To Fear a Painted Devil (20 page)

This is it, he thought. He needed to hear and at the same time he wanted to stop her. Almost unconsciously he fumbled along the window sill.

‘Did you want a cigarette, Max?’

Taking one from the silver box, he said, ‘I’ve given it up,’ and lit it with shaking fingers.

‘What was I saying? Oh, yes, about Grandmother. She knew I wasn’t getting on all that well with Patrick. Funny, she made the match and she wanted us to make a go of it. Just because we were cousins she thought we’d be alike. How wrong she was! After she died we went along to hear the will read—like they do in books. Dramatic, I can’t tell you! Patrick wasn’t mentioned at all. I don’t know if she thought he’d had enough from his father—that went on this house—or perhaps she resented it because he never went to see her. Anyway, she left all her money to me, the income, not the capital, on condition …’

She paused as the dog padded in and Greenleaf listened, cursing the diversion.

‘On condition Patrick and I were never divorced!’

O God, he thought, how it all fits, a pattern, a puzzle like those things the boys used to have, when you have to make the ball bearing drop into the right slots.

‘As if I wanted to be divorced,’ she said. ‘I can’t support myself. They were too busy educating him to bother about me.’

But Patrick had been going to divorce her. She would have had nothing. Without money from her Oliver Gage would have been unable to marry her, for the costs of her divorce and Nancy’s would have fallen on him. Like everyone else he must have been deceived about her income until she got cold feet and told him. He pictured her confessing to Gage; then, when he recoiled from her, running ashamed and wretched—for Tamsin, he was sure, was no nymphomaniac—to
Marvell, her last resort. When Marvell refused her there was only one way out …

‘Doesn’t anybody know?’ he asked sharply, not bothering to conceal a curiosity she must take for impertinence.

‘It was so humiliating,’ she said, whispering now. ‘Everybody thought I was quite well-off, independent. But if Patrick had divorced me I would have been—I would have been destitute.’

It was a sudden bare revelation of motive and it recalled him to the real reason of his visit.

‘Tamsin …’ he began. The cigarette was making him feel a little dizzy, and to his eyes, focusing badly, the woman in the chair opposite was just a blur of brown and bright green. ‘I came to tell you something very serious. About Patrick …’

‘You mean Freda Carnaby? I know all about that. Please! They were the same kind of people, Max. They really suited each other. If Patrick could have made anyone happy it was Freda Carnaby. But you mustn’t think I drove him to it. It was only because of that—Oliver and me … I was so lonely, Max.’

He was horrified that she should think him capable of repeating gossip to her and to stop her he blundered into the middle of it, forgetting his doctor’s discretion.

‘No, no. I meant Patrick’s death. I don’t think he died of heart failure.’

Was it possible that, immured here since her return, she had heard nothing of the gossip? She turned on him, quivering, and he wondered if this was the beginning of the violence he expected.

‘He must have,’ she cried. ‘Max, this isn’t something that’ll stop me going tomorrow, is it? He was so
hateful to me when he was alive and now he’s dead—I can feel him still in the house.’

So intense was her tone that Greenleaf half-turned towards the door.

‘You see what I mean? Sometimes when I go upstairs I think to myself, suppose I see his writing in the dust on the dressing-table? That’s what he used to do. I’m not much of a housewife, Max, and we couldn’t keep a woman. They were all frightened of Queenie. When I hadn’t cleaned properly he used to write in the dust “Dust this” or “I do my job, you do yours”. He
did
.’

Were some marriages really like that? Yes, it fitted with what he had known of Patrick’s character. He could imagine a freckled finger with a close-trimmed nail moving deliberately across the black glass, crossing the t, dotting the i.

Although he knew her moods, how suddenly hysteria was liable to wistfulness or vague reminiscing, he was startled when she burst out in a ragged voice:

‘I’m afraid to go in his room! He’s dead but suppose—suppose the writing was there just the same?’

‘Tamsin.’ He must put an end to this. ‘How many wasp stings did Patrick have?’

She was still tense, hunched in her chair, frightened of the dead man and the house he had built.

‘Four. Does it matter? You said he didn’t die of the stings.’ The air in the room was pleasantly warm but she got up and closed the door. It was stupid to feel uneasy, to remember the frightened charwoman, the Smith-King children. She sat down again and he reflected that they were shut in now with the strong watchful dog and that all the neighbours were away on holiday.

‘How many did he have when he came in from the garden?’

‘Well, four. I told you. I didn’t look.’

‘And after—when he was dead?’

He stubbed out the cigarette and held his hands tightly together in his lap. His eyes were on her as she coaxed the Weimaraner to her chair, softly snapping her fingers and finally closing them over the pearly fawn snout.

‘There, my Queenie, my beauty, my beauty …’ Dry brown cheek pressed against wet brown nose, two pairs of eyes looking at him.

‘I think he was stung by a bee, Tamsin.’

At a word from her the dog would spring. For armour he had only the long curtains that hung against the window blinds. Wrapped around him they would protect him for a moment, but the dog’s teeth would rip that velvet and then …?

‘Stung by a
bee
?’

‘Perhaps it was an accident. A bee could have got into the bedroom—’

‘Oh, no.’ She spoke firmly and decisively for her. ‘It couldn’t happen that way.’ Her mouth was close to the dog’s ear now. She whispered something, loosening her fingers from Queenie’s dew-lap. Greenleaf felt something knock within his chest like a hand beating suddenly against his ribs. But it was ridiculous, absurd, such things couldn’t happen! The dog broke free. He braced himself, forgetting convention, pride, the courage a man is supposed to show, and covered his face as the chair skidded back across the polished floor.

