Читать книгу Police at the Funeral - Margery Allingham - Страница 8

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Mr Campion was not a naturally early riser, and when he descended the stairs the next morning he found that not only had Marcus preceded him, but that he was already entertaining a caller in the breakfast-room. Campion, who was fully aware that this was a most unusual proceeding at Soul’s Court, was somewhat startled to see a bright-eyed, red-haired little squirrel of a young woman regarding him quizzically over a cup of coffee. Marcus, less formal than he had ever known him, was comparatively vivacious. He looked up as Campion came in and introduced the stranger.

‘This is Miss Ann Held, Campion,’ he said. ‘Ann, this is the man we’re relying on to get us out of all our troubles.’

‘For Heaven’s sake!’ said Miss Ann Held politely. ‘How d’you do?’

She was little more than twenty-five, and pretty in animation, if her features were more unusual than conventionally beautiful. She was so completely at ease and so startlingly American that Mr Campion understood the total absence of any stiffness which might have been occasioned by the unconventional calling hour. As he sat down Miss Held explained her appearance with ingenuous friendliness.

‘I saw the papers this morning,’ she said, ‘so I came right round to ask Marcus if there was anything I could do for Joyce. She’s one of my best friends here. You see, there’s no phone at that house, and I can’t very well call. They won’t want strangers about the place with this terrible business upon them.’

Marcus chimed in. ‘I’ve been explaining to Ann that I’d be awfully grateful if she’d ask Joyce to stay with her until this thing is over,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a bad idea of William Faraday’s.’

Mr Campion made no comment. Uncle William’s solicitude for Joyce’s comfort had struck him as remarkable in such a blatantly selfish man.

‘I’ve been telling Marcus,’ Miss Held continued, her bright brown eyes flickering at Campion, ‘I’ll certainly ask her, but I don’t think for a minute that she’ll come. Unless maybe Marcus put his foot down.’ She glanced at the other man and smiled mischievously. ‘And I doubt if even such a product of England’s finest educational system would dare do a thing like that nowadays, with us women getting so wild.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Mr Campion mildly. ‘Marcus has had his moments. Who supplied the statue of Henry the Eighth in Ignatius Square with one of the most useful products of a new domestic civilization? A feat, moreover, which had not been attempted since the time when my venerable uncle, the Bishop of Devizes, did it in a fog, disguised as Mrs Bloomer, then visiting the country. The lad has stamina.’

Marcus looked at Campion in scandalized reproach. ‘If we’re going into reminiscences,’ he said warningly, ‘as I sincerely hope we’re not, I could unfold a tale or so.’

Mr Campion looked blandly innocent and Miss Held laughed.

‘I just take that as another evidence of Marcus’s mania for doing the right thing,’ she said. ‘It’s more than an instinct with you, Marcus—it’s a passion. Well, we’ll leave it that you’re to tell Joyce that I’m dying to see her, which is perfectly true. Of course, I don’t want to butt in, but you know if there’s ever anything I can do, the line’s just got to be indicated and I’ll be off down it like a rabbit.’

She spoke with perfect sincerity, and Mr Campion beamed upon her approvingly. As far as he could see, really attractive characters in this affair were going to be scarce, and it was delightful to find one at the breakfast-table so unexpectedly on the first morning of his arrival.

It was at this point that the door of the room was opened with scant ceremony, and instead of the gaunt and rheumatic Harriet it was Joyce herself who appeared on the threshold.

At the first sight of her the three young people rose to meet her. She was incredibly pale and seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

‘Why, child, whatever is the matter?’ Ann Held put her arm round the girl’s waist and drew her into a chair.

Joyce took a deep breath. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘It’s—it’s Aunt Julia.’

Marcus paused in the act of pouring out a cup of coffee for her. ‘Julia?’ he demanded. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘She’s dead,’ said Joyce explosively, and began to cry.

There was silence in the room for a moment while the other three assimilated the shock. The practical-minded Ann Held came to the most natural conclusion.

‘Poor dear,’ she said. ‘I suppose all this business affected her heart.’

Joyce blew her nose violently. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘She’s been poisoned, I think. Great-aunt Caroline sent me down to tell you.’

Her voice died away in the room, which seemed suddenly to have become very cold. The horror of this bald announcement, coming in the very midst of the drama of Andrew Seeley’s death, had, temporarily at any rate, a numbing effect. This was a development that neither Campion nor Marcus had considered.

