Chapter 2

Bill knelt down by Philip’s bed, and held the mirror from the dressing-table to the half-open lips, but it remained clear of any hopeful trace of mist. He touched the grey forehead, smoothed now of the troubling lines of thought, and drew back his fingers with a shiver from the coldness of the skin. Philip lay on his back, his face uplifted to the morning light, his arms relaxed and easy in the folds of the sheets. He looked young, and aloof, and ironical, wearing still the half-smile with which he had fallen asleep.

‘Is he dead?’ Mary asked in a whisper. But she knew, she had known from the first moment. Never could Philip have looked like that alive, whether waking or asleep.

Bill said: ‘Yes.’ The word was almost inaudible, as though shock had done something to his vocal cords. He cleared his throat laboriously, and slowly stood up. In the act he accomplished several stages of the transition into manhood, though all he understood of it was that the weight of events had suddenly come down upon his shoulders, and that instinctively he braced himself to receive the load. There was no time to avoid it, no opportunity to deflect it on to somebody else. There was nobody else, except Mary, and she was hovering at his back, still half-stunned with shock, and surprisingly helpless when confronted with the unforeseen, she whose daily routine ran on well-regulated tracks, like a train.

‘But it isn’t possible! How could he die? Why should he? There was nothing the matter with him. His heart was sound as a bell. People don’t just die in the night for no reason—’

‘I don’t know, Aunt Mary, I don’t know any more than you do. We shall have to call Dr Benson.’ He had to make an intense effort to remember the steps which had to be taken after a sudden death, but this at least was certain, and urgent. The doctor who had been in attendance in the household must be called in at once, and he would give a death certificate. Or, of course, refuse one! There might have to be an inquest! Indeed, now that he had thought of that possibility, he saw that it was very likely in these circumstances. But only Dr Benson could decide. He took Mary by the arm, very gently, and led her out of the room and into Philip’s study next door, and put her into a chair. The stunned and motionless look was still on her face, and her hands, when he took them in his, were stiff and cold.

‘Darling, I’m going to get you a drink, whether you like the stuff or not. Don’t try to think, or move, or do anything yet – you’ve had a bad shock. Just sit here till I come back, I’ll see to everything.’

Perhaps it was the wrong treatment. Perhaps he was taking away from Mary, by thus assuming responsibility, the very thing she most needed, the necessity of coping with events. But she looked so helpless and witless that he couldn’t spare time to rouse her yet, he would have to get on with it himself. There was the doctor, first of all – and what followed would depend on him. And there was Helen’s train, drawing steadily nearer to the station, and no one to meet her. He couldn’t possibly leave here now. Renaud might quite well be asked to meet the train, but Renaud was out walking somewhere, and Bill didn’t know where, and hadn’t time to hunt for him. Perhaps the rector would go. Helen – Helen—At the thought of her his emotions, which had been in a state of suspended animation since the terrible thing happened, started into vehement and painful life again. Poor Helen, he thought wildly, poor Philip, the two figures moving in and out in a tragic dance in his mind. He couldn’t bear the thought of the rector breaking the news to her. But who else was there? And it was unthinkable that she should be left unmet, wondering what had happened, driving in anxiously by taxi to find her husband dead and her household in chaos.

Dr Benson answered the telephone from his surgery. Bill poured out the naked facts without finesse; there was no time for softening blows, especially for the benefit of this tough old professional, even if he had known Philip for fifteen years and been in a very real measure his friend.

‘Can you come over as soon as possible? Don’t leave anyone who really needs you, because there isn’t anything you can do for Uncle Philip – but do come as soon as you can. He’s dead! He didn’t come down this morning, and Aunt Mary went up to wake him, and found him dead in bed. He looks as if he was quite fast asleep when he died, and never knew anything about it. No, we haven’t touched anything. No, there’s no doubt at all. He’s cold—!’ Bill heard his own voice split in two, and gulped down determinedly the constriction in his throat. ‘Mary might need a sedative – she’s badly shaken. I’m going to dope her with brandy.’

‘Don’t overdo it,’ said Dr Benson briefly. ‘I’ll be there inside ten minutes.’

Bill pushed down the receiver rest for a moment, and dialled the rectory number. He still didn’t like the idea, but he had no choice; and Helen, after all, in her charitable innocence, had the best of opinions of the rector, without any of the slight reservations the rest of the household felt about him. Tact without warmth seemed to Bill an offence, but it might have its uses. He braced himself to meet the inevitable condolences as gracefully as he could.

But it was not the rector who answered, it was Rachel Pharamond. Bill had never expected to feel such relief at the sound of that fresh, incisive young voice.

‘Oh, Rachel, thank God it’s you! Will you do us a great favour? It’s frightfully urgent. I was to have met Helen’s train at ten, and now something ghastly has happened, and I can’t leave here, and she mustn’t, simply mustn’t, be left to come home alone and find out what’s happened without any warning. It’s Philip – we found him dead in bed, ten minutes ago. The doctor’s on his way over now.’

‘Wait a minute – it must be the line – I thought you said Philip was dead—!’

‘He is! Aunt Mary found him. He must have died in his sleep. I know—! We can’t believe in it, either. But there isn’t any doubt about it.’

