Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (28 page)

‘It won’t get me anywhere: except one up over
you
. And if I can’t have my proper share of the pearls, that’ll do next best for me. Twenty-five per cent—of what a fence will give for them!—it’ll be worth that much to see you doing time. And don’t think you won’t. You can say what you like to them about me—I haven’t got them, I’m in the clear; they don’t even know that I know Edgar. But Edgar was at that old woman’s last night, and he was here the next morning. You wait till Edgar starts coming clean to the police: how you bribed him to deal with the sale of the pearls—which you’d already stolen on one of the old woman’s visits here, replacing them with false ones: perfectly easy while the doctor was examining the patient. You’d have told him to look for them behind the picture frame,’ said Patsy warming to her theme, ‘and to swallow them down with some medicine and so smuggle them out…’ She shrugged. ‘Lots of holes; but Edgar will stop all those up, never fear! He’s a past master, is Edgar, at conning the police. And there’ll still be nothing against him; he won’t ever have touched the pearls, he’ll tell them you have them, and that’ll be true. And against me also—nothing.’

‘Except, of course,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘that the most casual enquiry will reveal you as being the Niece from Scotland: with a grudge against Lady Blatchett and a well-founded conviction that what she possesses is rightfully yours.’

‘Oh, that!’ said Patsy. ‘No dice there, I’m afraid, love! You didn’t really fall for that, did you?’

‘Well, no,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘You cooked it all up on the spur of the moment from what poor Gladys had confided to your friend, Mr. Snaith. You thought such a story must surely win over my sentimental spinster heart, and I’d turn over the pearls to you.’

‘But you didn’t believe it?’

‘Lady Blatchett is an old woman,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘So odd for her to have a niece of your generation; especially as your poor dying mother is still so young—you are not the child of elderly parents.’ She smiled at Miss Comfort with the smile of a crocodile. ‘So much more likely, don’t you think, that the Niece from Scotland is by now at least a middle-aged woman.’

Miss Comfort saw the light immediately. ‘Like you?’ she said.

‘That’s right, my dear,’ said Miss Hodge. ‘Like me.’

The Niece from Scotland: obliged to earn her own living, wangling herself at last with her excellent references into a post where she might observe the old aunt at close quarters: might even ingratiate herself into her favour. The older one becomes, the more frequent one’s visits to the doctor—chosen because he dwelt so handily just across the way—and the more necessary the attentions of the doctor’s kindly receptionist. Miss Comfort bowed to necessity. ‘
You
are the Niece from Scotland?’

‘And you a professional thief,’ said Miss Hodge, ‘and that’s all about it.’ She rose, dusted down her charmless dress. ‘So I think fifty-fifty is a very fair division. Where do we begin?’ she said.

At Number 20, Lady Blatchett rang the bell for Gladys. She continued a serial lecture upon the sins and follies of careless talk in public. ‘But I have decided after all to retain you in my service.’

Gladys was not entirely astonished; not for nothing had she made herself indispensable over all these years. She said however, with due deference: ‘Thank you, my lady.’

‘I have had a nice cheque from the insurance people so I feel rather better.’

‘Oh, I am glad,’ said Gladys, much relieved. ‘Now your ladyship can have some pearls again.’ She said humbly, for in some mysterious way the theft was acknowledged to have been all her fault, ‘Always seeing you with them—I’ve missed them, my lady.’

‘I hadn’t intended…’ But Lady Blatchett looked into the mirror. ‘Perhaps I do need something.’

Bare, ancient, crêpey throat, where the dewlap hung unlovely and the ‘bracelets’ deepened with each succeeding year. ‘I was even thinking that your ladyship might have got a double row, this time. You’ll never match the last, I know; but perhaps two rows of something not quite so good—?’

Her ladyship thought on reflection that that might be a good idea. After all, a nice bit of jewellery was better for her, really, than all that money lying in the bank.

Better for Gladys too. What a blessing the burglary had been! Not that she hadn’t been, for simply ages, working towards something of the sort—all that carefully indiscreet talk in pubs! She’d been beginning to be a bit desperate by the time Mr. Smith turned up; the money from the first pearls wouldn’t last for ever—and if she died for it, her poor brother wasn’t going to be moved to some public institution where he wouldn’t have his proper privacy: a man of his background mixing with just ordinary patients…!

