Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  For answer the doctor produced a large white handkerchief, tied into a bundle, and slowly untied the knot. I noticed these in the waste-paper basket in her room. I had a closer look at them, and then I thought I ought to keep them for someone in authority. I fished them out and wrapped them up; it was easy enough, they were all occupied with the patient.’ He was rather miserable about it. ‘It seems a bit mean—but what else could I do?’

  What else indeed? A dozen little white envelopes, tiny white envelopes such as pharmacists use; each with the legend, ‘To be taken as prescribed’, each labelled POISON, each with the name and address of a different chemist. ‘Quite small doses, probably,’ said the doctor. ‘Harmless by themselves. But twelve!’

  ‘She must have gone round collecting them,’ said Charles-worth. He spelt out the addresses, Paddington, Bayswater, Westbourne Grove, Marble Arch … ‘Juggle them about a bit and you can practically trace her route; she must have just walked along, popping into each of the shops she passed.’

  ‘But where did she get all these prescriptions from?’

  Rosie had got the prescriptions from Thomas. They were written on his headed writing paper, signed with his name; twelve prescriptions each for a small dose of a proprietary drug. A young lady had come in, the day before, said the various pharmacists, and presented a prescription which seemed to be quite in order; and here, if the police doubted them, were the originals.… Twelve prescriptions which, all added together, amounted to certain death.

  Pushed into Rosie’s handbag was a thirteenth prescription, dated two days ago. Written across the bottom were the words, ‘Repeat once’. It had been stamped by a Maida Vale chemist, but the second dose had not been applied for. Charlesworth himself visited the chemist, and later confronted Tedward with the prescription. ‘you gave Rosie Evans this?’

  Tedward was still sitting, dumb and unmoving, in the office, where Matilda was coaxing a reluctant fire. He lifted an unshaven face and looked back at Charlesworth with bleary eyes. ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s an abortifacient.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tedward. ‘She was having an unwanted baby.’

  ‘You mean you were helping her to get rid of it?’

  ‘Oh, go to hell,’ said Tedward and relapsed back into his coma.

  Charlesworth took him by the shoulder and shook him roughly. ‘Give your mind to this. She died of the stuff.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ said Tedward.

  ‘Enough of it would.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t have enough of it. This was for a small dose, two small doses that wouldn’t have done her any harm—or any good either, for that matter—if she’d taken them together. But I told her to take them three days apart.’ He looked more closely at the paper and added, indifferently: ‘She’s never even cashed the second one.’

  ‘Why give them to her at all, if they’d do no good?’

  Tedward put his head back in his hands. ‘Oh, dear God! I gave them to her because she begged and badgered and I thought it would keep her quiet and prevent her from running off to some phoney who would “help” her. There was nothing wrong with them, they might just as well have been aspirin.’

  ‘Then why not have palmed her off with aspirin?’

  ‘Because Rosie was not a damn fool,’ said Tedward shortly.

  Matilda sat back on her heels, brushing away a strand of hair with the back of a sooty hand. ‘Anyway, how could this small dose of Tedward’s have made any difference?’

  Charlesworth spread out the twelve prescriptions. Matilda, craning forward to look at them from her position on the hearth, said, sharply: ‘But those are Thomas’s!’

  Charlesworth turned the papers so that she could more easily read them. ‘Yes—they are, aren’t they?’

  ‘But Thomas—well, Thomas wouldn’t give her all those, he wouldn’t sign a dozen prescriptions at a time, he wouldn’t dream of it. And anyway, he didn’t know about the baby.’ She stared at them, terror-stricken. ‘Yes, they’re his … It’s …’ But suddenly she said: ‘But they’re dated yesterday.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlesworth. ‘All of them.’

  ‘But yesterday.… But yesterday, Thomas was in prison. And the day before. And the day before.’ And she raised her head and said urgently: ‘Rosie took a lot of his headed notepaper upstairs. She said she was going to write to Tedward. She was up there for hours.’ She swung round on Tedward. ‘Did she write to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Tedward. ‘What would she write to me about?’

