Death of a Ghost (16 page)

She paused for a moment on the Potter step to break off a dead rose hip left over from the autumn on the rather straggly seven-sister tree which grew over the porch.

Then, mildly surprised at receiving no answer to her knock, she went round to the scullery door, which stood open.

‘Claire, my dear,' she called. ‘Claire, are you busy? May I come in?'

Her voice fluttered round the little building and was silent, and after waiting expectantly for a moment or so she went in and passed through to the studio.

Claire Potter lay face downward on the divan, her arms limp and her features mercifully covered by the cushions. Her small compact figure in its art overall mingled so well with the homespun blanket that for a moment Belle's eyes failed to distinguish it and she stood looking round the room, faintly disappointed to find it deserted.

She had decided to sit down to wait, avoiding the exertion of a second visit, when the body on the divan caught her eye, and her whole attention was focused upon it, as if its shape had been defined by thick black lines.

A quick intake of breath preceded her sharp exclamation. ‘Claire! I didn't see you, my dear. What's the matter?'

Claire Potter's body lay limp and flat, like a heap of clothes. Belle went over to it, her puckered face colouring with motherly concern.

‘Aren't you well, child? Claire!'

She laid a hand upon the flaccid, unresisting shoulder and attempted to rouse the piteous thing in the art overall.

‘Come, dear. Come, Claire. Sit up.'

Beneath the old woman's frail strength the body lifted a little, and for an instant the face which had once been Mrs Potter's was exposed. Blue skin, distended eyes, and terrible parted lips, they all showed clearly against the raucous orange of the cushions.

Belle's old fingers released their hold and the face disappeared again in the pillows.

The woman standing in the studio straightened herself. The movement was very slow. Her face was pale and her gentle brown eyes oddly expressionless. For some seconds she remained irresolute. Then she began to move with remarkable determination and agility.

She glanced round the studio, noted that the place seemed to be in normal good order and then, stepping gently out of deference to that odd superstition that the dead sleep lightly and so must be preserved from noise, she went out into the scullery again.

The small mirror over the sink shocked her with its reflection of a tottering, white-lipped old woman in a dishevelled bonnet of lawn, and she stopped resolutely to compose herself.

At all costs, for everyone's sake, there must be no fuss, no painful scene. No one else must be subjected to the shock of seeing unexpectedly that terrible, terrible face. Poor Claire. Poor, clever, practical Claire.

In a moment or so she imagined she had forced herself to look more or less normal, and she continued steadily about the things she had to do.

From the scullery door she could see down the path to Rennie's shed.

‘Fred,' she called softly. ‘Fred, come here a moment.'

She fancied that her voice was normal, but the man had shot up from his bench and came hurrying towards her, the liveliest concern in his face.

‘Why, ma'am, what is it?' he demanded, catching her arm to support her.

Belle looked up at him and remembered disconcertingly in the midst of the crowding fears and sorrows in her mind that the first time she had seen him he had been a ragged, dirty child of five crying for his mother at her knee.

‘What is it, ma'am?' he repeated urgently. ‘Are you ill at all?'

His concern for herself at such a time irritated the old lady and she became briskly practical.

‘Come in here, where we can't be seen from the house,' she said, stepping back into the scullery, and continued as he followed her wonderingly. ‘Mrs Potter is in the studio. I've just found her. She's dead.'

‘Dead?' said the man, his jaw dropping open. ‘Are you sure, ma'am?'

Belle shuddered, and was ashamed of herself for the reaction.

‘Yes,' she said simply. ‘Go in, but don't disturb her, poor soul.'

Fred Rennie returned, his dark face grave and his forehead puckered.

‘You must come into the house, ma'am,' he said. ‘It's not right for you to have had to see that. Not at all right. You must lie down. Put your feet up,' he added rather helplessly.

‘Rennie, don't be a fool.' Belle's authority returned. ‘There are several things to be done. Poor Potter will be home at seven and we can't let him go in there. First of all we must get a doctor.'

‘That's right, ma'am. We must tell someone. No need for Miss Beatrice to know at once.'

