Feelings of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  The kettle started to dribble, and then to whistle, and she went to the larder to find the coffee-jar. The larder door was already slightly open, only three or four inches. But as she approached it she could see the leftover turkey on the marble shelf on the left – and, on the red-and-white tiled floor directly below it, she could see a blue-gray fluffy leg.

  She opened the door wide and there was Tarquin, lying on his side, his coppery eyes wide open, and obviously dead.

  Uncle Philip sat on a chair in the kitchen with Tarquin in his arms, rocking backward and forward. Tears dripped down his withered cheeks and clung to Tarquin’s fur like diamonds.

  Kenneth stood in one corner, his eyes half-closed like overripe damsons, his hand pressed against his forehead in the classic gesture of a man who is swearing to himself that he will never touch another alcoholic drink as long as he lives. Nicholas, in his red silk dressing-gown, was calmer and waxier than ever.

  “He was eating the leftover turkey,” said Paul, Caitlin’s husband, who was all dressed up in a bizarre assemblage of socks and tracksuit bottoms and a frayed brown jumper.

  “But that couldn’t have hurt him,” said Roger. “We all ate the same turkey, didn’t we, and none of us are sick.”

  “He could have choked,” Caitlin suggested.

  “He could have had a heart-attack. He’s almost fourteen, after all.”

  Paul knelt down beside Uncle Philip’s chair and said, “Do you mind if I – you know, touch him?”

  Uncle Philip didn’t seem to care. He turned away and his face was a mask of terrible distress.

  Paul carefully opened Tarquin’s lips. “Look, he didn’t vomit, you see. He’s still got half-chewed turkey in his mouth.” He leaned closer and sniffed, and sniffed again.

  “What is it?” asked Nicholas.

  “Prussic acid. Or cyanide, to you.”

  “You mean he’s been poisoned?”

  “I used to work for Kodak,” said Paul. “You use a lot of potassium cyanide when you’re developing photographs, and they taught us to recognize the symptoms. Blue face, blue lips. Well, poor old Tarquin was blue already. But you can’t mistake that smell. Sweet, isn’t it? One of the most pleasant-tasting poisons there is.”

  Grace boomed, “Who on earth would want to poison Tarquin?”

  “Well, nobody, of course,” said Nicholas. “The whole thing was an accident. Somebody must have injected the cold turkey with cyanide after we went to bed last night, with the intention of harming whoever was going to eat it. Fortunately for the intended victim -but very unfortunately for Tarquin – the larder door was accidentally left open.”

  Caitlin looked aghast. “But we were all planning to leave after breakfast, all of us. We always do, on Boxing Day. The only person who would have eaten the turkey was—”

  Uncle Philip looked up, although he continued to stroke Tarquin’s lifeless head. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, I would have thought it was quite obvious. Somebody poisoned the turkey because they wanted to get rid of me.”

  Kenneth looked at Caitlin and Caitlin looked at Paul and Paul looked at Libby. “The house was locked up all night,” said Nicholas. “You always switch on the alarm. That means that whoever did it – well, it must have been one of us.”

  “We should call the police,” said Libby.

  “But if it’s one of us—”

  “If it’s one of us, the police will find out who it is, and presumably charge him or her with attempted murder.”

  “My God,” said Libby. “I simply can’t believe that one of us would be capable of such a thing.”

  “Why not?” Kenneth demanded. “We all have more than enough of a motive, after all. We’re all practically broke, and here’s Philip sitting on several millions of pounds worth of property and shares … and making sure, year by year, that he reminds us how foolish we’ve been, how wasteful we’ve been …”

  “You have been foolish, and you have been wasteful,” said Uncle Philip. He stood up, with Tarquin’s heavy dead body cradled in his arms. He circled the kitchen, and his voice was cracking with emotion.

  “I always thought that you were rotten, all of you. Rotten through and through. You were each given more money than some people can earn in a lifetime, and each of you wasted it, and ended up with nothing. That’s why you come here for Christmas, every year, even though you hate me, even though you hate each other, even though you’re so bored.

