Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (32 page)

Mrs. Dorinda Jones lapped up every word of it. But… ‘Alone in the car with him…’ ‘How very odd!’ said Mrs. Jones to herself and she rang up a very grand person at Scotland Yard—Mrs. Jones knows simply
every
one—and said: ‘But what about the rough looking man?’

The chauffeur, Smith, received the information about the rough looking man with passionate gratitude. His own position was dicey in the extreme. Blood had been found on his hands and uniform—he had of course helped to get the body out of the car—and he’d never made a secret and therefore could make none now, of his fear and loathing of his employer. Certainly he had admitted to having seen no intruder, rough looking or otherwise; but the car had been crawling through the traffic, frequently at a standstill—and the glass partition was sound-proof and opaque; perfectly possible for someone to have entered and left the car, without his being aware of it. ‘He did a lot of talking business in the back of that car, sir,’ said Smith, earnestly explaining to the police. ‘And—other things.’

He had been with the Sheik for several years, living in a lodge in the grounds of the mansion and driving the Rolls whenever His Excellency was in England. A cushy job—yes, indeed—except when His Excellency was in England.
Not
a considerate employer, the suspect quite frankly confided: ill-tempered, intemperate and bullying and downright diabolical to those poor bastards he’d bring with him when he came over from Where-ever-it-was—it had made Smith’s blood boil to see it. And one habit he’d had…‘He’d pick up these poor girls, sir, in some night club or other and drive them home—even through the soundproof glass, I’ve heard the screams. And then I’d be got up at any hour of the night to drive them back where they belonged. More dead than alive some of them, poor little creatures; I swear it used to make me sick.’

‘Not so sick that you thought of telling the police?’

But Smith had seen what happened to those few wretches who had ever dared to rebel against Sheik Horror-horror; and you could get away and hide at the ends of the earth, his thugs would still find you out. Besides….‘Poor kids, they’d hired theirselves out, sir, hadn’t they? And been paid. Paid fortunes, sir. And taken the money. Gone wrong in life, poor little devils,’ said Smith, ‘and lost their way and come to this.’

M’m. Mr. Smith wouldn’t by any chance have a daughter himself, who had lost her way in life—?

‘
Me
, sir?’ said Smith. He drew himself up. ‘Do I look like a man who could have a daughter fallen to such depths as that?’

But he’d forgotten, confided her highly placed friend to Mrs. Jones, that he wasn’t now wearing a smart uniform and peaked cap; in mufti, any man might look as though he could have had a daughter gone wrong. Which could have been a motive—

‘But what about my rough looking man?’ insisted Mrs. Jones. ‘I mean that
must
let him out?’

And in fact it did. The cab driver was sought and found, and conceded that, though he’d been looking ahead, watching the traffic, he might just have caught out of the corner of his eye, a glimpse of the rough looking man in the Rolls. The police sighed heavily and said goodbye to Mr. Smith. No one, not even back home in Where-ever-it-was, as Mrs. Jones would have said—was anything but delighted that Sheik Horror-horror had got his just deserts. It was highly embarrassing to the British Government, all the same. The police are understood to be keeping a sharp eye out to this day for Mrs. Dorinda Jones’ rough looking man.

Mr. Smith, however, in an ecstasy of gratitude, approached Mrs. Jones with a large—if rather ill-assorted—bunch of flowers. He had now joined a car-hire firm and any time Mrs. Jones wanted to do a bit of shopping—that would be on the house. Mrs. Jones accepted with simple delight and upon their first excursion suggested driving past the scene of the crime: there had been a rather divine pair of boots in the window of a shop, and she wondered if they might not still be there.

At the Arab restaurant, the lunch time rush had not yet begun and the commissionaire came forward hopefully when the traffic halted their car outside its doors. He seemed to recognize her—Mrs. Jones is highly photogenic and her pictures had vied in the papers with Identikit portraits of the rough looking man—and his large, florid face took on a rather strange tinge of grey. ‘How odd!’ thought Mrs. Jones. ‘Just a minute,’ she said to Smith, and stepped out of the opened door. ‘You’ve given up your nice white cotton gloves,’ she said to the commissionaire.

He went greyer still. ‘I found that they showed the dirt, Madam.’

‘And stains? But if they got stained, you could take them off and stuff them into a pocket. And then of course, there’s the question of fingerprints.’ She looked at him very kindly. ‘Have you by any chance got a young daughter?’ she said.

