More Work for the Undertaker (22 page)

His camp-bedstead was wedged between two rather fine Georgian mahogany pedestals complete with brass-mounted urns, and it was evident that he kept his clothes neatly folded in and about a sideboard now too large for any private household.

The general effect was, curiously, not at all uncomfortable. The tapestry-covered armchair on the hearth was bag-seated but very tidy and well brushed, and the solid table with rounded ends, which ran the whole length of the worn carpet, was neatly divided into three sections, the first a desk, the second a filing department, and the third a fairly well fitted sandwich bar. The rest was books, not one of them dusty or dog-eared. They filled walls and side tables and the tops of cabinets, overflowing into heaps in corners and on chairs.

Yet it was the tidiest living-room in Charlie Luke's wide experience. He remarked upon it as he stood looking round with Campion at his side.

They had entered without invitation and were giving it what Luke had called ‘the old once-over' while they waited for the owner. On one side of the desk end of the table a butler's tray on a stand had been arranged. It was packed solid with books in use, all neatly stacked, spines uppermost.

Campion bent over them. The first title he read was
Forensic Medicine
by Sidney Smith, and the second
Toxicology
by Buchanan. As his eye ran along the line his expression grew more and more blank. The inevitable
Gross
was there, and a
Materia Medica
, Lucas on
Forensic Chemistry
, and a very old
Quaine
. He began to look for other friends and was interested to see
Glaister, Keith Simpson
, and the engaging
H. T. F. Rhodes
, as well as a large section of supplementaries including
Streker and Ebaugh
, and
Mental Abnormality and Crime
in the ‘English Studies in Criminal Science' series.

It was a small but comprehensive working library of criminology.

He took up the
Materia Medica
and glanced at the flyleaf, sighed with comprehension, and was continuing his investigations with the other books when Luke interrupted him.

‘Chase me!'

The old-fashioned Cockney expletive had the force of the unusual. Campion looked up to find his circumflex-accented eyes wide with astonishment. He was holding out a sheet of paper which he had just taken from the mantel-shelf.

‘Foul-mouthed Freda again,' he said. ‘Look.' Campion went over and together they read the fellow to the note to the doctor. As he read, Campion felt the chill which always assailed him whenever he met the abnormal. This was madness, cold and festering. The message, when taken out of the mass of decay, was simple.

‘You . . . have robbed a . . . fool.'

The envelope, which still lay on the shelf, was correctly addressed to Lawrence Palinode and the local postmark was clear.

‘Posted yesterday morning.' Luke put the letter back where he had found it. ‘I don't know if this is the first note he's had. If it isn't, why the hell hasn't he reported it? Looks damn funny to me.'

He walked on down the room, his fingers playing noisily with the coins in his pockets. As he followed him, Campion could almost hear his mind working.

‘Well, we'll have another talk with him,' he went on as they reached the second half of the double room. ‘I may as well admit I didn't understand a quarter of what he said last time. Maybe it's my lack of education.' He spread out his hands to convey emptiness. ‘We'll have another go.'

Campion touched his arm. ‘At this very moment.'

From the hall outside excited voices reached them clearly, Lawrence's goose-tones sounding high above the others. The door rattled and there was a moment of hestitation as they heard him say, ‘Come in, come in. I insist.'

Luke and Campion, who were standing in the shelter of the folded dividing doors, remained where they were. In the darkness of the corner they were, if not invisible, at least not instantly obvious.

Lawrence came in with a rush. His hand brushed the light switch and in his extreme preoccupation he did not notice that the room was already lit. His tall, heavy-boned figure was clumsier than ever and he was trembling so violently that the door he held shook noticeably and a book from a pile on the chair behind it slid to the ground.

In stooping for this he knocked over the others, made a movement to recover them, changed his mind and stood up again with a gesture of resignation.

‘Come in,' he repeated, the notes of his voice jarring the piano wires. ‘Come in at once.'

Clytie White stepped slowly into the room. She was colourless, her dark eyes looking enormous. The blue-black helmet of her hair was dishevelled and her ugly old-fashioned clothes stood away from her thin body as if she had shrunk within them.

