To Fear a Painted Devil (12 page)

‘Oh, dear,’ said Bernice comfortably.

‘I really don’t know who it was told me,’ Nancy said. She picked up the plate of canapés and handed it to Marvell. To his shame Oliver saw that only half a cocktail onion topped the salmon mayonnaise on each of them. ‘Do have a savoury, won’t you?’

Marvell refused. The plate hovered.

‘Somebody told me about it. Now who was it?’

‘It was me,’ Oliver said sharply.

‘Of course it was. And Tamsin told you. I can’t imagine why.’

All childish innocence, she looked archly from face to face.

Marvell said: ‘I’m afraid I’m being obtuse, but I can’t quite see what Patrick’s father’s suicide had to do with his son dying of heart failure.’

‘Oh, absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. You
mustn’t think I was insinuating anything about Patrick. It’s just that it’s one of the funny circumstances. On its own it would be nothing.’

Oliver emptied his glass and stood up. He could cheerfully have slapped Nancy’s face. ‘I think we’re boring our guests,’ he said, bracketing himself with his wife and trying to make his voice sound easy. ‘Another drink, Max? Bernice?’ Marvell’s glass was still full. ‘What about you, darling?’

‘Oh, really!’ Nancy burst out laughing. ‘You don’t have to be so discreet. We’re all friends. Nothing’s going to go beyond these four walls.’

Oliver felt himself losing control. These people
were
discreet. Would it, after all, ruin his career, damn him as a social creature, if in front of them he were to bawl at Nancy, strike her, push her out of the room?

He stared at her, pouring sherry absently until it topped over the glass and spilled on the tray.

‘Damnation!’ he said.

‘Oh, your table!’ Bernice was beside him, mopping with a tiny handkerchief.

‘Linda Gaveston was here today,’ Nancy said. ‘She told me something very peculiar. No I won’t shut up, Oliver. I’m only repeating it because I’d be very interested in having an opinion from a medical man. You know that funny little man who’s a commercial traveller? The one who lives in the chalets?’

‘Carnaby,’ said Marvell.

‘That’s right, Carnaby. The one who was so difficult at the party. Well, the day before Patrick died he came into Waller’s shop and what d’you think he tried
to buy?’ She waited for the guesses that never came. ‘Cyanide! That’s what he tried to buy.’

Greenleaf stuck out his lower lip. They had only been in the house half an hour but he began to wonder how soon he could suggest to Bernice that it was time to leave. His drink tasted thin. For the first time since he had given up smoking as an example to his patients he longed for a cigarette.

‘Waller wouldn’t sell anyone cyanide and maybe he managed to get it …’ She drew breath. ‘Elsewhere,’ she said with sinister emphasis. ‘Now why did he want it?’

‘Probably for killing wasps,’ said Marvell. ‘It’s an old remedy for getting rid of wasps.’

Nancy looked disappointed.

‘Linda overheard the conversation,’ she said, ‘and that’s just what this fellow Carnaby said. He said he wanted it for wasps. Linda thought it was pretty thin.’

Thumping his fist on the table, Oliver made them all jump.

‘Linda Gaveston is a stupid little trouble-maker,’ he said furiously.

‘I suppose that goes for me too?’

‘I didn’t say so,’ said Oliver, too angry to care. ‘But if the cap fits … I hate all this under-hand gossip. If you’re trying to say Carnaby gave Patrick cyanide you’d better come straight out with it.’ He drank some whisky too quickly and choked. ‘On the other hand, perhaps you’d better not. I don’t want to pay out whacking damages for slander.’

‘It won’t go any further. Anyway, it’s my duty as a citizen to say what I think. Everyone knows Edward
Carnaby had a terrific motive for getting Patrick out of the way.’

There was an appalled silence. Nancy had grown red in the face and her plump breasts rose and fell under the clinging pink wool.

