Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  ‘I believe you may be right,’ said Frederick. ‘Only in that case it’s a pity we gave her the black coffee.’ He glanced over towards the sofa. ‘She seems to be considerably woken-up already.’ (These must be the first signs, the restless, voluble symptoms before the coma set in. Time was growing very short.)

  Ricky glanced for the hundredth time at his watch. ‘I simply must go. Yes, I think this is best, Stella. Everything looks clearer by daylight and I’ll go to Matron myself and sort it out with her. She’s a good soul!’ He turned back to the lolling figure on the sofa. ‘Look here, my wife thinks you’d better stay here for the night and then we can talk things over in the morning, more calmly. It’s a pity you had the coffee but I’ll give you something to counteract that and you can have a good sleep; then you’ll feel better.’ He gave her no time to argue but went through to the surgery and returned with half a dozen small white pills. ‘Give her these, Stella, with a drop of warm milk.’ He rolled them out of his cupped hand on to the high mantelpiece.

  ‘Six?’ said Frederick, looking at them a bit doubtfully.

  ‘It’s only that Restuwell stuff; they’re quite mild and she’s had all that coffee. Now I must rush.’ He gave not a backward glance at the girl but hurried off out of the door. They heard the car engine purr into life outside.

  ‘They’ll think it very peculiar, won’t they?’ said the cool, sweet voice from the sofa ‘—you keeping me here for the night. I suppose they’ll think Mrs. Harrison didn’t want it to come out about my trying to commit suicide because I was having a baby by her husband: and they gave me antidotes and things and kept me here till I was all right again.’

  ‘An impression you would do nothing to correct, would you?’ said Frederick, savagely sardonic.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ann Kelly: smiling her little smile.

  Stella’s self-control fell away from her, suddenly, as though her clothes had ripped apart and fallen, leaving her naked. ‘You utter little bitch! You vile, filthy, lying, blackmailing utter little bitch!’ She stood over the girl, dreadfully shaking, one hand clenched as though she would hit out at her. Frederick caught her shoulder and pulled her away and she collapsed against him, lying convulsed with great, shuddering sobs, against his breast. ‘Oh, Frederick! Oh, God, Frederick, it’s all so vile, so terrifying, so horrible….’ Vile and terrifying and horrible to have this cool, smiling, taunting little face lifted to hers like an evil white flower; to know that soon it would smile its sneering little smile no more….To be unmoved by that knowledge; to know oneself suddenly not human any longer, not capable of ordinary human pity or remorse….

  Frederick held her close, strong, reassuring, kind. ‘Hush, my dear, hush, don’t upset yourself, don’t let it get you down. You’ve been marvellous, love, you’ve handled the whole thing perfectly, and you’ll see, it’ll all be all right in the morning.’ He held her away from him, pulled out a handkerchief, dabbed at her livid, tear-stained face. ‘Come on, dry up those lovely blue eyes of yours; it isn’t as bad as all that.’

  She leaned her head for a moment, just for a moment, against that firm, kind shoulder; revelling uncontrollably in her first physical contact with him, drowned for a moment in the first revelation of his tenderness. ‘Oh, Frederick—!’

  ‘Oh, Frederick….!’ mimicked the soft little, sneering voice.

  They moved apart sharply, as though a sword had been cleft between them. Stella cast one venomous glance at the sofa and went out of the room. ‘I’ll ring Matron.’

  Matron seemed only mildly surprised to learn that Nurse Kelly was at Dr. Harrison’s house. ‘Has there been any drama at the hospital, Matron? She says she left a note saying she’d taken some morphia—’

  ‘Yes, there was some rubbish of that sort,’ said Matron. ‘But the poisons are all accounted for and I’m getting a bit used to the young lady’s tricks—not to say fed up with them. Why did she come to you?’

  ‘Well, you know she’s supposed to have a crush on my poor husband?’ (Better to be casually frank….)

  ‘They all do this kind of thing,’ said Matron, comfortably. ‘It hasn’t prevented her going around with one of the housemen.’

