Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (31 page)

But on the third occasion she took the revolver out of the drawer, handling it carefully, wrapping it in a silk scarf; and put it in the large handbag. And this time she took no money with her.

She had thought it all out very carefully, reducing it to its simplest elements. Now she carried no open umbrella but clutched about her head and face a plastic ‘pixie-hood’; and she had hoicked up the long macintosh by its belt so that the skirt came hardly down to her knees, and scuttled along with a wibble-wobbling gait on her highest heels… In the hall of the offices she dropped off the macintosh, slipped over her head a large plastic bag in which she had cut a hole for her face and another for her (rubber-gloved) right hand. So attired and holding the revolver, she walked without flurry up the stairs to Mr. Bindell’s room.

He went very white when he saw the gun; whiter still when he took in the significance of the plastic covering. He stammered: ‘For God’s sake…! Don’t shoot…! Take them, take the whole lot, I’ll never tell a soul, I swear it—’

‘Not even an anecdote in a pub?’ she said, quoting, ‘—when you’ve had a drop too much.’ And she pointed the gun at the left side of his chest and, giving herself no time to think, pulled the trigger. It was stiffer than she’d expected and for a moment the whole thing seemed strong and alive in her hand; and there was more noise than she’d hoped—Harold had told her the gun was fitted with a silencer and she’d rather relied upon that. But at any rate, it did its work. At that range, it could hardly fail—and Mr. Bindell who had been unpleasant enough in life, was now most unpleasantly dead.

She put down the revolver upon the desk, stripped off the rubber glove and the spattered plastic. A gun, its origins untraceable—fingerprints on it of a man unknown, who could never be known, for his fingers, prints and all, were to ashes returned and in her well-polished home, no trace of him remained. But a man’s fingerprints, that was the point: not a woman’s. And a common, household, rubber glove, worn over a glove—firstly to obviate fingerprints inside the rubber, secondly to allow for a size that a man might have worn. And a plastic bag, never touched by her own fingers… And nothing in the world—for Mr. Bindell himself had been the careful one, the secretive one—to connect herself with him: not, at any rate from the lethal point of view.

She had brought with her a large envelope, addressed to herself at home, and ready stamped. Into this she put the envelope containing the photographs. In the hall she put on her macintosh again, belted it up very short and on her high-heeled shoes wibble-wobbled herself out of the side door again and into the rainy evening.

She had marked a convenient pillar-box between her home and the office. She now returned to it and there posted the envelope; in a dark corner behind it, let down the macintosh to its full length, took off the plastic hood, dried it carefully and rolled it away in its little plastic case. The handbag had been chosen, long in advance, to accommodate a folding umbrella. In her own image again, without the furtiveness and certainly without the wibble-wobble, she returned to Mr. Bindell’s office; tried the front door, put on a puzzled air, went round to the side door at last—went in, shaking the wet umbrella, called up the stairs, mounted to Mr. Bindell’s door—shrieked like any startled woman upon seeing the blood-stained figure sprawled across the desk, ran to him, made such futile attempts as anyone might make to do something, anything… Pushed aside the horrid black gun, picked up the plastic with fastidious finger-tips and quickly dropped it again; at last picked up the telephone…(‘Well, I may just have touched things—if there are any fingerprints on them, then I must have, but I was so shocked I hardly knew what I was doing… And blood, yes, there may be blood on me, on my clothes—but I did try to lift his head, I did handle the blood-spattered telephone….’) Meanwhile, however, she contented herself with dialling the police. ‘Do please come quickly! It’s dreadful. Yes, Mr. Bindell—you know, the solicitor. Yes, I came to see him on business—the papers are right here on his desk; he said to drop in any time, he’d be working late…’

The investigations took simply ages. It was not for several months that widowed Mrs. Hartley felt the time ripe to call upon widowed Mrs. Bindell. ‘I thought I should have a word with you about Linda’s acceptance to Hallfield School.’

‘That matter comes up before the Board on Tuesday,’ said Mrs. Bindell—by this time well back in harness.

‘Then Linda will start with Joy next term,’ said Louisa—and it was a statement.

‘
If
we decide to admit her,’ said Mrs. Bindell.

‘I think you’ll decide to admit her all right,’ said Louisa. She produced a large envelope and slid out a couple of glossy black and white prints. ‘Disgusting, aren’t they?’

