Sitting limply in a chair, with Eve, grown suddenly cool and still, standing over him, Colin said the rest of what he had to say. His head was hanging forward, his eyes were on the ground.
“You’d better be careful,” he said. “Don’t go in there yet. It’s HCN. I knew the beastly stuff the moment I opened the door. I’ve left everything open. It ought to be all right soon.”
“Dyke,” said Vanner, “I’m going down there at once. You bring him along as soon as he’s able to come.”
“Don’t,” said Colin. “Don’t go in yet. I’m all right—I’ll come with you. But you’ve got to give it time to clear.”
“Come on, boy, drink this,” said Eve, “then we’ll all go down together.” Her voice did not sound like her own, barely audible yet quite impersonal.
Colin drank.
“If you don’t mind, Mrs Clare,” said Vanner, “I’d sooner you stayed here. And I want to use the telephone.”
She nodded. She sat down.
Charlie Widdison suddenly put an arm round her shoulders.
Colin started again: “I went down to the cottage and opened the door, and there he was on the floor, and that foul smell coming at me. I haven’t touched anything except the windows. I shoved a handkerchief over my face and opened the windows. And then I left the door open as well and came up here.”
“Then you didn’t make certain he was dead?” said Vanner swiftly.
Colin’s mouth twitched. “No need to when that stuff’s about. That’s how it gets you.”
Charlie Widdison walked to the open window. “Well,” he said, “are we going?”
It took only a few minutes to reach Colin’s cottage. When Vanner had had a few words of conversation on the telephone with Sergeant Gurr they set off. The path ran through the wood and along the edge of a meadow, bringing them to a stile into a narrow lane. The lane was shaded with hazel, hawthorn and a few tall hollies. Opposite the stile was the gate of Colin’s garden. The cottage was an undistinguished box of red brick with a painted wooden porch, the garden a neglected place where madonna lilies reared gracious heads out of tangled weeds, field poppies blazed amongst the withered foliage of daffodils and roses sprawled over sagging trellises.
In the lane outside was a car.
“That’s Clare’s car,” said Toby.
They went up the path towards the wide-open door of the cottage.
“Were you expecting Mr Clare to visit you?” said Vanner to Colin.
“No,” said Colin. “Wait a minute, let me go in—I’ll see if it’s all right.”
But Vanner kept close behind him.
The open door led straight into a small sitting room. Windows on two sides of it were wide open. A breeze passed lightly through. A few red poppy petals had been blown in from the garden and were lying on the floor, a scrap of thistledown was sliding hither and thither on the current of air. The room was the untidy room of a young man who lives by himself, whose char has been browbeaten into regarding every crumpled scrap of paper as sacred. Slumped against the wall under a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers was the body of Roger Clare. A crumpled heap of limbs with the head sunk between the shoulders, it was like a grotesque imitation of a man who has fallen asleep in a railway carriage.
Toby looked at the picture while Vanner stooped over the dead man.
“Doctor Widdison,” said Vanner, and he motioned Charlie towards the body.
“Dead as cold mutton,” said Charlie.
“Vanner,” said Toby, “that picture. It’s remarkably crooked.”
Vanner straightened up. He put out his hand to the picture.
“Don’t touch it!”
“What the hell——”
Toby came forward. “Roger Clare was the man who couldn’t bear crooked pictures, wasn’t he?”
Vanner gave a sort of laugh. “Roger Clare was the father of Lou Capell’s child.”
Toby’s black eyebrows shot upwards. He stopped dead.
“That’s right.” Vanner sighed. “I’ll tell you all about it presently.”
“I’m going to be sick again,” said Colin Gillett. He dived for the window and hung his head out. Nothing happened.
Toby was staring at Vanner. “Yes,” he said, “you’d better tell me all about it presently. A nice bedtime story it ’ll make. Now we’ll look at this picture. You see, Clare wouldn’t have pushed it crooked like that himself; he couldn’t stand a crooked picture. In fact, he couldn’t have stood being in a room with a picture hanging like that for more than a moment. I think as soon as he came into this room and saw it he’d have walked across to it and——” Toby reached up, took hold of the picture frame by the edges and pulled. Then he took his hands away. With a jerk the picture sprang back into the same position as before. “We begin to see,” said Toby, and, pulling the picture forward, he looked behind it.