‘Certainly not,' said Belle, adding involuntarily, ‘Fred, I'm glad your master's not alive.'

The man nodded gravely. ‘It would have worried him,' he said, and went on after a pause, ‘better have her own doctor. He lives down in the Crescent. Shall I phone him?'

Belle hesitated. ‘No. I don't think so. Donna Beatrice might hear you and I don't want the household alarmed.'

‘There's Mrs Potter's own phone in the studio?'

Belle shook her head. ‘No. It's not quite respectful in front of the dead. Besides, I think nothing in that room ought to be disturbed, not even in the slightest.'

‘Not disturbed?' he began, and broke off abruptly as the significance of her words sank into his mind. ‘Why, ma'am, you don't mean to say that you think she … that is, you don't mean that her death wasn't natural, that there's been another …?'

He stopped, not caring to use the word.

‘I don't know what I think,' said Belle. ‘You'd better go and fetch the doctor. Bring him back with you.'

‘But I can't leave you here, ma'am.'

‘Rubbish,' she said. ‘Do as you're told.'

But when Rennie had departed, walking with suspicious nonchalance until he was once past the garden gate and then taking to his heels like the proverbial bringer of bad news, Belle bethought her of Mr Campion.

She went quietly down the garden path and called to Lisa. ‘Lisa,' she said, ‘I want you to stand on Mrs Potter's doorstep. Don't let anyone go in until I come back.'

On the phone in her own house Belle was studiously non-committal, but to Mr Campion, sitting up in his flat in Bottle Street, her message came like a frantic appeal for help.

‘Albert,' she said, ‘is that you, my dear? I've had such trouble getting on to you. I wonder if you could come over and see me? Yes, now. At once. No, no, nothing is exactly wrong. Nothing to get alarmed about, actually. But I should be very grateful if you could come soon. Albert, listen. Take a taxi.'

It was the last three words which convinced Mr Campion that something was seriously amiss. Like many people of her generation, Belle regarded taxicabs as telegrams, measures of emergency.

‘I'll be over right away,' he said and heard her gentle sigh of relief.

As Belle hung up the receiver Donna Beatrice came to the top of the stairs.

‘Whom were you talking to?' she asked suspiciously.

‘Campion,' said Belle truthfully. ‘He's coming over to talk to me.'

Miraculously, Donna Beatrice was satisfied, and Belle went down the staircase to the garden again.

Lisa came out of the porch as her mistress appeared. Her skin was very yellow and her bright black eyes looked scared.

‘I went in,' she said without preamble.

‘Oh, Lisa.'

One old woman eyed the other.

‘How did she die?'

‘I don't know. I'm waiting for the doctor.'

‘I will wait also,' said Lisa, and they were both in the little scullery when Rennie returned with assistance.

Young Doctor Fettes was a quiet, square young man with bushy black hair growing low down over his forehead and the gift of looking blank without appearing foolish. During his seven or eight years of general practice he had not quite grown used to the amazing complacency with which the relations of his patients put their responsibilities gratefully on his shoulder, as if his medical degrees carried with them a species of omnipotence together with a thorough knowledge of the world.

He surveyed the three anxious people in the scullery now, their frightened eyes resting on him trustingly, and wondered regretfully what past generation of super-medicos had engendered the superstition. Mercifully they saw nothing in his face but the comforting stamp of authority. He was a doctor.

He knew them all slightly, which made it easier, and when Belle explained that Potter was down at his school and would not return until seven he went in to see that which had once been Mrs Potter.

Lisa accompanied him. She was firm on this point, and Belle relinquished the unpleasant duty gratefully.

Rennie brought a chair from the shed for his mistress, and stood by her side like a sentinel throughout the gruesome business.

From the scullery doorway a bright corner of the studio was visible. Its brightness was intentional, with heaped shawls and Chianti bottles and painted poppy heads. Belle could not look at it, but sat like a girl and twisted her wedding-ring round and round to keep herself from crying.

Campion found her like that, sitting on the kitchen chair, her head bent and her old fingers turning in her lap. She lifted her head as he came up and he stooped and kissed her involuntarily and slipped his hand over hers.

