by Simon Brett
She looked without sentiment at the washed-out face on the pillows, then briskly left the room.
As soon as the door clicked, one eyelid flickered cautiously open. The room was empty. The other eyelid opened. The eyes they revealed were alert, sharp and ill-intentioned.
Reaching under her clean bedclothes, Mrs Mendlingham produced her hard-covered black notebook and pen.
She started to write.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
20
THURSDAY, 7 MARCH – 10.15 p.m.
I t has to be tonight. At the moment I can’t tell exactly how much she knows, but with every passing minute the danger of her saying something indiscreet becomes that much greater, so I have to act quickly.
Besides, let’s face it – if I am honest with myself (and that is one thing I have always resolutely tried to be) – I am really looking forward to doing it.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
21
At three o’clock in the morning the Devereux was silent except for the constant, almost-forgotten, rhythmic swishing of the sea. Maybe some of the residents snored or grunted in their sleep, but none was so lacking in gentility as to let such noises percolate through a bedroom door on to the second-floor landing where the murderer stood.
The diarist felt heady with suppressed excitement, but completely in control of the situation. It would not, after all, be the first time, and the inquest of the previous day had awarded a seal of approval to the quality of the first murder. Quick, efficient, and without raising a whisper of suspicion. That was the sort of standard that must be maintained in the second murder.
The diarist paused for a long moment outside Mrs Pargeter’s door. She was a meddling woman, the diarist reflected, who showed far too much interest in what went on at the Devereux. There was also a shrewd intelligence there, which might all too quickly make unwelcome connections between apparently irrelevant details. Mrs Pargeter could be a threat.
The diarist put an ear to the door, and heard the deep, rhythmic breathing of someone at peace with the world. That was ideal. How very convenient.
Then the diarist went down the stairs to the first-floor landing and, for the second time that evening, opened the door of Mrs Mendlingham’s room.
The curtains were imperfectly drawn, and a slice of greyish light fell across the bedside table and the pillows. On the table the level in the medicine bottle showed gratifyingly lower than it had been when Miss Naismith had brought it upstairs the previous evening. The tumbler was empty, another cause for satisfaction.
The stiffening of Mrs Mendlingham’s draught had been the reason for the diarist’s first visit to her room that night. The equivalent of fifteen 2 ml spoonfuls had been decanted into the tumbler and mixed with the minimum of water. The diarist had anticipated that, as was her custom, the old lady, however strong the sedative, would have woken after a few hours, and turned for comfort to another dose. This was confirmed not only by the empty tumbler, but also by the slow, slow rhythm of the breaths that stirred her body.
The diarist moved forward to the bed and looked down at the old face, around which grey hair sprayed, Medusa-like, on to the pillows. Her position on the bed was very satisfactory, face pressed sideways, almost buried into a pillow.
It was time to remove the ‘almost’ from that burial.
Gingerly, with gloved hands, the diarist lifted the end of the pillow and slowly, slowly moved it up till the surface pressed against the old face.
The body twitched at the discomfort, but was too comatose to make much of a struggle.
The gloved hands exerted a little more pressure, bringing the pillow round to wrap like a gag across the gaping mouth.
The rhythm of the breathing changed to a little choke. The body gave a final twitch of recalcitrance, a final assertion of its atavistic instinct for survival.
But the instincts were too fuddled to co-ordinate the muscles. Sleep, for however long, was more attractive than the efforts of resistance.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the body slumped. With a few small spasms, like those of a child falling asleep, Mrs Mendlingham sank into oblivion.
The diarist slackened the pressure and checked that there was no more breath. Then, slightly pulling out the trapped end of the pillow, the gloved hands arranged it to flop over the motionless face.
The diarist stood back to assess the handiwork. Good. Artistically satisfying. The pillow lay naturally, as if it had been displaced by the burrowing head and fallen accidentally across the drug-slackened face.