‘Philip!’ said Rachel, on a great, exhaled breath. ‘Oh, God, Bill, I’m so sorry! I liked him so much! Yes, I’ll go for Helen, of course! There’s time – I’ll be there before the train gets in, don’t worry.’

How prompt she was in decisions, and how blessedly brief in giving voice to sympathy! She almost rang off before he could call her back in sudden agitation: ‘Rachel – don’t tell her he’s dead! Please! If you could just prepare her a little – say I rang up and asked you to come – say there’s something wrong, and I couldn’t come myself, but don’t – I’d rather—’

‘That’s all right,’ said Rachel. ‘You shall break the news to her yourself. I’m just a stand-in for the journey. Good-bye, Bill!’

She was gone. He was amazed at the feeling of gratitude he had for her directness, and the absolute reliance he found himself placing in her. He went back at once to Mary, and coaxed and compelled her into swallowing the brandy he had brought for her. It quickened colour in her cheeks again, and made her shudder and grimace, which at least was better than that blank, fixed look of shock. She began to look round uneasily, convinced that in this or any crisis she ought to be hard at work, doing with competence whatever had to be done.

‘Dr Benson’s on his way. There’s nothing we can do until he comes, except perhaps tell the Renauds what’s happened.’

‘And there’s poor Helen just coming home – Oh dear, we’d forgotten her! How can we tell her? They adored each other so! And there’s nobody to meet her, even!’ Mary’s tears brimmed over, and whether they were for Helen or for Philip was something Bill could not guess. He put his arm round her shoulders rallyingly, and hugged her for a moment, applying a technique of comfort which had gone out with his childhood, but might have its uses yet.

‘It’s all right, Aunt Mary, there’ll be somebody to meet her. Rachel is going. I just telephoned her. Won’t you go down now, and take care of Mrs Renaud, if she’s put in an appearance? Things have got to go on, you know, for Helen’s sake – for all our sakes. I’ll stay here with Uncle Philip till the doctor comes.’

‘Poor Bill,’ said Mary, wiping her eyes, ‘it’s just as awful for you. It’s as if the ground had opened under the house. He was so very alive!’

She rose, however, with some of her old briskness, and looking round with eyes still slightly dazed, observed the evidences of her brother’s last preoccupations. On his desk the unfinished proof was pushed aside to make room for a pile of gramophone records, and the player still stood open on its cabinet. Beside the records, on a corner of the desk, lay the coffee tray, the bottom of the single cup dark with grounds.

‘I may as well take that down, I suppose,’ she said sadly, and stretched out her hands to pick it up. Bill checked her with a hand on her arm, hardly yet realising himself the significance of what he did.

‘No, leave it. We ought not to touch anything yet. We don’t know—’

He stopped, his eyes suddenly fixed in appalled remembrance on the black ceramic pot. He heard Philip’s thoughtful, dispassionate voice lecturing on the psychology of successful murder, saying with deliberation: ‘All you need to kill efficiently is patience, placidity, and the ability to observe accurately.’ Bill felt sick, and recognised with humiliation that he was horribly frightened. This death was altogether too apt. Had there been among Philip’s audience one pupil willing to learn the technique literally? Somebody – was it Renaud? – had put the exact case as an instance. ‘Say I wanted to murder you – how would I set about it?’ And Philip had told them, in so many words, leaning forward to impale himself on the knife he himself had sharpened and handed to his murderer. Every victim of murder, he had said, is to some extent a suicide.

It isn’t true, Bill told himself frantically, shaking the nightmare remembrance away from him. There’ll be something quite prosaic, something we ought to have known about, something he should have been worrying about, an enlarged heart, an aneurism, something natural. The doctor will know. It’s just one effect of shock, this running to invent trouble. Snap out of it. There was coffee in the pot, and that was all!

It was at that moment that they heard Dr Benson’s feet stumping up the stairs. He would have left his car by the farm-gate, as usual, and come across the field and the bridge into the garden, letting himself in unannounced, as he always did. He had been in and out of the house so often in attendance on Helen that no ceremony ever attached to his visits. Mary hurried to meet him on the landing, and he gave her merely an abstracted pat on the shoulder and a jerk of his head backward down the stairs.

‘One of your guests just came in from the lane, Mary. I’d go and keep him occupied for a while, if I were you. This is a bad business, we’d better know a bit more about it before we make it public property.’

She went down at once, grateful to have something definite to do again, now that she had so far recovered herself as to feel the want of action. Bill led the doctor into Philip’s room, and stood back, watching with strained attention, as he made his rapid and careful examination. Neither of them said a word throughout this process. Bill fixed his eyes upon Philip’s leaden face, with its ironical half-smile already smoothing out into a grand and humbling indifference, and waited with a thumping heart for the verdict. At length the doctor drew up the sheet over the dead man’s face, and turned and looked at Bill for a long moment in silence.

‘Well?’ said Bill in a hoarse whisper, when he could no longer bear the waiting.

‘It isn’t well, Bill, my boy! It’s far from well! I went over Philip about six months ago, when he’d been overdoing it badly, and I know he was fundamentally sound – heart, lungs, everything. Just run-down from overwork, but at bottom as strong as an ox. Healthy people like Philip don’t go out overnight, like this. I’m sorry, Bill, but I can’t give a certificate. I’m really very sorry, but where a death doesn’t make sense it’s my duty to pass on the job to the coroner. You understand what that means?’

