Most Loving Mere Folly

by Edith Pargeter

  ‘Do! And while you’re there, go over the studio again, and see if we missed anything in the way of traces of the stuff. I don’t think there’ll be anything to find, but we can’t afford not to look again. If there is antimony among her materials, you’ll probably need to test all round the place for fingerprints, though I doubt if you’ll find any but the residents’. Still, a negative answer is an answer of a sort. Take Martin with you.’

  So Sergeant Grayne arrived once again at Little Worth, some thirty-seven hours after his first visit, just as Suspiria was opening her kiln. She did not hear his gentle tap at the front door; and when he tried the latch, and found the door unlocked, he let himself into the dark living-room and stood listening for a moment, and tracing the gleams of light which flowed under the curtain from the back premises. Then he walked through to the workshop, and through the soiled windows he saw her standing over the kiln. She was so intent that she did not hear him come into the room, and for the racks of pottery and hanging screens she could not see him until he chose to move forward from the doorway.

  The kiln was still fairly hot, but sufficiently cooled for her to lift out the upper layers of pots with tongs, with only a slight risk of causing wounds on the glaze. All the glow of heat had already dulled from sight, though the workshop was warm with released air. She was standing the few intact pots round the rim of the kiln, and had reached the disordered mass in the centre, where even the bat shelves had been broken and welded into the lump of shattered ceramic. Colours emerged from the corners, clean and bright, shining across the wreckage. The young constable craned over Sergeant Grayne’s shoulder to see Suspiria’s face, and caught his breath with a shock of surprise, for she was crying.

  She stood looking down into the pit, still palpitating with heat, with such a frenzy of sadness in her face that it was as if she were regarding another death. Hardly anything in the bottom of the kiln had survived. Only shining small curves of those beautiful things, the fruit of her mind and hands, rose here and there out of the raw, hot mass, the rapid strokes of her brushes leaping across them and into the fused clay monstrosity again, where they hid and were lost. She had killed them, and maimed herself. She wondered if she could ever forgive that to the innocent who had caused the crime, and whether indeed innocents who bring about murder and perjury ever should be forgiven. A few unregarded tears flowed down her cheeks, and hissed into dryness upon the dead body, but no miracle happened.

  ‘Is anything the matter, Mrs. Freeland?’ asked Sergeant Grayne, advancing round the racks suddenly to shatter her solitude.

  She did not so much as start, only looked at him incuriously over the hot grave, and said in the dullest of voices: ‘I had a burst. One of the pieces has exploded in the firing, and smashed most of the others. It happens! It can’t be helped.’

  He felt that it was a tragedy, and had enough craftsman’s blood in him to understand how the failing of the hand can excite the same passion of remorse and grief as a crime. It was not her mind that felt the guilt, it was her body, the coordinating muscles, the knowledgeable nerves, every particle of that intricate machinery by means of which she exerted her mastery over clay, and delighted in it. Only it seemed to him that her feeling of grief was extreme for one failure, rather the kind of desperation of loss which old men feel when the machinery has ceased to work smoothly or have validity any more. He was so sorry for her that he could not think of anything to say.

  Suspiria lifted the tongs in both hands, and gripping the shapeless mass, hoisted it out of the kiln in a wave of heat, and let it drop heavily into the waste-bin, where all the fragments of bat and the rubbish of broken pots were thrown. His eyes followed it in helpless sympathy; and when she turned to him again her face was still sad, but the moment of artistic despair was over. He supposed that it was almost irrelevant now beside the giant anxiety of her personal predicament, and only for a moment had it been able to assert its identity and importance.

  ‘There are a few survivors, at any rate,’ she said, with a pale smile towards the row of pots on the edge of the kiln. ‘I suppose it’s only habit that makes me care about them. But when you’ve spent years of your life caring very much, you can’t stop all at once. I’ll leave these to cool off completely now. Do you want me? Or would you rather I just got out of your way for a while?’

  Sergeant Grayne said simply: ‘Well, you can help me, if you will. Do you happen to have any antimony oxide among your things here? It’s used for a yellow colouring, isn’t it?’

  Her eyes opened wide, without the flicker of a glance away from his face. ‘Yes, I’ve got some. Do you want to see it? It’s here, in this cupboard.’

  She was lifting a hand to open the little door, but he shut his fingers gently about her wrist.

  ‘Don’t touch it, if you don’t mind. We’ll do that, all in good time. Have you used any of it lately?’

  She had to think back more than a month to recall the last occasion when she had wanted a yellow glaze. ‘I think it’s just over five weeks since I used it. But I keep these oxides in stock all the time, of course.’

  ‘You don’t lock them up? Some of them could be highly dangerous to people who didn’t know much about them, couldn’t they?’

  ‘There was seldom anyone here who didn’t know about them. One’s friends hear so much about the whole business that some of mine know very nearly as much as I do myself. No, the doors were never locked – some of them haven’t got any locks. But at night I usually locked up the whole workshop.’

  ‘Would you be able to tell me how much of this stuff ought to be left, after the last time you used it?’