Behind the shop front of a respectable jeweller’s, Miss Hodge, Miss Comfort and Mr. Snaith stood aghast at an offer of twenty-five pounds for some nice cultured pearls; and up in her comfortable room, Lady Blatchett’s well-paid housekeeper was writing off to an address in Scotland…

‘G
OOD HEAVENS,’ SAID MRS
. Fletcher-Store, ‘what a revolting jacket! Where on earth did you get it?’

‘I bought it off a man in the pub,’ said Mr. Fletcher-Store.

‘A man—what man?’

‘
I
don’t know—just a man.’

‘You really should be more careful what you buy off strangers in pubs,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store. ‘It’s awful. Looks like a dead sheep, turned inside out.’

‘Good lord!—just what he said
his
wife said.’ He looked down at the jacket doubtfully, flattening his chin against his chest. It was a brightish tan, true, but heavily fleece-lined and he’d fancied it had a—well—a bit of a Raffish look… And, lost in reverie, he saw himself, flailing his arms to shrug on the jacket as he ran across the tarmac to his waiting kite. ‘I thought it looked rather good,’ he said.

‘You thought it looked like the jolly old R.A.F.,’ said Mrs. Fletcher-Store, pronouncing it ‘raff’. ‘Wizard prang, old boy, and a couple of crates in the drink in my time, what, what: and if you don’t believe me—as well you may not!—a handle-bar moustache to prove it.’ She looked at her husband with something very much like loathing. ‘How I’ve lived all these years with such a miserable phoney…’

‘I
was
in the Raff,’ protested Mr. Fletcher-Store.

‘For six months. On the ground. And never saw a kite fly, except on Hampstead Heath. The ugly truth is, Gerald,’ she said viciously, ‘that you’re a phoney, a rotten, bombasting phoney, trying to cover up from all the world, yourself included and especially, that you’re nothing but a dud and a failure—never did a decent job in your life, never kept a woman in your life—except me, because I’m sorry for you; never even made a friend, except a few miserable pick-ups in pubs, bought with drinks you couldn’t afford. And now selling you jackets you can’t afford either…’

‘All right, all right,’ said Fletcher-Store. ‘I know.’

‘
You
know? You don’t know and you don’t want to know.’

‘I don’t suppose any man wants to know that sort of thing about himself. Especially if it’s true,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think it really does any good, quite so constantly reminding him of it.’

‘Then don’t go off spending money at that rotten little pub in Hartling and buying a lot of rubbishy tripe we can’t afford. You seem to forget that what money comes into this house is made by me. You with your shoddy little half-baked short stories—’

‘All right, all right,’ he said again. ‘Skip it. I’ve got the message. No more purchases in pubs.’ And he added, half to himself but loud enough for her to hear it, for it always galled her that in fact he was the better educated of the two:
‘Hic jacet.’
…

‘Hick jacket?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was making a pun, dear,’ he said sweetly. ‘In Latin. It means you’ve slain me in the battle of the jacket.
Hic jacet
—here lies…’

But she got the last word as usual, after all. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘you were always good at that.’ He heard her footsteps pounding up the stairs, moving about the bedroom as she changed for her evening swim. After a little while the front door banged.

He waited five minutes to be sure she wouldn’t come back for anything, and then went out to the tool-shed where he kept hidden his bottle of whisky: she hardly ever let him go to the pub, so this was next best. Just the right tot, or one’s brain got fuddled and he had some hard thinking to do—filled up with a good deal of water to make it last longer. He carried it back to the sitting-room, pulled up a chair to the moonlit window, and sat down to go on thinking out his plan to murder her.

On the whole, Gerald had decided, the odds were in his favour. For a start there need be no hurry: the sooner the better, certainly, but there might yet come to be almost a pleasure in listening to increasingly frequent tirades, when each word added fuel to a funeral pyre already crackling. And then there could be no obvious motive. No ‘other woman’—one reason for coming to this ghastly hole had been, according to Elsa, to get away from the other-woman menace; and certainly here, candidates were nil. And no money interest: they could just about eke out on her scribblings and his own: living cheap on the fruit and vegetables and eggs he was supposed to provide by his work on the small-holding. (Small-holding! A vile old pig and a lot of scrawny hens, and all that manuring and digging—he, who in his day….) And he fell into a reverie again of those old wild, wonderful times of the ditched crates and the pranged kites and the boon companions boasting together over the exploits of others—never of one’s own, by George!—over the tankards in the jolly old hostelries….And after all, given the chance, might not he too have been of that splendid company? A man was not born to failure: surely it must be fair to say that it was bad luck that had made him one?

