No Love Lost (5 page)

Now that was a trump card, had he known it. I could just see myself waking up old Chatterbox at the local garage and getting
him to turn out to take Gastineau away from my house at midnight on my day off duty. I began to feel very angry indeed.

‘Very well,' I said. ‘Put on your coat and I'll run you back and take a look at her.' There was nothing else I could trust myself to say.

I got my own heavy tweed from the lobby and took him out through the kitchen to the yard. Rhoda gaped at me and I let them both see that I was not exactly pleased.

On the journey I said nothing at all, as far as I remember. After one or two ineffectual attempts to interest me in my new patient, he gave up and we raced on in silence.

There was a light in Miss Luffkin's front room which went out as we sped past, and I was unreasonably glad that the night had become so dark. All the lights were on at Peacocks. The old house looked as though it were celebrating something. Grethe, the housekeeper, a swart eastern European with the most eager eyes I have ever seen in a woman, met us in the hall. She spoke to Gastineau in a language I didn't even recognize and he turned to me.

‘Madame Maurice is in the guest room. Will you come up?'

‘Yes, I'll see her since I'm here,' I agreed ungraciously, but I did not take my coat off.

I followed him up the polished staircase, which was black with age and very wide, on to a large landing where Radek was waiting. I got the impression that this solid wedge of a man, with the heavy face and coarse yellow hair, had been sitting outside one of the doors, but I could not be sure. He too said something to his employer and Gastineau nodded and signalled him to leave us.

‘She's here,' he said, and without knocking opened a door on the extreme right of the landing, facing the back of the house.

I went in first. It was one of those tremendous rooms which were designed to house a family. There was a coal fire in the grate and not much other light, and at the end of the plane of carpet I could see a big old-fashioned bed with a canopy and chintz hangings.

Two things impressed me the moment I entered. One was that the patient, whatever was wrong with her, was snoring
more or less normally, and the other that there was a violent smell of alcohol in the room. I think I was saved from turning to box Gastineau's ears by the recollection of the story which little Mr Featherstone, the vet, had told me the week before. He said his Christmas evenings were always spoiled by dowagers who sent for him to see their apparently dying pets, and were furious when he had to tell them that if they fed a dog on plum pudding and brandy sauce they must not be surprised if they became tipsy.

I went over to the bed and looked down. It was so dark that I could only make out a little face and a cloud of hair on the pillow. I spoke without looking up.

‘May I have some more light, please?'

‘Of course.' His voice sounded odd, husky with intense excitement. I was concentrating on the patient at the time and although I noticed it I did not pay much attention to it until afterwards. He had gone round to the other side of the bed and now turned an unusually powerful reading lamp on the two of us. It almost blinded me. I waved it down a bit.

The woman lying before me was scarcely thirty and must, I reflected, be quite beautiful when her face was less flushed and mouth less slack. Her fair hair was bleached but very lovely and it spread round her head on the pillow like a halo. I don't know if I am particularly stupid or unobservant, but I do know that my training has taught me to concentrate only on certain details of a patient's face. It has happened that I have not recognized a woman whom I have been treating for weeks when I have met her some time later in the street. Anyhow, I know that on that night, up in the vast guest room at Peacocks, it was fully five minutes before the message which was hammering on the back of my mind suddenly got through my professional concentration and I looked at the woman and realized who she was.

Francia Forde.

I had never studied her photographs consciously and I had never seen her films, but now that I was confronted by her I knew it was she as surely as if I had lived with her half my life. In one way I suppose I had. It was one of those revelations
which are at once terrifying and shaming. I saw just how much and minutely I must have thought about her, and just how avidly my subconscious mind must have seized on every little trick and detail of her face.

I found I knew the moulding of her cheek and the faint hollow beside her temples as well as I knew the lines round Rhoda's mouth. There were differences I hadn't expected, tiny blemishes the camera had not shown. This woman had not been doing herself much good just recently. There was a network of tiny lines, finer than a spider's web, on her eyelids. But she was still lovely. So lovely that the old helpless feeling settled down over my heart without my daring to question why or whence it came.

It was some seconds before I realized that I was being watched from the other side of the bed and I wondered if I could have given myself away. Gastineau couldn't have known anything about my private life, whatever the explanation of Francia Forde's appearance in his house might be. That was one thing I was certain of.

Fortunately I have a poker face by nature and my training has strengthened the gift. If I am scared or even very interested I am mercifully merely liable to appear preoccupied, and when he said at last, ‘Well, Doctor?' I felt sure he had noticed nothing.

I returned to my job with relief, remembering that it was nothing to do with me who the woman was or why she was there. All I had to decide was what was wrong with her. That was not very difficult. She showed no inclination to awake, but she was by no means unconscious and when I shook her gently she flung away from me with an incoherent word.

‘Was she like this when you collected her this afternoon?' I inquired.

‘Not so sleepy.' He sounded doubtful and I wondered whether he could be really so stupid as he appeared to be.

‘Yes, well,' I said, ‘she's been taking a considerable amount of some sort of sedative, which you will probably find among her luggage if you look, and to put it bluntly she has also had a great deal of alcohol. You will doubtless find the source of that too if you use your eyes.'

I was falling back on an excessive formality because I was both annoyed and shaken.

‘I should look under the bed valance, behind the curtains, and of course in her suitcases.'

He nodded. He was not going to pretend complete ignorance, I was glad to see.

‘I can hardly believe it,' he said, coming round the bed, and walking down the wide room with me. ‘It doesn't seem possible. She's a very fine actress, you know.' He shot a little quizzing glance at me on the last word or two, but I was in an odd emotional state just then and I didn't want to discuss her, or even to find out if I was right about her identity. I just wanted to get out of that dreadful room.

