The Fashion In Shrouds (39 page)

‘I am ill,' said Tante Marthe. ‘I feel the end of the world
is coming, and I do not care what I wear for it. Don't you know anything at all, Albert? We haven't even seen you for two days.'

‘Albert's had troubles of his own,' said Val absently and bit her tongue as he turned to look at her with sudden darkness in his eyes.

‘
Ciel!
Yes. But what a time to choose!' Lady Papendeik spoke to herself, but the events of the last week had destroyed a poise which had lasted half a lifetime and the words were audible. Hal heard them and so did Amanda, and their reactions were precisely similar. Hal replenished Lady Papendeik's glass and Amanda began to talk about her house. There was not a lot to be shown, but she did the thing thoroughly, displaying the convenience of the white gas stove, the sink and the cupboard in the kitchenette, the stairs to the two little bedrooms, the bathroom, and her own newly-invented electric geyser. There were several interesting labour-saving features, all of a startlingly practical rather than a merely gadgety character, and Gaiogi began to chip her gently about her domesticity, avoiding most adroitly any errors of taste which the nature of the occasion might have invited.

‘But, darling, it's mad to live here
alone
,' said Georgia, innocently spoiling everything. ‘It's all so sort of honeymoon, isn't it? What do you do about service?'

‘Oh, a char, you know.' Amanda spoke with determined cheerfulness. ‘She's a good old thing. She lives just down on the high road, and she doesn't come when I don't want her. I go away rather a lot. I'm off to Sweden to-morrow.'

‘Really?' It was Gaiogi who spoke, but everyone had heard and there was a moment of embarrassment as her immediate personal difficulties were recalled to everyone's mind. Hal moved over to her side.

‘I have persuaded my sister to come with me to visit the Tajendie Works,' he said primly. ‘Alan, you approve, don't you?'

‘Oh yes, rather. Very useful. We must keep in touch with what the other fellow's doing.' Dell spoke dutifully, but his eyes strayed curiously towards Mr Campion, who met his glance with studied disinterest. Campion did nothing, nor did he speak, but at that moment everyone was aware of
him. He stood looking at Dell and there was a wave of unrest in the room as it passed through most people's minds that perhaps this lean, affable person was not entirely reliable in his present mood. It was a sort of telepathic warning that he was not taking his personal disaster with quite the same decent casualism that everyone else was prepared to afford it and they were all, in spite of their own worries, a little embarrassed by it.

Georgia alone seemed unaware of the signal. As usual, she was entirely occupied with her own point of view.

‘You just shut the cottage when you go away, do you, Amanda?' she said.

‘Yes, it's very convenient. In the country but with all the amenities of town.' Amanda's satisfaction had a trace of hardness in it. ‘I'm off to-night. I go home to Suffolk first and we sail on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to it.'

‘My dear, of course you are. I wish I could do something like that, but then you haven't got children, have you?' Georgia sighed and looked out of the window again. Her beautiful face was troubled and her eyes were gentle. ‘I wish to God I
could
go away and get out of it all,' she went on quite sincerely, forgetting the unfortunate inference. ‘I bet you do, too, don't you, Val? My dear, let's
rat
. Let's bunk and go to Cassis and lie in the sun.'

‘Darling!' The protest escaped Val before she could prevent it and, as Georgia gaped at her, she added, with the quiet bluntness of exasperation, ‘For pity's sake, sweetheart, shut up. Things are bad enough.'

‘I wonder if you realize how bad they are, my dear. Mr Campion's soft observation from the other side of the room made them all turn to him. He was leaning over the drawing-table, his strong, sensitive hands, which no one seemed to have noticed before, gripping the sides of the board. His natural vacuity of expression had vanished and he had taken off his spectacles. He looked vigorous, deeply intelligent and by no means unhandsome in his passionate sincerity. ‘I don't like putting it to you as baldly as this,' he said, clipping his words a little. ‘It's not a jolly subject to rake up at this particular party, of all times. But you terrify me. You appal me, standing around hopefully as you discount this and that little private awkwardness, packing it away in the
back of your minds as not really important while you blind yourselves to the terrifying fact that these little awkwardnesses all mounting together make up one tremendous and overpowering sum, awkward enough to ruin every one of you. At the actual moment you're all comparatively safe. The libel laws protect you and the police inquiry is at its beginning. But my inquiry is nearing its end. I don't intend to rat to the police, but the methods I have used are ordinary orthodox methods and what I know to-night they are bound to know soon, certainly by the end of the week. There is nothing to stop them finding out everything if they consider it necessary to pursue the inquiry, and as long as the murderer of Caroline Adamson goes free they will consider it necessary.'

