Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  ‘How do I know?’ said Thomas. ‘I haven’t got their name. But it was unlikely they’d be paying patients coming from that particular district.’

  ‘Would it be in your area?’

  ‘I haven’t got an area,’ said Thomas, increasingly cross. ‘I let my patients live where they like.’

  ‘I’m merely putting it to you as the police on the job will put it, Thomas. You had an address and the fact that a child was ill. Out you went into practically impassable fog and spent over two hours searching for them. Wouldn’t they meanwhile have taken the child to hospital?’

  ‘That’s what they probably did as the house was empty. But I couldn’t count on it. Once patients have rung up for the doctor, they just fold their hands and wait patiently in sublime confidence that sooner or later he’ll appear. And they wouldn’t want to take a sick child out into the fog. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong, I suppose, in a doctor going out to see a case? For Pete’s sake.…’

  ‘Now, hold your horses, son: nobody’s accusing you of anything.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Thomas. ‘Wait till you hear! Where did I find the message?—written on a scrap of paper lying on the appointments pad, here on the mantelpiece in this room, beside the telephone. Where is it now?—I tore it up; I copied the address into my little book in the usual way, and chucked the paper into the fire. Wasn’t that rather a silly thing to do?—Well, yes, perhaps it was, in case I got the address copied down wrong, but there it was, I just did it. And, why is that rather a pity?—Because, my dear Inspector, I now can’t show the scrap of paper to prove that it ever existed. And nobody in the house ever saw it. Nobody took the message, nobody wrote it down. Matilda didn’t, Rosie didn’t, Granny didn’t, and now Melissa tells us that she didn’t; and there’s nobody else.’

  ‘M’m,’ said Cockie. ‘It doesn’t sound too good.’

  ‘It sounds pretty good to Inspector Charlesworth,’ said Thomas. ‘It sounds just the job to him. I waved a blank paper under Matilda’s nose, told her it was a case and I’d have to go out, skipped off without seeing the victim, presumably so that I wouldn’t have as an excuse for killing him that I didn’t like his face, hung about in the fog till I saw by the lights in the house that Matilda had gone upstairs and left him alone, whizzed into the hall, got my little hatchet out of the drawer, whistled him to come out of the drawing-room and be killed, and blipped him on the head. Then, not being a good enough doctor to know whether or not a man’s dead, I went off into the fog again, leaving him to hop up and ring round telling everybody all about it before he passed away.’ He looked Cockrill in the eye. ‘And the hell of it is, that it hangs together you know; it sounds damn silly, and yet it’s watertight. Charlesworth’s not quite such a bloody fool as he looks.’

  ‘ ‘Ere, ’ere, ’ere, ’ere, wot’s all this?’ said Detective Inspector Charlesworth, coming in at the door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ROSIE privately thought Mr. Charlesworth was simply heaven! Fancy a detective being so young, and then so frantically good-looking with his hair brushed up into divine little sort of moustaches over his ears; and lovely long legs and nice grey eyes and a gent! Even if he was rather beastly and suspicious about poor Thomas. I expect I could get round him, though, she thought; not to fuss any more but just say it was a burglar and be done with it. Getting round Mr. Charlesworth would in itself be quite fun.

  Mr. Charlesworth was perfectly (and genuinely) enchanted to see Inspector Cockrill; no suspicion of unfriendly feeling, no slightest intention of giving offence lurked, or ever had lurked, in his guileless heart. He wrung the old man’s hand, asked after Grime in Kent, rather as though it were the routine of general misdemeanour in a minor preparatory school, and referred with great jocularity to that Jezebel case, when they had worked together—apparently blissfully forgetful of where the ultimate credit for its solution had lain. Cockie, who had so recently adjured the Evans family to be of good behaviour with the police, set them but a poor example of frankness and honesty. He just happened to be in London.… And just happening to drop in on his friends, the Evans’s.… ‘I find them in rather an unfortunate situation; and I thought that perhaps …’

  ‘We thought that perhaps Cockie could just explain to you how idiotic it was to think that Thomas could possibly have wanted to kill Raoul,’ said Rosie, ‘and then he could help you to find out who it really was.’

