PART ONE

Before the Act

 

Chapter One

 

Mr Brownjohn at Home

 

In the end Arthur Brownjohn killed himself, but in the beginning he made up his mind to murder his wife. He did so on the day that Major Easonby Mellon met Patricia Parker. Others might have come to such a decision earlier but Arthur Brownjohn was a patient and, as all those who knew him agreed, a timid and long-suffering man. When people say that a man is long-suffering they mean that they see no reason why he should not suffer for ever.

Major Mellon met Patricia Parker on a Wednesday in April. On the day before that Arthur Brownjohn returned to his home in Fraycut at about five in the afternoon. The house was called The Laurels, although there was no remaining trace of a laurel tree. It was a small square detached house made of red brick, with a neat garden in front and a larger one, just as neat, behind. There are hundreds of such houses in Fraycut, and they are loved by those who live in them because they establish so satisfactorily their owners’ position in society. Arthur’s wife Clare greeted him with a fierce peck on the cheek and the news that the hedge needed clipping. She was a powerful woman with one of those red healthy faces that carry with them a suggestion of hunting and horse shows. Clare was two inches taller than Arthur, and it might have seemed that she was physically better equipped for hedge clipping than he. It was her expressed belief, however, that it did Arthur good to get out into the air, and now she stood with hands on hips watching him from outside the French window in the drawing-room while he unsteadily climbed a pair of steps and snipped at the hedge.

‘Not quite even, a little more off there on the right,’ she said and then, like a sergeant-major calling a recruit to attention, ‘Arthur. What are those trousers?’

He looked down from the steps. ‘Trousers?’

‘They are your best gaberdine.’

‘Not my best.’

She did not relent. ‘You know you don’t wear them for gardening. Go up and change.’

Arthur had already changed once, from business suit to gaberdine trousers, but he changed again. Clare went into the house.

Clip the hedges, trim the edges, mow the lawn. These were among his duties. It was half past six when he put away the gardening tools in the garage that contained no motor car, and then it was to find that Clare was dressing. Time for him to change again. The Paynes were coming for bridge.

‘I should really like to have a bath.’

‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had one, water won’t be hot. Besides, there’s no time.’

The Paynes arrived just before seven-thirty. They were one of half a dozen bridge-playing couples with whom the Brownjohns exchanged visits. The procedure on these occasions varied very little. The visitors had one or perhaps two drinks, a rubber of bridge was played, sandwiches and coffee were served by the hostess, more bridge was played and at some time between eleven and twelve o’clock a good-night whisky was offered. The whole thing made, as Clare said when she won, a thoroughly nice evening.

Mr Payne was the manager of the Fraycut branch of the bank at which Arthur and Clare had a joint account. He was not, as Clare had often said to her husband, quite out of the top drawer.

‘Funny old weather we’re having,’ he said as he sipped his sherry. ‘Rain and shine, rain and shine. April though, I suppose you must expect it. How was it in London?’ He spoke as if Fraycut were at the other end of Britain, instead of half an hour’s journey from London.

‘About the same as here.’ Mr Brownjohn twiddled his glass.

‘You can’t trust the English weather.’ Clare mentioned the weather as if it were an unreliable servant.

‘That’s just what I always say.’ Mrs Payne said it, as she said everything, with a nervous rush. ‘What’s the summer going to be like? You can’t tell. So George and I are going to Spain.’

‘The Costa Brava?’ Clare asked with a note of ennui. The Brownjohns never went abroad for holidays, and indeed had not been away together for years.

‘The Costa Blanca. They say it’s nicer, so much less crowded.’

‘How odd,’ Clare bayed in her deepest tones. ‘I was in Penquick’s yesterday. The Penquicks are going to Costa Blanca. Perhaps you may see them there.’

There was silence after this remark. The Penquicks owned a grocery shop in the High Street. Mr Brownjohn offered more sherry, poured it into three glasses. His wife said sharply: ‘Arthur.’

‘My dear.’

‘No more for you. You know you haven’t a head for liquor.’

Arthur left his glass unfilled. Mr Payne and his wife exchanged a meaningful glance. They had heard similar conversations in the past.

‘Well,’ Mr Payne said, ‘Bring out the devil’s playthings. After all, that’s what we’re here for.’

‘I think it’s absurd to call them that,’ his wife riposted. ‘As long as you don’t play for high stakes and don’t take it too seriously, there’s no harm in it.’

Clare made no comment. She played with a concentration that was terrifying to behold.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven o’clock. Husbands and wives played together, and the Brownjohns held bad cards or had bad luck or played badly. They lost every rubber. The financial deficit was small, the mental irritation extreme. ‘What made you double that heart call?’ Clare asked her husband. ‘Surely anybody with eyes in his head could see that wasn’t what I wanted. Just because you’re sitting with the king and two others.’

Mr Payne wagged a finger. ‘Now now. No inquests.’

‘The trouble is Arthur’s not here half the time.’ She spoke as if her husband were physically absent. ‘I don’t know where he is. In cloud-cuckoo-land.’

‘Or in the attic,’ Mr Payne said with a loud laugh. ‘Racing those cars round the track.’ It was a source of amusement to all visitors that Arthur kept a complete layout for model electric car racing up in the attic with a quadruple track, a special Le Mans start, bridges and cross-overs, and twenty different cars.

‘We had bad cards, my dear.’ Arthur was pouring whisky into cut glass tumblers.

‘Give you your revenge next week,’ Mr Payne said. ‘Tuesday, Wednesday? The Grevilles are coming over for a game on Monday.’

