Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (7 page)

Long after I knew I couldn’t stand one more minute of it, he came. I suppose they muttered some formalities, but I don’t remember: Fred and I might hate one another, and by this time we did, well and truly, there’s no denying it—but it was worse, a thousand times worse, without him there. My head felt as though it were filled with grey cotton-wool, little stuffy, warm clouds of it. He sat down in front of me. He said: ‘Well—have you come to your senses? Of course you killed her?’

‘If anyone killed her,’ I said, clinging to our patter, ‘it must have been him.’

‘Your brother?’ he said. ‘But why should your brother have killed her?’

‘Well,’ I says, ‘if the girl was having a baby—’

‘A baby?’ he says, surprised; and his eyes got that bright, glittering look in them. He said after a minute of steady thinking: ‘But she wasn’t.’

‘She wasn’t?’ I said. ‘She
wasn’t
? But she’d told him—’

Or hadn’t she told him? Something, like an icicle of light, ice-cold, piercing, brilliant, thrust itself into the dark places of my cotton-wool mind. I said: ‘The bloody, two-timing, double-crossing bastard…!’

‘
He
didn’t seem,’ said the Inspector, softly, ‘to expect her to have been found pregnant.’

So that was it! So
that
was it! So as to get me to agree to the killing, to get me to assist with it… I ought to have been more fly—why should Fred, of all people, be so much afraid of Black Will as to go in for murder? Will’s a dangerous man, but Fred’s not exactly a softie… The icicle turned in my mind and twisted, probing with its light-rays into the cotton-woolliness. Revenge! Cold, sullen, implacable revenge upon the two of us—because Lydia had come to me: because I had taken her. Death for her: and I to be the accomplice in her undoing—in my own undoing. And for me… I knew now who had sent the anonymous note about the hit-and-run accident: so easily to be ‘traced’ (after she was dead) to Lydia.

But yet—he was as deep in it as I was: deeper, had he but known it. I said, fighting my way up out of the darkness: ‘Even if she
had
been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I’d only been going a couple of weeks with the girl.’

‘That’s what you say,’ he said.

‘But all the village—’

‘All the village knew there were goings-on; nobody knew just where they went on, or when. You must, all three, have been remarkably careful.’

I tried another tack. ‘But if she wasn’t pregnant—why should I have killed her?’

‘You’ve just told me yourself that you thought she was,’ he said.

‘Because he told me—my brother told me. Now, look, Inspector,’ I said, trying to think it out as I went along, trying to ram it home to him, ‘you say she wasn’t having a baby? So why should I have thought she was?
She
wouldn’t have told me, if she hadn’t been: why should she? It was he who told me: it was my brother. But you say yourself, he knew it wasn’t true. So why should he have told me?’

He looked at me, cold as ice. He said: ‘That’s easy. He wanted you to kill her for him.’

He
wanted
me
to kill her! I could have laughed. The thing was getting fantastic, getting out of hand; and yet at the same time I had the feeling that the fantasy was a hard, gripping, grim fantasy that, once it had its hold on me, would never shake loose. I stammered out: ‘Why should he have wanted her killed?’

‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was threatening to tell that it was he who ran the child down, and left it to die.’ And he said, cold and bitter: ‘I have no wish to trap you. We know that it was your brother who killed the child: we have proof of it. And we know it was you who killed the girl. We have proof of that too: there’s her blood on your cuff.’

On my cuff. Where he had put his hand that night: taking my wrist in his grasp, giving me a brotherly little shake ‘to steady me’. I remembered how I’d thought, even then, that it wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative.

Putting his hand on my wrist—fresh from the blood-smeared plastic. Making such a point, later on, about there being no chance of our soiled shirts getting confused, one with the other’s…

So there it is. I wonder if we’ll be doing our time in the same prison?—sharing the same cell, maybe?—we two blood brothers…

Because he’ll be doing time all right, as well as me. While I’m doing my time for
his
killing of the girl—he’ll be doing his, for my killing of the child.

Well—that’s all right with me. He’ll be first out, I dare say, (is it murder to leave a kid to die, in case, when he gets better, he tells? I suppose not: the actual knocking-down would be accidental, after all.) So Fred’ll be out, first: and Black Will will be there to meet him when he comes. By the time I get out, I dare say Will will be ‘in’ for what he done to Fred; may even have got over it all by then—it looks like being a very long time away.

