As Basil let himself out by the back door into the garden, he heard Fanny calling him, but he did not answer.
With the door still open, he stood listening till he heard her go to answer the knocking, then he closed the door softly and walked away through the garden. He went towards the gap in the hedge that divided the garden from the Gregorys’. The evening was very dark. The two gardens, lying side by side, looked as if they were all one. Even the trees at the bottom, where the meadows began, scarcely showed against the blackness of the sky.
Basil found the gap by habit and passed through it. In the Gregorys’ house the only window with a light behind it was the window of Jean’s study. There was no light in the kitchen or in the small sitting room beside it that was used by the old Polish couple. That meant that they were out for the evening, probably at the cinema. This fact disturbed Basil and made him move faster. He went to the front of the house and without ringing or knocking, tried the door handle. The door was not locked. Opening it quietly, he stepped into the dark hall.
He heard no sound in the house.
After standing there for a moment, listening with a look of troubled indecision on his face, he switched on a light and called out, ‘Jean – Colin!’
At first there was no answer, then Basil heard slow footsteps overhead and a door open. Colin appeared at the top of the stairs.
He stood there in silence, looking down. Where he stood he was in shadow, for the light, switched on by Basil, illuminated only the hall. Basil could scarcely see his face, but had a feeling that there was some strangeness about it, and something that Colin wished to hide, for he seemed to hold back deliberately where the shadow was deepest.
‘Hallo, Basil,’ he said quietly.
There was a strangeness about his voice too, a curious throaty roughness.
‘I came – ’
‘I know why you came,’ Colin said. ‘I’ve been expecting it sooner or later – you or someone. And now that you’re here, you’d better come up. I’ve something to show you.’
There was a deadness in the voice, as well as the roughness.
‘All right,’ Basil said and started to mount the stairs.
Colin turned as Basil reached the top and went ahead of him into Jean’s study.
‘You see,’ Colin said, as Basil stopped in the doorway, ‘you were too late.’
At what he saw, Basil felt cold all over, but not really surprised.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘too late.’
‘Or perhaps not. Who knows?’ Colin said.
For an instant Basil was able to wrench his eyes away from what was there in the room to Colin’s face. He recognized then what had seemed strange about it and understood the unfamiliar quality of the voice. Colin’s face was streaked with tears, his eyes were bloodshot and his eyelids swollen.
‘Both of them, you see,’ Colin went on. ‘She took the baby with her.’
Basil could not speak. He stood looking at the terrible thing that seemed to fill every nook and cranny of the small, bare, austere room. His heart felt as if it were beating in slow motion.
Jean was in the chair at the desk. She had fallen forward across it, her shattered head lying on the blotter. The blotter had soaked up some of the blood. One of her arms hung down loosely towards the floor, where, a few inches out of reach of her fingers, lay a revolver. Her other arm lay across the body of her child, which was on her lap. There was no sign of violence on the child. It looked like a little white waxen doll, with staring blue glass eyes.
‘How …?’ Basil began, but could not go on.
‘I think she must have suffocated the child before she shot herself,’ Colin said in the same lifeless throaty voice. ‘She left this.’
He picked up a sheet of paper from the desk and handed it to Basil.
The paper had a few lines written on it in Jean’s clear handwriting.
‘This is my own doing. I could not have gone on. Laura rang me up today demanding money. I went to see her. There is nothing for me to do now but this. Jean.’
Colin was watching Basil intently while he read. When at last Basil looked up, the two men gazed into one another’s eyes. A kind of mockery came into Colin’s.
‘It isn’t quite good enough, is it?’ he said.
‘No, not really,’ Basil agreed.
‘There’s an ambiguity in it. She couldn’t quite bring herself to accuse herself of murder.’
‘No.’
‘Yet she half hoped that that was how it would be taken.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s Jean, you know. That’s very like Jean. And I’ll never know whether she did it like that because she was merely too moral to tell a lie, or whether she was determined, though not quite honest with herself about it, that murder shouldn’t go unpunished. It’s difficult for me, isn’t it, Basil? Can you understand my puzzling about a thing like that at this moment?’
‘No,’ Basil said.
‘Ah, that’s because you never lived with Jean,’ Colin said. ‘I’ve got into the habit of puzzling over such things. I never knew what she really thought, because she never knew herself, and I was always trying to find the answers she couldn’t give me. I always wondered if the real truth was that she hated me.’
‘Not till the end,’ Basil said. ‘At the end I think she did, or she wouldn’t have killed the child.’
‘Yes,’ Colin said, sounding interested, as if this were a new idea, worth thinking about with care. ‘I think you must be right. Yes, at the end she hated me. She may have thought – and how could she really think otherwise, being what she was? – that I did it all for the sake of her money.’
‘Being what she was?’ Basil said.
‘So unsure of herself,’ Colin answered, ‘so uncertain that anyone could really love her.’
‘But perhaps,’ Basil said, ‘she was right.’
Colin gave a quick frown. It gave his tear-stained, empty face a querulous fierceness.
