No Love Lost (9 page)

‘Look here,' I announced as unequivocally as I knew how, ‘I want an explanation.'

His eyes met mine and I was aware of a sort of quietude, a contentment which I had not seen there before.

‘But of course you do,' he agreed. ‘How understandable that is. But you know I don't think it is wise.'

It was the last attitude I had expected him to take. I had to struggle to keep the initiative.

‘That's for me to decide.'

‘Perhaps so.' He offered me a cigarette box from the telephone table at his elbow, and when I refused, took one himself.

‘What do you want to know?' He was pleasant and conversational. We might have been talking of anything in the world.

‘When did Madame – Miss Forde go to Barton Square?'

‘A little over a week ago.'

‘Why did she go there?' If he preferred to do it this way I did not mind. I was not moving unless Nurse called me.

‘I took her there,' he said at last. ‘We had been dining together.'

‘And left her there?'

‘Yes.' He laughed at my expression and I had to take a grip on myself. I had known patients who had played the fool like this when they were monkeying with the truth.

‘Explain', I snapped.

He hesitated for a long time and finally shrugged.

‘You are a good doctor, I think. You probably saw for yourself that she had recently taken – what shall we call it, a little sedative.'

‘In fact you drugged her.'

He spread out his hands. ‘Well, that is a theatrical way of putting it. I gave her an opiate. It is a prescription I have had for many years and have used myself when I had much pain. When she became sleepy I took her to Barton Square, where I had a very good friend who looked after her …'

‘And kept her prisoner?' I demanded, aghast.

‘Not at all. She was persuaded to stay.' He spoke easily and rationally, and it occurred to me that he had had experience of being questioned. There was something skilled in his little retreats and omissions. ‘She waited until I could make arrangements and come to fetch her.'

‘Do her friends know where she is now?'

For the first time I saw him waver. ‘Perhaps not,' he said at last. ‘You see, Doctor, there is a little secret about Francia. It is the thing which tempted me to – well, to persuade her to come here in the way I did persuade her. Just before her last film was made she had some sort of
crise de nerfs
and it was discovered, with dismay, that she had taken refuge in alcohol. It was all kept very dark, you understand. An eminent specialist prescribed. She went into a nursing home and she was cured. Splendid. The incident was forgotten. The new film was made. Everyone was delighted. And then this magnificent offer from Moonlight came along, and she was photographed from morning to night, very successfully, I believe.'

He paused, and I saw something so cold and so terrible in his face that I had to master an actual fear of him.

‘I have kept a very careful eye on her for some time and I was one of the few who knew about that breakdown,' he went on at
last, adding calmly, ‘It occurred to me that such a thing could so easily happen again.…'

‘That's abominable!' I exploded, and he watched me placidly.

‘Do you think so? It was not very difficult to arrange at Barton Square, I assure you. She was angry and alarmed and the alcohol was there. I did it because it was so convenient. You see, I felt certain that when she vanished those nearest to her would jump at once to a certain conclusion and would probably keep quiet. On the other hand, if they did not, and by some bad luck she was found before I was ready, well, it would appear to be just as they had feared.'

The sheer wickedness of it appalled me. I leaned forward.

‘And you brought her here in an ambulance because you knew no one would query it, getting a doctor to order it for you to make yourself doubly safe?'

‘No.' For the first time he came back at me and his dull eyes became bright and alive. ‘You are forgetting. I got not
a
but
the
doctor to order it for me, and to go to Barton Square where she was noticed. I should not be surprised if you called considerable attention to yourself when you saw no ambulance there. Did you ask a policeman?'

I didn't answer that. ‘A doctor or the doctor, it makes no difference.'

‘But it does.' The gentle voice was soothing, and it filled me with sheer terror. ‘Of course it does. Come, you are a realist, you are not a fool. We have discussed this already. You know where you stand.'

He was getting the upper hand. It was becoming his interview. I sidetracked to get it back again.

‘Who was the deaf woman I saw at Barton Square?'

‘The Ukranian servant of my friend. She would have been alone in the house when you arrived.'

‘And who was the man with the umbrella?'

Gastineau was puzzled by that. I could see it in his face.

‘Where did you find him? In the kitchen?'

‘Yes. What's more, I think he's followed us down here. He's been asking questions at the ambulance station,'

This information did not alarm him in the least. He swept the news away with a flicker of a finger.

‘It may be someone who is employed by my friend in Barton Square. Women are inquisitive and sometimes jealous. There is nothing in that.'

To my horror I discovered that I was finding him reassuring.

‘What was your reason?' I demanded suddenly. It was the shock of mistrusting myself which made the question come out so brashly. All the time I had been wondering about it, but to ask it outright meant that I accepted – well, the thing I wasn't accepting.

He understood me at once. It was still the most frightening thing about him that we did understand each other so well, as I had noticed long before. He looked down at his knees, the wooden stiffness of his legs, and peered up at me from under his lids without moving his bent back.

‘I was a tall man at one time,' he remarked unexpectedly and with a detachment which I found unnerving. ‘I walked a great deal. Mountain climbing was my hobby. I was also very sensitive to my surroundings. Sordidness, ugliness, anything dirty or cruel disgusted me physically.' He stopped, his flat eyes still watching me. ‘If you want to know you must listen to this. It won't take very long.'

‘Go on,' I said.

‘There was a time in my life,' he continued quietly, ‘when I was in business in Stockholm. It was just before the war. During that time I was able to do certain little services for my own country. I shall not explain them, but you must understand that they were secret. And, since I was able to enter into the high circles in Germany and Austria, of some little use. Do you understand?'

‘You were a spy,' I suggested bluntly.

‘No. If that were true I should be dead by now. No, I was in effect a confidential messenger, no more.'

‘I see.'