  ‘You know she’s going to have a baby?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Matron rather flatly. She added: ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘When she really shows you—’

  ‘I suppose I ought to have spotted it,’ said Matron. ‘Well, tomorrow I shall send the young lady packing. Him too, if I had anything to do with it but I don’t.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Well, young Bates is obviously the father. They’ve been very thick, and there’s been nobody else.’

  Obviously the father….! All for nothing—a murderess and all for nothing: the whole ugly threat dissipated into gossamer. In this new light, Stella saw that any suggestion against Ricky would have been brushed aside: Matron, sturdy and outspoken, would have stamped a scornful foot upon the first whisper of scandal, despatched the girl before she’d had time to make further trouble, probably extorted from the young man an admission of responsibility. All safe: all harmless and clear and unsensational. And now…

  Too late. If she made any move now to save the girl, Ann Kelly would be abroad with the dangerous knowledge that in this house an attempt had been made upon her life. Very well; by her own folly and malice she had signed her death warrant and execution must be carried out. She had declared, and in writing, her intention of destroying herself by this means, and nurses must have opportunities of obtaining drugs and covering over the traces of their depredations. If she were not alive to deny it, the police would accept her as a suicide. With the threat of scandal gone, there was nothing to connect her death with anyone in the Harrison household.

  Matron thought it a good idea if the girl could be kept for the night; in the morning she might be less hysterical and could be dealt with. They rang off in mutual trust and friendliness.

  Once released, Stella flew to the poisons book in the surgery. A ball point pen was kept in the book, always handy. Not daring to put on a light, she picked it up and, turning back the pages at random, here and there altered a figure.

  Ann Kelly was making a small play for handsome Dr. Graham, gazing up at him with increasingly bright eyes; her hands, thought Stella, looked like plump claws, waving as she chattered. Frederick was looking at her a little curiously. ‘She seems very over-excited,’ he said, aside, to Stella. ‘Better get her upstairs, I think.’ He took the six tablets from the mantelpiece. ‘Don’t forget these.’

  ‘I don’t want them,’ said the girl, looking at Stella like an obstinate child, the coy glance reserved for Frederick.

  ‘Mrs. Harrison will bring you a nice hot drink—’

  ‘I don’t want any more of Mrs. Harrison’s nice hot drinks. She’ll probably put arsenic in it, if she hasn’t already.’ But she saw the gathering frown, the coming together of the slanted black eyebrows. ‘Well, all right—for you, Dr. Graham,’ she said.

  He dropped them into her hand and she swallowed them dry, one at a time, tossing back her head with each swallow. She looks like a hen, drinking, thought Stella, revolted.

  Frederick took her up the stairs, a hand under her elbow, but she would have no further assistance. ‘I don’t want her fussing around me,’ she said, tossing her head towards Stella who was hurriedly making-up the bed. ‘If you’ll leave me alone, I’ll go to bed quietly, honestly I will. I’m—a bit exhausted.’ She clutched at a last moment of drama. ‘It’s been rather a strain.’

  ‘Well, the bathroom’s over there,’ said Stella. She fished a clean towel out of the linen cupboard and ushered the girl in. When she returned to the bedroom, Frederick was going hastily through the scruffy little handbag, dipping a hand into coat pockets. ‘We can’t take any chances.’ But there was nothing there; and when she returned from her very brief ablutions, they left her. The point of no return, thought Stella. But the point of return had been passed half an hour ago.

 
; He took her down and she flopped wearily on to the disordered sofa and let him bring her a drink and sit there quietly with her, while the whisky did its reviving work. Once he went upstairs and poked his head into the darkened bedroom. ‘A bit restless, but sound asleep and rather unbeautifully snoring,’ he said, grinning, coming down again; and when Ricky returned he said the same thing to him. Asleep… Rather restless… Like a doomed ship, thought Stella, rolling, wallowing, settling down at last into the waters of death. ‘You don’t think we’d better….?’ But better—what? There was nothing now to be done.

  The sound of the stertorous breathing reached them again and she and Ricky made their way up to bed. She sent him on ahead, and made a pretence of going into the room to see that all was well. ‘She’s quite quiet now; only snoring a bit,’ she said rejoining him. ‘I dare say she was pretty worn out, silly girl,’ he said. ‘She’ll be better in the morning.’ And he added, humbly and gratefully, ‘Thank you, darling. You were splendid,’ and kissed her. She turned away her head.

