Death of a Ghost

by Margery Allingham

  It was with a sense of relief that she heard the latch of the garden gate and Miss Florence Cunninghame’s soft heavy feet on the brick.

  She thrust the empty cup out of sight and rose to meet her visitor with a travesty of her bright professional smile.

  Miss Cunninghame was a very fair specimen of her type. She was plump, ladylike, elderly, and quite remarkably without talent. Her tweed coat and skirt, silk blouse, and pull-on hat might have belonged to any provincial schoolmistress. She had money of her own, and an insatiable passion for painting water-colours.

  As a person she was not very nice. Her blue eyes were set a little too closely together and her mouth had small vertical creases round it which made it look as though it drew up on a string. It was her habit to bring her sketches every fortnight to Mrs Potter for criticism and advice. She had a great portfolio of them now, having just returned from an orgy of painting near Rye.

  ‘Glorious weather,’ she said in a faint, rather affected voice. ‘I painted the whole time. The colouring is so beautiful down there. There was quite a crowd of us.’

  Mrs Potter felt suddenly helpless, an experience she never remembered knowing before in a similar situation, but the fine weather and colour near Rye, and Miss Cunninghame’s sketches, seemed to have become inexplicably silly.

  Her visitor stripped off her brown kid gloves and set about unpacking the portfolio with the eagerness of a child preparing a surprise.

  Mrs Potter felt her eyes glazing as she watched, and when the dozen or so green landscapes, horrible in their wet similarity, were spread out in front of her on the table she could hardly force herself to say the right things, to remember the well-worn words and phrases, the right inflections of surprise and gratification for which her visitor waited and would eventually pay her.

  When the first excitement of showing her drawings had passed, Miss Cunninghame’s blue eyes took a more determined light and she sat down, quite frankly preparing to gossip.

  ‘No more news?’ she said, lowering her voice and leaning forward confidentially. ‘I mean,’ she went on hastily, ‘last time I was here it was just after the – the affair. Don’t you remember? You were very upset, and I only stayed for ten minutes or so. You poor thing, you did look ill. You don’t look very much better now,’ she went on, eyeing her victim appraisingly. ‘I’ve been away, so I haven’t heard much. The newspapers have been very quiet, haven’t they? But my friend, Miss Richards, whose brother is in the Foreign Office, tells me that the police have dropped the whole affair. Is that true?’

  Mrs Potter sank down in a chair opposite Miss Cunninghame, not because she wanted to talk but because her knees would no longer support her. She knew her forehead was damp under her fringe, and wondered how long this dreadful physical reaction to the thoughts she would not permit herself to face would last.

  Miss Cunninghame went on with the dreadful eagerness of one who has broken the ice of a difficult subject.

  ‘You haven’t heard, I suppose? The police are very inconsiderate, aren’t they? I’ve always understood that. It must have been very terrible for you,’ she added in a blatant attempt to flatter her hearer into a confidence. ‘You knew him quite well, didn’t you? Was he ever a pupil of yours?’

  ‘Dacre?’ said Mrs Potter. ‘Oh, no. No, I never taught him anything.’ She might have added that that would have been impossible, but her instinct was to keep very quiet, to say nothing. It was as though she were standing in the middle of a stream of traffic and her only hope was to remain still.

  Something that was almost a smile of satisfaction broke through Miss Cunninghame’s imperfect mask of sympathy.

  ‘I mean, the inquest was so funny, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘I didn’t go, of course, but the reports in the newspapers were so vague. There was one thing I was going to ask you. They said he was married. I always understood that he was engaged to Miss Lafcadio. But perhaps I was mistaken.’

  Mrs Potter forced herself to speak. ‘They were engaged once,’ she said, ‘but it all blew over. Before he went to Italy, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Miss Cunninghame nodded and pursed her lips which pursed so easily. ‘Of course,’ she went on suddenly, her mild blue eyes widening alarmingly, ‘he was murdered, wasn’t he? Oh, forgive me for using that word, but I mean he was stabbed. But I see that perhaps you don’t want to talk about it. Perhaps it’s too painful.’