He nodded and continued. ‘I was in love with a woman who was very much younger than I. She had come to the country with a dancing troupe which had been stranded, leaving her with
a British passport and not much else. When I first saw her it was in the summer and she was trying to persuade a business friend of mine to give her a job dancing and singing in his restaurant. She had no voice and her shabby little clothes hung on her like paper streamers on one of those wands you buy on a fairground.'

There was no actual change in his tone, which was still quietly conversational, but there was a force there which I recognized. It was an emotional thing. I knew it only too well.

‘I was not very rich,' he said slowly, ‘but I was not poor, and there was something indefinable about her which attracted me. I got her her job and I saw that she had something to wear. She accepted anything I offered eagerly, her passion to get on somehow at all costs amused me. I saw a great deal of her after that and gradually a terrible thing happened to me and I fell in love with her.'

He was still watching me. ‘Not everybody loves,' he observed at last. ‘With some people it is a ghost of a thing, a flare in the night which is bright and transfiguring and then … gone. But with others, and I think you know all about this, it is a most dreadful power, frightening and devouring and inescapable.'

I tried to shut him out of my sympathies.

‘I just want the facts,' I murmured as if he were describing a set of symptoms.

‘But that is
the
fact,' he protested. ‘You know that as well as I do. I loved this girl in that particular way, and because she was the kind of woman she is I was soon near ruin and I had to tell her so. I do not think I have ever horrified anyone more, even you, dear Doctor.' He laughed a little, but not with amusement. ‘Fortunately, I still had the little money on which I now live tied up in England, but by then the war had begun. The time came when I had to make one of my regular journeys to Berlin. Because I was in love with her I trusted her with a secret connected with my trip. It was only a little thing, mercifully – I carried no papers. It was no more than that I had to go to a certain man and tell him that the answer was yes. In my complete infatuation, perhaps because I was insane enough to
imagine it might make her think more of me, I let her know I was not going solely on business.'

I knew what was coming. It was clear in his dark ugly face. There was nothing to guess, even.

‘Yes,' he agreed, as if I had spoken, ‘she sold the information. I was of no further use to her so she took the last there was to be got out of me. She whispered the news at a party where she was dancing, wearing a dress I had chosen for her and jewels I had given her. The man she told paid her in cash. And as for me, when I reached the little house in the German capital, I was arrested. The rest I will not speak about!'

The last words came out with passion and brought me half to my feet. I hardly recognized him in the blazing, bitter wreck before me. He thrust out his hands, which were already malformed, and his gesture embraced the rest of his warped and tortured body.

‘You
know
,' he said. ‘There is no more for me to tell you about that. You are a doctor. You can comprehend something of that imprisonment.'

I said the one thing that I could say to that. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Sure it was she? Sure it was done for money and to get rid of me? Yes.' It was final, a very softly spoken word.

I have said somewhere that I myself am frightened of hatred and that I have always fled from it lest it should consume me. As I looked at him I knew what had happened to him as surely as if he had shown me a gangrenous joint. He
was
the ash of hatred. It had got him and poisoned him and made him mad.

He went on talking quietly again now and almost pleasantly.

‘I could not face discomfort and hideousness again. I could not risk any kind of imprisonment, anything ugly or terrible. I had to find a way to punish her that for me was quite safe. I had to have help. So when that other woman in Barton Square, who has always watched my affairs so carefully, showed me a cutting from a magazine which she had saved, and I found out that there was another person who had cause to hate Francia as much as I did …'

‘No.' The word was jerked out of me and it sounded frightened. He went on as if I had not spoken.

‘When I discovered that not only did such a person exist, but that she was a doctor, someone in the ideal position to make what I had to do perfectly simple and perfectly safe, then I felt that there was justice in the world, and I – came here to Mapleford to find you.'

‘Yes,' I said cautiously, feeling my way as one does when the disease is new to one and shocking. ‘But when you saw me didn't you realize that it wouldn't work?'

‘When I saw you,' he said contently, ‘I recognized you, or rather I recognized something in you. You were drowning yourself in work, hiding in it, but you were not quite escaping, were you? I saw that if I put the idea to you you would do your best to have me certified insane, but I guessed that if the
fait accompli
were presented to you suddenly I should get my way and you would help me.' He threw the butt of his cigarette into the fire. ‘And I was right,' he said.

‘No.' I spoke as quietly as he had done. He had ceased to terrify me. I had begun to see him as a pathetic pathological case with which in other circumstances I could even have sympathized. ‘You're making a mistake.'

‘I don't think so. You have imagination. You know what will happen to you if you do not do your part. There are too many coincidences for you to explain in any police inquiry. Besides, this is the woman who stole your man. Since then you have not even considered anyone else. Your neighbours have noticed it “The little doctor has taken a knock. She hasn't forgotten it.” Isn't that what they say?'

I ignored the last part of that and tried to reason with him. He was sane enough in every particular save one.

‘Don't you see,' I said gently, ‘all this happened some years ago? If I was upset then, I did nothing about it. Why should anyone believe that I should seek out Francia Forde now?'

I saw the doubt creeping over him. His own hatred had been kept alive so long by his sufferings. He had identified mine with it.

‘But you stayed tonight.'

‘I hope to save her.'

‘You won't.' It was as though he knew something I didn't. For
a second he had me off balance. ‘You knew it tonight,' he said. ‘That was why you sent for the nurse you felt you could trust. I could tell from the way you spoke to her you were certain she would never give you away. Perhaps she is too stupid or perhaps she is too dependent on you. It is one or the other.'

‘You're wrong.' Now it was my words which were really convincing. There was triumph in them; I couldn't keep it out. ‘I chose Nurse Tooley because I trust her more than I do myself. She's my sheet anchor.' That was the first time I frightened him. He understood exactly what I meant, as I had known he would.