Campion, who had never seen Julia, and was therefore only impersonally moved by Joyce’s announcement, took command of the situation.

‘I say,’ he said soothingly, ‘do you think you could tell us about it?’

Joyce pulled herself together before his quiet matter-of-fact tone and wiped her eyes.

‘I don’t know when it happened,’ she said. ‘Last night, I suppose, or early this morning. When Alice went to call her at seven o’clock this morning she was sleeping so soundly that she couldn’t wake her. Thinking she was probably overtired, she let her sleep on. She didn’t come down to breakfast at eight, and afterwards—about half-past—I took her some food on a tray. As soon as I entered the room I saw she was ill. She was breathing horribly, making the most dreadful noise, and the whites of her eyes were showing. I took the food away and sent young Christmas—that’s old Christmas’s son, the one who drives the car—down to fetch Doctor Lavrock. He was rather late coming. They got the message muddled or something, and the doctor stayed to see another patient on the way. When he did arrive it was about half-past nine, I suppose. She must have died practically the moment he came into the room. Aunt Kitty and I were with her.’

She paused breathlessly and they waited patiently for her to continue.

Joyce went on, eager to get the story out. ‘She never spoke and never seemed to wake up. The breathing just stopped, that was all. The dreadful part was that great-aunt didn’t even know she was ill. You see, she never gets up until eleven o’clock, and we hadn’t thought it was serious enough to disturb her before.’

‘What makes you say it was poisoning?’ demanded Marcus suddenly.

‘Dr Lavrock,’ said Joyce. ‘He didn’t say so in so many words, but it was quite obvious what he thought from the first moment he came in. You know him, don’t you, Marcus? This isn’t old Lavrock, the “veteran doctor of Cambridge”. This is his second son, the one with the beard. He’s known the family ever since he was a child; nowadays old Lavrock only comes to see great-aunt, and this one—Henry—looks after the rest of the family. He took one look at Julia this morning, examined her eyes, and promptly turned Aunt Kitty, who was practically in hysterics anyhow and in floods of tears, out of the room.

‘Then he turned on me and said quite angrily: “When did you find this out?” I told him—exactly what I told you. Then he asked me if she’d been depressed at all lately, and if Uncle Andrew’s death had upset her and—well, I had to tell him that it had simply made no difference to her at all, and that if anything she was rather acidly glad about it.’ She shuddered. ‘It was horrible, with her lying there dead. He asked me a lot of other questions. If she’d had any breakfast. I told him no. I’d carried some up to her, and it was then that I’d found her so ill, and therefore I’d taken it down with me again.

‘Then he started asking the most obvious things. Had anyone received a note from her? And we looked round the room together to see if there was a note. While we were doing this Alice came in with a message from Great-aunt Caroline, asking us both to go to her room immediately. The doctor posted Alice outside Aunt Julia’s door with instructions to let no one go in, and when we got there we found that she’d been talking to Kitty, and knew practically as much about it as we did. The doctor was very straightforward, although, of course, he couldn’t be snappy with great-aunt. She took it amazingly calmly, sitting up in her great canopy bed, in a big lace cap. It was when the doctor said he’d have to report the matter at once to the coroner’s officer that she sent me down here for your father, Marcus, and if he wasn’t back I was to fetch you. She also said that if Mr Campion was here she’d be very pleased to see him. I suppose Uncle William must have talked about you to her when he came in last night.’

She glanced at the other girl.

‘You’d better keep away from us, Ann. This is going to be a terrible scandal. I’m as sure as I’m here that Aunt Julia never committed suicide. She wasn’t that sort. Besides, the last thing she said to me last night was that I was to see that Ellen—that’s the cook—“didn’t let her hysteria over affairs that didn’t concern her interfere with the culinary arrangements, and would I see that the bread sauce was better made tomorrow than it was this evening.” Whatever you do, you mustn’t get mixed up in this.’

Ann snorted. ‘Don’t talk any more nonsense like that,’ she said. ‘If you expect anyone to go high-hat over a misfortune like this, you’re on the wrong track where I’m concerned. I know it’s no good asking you to come and stay with me now, but if at any time of the night or day you want to get away from it, come right round. I’ll never forgive you if there’s anything I can do and you don’t ask me.’

While the girls were talking Campion and Marcus prepared for departure. In the hall the young lawyer caught his friend’s eye.

