Means Of Evil And Other Stories (9 page)

   "Mother came to sleep down here a few years back," said Mrs. Betts. "There's a toilet just down the passage. She couldn't manage the stairs any more except when nurse helped her." She sat on the edge of the mattress, nervously fingering a cage-like object of metal bars. "I'll have to see about her walking frame going back, I'll have to get on to the welfare people." Her hands resting on it, she said dolefully, "Mother hated Harry. She always said he wasn't good enough for me. She did everything she could to stop me marrying him." Mrs. Betts's voice took on a rebellious girlish note. "I think it's awful having to ask your mother's consent to marry when you're sixty-five, don't you?"

   At any rate, he thought, she had gone ahead without receiving it. He looked wonderingly at this grey wisp of a woman, seventy years old, who talked as if she were a fairy princess.

   "You see, she talked for years of changing her will and leaving the house to my brother. It was after he died that the nursing home business started. She quarrelled outright with Harry. Elsie Parrish was in here and Mother accused Harry in front of her of only marrying me to get this place. Harry never spoke a word to Mother again, and quite right too. I said to Mother, You're a wicked woman, you promised me years ago I'd have this house and now you're going back on your word. Cheats never prosper, I said."

   The daughter had inherited the mother's tongue. Wexford could imagine the altercations, overheard by visitors, by neighbours, which had contributed to the gossip. He turned to look at the framed photograph on a mahogany tallboy. A wedding picture,
circa
1903. The bride was seated, lilies in her lap under a bolster of a bosom hung with lace and pearls. The bridegroom stood behind her, frock coat, black handlebar moustache. Ivy Wrangton must have been seventeen, Wexford calculated, her face plain, puffy, young, her figure modishly pouter-pigeon-like, her hair in that most unflattering of fashions, the cottage loaf. She had been rather plump then, but thin, according to Nurse Radcliffe in old age. Wexford said quietly, apparently idly:

   "Mrs. Betts, why did you send for Dr. Moss on May 23rd? Your mother wasn't ill. She hadn't complained of feeling ill."

   She held the walking frame, pushing it backwards and forwards. "Why shouldn't I? Dr. Crocker was away. Elsie came in at nine and Mother was still asleep, and Elsie said it wasn't right the amount she slept. We couldn't wake her, though we shook her, we were so worried. I wasn't to know she'd get up as fit as a flea ten minutes after I'd phoned for him, was I?"

   "Tell me about the day your mother died, Mrs. Betts, Friday, June 2nd," he said, and it occurred to him that no one had yet told him anything much about that day.

   "Well . . ." Her mouth trembled and she said quickly, "You don't think Harry did anything to Mother, do you? He wouldn't, I swear he wouldn't."

   "Tell me about that Friday."

   She made an effort to control herself, clenching her hands on the metal bar. "We wanted to go to a whist drive. Elsie came round in the morning and I said, if we went out would she sit with Mother, and she said, OK, of course she would if I'd just give her a knock before we left." Mrs. Betts sighed and her voice steadied. "Elsie lives two doors down. She and Mother'd been pals for years and she always came to sit with her when we went out. Though it's a lie," her old eyes flashing like young ones, "to say we were always out. Once in a blue moon we went out."

   Wexford's eyes went from the pudding-faced girl in the photograph, her mouth smug and proud even then, to the long strip of turfed-over garden——why did he feel Betts had done that turfing, had uprooted flowers?——and back to the nervous little woman on the mattress edge.

   "I gave Mother her lunch and she was sitting in the front room, doing a bit of knitting. I popped down to Elsie's and rang her bell but she can't have heard it, she didn't come. I rang and rang and I thought, well, she's gone out, she's forgotten and that's that. But Harry said, Why not go out just the same? The painter was there, he was only a bit of a boy, twenty, twenty-two, but he and Mother got on a treat, a sight better than her and I ever did, I can tell you. So the upshot was, we went off and left her there with the painter——what was he called? Ray? Rafe? No, Roy, that was it, Roy——with Roy doing the hall walls. She was OK, fit as a flea. It was a nice day so I left all the windows open because that paint did smell. I'll never forget the way she spoke to me before I left. That was the last thing she ever said to me. Doreen, she said, you ought to be lucky at cards. You haven't been very lucky in love. And she laughed and I'll swear Roy was laughing too."

   You're building an edifice of motives for yourself, Mrs. Betts, reflected Wexford. "Go on," was all he said.