‘You’re all crazy about Tamsin. I know that. But Patrick wasn’t. He didn’t care for her a bit. He was having an affair with that awful little Freda. Night after night he was round there while her brother was out at evening classes. He used to tie that great dog of theirs up to the gate. It was just a horrid sordid little intrigue.’

As much as Oliver, Greenleaf wanted to stop her. He was immeasurably grateful for Bernice’s rich cleansing laughter.

‘If it was just a little intrigue,’ Bernice said lightly, ‘it can’t have been important, can it?’

Nancy allowed her hand to rest for a moment beneath Bernice’s. Then she snatched it away.

‘They’re twins, aren’t they? It means a lot, being twins. He wouldn’t want to lose her. Patrick might have gone off with her.’

But the tension was broken. Marvell, who had taken a book from the fireside shelves and studied it as if it were a first edition, now relaxed and smiled. Oliver had moved over to the record player and the red glaze had left his face.

‘Well, what does Max think?’ Nancy asked.

How wise Bernice had been, laughing easily, refusing to catch his eye! Greenleaf didn’t really want to do a Smith-King and flee at the scent of trouble. Besides, Oliver had some good records, Bartok and the wonderful Donizetti he wanted to hear again.

‘You know,’ he said in a quiet gentle voice, ‘it’s amazing the way people expect the worst when a young person dies suddenly. They always want to make a mystery.’ He wondered if Bernice and, for that matter Marvell, noticed how dismay was evoking his guttural accent. ‘Real life isn’t so sensational.’

‘Fiction stranger than truth,’ Marvell murmured.

‘I can assure you Patrick didn’t die of cyanide. You see, of all the poisons commonly used in cases of homicide cyanide is the most easily detected. The smell, for one thing …’

‘Bitter almonds,’ Nancy interposed.

Greenleaf smiled a smile he didn’t feel.

That among other things. Believe me, it’s fantastic to talk of cyanide.’ His hands moved expressively. ‘No, please,’ he said.

‘Well, what do you really think, then?’

‘I think you’re a very pretty girl with a vivid imagination and Linda Gaveston watches too much television. I wonder if I might have some more of your excellent whisky, Oliver?’

Oliver took the glass gratefully. He looked as if he would gladly have given Greenleaf the whole bottle.

‘Music,’ he said, handing records to the discerning Marvell.

‘May we have the Handel?’ Marvell asked politely. Nancy made a face and flung herself back among the cushions.

The sound of the rain falling steadily had formed throughout the conversation a monotonous background chorus. Now, as they became silent, the music of The Faithful Shepherd Suite filled the room. Greenleaf listened to the orchestra and noted the repetition of each phrase with the appreciation of the
scientist: but Marvell, with the ear of the artist
manqué
, felt the absurd skimped room transformed about him and, sighing within himself for something irrevocably lost, saw a green grove as in a Constable landscape and beneath the leaves a lover with the Pipes of Pan.

9

T
he rain ceased as darkness fell and the sky cleared suddenly as if washed free of cloud. It was a night of bright white stars, so many stars that Greenleaf had to point out and admire—although he did not know their names—the strung lights of Charles’s Wain and Jupiter riding in the south.

‘Patines of bright gold,’ said Marvell. ‘Only they’re not gold, they’re platinum. Patines of bright platinum doesn’t sound half so well, does it?’

‘It’s no good quoting at me,’ said the doctor. ‘You know I never read anything but the
B.M.F
.’ He drew a deep breath, savouring the night air. ‘Very nice,’ he said inadequately. ‘I’m glad I summoned up the energy to walk back with you.’

‘It was a sticky evening, wasn’t it?’ Marvell went first, holding back brambles for Greenleaf to pass along the path.

‘Silly little woman,’ Greenleaf said, harshly for him. ‘I hope Gage can stop her gossiping.’

‘It could be awkward.’ Marvell said no more until the path broadened and the doctor was walking abreast of him. Then suddenly, ‘May I ask you something?’ he said. ‘I don’t want to offend you.’