There was a simple, ugly ingenuity in what he found there. This trap to catch Roger Clare consisted first of a spring placed diagonally, with the higher end attached to the wall, the lower to the picture. It was this spring, contracted, that held the picture crooked. Then from the lower end of this spring a fine string went up to and was threaded through one of the eyelets by which the picture was suspended. This string went in at the neck of an open bottle which was attached to and hanging close under the eyelet. Inside the bottle, to the end of the string, was tied a small test tube or, rather, the remnant of a small test tube, for the test tube had been shattered to pieces. Plainly, when the picture was pulled straight the test tube would have been lowered inside the bottle, then, as soon as the picture was released and the spring contracted as it jerked the picture back into the crooked position the test tube would have swung up against the eyelet and been broken.
“Yes,” said Vanner, “but…” And he waited for someone to explain it.
Colin Gillett did so. “You see, there was potassium cyanide in the bottle and sulphuric acid in the test tube. Mix ’em and you get hydrocyanic acid gas. That’s all there is to it.”
“Well, I’m glad that’s all,” said Vanner.
“Gillett,” said Toby, “when were you in here last? I mean, before you came here and found this.”
“This morning,” said Colin, “just before lunch.”
“Was the picture straight or crooked?”
“Straight,” said Colin.
“If you’d come into this room and seen that picture like that, would you have done anything about it?”
Colin moistened dry lips. “Would I have bothered to straighten it, you mean? I don’t know. I don’t think I worry about things like that much. I don’t know. But why did Clare come here? Why was a trap set for him here?” He let his gaze slide down to the dead thing on the floor.
“And why,” said Vanner suddenly, stepping up close to him, “did Roger Clare come here yesterday afternoon? And why did you try to see him at The Dolphin this morning? And why is it surprising that he should be here?”
But if what Vanner had intended by the intimidation he put into his tone was the cracking of the young man’s shuddering nerves, the effect was almost the opposite. Simple truculence took the place of the strain on Colin’s face.
Toby put in: “Did you go to see Roger Clare this morning?”
“I tried to. He was busy.”
“You’d no sooner left the police station,” said Vanner, “than you went running off to talk to Roger Clare.”
“Well, what about it?”
“What did you want to talk to him about?”
Colin Gillett turned contemptuously away. He muttered: “Oh, my God, what a filthy, horrible business.” He looked again at Vanner. “I’m not answering any questions.” He went and stood in the doorway with his back to the room.
With a grunt and a frown Vanner once more bent his back over the body.
“Doctor Widdison,” he said, “will you and Mr Gillett please return to the house? Probably you’ll find Sergeant Gurr there. I want everyone to remain until I come.”
“All right,” said Charlie. He slipped an arm through Colin’s. “Come on.” They walked away.
Vanner went to the doorway and spat vigorously into a patch of weeds. “This stuff leaves a foul stink behind it,” he said.
“Vanner,” said Toby, “what’s all this about Roger Clare being Lou’s lover?”
Vanner turned back into the room. “That’s the way it was,” he said. He pulled a chair round and seated himself astride it. “Sorry if you don’t like it.”
“You’ve got reasons, I suppose, for saying so?”
“Plenty of ’em.”
Toby sat down on the doorstep. The afternoon sun fell pleasantly on his face. “Well?” he said.
Vanner looked dubiously from him to George. “Reckon you’d best get up to the house before the chief constable arrives here, Dyke.”
“We will,” said Toby. He did not move. George stepped past him into the garden and squatted on the lower doorstep.
“Would it surprise you, Dyke,” said Vanner, “to hear that Miss Capell wasn’t going to spend her summer holiday in Okehampton?”
“Not a great deal,” said Toby.
“It wouldn’t?”
Toby shook his head. “No. I’ve been wondering about it, and if you say it’s so, I’m not really surprised at all. Where was she going to spend it?”
“With Roger Clare in the south of France.”
“Wha-at?” Toby’s head jerked round. “How did you get hold of that?”
