‘Mummie’s out,’ I told her—for Mrs Gordon had gone to spend the evening with some friends.
‘I know, but I forgot. And when I opened the door it creaked, you know how it does, and she called me and so I went in.’
‘Well, you hop straight back to bed. You’ll catch your death of cold, a night like this!’
‘Can’t I wait and take her the cocoa?’
‘I’ll see to the cocoa,’ I said—shortly enough, for I was vexed. The idea of sending a little thing of seven years old running errands about the house at ten o’clock on a December night!
I made some cocoa and poured it into a covered jug and then I went upstairs with it. I didn’t grudge the trouble, or the time, but I thought Mrs Peverelli was a selfish woman and that it wouldn’t do her any harm to be told so.
She looked wretched enough, poor soul. Her face was glazed with crying, and she was one of those women who scatter powder all over everything in a bedroom, and leave soiled handkerchiefs lying about.
The room was a nice room, but she’d somehow made it look sordid and forlorn.
‘I’ve brought you the cocoa, Mrs Peverelli, but I’ve sent Joan off to her bed. It’s too late, and too cold, for a delicate child like that to be running up and down stairs. I’m afraid you’re not feeling well.’
‘No,’ she said—and I thought what a hunted look her eyes had—‘No, I don’t feel particularly well. And I can’t sleep.’
I suggested aspirin.
‘Nothing does me any good,’ she said. ‘It’s my mind, more than my body.’
And she began to cry again.
I begged her to try and brace herself. I told her that she’d a good deal to be thankful for, with her husband in a good job, and always ready to do what would please her, and no anxieties like poor Mrs Gordon, a widow obliged to work for herself and a child who wasn’t any too strong.
‘And,’ I couldn’t help adding, ‘your own health, if I may say so, would surely improve if you didn’t fret yourself so much over nothing.’
Rather to my surprise, she didn’t resent that.
‘It isn’t nothing,’ she said, in a kind of whisper. ‘You don’t know. I’m so frightened.’
‘What is it that frightens you?’ I asked, feeling as though I were trying to reason with a rather tiresome child.
She shivered, and cried a little more, and looked all round her with her poor, swollen eyes before her answer came. When it did, I don’t mind admitting that I was a bit startled.
‘I’m not safe,’ she whispered. ‘My life isn’t safe. There—there are people who want me out of the way.’
Well, as I’ve said, I was startled because, neurotic though I knew her to be, I hadn’t thought she was as near the border-line as all that.
‘You’ve been reading detective stories,’ I said. ‘You know very well you’re talking nonsense. Who should want you out of the way?’
Of course, she couldn’t answer that. So she poured out a whole flood of nonsense, about her being of no use to anybody, and having no friends, and people hating her because she was difficult, and nervous, and ‘they’ said she was always making scenes.
‘“They,”’ I repeated. ‘I don’t want to force your confidence, Mrs Peverelli, but you started this of your own accord. Who are ‘they?’ You don’t mean your husband, surely?’
She gave a sort of smothered shriek. It sounded to me very forced and unreal, like somebody play-acting.
‘You think he’s a good, kind husband to me, don’t you, Mrs Fuller? Everyone does.’
‘It’s not my business to offer any opinion on such a question, and I’m astonished you should ask it,’ I retorted. ‘But since you have asked it, I think you’re very lucky. Mr Peverelli is good-tempered, and patient—which is more than every man would be, in all the circumstances—and though I dare say he has his ways, like most gentlemen, I don’t think you’d find many would say you had much to complain of.’
‘You wouldn’t believe me, would you, if I told you that he’s tried, over and over again, to poison me?’
‘I wouldn’t believe you, Mrs Peverelli, and I should think you were either a very wicked, or a very silly, woman—or both—for letting yourself imagine such things, let alone saying them.’
She burst out crying again and threw herself back on the pillow.
‘Sometimes I know it isn’t true. I know I’m just what he says—morbid, and letting my imagination run wild. Oh, I think I shall go mad!’
