Rehearsals for Murder (6 page)

“Where?” said Toby.

“At my flat. She came in order to make the final arrangements. I'd arranged, of course, to pay for Vanessa's board but I also wanted to make some payment to Miss Capell for all the trouble she was taking. I knew she'd no work, in fact was subsisting on what she could get from the Unemployment Assistance Board. However…” In his sigh was a sound of heavy pain. “If I'd realized how she'd take the suggestion, if I'd had the least anticipation of the distress it'd cause her, I'd never have made it. She was unbelievably distressed—unbelievably. She said I was the last person on earth from whom she'd dream of accepting any money. She said——” He hesitated, and his voice went stiff and cold with discomfort. “She said she was in love with me.”

Toby looked up sharply.

“Oh,” said Roger Clare swiftly, “of course I knew it was—it was, well, a combination of her warm and expansive nature and her sympathy for…”

“Your bereavement,” Toby suggested.

“In short,” said Roger Clare, “I realized it was simply a mixture of her own generosity and a certain amount of gratitude that gave her this—this idea. Nevertheless, it upset me a great deal. I wondered if I'd been to blame. It made me feel——”

“We can guess how it made you feel,” said Toby.

“Let's get on to the telephoning.”

Roger Clare rose and again paced across the floor. He was more restless and less master of his nerves than he liked to show.

“I decided,” he said, “perhaps mistakenly, I don't know, that the best thing for Lou would be if she and I were to terminate the friendship between us, if we were simply to agree to see no more of one another. I thought, too, that it'd be best if I were to make some other arrangement for Vanessa. As I say, perhaps I was wrong. She became—she became exceedingly distressed. She cried. She told me she hadn't dreamt of its making any difference to our relations. She begged that she should be allowed to take Vanessa down to Okehampton. Well, I agreed. That's to say”—his hand was again busy, smoothing his unruffled hair—“I agreed at the time. But after she'd gone I started thinking it over and came to the conclusion that this business of—of obligations and gratitude and so on had better cease. I rang up her flat——”

“Telephone makes it so much easier, doesn't it?” said Toby.

“I rang up her flat, but she wasn't there. I rang up several times and again in the morning, but there wasn't any answer. So I decided to ring up here. I thought perhaps I could catch her before she and Vanessa left for Devon. It was Mrs Fry who answered the telephone. She told me that Miss Capell was staying for the weekend. So after lunch I drove down here to see her and tell her my view of things.”

“Did you tell Mrs Fry why you were telephoning?” asked Vanner.

“No, I told her I'd rung up simply to inquire whether Vanessa had got away all right. I saw no reason to—to expose any of this to anyone.”

“Mrs Clare appears to have had no knowledge of your coming here this afternoon,” said Vanner.

“No. You see”—Clare seemed to become conscious of his fidgeting hand and thrust it, clenched, into a pocket—“I'd no desire to come to this house. Apart from anything, the divorce isn't absolute yet. So I went instead to the cottage of Mr Gillett. It's in Green Lane, just below those woods.” He nodded at the line of trees that showed in the dusk beyond the tennis lawn. “Mr Gillett's a young man with a research grant at the Victor Hildebrand Institute.”

“At the——” Vanner leant forward. Toby looked with some surprise at the change on his face.

“Yes,” said Clare. “He came there a few months ago. He's become a friend of my wife's and he's often up here. As I was saying, I went there and asked him if he'd mind my having a talk with Miss Capell in his cottage, also if he'd mind going up to the house to tell her I was there and ask her to come down. He was rather unwilling; he can be a surly devil at times. I waited after he'd gone, and——”

“How long?” snapped Toby.

“Well, I arrived at the cottage about half-past two, and it must have been about half-past four when she came.”

“Why did it take her so long?”

“I didn't ask her. I told her that I'd definitely made up my mind to arrange some other summer holiday for Vanessa. She was—upset.”

“She wept like hell,” said Toby.

Clare blazed at him: “I've said I know I may have been wrong! But I was doing what I honestly thought best for her. However, I saw no reason for anyone else to know the real cause for the change of plan. It would have been embarrassing for her. So I told her to go back to the house and that I'd telephone later in the evening. It may sound a foolish sort of plan to you, but I thought it'd meet the case: I told her I'd speak in an assumed voice and say that I was speaking from Okehampton and that it would be impossible for Vanessa to come down there because one of the children there had developed measles. Lou went back to the house, and I drove back to London. Later I telephoned——”

“Using cockney as a suitable dialect to come from Okehampton.” Toby heaved himself off the window sill, crossed the room and flung himself down into a chair.

