Death of a Salesperson (25 page)

‘Right,' said Jonathan. ‘Two out. The rest of us all had. I was there with Nicky two or three times, trying on clothes. Both of us were in and out of the loo—to wash hands, quite apart from anything else. Voilà us!'

He looked around, as if expecting the rest to come clean.

‘I was there once after the engagement, to congratulate her,' said Cybella. ‘To tell you the truth, I've no idea whether I went to the loo or not. It's not the sort of thing one notes down in one's diary.'

‘I was there several times,' said Judith. ‘I expect I went to the bathroom.'

‘I went once,' said Pam. ‘I was . . . happier about her after the engagement. I went to wish her well. I didn't go into the bathroom, but you've only my word for that. There was no one else in the flat.'

Really, thought Lottie, looked at objectively Pam is a very likely suspect. The woman scorned. I imagine the police have only her word that it was
after
the engagement she visited the flat.

‘I went often, of course,' said Mike abruptly. ‘I must have gone to the loo, on one or other occasion.'

‘You don't need to explain yourself, Mike,' said Lottie warmly. ‘you're one who isn't under suspicion.'

She looked around for the rest to back her up. She found they were all looking at their plates.

‘Well, that didn't seem to get us very far,' said Gabriel. ‘Perhaps we ought to look at motive.'

Here there was an uneasy shuffling of feet. This was something they all found far from easy to discuss in the presence of Mike.

‘Right, darlings,' said Nicholas, ‘this is going to be embarrassing, but the only thing to do is to be quite open about it. We'll examine every possibility, however far-fetched. Where shall we start? Let's say Judith. Now, Judith, you fancied Davina, right?'

Judith nodded, with some dignity. Lottie thought: But you could say that Judith had a better motive than Pam, after the engagement. I suppose that's what Nicholas will fix on.

‘So Judith could well regard the engagement to Mike as a spurning of her advances. She could conceive a hatred for the poor girl, regard herself as having been used, or played with. I'm not saying you
did
, darling, merely that you
could have.'

‘Of course,' said Judith.

‘And then there's Pam: as we could all see, she was madly jealous.'

‘A bit jealous,' put in Pam, ‘not madly.'

‘However that may be, the engagement
lessens
the motive rather than the reverse. Still, you could have tampered with the thing
before
the engagement.'

‘I was only in the flat
after
it,' said Pam.

‘Point taken. But we only have your word for that.' Nicholas is quick, thought Lottie. The police are sure to check on that. ‘Then there's Gabriel. He could have fancied her.'

‘I did fancy her.'

Lottie tried to hide her look of contempt at her brother.

‘Motive obvious: scorned advances. Jonathan and I are different. If Jonathan were the least bit bisexual—'

‘But you know I'm not, my dears. Otherwise Cybella would certainly have been the object of my lustful advances.'

‘What I've missed,' said Cybella.

‘If he were, or if I were, there might lie a motive. Or do we fancy Mike, do you think? No, I think we'll have to come up with something non-sexual, and I'm open to suggestions.'

He looked around, but nobody, not even Lottie, could come up with any.

‘Ah well, leave that open. Now, since we're on the subject of fancying Mike, both Cybella and Lottie fancied Mike, as we all know.'

‘You can't know anything of the kind,' Lottie protested.

‘I love him like a daughter,' said Cybella. ‘You seem to forget how much
younger
I am than all of you.'

‘Don't rub it in, darling. Ageism is quite as bad as racism, and some of us are sensitive. Anyway, who's to say you haven't got a father fixation? Why else hang around with all us pathetic oldies? And then you see the daughter-role taken over by someone else. And then there's Mike: he may have repented of his proposal—'

‘I never did,' said Mike bleakly.

‘Mike's not in question,' said Lottie.

‘Oh, but he is. He may have felt he was being led by the nose, a Trotskyite lamb to the Christian altar. We all know what loss of one's Socialist purity means to someone like Mike. And then there's Mike's children.'