‘What do you know?' Tante Marthe's question was sharp and unexpected, but no one in Mr Campion's audience looked round at her.

‘1 know a number of interesting things.' He was very earnest ‘Several of them are criminal and the rest are, in varying degrees, unfortunate. For any one of them to be set down in print would be a considerable embarrassment for one of you, but for all of them to come out would be a catastrophe for the whole crowd of us. Let me tell you something. I know, and the police will eventually know, that Richard Portland-Smith was driven to suicide, not deliberately but by accident. The fact that he committed suicide was fortuitous. The idea behind that blackmailing was the desire to ruin him, to get him out of the way. I know that a carefully arranged frame-up, involving Miss Adamson, was staged for him at the Green Bottle Hotel at Shelleycomb on the Downs in October nineteen-thirty-three. I know that one other person was present on that occasion besides Caroline Adamson, and that that other person was a woman.'

‘A woman?' Georgia spoke faintly but Campion ignored her.

‘I know,' he went on, ‘that Portland-Smith used to meet this second woman in a back room in Hakapopulous's restaurant in Lord Scroop Street and that there he paid her all he had. I also know that this woman was not the main instigator of the plot. She merely did the work and took the
money, half of which she paid to Caroline, who threw it away, and half of which she kept herself and invested most unprofitably. I know that Ramillies was murdered. I know that he left Caesar's Court in the middle of a party, because he was so frightened of the approaching flight that he couldn't bear himself any longer. He went to Boot's Hotel and spent the night there in an agony of apprehension, and in the morning he went to see someone who knew his phobia and who gave him a hypodermic injection, promising him that the effects of it would be discomfort for four hours followed by a feeling of happy irresponsibility and freedom from fear. I know that the flight was unexpectedly postponed for an hour and that therefore Ramillies died on the ground when he should have died in the air. But I also know that any accident of this sort was anticipated by the fact that his specialist was at Caesar's Court in response to an invitation to sample the amenities of the place at the management's expense. I know that Miss Adamson was killed because, having been taught to blackmail once, she saw in Ramillies's death an opportunity to blackmail again. I know that she visited Hakapopulous's restaurant thinking to receive money and met a knife instead.'

He paused and looked round. They were all watching him. Georgia stood with tears on her cheeks and her eyes wide, but the others were all imperturbable, their faces strained but expressionless.

‘That is the criminal side,' said Mr Campion. ‘Now we come to the merely interesting but unfortunate. I make no apology for digging up these facts about you all. My principal care has naturally been for my sister and in her interest I have done my best to satisfy myself of the whole truth of the story. I've told you that I shan't squeal to the police, and I shan't, but, as I say, my methods of inquiry are the same as theirs and they are doing now what I did a week ago. Some of these facts are relevant and some of them aren't. I don't know yet which are which, but I shall know, and should the police come to discuss them the entire world will know. I know, for instance, that you, Gaiogi, received a small but mysterious backing for the Poire d'Or. I know that you, Dell, have an enormous sum of money invested in Caesar's Court. I know that you, Georgia, have all the money you
possess in the world in the same place. You, too, Ferdie, have a packet there, and so has Val and Tante Marthe. Then there's Rex. Rex has a lot of money, Tante Marthe. He's your senior partner, isn't he? Then Caroline Adamson's father was a friend of Gaiogi's and when he died Gaiogi promised to keep an eye on the girl. I know lots of little odd things which may mean nothing, but which have come out In my inquiry, personal things which perhaps don't matter very much to anyone but those concerned. I know Georgia's first husband is playing in a concert party in a third-rate watering place. I know the name of Ferdie's doctor in Paris. I know the White Empress Club is financed by Gaiogi, and I know that Val was criminally careless to leave some seven ounces of morphine where any member of her staff could steal it. None of these may matter very much, but they won't look jolly in print, with ghouls like Honest John McQuean and Lady Jevity underlining them. There's only one way to save the worst of the mess and that is to get the murderer into the hands of the police immediately. Fortunately one can only hang a murderer once. One body is sufficient to inaugurate the ceremony. If the police can only get Caroline Adamson's murderer they won't go into the death of Ramillies. That is why I am still here. I shall make one last attempt. If I fail, and I warn you I'm not too hopeful, then I'm through. I don't care what happens to me or to anyone else. I'm finished.'

