by Ellis Peters
‘Yes,’ said Bill with difficulty. ‘It means an inquest, and probably a post-mortem, too.’
‘You don’t seem surprised,’ said the doctor, looking up at him narrowly from under his rumpled grey eyebrows.
‘No. I thought myself that it was all wrong. He wasn’t ill. I’ve never known him really ill, nothing but seasonal colds, and flu, and things like that. I didn’t see how he could possibly just stop living, like this. Can you tell what he really did die of?’
‘It will take a post-mortem to say for certain; but yes, I can make a pretty close estimate. He died of a good large dose of one of the barbiturates, luminal or something like it. He’s been dead several hours.’
They stood looking at each other for a moment in an exchange of thoughts which needed no words. Then Bill said: ‘He had his coffee last night, as usual. I don’t think he sat up late, I don’t think he was working. But he drank his coffee. The tray’s in the next room now, it hasn’t been touched. That was right, wasn’t it?’ And after a momentary struggle with the wave of panic that rose in him like a high tide, he asked almost brusquely: ‘I don’t know the proper drill – who sends for the police, you or me?’
Estelle and Gerard were in the hall together when Bill came downstairs at the doctor’s heels. They were silent, and they were not looking at each other. Gerard stood near the window, staring out into the garden; Estelle was in a chair by the hearth, with the morning paper spread open in her hands, but the intense nature of her stillness and concentration did not suggest that she was reading it.
‘I’m sorry!’ said Bill rather wearily, ‘I’m afraid you’ve been shockingly neglected, I do apologise. But something pretty shattering has happened. I don’t know if my aunt has told you already – Uncle Philip died suddenly in the night.’
It sounded curiously stilted to him, and completely unreal. Every time he said it or thought it, it hit him hard under the heart again, and made him gasp. It didn’t seem to him that he could ever get used to it.
The paper crumpled sharply between Estelle’s hands. Her eyes looked over it with a scared, wild gleam of violet light, animal in their alarm and defensive ferocity. But when the paper sank slowly into her lap her face was revealed in marble stillness, even her breath held for a moment. ‘Dead?’ she said in a whisper, not doubting, only, as it seemed, trying to grasp it, and her eyes flew to her husband. ‘But how?’ But it was clear that she was not putting the question to Bill, and he made no attempt to answer it.
Gerard, turning so that the light was behind him and his face obscured, stared with dropped jaw and almost incredulous frown and, having grasped the certainty of Bill’s verdict, made appropriate noises of distress and dismay.
‘How terrible! What a dreadful thing to happen, and what a shock for you! I can’t tell you how sorry Estelle and I are to hear such sad news. If there’s anything we can do to be of help – anything at all – please do count on us. Mrs Greville – she’ll be arriving by train – could I—?’
‘Rachel Pharamond is meeting her,’ said Bill. ‘Thanks, all the same! Will you excuse me for a moment? I have to telephone the police.’
He didn’t know why he dropped the brutal fact in their laps like that, nor why he recoiled with so much distaste from Gerard Renaud’s sympathy. Perhaps it had already become clear to his subconscious mind that someone in this household had poisoned Philip, and instinctively he was selecting for distrust the stranger simply because to look with doubt upon Mary, or the servants, was altogether too fantastic, as well as quite unbearable. He saw Gerard’s heavy jaw sag still further in amazement and consternation, or a good imitation of both. But what did that mean? No one in this house could afford to be anything but amazed and concerned from now on. He went to telephone, leaving Dr Benson to meet the inevitable outcry.
‘The police? But I don’t understand! How can the police possibly come into the matter? You have examined Mr Greville, I take it, Doctor – a most tragic death, and a terrible shock for his wife, but is there really any ground for supposing it to be anything but natural?’
Estelle sat mute, her hands gripping the arms of her chair, her eyes flashing with desperate shrewdness from one face to the other, like an animal making a lightning estimate of the possible bolt-holes out of a dangerous situation. Grief, if she had for one instant had grief in her eyes, was already gone; among so many nearer preoccupations there was no longer any room for it. She could think as quickly as Gerard, and see as far.
