The Paying Guests (49 page)

But she resolved, at least, to answer Christina’s telegram. When the cigarette was finished, and as quickly as she could, she put on her outdoor things and, saying nothing to her mother, she went down the hill to the post office at Camberwell Green.
OH
CHRISSY
SO
GRIM
BUT
JUST
COPING
SEE
SOON
PROMISE
LOVE
. The girl at the counter looked at her as though she thought her slightly mad. Perhaps I
have
gone mad, she said to herself. Leaving the building she stood gazing towards Walworth, utterly unable to decide whether or not to press on to Mr Viney’s shop. The desire to see Lilian was like a craving, like the craving she imagined came after the taking of a drug. But she thought of the reception she’d be bound to get, the surprise and commotion of it. Would there even be anywhere for the two of them to be alone together? And what did she have to tell Lilian, in any case? It was Charlie who was most in danger. Lilian might say that they ought to warn him; but they couldn’t do that without giving themselves away. Wouldn’t she simply make Lilian more frightened, more likely to let something slip?

And even in the twenty or so minutes that she had been away from the house she had started to worry about what might be happening there in her absence. She turned her back on Walworth and hurried up the hill, with every step growing more convinced that she would find the place swarming with policemen.

The house was just as she had left it. Her mother was still in her room: she didn’t emerge until after seven, when Frances tapped meekly at her door to say that dinner was ready. They passed a strained evening together, Mrs Wray keeping to her chair with a blanket over her knees, and answering any remark of Frances’s with a vagueness, a doubt, a delay… Frances lay wide awake in bed that night, knowing that her mother was downstairs lying wide awake too; thinking of the tick, tick of her mother’s mind as it pieced things together.

But nothing was said the following morning. Her mother was pale, calm, distant. Frances went out as soon as she could for the early papers, fully expecting to see some change in the reporting of the case; there was no mention anywhere, however, of the spooning couple. The police were pressing on with their manhunt and had evidently widened their search: they were said to be interviewing people as far away as Dulwich. But Charlie’s name did not appear in any of the columns, and, realising that, she began to recover some of her confidence. How strong, after all, was the case against him? It was all speculation, surely? There was no evidence to support it. And even if the police were to go so far as to arrest him – well, she thought determinedly, arresting someone wasn’t the same as charging them. He’d simply have to come clean, then, about what he’d been up to on Friday night. If he was at some brothel or drug-den, or whatever the hell he’d been doing, he’d surely sooner admit that than be charged with his best friend’s murder. As for the timings of it all – it couldn’t matter what time Leonard was killed. There was still absolutely nothing to suggest that he had been killed in the house; nothing to link his death with Lilian or with her.

After a silent lunch, her mother announced quietly that she was going out for an hour or two. Frances looked at her, and felt herself whiten: she imagined that she had made up her mind to speak to the police. But it was some charity business, her mother said as she put on her coat; a set of minutes that had to be delivered to one of her committees. No, Frances was kind to offer, but she was happy to take them herself. She wanted to call in to church – her eyelids fluttered as she spoke – she wanted to call in to church on her way home.

Perhaps, then, she planned to confide not in the police but in the vicar. Frances watched her go with a feeling of doom. Suppose Mr Garnish were to talk? She had to think it through, be ready.

But she had the house to herself: that was an unexpected gift. This was the first time since Leonard’s death that she had been alone in it. She had to make the most of the next two hours. She ought to look for signs, for evidence.

She felt better as soon as she’d started. Upstairs in the sitting-room, the blood-stains were as visible as ever, but the carpet, she saw now, had other marks on it, streaks of dirt and spots of ink, something that might have been a splash of tea: there was no reason for the eye to travel to one stain over another. It was the same with the ashtray. The scorch on the base meant nothing. And though she could hide it away, get it out of the house – wouldn’t that simply draw attention to it? It was less incriminating to leave it right where it was… The hearth was brimming over with a new mess, from Sunday’s fires – that was good – but the ash-pail was still there, with those scraps of gingham and lumps of clinker in it, the latter looking like the sort of greasy black nuggets one might find at the bottom of a roasting-dish. But those, at least, she could take care of. She carefully carried the pail downstairs, put on an apron and galoshes, then picked her way down the muddy garden to the ash-heap. She didn’t rush the job. She took her time as she stirred the clinker into the slurry, not caring if a neighbour should chance to look out and see her – for, after all, emptying ash-pails was the sort of chore she did every day. Even when she spotted an unburned scrap of yellow fabric in the grey her nerve remained strong. She fetched a spade, made a cut in the earth at the side of a rosemary bush, pushed the yellow fragment into it, and sealed up the ground.