  “Well, every Christmas has been my way of showing my contempt for each and every one of you, because I never had any intention of giving you any of my money. I just wanted to see you grovel, year after year. I just wanted to see how low you were prepared to crawl.

  “In the whole of my life, I have never come across greed and arrogance like yours. Never. You assumed that I would bequeath you all of my money. You couldn’t see that the world is full of far more deserving beneficiaries. But worse than that, you couldn’t even wait till I died, could you? One of you tried to poison me. One of you actually tried to murder me. But all you succeeded in doing was killing the one creature who took me for what I was. Tarquin didn’t love me because I was wealthy. Tarquin loved me without any conditions at all. I loved him more than life itself, and I can’t imagine how I’m going to live without him.”

  He looked from one to the other with an expression of total wretchedness, and then he walked out of the kitchen with Tarquin still dangling in his arms. The family watched him go, and none of them said a single word.

  Only a second later, however, they heard a thumping sound in the hallway, and the clatter of a table tipping over. They rushed out of the kitchen to find Uncle Philip lying on his back, his eyes open, his face convulsed, with Tarquin lying on top of him.

  “Ambulance!” Nicholas shouted. “Call for an ambulance!”

  Detective Inspector Rogers came into the drawing-room where they were all assembled, blowing his nose loudly on a grayish-looking handkerchief.

  “Christmas,” he complained. “I always get a cold around Christmas.”

  Nicholas looked at his watch. “I do wish you’d get this over with, Inspector. I was hoping to get back to town before it got dark.”

  It was New Year’s Eve, five days after Boxing Day. During the week, the family had been allowed to return home, but they had all been warned not to leave the south east of England until the police had completed their preliminary investigations; and Inspector Rogers had been around to each of them, with a long list of penetrating questions. Now they had been called back to Polesden View – as fractious as ever.

  “First of all,” said Inspector Rogers, “a post-mortem examination has shown that Tarquin the cat died from ingesting hydrocyanic acid, and that the poison entered his system by his consumption of a small quantity of contaminated turkey.

  “If the intention of contaminating the turkey was to cause harm to Mr Philip Chesterton, almost all of you who were present on Boxing Day had a motive. A mistaken motive, as it turns out, because Mr Chesterton had no intention of leaving you any money – but you didn’t know that.”

  He walked over to Kenneth and Libby, and said, “Your brokerage business is bankrupt, sir, and you desperately need a substantial amount of money to avoid losing your house.”

  To Grace, he said, “You, madam, after a long period of living alone, have found a partner of whom you are extremely fond. Unfortunately, he is very much younger than you, and you are finding that you keep having to buy him gifts in order to keep him happy. He wants a car, which you can’t afford.”

  He crossed over to Nicholas, and said, “Now that you’re a partner in your law firm, sir, you want to move into town and live according to your new status … amongst other things.” Nicholas looked relieved. What nobody else in the family knew was that “other things” was his secretary, with whom he had just started an affair.

  Inspector Rogers came over to Mary. “Your husband died in spring last year, leaving you and your daughter almost penniless.”

  Then
he went up to Caitlin. “The lease on your pottery studio has just run out, and unless you can find a new one, you’ll be going out of business.”

  Lastly, he approached Michael. “You’re separated from your wife, sir, and she’s threatening to divorce you. You’re certainly going to need all the funds you can lay your hands on.”

  Inspector Rogers returned to the center of the room. “To be frank with you, however, there is no evidence that links any of you directly with the contamination of the turkey. It could have been any one of you, or it could have been some of you, or all of you, in concert.

  “There is also the legal problem that nobody ate any of the poisoned turkey except for the cat; and that it is unlikely that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that whoever poisoned it was specifically intending to kill Mr Chesterton. It isn’t as if the turkey was set out on a plate that was solely intended for him.

