by Ruth Rendell
Cheryl struggled and began to howl.
‘Of course she isn’t going to die.’ Greenleaf said roughly while Carnaby fumbled at his feet with bits of metal.
‘She is, she is! You’re just saying that. You’ll take her to the hospital and we’ll never see her again.’
He was surprised at so much emotion for she had never seemed to care for the child. Patrick’s death must have left a real wound into which a new-found maternal love might pour. Patrick, always back to Patrick … He looked quickly at Carnaby, wondering when the report would come from the analyst, before saying sharply to Freda:
‘If you can’t control yourself, Miss Carnaby, you’d better go outside.’
She gulped.
‘Let’s have a look at it, Cheryl.’ He prised Freda off her and gently eased the handkerchief from her mouth. The lower lip was bulging into a grotesque hillock and it reminded the doctor of pictures he had seen of duck-billed women. He wiped her eyes. ‘You’re going to have a funny face for a day or two.’
The child tried to smile. She edged away from her aunt and pushed tendrils of hair from her big characterful eyes, eyes that she must surely have inherited from her mother.
‘Mr. Selby had wasp stings,’ she said and darted a precocious glance at Freda ‘I heard Daddy talking about it when they got back from that party. I was awake. I never sleep when I have a sitter.’ Her lip wobbled. ‘It was that Mrs. Staxton. She said wasps were ever so dangerous and she was scared of them, so Daddy said he’d got some stuff and she could take the tin. And she did, she took it home with her and a jolly good thing, because wasps are dangerous.’ Greenleaf sighed with silent relief. The analyst’s report could hardly matter now. Cheryl’s voice rose into fresh panic. ‘Mr. Selby died. Aunty Free said I might die.’
Greenleaf felt in his pocket for a sixpence.
‘There’s an ice-cream man by The Green,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch him if you hurry. You get a lolly.’ Carnaby looked at him, a foolish smile curling his mouth uneasily as if at some inconsequential joke. ‘It’ll be good for your lip.’
Freda watched her go with tragic eyes. She evidently thought Greenleaf had got rid of Cheryl in order to impart confidential information as to her probable fate. She looked affronted when he said instead:
‘Patrick Selby did not die of wasp stings. I thought you had more sense, Miss Carnaby. To talk of dying to a child of eight! What’s the matter with you?’
‘Everybody knows Patrick didn’t die of heart failure,’ she said stubbornly.
Greenleaf let it pass. Her bosom quivered. The fallen tears had left round transparent blotches on the thin blouse through which frilly fussy straps and bits of underclothes showed.
‘He must have died of the stings,’ she insisted, ‘and he only had four.’
‘Five, but it doesn’t matter. Cheryl …’
‘He didn’t. He only had four. I was sitting with him and I could see.’
Greenleaf said impatiently:
‘I should give that a rest, Miss Carnaby.’
Carnaby who had remained silent, ineffectually picking up things that might be ratchets or gaskets, suddenly said rather aggressively, ‘Well, it’s a matter of accuracy, isn’t it, Doctor? It so happens Selby had four stings. I was in the bathroom and I saw the wasps get him. Unless you’re counting the one he had a couple of days before.’
‘One on his face,’ Freda said, ‘two on his left arm and one inside his right arm. I thought Cheryl—well, it might have taken her the same way, mightn’t it?’ The sob that caught her throat came out ludicrously like a hiccup. ‘She’s all I’ve got now,’ she said. ‘Patrick—I could have given him children. He wanted children. I’ll never get married now, never, never!’
Carnaby hustled the doctor out into the hall, kicking the door shut behind him. Recalling what Bernice had said, Greenleaf wondered whether Freda’s renewed cries were caused by true grief or the possible damage to the paintwork. Then, as he stood, murmuring assurances to Carnaby, the penny dropped. Not the whole penny, but a fraction of it, a farthing perhaps.
‘She’ll be all right,’ he said mechanically. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ The worry was all his now.
Then he went, almost running.