  The mild eyes seemed to have become positively devilish. Mrs Potter wondered if the beads of sweat had rolled down under her fringe. The chattering old gossip seemed to have become a fiend possessed of superhuman insight and the power to wrest truth from its well.

  Mrs Potter defended herself weakly.

  ‘It was a great shock,’ she said. ‘I know nothing about it.’

  ‘But, of course, you don’t,’ laughed Miss Cunninghame, a little nettled. ‘Of course you don’t, my dear, or else you wouldn’t be sitting here, would you? I only wondered. Of course, I did hear – or at least I gathered from something Miss Richards let slip – that there was some business about an Ambassador.

  ‘Not that he had done it, you know, but that – well, that he was there. Miss Richards thought,’ she went on, lowering her voice, ‘that it might be – well, Bolshevists, you know. Not quite intentionally, you know, but for propaganda, like the suffragettes. One does hear such extraordinary things.

  ‘I suppose,’ she went on in a last attempt to get something intelligent out of her informant, who had become wooden-faced and dumb with sheer, unmixed, stultifying fear, ‘I suppose you haven’t any idea?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Potter dully. ‘I haven’t any idea.’

  When Miss Cunninghame had packed up her drawings and stood ready to go, having already stayed a little over her time, she made a final effort.

  ‘Poor Mrs Lafcadio!’ she said. ‘She’s so old. What a shock for her. It’s so terrible it being left like this with nobody really knowing.’

  Mrs Potter gripped the door handle.

  ‘Yes,’ she said unsteadily. ‘Nobody really knowing. That’s the awful part.’

  ‘That’s what I say,’ said Miss Cunninghame brightly, and went.

  Left to herself, Mrs Potter glanced at the clock. It was half past four. William would not return until seven, and until then she was free. There was no need to prepare a meal. At a quarter to seven Belle would come down the garden path and ask them both to dinner: ‘As you’re so busy on Thursdays, my dear, I’m sure you haven’t had time to get anything ready.’

  Belle had done this every Thursday for nearly six years now. The invitations sounded spontaneous every time, but it had become a tradition and there was no reason to suppose that this day would be unlike any of the others, were it not for that awful feeling of impending danger pressing down upon her.

  As she stood irresolute her eyes wandered across the room and rested on something standing there, but she drew them away from it. That was not the way. She must pull herself together and not think.

  Suddenly everything in the room became startlingly clear. She saw it as though she had never seen any of it before. The fact that it was the last time that she would ever stand and look round this little room, so full of its pathetic mementoes of past affections, was, of course, unknown to her, but the fact remained that she saw it all in relief. Every piece of furniture, every picture, every drapery stood out clear from its neighbour.

  It was while she remained there wondering at this phenomenon that the telephone bell began to ring.

  CHAPTER 12

  What Shall We Do?

  –

  IT WAS Belle who found the body; sweet, friendly old Belle with her white Breton cap a-flutter from the breeze in the garden and her skirts held up a little to escape the dewy grasses on the sides of the path.

  She paused for a moment on the Potter step to break off a dead rose hip left over from the autumn on the rather straggly seven-sister tree which grew over the porch.

  Then, mildly surprised at receiving
no answer to her knock, she went round to the scullery door, which stood open.

  ‘Claire, my dear,’ she called. ‘Claire, are you busy? May I come in?’

  Her voice fluttered round the little building and was silent, and after waiting expectantly for a moment or so she went in and passed through to the studio.

  Claire Potter lay face downward on the divan, her arms limp and her features mercifully covered by the cushions. Her small compact figure in its art overall mingled so well with the homespun blanket that for a moment Belle’s eyes failed to distinguish it and she stood looking round the room, faintly disappointed to find it deserted.

  She had decided to sit down to wait, avoiding the exertion of a second visit, when the body on the divan caught her eye, and her whole attention was focused upon it, as if its shape had been defined by thick black lines.

