Читать книгу Death at the Bar - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 9

Watchman, with his cousin for company, ate his lobster in the private taproom. There is a parlour at the Feathers but nobody ever uses it. The public and the private taprooms fit into each other like two L’s, the first standing sideways on the tip of its short base, the second facing backwards to the left. The bar proper is common to both. It occupies the short leg of the Public, has a counter for each room and faces the short leg of the Private. The top of the long leg forms a magnificent ingle-nook flanked with settles and scented with three hundred years of driftwood smoke. Opposite the ingle-nook at the bottom angle of the L hangs a dart board made by Abel Pomeroy himself. There, winter and summer alike, the Pomeroys’ chosen friends play for drinks. There is a board in the Public for the rank and file. If strangers to the Feathers choose to play in the Private, the initiates wait until they have finished. If the initiates invite a stranger to play, he is no longer a stranger.

The midsummer evening was chilly and a fire smouldered in the ingle-nook. Watchman finished his supper, swung his legs up on the settle, and felt for his pipe. He squinted up at Sebastian Parish, who leant against the mantelpiece in an attitude familiar to every West End playgoer in London.

‘I like this place,’ Watchman said. ‘Extradordinarily pleasant, isn’t it, returning to a place one likes?’

Parish made an actor’s expressive gesture.

‘Marvellous!’ he said richly. ‘To get away from everything! The noise! The endless racket! The artificiality! God, how I loathe my profession!’

‘Come off it, Seb,’ said Watchman. ‘You glory in it. You were born acting. The gamp probably burst into an involuntary round of applause on your first entrance and I bet you played your mother right off the stage.’

‘All the same, old boy, this good clean air means a hell of a lot to me.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Watchman dryly. His cousin had a trick of saying things that sounded a little like quotations from an interview with himself. Watchman was amused rather than irritated by this mannerism. It was part and parcel, he thought, of Seb’s harmless staginess, like his clothes which were too exactly what a gentleman, roughing it in South Devon, ought to wear. He liked to watch Seb standing out on Coombe Rock, bareheaded to the breeze, in effect waiting for the camera man to say ‘OK for sound.’ No doubt that was the pose Norman had chosen for his portrait of Sebastian. It occurred to him now that Sebastian was up to something. That speech about the artificiality of the stage was the introduction to a confidence, or Watchman didn’t know his Parish. Whatever it was, Sebastian missed his moment. The door opened and a thin man with untidy fair hair looked in.

‘Hallo!’ said Watchman. ‘Our distinguished artist.’ Norman Cubitt grinned, lowered his painter’s pack, and came into the ingle-nook.

‘Well, Luke? Good trip?’

‘Splendid! You’re painting already?’ Cubitt stretched a hand to the fire. The fingers were grimed with paint.

‘I’m doing a thing of Seb,’ he said. ‘I suppose he’s told you about it. Laying it on with a trowel, I am. That’s in the morning. Tonight I started a thing down by the jetty. They’re patching up one of the posts. Very pleasant subject, but my treatment of it so far is bloody.’

‘Are you painting in the dark?’ asked Watchman with a smile.

‘I was talking to one of the fishing blokes after the light went. They’ve gone all politically-minded in the Coombe.’

‘That,’ said Parish, lowering his voice, ‘is Will Pomeroy and his Left Group.’

‘Will and Decima together,’ said Cubitt. ‘I’ve suggested they call themselves the Decimbrists.’

‘Where are the lads of the village?’ demanded Watchman. ‘I thought I heard the dart game in progress as I went upstairs.’

‘Abel’s rat-poisoning in the garage,’ said Parish. ‘They’ve all gone out to see he doesn’t give himself a lethal dose of prussic acid.’

‘Good Lord!’ Watchman ejaculated. ‘Is the old fool playing around with cyanide?’

‘Apparently. Why wouldn’t we have a drink?’

‘Why not indeed?’ agreed Cubitt. ‘Hi, Will!’

He went to the bar and leant over it, looking into the Public.

‘The whole damn place is deserted. I’ll get our drinks and chalk them up. Beer?’

‘Beer it is,’ said Parish.

‘What form of cyanide has Abel got hold of?’ Watchman asked.

‘Eh?’ said Parish vaguely. ‘Oh, let’s see now. I fetched it for him from Illington. The chemist hadn’t got any of the stock rat-banes, but he poked round and found this stuff. I think he called it Scheele’s acid.’

‘Good, God!’

‘What? Yes, that was it – Scheele’s acid. And then he said he thought the fumes of Scheele’s acid mightn’t be strong enough, so he gingered it up a bit.’

‘With what, in the name of all the Borgias?’

‘Well – with prussic acid, I imagine.’

‘You imagine! You imagine!’

‘He said that was what it was. He said it was acid or something. I wouldn’t know. He warned me in sixteen different positions to be careful. Suggested Abel wore a half-crown gas mask, so I bought it in case Abel hadn’t got one. Abel’s using gloves and everything.’

‘It’s absolutely monstrous!’

