‘You did go and speak to Richard for a few minutes,’ he heard her saying in a faint, frightened voice, and the words seemed to come from an appalling distance. ‘Before we went out – about half past nine it must have been – Mr McHugh had only just come out and left the brandy there on the table. You can’t have forgotten. You asked me to wait for you.’
‘But I never went out of your sight!’ gasped Laurence. He couldn’t believe in this, it wasn’t happening. ‘You were there in the doorway the whole time, you must have seen every move I made.’
She stared back at him with dark eyes enormous in a blanched face, but she stood her ground. ‘You were between me and the table,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t see the glass while you were standing there – or your hands. You could have—’
‘But it was only a matter of seconds.’ He could hardly speak, the breath had gone out of him as though he had been hit hard in the solar plexus. ‘And how could I have got hold of the morphine? You’d been with me all the time in the bar—’ His voice foundered in the shoals of sand in his throat, and ceased to make any sound.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t tell anything but the truth, how can I? You’d just been upstairs to get your coat – and the doctor wasn’t in his room then, he was still in the dining room, I heard his voice while I was waiting for you to come down. Laurence, you must see I have to tell the truth – I can’t help it!’ She was almost in tears, but that didn’t alter the things she was saying. ‘You could have taken the tablets then – and you could have used them!’
Laurence felt behind him very carefully for a chair, dragged it round towards him, and let himself down dizzily into it. Miranda uttered a strangling sob and made a darting move towards him, and then, changing course as though a gale had blown her aside, turned and went for Susan like a fury, her fingers crooked into claws.
‘You bitch!’ shrieked the prim, pale mouth, contorted viciously. ‘You murderous, lying bitch!’ No one had ever heard such words from her before; the epithet most of them would have been prepared to swear was totally unknown to her, but she gave it the force of a slingshot. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she raved, ‘I’ll kill you for this!’
The attack was so unexpected that Susan threw up her hands and the men sprang between them far too late. The nails of Miranda’s right hand clawed red weals down Susan’s cheek, the left hand locked hard fingers in her hair. She gripped at a bony wrist, and fended off the second slash by a matter of an inch or so, forcing the lean hand violently away from her face. The one cry she had uttered under the shock of the assault was quite lost under the flood of Miranda’s frenzied screams.
Then Trevor and the doctor had flung themselves between the two women, and Neil had Miranda by the left wrist and was trying to prise open the fingers locked in Susan’s hair. It took them all their time to drag the two apart without damage. Miranda fought like an infuriated cat, writhing so violently that they could hardly hold her, and shrieking all the time on a wildly rising scale that was physical pain in the ears. No words now, only an agonising, hysterical screaming. When her strength failed her she collapsed through their arms to the floor, and lay cackling and howling in demented grief and laughter, and flinging herself about so recklessly at every approach that they were afraid to touch her.
The doctor pushed Laurence brusquely aside, dropped to his knees beside her, and held her down by the shoulders. Without turning his head he ordered urgently: ‘Neil, fetch my bag!’ Neil was already at the door when he added sharply: ‘Don’t handle it!’
‘Right!’ Neil shouted back, and fled up the stairs three at a time.
‘Frau Mehlert, some water!’
Frau Mehlert ran, too. Her husband brought a cushion for Miranda’s head. Liesl stood motionless by the door, saying nothing and missing nothing. She was nineteen, large, calm and rather beautiful. She had never seen hysterics before, and possibly never would again, and she was natural enough to be fascinated by the exotic. Laurence stood wavering helplessly between Susan’s dishevelled hair and bleeding face and his mother’s infinitely more distressing collapse. He knew he could do nothing, and yet did not feel absolved from trying. And all the while, hoarsely now, with a note of exhaustion in her shrillness, Miranda screamed.
