The Sibyl in Her Grave (35 page)

His friends all said that the letter should be burnt.

“You see,” said Regina, “we all know he wouldn’t really have done it. It’s quite absurd to think that Maurice could poison anyone. If he hadn’t been taken ill on Christmas Eve, he simply wouldn’t have given Daphne the chocolates. But of course when I found Maurice’s Christmas presents in the drawer of his desk, I gave Daphne the one with her name on it, just as I did with everyone else. So her dying was really just an accident and Maurice is no more to blame for it than I am.”

“What I don’t quite understand,” said Selena, “is how the letter comes to be in your possession.”

“Well,” said Regina, looking slightly surprised, “it was beside the poor girl’s body when I found her. And I didn’t want the police to find it, so I put it away in my handbag before they came. And the empty chocolate box and all the wrappings, of course.”“Oh dear,” said Julia, turning rather pale. “I’m not entirely sure you should have done that, Reg. I think they might call it tampering with the evidence.”

“Oh nonsense, Julia,” said her aunt. “How could it possibly be right to let the police find something which would only mislead them? I knew perfectly well that Daphne’s death was simply an accident, but if the police had seen Maurice’s letter they’d have been bound to say that he poisoned her on purpose. And then there’d be horrible stories in all the newspapers and that’s how everyone would remember him, not as the kind of person he really was at all. And it simply wouldn’t be fair.”

It was with some difficulty that I persuaded them of the dangers of burning the letter; the danger that the inquest would find on the following Monday that Daphne had died by some criminal act: the danger that some innocent person would be suspected of the crime: the danger, in particular, that the person suspected would be Terry himself They finally agreed that it should be placed in a sealed envelope and lodged in the custody of some respectable bank.

The documents in Isabella’s filing cabinets I did not attempt to save from the bonfire: though their destruction caused me, as an historian, a certain pang of distress, I supposed that it would add to the sum of human happiness. Besides, I could not think quite what else could be done with them.

The only remaining object of contention was the Book; impressively large and bound in leather, as Regina had described it, it still occupied, as it had when she first visited Isabella, the display cabinet at the end of the long drawing room. While disclaiming any superstitious belief in its malevolent powers, they all seemed curiously reluctant to handle it. At length, since books are not among the things I am afraid of, I offered to take custody of it.

On the Wednesday before Easter there was champagne in the Corkscrew: the bookshelves had finally been installed; subject only to the return of the electrician to fit the lights, the refurbishment of 62 New Square was complete.

Several weeks had by now elapsed since the inquest on Daphne’s death. Griselda had given evidence that hemlock was one of the plants which had once grown in
the physic garden of the Old Rectory and perhaps still survived there; she had also drawn attention to the similarity in appearance between hemlock and parsley The jury had taken no more than a few minutes to return a verdict of death by misadventure.

In the meantime, thinking it prudent to recommend the destruction of any medicines acquired from Isabella which Sir Robert might happen to have in his possession, I had telephoned Miss Tavistock. She told me that Isabella had indeed from time to time given him medicine for various ailments; but he had used the last of it the previous summer, when he had been in France and caught a heavy cold. My theory regarding the deaths of Isabella and the Reverend Maurice could have had no clearer confirmation.

One aspect of the affair, though of no intrinsic importance, had for some time continued to puzzle me: the letter which Maurice had posted shortly before Christmas, apparently as a result of his conversation with Julia about insider dealing, and which I had supposed to have been addressed to Sir Robert Renfrew. To whom had it been written? What had it said? Was it after all entirely unconnected with the insider-dealing business? I became almost resigned to never knowing the answer to these questions.

A few days before Easter, however, I had happened to encounter Benjamin Dobble on the steps of the Bodleian Library. Our conversation had turned to Terry Carver and we spoke of his attachment to the Reverend Maurice.

“He must have been a dear old thing,” said Benjamin. “I wish I’d met him. He wrote to me once, you know.”