  “For that reason I am obliged to let you all go about your business, but I must caution you that our investigations will continue and that you should stay in the country until further notice.”

  “By the way,” said Mary, as they gathered up their coats. “Do you have any idea who is going to inherit?”

  “Well – this is the funny part,” said Inspector Rogers, taking out his handkerchief again and trying to find a dry bit. “The whole estate was supposed to go to Tarquin. All eleven million of it. He would have been the richest cat in the country.”

  “What!” Kenneth exploded. “Eleven million to a cat! It’s insane!”

  “It’s legal, I’m afraid,” said Inspector Rogers. “Didn’t you read about that woman who gave two million to her spaniel?”

  “But Tarquin’s dead. Who gets the money now?”

  “Let’s see … something called the British Blue Protection League.”

  “Bloody cats again,” grumbled Kenneth. “I hate bloody cats.”

  Mandy and her mother drove back to their semi-detached house overlooking Ealing Common in West London and her mother asked her if she wanted to go out for a curry because she had nothing in the house.

  Mandy flopped back on the sagging corduroy sofa and said, “No. I’d rather be hungry.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Because I’m never going to be hungry again, ever; and I want to remember what it’s like.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Uncle Philip’s inheritance.”

  “I still don’t understand you.”

  “Uncle Philip never believed that any of you loved him, did he? He always thought you were after his money.”

  “He was right, wasn’t he? We didn’t, and we were.”

  “But he knew that Tarquin loved him, and that Tarquin never wanted anything but warmth and food and his bony old lap to sit in.”

  “So?”

  “So none of you used your brains, did you? If you want a cantankerous old man like that to feel good towards you, you don’t pretend to like him for what he is, because he won’t believe you. In fact he’ll be even more suspicious of you than ever. No – you make sure that you win the confidence of somebody he trusts. Or, in Uncle Philip’s case, something they trust, which was Tarquin.

  “I started to make a fuss of Tarquin because there was nothing else to do at Polesden View. But Tarquin began to trust me, and Uncle Philip began to trust me, too. He gave me bits of money and sweets and he told me that he was going to leave all his inheritance to Tarquin, just to show you how greedy and insincere you all were.”

  “You knew about him giving his inheritance to Tarquin? And you didn’t tell us?”

  “If I’d told you, you would never have gone down to see him at Christmas, would you, and he wouldn’t have trusted me any more.”

  “But we suffered all of those horrible, horrible Christmases, and you knew?”

  Mandy smiled. “We called it our secret, Uncle Philip and me.”

  “But what was the point, when the money was all going to go to that stupid cat?”

  “Oh, mum! The point was that even the brainiest cats can’t look after themselves, can they? Cats can’t open bank accounts. They can’t even open tins of catfood. When their owners die, cats have to have people to look after them … people that their owners trust. And when cats die, they have to leave their money to somebody, don’t they?”

  Mandy went to the bookcase and tugged out a file. She opened it up so that Mary could see the first page. In official-looking letters, she had typed British Blue Protection League: Annual Accounts. The column under “credits” was still blank.

  “I put Uncle Philip in touch with them. He never realized it was only me.”

  “You poisoned the turkey,” Mary whispered.

  Mandy nodded. “And I opened the larder door, so that Tarquin could get in.”

  “You couldn’t have known that Uncle Philip would have a stroke.”

  “No … that was something of a bonus, wasn’t it?”

  “My God,” said Mary. “I can hardly believe it. Eleven million pounds.”

  “Not until he dies, of course. But we can wait, can’t we? It’ll give us time to think what we’re going to spend it on. You know what I’ve really always wanted? A dog.”

  Picnic at Lac du Sang

  “The girls here are very young,” said Baubay, taking a last deep drag at his cigarette and flicking it out of the Pontiac’s window. “But let me tell you, they’ll do anything.”