The doctor was sparing of words and movements as he was of drugs, and even the shock of cold water he employed sparingly and neatly. The monotonous screams halted in a sharp gasp at the first tilt of the pitcher, then resumed feebly and spasmodically. At the second they subsided, and then faded naturally into quiet and exhausted weeping. Miranda lay openeyed, limp, and pathetic. Frau Mehlert went on her knees beside her and dried her face with smooth, round movements of a calm hand. Disturbances of a kind so easily comprehensible restored her large tranquillity.
‘That’s better,’ said the doctor shortly. ‘Now be quiet and lie still.’ Neil was at his elbow, the bag. carried carefully by its handle in a folded handkerchief, but the doctor took it firmly in his hands and opened it on the floor beside him. His prints would be all over it in any case, why should he fight shy of a few extra ones now? ‘Get me a glass, please.’ He gave her a sedative, and supported her while she swallowed it docilely. ‘We’d better get her to bed at once. Frau Mehlert, will you help me with her?’
Miranda’s convulsive trembling was ebbing now, and her strength seemed to have gone with it. She was so weak that they almost had to lift her to her feet and carry her upstairs. Laurence started forward to help her, but Neil took him by the wrist, quite gently, and held him back.
‘Not you, Laurence, if you don’t mind. Randall and Frau Mehlert will take good care of her, they don’t need you.’
He understood only too well, but he made no complaint. He followed his mother’s lame departure with sombre eyes, and said nothing. The trio were already in the hall when Neil released his hold, and went quickly after them. ‘Frau Mehlert, please—’ He followed them to the foot of the stairs, and the murmur of low voices went on for a few moments. Those in the dining room caught little of what passed, but Frau Mehlert’s full, warm voice illuminated their darkness, enquiring without astonishment: ‘And for what must I look?’
Neil came back into the room and closed the door. ‘I’ve asked Frau Mehlert to examine Mrs Quayne’s belongings. I hope you’ll all understand that we’ve no alternative. We have to try and find that phial with the remaining tablets, and the only fair way is to submit to a general search. If anyone wants to object, do it now.’
No one objected, and now not even Trevor found the heart to laugh. McHugh said: ‘The sooner the better. After that’s been done I take it we needn’t follow one another about any more, and we might even snatch a couple of hours sleep.’
‘Yes, I think we might. We shall have done all we can do at the moment. I shall ask Franz here to go through what pockets we’ve got among us in this rig, and then to look through our rooms. And Liesl will go upstairs with you, Susan.’ He approached her solicitously; she was sitting silent, withdrawn from the light; on her left cheek the four weals had bled a little and dried into dark-red lines. She looked beyond him to where Laurence stood, and her eyes were dilated and dark.
‘Are you all right, Susan? I’m terribly sorry about this. You mustn’t blame yourself, you couldn’t do anything else.’
‘I’m all right,’ she said steadily, and rose from her chair. ‘I’ll go.’ But from the door she looked back, and took a step towards Laurence, putting out an almost pleading hand.
‘Laurence, you must understand—’
‘I do understand,’ he said curtly, and turned his back on her.
She put her hands to her face, and turned and went out blindly, and Liesl put an arm round her shoulders and led her away. Laurence stood rigid until he heard the door close behind them, then he shrugged his way violently out of his coat, and began to empty his pockets upon one of the tables.
‘Better begin with me. I’m the only one still dressed. I suppose that’s a suspicious circumstance, too.’
‘There’s no need to take it like that.’ Neil was getting irritable with weariness, it showed in the abruptness of his movements and the arduous quietness and reasonableness of his voice. ‘We all propose to go through the same process, it makes no difference who’s first. Stop behaving as though you’ve been charged with murder.’
‘There you are, feel for yourself.’ Laurence raised his arms, and turned about defiantly under Franz Mehlert’s searching hands. ‘Satisfied? May I pocket my things again?’ He sat straight and watchful while they all in turn submitted to the same examination, but nothing illicit was turned out upon the table.
‘Maybe we should begin upstairs by looking in Mr Hellier’s room,’ suggested McHugh then, ‘in case it’s been disturbed in any way, or anything taken from it.’