“I’ve been busy.”
Toby’s emphatic nod conveyed ironic agreement.
“Last night,” said Vanner, “I got on the telephone to those relations of hers in Okehampton. Well, she was going down there all right, taking the kid with her. But they weren’t expecting her to stay more than a night. She was just going to leave the kid and come away again. They didn’t even know she’d told anyone she’d be staying there. They said she was going to Norfolk with a couple of girl friends.”
Toby said: “When a girl’s got a baby coming it isn’t usually the time she goes and puts herself in the bosom of her aunts and uncles and cousins.”
“That’s quite true,” said Vanner. “I made one pretty big mistake, though. I’ve been reckoning till this afternoon it was her lover who’d killed her.” Somberly his gaze dwelt on Roger Clare. “Poor devil.”
“Poor devil,” Toby echoed, “and he wasn’t even her lover.”
“Wasn’t he? You listen. Last night I got thinking. That story of his—I thought: ‘That’s a very nice story, my lad, and just made to fit the situation, but suppose you’ve left out your own side of it?’ And I had some investigations made, and what was found in a drawer of the desk in his flat was a couple of first-class tickets to Nice for next Tuesday. And there’s a letter from some hotel there, reserving him a double room.”
Sourly Toby commented: “All sorts of people go to Nice.”
“But not with Roger Clare. He’s had nothing to do with any woman but Miss Capell since he separated from his wife. I’ve had inquiries made; he’s been damn careful all along; no asking for the discretion of the court for him. But he wasn’t quite careful enough. Last Easter—the porter of those flats was ready to swear it was Easter; he remembered it because it was Easter, Easter Monday, and he thought: ‘What-ho, my lad, you’re the same as everyone else, are you?’—well, last Easter Miss Capell turns up at Clare’s flat about seven in the evening. She’s in an excited state, got no hat on——”
“She hardly ever wore a hat,” said Toby.
“Well, anyway, she was excited and upset looking. After a bit she and Clare come down and go out and in a couple of hours they come back, and the girl stays the whole night. She doesn’t leave till about ten next morning.”
“She spent Friday night in my flat,” said Toby. “I know just how little that can mean.”
“Maybe,” said Vanner, “but one night somewhere or other must have meant something, eh? And Easter is just ten weeks ago, and Doctor Syme tells me that that child of hers was ten weeks gone.”
“Hell,” said Toby.
“Hell,” he repeated, and, placing one hand over the other, cracked his knuckles loudly. It seemed to give him satisfaction. “Vanner,” he said, “you may be right, and I may be wrong, but what I think is this. If Clare had been Lou’s lover and if they were still on good enough terms to be going to Nice together next Tuesday Lou wouldn’t have come to me for money when she needed it. She’d have gone to him. But she came to me in tears begging for fifteen pounds because the two Chinese vases she’d just sold hadn’t brought her in as much as she needed. You’ve rather been forgetting about that money, haven’t you, Vanner?”
“That fifteen pounds?”
“That thirty pounds,” said Toby. “I gave Lou a cheque about midnight on Friday. She left early next morning, getting down to Wilmer’s End about ten o’clock. Banks don’t open until ten, so she couldn’t have cashed my cheque on her way. Also, on Saturdays banks shut at twelve, yet she spent the whole day until about half-past four, when she disappeared, at Wilmer’s End. That cheque was never cashed, Vanner. You can verify it at my bank. And I don’t expect it ’ll ever be presented. I realize, of course, that one of those people at Wilmer’s End may have cashed it for her but I think it’s reasonable to believe that whoever it was that rang me up yesterday evening had removed it, as he or she said.”
“And what about the Chinese vases?”
“They were a bit of a shot in the dark. If the fifteen pounds in her bag hadn’t come from my cheque they must have come from somewhere. I started remembering then that she’d been dead scared at the idea of going back to her flat and meeting Druna Merton. So I wondered if she’d taken something from the flat and sold it. I made some inquiries from Druna; I asked her if there was anything missing from the flat worth about thirty pounds. I put it at thirty because I reckoned that if Lou sold something she’d never have got more than about half its value. Well, Druna found out for me that there are two Chinese vases missing, valued at thirty pounds.”
