The Little Stranger

  My own house sits at the top of the High Street, and as I approached it I saw, at the surgery door, a man: he was ringing the night-bell, then cupping his hands around his eyes to gaze in through the pane of frosted glass beside the door. He had on a hat and a coat with the collar up, and I couldn’t see his face; I supposed him a patient, and my heart sank. But hearing my car, he turned—and then I recognised David Graham. There was something about his pose that made me guess he had brought bad news. When I drew up, and saw his expression, I knew it must be very bad. I parked, and got out, and he came wearily over.

  He said, ‘I’ve been trying to find you. Oh, Faraday—’ He passed his hand across his mouth. The morning was so silent, I heard the rasp of his unshaved chin against his palm.

  I said, ‘What is it? Is it Anne?’ It was all I could think of.

  ‘Anne?’ He blinked his tired-looking eyes. ‘No. It’s—Faraday, I’m afraid it’s Caroline. There’s been an accident, at Hundreds. I’m so sorry.’

  A telephone call had come out from the Hall, some time around three. It was Betty, in a dreadful state, wanting me; I, of course, was not at home, so the exchange had passed the message on to Graham. He was given no details, told only that he must get out to Hundreds as quickly as he could. He had pulled on his clothes and driven straight there—only to find his way blocked by the chained park gates. Betty had forgotten about the padlock. He tried one gate, then drove around and tried the other, but both were very securely fastened, and far too high to climb. He was just on the point of heading home and calling Betty by telephone when he thought of the new council houses and the breach in the park wall. The houses now had rudimentary gardens, with chain-link fences at the back; he was able to clamber over one of these fences and make his way up to the Hall on foot.

  Betty answered the door to him, an oil-lamp trembling in her hand. She was, he said, ‘beyond hysteria’, almost dumb with shock and fear, and as soon as she had let him into the house he could see why. Behind her, in the moonlight, on the pink and liver-coloured marble floor, lay Caroline. She was dressed in her nightgown, the hem of it flung up and twisted. Her legs were bare, her hair seemed spread out like a halo around her head, and for a second, with the shadows so thick, he thought she might simply be lying there in some kind of fit or faint. Then he took the lamp from Betty and went over and, with horror, saw that what he had taken for the spread of Caroline’s hair was actually darkening blood; he realised that she must have fallen from one of the upstairs landings. Automatically he looked up, as if for broken banisters; there was nothing amiss. He lit another couple of lamps and briefly examined the body, but it was clear that Caroline was well beyond help. She would have died, he thought, the moment her head had struck the marble. He fetched a blanket and covered her over, then he took Betty downstairs, and brewed some tea.

  He hoped for an account of what had happened. But Betty, frustratingly, had nothing much to tell him. She had heard Caroline’s step on the landing, in the middle of the night. Coming out of her room to see what the matter was, she had actually seen Caroline’s falling body, then heard the dreadful thump and crack of it hitting the marble below. That was more or less all that she could say. She ‘couldn’t bear to think about it’. The sight of Caroline plunging down in the moonlight was the most horrible thing she’d ever seen. When she closed her eyes, she could still see it. She thought she’d ‘never be right again’.

  Graham gave her a sedative, and then, just as I had recently done, he picked up the old-fashioned Hundreds telephone and called for the police and the mortuary van. He also called me, wanting to let me know what had happened; again, of course, there was no answer. He thought of the vehicles that would soon be coming, and remembered the fastened park gates; he got the key to the padlocks from Betty and went back across the moonlit park to his own car. He said he was glad to leave the house, and reluctant to enter it again. He felt, irrationally, as if the place had a sickness in it, a sort of lingering infection in its floors and walls. But he stayed through all of the ensuing business: the arrival of the sergeant, and the loading of Caroline’s body into the van. It was all finished by five o’clock; after that, there was only Betty to deal with. She looked so shaken and pathetic, he considered taking her home with him; again, though, he found himself oddly unwilling to prolong his contact with the Hall. But it was out of the question to leave her alone in that frightful setting, so he waited while she put her things together, then drove her the nine-and-a-half miles to her parents’ house; he said she shivered all the way. After that he had returned to Lidcote, to tell Anne what had happened; and then he’d come looking for me.

