The Paying Guests

With a glance at Sergeant Heath, half doubtful, half fearful, Violet slid from the pouffe, took Siddy from Netta’s arms, and carried him gracelessly from the room.

  ‘Well,’ began the inspector, when the door had banged shut behind her, ‘it’s a matter of the different effect of different sorts of blows to the human head. A man taking a tumble, you see, and striking his head: that produces one quite distinct sort of wound. But a man being hit – let’s say, by a hammer – well, that produces quite another. Mr Palmer was alerted right away by the appearance of the fracture, and by the direction in which the blood had run into Mr Barber’s clothes. Once he’d made a full examination he found, from the bruising on Mr Barber’s brain, that – Well, it put the matter quite beyond question.’

  He kept his gaze on Lilian as he spoke. She had lowered her eyes, but her breast had begun to rise and fall. She wants to look at me, thought Frances, able to feel the tug of her fear, and growing fearful in response. She pleaded with her, silently, Don’t! Don’t! The look would give everything away!

  But now Mrs Viney leaned forward. Fixing the inspector with a lashless eye, a touch of challenge in the creak of her stays, she said, ‘How it was done is one thing. Can you say who done it?’

  After a second, he sat back. ‘We can’t, just yet. But we’re confident that the killer will be found. You’ll have seen our men, going up and down the street. We’re putting things together, one piece at a time. There’s not much evidence, unfortunately, from the actual scene of the crime. One or two interesting details on Mr Barber’s overcoat, but aside from them, and a fingerprint —’

  ‘A fingerprint?’ echoed Frances.

  He said, ‘A print was discovered in among the blood on Mr Barber’s shirt-front. It’s more or less useless, I’m sorry to say. It was too long in the rain. It might have come from Mr Barber himself, or might have got there in some sort of a struggle. His clothes were pulled about, you see, and his hat was off before the blow came, suggesting to us that he grappled with his attacker before he died.’

  Frances had been right about the clothes, then. But the fingerprint – that was almost as bad as the stuff about the brain. It must have got on to Leonard’s shirt as she was tidying him in the dark. She felt suddenly conscious of her hands, had to fight down the urge to clench them, hide them away. Had she made any other blunders? What the hell were those ‘interesting details’ on Leonard’s coat?

  Again she felt the pull of Lilian’s fear, and this time her own fear seemed to extend across the room to meet it. Risking a look at the sofa, she saw her with her head bowed and a hand in front of her face, her lips parted; Inspector Kemp had begun to talk about the interviews that he and Sergeant Heath had conducted the day before. They had spoken to several people at Pearl Assurance, he said, who had confirmed that Leonard had left work on Friday at the usual time. And they’d talked at length with Mr Wismuth – ‘who, naturally, was of particular interest to us, as being able to help us put together a sense of Mr Barber’s movements just before his death.’

  At the mention of Charlie’s name, Lilian briefly closed her eyes. Frances knew that she was readying herself for what would come next. Chafing at her forehead with her fingertips, she looked up at the inspector and said in a thin, brave voice, ‘What did Charlie tell you?’

  He fished in a pocket. ‘Oh, he was very useful to us – gave us a good sense of the various timings of the night. He last saw your husband – Let me see.’ He brought out a notebook, located a page; and Frances, too, prepared herself for the revelation. ‘Yes, he last saw Mr Barber at just after ten. They’d been drinking in the City together, going from one public house to another. He can’t recall which one they ended up in – that’s a pity, of course; we’re sending officers to all the likely ones, to ask for witnesses – but he remembers very clearly saying good night to Mr Barber at the Blackfriars tram-stop just after closing-time. Now, assuming that Mr Barber had no trouble in catching his tram, and taking into account the length of the journey from Blackfriars to Camberwell, we calculate that he arrived back here at around a quarter to eleven. That would have been when you yourself, Mrs Barber, were already asleep in bed. That’s what you told us yesterday?’

  Lilian’s head was still bowed, her hand was still in front of her face; she’d been staring at him through her fingers. Now she lowered the hand. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Miss Wray and her mother,’ he went on, with a nod to Frances, ‘were also in bed at that time. Which is perhaps why Mr Barber went to the trouble of walking all the way round to the back lane? To avoid disturbing the house too much? Can you think of any other reason?’

