She opened the gate and walked up the gravel path to the front door. The knocker, keyhole, and brass letter-box were brightly polished. There was a blackleaded iron shoe-scraper beside the doorstep and a neat red-patterned fibre mat in the porch. The bell was a small black button set in a white surround. Pat pressed it. With the suddenness of a Jack-in-the-box, a tongue of celluloid shot out and before, with equal suddenness, it withdrew she had time to read the words: ‘No reporters, no hawkers, no circulars,’ printed on it. The late Councillor Smith had had his own idea of humour.
Pat, true to her calling, took up the knocker and banged vigorously.
• 3 •
“You ought not to have mentioned the poison,” said Melchior Blackburn to his sister. The edges of the black-out blinds, which were of thick, opaque satin, hung out beyond the edges of the original drawing-room curtains, and gave melancholy emphasis, it seemed to Elvira Blackburn, to the fact of her uncle’s death. She went across and straightened them before she answered her brother’s challenge.
“Don’t stand on the sheepskin rug, Mel,” she said, determined to put herself to some extent in the right, and in the position of dictator, before the argument began. “After all, everybody knows by now that Uncle Smith made a new will when war broke out. It’s no use trying to keep dark a fact which came out at the inquest.”
“I suppose you realise,” said her brother, seating himself and hitching up the knees of his trousers, although his feet were fully extended across the sheepskin rug towards the aspidistra in the fireplace, “that we shall have the police here again at any moment? And yet you must go and give that stork of a girl every atom of information in our possession! I respected Uncle, if you didn’t, and I’m hanged if I want to see his name on the front page of the local rag for the next five weeks or so. You know what reporters are—especially girl reporters! No sense of the fitness of things, and no decency. Sometimes I wonder whether you’ve any yourself!”
“Why not accuse me of poisoning Uncle, and have done with it?” said his sister, with the dangerous calm of a person on the verge of nervous collapse.
“Oh, don’t be silly, El. But the fact does remain—and our squabbling with each other won’t alter it—that we’re in the deuce of a hole. Uncle was poisoned, and we inherit about thirty thousand pounds. It’s no use blinking facts.”
“He had a weak heart and a funny inside,” said Elvira.
“Exactly.” Her brother drew up his knees, hitched his trousers again as he did so, and looked up into her eyes. “And who knew that? We did.”
“Plenty of people did.”
“I know. But that doesn’t let us out. I’ve lain awake for the past two nights trying to work out our position, and the more I think of it, the more utterly hopeless it seems. Who cooked his food? You did. Who acted as his secretary and valet, and was never out of the house without his permission? Me!”
“I,” said his sister automatically. “Oh, I know what you mean, but if we don’t know anything, well, we don’t and that’s the long and short of it. Oh, Mel, don’t scuffle on that rug!”
“What’s it matter now?” said her brother brutally. “It all belongs to us. We’re not his stewards—his beastly slaves—any more.”
“Do you think people knew?” asked Elvira, after a pause, during which she went to the window and straightened the curtains again.
“Knew what?”
“How he bossed us, and how we disliked him, and how he only altered his will like that because you said you’d leave him, and take me with you?”
“I don’t see how they could know. He wouldn’t talk. And I haven’t. How about you?”
“Even if I’d wanted to, there hasn’t been much chance.”
“And yet, you see, you go and blab it all out to that wretched girl!”
“Patricia Mort is not a wretched girl. She was the most brilliant girl the school has ever had. It wasn’t her fault her parents couldn’t afford to let her go to college for the diploma. In any case, she had to get experience on a local paper first. They all have to. And she could have gone to college if only uncle had tipped the Education Committee the wink when he was chairman. Anyhow, she already knew what I told her.”
“How do you know that she knew?”
“She told me, quite frankly, all that she’d gathered at the inquest.”
“But was she there? I didn’t see her.”
