Beaumont was already looking better, some colour had found its way to his cheekbones. “That’s better,” he said, more calmly. “I really thought I was for the high jump.”
“Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come,” was Dr. Morelle’s reply.
Beaumont was shaking his head with disbelief. “But how did you come to leave those roses there, when you were expecting me?”
“I must reprimand Miss Frayle for her carelessness. According to her they symbolize romance. Look at this one —”
“No, really — I,” Beaumont said. “Why, why, it’s made of paper —”
“Precisely. A paper rose. They’re all paper roses. Miss Frayle has just brought them back from a shop in Oxford Street. Very realistic, don’t you think?”
“Paper roses — not real roses at all,” said Beaumont. “No more than the adrenalin in the hypodermic injection. It was merely sterilized distilled water.”
“Water?”
“Paper roses and water,” Dr. Morelle said.
“What are you getting at?”
“It means that your asthma attacks are the result not of an allergy to roses, they are caused by a neurosis. A fear of something you are afraid to reveal.” The other was staring at him as if he were a creature from another planet. It was an expression in the faces of his patients and many people who encountered him to which Dr. Morelle was not altogether unaccustomed. “The next step, accordingly, is to discover what it is of which you are afraid.”
A few minutes later, Beaumont now completely relaxed was talking easily and quickly. “It was seven or eight weeks ago, Dr. Morelle,” he was saying. “I’d gone up to my father’s bedroom. He wasn’t there, the bathroom-door was open and quite by chance I glanced in, and there he was in the bath. He had slipped and hit his head. I started to pull him out, and then this extraordinary sensation came over me.” He broke off and bit his lip, his brows drawn together in a dark frown.
“An overwhelming compulsion to leave him as he was?” Dr. Morelle said. “Was that what you were about to say?”
The other nodded and went on. “Everything flashed in my mind, the overpowering knowledge that his will was in my favour, and that by leaving him I wouldn’t really be guilty of murdering him —”
“But in fact, you dragged him out of the bath?”
Again a nod. “I carried him into the bedroom and within a few minutes he’d recovered and was perfectly all right. I left a couple of hours later and got a taxi home.” He paused and glanced at Dr. Morelle as if he was arriving at the most impressive part of his story. “I hadn’t been in the taxi long,” he said slowly, “when I noticed the scent of roses. It became so overpowering that I had to stop the taxi. In the corner was a bunch of roses. Must have been left there by a previous passenger. By now I was almost choking to death, and I had to get another taxi to take me home.” His voice fell away to a whisper. “I — I’m afraid I’ve not been very frank with you,” he said.
Dr. Morelle was leaning forward, his brilliant gaze transfixing him. “This was the first asthmatic attack you ever suffered? And which you attributed to the roses?”
“Yes, that first attack passed off, but that night I couldn’t sleep. I kept on realizing how near death Father had been, and it would have been my fault.”
“Plus your subconscious realization,” Dr. Morelle said, “that his will played an important part in the circumstances.”
“You see, sometimes he decides that he’ll leave everything to me. Then he changes his mind and leaves it all to his sister. Then he’ll decide to leave half to us each. It’s a joke, except there’s nothing very funny about being left £20,000.”
“And even less amusing not to be left it,” Dr. Morelle said. “Are you a frequent visitor to your father’s house?”
“I’m always in and out,” Beaumont said. “My flat’s only the other side of Regent’s Park. He’s pretty lonely, hardly anyone else goes to see him.”
“And,” Dr. Morelle said, “your motive for giving this somewhat eccentric old man the pleasure of your company would be purely disinterested?”
The other was visibly confused and then he answered hesitantly. “Er — yes,” he said.
“You have made it clear,” Dr. Morelle said, his tone rasping, “that you might inherit a large sum of money upon your father’s death. Obviously you are profoundly inhibited by the prospect. Up till now you have proved an unresponsive patient, hence the strategem I perpetrated upon you with the paper roses; having, as a result, come this far, don’t hold out at the last.”
“I might as well confess it, Dr. Morelle.”
