Five Roundabouts to Heaven (11 page)

It was a shocking breakfast. He asked for tea and cereal, and he was brought coffee and porridge. This was followed by a piece of shrivelled smoked haddock. Instead of sugar for the porridge, there was watered-down syrup in a jug. Sugar for the coffee consisted of two tiny cubes, and there were two thin wafers of margarine for the toast.

In the middle of eating his porridge, Bartels heard a man shout plaintively across the dining room: “Can’t I ’ave my ’addock, Miss?”

Five years after the war, thought Bartels, and no breakfast after 9.30 except on sufferance. He picked disconsolately at his fish, and thought of his uncle James, in his loud check suits, his jaunty brown bowler hat and white socks.

Uncle James would have raised hell. He would have stormed and banged and called for the manager, and sent the coffee back, and had sugar for his porridge and butter, and lots of it, for his toast.

Finally, he would in all probability have got away from the hotel without paying his bill, and even, with the help of the genius of aunt Rose, have borrowed a fiver off the manager—to be paid back, tenfold, of course, when the great case was won.

But they were proper salesmen, and I am not, thought Bartels, I am just a bum commercial traveller who is now going to sneak out and buy some poison, if I’ve got the guts.

Bartels had no difficulty at all in buying a two-ounce bottle of altrapeine. The only mistake he made, and, as it turned out, it hardly mattered, was in trying to be a little too clever.

On the way out of the hotel he stopped by the letter-rack and examined some of the letters. What he wanted was a genuine name and address which was easy to remember. One of the letters was addressed to: A. Thompson, Esq., 99 Rugely Avenue, Bradford. He thought that would do very well. That would look as well as any other name in a poison book.

The chemist shop he decided to patronize was a large one in the middle of the city. He stood outside it a moment, watching the people enter and leave. Then he went in, and made his purchase.

He thought the assistant might ask him what he wanted such a dangerous drug for, but he didn’t. It was absurdly easy, thought Bartels, as he handed over the money, and took out his pen to sign the dangerous drugs book.

It was then that he made a slight slip, owing to the fact that, to make himself less easily recognizable should anything ever go wrong, he had removed his spectacles before entering the shop.

He tried to sign his name in the wrong column.

It gave him a bit of a shock, of course, because the assistant laughed as he corrected him and Bartels did not wish to attract attention, either by causing laughter or in any other way.

Later that day, he turned his car towards London. Once or twice he put his hand into his overcoat pocket to make sure the bottle was really there, that the whole thing was not a dream. His mind was not yet one hundred percent attuned to murder. But it was by the time he reached London.

W
hile Bartels was fumbling towards his crisis, I was making my own plans. I was crafty all right. I’ve already admitted as much. I wanted Lorna Dickson, and I made the necessary plans to get her. It is odd that I, Peter Harding, the cosmopolitan, the hotel proprietor, the cynic, had fallen for the woman at one meeting.

Yet that is one of the effects which Lorna Dickson had on people: either she made no impression at all, or else, once you had met her, you could think of little else.

I do not know why I fell in love with her. She was no longer a young girl. She had no classic beauty. She was not even unusually witty. So much my brain told me. My senses told me that she was the only woman I had ever met whom I seriously wished to marry. It was all illogical and even nonsensical, but it was a fact.

Lorna occupied my thoughts by day and by night, so that sometimes I hardly paid sufficient attention to the business at the office; instead, I would sit dreaming of her, of a future with her, or torturing myself with the thought that I might lose her to Bartels. The latter, however, was a mere masochistic game; given time, I knew I could beat Bartels.

But first I had to persuade myself that though it might cost me the friendship of Bartels, I had right, of a sort, on my side. For that is the hypocritical way some are made, and I am one of them.

Since I was determined to be so convinced, it was easy. It was merely a question of selecting the most telling argument. I pointed out to myself that I was unmarried, and Bartels was married, and married, too, to a jolly good wife, in whom any ordinary man would rejoice. Further, Beatrice did not deserve a blow of this kind.

I dismissed all Bartels’ own arguments as specious and finicky. I was pretty well off, too, one way and another, whereas Bartels, to put it frankly, was a bit of a failure. He was unlikely ever to have enough money to pay his wife an allowance and to keep Lorna in any real comfort. In fact, Lorna would probably have to continue with her dressmaking if they were going to do anything more than barely make ends meet. It was an iron-clad alibi for an act of treachery to a friend.

