Feelings of Fear (19 page)

“He looks so hungry, poor thing,” said Mandy.

Uncle Philip gave her a wide, emaciated smile. “He has to learn to wait for what he wants, like everybody else. We mustn't spoil him, must we?”

“I suppose not,” said Mandy, and stroked Tarquin under his chin until his throat rattled with harsh, catarrhal purring.

Grace said, “Philip … I hear you've been ill.”

“A bout of the 'flu, that's all,” said Philip. “The Grim Reaper isn't going to get me yet.”

“You should think of selling this house. It's so big. It's so damp. It's so impractical.”

“It's my home,” said Philip. “More than that, it's Tarquin's home. Tarquin would be lost, anywhere else.”

“Even if you don't move, you should at least think of re-assessing your holdings,” said Kenneth, after a while. “Some of your older portfolios, well …”

Philip didn't even raise his voice. “When I need advice from a bankrupted stockbroker, Kenneth, I'll ask for it. I promise.”

“Now come on, Uncle Philip, that's not fair,” protested Joy. In the days when Kenneth had been handsome, the blond-haired captain of the village cricket team, Joy had been deliciously pretty, in a scrubbed, country kind of way. Now her face had been disassembled by Kenneth's alcoholism and their children's delinquency. Her young and golden life had vanished and she didn't know where to look for it.

Uncle Philip raised his eyes from his plate, where he had been tirelessly pursuing a Brussels sprout. “Fair, Joy? Fair? You all inherited a hundred thousand each when Father died; and what you did with it afterward was up to you. If you decided to spend it on cars and holidays and ridiculous business ventures, that isn't any concern of mine; and there's nothing about it that isn't
fair.
”

He turned to Mandy and laid his hand on top of hers. “What game shall we play after lunch, Mandy? Scrabble? Or shall we play charades?”

Tarquin had cautiously lifted one paw on to the tablecloth. His eyes were locked on to the turkey as if by laser. Uncle Philip rapped his paw with the flat of his knife, and said, “Tarquin! You can't always have what you want, just when you want it!”

Mandy smiled at her mother, and then she said, “Let's play charades. This family seems to be good at it.”

After the turkey came the blue-flaming Christmas pudding, and mince pies with thick Cornish cream. They pulled their crackers and put on paper hats and read out all the jokes. “
Father:
Your hair needs cutting badly.
Son:
No it doesn't … it needs cutting well!”

Mandy was too full to eat any more so she helped to clear away the dishes. In the large, pine-paneled kitchen she found Avril, the cook, scraping heaps of sprouts and roast potatoes into the bin. “I don't know why he always orders me to cook so much. Nobody ever eats it. They're all to busy arguing and scoring points off each other. They're all too busy worrying about their inheritance; that's it. That's what Mr Chesterton says, anyway.”

“Doesn't he
ever
believe that we come here because we want to?” said Mandy.

The cook shook her head. “He knows you don't want to. But that's all part of the fun.”

“You don't think it's
fun,
do you?” asked Mandy.

“Yes, Miss, I do, in a way. My father used to say that there was nothing that made him laugh more than monkeys dancing for nuts. I didn't really know what he meant until I came here, and saw you lot visiting Mr Chesterton once every Christmas. No more, because you really can't stand him, can you, the horrible old shriveled-up creature? And no less, because he might decide to cut you out of his will.”

Nicholas came in, carrying the remains of the turkey. The cook loosely covered it with a tea-towel and put it into the larder to cool. “Turkey,” she complained. “I can't stand the stuff. But your Uncle Philip always wants his cold turkey salad on Boxing Day.”

Not surprisingly, Tarquin appeared, on a foraging expedition away from the base camp of Uncle Philip's lap. He went up to the cook and rubbed her legs with the flat of his head, and mewed.

“No, Tarquin, you're not having any turkey tonight. He's a terror, you know, when it comes to any kind of birds. Pheasants, quail, chickens. He hangs around the larder until I chase him away with the sponge-mop.”

Mandy hunkered down and stroked Tarquin's soft and fluffy fur. “Surely we could give him just one slice of turkey?”