“Confession is good for the soul.” Dr. Morelle lit one of his inevitable Le Sphinx.
“I’ve had a rough time this last couple of years,” Beaumont said. “I may not be flat broke, but I’m damn near it.”
“So that your visits to your father are quite calculated?”
“I suppose you might say so.”
The man facing him sank his head as Dr. Morelle said: “There is precious little supposition about it; you are striving your utmost to remain in his affections in the hope that you will benefit by his death.”
“In my secret heart, yes.”
“It is into your secret heart that we are probing. There lie your subconscious guilt-complexes, your obsessive delusion that roses give you asthma.”
“What can I do to help myself?”
“You have already achieved much by at last understanding the truth about your asthmatic symptoms,” Dr. Morelle said, “and the truth about yourself. My advice is to concentrate your mind upon using your talents to remedy your financial situation. Come and see me again in two weeks’ time, and tell me what plans you have made to make yourself independent of your father’s capricious eccentricities.”
“I see what you mean, Dr. Morelle.”
It was at this point that Miss Frayle came in, Dr. Morelle turned to her. “Mr. Beaumont is just going, he’ll be ringing up for an appointment in a fortnight. When you will have returned from your holiday.”
“Yes, Dr. Morelle.” Miss Frayle smiled at Beaumont, noting the decided improvement in his appearance. His eyes were brighter, his complexion less palid, there was a briskness about his demeanour.
“Thanks, Doctor,” Beaumont was saying. “Thanks so much for all you’ve done. I promise you I’ll try and sort myself out.”
And Miss Frayle gently urged him out into the hall towards the front door. There were occasions, rare though they might be, when Miss Frayle permitted a certain amount of self-interest to deflect her preoccupation with the interests of Dr. Morelle and his patients. This was one of them.
She had a train to catch.
Chapter Six
MISS FRAYLE CAME out of the tube-exit at Victoria Station and, dodging through the crowd that milled about her into the brief tunnel, turned left. Her eyes behind her horn-rimmed glasses fastened at once on the big whitefaced clock suspended high above the perspiring holiday throngs and hurrying porters, and she checked her time with her wrist-watch.
She was all right. More than ten minutes before the train was due to arrive and here she was, the platform bang in front of her, with the words Golden Arrow arched over the gates. She glanced at the Continental Arrivals indicator, which advised her that the twenty-four hour system for railway times operated on the Continent, therefore she must subtract twelve from the figure shown. It was a form of mathematics with which she was not entirely unfamiliar, yet somehow it never failed to fluster her.
The time of the arrival of the boat-train from Folkestone was shown as 16.05. Five minutes past four, that would be, and she glanced at the clock again and then at her wrist-watch. Nothing was said that the boat-train would not be arriving on time and she looked about her with a relaxed smile of anticipation.
Her eyes caught the other train indicator nearby, and the magic names: Orient Express, Zurich, Zagreb, Warsaw. Her imagination was fired with pictures of romantic places seen from luxurio
us railway-compartment windows, or from the softly-lit table of a restaurant-car speeding through a purple twilight sprinkled like stars with the lights of glamorous cities, and around her the aroma of cigars and exotic scents of dark, svelte women with foreign-looking eyes.
Miss Frayle gave a little sigh. She often thought how wonderful it would be to spend a holiday on a train like the Orient Express. Still, dreams were dreams, but in reality she was just about to begin her holiday, which while it mightn’t take her across Europe was going to be most enjoyable, she felt sure.
She took a platform-ticket from the machine by the barrier. Everything had gone smoothly since she had left Dr. Morelle at Harley Street just after lunch. Allowing herself plenty of time, she had taken her suitcase by taxi to Liverpool Street and deposited it in the station cloakroom. Then she took the tube to Victoria Station, and here she was, going onto platform eight to meet Erica Travers off the boat-train from Folkestone. Together they would take a taxi to Liverpool Street in time to have a cup of tea before catching the 5.12 to Sharbridge, in Essex, where Miss Frayle was going to spend two weeks’ holiday aboard the houseboat owned by Erica’s aunt.