“We didn’t look for her, did we? And, anyhow, nobody ever notices Pat, because you take her for granted. Anyway, I felt too horribly self-conscious and uncomfortable to look anywhere except at the coroner. I felt just as uncomfortable as I felt when I was in the third form, and somebody stole a girl’s purse. It was dreadful. I felt certain that everybody, somehow, would think it was me.”
“I,” said her brother, without malice. “And don’t talk about stealing, please. It’s scarcely tactful.”
“Oh, Mel, I’m sorry, but you know I didn’t mean that.”
“Well, shut up about it, anyway. I tell you what, though, El. We ought to help find out who did poison Uncle, you know. I mean, it’s a very uncomfortable thought that we haven’t the least idea who could possibly have done such a thing.”
“Mel?”
“What is it now?”
“I…suppose it wasn’t you?”
“Good Lord, Elvira! Draw it mild!”
“Yes, but…was it, Mel?”
“I might as well ask you. We inherit the money between us.”
“Oh, Mel, what an awful thing to say!”
“How is it worse than what you said?”
“Well, it isn’t, I suppose. But who else would want to kill him, anyway?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out. And I’ll tell you the first thing we ought to do about it. We ought to find out where Uncle went and who he was with on the evening of his death. Now, then, where can we start?”
“Let’s start with tea. He was all right up to then.”
“Yes. Now, what did he have?”
“What did we have, as well? I mean, if it didn’t poison us, it couldn’t have poisoned him.”
“In that case I should think we could cut out tea. We all had exactly the same. I wish they hadn’t adjourned the inquest. We ought to have heard the medical evidence about when the poison was probably administered. I wonder if one could possibly pump the doctor? I mean, we’ve probably got a perfect alibi.”
“Do you know, Mel, I wish now I’d told the inspector that he did have some of that fish paste. You see, the jar got thrown away, and we could have got rid of it. Then they would have thought the poison might be in that, and…Oh, no. I see it wouldn’t have helped.”
“It certainly wouldn’t. Anyway, they found the pot and sent it for analysis, just to make sure we were telling the truth, I suppose.”
“Oh, Mel!”
“What is it?”
“Don’t you see? If they should find arsenic in the fish paste it would go dreadfully against us, because they’d think we’d lied, and he did have some, and that we’d put it in, and…”
“There, don’t cry, Elvira. It’s no good giving way. We know we didn’t poison the old blighter, so it follows that someone else, or something else—it may have been accidental—did. We shall have to look further than tea-time. That is, if we can trust one another.”
“Well, after tea he and I went over the household accounts.”
“Did you tell the police about that?”
“I thought I’d better. Mollie probably heard Uncle call me a bitch. If that had come out, and I hadn’t happened to mention it, the fat would have been in the fire.”
“Yes. Blast that girl! She’s always had ears on elastic. I can’t think why we don’t sack her. She’s our servant now.”
“Yes, and what would people say?”
“You mean, we’d got something to hide that the girl knew something about? Yes, and trust Mollie Slatter; she’d make up some tale or other just to spite us. I always thought that Uncl
e seduced her; in fact, that she was his mistress.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I think he liked her, but not in that sort of way.”
“Well, as you say, we’d better keep her, at least until all this blows over.”
“Oh, Mel, I wish it would. It’s like a nightmare. Why on earth did he have to be poisoned? As though he wasn’t enough trouble all his life to us, that he had to drag us into his death like this!”
“No good getting hysterics over it, old thing. Where were we? After the accounts. What next? Oh, and what was the time?”
“Well, tea was over by about a quarter to six. Then we did the accounts until about seven. It was all the quarterly payments—getting ready for them at the end of the month. Then there was a row about the laundry bill. He thought we ought to have towels washed at home. I told him Mollie wouldn’t do it, and he said it wouldn’t hurt me to give her a hand. I said I wouldn’t mind if he’d buy a mangle and let us use an electric iron. Then we had words, and then he told me to pack up the bills and book, because he’d got to go off to a Council meeting.”
