Rehearsals for Murder (20 page)

But at the door he turned and came back, placing himself close to Toby.

“In the morning, Mr Dyke.”

“Yes, rather, in the morning,” said Toby heartily.

“Come to Belling Lodge. My wife and I will be returning home after breakfast. If you would call during the course of the morning we could have a long talk, undisturbed. Come at eleven o'clock.”

“Uncle Dolphie,” said Eve admonishingly.

“You'll come, won't you, Mr Dyke?”

That was the moment chosen by George to mutter a general good night and slip out of the room.

“Thanks very much, Mr Fry,” said Toby, “of course I'll come; it 'll be a pleasure.” Habit forced out the words with sufficient sound of enthusiasm to satisfy the old man. He smiled, nodded, took Eve's arm once more and disappeared along the passage.

“Whew!” Toby shut the door firmly after them, turned and flung himself down onto the bed. He lay there on his back, spread-eagled. “Whew!” he said again, and kicked fiercely with one leg at nothing.

He lay there for about ten minutes without another movement.

A nightingale sang in the woods.

Another answered it.

Toby sat up on the bed.

“What a fool I've been!” he said.

But he said it with zest. Past folly was accepted as the necessary precursor of present wisdom. He grinned. He got up and strode to the door. Moving with long, silent steps to George's room he presented, with the eager tension of his muscles and the sinister light in his eyes, something really quite impressive along Tarquin lines. He opened the door.

Darkness, silence, emptiness.

Toby's conversation with himself for the next few minutes did not express satisfaction and lacked politeness.

A
s it had been the day before, it was Lisbeth Gask who greeted Toby when he came down to breakfast. But she was not alone in the dining room. Both the Frys were seated at the table, and Reginald Sand, with a buttered roll in one hand, was standing by the open French window.

“Look at the papers,” said Lisbeth.

There were several papers strewn about the room. The disappearance of Vanessa filled their headlines. Toby turned from them impatiently and sought kidneys and coffee. Mrs Fry poured out the coffee for him. Lisbeth helped him to the kidneys. Mr Fry sat looking at a spot on the tablecloth a few inches in front of a plate on which, untasted, were heaped some grated raw carrots. His face had a burning over aliveness; Mrs Fry's had an agony of weariness upon it; Lisbeth's looked flat and dull.

Mrs Fry said suddenly: “I don't believe we shall ever see her again.”

Toby scowled and dug a fork into a kidney.

Lisbeth said something banal about hoping for the best. She said it quite without conviction.

“By the way,” growled Toby after the next bit of silence, “has anyone seen George this morning?”

Nobody had.

“Dolphie, do eat some breakfast,” said Mrs Fry.

“I don't need to eat,” he answered.

Her sigh in a less controlled person might have been a scream.

The kidneys were good; the coffee was good.

“Oh, my God!” cried Reginald Sand suddenly. “Here's Max!” And he dodged like a rabbit into the farthest corner of the room, sat down there and bit feverishly into the buttered roll. Max Potter appeared on the terrace.

Toby passed up his cup for more coffee, his plate for more kidneys. Max Potter came in.

“Good morning, good morning,” he said, “good morning, good morning.”

Mrs Fry rose sharply. She looked round at everyone there with a blaze of hatred on her face. Then she sat down again limply, folded her hands, bowed her head and murmured what was probably a prayer.

Max Potter reached across Toby, picked a banana out of a bowl, stripped it of its skin, bit into it and said: “What d'you think I've been doing all night? I've been up playing some of those Granados dances. Gorgeous things. Red blood. Lechery. Make you tingle all over. Yum-yum!”

No one replied, but it was not in Max Potter to be affected by this.

“I've got important news,” he went on.

“So have I,” said Mr Fry, “so have I. From above.”

“Mine's from America,” said Max Potter.

His beam, his self-satisfaction were stridently out of place in that room of torn nerves and haggard faces.

“Been wanting to go to the States for a long time,” he said. He pulled a chair towards him and sat down astride it, munching his banana. “Got it all fixed up at last. A year at Chicago University.”

“You're going to America?” said Mrs Fry.

He nodded. “Haven't been there since I was a boy. Haven't been anywhere since I was a boy.”

Reginald Sand protested: “You've been to Turkey!”

“Oh yes, Turkey.”

“And China!”

“Yes, yes, China, but——”

“And France and Germany and——”

“But never to America. I've never been to America since I was a boy. Eve 'll like America.”

“Oh,” said Lisbeth Gask.