Vanner shook his head, “It doesn’t make any difference. What was that letter of hers but the beginning of a confession to Mrs Clare that she’d been misconducting herself with her husband? ‘I have betrayed your confidence.’”
“The confidence of a divorced wife?” said Toby sardonically.
“Maybe Miss Capell doesn’t recognize divorce.”
Toby stood up. He slapped the dust from the seat of his trousers. “As you say. Well, we’ll be getting back to the house before the rest of your pals turn up. You may be right.”
“I’m right,” said Vanner.
“And the motive, Vanner, the motive for killing this poor devil as well as Lou?”
A small smile twitched at Vanner’s heavy mouth. His gaze came up at Toby from under half-sunk lids. It was a sly gaze, self-confident and faintly mocking.
“Stares you in the face, don’t it?” he said softly.
As they went through the gate into the lane George said to Toby: “Talkin’ of money, you didn’t show him that piece of paper I pinched from the flat.”
“Because I’ve no right to be in possession of it,” said Toby.
“Oh.” The corners of George’s mouth sank in a grimace.
Toby glanced at him sideways. “Not really so very deaf, are you, George?”
“I can hear what you say all right; you got such a nice, clear voice,” said George.
“H’m. A simple person might think you were hoping to overhear something you weren’t meant to.”
“That’d be a very simple person.”
They skirted Roger Clare’s car. They had gone a few yards beyond it and were just at the stile when George stopped suddenly, looked down at the ground, looked back at the car and then exclaimed: “That’s not uninterestin’.”
Toby looked where George was pointing.
The stile had a gate beside it leading into the same field. The ground before it was dusty, and on its surface showed a clear pattern of tyre tracks. There were the tracks of two cars. One set had plainly been made by Clare’s car, but superimposed on this were the tracks of a car three of whose tyres had apparently no tread at all and whose fourth tyre was brand new, a car whose tracks George and Toby were able to recognize without any trouble at all.
“Max Potter’s car,” said Toby, and George nodded.
“Clare must have reversed his car here when he left yesterday afternoon,” Toby continued, “which means that Potter’s been here since.”
George was strolling down the lane. He pointed again. “It was before Clare came here this afternoon,” he said. “Here’s Potter’s track and here’s Clare’s goin’ over it.”
“It ’ll have to be gone into.”
They returned, climbed the stile and set off across the field.
Arrived back at the house, they found the usual group of people on the terrace, but Eve herself was not there. Charlie Widdison heaved himself off the grass and came a little way across the lawn to meet Toby.
“Will you go up and talk to Eve?” he said. “She’s lying down. She said she wanted to see you as soon as you got back.”
“All right,” said Toby.
“I suppose I ought to go up and see her, too,” said Max Potter. “By the way——” He tossed a matchbox to Toby. “Here’s your whatnot.”
Toby opened the matchbox. The dart was inside it.
“Well,” he said, “did you find out what made the stain?”
Max Potter nodded. His eyes were grave. “I did,” he said somberly.
“What was it?”
“Tincture of iodine!” And Max Potter let out roar upon roar of laughter.
Swiftly Toby crossed to the open doorway. Max Potter’s voice followed him: “Tell Eve I’ll come up as soon as I’ve had a drink.”
“Have two!” said Toby, and vanished.
He went to Eve’s bedroom. At his knock she called: “Come in.” She was lying on the bed. As he entered she raised herself sharply on one bare elbow while with her free hand she clawed back her rumpled hair. Her large, light-coloured eyes were expectant, a spot of scarlet burned on either cheek. Under her thin, restless body the silk counterpane had been tumbled into a mass of creases.
As he closed the door she flung herself back on the pillows. A fit of trembling had caught her; from head to foot it shook her. Her helplessness to control it filled her with violent anger. With her clenched fists she beat the bed on either side of her. She dug her head backwards into the pillows, the muscles of her neck taut and quivering. A moaning sound was squeezed through her stiff lips. Then as Toby crossed the room to her bed and sat down at the foot of it she jerked her head up again. There was sullen gloom on Toby’s face as he stared at the carpet.