His hands were beginning to shake: it was horrible. ‘I had a daughter, Madam,’ he said. ‘She’s dead now. She died in hospital of—injuries.’ He pulled himself together. ‘The police asked me these questions, Mrs. Jones. It was you, yourself, who told them that when you saw him in the car driving away from here—the Sheik was alive and well.’

‘He was alive,’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘I wouldn’t know about well. He did open his eyes, it’s true, and looked at me. But—I ought to have realised it before—not at all the look that a gentleman all that keen on girls might be expected to give one. A terrible look—almost as though… Well, almost as though I’d stabbed him in the back. Or
some
one had stabbed him in the back. Then his eyes closed again.’

A silence. He said at last: ‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘I mean—there’s one’s duty and all that. But I’d let you know first.’ She got back into the car, but before he closed the door on her, she leaned out and put her small, gloved hand on his arm. ‘I’m very, very sorry about your daughter,’ she said.

It was an awful situation, all the same. ‘
I
don’t know,’ she said to Smith as the car moved on again. ‘Ought one to tell?’

They came once more opposite the black marble nursing home with its golden curlicues. ‘You’ve forgotten, Madam,’ said Smith. ‘There’s still the rough looking man.’

‘Oh, yes, so there is,’ said Mrs. Jones, thankfully. She gave no thought at all to the divine boots in the shop across the road. ‘We’d stopped just about here. The man was sitting…’ She broke off. A car was drawn up at the door of the nursing home, a patient being assisted to alight. Only the driving seat was now occupied. ‘What an odd coincidence!’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘Their chauffeur has just the same uniform as you have.’

Smith turned his head to look and in the same movement the chauffeur turned and looked straight back at him. ‘Yes, he has, Madam, hasn’t he?’ said Smith. ‘And what’s more—just the same face.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Jones in a very small voice. ‘Yes. So he has!’ She thought it all over in her own cool little way. ‘That day,’ she said. ‘It was raining. I had my umbrella up and my head down—I suppose I never looked at my taxi driver at all. Not to recognise him if I saw him—well, in some different situation.’

‘In a mirror, for example,’ said Smith. ‘That black marble, you know—when it’s wet, it does get a shine on it. You could see your face in it, really you could.’

‘Or somebody else’s. I saw my own taxi driver, didn’t I?’ said Mrs. Jones, humbly. ‘He’d be sitting a bit ahead of me like you are now. And, through the window of the car drawn up beside me, I’d see him in the mirror of black marble and he’d look as though he were sitting in that car!’

‘That’s the way I’d worked it out,’ said Smith. ‘Last time I drove past here on a rainy day. I daresay when the police were here, it happened always to be fine.’

‘Yes. Well. I suppose one ought to whizz off this
min
ute and confess to them?’ She didn’t seem too much delighted at the prospect.

‘Perhaps one should. On the other hand,’ said Smith, ‘you never saw those girls like I did, Madam, when His Excellency had done with them. Crying all the way home in the car, poor little devils. And that chap, the commissionaire—his girl, she’s dead. Died in hospital, he said.’

‘So if everyone just goes on believing in the rough looking man….I really do think on the whole that I ought to keep quiet about it. Don’t you, Smith?’ said Mrs. Dorinda Jones, hopefully. She added: ‘Upon reflection.’

F
ROM THE BALCONY UP
there, they could see right down into her house. And she knew that they talked about her. The old woman sat out on every fine day in her wheel-chair, peering down through the railings with nothing else to do, but watch.

‘I knew it,’ said the old woman. ‘There she goes again! Dipping a great hunk of bread into the curry sauce.’

‘ “Tasting it,” ’ said her daughter, with a sneer.

‘Gobbling it,’ said the old woman. ‘Then she’ll sit down to her supper and eat a great dob of it on a mound of rice. No wonder she’s fat.’ She herself, long ailing, was very thin.

‘Fat!’ said the daughter. ‘She’s disgusting.’
She
was not thin but slim. She ate sensibly, carefully, keeping herself slim. Her husband loved and admired her for her beautiful figure. ‘What can the husband think, married to such a mountain of flesh?’

Mrs. Jennings was not a mountain of flesh but she was over-weight and it was true that her husband found her unlovely in consequence. ‘Aren’t you having any curry?’

‘No, I picked when I was cooking. I must pay for it.’

‘Well, that makes a change,’ he said, finishing up her share.

