Crooked Wreath

by Christianna Brand

  Bella was bewildered and frightened. “The coramine? No, I didn’t take it. Richard had some already, in his pocket.”

  Philip looked back over her head at Peta and Ellen and Edward, following. “Did anyone take it? Did anyone go to my bag?” As they all disclaimed, Bella caught at his sleeve. “For God’s sake, Philip, what’s happened? Is it Richard? Is he ill? Has he had another attack?” At sight of his face she went, if possible, more white than she had been before, and cried, with a sort of desperate comprehension: “He’s dead! You’re trying to tell me that Richard’s dead!”

  “Yes,” said Philip, “he’s dead. And all that coramine has disappeared from my bag; and a hypodermic and a phial of strychnine …” He stood, also ashy white, looking back at them in doubt and terror as though astounded by the implications of what was before them all, and suddenly blurted out: “I believe somebody’s killed him,” and so pushed open the door and led the way abruptly into the drawing-room.

  In the centre of the floor, where Claire had left it last night, was a pool of spilt water, a mass of broken glass, and a heap of dead flowers; and above Serafita’s portrait, the wreath of roses was hanging askew again.

  6

  INSPECTOR COCKRILL was at the house before midday. Small, brown, and bright-eyed, a dusty little old sparrow arrayed in a startlingly clean white panama hat, he was soon, sparrowlike, at the centre of all interest and activity, hopping and darting this way and that, in search of crumbs of information. Stephen Garde, summoned by a tearful Peta craving sympathy and support, had insisted upon his being sent for. “Since you know Cockie personally, Lady March, why not get him over and ask his advice? If there’s nothing wrong, you can be sure he won’t make any fuss; on the other hand, if there is–well, you’ll all be in a very bad position if you’ve made things more difficult for the police.” He had stood there, cold and quiet all of a sudden; such a little man with his childish, fair curly hair, to be steadily opposing the united will of people whom he knew and loved, who should surely, thought Peta resentfully, have been his first, his only, thought.… “I am thinking of you, it’s absolutely for your sakes that I suggest it. You’ll be putting yourselves hopelessly in the wrong if you just go ahead as though there was no question of Sir Richard’s having–having died a normal death. Well, yes, Philip, we all hope it was normal, and I quite agree that the disappearance of this coramine and strychnine or whatever it was, doesn’t necessarily mean that–that there was anything wrong. But with the draft of the will missing–because Briggs definitely handed it in to Sir Richard last night–well, the whole thing looks jolly unsatisfactory to say the least of it, and I simply can’t advise you just to let things go.”

  Peta gazed at his stern face, white and trembling. “Can’t you forget for a moment that you’re our lawyer, Stephen? Don’t be so–so beastly pompous!”

  “It’s for your own sakes,” repeated Stephen, doggedly. “Anyway, I very much doubt that the doctor will give a certificate, so it’s all bound to come out.” He had gone straight down to the lodge and there waited quietly for Cockrill to arrive, allowing nobody to come nearer than the rose beds and the sanded paths. “All right, if I’m fussing, I’m fussing: Cockrill will decide all that.” Apologetic but indomitable, he had fought them all off till the Inspector arrived. When Cockrill, having glanced over the lodge and alloted tasks to his various henchmen, summoned the family to the drawing-room at the house, Stephen asked, diffidently: “Can I come along and watch your third-degree methods, on behalf of Lady March?” and without reference to anyone else, perched himself, swinging his short legs, on a table outside the circle and tried to convince himself that Peta would ever speak to him again, and doubted it.