‘I had to sign for it, old boy,’ said Parish. ‘Very solemn we were. God, he was a stupid man! Bone from the eyes up, but so, so kind.’

Watchman said angrily, ‘I should damn well think he was stupid. Do you know that twenty-five drops of Scheele’s acid will kill a man in a few minutes? Why, good Lord, in Rex v. Bull, if I’m not mistaken, it was alleged that accused gave only seven drops. I myself defended a medical student who gave twenty minims in error. Charge of manslaughter. I got him off but – how’s Abel using it?’

‘What’s all this?’ inquired Cubitt. ‘There’s your beer.’

‘Abel said he was going to put it in a pot and shove it in a rathole,’ explained Parish. ‘I think he’s filled with due respect for its deadliness, Luke, really. He’s going to block the hole up and everything.’

‘The chemist had no business to give you Scheele’s, much less this infernal brew. He ought to be struck off the books. The pharmacopœial preparation would have been quite strong enough. He could have diluted even that to advantage.’

‘Well, God bless us,’ said Cubitt hastily, and took a pull at his beer.

‘What happens, actually, when someone’s poisoned by prussic acid?’ asked Parish.

‘Convulsion, clammy sweat, and death.’

‘Shut up!’ said Cubitt. ‘What a filthy conversation!’

‘Well – cheers, dear,’ said Parish, raising his tankard.

‘You do get hold of the most repellent idioms, Seb,’ said his cousin. ‘Te saluto.’

‘But not moriturus, I trust,’ added Parish. ‘With all this chat about prussic acid! What’s it look like?’

‘You bought it.’

‘I didn’t notice. It’s a blue bottle.’

‘Hydrocyanic acid,’ said Watchman with his barrister’s precision, ‘is, in appearance, exactly like water. It is a liquid miscible with water and this stuff is a dilution of hydrocyanic acid.’

‘The chemist,’ said Parish, ‘put a terrific notice on it. I remember I once had to play a man who’d taken cyanide. “Fool’s Errand,” the piece was; a revival with whiskers on it, but not a bad old drama. I died in a few seconds.’

‘For once the dramatist was right,’ said Watchman. ‘It’s one of the sudden poisons. Horrible stuff! I’ve got cause to know it. I was once briefed in a case where a woman took –’

‘For God’s sake,’ interrupted Norman Cubitt violently, ‘Shut up, both of you, I’ve got a poison phobia.’

‘Have you really, Norman?’ asked Parish. ‘That’s very interesting. Can you trace it?’

‘I think so.’ Cubitt rubbed his hair and then looked absentmindedly at his paint-grimed hand. ‘As a matter of fact, my dear Seb,’ he said, with his air of secretly mocking at himself, ‘you have named the root and cause of my affection. You have perpetrated a coincidence, Sebastian. The very play you mentioned just now, started me off on my Freudian road to the jim-jams. “Fool’s Errand,” and well named. It is, as you say, a remarkably naîve play. At the age of seven, however, I did not think so. I found it terrifying.’

‘At the age of seven?’

‘Yes. My eldest brother, poor fool, fancied himself as an amateur and essayed the principal part. I was bullied into enacting the small boy who, as I remember, perpetually bleated: “Papa, why is mamma so pale” and later on: “Papa, why is mamma so quiet? Where has she gone, papa?”’

‘We cut all that in the revival,’ said Parish. ‘It was terrible stuff.’

‘I agree with you. As you remember, papa had poisoned mamma. For years afterwards I had the horrors at the very word. I remember that I used to wipe all the schoolroom china for fear our Miss Tobin was a Borgian governess. I invented all sorts of curious devices in order that Miss Tobin should drink my morning cocoa and I hers. Odd, wasn’t it? I grew out of it but I still dislike the sound of the word and I detest taking medicine labelled in accordance with the Pure Food Act.’

‘Labelled what?’ asked Parish with a wink at Watchman.

‘Labelled poison, damn you,’ said Cubitt.

Watchman looked curiously at him.

‘I suppose there’s something in this psycho-stuff,’ he said. ‘But I always rather boggle at it.’

‘I don’t see why you should,’ said Parish. ‘You yourself get a fit of the staggers if you scratch your finger. You told me once, you fainted when you had a blood test. That’s a phobia, same as Norman’s.’

‘Not quite,’ said Watchman. ‘Lots of people can’t stand the sight of their own blood. This poison scare’s much more unusual. But you don’t mean to tell me, do you, Norman, that because at an early age you helped your brother in a play about cyanide you’d feel definitely uncomfortable if I finished my story?’

Cubitt drained his tankard and set it down on the table.

‘If you’re hell-bent on your beastly story –’ he said.

‘It was only that I was present at the autopsy on this woman who died of cyanide poisoning. When they opened her up, I fainted. Not from emotion but from the fumes. The pathologist said I had a pronounced idiosyncrasy for the stuff. I was damned ill after it. It nearly did for me.’

Cubitt wandered over to the door and lifted his pack.

‘I’ll clean up,’ he said, ‘and join you for the dart game.’