Two weeks away from hot, noisy London, the dust and the crowds along Oxford Street, the buses and angry taxis in Piccadilly. Two weeks away from the typewriter and dictaphone in the study at 221b Harley Street, the telephone and the doorbell, the patients and the dossiers, the filing-cabinets and the microscopes, the gleaming test-tubes and the specimen-jars of the laboratory. Two weeks away from Dr. Morelle.
Miss Frayle’s heart felt light, her blue eyes sparkled as her imagination filled with the mental pictures she had been conjuring up of the houseboat on the creek which Erica Travers had described to her so enthusiastically before she had gone off to Paris.
“It’s out of this world in every sense of the term,” Erica had said. “Nothing to do, except laze about in the sun all day. Swimming and sunbathing, eating and sleeping. Nothing to think of, nothing to worry about.”
Miss Frayle had never been to Essex before, at least not to stay for any time at all, but she had been fascinated by Erica’s description of the creeks and marshes, the saltings teeming with wildfowl and the quaint, isolated villages with their picturesque boarded houses. A world of its own, on its own, which had managed to remain unspoilt to a great extent by the advance of urban civilization, a world uninvaded by despoiling holiday-crowds, charabancs and streams of cars, choking the quiet roads.
“That’s what’s such bliss,” Erica had said, “it’s so marvellously inaccessible. Something to be said for a rotten train-service, and the trains to that part are ghastly, but it does save us from the mob.”
Erica Travers was secretary to a research biologist working at the Welbeck Hospital. Miss Frayle had met her quite a lot during the past several months: Dr. Morelle had been using the wonderfully equipped laboratory at the Welbeck for some of his more advanced experimental work, in which he had been assisted by Erica’s boss; and Erica and Miss Frayle, teaming-up on their respective employers’ behalf, had often lunched together at a little restaurant in Marylebone High Street which Erica had discovered, and had become good friends.
Erica was a few years younger than Miss Frayle, but was self-possessed and poised and with a confident air which seemed to suit her smart, brunette good looks. It was she who had inspired Miss Frayle with the idea of spending her two weeks’ holiday with Erica and her aunt in Essex on the houseboat, Moya. At least it wouldn’t work out quite like that. Erica herself was taking her holiday a week earlier than Miss Frayle, and had already planned to split her own fortnight into two parts, the first week in Paris, which she had always longed to visit, followed by the second week with her aunt in Essex. So the idea had developed that Miss Frayle should spend her first week’s holiday on the houseboat with Erica, during the latter’s last week, and then stay on for the remaining week after Erica had returned to London.
“If you want to, that is of course,” Erica Travers had said. “After all, you may not like it. But if you’re bored there are several places nearby where I’m sure you could be put up for the rest of your holiday. I mean, I suppose Aunt is a bit eccentric, and you may find her too much to cope with on your own. Personally, I adore her.”
That was the arrangement, although Miss Frayle felt quite certain she would find Erica’s aunt easy enough to get along with. She looked forward to spending the remaining week on the houseboat, in her company.
Miss Frayle was smiling a little to herself as she moved along the platform, awaiting the boat-train’s arrival. She was anticipating how full Erica would be of her week in Paris. Miss Frayle felt quite blasé about it, she had accompanied Dr. Morelle to Paris on several occasions in the past when he had gone there in the course of his work. True, her stay each time had been of only a brief duration, Erica had spent an entire week there, and on her own, free to roam Paris and enjoy it without any ties of work.
The platform was not very crowded. Miss Frayle found it almost restful and felt thankful that she did not have to wait where the long queues and noisy travellers bustled and eddied about, desperately bent on getting away from hot, sticky London for the holiday coasts.
Then her rising anticipation as the moment of the train’s arrival drew near was tinged by a sudden feeling of guilt. Involuntarily she had let her mind fly back to 221b Harley Street, and the study where she had left Dr. Morelle. She was recollecting how the last she had seen of him was his tall angular back as he stood apparently absorbed in the view from the window of the sky above the house-tops.
