Authors: Christianna Brand
‘But it tells us the registration number of your car,’ said Charlesworth. ‘And the engine number.’ He turned away and glanced down into the yard. He said at last: ‘The tree fell across the road? And you met this stranger? And you swapped cars?’
‘I
told
you,’ said Sari.
‘And subsequently a dead body is found in the car.’ He took her arm and held her while she stood beside him, staring down at the big, shining black Halcyon, out in the open now with the police still milling around it. ‘Miss Morne—look at the number plate. That’s your own car,’ he said.
A
ND DOWN IN WREN’S
Hill, Nanny was ringing up Mummy. ‘I’ve got a bit of news for you dear, I think she lives in Grenwidge.’
‘In Greenwich?’
‘Well, breakfast time this morning, Ena Mee suddenly comes out with, “Where’ll we go for our picnic, Daddy?” “Picnic?” he says. “You promised to take me for a picnic today,” she says—never a word to me, of course, never a word to Nanny who’s got to get the samwidges and that. Well, he looks a bit sick, you could see he had something else up his sleeve, he’d forgotten about the picnic, but she starts creating, “You always break your promises!”—and “Mummy would take me if
she
said she was going to,” ’ said Nanny, contributing a touch of flattering embroidery which both of them must recognise to be totally false. ‘So he says, “I can’t,” he says, “I’ve got a case to see,”—always the same old excuse. So Ena Mee, she sets up a hullabaloo, so he sits there thinking and at last he says, “Well, look, all right, I was supposed to be going to Grenwidge to see this patient, so what we’ll do, we’ll take our picnic to Grenwidge Park, and I’ll drop in and see the patient and you and Nanny can wait just a few minutes.” Ena Mee says no, she wanted to go to the zoo’, but, “It’s lovely in Grenwidge Park,” he says, “you can sit on the hill and look all the way down to the river.” “What, after all that rain last night?” I says. “Why not a nice restrong?” but no, we can take the tarpauling and a picnic it has to be. And I have to say,’ admitted Nanny, ‘it turned out a nice day after the storm, and not all that cold.’
‘Yes, well obviously it was all an excuse to go to Greenwich. So, Nanny, what about Her? He parked you there and just went off and left you?’
‘Well, he had to tell her he couldn’t manage it after all, I suppose. But pretending it was a patient—But it wasn’t a patient,’ said Nanny, shrewdly, ‘I know
him
! Just come back and says after all that trouble, the patient had gone out, so he just left a message. And I bet she had too, he looked that upset!’
Goodness: thought Ena, listening with only half an ear. Greenwich? She had an idea, though only a very vague one, as to the identity of the lady concerned. That there’d been any lady before she’d left him, was certainly not the case, though she had made considerable parade of jealousy at his seeing all those females and under such intimate conditions, in his consulting rooms. But afterwards... Well, Phin was a bit of a one for it; and doctors, especially gynaecologists, had to be very, very careful about dalliance with their patients; and, especially again, with young married patients. If she could discover that Phin had been up to something of the sort, then the law would be willing to hand Ena Mee back to her Mum. Not that Ena had the smallest intention, whatever Nanny might imagine, of lumbering herself again with a six-year-old child, and Ronald would certainly never stand for it—but by pretending to want her, she could blackmail lots and lots of lovely lolly out of Phin. Ronald was loaded, but had proved not all that generous, after all, in doling it out to the little woman. ‘Well, so what did you have for the picnic then, Nan?’ (Greenwich Park. She must be one of his Harley Streeters, sent to him by a general practitioner. The hospital where Phin was consultant was in North London, which was why he chose to live out in Hertfordshire; and Greenwich, after all, just about slap opposite, a good twelve miles away, the other side of London. The lady would not come to him via a North London hospital. A small contribution to Mr Charlesworth’s collage floated through Ena’s cunning mind; she was unconscious that it was this that had prompted her to ask what they’d had for the picnic.)
‘Oh, well, the picnic,’ said Nanny, flattered. One of Mummy’s charms had been that she always said that Nanny’s fixing-uppings for all special occasions were so marvellous that she would leave everything to her—by which Ena in fact meant all the work and trouble. ‘Well, you know what our young lady is about a picnic. Them little soft rolls spread with Lipter cheese. Wouldn’t touch them if you gave them to her in the house, but for a picnic—Lipter cheese it has to be. “But, petty,” I says to her, “Nanny hasn’t
got
any Lipter cheese.” “You can get it in the shop,” she says; and Sunday, but no flies on our young Madam, “The dellycatessing’s open on Sundays,” she says. Well, I ‘d been up half the night, dear, what with my tooth, but never mind that, down to the shop poor Nanny has to go, trit trot...’
