Blood and Water and Other Tales

by McGrath, Patrick

  I took a cigarette. I needed it. For some moments Arnold smoked in silence, while I scribbled in my pad.

  I suddenly noticed how many flies were buzzing about the ceiling of that hot little room; and then I became aware that Arnold was smiling at me! The bile had drained off, he was happy once more, he was smiling at me! “Gardens,” he said softly. “We must talk about gardens, Miss Kennedy.”

  And then, indeed, we talked about gardens—or rather, he talked about gardens, he talked about nature, and I glimpsed the delicate flame of humanity that yet flickered in his heart. I did not take notes, and only later reconstructed his general drift. “When I speak of my garden,” he said, “I do not mean the Wimbledon garden, Miss Kennedy. That was a fairly modest affair, but I left it a better garden than I found it, which is something to be proud of... I grew some lovely flowers in that soil.... No, when I speak of my garden, I have in mind the ideal garden. Do you believe in God, Miss Kennedy? Well, imagine God Almighty suddenly saying to you: “You may have any garden on earth, Miss Kennedy.” What would you choose? I know what I would choose. I would choose an English country garden. Without a moment’s hesitation.”

  Arnold’s eyes were bright. He went on to describe the clipped hedges this God-given garden of his would have, the shady, graveled walks, the bower thick with crimson rambler where he would sit and read on summer days. There would be a pond, he said, in the shade of a weeping willow tree, where goldfish darted among the stems of water lilies, and insects drifted across the glinting and shadow-dappled surface; and set against a dark box hedge nearby, garden figures of nymphs, and sylphs, and goddesses, all in stone... He described in loving detail these stone figures, then paused and gazed at me, his head craning forward and his face glowing, though his hands were, as ever, flat and still upon the table. “The lawn is as smooth as velvet, Miss Kennedy, and the flowers—the flowers!— my garden is ablaze all summer, Miss Kennedy, with sweet William, with irises and peonies, with carnations, wallflowers, and Canterbury bells!...”

  I left Wandsworth emotionally exhausted. Time spent in Arnold’s company allowed for no relaxation, no ease. He engaged one, at every moment. It was extraordinarily stimulating; it was also extraordinarily debilitating. I went back to my hotel and took a hot bath, feeling weak and somewhat queasy. That night I vomited violently for the first time since I was a little girl, and I had bad diarrhea too. Nevertheless, I went into the office the next day and filed my story. I was pale and unsteady, and in no mood for the gibes of the men. I was to see Arnold once more, on the following Tuesday. Two days after that he would hang.

  I did not spend a happy weekend. I read over my notes and prepared for Tuesday. I would, I decided, write one more piece on Arnold Crombeck the man— build it around his country-garden fantasy, maybe— and then I’d reveal the monster. But it seemed that even thinking about such things was enough to make me ill, for I spent most of the next three days with one end of me or the other stuck in the toilet bowl. I presumed it was English cooking—one of their bloody pork pies or something.

  I felt slightly better on Tuesday, but still far from confident. I doubt I’d have felt confident even if I’d been in top form—for in this, the last interview, I planned to ask Arnold about his crimes, about all the women he’d murdered. But as I was once again led down those grim, clanging corridors, I found myself thinking not about his victims, not about all those poor women, but about the man himself. Did death really hold no terrors for him? For now—the chilling thought kept coming back to me—he had less than forty-eight hours to live!

  But Arnold’s composure was, as ever, perfect. The question intrigues me still, whether Arnold Crombeck was truly unconcerned about his imminent death, or simply assuming a mask. Was it all a performance? I still wonder. And I think, in the light of what I’ve learned about the human condition over the course of a long and distinguished journalistic career, that it was a performance. I think Arnold Crombeck was deeply terrified of being hanged—that was why he spoke of it in such obsessive detail. I think that the habit of self-restraint, of formality, was so deeply ingrained in him that he could not express his feelings even in extremis. And he did have feelings; there was a man inside the monster—of that I am certain. In the end one cannot but admire his control; it’s very typically Anglo-Saxon, of course, though I wasn’t mature enough to realize it at the time.

  His composure was, as I say, perfect; but after a moment he said: “Miss Kennedy, you don’t look at all well.”