She was twisting about, working herself into a state—but I was thinking of what her words implied.
‘You don’t mean to tell me, Mrs Peverelli, that you’ve accused your husband of trying to poison you? My, I wonder he hasn’t had you certified!’
‘He wouldn’t do that,’ she said wildly. ‘He wouldn’t do that. Locked away I shouldn’t be worth anything to him. But if I die first, he gets the money, and he’s free—free to marry somebody young, and pretty, and amusing.’
I was beginning to see daylight.
‘You’re one of these jealous wives, is that it? It’s a terrible thing, jealousy—that I do know—and doesn’t let you see anything straight or in its true proportions. But what you’ve just been saying is nonsense, and you know it.’
‘Then why was I ill, before we left Essex? Why are we always moving from one place to another so that I never have time to get to know anybody? Why is he always making me try new patent foods, and drinks to make me sleep?’
‘And why,’ I asked in my turn, ‘if you really believe the rubbish you’ve been talking, do you drink them?’
‘He stands over me. He makes me. But after I’d been so ill, before we left Essex, I wouldn’t touch anything he brought me. He knew why, though we never spoke of it.’
‘All this talk out of books isn’t getting us anywhere,’ I said. ‘You’re making up a kind of drama, Mrs Peverelli, with yourself at the centre of it, and it doesn’t take one of these psycho-analyst doctors to tell you that if you do that kind of thing long enough, you end by believing in your own imaginings. And where that leads to, I leave you to guess. Now honestly, don’t you know that this nonsense about being poisoned is none of it true? Such things just don’t happen.’
‘I keep on telling myself that,’ she answered, in a weak, exhausted kind of whisper. ‘Sometimes I look at him and I tell myself it isn’t any of it true. It just can’t be true.’
‘Of course it can’t,’ I told her. ‘Use your common sense. If you really believed it, why—you’d have left him. It’s surely the very first thing you’d have done.’
‘No,’ she said, rolling her eyes at me like someone on the stage. ‘You don’t understand. I love him.’
I had her then, I thought.
‘If you loved him, you wouldn’t believe things like that about him. And if you really believed them, you couldn’t still love him,’ I said, feeling I’d scored rather neatly. I was sorry for her, in a way, but her wild way of talking, like a schoolgirl trying to make herself sound like someone in a story, was irritating. It was against common sense, too.
‘Try and be rational,’ I advised her. ‘Poison isn’t at all easy to come by, in this country, and I can assure you that nobody tampers with the food in this house.’
She stared at me without saying a word, and I suddenly remembered how Mr Peverelli had sometimes come down and mixed her a hot drink himself.
As the thought crossed my mind I felt indignant—as though she’d infected me with her own silliness.
‘I’ve just made the cocoa for you with my own hands,’ I said hastily. ‘Drink it up, before it’s cold.’
I poured it out for her and she drank it, and thanked me.
Poor, silly, neurotic thing, I thought—and I felt sorry for her. But thinking it over afterwards, as I was bound to do, I felt much sorrier for him. Well I knew that if she�
��d work herself up like that with me, a comparative stranger, she’d make scenes—much worse and more often—with her own husband.
Two days later he was back, for the week-end.
I must say it gave me a queer feeling to think of seeing them together, after what she’d said. But it was just as usual.
Mrs Peverelli looked ill and nervous, as she always did, and Mr Peverelli was cheerful and ragged her a little—but not too much.
He was in very good form at tea on Sunday afternoon, and told some funny stories that amused everyone very much. Only his wife didn’t laugh with the others, but just sat back in an armchair, with her eyes half-closed.
Mrs Gordon said to me afterwards:
‘She’s a kill-joy all right, isn’t she?’ and I had to agree that she was.
‘But,’ I said, ‘I don’t think she’s wholly responsible for her moods. Neurotic, that’s what she is, and full of fancies. She invents dramatic situations, if you know what I mean, and goes on brooding over them till she begins to believe they’re really true.’
‘What sort of situations?’ Mrs Gordon asked.