Her voice cracking shrilly, Eve said: “Go on, go on, tell me about it!”
“Didn’t Widdison do that when he came back?”
“He’s told me what happened—how it was done. But you’ve got to tell me the rest of it. I want to be told!”
In a low tone he replied: “It’s you who’ve got things to tell.”
“I?”
He nodded impatiently.
She lifted herself on her elbow again. She tugged her skirt over her knees. She looked as if she wanted to hurl abuse at him.
“Listen, Eve,” Toby went on in the same low voice, “you’ve got to talk a lot and you’ve got to do it quickly. We may not have much time.”
“I don’t understand. Roger’s been murdered. Lou’s been murdered. I don’t understand. Why should anyone want to murder Lou and Roger?”
“We mustn’t waste time,” he said wearily. “Vanner may be up here at any moment.”
“Well, what’s that got to do with it? I won’t see him. I feel ill. Charlie can tell him I’m not fit to see him. I do feel ill. My husband’s been murdered—don’t you understand that?” Her voice was mounting wildly.
Toby turned his head. His eyes held hers.
“I am ill,” she repeated, but in a quieter voice. “Look.” She took a folded piece of paper from the chair by her bed and thrust it at Toby, “Charlie’s been prescribing for me. It’s a sedative. He said I’d got to have one and ought to lie down and not see anybody. But I told him I’d got to see you.”
Toby glanced at the paper. “Widdison wrote this, did he?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” and Toby pocketed it. “I’ll send someone into Larking with it.”
“You needn’t,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of things like that in the house, but Charlie wanted to prescribe, so I let him. Now tell me, what’s going to happen? What are the police going to do?”
“Does it matter to you much—now?” said Toby.
Up till that moment there had been ceaseless movement in Eve’s slim body; not for a moment had hands, shoulders, small head and working lips been still at the same time. But suddenly she lay there in a complete stillness.
Toby leant nearer to her. “Eve, why did you ask me to stay last night?”
Her eyelids flickered. Nothing else moved.
“What are you afraid of?” he asked.
He waited.
“Well,” he said next, “whom are you afraid for?”
After another short pause he shouted at her: “Talk! We may have only a few minutes. In another few minutes I may not be able to help you.”
Then some words came from her, huskily: “Do I need help?”
“I think you may need it like hell.”
She closed her eyes. Her lips moved for an instant as if she were testing out some words. She opened her eyes again.
“You know,” she said, “I didn’t love my husband. I loved him for about a month once, just after we were married. But I relied on him. I spent nine years relying on him. It was comic to discover when he wasn’t there any more to be relied on that there wasn’t solid earth under my feet any more. One shouldn’t let that happen, you know; one should never get to rely on anyone so much that one stops feeling like a real person when they aren’t there. One stops feeling like a real person… even though one doesn’t like them very much. It’s funny, isn’t it, Toby Dyke?”
Toby retorted: “Did you ask me to stay because you thought Roger had murdered Lou and you wanted someone who might be pushed between him and the police?”
“Perhaps,” she answered indifferently.
“Did you think that Roger was the father of Lou’s child?”
“Wasn’t it the obvious thing to think?”
“Then,” said Toby, “yesterday evening you knew that Lou was pregnant?”
She nodded.
“How did you know?”
“My aunt told me—days before.”
“Mrs Fry? Had Lou confided in her?”
“I think she just guessed.”
“And you thought Roger was the father?”
She raised her fine eyebrows, taking a long look at him. “Wasn’t he?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, my God!” Suddenly, squirming and shuddering, she was convulsed by sobs. Noisy, torturing sobs, they almost rose to a scream in her throat.
Toby gripped her by the shoulders and shook her. “We can’t waste all this time. Where were you this afternoon?”
She drew a few long breaths, and her shoulders went limp under his hands. “In the wood,” she said.
“Alone?”
“No, with Charlie.”
Harshly he reminded her: “Charlie was with Druna. We met them coming downstairs.”
“But Charlie came down to the wood with me after lunch. We sat there and talked.”
“How long?”
