Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (30 page)

And it was all over, and finished. Nothing now could go wrong: there was no false move he could make. He had but to lift her up, go back to the bay with her, lay her down somewhere above the high-water mark and drive like a mad thing into Hartling—for they had no telephone at home—with the news. The very first informed eye to see her would recognise that she had long been dead.

Meanwhile, gasping, leaning back, spent, against the rock, while the little ripples washed their evidence over his wife’s dead body, face down in the sand at his feet—he forced himself to run through the whole thing in his mind, just to make sure. Black costume, white cap, all correct: Mrs. Butcher had seen her leave the house in them; the beach-robe would logically be up there somewhere on the dry sand. The bucket of sea-water had been emptied out and rinsed; and who would look for signs of a drowning under a clump of rhododendron bushes at their gate? His own hands and arms were free from scratches and the jacket had kept her unmarked by the struggle before death: anything after death might surely be accounted for by two hours of submersion, abraded by the rocks and the sand. He had examined the boot of the car to see that it held no signs of the rough journey to the bay; with every moment the tide was creeping up over such marks as he had made while he carried her down through the rocks. There was nothing to fear: nothing—even signs of agitation on his part would be accounted for by his natural distress. His wife had been seen to leave the house alive and well, he had been in Mrs. Butcher’s company for the following hour and a half; examination would prove that Elsa had been dead during most of that time. And if all else failed, if accident ever came to be doubted—still there was the scapegoat lover who could never clear himself of suspicion because in fact he had no existence. ‘All right,’ he said, grimly muttering to the still body lying at his feet, ‘a failure I may be and you’ve told me it, often enough. But not this time, my dear: not this time!’

And, sick with the effort of it, yet still resolutely strong, he picked her up and gathered her to him and, holding her in his arms, the white cap cradled against his shoulder like a lover with his lass, stepped out from behind the rock and to the beach.

Someone was there now. A small thin figure standing uncertainly at the top of the bay, looking out across the sea. And he saw that it was Mrs. Butcher. Well, all the better—just exactly what he needed. Curiosity alert, she would have gone home, thought it all over, crept back to do a bit of Peeping Tom and see what it was all about….And could now be a first-hand witness of the tragedy. He stood there, holding the lolling body cradled in his arms; and put on a face of grief and desperation as he waited for her advance.

And she advanced: screaming out suddenly, sharp and shrill, flying down the steep slope of the bank above and across the sands towards him: running, screeching—‘You brute, you filthy, cheating, lying beast, pretending you were working late; when all this time…!’ And she was upon him: and as beneath the violence of her assault he stumbled and half fell, spilling the body to the sands, plunged into his breast the kitchen knife she held in her hand.

And lay there for a moment, spread-eagled across him, tumbled over upon him by the violence of the knife thrust; and raised herself and looked down: and screamed out: ‘Fred? Oh, my God, it isn’t Fred! Oh, God, what have I done?’ And beat at the blood-drenched breast and cried: ‘But you told me it was Fred. You said he was there with her every night, making love to her you said; you said you
knew
. A big man, you said, dark and handsome—well, isn’t that Fred, what other man is there round here that looks like that?—only Fred.’ And as the red life-blood ebbed away, sinking into the white fleece, oozing out through the gashed tan leather above his heart, she sobbed: ‘And this is Fred’s jacket. The minute I saw it, I knew it, this—this horrible jacket of Fred’s…’

As Mrs. Fletcher-Store had long ago said, Mr. Fletcher-Store should have been more careful what he bought off strangers in pubs. And meanwhile…

Meanwhile:
hic jacet
. Here he lies.

L
INDA HARTLEY WAS SKIPPING
with the Bindell twins, singing, to the well-known old tune, a verse of their own improvisation: a game at which Joy and Roy were, through long practice, past-masters.

‘One, two, three and four,’ chirped Joy,

‘Father locks the office door.

Five, six, seven, eight—

He pretends he’s working late.’

She tripped over the rope and Roy leapt in.

‘Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—

He’s not working by himself!’

They all three stopped skipping and burst into giggles. Joy took the rope and skipped by herself, changing the theme.

‘Pig, dog, cat and cow

Mother knows and what a row!

Horse, goat, rat and boar—

I was listening at the door.’

