by Anne Morice
“Except that they might not have functioned in the case of someone who saw and heard exactly what he was expecting.”
“Oh, I’m with you now, with you all the way. You think this seizure was contrived by one of them? Well, that wouldn’t surprise me at all, but you’re out of luck, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Certainly, you are, because if the old harridan should die it will inevitably be attributed to natural causes; which means that no one is going to ask for your help in a lovely murder investigation.”
“There is such a thing, Toby, as seeking out the truth for its own sake.”
“So I’ve heard, but I’m afraid you won’t get very far with that either. They’re a very well organised little herd at Farndale, with Tilly running round like a zealous sheepdog whenever they show signs of straying. You wouldn’t get a foot in there. Incidentally, I presume you believe one of them has been impersonating Edna’s doppelgänger literally in order to scare her to death?”
“I regard it as a possibility.”
“So perhaps you have already decided which one?”
“No, not yet, but most of my money is on her sister, Alice. After all, she does start with the advantage of having some physical resemblance to the victim. It would certainly have been a lot easier for her than anyone else.”
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any more probable. She happens to be the only one of them who is not obliged to dance attendance on Edna and put up with her meanness and bad temper. Why should she bother with such pranks?”
“Well, I can’t tell you why, Toby, but I think that’s how it may have started: as a malicious prank. Apparently, she’s always been jealous of Edna, who never missed an opportunity to snub and humiliate her. It must have rankled and now that she’s retired and hard up, stripped of all her matronly power, as you might say, it must be even more irritating to think of her beastly sister lapped in luxury and not lifting a finger. But there’s another thing, which makes an even more damning case against Alice, that I haven’t mentioned yet.”
“I thought there must be.”
“Tilly told me that when she rang her up this morning, to pass on the sad news, Alice immediately offered her professional services.”
“What’s guilt laden about that? Personally, I consider it rather magnanimous. And since she’s a trained nurse, with time on her hands, what more natural?”
“But Toby, you know as well as I do that if Edna woke up and found Alice bending over her with the hypodermic it would not only delay her recovery, but probably precipitate her death. Tilly told me she had to tie herself in knots to head Alice off. She explained why more or less as I have, but I expect she had an extra reason too.”
“And what would that be?”
“Don’t you see that if it had occurred to her that Alice had been running round impersonating her sister, this would be a marvellous way to insinuate herself into the household and have another go? Captive audience, already very groggy, and Edna’s entire wardrobe there for her to choose from.”
“Yes, but that would take it out of the category of malicious prank. That really would be intent to murder.”
“And for all we know, Alice has a more sinister motive than appears. If so, I wouldn’t put anything past her and neither, I suspect, would Tilly.”
“So there you are! Tilly is right up alongside, if not one jump ahead of you, and she’ll never let any cat out of her old knitting bag.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something, Toby?”
“Am I? I do seem to forget most things. What is it this time?”
“Edna herself may be the one to tell us. She obviously has something very pressing on her mind and, if she only regained part of her faculties, she might be able to write down a legible message. Furthermore, that is just as likely to happen when the nurse is there as at any other time, in which case Tilly would be powerless to conceal it.”
“I suppose so, but I wouldn’t have thought the risk was enormous. Didn’t you tell me her last effort made no sense whatever?”
“I wrote it down for you,” I said, taking a piece of paper from my bag, “just in case your keen mind detects some hidden meaning.”
It looked at first as though it did, for, having scrutinised it briefly, he handed it back to me, saying:
“That’s easy, no trouble at all. It says ‘IOU one pound, love Ferdy’.”
“Oh sorry, that’s the wrong side. The silly fellow insisted on making it what he called official, so when he’d gone I used the back of his IOU to copy out Edna’s squiggles, as exactly as I could remember them.”
This time there was a longer interval before Toby looked up and then he said:
“After all, my keen mind is no more use than a wet flannel. I can only begin to make out one of the words and, by a long stretch of the imagination, it might be construed as ‘ell’. Perhaps she was trying to say: ‘I gave them an inch and they took an el’. That would be rather her style. But no wonder old Tilly saw no harm in showing it to you! Even you would be hard pressed to read anything between those lines.”
He was about to crush the piece of paper into a ball, but I snatched it from him protesting loudly:
“Don’t do that! Ferdy was so fussy about giving it to me that, for all I know, he may expect me to return it to him when he pays me back.”
“In that case, I should advise you to put it in the bank. You could well be a bed-ridden old lady yourself before that day comes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
An upstairs restaurant in one of the riverside pubs was making a good thing out of Three Course After Theatre Suppers and Special Matinée Luncheons. I make it a rule never to eat lunch before a matinée, special or otherwise, but on the day after my visit to Farndale we had only an evening performance and when Helena Plowman telephoned in the morning and invited me to join her in the dining room of the Jolly Angler I accepted at once.
I had scarcely known Helena until the Festival set our paths crossing and had never felt this left any gaping blank in my life, but she had said that she wished to ask my advice on a confidential matter, which was too much to resist; and the shaming part of it was that I could not quite repress the sneaking hope that Camilla was turning out to be totally inadequate for the job and that the advice Helena sought was in how to give her the graceful sack. I felt more ashamed than ever when this proved to be true.