‘Yes,’ said Bill with difficulty. ‘It means an inquest, and probably a post-mortem, too.’

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ said the doctor, looking up at him narrowly from under his rumpled grey eyebrows.

‘No. I thought myself that it was all wrong. He wasn’t ill. I’ve never known him really ill, nothing but seasonal colds, and flu, and things like that. I didn’t see how he could possibly just stop living, like this. Can you tell what he really did die of?’

‘It will take a post-mortem to say for certain; but yes, I can make a pretty close estimate. He died of a good large dose of one of the barbiturates, luminal or something like it. He’s been dead several hours.’

They stood looking at each other for a moment in an exchange of thoughts which needed no words. Then Bill said: ‘He had his coffee last night, as usual. I don’t think he sat up late, I don’t think he was working. But he drank his coffee. The tray’s in the next room now, it hasn’t been touched. That was right, wasn’t it?’ And after a momentary struggle with the wave of panic that rose in him like a high tide, he asked almost brusquely: ‘I don’t know the proper drill – who sends for the police, you or me?’

Estelle and Gerard were in the hall together when Bill came downstairs at the doctor’s heels. They were silent, and they were not looking at each other. Gerard stood near the window, staring out into the garden; Estelle was in a chair by the hearth, with the morning paper spread open in her hands, but the intense nature of her stillness and concentration did not suggest that she was reading it.

‘I’m sorry!’ said Bill rather wearily, ‘I’m afraid you’ve been shockingly neglected, I do apologise. But something pretty shattering has happened. I don’t know if my aunt has told you already – Uncle Philip died suddenly in the night.’

It sounded curiously stilted to him, and completely unreal. Every time he said it or thought it, it hit him hard under the heart again, and made him gasp. It didn’t seem to him that he could ever get used to it.

The paper crumpled sharply between Estelle’s hands. Her eyes looked over it with a scared, wild gleam of violet light, animal in their alarm and defensive ferocity. But when the paper sank slowly into her lap her face was revealed in marble stillness, even her breath held for a moment. ‘Dead?’ she said in a whisper, not doubting, only, as it seemed, trying to grasp it, and her eyes flew to her husband. ‘But how?’ But it was clear that she was not putting the question to Bill, and he made no attempt to answer it.

Gerard, turning so that the light was behind him and his face obscured, stared with dropped jaw and almost incredulous frown and, having grasped the certainty of Bill’s verdict, made appropriate noises of distress and dismay.

‘How terrible! What a dreadful thing to happen, and what a shock for you! I can’t tell you how sorry Estelle and I are to hear such sad news. If there’s anything we can do to be of help – anything at all – please do count on us. Mrs Greville – she’ll be arriving by train – could I—?’

‘Rachel Pharamond is meeting her,’ said Bill. ‘Thanks, all the same! Will you excuse me for a moment? I have to telephone the police.’

He didn’t know why he dropped the brutal fact in their laps like that, nor why he recoiled with so much distaste from Gerard Renaud’s sympathy. Perhaps it had already become clear to his subconscious mind that someone in this household had poisoned Philip, and instinctively he was selecting for distrust the stranger simply because to look with doubt upon Mary, or the servants, was altogether too fantastic, as well as quite unbearable. He saw Gerard’s heavy jaw sag still further in amazement and consternation, or a good imitation of both. But what did that mean? No one in this house could afford to be anything but amazed and concerned from now on. He went to telephone, leaving Dr Benson to meet the inevitable outcry.

‘The police? But I don’t understand! How can the police possibly come into the matter? You have examined Mr Greville, I take it, Doctor – a most tragic death, and a terrible shock for his wife, but is there really any ground for supposing it to be anything but natural?’

Estelle sat mute, her hands gripping the arms of her chair, her eyes flashing with desperate shrewdness from one face to the other, like an animal making a lightning estimate of the possible bolt-holes out of a dangerous situation. Grief, if she had for one instant had grief in her eyes, was already gone; among so many nearer preoccupations there was no longer any room for it. She could think as quickly as Gerard, and see as far.

‘Gerard, I feel that perhaps we could at least relieve Mrs Greville of the burden of having guests at a time like this. She’ll have more than enough trouble to face, without that. And I’m sure she’d much rather have just her own family about her. If we’re not needed, we could drive back to town today, instead of on Tuesday. It might be the best way of helping.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said the doctor dryly, ‘that it may be necessary for you to stay. It will be for the police to say if you can leave, and when.’

‘The police?’ Gerard moistened his grey lips, and his eyes flickered for an instant to his wife’s face, and were met by a look of wild, distrustful intelligence. ‘But surely they can’t suppose that my wife and I know anything about Mr Greville’s death? The most casual of visits – a mere accident that we’re here at all—’

‘If Mr Greville’s death is not the result of natural causes,’ said the doctor patiently, ‘and I can tell you here and now that that’s extremely unlikely, then there are just three possibilities: accident, suicide and murder. Nothing about him ever suggested to me that suicide would be within his scope; to have an accident with – what I take to be the agency of his death – he would have to be in possession of it, and in the legitimate habit of taking it, which emphatically he was not. I’m his doctor, I know the full tale of the drugs I’ve ever prescribed for him, and they’re precious few in any case, and this one isn’t among them. And that makes the third possibility loom a little larger than is quite comfortable, Mr Renaud. The police have their job to do. They’ll tell you when you can leave here – but I don’t think it will be today.’

