To Fear a Painted Devil (15 page)

Greenleaf didn’t know what to say. He looked about him at the room which Bernice used to say was like a set-piece in a furniture store or a picture in
House Beautiful
. Now it was a mess. Tamsin could scarcely have been home more than two hours but there were
clothes on the sofa and on the floor, magazines and newspapers on the hearthrug. She had covered the stark mantelpiece with shells, conches, winkles, razor shells, and there was a trail of sand on the parquet floor.

‘How’s everyone? How’s Bernice? If you’ve been thinking I neglected you, I didn’t send a single postcard to anyone. How’s Oliver? And Nancy? What have you all been doing?’

Talking, he thought, about your husband. Aloud he said:

‘We’ve all been going on in the same way. No news. Crispin Marvell’s with Bernice now giving her some tips about gardening.’

‘Oh, Crispin.’ There was scorn in her voice. ‘Don’t you think he rather overdoes this country thing of his?’ She caught his astonished eye. ‘Oh, I’m being mean, I know. But I just don’t care about anyone any more—not you and Bernice, Max—I mean the others. The first thing I’m going to do is sell this place and go far far away.’

‘It’s a nice house,’ he said for something to say.

‘Nice?’ Her voice trembled. ‘It’s like a great hothouse without any flowers.’ He had never thought her mercenary and he was surprised when she said, ‘I ought to get eight or nine thousand for it. Then there’s the Selby business.’

‘What exactly …?’

‘Oh, glass,’ she said vaguely. ‘Test tubes and things like that. It never did terribly well until recently. But a couple of months ago they got a marvelous contract making stuff for Harwell. The money’s rolling in. I don’t know whether to stay or sell out to the other directors. Really, Max, I’m quite a rich woman.’

There were such a lot of things he longed to ask her but could not. Where, for instance, if the business hadn’t been doing well, had the money come from to buy Hallows? Why had Patrick’s father committed suicide? What of Oliver Gage? And why, most of all, was she, a widow of three weeks’ standing, singing for joy when she returned to the house where Patrick had died? It struck him suddenly that in their conversation so intimately concerned with him, resulting as it did solely from his death, she had never once mentioned his name.

She took a shell from the mantelpiece and held it to her ear. ‘The sound of the sea,’ she said and shivered. ‘The sound of freedom. I shall never marry again, Max, never.’ Freedom, he thought, unaware he was quoting Madame Roland, what crimes are committed in your name!

‘I must go,’ he said.

‘Just a minute, I’ve something to show you.’

She took his hand in her left one and he sensed at the back of his mind that there was an unfamiliar bareness, something missing. But he forgot about it as they entered the dining room. The french windows were open and beyond them the wicker furniture on the patio was damp from many rains. This room, he remembered, had always been the most austere in the house, its walls painted white, its window hung with white blinds, so that it looked like a ward in a new hospital. But above the long sleek radiator there had once been a plaque of smoky blue pottery, a tiny island in an ocean of ice. It had been removed to lie rejected and dusty on the table, and in its place hung the picture that had frightened Patrick, dominating the room and emphasising its barrenness by contrast
with its own crusted gilt, its blue and gold and bloody scarlet.

‘The gardener was here when I got back,’ Tamsin said. ‘He helped me to hang it. Too absurd, but I thought he was going to be sick.’ She smiled and stroked the mother-of-pearl conch. His gaze, withdrawn for a moment from Salome, followed the movement of her hand and he saw what he had sensed. Tamsin had discarded her wedding ring.

‘She always seems to be looking at you,’ Tamsin said, ‘like the Mona Lisa.’

It was true. The painter had contrived that Salome’s eyes should meet yours, no matter in what part of the room you were standing.

‘Is it valuable?’ he asked, thinking of the thousands rich men would pay for monstrosities.

‘Oh, no. Mrs. Prynne said it’s only worth about twenty pounds.’

She was still looking at the picture but with neither gloating nor horror. As he turned curiously to look at her he thought he saw in her eyes only the same pride of possession one of his sons might feel for a tape recorder or an electric guitar. One woman’s meat, one man’s poison …

‘Patrick …’ he tried to begin, but he could not speak the name aloud to her.

‘W
hat’s the matter, darling? Not the little boy?’

‘No, no, he’ll be all right. I’m looking in again tomorrow.’

‘You’ve been so long.’

Instead of sitting down Greenleaf began to pace the room. The circumstances of Patrick’s death were beginning to worry him a lot. If in fact there were sufficient grounds to suspect homicide, wasn’t it his duty as the first medical man to have seen Patrick’s body, as one of those present at the post-mortem, to see justice done? And if he only suspected shouldn’t he, as discreetly as possible, probe just enough to discover whether suspicion was well-founded? Some of the information he had was given in confidence and he couldn’t tell Marvell about it. But there was one person he could tell, one from whom he had never felt it necessary to keep the secrets of the consulting room. He could tell his wife.

Bernice might well laugh away his fears and this, he had to confess, was what he wanted. She would tell him he was tired, that he needed a holiday.

The television was on, dancers in some grotesque ballet gyrating like demons. He touched the knob. ‘D’you want this?’ She shook her head. He switched it off and told her.

She didn’t laugh but said thoughtfully:

‘Tamsin and Oliver. Yes, I can believe that.’

‘You can?’

‘I couldn’t help noticing the way they danced together at Tamsin’s party. I never thought Tamsin and Patrick were very happy together. Except—except until a few days before he died. It was when I called on them collecting for the Cancer Campaign. Tamsin kept calling Patrick darling—she was very sweet to him. I remember thinking how odd it was.’

‘But apparently Patrick was in love with Freda Carnaby. Freda Carnaby after Tamsin?’

