Designs on Life (22 page)

“Be quiet, let me think.”

“We’d better get the doctor.”

“Yes, yes, of course, that’s unavoidable. But the question is, do we do it now, or—when it’s over?”

“It had better be now,” Evelyn said. “If she’s going to die anyway, it’s going to look better if we do everything we can to save her. It might even give us some sort of claim against the estate.”

“You can forget that now. That damned woman Judith will get the lot. And suppose she comes round. Wouldn’t it be better to wait? We can’t have her talking.”

“She’ll never come round. Go and phone the doctor. We can tell him she was convinced she’d never walk properly again and that that had been depressing her. Go on.”

“And you’d better do some cleaning up in here,” Oliver said. “The place looks filthy. We’ve got to make it plain we’ve been doing everything we could for the woman. Hurry.”

He went away along the passage to the telephone extension in the bedroom. Evelyn, giving the figure on the bed a look of the deepest malignancy, set about giving the room a rapid dusting.

Mrs. Gosse, in her deep coma, went on with her unconscious struggle for life, drawing one snorting breath after another into her labouring lungs. The effort of each breath seemed to use up more of her vitality than she could possibly afford. She looked far too wasted and fragile to survive till rescuers came.

It was morning when she recovered consciousness in the hospital. Through a fog, she became aware of people coming and going, of a bright young face under a starched cap bending over her, of voices nearby and of someone saying, “She’ll do.”

She could not think how it had come about. Her memory was a blank. But a sense of wonderful peace enveloped her. There was something beautiful about seeing human faces round her and the two rows of beds filled with other sick people in the long emergency ward. She smiled vaguely at a man who was standing by her bedside and murmured, “Are you from the police?”

“Of course not, I’m a doctor,” he said. “And a lot of trouble you’ve given me. If you weren’t as strong as a horse, we’d never have pulled you through. But we don’t need the police just because you took a few too many of your pills, do we? That’s all that happened, isn’t it? You lost count. We don’t need the police just because you were a little careless.”

“The police,” she said softly, as if it were a word that charmed her, then she drifted off into a normal sleep from which she did not wake for several hours.

When she woke, Evelyn Hassall, holding a bunch of lilac, was standing at the side of the bed.

Mrs. Gosse raised her head a little from the pillow and began to scream, “Nurse, nurse, nurse!”

Her mind was as clear as it had ever been.

“Sh, darling, don’t, you’ll disturb everyone,” Evelyn said. She looked hollow-eyed, as if she had not slept during the past night, but she smiled sweetly.

“Nurse, nurse!” Mrs. Gosse shrieked.

The heads of the other patients in the ward turned towards her. A nurse came running.

“Now, now, what’s this?” she said. “This is your niece, Mrs. Hassall. Don’t you recognise her? She sat up all night while we worked on you and it was touch and go. She’ll take you home again as soon as you’re strong enough.”

“Don’t let her come near me!” Mrs. Gosse shouted so that everyone could hear. “She gave me that stuff to drink. She tried to kill me. I told her I was going to change my will because she and her husband were so unkind to me and she gave me all that poison in my tea before I could call my lawyer. My lawyer, Mr. Deane. I want to see him now. I want to see him at once because I mean to change my will immediately and leave everything to my stepdaughter, Judith.”

“Change
your will…?” Evelyn began.

“Yes, yes, I’d left everything to you, you knew that,” Mrs. Gosse answered furiously. “When Andrew and I made our wills he said to me he was providing for Judith himself and that what he was leaving me was mine absolutely and that I should leave it, if I wanted to, to my own kith and kin. So I left it all to you and you would have had it if you hadn’t been too impatient. Trying to poison me, that’s further than I thought even you would go, that’s murder. Nurse, I want the police. I want to charge that wicked woman with trying to kill me.”

“But I didn’t know about your will… You didn’t say… And I didn’t give you anything, you took it yourself!” Evelyn’s eyes were wide and frightened in her pallid face. Her bony jaw trembled.

Suddenly she turned and went running out of the ward, dropping the lilac as she ran.

Mrs. Gosse gave a deep sigh. Settling herself more comfortably in the high, hard bed, she smiled up at the nurse.

“Of course, I knew there was something wrong with the tea as soon as I tasted it,” she said. “But I thought perhaps the teapot hadn’t been washed out properly. My niece is not as careful a housekeeper as she might be. But I didn’t want to make a fuss. I never make a fuss if I can help it. And naturally I never thought of murder. But I’m afraid there’s really no question of it. So now, dear, I’d really like to see someone from the police. After all, poisoners nearly always try again.”

The nurse gazed at her with a look of shock on her face, then went hurrying away to consult the sister.

Perhaps because Mrs. Gosse was not wearing her false teeth, which were in a glass by her bedside, her gentle features looked more shrunken than usual, more hollow, so that her jawbone stood out, giving it almost as hard an outline as that of her niece Evelyn.