Читать книгу Flowers for the Judge - Margery Allingham - Страница 6

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There are moments which stand out in clear detail in the recollection of an hour of horror. They are seldom dramatic, and those who are haunted by them are sometimes puzzled to discover why just they and none other should have been singled out by the brain for this especial clarity.

Neither Mike Wedgwood nor Miss Curley ever forgot the instant when the doctor looked up from his knees and said half apologetically:

“I’m afraid we shall have to move him after all. I can’t possibly see here.”

It may have been that the bounds of their capacity for shock had been reached and that his words coincided with the moment immediately before the first degree of merciful callousness descended upon them and they were able to begin again from a new level. But at any rate, the scene was photographed indelibly upon their minds.

The extraordinarily untidy room stood out in every detail. They saw with new eyes its lining of dusty junk-packed shelves, only broken at the far end where an old-fashioned green and black safe replaced the cooking range which had once been there. They saw the heavy table which took up nearly the whole of the centre of the room, heaped high with books and files and vast untidy brown-paper parcels.

They were even aware of the space beneath it; that, too, fully occupied by flimsy wooden boxes whose paper contents would have overflowed had it not been for the books piled carelessly on top.

The fog, which enveloped the city and now crept into every corner, hung about the air like smoke, giving the single swinging bulb a dusty halo. The body lay upon its back, the head in the shadow of the table ledge and the sagging legs and torso sprawled out towards the doorway where they stood.

The doctor rose stiffly to his feet and faced them. He was a short man, grizzled and of a good age, but still spruce, and his little eyes were shrewd beneath his fierce brows. In contrast with his sombrely smart clothes his bare forearms, muscular and very hairy, looked slightly indecent.

“Where can we take him?” he enquired.

Miss Curley, who took it for granted that the question was addressed to her, considered rapidly. Space at Twenty-three was restricted. In the basement, besides the present room, there were only the packers’ hall at the end of the passage, the stock room, or the little washroom next door, none of them suitable resting-places for a corpse. Upstairs the amenities were even less inviting, since the business of the day had begun and the staff was already hysterical.

She glanced at the table.

“If we move those things on to the floor and spread a sheet on the table you’ll be right under the light, Doctor,” she said. “I’ll get a better bulb.”

The little medical man looked at her curiously. He knew Paul had been a director, and although he did not expect office employees to have quite the same attitude towards a dead man as a family might have adopted, he was surprised to find an absence of the general tendency of laymen to get the body to the most comfortable place possible at the earliest moment. Aloud he said he thought Miss Curley’s a most sensible suggestion.

Mike stepped into the room, avoiding the piteous thing upon the floor, and began to shift the dusty papers to the ground on the opposite side.

The place was dry from the furnace on the other side of the passage, with occasional icy draughts from the door into the yard. Mike worked like a man in a nightmare, his tall thin figure and deep-lined sensitive face looking curiously boyish and despairing.

The doctor bent down once again, and as he worked he grunted to himself at intervals and made little breathing sounds.

Miss Curley returned with a new electric light bulb and a pair of sheets borrowed from Mike’s own flat next door. Her face was grim and she moved with a suppressed energy which made the doctor look at her sharply, but Curley was all right as long as she kept going.

It was she who superintended the changing of the bulb, a feat which Mike performed with unwonted clumsiness, and she who spread one sheet over the table and stood ready with the other, waiting for the doctor to move.

The two men glanced at each other. Mike was younger and considerably stronger, but he was very pale and there was sweat upon his forehead.

Doctor Roe spoke briskly. His calm was very comforting. Thirty-five years of general practice had built up an impersonal yet friendly shell which quite concealed the rather inquisitive, ordinary little man inside.

“I’ll take the shoulders, Mr. Wedgwood,” he said. “If you would grip the feet, now. That’s right—just above the ankles. Are you ready? Now then ...”

Mike looked down at the square-toed brown shoes. They were familiar. They were Paul’s. This dreadful helpless thing lying on the dusty floor was Paul himself. Only the physical effort of lifting steadied him. Deliberately he forced his eyes out of focus so that he should not see his cousin’s face. Miss Curley’s expression was quite enough.

