Designs on Life (11 page)

“That must have looked funny.” He turned towards the door.

The child’s father, smiling a little himself, though his manner was very grave, followed him out of the room and opened the front door. Beyond it, in the garden, the snow glittered in the calm, brilliant sunshine.

The big man turned up the collar of his coat. “She’ll have a fine time, mucking about with the first snow she’s seen in her long life, eh? And it’s fine and dry for her too, now that that wind’s dropped …” He paused. For a moment his face looked oddly empty and stupid, as if he had had a shock. “That north wind … And you came in looking like a snowman, Mr. Ellis? But if you’d been coming from the station in that north wind, you’d have had the snow behind you and you wouldn’t have looked like a snowman to your daughter till you turned your back on her. You’d have looked like a snowman only if you’d been coming in the opposite direction—
from
across the common,
Mr. Ellis! And it could be, after all, that there’s more truth than you’ve both been telling me in those stories I’ve heard about your wife and Mr. Ferguson.”

The child saw her father sway where he stood. She heard her mother scream. Then she felt Mrs. Nettle’s arms about her and found her face firmly held against Mrs. Nettle’s bosom, so that she could not see what else was happening. Everyone in the hall seemed to be talking or shouting at the same time, while Mrs. Nettle bore Meg away to the kitchen, muttering in her ear, “God help you, my poor love, God help you!”

It was on the day that Mrs. Holroyd refused Mr. Pocock’s offer of marriage that he first thought of murdering her. The rejection, so gently and kindly put, but so utterly unexpected, filled him first with astonishment, so that he felt as if he had tripped over something uneven in his path and fallen flat on his face, and then with a searing rage. For a wild moment he wanted to clasp his hands round her slender neck and squeeze the life out of her. But after that flare of hatred came fear. He had made up his mind, after his last murder, never to kill again.

On that occasion he had escaped arrest only by the skin of his teeth and he knew that the police still believed that he was guilty, although they had never had enough evidence to bring a charge against him. That had been largely due to Lucille’s passion for cleanliness. She had polished and washed and scrubbed everything in her little flat at least twice a week, so that the police, in their investigation, had not been able to find a single one of Mr. Pocock’s fingerprints. Dear Lucille. He remembered her still with a kind of affection, partly because she had cooperated so beautifully in her own death. Except, of course, for that business of the roses. It was that love that she had had for roses and the pleasure that it had given him to bring them to her from his own little garden that had almost destroyed him.

There had been no complications like that about his first murder. Almost no drama either. He had nearly forgotten why he had committed it. Alice had been a very dull woman. He could hardly recollect her features. However, it had happened one day that she had told him in her flat, positive way that she did not believe a word that he had told her about his past life, that she was sure that he had never been an intelligence officer during the war, that he had never been parachuted into occupied France, that he had never been a prisoner of the Nazis and survived hideous tortures at their hands, in all of which she had been perfectly correct, and really the matter had been of very little importance, but her refusal to share his fantasies had seemed to him such a gross insult that for a few minutes it had felt impossible to allow her to go on living. Afterwards he had walked quietly out of the house, it turned out that no one had seen him come or go, and her death had become one of the unsolved mysteries in the police files. There had been a certain flatness about it, almost of disappointment.

But in Lucille’s case it had been quite different. For one thing, he had been rather fond of her. She had been an easy-going woman, comfortable to be with, and she had never expected gifts other than the flowers that he brought her. But one day when he had happened to say how much he wished that she could see them growing in his glowing flower-beds, but that the anxious eye of his invalid wife, who would suffer intensely if she even knew of Lucille’s existence, made this impossible, she had gone into fits of laughter. She had told him that there was no need for him to tell a yarn like that to her of all people, and he had realised all of a sudden that she had never believed in the existence of any frail, lovely, dependent wife to whom he offered up the treasures of his loyalty and charity. The dangerous rage that had possessed him only a few times in his life exploded like fireworks in his brain. It had seemed to him that she was mocking him not merely for having told her lies that had never deceived her, but for having tried to convince her that any woman, even a poor invalid, could ever love him enough to marry him. His hands, made strong by his gardening, although they were small and white, had closed on her neck, and when he left her she had been dead.

