Death in High Heels (27 page)

“Can’t I go in?”

“Werl you could go in and stand, I suppose. You musern’t break the circle. Do you want a mask?”

“A mask?” said Charlesworth, incredulously.

“Yers, a mask. ’Aven’t you bin ’ere before? Lots of them wears them; they can talk more natural, I suppose. Not but what they keeps the room very dark—you couldn’t see much, anyway.”

“Oh, we must have a mask, I think,” said Charlesworth, grinning, “if only for the fun of it.” She looked a little dazed at such levity, but produced a small black square and a grubby pink ticket and said that that would be seven-and-six, and ninepence for the mask. She opened the door and Charlesworth slipped inside and propped himself against the wall.

A ring of shadowy forms sat round a table, on which burned a dim red light. A woman was breathing stertorously and now and again giving a sort of moan. At intervals a voice said in a thick whisper: “Is anyone there?”

Charlesworth checked an impulse to make an irreverent reply; nobody spoke. Somebody near him was wearing too much scent.

It seemed a long time before at last the medium stirred and began to make small, plaintive noises in her throat. This time, when the thick whisper spoke, a man’s deep voice replied: “I come!”

“It’s the Indian boy,” cried a woman’s voice, excitedly, and everybody else said, “Hush!”

The thick whisper started asking questions.

A woman had lost her husband and the deep voice told her that she must pray for him. “But he isn’t in purgatory, is he?” asked the woman, and the table rocked beneath the linked hands and the voice cried, “No, no, no!” “Don’t mention hell and purgatory,” whispered another voice, and the table rocked again and the spirit cried, loud and harsh: “No hell, no purgatory, no pain!”

A man asked, hopelessly, for “Mary,” but there was no reply. “She never comes,” he said, and the spirit took up the cry: “She never comes; she never comes; she never comes.” “Why does he have to repeat himself?” thought Charlesworth, irritably. “We heard him the first time. What nonsense all this is.”

Nonsense and yet worse than nonsense; the exploitation of sorrow for the sake of seven-and-sixpence and ninepence for a mask; a husky voice, a superficial knowledge of the cravings of the human heart, and the price of a ground-floor room three evenings a week … no ghostly hands, no unearthly lights, not even a tambourine: just a voice, answering questions in the dark. He began a calculation of the takings in seven-and-sixpences.…

The voice that he had been waiting to hear broke softly into his thoughts. “I want you to help me—to advise me,” said the tiny whisper, and the deep voice cried: “I help!”

“If one has done wrong and—and something terrible has come of it—I want you to tell me: even if it’s too late to repair the wrong—must one confess?”

“Confess your sins,” said the spirit.

“But if it was all a mistake; if it was just that things went wrong; if no more harm will come to anyone else … should one—must I—confess?”

“Mistakes are not sins,” said the spirit, speaking with a glimmer of sense for the first and only time.

“But may one benefit by those wrongs? Supposing—supposing I go to pick a rose and somebody else gets pricked, can I keep the rose? Ought I to keep the rose?”

“Keep the rose, keep the rose, keep the rose,” cried the Indian boy, and his voice began to fade.

“The rose is red,” said the whisper, fainter still. “The price of the rose was a life.…”

“Keep the rose, keep the rose, keep the rose,” cried the voice, and as it cried it grew higher and thinner and fainter until it died away in the breathless hush of the room.

A woman’s form slipped past Charlesworth, running down the steps and out into the rain. He cut across the garden and was in time to see her face as she hurried past. It was Victoria.

2

Victoria was standing in the doorway with Rachel and Judy when Irene got home. “We want to talk to you,” they said, and led the way into the flat.

Irene looked weary almost to death. She took off her hat and her warm coat and pushed back her soft, dark hair from her aching head. “I’m tired,” she said, looking at them drearily. “I couldn’t stay in hospital; I had to come out this evening. I’ve just been to a spiritualist séance.”

“So have I,” said Victoria.

There was a ghastly silence. Then Irene said, quietlly: “So you know?”

