Conversation became desultory. Curley never expanded in John’s presence, and Gina was lost in her own unhappy thoughts. Mr Campion did his best to keep the ball rolling, but without great success, since his peculiar line in small talk was hardly appreciated by the elder man. Long silences were bound to occur, and in the last of these they heard Mike’s quick steps in the passage outside.
Just for a moment a wave of apprehension touched them all. It was swiftly gone, but the sight of the young man with the red and gilt folder in his hand was somehow reassuring.
Campion might have fancied that he was unduly jumpy had it not been for John, who, after peering at his cousin inquisitively, inquired abruptly:
‘What’s the matter? Seen a ghost?’
They all glanced at the newcomer. His dark face was a little paler than usual and he was certainly breathless. However, he seemed genuinely surprised.
‘I’m all right. A bit out of training, that’s all. Fog’s getting very thick outside.’
John grunted, and, taking his folder, trotted out again. Campion took up the main conversation where it had left off and spoke reassuring words.
After a while Miss Curley left, and presently Mr Campion followed, leaving Gina and Mike by the fire.
Campion had reflected upon the peculiarities of other people’s lives and had dismissed Gina and her truant husband from his mind by the time he turned in just after midnight, so that it came with all the more of a shock to him when Miss Curley dragged him from his bed at ten o’clock the following morning with a startling story.
‘Miss Marchant, one of the typists, found him, Mr Campion.’ Her voice was unnaturally business-like over the phone, and he had a vision of her, hard, cool and practical in the midst of chaos. ‘I sent down to get an address file as soon as I got here, about half an hour ago. The door was locked. I gave her the key from my desk. She screamed from the basement and we all rushed down to see Mr Paul lying there. Can you come over?’
Mr Campion put a question and she answered it testily, as though irritated by his obtuseness.
‘Yes, the strong-room. Mike got the folder from it last night. Yes, the same room. Oh, and Mr Campion –’ she lowered her voice – ‘the doctor’s here. He seems to think the poor man’s been dead for some days’
Again Campion put a query, and this time Miss Curley’s reply did not sound irritable. Her tone was aweful, rather.
‘Right in the middle of the room, sprawled out. No one could have opened that door without seeing him.’
CHAPTER II
Funeral Arrangements Later
THERE ARE MOMENTS which stand out in clear detail in the recollection of an hour of horror. They are seldom dramatic, and those who are haunted by them are sometimes puzzled to discover why just they and none other should have been singled out by the brain for this especial clarity.
Neither Mike Wedgwood nor Miss Curley ever forgot the instant when the doctor looked up from his knees and said half apologetically:
‘I’m afraid we shall have to move him after all. I can’t possibly see here.’
It may have been that the bounds of their capacity for shock had been reached and that his words coincided with the moment immediately before the first degree of merciful callousness descended upon them and they were able to begin again from a new level. But at any rate, the scene was photographed indelibly upon their minds.
The extraordinary untidy room stood out in every detail. They saw with new eyes its lining of dusty junk-packed shelves, broken only at the far end where an old-fashioned green and black safe replaced the cooking range which had once been there. They saw the heavy table which took up nearly the whole of the centre of the room, heaped high with books and files and vast untidy brown paper parcels.
They were even aware of the space beneath it; that, too, fully occupied by flimsy wooden boxes whose paper contents would have overflowed had it not been for the books piled carelessly on top.
The fog, which enveloped the city and now crept into every corner, hung about the air like smoke, giving the single swinging bulb a dusty halo. The body lay upon its back, the head in the shadow of the table ledge and the sagging legs and torso sprawled out towards the doorway where they stood.
The doctor rose stiffly to his feet and faced them. He was a short man, grizzled and of a good age, but still spruce, and his little eyes were shrewd beneath his fierce brows. In contrast with his sombrely smart clothes his bare forearms, muscular and very hairy, looked slightly indecent.
‘Where can we take him?’ he inquired.