Arthur coughed. ‘I’m afraid I may be away in the middle of next week. Shall we let you know a little later on?’

‘You do that,’ Mr Payne said heartily. He finished his whisky. ‘Come on, my dear, we’ve made our fortune, let’s go and think how to spend it.’

 

‘I feel so sorry for him, George,’ Mrs Payne said as he drove sedately home. ‘I mean, it’s downright humiliating, telling him not to have another drink.’

‘I believe he has got a weak head.’

‘I dare say. But she doesn’t have to say it like that. He’s such a nice little man.’

‘Not much meat in those sandwiches.’ He negotiated a traffic light. ‘You know, she was a Slattery before she married. It makes a difference.’

‘I don’t see that.’

‘She married beneath her,’ George Payne said in a tone that denied the possibility of further conversation on the subject.

 

Back at The Laurels they were stacking plates in the kitchen. There was no need to wash up because Susan, the daily, would do that on the following morning. Arthur interrupted Clare’s analysis of his failings during the second rubber.

‘My dear.’

‘What?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t say that about my not taking another drink.’

‘You know the effect alcohol has on you. Remember the Watsons.’

‘That was seven years ago.’ But he knew that the occasion, on which he had danced and sung and tried to take off all his clothes, would never be forgotten. He said feebly, ‘I’m sure the Paynes thought it odd.’

‘The Paynes.’ Clare snorted quite loudly, like a horse. ‘A jumped-up fellow. In trade.’

‘A bank manager is not exactly in trade.’

‘As good as. Going to Spain with the grocer.’ Abruptly she said, ‘What are you doing next week?’

‘I shall be away tomorrow. I have to visit Birmingham and Manchester.’

‘You’re away as much as if you were a commercial traveller.’

‘I am a sort of commercial traveller. If you want to sell car parts –’

‘Spare me the details.’ Clare turned away her head. ‘I shall go to bed.’

‘I’ll bring up your drink. Then I shall tidy up.’

The Laurels was a tidy house. In the small square hall there was a square Baluchistan rug, a good rug as Clare often said, which belonged to her family. Above the rug hung a portrait of her father, Mr Slattery, a square-jawed man with large square nostrils. He stared across at the opposite wall with fierce contemptuous eyes. The sitting-room led to the left off the hall. It contained a sofa and two matching arm-chairs with loose covers, set at precisely the proper angles to each other. A glass-fronted cabinet was filled with books, most of them inherited from the Slattery connection. Little Victorian tables were dotted about and room had been found for a television set, which Clare moved about frequently because she felt that really it did not belong. Victorian ornaments stood on the mantelpiece, together with an old photograph of the Slattery family in Calcutta, Mr Slattery with arms folded, his wife wispy in something loose, Clare holding a tennis racket. The dining-room was on the right of the hall. Six chairs sat in it round a gate-leg table and beside one wall stood a twin cabinet to the one in the sitting-room containing the best china used only for visitors. More utilitarian crockery hung from the kitchen dresser. In the kitchen larder various spots were labelled ‘Jams,’ ‘Cereals,’ ‘Tea,’ because Susan constantly put things away in the wrong places. A plastic chart with differently coloured pegs reminded Clare what to buy and when to buy it.

Arthur made Clare the drink of hot whisky and lime which she invariably had as a nightcap, and took it up to where she sat waiting in her single bed, face creamed and hair in a net. They had played bridge in the sitting-room, which did not look as it should have done. Arthur put away the card table, returned chairs to their places, plumped up cushions. Then he went up past the bedroom to the attic. This large windowless coved room (a window would have disturbed the outside symmetry of the house) ran almost the whole length of the house. Half of it was occupied by the slot racing layout, the tracks bending in a double eight with two exciting chicane sections where cars could really go all out. Spectator stands with people in them, car pits with engineers waiting for cars to come in, television camera crews, hay bales, banking at bends, were all in place. Four cars stood ready to start. He thought of racing them, but knew that the sound would keep Clare awake. The other half of the attic contained much china discarded from down below, framed watercolours painted by his mother when he had been a child, and his old roll-topped desk. He unlocked this with a key from the ring at his waist. A loose leaf book in a black cover lay on the desk. It was his diary.

The first page said: ‘A Brownjohn, The Laurels, Fraycut, Surrey, England, Europe, The World.’ Below there was a little rhyme which he had once read and repeated, perhaps inaccurately:

 

He who unbidden looks within

Commits a fearful wicked sin.

Peeping Tom, filthy fool,

I bet you were a sneak at school.

 

He opened the diary, read one or two of the entries, ran his fingers over an untouched white page, decided that he was too tired to write and locked the desk again.

In the bathroom he paused while brushing his teeth to consider the face that confronted him. It was pale, thin-lipped, distinctly rabbitish round the nose and doggy about the eyes. Worst of all was the billiard-ball smoothness of the head. Arthur had started losing his hair at an early age, and by the time he was in his early thirties the whole lot had gone. He had once seen Yul Brynner on the screen and had tried to convince himself that baldness was attractive, but examination of his head in the glass had made it clear that the total effect produced by his features did not at all resemble that of Yul Brynner’s.

He went into the bedroom. Clare was lying as he had known she would be, on her right side with her eyes half closed. Her face was covered with shiny cream. He kissed the top of her head, undressed and got into bed, turned out the light. In the darkness he repeated what he had said earlier. ‘I wish you wouldn’t say that about my drinking. I don’t like it.’

She made no reply. Five minutes later she began to snore.