  Vincent frowned across the street at the large Gothic-revival house. It wasn’t at all what he had expected a brothel to look like. It was heavily overshadowed by three giant dark-green elms, but he could see turrets and spires and decorated gables, and balconies where net curtains suggestively billowed in the summer breeze. The outside walls were painted a burned orange color, and there was something strange and other-worldly about the whole place, as if he had seen it in a painting, or dreamed it.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” he told Baubay. “I never visited a bordello before.”

  “Bordello!” Baubay piffed. “This is simply a very amenable place where guys like us can meet beautiful and willing young women, discuss the state of the economy, have a bottle of champagne or two, play Trivial Pursuit, and if we feel like it, get laid.”

  “Sounds like a bordello to me,” said Vincent, trying to make a joke of it.

  “You’re not going to chicken out on me, are you? Don’t say you’re going to chicken out. Come on, Vincent, I’ve driven over eighty miles for this, and I’m not going back to Montreal without at least one game of hide the salami.”

  “It’s just that I feel like – I don’t know. I feel like I’m being unfaithful.”

  “Bullshit! How can you be unfaithful to a woman who walked out on you? How can you be unfaithful when she was screwing a crotté like Michael Saperstein?”

  “I don’t know, but it just feels that way. Come on, Baubay, I never looked at another woman for eleven years. Well, I looked, but I didn’t do anything about it.”

  “So – after all those years of sainthood, you deserve to indulge yourself a little. You won’t regret it, believe me. You’ll be coming back for more. Hey – with your tongue dragging on the sidewalk.”

  “I don’t know. Is there a restaurant or anything around here? Maybe I’ll have some lunch and wait for you.”

  Baubay unfastened his seatbelt and took his keys out of the ignition. “Absolutely emphatically no you are not. How do you expect me to enjoy fornicating with some ripe young teenager while all the time I know that you’re sitting alone in some dreary diner eating Salisbury steak? What kind of friend would that make me? You’re not backing out of this, Vincent. You’re coming to meet Madame Leduc whether you like it or not.”

  “Well, I’ll meet her, OK?” Vincent agreed. “But whether I do anything else—”

  Baubay took him by the elbow as if he were a blind man and propelled him to the opposite sidewalk. The morning was glazed and warm and there was hardly any traffic. The hou
se stood in the older part of St Michel-des-Monts, in a street which was still respectable but which was suffering from obvious neglect. The house next door was empty, its windows shuttered and its front door boarded up, its garden a tangle of weeds and wild poppies. Behind the houses, through a blueish haze, Vincent could see the mountains of Mont Blanc, Mont Tremblant, and beyond.

  They climbed the stone steps to the front door and Baubay gave a smart, enthusiastic knock. The door was painted a sun-faded blue, and the paint had cracked like the surface of an old master. The knocker was bronze, and cast in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head.

  “See that?” said Baubay. “That was supposed to keep evil spirits at bay. They’re quite rare, now.”

  They waited and waited and eventually Baubay knocked again. After a while they heard a door open and piano music, Mozart, and a woman’s voice. Vincent felt butterflies in his stomach, and he had a ridiculous childish urge to run away. Baubay winked at him and said, “This’ll be Madame Leduc now.”

  The front door was opened by a tall, ash-blonde woman with her hair braided on top of her head. She was wearing a long silk negligée in pale aquamarine, trimmed with lace. She must have been forty-five at least, but she was extraordinarily beautiful, with a fine, slightly Nordic-looking face, and eyes that were such a pale, washed-out blue that they were scarcely any color at all. Her negligée was open almost to her waist, revealing a deep cleavage in which a large marcasite crucifix nestled. Judging by the way her breasts swung, she must have been naked underneath.

  “François, what a pleasure,” she said. Her accent was faintly Québecois, very precize and refined. “And – how exciting! You’ve brought your friend with you today.”

  “I couldn’t keep you all to myself, could I?” asked Baubay. “Violette, this is Vincent Jeffries. He’s a very talented man. A great musician. Like, eat your heart out, Johann Sebastian Bach.”