  Unable to answer, Lilian shook her head. ‘Well,’ he said, after a second, ‘it’s a great shame that he did, for he must have been killed more or less straight off. Mr Palmer says his body was lying in the lane for above eight hours. It’s possible that he disturbed a burglar; that was one of our first ideas. But given that his pocket-book remained untouched we’re ruling robbery out for the moment. Instead, we’re working on the theory that he was pursued or lured into the lane by a person or persons unknown, who either set on him with the intention of killing him, or hit out at him as the result of some altercation. The blow was a vicious one, we do know that, and struck from behind, by a right-handed assailant, someone not over-tall. Death must have been almost instant: the bleeding seems to have stopped very nearly before he hit the ground. The instrument was blunt – a pipe or a mallet, I’d say. We’ve been looking in gardens and storm-drains for it, without success so far. But we’ll turn it up, you mark my words; and it’ll lead us straight to our man.’

  He said all this to Lilian, with occasional glances around the room to draw in and impress the rest of them, and Lilian returned his gaze as he spoke, as if mesmerised. But once he was silent she changed her pose, looking over at Frances as she shifted, and there was a flash of something between them – part apprehension, part bafflement. For why on earth, thought Frances, would Charlie Wismuth have said that he had been with Leonard until past ten? At ten o’clock Leonard was already dead, already out in the lane. At ten o’clock she was cutting up the grisly yellow cushion. Leonard had told Lilian – hadn’t he? – that Charlie had had to leave early; that they’d only had time for a couple of beers. But why would Charlie lie?

  Again it was Mrs Viney who spoke first. ‘Poor Lenny! He didn’t deserve that, did he? Not to be hit from behind like that. No, nobody deserves that. And he wasn’t a quarrelling man! That’s what I don’t understand. Why would he have gone into the lane with a blackguard like that?’

  ‘He didn’t go in there with him,’ said Vera, in a brittle, patient way. ‘The inspector says that somebody must have followed him.’

  ‘Followed him?’

  ‘Gone in after him, quietly.’

  Mrs Viney looked outraged. ‘Oh, now that’s a dirty trick!’

  Inspector Kemp said again that that was one of their theories, at any rate. And he repeated his claim about the pipe or the mallet: that they were sure to turn it up, and then the case would be halfway solved.

  ‘A professional killer, you see,’ he said, ‘or a man used to violence: he knows how to dispose of a weapon. He has pals he can pass it on to. But we’re not looking for a professional killer. We think our fellow’s more steady than that. Someone with regular habits —’

  ‘Regular habits?’ cried Mrs Viney. ‘When he goes about murdering people in the dark? I thought it was some old soldier you was after. Wasn’t it some old soldier who set on Lenny that other time?’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said the inspector, ‘there was only Mr Barber’s own word about that. He might well have been mistaken. The fact that no robbery took place, either that time or this —’

  ‘The man might have meant to do a robbery,’ said Vera, ‘and got the wind up.’

  ‘Or he might,’ put in Netta, ‘have heard a noise – seen someone coming —’

  ‘Yes, it’s possible,’ the inspector answered, in the polite, patient tone he
must, thought Frances, keep in reserve for thriller-enthusiasts. ‘But —’ He tapped his fingers on the brim of his hat. ‘I don’t know. There’s just something about this case. When you’ve been in the police force for as long as Sergeant Heath and I have, you develop a “nose”. And just now my nose is telling me that this wasn’t a cold-blooded act; that it was the work of a person with a grudge, or a score to settle, or some reason for wanting to get Mr Barber out of his way. And a person like that, with a used weapon in hand – his first thought is to get rid of it. His second thought is to get home as quick as he can. That works to our advantage, too. He has nowhere to hide, you see. He has neighbours, he has family, people seeing him come and go. Some of them might protect him for a time. He might have a wife, a girl, a lady-friend, someone who thinks it her romantic duty to keep quiet about what she knows. But she won’t think that for long, if she’s got any sense about her. She’ll come forward sooner or later – the sooner the better, of course, from the point of view of her own safety.’

