Sweet Poison (39 page)

‘Lady Weaver, Blanche,’ said Edward, ‘is there something the matter?’

‘Oh, Lord Edward, it is you. Yes, there is something wrong. I was just going to the hospital. It is Hermione – my daughter Hermione. They telephoned me to say she’s dead.’

19

Saturday and After

‘Oh God, but I have only just come from there.’

‘You were visiting Hermione?’

‘I was very worried about her. She seemed feverish. I called the nurse.’

Blanche was looking at him oddly and, ridiculously, he did feel guilty – as though he had killed her. Perhaps he had; perhaps by easing her soul of its great burden he had killed her. If so, surely it was just – God taking her because she had caused so much misery. No, that was not the way it worked; she was a poor girl, deeply unhappy, maddened by drugs.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘may I come to the hospital with you?’

Blanche made no objection – she seemed indifferent whether he came or not. In the taxi he said, ‘Does Lord Weaver know?’

Blanche, who was staring blindly out of the taxi window, said she had telephoned him at his office and he was going straight to the hospital. When they arrived they found Weaver already there. He was smoking a cigar but when he saw his wife he threw it in an ashtray and took her in his arms and they held each other. When at last he released her he nodded to Edward but showed no curiosity as to why he was there to share this very private grief.

Edward followed them into the room where Hermione lay and beside whom Edward had so recently sat hearing her confession. Blanche, when she saw the body of her daughter, livid and mouth slightly agape, broke down into a savage fit of weeping. The nurse hurried to get her water but all Edward could do was to stand there unhappily, wishing he was a thousand miles away. At last, when the weeping had subsided, Blanche turned to him accusingly.

‘What were you talking to Hermione about? Did you upset her? She was better yesterday. Why did she die so suddenly? What did you do to her?’

‘Please, Blanche, Lord Edward did nothing,’ said her husband soothingly. ‘The doctor says her liver was irreparably damaged.’

‘No, no, he killed her. She was . . . Hermione was getting better . . .’

‘I think you had better go, Lord Edward. Please don’t take any notice of what Blanche says. We know you did everything you could for Hermione and we are very grateful. We just blame ourselves for not having been there when . . . when she needed us.’

Edward, with relief, left the room and the hospital. He knew he ought not to be upset at what the distressed mother had said to him but he was, of course. He had failed. Wherever he went there was death. He had come to England from Africa with a light heart determined to do something useful but all he had done was . . . Oh God! Suddenly it came to him that there might still be another death to lay on his conscience. He stepped out into the street and hailed a passing taxi and gave the address in Cadogan Square.

During the short journey, he tried to make sense of what Hermione had told him. Did he believe her story? She was such a liar, but yes, he did. There was something so matter-of-fact about her confession, so convincing in its detail, that he could not disbelieve her. He had been repulsed by her complete lack of remorse. She had killed an innocent man; never mind that he was dying of cancer, he had a right to live his life to the end. She had attempted to murder her stepfather who had tried to love her and whom she had rejected. She had murdered Charlie Lomax, a man responsible for much misery and perhaps even death among the young people he supplied with drugs: one could not regret his passing but it had been murder and, in killing Lomax, Hermione had almost certainly made it impossible for the police to assemble enough evidence to put Captain Gordon and his cronies behind bars.

Hermione had blamed all her troubles on drugs and no doubt she had exacerbated her psychological problems by taking heroin and cocaine, but when Edward considered the problems overcome by those who had been wounded or lost loved ones in the war her troubles seemed very small beer.

He had set out, casually enough, to discover how General Craig had died. He had approached the problem as though it were a simple academic exercise. He had, in his arrogance, believed he had worked out what had happened to make the old soldier drink poison, only to be confronted with the knowledge that he had totally failed to understand one single thing or recognize motive and evidence even when they stared him in the face. He was disgusted with himself.

In this mood of self-flagellation he paid off the taxi in Cadogan Square and knocked on the door of the General’s house. There was no answer. He knocked again and then again. He had just decided that Jeffries was not in the house and was turning away when there was a shuffling and groaning as if he had woken the dead and the door opened a crack.