“We’ve known for a long time,” said Victoria, while the other two stood, a little behind her, silent and miserable. “I came here this evening to talk to you about it. I rang up the hospital to inquire about you and they told me you’d left, so I came on here. I could see that you’d been in and gone out again, but your diary was open on the mantelpiece and I saw a note of the séance and the address. I knew you had a lot of faith in that sort of thing, so I guessed that was where you’d gone. I was sure you couldn’t be fit to be running about London by yourself, so I thought I’d better follow you and bring you home; but after what I heard, I couldn’t stay. You killed Doon, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Irene.

It was a little, square room with an uninteresting wall-paper and ugly, chipped brown paint; there was a divan bed in one corner, unskilfully camouflaged, a washbasin with a screen round it, and one armchair in front of the small gas fire. Rachel took Irene by the arm and pushed her into the chair. She said, looking round: “Have you got any drink anywhere?”

There was only one place where Irene would keep drink. She said: “There’s some brandy in the medicine cupboard.”

Rachel found the little bottle and poured half its contents into a toothglass. “Here you are, drink it.” She waited till the glass was empty and replaced it on the washstand; she and Victoria and Judy stood leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down at the little figure in the chair. Judy said, kindly: “We know the worst, now, Irene; it’ll be easier to tell us the rest.”

Irene looked at the three lovely faces and saw in them horror and pity, but no uncharity. She said eagerly: “I didn’t mean to kill her; whatever you think of me, you must believe that. I intended the poison for Gregory, of course, but I didn’t mean to kill her,”

“What did you want to do, then?” asked Rachel, half incredulous.

“I meant to make her ill, Ray. I wanted to go to Deauville so much, and I thought if she were ill, only a little bit ill, just for a few days, Bevan would have to send me. They wanted someone there urgently.…”

“But Doon would have gone, Irene.”

“Not if Gregory had been ill. Bevan couldn’t have left himself to Christophe’s without either of them. It was touch and go between us three, only Gregory put Bevan off me by telling him things behind my back. Why should she have done me out of the job?
She
didn’t care whether she went or not, she was perfectly happy as long as she could be near Bevan; in fact, she was a fool to let him think of sending her, because as soon as she was safely parked over there she’d have lost him for ever. But she just couldn’t bear that anyone else should get it, so she did me out of my chance by saying cruel things about me; she deserved punishing, if it were only for that … she’s been hard and treacherous and unkind always, to all of us; she deserved to suffer and I wish she had!”

“
Irene!
”

“Well, it’s true, Victoria. But I didn’t mean it for Doon, and God knows I didn’t intend it to kill. I saw the little crystals lying there on the carpet where you spilt them as you brought them into the showroom, and it seemed like providence; but I had to put some back on to the heap on the table and I’d only picked up a few—I didn’t keep more than three or four grains of the crystal and I never dreamt for a moment anyone could die of that much.”

Rachel and Victoria and Judy looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders in a sort of bewildered dismay. Rachel moved over to the bed and sat down on it: “Well, anyway, you put some on the curry?”

“I meant it for Gregory,” repeated Irene, with childish insistence. “I put it on the curry while I was serving it out and I specially marked the plate for Gregory; how could I know that anyone else would get it?”

“Couldn’t you have stopped Doon having it?”

“But I didn’t
know
, Victoria,” cried Irene. “I was upstairs with my customer all during your lunch hour and then I went straight on with Cecil to the Ritz, and I wasn’t downstairs at all. By the time we got back, Doon had been taken to hospital; but even then it never occurred to me that she would die. I was afraid to say anything and it’s been a nightmare to me ever since, because, if I’d spoken then, there might have been time to save her.”

“There wouldn’t have,” said Judy in her blunt way. “By the time you got back from the Ritz, the doctor knew there was a possibility of her having taken oxalic acid; it was already too late to do anything. You can spare yourself that much anxiety, anyway.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” said Irene, leaning forward in her big armchair, her aching head in her hands. “I thought I would go mad, but I just had to carry on. I lived in a sort of daze last week, and I was dreading having to go to the funeral and pretend—well, of course, it wouldn’t have been pretending because no one there could have been more wretched than I, but—you know what I mean. I simply couldn’t have gone. Then, when Bevan suggested that I should stay behind, imagine how thankful I was! But after that, the letters came … and you were all so sweet … do you mean to say that you knew all the time?”