Linda was not so accomplished as the twins at it but she took the rope and had a go herself.

‘Sun, moon, day and night

My parents also had a fight….’

But she gave up and resorted to prose. ‘My mother said my father had got to make
your
father make
your
mother get me into Hallfield.’ Hallfield was the posh girls’ school of Linda’s aspirations: Joy was going there in the summer term. Mrs. Bindell was on the Board of Governors and, since she disapproved of Linda and looked down upon her mother, only too likely to oppose her election.

‘Stove, grate, fire and hob,’ sang Linda, skipping again. ‘Your mother is an awful snob.’

‘Awful,’ agreed the twins, not singing. It must be ghastly for poor Linda, her father having married beneath him.

That Harold Hartley had married beneath him was acknowledged by one and all, not excluding Mrs. Hartley and himself. That he had had much the best of the bargain, occurred to none of them. Not that he was unkind to Louisa—not particularly; but he had always been a difficult, disagreeable man and of late had grown quite impossibly irritable—so ill-tempered and nervous and—suspicious; neurotic, Louisa supposed would be the word for it—he had even dug out an old war-time, smuggled-home revolver and kept it loaded in a drawer beside his bed. A nasty, black, ugly thing, she wouldn’t so much as touch it herself, but it seemed to give him confidence. She sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t the victim of some kind of mild blackmail—there was some oddly secretive visiting, now and then. Well, if that were so, she could only pray that it might continue—there seemed enough money to spare, and anything was worth paying that might prevent any smear of scandal from interrupting the triumphant progress through life of her darling Linda.

Linda was their ‘only’: a horrid child, really, but to the loving and simple heart of her mother, the very pink of perfection both in brains and in beauty. For Linda alone did she resent the social rebuffs of snobby little Sanstone—led by Mrs. Bindell, the solicitor’s wife. Why Mrs. Bindell should be so positively inimical towards her, she never could quite understand; that she resented the bosom-friendship of the twins with Linda was evident. To effect a separation, Louisa strongly suspected, she would certainly oppose Linda’s entry to the new school. However, Harold must cope with that; Harold saw a good deal of Mr. Bindell over these property deals of his, and he would fix it…

But alas!—in grey December, Harold, in Louisa’s own phrase, took ill and was about to die.

She sat with Mrs. Bindell in ‘the lounge’ while Mr. Bindell went up to the sickroom. ‘Though it’s not much use him going, Mrs. Bindell. It’s days since poor Harold could speak a word, not to be understood; nor hold a pencil to write, or even make signs.’

‘It is usual to call and enquire,’ said Mrs. Bindell loftily, putting common little Mrs. Hartley in her place.

But Louisa, it seemed, had been right after all. Harold had been unable to say a word to Mr. Bindell. ‘But he does seem to be trying to ask me something, Mrs. Hartley. Something he wants me to find for him or something like that. Do you know what it could be?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Louisa. ‘We know about his will and all that. Something to do with the office, perhaps?’

‘I’ll go along there,’ suggested Mr. Bindell, ‘and get them to let me look around.’

But according to the office underlings, nothing was found that could account for Mr. Hartley’s anxieties; and when she herself tried to question him, he rolled his head on the pillow and his look said as plainly as it had many times said during their life together, ‘Mind your own business, Louisa, and leave me alone.’ And the days passed away and so at last did Harold; and at the Sanstone Crematorium, ashes to ashes returned, and that was the end of
him
.

Mr. Bindell waited a decent interval—a fortnight, he evidently considered sufficient—and then called upon the widow, this time without his lady. Linda had gone to the cinema with the twins. ‘So may I take it, Mrs. Hartley, that we are alone in the house?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Louisa startled. Was Mr. Bindell going to leap upon her with improper proposals, now that Harold was out of the way? She had always thought he had a nasty look.

But Mr. Bindell did not leap. Instead, he reached into his briefcase and brought out a large envelope. ‘You remember that your husband was trying to tell me something before he died?—trying to ask me to find something for him.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ said Louisa. ‘Did you find it? What was it?’

Mr. Bindell selected from the envelope a single item—a photograph on glossy art paper. He allowed Louisa one brief sight of it and then returned it to its envelope. ‘A collection of pornography,’ he said; and added: ‘The most lurid I’ve ever seen.’