‘Where on earth—?’ cried Mrs. Bindell, absolutely shocked.

‘That night I found your husband dead,’ said Louisa. ‘I told the police that I touched nothing in his office, Mrs. Bindell, but that wasn’t quite true. He had evidently been taken by surprise when the murderer came: this—filth—was spread out on the blotter in front of him.’ Mrs. Bindell opened her mouth as though to speak but shut it again. ‘I happened to have a large handbag and I gathered the things up and brought them away with me. I thought,’ said Louisa, limpidly, ‘that you wouldn’t care for them to be found by anyone else. No one wants a scandal; and you, with all the work you do in this town—Board of Governors at Hallfield, for example—you’d be particularly susceptible, wouldn’t you?’ Mrs. Bindell tried again to speak and again fell silent. ‘You’re going to suggest perhaps,’ said Louisa, ‘that I can’t prove that these pictures belonged to him? But these people—well, pore over this kind of stuff, so I’ve been told: sort of gloating over it, you know: and this glossy paper will be covered with his fingerprints.’

Mrs. Bindell seemed to think about it, sitting in a saggy heap, all the bounce and arrogance gone from her. She said at last, arriving surprisingly quickly on the whole at a proper conclusion: ‘How much shall I have to pay?’

Louisa had handed over two thousand pounds to Mr. Bindell. Say another thousand for pain and stress, not to mention what might, she supposed, be called ‘danger money’. ‘I’ll take three thousand down,’ she said. ‘That’s to settle—well, a kind of debt. And then of course there’s the matter of Linda getting into Hallfield. After that…’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not hard up, Mrs. Bindell; financially I shall be quite safe—now. So it won’t be a matter of cash. Just as long as my Linda gets along happily and successfully in Sanstone. Of course the right school is going to help, and then she and Joy might take some course together, modelling or whatever it is they’ll have set their hearts on by then; and of course knowing the right people helps too, and going to all the parties…’ She returned the envelope to her bag. ‘The secret will be safe with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t go to Rotary lunches or get drunk in pubs.’ And she fastened the bag with a snap and got up to leave. ‘Monday afternoon, perhaps, you could drop the money in at my house?—when you call to invite me to run a stall at the bazaar you’re organising for Lady William. I’ve never been asked even to help there; and though to be honest I don’t think I’ve missed much, still, everybody else goes and I’d like to know Lady William. I believe her children are charming, and the boy’s about three years older than my Linda… One never knows, does one?’ She thought it over for a moment, puzzled. ‘Now what exactly would his title be?’

‘The Honourable,’ said Mrs. Bindell, flat voiced.

‘It’s going to be a great help,’ said Louisa, ‘having you to help me over little things like that.’

Linda and Joy were skipping again, Roy being up at the house ‘key-holing’. He joined them, breathless, and seized up the rope. He addressed his song to Linda.

‘Cod, skate, sturgeon, shark—

Your mother’s on the blackmail lark!

Whale, walrus and sea-cow—

She’s
got the feelthy peectures now!

‘
No?
’ said Linda.

‘Yes, she has,’ said Roy. He went on skipping.

‘Sea, lake, river, pool—

So you’re going to Hallfield School.’

‘
No?
’ cried Linda and Joy, together this time, excitedly. ‘Yes, you are; and what’s more,’ said Roy, skipping again—

‘Men and horses, hare and hounds—

You’re going to get three thousand pounds,

And go around with Joy and me

And marry the ar-is-toc-racy…’

He stopped skipping altogether and they all rolled about with laughter, hugging one another triumphantly.

‘Well, honestly, can you believe it?’ said Linda, when at last they stopped, exhausted. ‘Grown-ups!’

‘What a flap if any of us so much as cheats a bit at school!’

‘I suppose this means that it really was my mother who shot your father?’

‘Of course it was,’ said Roy. ‘She knew these floozies had been going to his office after hours—all Sanstone knew it. Just hoicked up her skirt and looked like a teenager trying to walk like Marilyn Monroe. The police thought some boy-friend or father or someone had been watching, and went in and did for him. Of course they knew nothing about the blackmail.’ He exchanged a suddenly exultant glance with his sister. It might some day be profitable to be the only ones in the world who knew that Mrs. Hartley was a murderess.

Linda saw nothing of the glance. ‘It’s jolly decent of you to take it like this.’