He glanced across at Amanda.

‘God knows this business has cost me enough,' he said.

Nobody spoke for a long time. Young Pontisbright was white and angry and the others were thinking the swift, absorbing, lonely thoughts of self-preservation. It was an appalling minute and the incident which ended it was mercifully ludicrous. Tyres crackled in the flint road outside and Georgia started. Everybody looked out of the window and Gaiogi laughed abruptly. A long black chauffeur-driven car had pulled up outside the garden gate. The tonneau was nearly all glass and the three occupants were clearly visible. Two of them sat side by side in the back. One was Sinclair and the other was Towser. They had been to Whipsnade and had called back by appointment for Mama, forced to waste her time at a tiresome formal party.
Even at that distance it was evident that the outing had been a success. Towser spoke to the chauffeur, who smiled faintly and sounded the horn. Georgia did not say good-bye. She picked up her little pale blue handbag and her long gloves and walked out of the cottage in her demure white muslin, her bows, and her picture hat. She looked beautiful, sweetly feminine and virginal, as she went off on a new adventure, tears still on her cheeks.

Dell walked over to Val and led her out on to the little lawn behind the house. There was a gate leading into a flat meadow there and he piloted her through it. The atmosphere had been so electric that there seemed nothing odd in his behaviour. Her instinct had been to get away at all costs and his appearance at her elbow merely made the going easier, but out in the warm air, with the world green and rational about her, the sensation of nightmare wore off, leaving her battered but aware again of life as it was in the daylight.

‘He's very cut up,' Dell remarked as they stepped on to the turf.

She nodded. ‘I've never seen him like that before It's rather unnerving when you see someone you know so well go all out of character. He's frightened, too, I think. Things aren't good.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No. Yet they may not be as bad as he seems to think. We can only hope, you know.'

He was comfortingly calm and Val glanced up at him. She was relieved to see that he was at least not embarrassed by their recent personal upheaval. She tried to consider him objectively, and saw only that his hair was going grey and that he looked tired. In common with most modern thinking women she was pessimistic where her own emotions were concerned and she found herself acutely conscious of her attitude towards him. She was still most painfully in love with him. He still created in her that unaccountable excitement and exquisite sensitiveness which would seem to have some psychic or at least some chemical origin, since it had no birth in reason, but she still shrank from investigating him. She still recoiled from the secret door which Georgia's Pandora instinct found so irresistible in all men. A living-room or a junk cupboard? The risk was too great
to take. Her own exacting intelligence, her own insufferable responsible importance, weighed her down like a pack. She was desperately aware that she wanted something from him that was neither physical nor even mental, but rather a vague moral quality whose very nature escaped her. It was something of which she stood in great need and her fear was not only that he did not possess it but that no one did. Her unhappy superiority made her feel lonely and she turned from him so that she was not looking at him when he spoke.

‘I wanted to talk to you, Val. Do you mind if I talk about myself?'

The question was so unlike him and yet so much to be expected that her heart sank.

‘Oh, that's all right,' she said. ‘I think we can almost take that as read, don't you?'

‘What?' He was astonished and his bright blue eyes were amused. ‘What do you think I'm talking about? Georgia?'