15

F
or one of those seconds that take an age to live through he was caught up in fear and fettered to the chair. His eyes closed, he waited for the hot breath and the trickling saliva. Tamsin’s voice came sweet and anticlimactic.

‘Oh, Max, I’m awfully sorry. That floor! The furniture’s always sliding about.’

I make a bad policeman, he thought, blinking and adjusting his chair back in its position by the window. But where was the dog and why wasn’t he in the process of being mauled? Then he saw her, puffing and blowing under the sideboard in pursuit of—an earwig!

‘You baby, Queenie. She’ll hunt anything, even insects.’ It was all right. The drama had been nothing but a domestic game with a pet. And Tamsin, he saw, had noticed only that he was startled by the sudden
skidding of a chair. ‘Talking of insects,’ she said, ‘it’s funny about the bee. It’s a coincidence, in a way. You see, that’s what happened when Patrick first saw the picture. I’d never seen him before and I was watching from the garden. He ran into the conservatory and there was a bee on a geranium. He put out his hand and it stung him.’

The shock was subsiding now.

‘What happened?’ he asked rather shakily.

Tamsin shrugged and pulled Queenie out by the tail.

‘Why, nothing happened. It made me laugh. Children are cruel, aren’t they? Grandmother and my aunt, they made a dreadful fuss. They put him to bed and the doctor came. I remember I said, “He must be an awful coward to have a doctor for a bee sting. I bet you wouldn’t have got the doctor for me,” and they sent me to my room. I told him about it when we were older but he wouldn’t talk about it. He only said he didn’t like bees and he couldn’t stand honey.’

‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that he might be allergic to bee stings?’

‘I didn’t know you could be,’ she said, her eyes wide with surprise.

He almost believed her. He wanted to believe her, to say, ‘Yes, you can go. Be happy, Tamsin. Drive and drive—far away!’

Now more than ever it seemed likely that the bee had got there by chance. Hadn’t he opened the window in the balcony room himself? Wasps stung when they were provoked; perhaps the same was true of bees and Patrick’s killer, alighting on his exposed arm, had been alerted into venom by a twitch or a galvanic start from the sleeping man. If Tamsin were
guilty she would clutch at the possibility of an accident and no law could touch her.

‘I asked you about an accident,’ he said. ‘Could a bee have stung him by accident?’

‘I suppose so.’ Marvell is wrong, he thought. She isn’t clever. She’s stupid, sweetly stupid and vague. She lives a life of her own, a life of dreams sustained by unearned, unquestioned money. But dreams can change into nightmares …

Then she said something that entirely altered the picture he had made of her. She was not stupid, nor was she a murderess.

‘Oh, but it couldn’t!’ Dreamy, vague children often do best in examinations, drawing solutions from their inner lives. ‘I know it couldn’t. Crispin told me something about bees once. They’re different from wasps and when they sting they die. It’s like a sort of harakiri, Max. They leave the sting behind and a bit of their own inside with it. Don’t you think it’s horrid for them, poor bees? The sting would still have been in Patrick’s arm if it had been an accident. We’d have seen it!’

Unwittingly he had given her a loophole. A guilty woman would have wriggled through it. Tamsin, in her innocence, was confirming that her husband had been murdered.

‘Max, you don’t mean you think I …?’

‘No, Tamsin, no.’

‘I’m glad he’s dead. I am. I tried everything I could to make him forgive me over Oliver and give that woman up. But he wouldn’t. He said I’d given him the chance he’d been waiting for. Now he could divorce me and Freda’s name wouldn’t have to be brought into it at all. Oh, outwardly he was perfectly
friendly to Oliver, but all the time he was having his flat in town watched. Oliver and Nancy must come to the party. Then, when he’d got everything lined up he was going to drop his bombshell.’ She paused and drew a little sobbing breath, rubbing away the frown lines with her ringless fingers. ‘He liked to make people suffer, Max. Even the Smith-Kings. Did you see how he was torturing Denholm at the party?’ When Greenleaf said nothing she went on in a shaky voice that fell sometimes to a whisper, ‘Oh, that awful party! The evening before, he went straight to Freda’s house. I was desperate, I cried and cried for hours. Oliver came but I couldn’t let him in. All those weeks when we were at the flat he’d been hinting that he’d get Nancy to divorce him. My money would pay for that and keep us both. I had to tell him there wouldn’t be any money. I did tell him at last, Max, I told him at the party.’

And Gage had sat beside her gloomily, Greenleaf remembered. There had been no close sensual dancing after that.

‘He went on and on about it. He even tried to think of ways of upsetting the will. But d’you know something? I don’t want to be married. I’ve had enough of marriage.’ Her voice grew harsh and strident. ‘But I’d have married anyone who would have supported me. Can you see me working in an office, Max, going home to a furnished room and cooking things on a gas ring? I’d even have married Crispin!’

‘Marvell hasn’t any money,’ he said. ‘His house is falling down and he won’t get much for the land.’

She was thunderstruck. The mask slipped at last and her big golden eyes widened and blazed.

‘But his books …?’

‘I don’t believe he ever finishes them.’

To him it was the saddest of stories, that Marvell should have to leave the house he loved, that her nightmare of the room with the gas ring might become real to him. Because of this her ringing laughter was an affront. Peal upon peal of it rang through the room; hot laughter to burn and cleanse away all her old griefs. The Weimaraner squatted, alert, startled.