Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  Inspector Cockrill dutifully embarked upon a speech about the impossibility of interfering with the activities of the police on the spot, but she did not listen to him, she did not care. She poured it all out to him, heaped facts and figures at his feet. ‘So there you are, Cockie, how could it have been anybody but a burglar, how could Thomas have had anything to do with it.…?’

  ‘Nobody says I have, Tilda,’ said Thomas, crossly. ‘Except you.’

  ‘I only say that the police …’

  ‘Never mind, never mind,’ said Cockie. ‘Just keep quiet and let me get this straight. Now, Matilda—this man, Vernet, rang you from the Ritz yesterday morning and arranged to come to dinner at half-past seven—right? He was late, he arrived about a quarter to eight. Melissa was out for the afternoon and evening; Rosie had gone out just before he arrived; Thomas went off directly after, without seeing him; Mrs. Evans was upstairs in her room, ditto the baby; so you were to all intents and purposes alone with him. You had dinner and, at a quarter past nine, you went upstairs to do the baby, etcetera, leaving him in the drawing-room. Two minutes later, he was ringing up Dr. Edwards’ house saying that he had been attacked with a mastoid mallet, whatever that may be. Rosie was there and she took the message. She and Dr. Edwards rushed round as fast as the fog would let them, and got here at about twenty-five to ten, just as you were coming downstairs again. Vernet was lying dead in the hall, with his head caved in and Dr. Edwards says he had only been dead a few minutes; the telephone receiver was still in his hand, and the wire had been yanked right out, as though by the fall. At this time, Melissa had been in quite a while, but downstairs in her flat, and Thomas was driving about in the fog, trying to find a patient’s address. He got in ten minutes later. Is that all correct?’

  ‘Yes, it is, Cockie; so there you are, how could Thomas possibly …?’

  ‘All right, Matilda, don’t go on about it,’ said Thomas.

  It was a comfortable room; a rather shabby, very untidy, unselfconscious, comfortable room, with ugly, fat, comfortable old armchairs regrettably out of keeping with its high, moulded Regency ceiling; with Thomas’s all-important desk poked away into an unconsidered corner, Thomas’s appointment pads and books and a litter of pencils and scraps of paper on the wide marble mantelpiece; the screen behind which he must modestly conceal his female patients in their process of disrobing before they appeared stark naked before his professional eye, was now folded away against the wall (in fact he saw the vast majority of his patients in their outside surgery in St. John’s Wood); and on the examination couch, Rosie was curled up in one of her lovely, curving poses, with Annaran, the Siamese cat, stretched out ecstatically on her lap, having his velvet stomach rubbed up the wrong way. ‘Now, Rosie—stop messing about with that cat and listen to me: this telephone call you took——?’

  ‘Well, Tedward was getting out the car, Cockie, and I simply took it, in case it was a patient or something, just like I would here.’

  ‘Yes, all right. What time did you arrive there?’

  ‘It was nine o’clock,’ said Tedward, ‘or very nearly. I know because I was watching the time—I expected her about eight.’

  ‘But you left here at half-past seven, Rosie,’ said Tilda.

  ‘Yes, I know, but the fog was simply frantic,’ said Rosie, walking pink-tipped fingers up and down Annaran’s arched back.

  ‘You made her some tea and then went out to get your car?’

  Tedward sat forward in his chair, his hands between his knees; his trousers were extended, tight and wrinkled across his heavy thighs. ‘Yes. I didn’t like the look of her, I thought she looked white and tired and I wanted to get her home.’

  ‘But she’d only just arrived.’

  Couldn’t the silly old fool realize that Rosie had struggled for more than an hour through the fog, baby and all? ‘I thought she was over-tired,’ repeated Tedward, crossly.

  ‘All right, all right. Well, then—how long getting out your car?’

  Tedward shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know exactly. Three or four minutes Rosie? It was a hell of a job because the fog by the canal was as thick as cotton wool, and my garage is tricky, anyway. Does it matter?’

