Dorothy Eden (13 page)

“It’s a little late for that, dear. If you want to send any messages that can be arranged. Now just lie down and relax.”

Kate pushed back the bedclothes. “I will not relax. I’m going home.”

“Oh, no, dear! You can’t do that. Lie down, please. The doctor said—”

“I don’t care what the doctor said. This is me, isn’t it? This is my body. And all that’s wrong with it is a sprained wrist. I can look after that quite well myself. So please tell the sister and bring my clothes.”

She was not as strong as she had thought. And her head was full of images, faces, Francesca’s lost and forlorn, the fair and ghostly ones of two Mossop granddaughters who perhaps did not even exist, who were another hallucination, the old woman in Rosita’s room, with her grey straggly witch-locks, Mr. Grundy’s sharp, beady eyes watching her, and last of all that indescribably evil thing from which she had fled…

“My dear child, you aren’t fit to go home!” That was the firm but kind voice of the ward sister. “Have you anyone to look after you when you get there?”

“Yes,” Kate lied. But it wasn’t a lie, for Mrs. Peebles would flutter over her, and William, when he heard of her cowardliness, would look at her with cool, assessing eyes.

Those two people, however, would come afterwards. First she had to call on Mrs. Dix, and ask her who and what this strange new client Mrs. Mossop was, and why a man with an Oriental face seemed to be shadowing her.

These events were tied up with Francesca’s disappearance. Her conclusions as to this might be illogical, but they were deeply instinctive. Just as her consciousness of danger in that house had been instinctive and unfaceable.

She
was
a coward, but she would overcome her cowardice.

She promised she would go home by taxi, and go straight to bed. The nurse who came to the door with her gave the taxi-driver her address, but as soon as they were out of sight of the hospital Kate tapped on the glass.

“Please go to Chelsea first,” she instructed. “I have to make a short call.”

Mrs. Dix could no longer go on stalling behind an atmosphere of cosy intimacy and generous brandies and chocolates. This time she had to make some explanations or Kate would threaten to go to the police. The police liked cut-and-dried facts, not this airy-fairy sequence of strange things that were not so much events as anticipated events. Actually, Kate could not make a charge against any single person, except the car driver for dangerous driving and he had disappeared. It would be useless to tell London police about an Italian child lost on a Continental train. She really had no story to take to the police.

But if Mrs. Dix were nervous or had a guilty conscience, the threat would alarm her.

She
had
to know about the strange transformation of Rosita’s room, and that disembodied face this morning, white and hairless and indescribably menacing.

Outside Mrs. Dix’s office in the narrow, dark street, off the King’s Road, Kate asked the taxi-driver to wait.

She would be too late to see Miss Squires, who must surely be wondering why she hadn’t reported back that afternoon, but a light showed behind the drawn curtains in Mrs. Dix’s upstairs room. Knowing she, at least, was in, Kate pressed the bell and waited.

No one came. She listened for the slow footsteps that would herald Mrs. Dix’s approach down the narrow staircase. There was no sound from within.

Kate pushed the bell again, and felt the door move slightly. It hadn’t been latched properly. Goodness, Mrs. Dix was no doubt comfortably upstairs having her fourth or fifth brandy, unaware that her offices downstairs could be entered and robbed.

In some nervousness, which was not helped by her aching wrist or her annoying feeling of weakness, Kate pushed the door completely open and stepped over the dark threshold.

She couldn’t find the light switch. She groped across the small, outer office, feeling for it, but instead came to the door leading to Miss Squires’ office and the stairway. There would be a light at the foot of the stairs, if she could find it.

She could see something white glimmering on the floor. It looked like the plaster head of a child that had used to stand on the stairpost, a rather haunting piece of sculpture with wild locks and an empty lost stare.

Someone must have knocked it down. She stepped aside to avoid it and her foot encountered something else, a large, soft obstacle, a sack of clothes, surely.

She groped with her uninjured hand. Her fingers encountered something cool, pallid.

Her heart stopped, then jerked into a sickening beat. She tried to get to her feet, but could do nothing but sit there calling in a high, unrecognizable voice, “Help! Help!”

