Enough to Kill a Horse (25 page)

She thrust a hand into the pocket of her coat and brought out the envelope addressed to Laura on which the Mordues’ and the Gregorys’ telephone numbers had been written.

Fanny took it, then handed it to Basil. He looked at it thoughtfully, then handed it on to Tom.

‘So you think,’ Basil said, as Tom turned the envelope this way and that, as if he might succeed in finding more than the two telephone numbers, and keeping Minnie in a fever of impatience to see it, ‘you think that when Laura had telephoned you, or perhaps even before doing so, she rang up Jean and asked her to come and see her?’

‘She may not have asked her to come and see her,’ Susan said. ‘After all, she didn’t say she wanted to see me. She may just have said something to her that made Jean think she had better go and see her.’

‘For instance,’ Basil said, ‘she may have threatened her with knowledge of some kind and then demanded money.’

‘Basil!’ Minnie cried in a horrified, incredulous tone. ‘What a terrible thing to suggest! I’m sure Laura Greenslade wasn’t that kind of person at all. She was a fine young woman – I know it now, having talked to her. She was a fine, generous-hearted young woman.’

‘You don’t know that you did talk to her,’ Fanny said.

‘Susan,’ Basil went on gravely, taking no notice of this, ‘can you tell us anything about how the murder happened? Have the police told you anything?’

‘Basil, that’s really too much to ask the poor child,’ Tom said. ‘Can’t you see how upset she is?’

But Susan, upset or not, seemed willing, perhaps even eager, to keep on talking.

‘They told me how and when they think it happened,’ she said. ‘They think that while Laura was downstairs telephoning, someone slipped up the stairs to her room. You can get to those stairs from the yard where the dustbins stand, you know, there’s no need to go through the bar. And they think this person hid behind the door of Laura’s bedroom and then when she came up, hit her on the head and knocked her unconscious. And then – then stuck a knife in her back. There wasn’t any struggle, you see. She didn’t cry out. But Basil – Fanny – ’ She looked from one to the other, the colour in her cheeks mounting slightly. ‘I didn’t tell you all this about Jean to make you think she had anything to do with the murder. It’s only that – well, I had to tell someone. I didn’t know what to do myself. I found that envelope and I meant to show it to Jean before letting anyone else see it, but when I came out of the telephone cupboard, she’d gone. And I thought the fact that Laura had telephoned Jean was probably important somehow, but still I didn’t know whether or not to say anything about it to the police. What ought I to do? Shall I tell them, or shall I just say nothing about it?’

She was looking at Fanny as she finished, but Fanny, with a slight turn of the head, handed the question on to Basil.

A new look of anxiety had appeared on his face while Susan had been speaking. He seemed suddenly to be nervous and restive.

‘If I were you, I’d tell the police the whole story,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it can do any harm.’

‘I’m quite sure it can’t,’ Minnie said, ‘since we know who the murderer is. Colin has explained to us – ’

‘But he was all wrong,’ Fanny broke in as contemptuously as if she herself had never for a moment accepted Colin’s explanation. ‘Get Basil to tell you – about the phenylthiourea.’

Basil had just turned to the door. He looked irritated at being called back, but he paused.

‘Oh yes, the phenylthiourea,’ he said.

‘But that had nothing to do with it,’ Tom said.

‘Of course it had something to do with it,’ Basil replied.

‘One can accept the idea of just so much coincidence, but more than that … I mean, one can accept the possibility that two people with the idiosyncrasy of being unable to taste it could be in one room at the same time, but that something shockingly bitter-tasting should be prepared for one or other of them and yet phenylthiourea have nothing to do with it, is too much to accept.’

‘But then, who …?’ Minnie said.

‘Think of how,’ Basil said, ‘and why. Particularly why. And the answer is that that very uncertain method of poisoning Laura Greenslade was used by someone who couldn’t afford to meet her face to face. Isn’t that the only answer? It was impossible for this person to come into the same room as Laura and slip something into her glass or on to her plate, because that would have meant being recognized by her. But knowing of her peculiarity, it must have seemed at least worth trying to dose the lobster with arsenic and that bitter stuff which would put off everyone else but Laura. Having failed, there was nothing left but simple, violent killing. And now let me remind you, Tom, who it was who managed to pick a quarrel with you, so as to have an excuse at the last moment for not coming to the party.’