  It was nothing, I told him; an upset stomach, no more. But he was very concerned, and offered to postpone the interview, although, as he said with a small smile, his schedule was “rather tight” the next day or so, and after that—“how would you put it, Miss Kennedy? I shall be out of town. Indefinitely!”

  But I wouldn’t hear of it, and after further assurances that I was quite well enough to continue, I broached my question. Arnold got the point immediately. “Ah,” he said. “Methodology.”

  He was then silent for a moment, apparently gathering his thoughts. All was as usual—the guard at the door, the flies, the heat. It was a very hot summer, 1954, by British standards. Then he spoke.

  “I have always been a neat man,” he said slowly. “I was taught the importance of good tailoring early in life.... Do you know Max Beerbohm, Miss Kennedy? A fine stylist; you would do well to study his constructions. Max says: ‘The first aim of modern dandyism is the production of the supreme effect through means the least extravagant.’ The same, I think, is true of murder.”

  Like a preacher, Arnold proceeded to develop his text. I was not feeling at all well, and the content of Arnold’s “sermon” did little to improve matters. Nevertheless, I scribbled dutifully, mindlessly, as he spoke of his distaste for certain “techniques.”

  “Who can take pleasure in an ax murder, after all?” he said. “Can you imagine the mess, Miss Kennedy?”

  “Some murders are better than others, then?”

  “Oh, good Lord, of course they are.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, I have more respect for a drowner,” he said. “Have you heard of G. J. Smith?”

  I had not.

  “Brides-in-the-bath man. True monster. Grew careless toward the end of his career; hanged at Maidstone in the summer of 1915. He didn’t die well.” Arnold shook his head. “Have to die well,” he murmured, drumming his fingers on the table—the first and only manifestation of anxiety I ever saw in the man. “I’ve drowned,” he went on. “Never from choice, always out of necessity. There’s an art to it; there’s a right way and a wrong way, as in everything else... But you know my method, don’t you, Miss Kennedy?” The eyes gleamed behind the spectacles; the hands were flat on the table once more.

  “You’re a poisoner.”

  “Precisely. And it’s as a poisoner that I hope to be remembered.” He became very matter-of-fact at this point, very formal. “I only poisoned women, Miss Kennedy, and I poisoned them three at a time.” He waited till I’d got that down. He seemed concerned that this segment of the interview be accurately recorded. “Do you know what I would do with them then?”

  “Tell me,” I said. I had read the papers, of course, but I wanted to get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

  “I posed them.”

  “You posed them.”

  “That’s right. Have a cigarette, Miss Kennedy. I grouped them and draped them. I arranged them. I derived genuine aesthetic pleasure from it.”

  “This was after—?”

  “After they’d died, yes. I came to think of them as tableaux morts.”

  He had to spell that one out for me.

  “And it always seemed such a pity to have to dismantle them when the sun went down. But one day it occurred to me that I didn’t have to.”

  “Didn’t have to what, Mr. Crombeck?” My mouth was dry as a bone, and my head was spinning. I could barely see the pad in front of me.

  “Didn’t have to dismantle them, Miss K
ennedy. Not immediately, at any rate. I could keep them around for a few days, cohabit with them. And you know what I found?”

  “No.”

  “I found I could sleep like a baby with dead women in the house. You obviously don’t suffer from insomnia, Miss Kennedy, so you won’t understand what this means.”

  “And then?” I was close to blacking out.

  “Oh,” he said, “then I planted them. Put them in the garden.”

  “I see.”

  “Got all that, Miss Kennedy?”

  I had.

  “Strange bird, the mind, eh?”

  Well, that was the heart of darkness as far as Arnold Crombeck was concerned. He was willing, he told me, to go into greater detail if I wished; but that was quite enough for me. He seemed pleased. He terminated the interview shortly afterward. He shook my hand warmly and said he hoped I’d be feeling better soon. Then he nodded to the guard, and left the room. And that was the end of our relationship—or so I thought.

  When I got back to the hotel I went straight to bed—and stayed there, apart from trips to the bathroom, for the next two days. I was really very ill, but I thought that I’d merely “eaten something,” and didn’t call a doctor. On Thursday morning I listened to the BBC news. A crowd of at least two hundred people, most of them women and children, had gathered outside the gates of Wandsworth Prison, and at shortly after eight o’clock, when the black flag was run up, cheering broke out and lasted for ten minutes. Poor Arnold.

