Stella wriggled her toes. “I shall have to get my nails done soon,” she muttered. I suppose I had been twiddling them a bit with my fingers. “What haven’t you told me?”
“Who does your nails for you?”
“My toe-nails?”
“Yes.”
“A woman in Inishmore. I think she’s very good. Why?”
“You must always keep the parings and burn them yourself.”
“What on earth for?”
“Because anyone who hates you and has power over any part of your body has power over you.”
She sat up, removed her foot from my knee and stared at me. “Darling, are you all right?” she demanded.
“Of course I am.”
“Well, you look positively gaga and you’ve been talking drivel. Have you been spending too much time in Foyle’s witchcraft section? What has this got to do with Barney not coming home?”
“Nothing — I hope.”
She leaned over to grab the Armagnac bottle and replenished my glass and hers. “Let’s start again,” she suggested. “What is it that you haven’t told me?”
“Yes. I suppose I was talking nonsense,” I admitted. “I don’t know why.” That was true enough; the local witches had done their stuff and made a hames of it — they were hardly likely to try again. Perhaps I was the tiniest bit sloshed. “I didn’t tell you that Barney said the guards would run him home. He’ll probably bring them in for a drink, I should think.”
“What’s making him so damn’ public spirited this evening?”
“It’s his cottage that burnt, isn’t it? And someone burnt in it?”
It took a few seconds to sink in, then she looked at me as if she suspected that I was still talking nonsense.
“But it’s Joyce’s cottage that caught fire, isn’t it?”
“One about two hundred yards beyond your gate on the left.”
“That’s it. The Joyces aren’t coming back from Dublin for another week.”
“Well, somebody was burnt in there. I saw the body.”
“Who was it? A tramp?”
“I didn’t ask. A woman or girl, rumour had it. For a time I was almost afraid that it was you.”
“Me.” Her tone suggested that I had imputed something discreditable to her. “Why me?”
“Well — because first we heard that the fire was at Hazard Point — that could mean either the village or the house — then the next thing was this talk about a young woman having been burnt. But I suppose the real reason was that of all the girls and women in the world you were the one that I most particularly didn’t want anything to happen to.”
“Oh, darling.” She took my hand in both of hers. “You are sweet. Do you know what this girl looked like?”
“I don’t think anyone does. All I saw was something covered with coats. And the smell! That’s why I couldn’t eat. I don’t feel as if I shall ever be able to eat again.”
“Oh! My God, how awful. What a way to die.” Stella had got it at last; her face had suddenly crumpled up like a child’s. Even talking about a smell brings home the full realisation of mortality. “Isn’t it odd how one person’s death in a fire seems worse than a hundred.” She shivered. “As if company could make the agony more bearable.”
“You can identify with one, not with a hundred.”
“But what was she doing in the Joyces’ cottage? How did she get in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t anyone know?”
“Probably not.”
“Even Barney?”
“Why should he know — particularly?”
“It’s his village — and she was a girl, wasn’t she?” For a moment Stella looked almost ugly, then with an obvious effort she smiled. “Let’s forget it. Knock back your drink — this is no time for sipping. We’ll talk about ourselves.”
We tried, of course, but we kept coming back to the fire. There was not very much that I had to tell; my recent doings as an actor were already known to Stella through the Press and, since my parting from Grace, my personal life had not been a particularly interesting one, even to me. On the other hand Stella seemed several times to be on the point of going into details about her present relations with Barney, which were obviously on a footing that was less than ideal, but she never quite became explicit. One bit of news was sufficiently illustrative of the situation, however.
“Did Barney tell you that he’s struck oil?” she asked.
“I thought he spent his life striking oil.”
“This time it is oil — quite literally.”
“The Midas touch — not quite literally. Where?”
“Of course we can’t be certain till there’s been full scale boring, but we’re advised that the chances are good. It’s a big area between here and Rossderg — land that’s good for nothing in any other way.”
“Except lying on, and looking at the sea from. Why don’t I know about this? I thought oil strikes were news.”
“We’ve kept it dark up to this. People in Ireland have a habit of crying not ‘wolf’ but ‘bonanza’ and Barney wanted to make sure. Frankie advised that too.”
“Frankie Marr?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it got to do with him?”
“We’ve got money in his production company, and he’s coming in with us to exploit the oil — if it really exists in exploitable quantities. He’s mixed up with some big American exploration people. If news of that got out, the price of land round here would sky-rocket — obviously.”
“I thought Barney owned all the land between here and Rossderg.”
“That’s right. He did.”
“Do you mean that he doesn’t now?”
Something seemed to be amusing Stella, though perhaps there was a trace of wryness in her smile — which was not to be wondered at, considering what she had to say.
“Oh, yes, he owns it — all except for five acres that he gave away last year before we knew about the oil.”
“Gave away?” Barney was to some extent unpredictable, but this did not really sound like his form.
“Five acres bang in the middle of our prospective oil field.”
