Fanny ran to Clare, but as she knelt beside her, became suddenly uncertain what to do. She did not feel sure that it would be either wise or kind to bring Clare back to consciousness at that moment.
Colin’s face was drawn. He seemed to be finding it harder to bear the results of what he had done than he expected.
‘The resemblance,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t you all see the resemblance?’
Basil said, ‘Yes, it shows now, doesn’t it? The forehead, the eyebrows … She’s very like him. It was clever of you to notice that, Colin. Or had you anything else to go on?’
‘No,’ Colin said. ‘But I noticed the resemblance at once when I saw a photograph of Sir Peter in a newspaper after his death. It could easily have been a photograph of Miss Forwood.’
‘I never noticed it,’ Fanny said. ‘I never noticed any resemblance.’
‘You know her too well,’ Colin said.
‘And you mean,’ she said shakily, ‘that Clare was related to him?’
‘I think he was her father,’ Colin said. ‘Remember, Fanny, it was you who always said that Clare wasn’t really interested in anyone but the members of her own family, and that she never wrote about anyone but the members of her own family. So it was easy to argue from that that if she took a strong and surprising interest in someone, that person was in some way connected with her family. And then there was the resemblance.’
‘But why should that make her want to murder him?’ Minnie demanded.
‘You’ll find that out later,’ Colin replied. ‘It may have been revenge for the dishonour done to the man she had believed was her father and whom no doubt she had loved. Or it may have been hatred because of Sir Peter’s neglect of her. There’s no need to look for an altogether sane motive.’
‘D’you think he knew that he was her father?’ Fanny asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Colin said.
‘If he did, then he did neglect her.’
‘Wouldn’t that have been the best thing to do, in the circumstances? He had a family of his own and so had Alice Forwood.’
Clare’s head stirred a little and her lips seemed to be forming one or two inaudible words, but her eyes did not open.
‘Let’s get her up to her room and put her to bed,’ Fanny said. ‘And Basil can telephone for Dr McLean. Or – or perhaps Colin would – would go and fetch him.’
He gave her a grave, unhappy look, as if he realized quite clearly that at that moment Fanny could scarcely bear to have him in the house.
‘Yes, Fanny, of course I’ll go,’ he said.
‘But what about Sir Peter’s servants?’ Minnie exclaimed. ‘We heard this afternoon that they’d been arrested.’
‘If they were,’ Colin said, as he went to the door, ‘they’ll have perfect alibis for Laura’s murder.’
He went out into the passage and out into the small garden. The dimly lit village street had a dreadful busyness, with several cars drawn up in front of The Waggoners and far too many people for that time of the evening standing about in groups. Colin was at the gate when the door behind him opened once more and Fanny came out.
‘Colin, I – I didn’t mean …’ she began.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I know how you’re feeling about me at the moment.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I’m not. It’s only that this – it’s a terrible shock. Clare’s my very oldest friend. And though she’s so queer and difficult to get on with, I admire her more than anyone I know.’
‘Of course, Fanny,’ Colin said.
‘And I still only half-believe what you said is true.’
‘Then perhaps it’ll turn out I’m wrong after all.’
‘Perhaps.’ There was not much conviction in her tone. ‘But nothing will ever be the same again.’
He laid a hand on her shoulder.
‘Just wait,’ he said.
‘It won’t do any good,’ she answered miserably.
‘Everything gets forgotten, Fanny.’
‘No, nothing will ever be the same again,’ she said.
‘It’s got to be!’ He spoke with a note of passion in his voice that startled Fanny. ‘Things were too good to let them get spoilt. We’ve got to forget it all.’ As he said it, he glanced up at the lights of his home.
There was a light in the window of Jean’s little office.
‘Jean’s home,’ he said. He went through the gate and started walking towards the house.
‘Colin – aren’t you going for Dr McLean?’ Fanny called after him.
He wheeled round and started walking in the opposite direction.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I was just thinking of something else.’
Fanny stood watching him for a moment, then went indoors.
She found that Basil and Tom between them had carried Clare up to her bedroom. She was lying on the bed while Minnie bustled about the room, loosening Clare’s clothing, switching on the heater, drawing curtains.
Fanny went to the foot of the bed and stood looking down at the small blanched face on the pillow, seeing the resemblance to Sir Peter so clearly now that she wondered how she could possibly have missed it earlier.
Particularly the remarkable foreheads were alike. She remembered the two of them sitting side by side in the corner of the room, the old man, ill and exhausted by life, scarcely troubling any more to keep any hold upon it, yet still able to simulate a vivid interest in it, and the small, middle-aged woman who had withdrawn from life as fully as she was able years ago, except that her curious, brilliant mind still struggled to penetrate certain of its smaller mysteries. The old man had lost his wife and his sons. The woman had never had husband or children, and had lost parents and brothers. What might the two of them, intimately related to one another as they were, have meant to one another if death had not struck?
