by Anne Morice
“That’s not the same thing. You seem to forget what I’m going through.”
“No, I don’t, but the inquest will be over by now. You must try and put it out of your mind.”
“Easy for you to talk,” he grumbled and then relapsed into silence again.
When it had begun to sit rather heavily on us, I said: “There’s nothing else worrying you, is there, Philip? Apart from the inquest, I mean, and missing Dolly so badly?”
“You don’t consider that enough?”
“Oh, it would be for most people,” I agreed, seeing what a little flattery would do, “a great deal more than enough, but up to now you’ve borne up so well, been so marvellously brave. I wondered why it should have hit you so badly now?”
“It was a different environment, easier to be detached then. Now that I’m back here in our old dear home, where we spent so many happy hours together and surrounded by all her beloved objects . . .”
The pathos of it, despite being laid on a trifle too thickly, was causing the tears to flow and I said hastily: “Yes, of course, very foolish and unimaginative of me not to have foreseen that; but I suppose it had to be faced some time and the longer you put it off the worse it would have been.”
“I do wish you would stop talking in platitudes, Tessa. It’s getting on my nerves.”
It was tempting to reply that nothing would have given me more pleasure than to stop talking in anything at all, to walk out of the house and leave him to wallow in his own self-pity, but that would not have brought the errand of mercy to a very satisfactory conclusion, so I said meekly: “Okay, Philip, what would you like to talk about?”
“Nobody can understand what it’s like . . . being alone and having to make decisions all the time . . . I’m very worried and I don’t know what I should do.”
“About what, in particular?”
“I couldn’t make up my mind whether to mention it or not. At first, I decided not to, but then I remembered how you nagged and pestered me about those anonymous letters, as though they must be important in some way. And, for all I know, there could be other people who know about this too, so sooner or later it might come out and then perhaps I’d be in trouble for suppressing evidence.”
“I’m finding this rather hard to follow, Philip. Are you telling me there’s been another letter, by any chance?”
“No, no, certainly not. Way off the mark.”
“Then do please explain!”
“I can do better than that,” he said, getting up and walking over to the door, if not with an elastic step, with somewhat more spring than he had shown for several days. “Come with me.”
He led the way to the morning room, which was at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and just large enough to accommodate two swivel chairs, a filing cabinet and an enormous, executive type desk in the bay window, complete with blotter, pen tray, engagement diary and telephone.
Walking up to it and taking a small key from his pocket, he said: “Dolly used this as her office. It was where she did all her accounts and correspondence. She was so business-like, you know. I never had to bother about a single thing after I married her, not so much as a Christmas card.”
The key fitted the left-hand bottom drawer and when he had pulled it open he stood back so that I could look at the contents. After such an elaborate build-up, it was disappointing to find they consisted simply of the materials she had needed for wrapping her parcels. There was a ball of string in one corner, a tube of glue in another, with three different sized pairs of scissors between them, on top of a stack of neatly folded, unused brown paper.
I stared at this collection for over a minute, before its significance hit me.
“Now look underneath,” Philip ordered me.
I obeyed and saw what I was now half prepared for, a pile of newspapers, also so neatly folded as to suggest that they had never been opened and had lain there untouched since they left the shop.
Chapter Eleven
“So tell me what you make of that,” I said, having described this dramatic incident to Toby.
“That she had gone right out of her odious mind, presumably.”
“It’s one possibility. Would you care to hear what construction Philip puts on it?”
“If you think it would amuse me.”
“I couldn’t swear to that, but you may find it interesting because it shows distinctly more insight and imagination than I had believed him to possess. His theory is that Dolly, correctly as it turns out, was convinced that someone meant to kill her. However, she did not know who it was, or not for certain anyway and, having no proof, she realised that no-one would believe such a melodramatic tale. They would put it down to hysteria, or change of life or something, so she devised this scheme of manufacturing the proof by sending herself anonymous letters.”
“The flaw in that argument being that nobody realised until it was too late that the letters were intended for her and not for Philip.”
“Exactly! And that was intentional on her part and what I find so shrewd of Philip to have understood. He believes that she did it deliberately, guessing that, if the letters had been addressed to her, no-one would have paid much attention. Whereas, if it looked as though Philip were being threatened, Oliver would be bound to call in the police, in order to protect his valuable star and potentially valuable production. He believes, and he must have known better than anyone how her mind worked, that she would have foreseen that they, being both impartial and experienced in such matters, would have had no fixed, preconceived ideas about who the letters were intended for and would have conducted their investigations accordingly. In other words, they would be looking not only for someone who had a grudge against Philip, but also for someone who had it in for Dolly, thereby scaring the wits out of whoever it was and bringing it home to them that there was a fat chance of murdering her and getting away with it. There’s a certain twisted logic in it, you must agree, and it would explain why, right from the start she got so much more steamed up about the letters than anyone else and why she became so furious and frustrated when Oliver continued to be feeble and irresolute about taking any action.”