‘Oh, well, we didn’t like him very much, did we, Roy?’

‘We don’t like any grown-ups very much,’ said Roy.

‘And I must say, considering that he was blackmailing her with the Feelthy Peectures after my father died—he did deserve what he got.’

‘M’m. On the other hand,’ said Roy, ‘your father had been blackmailing
him
with them for years. So it was really only tit for tat.’ And he caught up one end of the rope and Joy caught up the other and Linda flew into the middle; and as they turned and skipped, they all three gaily sang,

‘Tit for tat and knick for knack—

The biter bit the biter back.

Hound hunts fox and fox hunts hound—

Oh, what a merry old merry-go-round!’

T
HE RAIN HAD STOPPED.
Mrs. Dorinda Jones sat back, very small and exquisite in the corner of her taxi cab, fastidiously holding her damp umbrella. The traffic was jammed solid but she was sufficiently entertained (between uneasy glances at the steadily ticking meter) by contemplation of a rather divine pair of boots in a shop across the road—and the new nursing home in process of completion, a little ahead and to the left of her.

The nursing home was being financed by Arab oil, a magnificent edifice apparently hewn from a block of gleaming black marble, with lots of lovely curlicues in what was doubtless solid gold. She was amused to observe with what opportunist haste a very grand new restaurant had been opened next door to it—apparently for an Arab clientele, for dozens of white-robed gentlemen were at this very moment pouring out, evidently from some celebration luncheon. The commissionaire, enormously impressive in scarlet coat, peaked cap and prodigious brass buttons, was dashing from the door of one magnificent car to another, crumpling into a white cotton palm the unconsidered five and even ten pound notes.

One of the Arab gentlemen, Mrs. Jones recognised as Sheik Horror-horror. Well, she called him that to herself—one read these foreign names in the papers and never got around to actually pronouncing them. And a proper horror he seemed to be, rich as Croesus but grinding away at the faces of the poor, back home in Where-ever-it-was, and well known to have slain off all sorts of nice, harmless people, including several wives and even a couple of expendable sons, who had stood between himself and some monstrous coup or other. Mrs. Dorinda Jones is an ardent, if not very accurate, follower of the more sensational items of world news.

A small gap had opened in the traffic and her taxi moved forward a few yards. She diverted her gaze to the boots in the shop opposite which now more clearly came into view—and when she looked round again, one of the magnificent cars had crept up beside them, between herself and the new building: the curlicues seemed to be Arab writing after all. And Sheik Horror-horror was on a level with her, lying back in a corner of the Rolls, his hands folded in the lap of his flowing white gown. His eyes were closed but he opened them for a moment, gave her a baleful glare, and closed them again. But what was really most peculiar, thought Mrs. Jones, was that he now had with him in the car the most extraordinary companion. The Rolls was on the V.I.P. pattern, with glass cutting off the driver’s seat from the driven; and behind the glass two little tip-up, forward-facing seats, such as young princes are wont to perch upon, on Royal occasions. And on one of the seats, staring straight ahead of him was a rough looking man—not an Arab, a white man, a good old Cockney type he looked, middle-aged, with a sharp profile, untidy dark hair and, from what she could glimpse of it, a cheap, rather shabby old jacket. A bodyguard? But what a strange sort of bodyguard to be chosen!—and anyway, Sheik Horror-horror was known to disdain any sort of protective entourage—a man so universally detested (he might well consider) would be unable to rely upon anyone at all and might as well just trust to himself. There were other reasons also, she was to learn, for his preferring to travel unattended. Not pretty reasons at all—if ever there was a born murderee, Sheik Horror-horror was
it
.

And so indeed it was to prove. That very evening, there was headline news—the chauffeur had driven up to the palatial mansion somewhere outside Ascot, and the welcome-home party, scurrying out to open the door and usher His Excellency forth, had discovered him slumped all anyhow in his corner, with a dagger plunged into his back.

The chauffeur’s name was Smith, an Englishman; and by the following morning, Smith found himself in the situation known as ‘helping the police with their enquiries.’ The Sheik had been seen off from the restaurant alive and well, the way home passed through some quiet countryside and Smith had confessedly been alone in the car with him all that time. The weapon proved to have been a knife of Arabic design, used universally both as weapon and decoration. It bore no finger-prints.