Vanner grunted. “Where's Mr Gillett?” he asked.

“I saw him out there in the hall.”

“Then that 'll be all we need from you at the moment, Mr Clare. Thank you.”

With no change of his expression but with a slight slackening of his shoulder muscles that showed relief, Roger Clare left the room. He paused for a moment by the door to straighten another picture that was hanging faintly crooked.

Toby hooked a leg over the arm of his chair. “Well, d'you believe it?”

“Don't ask me a thing like that.”

“It fits the facts, you know.”

Vanner started chewing his pencil. “You knew the girl, Dyke. You say you saw her yesterday. Would you have said she was in love with anybody?”

“Almost everyone of that age is, or is trying to be.”

“But a man like that, twice her age. Now if it had been on
his
side…”

“It may have been. But he'd got his divorce to consider.”

“H'm.”

Toby reached forward and took the pencil away from him.

“Vanner,” he said, “what's the Victor Hildebrand Institute?”

“It's a kind of scientific place near here. Research and all that. There's an experimental farm there and laboratories and so on.”

“Why did you look so excited when he mentioned it?”

“I didn't.”

“You did the best your face can manage in that line.” Vanner shook his head.

Toby stood up. “Have it your own way. Whom d'you want next?”

“The Merton girl. But first,” said Vanner, rescuing his pencil which Toby was about to pocket, “I want a word with Gurr.”

“About the Victor Hildebrand Institute?”

“About some routine matters,” said Vanner, giving Toby a glassy stare.

Toby grinned. “All right. I'll wander along and take a closer look at the inmates. But you ought to stop chewing your pencils, Vanner; it 'll spoil the shape of your mouth.”

“
A
nd so,” said Toby Dyke presently—he had placed himself next to Druna Merton on a settee; both were drinking whisky—“and so you're Druna Merton, Lou's dear and intimate friend.”

“And you,” she said, “are Toby Dyke, her ideal of disinterested behaviour.”

Sardonically they looked at one another.

“I'm looking at you and wondering,” said Toby, “what on earth you and Lou can have had in common.”

“I'm looking at you and wondering,” said Druna, “quite a number of things.”

“Beginning with?”

“Just precisely why you're here.”

Toby sipped his whisky, and Druna, her eyebrows raised, her gaze meeting his with steady self-assurance, sipped hers. She really was a remarkably beautiful object.

“Tell me,” he said, “is your name really Druna?”

“Why shouldn't it be?” she asked.

“It sounds so exactly the sort of name one would make up if one's name were really Dinah.”

Something self-conscious appeared in her faint smile. “But, really,” she said, “you were on the spot so very quickly after the—the murder.” She added: “I suppose there's no doubt that it's murder? I mean, accident, suicide. …”

“I know much less about it than you do,” said Toby.

“You've met the man Vanner before, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn't like you.”

“Some people don't.”

“You've done a good deal of crime reporting, haven't you? Did you make trouble for him somehow?”

“Look here,” said Toby, “one person in this house asking questions is enough. By the way, you're the next that Vanner wants to get to work on.”

“But isn't that why you're here yourself—to ask questions?”

Toby gulped down what was left in his glass. “I want another,” he said, and stood up.

“Anyway,” she said, looking up at him, “Roger Clare
did
disguise his voice when he telephoned.”

“Just a minute,” said Toby.

He crossed the room, refilled his glass and came and sat down beside her again.

“Go ahead,” said Toby.

“Yes,” she said. But she was no longer looking at Toby. With a sensual absorption in her gaze that she made little attempt to disguise she was staring across the room at Charlie Widdison. “Yes, I don't understand what it was all about, I only know it happened. He began by asking for Lou in the most awful theatrical cockney. Then when I answered that Lou was dead——”

“You said it just like that, did you? ‘Sorry, Lou's dead.' You know, Druna, that was just a spot macabre.”

“When I answered that Lou was dead he lost his head and answered in his perfectly normal voice.”

“Tell me,” said Toby, “was it he who divorced his wife, or the other way round? And d'you know what the atmosphere of the divorce was? I mean, was it a friendly affair?”