  ‘And then she came down with something in her hand. I thought it was an envelope for posting; and she went out and she was out all day. And then she came in and went straight up to her room, and later on when Cockie went up she was already in bed and she said she felt ill.’ She said, triumphantly: ‘She had Tedward’s prescription. She copied it out on Thomas’s paper, all these times, and signed his name.’ She looked more closely at the forged signatures. ‘They’re frightfully bad, really; but of course, on this official paper, how would the chemists know? They had nothing to compare with. It wasn’t as if it were a large dose or anything frightening like that.…’ And she buried her face in her hands, dizzy with relief, and said: ‘It’s nothing to do with Thomas—nothing at all.’

  ‘So that’s all right, isn’t it?’ said Tedward, savagely sarcastic. ‘What does anything matter if Thomas is in the clear?’ He got up and blundered out of the room, out into the cold November garden and up to the stone bench beyond the leafless mulberry tree, and there sat down and buried his head in his hands once more. They saw the baby trot up to him, full of excited confidences, gazing up into his face with her head on one side. He lifted his hand and pushed her so roughly away that she fell down and, picking herself up, ran bawling into the house. He did not even lift his eyes to look after her.

  If only, thought Cockrill, they would not all be so sorry for him because he had been the one to get up and go away leaving Rosie to die! He supposed that somewhere, fathoms deep down in him, he was sorry himself, but he had for so long gradually overlaid with the matrix of self-protection, the small pearl of pity in his arid old heart, that he no longer felt capable of this kind of distress. Far more than their sympathy he would have valued a simple recognition that he had done what each of them, knowing Rosie, would have done, that it had been the natural thing. But no! Sitting round the drawing-room on the day of her funeral, sick with the scent of inappropriate lilies, uneasily conscious of the casket of ashes which was already so pathetically becoming no more than a faint, faintly ludicrous, embarrassment, they forced on him still their generous, kindly pity. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said to Charlesworth, ‘let’s go out to a pub and drink in some nice fresh air.’ But at the pub, with beer glasses in their hands, it resolved itself into the same old round, whether she had been as ill already as she had claimed to be, when she must have taken the stuff to have arrived at that stage, the how, the why, the who.…

  ‘We sound like a couple of ruddy owls,’ said Charlesworth.

  ‘Owls are remarkable for seeing in the dark; but it was too dark for me, in her room that night.’

  The inquest had been adjourned ‘to allow the police to make further enquiries’. ‘Though what on earth we’re supposed to discover, I don’t know.’

  ‘I knew Rosie Evans pretty well,’ said Cockrill. ‘I must say I don’t see her working out all that.’

  ‘The alternatives.…’

  ‘The alternative is that someone put it into her head—either to help her or the other thing.’

  ‘Who on earth would want to kill Rosie Evans?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cockie. ‘Who on earth wanted to kill that poor, inoffensive Frog?’

  The curve of the great Edwardian bar glowed ruddily in the dreadful pink neon lighting; in the intricate carved wooden shelving behind the bar, bottles were reflected back and back again in their mirrored recesses. They repaired to an alcove, horribly upholstered in red, and sat down uneasily on
the rexeline-covered seat. ‘Let’s begin, anyway, by taking the charitable view. Dr. Edwards, in all innocence, gave her the original prescription; with or without advice she thought up this bright idea of getting a larger dose, and she went and overdid it by accident.’

  ‘Or by design,’ said Cockrill, sombrely.

  ‘What, suicide? But why?’

  ‘She was having an unwanted baby. Everybody had lost interest in her, nobody was helping her, they were all taken up with the business of the murder. Old Faithful, who might still have been counted on, had suddenly learned that she was nothing but a nymphomaniac; for that matter, they’d all learned that, and her stock was at zero.’ Cockrill drained his glass and set it down with a bump. ‘Not that I believe it; she was not the type.’

  ‘One so often hears that said,’ said Charlesworth, suddenly looking much older than his years. ‘But these kids—they do, you know, don’t they? They’re all froth and bubble—they haven’t much stamina. One does find them giving way to sudden fits of despair.’

  ‘This wasn’t a fit of despair,’ said Cockie. ‘It was a carefully thought out, elaborately carried out plan.’ He collected the glasses and went to the bar with them; Charlesworth watched him carrying them back towards him, shouldering his way crabwisc through the crowd, not spilling a drop. He said, as he sat down: ‘No—suicide’s out.’