‘Bring me in by all means, but leave them out,' said Mike. ‘They all loved her. And can you really imagine them getting hold of cyanide?'

‘What kids get hold of always surprises their parents,' said Nicky. ‘Well, if we are to judge things so far, I'd say Pam was fairly strong on motive, but weak on opportunity, and the same goes for Judith and Cybella. I'd count Gabriel and Lottie pretty strong on motive, but weak on opportunity. I think Jonathan and I are weak on motive, but very strong on opportunity. I'd count Mike—well, I don't know how I'd estimate Mike from the point of view of motive. We just don't have the information.'

To take the heat off Mike, Lottie said: ‘The idea that Mike might kill his own fiancée is about as farfetched as the idea that I was or am in love with him.'

To her amazement there was a general laugh.

‘Oh, come off it, Lottie,' Pam said. ‘You can't expect us not to have noticed that you've been making sheep's eyes at him for the past three years.'

So much for female solidarity, Lottie thought, boiling.

‘You have loved him with a love that has made his life a burden,' said Jonathan.

‘Don't,' said Mike. ‘I hate pointless cruelty.'

‘I'm not so sure it is pointless,' said Nicholas.

‘Of course it's pointless, since she hadn't been near Davina's flat since the engagement was announced. And you said yourself that the only time she was there, she was in and out of the bathroom in no time, far too fast to inject the spray.'

‘True, true. Still, she has such a first-rate motive: so besottedly in love with you for years, and your occasional
kindness only making things worse. It's no secret you told Davina to come over to yours every time she saw Lottie going there. In view of that splendid motive, perhaps we ought to look more closely at means. For example, could she have got a spray of
Autumnfresh
from one or other of Davina's workmates? She could be a friend of one of them.'

‘I do not make a habit of being friendly with salespersons in chain stores,' said Lottie waspishly. ‘I'm not being snobbish. I just don't find them as stimulating as you all seem to.'

‘Anyway,' said Cybella, ‘they've both still got their sprays.'

‘Hmm. Is there a photographic laboratory at this advertising firm you work for?' asked Jonathan.

‘Of course there is,' said Lottie. ‘It's one of the most important parts of any advertising firm.'

‘Possible source of potassium cyanide,' Jonathan murmured.

‘This is ridiculous!' protested Lottie. ‘It's turning into a kangaroo court! We should be looking into who
else
—outside the group—could have wanted to kill her.'

But she got no response. There was a silence in the room that amounted to an Atmosphere.

‘I wondered how any of us could have got hold of potassium cyanide,' said Nicholas meditatively. ‘That's the answer.'

‘Oh, for God's sake,' said Lottie. ‘Mike's a cameraperson.'

‘But Mike doesn't have your motive,' said Nicholas. ‘Because in spite of what I said, all of us could see he was terribly in love with her, and stayed that way. And if he hadn't—all he had to do was break it off. You had motive, access to poison . . .'

‘But I didn't go near her flat after the engagement was announced,' said Lottie. ‘So the whole discussion is pointless.'

‘But is
when
you went so important?' asked Nicholas
thoughtfully. ‘It was clear which way the wind was blowing. We all sensed it—though we may not have expected
marriage.
Most of us were happy, because we liked Davina. You didn't—and I bet you sensed the danger twice as quickly as anyone else, because you were directly involved. You'd been angling for Mike for years, and it was clear long before the actual engagement that you'd lost him to Davina. So even when you went to the flat, just before the announcement, you had a motive.'

‘I think we should cut this short,' said Lottie, getting up and collecting plates and glasses, since Cybella—absorbed in the discussion—didn't seem inclined to do it. ‘I couldn't have injected cyanide into the spray. You agreed yourself I was no time in the bathroom.'

She looked triumphantly round, and saw that everyone in the room looked miserable and uncertain. But suddenly Nicholas jumped to his feet and grabbed her by the arm.

‘You could have substituted!' he shouted. ‘You could have substituted a poisoned spray you'd prepared here!'

‘Don't be silly,' said Lottie, shaking him off. ‘How could I have got hold of
Autumnfresh
? All the sprays are accounted for.'