‘Gerard, I feel that perhaps we could at least relieve Mrs Greville of the burden of having guests at a time like this. She’ll have more than enough trouble to face, without that. And I’m sure she’d much rather have just her own family about her. If we’re not needed, we could drive back to town today, instead of on Tuesday. It might be the best way of helping.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said the doctor dryly, ‘that it may be necessary for you to stay. It will be for the police to say if you can leave, and when.’
‘The police?’ Gerard moistened his grey lips, and his eyes flickered for an instant to his wife’s face, and were met by a look of wild, distrustful intelligence. ‘But surely they can’t suppose that my wife and I know anything about Mr Greville’s death? The most casual of visits – a mere accident that we’re here at all—’
‘If Mr Greville’s death is not the result of natural causes,’ said the doctor patiently, ‘and I can tell you here and now that that’s extremely unlikely, then there are just three possibilities: accident, suicide and murder. Nothing about him ever suggested to me that suicide would be within his scope; to have an accident with – what I take to be the agency of his death – he would have to be in possession of it, and in the legitimate habit of taking it, which emphatically he was not. I’m his doctor, I know the full tale of the drugs I’ve ever prescribed for him, and they’re precious few in any case, and this one isn’t among them. And that makes the third possibility loom a little larger than is quite comfortable, Mr Renaud. The police have their job to do. They’ll tell you when you can leave here – but I don’t think it will be today.’
Gerard did not pursue the suggestion of leaving; he was perfectly aware that anxiety and indignation were to be dissembled at all costs. Instead, he asked at once: ‘But what is it you think he’s taken? What drug?’
‘One of the barbiturates, probably luminal. Something I’m convinced he never took in his life before. I doubt if there’s even any in the house.’
‘Yes,’ said Mary’s quiet voice from the doorway, ‘there is.’
She had come in unnoticed from the kitchen, and stood just within the room. She had been crying, and it had done her good; her face was wretched but calm, with the determined, competent, roused calm of someone who has emerged successfully from an intense crisis. ‘I had luminal tablets once,’ she said to the doctor, ‘on a prescription from your locum, when you were away in hospital yourself – do you remember? It must be nearly three years ago now. He gave me a bottle of fifty – I dare say he was over-enthusiastic, he was that kind of young man. I don’t think more than a dozen or fifteen were ever taken, but I can’t try to guess how many there ought to be in the bottle. It’s so long since I even looked at it.’
‘And where is this bottle now?’ asked Dr Benson.
‘Gerard and I could hardly know anything about it, could we?’ Estelle put in rapidly. ‘Only someone who lived in the house could possibly know you had any such tablets.’
The fight was on already, the fight to step back out of the spotlight and leave someone else blinded in its glare. Estelle would have no mercy and no scruples. Was she more afraid than other people, or only quicker in realisation of danger? Bill, coming back from telephoning, heard the note of resolute self-interest in her voice, and wondered bitterly if he was soon going to be elbowing his way past her towards the escape doors.
‘They’re in the bathroom cabinet,’ said Mary, ‘and available to anyone who happened to look in there for a styptic pencil or the iodine. The
re’s no secret about them, and they’ve never been under lock and key because we’ve taken it for granted that everyone in the house was an adult, and responsible. I dare say they ought to have been locked up, but they never were.’
‘Would you mind,’ asked the doctor, ‘if I took charge of them?’
‘I should be very glad if you would. If, of course, they’re still there.’
