by Nina Bawden
“There’s probably a defect in the exhaust pipe. You remember. You suggested that at first, didn’t you?”
He heard that. He gave me a watery sort of smile and said, “I’d forgotten about the exhaust pipe.”
Brigid said “Henry” again in a high voice, and for a moment or two we all looked at each other. Henry was shaken out of the kind of trance that had held him, and there were little beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
It was in this silence that the front door bell rang. We heard Dorry’s flat, firm footsteps going up the hall and the click as the door was opened. We heard her talking, and then a man’s voice said something in reply. Then the voices faded, and a door was shut.
Dorry stood in the doorway. Her eyes rested on Henry.
“There’s a gentleman to see you, sir,” she said. “Two gentlemen. I’ve put them in the study.”
Her face crumpled suddenly. She said, “Oh, sir, I …”
It was Brigid who answered her. She was standing very still and straight and her voice was cool. She said:
“Thank you, Dorry. Will you see the electric fire is on? And tell them, please, that Mr. Sykes will come in a moment.”
The door was shut and Brigid put a hand on Henry’s arm.
“I’ll ask Dorry to make them some tea,” she said. She gave me an imploring glance. “Paul, will you … will you give Henry a drink?”
She went out and I poured Henry a stiff glass of whisky. He drank it, and then he shook his head from side to side as though he were trying to clear the muzziness away. Then Brigid came back and he got up.
“I’d better go and see what they want,” he said.
He went out of the room and Brigid sat down.
“Paul, what is he going to say to them?” she said.
I didn’t know, and there was nothing I could say. I had never seen Henry like that before. I shrugged my shoulders and lit a cigarette.
“I wish …” said Brigid, and stopped short. She looked at me, as if for help, and then she went on, “Paul, I wish I knew what they were talking about in there.” It wasn’t what she had meant to say, I was sure of that.
She sighed a little and fumbled in a work-basket until she found some socks of Sebastian’s. She started to mend them, and I watched the top of her dark head. Once or twice she looked up and I thought she was going to say something, but then she seemed to think better of it and went back to her socks.
Henry was away for a long time. I didn’t look at the clock but the time seemed interminable. I poured myself a glass of whisky and then another. It produced a warm and glowing haze through which everything looked much better, if slightly unreal.
Henry came back. He stood in the doorway and said:
“Paul, they’d like to speak to you. They’ll want to see Brigid too, though I tried to put them off.”
He spoke dully, but he seemed to be in control of himself.
“You mustn’t worry about me,” said Brigid. “I don’t mind talking to them at all.” She spoke with a controlled quietness that was, I thought, quite foreign to her.
“What do they want to know?” I asked Henry.
“What? Oh, all sorts of things. About the car and the key of the garage … whether we were happy together.”
He brought the last words out with an effort and, seeing the look on his face, Brigid got up and went over to him. I left them and went across the hall to the study. I wasn’t sure whether to knock at the door or whether to walk straight in. In the end, I knocked and opened the door before there was time for anyone to answer.
There were two men in the room; one of them, a constable in uniform, was sitting to the right of Henry’s desk, a writing pad balanced on his knee. He looked very uncomfortable. The other man sat behind the desk. His face was in shadow; the light from the Anglepoise on the desk was directed on to the empty chair that stood in front of it.
The man behind the desk said, “Won’t you sit down?”
I sat down on the empty chair. I felt ridiculously nervous; the palms of my hands were cold and sweaty.
The man’s face was in shadow, but he seemed a very ordinary man in a very ordinary suit. He said, “My name is Walker,” and his voice was a flat, ordinary voice with a trace of a Midland accent.
It was then that I recognised him. Not, of course, because name or voice was unusual. It was the circumstances, I suppose, the light and the desk.
I said, “Haven’t we met before?” and I thought that he leant backwards a little, as though to put his face farther into the shadow before he said:
“I shouldn’t think so.”
He gave a little, merry laugh. And the laugh, too, was familiar. Then he became crisp and executive, and started to ask me questions. They were innocent little questions; he wanted to know when I had arrived at the house, why I had come, whether I had talked much to Venetia and what I had thought about her.
“What do you mean? Did I think her ill?” I asked.
I could see the shine of his eyes in the shadow. He said gravely, “Mrs. Sykes lost her leg when she was about fourteen years of age. Did it have any effect on her mentally?”
“Of course it did,” I said. “But not in the way you mean.”
“She was never depressed … suicidal?”
“Of course not,” I said, and, remembering Venetia, almost laughed.
He said, “I see.” He spoke gravely and a little thoughtfully. Almost as though he really did see.
He went on with his questions. Every time I didn’t remember as clearly as he wanted me to do he went back over the situation until I had got it straight. When he had finished he went through the questions again, putting each one slightly differently. Then he said:
“On the night of your arrival you say that you went to see Mrs. Sykes after the household had gone to bed. You say you went to have a good-night drink. You also said that Mrs. Sykes was excited. ‘Strung up’were the words you used.”
I nodded. The next thing was unexpected. It was meant to be.
