“Russian salad.”
“Saladin.”
“Doctor.”
“Tory Alexander.”
“Hymn.”
“Her.”
There was a significant pause. Then Phlox said, “Charwoman.”
“Charmian.”
“Egypt.”
“Pyramid.”
“Wall.”
“By heaven, Holmes,” said Dame Beatrice in a different tone, “this is wonderful. I can assure you, Mr. Carmichael, that you will see no angels, of whatever persuasion they may be, for years and years and years. Possibly never at all.”
“Really!” exclaimed Phlox, opening his eyes. “That is really worth knowing! Am I—do you—that is to say——”
“Five guineas, please.”
“Eh? Oh—oh, I see. I was really thinking of——”
“Another consultation? Hardly necessary at present, but if you find it imperative from your own point of view, this address, if I am not in Wandles Parva, will always find me.”
“You don’t think another consultation will be necessary?”
“What do you think yourself?”
“I don’t know,” said Phlox with complete sincerity. “I have enjoyed and appreciated this one, I must say, and I thank you for your help. As to the skeleton . . .”
“Oh, yes, the skeleton,” said Dame Beatrice. “I can see that, of course.”
“You can?” Phlox looked alarmed.
“Not in the sense that you mean. You have inspired me. I am extremely glad to have been of assistance to you. That is all, I think.”
“You puzzle me,” said Phlox. “I assure you that I had the shock of my life when it became known to me that the cadaver was modern English and not Ancient British. Well, we all have the same way to tread, I suppose, although, of course, we hope we shall not all be murdered. It is rather a horrible thing, murder, isn’t it? I really cannot think that we take it sufficiently seriously.”
“Murdered, to make a Roman holiday,” said Dame Beatrice.
“A Roman holiday?” Phlox looked startled. “It is curious that you should say that.”
“Not if you could read my mind, Mr. Carmichael, I assure you. I should like to have a word with your wife, if I may.”
CHAPTER SIX
Marigold Utters
“It is the method of charity to suffer without reaction.”
Ibid (Section 5)
* * *
IT seemed to Dame Beatrice that Phlox would have liked to refuse her request to interview Marigold. Certainly there was a pause only long enough for the drawing of a breath, but a pause there was. Then he said:
“Marigold knows nothing more about my hallucinations than I have told you.”
“Possibly not, but it would interest me very much to hear from her own lips the extent to which the hallucinations have affected her.”
“I see. Oh, well, of course, have her in. Do you want me to wait in the next room?”
“No, no. Stay here if you prefer.”
“I’ll go. It might embarrass my wife if she knew that I was listening to what she had to say. I am a firm believer in freedom of speech in every sense of the words.”
He changed places with Marigold, whom Dame Beatrice asked to be seated. There was a silence, broken at last by the young woman.
“Is it serious?” she asked.
“It is much too early to say.”
“Are you going to treat him?”
“That is for him to say. Tell me, Mrs. Carmichael, has he been troubled by hallucinations before? Can you recall any other occasions on which he has been affected like this?”
Marigold rested a tanned and slender arm on the table and leaned slightly forward. Her eyes, of melancholy brown, widened and her lips parted. Dame Beatrice waited.
“I would not say that he had actually suffered in this way before,” said Marigold at last, “but, of course, he is very highly strung.”
“Yes?”
“Oh, yes. He is so artistic, that is the point.”
Dame Beatrice envisaged her late patient—his stringy, over-tall figure, his small, intelligent, wary eyes, his long hands and his elegant sandals. Artistic? So that was it. Well, artists could and sometimes did suffer from hallucinations. She nodded, slowly and solemnly.
“Would you call him mentally unstable?” she enquired.
“Phlox?” Marigold screwed up her eyes and puckered her mouth—an attempt to register concentrated thought. “Mentally unstable? Oh, no, I don’t think so. Of course, he’s restless. We are forever chasing after something different. He becomes bored so soon.”
“You yourself, then, would prefer a more settled life? You live on a house-boat, I believe?”
“Yes, our romantic floating home! I love it very dearly.”
“But you are not allowed to enjoy it in peace?”
“I always give in to Phlox. He has such a strong, commanding nature and he likes me to share every part of his life—and, of course, that is what I want, too. I’ve been such a worry and such a responsibility, you know.”
“I should be interested to know what you meant when you said that your husband and you were always chasing after something new. What was Mr. Carmichael’s latest whim?”
“We walked the Roman Wall.”
“How very interesting.”
“Yes, it was—very interesting.”
“What masculine society does Mr. Carmichael enjoy?”
“Oh, none, as a general rule. There is the vicar here—a dear man and a great friend—but I don’t think that was what you meant.”
“You are right. I was thinking of the usual masculine friendships—those which involve, let us say, golf, horseracing, the saloon bar, attendance at football and cricket matches, friendly rivalry at chess or gardening—that kind of thing.”
“Phlox is interested in none of them. He did take up chess, but it taxed him too much, so he gave it up.”
“You mean he gave it up because he could not beat any other player?”
“He was not really interested in it,” said Marigold, on a defiant, protective note.