Excellent. Yes, riskier than Mrs Selsby’s death, maybe raising more possibilities for suspicion, but basically another job well done.
The gloved hands were rubbed together with satisfaction.
Then the diarist returned to bed, fell instantly asleep and slept well until the morning.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
22
It was at breakfast in the Admiral’s Dining Room the next morning that Mrs Pargeter noticed the absence of Mrs Mendlingham. The old lady did not like early morning tea, so was not regularly woken by Loxton’s seven-thirty knock. Her erratic memory, however, did sometimes make her late for meals and usually, if she hadn’t appeared for breakfast by eight-fifteen, Miss Naismith would send Newth up to rap peremptorily on the bedroom door. But on the morning of Friday the 8th of March, in view of the events of the previous day, Miss Naismith did not insist on this. Now that she was confident of soon being rid of Mrs Mendlingham, she could afford to be magnanimous.
For Mrs Pargeter the old lady’s absence rang an immediate and instinctive alarm bell. Muttering an excuse about having left a handkerchief upstairs, she picked up her handbag, left the Admiral’s Dining Room before Loxton had served her kipper, and hurried upstairs.
Inside Mrs Mendlingham’s room, her body lay exactly as the diarist had left it. The brightness of day intensified the light through the curtains, which, though in a bolder stripe across the bed, diffused throughout the room.
Mrs Pargeter paused inside the door. The stillness of the body, the face hidden by the pillow, both gave her an ugly premonition.
One of the late Mr Pargeter’s useful pieces of advice would have met with Miss Naismith’s approval. Any wife of his, he insisted, should at all times carry a pair of gloves in her handbag.
Mrs Pargeter, obedient to him in all such matters, habitually followed this recommendation, and she put on her gloves before going across to confirm the suspicion, of which she was becoming increasingly certain, that Mrs Mendlingham was dead.
Carefully, she raised the edge of the pillow. The congested face and the staring bloodshot eyes left no room for doubt.
Mrs Pargeter let the pillow drop back.
Miss Naismith would have to be informed.
But that could wait for a minute. Mrs Pargeter moved across to the bedside table and, without touching anything, checked the contents of the bottle and tumbler. The appropriate dosage was clearly written on the label in Dr Ashington’s neat, thin hand; there was no possibility for error. And yet, assuming that the Doctor had handed over a full bottle the previous day, considerably more than the permissible ten 5 ml teaspoonsful had disappeared. The viscous dregs at the bottom of the tumbler also suggested a considerably higher density of medicine than the recommended dilution.
Of course, it was possible that Mrs Mendlingham, in her fuddled state, had overdosed herself from the bottle, which had been so injudiciously left by her bed. It was possible also that the pillow had slipped across her face and suffocated her by accident.
These things were possible, but Mrs Pargeter, building on the suspicions that she had formed about Mrs Selsby’s death, inclined to another interpretation of what she saw.
She looked around the room. There was something that should have been there that she could not see.
With gloved hands, she opened the drawers of the bureau and the bedside table, but still did not find what she was expecting.
She moved b
ack to the bed, and, very gently, felt under the covers to the right side of the corpse. Triumphantly, she pulled out a hard-covered black notebook.
She checked her watch. She had been out of the Admiral’s Dining Room for still only three minutes. She could allow herself another couple before her absence might be noticed.
She opened the book, which was filled with Mrs Mendlingham’s scratchy, uneven writing. It was not exactly a diary, though it did contain descriptions of certain events. In fact, it was a rather sad document, the record of an old lady’s fight against failing memory. As Mrs Mendlingham said, she had tried to fix certain facts in her mind by writing them down, and many of the entries were just statements of information, some of them strangely moving.
The new resident’s name is Mrs Pargeter. Mrs Pargeter. I must remember that. It’s an unusual name, but I must remember it. Getting names wrong is just the sort of thing Miss N. notices and I don’t want to give her any more ammunition. I must stay at the Devereux. I don’t think I could cope with another move at my age. Mrs Pargeter. Mrs Pargeter. I must get it right.