“Though you’d have thought that, if she really believed her life was in danger, she’d have mentioned it once or twice in passing, at least in the privacy of the boudoir?”
“Apparently, she didn’t. At least, not in that connection, although Philip did tell me that she had suffered for years from hypochondria and got into a state over the most trifling symptoms. An ordinary bilious attack was enough to make her believe that she had been struck down by a fatal disease. I found that rather surprising, not the sort of neurosis one associated with extrovert Dolly, but it just shows how little one ever knows about what goes on in other people’s lives. However, I count it as a point in Philip’s favour that he doesn’t claim that she went so far as to hint that someone was trying to kill her. It would have been one very obvious way to back up his version of how the letters came to be written, if he had invented the whole story for my benefit and planted the evidence in the little bottom drawer himself.”
“Why should he have bothered to do that?”
“To shut me up, is the only reason I can think of. Perhaps he knows there is a very different answer to the puzzle and wants to head me off it, or perhaps he feels remorseful and guilt-ridden now for having treated the letters so lightheartedly and realises that, if he had behaved more responsibly, Dolly might still be alive. So it is more satisfying to his vanity that the letters should be buried and forgotten and to that end he would fob me off with any old tale, just to stop me going on about it. I wouldn’t put it past him, but I thought at first that the big snag there was that he couldn’t have put the evidence together himself, simply because there hasn’t been a single opportunity since her death to get his hands on it. Now I can see, of course, that it would hardly have presented any problem at all. It would have been typical of Dolly to have kept a handy supply of new brown paper for her parce
ls, instead of making do with bits and pieces of left-overs, like the rest of us. There’s one thing I do regret, though, and that is that it didn’t occur to me to sneak a look at the dates on those newspapers. If they’d been back numbers, it wouldn’t have positively proved that his story of having found them in the drawer was true, but if just one of them had post-dated the murder it would have blown it to smithereens. Too late now, though.”
“Oh, surely you can invent some excuse to take another look next time you go visiting?”
“Unfortunately, when he asked me what I thought he should do about it, my brain wasn’t working very fast and I said that, since a bundle of unopened newspapers would be useless as evidence and, if his understanding of their purpose was correct, the letters, should they ever be found, wouldn’t provide any clue to the identity of her murderer, there was nothing to be gained by doing anything. He might just as well use them to light the fire. If some of them happened to bear the wrong date, you may be sure the last piece of advice was carried out within two minutes of my leaving the house.”
“Yes, he does seem to have cut the ground very neatly from under your feet. What a wily old person he is turning out to be!”
“Or else completely ingenuous and as baffled as the rest of us. I don’t see how I am ever going to find out which. And that’s not the only bother because now we come to the puzzling behaviour of Mr. Oliver Welles.”
“Oh, do we really? Have you no mercy?”
“But don’t you find it altogether mysterious, Toby? It’s another thing I can’t make up my mind about, whether to believe that mugging story or not.”
“My dear girl, why should you not believe it? I am sorry to smash down the walls of your ivory tower, but I have to break it to you that it is the kind of thing that happens all the time and, from the way you have described his domestic surroundings, I should judge Oliver to be more vulnerable than most.”
“Oh, I’m not denying that. It was his reaction which didn’t ring true. For instance, when I asked him how this mugger could have known so accurately which house the keys belonged to, he was completely floored and he obviously hadn’t given it a thought. Now, wouldn’t you expect that to be one of the first things he’d start wondering about?”
“He’d had a nasty shock and was still feeling bemused, I daresay.”
“He wasn’t hurt and he’d had the whole night to recover. I don’t see why his brain shouldn’t have been functioning normally by then. And it wasn’t only that he hadn’t given any thought to it himself, but when I brought it to his attention that Mugs might have been someone who recognised him, he just slid away from the subject and let it die, which I call most unnatural.”
“And, understanding as I do the devious workings of your so-called mind, I daresay you have now convinced yourself that either Mugs didn’t exist, or was someone well known to Oliver, but whose identity he has some secret and probably shameful reason for wishing to conceal. In other words, he too is up to something?”
“You’re right, both explanations had occurred to me, and not without justification, in my opinion. For example, how do you account for his tearing round to our house, when he had so many urgent matters to deal with, in order to spend ten minutes with Philip? Quite unnecessary, one would have thought; and another point I’d like to draw your attention to is his strange reluctance to call the police. I could understand that attitude when the play was teetering on the edge of disaster and he was anxious to avoid a single whiff of bad publicity to tip it right over; but that’s all finished now and the reluctance remains as strong as ever. I mean, tell me, honestly, Toby, wouldn’t you have expected the first move on getting home after being mugged would be to dial 999? The man couldn’t have got far away in those three or four minutes and if they’d been able to nab him before he ditched the credit cards they’d have been home and dry. Yet, according to Clarrie, he did nothing of the sort, just sat around moaning about getting the locks changed. I find it inexplicable.”