  And in the morning, the girl was dead. Ann Kelly would smile her sweet, sneering, malicious little smile no more; and Stella Harrison was a murderer.

  Suddenly the house was full of policemen, large, slow, kindly-spoken men, led by a small, quick, snapping little man called, apparently, Chief Inspector Cockrill. ‘Sorry about this, Mrs. Harrison. Very distressing for you. And you say the girl was hardly known to you, to you or Dr. Harrison either…?’

  Up at the hospital Matron told her story: evidently they had all underestimated the lengths to which the girl would go in her neurotic desire for attention—or the girl herself had overestimated the dose which it would be safe to play with… At the house, they went through the anticipated routine. The coffee cup proved all that it had promised: the Chief Inspector dipped in a tentative little-finger tip and sucked it—‘No, nothing there—just black coffee,’—and gave instruction for a few drops to be poured off and the rest sent to the laboratories. ‘We’ll get a quick analysis done here, Sergeant: I dare say the doctor has some reagents about the place. We shan’t find anything but it’ll be nice to know for certain. Can’t be too careful, Mrs. Harrison, for your sake and the doctor’s. She might just possibly have smuggled something into it.’

  ‘Just as well I didn’t wash it up,’ said Stella. ‘But with all the fuss….’

  It was a Sunday. Ricky and Frederick sat wretchedly side by side on the sofa. ‘I’d have sworn she’d taken nothing.’

  ‘So would I,’ said Frederick.

  ‘You examined her carefully?’

  ‘Well—we were both prepared, you see, to believe she’d taken nothing. I know the type,’ said Ricky, ‘and they never have taken anything; and Stella had seen her pulling up her stocking when she was pretending to be half unconscious. And if she had taken the stuff—well, it must have been getting on for an hour before we saw her, and she’d have been showing symptoms long before that.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Frederick. He added slowly: ‘Of course, Ricky, we were basing the whole thing on the assumption that if she’d taken anything it would have been before she left the hospital—which is what she said. But—suppose she’d taken it just before she walked in here? She’d have been at such an early stage that we’d have been justified in doing nothing?’

  ‘I’d have thought there’d be something, even so,’ said Ricky. (Silly blind fool! thought Stella—can’t he ever leave well alone…?)

  ‘I must confess,’ said Frederick, looking back, ‘that when she went up to bed I did think she seemed over-excited. I said so to you, Stella, didn’t I?—and flushed and not flopping about as she had been. But… Well, I suppose it was the stocking episode—I was so convinced that it was all an act….’ He broke off wretchedly, conscious of a failure and of the dire consequence of that failure to a human life.

  When Ricky was uncertain and floundering, Stella could feel only irritation and a sort of contempt. Now, with Frederick so unwontedly at a loss, she was filled with a sense of protectiveness. She pointed out: ‘I’d just given her strong black coffee for that very purpose—to wake her up.’

  ‘You let her put herself to bed, Mrs. Harrison?’

  ‘She wouldn’t let me help her; we just left her to it.’

  ‘She said she was—exhausted was the word,’ said Frederick, thoughtfully. ‘And that she’d been through a strain. So—once again, you see: one accepted it as natural. But I suppose it was in fact symptomatic—flushed, excited….’

  ‘And she was breathing very heavily,’ said Ricky. ‘I ought to have gone in….’ These men! They seemed bent upon making themselves look inept fools and worse. ‘I went in,’ said Stella. ‘She was snoring, yes; she just seemed heavily asleep.’

  And so on, and so on—question and answer, but quiet, amicable, just talking it over….Times, places, words said, words unspoken. The story of the call to Matron, a passing reference to the ‘crush’ of the young lady on the doctor. ‘No doubt you get lots of that kind of thing?’

  ‘Doctors do,’ said Ricky, briefly.

  ‘And there was a boy friend in the case anyway?’

  All unsuspicious, friendly—safe. Uniforms roaming about the house, meanwhile, yes: but what was there to find? Chief Inspector Cockrill closed the notebook in which he had been making what appeared to be random scratchings of an indecipherable nature and rose to his feet. ‘Perhaps Mrs. Harrison would show me over the house and let me get my bearings.’ And on the way upstairs he said, toiling after her, ‘All this must have been unpleasant for you?’