  ‘I wanted to try and time the telephone call. Matilda left Raoul Vernet at exactly a quarter past nine.’

  ‘Well, the ’phone rang almost directly after Tedward went to get the car.’

  ‘Now tell me again exactly what was said.’

  Rosie was busy making herself a Mandarin moustache with the end of Annaran’s dark tail, but she desisted long enough to recite in a parrot gabble the gist of the telephone message, which she was by now heartily sick of repeating. ‘He definitely said, Rosie, “A man came in and hit me with a mastoid mallet”?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about “a man”, said Rosie, tucking Annaran’s tail back around him. ‘Mr. Charlesworth keeps asking me, too. Either “a man” or “someone” or something like that. But he did say about the mastoid mallet.’

  ‘You’re sure of that at least?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course; because otherwise how could I have known about the mastoid mallet?’

  ‘There was a mastoid mallet thrown down beside him in the hall,’ said Thomas. ‘It had obviously been used on him. It was mine.’

  ‘Yes, I want to come to that now. You kept this mastoid mallet in the hall?’

  It sounded very peculiar, it sounded as though one kept mastoid mallets tidied away in a corner with croquet and other mallets of that ilk, as Thomas would have said to annoy Matilda, who went nearly mad when people misused words. ‘Yes. At least I think it would be there, though some of the stuff’s in the old chest of drawers on the landing upstairs. My old Uncle Huw left me his instruments—Doctor Evans Pink Medicine, he used to be called back home in Wales, to distinguish him from Doctor Evans Little Pills. The ones I had no use for I stowed away upstairs, or in the drawer of that bureau in the hall where the telephone stands.’

  ‘And this mastoid mallet’s missing from either upstairs or downstairs, wherever it was?’

  ‘It’s not exactly missing,’ said Thomas. ‘The police have got it, duly covered with blood and hairs and what not. But there’s no mallet now in either of the drawers, and anyway, it’s mine all right. I know the look of it.’

  ‘What is the look of it?’ said Cockrill. ‘I mean what arc these things like?’

  ‘Well, they’re just miniature mallets, like little steel croquet mallets or like those things you knock pegs in with; only the handle’s much shorter by comparison. The business end’s about as big as … As big as …’ He looked about him for a comparison. ‘Well, as big as an ordinary tumbler, if a tumbler was a lot smaller than it usually is; or as big as a tin of baked beans, though why baked beans, I don’t know.’

  ‘Very handy for killing a man with?’ suggested Cockie.

  ‘So a good many ear, nose and throat surgeons have discovered,’ said Thomas, dryly.

  ‘What precisely is the thing used for in the ordinary way?’

  Thomas put two fingers behind his ear. ‘Chipping away diseased bone in the mastoid region, here. You hold a sort of chisel in your left hand, and hammer away at it with the mallet.’

  ‘It would be pretty heavy?’

  ‘Heavy-ish,’ said Thomas. ‘But well-balanced.’

  ‘As far as killing this man was concerned—anyone could have used the thing? A woman could have used it?’

  ‘Man, woman or child,’ agreed Thomas, readily. ‘Just the job.’

  ‘How long have you had it? Who knew it was here?’

  ‘We all knew,’ said Matilda. ‘We all helped to sort out Uncle Huw’s legacy. Tedward, you were here that day, and one of Rosie’s boy friends was here too—would it be Damien Jones?’

  ‘Yes’, said Rosie. ‘It was just before I went to Switzerland.’

  ‘Well, all right. Now, Matilda—it looks as if this man was attacked almost directly you left him and went upstairs?’

