“Is that near where that other body—Mr. Greene—was found?” I asked, again trying to sound as innocent as possible.
“Yes, awful business. I don’t know what’s going on here on this island. All this death.”
“Did you know the man?”
“No. The inspector did come round and question me about him and I told him the truth—that I had never met him. Until recently I haven’t been a very social animal, as I’ve been busy with my work, trying a build a network of like-minded souls and also the compilation of a definitive dictionary of magic. So much to do when working on a new book. Writing up all the notes, the indexing, and so on. Of course Violet helps when she can, but her nerves do seem to get the better of her, I’m afraid. Anyway, it’s very nearly finished, which is why I’m beginning to see people once more. I’m looking forward to Miss Hart’s party on Valentine’s Day. I think she mentioned that she had invited you.”
“Oh, yes, that will be very interesting. How do you know Miss Hart?” I asked.
“Helen? I think we met in London. I can’t quite remember now, but you know how it is. She’s a wonderful artist. I’ve asked her to create a piece for my garden, but it seems to be years in the making.”
“Did you hear what happened on the ship over here? Involving Mr. Trevelyan’s wife?”
“Oh, yes, just awful. But I heard that she had been quite ill for some time. In fact, I once saw her at one of those parties in London behaving as though she had lost her mind. Guy had to call in a doctor to sedate her, but it put a terrible strain on the marriage, as you can imagine. I kept telling him he should take her to the Mediterranean or even here, to Tenerife, where the sunshine serves as a form of healing in itself. You see, doctors only really look at the body, when of course there is so much more to health than that, as I’m sure you are aware.”
“Indeed,” I said. What was it my mother used to say? Yes, it was a quote from Eden Phillpotts. “ ‘The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.’ ”
“A Shadow Passes? I’m right, it’s Phillpotts, isn’t it?”
“How extraordinary, that’s right,” I said, genuinely amazed.
“I’ve got a photographic memory, you see, Mrs. Christie. I never forget anything I read. Would you like to see my books?”
“That would be fascinating,” I said as he led me through another sitting room towards the library, part of which held a display of primitive sculptures, Guanche artifacts he had collected over the years. I strained my eyes to see if I could spot anything that resembled the figure Davison and I had found in the cave.
“They are my pride and joy,” he said, gesturing towards the shelves stacked with a range of esoteric titles dealing with a wide range of subjects. My interest was drawn towards the sections that dealt with the black arts and magic before my eyes moved over to a whole case containing pharmaceutical texts, many of which were devoted to poisons. Grenville saw me studying the books and pulled one out for me to look at.
“Here, cast your eye over this,” he said, handing me an ancient leather-bound volume. “What a title! Directions for the Treatment of Persons Who Have Taken Poison, and Those in a State of Apparent Death. I would have thought you’d find that most interesting reading, Mrs. Christie.”
“Yes, I’m sure I would,” I said, turning to the title page, where I learnt that the book, which was written by M. J. B. Orfila and translated by a surgeon called R. H. Black, had been published in this second edition in 1820. What was Grenville trying to do? Did he know that I suspected him of poisoning Winniatt? Was he playing a clever game of double bluff? Surely he couldn’t know anything of the horrors I had endured during my so-called disappearance?
“If you don’t believe me about my memory, let us play a little game. Open it anywhere you like and give me the page number and subject. Then I’ll tell you what it says, word for word.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do that before.”
“It’s a trick I learnt in Paris. Go on.”
“Very well,” I said, as my eyes ran through the contents page, past the sections on mercurial, arsenical, and antimonical preparations, through to niter, sal ammoniac, liver of sulfur, preparation of lead, opium, laudanum, and poppy seeds to one particular poison that caught my eye. “Page 84, henbane.”
His eyes bulged and his tongue ran lizard-like over his fat lips. His eyes flickered as he began to recite the paragraph word for word as it was written in the book. “ ‘The root of black henbane has been sometimes confounded with the parsnip and used in soups, which has occasioned very serious accidents; the leaves are also very poisonous.’ ”
I was dumbfounded.