  ‘Horrible. But I’d never seen the girl before and I can’t say I fell in love with her. I don’t pretend to be personally all that upset.’ (Play it carefully!)

  ‘At least she won’t be able to make scenes about the doctor any more. I hear she was always creating, up at the hospital.’

  She shrugged. ‘Everyone knew it was really the boy friend who was responsible for the child.’

  He seemed to pause for a moment. He said quickly: ‘There was never any other suggestion, I suppose?’

  She could have cut out her tongue; but anyway Ricky was sure to have come blurting out with it some time. She took the bull by the horns. ‘I dare say she was all for pretending my husband was the father; but of course she had no hope of being believed.’

  They had come to the landing. He stood there, facing her, small for a policeman, elderly, a crest of grey hair crowning a splendid head. ‘All the same, you must have been worried? Mud sticks. If she’d gone round saying this kind of thing—’

  ‘She couldn’t go round saying it if she was dead.’

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Chief Inspector Cockrill.

  She lost a little of her poise. ‘Anyway we all knew it was this young man at the hospital.’

  ‘Oh, you knew that, did you?’

  ‘Matron told me when I rang her up.’

  ‘But that would be quite towards the end of the evening? By that time,’ he said, his bright, dark eyes oh hers, ‘you’d have had time to get pretty worked up about it all?’

  And suddenly it wasn’t so easy and friendly after all and, showing him the room where the girl had died, the bathroom she had briefly visited, she knew that it hadn’t really been easy and friendly, not any of the time. Hysteria rose in her, his hand on the banister as he followed her back down the stairs seemed like a great spider, hairless and horrible, creeping down after her to fasten itself upon her very life. She crushed down the panic, forced herself to quietness; but her head seemed stuffed with warm cotton-wool, nothing was clear, she could not remember, could not correlate, could not calculate….

  And in the hall Ricky came up to her, drawing her out of earshot. ‘Stella—I’m sure there’s some morphia gone from the surgery.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ she said sharply. ‘There can’t be.’ They would be asking this question soon; he must, he must, give calm, reassuring answers.

  ‘Suppose she helped herself while she was alone in the room?�
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  ‘She never was alone in the room, Ricky. I didn’t leave her, not for a second; and then you and Frederick were there. Besides, the key—’

  ‘A nurse would know whereabouts to look for the key. We all have some convenient hidey-hole.’

  ‘But I tell you, Ricky, she wasn’t left alone. Do stop muttering or they’ll get suspicious. Later if you like, we’ll add up the book if that’ll make you any happier—’

  But not Ricky! Ricky must go forward painfully to the Inspector and say that as he’s just been saying to his wife, he has a wretched feeling that there ought to be more morphia….‘You see, Stella,’ he said over their heads to her, ‘whatever she’d taken must be accounted for somehow. If she got it from here, we mustn’t let the blame fall somewhere else.’

  There was an altercation at the surgery door. Someone was insisting that her child had been knocked down by a car just outside, she wasn’t going to carry him round to any other doctor’s, not if she knew it ‘You go ahead,’ said Cockrill, seeing Ricky’s stricken face as the mother seemed about to be turned from the door by the policeman posted there. ‘I’ll just take your poisons book and be skimming through it.’ And he sat down with it on his knee, turning the pages earnestly like a child with a picture book. Frederick, comfortably sure that all was well with it, went out to help with the screaming child. After a while, the Inspector looked up. ‘Both partners would have access to this book, Mrs. Harrison?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Stella.

  ‘I see they use a ball point pen.’

  ‘We keep one marking the page in the book.’

  ‘M’m. Useful things,’ he said: ‘except that one never has a refill when one wants one. I see in this case they’ve changed to blue. Up to a week ago, it was black.’

  So that was it! In the dim light, last night, she had not been able to see what in daylight was perfectly evident: that the two, rather smudgy, grey-blue colours in fact were different. Figures, on pages chosen at random, two months back, three months, six months back—standing out clearly as having been altered in a different coloured ink….