Incredulously, Fanny exclaimed, ‘But that was Colin!’

Tom sucked his breath in noisily.

‘No, Fanny!’ he said. ‘It was not. I was there and I know who picked the quarrel with me. To do Colin justice, he did all he could to prevent the quarrel.’

‘But it
couldn’t
have been Jean!’

Tom was replying, ‘But it was, it was,’ when a loud knock sounded on the front door.

Minnie exclaimed, ‘Oh, heavens, that must be the police.’

Basil went quickly out of the room.

Assuming that he had gone to answer the door, no one else moved, yet after a moment the knock was repeated. Fanny went out into the passage, looked up and down for Basil, and as the knock was repeated once more, called his name softly. There was no reply. Full of disquiet, Fanny went to the door and opened it to let in the police.

As Basil let himself out by the back door into the garden, he heard Fanny calling him, but he did not answer.

With the door still open, he stood listening till he heard her go to answer the knocking, then he closed the door softly and walked away through the garden. He went towards the gap in the hedge that divided the garden from the Gregorys’. The evening was very dark. The two gardens, lying side by side, looked as if they were all one. Even the trees at the bottom, where the meadows began, scarcely showed against the blackness of the sky.

Basil found the gap by habit and passed through it. In the Gregorys’ house the only window with a light behind it was the window of Jean’s study. There was no light in the kitchen or in the small sitting room beside it that was used by the old Polish couple. That meant that they were out for the evening, probably at the cinema. This fact disturbed Basil and made him move faster. He went to the front of the house and without ringing or knocking, tried the door handle. The door was not locked. Opening it quietly, he stepped into the dark hall.

He heard no sound in the house.

After standing there for a moment, listening with a look of troubled indecision on his face, he switched on a light and called out, ‘Jean – Colin!’

At first there was no answer, then Basil heard slow footsteps overhead and a door open. Colin appeared at the top of the stairs.

He stood there in silence, looking down. Where he stood he was in shadow, for the light, switched on by Basil, illuminated only the hall. Basil could scarcely see his face, but had a feeling that there was some strangeness about it, and something that Colin wished to hide, for he seemed to hold back deliberately where the shadow was deepest.

‘Hallo, Basil,’ he said quietly.

There was a strangeness about his voice too, a curious throaty roughness.

‘I came – ’

‘I know why you came,’ Colin said. ‘I’ve been expecting it sooner or later – you or someone. And now that you’re here, you’d better come up. I’ve something to show you.’

There was a deadness in the voice, as well as the roughness.

‘All right,’ Basil said and started to mount the stairs.

Colin turned as Basil reached the top and went ahead of him into Jean’s study.

‘You see,’ Colin said, as Basil stopped in the doorway, ‘you were too late.’

At what he saw, Basil felt cold all over, but not really surprised.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘too late.’

‘Or perhaps not. Who knows?’ Colin said.

For an instant Basil was able to wrench his eyes away from what was there in the room to Colin’s face. He recognized then what had seemed strange about it and understood the unfamiliar quality of the voice. Colin’s face was streaked with tears, his eyes were bloodshot and his eyelids swollen.

‘Both of them, you see,’ Colin went on. ‘She took the baby with her.’

Basil could not speak. He stood looking at the terrible thing that seemed to fill every nook and cranny of the small, bare, austere room. His heart felt as if it were beating in slow motion.

Jean was in the chair at the desk. She had fallen forward across it, her shattered head lying on the blotter. The blotter had soaked up some of the blood. One of her arms hung down loosely towards the floor, where, a few inches out of reach of her fingers, lay a revolver. Her other arm lay across the body of her child, which was on her lap. There was no sign of violence on the child. It looked like a little white waxen doll, with staring blue glass eyes.

‘How …?’ Basil began, but could not go on.

‘I think she must have suffocated the child before she shot herself,’ Colin said in the same lifeless throaty voice. ‘She left this.’

He picked up a sheet of paper from the desk and handed it to Basil.

The paper had a few lines written on it in Jean’s clear handwriting.

‘This is my own doing. I could not have gone on. Laura rang me up today demanding money. I went to see her. There is nothing for me to do now but this. Jean.’