‘The Captain has gone on upstairs,' she said so softly that they could hardly hear her.

‘Never mind about that.' He closed the door and leant his back against it, lying in a crucified attitude which was certainly unnatural but not consciously affected. His mouth, which in the normal way was pale and inclined to be prim, was now bright and imperfectly controlled. His eyes, which were naked and blind-looking without his thick pebble-glasses, seemed to
be very near tears. The ugly honking voice, so much louder than was necessary, came at last.

‘Miserable girl!' he said distinctly.

It was pure barnstorming melodrama, absurd in the extreme, and yet disconcerting because of his appalling sincerity. His pain was a living thing in the room.

‘You look like my sister when I saw her first.' He was accenting alternate syllables without realizing it, and the halting verse and the hideous voice in conjunction stepped up the reproach to the point of savagery. ‘She was pale like you, and pure. Pure like white paper. But she was lying. She was creeping out, slyly to make love in the streets like a drab.'

He was no actor and no Adonis, yet he was terrible rather than ridiculous. Campion sighed. Charlie Luke stirred uneasily.

Clytie stood stiffly in front of her accuser. Her dark eyes were watchful and intelligent, like an experienced child's. She suggested wariness rather than alarm.

‘She married my father,' she said unexpectedly. ‘Don't you think you may all have made her deceitful, as you have me? I don't
like
making love in the park.'

‘Or in the public corridor of a hospital?' His contempt was agonized. ‘You do it because you can't help it, I suppose? The itch is in you, is it? Hot hands over the pavement in the yeasty dark, and the shuffle of the curious rustling by. Do you know, you make me retch? God! You disgust me! You disgust me! Do you hear?'

The girl was shaken. She grew paler and her fastidious nose came down over her mouth. The resignation of long-misunderstood youth appeared in the droop of her body.

‘Well?'

She met his gaze and a faint irrepressible smile of sheer naughtiness ran across her lips.

‘It isn't like that at all,' she said. ‘D'you know, I don't believe you know anything about it except what you've read.'

He winced as if she had struck him in the face, and Mr Campion, who had recognized something in his outburst, felt his own eyes growing blank behind his spectacles.

Lawrence was now naturally more angry. He flung himself across the room towards the fireplace.

‘And I have read a great deal.' He whipped the envelope off the mantelshelf and thrust it at her. ‘Do you deny you wrote this?'

The readiness with which she took it made her astonishment convincing. She glanced at the address in bewilderment.

‘Of course I didn't. That's not my handwriting, I hope.'

‘Isn't it?' He was leaning towards her in dreadful self-inflicted agony. ‘Isn't it? Aren't you responsible for all the unsigned letters which have brought your family this horrible notoriety? Isn't it you who is flinging this stinking mud all over us? Isn't it?'

‘No.' As she comprehended the accusation the blood had poured into her face. She was openly frightened of him this time and her eyes were wide and black. ‘That's a filthy thing to say.'

‘Filthy? My God! My girl, do you know what you write? My God! From what incredible subconscious do you drag such sludge? Read it and then for heaven's sake admit it.'

She stood hesitating, the envelope still in her hand. She was frowning, the queries about his sanity as obvious as if she had spoken them aloud. At last she pulled out the dirty fold of paper and held it unopened.

‘Honestly and truly I never saw this before,' she began cheerfully, but as if she knew she had no hope of convincing him. ‘I'm telling the literal truth, Uncle Lawrence. I've never seen this before, and really I'm not the sort of person to write anonymous letters. All that stuff about adolescence you've been looking up – can't you see it really doesn't apply to me?'

‘Read it, Clytie.' His voice was breaking. ‘You've done this thing and you must be made to realize how terrible it is. That is your only chance. You've got to be made to realize.'

She opened the note, glanced at it, and flung it out at arm's length.