  Cockie passionately disclaimed. Charlesworth declared that he would be only too happy to talk things over with the Inspector; but it was apparent that Rosie’s words had brought him back to earth with a nasty bump. They strolled into the garden together. ‘To be honest, Inspector, I don’t like this case one bit.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Cockie.

  ‘He seems such a nice chap,’ said Charlesworth. ‘And yet …’

  There was a dank stone bench beyond the mulberry tree and they sat down there on Cockrill’s mackintosh and offered one another cigarettes. ‘You must say the thing about the message is pretty fishy.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can base a whole case on it. Accidents happen. That ass of a secretary girl, Melissa—she may easily have forgotten writing it down, or she’s got in a flap and just blankly denies it; perhaps she knows she got it down wrong or something.’

  ‘She seems rather a peculiar wench,’ said Charlesworth, thoughtfully. ‘I wish to hell she’d put a Kirbigrip in her hair.’

  ‘Inferiority complex,’ said Cockrill. ‘When girls wear their hair draped over their faces, it’s always a sign.’

  ‘There was a girl called Veronica Lake who started off under the same disability,’ said Charlesworth. If the dear old boy were going to begin delving into psychology.…!

  Sergeant Bedd came out to meet them, moving quickly and quietly on his large feet up the overgrown garden path, as an elephant passes silently through the jungle. Like the elephant, he too wore a baggy, dark grey suit. His square brown face broke into a thousand delighted wrinkles at sight of Inspector Cockrill and he sat down before them, perched at their feet like a small boy, on the stump of a tree. ‘What do you think of this business, Sergeant?’ said Cockie. ‘By the way, Thomas Evans is a friend of mine.’

  ‘Well, it certainly looks a bit sticky for your friend, Inspector, but as I tell Mr. Charlesworth, there’s no use in rushing things. If it was an inside job, it must have been either Dr. Evans, or his lady—after all, she was here in the house with the chap. The great question is—was it really an inside job?’

  ‘What about the front door?’

  ‘Just pushed to,’ said Charlesworth. ‘They’re the scattiest family I ever came across. Everybody always forgets their latch key.…’

  ‘“Everybody” means Rosie,’ said Cockrill.

  ‘I daresay. Anyway, the front door sticks just enough to keep it shut without the latch being down, and during the daytime, that’s what they do with it.’

  ‘But this was the night-time,’ said Cockie.

  ‘Yes, but Rosie was still out.’

  ‘So that an intruder could just have pushed the door open and walked in?’

  ‘Yep. And just the night for it, fog and all.’

  ‘If the house had been watched at all, they’d know about the front door,’ said Bedd. ‘There’s a lot of that stuff around Maida Vale. And seeing the doctor go out …’

  ‘They may even have sent a fake message to get him out,’ suggested Cockrill, a trifle too eagerly.

  ‘Well, they might,’ acknowledged Charlesworth.

  Sergeant Bedd sat on his ricketty stump, looking up at them like an overgrown child with his elders, and thought his thoughts aloud. ‘They’ve been watching the house. They know Mrs. Evans goes upstairs for quite a while every evening. They’ve seen the others go out—they believe she’s alone. As soon as the lights go on upstairs, they push open the front door and go in. The Frenchie comes out to see what the noise is and they hit him over the head with the first thing handy and clear out.’ He shrugged. ‘W
e haven’t found any signs of them,’ he said.

  ‘They’d have gloves and sneakers and all the rest of it.’

  ‘Yes, it doesn’t count much, one way or the other.’ But there was a snag to it. Mr. Charlesworth and Inspector Cockrill sat eyeing one another warily. If the old boy didn’t tumble to it.… If the young jackanapes couldn’t see it.…

  ‘But the snag is,’ said Sergeant Bedd in his deep, slow rumble, ‘that the mastoid mallet wasn’t handy, was it?’

  Messrs. Charlesworth and Cockrill said that that was just what they had been going to say.

  Back in the house, Matilda was sitting in front of the high chair, pushing bits of nourishing biscuit into Emma’s reluctant mouth, with Gabriel at their feet in eager expectation of crumbs from the rich man’s table. Emma had reverted as, when life became too complicated, she often did, to her earlier babyhood and kept up a monotonous bow-wow, chuck-chuck, quack-quack, most trying to the nerves. Thomas sat with his behind perched on the high nursery fender, earnestly fishing with a hair-pin for the hook and band which held in place two curved, fat celluloid arms. ‘Don’t you think that that child might be happier in a zoo?’