‘What is it?'

She told him in a soft hushed voice which sounded old and pathetic, and he listened with horror creeping up his backbone.

‘You found her first?'

‘Yes.'

‘You're sure she was dead?'

‘Oh – oh, yes. Yes, my dear. Quite dead. Poor, poor busy Claire.' She swayed forward a little as she spoke and he caught her.

She refused to go into the house, however.

‘The doctor will want to see me,' she said. ‘He told me to stay.'

Doctor Fettes came into the scullery at last, was introduced to Campion, whose name he recognized, and began to ask questions.

‘Mrs Lafcadio,' he said, betraying a very faint Scots accent, ‘when you went into the studio and found the – the lady, did you move anything at all?'

‘No.' The old woman spoke unhesitatingly. ‘Nothing at all, except – her. I lifted her up, saw her face, and came out here.'

‘I see. You didn't by any chance open the windows? Or the doors, maybe?'

‘No.' Belle was puzzled. ‘No, I didn't.'

‘How long would it be after you found Mrs Potter that this fellow here came round for me?'

‘Five minutes … ten at the outside.'

‘Really!' The young doctor frowned and finally gave up the indirect method of enquiry for one better suited to his temperament.

‘I'll be frank with you, Mrs Lafcadio. You didn't notice a smell of gas when you came in?'

Belle looked bewildered.

‘Gas? Why, doctor, you don't think that she …? I mean …!'

You didn't notice a smell of gas in the room, did you?'

‘No.' She shook her head. ‘No. I didn't notice anything in the least unusual. The windows were just like they are now, I think; I didn't notice.'

The young doctor sighed.

‘Well,' he said at last, ‘it's half after six now. Maybe I'd better wait and see Mr Potter.'

Belle touched his sleeve. ‘That poor man won't be able to help you much,' she said. ‘He's been out all the day, and this shock will unnerve him terribly.'

Doctor Fettes considered. He knew Mr Potter, and had no illusions concerning that gentleman's capabilities whether under nervous strain or no. He also knew that the Potters lived, as it were, under Lafcadio patronage, and being uncertain of the exact path which etiquette dictated wisely chose the easier.

‘Frankly, Mrs Lafcadio,' he said, ‘I can't give you a certificate in this case. There'll have to be an inquest.'

Belle nodded. She made no other comment.

Campion took the situation in hand and Fettes, who knew his name and had heard all the gossip concerning the first mysterious death at Little Venice, was glad enough to permit him to do so.

Belle was persuaded to return to the house with Lisa to look after her and Campion phoned Inspector Oates.

He made the call from the house, leaving the doctor to keep an eye on the studio where the body lay.

‘The room is practically untouched,' he said. ‘I thought you'd probably like to come along right away. Yes, I've got the doctor here…. He doesn't seem to know … talks about gas.'

Stanislaus's usually weary voice sounded brisk, almost excited.

‘Good for you, Campion. Hold everything till I get there. I knew something like this would happen. Is the girl about?'

Mr Campion passed a hand over his forehead.

‘Look here,' he said. ‘I can't argue over the phone.'

‘You don't have to,' said Oates, who seemed to be positively elated by the gruesome news. ‘I'll be over in ten minutes.'

He rang off.

–

W
HILE
the discovery that Linda was away in Paris, and had been there for several days pursuing her own line of investigation, shook the Inspector's conviction of her guilt in the second outrage at Little Venice, it did not completely dispel it by any means.

He was set back rather than defeated, and retained an official reticence until the facts should be assembled and his theory triumphantly proved.

Doctor Fettes repeated his opinion that Mrs Potter's death was due to asphyxia, and refused to say more until after the post-mortem.

Belle retired to the house with Lisa, and the forlorn little studio was left in charge of the police.

Mr Campion was there, silent, observant and marvellously unobtrusive, while the dreadful formalities were accomplished.

In the beginning Oates was nearly as cheerful as his personality permitted. Here, experience told him, was an example of premeditated crime, which was nearly always handled successfully by police machinery.