Next she got a dustpan and brush, and then a bucket of soapy water, and went over the treads of the stairs, the floor of the hall, the passage, the kitchen – the route that she and Lilian had taken with Leonard’s body. Again she worked slowly and methodically, doing far more than she needed to, moving the pieces of hall furniture out of their places, even hauling the oak coat-stand away from the wall in order to get behind and beneath it. Near the threshold of the kitchen she found a single rusty splash that she thought had probably come from Lilian rather than from Leonard, and in the shadowiest corner of the passage she discovered the neat half of a black button that might, just possibly, have got tugged from one of Leonard’s cuffs as she had dragged him down the stairs. But the splash was easily wiped away, and the button she carried out to the kitchen stove along with the rest of the contents of the dustpan. She hesitated about throwing it in, though. If the police should ever take it into their heads to go through the ashes… In the end, remembering how she had buried the scrap of material, she pushed the button into the earth of the potted aspidistra that, for as long as she could remember, had sat on the largest of the hall tables beside the brass dinner-gong. The police would never look there, surely?

And she had just moved away from it, was just, almost complacently, picking the earth from beneath her fingernail, when she heard the clang of the garden gate, followed by unhurried footsteps across the front garden. The footsteps made their way, grittily, into the porch. There was a charged little silence, and then the knocker was lifted and dropped.

Don’t answer it!
she told herself. She held her breath, and did nothing.

The knock came again. She couldn’t leave it. It might be news of Lilian. She went across, opened the door – and found herself face to face with Inspector Kemp.

He lifted his hat. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Wray.’

‘Good afternoon, Inspector.’

Her voice had no scrap of welcome in it. He took in her apron, her bare lower arms, the bits of furniture standing about behind her at random angles on the floor, and said, ‘Ah. I’m afraid I’m disturbing you.’

She tried to speak with more life. ‘It doesn’t matter. But have you come to see Mrs Barber? She isn’t here. I thought you knew that.’

‘Yes, I do. No, it isn’t Mrs Barber I’d like to speak to.’ He paused, fractionally. ‘It’s you. Do you have a few minutes?’

She would rather have done almost anything than let him into the house. But in silence, she moved back. He stepped gingerly on to the still-wet tiles, giving a grimace of apology for the dirt on his shoes. Pulling off her apron, tugging down her cuffs a little, she led him into the drawing-room.

He unbuttoned his overcoat as he sat, then drew out his notebook from an inside pocket. Eyeing the book warily, she said, ‘Have you brought news? Is that why you’re here?’

‘Well,’ he said, thumbing his way through the small pages, ‘yes and no. We’re no closer to an arrest, I’m sorry to say. But we expect to be, very soon. There’s been a development, you see, that we think significant.’

She swallowed. ‘Oh, yes?’

‘Yes, we’ve been keeping the matter quiet for the sake of the inquiry, but the newspapers have just got wind of it, so it won’t be secret for long.’ He looked up. ‘Two possible witnesses from the night of the murder…’

And he proceeded to tell her everything she’d heard already from Mrs Playfair, about the man and the girl and the scuffling in the lane. She struggled at first to arrange her features, wanting to hit just the right balance between surprise and concern. But the longer he went on, the calmer she grew. If this was all he’d come for…

‘Naturally,’ he finished, ‘the biggest puzzle for us now is Mr Wismuth’s statement. He’s quite adamant that he last saw Mr Barber at Blackfriars at ten. But —’

‘Yes,’ she said helpfully, ‘I see how that places you.’