  Matilda, who thought
in pictures, saw Raoul sitting as she had left him, bald head thrown back against the coral-coloured cushion in the big, pale green armchair, long legs crossed, the pointed toe of a too-ornate brown shoe, gently swinging. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Raoul, but I must just go upstairs and fix up the old lady for the night and pot the baby; and then we can settle down and really talk.…’ ‘Mais, ma chère,’ he had said, ‘one hour and a half already I have been here and so far not one word of what I wish to say. Le cocktail, la cuisine, le café—et maintenant les vielles, les enfants.…’ She had sworn that she would not be long, at least not very long—uneasily conscious that what she had to do must take her at least twenty minutes. ‘Anyway, it’s your fault, Raoul, for refusing to discuss things at dinner.’ He had replied with ill-concealed impatience that what he had to say was extremely distasteful, that Mathilde would not like it any better than he did, and he preferred to dine before he was thrown out of the house, ‘Alors, Mathilde—allez, allez, depèchez-vous, s’il vous plait. In one minute your husband will return and then …’ He gave the sort of shrug with which the British caricature all Frenchmen on every stage. ‘It will be I, ma chère, who depèchc myself!’

  ‘You mean to say, Matilda, that you never did discuss whatever it was that he had come to say?’

  ‘My dear, nothing would induce him to disturb his digestion with a painful discussion, that was the truth of it; and I just had to do my chores at a quarter past nine—and then, after that, well, he was dead.’

  ‘How long were you away from him?’

  ‘I’ve worked it all out about a million times for Mr. Charlesworth,’ said Matilda, ‘so I can tell you exactly. At a quarter past, I went to Granny’s room and unhooked her wig for her, didn’t I, Gran?—and undid the back of her dress, and then I went to my own room and tidied myself up for about five minutes, and then by that time she was undressed and I helped her into bed and gave her her Horlicks. And then I went into the nursery, and I know it was half-past nine then, because I always do Emma at half-past nine, though I’ll spare you my well-known speech about the importance of regularity in bringing up children. So if I was five or six minutes with Emma, it must have been twenty-five to, or a bit later, when I came downstairs and saw Rosie and Tedward coming into the hall.’

  ‘And that fits,’ said Rosie, ‘because if she left him at a quarter past nine and the ’phone call was just after that, then Tedward and I took about fifteen minutes in the fog, and we arrived between twenty-five to and twenty to ten. We’ve been over and over and over it all with Charlesworth.’

  ‘You mean to say, Matilda, that you left your guest all alone for a whole twenty minutes?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t help it, Cockie. These things had to be done.’ She added that it was like being a farmer, if they knew what she meant; animals had to be fed and milked and things, and other things just couldn’t be more important. ‘Thanks very much; what docs that make me?’ said old Mrs. Evans, laughing.

  ‘You didn’t think of running down, half-way through, and reassuring him?’

  ‘Well, time passes so quickly when you’re busy and in a hurry. I did call over the banisters once, but he didn’t answer so I thought he hadn’t heard.’ She put her hand to her mouth in a gesture of dismay. ‘Oh, heavens! You don’t think …?’

  ‘He didn’t answer because he was lying there dead.’

  ‘Oh, Cockie!’

  ‘You couldn’t see down into the hall?’

  ‘No, you can’t from the landing; not unless you go down the stairs a little way.’

  ‘And you didn’t hear anything, Matilda?’

  ‘No, Cockie, absolutely nothing. At the time of the ’phone call, I’d have been in my room doing my face, and you couldn’t hear anything from there, even quite a row. We’ve tested it. And Gran says she heard nothing.’

  ‘I daresay I’m getting a bit deaf,’ said old Mrs. Evans—a most rare confession of weakness.

  ‘Not even the ting of the ’phone when the receiver was put back?’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t put back,’ said Tedward. ‘He fell with the receiver still in his hand, didn’t he? In fact, Rosie heard him fall.’

  ‘Yes, his voice got fainter and fainter and then there was a sort of bonk.’

  ‘Rosie heard the bonk over the telephone half a mile away, but you two good ladies, in your rooms one floor above—you heard nothing?’

  Mrs. Evans gave a loud, suspicious sniff. ‘Do I smell burning?’

  ‘No, darling, you don’t,’ said Matilda. Granny’s diversions had now and again come in handy with Mr. Charlesworth, but Cockie was ‘on their side’; at least she hoped he was.

