by Anne Morice
“The obvious one. Why have you told me all this?”
“Because I need your help. I could see from the expression on Louise’s face that my appeal had been useless. I have an idea that she knows more than she’s told us, but I’m not the one to get it out of her. She’s no friend to me.”
“Nor to me either.”
“That may be, but it’s not true of Elsa, is it? She’s the one I’d like you to work on. If Louise is concealing something, perhaps Elsa can find out what it is. As far as I can see, it’s my only chance. Will you at least try?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, getting up. “No promises, but I will think about it. And now I must go. My driver is the soul of punctuality.”
“I daresay there’s not much point in my saying this,” he replied, also standing up, “but despite all the white lies I’ve told in the past, this time I have been completely honest with you. I hope you believe that?”
“And I’ll be completely honest with you,” I told him. “Just now I’m not sure whether I do or not.”
TEN
Robin arrived on Friday and Elsa invited the three of us to dinner on Saturday evening. All the Laycock family were to be there, as well as Marc and Millie, Mrs. Laycock having given it out that she was feeling better and would welcome a change of scene.
“And she must be better,” Elsa added, “for Louise tells me that the nurse has now left.”
Toby flatly refused to go, declaring that he did not care for the sound of the Laycocks and that even a four-hour spell devoted exclusively to answering the telephone would be preferable to their company. Robin was not enthusiastic either, but I melted his resistance by warning him that he would give Elsa an inferiority complex if he persisted in wriggling out of all her invitations, for I could not bear to pass up this opportunity to meet the mysterious stepmother.
In fact the opportunity became over-extended because things worked out in such a way that after dinner I was stuck with her for almost an hour. Before this, however, there had been a short but spirited altercation between Gregory Laycock and, of all people, Millie, mercifully not witnessed by Elsa, who was out in the kitchen making coffee.
The minute dinner was over Marc and Andrea drifted off somewhere on their own, and when the rest of us had assembled in the other room Gregory remained standing with his back to the fireplace, gazing expectantly at the door and taking no part in the conversation. He then informed us that he could not imagine what had become of Andrea.
“Marc has taken her to the pub,” Millie explained.
“Taken her where? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Pub. P.U.B.,” she said, getting it right, luckily. “You know, short for public house. He is going to teach her to play darts.”
“But this is outrageous! How dare he take my daughter into such a place, without permission? He must be stopped at once.”
“Too late for that. They left ten minutes ago, so they’ll be there by now. And I don’t suppose it occurred to my brother that he needed your permission.”
“Then he has a lot to learn, your brother, as he will shortly find out.”
“Oh, don’t worry! It’s a very nice pub and all the customers are frightfully well-behaved. Unlike some!” she added in a scornful undertone.
It was as well that the door was pushed open at this point and Elsa entered with the coffee tray. Making a visible effort to control himself, Gregory darted forward to take it from her and while she was pouring it out fell into earnest conversation with her about some historic building which the Storhampton Council was proposing to demolish, to make way for a new car park.
Millie, meanwhile, had trained her guns on Robin. She was a dear girl and had evidently got her macrobiotic diet under control, for she had fined down a lot during the past year. She still had much to learn about the social graces, however, and was submitting Robin to a lecture on unilateral disarmament, which she appeared to be in favour of. He was either too kind-hearted to get up and walk away, or, more likely, feared that by doing so, he might be landed with Mrs. Laycock, which would be worse still. If so, he had made the right decision, for she was a sad disappointment.
She had appeared to be unmoved by the absurd fracas which her husband had created, but I suspected that apathy had become a way of life for her. If this was one of her good days, I should have hated to see her on a bad one, and anyone less fitted for the role of wicked stepmother could never have existed. She was a putty-faced woman with colourless hair and a colourless personality to match, with only her large, sad brown eyes to indicate that she might once have been attractive. Now, she had evidently come to think so little of herself as to go out to dinner looking unkempt and none too clean and with two or three single hairs sprouting from her chin, which reminded me so forcibly of gooseberry tails that it was both disagreeable to look at them and hard to look away.
This rebarbative appearance and lack-lustre manner probably both owed something to the fact that she ate very little and drank nothing but soda water throughout the evening. She smoked incessantly, however, causing Millie, who holds uncompromising views on pollution, to be in danger of bursting every blood vessel she possessed.
Elsa, it seemed, had been correct in the matter of the arthritis, for Mrs. Laycock was unable to walk without a stick and an arm to lean on, and then only with difficulty. All in all, it was hard to imagine her having the strength or will to kill a spider and any attempt of that sort might well have ended with her dying from fright of the spider.
We talked about the weather, we discussed some good books we had or had not read recently and we touched on the new car park. I asked her a number of questions about her house and garden and she reciprocated by asking me one or two about the television serial. I don’t think she can have listened very carefully to the answers, though, because after a particularly heavy silence she began asking the same questions all over again.