I always remember how innocently I wheedled her exact address and telephone number out of Bartels. It was the day the three of us had lunch together, and afterwards, when Lorna had gone, I said to him, quite casually:

“Whereabouts does she live, Barty?”

“Outside Woking,” he replied. “Near a village called Thatchley. She’s got a small, Georgian-style house. Runs a small car, and has quite a nice little business in the neighbourhood.”

“Thatchley,” I said thoughtfully, as though I had heard the name somewhere before. “Thatchley. Yes, I remember now, I’ve seen signposts pointing to it on the road to our hotel near Guildford.”

His face lit up, as though the mere fact that I had seen a signpost pointing to her village was a source of pleasure to him. Poor, foolish old Bartels. It was all so damned easy.

“Yes, I know now,” I said lightly. “Yes, of course—Thatchley, near Woking.”

I remember we had fetched our hats and coats, and were standing in the vestibule before parting. He said:

“If you pass that way during a weekend, pop in and see her. She gets a bit lonely during the weekends. It’s not so bad during the week, because she is often seeing people.”

Easy, dead easy, it was.

“She won’t want to see
me
,” I said deprecatingly, for I intended to cover my tracks.

Bartels took the bait with one gulp. “She will,” he said eagerly. “I assure you, she’d love to see you.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I replied. “Not me. I don’t think she wants to see me.”

He was like the lemmings of Norway, which rush down to the coast and swim out to sea and drown. He just plunged on to his fate, because he thought he could trust me and because he knew that Lorna was lonely at weekends.

“She likes you,” he insisted.

“How do you know?”

“I could see. I can always tell when Lorna likes somebody.”

I hesitated deliberately. “Oh, well,” I said, “perhaps one of these days I’ll call in. I’ll see.”

So he gave me Lorna Dickson’s address. More, he gave me exact details of how to find her house. He said he wanted to make absolutely sure that I would find it all right. Fool.

My attitude towards Bartels is changing as I write the record. I know that. It is changing as it changed that day when I revisited the château and relived this story.

I was always tougher than Bartels. More efficient. More worldly and realistic. Bartels was a dreamer, I am not. It is no good being a dreamer if you are running hotels. Perhaps that is why he liked me and respected me.

So I always start off by thinking of the Bartels of my youth with nostalgic affection. But as this story progresses, as I see how I fooled him and beat him, all along the line, I begin to lose patience with him. I know—indeed, I insist—that despite everything he was a gentle-hearted and kindly fellow. And I pity him, but in a contemptuous kind of way. This I regret, but cannot help.

Just beyond Cobham there is a fork in the road; the left branch carries on to Guildford, the right one leads to Byfleet and Woking. You have to take the Woking road, and follow it for some time before you come to the lane in which Lorna Dickson’s house was situated. It was while Bartels was in Manchester that I visited her first.

I found the house quite easily, thanks to Bartels’ instructions, despite the darkness and some falling sleet.

It lay behind a thick yew hedge considerably older than the house, so that I was not surprised to learn later that the modern house had been built upon the site of a couple of early Victorian labourers’ cottages.

A wrought-iron gate opened on to a stone-flagged path which led past a flower bed and small lawn to the white front door. Two apple trees stood in front of the house, and the house itself, built of light red brick, was pleasant enough with its clean, straight lines, and large windows. It was not large, having, as I learnt later, a drawing room, dining room, workroom, and kitchen downstairs, and, upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom.

I had telephoned her and told her I would like to call in at about 6 p.m. on my way back to London from Winchester. She must have heard my car draw up in the lane, for she had opened the front door, and switched on the porch light, by the time I had passed through the wrought-iron gate.

So I saw her for the second time: standing in the doorway, slim, of medium height, small-boned; dressed in a black barathea coat and skirt, and a turquoise-blue blouse. The light fell on her wavy, light brown hair, and, when she shook hands with me and looked me in the face, I thought once again that she had the most attractive eyes I had ever seen. It occurred to me, too, that her face combined, in a most unusual manner, well-defined features with un-doubted prettiness. The two do not normally go together. It was a face which would wear well through the years; a face which would look handsome in middle age and even old age.