‘Joyce thinks it’s murder,’ he said dryly.

Mr Campion made no comment. In a few moments the girls joined them and they all piled into the huge old-fashioned car. They dropped Ann in King’s Parade and hurried on. The shock seemed to have silenced Joyce after her first outburst, for she sat huddled up beside Marcus, who was driving, and said nothing until they were safely in the drive leading up to Socrates Close.

In the morning sun the old house looked much less forbidding than it had done the night before. The virginia creeper and ivy had softened the severity of the actual building and it was spruce and well-kept in the Victorian manner, a rarity in these days of expensive labour.

The doctor’s runabout stood before the door, and they pulled up short to avoid it. A plump middle-aged woman in a cap and apron admitted them. She was a little dishevelled and had evidently been crying. She greeted Joyce with a watery smile.

‘Mrs Faraday isn’t down yet, miss,’ she said in a whisper. ‘She said would the gentleman wait for her in the morning-room. But Mr William and his sister are there.’

‘That’ll be all right, Alice,’ Joyce spoke wearily.

The hall they had entered was large and gloomy. Nevertheless, the house exuded a solid Victorian welcome, a welcome of Turkey carpets and mediocre oil-paintings in ample gilt frames, of red damask wallpapers and the sober magnificence of heavy brass ornaments. But to two of the young people at least all this was subdued into a feeling of oppression: they knew the history of its inmates, and for them this great comfortable dwelling was a place of unknown horrors, of strange lumber from the lives of the family which had lived there ever since it had been built. To them it was a hot-bed, a breeding ground of those dark offshoots of the civilized mind which the scientists tell us are the natural outcome of repressions and inhibitions. To them the old house was undergoing an upheaval, a volcano of long fermented trouble, and they were afraid of what they were about to find.

They were taking off their things when the door opposite them opened and Uncle William’s puffy red face appeared in the opening. He came forward with slightly exaggerated affability.

‘I’m glad to see you—both of you,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ve heard our terrible news? Julia now. Come in, will you? I believe my mother’ll be down in a moment or two. She’s upstairs just now talking to Doctor Lavrock. I suppose the man knows his business.’

He escorted them into a room that would have been sunlit had it not been for the light Holland blinds drawn down over the two windows which faced the drive. This, it was evident, was the main family sitting-room. Originally intended for a breakfast-room, it naturally retained a great deal of its original furniture. The mahogany breakfast table and sideboard shone as only well-cared-for mahogany can shine. The glazed chintz was slightly faded with much washing, and there were dents in the green leather arm-chairs by the immense marble fireplace which suggested long use, each by its own particular owner. Here were water-colours, old-fashioned too, whose naïve charm was bringing them rapidly back into fashion.

Uncle William, in carpet slippers, seemed a shabbier, less bounding figure in the morning light, and his military air had almost entirely vanished.

‘Here’s Kitty,’ he said, adding in a bellowed whisper: ‘I’ve been trying to comfort her, poor creature.’

Aunt Kitty, quite as much flustered by the thought of meeting strangers red-eyed as by her tragic experience of the morning, rose from a low chair by the fire. She was a pathetic little woman, much older than her years, which were less than sixty. She was a fussy little person, fussily clothed in a black frock with tiny ruffles at the neck and sleeves. She was, too, the only woman Campion had ever seen in his life who wore a large gold watch attached by a bow-shaped gold brooch to her hollow bosom. Her eyes were red, as also was the tip of her nose, the only part of her face which was not wrinkled. She exuded an air of down-trodden virtue, an example of one who has carried gentleness to excess.

She shook hands with Campion without looking at him and turned to Marcus, her handkerchief much in evidence.

‘My dear boy, this is terrible,’ she said. ‘Poor Julia, last night so full of strength and vigour, so dominant, such a tower of strength to us all, and today lying on her bed upstairs—’ She swallowed noisily and the little lace handkerchief went to her eyes again.

The situation, although an awkward one, could have been handled perfectly by Marcus had it not been for the untimely attitude adopted by Uncle William.

‘Come, come, Kitty,’ he said, planting himself squarely in front of the fire and resuming some of his erstwhile bluster. ‘We all know that Julia’s death has been a bit of a shock, but we don’t want to be hypocritical. I won’t say I’m not shaken, and I’m sorry, too. Damn it all, she was my sister. Julia had too much of a dominant personality not to be missed. But she was an infernally bad-tempered old woman. Let’s face the facts.’