When I told her she was shocked.
‘And he’s so nice and patient with her!’ she said. ‘What a horrible woman.’
I told her she mustn’t let it go any further, and she promised she wouldn’t.
Only her manner towards Mrs Peverelli was rather cold afterwards, and she was more friendly towards him. Partly, I suppose, because she felt very sorry for him, and partly because he was kind to little Joan, making a fuss of her and sometimes bringing back a toy or a few sweets for her.
Just before Christmas something happened.
Mr Peverelli came down to the kitchen, as he’d sometimes done before, and he’d got a cardboard container in his hand with one of his favourite patent foods.
‘I believe it’ll help my wife to sleep, and she’s in a very nervous, highly strung mood to-night,’ he said, his usually cheerful face wearing a worried look.
I held out my hand for the packet.
‘If I may have the jug, and a spoon, and take some water from the kettle—’ he began.
‘I’ll do it, Mr Peverelli.’
‘But you’re busy,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I can do it.’ And I did.
He just thanked me and took it upstairs.
The next morning was Christmas Eve.
Joan was to have a little Christmas Tree, and her mother and I dressed it in the evening after she’d gone to bed. Mr Peverelli came into the sitting-room and he’d brought some of those coloured glass balls and little ornaments for the tree, and a lot of crackers.
‘He is a kind man!’ said Mrs Gordon, after he’d gone. ‘Joan’ll be delighted, and don’t they make a difference to the look of the tree!’
We’d only had cotton-wool and coloured paper and a couple of gilt stars, to decorate it, besides candles.
‘They’re pretty,’ I agreed. ‘Look at that red globe—and the string of green balls. I’ve always liked this kind of thing, though I know it’s trumpery.’
We were a small party, because everyone except the Peverellis and Joan and her mother went away to spend Christmas.
It was on Boxing Day that Mr Peverelli told me he was very much afraid they’d have to move again. His wife’s nerves were getting worse, and that always meant she wanted to try a change.
‘I’m very sorry, Mrs Fuller,’ he said wistfully. ‘You’ve made us very comfortable here. But haven’t you noticed that she’s been less well lately? More—how shall I put it—more inclined to get worked up over nothing?’
He looked at me quite pleadingly.
‘I think she lets herself go, Mr Peverelli, if I may say so without unkindness. Lets herself—fancy things.’
He nodded his head.
‘I thought so,’ he said.
The very next day they suddenly went—Mr Peverelli paying me the extra week in lieu of proper notice, and saying how sorry he was.
I was helping Joan to put away the things from her tree at the time, and I didn’t want to go into any of it before the child. Besides, if they’d decided to go, there really was nothing I could say.
And I was sorry for him—he seemed so distressed and helped us roll the things up in tissue paper, very kindly, before going off to his packing.
He came down later to get her a hot drink before the journey, and I told him I was sorry they were going.
‘So am I,’ he said. ‘So am I, Mrs Fuller.’
Mrs Peverelli, when they went off, looked worse than ever—sallower and more frightened.
She hardly said a word to anybody.
Just as the taxi moved off I remembered that he’d left no address, in case any letters came—but it was too late then.
However, he’d promised to let me hear from them.
Not that I set much store by that.
I went up to the first-floor front room, and couldn’t help remembering the night I’d gone up to Mrs Peverelli and she’d poured out all that hysterical rubbish.
I looked round the room, and it seemed as if they’d taken everything.
Something caught my eye, gleaming in a corner, and I stooped down. It was a tiny fragment of—what was it? For a minute I couldn’t think of what the brilliant colour reminded me.
Then I remembered Joan’s tree, and the glass balls.
It seemed as though one of them had got smashed up in the Peverellis’ room, and I looked round for the other pieces to have them swept up, knowing what fine powdered glass can do.
But I never found them.