He said, “Mrs. Sykes knew you liked a drink before you went to bed. She gave you a drink herself. Could she have expected you to have another drink later, out of your own flask?”
I said, “I might have had another nightcap, though it is unlikely.” I wondered what he was getting at.
“Was there anything in the brandy in my flask?” I asked.
Walker did not answer for a moment, and I wondered whether I should have said anything. After all, I thought, beginning to get a bit hot under the collar, if there was anything in my brandy, then presumably I was the intended victim. But then he smiled, and said:
“I’m afraid there was. Chloral hydrate, and quite a lot of it.”
He didn’t say any more, and I had a feeling that he was not to be drawn, so I let it alone. Then he drew his brows together and looked at me as though I were a problem in geometry and said:
“When you said that Mrs. Sykes was ‘strung up,’ what exactly did you mean?”
I said, without thinking, “She was like a woman who is going to meet her lover.”
I hadn’t meant to say it; I regretted it immediately afterwards. He said:
“Have you any reason to suppose that was the case?”
I said lamely, “I only meant she was in that sort of mood.” I remembered how she had been that night. I had gone to her room after my bath, and we had drunk brandy together. She had always had moods of wild exaltation, but this time she had been particularly excited, almost recklessly so. Every word and gesture had crackled with vitality, she had been radiant, her eyes had glowed like flames.
Walker said, a trifle awkwardly, I thought:
“There was a Mr. Adlesburg at dinner that evening?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering what was coming.
“Was there anything between them, do you know?”
I said carefully, “They were attracted to each other.”
He looked at me earnestly. Then he said:
“Mr. Adlesburg
was seen in the lane that goes past the house. Just after midnight.”
It knocked me sideways. “Have you seen him?” I said.
I couldn’t make out the expression on his face. He nodded, and then said, briskly, “I think that will be all for now.”
I felt dismissed like a schoolboy in his headmaster’s study. I got up from the chair and went to the door. I had my hand on the knob when he spoke to me again.
“I suppose you don’t know anything about the boy?” he said.
I repeated his words. “The boy?” not realising, for the moment, what he meant.
“Sebastian,” he said. “I believe he has some idea that someone is trying to poison him.”
“Someone almost succeeded,” I said dryly. There seemed to be a shade of annoyance on his face. He said:
“I wasn’t talking about that,” he said.
“You want to know whether I think there could be any truth in what he said?” I asked.
Walker nodded. I shrugged my shoulders.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems unlikely.”
“A lot of things are unlikely,” said Walker from the shadow behind the lamp.
I didn’t know what he was trying to do. Were all these non-committal little sentences meant to provoke me into saying something? What could he be expecting me to tell him? Then I remembered Caroline, and I thought I knew. I was conscious of a curious dryness in my mouth. I said:
“I only know what the boy was saying. I haven’t been here very long, you know.”
“Yes,” said Walker. “I know.”
He seemed to be playing with something on the desk. At first I couldn’t make out what it was, and then I saw it was a little paper knife, an ugly thing with a badly carved handle. He had blunt, square hands. They looked capable, and the nails were beautifully kept.
He said, “I’m inclined to believe that the boy has been telling lies. He’s a hysterical child, isn’t he?”
There was a kind of contempt in his voice that made me suddenly indignant. It was stupid of me; I didn’t realise till afterwards how carefully calculated that contempt had been.
I said, “He wasn’t telling lies,” and then I realised that he had expected me to react like that. But I had sprung his little trap; I had to go on.
So I told him about Sebastian’s dog, and about the lump of steamed pudding that I had taken from the child’s plate, and thrown away the next day because it had seemed rather a futile thing to keep it.
“I suppose,” I said, “you could exhume the dog.”
He didn’t smile. “Yes,” he said, “we could do that.”
He dismissed me, for the second time, rather more warmly than before, and the polite, impersonal smile made me wonder whether I had not been wrong, after all, in thinking that I recognised him. It had been a long time ago, and I had been very young. Besides, he did not look old enough, though that may just have been the kind of man he was.
I wanted to make sure, and, remembering one thing that he had said, I went into the drawing-room and said to Henry:
“Did you tell the policeman how old Venetia was when she lost her leg?”
He looked at me with dazed eyes.
“No,” he said. “Why should I? I’m not sure that I know myself exactly. She must have told me, I suppose, but we never talked about it.”
I sat down. “Brigid,” I said, “it’s your turn to play Postman’s Knock. You’ll find the policeman quite a nice type, though don’t be led away by his niceness. And don’t be surprised to find him quite an old friend. You should be able to have a cosy little chat.”
I was feeling a bit light-headed. I could have talked nonsense for the rest of the night if anyone had been prepared to listen. But Brigid gave me the frozen, disapproving look that was going to make her seem middle-aged long before she was forty, and got up to go. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her what to expect. At the least, it was unkind of me: at the most it was, perhaps, a little stupid.