  He said, ‘There was nothing you could have done, Faraday. And to be honest, I think it’s a blessing the call came to me. There would have been no pain, I promise you. But Caroline’s injuries—well, they were mostly to the head. It wasn’t something you should have seen. I just didn’t want you to hear about it from someone else. You were out with a patient, I suppose?’

  We were upstairs by now, in my sitting-room. He had taken me up there and given me a cigarette. But the cigarette was burning beside me, unsmoked: I was leaning forward in my armchair, my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. Without lifting my head, I said dimly, ‘Yes. An acute appendix. It looked bad for a while. I took the man to Leamington myself. Andrews sorted him out.’

  Graham said again, ‘Well, there was absolutely nothing you could have done. I wish I’d known you were at the hospital, though. I could have reached you sooner there.’

  I was having trouble piecing things together, and it took me a moment to understand him. But finally I realised that he assumed I had been at Leamington all night. I opened my mouth to tell him that, by a wretched coincidence, I’d actually been asleep in my car, only a couple of miles from Hundreds, when Caroline’s fall must have taken place. But as I drew my hands from my face, I remembered the queer state I had worked myself into the night before, and I felt a curious shame about it. So I hesitated, and the moment passed; and then it was too late to speak. He saw my confusion, and misinterpreted it as grief. He said again how desperately sorry he was. He offered to make me tea, cook me up a breakfast. He said he didn’t like to leave me on my own. He wanted me to go home with him, so that he and Anne could look after me. But to every suggestion, I shook my head.

  When he saw that he couldn’t persuade me, he slowly got to his feet. I rose too, to see him out, and we went downstairs to the surgery door.

  He said, ‘You look terrible, Faraday. I do wish you’d come back with me. Anne will never forgive me for not bringing you. Will you really be all right?’

  I said, ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re not going to sit here brooding? I know it’s a lot to take in. But,’ he grew awkward, ‘don’t go torturing yourself with all sorts of useless speculation, will you?’

  I peered at him. ‘Speculation?’

  ‘I mean, as to how exactly Caroline died. The post-mortem might shed some light on it. There might have been some kind of seizure, who knows? People are bound to assume the worst, but it was probably an ordinary accident, and we’ll simply never know for sure what happened … Poor Caroline. After all she’d been through. She deserved better, didn’t she?’

  I realised I hadn’t even begun to wonder what had caused her to fall; as if her death had a sort of inevitability to it, that could overpower logic. Then, muddily thinking over Graham’s words, I realised something else.

  I said, ‘You’re not suggesting she did it deliberately? You can’t think it was … suicide?’

  He said hastily, ‘Oh, I don’t think anything. I only mean, because of what happened with her mother, people are bound to wonder. Look, what the hell does it matter? Forget about it, will you?’

  ‘But it can’t have been suicide,’ I said. ‘She must have slipped, or lost her balance. That house, at night, with the generator off—’

  But I thought of the moonlight, that would have come streaming into t
he stairwell through the dome of glass in the roof. I pictured the solid Hundreds banister. I saw Caroline making her sturdy, sure-footed way along those familiar landings and stairs.

  I stared at Graham, and he must have seen the bewildered churning of my ideas. He put his hand on my shoulder and said firmly again, ‘Don’t think about it. Not now. It’s a ghastly thing, but it’s finished. It was no fault of yours. There was nothing anyone could have done. You hear me?’