“Apart from being contemporaries, you two have always been such close friends,” Helena said, rubbing salt in the wound, then wiping it off again by adding: “And, since it was largely thanks to you that we’ve been saddled with her, I thought you might be able to give me some guidelines.”
I had been studying her, in her cool, uncrushed toffee coloured shirtwaister, while she put the waiter through an inquisition on the ingredients of the Special Lunch and had come to the conclusion that she had changed very little since the days when, with a single word or look, she had struck terror into the unruly elements at the children’s parties. She was a woman who went to infinite pains to get the smallest details right, as the present instance proved, and this near-obsession applied to every aspect of her life. She always had the right flowers in the right vase, on the most polished of Sheraton tables; always meticulously checked, repeated and retained for ever the name of a stranger on being introduced, and was always immaculately dressed in the most suitable clothes for every occasion. Apart from a rather daunting lack of humour and something chilly and anaemic in her appearance, the principal flaw in all this studied perfection was that her pale blue eyes were set slightly too close together, which was probably how Bernard came by his shifty look.
However, there were some more nebulous faults too, to tarnish the image. For some reason, her poise and self-assurance, far from transmitting itself to others, created a barrier of unease. It was as though she were forever playing a part which Nature had not written for her and that deep within herself she was still worried about fluffing her lines. This impression
of being slightly at odds with herself had sometimes caused me to wonder whether she suffered from a total lack of the vulgar streak, or whether it was there all right and had only been partially repressed, so that she was always afraid it would bob up some day and catch her unawares.
I was not unique in having been repelled on occasions by this enigmatic quality and various stories and rumours had been dragged out to account for it. One was that in her early youth she had been engaged to the heir of a rich and noble family, that the wedding had been cancelled at the last minute, in somewhat dubious circumstances, as a result of which she had been bundled up the aisle with a second-rate country solicitor, a humiliation from which she had never wholly recovered. Another favourite was that her marriage to Robert Plowman had been disappointing and unsatisfactory, causing her to project her worldly ambitions on to Bernard, who was destined in her eyes to achieve all the glories she had missed and who had upset these schemes by turning out to be a weak and undistinguished boy, very much like his father.
“What’s gone wrong?” I asked, in response to her opening statement. “I understood Camilla was doing so well.”
“I don’t know where you got that idea! She got by, so long as Debbie Fox was in charge and able to chivvy her, but it’s a different story now. By the most maddening stroke of bad luck, poor Debbie has had a miscarriage and has had to retire from the fray. The Committee really had no choice but to hand things over to Camilla. We thought she’d have got the hang of it by then, but we couldn’t have been more mistaken, and what’s much worse is that she seems to have lost interest. Everyone is entitled to make mistakes from time to time, but it’s this attitude of apathy and laissez-faire which is so trying. She’s simply not pulling her weight.”
“You don’t think it’s just that she’s worried over this business with her grandmother?”
“Yes, no doubt, that could have something to do with it,” Helena said, prodding her melon in a suspicious way. “And, goodness knows, I don’t want to be hard on the girl. I know things must be difficult and I admire her for giving up her London job to spend more time down here. I just wish I could find the right way to ease her out, without hurting her feelings. Unfortunately, I’m the very last person for that, although I don’t feel that it gives me an excuse to shirk it.”
“Oh really? I should have thought you were expert at striking the tactful note?”
“My dear girl, do use your head! As her prospective mother-in-law, I am naturally suspect. So much so that it never occurred to her to apply to me in the first place, if you remember?”
“Well, couldn’t you just say that now the Festival is on its feet, so to speak, you’re scrapping that department altogether?”
“Which just shows how very little you know about all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes! Even Camilla would see through that! The fact is that keeping the press happy is absolutely vital at this stage. My dear, do you realise it was purely by accident that I discovered that not a single Oxford or Dedley paper had been sent tickets to cover your opening performance? Fortunately, Tara managed to straighten it out in the nick of time, but it could have been a fiasco. Heaven knows what our dear impresario, Mr. David Winter, would have had to say about it!”
Leaving him out of it, I was pretty badly shocked myself: “Well, I’ll be blowed! How did Camilla talk her way out of that one?”
“Quite unrepentant. Said she’d arranged with the box office for anyone with a press card to be given complimentary tickets, but I ask you, Tessa! What’s the good of that? You have to woo these people, you can’t expect them to make the running. And we have our Japanese Film Week coming up to-morrow,” Helena added thoughtfully. “People may not actually be fighting to get in, even if it does get a decent write-up and I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that our Camilla won’t have fallen down on that one, too.”
“Still, however lousy a job she’s doing, you’re not going to find it easy to replace her at this stage?”