Miss Curley, who took it for granted that the question was addressed to her, considered rapidly. Space at Twenty-three was restricted. In the basement, besides the present room, there was only the packers’ hall at the end of the passage, the stock-room, or the little wash-room next door, none of them suitable resting-places for a corpse. Upstairs the amenities were even less inviting, since the business of the day had begun and the staff was already hysterical.
She glanced at the table.
‘If we move those things on to the floor and spread a sheet on the table you’ll be right under the light, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a better bulb.’
The little medical man looked at her curiously. He knew Paul had been a director, and although he did not expect office employees to have quite the same attitude towards a dead man as a family might have adopted, he was surprised to find an absence of the general tendency of laymen to get the body to the most comfortable place possible at the earliest moment. Aloud he said he thought Miss Curley’s a most sensible suggestion.
Mike stepped into the room, avoiding the piteous thing upon the floor, and began to shift the dusty papers to the ground on the opposite side.
The place was dry from the furnace on the other side of the passage, with occasional icy draughts from the door into the yard. Mike worked like a man in a nightmare, his tall thin figure and deep-lined sensitive face looking curiously boyish and despairing.
The doctor bent down once again, and as he worked he grunted to himself at intervals and made little breathing sounds.
Miss Curley returned with a new electric light bulb and a pair of sheets borrowed from Mike’s own flat next door. Her face was grim and she moved with a suppressed energy which made the doctor look at her sharply, but Curley was all right as long as she kept going.
It was she who superintended the changing of the bulb, a feat which Mike performed with unwonted clumsiness, and she who spread one sheet over the table and stood ready with the other, waiting for the doctor to move.
The two men glanced at each other. Mike was younger and considerably stronger, but he was very pale and there was sweat upon his forehead.
Doctor Roe spoke briskly. His calm was very comforting. Thirty-five years of general practice had built up an impersonal yet friendly shell which quite concealed the rather inquisitive, ordinary little man inside.
‘I’ll take the shoulders, Mr Wedgwood,’ he said. ‘If you would grip the feet, now. That’s right – just above the ankles. Are you ready? Now then …’
Mike looked down at the square-toed brown shoes. They were familiar. They were Paul’s. This dreadful helpless thing lying on the dusty floor was Paul himself. Only the physical effort of lifting steadied him. Deliberately he forced his eyes out of focus so that he should not see his cousin’s face. Miss Curley’s expression was quite enough.
‘That’s right,’ said the doctor. ‘Ah!’
And afterwards, when he looked up and saw them:
‘Perhaps you’d care to wait for me outside? This – ah – isn’t a very pleasant business.’
In the stone corridor outside the door Mike gripped the iron banisters of the staircase which ran up beside him and hung there for a moment, his crisp shorn head pressed against the stone.
‘God, Curley, this is awful,’ he said at last. ‘Where the hell is John?’
‘He’s coming.’ Miss Curley’s voice was sharp. ‘I sent round word to him as
soon as I’d phoned the doctor. The woman said he’d been up half the night reading and wasn’t dressed yet, but that he’d come over right away. It’s a terrible thing. I haven’t sent anyone to tell Gina yet.’
‘Gina? Of course – I say, Curley, I’ll do that. Later – not now. She might come down and see him …’
He broke off.
Miss Curley’s sympathy for him returned and the softer emotion crowning the fear nearly undid her. She took off her spectacles and dabbed at her eyes petulantly.
Mike was silent, his brows drawn down so that his eyes seemed deep sunken and darker even than usual.
At the top of the staircase on the floor above somebody paused, and a greyer shadow thickened against the wall over their heads.
‘Miss Curley! Oh, Miss Curley!’
A girl’s voice, tremulous with its owner’s effort to appear unconcerned, floated down to them.
‘Mr Tooth is here.’
‘Put him in the waiting-room, Miss James. Put every visitor in the waiting-room.’
Mike spoke before Miss Curley could open her mouth and footsteps above pattered away.