‘Be careful what you say, Basil.’
‘I meant,’ Basil said, ‘that Jean without her money and the life she could give you with it might not have meant so much to you that you’d have done murder for her sake. Isn’t there some truth in that? If you’d loved just Jean herself …’
‘Well?’
‘No, I may be all wrong about it,’ Basil said with a sigh. ‘I confess I don’t understand much about murder.’
‘Which reminds me,’ Colin said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you since you came in – when did you decide that I was the murderer?’
‘That’s a difficult question,’ Basil said. ‘I think it was just a few minutes before I came here. But of course I’ve been thinking about it for some time.’
‘Then, as soon as you’d decided, you came round here.’ Colin’s lip drew back from his teeth in a stiff, unnatural parody of his usual smile. ‘That was a rather courageous thing to do, you know.’
Basil gave a slight shake of his head. ‘You’ve nothing to gain by harming me, have you? I don’t believe you actually like harming people. And you’ve already lost everything that made it seem worth while.’
‘Yes,’ Colin said, ‘that’s perfectly true. But then, why did you come?’
‘I thought I might be able to help Jean.’ Basil’s eyes dwelt for an instant on the terrible shattered face that rested on the blood-drenched blotter. ‘I thought I might be able to prevent – something like this.’
‘I wish you had – I wish to God you had!’ Colin cried out. Then his voice dropped again to its quiet, questioning tone. ‘How did you realize she’d found out the truth?’
‘That was from what Susan told me,’ Basil said. ‘Susan saw Jean outside The Waggoners, and she also discovered that Laura had telephoned Jean. Then she learnt from Kit that Laura had got extraordinarily excited over seeing Jean, and had questioned him closely about her money.’
‘Ah yes, that sounds like Laura.’ Colin said it as quietly as before, but with such hatred in his tone that Basil felt he had never heard this man speak before. It made everything else that Basil had ever heard his pleasant, good-natured neighbour say sound shadowy and unreal.
‘And out of that you arrived at the fact that I was the murderer,’ Colin went on. ‘That sounds interesting. How did you do it?’
‘Do you mean you really want to know that – now?’
‘Yes, naturally.’
‘Well, as I told you, I’d been thinking about you as the possible murderer,’ Basil said, ‘only I could see no shadow of reason for your wanting to murder either Laura Greenslade or Sir Peter Poulter. But it was clear that the poisoning had been done by someone who had been unable to come to the party, someone, that’s to say, who couldn’t afford to come face to face with whichever of the two it was who had to be murdered. And that, out of the people who knew enough about our habits to slip into our kitchen and poison our food, meant you or Jean, or just possibly Dr McLean.’
‘Good God!’ Colin exclaimed, sounding genuinely amazed. ‘You don’t mean you ever suspected him.’
‘Not very seriously,’ Basil said. ‘I learnt that the accident he’d been called to, the one that prevented his coming to the party, was perfectly genuine, whereas your quarrel with Tom had something a little queer and engineered about it.’
‘Quarrels with Tom don’t take much engineering,’ Colin said.
‘Perhaps not – but then I realized you’d been behaving altogether rather queerly recently,’ Basil said. ‘You’d been pursuing a course of action not very characteristic of yourself, but which was quite certain to lead to trouble with Tom. And it all began when Fanny told you that Laura was coming down for the weekend. It was then that you started to take such a surprising interest in Susan’s situation, and decided you must go away to see your friends in Essex about giving her a job. It was while you were away that you got hold of the arsenic and the phenylthiourea, wasn’t it?’
Colin nodded. ‘I must always have underrated you, Basil. It seems you do a lot of observing in your quiet way.’
‘Well then, you went on behaving in a curious fashion,’ Basil said. ‘That quarrel, for instance. I know it was Jean who refused to speak to Tom again and decided that the two of you couldn’t come to the party if Tom was coming. But I didn’t believe that could have happened if you hadn’t wanted it to. You could easily have calmed Jean down if it had suited you to do so. And I remember Jean’s telling us how you laughed when she turned on Tom. She was very upset by that laughter. She couldn’t understand it. But the truth was, I think, that you couldn’t help laughing because your plan was going so beautifully.’
‘Yes,’ Colin said, ‘I’m afraid my self-control slipped up badly there. What other mistakes did I make?’
‘I think, on the whole, your continued interference in the course of events,’ Basil said. ‘It suggested anxiety. At the same time, everything you did seemed designed to cause trouble. Your attempt to frighten the Mordues, for instance, into behaving suspiciously. It might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Susan. Then you handed on to Fanny what Susan had told you in confidence, and did succeed that time in making trouble between Fanny and Kit. And it was all a little too clever and at the same time too desperate, like your attempt to incriminate poor Clare Forwood.’
Colin nodded again.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was feeling desperate. Yet there was a certain amount of truth in what I said about her and it made a very nice case.’
‘You knew that she’d been to see Laura?’