  Half-an-hour later, I received a call from Scotland Yard. They told me not to go anywhere, and that an ambulance was on its way; and within a few minutes I was being wheeled out of the hotel, with a doctor in close attendance. I don’t remember much about all this, quite frankly; I was very weak. When I was fully conscious again, I found myself propped up in a hospital bed. I’d had all my blood changed, they told me, a total transfusion.

  “But why?”

  They gave me a letter which, they said, had been found in Arnold Crombeck’s cell shortly after he was hanged. I opened it with trembling fingers.

  “Dear Miss Kennedy,” it began, in beautiful copperplate script. “If you are able to read this, then I must apologize for causing you so much unpleasantness. I did enjoy our talks, but I’m afraid I couldn’t resist the temptation to try just one more; one for the road, as we say. I’ve always wanted to murder an American, so when they sent you along, and you were female to boot—well, I indulged myself, I’m afraid.

  “Doubtless you’re wondering how I managed it. It was not complicated. One flypaper soaked in water for twenty-four hours produces enough arsenic in solution to poison any normal person. Simple enough matter then to transfer it to cigarettes. But you know, the effectiveness of any poison depends to a large extent on the constitution of the victim, and if you can read this then I congratulate you. I’ve always heard you were a robust people...

  [There followed several paragraphs that concern only Arnold and me.]

  “I have very little time left, so I must close. Don’t forget me, Miss Kennedy; and pray God I don’t ruin these trousers, for as you know, I should hate to be planted not looking my best.

  “Yours faithfully, “Arnold Crombeck.”

  I still have that letter, and I certainly never did forget him. And as for his trousers, I contacted the prison authorities as soon as I got out of the hospital, and learned that for once Arnold had got his facts wrong. Executed convicts are buried within the prison walls, in a lime pit—stark naked. But if he had been buried in his trousers—? I asked them. And you can rest assured, Arnold, wherever you are, that your trousers were spotless to the end.

  Blood Disease

  This is probably how it happened. William Clack-Herman, the anthropologist (popularly known as “Congo Bill”) was doing field research on the kinship systems of the pygmies of the equatorial rain forest. One afternoon he was sitting outside his hut of mongongo leaves, writing up his notes, when a mosquito bit him. It is only the female that makes the blood meal, for she needs it to boost her egg output. From the thorny tip of her mouthparts she unsheathed a slender stylus, and having sliced neatly through Bill’s skin tissue, pierced a tiny blood vessel. Bill noticed nothing. Two powerful pumps in the insect’s head began to draw off blood while simultaneously hundreds of tiny parasites were discharged into his bloodstream. Within half-an-hour, when the mosquito had long since returned to the water, the parasites were safely established in his liver. For six days they multiplied, asexually, and then on the morning of the seventh they burst out and invaded the red blood cells. Within a relatively short period of time Congo Bill was exhibiting all the classical symptoms of malaria. He was delirious; he suffered from chills, vomiting, and diarrhea; and his spleen was dangerously enlarged. He was also alone—the pygmies had deserted him, had melted deeper into the gloom of the rain forest. An essentially nomadic people, they could not wait for Bill to recover, nor could they take him with them. So there he lay, shivering and feverish by turns, on a narrow camp bed in a dark hut in the depths of a chartless jungle.

  How he made it back is a fascinating story, but not immediately relevant to the events that concern us here. Make it back he did; but the Congo Bill who docked at Southampton one morning in the summer of 1934 was not the vigorous young man who’d left for Africa a year previously. He was haggard and thin now, and forced to walk with a stick. His flesh was discolored, and his fingers trembled constantly. He looked, in short, like a man who was dying. When at last he stepped gingerly down the gangway, one steward was at his elbow and another close behind, carrying a large bamboo cage. Huddled in the corner of the cage was a small black-and-white Colobus monkey that the anthropologist had befriended before leaving the Congo for the last time. He intended to give it to his son, Frank.

  Virginia Clack-Herman was considerably shocked at her husband’s frailty; and the fact that he could speak only in a hoarse whisper certainly added pathos to their reunion. Frank, then aged nine, did not recognize his father, and accepted with some unease the monkey; and then the three of them, with the monkey, made their way very slowly through the customs shed and out to the car. There were at the time no strict regulations regarding the quarantining of monkeys.