  She shook her head at that, with a dubious smile. ‘It’s so long! The intervals often are. No, I couldn’t even guess what weight should be there. Sometimes I use as much as eight per cent in a soft glaze or an enamel, as well as using it for pigments. I could find you the dealer’s bill, that would give you the quantity and the date. I might be able to tell you how often I’ve used it since, but I’m not too confident of that, and in any case it wouldn’t give us a record of how much was taken out at a time.’

  ‘Thank you, it would help, all the same. You don’t ask me any questions,’ he said, looking at her steadily.

  ‘You wouldn’t answer them if I did. Besides, do you think I need to ask? It didn’t take very much hard thinking,’ she said with a tired smile, ‘to connect for myself. Whatever you want from me, I’ll supply it if I can.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs. Freeland. Now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us to do a little routine work here—’

  When she was gone, Sergeant Grayne muffled his hand, and opened the cupboard. It was the smallest of half a dozen arrayed along the bare whitewashed wall, and had a well-fitting door with a knob greasy and polished from long years of handling, probably in a few other incarnations before this one. Inside there were two shallow shelves, each with a crumpled brown-paper parcel of powder. The larger packet was the bag of antimony oxide. He weighed it in his hand, wrapped in his handkerchief, and examined the dusty folds of the bag carefully. They had certainly been disturbed more recently than five weeks ago, for edges of cleaner brown showed, although the neck of the bag fell naturally into the lines it already bore from previous handling. He set it down on the bench, and gave his attention to the faintly smeared dust inside the locker.

  ‘We’ll need to take this bodily off the wall, and have it away with us. More effective than messing with it here, because it’s going to be a delicate job getting much off it. At least,’ he said with satisfaction, ‘this is something her husband wouldn’t normally be likely to touch very often. If we find his prints here it’ll mean something. Not like the studio, littered with everybody’s hands, and never telling us a thing.’

  The young constable was still looking thoughtfully over his shoulder, after the vanished woman. He was not sure that he approved of these curious moments of intimacy with which Sergeant Grayne complicated his passage through a case. ‘Why did you ask her about
the stuff?’ he wanted to know fretfully.

  ‘Because I was sure she’d tell me, and it saved time. And to see how she took it. A remarkable woman, that!’ said the sergeant, gingerly assembling the folds of his handkerchief about the parcel. The constable was still more shocked by the warmly appreciative note in his voice; he would never get used to the idea of admiring a woman while you were on your way to the consummation of hanging her.

  2

  The inquest on Theo Freeland opened on the following Monday, but after evidence of identification had been given the police asked for an adjournment of one week, the medical evidence being still incomplete. This was granted, together with the coroner’s permission for the funeral to take place; and two days later Theo was buried, as quietly as was possible by then. The word had gone round. There were reporters in and out of the Great Leddington shops and pubs, and crowds of people gathered at the churchyard to stare, which they did with unwavering determination throughout the scene at the graveside, and as long as Suspiria, or Dennis, or one personal mourner remained in sight.

  The widow was not even in black, said the scandalised witnesses afterwards, and whispered further that such disregard of the decencies proved she had murdered him. She had on the dark green corduroy suit she had often worn before, with a black lamb coat over it, and a small black hat, but that was not proper mourning. Even her stockings were only a soft sort of iris-grey. And what sort of woman would go to her husband’s funeral with her lover beside her in the car?

  Dennis suffered hideously on that ride, but would not be dissuaded from it. He knew that his family were in furious conclave behind his back, he knew that for once they were all united against him in the shocked recoil they had made towards their threatened respectability, about which they stood in a solid phalanx of protective rage. But he could not help it. There was no conflict, for he was aware of only one duty. His place was with Suspiria. The avid looks which followed her, the craning curiosity gaping at her across the churchyard wall, the flash of the cameras in her face as he helped her out of the car, these flooded his heart with such a passion of dedicated anger that he could not spare one thought for himself. And it had hardly begun yet. They both knew that.

  The opening of the inquest had not attracted a great deal of notice, because the sensation was then so new, and its full possibilities hardly realised; but the resumed hearing was another matter. Everyone was well primed by then, a Sunday had passed, and the newspapers had their teeth well into the promising scandal, even though they had to confine themselves to carefully oblique suggestion of revelations to come. Dennis sat tense and sweating through Suspiria’s evidence, his hand braced on the edge of her empty chair beside him, suffering vicariously everything she suffered, and perhaps some pangs of his own of which she knew nothing.

  It was impossible that the coroner should let the obvious questions pass unasked, and hopeless for her to try to let them go only half answered. The affair was practically common property already, but this was the first time she had been forced to rehearse it before an audience so large, censorious, and greedy for sensation. There was an instant when her heart failed her, when she wanted to turn back from the ordeal, and put up a hand suddenly to cover her face. Dennis’s heart heaved and struggled in his breast in a fury of helpless love, and his eyes fastened so intently upon her that she seemed to feel their compulsion, and suddenly lifted her head again, and returned their frantic look with a blazing green glance, eloquent and tender and fierce as fire. A quick flame of colour burned up in her pale face. She went on with her answer in a low voice, but very clearly:

  ‘Not money worries, but there was – a domestic worry. He and I – our situation had changed, and he was unhappy about it. We both were.’

