Death in High Heels

by Christianna Brand

  “Well, let’s pretend this is pleasure!” said Gregory, archly.

  It was not much pleasure for Charlesworth. Once again-he ploughed through the story of the previous evening, and the porter was summoned to assist in the matter of the keys to the guest-flat. There were no duplicates and no other means of access to the flat. The windows? Impossible, said the porter, and obviously thought Charlesworth a fool for asking. The main door to the flats would be open until midnight and anyone might have come in or gone out without being observed; but he believed that, after the young ladies left that evening, nobody had. “I made a few inquiries on my own, sir, ’aving a bit of a theory, you see …”

  “Ah! and what was that?” said Charlesworth, politely.

  “The same as you’re getting at—one of them young ladies came back; but it won’t wash,” said the porter, and sadly took his leave.

  Charlesworth refused a second offer of sherry and embarked on a new tack. “Tell me, Miss Gregory, you’re all very fond of Irene Best, aren’t you? I was wondering how anyone can have brought themselves to try to murder her; they must have had a very strong reason. She seems to be such a kind, affectionate little person—can you think of a grudge anyone might have held against her, sufficiently bad to have led them to do such a thing? Leaving out all question of the first murder, of course.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Charlesworth, everybody’s devoted to her. I must say she isn’t a girl I could make a friend of—she has no, well, no personality, has she? But, as you say, she’s a kind-hearted little thing, and the girls in the showroom are all devoted to her. She was extremely good to Rachel over her divorce. I don’t know the ins and outs of it,” confessed Gregory, who would dearly have liked to find out, “but Irene has a brother who is apparently a bad hat, and he has made her life a misery, sponging on her and turning up at awkward times; she was very anxious that Rachel should not come to some sort of half-and-half arrangement with her husband and leave herself open to the same kind of thing; and she persuaded her to try and get a divorce, and took care of the child while it was actually going on, and I think even lent her some money…. She’s not exactly Rachel’s soul-mate and they get terribly on each other’s nerves, but Rachel has often said what a debt she owes to Irene and that she can never be grateful enough for all she did. Rachel is perhaps a little given to exaggeration, and she is always unnecessarily frank about her affairs.”

  “What about the others? What about Judy and Aileen?”

  “Oh, Aileen—I don’t think she has it in her to care for anyone; she’s a very common little girl, Mr. Charlesworth, as I expect you’ve discovered in spite of her airs and graces. Not that I mean to say that for that reason she isn’t fond of Irene; I think she is quite, and of course I always say that the lower classes probably feel just as much as we do, though perhaps not so intensely …”

  “And Judy?”

  “Well, Judy again was very much attached to Irene. She’s a bit irritated by some of her fussy ways, but some time ago, as you may have heard, there was a little trouble between Doon and Judy, when Judy’s fiancé fell in love with Doon. Irene actually took it upon herself to see this wretched boy and tell him that he was breaking Judy’s heart or some such nonsense; it was very unnecessary and did no good at all, but Judy thought it was kind. As for Victoria, she likes everybody and I think she is devoted to Irene. She hasn’t got very much depth—I don’t think many of these universally loved and loving people have; it’s mostly that they haven’t got the intelligence to see the faults in other people or to have any in themselves…. I mean, there’s nothing to dislike in Victoria …”

  “I quite agree,” said Charlesworth, pointedly, and changed the subject. “Now, what do you think yourself about this business of Mrs. Best? You’re a very intelligent girl and you see more clearly than most, I should say. I wish you could give me your own opinion as to how she came to take this overdose.”

  Gregory was flattered and delighted. To be considered intelligent and level-headed was second only to being considered attractive and marriageable. “I have a brain like a man’s,” she would say, spreading out hands also regrettably like a man’s. “I’m not taking any credit for it, I was just born like that; but I really do reason things out more than most women, I think, and Mr. Bevan says …” What Mr. Bevan said would keep Gregory happy for hours.