“Literally gave it away, d’you mean?”
“Sold it for nothing, if you prefer to put it that way.”
“To some charity, or something?”
Stella laughed. “I suppose you might call her a friend,” she said, “a little blonde gold-digger who batted her eyelashes at him and pretended she had fallen in love with our coast-line. He was sloshed, of course, at a party and promised her this five acre field, but he wouldn’t go back on his word when he was sober.”
“Oh! So that’s all it was.” I felt relieved. “For a moment I thought ——”
“A few weeks later the little bitch had the nerve to sell the field secretly for its full market value — so, whatever Barney’s intentions towards her may have been when he was tight, they are now merely murderous. It’s a burnt out case, if it was one at all.” The slightly pussy-cattish expression was wiped from Stella’s face and she shivered. “Oh God! Why did I have to go and remind myself of that bloody fire?”
There was no smell of smoke in the air; only the night scents of the garden and the usual complement of flying insects came in through the open windows. I suppose that I, too, had forgotten about the tragedy at the Joyces’ cottage and was no less sorry than Stella to have it recalled to my mind. I could think of no way of getting it out again. After a little Stella, like a child seeking comfort, came and settled herself on my knee and snuggled her head against my chest; I held her as if she were a child. We were still sitting thus in silence when Barney came home.
We heard the crunch and slide of the car’s tyres as it went rather too fast into its turn on the gravel in front of the house; there followed the banging of a door and calls of good night. The dogs had known all the time, of course, that it was Barney who was coming; they had thumped their tails against the floor. Stella went bac
k to her own chair.
“Standish, I don’t know how to apologise for treating you like this.” Barney spoke as he burst through the door. “It isn’t at all the way we’d planned the evening.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way he was treated,” Stella said. “I was looking after him.”
He ignored her. Although he looked slightly singed and was smudged here and there as if with burnt cork — of which he also smelt — a startling whiteness seemed to underlie his tan. “I suppose your dinner was burnt.”
I told him that, even if the dinner were as perfect as I felt sure that it was, the last thing I wanted to do was to eat. Before I had finished speaking, however, he was off again in his breathless staccato — “Stella, Stella, Stella, what are you thinking of? Standish must be starved.”
“Standish says that after what he saw and smelt at the fire he couldn’t touch food,” she explained patiently. “Is your stomach stronger?”
Barney had stopped talking for long enough to listen, then he collapsed on the sofa, as if he had run out of momentum. “No. By God, it isn’t,” he said.
She poured him out a good dollop of brandy, and he knocked back at least half of it in one gulp. No one was treating the stuff with the proper respect that evening.
“I thought you were going to bring the guards in for a drink,” Stella said after a pause.
Barney sighed. I could sympathise with his obvious desire not to talk about what he had been through. “They wouldn’t come,” he said.
“That’s unlike them, surely?”
“My dear Stella, they’re still on duty.” He finished his drink and replenished all three of the glasses; the exercise of hospitality seemed to make him feel a little better. “When someone’s been killed — an unknown person, to make things worse — they’ve got more to do than just write out a report about a fire. Anyhow the chief superintendent is on his way over from Inishmore.”
“How did they get in touch with him?” Stella wanted to know. “By radio?”
“Mrs. Hubbard reopened the exchange to put through the original fire call; she’s keeping it open all night.”
“Good old Mother Hubb,” said Stella. “This will give her something to yak about for months to come.”
The dogs had returned to sleep. The night was so still that I thought I could hear the sound of cattle chewing the cud by moonlight in the near distance and the urgency of moths trying to commit suttee against the lights seemed indecently loud. A silence had descended on us of the sort that would have prompted someone to say that angels were passing — in the days when people believed in angels. I believed in angels and still do, but no angel can have been responsible for my thoughts about Stella and I cannot put the blame altogether on concussion and alcohol. How could we have been so blind, I wondered, as not to have seen that Stella and I should have stayed together? Even here and now in his own house it was Barney who seemed the interloper. I was fond of my old friend, indeed a warmth of feeling welled up in me for him but — to be quite frank, I wished that he were elsewhere.
As suddenly as the silence had fallen, it came to an end. A vixen cried from the distance and the dogs stirred restlessly in their sleep.
“Barney, who was the girl?” Stella asked.
“What girl?”
“The one who was burnt, of course.”
Barney gave me an unfriendly glance. “Nobody told you it was a girl,” he said.
“Several people did,” I told him. “The rumour was going round the crowd.”
“How should I know who she was?”
“If she’s a village girl, you must know. If she’s a stranger, you could tell us so,” Stella persisted.
“You didn’t see her — and you can thank heaven for that.” Barney stared straight in front of him for a moment then shivered and took another good swig of brandy. “Her own mother wouldn’t recognise her, except by instinct. No one seems to be missing in the village, and I can’t think of any local girl that she could have been. On the other hand, she obviously wasn’t just a wandering tinker who broke in to pinch what she could find.”