No one believed in the possibility of discovering anything by that means, but it was their obvious duty to look. They went upstairs in a body, all five of them, but there was a subtle difference now in the way they clung together. They had begun this horrible night with everyone looking sidelong at everyone else. Now Laurence moved in the middle of them with a hectic colour burning in his face and his eyes fixed before him, while they watched him covertly from all sides, and evaded his eyes as often as he turned his head. He knew it, and could not even defend himself; they would only find additional evidence in his very sensitivity to looks and words.
At the top of the stairs they encountered Susan and Liesl, newly emerged from Susan’s bedroom; they had heard a door close as they mounted to the turn of the staircase. The two girls were flushed but calm. Susan had changed into pyjamas and housecoat.
‘We have finished,’ said Liesl, in the careful English of which she was both proud and shy. ‘There is nothing.’
‘Thank you,’ said Neil. ‘And Mrs Quayne?’
‘There also not. My mother and the doctor are still with the lady, but soon I think she sleeps.’
‘Good! If you don’t mind helping us for a little longer, I should like you to be with us while your father looks in our rooms, too. It’s best that we should all be witnesses.’
Richard’s room, empty and orderly, presented no revelations. His suitcases were disposed neatly on the luggage stand, but they were empty. He had unpacked, and arranged his clothes meticulously in the wardrobe. His briefcase, which seemed to be exactly as on arrival, lay on one of the shelves, unlocked but fastened, and its contents were what might have been expected, his personal papers, a flat writing case containing some letters, a travel book with the flap of the dust jacket turned in to keep his place, a wallet of photographs from Antonia’s last tour, and some notices cut from the newspapers of several countries. There was also a small and not very good miniature of Antonia as a girl, painted on ivory, in a worn leather case.
‘So that’s what he wouldn’t leave behind in the plane,’ said McHugh. ‘Well, everything seems in order here. Where next?’
‘You’d better begin with me,’ said Laurence, jutting his chin aggressively. ‘It’s what you’re all waiting for, why postpone it?’
Neil passed a hand over his forehead in a gesture of sudden disgust and sadness, but acquiesced simply: ‘You or another, what difference does it make?’
Laurence had the small room at the end of the wing that enclosed the farmyard. A faint smell of cattle pervaded it; some of the stalls were certainly below. The double window was small, and had no balcony outside; probably the room was usually one of the last to be filled. He threw open the door and stood back to let them go in before him; the little space seemed full to overflowing when they were all inside. He sat down defiantly on the edge of the bed, and drew his feet under him out of their way.
‘It’s all yours. Anything compromising you can find, I’ll eat.’
Neil looked at Franz, who gave a deprecating heave of his shoulders, and went methodically to work, emptying first the wardrobe, then the large suitcase on the luggage stand. Laurence was less tidy with his possessions than Richard had been, and much of his clothing came out of Franz’s hands more neatly folded than it had been before. The case provided a great deal of sheet music and some manuscript notes, and the normal assets of a young man who was not particularly interested in his person, but compelled to conform to a certain standard by his share in the public appearances of a celebrity. Indignant hazel eyes, under a fall of disordered fair hair, followed every movement, watched every item taken up or laid down. He hugged his knees and shivered a little. Franz ran his large fingers delicately round the lining of the case, and the angry eyes followed faithfully and bitterly.
The drawers of the dressing table, the shelf over the washbasin, the open brush case, produced nothing that was not expected and approved. There was a book lying on the bedside cabinet, and a large china ashtray beside it, with a tight twist of burned paper lying curled in it. Franz passed both with only a thoughtful glance, and looked round the room to see if he had missed anything.
McHugh, inexhaustible and irrepressible, advanced from among the silent watchers and peered at the ashtray thoughtfully. ‘I thought you didn’t smoke.’
‘I don’t.’ Laurence turned his head with a jerk to see to what the obscure remark referred, and stiffened and frowned at sight of the coil of black ash, one end ground to powder, the other still intact. There was even a wisp of scorched but unburned paper, by which it had evidently been held between somebody’s fingers. But not his. He had not been into his room since fetching his coat, and there had been no such relic in the ashtray then. He straightened on the edge of the bed, and his hands went down and clenched nervously on the yielding softness of the feather quilt. McHugh had picked up the ashtray and was carrying it under the light. With a careful forefinger he probed at the blackened folds to which the scraps of white still adhered.
Franz stretched down a negligent hand and turned back the pillow. A thick black leather notebook, fastened with a metal clasp, lay on the smooth, glazed sheet. He took it up, hesitating whether to open it.
‘You can bloody well put that back,’ said Laurence, bristling. ‘That’s my diary.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ yelled Neil in an ungovernable spurt of nerves. ‘Nobody’s going to interfere with your diary.’
In the act of replacing the book Franz hesitated again, and then slowly drew back his hand. The shape of the soft leather spine was oddly distorted for half its length. It was not obvious to the eye, but his fingers had chafed at the feel of the spot where the bulge ended. He looked once at Laurence, and then snapped open the clasp.
‘Put it back, I said.’ Laurence came to his feet, raging, but Trevor caught at his arms and held him still. The doctor had entered the room and joined them unobserved, and was watching from just within the doorway. At his shoulder appeared the tired face of Frau Mehlert.
Franz opened the notebook in the middle, so that the pull on the spine was eased. He turned the open book upright and shook it, but whatever was lodged fitted too tightly to slide out upon the bed. He took a pencil from his pocket, and thrust it down the spine, and something moved unevenly before it, and stuck, and moved again.
Laurence had frozen into stupefied stillness now, and was staring with wide eyes at the reluctantly moving bulge which should not have been there. He moistened his dry lips, and tried to speak and could not, as Franz levered out on to the pillow a short tube of glass, stoppered with white plastic, with a handwritten label.
Among the huddle of silent watchers someone heaved a gasping sigh. The doctor stepped forward and fixed upon the phial a long, grim stare; there was no need for him to identify it.
‘Only two left,’ he said, and looked up into Laurence’s blanched face. ‘What have you done with the rest of them?’
‘I never had them.’ Laurence’s voice was flat and hopeless; he did not expect to be believed now, whoever had done this to him had managed it only too well. ‘I don’t know how it got there. I only know I didn’t put it there. I never saw it before.’
‘Did you use all the rest on Richar
d?’ pursued the doctor relentlessly.
‘I tell you I never had them. I know nothing about them.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, shaking his head helplessly, trying to rouse himself out of this hideous dream, but when he opened his eyes again the glass phial still lay there upon his pillow. He could not blink it away. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said without emphasis, ‘I know that. But I’m telling you the truth. Someone else has planted the thing on me. Someone’s elected me as a scapegoat for this business.’
He raised his head with sudden purpose, and looked for Susan. She stood with her shoulders flattened back against the wall, and her face was as pale and blank as his own. Above the whiteness of her unscarred cheek her eyes looked quite black.
‘It’s for you I’m carrying the can, isn’t it?’ he said in an almost inaudible voice. ‘I don’t know how you did it, but you made a good job of fixing me.’
The great eyes stared back at him, but she made never a sound. It was Neil who said sharply: ‘You’re wasting your efforts, Laurence. Since you gave the alarm and we all came down Susan hasn’t been alone for a moment. She’s had no opportunity whatever of planting evidence in your room, and you know it.’
‘I know it was done, by her or by someone else. I know I never saw your damned tablets, or that phial, or—’
‘Or this?’ said McHugh.
He extended the ashtray in one hand. In the other he held a nail file he had picked up from the dressing table. With the point he had prised apart the tatters of scorched paper, and pressed out a thin, frayed ribbon of singed white on which distinct traces of handwritten words showed.
‘You need the glass to see it properly, but my sight’s above average, and I can tell you now what you’ll find there. This bit comes from where one fold was made, it’s the end he held when he burned it, and because it was pinched tight it didn’t quite burn away. I’m pretty sure the handwriting could be identified by anyone who knows it well, but even without that the few words left are enough.’