Sleep of Death

by Anne Morice

  I had much to ruminate on while beating up the eggs and afterwards, during the twenty minutes’ drive to Toby’s house and one question kept recurring. Should this fresh disaster be seen merely as the latest in the long series of misfortunes which had been raining down on Oliver, or could it conceivably be linked, however remotely, with the murder of Dolly Mickleton?

  III

  “So you never heard what Paula had to say, after all?”

  “Oh yes I did, and with no nudging either. When we realised that Oliver wasn’t coining up to break the news in person, Philip asked me to repeat what had been said on the telephone. So I gave him the gist of it, but, as it didn’t concern him personally, he wasn’t greatly interested. He threw out some remark about how distressed poor Dolly would have been to hear about it, because Lady Hartman had been one of her oldest friends, but I took that to be a passing token to the vanity of the departed. So that didn’t take long and then he asked me whether I was, or was not going to read Paula’s letter aloud and I said I was and I did.”

  “Well, go on! Is she going to renounce the money and hand it back to him?”

  “Not on your life! If Philip had any hopes of that kind he must have been disappointed. Though, to be fair, I didn’t get the impression that he had. He agreed with me that she’s probably like a good many other well-off people, who believe that either everyone else has just as much money as they do, or that, if not, it’s because, for some reason, they prefer to be without it. However, I also suspect that many of them only pretend to believe that because it suits them to and in their innermost souls they are racked with guilt about it at least twice a year. Paula strikes me as belonging to that category.”

  “I congratulate you!”

  “What for?”

  “You appear to have penetrated so deep into her mind, and with only one little air letter to guide you!”

  “Well, you see, Toby, in one paragraph she chooses to infer that Dolly had settled a lot of money on Philip before she died, so as to avoid death duties, and that her own paltry share is no more than a drop in Auntie’s financial ocean; and in the next it sneaks out that she also feels that some compensation is due to him, with the onus on her to provide it.”

  “And how does she resolve this awkward contradiction?”

  “She announces that she has received a cable from the solicitors, giving her the bare facts of her inheritance and saying that a copy of the will is on its way to her. However, being the sound little business woman Philip assures me she is, this will not do for her. She is sure there will lie endless papers needing her signature and matters to be settled about probate and so forth, and that all this will be a very dragged out business, if it has to be conducted by correspondence. She therefore proposes to come over to England next week and deal with it on the spot. I expect her real purpose is to make sure there is no hanky panky and to put paid to any idea Philip might have about contesting the will.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much compensation for him in it, so far.”

  “No, but here comes the sugar round the pill. She ends by saying that she can’t tell how long she will need to spend in London, but that, when she returns to Johannesburg, she would like Philip to accompany her, as she feels it would do him all the good in the world, at this sad period of his life to have a holiday in the sun. She will fix the details with him when she arrives, but in the meantime she is so optimistic about obtaining his consent that she has already made the provisional airline reservations for them both. In other words, making it clear that all expenses will be paid. You see what I mean about the guilty conscience?”

  “And how does Philip take to the idea?”

  “He is tempted, I am glad to say, as well he might be, because she has thought of everything and forestalled all his objections. For instance, she says there will be no need for him to spend more time than he wishes with her and the boys, since she intends to put what she calls the guest chalet entirely at his disposal. So he will be able to retire from the hurly burly of family life to the privacy of his own apartments whenever he feels inclined to. Personally, I feel grateful to Paula and to Dolly too, for having had the sense to leave everything to her. Philip in England, with heaps of money, would have been an improvement on our present situation. Philip in South Africa will be better still.”

  “So you think he means to go?”

  “He’d be a fool not to. What can he lose? All the same, cunning and diplomacy will be needed, if we are not to gum things up. He is so pigheaded and perverse that the more we urge him to give it a try, the less inclined he will be to do so. And, if he once gets the idea that we can’t wait to go belting down to Heathrow to wave him goodbye, the whole scheme will go straight up the spout.”

  “You had better leave it to Paula to get round him. She sounds the sort of woman who knows exactly what she means to do and he will find himself being swept along on the course she has mapped out for him, whether he likes it or not.”

  “Yes, I expect you’re right. The curious thing is that, although they weren’t related, she and Dolly sound like two of a kind, don’t they? I daresay Paula managed to pick up a few tips in her formative years.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Here you are!” Robin announced two days later. “You may return it to the owner and tell him to put it back in the medicine chest. That should please him.”

  “You mean it’s harmless?”

  “About as toxic as Milk of Magnesia.”

  “What a pity!”

  “Is it? Why?”

  “Well, you see, if someone had really been putting arsenic in Dolly’s indigestion mixture, then perhaps, given time, something else, like another bilious attack, might have sent Philip plunging into a new burst of total recall and he would have been able to remember who it was. But no chance of that, now that we know for certain that it was all in her imagination, just another instance of the hypochondria getting out of control.”

