Sweet Sorrow

by David Roberts

  ‘Good idea! I tell you what, I’ll come too. I want to drop in on Ken Hines at the News Chronicle and I might see if Cathcart will talk to me. I’ll ask Liddell if I can have a word with Colonel Rathbone. By the way, when do we tell Jean and Ada about Frieda?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose they’ll have to be told sooner rather than later – or perhaps they won’t. Unless they read something about Frieda and Byron in the press why should they ever know?’

  ‘Do you think it would it upset them very much?’

  ‘You mean finding out that she was their father’s mistress or that she was murdered?’

  ‘Both, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t think they ever met her. I got the impression that she didn’t want Byron to introduce her to them. She was a good person, even if she was rather promiscuous. She had a kind heart and would have hated to cause them grief. She kept on saying how worried she was about them.’

  About eleven the next morning, Edward and Verity strolled round to Mark Redel’s cottage. They had an appointment to look at his paintings with a view to buying one or two for the Old Vicarage. He had told them to go straight to his studio and so they walked round the side of the cottage where they met an ashen-faced Adrian Hassel.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come. Mark’s tried to kill himself. Maybe he has, I don’t know. I was just going to get help.’

  Edward and Verity pushed past him into the studio. Mark was lying on the floor in front of his easel, unconscious but breathing stertorously.

  ‘Adrian, run and get Dr Hind. If he’s not there call an ambulance. Redel doesn’t have a telephone, does he? He’s taken something,’ Edward said, picking up an empty bottle with a chemist’s label, ‘but I’m not certain what it is – sleeping pills, I think. Help me get him sitting up, will you, V? We ought to try and make him sick but I don’t like to give him anything to drink in case he chokes.’

  As they struggled to get him on his feet, Verity caught a whiff of his breath. ‘Ugh! You’re sure he’s not just drunk? His breath smells of beer.’

  ‘Perhaps, but he’s definitely taken pills – luminal, probably,’ Edward panted. Redel was a dead weight and difficult to manoeuvre in the cluttered studio. ‘The writing on the label is smeared. I’m no expert,’ he grunted, ‘but I know that a combination of luminal and alcohol leads to coma more quickly than luminal alone. We have to try and get him walking. If he lapses into unconsciousness he may never wake.’

  Adrian appeared at the door with Dr Hind. ‘I just caught him as he was about to set out on his rounds,’ he explained. ‘And I’ve called an ambulance just in case . . .’

  Dr Hind said very little other than to ask Edward if he knew what Redel had taken. Edward showed him the pill bottle and mentioned the alcohol on his breath.

  ‘Just what I thought. I gave him those to help him sleep. Now we’ve got to make him sick it all up.’

  He set to work with a professionalism Edward admired. Ten minutes later Dr Hind was sweating profusely but he had succeeded in making Redel vomit up a lot of unpleasant-looking fluid – mostly beer, Edward thought. He was still a bad colour but his breathing improved and it wasn’t long before he began to regain consciousness. By the time the ambulance arrived it was clear that he wasn’t going to die even though he could barely talk and didn’t respond when Verity, mopping his brow with a cold cloth, asked him how he was feeling. She offered to go with him to the hospital but Dr Hind said he would accompany him.

  ‘I want to make sure he’s comfortable. There’s no need to worry. He’s out of danger and should be back home in forty-eight hours. Is there anyone who could look after him? I gather he is separated from his wife.’

  ‘That’s so,’ Adrian said, ‘but I have her address and I’ll see if she can be persuaded to come, though I fear she won’t. Otherwise, I suppose he’ll have to have a nurse. Of course, we’ll all be round and about but I expect for a week or so he won’t be able to fend for himself.’

  ‘No. Do you have any idea why he might have done this?’ Dr Hind inquired. ‘I wonder if he knows he could be prosecuted for attempting to do away with himself,’ he added with a mirthless laugh.

  ‘You’ll have to ask him that,’ Edward replied. ‘Perhaps it was an accident but, as you know, he had family worries and his last exhibition wasn’t a success.’