Well, in the matter of Elsa’s murder, he would not fail.

The house was isolated: three miles from the hamlet of Hartling, six from anywhere else, fifteen from the Cathedral city inland. No neighbours, therefore, to be inquisitive; no friends even, as she had truly said—not here nor out of the past. No friends: only the little world of public house acquaintances, the Bills and the Barbaras, the Noras and the Toms, drifting in from the evening, drifting out into the night: nameless, homeless, without existence for one another beyond the lit bar and clinking glasses, the boasting and the well-worn jokes. And even those, left behind now, in the gay city lights. Well, all right, O.K., he thought: no friends—so no one to stand as witness to the real motive—that tongue of hers that could strip a man down, bare, to his shuddering soul: and was to be endured no more.

The murder, he had decided, would have to be by drowning.

She had been a well-known athlete in her day; leaped higher or run faster, he never could remember which, than anyone in the world or in England or only in Surrey; he never could remember that either. But first and foremost she had been a swimmer: she cherished old photographs of herself, half out of the water in the Back Stroke or the Butterfly or whatever it was, forging along, tiny and sinewy, the vanquished spluttering in her rear. Those days were gone and the muscle turning to thick white fat; but she struggled, all honour to her, to keep it down and she still loved to swim. That had been the main reason for settling on this house: that close by was the tiny, deserted bay of Kittle Cove; and there she swam, morning and evening, and could never get enough. All alone—for such pastimes were not for Gerald Fletcher-Store—she would run off, the old regulation black woollen bathing dress under a bright beach-robe; tucking up beneath the white bathing cap as she ran, her rough, curly brown hair. Twenty minutes there, along the wild, lonely cart track, twenty minutes back: half an hour or more swimming around. ‘Keeps you fit,’ she would say, slapping the back of a hard little hand against his flaccid paunch. ‘I’ve got enough to do to keep me fit, digging in that filthy garden,’ he would say, ill-temperedly.

By drowning, then. An accident. But with such a good swimmer as she was, who would believe in an accident? His mind in the past had toyed, over a second whisky, with wild dreams of stopped-up snorkels and punctured water-wings, but she had no truck with such things: simply plunged in and swam to a rock far out, and dived off the rock a few times and swam round about it and swam back. No records being created, no foolish chances taken: no difficult currents to beware of. Just straight-forward swimming for the sheer love of it.

If she were to drown then, she must do it while her murderer was well out of the way. To just go down there, push her head under the water and run screaming for help—that wouldn’t do at all.

His wandering mind seemed to stand still all of a sudden: seemed to come slap up against the idea and just remain there, contemplating it. It had been those words: ‘Push her head under the water.’

What was drowning, after all, but water forced into the lungs? You could drown in three inches in a basin, you could drown in your bedroom at home, just as easily as you could in the sea.

And then if you were
found
in the sea…!

Force her head into a bowl of water: drown her. Carry her down to the sea and throw her in. (A detail here: could they tell if the water in the lungs was salt water or fresh? Fetch a bucket of sea-water then, and drown her in that. And tip that away somewhere safe, too: no salt-encrusted pipes or wilting garden-flowers to give the game away.)

But what difference between ‘finding’ her dead in the sea, and having in fact drowned her there? They could still say you had pushed her head under the waves and then gone for help. An alibi—that was what one was going to need: an alibi. And his mind had got going again and worked cold and clear. Drown her here, put her body in the boot of the car. Have somebody in the house for an hour at least, while Elsa was supposed to be sporting it down in the bay. Get rid of the alibi, drive down to the cove—‘I began to get anxious when she didn’t return’—dump her in the sea: fish her out again and go for help. Time of death established by the post mortem—a couple of hours earlier: but a couple of hours ago, one would have been sitting chatting, safe at home.