But can you beat it?—working it out so far ahead, leading up to it so patiently, so softly, so craftily? Planting the blood on my cuff: and then leading up to it so softly, so craftily… And all for revenge: revenge on his own twin brother!

After all, what
I
did, was done in self-preservation: there was no venom in it, I wished him no harm. That night after the accident, I mean: when, clutching his arm, begging him to help me—just to be on the safe side, I rubbed his sleeve with the juice of a blackberry.

‘W
E’VE GOT HORNETS NESTING AGAIN
in that old elm,’ said Mr. Caxton, gulping down his last oyster, wiping thick fingers on his table napkin. ‘Interesting things, hornets.’ He interrupted himself, producing a large white handkerchief and violently blowing his nose. ‘Damn these colds of mine!’

‘I saw you were treating them,’ said Inspector Cockrill; referring, however, to the hornets. ‘There’s a tin of that
WASP-WAS
stuff on your hall table.’

Cyrus Caxton ignored him. ‘Interesting things, I was saying. I’ve been reading up about them.’ Baleful and truculent, he looked round at the guests assembled for his wedding feast. ‘At certain times of the year,’ he quoted, ‘there are numerous males, the drones, which have very large eyes and whose only activity is to eat—’ he glared round at them again, with special reference to the gentlemen present’—and to participate in the mass flight after the virgin queen.’ He cast upon his bride a speculative eye. ‘You are well named Elizabeth, my dear,’ he said. ‘Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.’ And added with ugly significance, ‘I hope.’

‘But only one of the hornets succeeds in the mating,’ said Inspector Cockrill into the ensuing outraged silence. ‘And he dies in the process.’ He sat back and looked Cyrus Caxton in the face, deliberately; and twiddled his thumbs.

Cyrus Caxton was a horrid old man. He had been horrid to his first wife and now was quite evidently going to be horrid to his second—she had been the late Mrs. Caxton’s nurse, quite young still and very pretty in a blue-eyed, broken-hearted sort of way. And he was horrid to his own stout son, Theo, who was only too thankful to live away from papa, playing in an amateurish way with stocks and shares, up in London; and horrid to his step-son, Bill, who, brought into the family by the now departed wife, had immediately been pushed off to relatives in the United States to be out of Mr. Caxton’s way. And he was horrid to poor young Dr. Ross who, having devotedly attended the wife in her last illness, now as devotedly attended Mr. Caxton’s own soaring blood-pressure and resultant apoplectic fits; and horrid to his few friends and many poor relations, all of whom he kept on tenterhooks with promises of remembrances in his will when one of the choking fits should have carried him off. He would no doubt have been horrid to Inspector Cockrill; but—Mr. Caxton being incapable of keeping peaceably to a law designed for other people as well as for himself—Cockie got in first and was horrid to
him
. It must have been Elizabeth, he reflected, who had promoted his invitation to the wedding.

The little nurse had stayed on to help with things after the poor wife died; had gradually drifted into indisperisability and so into accepting the pudgy hand of the widower. Not without some heart-searching however; Inspector Cockrill himself had, in his off-duty moments, lent a shoulder in those days of Mr. Caxton’s uninhibited courtship; and she had had a little weep there, and told him of the one great love lost to her, and how she no longer looked for that kind of happiness in marriage; but was sick of work, sick of loneliness, sick of insecurity…‘But a trained nurse like you can get wonderful jobs,’ Inspector Cockrill had protested. ‘Travel all over the place, see the world.’ She
had
seen the world, she said, and it was too big, it scared her; she wanted to stay put, she wanted a home: and a home meant a man. ‘There are other men?’ he had suggested; and she had burst out that there were indeed other men, too many men, all men—it was dreadful, it was frightening, to be the sort of woman that, for some unknown reason, all men looked at, all men gooped at, all men—wanted. ‘With him, at least I’ll be safe; no one will dare to—to drool over me like that when he’s around.’ Inspector Cockrill had somewhat hurriedly disengaged his shoulder. He was a younger man in those days of Mr. Caxton’s second marriage and subsequent departure from this life; and taking no chances.

And so the affair had gone forward. The engagement and imminent wedding had been announced and in the same breath the household staff—faithful apparently in death as in life, to the late Mrs. Caxton—had made their own announcement: they had Seen it Coming and were now sweeping out in a body, preferring, thank you very much, not to continue in service under That Nurse. The bride, un-chaperoned, had perforce modestly retired to a London hotel and from thence left most of the wedding arrangements to Son Theo and Step-son Bill—Theo running up and down from London, Bill temporarily accommodated for the occasion beneath the family roof.