Fanny shivered. She wondered for how long Clare had known of her relationship to Sir Peter Poulter? She had spoken to Fanny many times of her mother’s lovers, usually in a tone more admiring than bitter, but never as if she had any doubts that Arthur Forwood was the father of her mother’s children. Clare had been deeply attached to this supposed father of hers, though she had always felt that she was of no great importance to him and that her brothers, both younger than herself, had the whole of his affection. She had had a great love for one of her brothers and an almost equal detestation for the other, but apart from these emotions, called forth at least to some extent by their qualities, had always been oppressed by a helpless jealousy of them both. They had been equally jealous of her, because of their brilliant mother’s obvious preference for her. These relationships, these jealousies and grudges and smothered miseries, had been the material of all Clare’s writing.
And then she had discovered that she had another father who had withheld his affection from her even more completely than the one she had known.
Fanny leant forward suddenly, peering at the shrunken face. It had just occurred to her that Clare was no longer unconscious. If Minnie would leave the room, she thought, Clare would probably show signs of recovery.
‘Minnie,’ Fanny said, ‘there’s some brandy downstairs. Basil said he was going to bring it, but something must have stopped him. Could you go and find him? I think I ought to stay with Clare.’
Minnie nodded and went tiptoeing out of the room.
As soon as the door had closed Clare opened her eyes, glanced round, made sure that she and Fanny were alone, then beckoned Fanny towards her.
In a fierce whisper Clare said, ‘Listen, Fanny, you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to do something for me. Will you do it? Will you promise?’
Her eyes looked dreadfully brilliant. Though she was conscious, she was not normal.
‘Promise!’ she repeated frantically.
‘All right, Clare,’ Fanny said softly. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Keep people away from me for a little while. Give me a little time, just a little. Don’t let anyone come in.’
‘All right,’ Fanny said. ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘You too,’ Clare said, ‘I mean you too. Go away and leave me quite to myself for a little while.’
‘But, Clare – ’
‘Please!’
On the staircase there was a sound of footsteps. Fanny knew that they were Basil’s and more than anything else just then she wanted him to come in.
But Clare, hearing the footsteps, exclaimed in agony, ‘Please, Fanny, please – keep them away from me! For just a little!’
Fanny drew away from her. Softly she went to the door, opened it only just enough to let herself out, closed it behind her and went along the passage. As she did so, she heard a thump as Clare leapt out of bed, rushed to the door and locked herself in.
When Basil reached the top of the stairs, he found Fanny standing there, leaning against the wall. She was trembling violently.
He put down the tray that he had been carrying and put his arms round her. Her trembling went on and she clung to him tensely. For a moment she could not speak at all, then, as he glanced past her to the closed door of Clare’s room, she managed to say in his ear, ‘I left her alone. She begged me to, Basil. She begged it. We’re old friends, Basil. Could I have done anything else?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think so.’
His voice was curiously unperturbed. For once his calm seemed to Fanny a shocking thing. She wondered if it was possible that he had not understood what she meant.
‘Basil, I left her alone – don’t you understand?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘poor woman, I can quite understand her feelings. She really does hate people and after what she’s been through today I should think she’d find it utterly necessary to be quite alone.’
‘Basil – ’
‘My dear, if you’re thinking that she’s taking her own life at the moment,’ he said, ‘you’ve no need whatever to worry. Clare wants to go on living to write a lot more books.’
‘But when the police come – ’
‘But, darling Fanny, you don’t believe she did it, do you?’
She drew away from him. She looked searchingly into his face, a look which he returned with one of mild, innocent surprise. Then he gave her a little shake.
‘Clare would never murder anyone,’ he said. ‘You ought to know that. She’s collapsed because life has been altogether too much for her just lately. You have to remember that she really does hate people – even you, when she’s seen too much of you, though the rest of the time she loves you dearly. And she’s had to be among people for days on end. Not to mention finding a body and being accused of murder. I expect she’ll now have a mild nervous breakdown, then become her own normal peculiar self.’
‘But then,’ Fanny cried, feeling that she would have to start laughing or crying, but that it would be wrong to do either, ‘who did kill the Poulter man and Laura?’
‘Someone who didn’t come to the party,’ Basil answered.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Think,’ he said, ‘about the phenylthiourea.’
‘No,’ she cried, as if the thought of doing such a thing maddened her. ‘No – I tell you, I don’t understand.’