  When the ambulance had gone, its bell ringing as if determined to alert the whole village to what had happened, Edward looked around the studio for a note or anything which might indicate that Redel had taken the luminal with the intention of killing himself. He noticed a leather-bound notebook lying on the table. It was held open by a fountain pen. He picked it up and saw it was a diary or journal. He began to read.

  ‘The greatest crisis of my life? The trouble is my work. What is my value as an artist? What have I in me after all? That is the point. I doubt myself terribly. I have worked so, so hard with my very blood. I have lived and fed upon my work. My work was my faith – my purpose. I am flooded with misery and despair. I feel inferior to all . . .’

  Edward turned to look at the powerful self-portrait on the easel, wondering how he could have doubted his talent.

  Adrian, who had been reading over his shoulder, answered his unspoken question.

  ‘The gallery had told him they wouldn’t represent him any more. And, if that wasn’t enough, he told me had written to Marjorie asking her to come home but she had refused. Then there was what he read in the papers about the Jews being persecuted in Germany. He felt he ought somehow to be sharing their misery. I tried to cheer him up and thought I had succeeded. He was excited that you were going to buy some of his paintings but it obviously wasn’t enough.’

  ‘And he had received this.’ Edward passed him a letter that had been lying beside the diary. It was unsigned and read, ‘You dirty Jew. Your pictures are filth and you are filth. You should face it – you are a failure and should die.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Adrian exclaimed. ‘Who on earth could have sent him such a beastly thing?’

  ‘The same person who sent us – Verity and me – an anonymous letter in London just a week or so ago,’ Edward said sourly. ‘You didn’t get one, I presume?’

  ‘No, but why would someone do such a horrible thing?’

  ‘It’s a question we’ve been asking a lot recently.’

  Edward wished they had come an hour or two earlier to look at Redel’s work. Verity’s enthusiasm might have carried him over that moment of despair. Perhaps the anonymous letter had been the last straw. Anyway, he would do his best to convince the doctor that Redel had taken an overdose by accident, however unlikely. It would achieve nothing if he were prosecuted for attempted suicide – probably just make him try again.

  Charlotte Hassel arrived, having been alerted by the ambulance bell that something was amiss, and Adrian told her how he had found Mark.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she exclaimed. ‘But he’s all right? Thank God you arrived when you did, Adrian.’

  Edward said he could do with a drink and suggested that they might walk down to the pub.

  ‘Good idea,’ Adrian agreed. ‘I certainly need a pint but, hang on, I thought you didn’t like pubs?’

  ‘I don’t, but this is an emergency.’

  When they were seated in the bar parlour, Edward lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. He felt very weary. After a moment or two, Charlotte broke the silence.

  ‘I suppose Mark did attempt to kill himself? I mean, he could hardly have taken all that luminal by accident, particularly at this time of day.’

  ‘Might he not have woken very early and, wanting to sleep, taken the pills in a muddled sort of daze?’ Adrian ventured.

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see what Dr Hind says, but I doubt a man in the state you describe could have downed all those pills without sicking them up,’ Edward said, his eyes still closed. ‘However, I think it’s important we try to persuade Hind not to call it attempted suicide. Redel would not want the police snooping into
his private griefs.’

  ‘I’d better go and tell Leonard and Virginia what has happened. Virginia’s going to be very upset,’ Adrian said. ‘No, of course, I forgot, they’re in London today. Oh well, bad news can wait, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I hate to think how it will affect Virginia,’ Edward agreed. ‘When you tell her, you must . . . not make light of it, exactly – but not give the impression that Mark was really serious about killing himself. Leonard hinted to me that Virginia has contemplated suicide when one of her depressions overwhelms her and she’s very fragile at the moment. This is just the sort of bad news which might tip her over the edge.’

  ‘It’s a horrible thing but at least it’s not another murder – unless you call that anonymous letter a murder weapon,’ Verity said. ‘Did you leave it in the studio, Edward?’