  Edward sat in a big armchair, very still and frightened. Unconsciousness, fugues, automatism … “You mean I could sort of walk about and do things, Doctor, and not know what I was doing?” The doctor had said that that was possible and had added that he must be careful about not glancing upwards too quickly and so bringing on an attack. And only yesterday … He had tried these little experiments for many years, now. Unconsciousness was easy; from childhood he had been able to faint almost at will, until at last the thing had become outside his own control and he fainted when it was expected of him, whether he consciously wanted to or not. But had the experiments gone further than that? For after all–would he know? Wasn’t that the whole point of a fugue, that you passed into and out of this condition and had no idea that anything had been wrong? Yesterday morning, for example, just before lunch–the wreath over the picture had been hanging crooked; it had caught his eye and he had glanced up at it, and it had reminded him of what the doctor had said. He had, accordingly, dropped the tray with the glasses and waited for unconsciousness to follow. Had it in fact followed? He thought definitely not. He had stood staring up at the chandelier, waiting for the family to come in and find him there and make a fuss over him; and a jolly long time they had been about it, too–he had got quite tired and no wonder he had fainted so easily afterwards. But last night? He had not gone into the drawing-room last night. He had come in from the terrace and gone to the ground-floor cloakroom and tried to make himself sick, because Peta had upset him dreadfully about the horse meat in the biscuits and he had felt he owed it to himself to be sick; but he hadn’t been able to, and rather than go back and confess that he was less injured, that his nerves and stomach were less delicate than he had supposed, he had wandered out on to the front terrace and had sat there on the edge of the balustrade, fiddling with his camera, until someone should come and express anxiety about him. He remembered towards the end seeing Brough with a barrow and some tools passing across the drive towards the lodge, though because of a hedge in the way, he could not see exactly where he went with them. After about a quarter of an hour, during which the family remained most heartlessly undisturbed, he had gone into the drawing-room and fetched the portable radio and had taken it out to them, without reproach.

  Into the drawing-room!

  But he had just told himself that he had not been in the drawing-room yesterday evening. He had forgotten, of course, about fetching the radio; anybody might forget a little thing like that. And yet … He had told the family, just now, that he hadn’t been in the drawing-room; none of them had noticed that he must have been to have got the radio–or had they noticed, had they said nothing to him, had they only pretended to believe? They had glanced at each other uneasily, wretchedly, and said that a–a vase had been found knocked over in the drawing-room; and they asked him if he remembered, if he thought he had had another of his “little turns …” “Like yesterday, darling … I mean, before lunch yesterday you did–you did drop the tray and the sherry glasses, and you fainted afterwards and didn’t–didn’t know anything about it all until we told you …” How could he explain to them that of course he remembered, of course, he had known all about it, that he had done it all purposely, or sort of purposely, that he had been staging these things for years; staging things until they had become half real, even to him. But were they only half real? Had they not grown quite real, had some of them always been real, things that he didn’t remember, that he had never known anything about? He knew that the family were afraid, in their hearts, that he had killed Grandfather. At half-past seven, Ellen had seen Grandfather, alive and well; by nine o’clock, Brough had finished sanding the paths, and the evidence of the footprints showed that nobody had gone near the lodge after that. Between those times, the family had been all together–except for him. Between those times, only he, Edward, could possibly have gone down to the lodge; and in the drawing-room was the sign that he had had “one of his little attacks.” They thought that he had gone into the drawing-room, to fetch the radio; that he had caught sight of the wreath and looked up at it again, and again lost consciousness; that, unsettled and ill-tempered as he had been all day–as they all had been that day–evil had insinuated itself into his unresistant mind; that he had taken the poisons and gone down to the lodge, befor
e Brough began his sanding, and there had killed Grandfather. He could easily have done it in the time, and he could not say that he had not. Philip and Claire and Peta had whispered together, they had called Bella over and whispered to her, while Ellen sat beside him, talking to him quietly, asking him, as though she believed him, how he had really spent his time. But she did not believe him. She had gone to the others at last and he had seen that, coolly and matter-of-factly, she was acquiescing with all they said. They were going to try to protect him, they were going to lie about him, they were banded together to shield him from the consequences of what he, in his innocence, had done. Stephen–cold, just, quiet, relentless Stephen–had been safely away down by the lodge; Philip had gone out to the terrace and found the camera, which had been there on the balustrade all night, and had examined it. There was a new film in it all right. But Philip, at first rejoicing, had then reluctantly worked out a time schedule. A minute or two in the cloakroom, trying to be sick; a minute or two in the drawing-room, glancing up, losing consciousness, robbing the bag standing unlocked on a chair where he, Philip, had left it after the incident just before lunch; three minutes, two minutes, running across the lawn to the lodge–five minutes, if you would–to knock at the window and obtain admittance; to tell Grandfather some hurried tale about an injection ordered by Philip, or without preamble to thrust the needle into the arm of an old man utterly unsuspecting and so disarmed. Two minutes more to run back again across the grass. Five, six, seven minutes left to sit, gradually recovering from the trance, out on the balustrade of the front terrace; to notice the camera, to put the new film in, to stroll to the back terrace, unaware and innocent, and yet a murderer! It could have been done; and he knew that this was what, beneath their loyal self-deception, they believed had been done.