‘And after all that,’ said Ena, unwilling to pass on to further unlimited detail, ‘he goes off and leaves you on your owns?’
‘Yes, and what am
I
supposed to do?’ said Nanny, ‘—sitting there on a bit of tarpauling with the picnic basket—nothing but a lot of grass and trees, and as for river, well, I don’t call that a river and about half a mile away, right down there below us.’ Nanny came from the wilds of Essex and had a deep contempt—especially now, having gone to all the grand restrongs with Madam—for any but the urban scene. ‘Not even a decent shop, to look in at the windows.’
‘Poor
Nan
! And how long did he leave you there?’
‘Oh, well,’ admitted Nanny, and it did come a bit flat at the end of all that, ‘I can’t say it was so very long. I suppose it just seemed longer. “
You
bin a long time,” I said to him and “A long time?” he says, “Exactly ten minutes,” he says, cross as two sticks he was: I thought to meself, so she hadn’t waited in for you after all? I thought—’
Ten minutes. So if they’d been up at the top there, it must be one of the houses just across Blackheath—well, just somewhere round there, anyway. ‘It really was ten minutes, Nanny?’
‘Yes, well, about that,’ confessed Nanny. ‘I looked at me watch. And then what d’you think? “I don’t think much of
this
place,” says Ena Mee, well, pore child, I don’t blame her; and, “Oh, don’t you?” he says, calm as a cucumber, after having driven all that way. “Well, let’s do something else,” he says, “let’s go to the zoo, after all, we can have our picnic on a bench there,” he says, “and give what’s left to the monkeys...” All that sweat down to the shops for the Lipter cheese!—and then of course she doesn’t eat two bites of it, much rather feed it to them rangatangs.’
‘So he didn’t see his bird after all?’ said Ena, disappointed.
‘Well, no.’ And what was more, added Nanny, feeling that one might as well get it over with in one go, she might have been wrong after all about his going off to see Her every Saturday evening. He really did seem to have bin to the cinema; last night anyway. She’d played a trick or two on him and he’d never got caught out, not once.
‘Oh, lor’!’ said Ena, gloomily. She’d seen a blue mink stole and Ronnie wouldn’t divvy up: she’d been counting on a spot more blackmailing of Phin, via Ena Mee.
B
Y SEVEN O’CLOCK, THE
police had gone—they had all gone, Etho and Nan, loving and clucking, and Sofa, recovered from hysteria and full of apologies, and Pony, profuse with departing bows of sympathy and regret and Charley; and now the euphoria had long passed away and Sari sat with Rufie on the great, endless couch, arms round one another, knees up to their chins like two sad monkeys huddled together on a branch. ‘Rufie, it
is
true, it
is
true, the tree did fall, I did meet the man, I did swap cars with him...’
Checks had been made with the local police and it was a fact that at some time before half-past ten the night before, the great elm had fallen. ‘Dovey-darling, you don’t think—? Well, I mean, yes, we know a tree did fall across the road. Suppose—? Well, if you’d just that second passed, it would have been such a ghastly shock, don’t you think you might have—well, imagined in your mind what would have happened if you’d been just a minute earlier: and then perhaps—?’ His voice trailed away wretchedly. It was never safe to suggest to Sari that something she said might not be true. And then, again, they’d never believed all those stories about her being in danger, and yet here was Vi Feather murdered—and just a couple of hours after Sari had been speaking to her. ‘But why poor old Feather, darling? Why should they—why should anyone—want to kill
her
?’
‘But of course,’ said Sari. ‘I told the policeman. They thought it was me.’
Dread dropped like a plummet in Rufie’s heart. ‘Oh, my God, Sari! But you don’t really believe—?’
‘What else? I’ve kept telling you all. And as you yourself say—why poor wretched Vi Feather?’
Poor wretched Vi Feather—cramped up in that narrow space, crammed in, crooked arms and legs set at spider angles, claw hands with their horrible outspread appeal. And something... A bleak terror niggled at Rufie’s mind. He said at last, slowly: ‘If people are strangled—surely there’s no blood?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’ She released her right arm from about his shoulder, sat back away from him, staring him in the face. ‘There was blood—’
‘But was it blood really?’ said Rufie.