Gerard did not pursue the suggestion of leaving; he was perfectly aware that anxiety and indignation were to be dissembled at all costs. Instead, he asked at once: ‘But what is it you think he’s taken? What drug?’

‘One of the barbiturates, probably luminal. Something I’m convinced he never took in his life before. I doubt if there’s even any in the house.’

‘Yes,’ said Mary’s quiet voice from the doorway, ‘there is.’

She had come in unnoticed from the kitchen, and stood just within the room. She had been crying, and it had done her good; her face was wretched but calm, with the determined, competent, roused calm of someone who has emerged successfully from an intense crisis. ‘I had luminal tablets once,’ she said to the doctor, ‘on a prescription from your locum, when you were away in hospital yourself – do you remember? It must be nearly three years ago now. He gave me a bottle of fifty – I dare say he was over-enthusiastic, he was that kind of young man. I don’t think more than a dozen or fifteen were ever taken, but I can’t try to guess how many there ought to be in the bottle. It’s so long since I even looked at it.’

‘And where is this bottle now?’ asked Dr Benson.

‘Gerard and I could hardly know anything about it, could we?’ Estelle put in rapidly. ‘Only someone who lived in the house could possibly know you had any such tablets.’

The fight was on already, the fight to step back out of the spotlight and leave someone else blinded in its glare. Estelle would have no mercy and no scruples. Was she more afraid than other people, or only quicker in realisation of danger? Bill, coming back from telephoning, heard the note of resolute self-interest in her voice, and wondered bitterly if he was soon going to be elbowing his way past her towards the escape doors.

‘They’re in the bathroom cabinet,’ said Mary, ‘and available to anyone who happened to look in there for a styptic pencil or the iodine. There’s no secret about them, and they’ve never been under lock and key because we’ve taken it for granted that everyone in the house was an adult, and responsible. I dare say they ought to have been locked up, but they never were.’

‘Would you mind,’ asked the doctor, ‘if I took charge of them?’

‘I should be very glad if you would. If, of course, they’re still there.’

They were still there. Within two minutes the doctor came downstairs again, carrying the little bottle carefully in a folded handkerchief. It was that handkerchief, more than any other detail, that underlined the real state of the case. Bill stood staring at it, and his mind was recapitulating feverishly some broken echoes from Thursday evening, and fitting them together into the framework of this tragedy. ‘—it would mean getting hold of something lethal by strictly private means – but it needn’t be something that left no trace, the traces would only end in mid air. Then all you would have to do would be to keep your nerve—’

‘Look at it, Mary.’ The doctor held out the little phial on the palm of his hand, still shielded by the handkerchief. ‘Does it seem to you less full than it ought to be?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t possibly say. Once the cotton-wool’s out of the neck, you know, the bottle’s already nearly half empty. At this half-way stage, ten tablets, more than ten, could be taken out, and still leave it looking much the same. I told you, I don’t know how many there ought to be, and it would be wrong to start guessing.’

‘These are two-grain tablets,’ said the doctor musingly. ‘Ten of them could—’ He broke off, and wrapped the little bottle carefully in the handkerchief.

But there won’t be finger-prints, thought Bill, in response to the doctor’s unspoken suggestion. That’s of the essence. Whoever took Philip’s tip and killed him had the whole idea fresh in his mind, detective-story fashion, straight from the horse’s mouth. He wouldn’t forget about finger-prints; he had an expert tutor.

And I was there, too, he thought, remembering things he would have preferred to forget. I spent the last few days quarrelling with him, all the household knows it, the rector knows it, the doctor knows it. I wanted him to release my money, and he wouldn’t, and everybody will think: ‘It suits Bill much better to have Helen stepping into his trustee’s shoes, he can get what he wants out of Helen.’ Once I even said something absurd, in a temper, after he’d been making fun of me. ‘Over my dead body!’ he said, and I said—A wave of burning heat swept through him as he remembered what he had replied, like a spiteful child screaming: ‘I hate you! I’ll kill you!’ when all it means is: ‘I can’t get my own way with you!’ He didn’t know whether he felt more frightened or ashamed, but the dull, miserable ache that filled his mind and heart did not seem to go with the fright part of his reactions.

The hum of the car turning in from the road, and the crunch of wheels on gravel, made them all spring round to look through the french windows, long before the car had time to make the circle of the house and enter their view.

‘That will be the police,’ said the doctor, almost with eagerness. For things mechanical the doctor had no ear at all; for the note of this engine was immediately recognisable to Bill as that of the rector’s Ford.

‘It’s not the police,’ he said, ‘there hasn’t been time. It’s Helen!’

He plunged across the room impetuously, before any of them could forestall him and make a hash of the unbearable business, which God knew was dreadful enough already. He sprang through the open french windows and down the steps into the garden, and ran to meet Helen as she stepped out of the car.