‘Oh yes, I saw her. I was in the yard when I heard her coming. So I stood back in the shadows till I saw her leave. She was in such a state of shock that she looked quite guilty. She wanted to get away without being seen, without getting involved in any way. It was that that tempted me. You can apologize to her from me, if you like. There was nothing personal in it. I had nothing against her.’
‘I almost feel,’ Basil said, ‘that there’s been nothing personal in your attitude to any of us, either love or hate, except to Laura.’
‘Oh no, I shouldn’t like you to think a thing like that about me,’ Colin said. ‘I’ve liked you all very much. But you still haven’t told me when you realized the truth about Laura and me.’
‘I have,’ Basil said. ‘I told you, it was just before I came over here. It was when Susan told us all about Laura’s telephone call to her and then about how she found an envelope by the telephone in The Waggoners, an envelope that she showed us. It was addressed to Mrs Charles Greenslade and it had the Mordues’ number and yours jotted down on it.’
‘Laura’s call to Susan – what was that about?’
‘Laura told Susan that she was handing Kit back to her, breaking off her engagement to him.’
‘Oh,’ Colin said. ‘I see.’
‘Yes, having seen you in the street this morning with Jean, Laura realized that she couldn’t go ahead with her marriage. I suppose that is what happened, isn’t it? When she pointed Jean out to Kit in such excitement and wanted to know who she was, you’d actually been with Jean the moment before.’
‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘We went out together. Then I went into the paper shop to buy cigarettes and Jean went on to do some other shopping. I suppose that’s when Laura pointed her out to Kit. It was rash of me to go out at all that day, but I hadn’t expected Laura to arrive till the actual day of the inquest. I’d been all prepared to develop ‘flu on that day and stay in bed.’
‘And Laura, on discovering not only that her husband was still alive but bigamously married to a rich woman, realized that this could be a very profitable situation for her – particularly as she could easily prove to Jean that you were responsible for the death of poor old Poulter.’
‘I was awfully sorry about that, you know,’ Colin said. ‘I’d nothing whatever against him. I realized what a crazy thing it had been to try to kill Laura in that way and I decided that next time I’d try something quite simple that couldn’t slip up. I pointed that out to you, you know, when I was working out the case against Clare Forwood.’
‘Yes, you pointed out that the phenylthiourea was really such a crazy thing to have tried that it couldn’t possibly be the true explanation.’
Another rigid, unnatural little smile tugged at Colin’s lips.
‘And I thought I was being so ingenious, working that in,’ he said.
‘Too ingenious, too ingenious all the time,’ Basil said.
‘But when did you realize that I was Charles Greenslade?’
‘I was very slow about that,’ Basil said. ‘It wasn’t until I saw the envelope, with your telephone number on it and your initials, C. G. – Colin Gregory or Charles Greenslade. Then things clicked together. Yet I’d known from the first that Laura must have been married already when she was my student. It was her name I remembered her by when Kit produced her and her name hadn’t changed. She’d stuck in my mind, of course, because she was an interesting specimen. A homozygous recessive, presumably. Most interesting indeed. But being married, one could be sure that her husband would have been one of the people who’d have heard all about her peculiarity and who’d have remembered it. And it seemed not unlikely too that her husband was a student, and, since it was wartime, and the question of reservation would have arisen, a science student. What was your subject, by the way?’
‘I began taking a degree in zoology,’ Colin said, ‘but I gave it up. I realized I’d never care for that sort of thing. I liked studying the ways of animals and so on, so I thought that meant I was cut out to be a zoologist. A complete mistake, of course. But a worse mistake was meeting Laura in my first week at the university and falling in love with her and marrying her. She was a selfish, scheming, ambitious, empty-headed creature, who decided I’d got to slave my guts out becoming important in some way. After a few weeks I hated her. So I got myself de-reserved and got away into the army. And then – and then I was spending a leave with my mother, whom Laura hated, and a flying-bomb hit the house. I’d gone out only a few minutes before and when I came back there was nothing – nothing left. And in a moment I knew I could vanish. I got into the army again under a false name and got sent to Italy. That was when I met Jean, in hospital …’
His voice faded and he took an uncertain step towards the figure at the desk.
Looking down at it and with his back half-turned to Basil, he said, ‘It wasn’t her money, Basil – I swear it wasn’t. It was that she was so awfully good to me. She gave me everything I’d ever wanted.’
Suddenly he stooped and picked up the revolver that lay just out of reach of Jean’s dead fingers.
‘And now you might go, Basil,’ he said. ‘You can tell it all to the police and tell them I drove you out at the point of the gun. I’d sooner not do that in fact. I do like you – I like you and Fanny very much. I’ve nothing whatever against you. So you’ll go now, won’t you?’
Basil hesitated, then he turned and went out of the room. He went down the stairs and out into the garden. There in the darkness, with a cold wind blowing against him, he stood still.
After a moment he heard the shot.
He gave a convulsive shiver. Then, with his face white from cold and from strain, he started running towards his own home.