‘It’s you, is it?’ said the valet. Edward was momentarily shocked out of his introspection. The veneer of respect a valet would normally show towards a visitor to the house, which he would have supposed in Jeffries’ case to have been thicker than his own skin, had been jettisoned, and Edward’s immediate thought was that the man was mentally disturbed.

‘What do you want?’ said Jeffries rudely.

‘May I come in?’ Edward was sure that if he did not act immediately the door would be shut in his face so, taking advantage of Jeffries’ hesitation, he pushed his way into the house as though there was no question of his not being admitted. The house looked darker and dirtier than ever.

‘How long are you stayin’ here, Jeffries?’ said Edward, trying to inject normality into the conversation.

‘I can stay here until the house is sold,’ said the old man, grudgingly.

‘Then what? Where will you go to then?’

‘I don’t know. I will find somewhere,’ Jeffries mumbled.

‘Look here, man,’ said Edward with forced energy, ‘you mustn’t go to pieces. It would have been the last thing the General would have wanted.’

‘Why are you here?’ said Jeffries fiercely, as though he resented being taken out of his misery and loneliness even for a moment.

‘I thought you would like to hear what I have discovered about your master’s death,’ Edward replied.

‘You don’t know anything, otherwise you would have said at the inquest,’ Jeffries said bitterly.

‘I do know now,’ he said. ‘I haven’t any proof but I am afraid your master was killed by mistake. One of the guests at that dinner wanted Lord Weaver dead and killed the General instead.’

Edward was disconcerted to find that Jeffries displayed no interest in what he was saying. He was shifting his feet as if he could hardly bear to have Edward in his presence. The latter, if pressed, might have told Jeffries who the murderer was if it would have given the old servant peace of mind, but he asked no questions. As his eyes began to adjust to the gloom he was able to examine the man. He was shocked by what he saw: he was dirty and haggard and Edward could smell his rank body odour.

‘Jeffries, are you eating properly?’ he asked ingenuously.

The man seemed not to hear him. He stood there in the hall sunk in apathy, too depressed to move. Edward decided he must get help. Clearly the man should not be left on his own. He tried once more to rouse him.

‘You miss the General, don’t you?’ he said gently. ‘How long was it that you worked for him?’

‘He was all the family I ever had,’ Jeffries replied at last, as if answering in his sleep. ‘He took me to be his batman as a young soldier in South Africa and I looked after him, along with Lady Dorothy when he married her, God bless her, until the day of his death. And now it is finished.’

‘The General would not want you say that,’ Edward chided him. ‘He would want you to have a long and peaceful retirement.’

Jeffries did not even bother to answer him. It was as if he had never spoken. Edward was suddenly reminded of his father’s grief when Frank had been killed. Here was the same abandonment to sorrow, the same surrender to depression which in his father’s case his two living sons had seen as a rejection of themselves. When an object of such devotion is taken away, when the source of all hope is removed, the will to live is also destroyed.

Reluctantly, he at last left the house, promising to return. As he strolled disconsolately back towards Piccadilly brooding over Jeffries, he was aware of a nagging feeling that he had omitted to do something he ought to have done. It was not until he was actually walking up the steps into Albany that he remembered: the other capsule. Hermione had not used General Craig’s cyanide capsule; Jeffries had said he was keeping it ‘safe’. He ought to have taken it from the man and destroyed it. His heart lurched and without a moment’s further thought he turned on his heel, much to the porters’ amazement, walked into Piccadilly and stopped a taxi. ‘Cadogan Square!’ he said to the driver. ‘As fast as you can.’

The traffic was bad and finally, in his agitation, he threw some money at the taxi driver and took to his heels. In ten minutes, sweating and panting, he was back at the General’s former house. He did not know why he was so certain that Jeffries was intending to end his own life. It wasn’t so much his depression, it was perhaps more his having so deeply withdrawn into himself. Then – fool that he was – he had had to start talking about how the old soldier and the valet had met. He cursed himself for his idiocy, and knocked on the door so loudly a constable on his beat asked him what was the matter.