“Sorry,” the cook told her. “Tarquin doesn't get any left-overs until your Uncle Philip's had all of his. Your Uncle Philip will eat a gammon until you can see his teethmarks on the bone, I promise you. Doesn't believe in waste. How do you think he stayed so rich? You've seen his car, haven't you? He bought that in 1962 and he won't change it for anything. Waste of money, that's what he calls it. And you should see the meat he expects me to cook with. Neck-end and scrag-end and skirt.

“He's mean and he's grumpy and if I were you I wouldn't come for Christmas ever again. You're just making fools of yourselves.”

Mandy gave Tarquin one last tickle and then she stood up. “Perhaps you're right. Perhaps we shouldn't come here, ever again.”

The next morning, Mandy woke up early and went down to the kitchen in her slippers to make herself a cup of coffee. The gloom of the previous day had lifted, and the sun was shining weakly through the trees. In the distance, through a gilded mist, she could see the Surrey Weald and the spire of Dorking church. While she waited for the kettle to boil she switched on the old transistor radio on the window-sill.

“Boxing Day promises to be bright and clear over most of the area, although there is a threat of wintry showers across Essex and Kent …”

When she was young, Mandy had always imagined that people held boxing matches on Boxing Day; and she still didn't quite believe her mother's laborious explanation that it was a day when the rich used to give boxes of Christmas leftovers to the poor – any more than she could quite forget her father's joke that the box trees
which had given Box Hill its name had real ready-made wooden boxes growing on them, instead of fruit.

The kettle started to dribble, and then to whistle, and she went to the larder to find the coffee-jar. The larder door was already slightly open, only three or four inches. But as she approached it she could see the leftover turkey on the marble shelf on the left – and, on the red-and-white tiled floor directly below it, she could see a blue-gray fluffy leg.

She opened the door wide and there was Tarquin, lying on his side, his coppery eyes wide open, and obviously dead.

Uncle Philip sat on a chair in the kitchen with Tarquin in his arms, rocking backward and forward. Tears dripped down his withered cheeks and clung to Tarquin's fur like diamonds.

Kenneth stood in one corner, his eyes half-closed like overripe damsons, his hand pressed against his forehead in the classic gesture of a man who is swearing to himself that he will never touch another alcoholic drink as long as he lives. Nicholas, in his red silk dressing-gown, was calmer and waxier than ever.

“He was eating the leftover turkey,” said Paul, Caitlin's husband, who was all dressed up in a bizarre assemblage of socks and tracksuit bottoms and a frayed brown jumper.

“But that couldn't have hurt him,” said Roger. “We all ate the same turkey, didn't we, and none of us are sick.”

“He could have choked,” Caitlin suggested.

“He could have had a heart-attack. He's almost fourteen, after all.”

Paul knelt down beside Uncle Philip's chair and said, “Do you mind if I – you know, touch him?”

Uncle Philip didn't seem to care. He turned away and his face was a mask of terrible distress.

Paul carefully opened Tarquin's lips. “Look, he didn't vomit, you see. He's still got half-chewed turkey in his mouth.” He leaned closer and sniffed, and sniffed again.

“What is it?” asked Nicholas.

“Prussic acid. Or cyanide, to you.”

“You mean he's been
poisoned?”

“I used to work for Kodak,” said Paul. “You use a lot of potassium cyanide when you're developing photographs, and they taught us to recognize the symptoms. Blue face, blue lips. Well, poor old Tarquin was blue already. But you can't mistake that smell. Sweet, isn't it? One of the most pleasant-tasting poisons there is.”

Grace boomed, “Who on earth would want to poison Tarquin?”

“Well, nobody, of course,” said Nicholas. “The whole thing was an accident. Somebody must have injected the cold turkey with cyanide after we went to bed last night, with the intention of harming whoever was going to eat it. Fortunately for the intended victim -but very unfortunately for Tarquin – the larder door was accidentally left open.”

