The Assize of the Dying

by Ellis Peters

  They drew breath as one creature, relaxing for a moment even from mutual hate into the one blessed conviction that they had survived it, that it was over. They hardly waited to gloss over their agony of relief with civilities, but after the barest of renewed protestations and regrets and excuses flew to pack their belongings and prepare for departure. Helen watched them go with the palest and politest of smiles.

  Chapter 3

  ‘I suppose,’ said Bill, drawing nearer to Helen’s shoulder, ‘that means, in effect, that the police have given up.’ And suddenly the thought held no pleasure or relief for him, as he had expected, but was only a gross wrong committed against Philip. He was in an odd state, he felt it himself, still scared, still feverish to have the crisis past and be able to breathe again without constantly wondering if the history of his last quarrel with Philip would not somehow leak out, and yet even more preoccupied with unexpected regrets and remembrances in which he sometimes lost sight of his own danger. How many things there had been to like about Philip, and how terrible, how unjust it was that his death should be reduced simply to a source of danger to the survivors. He wanted to express his sense of guilt to somebody, he wanted a confessor for this uncontrollable late fondness that could distract him even from the motions of self-preservation.

  ‘I don’t think they ever give up,’ said Helen. ‘They know where to lay hands on us all, whenever they want us.’

  ‘You know what I meant. They’ve given up expecting any success. I know they’ll go on trying. Helen, it’s only sometimes that I realise that somebody killed Philip – really killed him, put an end to him, all that life, and gaiety, and warmth he had. Do you know what’s the most terrible thing about it? – that I’ve been so frightened about my own position that I could hardly see how terrible it was that Philip should be robbed like that. It makes me so ashamed! Whoever killed him ought to pay for it to the limit. It wasn’t only a crime against him, it was a crime against the world! And yet all I’ve had room for in my mind was the worry of whether I should be suspected, whether somebody would tell that I’d fallen out badly with him over the money and was desperate for a way of getting my hands on it. Helen, it’s all so wickedly wrong!’

  ‘Bill, my dear!’ Helen put a hand on his arm, and lifted her beautiful face, smiling at him with soft, superficial tenderness. ‘There’s nothing to worry about now. Of course you were afraid for yourself! Did you expect to be superhuman? Don’t you think Philip would have understood? You’ll be able to make a clean break now. If it’s too late to go with your friend to Canada, there’ll be some other opportunity. And the money will be at your disposal whenever you need it – you know I won’t stand in your way.’

  He was aware of an embarrassing check, as though he had opened the wrong door. Did Helen still see that as of the slightest importance? He could hardly remember now the feeling of urgency he supposed it must have had for him some days ago. But he could hardly blame Helen for not knowing that, could he? None the less he was aware of frustration, as though language had failed him and he could no longer communicate.

  ‘It isn’t that, I’m not worrying about that. I only wish we hadn’t been at cross purposes about it, that’s all it means now. But I keep thinking how wrong it is that Philip should be dead. He had years and years of life in him, he’d have lived to be a hundred – he couldn’t have helped it, he was so in love with living. Someone just cut him off, like cutting grass, like swatting a fly! Philip! And all I could think about was that I might come under suspicion myself! And now there’s no way of making up for it. He’s dead. I can’t go to him and say: “All right, you old devil, you were right and I was wrong, and I’m sorry.” It’s too late. He’s gone.’

  ‘I know how you feel, Bill,’ she said gently. ‘I understand very well. But death isn’t such an infinite disaster. Nor life such a wonderful thing to lose.’