‘Well, let’s go downstairs,’ he said, ‘and leave Clare in peace for a little, as she wanted, and I’ll tell you how things strike me. Not that I understand the whole situation by any means. But I think I do understand about the phenylthiourea.’
Picking up the tray with the bottle of brandy on it, he started down the stairs.
Tom and Minnie were still in the sitting room and had been joined by Susan. Tom’s arm was round her, looking a little inexperienced and uncomfortable in that position, and he was patting her gently and saying, ‘Never mind, dear, never mind – we’ll go home now and Mummy will put you to bed. You’ll soon get over it.’
Susan did not look in the least as if she wanted to be put to bed. She had got over the worst of the shock of discovering Laura, and though her small, square face was sombre, it was no longer abnormally pale. Her eyes were alert.
‘Fanny, please, there’s something I want to know,’ she said, as soon as Fanny and Basil came into the room. ‘Can you tell me …?
But Fanny, glancing round the room, interrupted her. ‘Where’s Kit? Didn’t you see him, Susan?’
‘He’s with the police,’ Susan said. ‘They’re asking him an awful lot of questions. But listen, can you tell me – ?’
‘Will he be back soon?’ Fanny asked.
‘I don’t know. Please, Fanny, do tell me, do you know anything about where Jean’s money came from?’
Fanny frowned at the question, while Tom said, ‘Well, I’m damned!’ and Minnie said, ‘Good gracious me!’ No one made any attempt to answer the question.
Susan clenched her hands in a gesture of extreme impatience.
‘Please!’ she exclaimed. ‘Doesn’t anybody know?’
‘You know, Kit asked me that this afternoon,’ Fanny said, ‘but he didn’t tell me why he wanted to know. Has he told you, Susan?’
‘Yes,’ Susan said, ‘and put together with what I know it sounds completely crazy. You see, when he took Laura to The Waggoners this morning, she happened to look out of the window and she saw Jean. And she got awfully excited at seeing her and wanted to know who she was. And when Kit said that she was Jean Gregory, who lived next door to you, Laura got more excited still, and said, ‘She’s rich, isn’t she? She’s rich!’ And Kit says that all through the afternoon Laura kept asking him questions about Jean, about how rich she was and how the Gregorys lived – that’s to say, was she really rich, or just a little better off than most of us. And all the time, Kit says, it was as if Laura knew something awfully important about Jean, which she wouldn’t tell him. She was queer and excitable all the afternoon, so that he got worried and actually rather scared. And then she insisted on his going away and leaving her to have a rest.’
Fanny nodded. ‘That’s when he came back here. And I told him I didn’t know anything at all about Jean’s money, except that of course she has rather more of it than most of us, and that she’s got a fantastically bad conscience about having it. But I’ve always taken for granted that that was just because she’s such a puritanical, self-torturing sort of person, not because there was anything in the least discreditable about the way she got it. And surely – surely Laura wasn’t suggesting anything like that.’
‘I don’t know,’ Susan said. ‘I haven’t any idea what was going on in her mind. Kit hasn’t either. But you see, this is what seems to have happened, when Laura sent Kit away. She seems straight away to have made two telephone calls. One was to me. Mummy took it, because I wasn’t home yet – ’
‘We’ve told them about that,’ Minnie said. ‘Fanny and Basil know all about that.’
‘Well, the second,’ Susan went on, ‘seems to have been to Jean. But I’ll tell you about that in a minute. About that call to me – ’ She gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I got on my bicycle at once and went to ask Laura what on earth she meant by it. And just outside The Waggoners I saw Jean. She was – well, I don’t know how to describe it and I don’t want to give you a wrong impression, but there was something awfully odd about the way she was standing there, just as if she didn’t want to be seen. And I think she was quite put out at seeing me. And then when I asked her if she was going to see Laura too, she said no, she was looking for Colin. But the fact is, she was going to see Laura!’
‘How d’you know?’ Fanny asked. ‘Did she say so later?’
‘No,’ Susan said, ‘She came in with me, and then when I started screaming and behaving like a silly child when I found Laura dead, Jean went very calm and competent, saying she was a nurse and so on, but she still didn’t say anything about having to see Laura. All the same, I know she did. You see, I found this – I found it in that cupboard where the telephone is.’
She thrust a hand into the pocket of her coat and brought out the envelope addressed to Laura on which the Mordues’ and the Gregorys’ telephone numbers had been written.
Fanny took it, then handed it to Basil. He looked at it thoughtfully, then handed it on to Tom.
‘So you think,’ Basil said, as Tom turned the envelope this way and that, as if he might succeed in finding more than the two telephone numbers, and keeping Minnie in a fever of impatience to see it, ‘you think that when Laura had telephoned you, or perhaps even before doing so, she rang up Jean and asked her to come and see her?’