“That’s right,” said the doctor. “Ah!”

And afterwards, when he looked up and saw them:

“Perhaps you’d care to wait for me outside? This—ah—isn’t a very pleasant business.”

In the stone corridor outside the door Mike gripped the iron banisters of the staircase which ran up beside him and hung there for a moment, his crisp shorn head pressed against the stone.

“God, Curley, this is awful,” he said at last. “Where the hell is John?”

“He’s coming.” Miss Curley’s voice was sharp. “I sent round word to him as soon as I’d phoned the doctor. The woman said he’d been up half the night reading and wasn’t dressed yet, but that he’d come over right away. It’s a terrible thing. I haven’t sent anyone to tell Gina yet.”

“Gina? Of course—I say, Curley, I’ll do that. Later—not now. She might come down and see him ...”

He broke off.

Miss Curley’s sympathy for him returned and the softer emotion crowning the fear nearly undid her. She took off her spectacles and dabbed at her eyes petulantly.

Mike was silent, his brows drawn down so that his eyes seemed deep sunken and darker even than usual.

At the top of the staircase on the floor above somebody paused and a greyer shadow thickened against the wall over their heads.

“Miss Curley! Oh, Miss Curley.”

A girl’s voice, tremulous with its owner’s effort to appear unconcerned, floated down to them.

“Mr. Tooth is here.”

“Put him in the waiting room, Miss James. Put every visitor in the waiting room.”

Mike spoke before Miss Curley could open her mouth and footsteps above pattered away.

The doctor came out in what seemed an extraordinarily short space of time. They pounced on him, besieging him with questions, and as he washed his hands in the little toilet next to the strong room he talked to them over his shoulder.

“He’s been dead about three days, I should say. Very difficult to be more accurate once the period of rigor mortis has passed. But I put three days as the minimum. How odd he should not have been found before.”

For the first time Miss Curley noticed that his eyes were sharp and curious under his fiery brows, and unconsciously she spoke defensively.

“This room is very seldom used, Doctor. It’s virtually a safe, you know. It’s really extremely lucky that we found him this morning.”

“But he must have been missed,” the doctor persisted. “Surely his wife ... ?”

“Mr. Brande was a man of very uncertain habits.” Miss Curley had not meant to interrupt with such chilling asperity, and Mike attempted to come to the rescue with clumsy friendliness.

“We had begun to wonder where he was. We were only talking of it last night. No one thought of looking in there, naturally.”

He stopped abruptly and as clearly as though he had proclaimed it aloud it became obvious that a startling recollection had occurred to him. He grew suddenly crimson and stared at Curley, who did not meet his eyes. The doctor regarded them both with interest.

“I see,” he said hastily. “I see. And now, Mr. Wedgwood, is there any heating apparatus down here at all?”

Mike looked bewildered. “How do you mean? Do you want a fire? There’s the main coke furnace under the staircase here if—”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” interrupted the doctor shortly. “Let’s have a look at it.”

Together they inspected the central-heating system and the stove built into the tiny cellar-like cupboard under the staircase.

The doctor asked a great many questions and measured the distance between the cellar and the strong-room door with ridiculously exaggerated strides.

To Curley, who was only bearing up under the shock with great difficulty, the performance seemed absurd.

“But how did it happen, Doctor?” she demanded impatiently. “How did he die? That flush on his face—it’s very unusual, isn’t it? How did it happen?”

“That, madam,” said the little man, eyeing her with a pomposity which was oddly disquieting, “I am attempting to decide.”

On the whole, it was very fortunate that John should have arrived at that particular moment. He came running down the stairs, his head held slightly on one side and his excellently cut clothes looking out of place in the draughty dinginess of the basement.

He brushed past Mike and Miss Curley and shook hands perfunctorily with the doctor.

“Where is he?” he demanded.

Although no one who actually saw him during those first five minutes could possibly have doubted that John was genuinely shaken by his cousin’s death, a catalogue of his words and actions would have been misleading. He moved towards the door of the strong room with little, jerky, birdlike steps, paused for a moment on the threshold and peered in at the sheeted figure on the table.