“I see. Tell me all about the Roman Wall.”
“What we did? Where we went? What we saw?”
“Delightful. Of course, you had wonderful weather.”
“The weather, on the whole, was quite good, I suppose. I take very little stock in the elements. We are used to roughing it in every possible way. That is why I do appreciate sleeping in a house and having regular meals for which I haven’t had to do the shopping.”
“No doubt all housewives feel the same way about shopping. You went by train to the north of England?”
“Actually, no. We went in a hired car and paid it off at Newcastle. We came home by train.”
“And from Newcastle?”
“We made straight for Corbridge; again in a hired car—it is between sixteen and twenty miles from Newcastle, I believe—and made an exhaustive inspection of the remains at Corstopitum, half a mile to the north-west. There is the most wonderful view of Corbridge and the valley of the Tyne—entrancing! We saw everything that the Ministry of Works has to offer—granaries, fountain, the enormous courtyard, the military compounds, and, of course, the museum. Then, after a further walk to admire the Vallum and Wall, we returned on foot to Corbridge and put up for the night there.”
“At the Wheatsheaf, no doubt?”
“I’ve no idea. Phlox arranges all such matters. I only know that we spent a comfortable night and, in the morning, went on to Hexham, which we had decided to use as our centre for all of the Wall which we had still to see.”
“I wonder that you troubled to stay the night at Corbridge, since it is so close to Hexham.”
“Yes, but we wanted to do Corstopitum very thoroughly and then felt we should be too tired—and, possibly, too late for dinner—to go on further.”
“Had Mr. Carmichael suffered from hallucinations up to this point?”
“No, except that he did see men of the Asturian cavalry come riding up out of the reservoir at Benwell, two miles or so from Newcastle. It was very odd, because we did not know, until we bought a guide book at Chester, that the Benwell High Reservoir covers about a third of what was the original Roman fort. We were very cross, though, when we found we had missed a temple to a local god and a stone causeway, the only one of its kind along the Wall. But that’s Phlox all over. He is quite adorable but terribly, terribly obstinate. He just simply will not buy a guide book until he has seen the remains and the places for himself. It’s a form of conceit, I sometimes tell him, and I’m sure that’s true.”
“A harmless form of conceit, surely?”
“Well, not when you find that you haven’t seen things you would have seen if you’d known they were there.”
“So you put up in Hexham? Were Roman remains the only things in which you were interested?”
“Well, we went up there specifically to see the Wall, but we did do Hexham—the priory church and the Moot Hall and the Manor Office and so on.”
“Excellent. How long did you stay in Hexham?”
“Four days, I think, and then we came home by way of Carlisle and the lakes.”
“By train, I think you said.”
“Yes. We hired a car from Hexham to take us to Carlisle, and then came back by train to London, stayed the night with friends and then came back to our house-boat and so down here.”
“And the hallucinations?”
“Phlox says he can’t remember when they began to be really troublesome. What did he tell you about them?”
“That during the war they took the form of angels with swastikas on their wings.”
“Well, really! You didn’t take him seriously, I’m sure!”
“Not very, in one way; extremely so, in another.”
“He loves to tease.”
“On the contrary, Mrs. Carmichael, far from being a tease, I consider that your husband is an extremely worried man. He now tells me that he has seen and heard the ghost of Caesar’s Calpurnia.”
“Then don’t you think the hallucinations are genuine?”
“As he describes them, no, I do not. As allegorical figures, yes, I do. I have had similar cases. This one is not unique. When I have broken down this fiction and shaken its constituents into facts, we shall all be wiser than we are now.”
“But what is worrying him?”
“Oh, there is no doubt about what is worrying him. He knows something about the skeleton which he has not disclosed. He cannot make up his mind whether to disclose it or not.”
“He cannot know anything which I don’t know. We are always together. We do everything together.”
“Did you ever read The Speckled Band, one of the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories?”
“Yes—a long time ago. Why?”
“Do you remember that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson both saw the dummy bell-rope and the ventilator which did not ventilate?”
“Yes. Well? What do you mean?”
“Draw your own conclusions, my dear Mrs. Carmichael. You and your husband went everywhere together; saw everything together; but . . .”
“Phlox’s brains are better than mine, of course. I’ve never argued otherwise.”
“Think hard, Mrs. Carmichael, and, when you have thought, come and see me again.”
Marigold paused at the door.
“I don’t think I want to see you again,” she said. Dame Beatrice nodded, as though she approved of this statement. Instantly on edge, Marigold said swiftly, “I do hope you don’t think me rude. The fact is . . . well, Phlox isn’t the only person to feel worried. I was not particularly upset when I came in here, but you have contrived to make me feel very uneasy. In fact, you are beginning to make me wonder what sinister interpretation I am to put upon these questions you have asked. They give the impression of an inquisition.”
“If my questions persuade you to attempt to reconstruct your recent holiday in your mind and to recollect every possible detail of times and places, they will have achieved their object.”
“Dame Beatrice, I must ask you to explain what you say.”