The Unseen Door
Margery Allingham
Margery Allingham (1904–1966) was born in Ealing to writer parents; her father, Herbert, was editor of The New London Journal. She published her first novel, Blackerchief Dick, whilst still in her teens, and introduced the enigmatic Albert Campion in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929). Originally a minor character, he became Allingham’s series detective and was played by Peter Davison in a television series that first aired in 1989. Allingham is often ranked alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh as one of the ‘Crime Queens’ of the Golden Age of detective fiction.
Allingham lived in both London and East Anglia, and her best work is set against one or other of those backgrounds. The Tiger in the Smoke, featuring both Campion and the criminal Jake Havoc, is particularly atmospheric. The Margery Allingham Society remains highly active, and celebrated the author’s centenary in 2004 with the unveiling by American crime writer Sara Paretsky of a plaque at the home of the Allinghams from 1916 to 1925, 1 Westbourne Terrace, Little Venice.
***
It was London, it was hot and it was Sunday afternoon. The billiard room in Prinny’s Club, Pall Mall, which has often been likened to a mausoleum, had unexpectedly become one.
Superintendent Stanislaus Oates glanced down at the body again and swore softly to Mr Albert Campion who had just been admitted.
‘I hate miracles!’ he said.
Campion drew the sheet gently back from the terrible face.
‘Our friend here could hardly have been taken by this one,’ he murmured, his pale eyes growing grim behind his horn rimmed spectacles. ‘Strangled? Oh yes, I see—from behind. Powerful fingers. Horrid. Who done it?’
‘I know who ought to have done it.’ Oates was savage. ‘I know who’s been threatening to do it for months and yet he wasn’t here. That’s why I sent for you. You like this four-dimensional stuff. I don’t. See anyone in the hall as you came up?’
‘About forty police experts and two very shaken old gentlemen, both on the fragile side. Who are they? Witnesses?’
The Superintendent sighed. ‘Listen,’ he commanded. ‘This club is partly closed for cleaning. The only two rooms unlocked are the vestibule downstairs and this billi
ard room up here. The only two people in the place are Bowser, the doorkeeper, and Chetty, the little lame billiard marker.’
‘The two I mentioned?’
‘Yes. Bowser has been in the vestibule all the time. He’s a great character in clubland. Knows everybody and has a reputation for infallibility. You couldn’t break him down in the witness box.’
‘I’ve heard of him. He gave me a particularly baleful stare as I came in.’
‘That’s his way. Does it to everybody. He’s become a bit affected as these old figureheads do in time. He’s been a power here for forty years, remember. Surly old chap, but he never forgets a face.’
‘Beastly for him. And who’s this?’ Campion indicated the white mound at their feet. ‘Just a poor wretched member?’
‘That,’ Oates spoke dryly, ‘is Robert Fenderson, the man who exposed William Merton.’
Campion was silent. The story of the Merton crash, which had entailed the arrest of the flamboyant financier after a thousand small speculators had faced ruin, was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Merton had been taken to the cells shouting threats at Judge, jury and witnesses alike, and photographs of his heavy jaw and sultry eyes had appeared in every newspaper.
‘Merton broke jail last night.’
‘Did he, by Jove!’ Campion’s brows rose. ‘Was he a member here once?’
‘Until his arrest. Knows the place like his own house. More than that, someone sent Fenderson a phony message this morning telling him to meet the club secretary here this afternoon at three. The secretary is away this weekend and knows nothing about it. I tell you Campion, it’s an open and shut case—only Merton hasn’t been here unless he flew in by the windows.’
Campion glanced at the casements bolted against the heat.
‘He hardly flew out again.’
‘Exactly, and there’s nowhere for him to be hidden. Bowser swears that he went all over the club after lunch and found it deserted. Since then he’s been on the door all the time. During the afternoon only one member came in, and that was Fenderson. The only other living soul to cross the threshold was Chetty, who is far too frail to have strangled a cat, let alone a man with a neck like Fenderson’s. Bowser has a perfect view from his box of the street door, the staircase and this door. He insists he has neither slept nor left his seat. He’s unshakeable.’
Capital Crimes: London Mysteries Page 33