However, as Elsa had recently had cause to remind me, people are seldom all of a piece and after we had lurched on to the subject of where I lived, some signs of animation began to appear:
“It would have to be London for us,” I had explained, “whether we liked it or not, because of Robin’s job.”
“Oh, but you must like it, don’t you? I’d give anything to be back there myself.”
“You don’t care for the country?”
“I loathe it,” she answered with unexpected vehemence and I noticed that Gregory, who was sitting nearby with Elsa, looked up and shook his head at her.
“What made you come here, then?”
“Oh, it was Greg’s idea. I think it was for Andrea’s sake, mainly. She’d told him how much she enjoyed the holidays she’d spent here as a child and how she used to dread going back to London when they were over. Her life is one long holiday now.”
Not being sure how to respond to this, I let it drop and she then rocked me right back on my heels by saying:
“Tell me something: have you ever been in a fire?”
“Only a simulated one, I’m thankful to say.”
“Oh . . . what does that mean?”
“It was for a film, you see. Me, waking up in a smoke-filled room, cut to the exterior of the Building, with flames leaping out of an upstairs window.”
“All the same, it must have been terrifying?”
“No, I’m sorry to disillusion you, but they’d shot the exteriors weeks before we got to the smoke-filled room and I was nowhere near.”
“Oh, I see! You must think me very simple.”
“No, why should you know about such tricks of the trade? But what made you ask? Is it a particular phobia of yours?”
“No, but last night I dreamt the house was on fire. It was horrible. So real and vivid that even when I woke up I imagined I could still smell burning. I don’t know, though. Perhaps that was part of the dream and one shouldn’t bore people with one’s silly nightmares, I know that. I wonder if Greg’s ready to leave yet? I’m feeling a little ti
red. I sleep very badly and I get so easily tired nowadays.”
“I’ll go and tell him,” I said, bouncing up before she could change her mind.
“Arthritis?” Robin said in the car going home. “Who said anything about arthritis?”
“Elsa did.”
“Oh, Elsa! Just because she goes through life with blinkers on is no reason why you should.”
“Well, I don’t know why you say that, Robin. She’s certainly very lame and not at all well either, I should have said.”
“Quite so, but it is not caused by arthritis.”
“What then?”
“Everything points to the fact that she either is, or has been, a confirmed alcoholic.”
“Do you mean that?”
“It’s not the kind of thing one says without meaning it.”
“No, and now I’m getting used to the idea, I wonder that I didn’t see it for myself. She has all my sympathy too. Life with that horrible man and his odious spoilt daughter would be enough to drive anyone to drink. I wonder if Elsa has known about this all along and was just being discreet? There are a number of things I want to ask Elsa, when I get time, but perhaps I won’t bother her with this one. It would only upset her and it is far too tame a story to be worth that.”
I might have added that it was also likely to be a story with no ending, but life can be just as unpredictable as people and, by a startling coincidence, only forty-eight hours later the Laycocks’ house caught on fire.
The damage was not extensive, being confined to one small room on the ground floor, but by the time it was discovered Mrs. Laycock had died from fumes and suffocation.
ELEVEN
The history of this sad event, as it filtered down to me through all the usual channels, was as follows:
Gregory Laycock had returned home later than usual on Monday evening, having attended a reception for some international medical conference. The invitation had been accepted weeks in advance, when there was a nurse on the premises, but he had not changed his mind about going, having received an undertaking from Andrea that she would spend the evening at home.
However, she had either, as she claimed, mistaken the date, or had become bored by her step-mother’s company and at six o’clock had taken herself off to London, to dine and go to the cinema with Marc, not getting back until the early hours of Tuesday morning.
When Gregory had arrived home at about half past ten the house was in darkness and he had gone straight to the morning-room, which was situated at the back of the house and had now been turned into a bedroom for his wife. This was a hastily improvised arrangement, which had come into being when the nurse left and there was no longer someone always at hand to help her up and down stairs.
There had been no need to open the door to ascertain that she was asleep, because her snores had been audible from three feet away and, without pausing to question whether there might be something abnormal about their pitch and volume, he turned away, went to his own room and fell asleep until Andrea woke him up again.
He had not heard her come in, but had first been aroused by the sound of slamming doors and running taps. After that, when all was quiet once more, he had found difficulty in going back to sleep and had spent the next two or three hours slipping in and out of dozes, each bringing its own, or a continuation of its predecessor’s dream. The last of these, although he was unaware of it, was a replica of one his wife had had only two days earlier and when it was over and he was wide awake once more, the impression remained that the house was on fire.
For a while he tried to ignore it and to persuade himself that it was his imagination, but then he remembered that Andrea was fully capable of leaving a lighted cigarette in the drawing-room, or one of the burners switched on in the kitchen and he had forced himself to go downstairs and investigate.
