Symposium (7 page)

‘You
told me so once before. I forget why.’

‘It was
because I’m eighteenth century too. Basically, my morals are eighteenth
century. That’s why we get on so well, I think. We’ve both of us skipped the
nineteenth century in our genes.’

LONG
before Margaret Murchie met William Damien in the fruit section of
Marks & Spencer’s in Oxford Street — nearly two years before — she sat with
her parents and an uncle in the cluttered sitting-room of turreted Blackie
House within the sound of the North Sea at St Andrews. It was a glorious
October day; the light had that angelic radiance of a Scottish autumn and its
tingling freshness, so welcome to people who enjoy feeling cold, as the Scots
so often do.

‘What
is your advice, Uncle Magnus?’ said Margaret.

Magnus
was the only imaginative factor that had ever occurred in the Murchies’ family,
but unfortunately he was mad, and had to spend his days in the Jeffrey King
hospital, a mental clinic in Perthshire from where he was fetched, early on
most Sunday mornings, to spend the day at Blackie House. Magnus was beyond
cure, but modern medicine had done a great deal to mitigate his condition. He
had a mad look. He was large, and ate voraciously. There had been a time when
he was too violent to have at home, but thanks to the pills they gave him he
was violent no more. He had always had periods of comparative lucidity, hours
and hours of clarity, even days of it. Then, at any moment, he might go off on
his ravings.

Many
families have at least one fairly mad member, whether in or out of an institution.
But the families do not normally consult the mad people even if they have lucid
periods; the families do not go to them for advice. The Murchies were
different.

Dan and
Greta Murchie swore by the sagacity of Dan’s elder brother, Magnus. Greta felt
he was inspired.

‘In the
Middle Ages,’ Greta said, ‘the insane were considered to be divinely
illuminated.’

‘He’s
my brother as well,’ Dan said. ‘He can’t be all that mad.’

‘And
there’s a way of willing people to be serviceable,’ said Greta. ‘You can use
your willpower and make what is not so, so. Everyone knows that.’

And Dan
contributed a doctrine of St Thomas Aquinas which, like several others of the
philosopher’s teaching, does not stand up to practicality: Do not, wrote
Aquinas, take note of who is speaking, but of what is said take note.

Greta
brought to the question a final consideration: ‘The nursing home is costing us
a lot of money. Let us get something back.’ In fact it was Magnus’s money which
was keeping him in the private clinic, but to Greta and Dan it came to the same
thing.

Magnus
had now been their guru for six years. He it was who had suggested a course of
action which was to cause the Murchie scandal.

He had
a vast beard. Wearing a bright blue and satin-silvered windjammer, black
leather trousers and elaborate brown leather country boots of a very recent
design, with four cross-straps and the name Steiner imprinted on the front,
Magnus lorded it over his Sunday outing.

The
Murchies’ aged mother was now sick in a nursing home in Edinburgh. Mad Magnus
and Dan were her only sons. She had three daughters, two of whom were unmarried
and decidedly helpless. The third was married and lived in Kenya where her
husband had a business job.

Everyone
knew that the old and failing Mrs Murchie had left her fortune equally among
her five children. She had made it clear. It was a Scottish will, with quaint
but decided mention of ‘the bairns’ part’. The will had been written long ago
in 1935 on the death of her husband.

‘Out of
date,’ said Magnus. ‘Besides, I don’t want my part. It will only go to the
Master in Lunacy.’ He was referring to the old-fashioned term for Master of the
Court of Protection, the present authority whose office deals with the
interests of mad people.

‘Ah,
you might get better,’ said Dan. ‘You might come out and be normal.’

‘I
don’t want to,’ said Magnus. ‘It is written, “The Lord shall go forth as a
mighty man, he shall stir up jealousy like a man of war: he shall cry, yea,
roar: he shall prevail against his enemies.” That,’ said Magnus, ‘is what I
cite and it is what I say. See also Isaiah 38: 12, “I have cut off like a
weaver my life: he will cut me off with pining sickness.” So what I suggest is
that you make Ma change her will, cutting me out and the girls, and leaving the
lot to you.’

‘Easier
said than done,’ said Dan.

‘See
the lawyer. Primogeniture is a necessary concept in law when a house has to be
kept up. When Ma made that will the upkeep of big houses was an afterthought.
If you count me out because of my pining sickness, incurable, you are the only
son and the eldest.’

Dan
repeated this to his wife Greta. She thought it a good idea that Dan’s mother
should be asked if she wanted to make a new will, but she did not want to be
the person to suggest it. Nobody wanted to suggest it.

‘Anything
the matter?’ said the elder Mrs Murchie.

‘No,’
said the visiting son. ‘Perhaps one or two things we have to discuss some
time.’

‘We can
discuss them after I get home. Next week, they say. Waters came to see me.’

‘What
did he want?’ James Waters was the family lawyer in Edinburgh.

‘He
came to see me. People do come to visit.’

Dan
felt relieved. He had been uneasy at the prospect of approaching the family
lawyer about his mother’s business. He wanted her fortune, and it was really
hers, not inherited from his late father. But Dan also wanted to keep the
affection between them afloat. Greta, too, was fond of her mother-in-law and
she, too, was relieved to know that the first step toward the elder Mrs Murchie
seeing a lawyer had been taken by the lawyer himself, even if the step involved
no more than bringing her twelve pink roses to the nursing home.

Dan’s
mother was to visit St Andrews the following week. She had suffered a heart
attack. Her condition now seemed to be under control. Greta was to go and fetch
her at eleven in the morning.