  ‘Then, still in sweet charity.…’

  ‘There’s no charity in this thing,’ said Cockie. He stared down into his glass with troubled eyes. ‘Don’t let’s fool ourselves. This wasn’t a mistake. Suppose someone wants to help her, damn it all—they know that Dr. Edwards’ dose won’t amount to much, they suggest this way in which she may make it more—surely to God they might tell her twice as much, or three times as much, or if you like four times as much! But twelve times! Twelve times! Nobody in their senses would take such a risk.’

  ‘They might have suggested less and she thought she’d go one better.’

  ‘But she went nine or ten better,’ said Cockie. ‘She wouldn’t go one better to the extent of twelve times the dose; not even Rosie.’

  ‘On the other hand, Rosie did take that much.’

  ‘On the advice of somebody she trusted,’ insisted Cockie.

  Charlesworth thought it all over. He said, slowly: ‘We’re now talking of laymen?’

  ‘We’re talking of Matilda Evans and old Mrs. Evans and Melissa Weeks.’

  ‘Of course it may have been a non-layman; a doctor?’

  Cockie shrugged.

  ‘I mean, Thomas Evans could have put her up to it before he was taken into custody. We’ve nothing to prove that he didn’t really know about the baby business, all along.’

  ‘He may have,’ agreed Cockie. ‘He may have put her up to it and Dr. Edwards may have put her up to it. Neither of them could legitimately have given her such a dose as would terminate the pregnancy; they might see it as a way to help her without incriminating themselves. But if no layman would make such a hideous mistake—how much less a doctor.’ The pastille tin in which he kept his tobacco shot off the slippery surface of the seat and clattered on to the floor. ‘Blast the bloody thing,’ he said, and stooped and groped about for it. ‘I’m old,’ he said, straightening himself with a hand to his back. ‘I get feelings in my bones. I’ve got a feeling in my bones that this thing’s murder.…’

  But murder by whom? By the murderer of Raoul Vernet—or were they to believe that two killers lurked in that little group of plain, everyday people centring upon the house in Maida Vale? By Matilda Evans, then? But Matilda had never for a moment believed Raoul Vernet to be Rosie’s seducer; she had believed her lover to be a young man, a student. And what reason had Matilda to murder Rosie, to murder her by a cold, reasoned, premeditated plan? Only that, by ‘getting herself into trouble’ Rosie had made trouble for them all.

  Or old Mrs. Evans? But old Mrs. Evans could not have lifted her crippled hand to strike the blow; nor would she have had any reason, for she too had been told a story of a young man, a big, strong, young fisherman from the East, sweeping poor, fascinated Rosie off her feet. Mrs. Evans had had no reason to kill Raoul Vernet; and no reason to kill Rosie, whom she held so little responsible for her sins.

  Well, Melissa Weeks then? Melissa seemed hardly likely to have avenged Rosie’s seduction so drastically, even if she had not known that she would have to take on an army to do the thing properly. As for Rosie—what had Melissa against Rosie Evans, except for an occasional boy friend pinched, an occasional hope destroyed? And Thomas—Thomas who had been in prison while the plot against Rosie had been in action, who loved Rosie with all his heart; who purported to have known nothing of Rosie’s love affairs? Or Tedward? ‘Whether or not he could have killed the man,’ said Cockie, ‘or whether or not he would have—can you conceive that he would have killed this girl? He was in love with her, he’s been in love with her since she was an adolescent. He’d discovered that she’d been deceiving them all, he’d discovered, if you like, that if he’d killed Vernet, he’d killed the poor chap on an absolute misconception of the whole affair. But even so … You see, if he started this thing he must have started it that night; he must have suggested it to her when he took her upstairs, under the guise of “administering a sedative”, What?—just because he was disillusioned in her? It doesn’t ring true; it simply doesn’t ring true.’ He shook his head and the tin box shot off the shiny seat again and on to the floor. ‘But I get feelings in my bones these days,’ he said, retrieving it again. ‘And I’ve got a feeling in my bones that this thing’s murder—murder by suggestion, by a person or persons unknown.’