Back at Shalom his deck-chair awaited him. He sat down, conscious that on his way round The Circle he had passed Sheila Macdonald and Paul Gaveston without even a smile or a wave. They had been shadows compared with the reality of his thoughts. Before his eyes he could again see Patrick’s body in the bed at Hallows that Sunday morning, the thin freckled arms spread across the sheet, sleeves pushed back for coolness. And on the yellowish mottled skin red swellings. One sting on the face, two on the left arm, one on the right arm in the cubital fossa—and a fifth. There had been a fifth, about six inches below. Not the old sting; that had been just a scar, a purplish lump with a scab where Patrick had scratched it. The Carnabys could be wrong. Both wrong? They couldn’t both be mistaken. Why should they lie? He, Greenleaf, hadn’t bothered to count the stings on the previous night and when he had visited Patrick in bed the blue cotton sleeves had covered both arms down to the wrists. Tamsin had been uninterested, the others embarrassed. But Carnaby had watched the wasps attack, he had been there in the line of fire, staring from the bathroom window, and Freda had sat at Patrick’s feet, holding his hand. Of all the guests at the party they were in the best position to know. But at the same time he knew he wasn’t wrong. Five stings, one on the face, two on the left arm …
‘Hot enough for you?’ It was a high-pitched irritating voice and Greenleaf didn’t have to look up to know it was Nancy Gage.
‘Hallo.’
‘Oh, don’t get up,’ she said as he began to rise. ‘I’ll excuse you. Much too hot to be polite. You men, I really pity you. Always having to bob up and down like jack-in-the-boxes.’
‘I’m afraid Bernice has taken the boys into Nottingham.’
‘Never mind. Actually I came to see you. Don’t get me a chair. I’ll sit on the grass.’ She did so quite gracefully, spreading her pink cotton skirts about her like an open parasol. The renewal of love, strained and contrived though that renewal might be, was gradually restoring her beauty. It was as if she was a wilting pink and gold rose into whose leaves and stems nourishment was climbing by a slow capillary. ‘What I really came for was the name of that man who put up your summer house. We’re rather spreading our wings—I don’t know if Bernice told you—having an extension to our humble domain, and Mr. Glide—well, he is a bit steep, isn’t he?’
‘He’s in the phone book, Swan’s the name. J. B. Swan.’
‘Lovely. What a wonderful memory! What do you think? As I was coming across The Green I met that funny little Carnaby girl with an enormous lump in her lip. I asked her what it was and she said a wasp sting. She was sucking one of those filthy lollies. I ask you, the last thing! I said, now you run straight home to Mummy—I forgot she hasn’t got a Mummy, just an Auntie and what an Auntie!—and get her to put bicarbonate of soda on it.’
‘Not much use, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh, you doctors and your anti-biotics. I’m a great believer in the old-fashioned remedies.’ She spoke with a middle-aged complacency and Greenleaf thought he knew exactly what she would be like in fifteen years’ time, stout, an encyclopaedia of outworn and inaccurate advice, the very prototype of an old wife spinning old wives’ tales. ‘If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a dozen times, Patrick would be alive today if Tamsin had only used bi-carb.’ As an after-thought she exclaimed in an advertising catch phrase, ‘and so reasonably priced!’
Momentarily Greenleaf closed his eyes. He opened them suddenly as she went on:
‘As soon as we got back from that ghastly party I said to Oliver, you pop straight back to Hallows with some bi-carb. He hung it out a bit. Waiting for you to go, I’m afraid. Aren’t we crafty? Anyway, he trotted across with his little packet …’ It was an absurd description of the movement of that graceful, saturnine man
, but Greenleaf was too interested to notice. ‘… but Tamsin must have gone to bed. She’d forgotten to lock the back door because he tried it, but that Queenie was shut up in the kitchen and she wouldn’t let him in. He went round the back and all the food was still out there and Tamsin had left her presents on the birthday table, the chocolates and that bag and Crispin’s flowers. She must have been terribly upset to leave it all like that. He hung about for five minutes and then he came home.’
‘I expect she was tired,’ Greenleaf said, his thoughts racing. So that was the answer to what he had been calling in his mind the Great White Packet Mystery. Simply Oliver Gage taking bi-carbonate of soda to his mistress’s husband. And probably, he thought vulgarly, hoping for a little more love on the side. No wonder he waited for me to go.
