Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

by Christianna Brand

  Inspector Block said steadily, ‘Mr. Photoze lived in the same group of flats as this lady did. You were ready enough to accuse him of an affair with her. But your father also lived in that same group of flats; and the lady is a very pretty lady. And then—’

  ‘Oh, come now, darling!’ protested Marguerite. ‘First a photographer—now a policeman as well. Have a heart! I wasn’t very fussy—but!’

  ‘—along came Mr. Mysterioso,’ went on Block, ‘and took her away from them both.’

  ‘What a happy little threesome we seem to have been!’ said Mr. Photoze.

  ‘I don’t say you were a threesome—not in that sense. There may be many ways of caring for a woman, needing a woman—many reasons, at any rate, for resenting her being stolen from you.’

  ‘But I wasn’t stolen from the policeman,’ said Marguerite, half-laughing. And she looked at the boy’s white face and laughed no more. ‘Now, look, Inspector, this is absolutely not fair. I’ve told you about Mr. Photoze—we were both frank enough with you. So believe me when I say, when I swear to you on oath, that as for the policeman, I never set eyes on the fellow in my life. Not till after the shooting: then we all met one another, in connection with the case. But that was all.’

  ‘So there!’ said the boy passionately. He added with a suddenly rather sweet simplicity, ‘Besides, he was married to my mother.’

  ‘And loved your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the boy. (Loved her too much, to the exclusion of oneself—quarrelled with her, yes, but that was—surely?—because of the failure and the poverty brooding in the home; which in turn was because of the crime and subsequent unjust dismissal.)

  Inspector Block did not like what he had to say next. But he said it. ‘All right. He loved her. But Mr. Photoze lived with them, and perhaps in his own way he was devoted to her too—enough at any rate to enter into a plot to avenge her. Because’—It was not very nice, but it had to be said—‘Because Mr. Mysterioso had been visiting those flats, hadn’t he? And one lady at a time wasn’t necessarily enough for the Grand Mysterioso.’

  ‘You flatter me,’ said Mysterioso; but nobody listened to him. For it was terrible—horrible—to see the boy’s face. Before, it had been a young face, dark, pale, as the emotions passed across it. Now it was a man’s face, a clown’s face, a mask of white patched clownishly with pink. That gesture again, as though physical danger were coming close to him. He whimpered, ‘Oh, no! Oh, no!’

  ‘We have to consider everything,’ said Inspector Block, as though excusing what he did.

  ‘It’s madness,’ said Mysterioso. He hauled himself straighter in his chair, but he too had gone pale. ‘By all I hold sacred, I never even saw her—not till after the inquiries started.’ He looked with pity at the cowering boy. ‘I never touched your mother, child, never so much as saw her.’

  ‘You could have,’ said the boy sobbing. ‘You could have.’ His body was bowed over till his forehead rested on his two fists clenched on the arm of the chair. ‘Everyone tells lies—you have to say you didn’t know her. But you could have, you may have—’

  Marguerite got up from her place. She went and knelt beside him, lifted his head, pushing back the damp, soft, spiky young-boy hair from his forehead; caught at the writhing hands and held them steady in her own two hands, so white and well-cared-for with their long, pink, manicured nails. ‘Hush, love, hush! Of course it isn’t true.’ And she looked across the room at Mr. Mysterioso and said, ‘A secret—between us and these kind people here who’ll be too generous, I know, ever to give us away.’ She glanced at the door. ‘Nobody could be listening?’

  ‘No,’ said the Inspector.

  ‘Between these four walls then?’ She looked round at them, appealing, looked back to Mysterioso. She said, ‘I think we must tell.’

  An actress, ‘over the hill’, glad of the attentions of even a scruffy young press photographer using her as a sitter to practise his craft. Thankful beyond words for the advent of a new admirer and a rich, famous, and handsome one at that, ‘good to be seen about with’ at the fashionable restaurants where theatrical agents and managers would be reminded of her. Entertaining him at home, not at all secretly; dropping naughty hints to anyone who would listen—my darling, he’s fantastic! Using it all to further her own ends, to bolster her tottering career.