She detached her glance from the young doctor for a moment to look down at her nails. “Well, I don't really know. Roger's rather an unpleasant creature—rather puritanical, I think, and just terribly fussy. I daresay he might suddenly turn revengeful. But Eve's had other lovers besides Max, and he must have known of them; she's naturally public about that sort of thing. So I should think they must have arranged it between them in a fairly friendly way—although I believe the divorce got Max into a good deal of trouble; he'd an awful fight to keep his job. So perhaps it was just because it was Max that Roger suddenly decided to do something about it—I mean, it may have got his pride in some special way. Most of Eve's pickups are very young men whom Roger can just look down on, but I shouldn't think anyone's ever looked down on Max Potter.”

Toby exclaimed: “Max Potter! You mean the author of
Biology Is Fun
?”

She nodded. “He's at the Victor Hildebrand Institute; that's just near here, you know.”

“And of course Clare and Thurston were the publishers of that book, weren't they? It must have been a gold mine; popular science is when it hits the right line.”

“But what's all this got to do with——?”

He answered gravely: “With Lou? Listen, Druna, Lou knew a good many people whom, now I've run into them, it seems to me pretty queer she should have known at all. She knew them, I should imagine, because she'd an almost unlimited capacity for admiration. People like that when they can get it. All the same, one of them saw fit to murder her.”

“I see,” she said, “you want some of her background. Well, Lou was my friend; I don't mind helping you.”

But at that point Sergeant Gurr appeared and said that the inspector would like to speak to Miss Merton. She rose and followed him out.

“Always remembering,” remarked a voice at Toby's elbow, “that Druna herself was one of the queerest people for little Lou to have had as a friend.”

Toby jerked round. Beside him stood the small and undistinguished figure of a man in corduroy shorts and an open-necked shirt.

“I'm so sorry I overheard,” he said in a mild voice. “I was just standing here and thinking that if I could bleach my shorts a little they'd just match the sunburn on my legs. I wonder if I could do it; it'd be rather nice to have them matching.”

He sat down beside Toby on the settee.

“My name's Sand,” he said, “Reginald Sand.”

Toby gave him a more careful scrutiny. “The cartoonist?”

“That's right. Beautiful girl, Druna.”

Toby shrugged his shoulders. “Good looks of that sort,” he said, “are a very astonishing thing. I mean that literally—they astonish.”

“Oh yes, that's why you see her picture so often in the magazines. Photographer's model. I'm hoping so earnestly she doesn't pull anything off with our Charlie. He's a nice young man, although he has certain bad habits. But that's just it—Druna might so easily become one of them. Fortunately in Charlie we have the consummation of the struggle of his mother's generation for feminine emancipation. No, really,” as Toby laughed, “he was telling me only yesterday, when he takes a girl out to dinner he never takes enough money to pay for them both, and if she reacts badly then next time he doesn't take any money at all.”

“Surprising,” said Toby, “if there is a next time.”

“Ye-es, but just look at him, his face, I mean—that's what does it.” The little man grinned. “And it does show strength of character, doesn't it?”

“Yes, certainly it does.”

“Fortunately, as I was saying, I should think Druna has a more old-fashioned outlook on life than his.”

“I wonder…”

The little man looked at him in surprise.

“Oh, I should think she's got grasping tendencies,” said Toby, “but”—and he frowned at the empty glass in his hand and frowned then, as ferociously, across the room at the gracefully disposed figure of the young doctor—“which kind of grasping?”

When Druna returned she looked round the room and, finding Toby where she had left him, once more sat down beside him. The little man had gone.

There was a slight excitement in Druna's manner and in her eyes the pleased look of one who has held, if only for ten minutes, unquestioned possession of the centre of a stage. She took a mirror out of her handbag and spent a moment reassuring herself that her make-up was still as it should be. To Toby's “Well?” she made no immediate reply.

But putting her mirror away once more she said: “The only thing they were really interested in was that stuff Lou was using for her cold—Breathynne. They wanted to know if she was conscientious about following the instructions—that's to say, whether she used it more than every three or four hours. And then they wanted to know what time she used it last.”

“And what time did she use it last?” said Toby.

“About four o'clock. It was just before——” She stopped, and her gaze grew concentrated. Thoughtfully she added: “That's rather queer, really.”

Toby waited. But Druna suddenly got up, crossed the room and dropped into a chair beside Charlie Widdison. At once they were in earnest conversation. Toby lit a cigarette and glanced round at the other occupants of the room.

Eve was standing by the open French window. She was standing very still, had been standing like that for some time. When she moved it would be with some violent release of her wrought-up nerves that now were holding her tensely quiet. There was no ease in her pose; the set of her shoulders was unnatural, the hand that clasped an empty glass was rigid.