‘She may not have asked her to come and see her,’ Susan said. ‘After all, she didn’t say she wanted to see me. She may just have said something to her that made Jean think she had better go and see her.’
‘For instance,’ Basil said, ‘she may have threatened her with knowledge of some kind and then demanded money.’
‘Basil!’ Minnie cried in a horrified, incredulous tone. ‘What a terrible thing to suggest! I’m sure Laura Greenslade wasn’t that kind of person at all. She was a fine young woman – I know it now, having talked to her. She was a fine, generous-hearted young woman.’
‘You don’t know that you did talk to her,’ Fanny said.
‘Susan,’ Basil went on gravely, taking no notice of this, ‘can you tell us anything about how the murder happened? Have the police told you anything?’
‘Basil, that’s really too much to ask the poor child,’ Tom said. ‘Can’t you see how upset she is?’
But Susan, upset or not, seemed willing, perhaps even eager, to keep on talking.
‘They told me how and when they think it happened,’ she said. ‘They think that while Laura was downstairs telephoning, someone slipped up the stairs to her room. You can get to those stairs from the yard where the dustbins stand, you know, there’s no need to go through the bar. And they think this person hid behind the door of Laura’s bedroom and then when she came up, hit her on the head and knocked her unconscious. And then – then stuck a knife in her back. There wasn’t any struggle, you see. She didn’t cry out. But Basil – Fanny – ’ She looked from one to the other, the colour in her cheeks mounting slightly. ‘I didn’t tell you all this about Jean to make you think she had anything to do with the murder. It’s only that – well, I had to tell someone. I didn’t know what to do myself. I found that envelope and I meant to show it to Jean before letting anyone else see it, but when I came out of the telephone cupboard, she’d gone. And I thought the fact that Laura had telephoned Jean was probably important somehow, but still I didn’t know whether or not to say anything about it to the police. What ought I to do? Shall I tell them, or shall I just say nothing about it?’
She was looking at Fanny as she finished, but Fanny, with a slight turn of the head, handed the question on to Basil.
A new look of anxiety had appeared on his face while Susan had been speaking. He seemed suddenly to be nervous and restive.
‘If I were you, I’d tell the police the whole story,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it can do any harm.’
‘I’m quite sure it can’t,’ Minnie said, ‘since we know who the murderer is. Colin has explained to us – ’
‘But he was all wrong,’ Fanny broke in as contemptuously as if she herself had never for a moment accepted Colin’s explanation. ‘Get Basil to tell you – about the phenylthiourea.’
Basil had just turned to the door. He looked irritated at being called back, but he paused.
‘Oh yes, the phenylthiourea,’ he said.
‘But that had nothing to do with it,’ Tom said.
‘Of course it had something to do with it,’ Basil replied.
‘One can accept the idea of just so much coincidence, but more than that … I mean, one can accept the possibility that two people with the idiosyncrasy of being unable to taste it could be in one room at the same time, but that something shockingly bitter-tasting should be prepared for one or other of them and yet phenylthiourea have nothing to do with it, is too much to accept.’
‘But then, who …?’ Minnie said.
‘Think of how,’ Basil said, ‘and why. Particularly why. And the answer is that that very uncertain method of poisoning Laura Greenslade was used by someone who couldn’t afford to meet her face to face. Isn’t that the only answer? It was impossible for this person to come into the same room as Laura and slip something into her glass or on to her plate, because that would have meant being recognized by her. But knowing of her peculiarity, it must have seemed at least worth trying to dose the lobster with arsenic and that bitter stuff which would put off everyone else but Laura. Having failed, there was nothing left but simple, violent killing. And now let me remind you, Tom, who it was who managed to pick a quarrel with you, so as to have an excuse at the last moment for not coming to the party.’
Incredulously, Fanny exclaimed, ‘But that was Colin!’
Tom sucked his breath in noisily.
‘No, Fanny!’ he said. ‘It was not. I was there and I know who picked the quarrel with me. To do Colin justice, he did all he could to prevent the quarrel.’
‘But it couldn’t have been Jean!’
Tom was replying, ‘But it was, it was,’ when a loud knock sounded on the front door.
Minnie exclaimed, ‘Oh, heavens, that must be the police.’
Basil went quickly out of the room.
Assuming that he had gone to answer the door, no one else moved, yet after a moment the knock was repeated. Fanny went out into the passage, looked up and down for Basil, and as the knock was repeated once more, called his name softly. There was no reply. Full of disquiet, Fanny went to the door and opened it to let in the police.