To Fear a Painted Devil (11 page)

Tamsin got up like a woman in a dream.

‘In the drawer. I’ll get them.’

He followed her back into the other bedroom. She looked at Patrick, still without crying, and Greenleaf
expected her to kiss the pallid forehead. They usually did. When instead she turned away and went to the dressing table he drew the sheet up over Patrick’s face.

‘There are still five in the bottle,’ she said, and held it out to him. Greenleaf was very surprised. He felt a creeping unease.

‘I’ll get on to Dr. Howard,’ he said.

Howard was out playing golf. Mrs. Howard would ring the club and her husband would come straight over. When Greenleaf walked into the dining room Tamsin was kneeling on the floor with her arms round the neck of the Weimaraner. She was crying.

‘Oh, Queenie! Oh, Queenie!’

The room was untouched since the night before. The drinks were still on the sideboard and out on the patio some of the food remained: heat-curled bread, melting cream, a shrivelled sandwich on a doily. On the birthday table Marvell’s roses lay among the other gifts, pearled with Sunday’s dew. Greenleaf poured some brandy into a glass and handed it to Tamsin.

‘How long has he been dead?’ she asked.

‘A good while,’ Greenleaf said. ‘Hours. Perhaps ten or twelve hours. Of course you looked in on him before you went to bed.’

She had stopped crying. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to upset you.’

‘That’s all right, Max. I’d like to talk about it.’

‘You didn’t sleep in the same room?’

‘Not when one of us was ill,’ Tamsin said quickly. ‘I thought if he were restless it would be better for me to go in the back. Restless!’ She passed her hand across her brow. ‘Too dreadful, Max!’ She went on rather as if she were giving evidence, using clipped
sentences. ‘I tried to clear up the mess in the garden but I was too tired. Then I looked in on Patrick. It must have been about midnight. He was sleeping then. I know he was, he was breathing. Well, and I didn’t wake up till eleven. I rushed into Patrick because I couldn’t hear a sound. Queenie had come up on my bed during the night.’ Her hand fumbled for the dog’s neck and she pushed her fingers into the plushy fur. ‘I couldn’t wake him so I phoned Dr. Howard. You know the rest.’

Patrick had died, Greenleeaf thought, as he had lived, precisely, tidily, without dirt or disorder. Not for him the sloppy squalor that attended so many deathbeds. From mild discomfort he had slipped into sleep, from sleep into death.

‘Tamsin,’ he said slowly and kindly, ‘have you got any other sleeping pills in the house? Have you got any of your own?’

‘Oh, no. No, I know we haven’t Patrick just had those six left and I never need anything to make me sleep.’ She added unnecessarily: ‘I sleep like a log.’

‘Had he a weak heart? Did you ever hear of any heart trouble?’

‘I don’t think so. We’d been married for seven years, you know, but I’ve known Patrick since he was a little boy. I don’t know if you knew we were cousins? His father and mine were brothers.’

‘No serious illnesses?’

A petulant cloud crossed her face briefly. ‘He was born in Germany,’ she said. Then, when the war came, they lived in America After they came back to this country they used to come and see us sometimes. Patrick was terribly spoiled, coddled really. They used to make him wrap up warm even in the summer and
I had swimming lessons but they wouldn’t let him. I always thought it was because they’d lived in California.’ She paused, frowning. ‘He was always all right when he was grown-up. The only time he went to Dr. Howard was when he couldn’t sleep.’

‘I think you will have to prepare yourself,’ Greenleaf said, ‘for the possibility of an inquest, or, at any rate, a post-mortem.’

She nodded earnestly.

‘Oh, quite,’ she said. ‘I understand. That’ll be absolutely all right.’ She might have been agreeing to cancel an engagement, so matter-of-fact was her tone.

After that they sat in silence, waiting for Dr. Howard to come. The Weimaraner went upstairs and they heard her claws scraping, scraping at the closed door of the balcony room.

A
s things turned out, it never came to an inquest Greenleaf stood in at the post-mortem because he was interested and because the Selbys had been friends of his. Patrick had died, like all the dead, of heart failure. The death certificate was signed and he was buried in Chantflower cemetery on the following Thursday.

Greenleaf and Bernice went to the funeral. They took Marvell with them in Bernice’s car.

‘Blessed are the dead,’ said the Rector, a shade sardonically, ‘which die in the Lord.’ Since coming to Linchester Patrick had never been to church.

Patrick’s parents were dead; Tamsin had been an orphan since she was four. They had both been only children. Consequently there were no relatives at the graveside. Apart from the Linchesterites, only three
friends came to support the widow: the two other directors of Patrick’s firm of glass manufacturers and old Mrs. Prynne.

Tamsin wore a black dress and a large hat of glossy black straw. Throughout the service she clung to Oliver Gage’s arm. On the other side Nancy, sweating in the charcoal worsted she had bought for her February honeymoon, sat with a handkerchief ready. But she never had to hand it to Tamsin who sat rigid and dry-eyed.

It was only when the coffin was being lowered into the ground that a small disturbance occurred. Freda Carnaby tore herself from Mrs. Saxton’s arm and, sobbing loudly, fell to her knees beside the dark cavity. As he said afterwards to Greenleaf, Marvell thought that like Hamlet she was going to leap into the grave. But nothing dramatic happened. Mrs. Saxton helped her to her feet and drew her away.

W
hen it was all over Tamsin slung two suitcases into the back of the black and white Mini (SIN A1) and with Queenie in the seat beside her, drove away to stay with Mrs. Prynne.