  Again he made gestures to Mrs Viney, to the sisters and to Frances as he spoke. But it was unmistakably Lilian to whom he was addressing himself, and now, leaning forward, he fixed his gaze on hers.

  ‘I’m afraid your thoughts weren’t quite in order yesterday, Mrs Barber. Nobody could have expected otherwise, in the circumstances. But you’ve had time, since then, to turn things over in your mind, and I have to ask you what I asked you once before, in case some new piece of information should have occurred to you. Do you have any idea who might have killed your husband?’

  Lilian stared at him in that mesmerised way, but shook her head: ‘No.’

  He pressed her. ‘No idea at all?’

  She turned away. ‘No! None of it makes any sense to me. It’s like a horrible dream, that’s all.’

  He sat back, it seemed to Frances, as if not quite satisfied with what he’d heard, but with an air of patience, of calculation, of being prepared to accept it for now… Or perhaps she was imagining things. How much could he know? How far could he guess? He had being speaking confidently, even complacently; but his account of the case had been a muddle of fact and fantasy, sometimes approaching the heart of the matter, more often veering wildly away from it. As for all his talk about the man, the grudge, the score to settle —

  She suddenly absorbed the implication of his words, and for the first time in days she felt a lifting of anxiety, like a drop in the pressure in her brain. She and Lilian had failed to pass off Leonard’s death as an accident: all right. But wasn’t this the next best thing? The inspector could search for his man for ever. He couldn’t catch someone who didn’t exist…

  She came out of her own thoughts, to find him talking about the inquest. It was to be opened tomorrow morning at the coroner’s court, but would be a relatively brief affair, he said, with the case having turned into a murder inquiry; he would request an adjournment from the coroner, Mr Samson. But they would still appreciate it if Mrs Barber would attend – ‘and you and your mother, too, Miss Wray, I’m afraid’ – in case Mr Samson wished to interview them. He was sorry to say that they must be prepared for a certain amount of newspaper interest in Mr Barber’s death, and he hoped that that wouldn’t prove troublesome. Mrs Barber must be sure to let him or Sergeant Heath or one of his constables know if any reporters made a nuisance of themselves.

  ‘Now that you’re feeling a little better,’ he said to her, rising from the easy chair, ‘I’d just like to run over your statement with you, and clear up a few other points we’re still unsure about. I’d also like your permission to look through your husband’s things – the pockets of his clothes, for example; any personal papers or boxes.’

  He waited. Lilian looked up at him. ‘You want to do all that now?’

  ‘We’d be very grateful. Perhaps there’s another room we might go to, to save troubling your family? Oh, and there’s one other matter,’ he added as, uncertainly, she got to her feet. ‘Rather an intimate one; I’m sorry. But I think I might have mentioned Mr Barber’s overcoat? It’s been with the analysts at Scotland Yard, and they’ve found a number of hairs on it, not all of them from Mr Barber’s own head. I dare say the strays became attached just in the general way of things, but since there seems to have been a tussle before your husband died it’s possible that one or two of them came from the head of his attacker. It would help our inquiry if we could rule out the ones that must have got on to the coat while it was here in the house. Could I ask you to provide me with a sample of hairs from your own head? Just half a dozen from a comb or a hairbrush will do.’ Then, unexpectedly, he looked across at Frances. ‘Could I ask the same thing of you, Miss Wray? The hairs in question are all brown or black, so we needn’t trouble your mother, I think.’

  She couldn’t answer for a moment. The question had called up a shock of memories in her muscles and her skin: the digging of Leonard’s fingers into her armpit, the push and weight of his body as the two of them staggered across the carpet – this carpet, right here, with the stains of his blood still on it. She blushed, and felt her face blaze where his cheek had rasped against hers. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. She put down her head and left the room. But then she stood at her chest of drawers with the hairbrush trembling in her hand. She didn’t want to do it. They couldn’t make her, could they? She had to force herself to tug free the hairs from the tangle caught in the bristles. And when, out on the landing, she handed the hairs to Sergeant Heath, he had an envelope waiting for them, with her name already on it; and that made her tremble again.

  Back in the sitting-room, the women looked at her, impressed.