Afterwards she could only remember the taxi-driver saying, “Gawd!” She didn’t notice him go to the telephone and ring for the police.

He had found the light switch and she wished he hadn’t. For now she could see Mrs. Dix’s forlorn, upturned face, her body round and bloated in the brown velvet dress.

She sat on the edge of the stairs shivering, until two policemen came, brisk and seemingly unperturbed.

One of them rang for a doctor and an ambulance. The other asked her some brief questions.

Looked as if the lady had fallen down the stairs, he said. Regular death-trap they looked, too, for a woman of her build. Did she suffer from heart trouble? If so, the explanation was simple. Someone had rung the bell and she had hurried down to answer it, but had unfortunately not reached the door alive.

“The door wasn’t quite latched,” Kate said tonelessly. “If there were someone there, he didn’t know how easy it was to get in.”

“That was careless,” said the constable. “I’d have discovered it on my rounds later, of course. But too late.”

Too late indeed, Kate thought, looking with her shocked, exhausted eyes at the chocolate meringue figure lying so still on the floor, the cosy, evasive little person who had never quite told her the truth. And now never would.

As she stumbled into her room at long last, brought home in the police car, and equipped with a sedative given her by the police doctor, a long figure detached itself from the armchair.

“What are you doing here?” she asked crossly.

“Waiting. Waiting since lunchtime for a message or an apology which I was optimistic enough to expect.”

“Oh, William, I hadn’t a chance. I’m sorry. Too much—just too much—happens.”

Her voice was slurring curiously. William crossed the room. “Kate, have you been drinking?”

Brandy. That was what the police had said. They had gone upstairs and found, in Mrs. Dix’s warm, brightly-lit room, an empty brandy bottle, a half-filled glass, and an overturned box of chocolates, which indicated that she had sprung up hastily to answer the doorbell. She had not only been tipsy, she had also suffered from a weak heart. A bad fall would be fatal to her, and the dark, steep stairs, and her own unsteady condition, had provided that. There were no marks of violence on her body, and no immediate evidence that anyone else had been in the room, though that would be checked more thoroughly. Kate had been told to go home and get a good rest and not to worry. But also to stay in London as she would probably be required to give evidence at the inquest.

That was all. She had wanted a cut-and-dried fact to present to the police, and now there was one. But it was going to answer exactly nothing.

“Yes, I’ve just had some brandy,” she answered William. “That nice constable gave it to me.” She began to shudder. “Ugh! I loathe brandy.”

William had switched on another light, and was looking at her properly. “What have you done to yourself? You look as if you’ve been in a fight.”

Kate nursed her wrist. “I survived. Mrs. Dix—Mrs. Dix—” The words wouldn’t come out. She looked at William piteously.

“Kate, darling! Tell me. Has something happened to Mrs. Dix?”

She nodded. “The stairs. A death-trap, the police said. And she drinks too much. I didn’t know—about the drinking, I mean—until last night. I suppose, with a husband one perpetually grieves over, one gets driven to it. There was this plaster cast of a child’s head knocked down beside her. It seemed symbolic, somehow—lost-looking, like Francesca. And those two Mossop granddaughters who probably don’t exist. And that diabolical face—they’re all hallucinations, every one of them! Excuse me, William. I think I’m going to be sick.”

When she came back from the bathroom she was quite calm again.

“Sorry about that,” she said matter-of-factly. “I suppose I should have stayed in the hospital. But I’ll be all right now.”

William was methodically putting the kettle on. He looked up sharply. “The hospital?” His face was a mixture of disbelief and concern, almost comical. “Well, never mind. Tell me later. I’m making some tea. Go and get straight into bed.”

“Yes, in a moment—”

“Now.”

“I want to make a telephone call first. I’ll have to go and see Mrs. Peebles.”

“Kate, you can do your telephoning in the morning.”

“This I can’t. I have to know.”

Mrs. Peebles gasped and looked nervous when Kate said she wanted to put a call through to Rome.

“Goodness, will this instrument be good enough?”

“Of course it will. It works, doesn’t it?” She didn’t need to check the number she had scribbled down in Mrs. Dix’s flat last night. It was graven on her mind. The operator said the call would take a little while to come through. In the interval Kate sat in the hall, unable now to move away from the telephone that was presently either going to answer her question or baffle her further.