  She gave her whole attention to answering Charlesworth’s question. Then she said, weightily: “Have you ever heard of an involuntary suicide, Mr. Charlesworth? Does such a thing ever happen? Because, do you know, I really think that that is what must have happened to little Irene. She went to bed worn out and miserable after a terrible day. She was dopey and confused by the draught which she had had upstairs, and she only knew enough to tip the rest of the powders into the glass by her bed and swallow them. Perhaps she came to a little bit with the cold water and, realizing what she’d done, she thought she might as well make capital out of it for the sake of her friends; she scrambled out of bed and scrawled on one of her cards that she had decided to make an end of her life, and she tucked the card under her pillow and went back to bed. Perhaps the confession was even true. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’ve sometimes wondered whether—well, Mr. Charlesworth, I realize that Irene Best could not have intended to murder Doon, but it was I that was going to Deauville.…”

  Charlesworth sat staring at her unseeingly, and as he stared his eyes grew bright with excitement. He stared and stared and stared and thought and thought and thought and when, ten minutes later, he left her and stumbled out into the evening, the whole thing was crystal clear in his mind.

  Fourteen

  1

  “I WANT to go home,” said Irene, sitting up in bed.

  “Now, Mrs. Best, you must lie down again and keep quiet and comfortable. We’ll send you home just as soon as you’re fit to go.”

  “I want to go home,” repeated Irene, obstinately.

  The nurse sent for the staff nurse and the staff nurse sent for the sister. Finally the sister sent for the house physician, and a young man in untidy grey flannels and a tweed coat came and stood by her bed.

  “What’s all this, Mrs. Best? Sister tells me you want to leave and go home.”

  “I’m going now,” said Irene, firmly. “I’ve just remembered something and I want to go at once. What’s the time?”

  “It’s nearly seven o’clock. Why not just stay for the night, and to-morrow morning I’ll make arrangements for you to leave?”

  “I want to go now.”

  “Well, Mrs. Best, we can’t stop you; but we don’t think you’re fit to go and you’ll have to sign a statement that you go at your own risk and against our advice. Are you willing to do that?”

  “I’ll sign anything,” said Irene, impatiently.

  “And we shall have to notify the police.”

  “Tell them anything, I don’t care. Only do let me go, I’m late already.”

  She crept down the wide steps, a pathetic figure in the thin summer dress she had worn to Gregory’s flat the night before; with troubled eyes and a pale, pinched face under her big straw hat. Beneath one arm she clutched a bundle containing Gregory’s pyjamas and a few things Aileen had brought round to her from the shop; she scrambled on to a bus and jogged wearily home to her flat.

  Once indoors she flung the bundle on to the bed and, running to her little desk, got out her diary and feverishly searched through the pages of addresses. When she had found what she wanted, she took a warm coat from her wardrobe and hurried off out of the flat again. The diary remained lying open on the mantelpiece.

  Charlesworth saw it there when, arriving twenty minutes later, he finally obtained entrance by means of the hall-porter’s key. He glanced round the room, noted the bundle on the bed, and went quickly back to his car. At an address in South Kensington he knocked on. the door and a lugubrious maidservant answered his call. “Yor late,” she said.

  “Has the séance begun?” asked Charlesworth, breathless
ly.

  “Yers, I think she’s gorn orf,” said the woman, casting an anxious glance at a closed door to her left. She said again, severely, “Yor late.”

  “Can’t I go in?”

  “Werl you could go in and stand, I suppose. You musern’t break the circle. Do you want a mask?”

  “A mask?” said Charlesworth, incredulously.

  “Yers, a mask. ’Aven’t you bin ’ere before? Lots of them wears them; they can talk more natural, I suppose. Not but what they keeps the room very dark—you couldn’t see much, anyway.”

  “Oh, we must have a mask, I think,” said Charlesworth, grinning, “if only for the fun of it.” She looked a little dazed at such levity, but produced a small black square and a grubby pink ticket and said that that would be seven-and-six, and ninepence for the mask. She opened the door and Charlesworth slipped inside and propped himself against the wall.