“Willingly. Do you know the expression—I learned it at the Assizes some years ago—‘to be framed?’ ”
“Yes, I suppose so. It means, I believe, to be the victim of a conspiracy so that one is made to appear to be the guilty person. So that is what you are trying to tell me! Why could you not have said so openly, instead of suggesting all those embarrassing things?”
“I am sorry you found them embarrassing. To employ a trite, outmoded, and irritating expression, I asked them, I hope, for your own good. Mrs. Carmichael, have you, or has your husband, an implacable enemy?”
“Oh, yes,” said Marigold, speaking with the utmost composure, “we have several.”
“You astonish me!”
“There is no need for astonishment. There are our neighbours on the next house-boat. Phlox once pushed their son into the river.”
“Upon what provocation?”
“None at all. It was a sheer accident. But they were greatly incensed and demanded that we pay for a new outfit of clothes. We refused, I think with reason, as the boy was trespassing on our bit of the river bank and had thrown a stone at our port-side saloon window, cracking it.”
“But Mr. Carmichael pushed him into the river by accident?”
“He was pursuing the boy with the boathook and, in trying to catch him by the back of the jersey, he merely succeeded in prodding him in the lower dorsal region and thrusting him into the water. The boy could swim. There was no possible danger.”
“I see.”
“The parents took us to court and lost the day. Phlox very sensibly advanced the defence that the boy and he were playing a friendly game and that the boy had tripped over a mooring rope. There were no witnesses except myself and so it was one story against another. I did not bear testimony, but, had I been asked, I should have supported Phlox with all the eloquence I could summon. The view of the court was that the case should never have been brought, and there was an implied criticism from the bench that the boy’s parents were attempting to claim damages under false pretences.”
“Indeed? Mr. Carmichael has a persuasive tongue, I imagine.”
“Phlox is very clever. People think him a crank and an innocent, but that is quite a mistaken view, I assure you.”
“The boy, you imply, was never in danger?”
“Certainly not. Even if he had been, it was his own fault that he fell into the water.”
“And the breach has never been healed?”
“I am afraid not, even though Phlox did point out that, as he had won the case and been granted costs, he would not press the point of the shattered window. They were so angry with him that they paid for it without being asked.”
“Very pointed of them. You mentioned that you and your husband had several enemies. Are they all members of this particular family?”
“Oh, no. There is the old man who had the sanitary inspector call on him.”
“Yes?”
“His cottage was a disgrace, so Phlox appealed to the authorities and there was a fuss. But we were getting rats on board our boat and we could not tolerate that.”
“Is the cottage near your house-boat, then?”
“Yes. It is on a bit of waste land about a hundred yards from us. Everybody on the boats had complained, but it took Phlox, with his courage and his public spirit, to get something done.”
“And the cottage is now a model of cleanliness?”
“It is deserted, I am thankful to say. They put the old man into some sort of institutional home. The cottage was in very bad repair, so he was very much better off, although he would not admit it.”
“A man of that age and type could hardly be considered an enemy, I should have thought.”
“His daughter, a vulgar, shrewish woman, came to our boat and threatened us.”
“Oh, I se
e. He has relatives. He is not alone in the world.”
“He is not in the world at all. That was why the woman threatened us. He died, it appears, quite shortly after he was admitted to the institution.”
“Oh, I see. That does happen when old people are uprooted.”
Marigold glanced up sharply, but met a bland, unregistering countenance as yellow and inscrutable as a Chinaman’s.
“As though it was our fault he was moved!” she protested, feeling, in spite of Dame Beatrice’s impassive face, that she had been forced into a defensive position. “How were we to know that he would be taken away, or that he would die so soon? It isn’t reasonable to blame us. We did what we did for the best.”
“Such an error, one finds, to do things for the best. They usually seem to be such unpleasant things.”
“Oh, but really, Dame Beatrice!”
Dame Beatrice waved a yellow claw.
“So you think the daughter capable of working mischief?” she asked. Marigold shook her head vigorously.
“I think she might be capable of it, but I don’t see what harm she could do us. You might as well suspect the ferryman.”
“Ah, the ferryman!”
“He is quite mad.”
“Yes? In what compass direction?”
“Oh, in the direction of the Trade Winds, surely!”
“What happened?” asked Dame Beatrice, betraying no surprise at this totally unexpected answer from the seemingly mousy woman.
“We refused to employ him and persuaded others not to do so.”
“Because he was mad?”
“No, no. He was extortionate.”
“To what extent?”
“He would not issue season tickets to the people on the house-boats. We had to pay for every single journey if we used him. It cost twopence a time. It meant fourpence a day at the very least. Yes, and besides that, if you used your own rowing boats or dinghies he charged twopence for moorings on his side of the river.”
“Was he entitled to do so?”
“No, of course he was not, but he kept an eye on one’s rowing boat—at least, he claimed that he did.”
“He was in the position, I take it, of the attendant at a car park.”
“He was a swindler, but it was better than having one’s boat taken by unauthorised people or damaged by delinquent boys, which was the alternative, it seemed.”
Say It With Flowers Page 8