Mrs. Peebles had noticed her appearance and was staring inquisitively.

“You had an accident, Miss Tempest?”

William had come up the stairs, so Kate, supporting her injured wrist, told them briefly about the speeding car. She didn’t add her quite unprovable belief that the driver had been the man with the slant eyes and yellowish face.

“It wasn’t serious,” she said flatly, “and the Americans were awfully kind. I’d be perfectly all right now if—”

She stopped. She hadn’t told Mrs. Peebles about Mrs. Dix. At this moment she couldn’t stand the woman’s sharp-faced curiosity. She remained silent, and presently felt William’s hand on her head. The gesture was meant to be sympathetic and reassuring, but William had a large, heavy hand. It was almost insupportable. She felt like Atlas, with the world on her head, and moved crossly away.

“Don’t do that.”

“All right, angel. You’ve got a lot more to tell us. What you were doing in Bloomsbury, for instance.”

“Oh, a job. Have you noticed that—that person today, Mrs. Peebles?”

“Who do you mean? The prowler? The scrabbler? No, I haven’t seen him, thank goodness. Anyway, you said it was a cat.”

“It was, too.” Prowler… Scrabbler… Both words came out of the nightmare. Kate felt sick again, and when the telephone suddenly rang she jumped convulsively.

A perfectly unintelligible voice answered hers. She realized someone was speaking in the rapid Italian which sounded so excited and inflammatory. Probably he was merely saying, “Who is it, please?” but the sentence went on for a very long time. At last Kate was able to say slowly, “Is there anyone there who speaks English?
Parla Inglese
?”

There came another long, excitable statement. Kate gave a little despairing sound. William came over and took the receiver from her.

“What is it you want to say?” he inquired laconically.

“Ask him who is speaking and what that number belongs to.”

William, in what appeared to be fluent Italian, spoke for a few moments.

Then he turned to Kate, his eyebrows raised.

“Do you want to speak to the night watchman at a cardboard box factory?”

“Is that who it is?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Oh, my God, I suspected she was making up that call last night. Now I know, and it’s too late. I can’t ask her why she did it. I can’t ask her anything—” The bleak knowledge swept over her. She pressed her hands to her eyes. “Now we’ll never know,” she said hopelessly.

W
ILLIAM STAYED THE NIGHT
. He carried Kate down the basement stairs and put her to bed.

Helping her to undress he hurt her injured wrist, and she exclaimed with tears in her eyes, “Oh, you’re so clumsy! I hate you.”

“Get into bed and stop talking.” He jerked the bedclothes straight and grinned down at her significantly. “It will be a different story when you’re well.”

“It will be no story at all. And I’m not ill.”

But the tears continued to run down her face, and even they did not shut out the constant picture of Mrs. Dix’s upturned face, and the plump, twisted body in its brown velvet dress. Like a fat chocolate slightly squashed out of its healthy rotundity.

The simile was grotesque and made Kate begin to sob audibly.

“Your sedative,” said William professionally, bringing her two tablets and a glass of water.

“Will I have to go to the inquest?”

“I expect so. But that won’t be for a day or two.”

“I can’t face it. I’m such a coward. I ran away from that face this morning. I just ran away. I couldn’t stop myself. This sensation of awful fear comes over me. It did at the night-club in Paris, too.” She looked up bleakly. “I despise myself.”

William sat on the side of the bed and looked at her reflectively. Her pale face had shrunken by shock and illness to childish proportions, her dark hair was mussed, her eyes tragic. She was impetuous and reckless and tenderhearted, and sometimes deliberately obtuse and maddening, and just now quite plain to look at, but still completely irresistible.

He told her so, in a detached way, and added, “I don’t care how cowardly you are. Looking after you is my job. You just have to do the loving.”

“Who?” she asked suspiciously.

“You could start with me. After that we’ll think of lost children, and poor, foolish old women who stuff themselves with too much sugar and liquor and trip on stairs.”

“Do you think that’s what happened?”

“I don’t know the set-up, but would anyone want to murder her and commit no theft?”

“It might have been so that she couldn’t tell the truth about Francesca.”