He made no attempt to enter but stepped back sharply after a second’s contemplation, beating his long ivory hands softly together, cymbal fashion.

“Terrible,” he said shortly. “Terrible. We must get him out of here. We must get him home.”

Mike recognized that tone of quiet authority. When John spoke like that his commands were automatically carried out. The younger man turned to him.

“Gina doesn’t know yet,” he said. “Let me warn her, at least. Give me five minutes.”

“All right. But he can’t stay here, poor fellow.”

Both cousins had completely forgotten the doctor, and his diffident demur came as a surprise to them.

“Mr. Widdowson,” he ventured, “I hardly know whether I can advise—”

“My dear sir—” John turned upon him with raised brows, “—he can’t stay here in the office, in the strong room. Can you give me any valid reason why he should not be moved?”

The doctor hesitated. He had no story ready, no actual ground on which to stand. It was a situation in which the stronger personality was bound to triumph. Mike mounted the staircase.

“Give me five minutes to tell her,” he said over his shoulder.

As for Miss Curley, she hurried up to her office and phoned Mr. Campion.

Gina was pottering in the big living room, clad in a severe man-tailored pyjama suit, when the woman admitted her visitor. She looked up from the hearth rug, where she was sorting her morning’s correspondence, when he entered, and his vision of her, kneeling there in the warm navy blue suit, was the only lovely thing in all that day. He remembered afterwards that her red mules made little blobs of color on the white rug and her face turned to his was radiant with sudden pleasure.

“Mike, my pet! How nice to see you. Too early for some coffee? I’m just going to have some.”

Conscious that the charwoman was hovering behind him, he hesitated. All the old insufferable phrases crowded into his mind: “Gina, my dear, you must prepare yourself for a shock.” Or, “I have bad news, I’m afraid.” Or, “Gina, something terrible has happened.”

Now that the moment had come they stuck in his throat and he was only conscious of her sitting there smiling at him, sane and lovely and adorable by a fire.

“He would like some, Mrs. Austin, please.” Gina smiled at the woman and waved her hand to the sofa. “Sit down, animal, and don’t stand there goggling at me. What’s the matter? Can’t we go to the Athertons this afternoon after all? Good heavens, it doesn’t matter. Don’t look like that.”

Mike sat down heavily and raised his eyes to hers.

“Paul’s dead,” he said.

She had been in the act of placing a couple of envelopes in the flames when he spoke, and now her arrested movement, the shoulder half turned, the head bent, was more expressive than any sound she could have uttered. He dropped down on the rug beside her and put a hand on the small woollen back.

“Gina, I didn’t mean to say it like that. Oh, my God, I am a fool!”

She turned to him at once. Her face was very pale, her eyes wide and dark.

“Tell me,” she said quietly. “How did it happen? A car smash?”

“No.” He paused. She was so close to him.

Presently he heard himself talking in a guarded unnatural way which he was unable to correct.

“He’s been at Twenty-three the whole time. They’ve only just found him. They’re going to bring him up here. You—you had to be told, you see.”

“But of course I had to be told.” Her deep soft voice had sharp edges. “Mike, what’s happened? Was it suicide?”

“I—we—we don’t know.”

“But why should he? Why? Oh, Mike, why should he? We hadn’t even quarrelled. He had no reason, surely. Surely, Mike?”

“Hold on, old dear.” The man was gripping her shoulder tightly and she leant back into the crook of his arm.

Mrs. Austin set the coffee tray down on the table behind the sofa with a clatter and stood looking over it at them with the shrewd glance of a mendicant pigeon. Things were happening! She had been thinking they must get a move on for some time now, but if a man ignored his wife, well, he was asking for trouble; that was her opinion.

Gina became aware of her. She moved quietly to her feet.

“My husband is dead, Mrs. Austin,” she said. “They don’t know how it happened.”

The full arc of Mrs. Austin’s knitted bosom swelled. Her long face with its festoon of chins grew blank and she emitted a long thin sound midway between a scream and a whistle.

“No!” said Mrs. Austin. “Here,” she added hastily, clattering with the coffee-jugs, “you drink this, dear. You’ll need it.”