“Don’t look so shocked, Mrs. Christie,” he said. “It’s actually very easy to do—it’s just a matter of training, like everything else in life. And it’s actually very interesting that you chose that section to read.”
“Why?”
He broke into a wheezy laugh. “We’re going to have parsnip soup tonight.”
26
The three of us took our places at the wooden dining table, which had been covered in beautiful elaborate lace mats that Grenville said had been made by local women. Consuela entered the room carrying a tureen bearing the soup. As she placed it on the table and lifted off its lid, I smelt the distinctive aroma of parsnips. I watched closely as the servant woman spooned out the soup and passed us a bowl each. If the soup had been made from a poisonous root, then I was certain that it would affect not only me but each of us in turn. Grenville watched me as I looked down at the pale brown liquid before me.
“It’s one of Consuela’s recipes, using chicken stock from one of her own hens and parsnips grown at my request in her husband’s huerta,” said Grenville. “Consuela, gracias por todo,” he added, dismissing her for the evening. “Please, you must start before it gets cold.”
I took hold of a silver spoon and lifted a little of the soup towards my mouth, but then stopped. A glint of dark mischief flashed through Grenville’s eyes.
“Don’t be nervous, Mrs. Christie,” he said, turning to his daughter. “I was teasing her earlier, you see. We had a discussion just now about how easy it is to confuse parsnip with the root of black henbane.” The asthmatic laugh returned to rack his chest. “Listen to me—if I carry on like this, I will have to go and seek out the damnable Dr. Trenkel.”
“Father, please don’t speak ill of the doctor,” said Violet. “I think he’s worked wonders with Edmund.”
“The less said about that the better,” mumbled Grenville as he spooned some soup into his mouth.
Violet’s sullen mood enveloped the table, extinguishing the glint in her father’s eyes and forcing us into silence.
“Very wholesome,” I said as I tasted the earthy soup, confident enough to swallow it now that both Grenville and his daughter had done so.
The only sound in the dining room was the slurping of the soup and the ticking of a clock in the corner. I had to do something to bring a bit of life to the table.
“Are you a fan of Mr. Phillpotts?” I asked, biting into a piece of bread.
Grenville looked up from his soup. “Eden? Well of course, a very fine writer indeed. He had the potential to be a good actor too, but he had a terrible problem with his legs. Couldn’t control them apparently. I knew him in London before he moved to the country.”
“I can’t quite believe it,” I said, the words getting stuck in my throat. “He was our neighbor in Torquay.”
“Do you hear that, Violet? How extraordinary. Yes, a wonderful writer, and so prolific, I don’t know how he manages it.”
“And so kind, too,” I said, my face brightening. “I remember when I was young, around eighteen or so, I went to speak to him about writing. He was ever so encouraging and even read my first effort, dismal though it was.”
“Was that a book about crime?” asked Violet, her mood dissipating as she took a sip of wine.
“No, i
t was set in Cairo and concerned the choice a woman had to make between two suitors.”
“That sounds promising,” said Grenville. “Did it have a title?”
“Snow Upon the Desert,” I said. “I’m not sure why I called it that, but of course although Mr. Phillpotts was encouraging—he even sent it to his agent—it was never published. I’m sure it had many faults, but its chief problem was the fact that I had chosen to make my heroine deaf. With no conversation or dialogue, it became a very boring book indeed.”
Laughter broke out at the table and the mood lightened. For that moment, as I basked in the temporary glory of taking pleasure in making others laugh, I forgot what I was there for. As Grenville and his daughter asked me about how I started writing and what I planned to write next, I tried to formulate what I needed to do while I was here.
“That’s very interesting that Phillpotts helped you in your early days,” said Grenville, returning to the earlier subject. “He had a very talented daughter, or so I’ve heard. What was she called?”