‘And, to tell you the truth, there are one or two other things about his story that make us not quite satisfied with it.’

She paused at that, as if just getting the point. ‘But you surely don’t suspect Mr Wismuth of having anything to do with the murder?’

‘Well, we’re keeping an open mind.’

‘But Mr Wismuth – No, it couldn’t possibly have been him.’

He looked interested. ‘You don’t think so? I’ll remember that you said that. However —’ He returned to his book. ‘It’s really Mr and Mrs Barber that I’d like to talk about today. You won’t mind if I make a few notes?’

Again she eyed the little book. ‘No, I don’t mind. What is it you’d like to know?’

He brought out a pencil. ‘Oh, just general things about the couple and their routines. How well, would you say, did you and your mother know them?’

She pretended to think it over. ‘Not very well, I suppose.’

‘You didn’t tend to spend time with them?’

‘Our habits were rather different. My mother sometimes chatted with Mr Barber.’

‘Your mother got along all right with him?’

‘Yes.’

‘How about you? Did you get along with him?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Ever see him much on his own?’

‘No, never.’

‘Not even casually, about the house?’

‘Well, of course, on the stairs and places like that…’

‘And Mrs Barber? You saw more of her, I suppose?’

She nodded. ‘A little more.’

‘At parties and so on?’

That took her by surprise. When she didn’t answer he went on, ‘I understand you accompanied Mrs Barber to the party given by her sister in July – the night, of course, that Mr Barber was first assaulted. You didn’t mention that, Miss Wray, when we talked about it at the police station.’

She made her voice very level. ‘I didn’t? It was rather hard to concentrate that day.’

‘And yet the party seems, by all accounts, to have been a memorable one. I’ve spoken to several of the other guests. They tell me that Mrs Barber was – let’s say, making the most of her husband’s absence. Taking rather a lot to drink, and so on? Dancing with a number of men?’

Now she knew what he was getting at, why he had come. Quite steadily, she said, ‘Mrs Barber danced with her cousins, as far as I recall.’

He consulted his book. ‘James Daley, Patrick Daley, Thomas Lynch —’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know their names.’

‘But Mrs Barber was dancing pretty freely with them?’

‘It was a family party. Mrs Barber danced with several people. She danced with me, as it happens.’

‘She did?’

He said it in that bland way of his, that was somehow like the lenses of his spectacles, making his gaze more penetrating even while appearing to screen it. She went on, after a second, ‘All I mean is, the dancing was harmless.’

‘You don’t recall there being anyone – a cousin, or some other man – with whom Mrs Barber seemed on particularly friendly terms?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘No one who seemed specially to admire her? Just cast your mind back for me, would you?’

But her mind had gone back already. She was remembering watching Lilian from the sofa. She was remembering standing with her at the gramophone, the space between them tugging itself closed.

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘And you were with her all evening? You left the party together? No one else travelled with you? You weren’t aware, before you left, of Mrs Barber making any sort of arrangement with any other guest? I ask because the people I’ve spoken to, they all say there was something about Mrs Barber that night. Nobody can quite put a finger on it, but – just something. She had taken a great deal of trouble over her costume, apparently. You didn’t notice anything?’

‘No.’

‘Could you describe Mrs Barber’s temperament?’

‘Her temperament?’

‘Her likes and dislikes, and so on. I’ve been given the impression that she’s rather a romancer – rather dreamy, rather discontented. It seems to have been well known among her friends and family that she wasn’t quite happy in her married life.’

‘Well, that’s true of half the wives in England, isn’t it?’

He gave a faint smile. ‘Is it? I shall have to ask mine. You knew yourself that she was unhappy, then?’

She hesitated. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t surprise you, to hear of it.’

‘I – I never thought much about it.’

‘She never confided in you? She seemed rather to cling to you, I thought, on Saturday, at the police station.’

‘Well, she’d just had to view her husband’s body. She’d have clung to anyone sympathetic, I imagine.’

‘There haven’t been callers to the house? No notes? No letters?’