“Then let me explain! I realise that your faith in our wonderful police is such as to move mountains, which is as it should be, but most people regard it as a shocking waste of time to spend half an hour answering questions, only to be told that there is no reason to hope that anything can be done about it. What I find slightly more inexplicable is that he did not fly to the telephone and get the credit cards cancelled. That would be my first move, if I were ever unfortunate enough to be in his position.”
“Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. You have added one more puzzle to the list and here comes the last one, which in my view beats the lot. Apart from taking no action after the mugging, are you aware that neither did he bother to report the burglary? You’d have thought he’d have done that to satisfy the insurance company, if nothing else.”
“And, in fact, I distinctly remember your telling me that he had done so and the police were on their way?”
“That’s what he said, yes; about twenty minutes before Mr. Barksfield and I arrived. I believed him at the time, but not any more.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because I was there for another fifteen or twenty minutes, making a total of half an hour and there still wasn’t a copper in sight. Oliver passed this off very airily by saying that no-one could ever find the place and he often had to wait in for a whole morning for someone to come and do a repair job, but that won’t do for the local branch, will it? Even supposing they didn’t know the whereabouts of every nook and cranny in the area, they have things called maps, you know, and it’s my belief that Oliver had neither rung them up, nor had any intention of doing so.”
“I wonder why not?”
“As I keep repeating, it can only be for one of two reasons. Either the mugging and the burglary didn’t happen, or else they did and he knows who the culprit was and prefers to keep it to himself.”
“And which strikes you as the more likely?”
“Couldn’t hazard a guess, but there’s one thing I am sure of.”
“Oh, good! What’s that?”
“Whatever the answer, I’m willing to bet it’s tied up in some way with those anonymous letters.”
Chapter Twelve
I
The service was better attended than I expected, almost a full house, in fact, although, conceivably, more than half the congregation had been drawn there by curiosity, rather than affection for the deceased. If so, they probably felt that it had been worth the trouble because Philip, so often a better actor off stage than on, gave a plucky performance. He had dug out a wide-brimmed, black homburg hat, which certainly made him conspicuous and he got his timing right too. By making some trivial excuse to return to the house when we had got as far as the gate, he contrived to hold up the action by arriving several minutes late and pausing inside the church for at least one more after removing the hat. Then, leaning heavily on my arm, the very picture of dignified grief, he embarked at last on his slow progress up the aisle to the front pew.
Our departure was made in similar style and evidently had such an awesome effect on all present that only a handful of people had the temerity to shuffle up and mutter a word or two of condolence. These included the Vicar and family solicitor, although not Anthony Blewiston, whom I had noticed sitting on his own near the back of the church when we went in, but who had vanished by the time we came out again.
We had agreed in advance that in the circumstances it would be both unnecessary and inappropriate to invite anyone back to the house for sherry and biscuits, but Philip and I were both in need of something more reviving than those and we covered the short distance back to The Old Rectory at twice the speed with which we had left it. I was relieved to discover that the well-drilled Mrs. Gale had been far-sighted enough to leave a tray bearing glasses, ice and assorted bottles on a table in the drawing room.
As soon as Philip had been relieved of his hat and installed in an armchair, with a gin and tonic in his hand, I told him that I would leave him for a few minutes to go and clean up
and, when I came downstairs again, I turned left instead of right and made for the morning room. I had only the smallest hope of finding the newspapers still in the drawer where I had last seen them, but nevertheless considered it would be remiss and perhaps a touch cowardly not to grab this opportunity to try my luck. The fact that the door was not completely shut seemed to endorse this decision, since it enabled me to push it wide open and enter the room without making a sound.
Having done so, the only reward I got for my pains was a shock of major proportions. Philip was seated in the desk chair, which he had swivelled round to face the door. There was a long, thick white envelope across his knees, but he was not looking at it. His expression said plainer than words that he had been waiting for me.
“Looking for something?” he asked pleasantly.
“Well, no, that is, only the telephone. I wanted to ring up Toby and let him know what time I’d be back. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
“My dear girl, why should I mind. Ring up anyone you please. It’s all right, if I stay, I suppose? Nothing private?”
“No, of course not.”
“Good, because when you’ve said what you have to say to him I have something to show you. It’s Dolly’s will. I thought you might be interested, you and I being such old and trusted friends. More like father and daughter, I often say.”
Toby has a phobia about the telephone and rarely picks it up, if Mrs. Parkes, the housekeeper, is there to do it for him, which this time, to my relief, she was. It provided a reprieve of sorts and an extra minute or two while she fetched him to dredge up some slightly more pressing reason for calling him, since I was aware that the news about the time of my return was liable to be greeted by loud expressions of total indifference. I had worried unnecessarily, however, for he began by saying: “Thank God you’ve rung up at last! What time will you be back?”
“Well, pretty soon, actually. That’s really what I wanted to tell you. I mean Philip’s borne up tremendously well and I don’t think he needs me here much longer.”