She was intensely pale, and yet he had never noticed her brightness so clearly. It was as if she were lit from within, incandescent with her ecstasy of anxiety and foreboding. Her eyes, beneath the lucid forehead, were wide in wonder and dread, and already seemed to be staring at tragedy, but with a superhuman tranquillity. She said: ‘Bill!’ on an almost inaudible breath, and extended her gloved hands to him in appeal, and he flew to take them, to put an end to that hopelessly pathetic gesture of theirs in mid air. He drew her by them closely, warmly against him, and shut his arms tightly round her, and held her like that all the time he was speaking to her, his cheek against her hair. She had left her foolish little white hat, and her handbag and scarf, in the car. Rachel, quietly gathering them up after her, watched the meeting with interest, and found it enlightening, as well as moving.

Poor Bill, she thought, I wonder if that’s why he’s been so mad to get away, miles away, a continent away. If it is, he hasn’t an inkling of it himself, he thinks he feels towards her as a good son ought to feel – but it looks as if some bit of him, deep inside, has been uneasy for a long time, years maybe, feeling that there was something wrong in quality, something excessive, about his feelings towards his uncle’s wife. And Philip’s death hardly resolves that, does it? Poor Bill! She was proud of her detachment, but it did not prevent her from feeling a certain unpleasantly perceptible pain which did not, on the whole, appear to be entirely on Bill’s behalf. No wonder he’d never paid any attention to girls of his own age, no wonder he couldn’t even see them, with that blinding light in between.

‘Darling,’ said Bill, quite softly and slowly, putting into his voice all the molten affection that filled his heart to bursting, ‘something terrible has happened while you’ve been away, and you must be very brave, and remember that we all adore you, and rely on you, and would do anything, anything in the world, to help you, or keep you from unhappiness. Please forgive me if I was wrong, I couldn’t bear you to hear it from anyone but me, or anywhere but here, at home, where at least there’ll be privacy for you, and little things left to comfort you. Darling – it’s Philip. He – Helen, he—’ He faltered, seeing her face sharpen into a crystal clarity and awareness, and her eyes fix suddenly on the open windows where the others had appeared one by one, all but the one for whom she looked.

‘Philip!’ she said, in a still, thoughtful tone, to herself rather than to him. ‘I don’t see him – he isn’t here.’ She drew herself erect in the boy’s arms, and stared into his face; and in acknowledgement of his pain she even smiled a little. ‘My dear, don’t distress yourself so! If you can say it, I can hear it. Tell me – I shan’t make it worse for you. Philip is—’

‘He’s dead,’ said Bill very gently. ‘We found him dead in bed this morning. When he didn’t come down to breakfast we were worried, Mary and I, and she went to wake him, and he was dead. Dr Benson’s here now. After he’d seen him he waited, because there’s something more, you see, Helen, something wrong about the death. We think he’d taken some tablets that killed him in his sleep.’ He almost wished to keep back the last blows, but while she stood so straight and composed in his arms, and watched him with that pale and resolute face, he could not affront her by hiding anything. ‘We’ve had to call in the police. The doctor can’t give a certificate. There’ll have to be an inquest, to find out the real cause of Philip’s death. Darling, you are not to think at all about that – we will take care of everything. Don’t let any of the complications weigh on your mind, or make the thing ugly for you. Where you and Philip are concerned there’s nothing ugly at all – it’s just simply that you’ve lost him. He loved you as long as he lived, and he didn’t even know he was leaving you, so for him there wasn’t any ugliness or regret at all. And that’s what matters.’

Where had he found this unaccustomed eloquence? Nothing but love could have made him so fluent. Even at a moment like this Helen was able to find something amusing, as well as infinitely touching, in the measure by which Bill had excelled himself, for she was smiling through unshed tears as she reached up and kissed his cheek.

‘My dear, my dear!’ was all she said for a moment; and then, drawing herself a little away from his supporting arms, which at once released her: ‘I’ll go to him. Don’t worry about me, Bill – I shall be all right.’ Her voice was remote but firm, it came clearly from steady lips. When she walked towards the french windows she looked neither to right nor left, and nobody ventured to intrude upon her loneliness, even with sympathy. Bill followed her at a respectful distance across the hall and up the staircase, and waited humbly outside Philip’s door, in case she should need him.

Helen closed the door, and was alone with her husband.

Bill sat on the stairs and waited for what seemed a very long time, watching but not seeing the constrained movements, hearing but not comprehending the nervous and rare utterances, of the others down below. Rachel had come in, and was talking in low tones to Mary, there beside the window. In her short red duffle coat and slim grey skirt, with her dark fringe ruffled, she looked like an athletic schoolgirl, until you remarked the power and profundity of the face. Bill had never really looked at it before, but now it was perhaps the only thing he could see clearly in all the great room below, the only thing that had an authenticity of its own even at this extreme crisis, when all his senses were concentrated on that closed door which separated him from Helen in her grief. He didn’t blame her for shutting him out with the rest; his distress was all for her, not for himself.

At the first touch of her hand at the door he was on his feet, ready to stay or go, to embrace and hold her or draw back and let her alone, just as she should wish. She came out of the room with a slow, composed step, closing the door behind her. Her face was in shadow, he saw only the immense luminous blueness of her eyes shining in the dimness, and then the softer glimmer of her pale face. She was perfectly calm. No, this was something quite different in quality, more than serenity; she was exalted. She looked at him with that glittering stillness, and said in a quiet, direct and level voice:

‘A police car has just turned in at the gates, with two officers in it. You had better go down, Bill, and let them in.’

