Something Wicked

by David Roberts

  Treacher pulled himself together with an effort. ‘The man who killed these people is intelligent and well read.’

  ‘Reasonably well read,’ Edward corrected him. ‘All you’d need is a book of quotations. The quotations from Shakespeare – except perhaps the sonnet – are very well known, bordering on the obvious.’

  Treacher nodded his head, trying not to feel that his education had been lacking something. ‘I suppose we can assume the murderer is a man?’

  ‘I think so, Inspector. I can’t believe a woman would be strong enough to kill Eric Silver.’

  ‘Nor sadistic enough.’

  ‘Women can be sadistic but I agree that it’s much less likely a woman would do something so horrible. Of course, the other three deaths might have been the work of a woman. They say poison is a woman’s weapon but my instinct says a man did all this. He’s a cold-blooded killer who carefully planned what he thinks are perfect murders. Forgive me for saying this – I don’t mean to sound arrogant – but I can’t help feeling the killer was annoyed that the . . .’ he tried to think of a tactful way of putting it, ‘the initial investigations dismissed the deaths as accidents. He killed Mr Silver and left me a note telling me to take up the investigation.’

  ‘If you are right, then your life is in danger.’

  ‘I am aware of it, Inspector. And what is more, I believe the murderer will make himself known to me.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I think he will want to watch me at work. He’ll want to tease me and I am hoping that, in doing so, he will give himself away.’

  5

  Leonard Bladon had been warned that he faced a challenge when he took Verity into his clinic. To put it crudely, most of his patients were too ill to do more than lie on their beds or, when the weather was as warm as it was now, relax on the long chairs in the garden soaking up the sunshine. Verity was unable to stay still for more than a few minutes at a time. The sight of patients iller than she made her depressed and angry. She would not be one of those etiolated wrecks – that she swore. She read quite a lot. Mrs Woolf had delivered on her promise and sent her a pile of books. She and her husband, Leonard, ran the Hogarth Press which published books about social issues as well as poetry and fiction. Verity was particularly interested in one book they had published the year before called The Roots of War in which some of the great and the good explained how Britain had come to this pass and berated the Prime Minister for his policy of appeasing Hitler. Verity thought wryly that their complaints came rather late in the day.

  Her friends visited her but she suspected – probably unfairly – that they must resent having to travel out of London to see her and that she was being a bore. She hated to be in anyone’s debt but, paradoxically, would have been downcast if her friends had not made the effort to visit her. When they arrived they made a point of kissing her on the cheek to show they weren’t afraid of ‘catching anything nasty’. They talked too loudly and told her she looked well and forecast brightly that she would be ‘out of here in a week or two’. In short, they tried too hard. Their conversation sounded rehearsed and, since she herself hated hospitals, Verity knew, or thought she knew, precisely what they were thinking and feeling. She was grateful that they had come but glad when they went – all except Edward who provided her with a lifeline to the normal world from which she had had to withdraw.

  She was more at her ease with her room-mates who, being in the same predicament, could not pity her. They complained about the food together and fantasized about Dr Bladon’s love life like silly schoolgirls. There was something about being in this sort of place – so like a boarding school – which infantilized them. Everything was done for you and your only responsibility was to rest and get well. Jill Torrance, the student nurse, seemed very much in awe of her room-mates. ‘Oh dear! I feel so ignorant beside you two,’ she giggled nervously. Shyly, she asked about Verity’s travels and listened open-mouthed to her stories – only slightly embellished – of ducking bullets and seeing men killed all around her. Verity lectured Mary Black on the evils of the class system and the social inequalities which left children to grow up stunted and sickly in loathsome slums while people like themselves lounged about in country houses waited on hand and foot. She expatiated on the failures of Chamberlain’s government to stand up to Hitler and was surprised and perplexed when Mary forcefully disagreed with her.

  After one such debate, Mary told her tartly that she would shortly have the opportunity of telling her father what she thought of his party’s foreign policy as he was coming down to see her on Saturday. He was a widower, Verity knew. Mary’s mother had died two years ago. ‘I’m glad she never had to see me like this,’ she had said when Verity had commiserated with her.