But at
four in the morning the telephone was screaming beside the bed. ‘Perhaps it’s
your mother. You answer it,’ said Greta.

Dan
answered it. ‘Yes, her son speaking,’ said Dan. ‘Police?’ said Dan. ‘Oh, God,
right away. I’ll come right away. No, I’ve got a car; yes, perfectly able.’ He
was hardly able to drive in his state of shock. Greta pulled on her trousers
and her woollens and got in the car with him. Mrs Murchie had been murdered,
strangled by an escaped maniac, a young woman who had been in a mental home for
twelve years, as a secondary result of an irreversible drug sickness; the
primary cause of the woman’s psychotic state had been a built-in mental defect.
There was nothing to be done about the strangler, who was caught without fuss,
calmly walking along the road towards the docks at Leith in the moonlight.

But how
she had got away from the maximum security wing of the mental home, why she had
made straight for the nursing home in Edinburgh where Mrs Murchie lay in her
private room, how she had entered this nursing home, and how and why she had
gone to Mrs Murchie’s room — why exactly Mrs Murchie? — were questions to which
the police and after them the press set about to try to obtain answers. They
tried in vain, and not for long: ‘It’s useless’, said the Chief Inspector to
Dan, ‘trying to find a motive when you are dealing with the insane. They are
infinitely cunning, they bide their time. Perhaps she was hypnotized. Or perhaps
the woman knew, or got to hear, of the Calton Nursing Home and thought she
would be better off there, herself, than in the Jeffrey King, and somehow got
into a room, any room, and found your mother there, and …’

‘The
Jeffrey King?’ said Dan.

‘Yes,
that’s the name of the clinic near Perth where the woman got out of. A security
wing, mind you. Lock and key, it means nothing to them. Cunning. Superhuman
strength.’

Dan
left it at that. He didn’t even tell Greta where the strangler came from; she
read it in the papers. The coroner brought in a verdict of death by strangling
at the hands of one not fit to plead. There was not a great deal in the press. One
day’s horror headline and a report of an enquiry at the Jeffrey King clinic
into security measures; that was all.

It was
Greta, on the way home after the funeral, who finally said to Dan, not he to
her, ‘Magnus must be behind it.’

‘Well,
but why? The way he was talking last Sunday would seem to show that he wanted
to keep Ma alive, at least until she made a new will.’

‘Funny
that the mad woman was in the same home as Magnus. How could she have made her
way to Edinburgh, precisely to the Calton Nursing Home and to poor Ma’s room?’

They
were badly shaken by the horrible affair, but even more so when they heard that
Mrs Murchie had indeed changed her will.

‘I
think I am going mad,’ said Dan. What he meant was that he couldn’t face the
implications. Only Margaret had been with him the previous Sunday when Magnus
suggested that their mother change her will.

‘Phone
Margaret,’ he said to Greta. Margaret at this time had a job and a flat in
Glasgow. She had just got back from the funeral when her mother got through on
the telephone. ‘I know she changed her will,’ said Margaret. ‘I arranged for
Waters to go and see her. I was there. I said, “You asked for Waters, Granny,
as you wanted to change your will in my father’s favour, which I think is
logical.” Waters fully agreed. She was delighted with the flowers. He had
brought a newly drafted will. At first she wanted to divide her property
between the aunts and my father, but we said that wouldn’t work. Anyway, we
amended the draft and Waters took it away. He came back the next day and she
signed it in front of witnesses. She was very happy. At least she died happy.
Now Dad’s quite well off, we can keep the house.’

Greta
conveyed all this to Dan and then by phone to her two elder daughters, who were
so different from Margaret.

These
daughters were not long married. They both had jobs. The eldest, Flora, was an
elementary teacher, her husband a junior solicitor; they lived in a house at
Blackheath, where they let a flat to help pay up the mortgage. The next younger
daughter, Eunice, was married to a personnel manager in a car factory. She
taught in a comprehensive school at Dulwich, where they lived. Flora was
fairly pretty, cautious, pedantic, with a deep craving for a life of fixed
routine which her young husband fitted in with; it didn’t matter much what
exigencies arose in Flora’s life because she could somehow fit them in with a
known scheme, an already documented case-history, or under some trite heading.
Her husband was helpful in supplying the right language. The murder of her
grandmother was ‘an unfortunate incident’, the fact, with which Flora was
presently acquainted, that the will had been changed in her father’s favour,
was a ‘coincidence, fortunate in the circumstances’. That Magnus was mad was
something that ‘happens in the best of families’. The fact that the homicidal
maniac came from the same mental hospital as the one where Magnus was lodged,
was just a fact: ‘One thing has nothing to do with another.’ Flora took her
bath, which she always did at night, prepared her clothes to put on the next
day, while Bert, her husband, set the breakfast things ready for the morning.
Qualmless and orderly, they went to bed.

Her
sister Eunice, fair with pale eyes and long hair, was now five months pregnant.
Her general outline was vague and fuzzy, like a shakily taken photograph. She
said to her mother, ‘I hope this news doesn’t upset
me.
The murder was
bad enough.’

‘Perhaps
I shouldn’t have told you,’ said Greta.

‘Well,
you’ve done it now.’

‘I
thought you’d like to know at least that Daddy will be free from financial care.’

‘Lucky
him.’

‘It was
Margaret who sent Waters to visit your grandmother. And make her change her
will.’

‘And
Granny was killed the next day?’

‘No,
three days later. I mean, Waters went back on Friday to get her signature.’ Mrs
Murchie had died on the Saturday night.