“We were looking for Professor Farmiloe,” said Ezra, putting his head in a small window in the porter’s lodge.
The Professor, however, was not to be seen. Or rather they did see him, just in the distance, running hard.
“Got to get home,” said the lodge porter sympathetically. “Trouble at home.”
Ezra nodded.
“He left a note for you, though,” said the porter, feeling in a pigeon-hole.
Ezra opened it. Dear Barton (they were not on Christian name terms and never would be), thank you for putting the child to bed which I gather you and Miss Boxer did. I had just driven my wife off to catch the train for the Neuro-Philosophical Conference at which, as you probably know, she is reading a paper. I had intended to go to see Marion Manning ; from all I hear it is clear that once again she needs help. You understand? But, of course, we are both old friends. Go and call on her, there’s a good fellow. She needs help. If you can’t find Marion, ask for the short middle-aged woman with the dyed hair and the loud voice.
He added in a scribble: Please God you get to Marion. I’m afraid she is in trouble again.
Ezra handed this note to Coffin: it succeeded in at once puzzling and alarming.
“I’d better go I suppose,” he said.
“Yes,” said Coffin absently. “You look for Dr. Manning. And I will look for the other one.”
John Coffin, making a polite farewell call at St. Aldates before returning home, received a piece of information. Afterwards it occurred to him that they had known all along.
The murder knife had been traced.
It had come from the Mocha Mecca Café down by the station.
It had gone from the café just about the same time as one of the customers; neither had so far been seen since.
They did not know her name, but they could describe her. She was middle-aged, plump, much made-up and with a high voice.
“The spitting image of my Mrs. Beaufort,” Said Coffin. His colleagues watched him with interested speculative eyes. They were not indifferent to what he did, but they thought they would wait and see.
Chapter Eight
Ezra did not go in search of Marion as he had planned. He was suddenly filled with a new and unexpected anxiety.
For these were the hours when Rachel sickened.
His first warning of what lay before him was a telephone call from the girl Joan. She sounded anxious.
“You’d better come round,” she said, and afterwards it seemed to Ezra that there was a note of hysteria in her usually calm, even phlegmatic voice. “Someone had better come. Rachel’s ill. I’ve called the doctor.”
“What?” said Ezra; he found himself too startled to talk good sense, and yet he had noticed Rachel’s face when he had left her, he had noticed the flushed cheeks with yet a line of pallor round the eyes. Why hadn’t he realised then that she was sick?
“I found her when I got back from lunch; she’d been ill some time then, Ezra, I was rather late back, I’d been working in the library, it was almost tea time …” Her voice faded away, and there were distant sounds across the line, sounds that Ezra did not like. The clink of metal on metal, then a grating noise, followed by the noise of quiet voices. He heard Joan say: “Oh God.” Then he could hear nothing more. The receiver was down.
By the time he got to where Rachel lived, Joan was standing limply in the doorway. She looked at him silently.
“Where’s Rachel?”
“You’re too late.”
He went white and leaned against the door.
“No, no, I didn’t mean that.” She was concerned. “She’s gone to hospital. She’s alive. Or she was when they left,” she added sombrely. “It’s no joke, Ezra. Whatever she’s got is something horrible. It seems to be eating into her.”
They went upstairs to the quiet dark little room where Joan did her work. There was a photograph of her betrothed on the table and he smiled down happily upon the room. Ezra found that he kept catching his eye.
“I thought she was drunk at first because her voice was so thick, stupid of me. Rachel never drinks and anyway why should she so early in the day?” Sin for Joan started at six in the evening. At any other time Ezra would have smiled. He knew well enough that if Rachel had wanted to start the day with neat whisky she would certainly have done so, but the fact was Rachel didn’t in the least care for drink. “But then I saw it was fever: her face was so red and she was breathing so oddly. And her eyes, her poor eyes … Her eyes seemed fixed.” The words reminded Ezra unpleasantly of something Marion had said: “I saw a man with his eyes crossed in death.”
From next door came the noise of scrubbing and the sound of water being poured.
“What’s that?” he asked sharply.
Joan looked away; she was the sort of girl who always did look away in moments of crisis. “They have to tidy up; there was a mess.”
More than anything else this brought home to Ezra that his fastidious beloved clumsily-dressed Rachel was ravaged by a sickness beyond her control.
“She wasn’t really conscious,” said Joan quickly. “Not by then.”
There was a moment of silence.
“We shall have to let her parents know.”
“I’ve done that. But they’re abroad. Isn’t there someone in England?”
Ezra thought. “There’s a gran or something in Gloucestershire.’’
Two women in overalls came along the corridor. They looked at the two people standing there but said nothing, except that at the door one woman turned back and gave Ezra a smile.
“No good standing here,” he said. “I shall go to the hospital.” Then he saw Joan’s face. “I think you’d better come with me and have some brandy to drink.”
“You can’t go to the hospital smelling of brandy.”
“I can’t think of any better place to go smelling of brandy,” said Ezra grimly.
But before giving her the brandy he telephoned the hospital from a box in the broad street of St. Giles. Cars were rushing past, but he did not see them, all he could see was Rachel in a high white hospital bed.