  “Anyway, what’s it to you? You told me you had renounced all idea of sticking your oar in?”

  “Oh, I have. This would have been purely for my own entertainment. And, in my detached way, I cannot help feeling interested, you know. There are so many curious features about this case. Improbable as it may sound, I begin to think it may have been a conspiracy, more than one person involved.”

  “Thank you, I do know what a conspiracy is.”

  “Okay, if you’re so clever, tell me something else. Take the hypothetical case of a celebrated financier, whose empire, unknown to all but a few, is crumbling around him, but who is still fighting to stave off disaster.”

  “And, having taken it, what am I supposed to do with it?”

  “I would like to know whether it would be possible for who had got wind of the situation to leak it to the press, thereby making the crash inevitable? Or, to be completely accurate, whether the threat of doing so would carry any weight?”

  “I suppose a good deal would depend on which press you had in mind?”

  “Oh, is there more than one?”

  “In the sense that I do not believe there is an editor in this country who would touch a story like that with asbestos gloves clamped round a barge pole. It would be far too hot a potato. On the other hand, I can see that it might have great appeal for some foreign newspaper, say German or American, where the libel laws are different from ours. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “And is your hypothetical financier called Sir Joseph Hartman, by any chance? Just like the real one who shot himself the other day?”

  “Yes to that too.”

  “But it’s all strictly for your own entertainment?”

  “Yes, for the third time, although I will admit that it’s beginning to get a grip on me.”

  “Well, presumably, if there is a link, it will soon be found, but you do seem to have got in ahead of the field, so perhaps it would be worth following up. In the meantime, I have something else on offer for your entertai
nment this evening. I thought we might take a look at that play you’ve been talking about. We re supposed to pick up the tickets by seven o’clock, but I can ring up and cancel them, if you’re not in the mood for it.”

  “The girl’s quite good, don’t you think?” he asked during the interval, evidently pushed for something to praise.

  “Not bad, if you happen to like fat legs and a lot of teeth. Clarrie would have been better.”

  “Oh, surely not? This one is meant to be defenceless and vulnerable, which is hardly how I think of Clarrie.”

  “Her character has nothing to do with it. Apart from having the right number of teeth, she is a much better actress.”

  “All the same . . .”

  “Yes, yes, I know what you mean. She wouldn’t really be right for it, I know that. I suppose the truth is that she’s on my mind.”

  “There now! And here have I been congratulating myself that she was getting off it at last. There’s been a merciful silence from that quarter over the past few days.”

  “Which is precisely the trouble. I have a nagging suspicion that she may be more defenceless and vulnerable than appearances suggest, or than she is aware of herself. So I worry when I don’t hear from her.”

  “I can’t imagine why. If ever anyone was capable of looking after themselves, I’d have backed her to make a good job of it.”

  “I suppose it must be on account of Pete that I feel uneasy. There’s something about him I don’t trust. She finds his jealousy and mischief-making a huge joke, but in my opinion he could be dangerous.”

  “And you may be right there. I know my Superintendent would endorse every word.”

  “Is that so? Meaning that Pete is still high on his list?”

  “High enough, although it’s mainly based on hunch, as far as I know. Or, as some would say, prejudice. That promising line I told you about of the antique business being partly a cover-up turned out to be a dud. Nothing to support it, as yet. That was the second bell, by the way. Shall we go back, or have you had enough?”

  “Oh no, let’s go back. You never know, it may get better.”

  “Were you serious when you advised me to push on?” I asked in the car going home “Am I ever not serious?”

  “Frequently, and this is such a reversal of the usual line I get from you.”

  “I know, but I’ve been watching you during the rare occasions when you’ve been at home during the past week and I’ve seen what I’m up against. You go around like a zombie, with a soppy look on your face, straightening pictures which are straight already and picking things up, so that you can put them down again, and it’s clear that your thoughts are miles away.”

  “Oh, not all the time!”

  “Often enough to show which way the wind is blowing. That’s why I got the tickets this evening. I hoped an excursion into the theatre might snap you out of it, bring you back to what you think of as reality. A waste of time, as it turned out. If anything, it made you worse than ever. You hardly referred to the play once, just went on and on about Clarrie.”

  “How boring of me!”

  “Yes, it was, boring beyond belief. And I think you had better try some other way to get it out of your system.”

  “I see! So you are thinking of yourself, as well as me? Well, that’s a comfort. At least, I shall get plenty of co-operation.”

  “And would you like a piece of practical advice to be going on with?”

  “Very much.”

  “It hinges on another reason I have for encouraging you to go ahead, which is simply that I see your task this time as a purely mental exercise. Therefore, you will be in less danger of putting yourself at risk, or getting into any really bad scrapes.”

  “Why must it be a purely mental exercise?”