By chance he had left no fingerprints in her flat that day. But he had been seen arriving by the woman who lived in the flat below Lucille’s. Meeting on the stairs on his way up, he and the woman, an elderly person in spectacles, had even exchanged remarks about the weather, and it turned out that she had taken particular notice of the bunch of exquisite Kronenbourgs that he had been carrying. The rich velvety crimson of the blooms and the soft gold of the undersides of the petals and their delicious fragrance had riveted her attention, a fact which at first he had thought would mean disaster for him, but which actually had been extraordinarily fortunate. For afterwards she had been able to describe the roses minutely, but had given a most inaccurate description of the man who had been carrying them, and in the identity parade in which he had been compelled to take part when the police had been led to him by a telephone number scrawled on a pad in Lucille’s flat, the woman had picked out the wrong man. So the police had had no evidence against him except for the telephone number and the rosebush in his garden. But half a dozen of his neighbours, who had imitated him when they had seen the beauty of that particular variety of rose, had Kronenbourgs in their gardens too, and so Lucille’s murder, like Alice’s, had remained an unsolved mystery.

Yet not to the police. Mr. Pocock was sure of that and sometimes the thought that he might somehow betray himself to them, even now after two years, that he might drop some word or perform some thoughtless action, though heaven knew what could do him any damage after all his time, made terror stab him like a knife. He would never kill again, of that he was certain.

But that was before Mrs. Holroyd refused to marry him.

It had taken a long time to convince himself that marriage to her would be a sound proposition, even though he was certain that she had been pursuing him ever since she had come to live in the little house next to his. She was a widow and she believed him to be a widower, and she often spoke to him of her loneliness since her husband’s sudden death and sympathised with Mr. Pocock because of his solitary state. She admired his garden and took his advice about how to lay out her own, was delighted with the gifts of flowers that he brought her, and when he was ill with influenza she did his shopping for him, cooked him tempting little meals and changed his books at the library. And she had let him know, without overstressing it, that her income was ample.

“I’m not a rich woman,” she had said, “but thanks to the thoughtfulness of my dear husband, I have no financial worries.”

So it seemed clear to Mr. Pocock that Mrs. Holroyd’s feelings were not in doubt and that it was only his own that it was necessary for him to consider. Did he want marriage? Would he be able to endure the continuous company of another person after all his years of comfortable solitude? Would not the effort of adapting his habits to fit those of someone else be an extreme irritation? Against that, he was ageing and that bout of influenza had shown him how necessary it was to have someone to look after him. And marrying Mrs. Holroyd might actually be financially advantageous instead of very expensive, as it would be to employ a housekeeper. She was a good-looking woman too, for her age, and an excellent cook. If he wanted a wife, he could hardly do better.

Of course, she had certain little ways that he found very hard to tolerate. She liked to sing when she was doing her housework. If he had to listen to it in his own house, instead of softened by distance, it would drive him mad. She chatted to all the neighbours, instead of maintaining a courteous aloofness, as he did. She had a passion for plastic flowers. Every vase in her house was filled with them, with a total disregard for the seasons, her tulips and daffodils blooming in September and her chrysanthemums in May. She always thanked him with a charming lighting up of her face for the flowers that he brought her, but he was not really convinced that she could distinguish the living ones from the lifeless imitations. But no doubt, with tact, he would be able to correct these small flaws in her. On a bright evening in June, he asked her to marry him.