He was there in the box for some time while people came and went at the end of the telephone. Then a doctor spoke to him.
“If you are a friend of Miss Boxer’s then I’d be glad to see you.”
Ezra hurried, completely forgetting Joan still waiting patiently for her brandy, but even so by the time he got to the hospital the doctor was waiting in the entrance hall. Even Ezra, hurried, anxious, preoccupied, could sense the tension that lay behind this waiting. Doctors wait on patients, not on patients’ friends. There was a mystery, and the mystery, he knew at once, was Rachel’s illness.
An illness like this one, he realised, does not spring forward without a cause, there is a background to it. What had been the background? Days of nervous strain and worry; looking back with the eyes of knowledge he could see that Rachel had been tense and curiously apprehensive for days now.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions. Has Miss Boxer seemed normal lately?”
“Normal? I think so.” But had she? Had any of the three been normal? Could you expect it?
The doctor looked perplexed. “I might as well be frank with you; we are having some difficulty in making a diagnosis. If you have been in close touch with Miss Boxer” (for a second Ezra had time to speculate that Joan had not been incommunicative; that behind the prim manner she habitually got across just what she wanted to say), “then any details you can give me would be helpful.”
But Ezra had none to give.
“Certain symptoms: the fever, the violent headache, the vomiting and the giddiness, followed as it has been by stupor, hint towards a tentative diagnosis.”
Ezra looked up expectantly and at the same time with dread. The doctor tapped on the table before him (they were talking in a tiny little waiting-room almost fully occupied by a large deal table, its top polished by many anxious waiting hands), but he did not meet Ezra’s eyes. He murmured what
sounded like ‘cerebromeningitis’.
Ezra must have made some sound because the doctor looked up and said hastily, “It’s not always fatal now, you know, not with the new drugs.”
This was obviously meant to be a cheering statement.
“All the same, certain symptoms are not atypical.” He looked down at the table again and did not tell Ezra what these were. In a moment Ezra knew why. “And she is not responding to our treatment.” He sounded both irritated and anxious.
“That’s it,” thought Ezra,” there’s the rub, patients ought to respond.”
“Has she been in contact with any known cases of serious illness?”
“No … That is, there was a child. But that was only this afternoon.”
The doctor considered. “Too close in time, probably. But if they had both been in contact with a common source of infection”—he was thinking aloud. “I’d better have the name and address,” he said briskly, and having got it, disappeared.
Ezra sat alone in the little room and listened to the noises outside; somewhere under the same roof was Rachel, but he felt no comfort from any sense of contact with her, rather the reverse, as if the world divided them.
After a time the doctor returned. “Nothing wrong with the child. Or not much. Just showing off.”
“That’s what his mother thought,” said Ezra wretchedly.
The doctor tapped his fingers. If I saw much of him, this chap with his tapping fingers would irritate me, thought Ezra. “Can’t you do something.”
“We’re not doing nothing, you know. Already we’ve alleviated …”
“And cured?”
“We can’t do any more until we get the results of certain tests.” He paused by the door. “Why don’t you get off home?”
“I shan’t go home.” Ezra added defiantly, “I’m ill, too.” He had a lunatic idea that if he were ill and with the same illness he might get closer to Rachel.
The doctor looked at him. “No, you’re not ill. But you can stay.” He shut the door quietly behind him. They were all quiet in this place, thought Ezra, that is each individually was quiet but the whole added up to a gentle murmur of noise that never stopped. It was the noise of people living, of people trying to live, and of people dying.
All night the fever raged. But by now it was nothing to Rachel who if she was conscious of it at all was only so in a far-off distant way as if she was a stranger to her own body. Through it, she was weighed down by a sense of doom; aware of very little, she was still aware that she was very ill.
By this time they had diagnosed what was wrong with Rachel but it began to look as if it was too late.
Chapter Nine
Coffin had found Mrs. Beaufort, or he thought he had. At least he had found her house, and once again he was standing outside a shut front door, ringing a bell. They seemed to give themselves all the time in the world to answer bells in Oxford, he considered. He was something of an expert in doors, as all policemen get to be; he knew when a door was locked because of fear, because of absence, or because the person behind it was dead. He hoped this wasn’t a case of the latter.
Mrs. Beaufort lived above a junk shop in the Cowley Road, which is one of the great main roads leading out of Oxford and to London. Her front door was directly next to the door of the shop.
Coffin rang again, this time leaning on the bell with his shoulder. No one came.
Eventually the owner of the shop took pity on him, and poked out a bespectacled face.
“Don’t think she’s home. Haven’t seen her come in.”
“She might have got past without you seeing.” There was not much hope in Coffin’s voice; he could see that the owner of the shop had sharp eyes reinforced by powerful spectacles. And in fact the man ignored his remark.
“Unless, of course, she’s been in all this time and didn’t go out after lunch as per usual.”
“Does she usually go out?”
“Sure thing. Goes out to do her shopping. Does charing in the morning.” All this time he had been studying Coffin. “What are you this time? Healthy Foods? Nature-Life Scientist? League of Seekers into Yogi?”