‘Look here, constable, this is the house of General Craig who died two weeks ago.’

‘I remember, sir – he was poisoned, wasn’t he? Nasty business.’

That’s right, officer,’ said Edward impatiently. ‘I’m a friend of the General’s and I have reason to believe that the General’s valet, who is still living here, means to do away with himself. I know he is here because I saw him an hour ago and I was worried about him then, but now he is not answering the door.’

‘Maybe he’s out, sir,’ said the policeman doubtfully.

‘No, no, I tell you, he doesn’t go out. Look, there’s a window ajar down in the area – can you help me open it?’

‘Well, I don’t know, sir. That might be breaking and entering, sir.’

‘Not if we have reason to believe something’s amiss. Come on, officer, I don’t think we have much time.’

The constable made up his mind and responded to the urgency and authority in Edward’s voice. Together, they set about forcing the window open. It took longer than they had expected because it was stuck, either by dirt or just age, and was reluctant to budge, but at last it gave and the two men – Edward first, followed by the constable – clambered through. They were in the butler’s pantry and Edward knew that Jeffries’ sitting-room and bedroom were just the other side of the narrow passage. Edward thought he smelt it before he saw anything – a faint scent of burnt almonds. Jeffries was sitting in his armchair, his hands clasped in front of him, almost as though in prayer. His face was contorted with the agony of his death but there clearly had not been the same convulsions which had brought the General juddering to the floor. Looking at the dead man, Edward guessed that he had broken the cyanide capsule in his mouth. There was no glass or cup beside him or on the floor which might indicate that he had taken the cyanide in drink. Perhaps Jeffries had not wished to risk diluting the poison and not accomplishing his own death, or perhaps it had just never occurred to him to try and make his passing easier.

Edward turned to see the constable holding a silk handkerchief to his mouth, trying not to retch. ‘We are too late,’ Edward said sadly. ‘There’s a telephone in the hall, I’ll go and ring up Inspector Pride at Scotland Yard.’

Pride, when he arrived at the house, once again treated Edward as an object of suspicion but he was forced to admit that even in the absence of any sort of suicide note, Jeffries’ death could only have been self-destruction.

‘Who was there to write a note to?’ Edward said. ‘The two people he loved, the General and his lady, were already where he was going.’

20

Endings

The General might have been pleased that his funeral, while not as grand as Earl Haig’s, was still solemn and memorable. Many of his former comrades in arms came out from retirement to see the old soldier interred in Westminster Abbey, in itself a signal honour, and his pall bearers were six senior serving officers. In the address, reference was made to his patriotism, to his courage and to his achievements on and off the battlefield. Edward listened from half-way back and was relieved that no mention was made of the nature of his death or, of course, of killing prisoners of war. The General deserved this at least, Edward considered.

Jeffries was buried in a cemetery of especial ugliness and anonymity in west London. Edward, who had organized the funeral, went there with the dead man’s sister, a cross-faced woman who seemed interested only in her brother’s money. He refused to go back to town with the woman, of whose company he had already had quite enough, and instructed Fenton to drive her to Victoria in the Lagonda while he made his own way back. He walked for a mile or two before jumping on a bus which meandered slowly through parts of the city which he had never visited and hardly knew existed.

At home, Fenton brought him a whisky and soda, and he read once again a postcard which had come that morning from Spain. In her rather childish scrawl Verity had written: ‘Barcelona is beautiful and I am learning Spanish. Hope all is well, see you, love V.’

Edward felt he had to get out of London, out of England. The air in his rooms suddenly felt tired and stale. When Fenton came to tell him his supper was ready he said, ‘Fenton, I think it is time we had a change of scene. We shall depart these shores for foreign climes in search of spiritual refreshment and adventure. What say you?’

‘I shall attend to the matter in the morning. Will it be Spain or the United States of America you intend to visit, my lord?’

‘Good God, Fenton!’ Edward expostulated. ‘If you are not careful I shall suspect you of exhibiting a sense of humour and that would be one shock too many in my weakened state. Before we go anywhere I have one final funeral to attend to, have I not?’