  Three days later, at the renewed inquest, the jury, bewildered by a plethora of possibilities and alternatives, chose the most exciting and brought in a verdict to precisely the same effect.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SO, labelled now as person or persons unknown, the Maida Vale household stumbled through the necessities of routine, with Tedward, a ghost in the familiar, shabby old overcoat that, in a night, seemed to have grown so much too big for him, stumbling in their wake. Interviews, questions, answers, instructions; the police, the curious public, the ever-present press. Not a day but their names appeared in the papers, with inaccurate details of their private lives, with grey, smudgy photographs, misleading headlines, misrepresentations of the ‘recollections’ of their friends. ‘Mrs. Evans’, ‘Rosie Evans’, ‘Dr Edwards’ were household words. If it were true that eating created appetite, thought Matilda, the public had been fed to starvation point. They awaited with avid eagerness the reappearance of Thomas in the magistrate’s court.

  Thomas had almost looked forward to this day; a break, anyway, in the deadly sameness of life in his prison ward, with the constant companionship of his friend with the touch of schizophrenia. It was not very pleasant when one got here, however; perched up in the damn little narrow dock with no room for one’s legs, and one’s self-conscious back turned to the people in the long narrow benches so close behind one. There was quite an array here to-day, a smooth gentleman representing the Director of Public Prosecutions hurriedly mugging up his notes, his own solicitor, Mr. Granger, and a youngish barrister, patently anxious, representing Mr. James Dragon in the prisoner’s interests. The public squashed and squeezed into the gallery behind him, which was not a gallery at all really, but a sort of loose-box, very long and nearly as narrow as his beastly dock, and raised not more than a step or so above ground level. He thought he caught a glimpse of Damien Jones there, among the crowd; it was very decent of the kid to have come.…

  The gentleman from Public Prosecutions had probably just been doing a crossword after all for he had obviously no hesitations about his piece. He stood up and rattled it off, very clear, very brief, very fair. ‘That is the case against the prisoner, Your Worship.’ The case against the prisoner was that the victim had seduced the prisoner’s sister, or at any rate the prisoner had believed he had; that the prisoner had put forward a false alibi, a p
reviously planned false alibi, claiming to have been called out on a visit to a sick child in a house which, in fact, proved to be untenanted; that the weapons used in the killing had belonged to the prisoner and the prisoner, as a doctor, would have known how and where to strike; and finally, and surely conclusively, that there had been found in the prisoner’s car, traces of the victim’s blood which could not have got there unless he were the murderer. Or let the gentleman from Public Prosecutions put it in this way—the prisoner had arrived back after the discovery of the body and by his own admission had put his car away before entering the house; by his own admission, he had not returned to the car. How then, could those traces of the dead man’s blood, have got into the prisoner’s car? ‘That is the case for the prosecution.’ The gentleman from the D.P.P. sat down. And a damn thin case it is too, he said to himself.

  Witnesses, witnesses, witnesses.… Detective Inspector Charlesworth, Detective Inspector Cockrill, Matilda, nervous and anxious, hardly taking her eyes off Thomas, expert witnesses, out of turn because they had urgent business elsewhere and were anxious to be released as soon as possible, if His Worship could make it convenient to the Court.… So am I anxious to be released as soon as possible, thought Thomas, ruefully; and he wondered how soon that would be convenient to the court and whether it would be ever, whether he had not tied this noose a bit too effectively about his own neck. Melissa Weeks, nervous and gabbling, Gran, nervous and charming, Tedward.…

  He walked slowly and heavily, like an old man; and Thomas remembered Rosie and made no more jokes to himself. ‘I swear by Almighty God that the evidence I shall give to this court shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.… Yes, I arrived at the house with Rosie, with Miss Evans, at about twenty-five to ten … Yes, I left my car in the road outside. Yes, I removed the ignition key; it would be an automatic action, I always do.…’ A clerk took it all down in long-hand, filling up pages and pages of foolscap with large, flowing writing, enormously widely spaced. Counsel waited to put each new question till the clerk had finished with the last. Now and again he said, ‘Just a minute’, and the magistrate asked witness to go a little more slowly, please, because this gentleman had to take down what was being said. At the end of the witnesses’ evidence he would read it all back to him in a rapid, monotonous gabble and witness, stepping down from the box, would be invited to sign it and would do so, with much fumbling for glasses and preliminary scratchings, trying out the police court pen.…