  A ring of shadowy forms sat round a table, on which burned a dim red light. A woman was breathing stertorously and now and again giving a sort of moan. At intervals a voice said in a thick whisper: “Is anyone there?”

  Charlesworth checked an impulse to make an irreverent reply; nobody spoke. Somebody near him was wearing too much scent.

  It seemed a long time before at last the medium stirred and began to make small, plaintive noises in her throat. This time, when the thick whisper spoke, a man’s deep voice replied: “I come!”

  “It’s the Indian boy,” cried a woman’s voice, excitedly, and everybody else said, “Hush!”

  The thick whisper started asking questions.

  A woman had lost her husband and the deep voice told her that she must pray for him. “But he isn’t in purgatory, is he?” asked the woman, and the table rocked beneath the linked hands and the voice cried, “No, no, no!” “Don’t mention hell and purgatory,” whispered another voice, and the table rocked again and the spirit cried, loud and harsh: “No hell, no purgatory, no pain!”

  A man asked, hopelessly, for “Mary,” but there was no reply. “She never comes,” he said, and the spirit took up the cry: “She never comes; she never comes; she never comes.” “Why does he have to repeat himself?” thought Charlesworth, irritably. “We heard him the first time. What nonsense all this is.”

  Nonsense and yet worse than nonsense; the exploitation of sorrow for the sake of seven-and-sixpence and ninepence for a mask; a husky voice, a superficial knowledge of the cravings of the human heart, and the price of a ground-floor room three evenings a week … no ghostly hands, no unearthly lights, not even a tambourine: just a voice, answering questions in the dark. He began a calculation of the takings in seven-and-sixpences.…

  The voice that he had been waiting to hear broke softly into his thoughts. “I want you to help me—to advise me,” said the tiny whisper, and the deep voice cried: “I help!”

  “If one has done wrong and—and something terrible has come of it—I want you to tell me: even if it’s too late to repair the wrong—must one confess?”

  “Confess your sins,” said the spirit.

  “But if it was all a mistake; if it was just that things went wrong; if no more harm will come to anyone else … should one—must I—confess?”

  “Mistakes are not sins,” said the spirit, speaking with a glimmer of sense for the first and only time.

  “But may one benefit by those wrongs? Supposing—supposing I go to pick a rose and somebody else gets pricked, can I keep the rose? Ought I to keep the rose?”

  “Keep the rose, keep the rose, keep the rose,” cried the Indian boy, and his voice began to fade.

  “The rose is red,” said the whisper, fainter still. “The price of the rose was a life.…”

  “Keep the rose, keep the rose, keep the rose,” cried the voice, and as it cried it grew higher and thinner and fainter until it died away in the breathless hush of the room.

  A woman’s form slipped past Charlesworth, running down the steps and out into the rain. He cut across the garden and was in time to see her face as she hurried past. It was Victoria.

  2

  Victoria was standing in the doorway with Rachel and Judy when Irene got home. “We want to talk to you,” they said, and led the way into the flat.

  Irene looked weary almost to death. She took off her hat and her warm coat and pushed back her soft, dark hair from her aching head. “I’m tired,” she said, looking at them drearily. “I couldn’t stay in hospital; I had to come out this evening. I’ve just been to a spiritualist séance.”

  “So have I,” said Victoria.

  There was a ghastly silence. Then Irene said, quietlly: “So you know?”

  “We’ve known for a long time,” said Victoria, while the other two stood, a little behind her, silent and miserable. “I came here this evening to talk to you about it. I rang up the hospital to inquire about you and they told me you’d left, so I came on here. I could see that you’d been in and gone out again, but your diary was open on the mantelpiece and I saw a note of the séance and the address. I knew you had a lot of faith in that sort of thing, so I guessed that was where you’d gone. I was sure you couldn’t be fit to be running about London by yourself, so I thought I’d better follow you and bring you home; but after what I heard, I couldn’t stay. You killed Doon, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Irene.