The doctor came out in what seemed an extraordinarily short space of time. They pounced on him, besieging him with questions, and as he washed his hands in the little toilet next to the strong-room he talked to them over his shoulder.
‘He’s been dead about three days, I should say. Very difficult to be more accurate once the period of rigor mortis has passed. But I put three days as the minimum. How odd he should not have been found before.’
For the first time Miss Curley noticed that his eyes were sharp and curious under his fiery brows, and unconsciously she spoke defensively.
‘This room is very seldom used, Doctor. It’s virtually a safe, you know. It’s really extremely lucky that we found him this morning.’
‘But he must have been missed,’ the doctor persisted. ‘Surely his wife …?’
‘Mr Brande was a man of very uncertain habits.’ Miss Curley had not meant to interrupt with such chilling asperity, and Mike attempted to come to the rescue with clumsy friendliness.
‘We had begun to wonder where he was. We were only talking of it last night. No one thought of looking in there, naturally.’
He stopped abruptly and as clearly as though he had proclaimed it aloud it became obvious that a startling recollection had occurred to him. He grew suddenly crimson and stared at Curley, who did not meet his eyes. The doctor regarded them both with interest.
‘I see,’ he said hastily. ‘I see. And now, Mr Wedgwood, is there any heating apparatus down here at all?’
Mike looked bewildered. ‘How do you mean? Do you want a fire? There’s the main coke furnace under the staircase here if –’
‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ interrupted the doctor shortly. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’
Together they inspected the central-heating system and the stove built into the tiny cellar-like cupboard under the staircase.
The doctor asked a great many questions and measured the distance between the cellar and the strong-room door with ridiculously exaggerated strides.
To Curley, who was bearing up under the shock only with great difficulty, the performance seemed absurd.
‘But how did it happen, Doctor?’ she demanded impatiently. ‘How did he die? That flush on his face – it’s very unusual, isn’t it? How did it happen?’
‘That, madam,’ said the little man, eyeing her with a pomposity which was oddly disquieting, ‘I am attempting to decide.’
On the whole, it was very fortunate that John should have arrived at that particular moment. He came running down the stairs, his head held slightly on one side and his excellently cut clothes looking out of place in the draughty dinginess of the basement.
He brushed past Mike and Miss Curley and shook hands perfunctorily with the doctor.
‘Where is he?’ he demanded.
Although no one who actually saw him during those first five minutes could possibly have doubted that John was genuinely shaken by his cousin’s death, a catalogue of his words and actions would have been misleading. He moved towards the door of the strong-room with little jerky, bird-like steps, paused for a moment on the threshold and peered in at the sheeted figure on the table.
He made no attempt to enter but stepped back sharply after a second’s contemplation, beating his long ivory hands together, cymbal fashion.
‘Terrible,’ he said shortly. ‘Terrible. We must get him out of here. We must get him home.’
Mike recognized that tone of quiet authority. When John spoke like that his commands were automatically carried out. The younger man turned to him.
‘Gina doesn’t know yet,’ he said. ‘Let me warn her, at least. Give me five minutes.’
‘All right. But he can’t stay here, poor fellow.’
Both cousins had completely forgotten the doctor, and his diffident demur came as a surprise to them.
‘Mr Widdowson,’ he ventured, ‘I hardly know whether I can advise –’
‘My dear sir –’ John turned upon him with raised brows, ‘– he can’t stay here in the office, in the strong-room. Can you give me any valid reason why he should not be moved?’
The doctor hesitated. He had no story ready, no actual ground on which to stand. It was a situation in which the stronger personality was bound to triumph. Mike mounted the staircase.
‘Give me five minutes to tell her,’ he said over his shoulder. As for Miss Curley, she hurried up to her office and phoned Mr Campion.
