleam, tumbled half out from under the crumpled linen. A choker of pearls, not many of them and not very large—but perfectly matched, they said, of a wonderful quality and worth a small fortune. At that moment she heard the milkman’s knock and went down to the back door. Patsy had checked on this being settling-up day. Gladys would be kept occupied for several minutes.

She came back into the house to hear muffled squeals and the sound of her ladyship’s bell, violently ringing. Lady Blatchett had been shocked awake to find her head and shoulders enveloped in a tangle of black draperies; and by the time she got free to summon help, the front door had closed and the pearls were gone.

Gladys spent what time she must in calming her ladyship’s agitations, which centred largely upon the threat of the Niece from Scotland; and then telephoned the police.

The station was at the corner of the cul-de-sac, just opposite the Green Man; and a constable on duty outside was able to report that though many people had gone in and out of the cul-de-sac in the course of the morning, in the few minutes since the theft of the pearls, not a soul had left it. Unless egress had been effected through one of the other houses, therefore—which on a rapid mental reconnaissance seemed unlikely—it was safe to assume that both plunder and plunderer were still safely bottled up inside. A police officer made good time to the scene of the crime.

Patsy, meanwhile, had trotted calmly out of the front door of Number 20 (now, being daylight, with its defences down) and across to the front door of Number 10.