  And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed. My thoughts chased themselves in uneasy circles for a time, then wore themselves out. I passed the next few days almost calmly, almost as if nothing much had changed; in a sense, for me nothing had changed. My neighbours and patients were very kind, but even they appeared to struggle to respond properly to Caroline’s death: it had come too soon after her mother’s, and was too much of a piece with all the other recent Hundreds mysteries and tragedies. There was a certain amount of muted debate about how the fall might have occurred, with most people, as Graham had predicted, favouring suicide, and many—thinking of Roderick, I suppose—mentioning madness. It was hoped that the post-mortem would reveal something; the results of the examination, however, did nothing to clear things up. For they revealed only that Caroline was fit and perfectly healthy. There had been no stroke, no seizure, no heart attack, and no struggle.

  I would have been bleakly content for the matter to be left there. No amount of debate or speculation would return Caroline to life; nothing would bring her back to me. But from an official point of view, cause of death had to be determined. As he had after Mrs Ayres’s suicide six weeks before, the borough coroner called for an inquest. And since I was the Ayres family doctor, to my very great dismay I was subpoenaed to attend.

  I went along with Graham, and sat at his side. The day was Monday the fourteenth of June. The court was not crowded, but the weather was fine; we were all of us dressed as if for a funeral, in heavy blacks and greys, and the room quickly grew warm. Glancing around me as I sat, I made out the various spectators: the newspaper-men, the family friends, Bill Desmond, and the Rossiters. Even Seeley, I saw, was there: he caught my eye, and inclined his head. Then I spotted Caroline’s Sussex uncle and aunt, sitting with Harold Hepton. I had heard that they had been to see Roderick, and had been shaken by how they’d found him. News of his sister’s death, apparently, had tipped him into absolute mania. They were staying out at Hundreds, doing what they could to sort out the estate’s tangled finances on his behalf.

  The aunt, I thought, looked ill. She seemed to want to avoid my eye. She and her husband would have heard from Hepton what had happened about the wedding.

  Proceedings began. The members of the jury were sworn in; the coroner, Cedric Riddell, outlined the case, then started to call forward the witnesses. There were not many of us. The first to go up was Graham, to give a formal account of his attendance at the Hall on the night in question, and to offer his conclusions as to the circumstances of Caroline’s death. He repeated the post-mortem results, which in his opinion ruled out the possibility of any physical crisis. He thought it much more likely, he said, that Caroline had simply fallen, through—as he put it—‘accident or design’.

  The local sergeant went up next. He confirmed that the house had given no sign of having been broken into, with its doors and windows all quite fast. He then produced photographs of Caroline’s body, which were passed to the jury, and to one or two other people. I didn’t see them, and was glad not to; I could tell from the jurors’ reactions that the images were grim ones. But the man also had photographs of the Hall’s second-floor landing, with its sturdy banister rail; Riddell looked closely at those, and requested details of the banister’s dimensions—its width, its height from the floor. He then asked Graham for Caroline’s measurements, and when Graham had hastily looked through his notes and provided them, he had one of his clerks improvise a mock-up of the banister, and invited the court secretary, a woman about the same height as Caroline, to stand beside it. The rail came to just above her hip. He asked her how easily she felt she might be tipped—say, after stumbling—over a rail at that height. She answered: ‘Not very easily at all.’

  He asked the sergeant to step down, and then he called Betty to the stand. She, of course, was the chief witness.

  This was the first time I had seen her since my last, disastrous visit to the Hall, a fortnight before Caroline’s death. She had come to the inquest with her father, and had been sitting with him at the side of the room; she made her way forward, a small, slight figure, looking more girlish than ever against that crowd of dark-suited men, her face pale, her colourless fringe pinned up at the side with a crooked grip, just as I remembered seeing it on my first trip to Hundreds nearly a year before. Only her clothes were a surprise to me, used as I was to her parlourmaid’s costume. She wore a neat skirt and jacket, with a white blouse beneath. Her shoes had little tapping heels to them, and her stockings were dark, with seams.