  And a man, larger than life size, not quite like other men. Big, handsome, with his mane of tawny hair, a man who looked like a lion and must live like a lion; a man with a reputation for affairs, in middle age still strutting in the pride of his well-publicised virility. And all in an hour, in a moment….The accident that had left him a crippled thing, humiliatingly powerless, had left him powerless in other ways as well. ‘She was—kind,’ he said, looking at Marguerite, still kneeling by the boy’s chair. ‘She kept my secret a secret.’ To the boy he said, ‘Even if I’d ever set eyes on her, my child, your pretty young mother would have been safe from me.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Marguerite. She looked down at her hands. ‘I know.’

  Inspector Block helped her up from the floor and back to her chair. He said to them both, with something like humility in his cold voice, ‘Thank you.’

  The Grand Mysterioso stirred and sighed and came back to the present with a jerk. ‘Well, now… My dear boy, I think you have no cause to complain. We’ve done what we came here to do—talked it all out, put it all before you, all the facts, the ifs and the ands, the probabilities and the just possibles—riddled out our very souls for you, so that you may save your own. So save it! Accept the judgment of this court—who also have heard it all—and get rid of this bug that has been obsessing your mind and spoiling your splendid young life. I’ll help you. I’ll be your friend—you can start all over again, grow-up, be a man.

  ‘So now—you two have been the accused: you, playing the part of your father, and Mr. Photoze here. Go outside this room and wait; and we will arrive at a verdict in here, all of us, me and Inspector Block and this kind and lovely lady, Miss Devine, and these three kind people who have come here as witnesses, at no small trouble to themselves, to help you too. None of us with any axe to grind, remember that. So—whatever verdict we come to, will you accept it?’ And he said very kindly, ‘All we want, boy, in all honesty, is to arrive at the truth and set your mind at rest.’

  ‘Suppose,’ said the boy, ‘the truth doesn’t set my mind at rest.’

  ‘Then we’ll tell it just the same,’ said Block. He made a small-boy gesture, licking his thumb and crossing his heart with it. ‘I swear you shall hear the truth. I’ll tell you no lie.’

  ‘Considering that I’m in the dock too,’ said Mr. Photoze, getting up and going towards the door with his accompanying jingle, ‘and I’m ready to accept the verdict, I think you can too.’ He opened the door. ‘Come along, the jury is about to retire!’

  The door closed behind them. Mr. Mysterioso said, ‘Photoze will keep him safely out of earshot.’ But he looked anxious. ‘Can you really swear to tell him the truth of it? For that matter—what is the truth of it?’

  Inspector Block went and stood in the middle of the room. He said, ‘The truth of it is very short, and very simple. I can tell it to you in’—and he counted on his fingers—‘in fourteen words. In fact, I could reduce those words to six, and give you the whole story. Of course, I could say a lot of other words, but I’m not going to. It’s not for me to accuse. Our business is to exonerate.’ And he spoke the fourteen words. ‘I think the rest is self-explanatory… Verdict unanimous? Let’s have the boy back.’

  The big lush room, curtains drawn, hushed in the evening quiet, no traffic rumbling outside, scented with flowers and the upward curl of cigar and cigarette smoke; bottles and glasses hospitably placed within reach of outstretched hands… The door opened, and Mr. Photoze came jangling through, and the boy was standing there, wearing the dark look again, his eyes like the eyes of a frightened animal, his hands tensed into claws. Mr. Mysterioso struggled his helpless limbs
forward in his chair and held out a hand. ‘Come over here, son! Come and stand by me.’

  He came over and stood by the chair. ‘It’s all right,’ said Mysterioso, and took the narrow brown hand and held it, strongly and comfortingly, in his own. He said, ‘You see it hasn’t taken long. We all recognised the truth immediately. Verdict unanimous.’ And he gave it. ‘Mr. Photoze—not guilty; neither motive nor opportunity. And your father—not guilty. Neither motive nor opportunity. My hand on my heart!’

  A sort of shudder ran through the boy. Tears ran down his face as he stood motionless, his head bowed. ‘All go!’ said Mysterioso. ‘I’ll look after him. We’ve done our job. But never again,’ he said, giving a little shake to the nerveless hand still held in his own, ‘any threats to Mr. Photoze, let alone any violence! You accept the verdict? That’s a promise?’

  The bowed head nodded.