“I came in just after the inspector arrived asking for Roger. You came in yourself almost immediately after.”
“And how much of that time was Charlie with you?”
With a swift wriggle of her body she sat bolt upright. “What does it matter? What’s it got to do with you?”
“He wasn’t with you long, was he?”
She hesitated. “Not very.”
Toby stood up. He strode about the room and kicked at the carpet. Eve watched him with a dead, uninterested stare. He wheeled and threw some more words at her: “What was Roger’s will?”
She did not seem to take the question in. He raised his voice: “How did Roger leave his money? Do you get any of it?”
“Oh yes,” she said.
Toby cursed.
“I get a thousand a year,” she said.
“And the capital?”
“It all goes to Vanessa.”
“He left his will like that even after he divorced you?”
She nodded.
“Suppose he’d married again,” said Toby. “Would he still have left it like that?”
A curious smile compressed her lips. “He wasn’t thinking of marrying anyone else,” she said.
“But if he had?”
She shrugged her shoulders. The smile still gave her face a secretive, mocking look. Toby started walking about the room again.
“These questions I’ve been asking you,” he said, “they’re the ones Vanner’s going to ask you. Here’s another he’ll ask you: Were you at the Halloween party at the Victor Hildebrand Institute?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes,” said Toby with a sigh, “of course.”
“If that man asks me questions,” she said, “I shan’t answer them. I don’t have to.”
“You’ll have to answer them at the inquest—or some of them. D’you realize, Eve, that you’re the person who arranged that Colin Gillett shouldn’t be in his cottage this afternoon?”
She protested quickly with a flash of apprehension in her tear-reddened eyes. “But that was just a casual arrangement, all on the spur of the moment. I didn’t want to go to the V.H. myself, so I asked Colin. He was the obvious person to ask. Besides, how could I know that Roger’d go to the cottage? And how could I know what chemicals to use? I don’t know how to make poison gases. I don’t know anything about science—not anything!”
“You spoke to Roger on the telephone this morning, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, “yes, I did. Oh, but”—again her eyes widened with momentary fear—“but that was only when he rang me up and asked me to send Vanessa along for lunch. Really that was all. That was absolutely all we talked about.”
“Was anyone in the room when you were telephoning? Did anyone hear your end of it?”
She shook her head.
Toby gave a laugh and muttered to himself. Eve sat watching him and then, as he said nothing, reached for a hand mirror and started studying her face in it. She pressed a finger tip over her swollen eyelids and frowned at herself.
Toby asked abruptly: “Why didn’t you want to go to the V.H. this afternoon?”
She looked up from the mirror. “These tears are going to show for the rest of the day.”
“Never mind,” said Toby, “they’re quite appropriate. Why didn’t you want to see Max Potter?”
“You know,” she said, “the beginning of my affair with Max was wonderful. But you’ve no idea how tiring it is, having to go on and on trying to convince yourself you’ve got power over a man; you like to get that sort of thing settled. I’d no idea what it’d be like. And I’d no idea it’d make Roger go all intractable and revengeful. In fact”—she looked up at Toby over the rim of the mirror—“in fact, it’s all been a pretty good miscalculation on my part. Now I’d no need to tell you that. I haven’t told it to anyone else. If there’s a thing I hate, it’s looking a fool.”
“I see,” he said. “Gradually, I believe, we’re getting somewhere.”
“I don’t see where,” she said. “I don’t see what any of it’s got to do with all this—except that whatever happens I’m always to blame. Always, always. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I’m really worse than other people, but always, always, whatever happens I’m always to blame. I’m always put in the wrong. It doesn’t matter what I do; it doesn’t matter how hard I try to stick to other people’s rules; something always goes wrong, and I’m made to feel guilty and wicked and——”
“Stop it!’
“Always, always!”
“Stop it!” He scowled ferociously. “What about Lou’s letter to you?”
But at that moment the door was thrust open. It was thrust open with a fiercely decisive gesture. Standing there, glaring from one to the other, short, squat, and in some way incredibly menacing, was Mrs Fry.
There was menace in her tone when she spoke. “Eve,” she said, “what have you done with Vanessa?”