Caitlin looked aghast. “But we were all planning to
leave
after breakfast, all of us. We always do, on Boxing Day. The only person who would have eaten the turkey was—”

Uncle Philip looked up, although he continued to stroke Tarquin's lifeless head. “Yes,” he said. “In fact, I would have thought it was quite obvious. Somebody poisoned the turkey because they wanted to get rid of
me.
”

Kenneth looked at Caitlin and Caitlin looked at Paul and Paul looked at Libby. “The house was locked up all night,” said Nicholas. “You always switch on the alarm. That means that whoever did it – well, it must have been one of us.”

“We should call the police,” said Libby.

“But if it's one of us—”

“If it's one of us, the police will find out who it is, and presumably charge him or her with attempted murder.”

“My God,” said Libby. “I simply can't believe that one of us would be capable of such a thing.”

“Why not?” Kenneth demanded. “We all have more than enough of a motive, after all. We're all practically broke, and here's Philip sitting on several millions of pounds worth of property and shares … and making sure, year by year, that he reminds us how foolish we've been, how wasteful we've been …”

“You
have
been foolish, and you
have
been wasteful,” said Uncle Philip. He stood up, with Tarquin's heavy dead body cradled in
his arms. He circled the kitchen, and his voice was cracking with emotion.

“I always thought that you were rotten, all of you. Rotten through and through. You were each given more money than some people can earn in a lifetime, and each of you wasted it, and ended up with nothing. That's why you come here for Christmas, every year, even though you hate me, even though you hate each other, even though you're so bored.

“Well, every Christmas has been my way of showing my contempt for each and every one of you, because I never had any intention of giving you any of my money. I just wanted to see you grovel, year after year. I just wanted to see how low you were prepared to crawl.

“In the whole of my life, I have never come across greed and arrogance like yours. Never. You assumed that I would bequeath you all of my money. You couldn't see that the world is full of far more deserving beneficiaries. But worse than that, you couldn't even wait till I died, could you? One of you tried to poison me. One of you actually tried to murder me. But all you succeeded in doing was killing the one creature who took me for what I was. Tarquin didn't love me because I was wealthy. Tarquin loved me without any conditions at all. I loved him more than life itself, and I can't imagine how I'm going to live without him.”

He looked from one to the other with an expression of total wretchedness, and then he walked out of the kitchen with Tarquin still dangling in his arms. The family watched him go, and none of them said a single word.

Only a second later, however, they heard a thumping sound in the hallway, and the clatter of a table tipping over. They rushed out of the kitchen to find Uncle Philip lying on his back, his eyes open, his face convulsed, with Tarquin lying on top of him.

“Ambulance!” Nicholas shouted. “Call for an ambulance!”

Detective Inspector Rogers came into the drawing-room where they were all assembled, blowing his nose loudly on a grayish-looking handkerchief.

“Christmas,” he complained. “I always get a cold around Christmas.”

Nicholas looked at his watch. “I do wish you'd get this over with, Inspector. I was hoping to get back to town before it got dark.”

It was New Year's Eve, five days after Boxing Day. During the week, the family had been allowed to return home, but they had all been warned not to leave the south east of England until the police had completed their preliminary investigations; and Inspector Rogers had been around to each of them, with a long list of penetrating questions. Now they had been called back to Polesden View – as fractious as ever.

“First of all,” said Inspector Rogers, “a post-mortem examination has shown that Tarquin the cat died from ingesting hydrocyanic acid, and that the poison entered his system by his consumption of a small quantity of contaminated turkey.

“If the intention of contaminating the turkey was to cause harm to Mr Philip Chesterton, almost all of you who were present on Boxing Day had a motive. A mistaken motive, as it turns out, because Mr Chesterton had no intention of leaving you any money – but you didn't know that.”

He walked over to Kenneth and Libby, and said, “Your brokerage business is bankrupt, sir, and you desperately need a substantial amount of money to avoid losing your house.”

To Grace, he said, “You, madam, after a long period of living alone, have found a partner of whom you are extremely fond. Unfortunately, he is very much younger than you, and you are finding that you keep having to buy him gifts in order to keep him happy. He wants a car, which you can't afford.”

He crossed over to Nicholas, and said, “Now that you're a partner in your law firm, sir, you want to move into town and live according to your new status … amongst other things.” Nicholas looked relieved. What nobody else in the family knew was that “other things” was his secretary, with whom he had just started an affair.