Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (10 page)

Elizabeth stood with him, weeping, in the hall, while a sergeant herded the three men into the huge, hideous drawing-room and kept them there till the police car should come. ‘I don’t believe it: I utterly don’t believe it, Inspector. Those three? A plot—’

He had said it long ago: from the very beginning. ‘A very deep-laid, elaborate, absolutely sure-fire plan.’

‘Between the doctor and Theo then, if you must. But Bill—why drag Bill into it?’

‘Ah, Bill,’ he said. ‘But without Bill…? You have been very loyal; but I think we must now come into the open about Bill?’

And he was back with her, so many weeks ago now, when Cyrus Caxton’s proposed new marriage had first become an open secret. ‘With your job, Elizabeth, you could travel, you could see the world.’ ‘I
have
seen the world,’ she had answered. ‘All right,’ she admitted now, in a small voice. ‘Yes. I did go to America, with a private patient. I did get married there. Cyrus knew that I’d been married and divorced. I didn’t tell other people because he didn’t like anyone knowing that I was—well, he called it second-hand.’

Married; and divorced. Married to one who ‘bumming around’ had heard through the devoted family servants that his mother’s illness would be her last. ‘Inspector, we were desperate. He wouldn’t work, he gambled like a maniac, my nursing wouldn’t keep the two of us. And yet I couldn’t leave him. I told you that I had had a lost love; well, that was true in its own way. My love he was—and yet not lost really after all: my love he is still and to my ruin ever shall be. I suppose some women are like that.’

‘And some men,’ said Cockie; thinking of that suddenly desolate look with which he had said, ‘I think now that I made some pretty big mistakes.’

‘I’ve been so ashamed, Inspector,’ she said, weeping again. ‘Not only of what we were doing; but of all the lies, all the acting.’

‘Yet you went through with it.’

‘You don’t know Bill,’ she said. ‘But yes—it’s true. He wrote to his mother secretly, through the servants. He said a girl would get in touch with her, a wonderful nurse, who would soon be coming over to England. He told her to say nothing to the old man but to try to get this girl engaged to look after her; of course the girl was me, Inspector. The idea at first was simply to look after his interests, to try to get his mother’s money ensured to him, before she died. But then he got this other idea. The old man would soon be a widower; and he thought of him as a
very
old man, old and, he knew, in bad health. He hadn’t seen his step-father for years; to an adolescent, all adults seem far more aged than they are. He imagined an old crock far more in need of a nurse than of a wife. So—the first thing was a divorce. He beat up a man whom he accused of having an affair with me; he over-did that a bit and landed himself in prison; but even that he didn’t mind, it helped in speeding up the divorce because of the reason for the assault.’

‘Without a divorce, you couldn’t have inherited, of course. The marriage with the old man had to be water-tight.’

‘Inspector,’ she said, in anguish, ‘don’t believe for one moment that this began as a murder plot. It started from small beginnings, as I’ve said; and then in that gambler’s mind of his, it just grew and grew. Here was this golden chance. He knew that I had this—this power over men; something that I just have, I can’t help it, you’ve seen for yourself how, without any effort on my part, it works. With such an asset—how could he bear not to exploit it? A sick old man, recently widowed, a pretty little nurse already installed: how could it fail?’

‘And he was prepared to wait?’

‘He saw the thing in terms of a year or two, no longer. Meanwhile he would remain in England, we could see one another—after all, he was a member of the family. And I would provide him with money, I suppose; and he would gamble.’

‘But before this happy condition of things, you must nurse the dying mother; and then get to work succeeding in her place with the widower.’

She turned away her head. ‘I know you think it sounds terrible; put that way, it seems terrible to me too—and it always has done. But—well, of course I had only Bill’s picture of the situation, the picture of an ailing old man who would want a—a nurse rather than a wife… And when I found out differently—well, once again, you don’t know Bill. What Bill says, you have to do. And I did nurse her: she was dying, I couldn’t make any difference to that, but I did nurse her and care for her—almost her last words were of gratitude to me. When she died, I could hardly bear it. I rang up Bill in America and told him I couldn’t go through with it. But… Well, he just said—’

‘He said you
must
go through with it: and came over here himself, to make sure that you did?’

‘To make sure of that—and of something else?’ she said, faintly.

‘Yes,’ he said, thinking it over. ‘Of something else too. Because he’s still in love with you, Elizabeth, in his own way. And he might drive you to the altar with a horrible old man; but he would never let you get as far as the old man’s bed.’