  ‘No, I took the precaution of removing it and the diary. I have them here. I may be wrong but somehow I don’t think Mark would want the police reading either the letter or the diary. If we want Dr Hind to come to the conclusion that taking the pills was an accident, I thought it wiser to remove any evidence to the contrary. One thing I’m sure of – Inspector Trewen’s hobnail boots in his studio won’t make Mark feel any better when he returns.’

  12

  An almost tangible cloud of fear and depression hung over Rodmell. Verity and Edward had an irrational feeling that they were in some way to blame for the violent death and the attempted suicide which had transformed this peaceful English village into a place crawling with policemen and newspaper reporters. Thank goodness, Edward thought, the press had not as yet connected Frieda’s murder in London to Byron’s decapitation, but it was only a matter of time. Ken Hines had, of course, realized that Frieda and Byron had been killed by the same person but had agreed to hold off publishing the story until the picture was clearer.

  ‘I say, V, did you find anything about the badge – or whatever it was – that Frieda’s killer left with the overalls in the Silence Room?’ Edward asked as they lay in each other’s arms the morning after Mark’s attempted suicide, reluctant to rise and face another day of questions without answers.

  ‘Yes, I did. I spoke to Reg Barnes on the telephone and he told me the police had traced it to the Middlesex Hospital. Apparently it was an identifying label. The overalls belonged to a porter at the hospital and had been stolen from his locker three weeks before.’

  ‘I see,’ Edward mused. ‘So the murderer could either have worked at the hospital or been a patient there?’

  ‘Or visiting a patient.’

  ‘Less likely . . . A visitor wouldn’t know his or her way around the place. I assume the locker room is in a part of the hospital that isn’t open to visitors?’

  ‘Yes, I asked Reg that and he said it was in the basement. He had overheard Inspector Lambert discussing it with his sergeant. The room was kept locked but, as every porter and quite a few other people had keys, that doesn’t mean much. The lockers were also kept locked but this particular one had been left open for some reason.’

  ‘Did you ask if any fingerprints had been found on the statuette?’

  Apparently not. The murderer must have been wearing gloves.’

  ‘No surprise there. And no gloves were found in the Silence Room?’

  ‘Not as far as I know but the murderer could have taken them out of the building with him. There was something else I’ve been meaning to tell you. Reg said that when he played back Frieda’s interview with me, he realized the machine had still been running after I left the studio. Right at the end, you can hear Frieda saying something – just a word. He says it sounds like “not he” or possibly “knotty”.’

  ‘Knotty?’ Edward wrinkled his brow. ‘Could she have been saying “not me”, I wonder?’

  ‘Did the murderer – if we assume Byron and Frieda were murdered by the same person – write the poison pen letters?’

  ‘Frieda said she didn’t think Byron had received one, but perhaps we ought to talk to Jean. She’s a sensible girl and might know. I get the feeling that she didn’t terribly care for him. Not surprising really except that he obviously liked her rather more than Ada.’

  ‘Yes,’ Verity agreed, slipping out of bed and opening the curtains, ‘too much, perhaps. Jean is intelligent enough not to want the sort of admiration her stepfather was offering. She might have found it embarrassing – even creepy.’

  ‘True. Look, why don’t we tear the girls away from their books and take them for a walk after breakfast? It’s a lovely day and they might feel more like talking out in the fresh air. I don’t expect Joan will mind.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl, isn’t she, Edward?’

  ‘Yes. She doesn’t ask a lot of questions or talk too much. Just the sort of girl I ought to have married.’

  ‘What would she want with a man almost twice her age?’

  ‘Come back to bed and I’ll show you.’

  ‘We mustn’t overlook one thing,’ Verity said, doing as he asked.

  ‘What’s that, Dr Watson?’ Edward teased.

  ‘Stop it. You know how I hate it when you call me that,’ she protested, punching him. ‘We’re not detectives and, if we were, I would not be Watson. He was an old fool.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t. You’re judging him on the basis of Nigel Bruce’s ludicrous performance.’ They had recently seen the film of The Hound of the Baskervilles. ‘Would Holmes really have teamed up with such a buffoon? I think not. It would have driven him crazy.’

  ‘That’s beside the point. I’m not your stooge or sidekick, so there.’ She bit his shoulder.