  When the day of Mr Black’s visit came, Verity rather annoyed herself by finding that she was taking unusual care with her appearance. Why should she want to impress her friend’s father? He was just one of those largely silent, and no doubt ignorant, backbench Conservative MPs who were wheeled into the lobby to vote for the government whenever Mr Chamberlain decreed. It was another in a string of perfect English summer days with the temperature in the seventies. How long this ‘heat wave’, as the papers were calling it, would last no one could say but Dr Bladon urged all his patients to make the most of it. He strongly believed in the healing powers of the sun’s rays and it was certainly true that Verity was regaining her strength and putting on weight.

  They were waiting in the garden for Mr Black to arrive when the conversation turned to death. One of the patients had succumbed to his illness – quite unexpectedly – earlier in the week and everyone had been made uncomfortably aware of their own mortality.

  ‘I’ve never seen a dead body, you know,’ Jill said mournfully. ‘I don’t think I can call myself a nurse until I’ve looked death in the face, do you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Verity replied airily. ‘Death isn’t so very awful. I’m not afraid of it.’ She stuck out her chin. She was afraid of dying wretchedly of a disease she had never given a thought to before it was diagnosed but she wasn’t going to admit it in front of Mary and Jill. ‘Messy sometimes, or stupid . . . but then so is life.’

  ‘Stupid? I want to die beautifully – like Violetta, La Dame aux Camélias.’ Jill acted out a theatrical swoon.

  ‘Yes, stupid,’ Verity insisted. ‘People don’t look beautiful or dignified in death – or not the ones I remember seeing. Their jaws hang open and the skin looks . . . looks like . . .’ she searched for the right words, ‘white or yellow rubber. No, that’s not right, more like that awful Formica in the passage.’

  Mary Black said, ‘I saw a dead body once – in Africa, when I was little. He was a black man so perhaps it doesn’t count.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ Verity said angrily. ‘Why shouldn’t it count? What does it matter what colour we are?’

  Mary looked puzzled. ‘Of course it matters. You wouldn’t marry a . . .’

  ‘I would if I was in love. Some of the Algerians I saw in Spain were magnificent savages . . .’ She stopped, wondering if this was the right way to talk of the men who had fought against the Republic with such courage and cruelty. ‘Well, anyway, they were mostly on the other side so I didn’t get to meet many of them.’ She added after a pause, ‘I didn’t know you had been in Africa, Mary?’

  ‘No reason why you should. I was born in Kenya but my mother died when I was ten and my father brought me back to England to be educated.’

  ‘So who was the black man you saw dead? Do tell!’ Jill insisted.

  Mary’s face clouded. ‘It wasn’t very nice but that’s the way it was then. I didn’t understand it – I was only a child. They said it was a hunt but I realize now that it was more of a lynching. It was beastly and I’ve never managed to forget it though I’ve tried. He can’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen though he seemed grown-up to me then. He’d been accused of . . . I don’t know – not raping but “interfering”, I
think they called it, with a white girl about the age I was then – or maybe a year or two older. I’ve no idea if it were true or not but the white boys hunted him down. He ran for our house because I think my father had a reputation for being just. I remember hearing him banging on the front door. I’ll never forget the sound. Unfortunately, my father wasn’t at home and our houseboy wouldn’t open the door. There was only me and my mother in the house so I expect he made the right decision.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Verity demanded.

  ‘They cornered him as he tried to get into the house. Four of them grabbed him and took him on to our front lawn and beat him to death with sjamboks.’

  There was a horrified pause and then Jill asked, ‘What’s a sjambok?’

  ‘It’s a kind of whip they use on the cattle, made of rhinoceros hide.’

  ‘They whipped him to death?’ Jill whispered.

  ‘And you saw it?’ Verity asked disbelievingly.

  ‘My bedroom overlooked the front porch. I saw everything.’