We restrained ourselves from asking him why he thought so and waited for him to go on; in the end he did.
“She was having a bath.”
“Having a bath?” I think that we both echoed the words in astonishment.
“The bathroom’s relatively new; it’s in its own wing, added on some years after the rest of the cottage was built, and it has a slated roof. It wasn’t a standing invitation to fire like the older part of the place.” Barney was clearly explaining for my benefit; it was clear, too, that he had made up his mind to get the telling over and done with. “For one reason or another the bathroom was hardly touched by the fire; that’s how we were able to see that there was water in the bath and soap and a sponge and things ready for use, as well as clothes lumped on a chair as if they had just been taken off.”
Neither Stella nor I said anything; after a pause and another gulp of his drink Barney went on with the story.
“The clothes were cheap but clean and decent. I think they said the dress was from one of the big stores in Limerick. That might mean a local girl or not, but it doesn’t sound like a tramp. In any case a girl who had no business in the place would hardly stay there long enough to let the water get heated up from scratch. We saw that the immersion heater was switched on, so it all seemed very deliberate and innocent — except for the fire.”
“Then the thing is to get hold of the Joyces,” I said.
“They’re out at a party somewhere, address not known. The guards got on to their hotel.”
It seemed odd to me that, since the bathroom was spared, the girl should have managed to get herself burned to death, and I said as much to Barney.
“The body wasn’t found anywhere near the bathroom; it was in the living-room as a matter of fact.” Barney’s expression was puzzling; he looked like a conjurer who is about to produce from his hat some final wonder — even if, as in this case, it was only to be the corpse of a rabbit. “Besides, we don’t know for certain that she died by ——” That was as far as he got. Stella interrupted him.
“I know who it is,” she cried excitedly. “Oh, the poor little thing — it’s ghastly. But it must be she.”
“Must be who?” Barney demanded.
“Elly.”
“In heaven’s name, who is Elly?”
“Of course, you know her. Mrs. Crawley’s Elly.”
“Mrs. Crawley is a widow of twenty years’ standing, Stella, and never had a child to my knowledge.”
“Oh, don’t be so stupid, Barney. I mean her maid — the belle of the village. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed her.”
“Ah, I’ve got it now. You mean the one with the jealous husband. But why should it be she?”
“Because of the bath. Don’t you see?”
They kept tossing question and answer back and forth for some time, but when the matter had been sorted out it seemed simple enough and fairly conclusive. Elly had been brought to the village as the bride of the most sought-after local gardener who had almost at once become inordinately jealous and taken to drink; after a final quarrel she had left him and gone into service with Mrs. Crawley, the widow of a retired colonel who had settled in the old rectory. The house had only one bathroom, and Mrs. Crawley could not bring herself to share it with her maid; indeed the good lady was probably of the belief that servants neither required nor deserved baths. Elly had found a solution to the problem; on her weekly day off she put in a couple of hours’ work for the friendly Mrs. Joyce of the cottage and was thereafter welcome to take a bath before getting a lift into Rossderg for an evening of such amusement as she could find. She was enabled to do this with the greater freedom since her husband had upped sticks after she left him and had taken his horticultural talents elsewhere. In these circumstances it seemed reasonable to believe that the girl might have been entrusted with the keys of the cottage so that she could “do” the place
in preparation for the Joyces’ return from Dublin.
“I suppose we’ll never know how the fire started,” Stella said, “but the poor little thing probably stayed trying to put it out until too late — then she got burnt to a cinder.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Barney objected.
“Why isn’t it? Why must you always make a mystery of things?”
“I was trying to tell you when you interrupted me.”
“Oh nonsense, we’ve had to drag it all out of you. What were you trying to tell us?”
“Just that, in all probability, the place was deliberately set on fire.”
“Rubbish, Barney!” Stella looked as if she were on the point of hitting him with something. “You must be going out of your mind. If you think that poor little thing set fire to the cottage on purpose, tell me why she left her clothes in the bathroom? Tell me why she didn’t escape?”
Barney got rather stiffly to his feet. “Sometimes I wish that we had the telephone here,” he said. “I must let the guards know what you’ve told me.”
“Won’t it keep till the morning? A few hours won’t make much difference to Elly, or the Joyces — or the guards.”
Barney sighed. “It might make all the difference to the murderer,” he said.
This time we did not repeat after him the critical word, nor jump in with quick questions; we merely stared at him in silence, not because the word was unexpected but because it had gradually become inevitable. I suppose Barney had felt that he had to tell us and yet had instinctively kept shying away from it, as if the deed unreported remained in some way undone. Now, at any rate, he went on unprompted.
“The girl couldn’t have escaped because she was pinned to the living-room floor with a hayfork.”
Still he said nothing. Stella put a hand out to seek reassurance not from her husband but from me. I was within easier reach. Barney went slowly to the door.
“I imagine the guards will put out a general call for the husband,” he said. “It seems the obvious thing when a wife is murdered.”
Affairs of Death Page 6