Gina was pottering in the big living-room, clad in a severe man-tailored pyjama suit, when the woman admitted her visitor. She looked up from the hearthrug, where she was sorting her morning’s correspondence, when he entered, and his vision of her, kneeling there in the warm navy blue suit, was the only lovely thing in all that day. He remembered afterwards that her red mules made little blobs of colour on the white rug and her face turned to his was radiant with sudden pleasure.
‘Mike, my pet! How nice to see you. Too early for some coffee? I’m just going to have some.’
Conscious that the charwoman was hovering behind him, he hesitated. All the old insufferable phrases crowded into his mind: ‘Gina, my dear, you must prepare yourself for a shock.’ Or, ‘I have bad news, I’m afraid.’ Or, ‘Gina, something terrible has happened.’
Now that the moment had come they stuck in his throat and he was only conscious of her sitting there smiling at him, sane and lovely and adorable by a fire.
‘He would like some, Mrs Austin, please.’ Gina smiled at the woman and waved her hand to the sofa. ‘Sit down, animal, and don’t stand there goggling at me. What’s the matter? Can’t we go to the Athertons’ this afternoon after all? Good heavens, it doesn’t matter. Don’t look like that.’
Mike sat down heavily and raised his eyes to hers.
‘Paul’s dead,’ he said.
She had been in the act of placing a couple of envelopes in the flames when he spoke, and now her arrested movement, the shoulder half turned, the head bent, was more expressive than any sound she could have uttered. He dropped down on the rug beside her and put a hand on the small woollen back.
‘Gina, I didn’t mean to say it like that. Oh, my God, I am a fool!’
She turned to him at once. Her face was very pale, her eyes wide and dark.
‘Tell me,’ she said quietly. ‘How did it happen? A car smash?’
‘No.’ He paused. She was so close to him.
Presently he heard himself talking in a guarded unnatural way which he was unable to correct.
‘He’s been at Twenty-three the whole time. They’ve only just found him. They’re going to bring him up here. You – you had to be told, you see.’
‘But of course I had to be told.’ Her deep soft voice had sharp edges. ‘Mike, what’s happened? Was it suicide?’
‘I – we – we don’t know.’
‘But why should he? Why? Oh, Mike, why should he? We hadn
’t even quarrelled. He had no reason, surely. Surely, Mike?’
‘Hold on, old dear.’ The man was gripping her shoulder tightly and she leant back into the crook of his arm.
Mrs Austin set the coffee-tray down on the table behind the sofa with a clatter and stood looking over it at them with the shrewd glance of a mendicant pigeon. Things were happening! She had been thinking they must get a move on for some time now, but if a man ignored his wife, well, he was asking for trouble; that was her opinion.
Gina became aware of her. She moved quietly to her feet.
‘My husband is dead, Mrs Austin,’ she said. ‘They don’t know how it happened.’
The full arc of Mrs Austin’s knitted bosom swelled. Her long face with its festoon of chins grew blank and she emitted a long thin sound midway between a scream and a whistle.
‘No!’ said Mrs Austin. ‘Here,’ she added hastily, clattering with the coffee-jugs, ‘you drink this, dear. You’ll need it.’
Gina sat in the big white chair, and sipped the coffee obediently, while the other woman stood before her and watched her face. Mike glanced at the woman wonderingly. Hitherto Mrs Austin had been a mechanism to open doors in his life. Now she had miraculously become a personality.
It was as though a shadow had taken substance.
‘Will they be bringing him up here, dear?’ she demanded, and behind her ill-contrived sorrow Mike detected an awful secret glee.
Gina looked at Mike. He was still poised awkwardly, half kneeling on the rug at her feet.
‘They’re coming now, aren’t they?’ she said.
He got up stiffly. ‘Yes – yes, they are. But look here, Gina, there’s no need for you to do anything, unless you want to, of course. I mean –’
He broke off helplessly, the situation beyond him.
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Austin, her little green-grey eyes fixed on him with dreadful understanding. ‘I think I take your. meaning, sir. Oh well, there’s no need for the poor lady to see her husband for a bit. I’ll do all the necessary.’
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