  She kissed the Testament with a nervous ducking of her head, but repeated the oath, and answered Riddell’s preliminary questions in a strong, clear voice. I knew that her words would basically be an elaboration of what she’d already told Graham, and I dreaded having to hear the story again in more detail. I rested my elbows on the table before me, and sat with my hand across my eyes.

  On the evening of the twenty-seventh of May, I heard her say, she and Miss Ayres had gone to bed early. The house was in ‘a funny way’ at that time, because virtually all of its carpets, curtains, and furniture had gone. Miss Ayres was due to leave the county on the thirty-first, and on the same day Betty herself had arranged to return to her parents. They were spending their final few days seeing to all the last jobs that had to be done before the house could be handed over to the agents. They had passed that particular day in sweeping and cleaning the empty rooms, and were very tired. No, Miss Ayres had not appeared to be in low spirits, was not dejected in any way. She had worked just as hard as Betty—if anything, she had worked harder. She had seemed to Betty to be looking forward to leaving, though she had not spoken much about her plans. She had said more than once that she ‘wanted the house to be left tidy, for whoever should live in it next’.

  Betty had gone to bed at ten o’clock. She had heard Miss Ayres go into her own room about half an hour later. She had heard it very clearly, because Miss Ayres’s room was just around the landing from her own. Yes, that was the first landing. There was a second landing above, both of them overlooking the hall by the same stairwell, both lit by a glass dome in the roof.

  At about half past two she had been woken by the creak of footsteps out on the stairs. At first she had been frightened. Why was that, Riddell asked her? She didn’t quite know. Possibly the house, being large and lonely, was an unnerving one at night? Yes, she supposed that was it. The fear, anyway, had soon passed. She’d realised the steps were Miss Ayres’s. She guessed that she had got up, perhaps to go to the lavatory, perhaps to make herself a warm drink in the kitchen downstairs. Then she heard more creaks, and realised with surprise that Miss Ayres was heading, not down, but up, to the house’s second floor. Why did she think Miss Ayres had done that? She couldn’t say. Was there anything up there but empty rooms? No, nothing at all. She had heard Miss Ayres go very slowly along the upstairs passage, as if she was feeling her way through the dark. Then she heard her stop, and make a sound.

  Miss Ayres had made a sound? What sort of sound?

  She had called something out.

  Well, what had she called?

  She had called out: ‘You.’

  I heard the word, and looked up. I saw Riddell pause. Gazing hard at Betty through the lenses of his spectacles he said, ‘You heard Miss Ayres call out the single word, “You.”’

  Betty nodded unhappily. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You are quite positive about that? She couldn’t simpl
y have been crying out? Exclaiming, or groaning?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. I heard it very clear.’

  ‘You did? And how exactly did she call it?’

  ‘She called it as if she had seen someone she knew, sir, but as though she was afraid of them. Mortal afraid. And after that I heard her running. She came running back towards the stairs. I got out of bed, and went over to the door, and quickly opened it. And that’s when I saw her falling.’

  ‘You saw the fall clearly?’

  ‘Yes, sir, because the moon was so bright.’

  ‘And did Miss Ayres make any sound as she fell? I know it’s a hard thing for you to recall. But did she seem to you to be struggling? Or did she drop straight, with her arms at her sides?’

  ‘She didn’t make any sound; only her breath was sort of rushing. And no, she didn’t drop straight. Her arms and legs were waving about. They were waving like—like when you pick up a cat and it wants to be set down.’

  Her voice had begun to falter on these last words, and now failed her completely. Riddell had one of the court clerks pour her a glass of water; he told her she was being very brave. But I heard all this, rather than saw it. I was leaning forward again with my hand across my eyes. For if the memory had proved too much for Betty, it had very nearly proved too much for me. I felt Graham touch my shoulder.

  ‘All right?’ he murmured.

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re sure? You look ghastly.’

  I straightened up. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’

  Reluctantly, he drew his hand away.