No one else said anything, and after a moment Lisbeth went on: “Eve's going with you to America?”

“Of course,” he said. “We can get on and get married now. Just got nice time for it; I'm leaving at the beginning of August. The child 'll like it too. Good idea to travel when you're a child; otherwise you never really get it into your head that life in a foreign country has more than two dimensions. Coloured posters, you know—that's all foreign countries are to most people.”

The silence that followed his words seemed this time to reach his perceptions. He looked round at them all. He frowned, as if something about them puzzled him.

Mrs Fry said flatly: “Do you seriously believe, Professor Potter, that any of us will ever see Vanessa again?”

His eyes met hers. They exchanged a long stare. He smiled with his lips.

“Perhaps we shall,” he said—“some of us.”

“Why,” she said quickly, “why d'you think so?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said, and swallowed another mouthful of banana.

“Didn't you hear, Max,” said Lisbeth, “what the police said about it yesterday evening?”

“I heard 'em say a lot,” he said; “I didn't listen.”

“They said that it was Vanessa, who took the note to Roger, that made him go along to the cottage.”

“H'm, so Vanessa knows who done it.” But there was irony in the tone, and the curious, unamused smile remained on his full lips.

“Don't jest!” said Mrs Fry peremptorily. “It's evil, evil to jest at a time like this.”

“I'm not jesting,” he said; “at least, it depends…” Mr Fry rose suddenly to his feet.

“I'm going home now,” he said.

“Depends on what, Professor?” Tensely, although she had risen, too, and put her arm through her husband's, Mrs Fry shot the question at Max Potter.

He chuckled.

Tears appeared in her eyes. Her husband murmured in a dreamy voice: “The professor is in error; we shall not see her again. I'm going home now.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “we'll go home.”

“You needn't come, my dear. I'm going home because I have work to do.”

“Oh, I'll come,” she said wearily.

“Mr Dyke,” said Mr Fry, “at eleven o'clock. Remember.”

“Well, I'm going home too,” said Max Potter. “I've got some work to do too. I'm going to stay at home today and get on with it, without any disturbances from a lot of damn fools.” He swung himself off the chair. “Morning,” he said to them abruptly, and departed by the French window.

The Frys left by the door.

Lisbeth Gask looked thoughtfully at Toby.

“Mr Dyke,” she said.

He looked up.

“What d'you think Max really came here to tell us?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said indifferently. “That he was going to America.”

“But he's gone away without saying anything about it to Eve.”

He rose from the table. He said drily: “There's prosaic normality about that, compared with the general standard of events round here. What's the time? Twenty-five past nine. Where's Belling Lodge, Miss Gask?”

“Take the road into Larking,” she said. “It's just at the bottom of the hill that goes up to the church—a white house on the left.”

“Thanks,” he said. He lit a cigarette and went out into the garden.

There was less sunshine this morning. Clouds cast a pattern of shadows on the earth; a gusty wind snatched now and then at the trees; the light had a kind of greyness in it.

For a quarter of an hour or so he strolled up and down the terrace. No one came near him.

When he was tired of the terrace he wandered off to the wood. It was full of whispers, the whispering of leaf against leaf, of bough against bough. Changing shapes of sunlight moved swiftly across the ground and vanished. Toby picked up a stick and struck aimlessly at the tree trunks as he passed them. Once or twice, impatiently, he looked at his watch.

Suddenly he came face to face with Charlie Widdison.

Charlie was walking rapidly up the path. He passed Toby with the curtest of nods and made for the house. The next bend in the path brought Toby upon Druna. She was standing quite still in the middle of the path, standing in upright rigidity, her arms stiff against her sides. Her hands were clenched; in one was a crumpled handkerchief. There were marks of tears on her face.

“Morning, Dinah,” said Toby. “Been getting the raspberry?”

Her lips gave an ugly writhe. There was no grief on her face.

She said hoarsely: “My name isn't Dinah.”

“But if you don't let me call you that,” said Toby, grinning cruelly, “I'll tell them all everything I know. Wouldn't that be nice, Dinah?”

She was not looking at him; she was still looking up the path.

“Go away,” she said, “I don't want to talk to you.”

“He's escaped, you know; you won't be able to do anything about it.”

She brought her hands together and started ripping at the damp handkerchief.

“And, after all,” said Toby, “it would have been very expensive. Thirty pounds for three weeks—that's really too much for a girl who can't pay her milk bill.”

With a startled movement she faced him. “What d'you mean?”