Gina sat in the big white chair, and sipped the coffee obediently, while the other woman stood before her and watched her face. Mike glanced at the woman wonderingly. Hitherto Mrs. Austin had been a mechanism to open doors in his life. Now she had miraculously become a personality.

It was as though a shadow had taken substance.

“Will they be bringing him up here, dear?” she demanded, and behind her ill-contrived sorrow Mike detected an awful secret glee.

Gina looked at Mike. He was still poised awkwardly, half kneeling on the rug at her feet.

“They are coming now, aren’t they?” she said.

He got up stiffly. “Yes—yes, they are. But look here, Gina, there’s no need for you to do anything, unless you want to, of course. I mean—”

He broke off helplessly, the situation beyond him.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Austin, her little green-grey eyes fixed on him with dreadful understanding, “I think I take your meaning, sir. Oh, well, there’s no need for the poor lady to see her husband for a bit. I’ll do all the necessary.”

She crossed over to the girl and laid a kindly crimson hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t you worry, dear. Don’t you worry at all.”

Mike felt himself gaping at her with fascinated horror. There was a ghastliness about this practical side of death which overtopped the sum of frightfulness which had confronted him in that short morning. Mrs. Austin was kind; sympathy and friendliness oozed from her every pore; and yet she was enjoying the tragedy with all the shameful delight of the under-entertained.

He glanced at Gina. She was thinking, her face white, her eyes dark and blank.

He found himself feeling that she ought to cry and yet being relieved that she did not. He knew it would never occur to her to adopt any conventional attitude. The sudden loss of Paul could hardly be a great emotional tragedy, but it was naturally a tremendous shock.

He was looking at her, trying to divine her thoughts, when Mrs. Austin touched his sleeve.

“I’d like a few words with you outside, sir, please,” she said, and before the elaborate solemnity which scarcely veiled the exuberant curiosity which consumed her he was helpless. He followed her meekly.

The fog was not yet at its worst, but the streets were as dark as at midnight and the waves of bitter, soot-laden air softened and blurred the edges of familiar objects until London was like an old brown lithograph chalked by a man with no eye for detail.

In the basement at Twenty-three John had taken charge of the proceedings, the doctor hovering ineffectually at his side. One of the smaller packing tables had been taken off its trestles and upon it the sheeted body of Paul Brande now lay. Under John’s supervision the whole affair was being managed very decently.

Old Dobson, the chief packer, a bull-necked individual with arms like the forelegs of a cart horse and a red rim round his head where a cap had sat, took the head of the improvised stretcher, while the foot was supported by a Mr. Peter Rigget from the Accounts Department. Mr. Rigget had somehow appeared upon the staircase at the critical moment and, much to his delight, had been invited to assist. He was a squat, insignificant-looking young man, long in the body and short in the leg, with a solidarity which would become fleshy in a few years. It was his misfortune that he looked like the popular conception of the less attractive black-coated worker, even to the pink sensitive nose and the very shiny gold pince-nez. In a rather futile effort to combat this disadvantage he wore his very black hair en brosse, and, to his eternal credit, spent much of his spare time in the Regent Street Polytechnic Gymnasium hardening his muscles.

With a certain amount of assistance from the doctor, therefore, he was quite able to manage the task for which he had angled.

Mr. Rigget had been waiting to get into the heart of the excitement downstairs ever since his sensitive perceptions had got wind of it less than three minutes after the discovery of the body, for it was a tragic fact that, in spite of his struggles against his destiny, Mr. Rigget remained what he had been born and reared to be, an inquisitive, timid, dishonorable person with a passion for self-aggrandizement which was almost a mania.

“Not through the street.” John made the statement sound like an edict. “We shall have to go the back way, through the garden and into the basement at Twenty-one. We can’t have a crowd in front of the office. Are you ready?”

Not for the first time during the past ten minutes the doctor shot a curious glance at the elegant, elderly head of the firm. John Widdowson’s complete preoccupation with his own particular aspect of the tragedy, and his utter disregard for any sort of pretence at conventional grief, was something unique in his experience.