Listening to what Druna and Charlie were saying to one another, but standing at a slight distance from them and not joining in, was old Mr Fry. An odd little man, fussy and self-important, yet subdued. He might, in an eccentric and probably unrealistic fashion, be intelligent, or at least have been intelligent once. But it was not a strong face, and sensitivity is not enough to give an old face dignity. Toby's eyes turned from him to the fair-haired, middle-aged woman whom he had heard addressed as Lisbeth Gask.

Lisbeth Gask was knitting. A cigarette clung to her lips. She, too, was listening to Druna and Charlie and suddenly she interrupted something the young man was saying.

“But what
is
this brucine stuff, Charlie?”

As Charlie answered Toby's glance went on round the room. There were several people missing. Roger Clare, for one. Mrs Fry was upstairs putting Vanessa to bed. George was—where? Toby frowned. Someone else was missing too. There should be one more person at least.

Charlie, in his hesitant, gentle, artificial manner was saying: “Well, you see, Lisbeth, that's just the—extraordinary thing. Brucine isn't the sort of stuff that the ordinary person knows about at all. I'm pretty hazy about it myself. I know it's used for the—detection and estimation of—nitrates. But it's more or less a fluke that I know even that. Still, I daresay it'd have about the same symptoms as strychnine, which is what I thought it was. It comes from the same plant——”

“Strychnos nux-vomica,” broke in Mr Fry eagerly. “It produces a convulsive catching of the breath, then, very suddenly, paralytic seizures accompanied by violent trembling. At a later stage paralysis becomes more acute, accompanied by muscle rigor. The legs become stiffly outstretched, the back arched, the soles of the feet incurved, the——” He checked the flow of words. “Yes,” he said vaguely. He coughed. “But this brucine, Charlie. Please go on.”

Charlie, like the others, was looking at the old man oddly.

“Well,” said Charlie, “the queer thing is that a common or garden police sergeant should ever have heard of it.”

“D'you mean,” said Toby, getting up and coming nearer to the group, “that Gurr said he thought she'd taken brucine?”

“He suggested it
might
be brucine,” said Charlie. “You see, I was up there with the sergeant and inspector, telling them about how I'd found her, and I said I should make a—guess at its having been strychnine she'd taken. And then the sergeant, who doesn't look a particularly educated man, does he?—I mean, I shouldn't think he's ever seen the inside of a laboratory—anyway, he said, ‘Mightn't it be brucine?' I think that's really very—curious.”

Toby nodded. “About the most curious thing that's——” But just then there occurred the violent movement that sooner or later was bound to come from Eve Clare.

Actually it was the crash of glass that interrupted Toby. To the accompaniment of an explosive curse she had flung the empty glass she had been holding down onto the stone terrace outside the French
window.

“God, I wish people wouldn't do that sort of thing,” muttered Toby, and moved away, rubbing the back of his head as if that were where the sound had struck him.

Eve spun round. “When's all this going to be finished with?” she cried. “When are things going to be normal again? When are we going to get rid of policemen? Don't stare at me all like a lot of dummies!”

“Eve dear,” said Lisbeth Gask drily, “it's a bad idea to drink as much as you do, but since you've got the habit, suppose you have another.”

“But when?
When
, I want to know!” Eve's voice was high and grating. “How long have we got to go on feeling as if we were bugs under a microscope?”

“Goodness me,” said the little man in shorts, “you don't need a microscope to see a bug, Eve. They're simply enormous things. Why, in the flat I had in Regent's Square——”

“Eve,” said Lisbeth with brisk authority, “why don't you ring up Max and tell him to come round?”

“In the flat I had in Regent's Square,” said Reginald Sand, “I practised throwing darts at them. Between about three and five of a summer morning there were nearly always several on view. So I used to leave a bunch of darts by my bed and if I happened to wake up——”

“It's no use ringing him up,” said Eve. “He's in London tonight. He's doing a lecture each Wednesday and Saturday for the next month. But I did ring up and leave a message.” She crossed to the cocktail cabinet and poured herself another drink. “Anyone else?” She strolled back to the window. “This is about the most damnable thing that could have happened.”

Lisbeth's contemplation of Eve's slim figure was more than usually sardonic. She remarked: “Druna's just been telling us an odd thing she noticed. It
was
an odd thing. I noticed it, too, only I hadn't connected——Hullo, Roger.” She smiled up at Roger Clare as he strode in.

“Gillett,” he said, “they want Gillett next. Where is he?”

They all looked round.

“Why, he's not here,” said Druna. “But he was, just a little while ago.”