But Mrs Pargeter had no time to linger sentimentally. She flicked through towards the end of the writing and found the entry she was looking for.
What I saw on the landing keeps coming back to me. It is terrible, my memory’s so erratic I sometimes think I dreamed it, but then that comfort is denied me and I know for certain that it really did happen. It haunts me. The pressure to tell someone is enormous. But who? The new resident, Mrs Pargeter, seems sympathetic, but dare I trust her?
It was almost the last entry in the book. Mrs Pargeter’s face was grim. If only Mrs Mendlingham had taken the decision to trust her, a life might have been saved.
But it was too late for such thoughts.
With great care, Mrs Pargeter replaced the notebook under the bedclothes where she had found it.
On the landing she took off her gloves and put them back in her handbag.
Then she went downstairs to tell Miss Naismith about the latest death at the Devereux.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
23
Dr Ashington was instantly summoned. He examined the new corpse and, though his personal opinion veered towards a theory of accidental death, he called in the police. There were elements in the case, his own prescribing for Mrs Mendlingham, Miss Naismith’s possible carelessness in leaving the medicine bottle at the bedside, which might give rise to unfortunate gossip and conjecture unless the death were the subject of an official enquiry.
Miss Naismith was extremely unhappy about the idea of the middle-class peace of the Devereux being shattered by an invasion of policemen, but she could see the logic of Dr Ashington’s decision. There were sufficient cases even in the quality Sunday newspapers (which were the only ones that Miss Naismith was ever seen to read) about negligence and downright criminality in the running of private hotels or Homes for her to wish to avoid even a hint of suspicion about the Devereux.
The arrival of the police ensured that Mrs Mendlingham’s death prompted considerably more reaction than that of Mrs Selsby. Perhaps it would have done, anyway. Mrs Selsby, after all, had seemed to be fading away for years, while Mrs Mendlingham had been a much more assertive and controversial figure. Then there were the circumstances of the last few days of her life, the accident with the tea, the summons to Miss Naismith’s Office, the wild hysterical attack, the calling of the doctor.
And not to be discounted was the fact that hers was a second death in a very short period. The inquest of the previous day had neatly tied the bow on the closed file of Mrs Selsby’s life, and just when the residents of the Devereux might reasonably expect to be getting back to their normal routine, the pattern had been again disrupted by this new death.
These factors all ensured that there was plenty of discussion that morning in the Seaview Lounge, where the residents awaited their respective summonses to the Schooner Bar, in which the police had set up their temporary headquarters. The police were constantly reassuring; their enquiries, they insisted, were purely routine; it was just that in the case of an unexpected, violent death, such enquiries had to be made.
After Miss Naismith had made the constabulary properly aware of the kind of establishment they were dealing with, of the incredibly high standards of the Devereux, and of the exceptional moral and social qualities of its clientele, Mrs Pargeter, as discoverer of the body, was politely requested to go to the Schooner Bar.
She was encouraged by sympathetic prompting from one of the two plain-clothes detectives to describe exactly what she had done and seen in Mrs Mendlingham’s bedroom that morning. With a little discreet editing (she did not mention her putting on gloves or discovering the notebook under the bedclothes), Mrs Pargeter did this helpfully and concisely.
“I gather,” said the detective, whose name was Mitford, “that you have only recently taken up residence here…?”
“That’s true. Only five days ago.”
“And a rather unfortunate five days…?” Detective-Sergeant Mitford ventured.
“Yes. A death every other day so far. Miss Naismith certainly didn’t mention that feature of the hotel when I arrived.”
It had been a risk, but the broad smile on the detective’s face showed that she had taken the right approach. After Miss Naismith’s suffocating gentility, he was happy to hear a note of humour.
“So, Mrs Pargeter, you could hardly be expected to have known the deceased very well…?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Or any of the other residents, come to that…?”