‘Splendid, old boy,’ said Parish. ‘We’ll beat them tonight.’

‘Do our damnedst anyway,’ said Cubitt. At the doorway he turned and looked mournfully at Parish.

‘She’s asking about perspective,’ he said.

‘Give her rat-poison,’ said Parish.

‘Shut up,’ said Cubitt and went out.

‘What was he talking about?’ demanded Watchman.

Parish smiled. ‘He’s got a girl-friend. Wait till you see. Funny chap! He went quite green over your story. Sensitive old beggar, isn’t he?’

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Watchman lightly. ‘I must say I’m sensitive in a rather different key where cyanide’s concerned, having been nearly killed by it.’

‘I don’t know you could have a – what did you call it?’

‘An idiosyncrasy?’

‘It means you’d go under to a very small amount?’

‘It does.’ Watchman yawned and stretched himself full length on the settle.

‘I’m sleepy,’ he said. ‘It’s the sea air. A very pleasant state of being. Just tired enough, with the impressions of a long drive still floating about behind one’s consciousness. Flying hedges, stretches of road that stream out before one’s eyes. The relaxation of arrival setting in. Very pleasant!’

He closed his eyes for a moment and then turned his head to look at his cousin.

‘So Decima Moore is still here,’ he said.

Parish smiled. ‘Very much so. But you’ll have to watch your step, Luke.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s an engagement in the offing.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Decima and Will Pomeroy.’

Watchman sat up.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said sharply.

‘Well – why not?’

‘Good Lord! A politically minded pot-boy.’

‘Actually they’re the same class,’ Parish murmured.

‘Perhaps; but she’s not of it.’

‘All the same –’

Watchman grimaced.

‘She’s a little fool,’ he said, ‘but you may be right,’ and lay back again. ‘Oh well!’ he added comfortably.

There was a moment’s silence.

‘There’s another female here,’ said Parish, and grinned.

‘Another? Who?’

‘Norman’s girl-friend of course. My oath!’

‘Why? What’s she like? Why are you grinning away like a Cheshire cat, Seb?’

‘My dear soul,’ said Parish, ‘if I could get that woman to walk on the boards every evening and do her stuff exactly as she does it here – well, of course! I’d go into management and die a millionaire.’

‘Who is she?’

‘She’s the Honourable Violet Darragh. She waters.’

‘She what?’

‘She does water-colours. Wait till you hear Norman on Violet.’

‘Is she a nuisance?’ asked Watchman apprehensively.

‘Not exactly. Well, in a way. Pure joy to me. Wait till you meet her.’

Parish would say no more about Miss Darragh, and Watchman, only mildly interested, relapsed into a pleasant doze.

‘By the way,’ he said presently, ‘some driving expert nearly dashed himself to extinction against my bonnet.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. At Diddlestock Corner. Came bucketing out of the blind turning on my right, beat me by a split second, and hung his silly little stern on my front bumpers. Ass!’

‘Any damage?’

‘No, no. He heaved his pygmy up by the bottom and I backed away. Funny sort of fellow he is.’

‘You knew him?’ asked Parish in surprise.

‘No.’ Watchman took the tip of his nose between thumb and forefinger. It was a gesture he used in cross-examination. ‘No, I don’t know him, and yet – there was something – I got the impression that he didn’t want to know me. Quite an educated voice. Labourer’s hands. False teeth, I rather fancy.’

‘You’re very observant,’ said Parish, lightly.

‘No more than the next man, but there was something about the fellow. I was going to ask if you knew him. His car’s in the garage.’

‘Surely it’s not – hallo, here are others.’

Boots and voices sounded in the public bar. Will Pomeroy came through and leant over the counter. He looked, not toward Watchman or Parish, but into a settle on the far side of the Private, a settle whose high back was towards them.

‘’Evening, Bob,’ said Will cordially. ‘Kept you waiting?’

‘That’s all right, Will,’ said a voice from beyond the settle. ‘I’ll have a pint of bitter when you’re ready.’

Luke Watchman uttered a stifled exclamation.

‘What’s up? asked his cousin.

‘Come here.’

Parish strolled nearer to him and, in obedience to a movement of Watchman’s head, stooped towards him.

‘What’s up?’ he repeated.

‘That’s the same fellow,’ muttered Watchman, ‘he must have been here all the time. That’s his voice.’

‘Hell!’ said Parish delightedly.

‘D’you think he heard?’

‘Of course he heard.’

‘Blast the creature! Serves him right.’

‘Shut up.’

The door into the private bar opened. Old Abel came in followed by Norman Cubitt. Cubitt took three darts from a collection in a pewter pot on the bar and moved in front of the dart board.

‘I’ll be there in a moment,’ said a woman’s voice from the passage. ‘Don’t start without me.’

Abel walked into the ingle-nook and put a bottle on the mantelpiece.

‘Well, souls,’ he said, ‘reckon we’m settled the hash of they vermin. If thurr’s not a corpse on the premises afore long, I’ll be greatly astonished.’