“Takes things up, does she?” asked Coffin amused.
“A real old crank. She’ll go for anything loopy. Intelligent old bird, too. Don’t think I’m saying she’s round the bend. She isn’t. But it just seems as though certain things she can’t see straight.”
Coffin rang the bell again.
“I tell you it’s no use.”
“Wait a minute”—and Coffin listened. “I can hear footsteps.” There was a dragging slithering noise from the other side of the door. He bent down and looked through the letter-box, then he drew back with an exclamation.
“What can you see?” asked the man eagerly.
“A face,” said Coffin, “a great red face.”
“Can’t be her then; she doesn’t usually look red. More the pale sort.” He sounded thoughtful. “Maybe I’d better get my key.”
“The door’s opening.”
She stood there silently, swaying unsteadily before them, with her face red and puffed and her hair blown awry.
Take it all in all, she was a surprise to Coffin.
She looked at them morosely, screwing up her eyes in the light. “What do you want?”
Her landlord from the shop whistled. “You’re as drunk as an owl, my girl.”
“Are you Mrs. Beaufort?” asked Coffin.
She did not answer, but swayed towards them, waving her hands and opening the door even wider.
“Course she’s Mrs. Beaufort,” said her landlord. “As much as she’s anything. Don’t believe it’s her name at all, but it’s what she likes. Here, hold up, Katy old girl.”
“Well, I’m damned,” said Coffin. “Are you sure?”
Mrs. Beaufort lifted her head, and it was an untidy one, and said: “I’m not drunk.” Then she reeled a little. “I don’t drink.”
“She doesn’t, you know,” said the landlord, worried. “Someone been feeding you the stuff, old lady?” He was quite gentle and kind with her.
Coffin grunted. He had been studying her face closely. “We’d better get her in.”
Between them they half-lifted and half-walked Mrs. Beaufort up her long flight of stairs. She kept up a steady murmur of conversation in Coffin’s ear all the time. “I can fly,” she whispered. “Did you know? I have the secret of levitation. I’m flying now.”
“Are you, old girl?” Her landlord was sweating under her weight. “Well, fly a little higher, will you? You’re leaning on me.” He looked at Coffin. “One step forward and two back, ain’t it?”
The sitting-room upstairs was a small neat room, impeccably tidy. A table stood by the window, and on it was a tea-tray with cups and saucers, milk, sugar, and a plate of biscuits. Two chairs were drawn up to the table, and a third lay on the floor as if just knocked over.
Coffin put his hand on the teapot to test the warmth; it was quite cold.
“Give us a hand,” gasped his companion.” She’s coming on violent.”
Coffin swung round to see that Mrs. Beaufort, presumably attempting flight, was hurling herself and her companion to the ground. He rushed forward to help and together they got her to sit on the sofa which was drawn up to the hearth.
“You know, she’s very strong,” said Coffin; he studied her face, which was flushed and red and deceptively drowsy. “Much too strong.”
“Wonder what she’s been drinking? Must have dynamite in it. Wish I could lay my hands on anything as powerful.” He sniffed. “Can’t smell it, you know.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“And yet she must have had a basinful.”
“Not drunk,” said a voice from the sofa; it was a muffled, sodden voice but there was a far-away indignation in it. And as if this was an excitement to her Mrs. Beaufort shot to her feet, leapt onto the table, and clutched the electric light.
“She’ll kill herself,” cried her landlord.
“Or us,” said Coffin who was grimly hanging on to her ankles.
They pulled her back. But as suddenly as it had come, the energy left her, and she was limp again.
“Funniest drunk I ever saw,” murmured the landlord.
Coffin looked at her but said nothing; soon it was impossible to say anything. A tremendous noise filled the room, bursting through the windows from the street outside, a great brassy clanging of bells.
“What in heaven’s name is that?” Coffin looked out. A great red fire engine had come round the corner, bells ringing, and had stopped outside the door. Already the firemen were running forward with ladders, and the crash of glass sounded from below. It drew a cry of anguish from the shop-owner.
“My windows!”
There was one more crash and the owner quickly dropped his share of Mrs. Beaufort into Coffin’s arms and rushed downstairs shouting.
“Where’s the fire,” a man’s deep bass voice was calling.
“My door’s open. No need to break in,” was the angry response; too late, however, for there was a further tinkle of glass.
A ladder rattled against the window, but before Coffin could speak to the face that appeared, his attention was distracted by something else. Mrs. Beaufort was being very sick.
A white ambulance sped silently and unnoticed up to the door and two ambulance men carried a stretcher up the stairs.
These at least Coffin welcomed. He deposited Mrs. Beaufort upon their stretcher. “You’d better get her to hospital,” he said briefly to them. “And quickly, too. She’s been poisoned. One of the hyoscine group, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Out in the street more people had arrived and were noisily assessing the situation. A black police car had drawn up at the kerb.
Eventually the surprised face of one of Coffin’s Oxford police friends appeared at the top of the stairs. “What’s this? A riot?” He looked down at the stretcher, “What’s happened to her?”
“Poisoned I think.”
“And who called out the whole circus?”
Death Lives Next Door Page 14