“Adelaide,” I replied.
Grenville’s eyes seemed to mist over at the mention of the name.
“I went to ballet lessons with her when I was a girl,” I continued. “And of course she is a playwright in her own right now. After the success of Yellow Sands, the play she worked on with her father, she wrote one set in ancient Egypt.”
“Yes, a very unusual woman,” he said. “And wonderful that father and daughter can enjoy such a close relationship. Rather like Violet and me.”
The girl did not say anything, but simply stood up and started to clear away the soup bowls. As she left the dining room for the kitchen, carrying the dishes and spoons on a tray, Grenville turned to me and said, “Violet’s a lovely girl, don’t you think?”
Violet returned with a tray of food: potatoes, accompanied by a few small dishes of red and green sauces, a platter of fish, and a large salad.
“Would you serve, dear?” said Grenville to his daughter.
I still had to be careful—food like this could carry poison, too—and so I asked whether they would mind if I served myself. “I have a very small appetite, you see. Since arriving on the island my stomach has been a little delicate.”
“Of course,” said Grenville. “It’s a common problem with visitors. But I have the most effective remedy, which I can show you later, if you’d like.”
I nodded my head, but I would resist sampling anything of the sort. The meal continued, with Violet remaining mostly silent while Grenville asked me about my life in England, my childhood, my parents, and my interest in the supernatural. Of course, I had to embellish my fascination with the occult, but Grenville continued to maintain that I had talents in this direction. In turn, I quizzed him about his beliefs. He told me how he had been fascinated by Arthurian legends as a child—an interest I shared with him—and how he had always felt able to access different planes of reality. He had kept all this from his parents, who had been strict Christians, the puritan type, but at Oxford he started to attend ceremonies that worshiped the goddess Isis and became interested in the Golden Dawn movement. Luckily for him, he added, after the death of first his mother and then his father, he was left a large inheritance—the result of the family’s timber trade business—which meant he did not have to take up a profession. He was free to follow where his intellect and spirit of curiosity led him, which was to Paris, where he fell in with a bohemian crowd, and where he experimented with drugs, which he believed had the power to liberate the soul from its confines. There he became close to a Spanish-born occultist called Encausse, or Papus, as he was generally known.
“So I became a sorcerer’s apprentice of sorts,” said Grenville, dipping a small, wrinkled potato into a dish of red spicy sauce that he told me was called mojo. “Papus taught me a great deal, and I helped him with articles in L’Initiation and his books, and we even traveled together to Russia to conjure the spirit of Alexander III. The prophecy proved correct—Tsar Nicholas was indeed overthrown by revolutionaries.”
He paused to take a swig of wine and to wipe his lips, which had been covered with a smear of the red sauce.
“We were very close until one day we had a difference of opinion over the interpretation of a passage in an obscure Hebrew text. Of course, there were other things at play—namely that Papus thought that I was becoming more powerful than him, and so he banished me from his order. I was rather fed up with his world and wanted to see something of other countries, so I volunteered to become part of an expedition to climb Pico de Orizaba in Mexico.
“It was there, standing on top of the world, that I had a vision of my life’s work. I saw it all—everything appeared in a series of tableaux before me. I even glimpsed the face of the woman I was to marry, dear Jacqueline, and how she would die in childbirth. I saw our child being born, and then the next image was that of a volcano, which I learnt was Teide. As the mist cleared, I caught sight of bleak barren landscape, and from the rocky soil of a barren crater, there appeared a small flower, a beautiful violet. That’s how, when all this came to pass, when Jacqueline died giving birth, I knew straight away the baby had to be called Violet, a flower that blooms on Teide, even in the harshest of environments.”
Grenville had clearly enjoyed his little speech and was waiting for Violet to acknowledge him, but she did not raise her eyes from her plate. I was convinced that she knew something sinister about her father that she could be persuaded to share with me. But how on earth would I get her to myself?
