To Fear a Painted Devil (19 page)

What Marvell had said about anyone being able to get into Hallows while Tamsin was out had now been shown to be manifestly false. The dog Queenie would guard her master against all comers—against all except one. The feeble motives of Edith Gaveston and Denholm Smith-King evaporated like puddles in the sun. But Tamsin had a motive, or rather many motives which crystallised into a gigantic single drive against Patrick’s life. Tamsin was rich now and free. Not to marry Gage whom she had evidently sent about his business, but free to be herself in a glorious scented bright-coloured muddle.

‘You’re so silent,’ Nancy said. ‘Are you all right? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I haven’t got a thing on hand this afternoon. I’ll nip indoors and make the poor grass widower a nice cup of tea.’

Greenleaf hated tea. He thanked her, rested his head against the canvas and closed his eyes.

14

P
atrick had died too late. Greenleaf repeated the sentence to himself as he came up to the front door of Marvell’s house. Patrick had died too late. Not from the point of view of Tamsin’s happiness, but medically speaking. Marvell had suggested it at the time the rumors began and Greenleaf had shrugged it off. Now he realised that it was this fact which all the time had been nagging at his mind. Had he died soon after receiving the stings or even if he had had a heart attack on seeing the picture—for Greenleaf was beginning to believe that in Patrick’s history it corresponded to the something nasty in the woodshed of Freudian psychology—there would have been no mystery. But Patrick had died hours later.

Why had there been a fifth sting? A wasp in the bedroom? It was possible. Patrick had been heavily
sedated. You could probably have stuck a pin in him without waking him. But why should a fifth sting kill him when four had made him only uncomfortable? He banged on the almshouse door for the second time, but Marvell wasn’t at home. At last he went round to the back and sat down on the bench.

He had come for his honey, and after much heart-searching, to offer his friend a loan. Talking it over with Bernice after she came back from Nottingham, he had thought he could raise a few hundred, enough perhaps to have the house made habitable according to the standards of Chantflower Rural Council. It was an awkward mission even though he intended to be quite pompous about it, insisting for the sake of Marvell’s pride on the money being repayed at the normal rate of interest—Marvell would have to put his back into the history of Chantefleur Abbey. I am a peasant, he thought, and he is an aristocrat (the serfs to the wolves syndrome again). He might hit me. All alone in the garden, he chuckled faintly to himself. He didn’t think Marvell would do that.

Presently he got up and walked about, for he was nervous. He hadn’t counted on having to wait. Perhaps Marvell would be away for hours and he would have screwed up his courage in vain.

He passed the kitchen window and looking inside, saw that the table was laden with jars of honey, clear and golden, not the sugary waxen stuff you bought in the shops. There would be a pot for them and a pot for the Gages and the Gavestons. Poor though he was, Marvell was a generous man. Last year the harvest had been poor but there had been a jar on almost
every Linchester table. Not Patrick’s though. Patrick recoiled from honey as if it were poison.

Greenleaf turned away and began to follow the path towards the orchard. Under the trees he stopped and sat down on the stump of a withered ancient apple Marvell had felled in the winter. Apple, plum and pear leaves made a dappled pattern on the turf as the sunlight filtered through gnarled branches. All about him he could hear the muted yet ominous hum of the bees that had been robbed of their treasure. Marvell, he guessed, had reimbursed them, giving them—as he put it—silver for their gold. He had once shown the doctor the tacky grey candy he made for them from boiled sugar. But, just the same, bewilderment over their loss made them angry.

There were three hives made of white painted wood and this had surprised Greenleaf the first time he had seen them for he had expected the igloos of plaited straw you see in children’s picture books. Beneath the entrance to each hive—a slit between the two lowest boards—was a wooden step or platform on to which the bees issued, trickling forth in a thin dark stream. There was a suggestion of liquid in their movement, measured yet turbulent, regular and purposeful. Marvell had told him something of their ordered social life, and because of this rather than from the interest of a naturalist, he approached the hive and knelt down before it.

At first the bees ignored him. He put his ear to the wall of the hive and listened. From inside there came the sound as of a busy city where thousand upon thousand of workers feed, love, breed and engage in industry. He could hear a soft roar, constant in volume,
changing in pitch. There was warmth in it and richness and an immense controlled activity.

For a moment he had forgotten that these insects were not simply harvesters; they were armed. Then, as he eased himself into a sitting position, one of them appeared suddenly from a tree or perhaps from the roof of the hive. It skimmed his hair and sank on the windless air until it was in front of his eyes. He got up hastily and brushed at it and at the others which began to gather about it. How horrible, how treacherous Nature could be! You contemplated it with the eye of an aesthete or a sociologist, and just as you were beginning to see there might be something in it after all, it rose and struck you, attacked you … He gasped and ran, glad that there was no one to see him. Two of the bees followed him, sailing on the hot fruit-scented air. He stripped off his jacket and flung it over his head. Panting with panic and with sudden revelation, he stumbled into Marvell’s garden shed.

The bee-keeper’s veiled hat and calico coat were suspended from the roof, taped gloves protruding from the sleeves. The clothes looked like a guy or a hanged man. When he had slammed the door between himself and his pursuers, he sat down on the garden roller, sweating. He knew now how Patrick Selby had died.

‘B
ut wouldn’t he have swelled up?’ Bernice asked. ‘I thought the histamine made you swell up all over.’