“We could soon find out whether he went. There’s his little book. It’s printed with all the Council meetings, times and dates and things. Uncle never missed one—it’s partly why he got so many votes—so if there was a meeting he was at it, and we can check up times again from there.”
The leather-covered engagement book was discovered in a drawer of the dead man’s desk. There was no Council meeting listed for the day of their uncle’s death.
“Looks queer,” said Melchior, replacing the book. “Apparently the police didn’t think this diary important, or Stallard would have carted it off. I’ll tell you what. I like that chap, you know, El. I believe we’ll get a square deal from him, I do, really.”
“On the facts as he sees them. So do I. But is that good enough? I tell you, Mel, I’m scared about Uncle’s death. You see, everybody seems to have liked him except us.”
“Never mind. Get on with the washing. Ring up Mrs. Perk—she’s another regular old-timer—and ask her whether there was not a special meeting that didn’t get printed in the book. After all, the war wasn’t on when that book went to press.”
“Not Mrs. Perk, Mel. I really hardly know her. I’ve only spoken to her once. Better get one of the men. What about Councillor Commy? Or Councillor Grant?”
“Good old cronies of Uncle’s! Yes, all right. It doesn’t really matter who it is.”
When his sister had gone out of the room to telephone, he picked up the little engagement book, fingered it absently, and then slipped it into his pocket.
“There wasn’t a Council meeting,” said his sister, coming back. “Why, Mel! Where’s Uncle’s book?”
Her brother looked round for it, then searched his pockets, and, from the last one he felt in, produced the book, with an air of embarrassment which seemed, in the circumstances, excessive. He handed it over.
“Good Lord! I can’t remember putting it there,” he said.
“Oh, Mel, you might be a bit more careful! It’s just that sort of absent-mindedness that’ll look so awfully bad,” his sister said anxiously, putting the book into a drawer.
• 4 •
Patricia Mort bent over the local paper and, with a frown of concentrated thought upon her fair and otherwise unwrinkled forehead, re-read Joe Canopy’s letter and then compared the editor’s version with the epistle she held in her hand.
Dear Sir (Joe Canopy had written),
Theres goings on down the canal you ought to know about this murder I mean murder did ought to be looked into by the police and A.R.P. all my eye because dark deeds can be hid in the Blackout old Haw-Haw is right enough that’s why some fools takes notice of all his lies because he gets the truth sometimes. And we ought to see to it. I could tell more than this but what good will it do me well the Boatmen’s Institute will find me if you want me some game believe me lucky my barge don’t make no noise and old Widder don’t cough and her feet on soft ground at the time about sunset hows that for medical evidence I could tell you a good bit.
Yours truly.
Joseph Canopy, Master.
Pat put the letter carefully into its envelope, rested her chin on her hands, brooded for a bit, and then went to the top of the stairs.
“Mrs. Peat,” she called over the banisters, “I’m ready when you are.”
“Come on down, then, Miss,” a voice replied. “Mr. Peat’s come in and supper’s on the hob. Have you got to go out again to-night?”
“Yes, I’ve got an assignment at the Grand.”
“That’ll be a treat for you, then. Come on, or you’ll miss the beginning. That’s a terrible good picture at the Grand.”
“I hope I make a terrible good report of it, then,” laughed Pat. She hunted through a book of cuttings and found Miss Lejeune’s review of the film in the Observer. She read it carefully, replaced it lovingly, then ran down the stairs to the kitchen.
“I can’t see why they want you to write up the films, I’m sure,” said her landlady, serving her with mutton rissoles and some rice. “Bread, Miss? I’m sure you know who’s in it is quite enough for me. Once you know the stars you can’t go wrong. There’s that ducky Merle Oberon, for instance.”
“But you can’t always know the stars,” muttered Pat, thinking not of Miss Oberon, but of her own ambitions.
• CHAPTER 5 •
A dish with punched decoration: Cromwellian style, London, 1653-4.
Description by D. Kighley Baxandall of a piece in the collection of Lord Harlech.