She recalled with a distinct pang the distant chilliness of his tone in contrast to hers when she had said good-bye. He had barely responded, certainly he had abstained from wishing her a happy holiday. She had glanced into the laboratory with its glint of glass and chromium, its ordered shelves and benches, just to reassure herself that everything was in order, and then looked round the familiar booklined study and its files of dossiers. She had stared again at the tall black silhouette, still turned uncompromisingly, back towards her, then with a shrug of her slim shoulders Miss Frayle hurried out into Harley Street.
She recalled now with a faint wry smile how in her haste she had let the front door slam with a crash which seemed to have shaken the house, and in her mind’s eye she could visualize the expression on Dr. Morelle’s gaunt features as that door-slam echoed in the study where he stood.
Then Miss Frayle shook off the shadow that threatened to stretch out from Harley Street and darken her ebullient spirits and resolutely she looked forward again to the next two weeks of escape from that hooded, piercing gaze, those sardonic tones and that driving energy, that dominating personality. Two weeks of lazing in the sun, swimming and sunbathing. She smiled again to herself, remembering the swimsuit she had bought herself. An elegant item in the latest style, and which she intended to make good use of during the next couple of weeks.
There was a surge of movement around her as the straggle of porters and passengers began moving past; and she saw the train curve into sight at the end of the stretched-out platform, and straighten itself out as it snaked towards her. The boat-train from Folkestone arriving on the dot.
Eagerly Miss Frayle joined the movement of the rest of the people on the platform, and as the train’s speed slackened, began searching for Erica. The carriages moved more slowly past, and then suddenly she caught sight of her leaning out excitedly from a window.
“Erica.” And Miss Frayle hurried forward as Erica Travers called out and waved to her. She saw at once how well the other was looking, and in the same moment noticed that she was wearing a sleeveless frock of what appeared to her to be unmistakably Parisian cut. Trust dear Erica, she thought amusedly, and wondered how much of her week’s salary that had cost her. No doubt she would soon hear all about it. Just a few thousand francs, absolutely irresistible, simply couldn’t refuse a bargain like it, my first real Paris frock.
The train gasped to a halt, carriage-doors swung wide
, and Miss Frayle was helping Erica out of the compartment with her two suitcases, taking one herself, while Erica held the other, and shaking their heads at a would-be helpful porter who appeared out of the tangle of passengers and those meeting them, crying out greetings and what sort of a journey they’d had.
“It’s lovely to see you again, such a thrill to be met off the Paris boat-train,” Erica was laughing. “Paris was simply marvellous, I can’t tell you.” She had travelled near the end of the train and talking animatedly, she and Miss Frayle made their way towards the barrier, there was the taxi to find to take them to Liverpool Street, and they circled quickly round groups of people. Hurrying along the front portion of the train, neither of them noticed as they passed the compartment with its gaping doorway blocked by a porter’s broad back.
Frozen into immobility for several sickening moments, the porter was staring at the dreadful figure slumped in the corner-seat.
Chapter Seven
AS THE RESULT of a phone call from Superintendent Harper of the Transport Commission Police at Victoria Station, Detective Superintendent “Spider” Bruce of B Division had come over from divisional headquarters at Chelsea, and two men stood bent over a British Railways map spread out on a desk in Superintendent Harper’s office. From the open window came the sounds of Victoria Station, the muffled train-announcer’s voice, the whistle of arriving and departing trains, together with the rattle of taxis in Hudson Place, with their passengers to and from the Continent.
Action following the porter’s discovery in the compartment of the boat-train from Folkestone had been swift and according to routine. The porter had at once sent another porter to fetch the guard while he had remained at the carriage-door. He pulled down the blinds on the platform-side against the possible sight in the compartment being witnessed by any casual passer-by. The guard had promptly dispatched the porter who had fetched him to the office of the Transport Commission Police, and leaving the first porter still where he was he had hurried forthwith to the station-master’s office. From there a call was sent to St. George’s Hospital at Hyde Park, and within a few minutes an ambulance was on the platform roadway alongside the train.
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