  He sat in the armchair, digging with shaking fingers into the padded arms. Cockrill, in the centre of the little group, rolled himself the fourth of a chain of untidy, wispy cigarettes. “Very well. Thank you for all you’ve told me. In return, I’m going to tell you something; I must warn you that I don’t like the look of this at all. I think it’s perfectly conceivable that Sir Richard has been murdered; or, if you want to put it more prettily, assisted out of a world that the killer may have thought he would soon be leaving anyway. And if he was murdered, it seems to me more than likely it was by somebody from this house.”

  If he had expected an uproar, thought Edward, he must have been disappointed. They had long ago accustomed themselves to that idea. But oh! why must they allow themselves to glance up at the picture like that, at the wreath of roses now replaced neatly above the gilt frame, at the stain on the parquet where the water had soaked in. Cockie didn’t miss those glances, not he! He pointed to the mark on the floor with the toe of his small, shabby shoe. “What’s this?”

  “What’s what, Cockie?”

  “What’s this stain?”

  “I dropped a vase of flowers in here last night,” said Claire, coolly. “It’s the water from the vase.”

  But they were not very good at deception. Cockrill watched their eyes travel towards the small rug nearer the fireplace, and then pounced: “Why has that rug been moved? That’s the one that was here, where the water was spilt–you can see that the corner of it’s still wet. Why was it changed with the one that’s here now?”

  “Well, good gracious, Cockie, they got changed when the room was done; what’s wrong with that?”

  “Who did the room?” said Cockrill.

  A desperate silence. Then: “I did,” said Bella and Peta and Claire, all together.

  “What time did you do it?” asked Cockrill swiftly.

  Nobody answered. “What time?” insisted Cockrill to Bella.

  Bella shrugged her plump shoulders and fluttered her hands. “Dear Inspector Cockrill, what ever can it matter?”

  “Don’t ‘dear Inspector’ me, Lady March. You’re all keeping something back from me. Now–what time was this room done?”

  “At about ten o’clock,” said Bella sullenly. “We only have one woman now, a ‘help’ from the village, and she didn’t get here till late this morning …”

  “Oh.” He fished in the pockets of his droopy grey flannel suit and produced his shaggy tin of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers. “So at nine-forty-five you hear the news of Sir Richard’s death, and a quarter of an hour later you all turn to and spring-clean the drawing-room.”

  Ellen sat on the arm of a sofa in her tight, brief yellow linen dress, tapping the toe of her neat tan shoe against the parquet. “What’s so extraordinary? We came in here to learn the news, here was this mess of water and broken glass in the middle of the room, and we were all stepping over it and around it and it was in the way. So we cleared it up and dried the floor and moved the wet rug so that it shouldn’t get stepped on. That’s the way it is with death, isn’t it? The other people have to go on living.”

  It would have been more effective if they had not all turned upon her eyes of such passionate gratitude at this timely rescue, this cool return to a sense of proportion and sanity. Cockrill could not quite understand it; but he stored the whole incident away in his mind and returned to matters more obviously concerned with the case. “Now, Dr. March–you told me about those ampoules of coramine missing from your bag. In your grandfather’s case, at any rate, these would have been sufficient to cause death?”

  “Yes, they would, certainly. His heart was already in a very poor condition and such over-stimulation might easily cause it to peter out altogether.”