They were still there. Within two minutes the doctor came downstairs again, carrying the little bottle carefully in a folded handkerchief. It was that handkerchief, more than any other detail, that underlined the real state of the case. Bill stood staring at it, and his mind was recapitulating feverishly some broken echoes from Thursday evening, and fitting them together into the framework of this tragedy. ‘—it would mean getting hold of something lethal by strictly private means – but it needn’t be something that left no trace, the traces would only end in mid air. Then all you would have to do would be to keep your nerve—’
‘Look at it, Mary.’ The doctor held out the little phial on the palm of his hand, still shielded by the handkerchief. ‘Does it seem to you less full than it ought to be?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t possibly say. Once the cotton-wool’s out of the neck, you know, the bottle’s already nearly half empty. At this half-way stage, ten tablets, more than ten, could be taken out, and still leave it looking much the same. I told you, I don’t know how many there ought to be, and it would be wrong to start guessing.’
‘These are two-grain tablets,’ said the doctor musingly. ‘Ten of them could—’ He broke off, and wrapped the little bottle carefully in the handkerchief.
But there won’t be finger-prints, thought Bill, in response to the doctor’s unspoken suggestion. That’s of the essence. Whoever took Philip’s tip and killed him had the whole idea fresh in his mind, detective-story fashion, straight from the horse’s mouth. He wouldn’t forget about finger-prints; he had an expert tutor.
And I was there, too, he thought, remembering things he would have preferred to forget. I spent the last few days quarrelling with him, all the household knows it, the rector knows it, the doctor knows it. I wanted him to release my money, and he wouldn’t, and everybody will think: ‘It suits Bill much better to have Helen stepping into his trustee’s shoes, he can get what he wants out of Helen.’ Once I even said something absurd, in a temper, after he’d been making fun of me. ‘Over my dead body!’ he said, and I said—A wave of burning heat swept through him as he remembered what he had replied, like a spiteful child screaming: ‘I hate you! I’ll kill you!’ when all it means is: ‘I can’t get my own way with you!’ He didn’t know whether he felt more frightened or ashamed, but the dull, miserable ache that filled his mind and heart did not seem to go with the fright part of his reactions.
The hum of the car turning in from the road, and the crunch of wheels on gravel, made them all spring round to look through the french windows, long before the car had time to make the circle of the house and enter their view.
‘That will be the police,’ said the doctor, almost with eagerness. For things mechanical the doctor had no ear at all; for the note of this engine was immediately recognisable to Bill as that of the rector’s Ford.
‘It’s not the police,’ he said, ‘there hasn’t been time. It’s Helen!’
He plunged across the room impetuously, before any of them could forestall him and make a hash of the unbearable business, which God knew was dreadful enough already. He sprang through the open french windows and down the steps into the garden, and ran to meet Helen as she stepped out of the car.
She was intensely pale, and yet he had never noticed her brightness so clearly. It was as if she were lit from within, incandescent with her ecstasy of anxiety and foreboding. Her eyes, beneath the lucid forehead, were wide in wonder and dread, and already seemed to be staring at tragedy, but with a superhuman tranquillity. She said: ‘Bill!’ on an almost inaudible breath, and extended her gloved hands to him in appeal, and he flew to take them, to put an end to that hopelessly pathetic gesture of theirs in mid air. He drew her by them closely, warmly against him, and shut his arms tightly round her, and held her like that all the time he was speaking to her, his cheek against her hair. She had left her foolish little white hat, and her handbag and scarf, in the car. Rachel, quietly gathering them up after her, watched the meeting with interest, and found it enlightening, as well as moving.
Poor Bill, she thought, I wonder if that’s why he’s been so mad to get away, miles away, a continent away. If it is, he hasn’t an inkling of it himself, he thinks he feels towards her as a good son ought to feel – but it looks as if some bit of him, deep inside, has been uneasy for a long time, years maybe, feeling that there was something wrong in quality, something excessive, about his feelings towards his uncle’s wife. And Philip’s death hardly resolves that, does it? Poor Bill! She was proud of her detachment, but it did not prevent her from feeling a certain unpleasantly perceptible pain which did not, on the whole, appear to be entirely on Bill’s behalf. No wonder he’d never paid any attention to girls of his own age, no wonder he couldn’t even see them, with that blinding light in between.