Bernice lit a cigarette and said shrewdly, ‘Did you ever notice how very Teutonic Patrick was? The first
four years of his life must have influenced him a lot Of course, his mother was German. He was an awfully
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
sort of person, house-proud, passionately neat and tidy. But Tamsin’s a sloppy girl. Not in her appearance, she’s vain about that, but about the house. You could see it narked Patrick.’

Greenleaf’s mind went back half an hour. Again he saw the untidy rooms, the shells dribbling sand.

‘Now, Freda Carnaby, she’d be different again. Very brisk and practical—or she used to be. All the time they’ve been here I’ve never seen her in slacks or without stockings, Max. Time and time again I’ve noticed it, women who wear those tight little pointed shoes are mad keen on polishing and turning out rooms. Patrick was cruel, too, you know, Max, but I don’t think cruelty would get very far with Tamsin. She’s too vague and self-sufficient. But Freda Carnaby! There’s a masochist if ever I saw one.’

‘You may be right,’ Greenleaf said. ‘But forget the Carnabys for a minute. What about Gage? I can imagine he might want to marry Tamsin.’ He grinned faintly. ‘He has marriages like other people have colds in the head. But apparently Patrick was going to divorce Tamsin anyway. Would Gage want to’—he almost baulked at the word—‘to
kill
him?’

Bernice said unexpectedly, ‘He’s rather a violent man.’

‘Violent? Oliver Gage?’

‘Nancy told me something when they first came here. I didn’t repeat it because I know how you hate that kind of thing. She was proud of it.’

‘So?’

‘Well, when Oliver met her she was engaged to
some relative of his second wife’s. Apparently Oliver just set out to get her. It’s a strange way of conducting one’s life, isn’t it? Oliver and the fiancé were playing billiards in Oliver’s house and Nancy came in. Anyway, the fiancé said something to her she didn’t like and she told him she’d finished with him and that she was going to marry Oliver. Just like that Oliver and the fiancé had a violent quarrel and the upshot of it was Oliver hit him over the head with a billiard cue.’

Greenleaf smiled incredulously.

‘It isn’t really funny, Max. He knocked the fellow out cold.’

‘Hitting someone over the head is a long way from poisoning a man in cold blood. Freda Carnaby says she saw him carrying a packet. A packet of what? Glover was very thorough in his tests.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve never been interested in toxicology. When I was a student I didn’t care much for medical jurisprudence. But I always come back to that in the end. If Patrick was killed, what was he killed with?’

‘One of those insecticides?’ Bernice asked vaguely. ‘You know, you read about them in the papers. I thought they weren’t supposed to leave any trace.’

‘Not in the body maybe. But there would have been signs. He would have been very sick. The sheets on the bed, Bernice, they weren’t clean sheets. I don’t mean they were dirty—just not fresh on.’

‘Observant of you,’ said Bernice. She reached for the cigarettes, caught her husband’s eye and let her hand drop.

‘Besides, why would Gage want to do away with Patrick? There’s always divorce. Unless he couldn’t
afford two divorces. He’d have to pay the costs of both of them, remember.’

‘On the other hand, Tamsin has her private income.’

Greenleaf banged his fist on the chair arm.

‘Wherever I go I keep hearing about that private income. What does it amount to, I’d like to know. Hundreds? Thousands? A couple of hundred a year wouldn’t make any difference to a man in Oliver’s position. Killing Patrick would secure his money too and that might pay for Nancy’s divorce. And Tamsin …’

Bernice stared.

‘You don’t mean you think Tamsin …? Would a woman murder her own husband?’

‘They do, occasionally.’

She got up and stood before him. He took her hand and held it lightly.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Maybe I do need that holiday.’

‘Oh, darling. I don’t want you to get into this. I’m scared, Max. This can’t be happening, not here in Linchester.’

Reading her thoughts, he said gently, ‘Whatever we have said no one can hear us.’

‘But we have said it.’

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Listen. There’s something we’ve got to realise. If someone did kill Patrick, Tamsin must be in it too. She was in the house. I left her and she says she went to bed. You’re not going to tell me someone got into the house without her knowing?’

‘You say she was happy?’

‘Now? Yes, she’s happy now. I think she’s glad. Patrick’s dead. After I told her he was dead she didn’t cry,
but she cried later. She put her arms round the dog and she cried. Bernice, I think she was crying from relief.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe, nothing. I can’t go about asking questions like a detective.’ He stopped, listening. A key turned in the lock and he heard the boys come into the hall. And if those women talk, he thought, if Nancy goes about saying Carnaby killed Patrick with cyanide and Freda says Gage killed him with a mysterious white packet, I shall begin to lose my patients.

11

‘O
ne large jar of zinc and castor oil cream, half a dozen packets of disposable nappies, a dozen tins of strained food …’ Mr. Waller reckoned up the purchases rapidly. ‘Gone are the days of all that mashing and fiddling about with strainers, Mrs. Smith-King. I always say you young mothers don’t know how lucky you are. A large tin of baby powder and the Virol.’ He handed the things to Linda who wrapped each up efficiently and sealed it with sello-tape. ‘I’m afraid that comes to three pounds seven and tenpence. Say it quickly and it doesn’t sound so bad, eh?’

Joan Smith-King gave him a new five pound note.

‘It’s terrible the way it goes,’ she said. ‘Still, you can’t expect it to be cheap taking five children away on holiday.’ She jerked Jeremy’s hand from its exploration of Linda’s carefully arranged display of bathing
caps, each an improbably coloured wig of nylon hair on a rubber scalp. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be going at all. My husband’s had a very worrying time lately with the business but now everything’s panned out well and he’ll be able to take a rest.’