  ‘Good boy! Well, then, good night to you all,’ said the old man, ‘and thank you.’ And he said, again to the boy, ‘I’m sure you thank them too?’

  Yes, nodded the hanging head again; thin hand still clasped in the veined old hand, the beautiful, still mobile, veined old hand of the master magician, the Grand Mysterioso.

  Mr. Photoze walked away with Inspector Block. ‘Well, thank God that’s over! I think I’m pretty safe from now on. He gave his promise, and he’ll keep it; don’t you agree?’

  ‘Oh, yes, you’ll have no more trouble,’ said Block. ‘He meant it. I know these kids; they only need convincing.’ He walked a little further in silence. ‘What you and I now know,’ he said carefully, ‘at least I think you know it?—had better be kept secret.’

  ‘Mysterioso and the others know it too.’

  ‘Some of it,’ said the Inspector. A vain man, Mysterioso, he added, really one of the vainest he had ever known. ‘Of course, as you said, it’s their stock-in-trade.’

  ‘After what he admitted tonight,’ suggested Mr. Photoze, ‘I think much may be forgiven the old man.’

  ‘Nevertheless, through his vanity he’s obstructed the course of justice. From the very beginning—from before the very beginning.’

  ‘You mean—the letters?’

  ‘The letters—anonymous letters signed, “Her Husband”. In all sorts of different envelopes, in all sorts of different type, posted from all sorts of different parts of the country—’

  ‘Ye gods! And who travelled all over the country constantly, with his act? And who got all that lovely publicity? You mean he wrote them to himself?’

  ‘No, I think the letters were genuine,’ said Block slowly. ‘Genuine letters in genuine envelopes. I just think the letters didn’t belong in the envelopes.’

  Typed envelopes—envelopes that had previously held circulars, impossible to distinguish, even by the senders, from the myriad of similar envelopes pushed day after day through letter boxes up and down the land. ‘He’d just pick one with a Birmingham postmark or a Glasgow postmark or what you will—put the letter in that, seal it up instead of merely tucking it in—the glue would be still intact—tear it open again and then send it off to the police—first taking care to arrange for the maximum publicity.’

  ‘The publicity I understand,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘But for the rest—I daresay I’m dense, but why put the letters into new envelopes? Why not just show them as they were?’ And he answered himself immediately, ‘Well, but good God, yes—of course! Because the letters were addressed to someone else.’

  Fourteen words: The young man’s father couldn’t have killed Tom. Tom was the young man’s father.

  While the cat’s away, the mouse will play. How had the indispensable servant spent the long waiting hours, while his master dallied five storeys above?

  ‘So the letters were really addressed to Tom—Tom Cat, perhaps we should call him from now on. And the shot—But good heavens, that performance at the foot of the cornerstone?’

  ‘A performance,’ said Inspector Block briefly.

  ‘With a dying man in his arms—his friend?’

  ‘I wonder if the poor neutered cat felt so very warmly towards the full Tom after all? And think of the dividends! The photograph—but that was a bonus—of the great, defiant gesture; the reputation ever afterwards for heedless courage. Some defiance!—he knew perfectly well there wouldn’t be another shot. The murderer hadn’t got the wrong man at all. It was meant for Tom.’

  ‘But Tom himself said—’

  ‘Just recall the way that went,’ said Inspector Block. ‘The man was bleeding at the mouth, hardly in good shape for clear articulation. Mysterioso listened, then he called the woman to come close. He told her what the man was saying: “Thank God they only got me—it was meant for you.” He told them all. The woman listened to the choked-out words, and believed what she’d been told. No doubt Tom gasped out something like, “My God, he’s got me! He really meant it!”—something like that. Don’t you see, the magician forced the card on her?—she heard what he told her to hear, that’s all.’

  ‘Some opportunist!’

  ‘He’d shown that in the matter of the letters. This was only an extension of that.’

  ‘Tom would bring the first letter to his master—I daresay there weren’t many secrets between those two. I wonder,’ said Inspector Block, ‘what Mysterioso’s first reaction would have been?’

  ‘Jealousy,’ said Mr. Photoze.