“Wrote to you? Why?”

“Oh, it was a rather strange letter. He wanted to know the name of the man who lived opposite my flat in Cannes, but I imagine he just wanted an excuse to get in touch with me in the hope of getting in touch with Terry again. But before I had time to ask Terry what he’d like me to do about it there was a telephone call saying he was ill and Terry went back anyway. And then of course I heard he’d died, so there was no point in doing anything about it.”

I now felt able, therefore, not only to share in the general rejoicing at the completion of the bookcases but also to reflect with modest satisfaction on the successful completion of my investigation.

“I am not entirely sure,” said Selena as she filled my glass with champagne, “in what sense precisely you are using the word ‘successful.’ ”

“I mean,” I said, “that the truth has been established.”

“Yes,” said Selena. “Yes, I suppose it has. But not exactly as a result of your investigation—as a result of Maurice’s letter.”

“That, certainly, was of great assistance in establishing how Daphne died. Daphne’s death, however, was peripheral to the main subject of my investigation—that is to say, the deaths of Isabella and Maurice and the insider-dealing problem.”

“But Hilary, most of your theories about those matters have turned out to be entirely wrong.”

“My dear Selena,” I said, “to be always right is the claim of the charlatan, not of the Scholar. The mark of true Scholarship is a fearless and unflinching readiness to modify one’s theories in the light of new evidence.”

“So when you finally decided that the deaths of Maurice and Isabella had nothing to do with the
insider-dealing problem, that was a modification of your theory that they had both been poisoned by the person responsible for the insider dealing?”

“Exactly.”

“Which in turn was a modification of the theory that they had both died natural deaths?”

“Quite so.” I paid no heed to her slightly satirical tone: to a woman who has spent the year dealing with builders much may be forgiven. “I fully concede that in the course of my investigation I have frequently been in error. My cardinal mistake was my failure to attach the proper significance to the affair of Mrs. Tyrrell’s ring.”

“I will admit,” said Selena, “that I don’t see what relevance Mrs. Tyrrell’s ring has to anything at all.”

“Unless you mean,” said Julia, who had settled in prudent proximity to the champagne, “that you believe Daphne really did have some kind of prophetic powers?”

“On the contrary, the one thing of which I have throughout been entirely certain is that she did not. I should therefore have reflected far more carefully than I did on the alternative explanation. It was, after all, a perfectly simple one: Daphne had seen the ring lying on the washbasin or some such place and recognised it as Mrs. Tyrrell’s. But instead of simply saying, as most people would have done, ‘I think Mrs. Tyrrell has left her ring in the bathroom,’ she had seen an opportunity to demonstrate her psychic powers.”

“And I suppose,” said Selena, “that there is some equally simple explanation for her remark about Ricky Farnham being paid for some medicine he’d sold?”

“She could have known in any number of ways that he had shares in a particular pharmaceutical company—he’d probably mentioned it himself sometime in
the bar of the Newt and Ninepence. To find out when it was due to pay a dividend she had only to look at the financial page of the newspaper.”

“You make it sound,” said Julia, “as if she were quite clever. That wasn’t my impression of her.”

“You underestimated her, my dear Julia, because she was not interested in the same things that you are interested in. In some ways she was really quite clever, as indeed Isabella must have been. Moreover, children generally acquire the skills of those they grow up with, even without any conscious effort to learn or teach. Daphne had acquired the skills of a professional fortune-teller. These include, I need hardly say, the art of collecting small scraps of information, perhaps in themselves entirely trivial, and presenting them as extraordinary and mysterious. If I had given proper consideration to the affair of the ring, I should soon have seen that certain other events, apparently mysterious, also bore the hallmarks of Daphne’s authorship. Instead, having allowed my attention to become concentrated on the insider-dealing question, I mistakenly attributed them to the man in the black Mercedes.”

“You are referring,” said Selena, “to Daphne’s burglary and the stone-throwing incident? I take it that she simply invented them?”