What Marvell had said about anyone being able to get into Hallows while Tamsin was out had now been shown to be manifestly false. The dog Queenie would guard her master against all comers—against all except one. The feeble motives of Edith Gaveston and Denholm Smith-King evaporated like puddles in the sun. But Tamsin had a motive, or rather many motives which crystallised into a gigantic single drive against Patrick’s life. Tamsin was rich now and free. Not to marry Gage whom she had evidently sent about his business, but free to be herself in a glorious scented bright-coloured muddle.
‘You’re so silent,’ Nancy said. ‘Are you all right? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I haven’t got a thing on hand this afternoon. I’ll nip indoors and make the poor grass widower a nice cup of tea.’
Greenleaf hated tea. He thanked her, rested his head against the canvas and closed his eyes.
14
Patrick had died too late. Greenleaf repeated the sentence to himself as he came up to the front door of Marvell’s house. Patrick had died too late. Not from the point of view of Tamsin’s happiness, but medically speaking. Marvell had suggested it at the time the rumors began and Greenleaf had shrugged it off. Now he realised that it was this fact which all the time had been nagging at his mind. Had he died soon after receiving the stings or even if he had had a heart attack on seeing the picture—for Greenleaf was beginning to believe that in Patrick’s history it corresponded to the something nasty in the woodshed of Freudian psychology—there would have been no mystery. But Patrick had died hours later.
Why had there been a fifth sting? A wasp in the bedroom? It was possible. Patrick had been heavily sedated. You could probably have stuck a pin in him without waking him. But why should a fifth sting kill him when four had made him only uncomfortable? He banged on the almshouse door for the second time, but Marvell wasn’t at home. At last he went round to the back and sat down on the bench.
He had come for his honey, and after much heart-searching, to offer his friend a loan. Talking it over with Bernice after she came back from Nottingham, he had thought he could raise a few hundred, enough perhaps to have the house made habitable according to the standards of Chantflower Rural Council. It was an awkward mission even though he intended to be quite pompous about it, insisting for the sake of Marvell’s pride on the money being repayed at the normal rate of interest—Marvell would have to put his back into the history of Chantefleur Abbey. I am a peasant, he thought, and he is an aristocrat (the serfs to the wolves syndrome again). He might hit me. All alone in the garden, he chuckled faintly to himself. He didn’t think Marvell would do that.
Presently he got up and walked about, for he was nervous. He hadn’t counted on having to wait. Perhaps Marvell would be away for hours and he would have screwed up his courage in vain.
He passed the kitchen window and looking inside, saw that the table was laden with jars of honey, clear and golden, not the sugary waxen stuff you bought in the shops. There would be a pot for them and a pot for the Gages and the Gavestons. Poor though he was, Marvell was a generous man. Last year the harvest had been poor but there had been a jar on almost every Linchester table. Not Patrick’s though. Patrick recoiled from honey as if it were poison.
Greenleaf turned away and began to follow the path towards the orchard. Under the trees he stopped and sat down on the stump of a withered ancient apple Marvell had felled in the winter. Apple, plum and pear leaves made a dappled pattern on the turf as the sunlight filtered through gnarled branches. All about him he could hear the muted yet ominous hum of the bees that had been robbed of their treasure. Marvell, he guessed, had reimbursed them, giving them—as he put it—silver for their gold. He had once shown the doctor the tacky grey candy he made for them from boiled sugar. But, just the same, bewilderment over their loss made them angry.
There were three hives made of white painted wood and this had surprised Greenleaf the first time he had seen them for he had expected the igloos of plaited straw you see in children’s picture books. Beneath the entrance to each hive—a slit between the two lowest boards—was a wooden step or platform on to which the bees issued, trickling forth in a thin dark stream. There was a suggestion of liquid in their movement, measured yet turbulent, regular and purposeful. Marvell had told him something of their ordered social life, and because of this rather than from the interest of a naturalist, he approached the hive and knelt down before it.