The police were in almost constant possession of Philip’s study for three days. They interviewed, and questioned, and took finger-prints, and went over the events of Good Friday again and again with every member of the household; but they did not extract from anyone the gist of the conversation which had taken place on Thursday evening. Philip himself had given them all the most explicit instructions on how to deal with this situation. ‘All you have to do is keep your nerve, admit nothing, know nothing, do nothing. The traces will end in mid air, among half a dozen people who shared the same opportunity.’ Did the police even discover any of the possible motives that were thick in the air of the house? Bill had only realised them himself, had only grown sensitive to their implications, after the event, when he saw Gerard and Estelle staring at each other with bleak and ferocious hatred through their masks of solidarity and affection, as they stood together shoulder to shoulder against the world. Not out of love, that was certain! Out of self-interest. I will swear black white for you, because it is the only way I can hope to induce you to swear black white for me. I will know nothing, absolutely nothing, of any compromising relationship you may have had with Philip Greville, on the strict though unspoken understanding that you will suppress what you know about me. Nothing was ever said, no such bargains ever made in words; that was not necessary. These two understood each other as completely as they hated each other.

‘We sat here for perhaps ten minutes after Miss Greville had said good night,’ Gerard had said at his first interview, ‘and then we went up to bed.’

‘Together?’

‘Of course, together.’

There had been no need for any prior agreement between them on this point. They had drawn together instinctively in the impregnable lie. No one had heard them quarrel, no one had seen them part. No one could prove they were lying, even if Bill, grown abnormally sensitive now to the stresses round him, vibrated in protest like a lie-detector when they made their flat statements.

And that left him, last to go up to bed that night, with no one to lie for him, or at least only by suppression. He had gone up the stairs alone, after the house was quiet; he had even hesitated for a long minute outside Philip’s door, he had – oh, God, he’d touched the coffee-pot, he might have left distinguishable prints on it! He could have dropped luminal tablets into it easily enough; he could have taken them from the bathroom at any time that day or days beforehand, they were always available to him. So much for an opportunity. What about motive? The Renauds would know nothing, though they could not choose but know how the whole house had been uneasy with his fretting after escape, and how Philip had said flatly, in front of them all, that he would not, in any circumstances, let him have the means to go off to Canada with Lawson. Mary and Helen would not lie, perhaps, but they wouldn’t volunteer any information on that subject unless they were asked, and if no one prompted the police in the first place they probably never would be asked. The household, with all its diverse personalities, was being forced into a solidarity of silence against the common enemy. Most people talk too much when the police are around, out of sheer nervousness; but these people had been tutored by Philip, and were schooled in the virtues of ignorance and silence.

And the servants were not resident in the house, to know all too well the affairs of uncle and nephew. They came in daily from the village, and went home in the afternoon. So only Bill himself could supply the police with the facts about his motive, short of some unforeseen disaster. He was going to have some strenuous lying to do, at least by implication.

When it came to the point, however, he did not actually have to lie about his relations with Philip; and that in itself was a revelation.

‘You were on good terms with your uncle, Mr Grant?’

He had said: ‘Yes,’ even before he had time to consider, so natural and true did the affirmative seem. He spoke with a sudden half-smile of remembrance for Philip’s many-sided personality, which had rendered life with him long ago so unpredictable, so stimulating, so much fun. ‘We fell out sometimes,’ he said, still remembering, and still smiling. ‘I was fond of my own way, and he was an artist, and volatile, and the mixture was often explosive. The fireworks we generated were very handsome, but they never did any great harm.’

After that he had found himself sweating in the expectation that the next question would be: ‘Was there anything in dispute between you recently?’ And then he would have lied, because he was scared, because when it came to the point he simply didn’t trust the law as completely as all that, because he didn’t believe that innocent people are never convicted. But the next question was: ‘Had your uncle any enemies, to your knowledge?’ And he had said ruefully: ‘He must have had one. But I don’t know who that could be. I should have said he hadn’t a real enemy in the world. There were lots of people he couldn’t get on with, lots of people he quarrelled with, all the humbugs and the climbers and the sycophants and the poseurs – he couldn’t bear them and they couldn’t bear him. But they just kept out of his way. You don’t kill people because you’re incompatible with them, not unless you’re forced to live with them – you just sheer off.’

The inspector had looked at him thoughtfully, and said at length: ‘You’re taking it for granted someone killed him? I don’t recollect committing myself to any such opinion. We haven’t got the inquest over yet, you know.’

‘No, I know. But you did say that it’s already established he died of luminal poisoning, and I don’t quite see how that could have happened by accident.’

‘You wouldn’t, I take it, consider suicide as a possibility?’

Bill had shouted: ‘No!’ to this, so scornfully that there was hardly any need to elaborate his rejection of the theory. But he did add, a shade startled by his own vehemence: ‘He was a hundred per cent happy – well, say ninety, maybe no one ever does better than that – and two hundred per cent alive. But even if he’d been old, and decrepit, and ill, and lonely, he’d never have killed himself – not in any circumstances. It was just the flat opposite of everything in him.’

And then he had felt better, because it was true, and in some obscure way it was an obituary of Philip, and one he was glad to have uttered.