“Don’t think we weren’t sincere about that, Irene,” said Victoria. “We knew that the things they said weren’t true, all the filth about your revelling in her sufferings and so on; and you looked so ill and desperate that we couldn’t bear to see you—we knew you must be going through hell, knowing the dreadful truth behind it all. Aileen was the only one that didn’t know.…”

“When did you realize, Victoria?”

Rachel and Victoria looked at each other. “It was Wednesday,” said Rachel at last. “We were sitting, talking things over, after Gregory made her speech; Toria, do you remember? You said that Irene couldn’t have got hold of any of the poison, because she hadn’t been near the table where we were doing the hat.…”

“And then I suddenly realized that she might have kept back some of what she picked up off the floor; but I was just going to say that even
so
she couldn’t have murdered Doon because she’d thought, as I thought, that the lunch was for Gregory, and it flashed upon me that the poison might not have been meant for Doon at all, but for Gregory. The detective thought the same thing afterwards about me.”

“I saw it at the same moment,” said Rachel, from the bed.

“And Judy …?”

“I saw you as you were picking up the crystals, Irene, from the showroom carpet; and I saw your face.… Of course, I didn’t understand until much later, and by that time Doon was dead. While I was making up my mind what to do, Rachel told me that she knew, too, and that if we weren’t going to tell Mr. Charlesworth, we must keep the whole thing an absolute secret and not let you guess that we knew.…”

“Why not?” said Irene, staring at her.

Rachel looked embarrassed, but she said, gravely: “We didn’t know then, Irene, that you hadn’t intended to murder Doon—or rather Gregory. Mr. Charlesworth told the Dazzler on the day of the inquest that the murderer wouldn’t kill anyone else
unless they knew too much
. It suddenly came to me, while I was dressing for the funeral, that I had noticed Judy standing at the door of the mannequins’ room, while we were picking up the poison; I thought she might have put two and two together, so on the way to the funeral I asked her if she knew; and she said that she’d seen us picking up the crystals. I told her that we must both say nothing to anybody about our suspicions; but when Victoria began to get into a mess over your attempt at suicide, of course we couldn’t allow that. We talked it over at odd moments in the shop to-day, and this evening we got hold of Toria and agreed to meet you here and tell you that we couldn’t let Victoria suffer to protect you.”

Victoria looked miserable. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t let it go on a little longer.…”

“No, no, darling, of course not,” said Irene. She looked at them wistfully. “It was terribly loyal and marvellous of you all.”

“It was terribly wrong of us all,” said Rachel, without a smile. “I don’t know what we’d have done in the end, Irene; I think we all expected that the police would inevitably find out, and we didn’t want to feel responsible for—for giving you up. Each of us had something to be grateful to you for; we were all so fond of you.…”

“Well, we just couldn’t give information against you,” said Judy, “that was all. We knew you were suffering; it wasn’t as if you were just going gaily on and showing no remorse or anything.…”

“I’ve never been through such hell in all my life,” said Irene, looking up into their eyes, twisting her little hands. “The letters were the last straw; knowing that they were true, having you all so good to me; when I went to bed after the party at Gregory’s, I felt I just couldn’t go on. Gregory had given me a box full of sleeping powders and it seemed the best and happiest and easiest way out; I sat up in bed and tipped the powder all into the glass and drank it down; I hardly thought at all. Then, just as I was fading off to sleep, I realized dimly that I hadn’t left any sort of message to say what I was doing. We’d been living in such a world of poison and suspicions and dreadfulness that it came to me that perhaps nobody would realize I’d done it myself and that one of you might be suspected. I was getting drowsier and drowsier and I couldn’t drag myself out of bed to write a note, but with a last sort of dying effort I took the edge of my sheet and wiped round the outside of the glass, and then I gripped it hard with my hand to show that my fingers only had touched it. That was the last thing I remember before I woke up in hospital. I couldn’t understand what had happened, but when I realized that I’d been saved, I had the sense to close my eyes and think things over before I said anything.”

“Naturally you couldn’t have admitted that you’d tried to commit suicide, or the police would have begun to realize why you’d done it?”