But he held on to her.

‘Who else would the makers have sent advance samples to, apart from stores that might stock it?'

The answer came from Lottie's own brother, sitting miserably on the floor.

‘Advertising agencies.'

‘Who had the
Autumnfresh
account?' shouted Nicholas. ‘Who? Was it your firm, Lottie?'

‘I don't know, I don't know,' she screamed back. ‘You're all hateful, out of your minds. How could I know she had the damned stuff in her bathroom? Am I really the sort of person who goes round comparing notes about mouth-sprays with people?'

It was a point. Nicholas let go of her arm. Lottie was
turning to go out of the room when Cybella said: ‘When you went there, Lottie, you were returning a book, weren't you?'

‘Yes, I was.'

‘When did you borrow it?'

Lottie looked at Cybella in silence for some moments, and when she failed to outstare her she turned and marched into the kitchen. She put the plates on the table, and then rested her hands on it to get her breath back. I'm silly to be upset, she thought. It's just a game. Maybe next time we get together they'll play Get Cybella, or Get Judith. It's Davina, dividing us in death, as she did in life. To think this was a close, loving little community of people before she came along and spoiled everything!

She started up, as she heard the front door shut softly. Going back into the living-room she saw them all scuttling away. Perhaps they felt ashamed. They were going to Mike's! Mike would stamp on all this nonsense. Dear old Mike.

It was the betrayal that hurt most, Lottie wrote in the article she sent to
Spare Rib.
That was the feeling that was uppermost in her mind when the police car drew up outside her house next day. That and the feeling that they had gone against all their principles: they hadn't only suspected her, they had gone to the police with their suspicions! ‘When I remember how often we discussed alternatives to punishment, and caring community action as a substitute for policing, the sense of betrayal is total.' Once they had voiced their suspicions it was inevitable (though Lottie did not dwell on this) that the police should go along to Capstone and Willis, find out about the advance trade samples of
Autumnfresh
, hear about the loss of potassium cyanide from the lab. When you think, Lottie lamented, of all her cheerful endeavours to cement them into a happy, mutually supportive team!

It was characteristic of Lottie that she ended her article,
smuggled out of Holloway Prison, on an up-beat note. It took some time, she said, to adapt to a confinement situation. But she had begun to collect around her a really super group of concerned and caring women, and she was coming to understand that only in an isolated, all-female community, totally cut off from a male-dominated, consumer-oriented society could true freedom for women be attained. Fancy having to come to prison, she burbled on, in very much her old manner, to experience real Liberation!

‘T
hat's my last girlfriend,' said Miles, when he caught Deborah looking at the framed snap on the side table.

They were together on Miles's specially roomy sofa, and neither of them had a stitch on, though Miles had managed to retain his Sagittarius charm. Already Deborah was talking in terms of moving in. She was somehow on top of him when she spotted the photograph, and she swivelled round to sit by his long legs and look at it.

‘She looks nice,' she said, unrancorously. ‘Sort of pleasant—smiling.'

Miles turned and looked, apparently unconcerned, at the picture of him in full boating rig, standing beside the smiling girl.

‘Oh yes,' he said. ‘She smiled all right.'

‘Who took the snap?'

‘My pater. And he's about sixty-five, so you can get
that
thought out of your head.'

‘Oh, I didn't mean . . . What a funny thing to say. After all, you can smile at people without meaning
that
, can't you?'

Miles curled his very handsome lip.

‘Can you? I don't know that
she
could. She smiled at people a good deal too much, as far as I was concerned.'

‘I expect you imagined it. Anyway, you didn't own her.'

‘No?'

There was silence for a moment. Miles was now at one end of the sofa, his knees drawn up under his chin. Deborah was squatting at the other end, still looking at the picture.

‘No,' she said, in her best attempt at a decisive voice. ‘Of course she's got a right to behave how she likes to other people.'

‘Matter of opinion,' said Miles off-handedly. ‘It was the
way
she smiled I objected to.'