‘Yes, it does.’ Greenleaf bent over the kitchen sink,
washing tool-shed cobwebs from his hands. ‘I gave him anti-histamine …’

‘Why didn’t it work, Max?’

‘I expect it did, up to a point. Don’t forget, Patrick wasn’t allergic to wasp stings. But if he was allergic to
bee
stings, as I think he must have been, the histamine reaction would have been very strong. Two hundred milligrammes of anti-histamine wouldn’t have gone anywhere. The only thing for people with that sort of allergy is an injection of adrenalin given as soon as possible. If they don’t have it they die very quickly.’ She shivered and he went on: ‘Patrick didn’t have that injection. He was heavily sedated, he couldn’t call for help and if there was no one near …’ He shrugged. ‘There would have been a lot of swelling but the swelling would gradually disappear. I didn’t see him till ten or eleven hours after he died. His face was a bit puffy and I put it down to the wasp sting under his eye. By the time Glover got to work on him—well!’

‘An accident?’

‘Too much of a coincidence. Four wasp stings and then you get stung by a bee in your own bedroom?’

‘He must have known he was allergic to bee stings.’

‘Not necessarily, although I think he did. He hated honey. Remember? He knew about it all right and someone else knew too.’

‘You mean he told someone?’

‘Bernice, I have to say this. At the moment I can only say it to you, but I may have to tell the police. People with this sort of allergy usually find out about it when they’re children. They get stung, have the adrenalin, and afterwards they’re careful never to get
another. But others know about it, the people who were there at the tune.’ Turning his back on the window behind which Nature seemed to seethe, he looked at the manufactured, man-made things in the modern kitchen, and at civilised, corseted, powdered Bernice. Tamsin and Patrick weren’t only husband and wife; they were cousins. They’d known each other since they were children. Even if he half-forgot it, never spoke of it, she might remember.

‘So simple, wasn’t it? Patrick has the wasp stings and he takes the sodium amytal to make him sleep heavily. When he’s asleep she goes to the only place where she can be sure of getting hold of a bee, Marvell’s orchard, and she takes with her a
straw
handbag.’

‘I see. Straw for ventilation, you mean. The bee wouldn’t suffocate. She found the bee before Crispin saw her. But why stay there, why make love to him?’

‘I don’t know. So it was a good excuse for coming? I tell you I don’t know, Bernice. But when she got back Patrick was under heavy sedation. You could have stuck a pin in him.’

‘Oh, Max, don’t!’

‘I’m going over to see her now.’ He brushed away the warning hand Bernice rested on his arm. ‘I have to,’ he said.

S
he was loading cases into the big car, Patrick’s car, when he came slowly between the silver-green crinolines of the willows. The car was standing in front of the double doors and Queenie was lying on the driving seat watching the flights of swifts that
swooped across the garden, off-course from their hunting ground on The Green.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow, Max,’ she said. He took the biggest case from her and lifted it into the boot. ‘Such a mad rush! I’ve sold my house and the solicitor’s dealing with everything. Queenie and I—we don’t know where we’re going but we’re going to drive and drive. All the furniture—they’ve bought that too. I shan’t have anything but my clothes and the car—I’ve sold the Mini—and oh, Max! I shall have enough money to live on for the rest of my life.’

The mask had not slipped at all. Only her lips, russet against the egg-shell brown of her face, smiled and swelled the lineless cheeks.

‘Leave, Queenie,’ she said, for Greenleaf, no lover of animals, was caressing the dog’s neck to hide his embarrassment and his fear. ‘She thinks she’s a bird dog. Come into the house.’

He followed her into the dining-room. The picture had been taken down and was resting against the wall. Was she planning to take it with her or have it sent on? She must have seen him hesitate for she took his hand and drew him to a chair by the window. He sat down with his back to the painted thing.

‘You don’t like it do you?’

Greenleaf, unable to smile, wrinkled his nose.

‘Not much.’

‘Patrick didn’t like it either.’ Her voice sounded like a little girl’s, puzzled, naive. ‘Really, too silly! He wasn’t awfully mature, you know. I mean, people grow out of things like that, don’t they? Like being frightened of the dark.’

‘Not always.’ In a moment he would have to begin questioning her. He had no idea how she would react.
In films, in plays, they confessed and either grew violent or threw themselves upon your mercy. His mission nauseated him.

She went on dreamily, apparently suspecting nothing:

‘That picture, it used to hang in a room in my grandmother’s house in London. The garden room we called it because it opened into a sort of conservatory. Patrick made an awful fuss the first time he saw it—well, the only time really. My uncle and aunt had come home from America and they stayed a couple of nights with my grandmother. Patrick was terribly spoilt.’ She swivelled round until her eyes seemed to meet the eyes of Salome. ‘He was nine and I was seven. Grandmother thought he was wonderful.’ Her laughter was dry and faintly bitter. ‘She never had to live with him. But she was fair, my grandmother, fair at the end. She left her money to me. So sweet!’

If only she would tell him something significant, something to make him feel justified in setting in motion the machinery that would send this sprite-like creature, this breathless waif of a woman, to a long incarceration. And yet … Tamsin in Holloway, Tamsin coarsened, roughened in speech and in manners. It was unthinkable.

‘That was nice for you,’ he said stupidly.

‘I loved her, you know, but she was a bit mad. Patrick’s father committing suicide, it sent her over the edge. It gave her a sort of pathological fear of divorce.’