  It was a little, square room with an uninteresting wall-paper and ugly, chipped brown paint; there was a divan bed in one corner, unskilfully camouflaged, a washbasin with a screen round it, and one armchair in front of the small gas fire. Rachel took Irene by the arm and pushed her into the chair. She said, looking round: “Have you got any drink anywhere?”

  There was only one place where Irene would keep drink. She said: “There’s some brandy in the medicine cupboard.”

  Rachel found the little bottle and poured half its contents into a toothglass. “Here you are, drink it.” She waited till the glass was empty and replaced it on the washstand; she and Victoria and Judy stood leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down at the little figure in the chair. Judy said, kindly: “We know the worst, now, Irene; it’ll be easier to tell us the rest.”

  Irene looked at the three lovely faces and saw in them horror and pity, but no uncharity. She said eagerly: “I didn’t mean to kill her; whatever you think of me, you must believe that. I intended the poison for Gregory, of course, but I didn’t mean to kill her,”

  “What did you want to do, then?” asked Rachel, half incredulous.

  “I meant to make her ill, Ray. I wanted to go to Deauville so much, and I thought if she were ill, only a little bit ill, just for a few days, Bevan would have to send me. They wanted someone there urgently.…”

  “But Doon would have gone, Irene.”

  “Not if Gregory had been ill. Bevan couldn’t have left himself to Christophe’s without either of them. It was touch and go between us three, only Gregory put Bevan off me by telling him things behind my back. Why should she have done me out of the job? She didn’t care whether she went or not, she was perfectly happy as long as she could be near Bevan; in fact, she was a fool to let him think of sending her, because as soon as she was safely parked over there she’d have lost him for ever. But she just couldn’t bear that anyone else should get it, so she did me out of my chance by saying cruel things about me; she deserved punishing, if it were only for that … she’s been hard and treacherous and unkind always, to all of us; she deserved to suffer and I wish she had!”

  “Irene!”

  “Well, it’s true, Victoria. But I didn’t mean it for Doon, and God knows I didn’t intend it to kill. I saw the little crystals lying there on the carpet where you spilt them as you brought them into the showroom, and it seemed like providence; but I had to put some back on to the heap on the table and I’d only picked up a few—I didn’t keep more than three or four grains of the crystal and I never dreamt for a moment anyone could die of that much.”

  Rachel and Victoria and Judy looked at one another and
shrugged their shoulders in a sort of bewildered dismay. Rachel moved over to the bed and sat down on it: “Well, anyway, you put some on the curry?”

  “I meant it for Gregory,” repeated Irene, with childish insistence. “I put it on the curry while I was serving it out and I specially marked the plate for Gregory; how could I know that anyone else would get it?”

  “Couldn’t you have stopped Doon having it?”

  “But I didn’t know, Victoria,” cried Irene. “I was upstairs with my customer all during your lunch hour and then I went straight on with Cecil to the Ritz, and I wasn’t downstairs at all. By the time we got back, Doon had been taken to hospital; but even then it never occurred to me that she would die. I was afraid to say anything and it’s been a nightmare to me ever since, because, if I’d spoken then, there might have been time to save her.”

  “There wouldn’t have,” said Judy in her blunt way. “By the time you got back from the Ritz, the doctor knew there was a possibility of her having taken oxalic acid; it was already too late to do anything. You can spare yourself that much anxiety, anyway.”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” said Irene, leaning forward in her big armchair, her aching head in her hands. “I thought I would go mad, but I just had to carry on. I lived in a sort of daze last week, and I was dreading having to go to the funeral and pretend—well, of course, it wouldn’t have been pretending because no one there could have been more wretched than I, but—you know what I mean. I simply couldn’t have gone. Then, when Bevan suggested that I should stay behind, imagine how thankful I was! But after that, the letters came … and you were all so sweet … do you mean to say that you knew all the time?”

  “Don’t think we weren’t sincere about that, Irene,” said Victoria. “We knew that the things they said weren’t true, all the filth about your revelling in her sufferings and so on; and you looked so ill and desperate that we couldn’t bear to see you—we knew you must be going through hell, knowing the dreadful truth behind it all. Aileen was the only one that didn’t know.…”