  She hesitated for a moment, but this time it was not her resolution which had wavered, but only her intelligence which was busy selecting words. ‘Our marriage had been disturbed because of my – feeling for someone else. I had told my husband about it, and told him that my feelings were not likely to change again. I had no plans to leave him, and no intention of causing him more pain than I had to, but I know he was very unhappy about it.’

  The coroner was old, and had seen too much of sudden death to be quite as greedy or quite as censorious as the public in the body of his court. He pursued without warmth or curiosity: ‘I understand you to say you had no plans, and it is quite easy to believe that you were unwilling to cause him pain, but you must have had some idea in your mind of what was to happen in the future. However vaguely, you must have known what was likely to follow your revelation.’

  ‘I hoped,’ she said in the same low voice, ‘that we should be able to discuss it amicably, and come to some agreement.’

  ‘I don’t altogether see, if your mind was quite made up, and you saw no possibility of changing it again, what agreement could be reached, except that you and your husband should eventually separate. Would you agree to that as a fair statement of the position?’

  She said, almost inaudibly: ‘I didn’t think of it as clearly as that.’

  ‘So, however patient you were prepared to be, and however reasonable, your husband must have interpreted your declaration as meaning that his marriage and his life with you were virtually at an end?’

  ‘Yes – I suppose so.’

  He asked her – it was inevitable – if she did not think this blow might have affected her husband’s state of mind in a way sufficient to cause him to contemplate his own death, at least in moments of depression precipitated by heavy drinking. She gave her rigid and proud answer, like a ceremonious bow in Theo’s direction:

  ‘I can’t say it would be impossible. I can only say it would be against all the instincts of his nature, even under intense pressure.’

  He said: ‘Thank you, Mrs. Freeland!’ and let her go. She came back to her chair beside Dennis with a fixed and motionless face, and sat like a stone woman for a few minutes, staring straight before her. In the shelter of his leaning body he laid his hand over her clenched hand; the rigid fingers opened passionately, and closed upon his, and they sat for a few minutes holding each other tightly beneath the folds of his coat, until the strained whiteness of her face relaxed, and a recovering flame of colour rose and warmed her cheeks.

  As soon as the immediate pain subsided he was again aware of the greedy eyes clinging to them both, from the jury, from the public seats, from every corner of the room, creeping down the lines of their arms, feeling along the folds of the coat for the convulsive knot of their clasped hands. Worse than the conscious disapproval was the subconscious, gratified glee of these looks. There was a young woman in the jury who had a better view of them than the others; he thought he could hear her, clean across the clerk’s table, purring like a fed cat.

  What followed was what the public had come to hear, the medical evidence. First, the local doctor, who made a brief and mildly dull story of his being called to the house, his examination of the body, sufficient to inform him at once that this was no natural death, but a probable case of poisoning, and his notification of the case to the coroner. He gave it as his opinion that the man had died after swallowing some irritant poison.

  Faint waves of excitement and horrified pleasure seemed to pass through the public seats at this. The police surgeon was even more satisfying, because he knew so much more. Yes, he had performed an autopsy on the dead man, and had come to the conclusion that the cause of death was the consumption of a large dose of antimony oxide, enough to bring on acute gastric symptoms in less than one hour. He went into minute particulars of the ascertainable amount swallowed.

  ‘The onset of such symptoms in an acute case may take place in ten minutes or even less on an empty stomach, or as much as twelve hours afterwards if the stomach were full. More normally I should expect them in from half to one hour after the poison was taken. The symptoms are not unlike those of arsenical poisoning – heat and burning pain in throat and stomach, vomiting, great thirst, probable purging later, finall
y complete collapse. All the appearances in this case were consistent with this, there was both vomiting and purging, but there had also been a somewhat rarer but not unusual effect upon the nerve centres, with acute collapse, coma and death following fairly rapidly. – The post-mortem appearances bore out this view of the case. There was considerable inflammation of the stomach and lungs, and some submucous haemorrhage. The vomited matter also yielded a large percentage of antimony oxide.’

  ‘Were you able to form any opinion as to the actual time of death?’ asked the coroner. He waved away the ready and unintelligible details, which the surgeon immediately began to proffer with the greatest placidity. ‘Yes, yes, just the conclusion, please.’

  ‘Everything points to a very rapid onset of coma and death in this case. I formed the opinion that the man died not later than about two o’clock in the morning. To be sure of the duration of the attack from the first symptoms to death is very much more difficult. There are certain complicating factors. He had been a heavy drinker, I should say for years, though his physical condition was remarkably good. However, on the whole I should say his attack began not earlier than ten o’clock, and probably not later than midnight.’

  ‘I see. Which makes it probable that the poison was taken at some time between nine and eleven that evening?’

  ‘Yes. Almost certainly not earlier than nine, but possibly rather later than eleven – I would say certainly between nine and eleven-thirty. In view of the condition of the stomach the attack may have taken rather less than an hour to develop, but is hardly likely to have taken longer.’

  ‘Thank you. Can you tell us something about antimony oxide? The form it occurs in? What it would be doing in an ordinary household? How it might have been taken?’