The inspector said resignedly to his sergeant, on the eve of the inquest: ‘Every person in the house may have had a strong motive for wanting Greville out of the way, but we shall never know any of them, unless a miracle happens.’ He had been reviewing the relationships involved in the case, and they were all apparently blameless. Greville, his wife, his sister and his nephew had lived amicably together for fifteen years, and there was no visible reason why they should change now. The other two were strangers, an old acquaintance – perhaps more? – of Greville’s, and her husband, chance-met a few weeks ago, and invited for Easter. There was no one here, outside Hugonin’s Mill, who knew anything at all about them; and no one in the other part of their life, it seemed, who knew anything about the Grevilles. The woman was interesting, very interesting, but the connection, as it stood, extremely tenuous.

‘Opportunity,’ said the sergeant, ‘they all had – barring Mrs Greville, of course, she was a hundred miles away all that day. Miss Greville made the coffee, she was alone in the kitchen, she took the tray up herself. She’s the one who had the tablets – I know they were where anyone could get at them, but she’s the one most likely to think of them, because they were prescribed for her. But why in the world should she want to kill her brother? There’s the boy Grant, he came back after seeing Miss Pharamond home, and found everybody else had already gone up to bed. He says himself the tray was still there. Naturally he says he didn’t touch it, but he easily could have done, there was nobody else about by that time. But again, we don’t know of any reason he had for wanting his uncle out of the way. Then the Renaud couple – they’re out of it according to their evidence, they went up to bed together. Well, they’re husband and wife, maybe you could say it’s only natural they should give each other an alibi. Only in this case I can’t say I get the impression of a devoted couple, exactly. In any case, we haven’t a scrap of evidence that either of them had a motive for killing Greville. There could have been all sorts of grudges among them, but there’s no sign of any.’

‘The coffee in the pot was stiff with luminal,’ said the inspector, ‘as well as the dregs in the cup. Evidently the stuff was dropped into the pot – which is just about the most unlikely way in the world of committing suicide. The only prints on the pot are Greville’s own, and those of Mrs Greville, who put the tray ready in the morning, and Miss Greville, who made the coffee at night. There’s some trace of a hand-print round the belly of the pot, but nothing identifiable. The knob on the lid has no prints except Greville’s and Miss Greville’s, which is as it should be. Everything, in fact, is as it should be, except that a man’s dead who ought to be alive. We don’t even know for certain that the luminal that killed him came from that bottle, though it’s a reasonable assumption, especially as the bottle is a dead blank where prints are concerned, which in normal circumstances it certainly wouldn’t be. We don’t, in fact, know anything for certain – except, as I said, that the poor devil’s dead.’

‘And none of the people involved knows anything for certain either,’ said the sergeant sceptically.

‘That could be genuine in all cases but one, of course. Or it could be pure fright. Or it could be a case of everybody having something to hide. We’ll stay close, and keep pegging away. Sooner or later somebody’s nerve is going to give way.’

But nobody’s nerve gave way. They were already forewarned and forearmed against any such eventuality. Philip had had apt pupils.

Nothing new emerged at the inquest; nothing new was allowed to emerge. Only the awkward fact that the luminal had undoubtedly been administered in the coffee, in a manner very unlikely in a suicide and almost impossible to consider as an accident, prevented the jury from bringing in an open verdict. As it was they were compelled at last to agree on a verdict of murder against a person unknown. If Thursday’s conversation on the subject of reached the same conclusion in considerably less time and with fewer misgivings; but somehow that little discursion had fallen clean out of the memory of every person who had been present to hear it. Even the rector had seen fit to put it out of his mind, perhaps because it made contacts with the household at Hugonin’s Mill too embarrassing, and he had come to rely on them too much to want to sever them now.

‘A perfectly sound verdict,’ said the inspector bitterly, ‘and only four people to pick from, barring the extremely remote chance of some unknown intruder. And we’re about as likely to be able to pick put the right one and bring it home to him – or her! – as we are to pan gold out of the mill-stream down there. If only they’d be a shade more talkative, at least one of them might say the wrong thing.’

But they preserved still their impenetrable reserve. After the brief, unelaborated answers he let the silences grow long and oppressive, but no one was shaken into rushing in to fill the gaps with indiscreet sound. Only Helen, immured from all other anxieties in her solitary and unobtrusive grief, talked, as he felt, naturally; but why should Helen, in any case, labour to contain what she knew, when she knew no more than he did? She alone stood clear of all the events of that Good Friday, with some millions of witnesses to testify to her whereabouts and her actions at the close of the evening, at least a hundred miles from the scene of the crime.

Permission had been given for Philip’s funeral to take place, and two days after the inquest they buried him. Helen in her deep black stood by the graveside, in the heavy, reddish clay, and watched what was mortal of Philip lowered into the pit. Her face was veiled, but it would seem by the stillness of her hands, which were gripped together before her, and the composure of her slight body, that she did not weep. Bill stood beside her, his arm through hers. He was extremely pale, and looked tired and haggard, and more than his age, and his eyes followed the descent of the coffin with fascination and horror; but his composure matched Helen’s. When they turned away from the grave Helen’s enormous wreath of daffodils and tulips, all white and gold, was left shining radiantly in the mist and gloom of a dull day. Rachel watched them get into the car, just as the thin, cold rain of spring began to fall. She wondered if Helen had noticed how abruptly, during the past few days, Bill had completed his growing up.