• 1 •
“You know,” said Councillor Mrs. Perk to her thin-faced, iron-grey husband, “I still think I ought to go to the police about poor old Councillor Smith.”
“My dear girl, rubbish!” said her husband, very sharply. He picked up a glass of sherry from the tray his wife was holding. “I’ve told you before, and I say again, that I would go with you myself to the police if I thought even remotely necessary. But it isn’t, and it would only land you—and me, of course!—in a lot of beastly unpleasantness. The police want somebody who saw the last of him. Well, that wasn’t you. If it was anybody, I should think it would be the chap who keeps the pub! From what I know of Smith, he was not the man to leave the ‘Rat and Cow-catcher’ whilst it was still legally open.”
“But, Arthur, it seems he did.”
“Then somebody must have enticed him, and that person is most probably the murderer. Now, Emmy, do please be reasonable. I particularly don’t want our name in newspaper headlines, especially local ones. You know what a feast of reason and flow of soul the Record has treated us to this last week! Three editions, special features and articles, pious editorials, and a correspondence column the length of a month of Sundays! Besides, it’s simply wasting the time of the police. They want the last person who saw him; not people who were with him at some time during the evening.”
“But, Arthur, darling, I’ve been reading up about arsenic, and it says…”
“To hell with arsenic!” He sipped sherry as though he were drinking a heartfelt toast.
“No, but, Arthur…”
Big, fair and personable, she walked across the grey and blue carpet, across parquet flooring, across a wide hall and a book-lined room. She returned triumphantly, seated herself on a stool, and pulled him into a chair beside her. Mr. Perk, who had finished his sherry and was reaching for the decanter, put his glass down with a sigh.
“You needn’t, darling.” She poured him out another glass, gave it to him, and resumed her seat on the stool. “Just listen to this while you drink it.”
“Irritant poisons: In the case of the milder irritants, the results may be deferred for a few hours, particularly when a full meal has been taken along with the poison.”
“Stop a minute,” said her husband. “That’s what must have happened.”
“What?”
“He took the poison along with his dinner that night. Therefore you’re not brought
into it, and your evidence that you were with him after his dinner is valueless.”
“But, Arthur, he didn’t have dinner.”
“How do you know that?”
“He has often told me he didn’t. He said that what was good enough for his father was good enough for him, and would have to be good enough for his niece and nephew. I’m sorry for those poor children, Arthur, you know. They inherit all the money, and are sure to be suspected of the murder.”
“Don’t sound so ghoulish, Emmy.”
“Well, darling, to go on with what I was saying: he’s told me several times that his household have a large midday meal, a high tea at about half-past five, and then supper—cheese and cocoa and things—just before they go to bed. So where does your full meal come in? He wouldn’t have had his supper that night before he died.”
“High tea might be a full meal. No, Emmy, look. Be logical. Either the man took the poison at tea-time before you and the others met him, or else he took it after you’d left the ‘Rat and Cow-catcher.’ And while we’re on the subject of the ‘Rat and Cow-catcher’…”
“Don’t tell me,” interrupted his wife. “I know. Prompt me if I go wrong or can’t remember. You asked me at the very beginning not to accept that silly invitation to go with the rest of the Committee to the ‘Rat and Cow-catcher’; you said that no good would come of it; you said that it was undignified and unwise; you begged me to take your advice. And,” she added, changing her voice, “I jolly well wish, my poor old man, that I had taken it, for I am very far from easy in my mind.”
• 2 •
Young Derek Coffin looked at the large stone which the police inspector was holding and looked away again.
“I wouldn’t know where it came from,” he said. “I mean to say…” he cleared his throat, “it’s like this…what I mean…they’re all the same, aren’t they? So how should I know?”
“But your fiancee, Lillie Fletcher, came over here on the night of her death, didn’t she?”
“No. But she came other evenings.”
“Those don’t signify. It’s last Thursday week I’m concerned with. Now don’t lose your head, Coffin, there’s a good chap. Nobody thinks you did it…”
Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley) Page 4