‘Darling,’ said Bill, quite softly and slowly, putting into his voice all the molten affection that filled his heart to bursting, ‘something terrible has happened while you’ve been away, and you must be very brave, and remember that we all adore you, and rely on you, and would do anything, anything in the world, to help you, or keep you from unhappiness. Please forgive me if I was wrong, I couldn’t bear you to hear it from anyone but me, or anywhere but here, at home, where at least there’ll be privacy for you, and little things left to comfort you. Darling – it’s Philip. He – Helen, he—’ He faltered, seeing her face sharpen into a crystal clarity and awareness, and her eyes fix suddenly on the open windows where the others had appeared one by one, all but the one for whom she looked.
‘Philip!’ she said, in a still, thoughtful tone, to herself rather than to him. ‘I don’t see him – he isn’t here.’ She drew herself erect in the boy’s arms, and stared into his face; and in acknowledgement of his pain she even smiled a little. ‘My dear, don’t distress yourself so! If you can say it, I can hear it. Tell me – I shan’t make it worse for you. Philip is—’
‘He’s dead,’ said Bill very gently. ‘We found him dead in bed this morning. When he didn’t come down to breakfast we were worried, Mary and I, and she went to wake him, and he was dead. Dr Benson’s here now. After he’d seen him he waited, because there’s something more, you see, Helen, something wrong about the death. We think he’d taken some tablets that killed him in his sleep.’ He almost wished to keep back the last blows, but while she stood so straight and composed in his arms, and watched him with that pale and resolute face, he could not affront her by hiding anything. ‘We’ve had to call in the police. The doctor can’t give a certificate. There’ll have to be an inquest, to find out the real cause of Philip’s death. Darling, you are not to think at all about that – we will take care of everything. Don’t let any of the complications weigh on your mind, or make the thing ugly for you. Where you and Philip are concerned there’s nothing ugly at all – it’s just simply that you’ve lost him. He loved you as long as he lived, and he didn’t even know he was leaving you, so for him there wasn’t any ugliness or regret at all. And that’s what matters.’
Where had he found this unaccustomed eloquence? Nothing but love could have made him so fluent. Even at a moment like this Helen was able to find something amusing, as well as infinitely touching, in the measure by which Bill had excelled himself, for she was smiling through unshed tears as she reached up and kissed his cheek.
‘My dear, my dear!’ was all she said for a moment; and then, drawing herself a little away from his supporting arms, which at once released her: ‘I’ll go to him. Don’t worry about me, Bill – I shall be all right.’ Her voice was remote but firm, it came clearly from steady lips. When she walked towards the french wi
ndows she looked neither to right nor left, and nobody ventured to intrude upon her loneliness, even with sympathy. Bill followed her at a respectful distance across the hall and up the staircase, and waited humbly outside Philip’s door, in case she should need him.
Helen closed the door, and was alone with her husband.
Bill sat on the stairs and waited for what seemed a very long time, watching but not seeing the constrained movements, hearing but not comprehending the nervous and rare utterances, of the others down below. Rachel had come in, and was talking in low tones to Mary, there beside the window. In her short red duffle coat and slim grey skirt, with her dark fringe ruffled, she looked like an athletic schoolgirl, until you remarked the power and profundity of the face. Bill had never really looked at it before, but now it was perhaps the only thing he could see clearly in all the great room below, the only thing that had an authenticity of its own even at this extreme crisis, when all his senses were concentrated on that closed door which separated him from Helen in her grief. He didn’t blame her for shutting him out with the rest; his distress was all for her, not for himself.
At the first touch of her hand at the door he was on his feet, ready to stay or go, to embrace and hold her or draw back and let her alone, just as she should wish. She came out of the room with a slow, composed step, closing the door behind her. Her face was in shadow, he saw only the immense luminous blueness of her eyes shining in the dimness, and then the softer glimmer of her pale face. She was perfectly calm. No, this was something quite different in quality, more than serenity; she was exalted. She looked at him with that glittering stillness, and said in a quiet, direct and level voice: