Blount gave Nigel one of his coldest looks. ‘Why?’
‘He might tell me things he’d hold back from your official inquiry. You’re an intimidating sort of bloke, you know.’
‘I may take it you’re not acting on any one’s behalf in this affair?’
‘Not now,’ replied Nigel, a sudden vision of Elizabeth Restorick in the outrageous beauty of her death flashing through his mind.
‘Very well then. I shall expect you to pass on all relevant information, of course.’
‘That’s understood.’
Nigel found Will Dykes poking about in the library and brought him out into the garden. The novelist seemed to have taken a grip on himself since yesterday, though his eyes showed he had slept little last night. They walked briskly, for the wind bit hard, towards the sheltered side of the house where stood a coppice of birches holding the snow delicately at their fingertips.
‘Are you – spying out the land for the police?’ asked Dykes flatly when they had got beyond earshot of the house.
‘You don’t like the police?’
‘People of my class never have liked them. They’re the paid guardians of privilege, and every one with any sense knows it.’
‘I gathered you’d feel like that. That’s why I want a little preliminary talk with you. Blount – that’s the C.I.D. chap – is very much the policeman. He’s fair enough, and able, but he doesn’t allow his heart to interfere with his head.’
‘Why should he?’
‘He might be a better detective if he did. But that’s by the way. My point is – he’d put your back up, put you on the defensive, make you give a far worse impression of yourself than you need.’
Dykes was about to make a truculent reply. But he thought better of it. Nigel’s words appealed to the novelist in him – the analytic observer.
‘Maybe you’re right. Yes. You seem to have got some sense, young man. Though I’m damned if I can see what business it is of yours.’
‘Never mind about that. And let’s get this clear. I’m not on your side. Not on any one’s side. Except perhaps Elizabeth Restorick’s. Anything you tell me, which I believe relevant to the inquiry, I shall pass on to the police. I’m talking to you because I believe you’d feel able to say things to me you wouldn’t say before a row of policemen.’
‘Plain speaking, eh? Well, I reckon it’s a tonic after the milk-and-water of some of those in there.’ He jerked a finger towards the house. ‘Not that I’ve anything to conceal.’
‘I dare say not. Except, perhaps, your blushes.’
Will Dykes halted and studied him keenly. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. The sex side of it. Well, I dare say I used to be a bit of a prude – working-class chaps are foul-mouthed all right, but they don’t wear dirty hearts on their sleeves like that Ainsley bitch. Still, after the sort of people Betty ran around with, I’m properly inured.’
‘How long had you known her?’
‘Six months. No, eight. It was in May. I met her at one of those bloody publishers’ parties. You know – I was being shown off. We took to each other, because all the rest of the people in the room looked such a bloodless crew. Talk about ghosts! Betty was no angel. But, my God! she’d got some blood in her.’
‘You say she was no angel. Did you know she was a drug-addict?’
The novelist grunted involuntarily, as if he had been struck over the heart. ‘Is that true?’ he demanded, seizing Nigel by the arms. His tears yesterday, his violence now – there was an easy emotionalism about the man which you might call a flaw of character if you were born to the standards of the Restoricks, thought Nigel.
‘I’m afraid so. It came out at the post-mortem. Cocaine.’
‘So that’s what it was,’ muttered Dykes. ‘Poor Betty. Oh, the vile, cold devils!’
‘You suspected it, then?’
‘That Ainsley woman hinted at it. And others of Betty’s friends. “Friends”! My God! If only she’d told me! We could have faced it out together. Who – introduced her to the stuff?’ Dykes added with murderous rage in his eyes.
‘We don’t know. I’d like to tell you this, Dykes. Six months ago, Elizabeth put herself under Bogan’s treatment. She wanted to be cured of the habit. Has that date any significance for you?’
‘Significance? Oh, I get you. Yes, it was about six months ago I asked her to marry me.’
‘She agreed?’
‘She said I must wait. I see why now. She wanted to be cured first. I remember her saying – it was on top of a bus, we used to go for long bus-rides in London – you know, take a ticket from one end to the other – a new thrill it was for her, I suppose, riding on a bus – she said: “Willie, I love you, God knows why – but I love you too much to let you marry me yet.” Now I understand it.’
They were walking on into the birch coppice, struggling through the thick snow. A queer setting for such a tête-à-tête, thought Nigel.
‘Pretty, these trees, aren’t they? We used to have one in our backyard at home. Always covered with soot. A pretty, black girl.’
‘Were you lovers?’ asked Nigel.
‘No. Betty wanted it. But I wasn’t having any of that. Marriage or nowt, I said. And nowt’s what I’ve got.’
Little by little, Nigel reflected, he was realizing the strange attraction Will Dykes must have had for Elizabeth. At first, he’d put it down to sheer perversity on her part. But Will, he could see now, was not just a new thrill for her, he was a new world. He combined imaginative understanding with sturdy common sense and a code of morality she had never met. But it was more than that. It was the impact upon her own of a personality which combined loyalty with lack of illusions. He would treat her neither as a Cleopatra nor a playgirl. The kind of men she had met before would feel for her the awe that precedes a too easy passion and the contempt that follows it. They could at no time, as Dykes did, perceive in her an equal, to be respected. Moreover, the very intensity of Elizabeth’s passion, the all-for-love-ness of her life, would deeply shock the ordinary philandering man. Such men, afraid to commit themselves as deeply as Elizabeth, for to do so would be to go right out of their depth, must always have failed her. But Will Dykes, Nigel fancied, would not be shocked nor afraid: though physically she might enslave him, a part of him would remain not so much her master as out of her control, detached, self-sufficient.
Yes, Will Dykes represented for her that stability and wholesomeness which every rake, at some stage of his progress, yearns for. But this did not necessarily mean he had not murdered her.
‘You realize,’ said Nigel after a long silence, ‘that you’ll be suspected by the police?’
‘Suspected of killing Betty? I suppose so. Trust them to pick on a working-class chap if they can.’
‘It won’t be for that reason. They’ll say it was a crime passionel, that you had been her lover, and killed her from jealousy because she had thrown you over for Dr Bogan. For all I know, they may be right.’
Will Dykes spat. ‘What a filthy business! Reckon I’ll never get the taste of it out of my mouth. Me kill Betty! Oh well, it should be a lesson to me to stick to my own folk.’ They had turned back, by tacit consent, towards the house. ‘You think I’m callous, Mr Strangeways? I ought to be saying that my life is finished now Betty’s dead? Nay, you can get over anything. I’m lucky. I’ve got my books to write, and I’ve got Betty in my heart to keep me going. Chaps like me – we’re used to the rough side of things. Not like those sheltered ones in there’ – he jerked his thumb at the house – ‘who think it’s the end of the world if the electric light fails.’
‘I wouldn’t call Andrew Restorick a sheltered type.’
‘Oh, he’s not so bad. But he’s always had this to fall back upon, if the worst came to the worst. No, they don’t get within a hundred miles of life. Look at this stuff –’ Dykes kicked his foot through the snow. ‘Where I come from, it means snowballs for the kiddies – with stones in ’em; it means your clothes aren’t thick enough and your fi
re isn’t big enough; maybe it means a stoppage of work and less money in the pay-packet on Fridays. Aye, it does so, and we don’t make a song about it. But what do these folk here make of it? Just a bit of icing on their cake. Or a damned inconvenience – the pipes burst, and they kick up such a fuss you’d think it was Noah’s flood, and then they have to send for one of us to mend them. Or the trains are a bit late, and that silly Ainsley girl won’t get up to town in time for her appointment with the beauty specialist, and she’ll –’
‘Take it out on you?’ Nigel suggested.
‘On me? Why should she?’
‘You two seem to be permanently at loggerheads, judging by your performance the night before last.’
‘I didn’t like the way she hinted things. I didn’t know what she was hinting at, then. I thought it was just plain jealousy.’
Nigel suppressed a smile. The idea of this stumpy little man, with his oiled quiff, his coarse skin and coarser manner, being a battleground for two such elegant females – it was laughable. Disconcertingly, Will Dykes divined his thought.
‘Funny, isn’t it? You have to laugh. Y’see, in the ordinary way, Miss Ainsley wouldn’t look at me twice. A shatteringly common little twirp, my dear’ – he mimicked her drawl to the life. ‘But she became obsessed by the interest Betty took in me. What could Betty see in me? It began to worry her. After a bit, I’ve no doubt she was thinking I must be a Great Lover, a sort of Valentino in disguise. And the next step was she wanted me herself. It’s a fair knock-out, is female curiosity. That’s why she was jealous.’
‘Yes, I see. Miss Ainsley was an old friend of Elizabeth?’
‘I believe so. One of that click, any road. The trouble with Betty was being so warm-hearted – people like that have no discrimination. Like the sun, shining upon the just and the unjust.’
A good epitaph for Elizabeth Restorick, thought Nigel. Well, we must get on with it.
They entered the house, and Nigel took Dykes along to the writing-room. He had hoped to put a call through to London, but Blount told him the wires were down. That meant an icy protracted railway journey for him. Still, it was necessary. He had come down to Easterham to see about a cat, and he intended to go through with the mission.
CHAPTER TEN
‘How soon prospers the vicious weed!’
PHINEAS FLETCHER
IT WAS ON the afternoon of the same day, while Nigel’s train was painfully making its way to London in the face of snowdrifts and iced-up points, that Georgia unwittingly laid her finger upon another of the scattered pieces of the puzzle. With her cousin’s consent, she had invited the Restorick children to spend the afternoon at the Dower House. They were a little subdued when they arrived, for that morning they had been told of their Aunt Betty’s death, but a protracted snowball fight with Georgia in the garden, which incidentally made John revise his opinion that women could never throw straight, soon restored their spirits.
When it was over, they went indoors. Georgia had been doubtful how to entertain children in a house of which three-quarters was as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard and the rest full of priceless and fragile bric-à-brac. The problem, however, was resolved by fetching down a number of trunks from the attics into one of the empty rooms and building them up to make an imaginary pirate ship. John, as the pirate captain, made Georgia and Priscilla walk the plank to his heart’s content. Georgia, combining the rôles of victim and navigator, forgot for a while the tragedy hanging over Easterham Manor, and Priscilla seemed quite happy in being ordered about by her masterful brother.
During an interval of the game, Georgia lit a cigarette and in fun offered one to John. ‘Smoke, captain? Or do you chew your tobacco?’ she said.
The effect of this harmless remark was odd. The children exchanged covert glances, whether of guilt or simple embarrassment Georgia could not decide. Perhaps they indulged in an occasional secret smoke at home. But she fancied that John Restorick had momentarily winced away a little from the cigarette case she extended to him.
‘No, thanks. We never smoke,’ said Priscilla a trifle sanctimoniously.
‘Aunt Betty smoked like a chimney,’ said John. ‘She was an addict.’
‘It isn’t fair. Why should grown-ups –? I mean, she got in a frightful flap when we –’
‘Oh, shut up, Priscilla. She’s dead now. I say, Mrs Strangeways, why are there policemen in the house?’
It was the question Georgia had dreaded. ‘Hasn’t your mother told you about it?’
‘I dunno. She said Aunt Betty wanted to die and go to Heaven, so she did. Do policemen always come into the house when a person dies like that?’
‘Yes. There’s a law about it.’
‘I think it’s silly,’ said Priscilla. ‘Why shouldn’t you die if you want to?’
Georgia had no answer to this, and did not feel that the ordinary vague reassurance or changing of the subject would pass with these children. It was they, to her relief, who changed the subject. Swinging his legs over the bulwarks of the pirate ship, John said abruptly:
‘Do you believe in ghosts, Mrs Strangeways?’
‘Well, I’ve not seen any,’ she replied. ‘Have you?’
A cunning, secretive look came into the boy’s eyes. ‘Oh, our house is full of them,’ he boasted.
Georgia had the fancy that, in spite of appearances, he was side-tracking the subject.
‘Don’t talk bosh, Rat,’ said Priscilla. ‘You’ve not seen them, anyway. You wouldn’t half whiz away if you did.’
‘That’s what you think, Mouse.’
‘Are you talking about the Bishop’s room?’ Georgia asked.
A faint frown of puzzlement showed on John’s face, then it closed down into the stubborn, mock-innocent look which warns the sensitive adult not to press a child’s confidence any farther. Georgia let it go, and they resumed their game.
It was not till nearly ten o’clock that Nigel returned from London. He was numb with cold, but experiencing the agreeable light-headedness of the civilized man who has endured a few mild unaccustomed rigours.
‘They had to dig the train out of a drift,’ he announced proudly, as he gulped down some of Miss Cavendish’s whisky – “a glass of spirits” as she described it.
‘And did you dig anything out in London?’ asked Georgia.
‘We are not impressed. We ourself think nothing of walking over the Andes in mid-winter, but –’
‘It wasn’t mid-winter,’ Georgia protested.
‘– but here is a person who makes a song about being held up for an hour or two in a drift. Yes, I know. But I believe scientists would concur with me in stating that snow is as cold in England as in South America. This is excellent whisky, Clarissa.’
‘I am gratified that you approve it. Pray take another glass.’
‘Thank you, I will.’
‘So you did find out something in London. Nigel has an irritating weakness for dramatizing his squalid little discoveries,’ Georgia explained to Miss Cavendish. ‘He holds up the action for his entrance like a spoilt matinée idol.’
‘A metaphor from the playhouses,’ remarked Miss Cavendish. ‘It is apt enough. I believe it may suffice.’
‘Well, as you insist on spoiling my entrance, I’ve a good mind to dry up on you. However, here it is. Uncle John put me on to one of their poison-experts. He recognized Scribbles’ symptoms at once. The cat had been dosed with hashish.’
‘Hashish? Upon my soul!’ exclaimed Miss Cavendish. ‘That is the drug, if I am not mistaken, from which we derive the word “assassin”.’
Nigel gazed down his nose. His hand, straying to the side-table on which his glass of whisky rested, took up absent-mindedly a very different object. It was a musical box, and it began to play – in tones thin and crystal as an icicle: ‘Where’er You Walk.’ They heard out the air in silence. Even at that moment they could not interrupt it. Then Georgia said:
‘Is there some connexion? I mean, between the “assassin” dru
g and the murder? It becomes more and more like the play scene in Hamlet.’
‘Except that in this case the murder was still to come.’
‘And, of course, Miss Restorick wasn’t killed by a drug.’
‘Hashish,’ announced Miss Cavendish in her most donnish manner, ‘is derived from Indian Hemp. To-day it is used chiefly for the purpose of obtaining sensuous intoxication. But the original “assassins” were members of a Mohammedan sect, headed by a person who earned the sobriquet of “Old Man of the Mountains.” This sect was in the habit of employing the drug as a kind of stimulant before murder. Its effects, in the later stages, are conducive to extreme violence and cruelty. I make no doubt that the cat was experiencing hallucinations similar to those felt by the “assassins”.’
‘Good Lord, cousin Clarissa!’ exclaimed Georgia, ‘you sound as if you were a devotee of hashish yourself!’
‘The facts should be familiar to every schoolgirl,’ replied the old lady, austerely.
‘Oh, damn!’ cried Nigel. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ He had dropped the musical box on to the floor, where it tinkled a few bars of Handel and then gave out.
‘You’re tired, I am sure, Nigel,’ Miss Cavendish said. ‘No, please, it is of no consequence at all. The instrument is undamaged. But we must not keep you any longer from your well-earned repose.’
The well-earned repose had to be postponed for a little, though. Up in their bedroom, Georgia asked him why he had dropped the musical box.
‘No, it wasn’t to create a diversion, I swear,’ he said. ‘I was just startled out of my wits.’
‘But why? Clarissa only said the facts should be familiar to every schoolgirl.’
‘Exactly. School-girl.’
‘Well, naturally. She was a schoolmistress. A female don, anyway. It’d be just the phrase she’d use to quell some young upstart at Girton.’
‘It’s not that I’m thinking of. Her words gave me a thought association I’ve been groping after all the way from London. Listen. Elizabeth Restorick was a schoolgirl in America. She went wrong. Now then. You’ve heard of marijuana; it’s home-grown Indian hemp. Since the last war, there’s been growing anxiety in the United States over the practice of dope-pedlars haunting the vicinity of high schools and selling marijuana to the boys and girls in the form of candies or cigarettes. Marijuana creates erotic hallucinations. Hashish or marijuana crops up just before Elizabeth’s death. Was it also the original cause of her downfall? Surely there must be a connexion – or why should any one dope the cat with the stuff?’