‘Really?' I sounded uninterested. ‘Well, I'm afraid I can't help her any more. Take away any alcohol or any drugs you may find. Give her bismuth or something of the sort in the morning, and if she is very excitable, one ounce and no more of whisky at eleven. By tomorrow night you should know whether the trouble is – er, chronic or not.'

To my discomfort I heard him laugh very softly.

‘You're very businesslike.'

‘I'm also very tired. Perhaps you'll forgive me if I get away now.'

I moved towards the door and he came after me.

‘When will you come again?'

‘You may not need me any more,' I said cheerfully. ‘There's nothing very wrong with her. This may not be a regular thing. But if it is, you'll need rather different advice from any I could give you. Good night, Mr Gastineau. No, don't come down. I can find my way out.'

He hobbled to the stairhead with me and looked down as I descended. I heard his murmur just above me and the words were so extraordinary that I thought I must have mistaken them.

‘Courage,' I thought I heard him say half to himself and half to me. ‘That was the only thing I doubted.'

I glanced up sharply but he was simply smiling and nodding.

‘Good night, Doctor. It was very good of you. Thank you. Good night.'

I did not realize I was so shaken by the whole business until I got out into the air. As my hands gripped the steering wheel I found they were trembling. This alarmed me as much as anything, for my life is based on the premise that I am a sensible, unshockable sort of person. I am one of those who have never thought mystery, doubt, or drama in any way exciting. I hate the lot of them. My instinct is to scramble stolidly to my feet whatever happens to me, like one of those toys which are weighted at the bottom, and the result is that I seldom get rattled and am made twice as bad by noticing it when I do.

As soon as I got the car going it occurred to me very forcibly that if Gastineau's Madame Maurice was really Francia Forde (I admitted there was a strong chance I had made a crazy mistake here) there was something very odd indeed about her arrival in Mapleford, and the sooner I made a graceful escape from the affair the better.

I was reflecting on the most practical way of arranging this, and was thinking that Wells would be a more sympathetic ally than Ludlow, when I was pulled up by someone who walked out into the road and waved a torch at me. I trod hard on the brakes before I realized that I was just outside Miss Luffkin's house.

There she was, wrapped up like a bundle of laundry, her thin excited face peering out at me from under a sou'wester tied on with a Liberty scarf.

‘Oh, Doctor it
is
you.' I was aware of her eyes noting that I was hatless and had a silk suit on under my ulster. ‘I've been so worried about those poor people down at Peacocks. I saw the ambulance go by. Is someone very bad, Doctor?'

I have sometimes thought that Lizzie Luffkin's curiosity is quite as pathological as her popeyes, an overactive thyroid gland. I don't believe she can help it Even she must have known that the solicitude in her voice was unconvincing. The sight of the ambulance must have acted like a red rag to a bull on her, and not knowing the explanation for five or six hours must have been pure agony.

‘Nothing serious,' I said with forced heartiness. ‘Just an old friend of Mr Gastineau's come to convalesce.'

‘Oh, I see, a friend.' Her disappointment was so obvious that it was funny. She clung to the door of the car, eager for just a scrap more gossip. ‘You are out very late, Doctor.'

‘Yes, I am, aren't I?' I shouted above the engine I was revving. ‘But so are you. Good night.'

I shot away into the darkness, hoping I had not been too abrupt and should pay for it. In ten minutes I was home and I put up the car and walked into the kitchen. If Rhoda was sometimes a thorn in my flesh, there was nothing like that about her now. She was the one person in the whole world whom I knew to be unshakably on my side. As always, whenever I needed a really sober-minded confidante, she was there.

I told her who I thought was at Peacocks Hall. I can see her now turning away from the stove, the kettle in one firm red hand. There was no smart comeback, no undue surprise.

‘Are you sure?'

‘No, and I can't believe it. It's too ridiculous. Have you got that photograph you were showing me the other day?'

She got it for me at once out of her own private drawer, the middle one of the dresser, and spread it on the table for me to see.

I stood looking at it carefully for some time. I could see where it had been touched up, where the line of the jaw had been sharpened and the eyelashes drawn in. But the other facts were all there. It was not a usual face, not even one of a type. The contours were definite and convincing, the features line for line the same.

‘Is it?' Rhoda came to stand beside me and put a heavy hand on my shoulder, a possessive gesture she seldom permits herself.

‘I think it is,' I said slowly. ‘It's either her or a double. It's not sense, though, Rhoda. How could she be here calling herself Maurice?'

‘
He's
calling her Maurice,' she corrected me with typical reasonableness. ‘Besides, it's not quite so funny as you seem to think. You've not seen the paper today, have you?' She was ferreting under the radio table, where she keeps current reading
matter, as she spoke, and soon came back with a copy of her favourite daily. ‘I noticed this when I was reading at lunch-time.'

I read it through two or three times before it made any sense to me.

‘That's all very well,' I said at last. ‘But I don't see why she should come down here in an ambulance. I don't see why Gastineau should tell me this Maurice story or why she should be staying with them.'

‘Perhaps she's hiding.'

‘Who from? She's very well known but she's not one of the American top-liners. There aren't armies of fans hounding her.'

Rhoda had become very thoughtful. If I had been more myself I should have noticed that tightening of the lips and the lowering of the thick determined brows, and might have been on guard.

‘You're not satisfied, are you?' she inquired, and the slightly hopeful note in her tone irritated me instead of warning me.

‘Well, of course I'm not,' I burst out angrily. ‘How can I be? I'm persuaded to send an ambulance to London to fetch a woman who appears to be no more than very tipsy, and when I see her I recognize her as … well, as somebody other than the person she is represented to me to be.'