Despite the difficulties of its achievement, Mr. Caxton was far from satisfied with the wedding breakfast. ‘I never did like oysters, Elizabeth, as you must very well know. Why couldn’t we have had smoked salmon? And I don’t like cold meat, I don’t like it in any form. Not in
any
form,’ he insisted, looking once again at his virgin queen with an ugly leer. Inspector Cockrill surprised upon the faces of all the males present, drones and workers alike, a look of malevolence which really quite shocked him.

She protested, trembling. ‘But, Cyrus, it’s been so difficult with no servants. We got what was easiest.’

‘Very well, then. Having got it, let us have it.’ He gestured to the empty oyster shells. ‘With all these women around—am I to sit in front of a dirty plate for ever?’

The female relations upon this broad hint rose from their places like a flock of sitting pheasants and began scurrying to and fro, clearing used crockery, passing plates of chicken and ham. ‘Don’t over-do it, my dears,’ said Mr. Caxton, sardonically watching their endeavours. ‘You’re all out of the will now, you know.’

It brought them up short: the crudeness, the brutality of it—standing staring back at him, the plates in their shaking hands. Half of them, probably, cared not two pins for five, or five-and-twenty pounds in Cyrus Caxton’s will, but they turned, nevertheless, upon the new heiress questioning—reproachful?—eyes. ‘Oh, but Cyrus, that’s not true,’ she cried; above his jeering protests insisted: ‘Cyrus has destroyed his old will, yes; but he’s made a new one and—well, I mean, no one has been forgotten, I’m sure, who was mentioned before.’

The lunch progressed. Intent, perhaps, to show their disinterestedness, the dispossessed scuttled back and forth with the cold meats, potato mayonnaise, sliced cucumber—poured delicious barley water (for Mr. Caxton was a rabid teetotaller) into cut glass tumblers, worthy of better things. The bridegroom munched his way through even the despised cold viands in a manner that boded ill, thought Inspector Cockrill, for the wretched Elizabeth, suddenly coming alive to the horror of what she had taken upon herself. She sat silent and shrinking and made hardly any move to assist with the serving. Son Theo carved and sliced, Step-son Bill handed plates, even young Dr. Ross wandered round with the salad bowl; but the bride sat still and silent and those three, thought Cockie, could hardly drag their eyes from the small white face and the dawning terror there. The meat plates were removed, the peaches lifted one by one from their tall bottles and placed, well soused with syrup, on their flowery plates. Step-son Bill dispensed the silver dessert spoons and forks, fanned out ready on the sideboard. The guests sat civilly, spoons poised, ready to begin.

Cyrus Caxton waited for no one. He gave a last loud trumpeting blow to his nose, stuffed away his handkerchief, picked up the spoon beside his plate and somewhat ostentatiously looked to see if it was clean: plunged spoon and fork into the peach, spinning dizzily before him in its syrup, and, scooping off a large chunk, slithered it into his mouth: stiffened—stared about him with a wild surmise—gave one gurgling roar of mingled rage and pain, turned first white, then purple, then an even more terrifying dingy, dark red; and pitched forward across the table with his face in his plate. Elizabeth cried out: ‘He’s swallowed the peach stone!’

Dr. Ross was across the room in three strides, grasped the man by the hair and chin and laid him back in his chair. The face looked none the more lovely for being covered in syrup and he wiped it clean with one swipe of a table napkin; and stood for what seemed a long moment, hands on the arms of the chair, gazing down, intent and abstracted, at the spluttering mouth and rolling eyes. Like a terrier, Elizabeth was to say later to Inspector Cockrill, alert and suspicious, snuffing the scent. Then with another of his swift movements, he was hauling Mr. Caxton out of his chair, lowering him to the floor; calling out, ‘Elizabeth!—my bag. On a chair in the hall.’ But she seemed struck motionless by the sudden horror of it all and only stammered out, imploring, ‘Theo?’ Stout Theo, nearest the door, bestirred himself to dash out into the hall, appearing a moment later with the bag. Step-son Bill, kneeling with the doctor beside the heaving body, took it from him, opened it out. Elizabeth, shuddering, said again: ‘He must have swallowed the stone.’