“Undoubtedly. The story of the burglar was invented by Daphne to make herself an object of sympathy and interest, in particular to Maurice, but by telling it at midnight on the doorstep of the Vicarage, dishevelled and apparently terrified, she lent it a plausibility it might not otherwise have had. The stone-throwing incident was a repetition of the same effect, with a certain amount of embellishment—she threw the stone herself, of course, from inside rather than outside
the Rectory garden, and then scraped her head with it until she drew blood.”

“Just to make herself interesting?” Julia turned pale and hastily lit a Gauloise.

“People have been known to go to greater lengths.”

“And you think that was also her reason for claiming to have the power of prophecy?”

“That, I would say, did rather more than make her interesting. If she could persuade people to believe it, it provided her with a means of influence, even of control, over people and events. Having even less power than most of us to have any effect on the world around her, she had a correspondingly more desperate desire to do so.”

“Hilary,” said Julia, drawing deeply on her Gauloise, “you seem to be saying that everything Daphne did was a conscious and deliberate deception. But you never met her—you don’t know how appallingly earnest she was about everything. I’d have sworn that she really believed every word she said—that she had the power of prophecy and all the nonsense about the Book and so on.”

“My dear Julia,” I said, “I have no doubt that she believed in them absolutely. In order to deceive others, it is necessary also to deceive oneself. The actor playing Hamlet must believe that he is indeed the Prince of Denmark, though when he leaves the stage he will usually remember who he really is. On the other hand, when someone’s entire life is based on pretence, they will seldom if ever return to reality. That is the secret of successful politicians, evangelists and confidence tricksters—they believe they are telling the truth, even when they know that they have faked the evidence. Sincerity, my dear Julia, is a quality not to be trusted.”

“What I find curious,” said Selena, “is her prediction about animals. Why did she risk her credibility by making it? After all, it was pure chance that it actually came true.”

“Well, perhaps. You will remember, however, that it came true, so far as Griselda was concerned, as the result of an accident of which Daphne was the indirect cause. The primary purpose of the stone-throwing incident was no doubt to inspire the interest and concern of the Reverend Maurice. But was it, I wonder, entirely by chance that it occurred at a time when Griselda was sitting out of doors and the notoriously nervous Tabitha was asleep on the roof of the potting shed and the traffic in the High Street was at its busiest?”

“You surely don’t think she did it on purpose?”

“My dear Julia, who can fathom the workings of the subconscious mind? She would not, I imagine, have admitted to herself that she was hoping to cause an accident. The fact remains that she achieved what she wanted—her prophetic powers were vindicated and Griselda was prevented from looking after Maurice’s garden. Which was the motive for the prophecy in the first place—she was hoping, quite absurdly of course, to frighten Griselda into giving up working at the Vicarage. Reference was made, you remember, to the bad-tempered Alsatian in the garden next door.”

“But Hilary, why on earth should she want to do that?”

“Because no one was to do anything for Maurice except Daphne herself. She not only wanted to play a part in his life, she wanted to be the only person who played any part in it. She was determined that he should need her—and that he should need no one else. She succeeded, as I have said, in replacing Griselda as his
gardener. She hinted to Mrs. Tyrrell that he could no longer afford to pay for cleaning, so Mrs. Tyrrell tactfully stopped cleaning for him and was also replaced by Daphne. By her constant presence and her exaggerated devotion she began to separate him from his friends. And when Terry came on the scene, she naturally took steps to get rid of him—hence the theft of the frontispiece.”

“Even so,” said Selena, “one could hardly have foreseen that she’d be the death of him.”

“Not quite that, perhaps. But one might have foreseen, I think, that if he was ill she would tamper with his medicine—she could not have borne the idea that she played no significant part in his treatment. There was one thing at least, you see, about which she had been entirely truthful: she wanted what she always said she wanted—to feel that she was caring for someone who really needed her.”