Colin was watching Basil intently while he read. When at last Basil looked up, the two men gazed into one another’s eyes. A kind of mockery came into Colin’s.

‘It isn’t quite good enough, is it?’ he said.

‘No, not really,’ Basil agreed.

‘There’s an ambiguity in it. She couldn’t quite bring herself to accuse herself of murder.’

‘No.’

‘Yet she half hoped that that was how it would be taken.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s Jean, you know. That’s very like Jean. And I’ll never know whether she did it like that because she was merely too moral to tell a lie, or whether she was determined, though not quite honest with herself about it, that murder shouldn’t go unpunished. It’s difficult for me, isn’t it, Basil? Can you understand my puzzling about a thing like that at this moment?’

‘No,’ Basil said.

‘Ah, that’s because you never lived with Jean,’ Colin said. ‘I’ve got into the habit of puzzling over such things. I never knew what she really thought, because she never knew herself, and I was always trying to find the answers she couldn’t give me. I always wondered if the real truth was that she hated me.’

‘Not till the end,’ Basil said. ‘At the end I think she did, or she wouldn’t have killed the child.’

‘Yes,’ Colin said, sounding interested, as if this were a new idea, worth thinking about with care. ‘I think you must be right. Yes, at the end she hated me. She may have thought – and how could she really think otherwise, being what she was? – that I did it all for the sake of her money.’

‘Being what she was?’ Basil said.

‘So unsure of herself,’ Colin answered, ‘so uncertain that anyone could really love her.’

‘But perhaps,’ Basil said, ‘she was right.’

Colin gave a quick frown. It gave his tear-stained, empty face a querulous fierceness.

‘Be careful what you say, Basil.’

‘I meant,’ Basil said, ‘that Jean without her money and the life she could give you with it might not have meant so much to you that you’d have done murder for her sake. Isn’t there some truth in that? If you’d loved just Jean herself …’

‘Well?’

‘No, I may be all wrong about it,’ Basil said with a sigh. ‘I confess I don’t understand much about murder.’

‘Which reminds me,’ Colin said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you since you came in – when did you decide that I was the murderer?’

‘That’s a difficult question,’ Basil said. ‘I think it was just a few minutes before I came here. But of course I’ve been thinking about it for some time.’

‘Then, as soon as you’d decided, you came round here.’ Colin’s lip drew back from his teeth in a stiff, unnatural parody of his usual smile. ‘That was a rather courageous thing to do, you know.’

Basil gave a slight shake of his head. ‘You’ve nothing to gain by harming me, have you? I don’t believe you actually like harming people. And you’ve already lost everything that made it seem worth while.’

‘Yes,’ Colin said, ‘that’s perfectly true. But then, why did you come?’

‘I thought I might be able to help Jean.’ Basil’s eyes dwelt for an instant on the terrible shattered face that rested on the blood-drenched blotter. ‘I thought I might be able to prevent – something like this.’

‘I wish you had – I wish to God you had!’ Colin cried out. Then his voice dropped again to its quiet, questioning tone. ‘How did you realize she’d found out the truth?’

‘That was from what Susan told me,’ Basil said. ‘Susan saw Jean outside The Waggoners, and she also discovered that Laura had telephoned Jean. Then she learnt from Kit that Laura had got extraordinarily excited over seeing Jean, and had questioned him closely about her money.’

‘Ah yes, that sounds like Laura.’ Colin said it as quietly as before, but with such hatred in his tone that Basil felt he had never heard this man speak before. It made everything else that Basil had ever heard his pleasant, good-natured neighbour say sound shadowy and unreal.

‘And out of that you arrived at the fact that I was the murderer,’ Colin went on. ‘That sounds interesting. How did you do it?’

‘Do you mean you really want to know that – now?’

‘Yes, naturally.’

‘Well, as I told you, I’d been thinking about you as the possible murderer,’ Basil said, ‘only I could see no shadow of reason for your wanting to murder either Laura Greenslade or Sir Peter Poulter. But it was clear that the poisoning had been done by someone who had been unable to come to the party, someone, that’s to say, who couldn’t afford to come face to face with whichever of the two it was who had to be murdered. And that, out of the people who knew enough about our habits to slip into our kitchen and poison our food, meant you or Jean, or just possibly Dr McLean.’