Smoke was wafting out from under the morning-room door and when he flung it open the atmosphere inside was so dense that all he could see was that the draught he had now created had injected an extra spurt of energy into the flames which had already got a hold on one of the curtains.
He had managed to take a few steps in the direction of the newly installed bed, but was then overpowered by smoke and fumes and had been forced to retreat into the hall. Gasping for breath, he had closed the door behind him and then telephoned the Fire Brigade, before going upstairs to wake Andrea. As he later discovered, if he had succeeded in penetrating a yard or two further inside the room, he might have stumbled over the recumbent figure of his wife. She was found lying face-down on the floor, one arm outstretched and the walking stick at her side, midway between the bed and the door. Although it was estimated that the fire had been going for between two and three hours, there was a bare possibility that when he came on the scene she was still alive.
Two other discoveries which the room yielded were an empty gin bottle and an ashtray overflowing with half-smoked cigarettes and spent matches.
Naturally, it was several days before the full story came out and I did not even hear the beginning of it until I got back from work on Tuesday evening. It did not have so much impact as might have been expected, my mind by then being beset by problems far removed from the remorseless extermination of the female population of Sowerley.
This was due to my agent having come on a visit to the location, ostensibly for the routine business of casting a professional eye over the proceedings, but in reality, as I discovered over lunch, to press her case for the television serial. In doing so, she had dangled enough golden carrots in front of my nose to tempt a far less acquisitive spirit than mine.
“But you were the one who pointed out that sixteen weeks in L.A. might not do much for my marriage,” I reminded her.
“I know that, my dearest, and no one wants to upset darling old Robin, least of all me, but I have not been idle, you know. I’ve really been working very hard for you, and I think you’ll agree that it’s good news.”
“What is?”
“I’ve talked them into allowing you a clause in your contract, giving you a two-week break in the middle for a lovely little hols. You can fly home at their expense. There now, isn’t that something?”
It was certainly something which needed as much digesting, in its own way, as the roast pork, potatoes, cabbage, apple sauce and stuffing, and avarice and better judgement were still fighting it out when I arrived back at Roakes at half past eight.
Toby was in the dining-room, chumping away at something which looked suspiciously like roast pork.
“Yours is drying out on what, in the pre-Florida era, was known as the hot plate,” he informed me, “and is now called the cuisinette.”
“I don’t think I’ll bother, not very hungry. Rather late for your dinner, isn’t it?”
“Yes, far too late and all the fault of that tiresome Elsa, who dropped in, as she put it, on her way home from Dedley. I can only say that she must have been lost in a reverie and in no state to drive at all, since it can’t have taken her less than eight miles out of her way.”
“Could she remember why she’d dropped in?”
“I suppose she was hoping to see you and be first with the news. It was a great bore because she would neither go away, nor stay for dinner. I think you are wise not to have any, it is badly overcooked.”
“First with what news?”
“Be so good as to fetch the strawberries,” he replied, “and you shall hear.”
“I wish now that she had waited to tell you herself. Judging by your wooden expression, I have not succeeded in wringing the last drop of drama from it.”
“There’s not much drama to be wrung, is there? Just rather squalid and sad. Only two points of minor interest that I can see.”
“Better than nothing. What are they?”
“Well, it’s curious that she should have had a premonition about it, don’t you think? On the other hand, I suppose it could easily be explained by assuming that this wasn’t the first time she’d dropped a lighted cigarette on
the bedclothes and what she experienced wasn’t a dream, but the real smell of scorching.”
“So, after all, it’s not even of minor interest?”
“Something I find more arresting is that, if she was an alcoholic, and it looks as though Robin was right about that, why did they allow her to get her hands on the gin bottle?”
“Yes, Elsa was puzzled too.”
“So she did know? The arthritis was just a whitewash?”
“It seems that Louise had tipped her off. In the strictest confidence, I need hardly say.”
“Oh, that Louise! She crops up everywhere, doesn’t she? And how does Louise account for Mrs. Laycock hobbling off to bed, with a bottle of gin tucked underneath her arm?”
“She is unable to account for it. All the booze in that house is kept under lock and key and Gregory never leaves the house without the key in his pocket.”
“Oh well, I suppose the poor creature bribed someone to get hold of a bottle for her. Or maybe just rang up her husband’s wine merchant and asked them to deliver one. That would be the simple answer.”
“A sight too simple, perhaps. One can hardly conceive that they wouldn’t have been warned.”
“So we shall have to wait for the inquest and see what that brings forth. When is it, by the way?”
“I have no idea. You’ll have to ask Louise.”
“Well, all I hope is that it doesn’t occur to anyone to call Andrea as a witness. It is a chance I can’t see her failing to make the most of.”