  A quick intake of breath preceded her sharp exclamation. ‘Claire! I didn’t see you, my dear. What’s the matter?’

  Claire Potter’s body lay limp and flat, like a heap of clothes. Belle went over to it, her puckered face colouring with motherly concern.

  ‘Aren’t you well, child? Claire!’

  She laid a hand upon the flaccid, unresisting shoulder and attempted to rouse the piteous thing in the art overall.

  ‘Come, dear. Come, Claire. Sit up.’

  Beneath the old woman’s frail strength the body lifted a little, and for an instant the face which had once been Mrs Potter’s was exposed. Blue skin, distended eyes, and terrible parted lips, they all showed clearly against the raucous orange of the cushions.

  Belle’s old fingers released their hold and the face disappeared again in the pillows.

  The woman standing in the studio straightened herself. The movement was very slow. Her face was pale and her gentle brown eyes oddly expressionless. For some seconds she remained irresolute. Then she began to move with remarkable determination and agility.

  She glanced round the studio, noted that the place seemed to be in normal good order and then, stepping gently out of deference to that odd superstition that the dead sleep lightly and so must be preserved from noise, she went out into the scullery again.

  The small mirror over the sink shocked her with its reflection of a tottering, white-lipped old woman in a dishevelled bonnet of lawn, and she stopped resolutely to compose herself.

  At all costs, for everyone’s sake, there must be no fuss, no painful scene. No one else must be subjected to the shock of seeing unexpectedly that terrible, terrible face. Poor Claire. Poor, clever, practical Claire.

  In a moment or so she imagined she had forced herself to look more or less normal, and she continued steadily about the things she had to do.

  From the scullery door she could see down the path to Rennie’s shed.

  ‘Fred,’ she called softly. ‘Fred, come here a moment.’

  She fancied that her voice was normal, but the man had shot up from his bench and came hurrying towards her, the liveliest concern in his face.

  ‘Why, ma’am, what is it?’ he demanded, catching her arm to support her.

  Belle looked up at him and remembered disconcertingly in the midst of the crowding fears and sorrows in her mind that the first time she had seen him he had been a ragged, dirty child of five crying for his mother at her knee.

  ‘What is it, ma’am?’ he repeated urgently. ‘Are you ill at all?’

  His concern for herself at such a time irritated the old lady and she became briskly practical.

  ‘Come in here, where we can’t be seen from the house,’ she said, stepping back into the scullery, and continued as he followed her wonderingly. ‘Mrs Potter is in the studio. I’ve just found her. She’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ said the man, his jaw dropping open. ‘Are you sure, ma’am?’

  Belle shuddered, and was ashamed of herself for the reaction.

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Go in, but don’t disturb her, poor soul.’

  Fred Rennie returned, his dark face grave and his forehead puckered.

  ‘You must come into the house, ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s not right for you to have had to see that. Not at all right. You must lie down. Put your feet up,’ he added rather helplessly.

  ‘Rennie, don’t be a fool.’ Belle’s authority returned. ‘There are several things to be done. Poor Potter will be home at seven and we can’t let him go in there. First of all we must get a doctor.’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am. We must tell someone. No need for Miss Beatrice to know at once.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Belle, adding involuntarily, ‘Fred, I’m glad your master’s not alive.’

  The man nodded gravely. ‘It would have worried him,’ he said, and went on after a pause, ‘better have her own doctor. He lives down in the Crescent. Shall I phone him?’

  Belle hesitated. ‘No. I don’t think so. Donna Beatrice might hear you and I don’t want the household alarmed.’

  ‘There’s Mrs Potter’s own phone in the studio?’

  Belle shook her head. ‘No. It’s not quite respectful in front of the dead. Besides, I think nothing in that room ought to be disturbed, not even in the slightest.’

  ‘Not disturbed?’ he began, and broke off abruptly as the significance of her words sank into his mind. ‘Why, ma’am, you don’t mean to say that you think she … that is, you don’t mean that her death wasn’t natural, that there’s been another …?’

  He stopped, not caring to use the word.