  He saw with consternation, with a hideous constriction of the heart, that she didn’t understand at all, that she was worlds away from knowing how he felt. ‘It is! It is! If you despise life you despise everything – God most of all! Philip knew how to value it! Philip’s values were all sound and true!’ He didn’t know how to express what he had in his heart, while she stood smiling at him so softly and distantly, her blue eyes large and kind and vague upon his distress. She wasn’t really with him. Good God, she wasn’t even listening, except with the smooth surface of her mind, on which his laboured phrases made hesitant, unexpressive ripples, and then left it still and calm. She was immured within her own world, looking out at him. He felt for a way in to her, but there was none; he had never been so alone in his life. She looked at him with affection, touched him briefly on the cheek with her small, delicate hand, stretched upward quickly, and kissed him. He felt cold, confused and miserable, but his tongue could not find any better words, and he was hopelessly silent.

  ‘Darling, do you think there’s anything you can tell me about Philip that I don’t already know? He was my husband, and I loved him. Some other time we’ll have a long talk about him – yes, Bill, I mean it, I need it too. But now I’ve got to go in – here’s Dr Benson coming to see me. No, it’s nothing out of the way, don’t worry, only a routine examination.’

  The doctor had left his car on the road and cut across the field to the pack-bridge, as he always did. He came across the treacherous, mossy stones at his usual brisk half-walk, half-trot, greeted Bill with a bright, shrewd glance, and swept Helen away with him through the garden and into the house.

  Baulked of the humble, bewildered apology he had certainly been about to offer to Helen, for what precise fault he himself hardly knew, Bill sat kicking his heels on the arm of the stone seat by the river-bank and moodily watched them go. It shamed and frightened him that when Helen had stated her claim to know her husband through and through, he had suffered a sudden vision of a row of slim novels and three or four literary prizes arrayed on Philip’s empty desk. What was the matter with him? If it was nothing but the hangover from personal grief and fear, he had better snap out of it at once. And it couldn’t be anything more. He must be ill if he was beginning to think his sense of values more reliable than Helen’s!

  Rachel found him still sitting there when she crossed the field from the village and picked her way with long, sure strides over the uneven stones of the bridge. She had a shopping bag on her arm and the parish magazine in her hand; he couldn’t help smiling at the sight of her, the girl herself seemed to have so little possible connection with her errands.

  ‘I know!’ said Rachel, by no means offended by the grin. ‘I suppose I do look about the least probable deliverer of parish magazines you could imagine – but it gets me out of the house.’ She halted by his stone bench, and looked down at him with a considering frown. ‘I hear the Renauds are off.’

  ‘The grapevine’s still working well up to schedule, then. The inspector only left here about ten minutes ago. Yes, he says they can leave. They’re busy throwing their things together now. They can’t get away from us fast enough. I suppose the village doesn’t claim to know which of us actually did it?’

  ‘If they know, they haven’t confided in me. Probably I’m held to be connected with the house, and therefore not on the delivery list for the more intimate rumours. I think it’s regarded as unlikely that anybody’ll ever be charged.’

  Bill heard himself saying, to his own amazement: ‘You didn’t ever consider it as a possibility that I’d done it?’ He hadn’t meant to ask her anything of the sort, as far as he knew; and the tremor of anxiety beneath his carefully light tone deepened his astonishment. He covered his momentary consternation by moving up to make room for her beside him. ‘Sorry, I’m an oaf! Do stay for a bit – I can’t get anyone to listen to me seriously.’

  With composure Rachel sat. ‘Did you want me to take that question seriously? Then, no, I never entertained the idea that you could have done it.’ She was entirely grave, her dark eyes met his squarely, and he was strangely comforted. He didn�
�t know exactly why. It was perhaps that he felt something in her which had been in Philip too, and if she had fully and fairly understood that none of his rages against Philip had ever had in it anything secret, permanent or venomous, then probably Philip had always known as much and always been, in the obscure way which really mattered, profoundly at peace with him.

  Almost fearfully, in case the answer should be disastrously wrong, he asked: ‘Why did you feel so sure of that?’

  ‘Because you and Philip loved each other very much,’ said Rachel, ‘and that’s tough enough to stand all the pressures either of you could ever put on it.’ She named love as directly and fearlessly as she had once named God, conceiving it as either adolescent or hypocritical to be embarrassed by the grandeur of either name. And the answer was not wrong; it was so beautifully, mercifully right that he felt all his tensions relax into trembling gratitude.