  “It’s in the nature of things. Now that the company is split up, you have no hope of acquiring any more information than you possess already. And you’ll achieve nothing by pounding round fabricating excuses to get in touch with them all again and arousing hackles and suspicions by asking awkward questions.”

  “So what do you suggest instead?”

  “My advice would be to take the telephone off the hook and spend a couple of days writing down everything you can remember about what happened, which could conceivably be relevant, from the moment when the first letter arrived. And I do mean everything; not only events, but people’s reactions to them and what they said.”

  “It would fill a book.”

  “Okay, write a book!”

  “Perhaps you are hoping that months before it is finished the murderer will have been caught and brought to trial?”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be bad, but I am actually quite serious about this. I feel that if only you were to get it all down in the right order, with nothing left out, you might well discover a point where someone had slipped up, revealed more knowledge than an innocent person could have possessed, that kind of thing.”

  I was grateful for the advice, which I considered sound enough in its way, so did not spoil it for him by saying that I believed I already had discovered who had slipped up, not once but several times. The snag was that my only hope of proving it lay in pounding round and asking awkward questions.

  Chapter Seventeen

  As so often happens, the one on whose answer most depended was, from the asking point of view, of such supreme awkwardness as to make all the rest seem like child’s play. After wasting half an hour trying unsuccessfully to fabricate an excuse, I put it aside, leaving it to chance or the inspiration of the moment to provide one and concentrated instead on those in the easier category. On this list there were one or two names for whom no fabrications were needed, so, having put the telephone back on its hook, I rang up Clarrie and dished out a quantity of jam, before coming to the pill inside it and asking her how Pete was getting on and whether he’d been in any more trouble with the police.

  “Not as far as I know,” she replied, “but then I wouldn’t, would I? We’re not speaking at the moment.”

  “Oh, Clarrie, not another row?”

  “But yes, indeed! I can never describe to you how he’s behaving.”

  “What have you fallen out over this time?”

  “Well, like I was telling you, I’ve been offered this job in Manchester and naturally I want to do it, who wouldn’t? It’s only six weeks and I shall be working like a packhorse from dawn till dawn, but of course he can’t leave London himself and the silly fool has got it into his head that it’s only an excuse to get away from him. He’s been popping off threats like a machine gun.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “When last heard from, they were coming in two varieties. One was to do me a mischief, such as gouging my eyes out, so that I’d keep banging into the flats. The other was to run up to Manchester one afternoon and set fire to the theatre. Talk about tempestuous! Honestly, Tessa, nobody knows what I have to . . .”

  She continued in this strain for several more minutes and I knew there was no hope now of getting her to talk of anything but herself, but I wasn’t bothered. In a curious way and with hardly any prompting, she had not only swallowed the pill, but handed back some jam as well.

  Philip came next on the list and, after the routine enquiries, I told him that his indigestion mixture had been tested and found wanting.

  “Wanting?”

  “Of contamination.”

  “Nothing wrong with it, eh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So that’s that. The hypochondria must have got a worse hold on her than I’d realised.”

  “Not necessarily, Philip.”

  “My dear child, you’re talking nonsense! If it had got to the pitch of imagining that her medicine was being poisoned, she must have been in a pretty bad state, poor darling.”

  “Surely the point to remember, though, is that she was convinced that someone was trying to kill her and, as we know only too well, there was nothing imaginary about that. Hypochondria doesn’t enter into it
because, naturally, in that situation, she would have become suspicious of everyone around her and everything she touched. If she believed it was the medicine which was making her ill, what more logical than to assume there was something sinister about it?”

  “Well, yes, I see what you mean. I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way, but I daresay there’s something in what you say. Doesn’t get us any further though, does it? What you might call a dead end.”

  Feeling that he might have found something else to call it, I dropped the subject and made some more enquiries about his own health and well-being.

  “Better, as I told you, but not right yet and I get very depressed. It’s not much fun being stuck here all on my own, you know. I’m getting absolutely sick of it.”

  “I’m sure you are, but perhaps you’ll be winging off to Africa quite soon?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, I haven’t made up my mind yet. And don’t say ‘Oh Philip!’ in that mournful voice.”

  “Well, I know it’s none of my business and I shan’t try and persuade you against your will, but, honestly, wouldn’t it be the best thing? You’d be well looked after and not lonely any more and you wouldn’t need to stay longer than a month or two, if you found yourself getting bored.”

  “A month or two? Whatever gave you the impression that I would dream of staying as long as that? Two or three weeks would be my limit.”

  “Oh, but would it be worth the trouble of going all that distance for such a short visit? You’d hardly have got settled in when it was time to come home again.”

  “My dear girl, what are you talking about? I have no intention of getting settled in. I do have my living to earn, let me remind you. You seem to forget that I am now virtually penniless.”

  “No, I hadn’t forgotten, but this holiday won’t cost you anything and I should have thought it would be only sensible to take a few months off, after all you’ve been through.”