  There was something almost voyeuristic about the story which made Verity uncomfortable. It was horrible enough but it seemed to her that Mary had enjoyed telling it, or at least seeing the effect it had on her audience.

  At that moment they heard the solid clunk of an expensive car door closing and Dr Bladon appeared with Mr Black – a good-looking man in his early sixties who wore an air of authority like a familiar cloak he put over his shoulders whenever he went out. He walked with the swagger of a man of the world that made even Bladon appear smaller and less significant.

  He kissed his daughter on the cheek and Bladon introduced him to Verity and Jill.

  ‘Miss Browne, I am delighted to meet you,’ he said in a gruff but rather attractive growl as he shook her hand. ‘I have heard so much about you. The New Gazette is a much duller read without your dispatches from the front.’

  Verity desperately wanted to dislike this man who represented so much she abhorred in English political life but found herself, to her annoyance, enjoying his flattery. She tried to remind herself that this was the way the upper classes always disarmed their enemies – by taking them to their bosom. Look at Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister. Duchesses had him fawning on them before he had been in office a week, and the Irish patriot, Michael Collins, was made to look a fool in exactly the same way. He had come to London in 1920 hating all things British and ended up the lapdog of the ruling class and the lover of the wife of one of them. She told herself she must be resolute in defence of her principles. Her friend David Griffiths-Jones, a senior member of the Communist Party, had told her she could mix with the aristocracy as much as she liked as long as she remembered they were the enemy. And Mr Black wasn’t even an aristocrat!

  ‘Mary, dear,’ her father continued, ‘I thought we might go on the river as it’s so clement. Would your friends like to come with us? That would be all right, wouldn’t it, Bladon?’

  ‘So long as you aren’t too long. In fact, I think the fresh air would do them good.’

  Jill refused as she was feeling too weak but Verity – happy to have a distraction – accepted the invitation. Mr Black’s chauffeur touched his hat and opened the door of the Bentley. As they slid silently away, Verity felt a surge of gratitude to this man whatever his politics. Mary and she were lepers, rightly shunned as carriers of disease and possibly death. To come across someone who seemed unafraid of being tainted was a shot in the arm for her self-confidence. She felt that she might, after all, one day rejoin the human race.

  It seemed Mr Black had been so confident of his invitation being accepted that he had already organized a motor launch to take them upriver. When Verity jokingly said something to this effect, he informed her that he owned it. ‘I use it a good deal in the summer, particularly when coaching my son Guy,’ he explained. ‘He’s a mad keen rower, as I was in my day.’

  The Henley Hornet was a substantial craft with a small enclosed cabin and a more powerful engine than most of its kind. The chauffeur, after helping them aboard, passed to his master a picnic basket, several rugs and a cold box which rattled pleasantly as it was set down beside Mary. He then saluted respectfully and withdrew.

  ‘Would you ladies like to go below and rest or do you prefer it here on deck?’ Mr Black asked. He indicated several comfortable-looking basket chairs. They both said they wanted to stay on deck and watch the watery world go by.

  He cast off and expertly steered the Hornet into midstream. Verity lay back on the cushioned chair to soak up the sun and relax.

  ‘This is so kind of you,’ she murmured but Mr Black, intent on avoiding the many small craft wandering this way and that, ignoring the rule of the river to keep to the right, did not hear her. Verity’s eyes closed and she slept. It annoyed her that, though she did not sleep much at night, during the day and particularly if she were relaxed, she would drop off to sleep at odd moments. Dr Bladon said it was all part of the healing process, and perhaps it was, but she never liked to be caught napping.

  She woke up with a start, unsure if she had slept for a few seconds or an hour. Mary was awake, trailing her hand in the water. Her father was still at the wheel, looking rather grim-faced for a pleasure outing. Perhaps, she thought, he was worrying about his daughter’s health.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked idly, sitting up straight.

  ‘Maidenhead. Not far now. It’s the house of a friend of mine. He’s invited us to have our picnic in his garden.’