Mrs Pargeter shook her head apologetically.
“I often find…” he began slowly, “that in any sort of investigation of an enclosed community – which is what this is – it’s useful to get an outsider’s view of the situation. People who’ve been around for any length of time have their judgement clouded by personal loyalties and rivalries, so it’s often difficult to get an accurate picture from them.”
Mrs Pargeter waited to see what would come next.
“All I’m saying is that you are in an ideal position, having just come to the Devereux, to give us a feeling of what the place is like.”
Still she didn’t say anything. Another invaluable tip from the late Mr Pargeter had been that one should never volunteer information unless one wishes to change the direction of a questioner’s enquiry. Answer every direct question as truthfully as discretion allows, but never give the answers to unasked questions. It is surprising how many important questions never get asked. (This advice was another expression of the late Mr Pargeter’s philosophy of life, which could be summed up in the following sentence: Be scrupulously honest for as long as you can, and never resort to illegality unless there is truly no alternative.)
“How would you describe the atmosphere here, Mrs Pargeter?”
“Pretty friendly, on the whole,” seemed a fair and balanced reply.
“On the whole…?”
“Yes, on the whole,” Mrs Pargeter agreed, beaming. She wasn’t going to give him anything he hadn’t earned.
“No evidence of internal dissension? Quarrels, arguments, that sort of thing…?”
“No more than you’d expect in a place like this,” she replied evenly. “As you said, I haven’t been here long, so perhaps everyone’s still on their best behaviour with me.”
Detective-Sergeant Mitford nodded, again responding to the note of humour in her voice. He paused before continuing, “But there’s nothing you have felt, no tensions, no conflicts, that might lead you to suspect that Mrs Mendlingham’s death was anything other than the accident it appears to be…?”
She was tempted. It would be comforting to share with someone the unpleasant conjectures that had been shaping in her mind. But, on the other hand, those conjectures were based on the flimsiest of instincts and feelings; she did not think they would stand up to serious scrutiny. Anyway, another of the late Mr Pargeter’s dicta had always been: “If the police arrive, be
nice to them. But don’t ask for trouble by inviting them in.”
She feigned ignorance. She wasn’t going to volunteer the word ‘murder’. “I’m sorry, Detective-Sergeant. I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Never mind.” He tried another tack. “Did you know that Mrs Mendlingham kept a sort of notebook?”
“I had seen her writing in one, yes,” was her honest reply.
Detective-Sergeant Mitford nodded. “It’s a strange book. She recorded all kinds of snippets of information and feelings. Haven’t read it all through yet, obviously, just glanced at it, but there is one interesting entry…”
“Oh?”
“She refers to having seen something ‘on the landing’, something that upset her…Have you any idea what that might be, Mrs Pargeter?”
“The only thing I can possibly think of,” she replied truthfully, “is that it might be something to do with the death of Mrs Selsby.”
“Oh?”
“Well, I don’t know whether you’ve heard what happened, but Mrs Selsby was killed falling down the stairs from the first-floor landing. Since Mrs Mendlingham’s bedroom is on that landing, it’s possible that she saw Mrs Selsby fall. And that the memory of that – or perhaps the thought that she should have been able to prevent it – is what was upsetting her.”
Detective-Sergeant Mitford nodded with satisfaction. “Thank you, Mrs Pargeter. You’ve been most helpful. And may I say that, with regard to the reference to what Mrs Mendlingham saw on the landing, we have come to exactly the same conclusion as you have.”
Well, perhaps not exactly the same, thought Mrs Pargeter.
∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧
24
As Mrs Pargeter was making her way from the Schooner Bar back to the Seaview Lounge, she was stopped in her tracks by the sound of raised voices behind the closed Office door. Discovering a sudden interest in the Beaulieu Motor Museum and the Chalk Pits at Amberley, she moved across to the hall table on which such leaflets were always kept, and found that she was able to hear the voices much more clearly.