  “Is his appearance consistent with this having happened?” As Philip paused, looking a trifle taken aback at having this question put to himself, Cockrill added: “Naturally there will have to be a post-mortem, and all this will be checked; the police surgeon is coming along very shortly, I hope. But, meanwhile, it would help me to have your opinion.”

  “I see. Well, yes, I think the post-mortem appearance does bear out such a–well, such a possibility. I didn’t think of it, when I first saw him, of course; I wasn’t looking for unnatural signs; I’d expected him to die one day, just the way he did. None of this would ever have entered my head, if I hadn’t found the coramine missing. There’s certainly no indication that he didn’t die of an overdose.” He glanced at Bella’s tearful face and added sarcastically: “I suppose you will spare us a more detailed disquisition upon the subject, just at the moment.”

  Bella understood him and gave him a tremulous smile of gratitude. Cockrill ignored the entire remark. “Can you tell me, Doctor, how the fatal dose was administered?”

  “Well, the theft of the syringe would suggest that it was injected hypodermically.”

  “I’ll do the suggesting,” said Cockie, tartly. “Could the dose have been taken by the mouth? Would you know by the post-mortem signs?”

  “No, you wouldn’t. And what’s more, the post-mortem examination isn’t likely to reveal that either. Of course, death would follow more slowly if it was taken orally; and Grandfather was still sitting at his desk, which would seem to show …” He broke off. “Oh–but I must let you do the suggesting, mustn’t I?”

  Cockrill acknowledged this thrust with a bleak smile. “I presume you didn’t examine your grandfather for the marks of a hypodermic needle?”

  “I tell you, I had no idea he’d died anything but a natural death. In any event, he’s probably covered with marks of hypodermic needles; he’s been having injections from Dr. Brown, down here.”

  Cockrill moved from the subject of the coramine. “I suppose there’s no possibility that it was the strychnine which might have been used? There would be indications of that?”

  “Just slight indications,” said Philip; he was very weary and anxious, and his voice began to rise and to grow in rapidity as he lost control. “My grandfather’s corpse would have been stiffened into a horrible, convulsive arch, probably supported by the head and the heels; his eyes would have been starting out of his head, his face cyanosed and his hands and feet curve
d and stiffened into claws …” He knew that he was talking nonsense, that in death the more dreadful symptoms would have passed; but he bitterly piled on the agony, relieving his pent-up feelings by the ugliness and violence of his words. It was as good as swearing: and he thus swore at length and with fluency. At the end of it, Cockrill simply said coolly: “I see. Then you think the strychnine was not used?”

  “Precisely,” said Philip. “How did you guess?”

  It seemed so unwise and dangerous to be making an enemy of Inspector Cockrill. Cockie was so quick and acute, he would know that they were all on edge, that they shared some secret, that they were afraid of him–afraid for themselves, or for one of themselves. Edward shrank back in his big chair, looking on helplessly, wishing that Philip wouldn’t be so impatient and irritable, wouldn’t by his nervousness so clearly show his hand. Cockrill, however, merely said: “We must all realize that this lethal dose of poison is still missing; whether or not there has been one murder, there is danger all round us here …” He turned away from Philip. “You have all told me how you spent the evening, and how you went down to the lodge before dinner. What happened there? Peta, you and Lady March went down first?”

  “Yes, I carried the tray of supper things.”

  “Who prepared this meal?”

  “Our old hag did,” said Bella. “The Turtle we call her; the woman who comes up from the village. I really forget what her name is.”

  “Well, I’ll inquire into her afterwards. Had you been near this tray or near any of Sir Richard’s food, Lady March, before that?”

  “No, I hadn’t. If you mean to suggest … Well, you can ask them in the kitchen,” cried Bella, angrily. “I never went near the food. You can ask them.”

  “I shall,” said Cockrill.

  Philip’s rage deepened. “Have you any right, Inspector, to be questioning us like this? You’ve got no authority here, yet. There’s been no–no charge, or anything like that …”