‘I thought you’d rather admire me,’ she said, trying a little joke. ‘It’s a long time since I did that,’ he said.

They were out there again, next day, the old woman in her chair, the rest popping in and out, waiting on her—the old grandfather, the daughter and her husband, a couple of teen-age kids. The Family, Mrs. Jennings called them to herself, with a capital F. They could see everything. They could see into the kitchen, all the front rooms, upstairs and down; even part of the garden at the back of the house. Mrs. Jennings’ garden had a tiny swimming pool. ‘Don’t tell me she’s going in!’ said the boy, coming out with a glass of nice cold milk for Gran’ma. ‘What’ll the displacement be?’

‘Flood the garden,’ said his sister, sniggering.

‘That I
would
like to see,’ said the old woman. ‘Her in one of them bikinis.’

Mrs. Jennings in fact did not venture into the pool. ‘Those people would have been watching me,’ she said, excusing herself to her husband when he came home. ‘Saying things about me.’

‘Some old trout in a wheel-chair,’ he said. ‘What the hell does she matter?’ The Family were a frequent source of disagreement; sometimes, she thought, the original cause of it all. Was it not her complaints about them that had first drawn his attention to her increase in over-weight, so gradual a process that he had hitherto been blind to it?

‘So you didn’t go for a wallow?’ he said. ‘Pity. It might tone up that flab of yours.’

‘Yes, I know. So I came in and did some hard housework instead.’

‘Well, she’s given that up. Now we’ll begin on some housework,’ said the old woman to her granddaughter, looking down into the drawing room. ‘You wait!—twenty minutes and she’ll be on the sofa, gorging biscuits.’

It was true that, carrying so much overweight, Mrs. Jennings got easily tired, doing housework. ‘But I’m not going to eat anything,’ she said to herself. ‘I know that old hag up there watches everything I touch.’ She could not resist a cup of coffee, however, and an hour later was still stretched out on the sofa, doing the crossword. ‘A bit more exercise would do her good,’ said the old grandfather. ‘All that money—better for her to be a bit hard up, have to go out to work.
And
on foot,’ he added, almost savagely.

‘And how did you bestir yourself today?’ asked Mr. Jennings, sitting down to a well-filled dinner plate. He was not such a beauty himself, reflected Mrs. Jennings; not as svelte as all that. ‘I did a big household shop,’ she said. Only at the last minute had she succumbed and taken a taxi home. ‘All by bus,’ she said, fibbing. ‘Parcels and the lot.’

‘I bet,’ said Mr. Jennings on an unlovely, jeering note.

‘Well, nearly all. Oh, and I took your suit to the cleaners. There was a letter in the pocket. I put it on your desk.’

He went a shade pale. ‘Having had a good look at it first?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t read other people’s letters.’

‘All women read other people’s letters,’ he said. ‘Especially their husbands’.’

‘Well, I don’t and I didn’t. Why should I?’

‘I simply took the girl out to lunch,’ he said, defensive.

‘The girl? What girl?’

‘The girl in the letter. A thin girl,’ he said.

‘Got a girl friend now,’ the old woman was saying, cosy now indoors in the sitting room. Friends had come in for coffee and the Family were regaling them with the continuing story of That Woman Opposite. ‘Brought her home the night old Fatso was away—whatever took her away, but she was gone for the night. And in they come, like a couple of rabbits to the burrow, him and this floosey with him. You could follow the lights—hall, sitting room—lights on in the sitting room—lights out in the sitting room, lights on up the stairs—lights on in the bedroom, lights off in the bedroom…’

‘What’s she like?’ said the grandchildren.

‘Thin,’ said the old woman.

So now she really went to work, dieting hard. It was a weary business all the same, depriving yourself, starving yourself, losing weight, yes, but so gradually that nobody noticed it—never really anything to show. ‘Well, you’re not all that fat,’ said her doctor. ‘Lose a couple more and you’ll be a sylph.’ A couple more stone he meant.

‘I’m eating literally nothing.’

‘What’s nothing?’ he said.

‘No meals,’ she said. ‘But I pick when I’m cooking. I lick the spoon. Well, I can’t help it. I’ve got to cook rich things for my husband and I have to taste while I’m going along, haven’t I?’

‘Why must you cook rich things for him?’ he said. ‘Couldn’t he manage on something less destructive to
you
?’

‘Oh, no, he loves those things, he wants everything cooked in cream. And I’ve got to give him what he wants.’