The inspector came to see Helen the next day. He found her in Philip’s study, assembling the mass of her husband’s works, and collecting together all the letters and documents he had accumulated in the years of his celebrity. Bill, who had been helping her to sort out this material, took himself off as soon as the inspector arrived, and went down into the garden, leaving them to talk in privacy.

He didn’t know what was the matter with him. He wished he could feel happier about the work in hand, as Helen, he was sure, took comfort in it. There ought to be a life of Philip Greville, by all means, he ought to be remembered; more than that, his memory ought to be celebrated with ardour; only somehow, when he saw that row of rather precious novels assembled, and the small honours put together, the little prizes which so delighted Helen’s heart, the sum of it seemed so ludicrously and meanly inadequate to be Philip’s memorial. And he thought, if I were writing a book about him, I don’t think I should find it necessary to do more than mention those things; they hardly seem important enough even to go in at all. Philip was something quite different, something infinitely bigger. All the same, he was glad to see Helen occupied upon a darling project of her own, something that would keep Philip ever-present with her while she worked at it. She had grown more remote, more abstracted, more radiant and silent and still, since Philip was gone, as though she had her plans already made to go after him. Philip would have been vehement in disapproval. To him, life was for living.

Down by the pack-bridge the wet green trees leaned over angry brown water, swollen after the heavy rain. On the banks stood the Renauds, very close together, turned a little away from each other, as he had seen them constantly since Philip’s death. They looked exactly like two swordsmen, not naturally allies but drawn together for mutual protection in a world of enemies, guarding each other’s backs from treacherous assault. But when they exchanged glances he had seen their faces stiff with concealment, and their eyes looking out as through windows in a wall, anguished with mutual hate. They had been waiting for days now to get away, only to get away, to be allowed to go where they need no longer stand together in this enforced alliance which scarified them both, where they could discard the niceties of self-preservation, and tear each other to pieces. And yet he was sure, as sure as he was of their state now, that they had come to Hugonin’s Mill tolerant of each other, rather bored and mischievous on her part, rather possessive on his, nothing worse than that. What had happened between them? That it had involved Philip he was quite sure. That one of these two had been the instrument of Philip’s death he felt in his heart. Only there was nothing to show which, and no means of proving it.

They saw him approaching, and turned to face him with expectancy, almost with eagerness. They were waiting all the time for the words that would release them, and he might easily be the messenger.

‘That was the inspector again, wasn’t it?’ Gerard asked without finesse. ‘What did he want this time?’

‘He’s still with Aunt Helen,’ said Bill. ‘I left them to it.’

‘How much longer does he think he can keep us here? My business is suffering. There’s surely no need for us to stay here now – if he wants us again he could very easily find us.’

‘If he sees fit to take the restrictions off us,’ said Bill, ‘no doubt Helen will be glad to let you know as soon as possible.’

‘It will certainly be a relief to her, too,’ agreed Gerard, noting the hint of asperity in this rejoinder. ‘I suppose you’ll probably be off yourself,’ he went on, watching the boy with wary curiosity. ‘The money, I take it, won’t be a problem now.’

‘Does he really think I did it?’ thought Bill. ‘And for that reason? If he means that, then he can’t have done it himself, can he? Or is it only that, precisely because he did it himself, he finds it expedient to drop these subtle indications that he believes it was my doing? And would he bother to put on a show of that kind for me, after the way we’ve all lied the last few days, either explicitly or implicitly?’ He hesitated, wondering how to reply to the question in any case, whether it was honest or whether it wasn’t. The project had dwindled so far into the back of his mind that he found it an effort to care now whether he went or stayed; the excision of Philip from his life dwarfed everything else.

However, he was absolved from having to make any answer. Estelle’s attention had been diverted by a movement between the shrubberies, far away up the long green vista of lawns; and where she looked Gerard instantly looked, too.

‘Ah, here’s Mrs Greville now. He must have left already. Whatever he had to say, it hasn’t taken him long to say it.’

Helen came over the wet grass, slender and frail in her dress of unrelieved black, which rendered her gleaming fairness more ethereal than ever. If she had news, it did not show in her face, which was calm, serene and still. It seemed strange to Bill that she could be so unmoved by the stresses round her. She had not, it was true, the unworthy motives all the rest of the household had for wanting Philip’s death to remain an unsolved mystery; but at least she ought to have cared, one way or the other, that so many creatures of her own kind should be living precariously from day to day in fear and pain. It wasn’t like her not to care.

‘You needn’t have run away, Bill,’ she said. ‘The inspector stayed only a few minutes.’ She looked into Gerard’s face, and very faintly and coolly she smiled, aware of his agony of impatience. ‘He apologised, Mr Renaud, for keeping you here so long. I’m sure you understand that he was only doing his duty. But now he says that we can all consider ourselves free to move again. You may leave Hugonin’s Mill whenever you wish.’

They drew breath as one creature, relaxing for a moment even from mutual hate into the one blessed conviction that they had survived it, that it was over. They hardly waited to gloss over their agony of relief with civilities, but after the barest of renewed protestations and regrets and excuses flew to pack their belongings and prepare for departure. Helen watched them go with the palest and politest of smiles.