  ‘I think we’d all be happier in a zoo,’ said Matilda, with a sigh. ‘Then at least we could be red in tooth and claw and it would only be our natures.’

  The elastic slid off the hair-pin for the hundredth time. ‘What I cannot make out, Tilda, is why or how he rang up Tedward’s number. He knew nothing about him.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot; it’s all been worked out. It’s written in huge numbers over every extension to the telephone in the house, and DOCTOR in huge letters too, in case of you being out and Melissa alone in the house, and anything happening to Emma. It would be the first thing to catch his eye.’

  ‘Yes, but you were upstairs. Why not just call out?’

  ‘He may have tried,’ said Matilda, going a little white at the thought of it.

  ‘Of course his voice was very faint,’ said Thomas. ‘Or so Rosie says. I suppose if he couldn’t make anyone hear.…’

  ‘He’d see “Doctor” written there and the telephone right in front of him. And after all, when I did hear, the first thing I would do would be to ring a doctor.… (Come on Emma, if you don’t want it, Gabriel does.…) No, it seems quite reasonable that he should have done it, Thomas; but the thing is how could he have done it with his head all—all bashed in like that?’

  Thomas had caught the elusive hook and triumphantly slid the elastic over it and started on the legs. ‘You only saw it when it was covered in blood and what-not, darling; you don’t know how much or how little it was bashed in, under all that.’

  ‘Well enough to kill him, damn it,’ said Matilda, shuddering.

  ‘Yes, but these head cases are funny. They often do all sorts of things after injury that you wouldn’t dream they could. They’re like Charles the Whatsaname, they walk and talk half an hour after their heads are cut off; they get what are called “lucid periods”, or they may just do things, quite sensible things, not knowing what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to die in the end.’

  ‘And it does seem as if poor Raoul took a long time to die.… (Emma, come on, darling! My God, I shall brain this child one day.).’

  Thomas fished about blindly for the elastic hook. ‘Perhaps you might settle for some other form of outlet? I feel that one braining may be enough for the moment.’ He lifted his head from his absorption with the celluloid doll and smiled at her across the room. ‘Don’t let it get you down, darling. I know he was a friend of yours, but …’

  She yanked the baby out of its chair and, sitting it on her her knee, began to wipe its grubby face. ‘Oh, Thomas, for goodness sake don’t start being kind and make me burst into tears. Raoul wasn’t a friend of mine, at least not really—he used to be, but I’d quite got over him. Of course I’m sorry he’s dead, I’m sorry for anyone if they’re dead, but all I can actually feel is that I wish he hadn’t got himself killed in our house. Which does seem ungrateful, I know, because after all he was our guest.… Well, you know what I mean!’ She broke off, half laughing, half in tears.

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ said Thomas.

  ‘(Emma have milko now, lovely, heavenly milko!) But, Thomas, about him dying—it’s definitely established that he didn’t actually die for about ten minutes?’

  ‘It may have been even longer. Tedward was about twenty minutes getting here after the ’phone call, and he says he thought when he saw him that he’d only been dead a very few minutes. The police surgeon confirmed that when he saw the body.’

  ‘If only I’d gone down, between doing Granny and baby!’

  ‘You couldn’t have done anything, Tilda. He was going to die anyway, and after the telephone call he was almost certainly unconscious. You could see how he’d sort of clung on to the bureau with the receiver in his hand, and got weaker and weaker and fuzzier and fuzzier, I suppose, poor chap, and just passed into unconsciousness and slid down the front of the bureau and lain there with the thing still in his hand. What does it matter whether he was actually alive or dead? He didn’t know anything about it; don’t you worry.’ He smiled at her again, briefly, and bent over the doll.