He found it all the more puzzling because he did not know the man well and did not realize that it was the outcome of lifelong habit and was nothing to do with the unusual circumstances.

The procession moved off out into the yard through the narrow door between the strong room and the furnace cellar. Once in the fog the picture became macabre. The massive Dobson was blurred and transfigured into a shadow of heroic size, while Peter Rigget, bending forward under the weight, became foreshortened and spread out into something dwarfish and deformed.

The white burden between them widened and narrowed at every new angle which its path dictated, and the folds of the sheet hung limply in the cold still air.

They went down the stone way between the garage and the loading shed and turned sharply to the right, negotiating a little-used gate in the wall with difficulty.

Their progress through the other house was even more awkward, and both John and the doctor were forced to lend every assistance as they struggled and panted up the seven flights of stairs.

Mrs. Austin admitted them with red-eyed reverence as long as the door was open and whispering efficiency as soon as it was shut. She and the doctor understood each other instantly, and for the first time that morning the professional man received that mixture of awe and clumsy but well-meant assistance to which his long professional life had accustomed him.

“Mrs. Brande’s quite laid out, poor thing,” Mrs. Austin announced in a stage whisper, adding with ambiguous sentimentality, “Mr. Wedgwood’s with her, comforting her as only he can. I’ve told him not to let her come out for a minute or two.”

John looked at the woman as though he wondered what rather than who she was, and followed Dobson and Peter Rigget into the spare room, where nearly all the best linen had been set out by Mrs. Austin because a doctor was coming.

Dobson left at once, glad to go, but Peter Rigget lingered until bidden sharply by his employer to return to work.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Austin turned back the sheet.

John went out of the room. He felt he could not possibly be of any assistance, and he found the situation disagreeable.

Mike had only escaped from Mrs. Austin when the knock at the door heralded bigger game. He and Gina had barely spoken when John came in. He stood eyeing their questioning faces absently for a moment, his mind clearly upon other things, but as he sat down he addressed the girl.

“We brought him up, Gina, because he couldn’t possibly stay down there.”

“But of course not. Of course not,” she said, her deep voice rising a little. “What’s the matter with you all? Of course they must bring him to his home. I’ll go to him.”

Mike stood in her path and she looked up at him.

“You’re not protecting me, you’re frightening me,” she said, and swung round to John. “Where did it happen, John? Where has he been all this time?”

“In the strong room.” He still spoke impersonally, his mind preoccupied.

“In the strong room?” The girl repeated the words as though she doubted her senses. “But I thought that place was kept locked; locked from the outside and the key in Curley’s desk.”

John blinked at her. “It’s all very terrible, I admit, my dear, but there are so many things to think of besides details.”

Gina sat down suddenly. The change in her face was extraordinary. She looked haggard, blue-shadowed and years older.

“Mike,” she said unsteadily, “you were down there last night.”

“In the strong room? Were you really, Mr. Wedgwood? You must excuse me, but this is very curious indeed, isn’t it?”

Little Doctor Roe stepped forward from the doorway, where he had been hesitating for the past few moments.

“Doctor, this is Mrs. Brande.” John’s voice was gently reproving.

The little man was pulled up short. He looked uncomfortable.

“Er—quite, quite; I see. Er—may I say how extremely sorry I am, madam? I am afraid you must have had a very great shock.” Doctor Roe’s best professional manner was to the fore as he pressed Gina’s hand, but he returned to Mike immediately.

“You went down to the strong room last night?” he repeated.

“Yes, Doctor, I did.” Mike’s tone sounded over-friendly in his eagerness to explain. “Yes, I did. I went down for a folder for my cousin. I took the key out of the desk where it is always kept, unlocked the door, found the book, relocked the place and put the key back and hurried up here. I was only in there for a second but I—I didn’t see anything.”

There was a long pause. The doctor’s eyes had become like John’s, veiled and introspective.

“Well,” he said after what seemed an interminable silence, “there will be certain formalities, you understand.” He coughed.

“Formalities?” John looked up. “I don’t quite understand. What was the cause of death, Doctor?”

The professional man hesitated. “I shouldn’t like to commit myself just now,” he murmured at last. “My opinion will be tested by post-mortem before the inquest.”