And in that determination, he had found unexpected allies. ‘I suppose, Inspector, he may have meant to do it himself—God knows, he never to me breathed a word of such a thing. As I say, back in the States, he was visualising this old-man-and-nurse relationship. But anyway, he’s a gambler, here was this chance and nothing must stand in the way of it. Then he came over here and saw me again: and saw me with his stepfather… And then, perhaps, finding how the other two felt about it, I suppose he roped them in. Another gambler’s chance: so typical of Bill. Only this one will come off for a change, because in this way the law can’t do anything to them?’

‘How do you mean?—can’t do anything?’

‘Well, but—who has committed any crime? Bill has bought a tin of stuff for killing wasps: there’s nothing wrong in that? Theo has bought a bottle of peaches—nothing wrong in that either? The doctor—well, I suppose he did put the finger-stall down Cyrus’s throat. But
he
didn’t poison it. None of them has actually done one wrong action. They can’t even be put in prison?’

‘Only for a very short time,’ acknowledged Cockie.

‘For a short time?’ she said, startled.

‘Till they’re taken out and hanged,’ said Inspector Cockrill.

‘You don’t truly mean that? All three of them could be—executed?’

‘All three,’ said Cockie. ‘For being concerned in a murder: that’s the law. The flight of the queen, Elizabeth—
at certain times of the year the drones sit around eating
—well, we saw them do that—
and gazing with huge eyes upon the virgin queen
—well, we saw them do that too. And then,
the mass flight after the queen
: and that also we’ve seen. But here something goes wrong with the comparison; because only one succeeds in the mating; and therefore—only one dies.’

‘You mean that these three—?’

‘I mean that these three are not going to die. It would be too inartistic an ending to the metaphor.’

‘What can save them?’ said Elizabeth, beginning to tremble.

‘Words can save them: and will save them.’

‘Words?’

‘A dozen words: carelessly spoken, hardly listened to, attended to not at all. Except by me when later I remembered them. Your husband saying, “Why couldn’t I have had smoked salmon?” and you replying, “We got what was easiest.” ’ A plain-clothes man who had all this time sat quietly on a chair by the front door, got up, as quietly, and came forward; and Inspector Cockrill shot out a hand and circled, with steely hard fingers, her narrow wrist. ‘Why should oysters have been easier than smoked salmon, Elizabeth?’ he said.

A very elaborate, long-thought-out, deep-laid, absolutely sure-fire plan…

The ugly collusion between husband and wife, to implant in the household of the dying mother a new bride for the rich widower soon to be. On the husband’s part, probably nothing more—nothing worse intended than an impatient waiting from then on, for the end of a life whose expectations had been somewhat underestimated. On hers—ah! she had been on the spot to recognise in advance the long years she might yet have to serve with a man who at the least sign of rebellion would pare down her inheritance to the limit the law allowed. Had she really confessed to Cyrus Caxton an earlier marriage? Not likely! ‘You are well named Elizabeth—the virgin queen,’ he had said; and added, ‘I hope!’ Of them all, the one who had had most cause to dread Mr. Caxton’s marriage bed had been Elizabeth herself.

The plot then, laid: but in one mind alone. Use the ex-husband, expendable now, as red-herring number one; ensnare with enchantments long proved irresistible, such other poor fools as might serve to confuse the issue. With gentle persistence, no injury pin-pointable, alienate servants too long faithful and now in the way. And, the scene set, sit, sweet and smiling, little hands fluttering, soft eyes mistily blue—and in the back of one’s scheming mind, think and think and plan and plan…

‘You can’t know,’ she said, spitting it out at him, as they drove away from the house, the three men left sick and bewildered, utterly confounded, watching her go: sitting between himself and his sergeant in the smooth black police car, ceaselessly, restlessly struggling against their grip on her wrists. ‘You don’t know. It’s all a trick, trying to lead me up the garden path.’

‘No,’ said Cockrill. ‘Not any more. We’ve been up enough garden paths: with you leading
me
.’ His arm gave slackly against the tug and pull of her hand, but his fingers never left their firm hold. ‘How well you did it!—poking the clues under my nose, snatching each of them back when you saw it wasn’t going to work—and all with such a touching air of protecting your poor dear admirers, fallen into this terrible trap, for love of you. But I matched you,’ he said with quiet satisfaction, ‘trick for trick.’

‘You can’t know,’ she repeated again.