8

T
wo days later the weather broke with a noisy spectacular thunderstorm and a man died when a tree under which he was sheltering on Chantflower golf course was struck by lightning. The silly season had begun and this was national news. For the Linchester housewives kept indoors by continuous rain, it was for days the prime topic of conversation—until something more personal and sensational took over.

The young Macdonalds had taken their baby to Bournemouth; the Willises and the Millers, each couple finding in the other the perfect neighbours and friends, were cruising together in the Canaries. Tamsin was still away. With four empty houses on Linchester Nancy was bored to tears. When Oliver came home for the week-ends, tired and uneasy, he found his evening programmes mapped out for him.

Tonight the Greenleafs and Crispin Marvell were
invited for coffee and drinks. Opening his sideboard, Oliver found that Nancy had laid in a stock of cheap Cyprus sherry and bottles of cocktails as variously coloured as the liquid that used to be displayed in the flagons of old-fashioned pharmacy windows. He cursed, clinging to the shreds of his pride and remembering the days that were gone.

The mantelpiece was decorated with postcards. Nancy had given pride of place to a peacock-blue panorama from Clare Miller, relegating two monochrome seascapes to a spot behind a vase. He read Sheila Macdonald’s happy scrawl irascibly. Tamsin was at the seaside too, but Tamsin had sent nothing …

From where he stood, desultorily watching the rain, he could hear Nancy chattering to Linda Gaveston in the kitchen. Occasionally something clearly audible if not comprehensible arose above the twittering.

‘I said it was dead grotty’ or ‘How about that, doll?’ conflicted inharmoniously with Nancy’s ‘You are awful, Linda.’

Oliver grunted and lit a cigarette. These visits of Linda’s, ostensibly made to deliver Nancy’s order of tablets of soap or a packet of Kleenex, always put him in a bad temper. They invariably led to petulance on Nancy’s part, to dissatisfaction and a carping envy. It amazed Oliver that a village chemist like Waller could stock such an immense and catholic variety of luxury goods, all of which at some time or another seemed so desirable to his wife and at the same time so conducive to the saving of money. The latest in Thermos flasks, automatic tea-makers, thermostatically controlled electric blankets, shower cabinets, all these
had in the year they had lived in Linchester, been recommended to Nancy and coveted by her.

‘It would be such a saving in the long run,’ she would say wistfully of some gimmick, using the suburban colloquialisms Oliver hated.

Moreover it was surprising that behind Waller’s counter there stood concealed the most expensive ranges of cosmetics from Paris and New York, scent and creams which were apparently exclusive to him and not to be found in Nottingham or, for that matter, London. He was therefore pleasantly astonished when the door had closed on Linda to see Nancy come dancing into the room, contented, gay and in a strange way, gleeful.

‘What’s got into you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘For a poor house-bound, forsaken child bride,’ he said, recalling earlier complaints, ‘you’re looking very gay.’

Indeed she appeared quite pretty again in the honeymoon skirt and a pink sweater, not a hand-knitted one for a change but a soft fluffy thing that drew Oliver’s eyes and reminded him that his wife had, after all, an excellent figure. But his words, sharp and moody, had altered her expression from calm to secretiveness.

‘Linda told me something very peculiar.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Surprise me.’

She pouted.

‘Not if you’re going to talk to me like that.’ For a moment, a transient moment, she looked just as she had when he had first seen her dancing with the man she had been engaged to. It had been such fun stealing her from him, especially piquant because the
fiancé had also been Shirley’s cousin. ‘Nasty Oliver! I shall save it all up till the Greenleafs get here.’

‘I can see,’ said Oliver in his best co-respondent’s voice, ‘I can see I shall have to be very nice to you.’

‘Very, very nice,’ said Nancy. She sat on the sofa beside him and giggled. ‘You are awful! It must be the country air.’ But she didn’t say anything after that and presently Oliver forgot all about Linda Gaveston.

When Marvell rang the door-bell she didn’t bother to tidy her hair or put on fresh make-up. There was something of a bacchante about her, exhibitionistic, crudely female. Suddenly Oliver felt old. Her naiveté embarrassed him. He went to dispense drinks from his own stock, leaving the bright mean bottles in the sideboard.

Greenleaf and Bernice had barely sat down when she said brightly:

‘Has anyone heard from Tamsin?’

Nobody had. Oliver fancied that Marvell was looking at him quizzically.

‘I don’t suppose she feels like writing.’ Bernice was always kind and forbearing. ‘It’s not as if we were any of us close friends.’

‘What would she have to write about?’ Greenleaf asked. ‘She’s not on holiday.’ And he began to talk about his own holiday, planned for September this year, and to ask about the Gages’.

Holidays were a sore point with Oliver who hoped to do without one altogether. He need not have worried. Nancy was obviously not going to let the subject go as easily as that.

‘Poor Tamsin,’ she said loudly, drowning the doctor’s voice. ‘Fancy being a widow when you’re only twenty-seven.’

‘Dreadful,’ said Bernice.

‘And in such—well, awkward circumstances.’

‘Awkward circumstances?’ said Greenleaf, drawn unwillingly from his dreams of the Riviera.

‘I don’t mean money-wise.’ Oliver winced but Nancy went on: ‘The whole thing was so funny, Patrick dying like that. I expect you’ll all think I’ve got a very suspicious mind but I can’t help thinking it was …’ She paused for effect and sipped her gin. ‘Well, it was fishy, wasn’t it?’

Greenleaf looked at the floor. The legs of his chair had caught in one of the Numdah rugs. He bent down and straightened it.

‘I don’t know if I ought to say this,’ Nancy went on. ‘I don’t suppose it’s common knowledge, but Patrick’s father …’ She lowered her voice. ‘Patrick’s father committed suicide. Took his own life.’