  ‘You little cat! You know what happens to biters, don’t you?’

  ‘And Basil Rathbone is much better looking than you – though I have to say, you do have his nose.’

  ‘Thank you for nothing. Now, stop wriggling and let me have my wicked way with you.’

  Afterwards, Verity turned on her back and lit a cigarette.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Edward said, taking it out of her mouth and putting it in his. ‘You know what the doctor said. Anyway, what was it you were saying we mustn’t overlook?’

  ‘Damn you and damn all doctors!’ Verity exclaimed but could not be bothered to wrestle the cigarette from him. Instead, she let her mind return to Frieda’s murder. She could not admit it, even to Edward, but the way Frieda had died, almost in her presence, and the violence with which she had been struck down had shaken her badly. She was unable to get the image of Frieda’s smashed skull out of her mind. ‘I was going to say, we mustn’t overlook the fact that Mark could have killed Byron and Frieda and then tried to kill himself out of remorse. He had the opportunity. He was in London the day Frieda died and I happen to know that he knew his way round Broadcasting House. He told me he was a chum of Dylan Thomas, the poet, who works at the BBC on and off.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a thought. We heard him say how much he disliked Byron and how he had refused to paint Frieda. There must have been some bust-up between them when they were both living in Hampstead. I wonder if it would be worth having a talk with Thomas,’ Edward mused.

  ‘On the question of the poison pen letters,’ Verity said, as Edward went into the bathroom to shave, ‘it’s generally agreed that they are normally written by women but Rogers said our letter was delivered to Albany by a man. Though I suppose it could have been a woman dressed as a man.’

  ‘I distrust any rule of thumb about which sex does what. I think the sexes are equal when it comes to nastiness,’ Edward shouted from the bathroom.

  ‘Thank you for that unchivalrous thought, but when it comes to murder I can’t see a woman having the nerve or the physical strength to tie Byron up and then behead him, can you?’

  Edward poked his face, covered in shaving foam, round the door. ‘No, I can’t. However, if we discover that he did get a letter, then we have to assume that receiving one precedes the recipient’s violent death. We – or rather I – had such a letter so I’d better watch out. Mind you, I go armed!’
Grinning he waved his razor.

  The girls were delighted to leave their school work, and Joan said tactfully that she had some letters to write so would not accompany them on their walk.

  Ada seemed to be returning to normal but Edward knew that the kind of shock she had suffered was not easily absorbed and the wound would take many months to heal if, indeed, it ever did. She might suppress her grief but it could have scarred her for life.

  Just as they were going out of the front door, a boy in a peaked cap rode up on his bicycle. He had a telegram which he offered not to Edward, though he put out his hand for it, but to Jean. She tore it open and read it excitedly.

  ‘Mother says she’s on her way home. Isn’t that wonderful?’ she told them, waving it in the air. ‘The Aquitania is due to dock at Southampton next Friday.’

  ‘That’s splendid!’ Edward said.

  Ada tried to look pleased but she was clearly apprehensive. Verity kissed Jean and added, ‘I’m so pleased but we’ll miss you. I wonder if she’ll whisk you both back to America.’

  Jean’s face fell and Verity wished she had kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Ada, what will you say if Mother wants to take us back to Hollywood with her?’

  Ada smiled wanly. ‘It’ll be all right for you. You’re so beautiful. You’ll be snapped up by some mogul – isn’t that what they’re called? – and turned into a film star, but what will I do?’

  No one answered. Instead, Verity said, ‘Come on! Let’s have our walk. It’s a glorious day and Basil is mad with excitement at the thought of going on the downs, aren’t you, Basil?’

  They had no alternative but to tell Jean and Ada about Mark’s attempted suicide and, inevitably, it cast more gloom on the girls. They didn’t know him well but he had given Jean a sketch he had done of her which she treasured. However, no one could be depressed striding over the downs, a warm wind ruffling their hair and Basil leaping around them like a puppy. Ada was walking with Edward while Verity and Jean followed some way behind discussing what qualifications were needed to be a reporter. Verity admitted she had none at all.