‘You won’t do that.’

‘You’re a doctor, but Patrick wasn’t your patient.’ Marvell spoke quietly. ‘I asked you if I would offend you because I was thinking of medical etiquette. But—look, I’m not scandal mongering like Nancy Gage—weren’t you very surprised when Patrick died like that?’

Greenleaf said guardedly, ‘I was surprised, yes.’

‘Thunderstruck?’

‘Like that poor fellow on the golf course? Well, no. You see a lot of strange things in my job. I thought at first Patrick had taken an overdose of sodium amytal. I’d given him an anti-histamine, two hundred milligrammes Phenergan, and one would potentiate …’ He stopped, loath to give these esoteric details to a layman. ‘He had the sodium amytal and I advised him to take one.’

‘You left the bottle with him?’

‘Now, look.’ Greenleaf had said he wouldn’t be offended. ‘Patrick wasn’t a child. Howard had prescribed them. In any case, he didn’t take any more. That was the first thing Glover looked for at the post-mortem.’

Marvell opened the orchard gate and Greenleaf stepped from the forest floor on to turf and the slippery leaves of wild daffodils. The petals of a wet rose brushed his face. In the darkness they felt like a woman’s fingers drenched with scent.

‘The first thing?’ Marvell asked. ‘You mean, you looked for other things? You suspected suicide or even murder?’

‘No, no, no,’ Greenleaf said impatiently. ‘A man had died, a young, apparently healthy man. Glover had to find out what he died of. Patrick died of heart failure.’

‘Everybody dies of heart failure.’

‘Roughly, yes. But there were signs that the heart had been affected before. There was some slight damage.’

They had come to the back door. The kitchen smelt of herbs and wine. Greenleaf thought he could detect another less pleasant scent. Mildew. He had never seen mushrooms growing but Marvell’s kitchen smelt like the plastic trays of mushrooms Bernice bought at the village store. Marvell groped for the lamp and lit it.

‘Well, go on,’ he said.

‘If you must know,’ Greenleaf said, ‘Glover made some enquires at Patrick’s old school. Tamsin didn’t know anything and Patrick’s parents were dead. He’d never complained to Howard about feeling ill. Only went to him once.’

‘May I ask if you got anything from the school?’

‘I don’t know if you may,’ Greenleaf said severely. ‘I don’t know why you want to know. But if there’s going to be a lot of talk.… Glover wrote to the headmaster and he got a letter back saying Patrick had had to be let off some of the games because he’d had rheumatic fever.’

‘I see. So you checked with the doctor Patrick had when he was a child.’

‘We couldn’t do that.’ Greenleaf smiled a small, bitter and very personal smile. ‘Patrick was born in Germany.
His mother was German and he lived there till he was four. Glover talked to Tamsin’s Mrs. Prynne. She’s one of these old women with a good memory. She remembered Patrick had had rheumatic fever when he was three—very early to have it, incidentally—and that the name of his doctor had been Goldstein.’

Marvell was embarrassed.

‘But Dr. Goldstein had disappeared. A lot of people of his persuasion disappeared in Germany between 1939 and 1945.’

‘Stopping for a quick drink?’ Marvell asked.

Five minutes passed before he said anything more about Patrick Selby. Greenleaf felt that he had been stiff and pompous, the very prototype of the uppish medical man. To restore Marvell’s ease he accepted a glass of carrot wine.

The brilliance of the white globe had increased until now only the corners of the parlour remained in shadow. A small wind had arisen, stirring the curtains and moving the trailing violet and white leaves of the Tradescantia that stood in a majolica pot on the window sill. It was rather cold.

Then Marvell said: ‘I was curious about Patrick.’ He sat down and warmed his hands at the lamp. Greenleaf wondered if Bernice, at home in Shalom, had turned on the central heating. ‘Perhaps I have a suspicious mind. Patrick had a good many enemies, you know. Quite a lot of people must be glad he’s dead.’