  Verity did not reply but her peace of mind was disturbed by a feeling of unease. What was she doing on this rich man’s boat? Why had Mr Black invited her? He must know she was his natural enemy. Was it pure kindness or was there something behind it? But why should there be? She was being absurd. What possible interest could he have in her?

  A few minutes later, he waved to a man on the river bank and expertly brought the boat alongside a low brick wall into which steps had been cut. After he had helped the two girls out of the boat, he introduced them. ‘Jack, this is my daughter Mary.’

  ‘Mary! Of course I remember you. We met in London last year. I was so sorry to hear you had been ill, but you’re looking well.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Amery. I am feeling better but I’m still rather weak. I hope you will forgive us if we don’t rush around too much.’

  ‘Of course, my dear, and this is . . .?’ He put out his hand.

  ‘This is the celebrated Verity Browne. She shares a room at Bladon’s place with Mary. Do you know each other?’

  Amery withdrew his hand and looked first at Mr Black and then at Verity, as though wanting to know what joke was being played on him. Whether Black was being mischievous or whether he really didn’t know that Jack Amery was a fervid supporter of Franco and the rebels in Spain while she was a noisy supporter of the Republic, Verity could not say, but here she was, a guest of one of the men she and her friends most excoriated. She was taken by surprise and had no idea how to react. One thing was certain, she was not going to shake his hand.

  ‘Verity Browne!’ She saw that Amery was as taken aback as she was and acquitted him of being complicit in Black’s little joke, if that was what it was. She was sure he had had no idea of her identity until he heard her name. He pulled himself together, saying ‘I fear, old chap, that you have dropped a bit of a clanger. Miss Browne and I do not see eye to eye on Spain, and on much else, I suspect.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s rubbish, Jack. I insist on you knowing Miss Browne. She won’t bite.’

  Amery seemed less than sure about this and, to Verity’s relief, said, ‘I say, if the ladies will forgive us, I’d like to have a word with you in the house.’

  ‘Is Una at home?’ Black inquired.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ he replied shortly.

  ‘Mary, lay out the picnic, will you? We won’t be long.’

  Verity’s heart was beating fast. How could she break bread with this Fascist arms dealer? She could wear a mask of courtesy when talking
to people whose views she violently disagreed with but this man was disgusting. She forced herself to admit that Amery probably thought the same of her. She wondered if he would make some excuse not to return to share their picnic. The trouble was she could not escape. She had no money with her even if she had had the strength to walk somewhere to summon a taxi. She looked at the river but, perversely, it was suddenly empty. But what a wild idea even to think of hailing a passing launch to take her back to the clinic, as though she was in Piccadilly Circus hailing a taxi. No, she must wait and hope that Amery would do the decent thing.

  ‘Mary, is your father an old friend of Mr Amery’s?’

  ‘I have never heard him say so. Take the strawberries, will you? His father is a great friend.’

  ‘Leo Amery – the MP?’

  Oddly enough, Edward had been talking to her about him the previous day and had mentioned his meeting with Jack at Turton House. He had been far from sure about Leo Amery. He said Churchill had called him the ‘straightest man in public life’ and congratulated him on a speech he had made in the House of Commons at the time of the Abyssinian crisis castigating the Prime Minister for his pusillanimous stand against Mussolini’s naked greed. The Italian dictator had been able to seize Ethiopia for his shoddy new empire without serious opposition. On the other hand, two or three years earlier Amery had returned from a visit to Hitler calling him ‘a bigger man’ than he had expected and talking of ‘the fundamental similarity of many of our views’.

  Jack was a constant source of embarrassment to his father and Edward had said that he admired Amery for his loyalty to his boy whatever scrapes he got into. He had gone on to ponder how it was that so many good men in public life – even Winston Churchill and Stanley Baldwin – had unsatisfactory sons who caused their fathers much heartache. Perhaps, Verity had suggested, it was impossible to be devoted to politics and still make time for family life. Edward had wondered if she was alluding to her own reluctance to marry and have children.