  What goes on inside you? thought Matilda. What’s in your head now?—being able to give your attention to that damn doll, and yet thinking so clearly and carefully. What do you know? What had you guessed?—about me, and about Raoul; and about Rosie. And if you suspected that I’d been unfaithful to you with that creature, would you—would you go out and bat him on the head, would you even mind enough to do that? As for Rosie … She remembered how sharply Thomas had questioned her about this sudden descent of Raoul Vernet upon them, how he had pounced upon the fact that she wanted to be alone with Raoul, how he had followed Rosie out into the hall. ‘Aren’t you staying to see this wonderful Frenchman?’, and ‘You did know this man in Geneva, didn’t you?’ ‘If you want to know, I knew him a great deal too well,’ Rosie had said, bursting out with it, irritably. He had come back into the kitchen, staring down into his glass with troubled eyes; though when, after the murder, she had broken to him the news about Rosie—knowing that in the subsequent investigations it must almost certainly come out—he had protested that he had had no suspicion, none. And yet … Could anybody stand there, could even Thomas, the quiet, the unfathomable, the unpredictable, could even Thomas stand there so non-chalantly, his mind apparently altogether intent upon linking up the arms and legs of a celluloid doll, while all the time murder was hot in his heart and head? She took the empty mug away from the baby, and holding it on her lap again, its red head leaning against her shoulder, wiped its sticky, rose-leaf hands. ‘But Thomas,’ she said, after a minute, ‘you’ve put the legs and arms on back to front. It looks most odd!’

  Damien Jones enjoyed little sympathy at home over his political views. ‘What on earth were you doing at your meeting last night, Damien, with those nasty foreigners of yours? You’ve been as white as a sheet all day and I’m sure you’re up to no good. You’re not planning some sort of Attack, Damien, are you?’ Mrs. Jones lived in terror of violence to members of His Majesty’s Government at the hands of Damien’s Branch—which, however, was so much more nearly a twig that the Home Secretary might be considered justified in sleeping soundly o’ nights as far as that particular threat was concerned. ‘And you came home from the office to-day, limping, Damien.’

  ‘Well you don’t think I’ve been out kicking the Prime Minister, Mother, do you?’

  ‘If there’s anything wrong with your foot …?’

  ‘There isn’t anything wrong, Mother, do stop fussing.’

  ‘Then it must be your shoes,’ said Mrs. Jones, fretfully. ‘Your new shoes, Damien, and we paid such a lot for them. I don’t know why they should suddenly start pinching you, they’ve been perfectly comfortable on you up to now, and Mr. Harvey’s worn that kind for years and he’s never had a minute’s trouble with them, that’s why we got them.…
’ Mr. Harvey was Mrs. Jones’ pet lodger, a subdued little man who collected subscriptions for an insurance firm, and who now had weathered three years of the storms of what Mrs. Jones was pleased to call Liberty Hall.

  Damien thumped on the table with a shaking hand. ‘Mother, I tell you, there’s nothing wrong with my feet. And there’s nothing wrong with my shoes and I—am—not—limping. So please don’t go on and and on about it, please don’t, please DON’T!’ Oh, God! he thought, if she goes and babbles all this out when the police come … If the police come …

  ‘Well, all right, dear, don’t shout. Oh, and some girl has been ringing you up all day.’

  ‘A girl?’ faltered Damien.

  ‘Well, anyway, she’s rung up twice in the last half hour.’

  ‘I expect it was Rosie?’ said Damien, all offhand.

  ‘No, it wasn’t—do you think I don’t know Rosie Evans’s voice? It was from a call-box. One of your Reds, I suppose, she sounded all whispering and mysterious like they always do.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Oh, lord, what did she say now? The usual thing, I’ve no doubt. “I’ll meet him at the usual place only a bit further up, same day but not the time he arranged but an hour later,” and not to tell a soul. Honestly, Damien dear, I have no patience.…’

  If his mother knew, if she but knew the sick terror in his inside, the swirly-whirly terror heaving up and down in his stomach, the hot mist of fear that seemed to beat against his aching eyes, turning everything to grey despair … ‘Mother, please don’t go on and on, please give me the message and be done with it.’

  ‘Damien, you’re not well, child,’ said his mother, looking at his white face with renewed anxiety.

  ‘Yes, I am, mother, I’m fine; please, please don’t go saying around that I’m not well, please don’t go—don’t go telling people that I wasn’t well to-day, don’t say I was limping, don’t say anything about me.…’