I hung about a bit after Brigid had gone into the study, but Henry didn’t want to talk, so I went upstairs and had a bath. I took a long time over it; the water was very hot, and instead of waking me up as it usually did the water made me very sleepy, so that when I got back to my room I wasn’t very pleased to see Brigid sitting on the edge of my bed.
She had been crying and there were red, angry patches all over her face and neck.
She said, “Oh, Paul, why didn’t you tell me?”
“About Walker?” I said.
She said, “Of course about Walker,” almost contemptuously, and I felt that for the first time in our lives she was not afraid to show that she was angry with me.
I said, feeling a little on the defensive, “I wasn’t sure. Not until I came back into the drawing-room.”
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I don’t like him,” she said. “He’s a horrid little man. Worse than horrid. He’s frightening, somehow.”
“What did he ask you?” I said. I could feel my mind waking up, escaping from the slow, lovely lethargy that had overtaken me in the bath. I knew that if Brigid went or stayed I was in for a sleepless night.
So I turned on the gas fire and lit a cigarette.
Brigid said, “He wanted to know a lot of things. About Venetia and Sebastian … and about Henry.” Her eyes widened with a kind of terror in them. “Paul,” she said, “I think he guessed about me and Henry.”
“He was bound to find out,” I said. “He’s not a fool.”
She looked at me desperately. “Do you think so?” she said. “Yes, I suppose he was. But Paul, what will he do?”
“Do?” I repeated stupidly. Perhaps I hadn’t woken up as thoroughly as I thought.
She gave an exasperated sigh.
“He thinks Venetia was killed,” she said. “And if he knows about Henry and me, it might make him … wonder about Henry.”
So that was what she had been afraid of. It was stupid of me not to have seen it.
I said, “But, Brigid, the police don’t accuse innocent people.”
“I know,” she said. She had got the edge of the silk bedspread between her fingers; she was creasing it into folds and then smoothing them out again.
I said, “Do you think Henry killed Venetia?”
She said, “Oh, no,” a little too late. Her face had turned crimson and I remembered that Brigid had always blushed when she lied. I think I was shocked. I said:
“Of course he did have a motive. There was you.”
She said quickly, “Oh, he wouldn’t have done anything like that because of me.”
I knew that she believed that. I said:
“Henry was very worried about Sebastian, wasn’t he? Do you know why?”
She gave a little gasp. “No,” she said slowly. “I don’t think I do. I mean I don’t know why he was worried, but I was afraid. I … I think that Mr. Walker had some sort of idea about it.”
“What did he say?” I said.
She didn’t want to tell me. She was almost choking with the effort to keep silent. I suppose it seemed to her so much worse when it was said out loud.
“He said that Sebastian was about the same age as Caroline, when she died.”
I don’t think my voice was quite steady. I said:
“Did he say that off his own bat? Had you said anything about Caroline?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “he asked me about the family, you see, and I said there had been a sister that had died. A step-sister. He seemed interested, and I went on talking about it because it was easier than being asked questions. It couldn’t matter, you see, because Caroline was dead. And I’m so bad at answering questions. I keep thinking there’s a trick in them, somewhere, so I get so muddled. I told him about the inquest, and everything. Of course, when I saw him I knew that he must know all about it, but he didn’t say he knew.”
“You recognised him at first?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I knew who it was as soon as I went into the
room. I remembered that funny little paper knife he was playing with. He had it when he came to the house after Caroline had died. He sat in Daddy’s study and played with it, just as he was doing this evening …”
Her voice had trailed off into silence. She sat limply, now, her hands falling straight beside her, her feet dangling from the high bed. It was an attitude that made her look surprisingly young and without defences.
I said suddenly, “Brigid, Henry never talked to you about Caroline, did he?”
She shook her head. She said, “No. We never talked much about things like that. I wish we had. It would make it easier to talk to him now.”
“Did he know about her?” I went on.
“I really don’t know. I suppose he must have done,” she said.
“And he was fond of Sebastian, wasn’t he?” I persisted.
She gave me a quick, frightened look and then she burst into tears. She didn’t hide them, they streamed down her face and splashed on her hands.
She got off the bed and flopped, ungracefully, on the hearth-rug beside me. She clawed at my sleeve.
“Oh, Paul,” she said, “you must help Henry. You must. You mustn’t let them do anything to him. He’s not good at looking after himself; he’s so bad with these people. He’s not clever, like you, and you could help him so much. You will, won’t you?”
Her face was very close to mine, and I edged away.
I said, “I can’t do anything. Henry will say what he thinks is the truth. He’s that sort of chap. It might help if he could lie, but he couldn’t. It isn’t in him.”
She sat back on her heels and looked at me. She said, in a forlorn voice, “I did think you’d help him, Paul.”
I was angry, then. I said:
“If you think Henry killed Venetia you must be mad to ask me to help him. You know how I felt about her.”
She stood up. There was a sudden, rather pathetic dignity in her voice.
“I’m sorry, Paul. I shouldn’t have talked to you like this. I was worried about Henry; perhaps I made it sound worse than I meant to. I don’t think he killed Venetia.”
She went without looking at me, and she closed the door very
softly behind her.