Aunt Kitty took her handkerchief from her eyes and turned upon her brother. She looked distressingly like a rabbit at bay. Her pale cheeks were faintly flushed with pink, and her red-rimmed blue eyes gleamed with righteous indignation as she dragged up the last ounce of spirit in her composition to meet this outrage upon the decencies.

‘Willie!’ she said. ‘Your own sister! Lying dead on her bed upstairs, and you speaking of her as you never would have dared to have spoken of her had she been alive to hear you!’

Uncle William had the grace to look discomforted, but his was not the temperament to accept these reproaches with dignity or even politeness. He blew out his cheeks, therefore, raised himself once or twice on his toes, and blared at Kitty, who was already more than a little astonished at her own temerity.

‘I’d say anything to Julia’s face,’ he said. ‘Always have done. She was a damned bad-tempered old harpy! And so was Andrew—they were a pair. This house will be a sight quieter without the two of ’em. Answer that if you can. And don’t call me “Willie”.’

Marcus, who was acutely embarrassed by this display of nerves and that offensive lack of consideration for others which one so often finds in family emergencies, turned away and contemplated the faded water-colour of the old gateway at Ignatius, but Mr Campion remained looking at the brother and sister with his usual expression of friendly stupidity.

Aunt Kitty wavered, but having defied her brother once, she seemed unable to stop.

‘Julia was a good woman,’ she said. ‘Better than you’ll ever be, William. And I won’t listen to you befouling her dear memory. It isn’t as though she’d been buried. What you’ll come to, Willie, with no religion to help you, I don’t like to think.’

Uncle William exploded. He was liverish, his nerves were on edge, and like so many men of his type he regarded his immortal soul as something physical and indecent.

‘Call me what you like, Kitty,’ he blared, ‘but I won’t stand hypocrisy. You can’t deny the sort of life Julia led you. You can’t deny that she went out of her way to annoy Andrew and myself with a venomous tongue and darned greedy habits. Who used to have The Times sent straight up to her room and kept it there until three o’clock in the afternoon? She never shut a door after her in her life, and if there was any kind of offensive muck-raking to be done, she did it.’

Aunt Kitty summoned all her frail forces for one last retort.

‘Well,’ she said, her little body shaking with wrath at this outrage to all her instincts, ‘at least she never got secretly—inebriated.’

Uncle William stood petrified. There was a hunted expression in his little blue eyes as they glared at her balefully from his flaming face. When his complete suffocation appeared to be no longer probable, he recovered his voice on a note clearly louder and higher than he had intended.

‘That’s a damned lie!’ he said. ‘A damned ill-natured lie! A prejudicial lie. You’ve got a poisoned mind, my girl. Haven’t we got enough trouble as it is without trying to saddle me with a trumped-up charge—’ His voice cracked and was silent.

Before this tirade Aunt Kitty suddenly crumpled. Sitting down abruptly in one of the high-backed chairs by the table, her eyes turned up and her mouth opening, she emitted the horrible pain-filled laugh of hysteria and sat there rocking to and fro, the tears streaming down her face, while Uncle William, forgetting himself entirely, shouted at her in a lunatic attempt to silence her.

It was Mr Campion who stepped forward, and seizing one of the old lady’s hands, smacked it hard; at the same time admonishing her in a tone utterly unlike his usual inconsequential murmur.

Marcus advanced upon Uncle William with no very clear plan in his mind, while Joyce assisted Mr Campion.

It was at this psychological moment when the noise was at its height that the door swept open and Great-aunt Faraday appeared upon the threshold.

One cannot have an imperious personality for over eighty years without developing at least traces of the grand manner. Mrs Caroline Faraday, widow of Dr John Faraday, Master of Ignatius, had the grand manner itself.

She was an old woman of striking appearance without any of the ugliness which great age so often brings to a masterful countenance.

It is worthy of note that two seconds after her appearance the room was in complete silence. She was very small, but surprisingly upright. It seemed to Mr Campion’s fascinated gaze that the major portion of her body was composed of some sort of complicated structure of whale-bone beneath her stiff black silk gown. Around her tiny shoulders she wore a cape of cream rose point, and the soft web was caught at her throat by a large cornelian brooch. Her serene old face, in which black eyes gleamed as brightly as ever they had done, was surrounded by a short scarf of the same lace worn coif-fashion and held in place by a broad black velvet ribbon.