“A holiday in France,” said Toby, “estimated at about twenty pounds, with an unspecified amount more than that for clothes. Say thirty pounds. Thirty pounds for a holiday in France with a young man who's since turned out unwilling. But does that matter very much, Dinah, seeing that, after all, you haven't got the thirty pounds?”

“What d'you mean? What have you been doing? How d'you know that—that——?”

Toby struck with his stick against the grey, lichened bark of an oak tree.

“I know,” he said, “that our Charlie doesn't believe in paying for the delights he bestows as well as the ones he receives. He wasn't going to have you along with him unless you could pay for yourself.”

She came a step closer to him. “What's he been telling you?”

“He didn't have to tell me anything to speak of,” said Toby. “I rather think that even now I know a bit more than he does.” He struck against the tree. “Aren't you glad of that, Dinah?”

She lifted a hand with fingers curling like claws.

“You—you——”

“Come off the grass,” said Toby. He tossed the stick away and sat down on a wide, smooth tree stump. “You know,” he said agreeably, “you're one of the nastiest bits of work I've run into for a long time.”

“You wouldn't dare to speak to me like this if there were anyone else here!” she croaked at him.

“We-ll,” said Toby, “if you took me up for slander I daresay I'd come out of it all right.”

“Slander! I wasn't thinking of
legal
action. But because I'm a woman, alone——”

“Whoah!” said Toby. “I'll say it all in public any time you like; it's letting you off lightly to choose a woodland dell to do it in. Because, Dinah”—and Toby's voice, losing its flippancy, became even harder—“you'd have to be told sometime that someone knew what you'd been up to. It isn't good for a person to get away with the sort of thing you tried to do—even if the scheme happened to fail because an untimely murder interfered with it.”

She drew back and stood looking at him with eyes like cold, black stones.

He remarked quietly: “You said you were Lou's friend.”

“I was.”

“Is blackmail one of the prerogatives of friendship?”

He had to fling up an arm swiftly to ward off the blow she aimed at his face.

“Quiet, quiet,” he said. “D'you want Charlie to know? It'd be so easy to tell him.”

The girl turned away suddenly and leant against a tree.

Toby said: “It's a horrible thing to use one's imagination on—the state poor Lou must have been in the last few days of her life. If death had come less vilely… I don't know. … But there she was, anyway—she'd been hoping, I suppose, stupidly and utterly without reason, as people will, that fate would somehow give her Roger; and then Eve, to stimulate her loyalty and get her out of the way, told her of her own reconciliation with Roger. So Lou, needing, I suppose, someone to talk to, needing some support in the shoddy little desert she'd managed to make of her life, turned to her dear friend Druna. She told her everything. And the dear friend said——”

Druna drummed with her fists against the tree. “I didn't mean it! I was joking—I didn't mean anything. Lou was a fool, a fool to take any notice.”

“The dear friend said: ‘Your friends, Mr and Mrs Clare, who are about to do something which it is essential to them should be kept secret, are rich people. I happen to need thirty pounds. Get that thirty pounds for me, and the secret will remain a secret.' Wasn't that how you did it, Druna?”

She had her arms crossed against the tree and her face hidden in them.

“You see,” said Toby, “there was a phrase in a letter that Lou started to write to Eve, a letter that didn't get finished. She wrote that she was going to pay for her breach of confidence herself and not get any of it from Eve ‘as was intended.' That, as I read it, meant as someone else had intended. As you'd intended.”

Druna swung round on him.

“She was a fool,” she cried, “a horrid little fool. I used to get furious with her. I was so fed up with her I could have killed her myself. She didn't know anything about anything. And she was always humble and generous and forgave everyone everything they did to her. Look at Clare, trading on her all the time, using her just to make himself feel good and kind and understanding. Did she know it? No, she thought it was marvellous that he should take any notice of her at all. But I didn't mean anything—I didn't!”

“You meant thirty pounds. And you'd have got it, fifteen from the sale of two Chinese vases which Lou actually had the temerity to sell in spite of your orders to the contrary—though she wasn't anxious to meet you just after doing it—and fifteen from me. I've no doubt that that fifteen would have been paid back somehow, sometime. But death happened first. And so, Druna”—Toby rose—“it 'll just have to be a week at Margate, won't it?”

She said in a whisper: “I hope you're the next one.”

“Next what?”

“And I hope the poison they choose works slowly.”

“Thanks,” he said. “As I said, you aren't really a nice girl, Dinah. Good morning. I rather hope we shan't meet again.”