  ‘I think so too; especially after what we heard tonight. I think Mr. Mysterioso wanted those letters for himself. So—all sorts of good reasons to the man: you’re in danger; this idiot, whoever he is, might try something funny. The police won’t bother much about you, but if I were to ask for protection—And Tom, after long years in “the business”, would be the first to appreciate, the value of the publicity, the anxious fans, the eager sensation-seekers, flocking to performances with the subconscious hope that something tragic would happen—as they flock to the circus.’

  ‘Why no letters before that?’

  ‘I think,’ said Block slowly, ‘that all the way along, this was a crime arising out of opportunity. And here was the first opportunity. The months passed, the baby was born, Robbins fumed and was sick with anger; he couldn’t just go and beat up the seducer—he was in the police, and the police wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing; and more important, he wasn’t going to let the world know of his shame. But then—well, Mysterioso told us that these invitations to lay cornerstones and whatnot were arranged months in advance; and the first people to know about forthcoming events are the local police. Suddenly P.C. Robbins learned that his enemy was coming to Thrushford.

  ‘Threats at first, meaningless probably, just to give the seducer a bad time, with the vague hope that when he comes to Thrushford with his master, one may be able to add some small frightening shock just to shake him up. But the seducer turns it all to his own advantage, makes a sort of public joke of it, hands the letters to another man. The rankling anger grows and grows and begins to take on a more positive quality. And then the second opportunity presents itself.

  ‘I don’t know which came first—the rifle or the post of duty outside the unfinished wing. Either could have been fiddled, I daresay, having achieved the other. Not too difficult, for example, for a policeman to come by a weapon. Some old lady finds the gun after her husband’s death, hardly dares to touch the nasty dangerous thing, knows nothing certainly of numbers and identification marks, hands it over to the first copper, and thinks no more about it. He may have had it stashed away for years, or from the time his suspicions were first aroused; by the time it came to be used, the hander-over could be dead or senile or have moved elsewhere—certainly it was never traced. At any rate, with it in his possession and a perfect place at his disposal for using it, he began seriously to think about taking action. He thought out a plan, worked on it, and brought it off. And damn near perfect it turned out to be.’

  ‘No one guessed at the time how the thing was done?’

  ‘My higher-ups may have; but it was all so te
nuous. Still, he’d lived in the flats where Mysterioso had visited; they must have had some suspicions—’

  ‘Only, I had lived there too.’

  ‘That’s right. And been on the scene of the crime also. So how to choose between the two of you when it seemed impossible for either of you to have done it? At any rate, they cooked up some excuse and got rid of him—I remember him as a difficult chap, brooding and touchy—well, no wonder! I daresay they weren’t sorry to let him go. It wasn’t till tonight…’ He laughed. ‘It hit you at the same moment?—how it had been done. I remember how you stopped and stared and said, “Dear God!” ’

  ‘But you went on with the theory about possible collusion—’

  ‘I had to run through all the possibilities. I had to leave no doubts in anyone’s mind. I didn’t want people coming to the boy afterwards, saying, “He never covered this or that aspect.” But by then, I knew. When the boy accused you of making the hole in the roof before I saw you apparently making it—’

  ‘It accounted for the bag of apples and all,’ said Mr. Photoze. ‘So simple! Wasn’t it?’

  So simple.

  P.C. Robbins with hate in his heart and a long-perfected plan of revenge. After the major search of the previous day, concealing the rifle, the rope, the string, the apples, preparing the boards for dovetailing into a tripod. Slipping up when the final inspection had been concluded and they’d all gone off to prepare for the ceremony, erecting the tripod, fixing the rifle, winding a length of twine around the butt to suggest exactly what in fact had been deduced—that some trick with the string had been played. (A bag of apples dropped on to a taut string, jerking back a trigger—the nonsense of it! As if anyone for a moment could really depend on anything so absurdly susceptible to failure!) Down again, unseen because there was as yet nobody on the hospital balcony; or if observed, just another copper going about his business; the police had been up and down all day.

  And then—

  The sound of a shot—in the unfinished wing. A policeman tearing up, two steps at a time, pausing only to yell out, ‘Watch the stairs!’ and ‘They’ve got him!’ Pandemonium, predictably, on the hospital balcony, everyone talking at once, a lot of people ill and easily thrown into hysteria. Noise and confusion, at any rate, masking the sound of—