This display of lace was perhaps her only weakness. She possessed a vast collection and wore examples from it perpetually. During the whole of the terrible time which was to follow, Mr Campion, who had an eye for such things, never saw her wear the same piece twice.

At the moment she held a thin black walking-stick in one hand and a large blue cup and saucer in the other.

She looked like a small eagle as she stood in the doorway glancing from one to the other of them standing before her like the naughty children she considered them.

‘Good morning,’ she said in a voice which Campion found surprisingly youthful. ‘Tell me, is it necessary to make so much noise defending yourself, William? I heard you as I came downstairs. Must I remind you that there is death in the house?’

After an uncomfortable pause Marcus stepped forward. To his relief Mrs Faraday smiled at him.

‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. ‘Your father is still away, I suppose? Did you bring Mr Campion?’

There was no wavering. Here was a woman completely in possession of her faculties.

Marcus ushered Mr Campion forward and the introduction was made. Since Mrs Faraday had her stick in one hand and the cup and saucer in the other, she made no attempt to shake hands, but bowed graciously, granting the young man one of her rare smiles.

‘In a minute,’ she said, ‘I want you both to come into my writing-room. But before that there is just this matter of the tea-cup. We are all here, so perhaps it were better if it were made clear now. I have already spoken to the servants. Will you shut the door, Marcus?’

She advanced into the room, a frail but completely commanding figure.

‘Joyce,’ she said, ‘give me one of the little mats, will you?’

The girl opened a drawer in the sideboard and took out a small circle of embroidered canvas. When this had been placed over the polished surface of the table, Great-aunt Caroline put the cup and saucer down upon it.

‘That,’ she said quietly, but with a distinct touch of reproof in her tone, ‘I found myself in Julia’s room. It was just under the bed valance. I found it with my cane and Alice picked it up. It appears to have contained tea.’

They were all still upon their feet, and from his position on the old lady’s right Mr Campion was able to see a few dregs and tea-leaves in the bottom of the cup. The inquisitorial atmosphere rather surprised him, and he did not at first understand the air of domestic friction, the hint of a breach in the household routine. Still less was he prepared for the immediate results of Mrs Faraday’s inquiry.

Aunt Kitty, who until now had remained quietly sniffing into her handkerchief, suddenly burst into piteous and embarrassing tears. She came forward and stood fidgeting before her mother.

‘I did it,’ she said tragically. ‘I made the tea.’

Great-aunt Caroline remained silent, no third person in the room would have dared to have spoken, and Aunt Kitty continued humbly.

‘Julia liked her cup of tea in the morning,’ she said pathetically, ‘and so do I. I got used to it when my poor Robert was alive. He liked it, too. Julia suggested—no, well, perhaps it wasn’t she—but one of us thought that although morning tea isn’t served here we shouldn’t be doing any harm if I bought a little kettle and a small spirit stove from Boots, and made the tea in my room every morning before Alice brought in the hot water. We’ve done this for two years now. Every morning I made the tea and took a cup in to Julia in my dressing-gown and bedroom slippers. I took it in to Julia this morning. She—she was quite well then. Oh, Mamma! if she put anything in her tea and drank it up I never shall forgive myself, I never shall.’

At the end of this remarkable revelation there was another outburst of sobbing, in which Joyce vainly tried to comfort her. Great-aunt Caroline regarded her daughter with a mixture of disapproval, astonishment and scorn. At last she turned to Joyce.

‘My dear,’ she said quietly, ‘take your aunt up to her room, and if Dr Lavrock is still in the house, ask him to give her a sedative.’

But Aunt Kitty had not plumbed the depths of her self-abasement yet. Like many down-trodden people she had a strong, if somewhat misguided, sense of the dramatic.

‘Mother,’ she said, ‘forgive me. You must say you forgive me. I shan’t be myself again until I know that.’

If old Mrs Faraday had been physically capable of blushing, doubtless she would have done so. As it was, her finely crumbled skin took on a deeper shade of ivory and her bright black eyes were embarrassed.

‘Catherine, my dear,’ she said, ‘you are evidently not at all well. Surreptitious early morning tea is not the matter which is worrying Dr Lavrock or myself at the moment.’ She turned away. ‘Marcus, I want you to carry that cup very carefully for me. Mr Campion, your arm, if you please. William, you will oblige me by remaining here until I send for you.’