  The journey from Southampton was uneventful. Virginia drove, and Bill sat beside her with a rug over his knees and slept most of the way. Frank sat in the back; the bamboo cage was placed on the seat beside him, and the little monkey sat hunkered inside it, alert but unmoving. From time to time the boy’s eyes were drawn to the monkey’s; they were both, clearly, perplexed and slightly alarmed. Congo Bill muttered as he dozed, and Virginia, stony-faced, kept her eyes on the road.

  It was a warm day, and in the sunshine of the late afternoon the cornfields of Berkshire rippled about them like a golden sea; and then, just as Virginia began to wonder where they would break the journey, from out of this sea heaved a big inn, Tudor in construction, with steeply gabled roofs and black beams crisscrossed on the white-plastered walls beneath the eaves. This was the Blue Bat; since destroyed by fire, in the early Thirties it boasted good beds, a fine kitchen, and an extensive cellar.

  Virginia pulled off the main road and into the forecourt of the inn. Servants appeared; suitcases were carried in and the car taken round to the garages. Some minutes later, a cream-colored roadster pulled in beside it. The owner of this car was Ronald Dexter. He was traveling with his valet, an old man called Clutch.

  Ronald Dexter was a gentleman of independent means who had never had to work a day in his life. He was an elegant, witty chap with sleek black hair, parted high, brushed straight back from his forehead, and gleaming with oil. Half-an-hour later he stepped out of his bathroom and found Clutch laying out his evening clothes. He slipped into a dressing gown, sank into an armchair, lit his pipe—and sighed, for Clutch was running a small silver crucifix with great care along the seams of his garments. A curious-looking man, Clutch, he had a remarkable head, disproportionately large for his body and completely hairless. T
he skull was a perfect dome, and the tight-stretched skin of it an almost translucent shade of yellowy-brown finely engraved with subcutaneous blue-black veins. The overall impression he gave was of a monstrous fetus, or else some type of prehistoric man, a Neanderthal perhaps, in whom the millennia had deposited deep strains of racial wisdom—though he wore, of course, the tailcoat and gray pin-striped trousers of his profession. He was stooped and frail now, and Ronald had long since given up interfering with the bizarre superstitions he practiced. When he was finished, he tucked the crucifix into an inside pocket and turned, nodding, to his master.

  “Do you imagine, Clutch,” said Ronald, “that I shall be set upon by vampires?”

  “One cannot be too careful,” replied the old man. “We are not in London, sir.”

  “No indeed,” said Ronald, as the put-put-put of a tractor came drifting across the cornfields. “This is wild country.”

  “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  Ronald told him there was nothing else, and Clutch left the room, closing the door softly behind him. At precisely the same instant, just down the corridor, Virginia Clack-Herman, who was a tall, spirited woman with a rich laugh and scarlet-painted fingernails, was sitting before her mirror clad only in stockings and slip, the latter a silky, sleeveless undergarment with thin shoulder straps and a delicate border of patterned lacework at the breast. A cigarette burned in the ashtray beside her, its tendril of smoke coiling away through casement windows thrown open to the warmth of the early evening. She was plucking her eyebrows with a pair of silver tweezers, and in the bathroom that connected their rooms she could hear her husband shuffling about and talking to himself. With her head close to the glass, the fingers of her left hand splayed upon her forehead, she clamped the twin pincers about a hair. Her lips were parted, her teeth locked; all at once she plucked out the hair; her eyes fired up and a single tear started from the left one. Simultaneously, Congo Bill dropped his hairbrushes, and as they bounced on the tiles Virginia cast a glance at the bathroom door. She turned back to the mirror and prepared to pluck a second hair. Bill’s mumble rose and fell like the distant drone of public prayer. Oh, to come back to her so utterly ruined, like one of the walking dead! Out came another hair; the eyebrows arched thin as filaments, flaring a fraction as they neared the nose. Satisfied, she dabbed at her left eye with a small handkerchief and then, still facing the glass, she closed her eyes and clenched her fists and sat rigidly for a moment in an attitude of bitter mortification. But when Congo Bill came in, several minutes later, with his shirt cuffs flapping pathetically about his wrists and asked her to fasten his links, she displayed only warm concern. “Of course, darling,” she murmured, as she rose from her dressing table and pecked his cheek, leaving a very light impression of red lips upon the yellowing skin.