‘Not blood?’
His two white hands were thrust up rigidly into the flame of pale hair. ‘Sari—when we found—it, I did something. I touched something. What did I do? What did I touch or pick up or something—?’
‘God knows, darling,
I
wouldn’t know. The whole thing’s sort of blacked out.’ But through the blackness she saw the white face now, in her mind’s eye, the terrible upturned white face and the bent arm tumbling out with the opening of the door, brushing against her leg. And the huddle of pale blue mackintosh; and—the blood... ‘Only it wasn’t blood, you’re right. It wasn’t blood. It was—’
‘It was a rose,’ said Rufie.
Death had been by strangulation. Some time before midnight. And Mr Charlesworth had said nothing about any rose.
‘Sari—that’s what I did. It’s been niggling me ever since, it’s been at the back of my mind. But with the horror of the whole thing... I picked up the rose. That’s what I did. God knows why. A sort of shock reaction, I suppose. It was a rose, a red rose, lying on top of—of her; and I picked it up.’
‘Where is it, then, what did you do with it?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t remember. I just barely remember that for some unknown reason I picked it up. It was beginning to slide—Now I remember,’ said Rufie. ‘It began to slide down—well, slide off her, slide down the shiny mackintosh, I suppose; it must have got jerked when we pulled open the door. And I sort of—caught it.’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Sari. ‘I don’t remember anything. Just... Well, all the rest I don’t remember—only running back across the yard to the flats—and I think I was screaming—?’
Yes, she had been screaming. It had been horrible, those terrible, horrifying, piercing screams. He had run after her, almost hating her. It had added so much to the shock and the horror, that almost ludicrous, engine-whistle screaming as they ran.
He’d run across the yard...
The yard below their window was studded with ugly squared-off flower-beds, cut into the concrete and planted with orderly phalanxes of roses. ‘My hand! Look, darling, these scratches! When that Superintendent said something about—I forgot what, but something about scratching—I remember now in the back of my mind that I glanced down and saw these scratches on my hand and for some reason I didn’t want him to see them and I pulled down my sleeve to cover them. I don’t know why. I didn’t know where I’d got them. But I do know now—when we ran across the yard, I realised I had this thing in my hand and I flung it into one of the rose beds. I don’t know why I did that, either—’
‘Oh, but I understand that. You’d be so sort of—disgusted. I suppose,’ said Sari, ‘we ought to ring up that man and tell him?’
‘You’re not supposed to—interfere with things, whatever it’s called, at “the scene of the crime”. Will I get into trouble?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sari, wearily. She thought it over. ‘Oh, Rufie—let’s leave it! I really couldn’t face any more tonight.’
Rufie got up and went into his room, found paper, dived first and second finger in a pincer movement into ajar, pulled out a mixture and rolled himself an untidy cigarette. ‘Darling,
need
you?’ said Sari. ‘I do so hate the smell.’
‘I’ve got to have a clear head and think.’
‘By the same token, Rufie, hadn’t you better stash the stuff away somewhere? If we’re going to have the fuzz prowling all over the place—?’
‘Oh, lord,’ said Rufie. ‘I suppose I’d better.’
Their spirits rose a little as they entered into earnest discussion of where best to conceal several ounces of hash, growing increasingly hilarious as, with the drug, Rufie’s exhilaration rose. He had known a girl who had padded out her bra with it, but Sari was not going to carry the can—well, the pot, ducky, if you’ll pardon the pun—for
anyone.
‘Damn it, I don’t play the scene myself, I don’t see why
I
should be hassled. Pad your own bra with it.’
‘Dovey, as gay as you please but a transie,
no.’
He leapt to his feet nevertheless, tore Sofa’s huge unfinished kaftan from the sewing machine on the floor, wrapped it twice round himself and minced around with a wobbling pile of crystallised fruit balanced on his head to which, as he moved about, he carefully added more and more. Sari rolled on the couch, exhausted with laughter. ‘Oh, darling, you
are
a fool! You’re high as a kite!—and now you’ll have to wash the sugar out of your hair. And who’s going to eat them after this?’
‘They’ll never know,’ said Rufie, recovering glistening plums and apricots from the carpet and slapping them back into shape with the heel of his hand.
‘Give them to Sofy. She won’t mind. It’s a wonder she didn’t scoff them up anyway.’