Just as Grenville was about to launch into another long speech about what he had seen on the top of that mountain, I set my knife and fork down on my plate and raised the starched cotton napkin to my mouth.
“I wondered if you would excuse me?” I said, getting up from the chair with a bolt. “Violet, would you show me where I could powder my nose?”
“Of course,” said the girl, rushing over to me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m just feeling a little off-color,” I said.
“I hope it wasn’t our food,” said Grenville.
“No, not at all,” I said. “Just my unpredictable stomach, I’m afraid.”
Violet took my arm and led me out of the dining room and down the corridor. Before I entered the room where they had installed a primitive lavatory, I turned to her and looked at her with a concerned expression. The look prompted a spirited outburst that took me aback.
“What do you expect me to say?” she hissed. “You heard him in there. What a wonderful relationship we have, what a fabulous father he is.”
“Violet, I know there’s something bothering you,” I whispered. “If you have anything to tell me that relates to your father or to Winniatt’s murder, you must do so. There’s no point keeping this to yourself. I can see it’s eating away inside you, destroying you. Secrets like this can be deadly.”
She looked frightened, haunted. “What do you mean?”
“If you don’t tell me what you know someone else could be killed. First there was Douglas Greene, found in that cave by Martiánez beach. And now Mr. Winniatt, murdered not far from this house. It’s unlikely it’s going to stop there.”
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“What is it then? You must tell me what’s on your mind, as I can see that something is very wrong indeed.”
From down the corridor came the sound of the smash of a glass. “Damn!” shouted Grenville from the dining room. “Violet! Could you fetch something to clear up this mess? Violet, where the devil are you?”
“Coming,” she shouted back before she whispered, “Quickly, go in here.”
She pushed me in through the door and then turned back to the dining room, where she could deal with the demands of her father. In case she remained outside the door, listening, I poured some water from a jug down into the bowl of the lavatory. I used some more to splash into a basin and onto my face, which I wiped with an embroidered white towel. When I was ready and composed, I returned t
o the dining room to see Violet on her knees, sweeping the remaining shards of glass from the floor into a dustpan.
“Feeling better, I hope, Mrs. Christie?” said Grenville, standing behind my chair and gesturing for me to take my place at the table.
“Oh, yes, very much so. I’m so sorry about that,” I said, sitting down again.
“It’s no trouble, no trouble at all,” he said, moving away towards a cabinet at the side of the room. “And sorry about this mess. You see, I was searching for the remedy I was telling you about, the one that is a miracle cure for digestive problems such as yours. Just as I found it, I misplaced a glass and sent it flying onto the floor. Never mind, these things can’t be helped. Anyway, the main thing is I found the remedy for you.”
From the top of the cabinet he took hold of a small vial of colorless liquid and said with a sinister smile, “I would strongly recommend you try it.”
“W-what is it?” I asked.
“No need to be so nervous, Mrs. Christie. It’s from my garden here at Mal País, made from the finest herb and plant essences.”
“May I ask which ones?”
“Well, let’s see, there’s lemon verbena, fennel seeds, orange peel, and chamomile, I believe. All very soothing and calming, for the body and the mind.”
It sounded like a very dubious mixture to me. He unscrewed the bottle and, using a small pipette, sucked up a line of the clear liquid. “A couple of drops should do it,” he said, proffering the pipette towards my water glass.
“That’s very kind of you, thank you,” I said, moving my glass towards him.
Violet kept her head directed towards the floor, even though I was sure she had swept up all the shards by now. In the dustpan by her hands lay a large sliver of glass. What would happen if she were to reach out, grab the sharp piece of glass, and use it to slit Grenville’s throat? An image flashed into my mind of the blood oozing out of his neck to form a sinister necklace. His frog-like eyes bulging at being surprised by the indignity of imminent death. His great bulk slumping into the tableware before falling lifeless onto the floor.
A Different Kind of Evil Page 16