  ‘I don’t know what I think,’ said Belle. ‘You’d better go and fetch the doctor. Bring him back with you.’

  ‘But I can’t leave you here, ma’am.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘Do as you’re told.’

  But when Rennie had departed, walking with suspicious nonchalance until he was once past the garden gate and then taking to his heels like the proverbial bringer of bad news, Belle bethought her of Mr Campion.

  She went quietly down the garden path and called to Lisa. ‘Lisa,’ she said, ‘I want you to stand on Mrs Potter’s doorstep. Don’t let anyone go in until I come back.’

  On the phone in her own house Belle was studiously non-committal, but to Mr Campion, sitting up in his flat in Bottle Street, her message came like a frantic appeal for help.

  ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘is that you, my dear? I’ve had such trouble getting on to you. I wonder if you could come over and see me? Yes, now. At once. No, no, nothing is exactly wrong. Nothing to get alarmed about, actually. But I should be very grateful if you could come soon. Albert, listen. Take a taxi.’

  It was the last three words which convinced Mr Campion that something was seriously amiss. Like many people of her generation, Belle regarded taxicabs as telegrams, measures of emergency.

  ‘I’ll be over right away,’ he said and heard her gentle sigh of relief.

  As Belle hung up the receiver Donna Beatrice came to the top of the stairs.

  ‘Whom were you talking to?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Campion,’ said Belle truthfully. ‘He’s coming over to talk to me.’

  Miraculously, Donna Beatrice was satisfied, and Belle went down the staircase to the garden again.

  Lisa came out of the porch as her mistress appeared. Her skin was very yellow and her bright black eyes looked scared.

  ‘I went in,’ she said without preamble.

  ‘Oh, Lisa.’

  One old woman eyed the other.

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m waiting for the doctor.’

  ‘I will wait also,’ said Lisa, and they were both in the little scullery when Rennie returned with assistance.

  Young Doctor Fettes was a quiet, square young man with bushy black hair growing low down over his forehead and the gift of looking blank without appearing foolish. During his seven or eight years of general practice he had not quite grown used to the amazing complacency with which the relations of his patients put their responsibilities gratefully on his shoulder, as if his m
edical degrees carried with them a species of omnipotence together with a thorough knowledge of the world.

  He surveyed the three anxious people in the scullery now, their frightened eyes resting on him trustingly, and wondered regretfully what past generation of super-medicos had engendered the superstition. Mercifully they saw nothing in his face but the comforting stamp of authority. He was a doctor.

  He knew them all slightly, which made it easier, and when Belle explained that Potter was down at his school and would not return until seven he went in to see that which had once been Mrs Potter.

  Lisa accompanied him. She was firm on this point, and Belle relinquished the unpleasant duty gratefully.

  Rennie brought a chair from the shed for his mistress, and stood by her side like a sentinel throughout the gruesome business.

  From the scullery doorway a bright corner of the studio was visible. Its brightness was intentional, with heaped shawls and Chianti bottles and painted poppy heads. Belle could not look at it, but sat like a girl and twisted her wedding-ring round and round to keep herself from crying.

  Campion found her like that, sitting on the kitchen chair, her head bent and her old fingers turning in her lap. She lifted her head as he came up and he stooped and kissed her involuntarily and slipped his hand over hers.

  ‘What is it?’

  She told him in a soft hushed voice which sounded old and pathetic, and he listened with horror creeping up his backbone.

  ‘You found her first?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sure she was dead?’

  ‘Oh – oh, yes. Yes, my dear. Quite dead. Poor, poor busy Claire.’ She swayed forward a little as she spoke and he caught her.

  She refused to go into the house, however.

  ‘The doctor will want to see me,’ she said. ‘He told me to stay.’

  Doctor Fettes came into the scullery at last, was introduced to Campion, whose name he recognized, and began to ask questions.

  ‘Mrs Lafcadio,’ he said, betraying a very faint Scots accent, ‘when you went into the studio and found the – the lady, did you move anything at all?’