“Inquest?” John stiffened. “Really? Surely that’s not necessary in a case like this?”

The authoritative tone somehow saved the question from sounding absurd.

The little doctor stood like a Trojan on the one piece of ground he knew to be firm.

“Mr. Widdowson,” he said, “I did not attend your cousin before his death. I am not at all sure how he died and I am afraid I must refuse to grant a certificate.”

“And what exactly does that mean?” John’s tone was, if anything, slightly contemptuous.

The doctor looked profoundly uncomfortable.

“The case will automatically come under the cognizance of the Coroner as an uncertified death,” he said slowly. “I—er—I am afraid I can do nothing more.”

He still hovered, his eyes beneath their heavy brows interested and bright.

Gina pulled herself together with an effort.

“Doctor,” she said, “I think I will go to my husband. Will you come with me, please?”

She moved quickly out of the room, the little man at her heels.

Mike strode restlessly up and down. The cousins were not communicative as a family and a crisis did not loosen their tongues. John remained silent for some considerable time. Finally he said:

“Inquest, eh? How extremely like Paul—flamboyant to the end.”

Mike stared at him, but he went on in a perfectly normal tone:

“Ring down to Miss Curley, will you? Tell her to come up here herself and bring a notebook.”

Mike hesitated, opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it and went out obediently. He had just finished phoning in the little booth at the far end of the hall when the doctor and Gina came out of the spare room. He hung back to wait for her.

The little man was all kindliness.

“Leave it all to me, Mrs. Brande,” he said, holding her hand. “I quite understand. The shock has been very great. Don’t worry. Leave it all to me.”

It passed through Mike’s mind that Gina was like that. There was something essentially feminine about her, something that inspired a spirit of protection in the most unlikely breasts. However, there was nothing shrinking about her as she came hurrying down the corridor towards him.

“Oh, Mike, what has happened?” she demanded. “What are you and John doing? What are you hiding?”

“Hiding? My dear girl—” Mike was aghast. “You must forgive old John,” he went on hastily. “He’s much more knocked up than he shows, and after all, the firm does mean such a lot to him that he can’t help thinking of it even at a time like this.”

The girl placed her hand on his arm and looked up into his eyes.

“Mike,” she said, “I do believe you actually mean all this rubbish. My dear, don’t you see, the doctor won’t give a certificate. He’s not satisfied. How could he be in the circumstances? How could you be? How could I be? I’ve asked him to report to the Coroner. He was obviously going to anyway. Oh, Mike, are you listening to me? Do you understand?”

“I only know that this ghastly thing has happened to you, of all people,” he said. “Look here, Gina, don’t get alarmed. We’ll fix it somehow so that you don’t have to go to the damned inquest.”

The girl passed her hand over her forehead.

“Oh—oh, dear God!” she whispered, and crumpled at his feet.

Mike carried her into her bedroom.

It was over three quarters of an hour later when Mr. Rigget came creeping up the stairs. John held up his hand warningly as Mrs. Austin showed the excited young man into the room. It was one of John’s peculiarities that he regarded himself as the undisputed owner of any room in the two buildings, and the fact that he was now using his bereaved cousin-in-law’s studio as an office did not strike him as being in any way unfitting or extraordinary.

“... suddenly at his place of business, Miss Curley,” he was saying. “Funeral arrangements later. That’s for the Times, Morning Post and Telegraph. The other paragraph Mr. Pelham can send out to the places he best thinks fit. Mr. Rigget, what do you want?”

The final phrase was uttered in such a complete change of tone that Miss Curley started violently. But Peter Rigget was not quelled. For one of the few times in his life he was the bearer of important news.

“Mr. Widdowson,” he burst out, “there are two men at the office asking for you. I slipped out through the garden and came up the back way to warn you.”

“To warn me?” John eyed the young man with a nice admixture of distaste and astonishment. “What are you talking about? What two men?”

“Well, sir,” said Mr. Rigget flatly, cheated of his drama, “one of them’s a Coroner’s Officer and the other is a plain-clothes man. They only send the plain-clothes man, sir, when it’s—serious.”