She answered, “Oh, dear Mr. Pocock, how can I possibly tell you what I feel? I am so touched, so very honoured! But I could never marry again. It would not be fair to you if I did, for I could never give my heart to anyone but my poor Harold. And our friendship, just as it is, is so very precious to me. I think we are wonderfully fortunate, at our age, to have found such a friendship. To change anything about it might only spoil it. So let us treasure what we have, won’t that be wisest? What could we possibly give to each other more than we already do?”

He took it with dignity and accepted a glass of sherry from her. What made the occasion particularly excruciating for him was his certainty that she had known that he was going to propose marriage and had had her little speech all ready rehearsed. It disgusted him to discover that all her little kindnesses to him had simply been little kindnesses that had come from the warmth of her heart and not from any desire to take possession of him. Looking at her, with her excellent sherry tasting like acid in his mouth, he was suddenly aware of the terrible rage and hatred that he had not felt for so long. However, he managed to pat her on the shoulder, say that of course nothing between them need be altered, and go quietly home.

The most important thing for the moment, it seemed clear to him, was not to let her guess what her refusal had done to him. She must never be allowed to know what power she had to hurt him. Everything must appear to be as it had been in the past. In fact, their relationship was poisoned for ever, but to save his pride this must be utterly hidden from her. Two days later he appeared on her doorstep, smiling, and with a beautiful bunch of Kronenbourgs for her.

She exclaimed over them with extra special gladness and there was a tenderness on her face that he had never seen there before. She was so happy, he thought, to have humiliated him at apparently so little cost to herself. Tipping some plastic irises and sprays of forsythia out of one of the vases in her sitting-room, she went out to the kitchen to fill the vase with water, brought it back and began to arrange the roses in it.

Up to that moment he had not really intended to murder her. He would find some way of making her suffer as she was making him suffer, but when his hands went out to grasp her neck and he saw at first the blank astonishment on her face before it changed to terror, he was almost as surprised and terror-stricken as she was. When she fell to the floor at his feet in a limp heap and he fled to the door, he was shaking all over.

But then he remembered something. The Kronenbourgs. Once before they had almost destroyed him. This time he would not forget them and leave them behind. Turning back into the room, he snatched the roses from the vase, jammed the plastic flowers back into it, and only pausing for a moment at the front door to make sure that the street was empty, made for his own home. Inside, he threw the roses from him” as if they carried some horrible contagion and for some time left them lying where they had fallen, unable to make himself touch them. How mad he had been to take them to the woman! How easily fatal to him they could have been! He drank some whisky and smoked several cigarettes before he could force himself to pick them up and put them in a silver bowl, which he stood on a bookcase in his sitting-room. They looked quite normal there, not in the least like witnesses against him. It was very important that everything should look normal.

Next morning, when two policemen called on him, he was of course prepared for them and felt sure that his own behaviour was quite normal. But he was worried by a feeling that he had met one of them before. The man was a superintendent who told him that the body of his neighbour, Mrs. Holroyd, had been discovered by her daily woman, choked to death, then went on to ask him when he had seen her last and where he had spent the evening. He supposed that such questions were inevitable, but he did not like the way, almost mocking, that the man looked at him.

Then, standing looking at the roses in the silver bowl, the superintendent remarked admiringly, “Lovely! Kronenbourgs, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Mr. Pocock said, “from my garden.”

“I’ve got some in my own garden,” the superintendent said. “There’s nothing to compare with a nice rose, is there? Now, your neighbour doesn’t seem to have cared for flowers. She stuck to the plastic kind. Less trouble, of course. But a funny thing about her, d’you know, she kept some of them in water? Some irises and forsythia, they were in a vase full of water, just as if they were rea1. That’s carrying pretence a bit far, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Pocock? Unless there’d been some real flowers there first, like, say, your roses. You’d a way of giving her flowers, hadn’t you, Mr. Pocock? That’s something she told the neighbours. But really you ought to have learnt better by now than to take them with you when you’re going out to do your murders.”

Rina Evitt’s eyes were stretched wide with fear. Staring across the room at her husband, they were not quite focussed.