  Melissa sat staring down at her hands and in all her life she had never been so much afraid. Now he’s coming to me. Now he’ll start asking me! Her head swam, her mind was a blank. What had she said to Inspector Charlesworth, what lies had she told that must be adhered to now? And if she contradicted herself, would this dreadful little fierce old man compare notes with the others—and find out the whole appalling truth? She bent her head still lower over the clenched hands so that her hair hung like a curtain over her face. She had said that.… She had said that she had been with Stanislas. And that had been all right because she could honestly say that she didn’t know his name or where he lived or anything about him, as Rosie could testify; as to the telephone number, it had been too well-remembered to need writing down in the little book with the dearth of abortionists and one must just deny that one had ever known it. Mr. Charlesworth had said that no doubt the police would have very little difficulty in tracing him, and one could only hope and pray that that was not true. It had occurred to her to get in touch with Stanislas and beg him to keep silent; but all things considered.… No; she would not do that. And when he saw in the papers that she was mixed up in murder, he, who had to be so ‘careful’, would almost certainly stay away, slip away out of the whole thing, and for ever.

  So she trotted out her story once again. She had met her Friend and they had started off to a cinema, had lost their way in the fog and just been—well, just walking about. And she had got back about half-past nine (or had she said to Inspector Charlesworth that it was a quarter to ten? It was so important, so ghastly-ly important and now she had gone and forgotten …), and had been in her flat, and heard nothing until there was a commotion in the hall, people talking and things, and she had gone up and found them all leaning over the body; they must have turned him over on his back by then because his two pointed toes were sticking up into the air.…

  A little fish of doubt swam into Cockie’s consciousness and hung about there for a moment waggling its fins at him; but he was more interested in Thomas than in Melissa Weeks and so he passed on and never knew how much trouble and tragedy might have been saved if he had noticed it. ‘Now Thomas—let’s hear from you.’

  Thomas sat, looking rather lost in the big armchair. His short legs would not, comfortably, reach the ground and he had tucked them up under him, like a child. It gave him an oddly defenceless air, curled up there, with his pale face and untidy fair hair and the little bumps that came up under his eyes when he was tired or anxious or unwell. ‘Nothing to tell you. I went out to see a case, I couldn’t find the address, I milled about for hours in the fog looking for it, and finally I came home. By that time, this ruddy fellow was lying there dead, cluttering up my hall. That’s all I know.’

  ‘You never saw the case?’ said Cockie, anxiously.

  ‘I tell you, I couldn’t find the address. I don’t know that part very well, it’s outside my usual territory, I lost my way about forty times and there was nobody about in the fog to ask. And in the end I may have got it wrong, because when I did get there the house was all shut up and there was nobody there. It was in a little back street, a sort of mews thing, called Harrow Gardens—too small to be in the London Guide.’

  ‘Well, but Thomas, that didn’t take you over two hours?’

  ‘You don’t know what the fog was like, Cockie; damn
it, it took Tedward twenty minutes to get from his place to here, and that’s not half as far, not a quarter as far, and what’s more, he knows the road, which I don’t round that Harrow Road part. But apart from that, when I found the house empty, I thought I might have mistaken the address so, having gone so far, I looked round a bit more. I found a Harrow Place and a Harrow Street and a few more Harrows, but none of them went up to the number I’d got, so I gave the whole thing up and came home.’

  ‘You didn’t think of ringing up here?’

  ‘I did, later, but by that time the line here was dead. Anyway, it was a forlorn chance; I thought Melissa had taken the message, and she’d still be out, so what could they tell me? I just went on searching.’

  ‘Was it a serious case, that you took so much trouble?’

  ‘It was a case,’ said Thomas, briefly.

  ‘Oh, Thomas, now don’t get all cross and shut-up,’ implored Matilda. ‘This is what he does with Mr. Charlesworth, Cockie, when Mr. Charlesworth seems to think it’s fishy. It was a serious case, at least it might have been; it was a baby and it could easily have died. Couldn’t it, Thomas?’

  ‘Were they private patients? Or would they be on your panel or whatever they call it with this National Health thing?’