‘I knew from the first moment,’ he said. ‘From the first moment I remembered his asking why he couldn’t have had smoked salmon.
You
ordered the meal: accuse who you will—whatever you had said about the meal, that would have been decided. So why give him oysters; which would only make him angry? If one thought about it—taking all the other factors into consideration—the answer had to be there.’

‘But the tin! You saw it yourself when we came into the dining-room. I never left the dining-room—how could I have hidden it in the vase?’

‘You hid it when you went out to “look”; it wouldn’t take half a second and you had your little hankie in your hand, didn’t you?—all ready to muffle your finger-prints.’ And with his free hand he smote his knee. ‘By gum!—you’d thought this thing out, hadn’t you?—right down to the last little shred of a handkerchief.’

She struggled, sitting there between them, ceaselessly wrenching to ease their grip on her wrists. ‘Let me go, you brutes! You’re hurting me.’

‘Cyrus Caxton didn’t have too comfortable a time, a-dying.’

‘That old hog!’ she said, viciously. ‘Who cares how such an animal dies?’

‘As long as he dies.’

‘You’ll never prove that I killed him, Inspector. How, for example,’ she said, triumphantly, subsiding a little in her restless jerking to give her whole mind to it, ‘how could I have taken the poison from the tin?’

‘You could have taken it while you were in the house with Theo, on the way to the church. Theo went off to the downstairs cloakroom—’

‘For half a minute. How long does a man take, nipping into the loo? To get the stuff out of the tin, do all the rest of it—’

‘Ah, but I don’t say you did “do all the rest of it”—not then. “All the rest of it” had been prepared in advance. We’ll find—if we look long enough; and we will—some chemist in London where you bought a second tin of cyanide. The tin here was a blind; there was time enough even during Theo’s half-minute, to take a quick scoop out of it (no doubt you’d arranged to have it left on the hall table)—just as a blind. That lot, I suppose, you disposed of in the cloak-room when you went there, after Theo.’

‘You know it all, don’t you?’ she said, sarcastically; but she was growing weary, helpless, she had ceased to struggle, sitting limply between them now, slumped against the seatback.

A very deep-laid, elaborate, absolutely sure-fire plot: and all to be conceived in the mind of one little woman—a woman consumed, destroyed, by the dangerous knowledge of her own invincibility in the hearts of men. But the cleverness, thought Cockie; the patience! The long preparation, the building-up, piece by piece, of the ‘book’ itself, the stage-props, the make-up, the scenery: as a producer will work long months ahead on a projected production. Then—the stage set at last, the puppet actors chosen: curtain up! The ‘exposition’—‘Bill, for goodness sake collect the things from the chemist for me, the old man will slay me if I don’t get his wretched wasp stuff. Just leave it on the hall table, let him think I got it…’ And, ‘Theo, I’ve ordered the stuff from Harrod’s, but I never thought about a dessert. You couldn’t hop across to Fortnum’s and get some of those peaches-in-Kirsch?—I’ve seen them there and they look so delicious. Teetotal?—oh, lord, so he is! But still, why should everyone else suffer?—perhaps this will make up to them for having no champagne. And he’s got his usual fearful cold, may be he won’t even notice.’ In the excitement and confusion, who would remember accurately, who would carry in their heads, all the commands and counter-commands, all the myriad unimportant small decisions, and who had made them? Who, for that matter, of her three cavaliers, would shelter behind her skirts to cry out, ‘It was Elizabeth who told me to.’ So Bill introduces the poison into the house, and Theo the peach which is to be found guilty of conveying the poison; and if the doctor does not bring in his medical bag, then busy little Elizabeth, ex-nurse, will be there to remind him of police exhortations. The stage set; the cast assembled; the puppet actors (Inspector Cockrill himself included to do the observing)—moved this way and that at the twitch of a thread, held in a small hand already dyed red with the victim’s blood.

For even as he swallowed his last oyster, munched his way resentfully through his cold meat, began on his peach—already Cyrus Caxton had been a dying man: had not the doctor smelt the cyanide upon his breath? ‘Why couldn’t you have got smoked salmon?’ he had asked angrily: and, after all, smoked salmon could have been sent down from Harrod’s as easily as oysters. But ‘We got what was easiest,’ she had replied; and even then, Inspector Cockrill had asked himself—why? Why should oysters, which require cut lemon, a little red pepper and perhaps some brown bread and butter, have been easier than smoked salmon which requires just the same?