“On the contrary, Tara’s perfectly willing to take over and she’d do a first class job, no question of that.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Oh, she had far too much on her plate during the preparatory period. No one could believe what that woman takes on! But now that we’re off the ground, so to speak, the pressures are off too, and she could handle the press side without turning a hair. Naturally, though, she insists on having a clear field, and I don’t think Camilla would take kindly to having someone else in authority, so the problem is how to shift her without hurting her feelings or setting up an extra hostility towards myself. That’s where I was looking to you for some advice. You’ve hardly touched your fish! Is there anything wrong with it?”
The only truthful answer was that it tasted as though the chef had cooked it in the bag and then thrown all but the bag away, so I took refuge in Camilla’s trick of substituting a vapid smile for the spoken word, before returning to the point of discussion:
“If you want an honest opinion, Helena, I’d say you haven’t much to worry about. A face saver is all you need and there won’t be any danger of hurting her feelings. Explain that her exceptional talents will henceforth be needed for keeping a check on the car stickers and you’ll be home and dry.”
“Indeed?” Helena asked snootily. “You do surprise me! One had always thought of her as a particularly sensitive young woman. Hyper-sensitive, one might almost say.”
“I know one might, but that’s when her own feelings are concerned, and that’s not the case here. This job was simply the means to an end.”
“Good heavens!” Helena said, looking quite scandalised by such heresy. “To what end, pray?”
“Well, you see, when Mrs. Mortimer had her visitation from the spirit world, or whatever it was that caused the first attack . . .”
“I beg your pardon?” Helena interrupted, frowning so heavily that it gave her a slight squint. “What’s all this talk of spirits?”
“Oh, you know, this mysterious apparition that’s been bobbing up during the past two or three weeks. No one is sure whether Mrs. Mortimer has imagined it, but each of her bad spells has been brought on by seeing someone who was so nearly her own double that she concluded she’d died and was looking at herself from another world. Bernard must have told you about it?”
“I assure you he hasn’t.”
“Honestly? How very strange! We seem to have been talking about nothing else for weeks; but I suppose he doesn’t take it very seriously.”
“And also you must remember that I’ve had rather a lot on my plate recently,” she reminded me, looking self-righteous about it, as people are apt to do when they have missed out on a sizzling bit of gossip. “Besides, Bernard has never confided in us very much. However, go on with what you were saying about Camilla.”
“Oh, simply that she’s hooked on the idea that she has some kind of obligation to stick around during this rather alarming phase, but not in such a way that she’d be tied to the house the whole time. Furthermore, I think that was also the last thing Tilly wanted, so it suited all parties for Camilla to play the dutiful grand-daughter, with none of the boredom the role would normally have entailed. Mind you, that’s only my personal opinion.”
“And a depressingly cynical one, if I may say so! However, you may be right and I certainly hope you are, because it will make my task a lot easier. I think I’ve just time for coffee, if you’d like some?”
Having unburdened herself and been granted such an acceptable solution, she unbent quite a lot while we drank our coffee, even stooping so low as to press for details about Edna’s hallucinations and declaring herself to be quite as mystified as the rest of us when she had heard the full story.
“Of course, she is apt to dramatise even the most ordinary events, but frankly I wouldn’t have thought she had the imagination to invent a tale like this.”
“Which is the view that most people take.”
“It’s odd really,” Helena mused, squinting i
nto her cup. “If one didn’t know better, it would be so easy to assume that she and Camilla were blood relations. They have so much in common. Some of the resemblances are quite remarkable.”
“Not having their feet quite on the ground, for instance?”
“I wouldn’t have put it as strongly as that,” Helena replied, obviously regarding this as a terrible condemnation. “But, without wishing to be unkind, you must know what I mean? This trick of saying whatever comes into their heads, in order to justify themselves in some way?”
“Yes, I expect it’s catching. Were you surprised when she and Bernard got engaged?”
“I must confess I was,” Helena said, grimacing slightly as she put her cup down. “Very much surprised, as it happens. Not that I’ve anything against Camilla, you understand, but Robert and I both thought Bernard and Fiona Batterby would make a match of it. You know her, I expect?”
I shook my head.
“The Tivertons’ eldest girl; an absolute poppet and she and Bernard have been chums since they were in their teens. Still, it can’t have been serious, I suppose, because, out of the blue, he tells us that he’s going to marry Camilla.”
“A touch of the rebounds, perhaps?”
“Couldn’t say, my dear. One has learnt not to ask questions. I’m sure Camilla will make a splendid wife, but they certainly don’t behave like engaged couples used to in my day.”
“More like brother and sister, you mean?”
“Not exactly, no. That wouldn’t bother me so much because I think a good many young people adopt that kind of pose nowadays. A form of self-consciousness, perhaps, or something to do with the clothes they wear, but my pair aren’t like that at all. I don’t know how I can explain it to you, but they’re more like two people collaborating in some business arrangement. While the deal is going through they live entirely in each other’s pockets, even take pleasure in doing so, and yet somehow you know instinctively that once their business has been concluded they’ll both move on to new enterprises and scarcely give a thought to each other ever again. Oh well, it’s just their way, I suppose and probably I’m out of touch with modern customs. You obviously haven’t the faintest idea what I’m driving at, if that gawpy look is anything to go by.”