  ‘Yes, I did love him! I hardly realised it myself, I’d never thought much about it until now – you don’t think about these things. But I did! I hope he knew it.’

  ‘He knew it,’ said Rachel. ‘What’s come over you, to start digging over this particular ground? You haven’t been suffering from a sense of estrangement, have you, just because you happened to be fighting a minor skirmish with him when he was killed? Accidental complications like that wouldn’t upset Philip’s judgement, you needn’t worry.’

  ‘It wasn’t only that. It was that first, but not only that. It was the losing sight of him afterwards – being unable to feel anything except fright for myself, when I ought to have been feeling anger for him. It seemed to set him at such a distance from me—’

  ‘It wouldn’t,’ said Rachel with conviction. ‘He’d stick by you all the more if you were scared, and disgusted with yourself for being scared. It was heroes Philip was sceptical about.’

  ‘You’re sure,’ said Bill, dazed by the fervour of his own relief, ‘that you’re not just trying to be nice to me?’

  ‘I’m not thinking about you. I’m thinking about Philip. Even he had done a few things he wasn’t proud of.’ She gave him a quick, thoughtful look, and checked herself there. Very deliberately she said, watching him with sympathy at every word: ‘Has it occurred to you, Bill, that there’s only one person who seems to have no curiosity at all about the cause of Philip’s death? This case is going to fade away gradually, as far as we can see, leaving a permanent shadow on everyone – except Helen. Isn’t it odd that she, the only one patently innocent, the one most wronged, should show no preoccupation at all with the question of who killed her husband? Especially as he was her creation!’

  Bill had lifted his head from his hands and was staring at her doubtfully, already disturbed by the seriousness of her tone, and remembering, only too evidently remembering, the reserve with which she had always contemplated Helen.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He was ready to spring into resentment at a word.

  ‘Well, wasn’t he? The Philip who operated here was a Philip she’d made. It was she who shrank him to fit, down from the wild, lavish, generous creature he was, into her domesticated novelist, with his small accomplishments that he regretted and disliked so much. You heard what he said about his work, that night. Believe me, Philip wasn’t joking – or if he was, it was a double-edged joke. Wouldn’t you have thought Helen would have felt God’s own indignation at seeing her creation cut off? Well, you’ve seen her! She doesn’t even show any desire to know who killed him.’

  Bill said, stiffening formidably: ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at! I know you’ve never liked Helen. What’s the matter, are you jealous of her, or something?’

  Rachel gave him a long, considering and slightly belligerent stare of her dark eyes. ‘In case it makes it easier for you, I don’t mind admitting that I used to be. I was in love with Philip, terribly in love, when I was sixteen. He knew all about it – Philip always did. That’s how we became such friends, once I’d got over not being able to be more. If you like to think I’ve still got it in for Helen because of that, of course you can. It remains true that she isn’t at all preoccupied with the problem of who killed him. People act like that, Bill, only when they know already.’

  Bill sprang up from the stone bench, trembling violently, and stood over her with a face convulsed with bewilderment and distress. ‘What’s wrong with you? Why do you always have to confuse everything? What makes it such fun for you to go round kicking over all the standards other people live by? Do you just enjoy overturning things?’

  Rachel looked at him for once with a curiously vulnerable helplessness, and shook her head. It must have been an optical illusion that her lips quivered. ‘No, I don’t know that I enjoy it. But things may need overturning,’ she said defiantly, ‘if they’ve been standing on their heads from the beginning.’

  Bill took her by the arm, and jerked her to her feet to face him. ‘What did you mean, about Helen behaving as if she knows? I’ve got to know what you meant!’

  ‘Exactly what I said, of course. What do you think I meant?’ Rachel freed herself with a strong turn of her arm, but without any anger, and without drawing away from him. Looking over his shoulder she said, in a low voice: ‘Look out, Helen’s coming down the lawn with Dr Benson.’