At first the bees ignored him. He put his ear to the wall of the hive and listened. From inside there came the sound as of a busy city where thousand upon thousand of workers feed, love, breed and engage in industry. He could hear a soft roar, constant in volume, changing in pitch. There was warmth in it and richness and an immense controlled activity.
For a moment he had forgotten that these insects were not simply harvesters; they were armed. Then, as he eased himself into a sitting position, one of them appeared suddenly from a tree or perhaps from the roof of the hive. It skimmed his hair and sank on the windless air until it was in front of his eyes. He got up hastily and brushed at it and at the others which began to gather about it. How horrible, how treacherous Nature could be! You contemplated it with the eye of an aesthete or a sociologist, and just as you were beginning to see there might be something in it after all, it rose and struck you, attacked you … He gasped and ran, glad that there was no one to see him. Two of the bees followed him, sailing on the hot fruit-scented air. He stripped off his jacket and flung it over his head. Panting with panic and with sudden revelation, he stumbled into Marvell’s garden shed.
The bee-keeper’s veiled hat and calico coat were suspended from the roof, taped gloves protruding from the sleeves. The clothes looked like a guy or a hanged man. When he had slammed the door between himself and his pursuers, he sat down on the garden roller, sweating. He knew now how Patrick Selby had died.
‘But wouldn’t he have swelled up?’ Bernice asked. ‘I thought the histamine made you swell up all over.’
‘Yes, it does.’ Greenleaf bent over the kitchen sink, washing tool-shed cobwebs from his hands. ‘I gave him anti-histamine …’
‘Why didn’t it work, Max?’
‘I expect it did, up to a point. Don’t forget, Patrick wasn’t allergic to wasp stings. But if he was allergic to bee stings, as I think he must have been, the histamine reaction would have been very strong. Two hundred milligrammes of anti-histamine wouldn’t have gone anywhere. The only thing for people with that sort of allergy is an injection of adrenalin given as soon as possible. If they don’t have it they die very quickly.’ She shivered and he went on: ‘Patrick didn’t have that injection. He was heavily sedated, he couldn’t call for help and if there was no one near …’ He shrugged. ‘There would have been a lot of swelling but the swelling would gradually disappear. I didn’t see him till ten or eleven hours after he died. His face was a bit puffy and I put it down to the wasp sting under his eye. By the time Glover got to work on him—well!’
‘An accident?’
‘Too much of a coincidence. Four wasp stings and then you get stung by a bee in your own bedroom?’
‘He must have known he was allergic to bee stings.’
‘Not necessarily, although I think he did.
He hated honey. Remember? He knew about it all right and someone else knew too.’
‘You mean he told someone?’
‘Bernice, I have to say this. At the moment I can only say it to you, but I may have to tell the police. People with this sort of allergy usually find out about it when they’re children. They get stung, have the adrenalin, and afterwards they’re careful never to get another. But others know about it, the people who were there at the tune.’ Turning his back on the window behind which Nature seemed to seethe, he looked at the manufactured, man-made things in the modern kitchen, and at civilised, corseted, powdered Bernice. Tamsin and Patrick weren’t only husband and wife; they were cousins. They’d known each other since they were children. Even if he half-forgot it, never spoke of it, she might remember.
‘So simple, wasn’t it? Patrick has the wasp stings and he takes the sodium amytal to make him sleep heavily. When he’s asleep she goes to the only place where she can be sure of getting hold of a bee, Marvell’s orchard, and she takes with her a straw handbag.’
‘I see. Straw for ventilation, you mean. The bee wouldn’t suffocate. She found the bee before Crispin saw her. But why stay there, why make love to him?’
‘I don’t know. So it was a good excuse for coming? I tell you I don’t know, Bernice. But when she got back Patrick was under heavy sedation. You could have stuck a pin in him.’
‘Oh, Max, don’t!’
‘I’m going over to see her now.’ He brushed away the warning hand Bernice rested on his arm. ‘I have to,’ he said.
She was loading cases into the big car, Patrick’s car, when he came slowly between the silver-green crinolines of the willows. The car was standing in front of the double doors and Queenie was lying on the driving seat watching the flights of swifts that swooped across the garden, off-course from their hunting ground on The Green.