‘I don't think I want to.' There was more than a touch of Miss Evadne in her dignified disgust. ‘Can't you see that you're making a rather beastly mistake? You've absolutely no
business to treat me like this. I won't have it. Take this disgusting thing at once or I'll chuck it in the fire.'

‘Read it. Read it aloud to me.'

‘I won't.'

‘Read it.'

Charlie Luke strode swiftly down the room and snapped up the letter from between them. He was thoroughly shocked.

‘That'll be quite enough.' He involved a thousand-volt charge into his primness and succeeded in looking like the Angel of the Lord from a modem morality play.

It was typical of Lawrence Palinode that he did not notice that he had not come through the door.

‘I did not hear you knock,' he said with dignity. It was, probably, the one remark which could have disconcerted Luke at that particular moment. His mouth opened and closed again without words, but his stare remained piercing and packed with disapproval.

He stood looking at Lawrence for perhaps fifteen seconds before he transferred his attention to Clytie. She was far more startled than her uncle and was inclined to be defiant. Luke's opening gambit took her completely by surprise.

‘You've got some walking-out clobber,' he announced, ‘togs you've been wearing on the quiet.'

She nodded guiltily.

‘Go and put 'em on. It's time you grew out of all this, don't you think?' The wave of his hand embraced family authority and all Lawrence Palinode's literary researches into the mental states attendant on puberty in one comprehensive gesture. ‘In my district there are girls of seventeen who've been damned good wives and mothers for eighteen months or more,' he added by way of explanation. There was a gentle reasonableness about him which was always noticeable when he was talking to Clytie. It was as though he understood her so well that their acquaintance was timeless.

She comprehended him perfectly. There was not even gratitude in her grin of relief.

‘Oh, you're right, aren't you?' she said. ‘Yes, that's what I'll do.'

‘Where are you going? Where are you going?' Lawrence started after her, his hand on her shoulder.

She released herself gently, almost kindly.

‘To be my age, my dear,' she said. ‘I shan't be long.'

He stood looking blankly at the closed door for a moment and then swung round to see Campion in the room for the first time.

‘
I'M NOT AT
all pleased by this intrusion, you know, not at all pleased.' Lawrence Palinode made a petulant movement with his entire body, counteracted any effect it might have had with his sweet shy smile, and sat down at the desk end of the long table, knocking over a small pot of ink which stood there. He mopped up the mess with a special wedge of blotting paper which he appeared to keep for such emergencies, and continued, the volume of his voice flaring and dying like a faulty loudspeaker.

‘I was having a very important talk with a member of my family. Don't exceed your office. You really mustn't do that.' His long red neck swung out at them like a wand with a weight on it. ‘You have a letter of mine, Inspector. Hand it back if you please.'

Charlie Luke regarded the sheet of profanity in his hand.

‘Do you mean you wrote it?' he inquired bluntly.

The near-sighted eyes widened with interest.

‘I? In moments of aberration, I suppose? It's an interesting theory but hardly tenable. No. Give it to me, please. I regard it as a ra-ather important document at this juncture.'

‘So do I, sir.' Charlie Luke put the paper in his inside pocket.

Lawrence Palinode's lantern cheeks became patched with colour.

‘That's hardly fair,' he protested. ‘You have all the others.'

‘How do you know?'

‘My dear man, this is not quite a
fantoccini.
People do talk to each other and some of them even read the newspapers.'

Luke was sulky and dogged.

‘Why did you think this letter came from the same writer if you hadn't seen the others?'

‘Oh, but I had. At least I saw the first one and made a note of it. The doctor showed it to me when it arrived. When this one appeared in the post this morning I recognized Madame Pernelle again.'

‘Why bring her into it? I thought you were accusing Miss White five minutes ago?'

A shadow of tragedy, irreproachably genuine, passed over his bald face with the underhung jaw, but he had himself well in hand. He emitted a crow, apparently at self-discovery.

‘Ah, the Bowl of the Sister!' he exclaimed. ‘It's a woman, you see. Probably you don't find that as shattering as I do.' After a pause he shook his head. ‘You may be right. Perhaps all I know of her is that she is Madame Pernelle.'