  He looked round quickly, half-suspecting a trick to deflect his anger, until he remembered that it was with Rachel he was dealing. Helen and the doctor were walking slowly, and deep in conversation, and not yet so near that they must have observed the two people beside the bridge. Bill found himself very reluctant to meet anyone just then, least of all Helen. He had to know what Rachel had on her mind, he had to get things clear in his own. What was the use of trying to pretend, even to himself, that Rachel was the sole author of this confusion which filled him?

  ‘Don’t go – you mustn’t go yet, you’ve got to explain yourself. Here, come away from here!’ He caught at her hand, in a gesture singularly different from that fierce grip on her arm a moment ago, and drew her back into the trees, the wet branches slithering past their shoulders. She could easily have pulled free from him, but this time she did not attempt it. They parted the bushes together until they were hidden from the path, and then stood still, looking back, for fear their rustling movements should betray their childish flight. The doctor would be leaving, as he had come, by this short cut over the bridge. A few minutes, and both he and Helen would be gone, and Bill and Rachel could resume their interrupted conflict. In the meantime they stood almost breast to breast, still hand in hand, looking at each other fiercely, and keeping an aching silence.

  Helen and Dr Benson came down side by side, strolling without haste, to the river-bank. The doctor kicked a pebble from the path into the creaming brown flood, and said: ‘One more rainstorm, and you’ll have it out on the grass here. It looks as if I shall have to drive round to the front door next time I come.’ And after a short pause he resumed, as though there had been no break in subject, and with the driest of voices: ‘So to all intents and purposes it’s all over.’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily follow,’ said Helen gently. ‘But I really think it may be all over. I expect we shall still see the police from time to time, but I doubt if anything new will turn up now, and it’s clear they don’t think they have enough to justify a charge against anyone at the moment.’

  ‘That doesn’t trouble you?’

  ‘Do you think it should?’ she asked in the same tranquil tone.

  ‘That depends entirely on your viewpoint, I suppose. Personally, perhaps from proximity, I feel rather strongly about poisons, and the people who use them, and I should be glad to see Philip’s murderer brought to justice.’

  The two in the bushes had not meant to listen; in the first place they had merely been telling off the words they heard like beads, measuring out the time until the other two should depart and leave them free to emerge again. Only gradually did meaning enter into the exchanges. But now they were listening in a mutual guilt and shamelessness which drew them still closer tog
ether. They were taut, straining their ears; and his eyes were on the glimmer of Helen’s fair hair and serene face as it appeared and disappeared between the stirring leaves, and Rachel’s eyes were on him.

  Helen was smiling; he could see the soft curve of her mouth and the silent dimpling of her cheek. She had halted by the bridge, the doctor close beside her; but in spite of the constant murmur of the water, the wind, blowing from the west, brought their voices clearly to the ears of the two who stood listening.

  ‘Since it is all over,’ said the doctor, ‘may I ask you a peculiarly intimate question, Helen?’

  ‘Of course?’ she said, surprised.

  ‘How did you manage it?’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ said Helen, after a moment of blank silence. ‘How did I manage what?’

  ‘How did you kill Philip?’

  If he had raised his voice, or in any way marked in his manner the extravagance of the thing he was suggesting, Bill would have cried out then and gone crashing through the bushes to confront him. But it was said so dryly and dully that for a moment he really did not understand, the sense of the words would not penetrate. Rachel saw the slow beginning of horror and indignation in his eyes, saw the hectic flush mount his face like a wave, and his lips open; and she put up her free hand and clamped it sharply over his mouth. It was not that she wanted to force him to hear further, it was rather that, whatever followed, he would not be able to bear the dubious memory of this challenge if he prevented Helen from answering now. It could not be left there, it had to be finished. She held him hard against her, and something in him acknowledged the force of her appeal and acceded to it. He was still, and when she took her hand away he did not cry out. The moment, in any case, the only possible moment for revealing themselves, was already lost.