  ‘Scotland Yard!’ said Mrs Viney. ‘Would you ever have believed it, Miss Wray! Isn’t it wonderful how they can put it all together? But just fancy them going through Lenny’s bits and pieces like that. Murder or no murder, I shouldn’t want them poking about in my husband’s things – should you, Netta?’ She cocked her head. Lilian had taken the men into her bedroom and was murmuring with them there. ‘Still, they’ve got to do it, I suppose, if it helps their investigations. Oh, but didn’t it turn you right over, hearing all that talk about poor Lenny’s brains!’

  The little girl had returned, in a cloud of eau-de-Cologne. Dumping a wriggling Siddy into his mother’s lap, she said, ‘What did they say about Uncle Lenny’s brains?’

  Mrs Viney pulled a sad face. ‘They said there was a great big bruise on them.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  ‘The doctors saw it.’

  ‘How did they see it?’

  ‘Well —’

  Vera was reaching for her cigarettes. ‘They cut his head open, didn’t they?’

  Min squealed. Netta protested. The little girl looked appalled and delighted. ‘Did they, Mum? Did they, Nanny?’

  ‘Of course they never did!’ said Mrs Viney.

  ‘How did they do it, then?’

  ‘Oh, well… The doctor’s got a special light, I expect, and he shone it in Uncle Lenny’s ear.’

  Hearing that, Violet got hold of a crayon lipstick from her mother’s bag and, calling it the doctor’s light, she started to go from person to person saying she had to put it in their ears so that she could look at their brains. Frances obliged, tilting her head, tucking back her hair. But she did it distractedly, her eye on Vera. For, having offered her cigarettes, Vera had risen from the sofa to carry the saucer of stubs to the hearth and throw its contents on to the coals; but instead of returning to her place she had set the saucer on the mantelpiece and was looking around, in search of something. Frances, her heart beginning to thud, watched her go to the easy chair and glance over the back of it; she watched her wander across the room, to look in the shadows beneath the table. After that, there was only one more place for her to try. She went to the sofa, peered behind it, and – oh, Christ, here it came. She reached a muscular braceleted arm into the gap between the sofa and the wall, brought out the stand-ashtray and, with a grunt of satisfaction, set it squarely down on the r
ug.

  Frances stared at the thing with eyes that, for a moment, seemed unable to close. There was a scorch-mark on the base of it, from where she had held it to the coals. And just an inch from where it stood on the carpet she could see, now, one of the stains. Again she felt the grip of Leonard’s fingers, the burn of his cheek. The violence, the horror – it was all still here, in this cosy room. Couldn’t anyone else feel it?

  But Netta, Min and Mrs Viney were fussing with the baby, Vera was thumbing a flame from a ladies’ lighter, and no one gave the ashtray a glance – no one save the little girl, who capered around it, the lipstick held between her fingers in a flapperish way. She hadn’t got a doctor’s light now, she announced, she’d got a cigarette; no she hadn’t, she’d got a cigar. And for the next few minutes she made elaborate play of puffing on the end of the crayon, then tapping it into the bronze-effect bowl.

  When Lilian and the men emerged from the bedroom, Lilian stood in the doorway, saw the ashtray, and the last remaining bit of blood in her face seemed to drain out of it. She looked so dreadful that her mother gave a cry at the sight of her, and Inspector Kemp said, Yes, he was sorry to have kept Mrs Barber so long. ‘But,’ with a lift of his eyebrows at Sergeant Heath, ‘we’ve everything we need for now, I think?’

  Frances saw the sergeant nod. He was tucking a bundle of things into his pocket: letters and papers, perhaps a railway ticket… She was too far off to be sure. The inspector stepped forward to retrieve his hat. Passing Violet at the ashtray, he gave her a genial tap on the head. ‘Having a smoke like the ladies, are you? What have you got there, a Player’s?’

  ‘It’s a De Reszke,’ she answered, in her withering way.

  ‘Oh! It is, is it?’

  Chuckling, he and the sergeant made their way out to the landing. When Frances rose to escort them, they waved her back. They could see themselves out, they assured her. They had put her to too much trouble already…

  As their steps faded on the staircase, she looked at Lilian. ‘Are you all right?’