Louisa thought, from her one glimpse, that this could hardly but be so. ‘
Harold
had this filth?’

‘In the private drawer of his safe at the office. Of course when I saw what it was, I concealed it from his staff.’ He snapped an elastic band round the envelope. ‘No wonder he didn’t want it found.’

‘No wonder,’ agreed Louisa, and thought of the gossip, spreading out and out in widening circles of ever more unsavoury scandal: nasty, dirty, salacious scandal, touched with that odd malice that, in so many quarters, Harold had seemed to attract. ‘Well, thank goodness, Mr. Bindell, that it was you who found it. And thank you very much for bringing it to me.’ Privately she thought that he might just as well have thrown the whole lot on the fire and not disturbed her in her widowhood; but he wanted thanks and appreciation, no doubt.

Mr. Bindell however wanted more than that and made very little bones about it. ‘Money is tight these days, Mrs. Hartley. My wife likes to keep up a—a good establishment; and we have two children yet to educate. I know Hartley left you pretty well off, and you’ve only the one girl.’

She sat with her hands in her lap, very still. She had been right, then, about there being a blackmailer. Only—Mr. Bindell! Mr. Bindell, the upright, respectable solicitor; and Mrs. Bindell, giving herself such airs…! She said at last: ‘How can you prove positively that they’re his? They might be anyone’s: you might even have—have got them for this very purpose.’

No fool, after all, Mrs. Hartley! Mr. Bindell reflected that these simple people had often very direct and rational minds. But he had been ready for it, anyway. ‘You saw what a glossy print it was? He would—no doubt pore over the stuff: gloating over it, you know. The whole lot will be covered with his fingerprints.’

‘I see,’ said Louisa. ‘So—?’

‘One word from me in my position—one whisper going the rounds at a Rotary luncheon, one anecdote confided in a pub when we’ve all had a drop too much… Not nice for a young daughter, Mrs. Hartley, growing up in a small town like this.’

‘No,’ said Louisa, very white. She wasted no more words. ‘How much?’

There are sixteen of them. Say a thousand pounds each. And you buy them outright: no hang-over. But one by one,’ said Mr. Bindell. ‘One by one. I can’t have you selling out sixteen thousand pounds’ worth of stock and being unable to account, frankly and openly, for the reason. And who knows?—in time values in the pornographic market may rise.’

She did not haggle: she acquiesced at once. He might have been alerted by that, but he was not; he knew her simple soul and that in it there was room for nothing but her precious Linda. And over the next year or two, she could find the money easily enough: it wasn’t worth her putting up a fight. ‘Next Monday evening, then, at my office? Half past six, by the side door—I’ll leave it ajar—after the staff have gone home. I often stay on and work late.’

‘I’ll come if it’s raining,’ she said. ‘If it isn’t, I’ll come the first evening after that, that it does.’

‘Raining?’

‘I’d better not be seen, Mr. Bindell, making regular visits to your office out of hours. And there’s no disguise like an umbrella, is there?’

Shrewd, very shrewd: and quick off the mark with it too. ‘But unnecessary,’ he said. ‘It’s all offices round there, there’s never a soul about in the evenings.’

‘There’ll be even fewer about,’ she said, ‘if it’s wet.’

And on Monday it was wet; and she took him a thousand and four weeks later another thousand—hurrying through the deserted streets, head down against the driving rain: wearing a long, belted macintosh and with an umbrella up. They wasted no time. He would leave the door open, and be sitting waiting at his desk, a few papers scattered there relating to Harold Hartley’s affairs just in case they should be disturbed. And she would slip in and go up to his room on the first floor and hand over the small envelope with the notes in it and wait, unaffronted, while he checked them. And he would hold out the large envelope containing the pictures, and allow her to select one—she did it steadily, not averting her eyes, though her cheeks would first go pale and then flush deeply—and tuck it into the big hand-bag she was careful to take with her; and so with hardly a word spoken, go her ways.

And meanwhile at home she swept and cleaned and polished as though—as though, now that he was gone, she would sweep and clean and polish away every touch, almost every memory, of Harold Hartley’s past presence there. The only thing she did not polish—did not even touch—was the ugly, black revolver in the bedside drawer.