Glancing over what I have written, I see that I have completely failed to describe the charm of Lorna Dickson. I have used the word handsome, yet to me, when that word is applied to a woman, it conjures up somebody rather Juno-esque and forbidding. Lorna was not at all forbidding. Again, I have said that her eyes were attractive, and that might somehow imply a certain superficiality, or lack of intelligence, but Lorna, as I soon discovered, was a very intelligent woman.

I followed her into the house, and into the drawing room. This was a pleasantly proportioned room, in which modern decorations had been combined with antique furniture and with comfort: for one thing, there were a couple of deep armchairs, and a large, chintz-covered settee in front of the fire.

A bright fire was burning; not one of those depressing affairs which depend upon logs for an uneasy flame and a trickle of smoke but a businesslike fire of logs and coal combined; a fire built to warm and cheer.

On a rug in front of the fire a corgi dog lay, looking like a cylindrical woolly bear, and pricked his ears when I came in.

I liked the look of the tray of drinks on a side table, and wondered whether Bartels had supplied them, and paid for them, at trade prices. She gave me a whisky and soda, and helped herself to a gin and Italian. I drank the whisky without a qualm.

I didn’t care if Bartels had paid for them or not. I had come to steal his woman, and I was quite prepared to drink his drink while I did so. If you are going to set fire to a man’s house, there’s no sense in feeling awkward because your cigarette end has singed his mantelpiece.

I had laid my plans carefully, and I felt confident. I was better looking than Bartels—not good-looking, but better looking than Bartels. For one thing I didn’t wear spectacles, and I was better built physically. I had a quicker wit, more experience of the world; and I had a far wider experience of women. Bartels had almost no experience of women.

I was good with women. I knew that most men try to impress women by talking about themselves. They try to show themselves in a clever light, shoot a line, preen their feathers. Women like this for a short while. Then it bores them.

A woman is seriously attracted to the man who talks, not about himself, but about women in general and about her in particular. This never bores her. Nor does it ever bore me to talk about an attractive woman, on the rare occasions when I am with one.

So that’s the way I played it, during the first part of that first evening with Lorna Dickson.

Within a few minutes, by asking questions about silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece and occasional tables, I had her talking about her family and her own affairs.

Her father, Major Clive Burton, MC, had been killed during the First World War. Her mother, who had a flair for dressmaking, and a circle of friends and acquaintances in the Woking area, had set herself up in business and had built up a reasonable clientele. It was not a flourishing business, not a big money-maker, but it brought in a steady income. And there was a little money from her father’s estate.

There was one other child, Leslie Burton, who was a chartered accountant.

Lorna had helped her mother in the business until she was twenty-three. Then she had married Ronald Dickson, a rubber-planter on leave from Malaya, and in 1938 had sailed with him to Singapore.

Two years later, under protest, but because he wished it, she had sailed for home alone. He had stayed, in the face of the gathering storm, and had been engulfed.

She never saw him again.

She never heard from him again, or, for a long time, received any firm news about him. Only once, through roundabout means, through a friend who had a friend who had fought with Ronnie Dickson, she heard a story that he had last been seen drifting down a river on a raft; wounded, but in good heart. Later, a story trickled through that he had been drowned.

“So I only had him for two years,” she said, standing by the mantelpiece looking down into the fire. “Not long, but by heavens it was worth it. I don’t regret a moment of my life.”

“You’re lucky,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled. “Why? Do you?”

“Lots. Did you never think of marrying again? I mean, until recently.”

She side-stepped the reference to Bartels. She said:

“I had no wish to. I joined the WAAFs, and spent most of the war on a crag in Scotland. Hoping, of course. Watching the post every day for a Red Cross letter, or something. Suspense like that is bad. But it gives you a chance to reconcile your mind.”

“I suppose so.”

“I used to cry a good deal at night, at first, especially after I heard the rumours that he had been drowned. But that stopped, too, after a while; and then there was only a sort of dull pain left.”

“And now that’s gone, too?”

She shook her head. “No, it hasn’t. I don’t think it ever will, really. There was no disillusionment. The stardust was still sprinkled over our marriage when he died.”

“He’s all right now,” I said, after a little while. “He wouldn’t want you to go on feeling that pain.”

“Oh, I know that. But you can’t just command yourself not to feel something. When the rumours were confirmed at the end of the war, I thought: Well, this is the end. I’ve had my life, or all of it that matters. Have another whisky?”

“Thank you, I will.”