   She moved directly into hearsay evidence, but Wexford didn't stop her. "That Roy closed the door to keep the smell out, but he popped in a few times to see if Mother was all right. They had a bit of a chat, he said, and he offered to make her a cup of tea but she didn't want any. Then about half-past three Mother said she'd got a headache——that was the onset of the stroke but she didn't know that, she put it down to the paint——and would he fetch her a couple of her paracetamols from the bathroom. So he did and he got her a glass of water and she said she'd try and have a sleep in her chair. Anyway, the next thing he knew she was out in the hall walking with her walking frame, going to have a lay-down on her bed, she said.

   "Well, Harry and me came in at five-thirty and Roy was just packing up. He said Mother was asleep on her bed, and I just put my head round the door to check. She'd drawn the curtains." Mrs. Betts paused, burst out, "To tell you the honest truth, I didn't look too closely. I thought, well, thank God for half an hour's peace to have a cup of tea in before she starts picking on Harry. It was just about a quarter to seven, ten to seven, before I went in again. I could tell there was something going on, the way she was breathing, sort of puffing out her cheeks, and red in the face. There was blood on her lips." She looked fearfully at Wexford, looked him in the eye for the first time. "I wiped that clean before I called the doctor, I didn't want him seeing that.

   "He came straightaway. I thought maybe he'd call an ambulance but he didn't. He said she'd had a stroke and when people had strokes they shouldn't be moved. We stayed with her——well, doctor and I stayed with her——but she passed away just before half-past."

   Wexford nodded. Something about what she had said was wrong. He felt it. It wasn't that she had told a lie, though she might well have done, but something else, something that rang incongruously in that otherwise commonplace narrative, some esoteric term in place of a household word . . . He was checking back, almost there, when a footstep sounded in the hall, the door opened and a face appeared round it.

   "There you are, Doreen!" said the face which was very pretty considering its age. "I was just on my way to——Oh, I beg your pardon, I'm intruding."

   "That's all right," said Mrs. Betts. "You can come in, Elsie." She looked blankly at Wexford, her eyes once more old and tired. "This is Mrs. Parrish."

Elsie Parrish, Wexford decided, looked exactly as an old lady should. She had a powdery, violet cashew, creamy smell, which might equally well have been associated with a very clean baby. Her legs were neat and shapely in grey stockings, her hands in white gloves with tiny darns at the fingertips, her coat silky navy-blue over blue flowery pleats, and her face withered rose leaves with rouge on. The bouffant mass of silvery hair was so profuse that from a distance it might have been taken for a white silk turban. She and Wexford walked down the street together towards the shops, Elsie Parrish swinging a pink nylon string bag.

   "It's wicked the way they gossip. You can't understand how people can be so evil-minded. You'll notice how none of them are able to say how Doreen gave Ivy a stroke when she wasn't even there." Mrs. Parrish gave a dry satirical laugh. "Perhaps they think she bribed that poor young man, the painter, to give Ivy a fright. I remember my mother saying that fright could give you a stroke——an apoplexy, she called it——or too much excitement or drinking too much or over-eating even."

   To his surprise, because this isn't what old ladies of elegant appearance usually do or perhaps should do, she opened her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes and put one between her lips. He shook his head when the packet was offered to him, watched her light the cigarette with a match from a matchbook with a black shiny cover. She puffed delicately. He didn't think he had ever before seen someone smoke a cigarette while wearing white gloves. He said:

   "Why didn't you go round and sit with Mrs. Wrangton, that afternoon, Mrs. Parrish?"

   "The day she died, you mean?"

   "Yes." Wexford had the impression she didn't want to answer, she didn't want to infer anything against Doreen Betts. She spoke with care.

   "It's quite true I'm getting rather deaf." He hadn't noticed it. She had heard everything he said, in the open noisy street, and he hadn't raised his voice. "I don't always hear the bell. Doreen must have rung and I didn't hear. That's the only explanation."

   Was it?

   "I thought she and Harry had changed their minds about going out." Elsie Parrish put the cigarette to her lips between thumb and forefinger. "I'd give a lot," she said, "to be able to go back in time. I wouldn't hesitate this time, I'd go round and check on Ivy whether Doreen had asked me or not."

   "Probably your presence would have made no difference," he said, and then, "Mrs. Betts had told the builders not to do any work upstairs . . ."

   She interrupted him. "Maybe it didn't need it. I've never been upstairs in Ivy's house, so I couldn't say. Besides, when she'd sold it the new people might have had their own ideas, mightn't they? They might have wanted to do their own decorating."

   They were standing still now on the street corner, he about to go in one direction, she in the other. She dropped the cigarette end, stamped it out over-thoroughly with a high heel. From her handbag she took a small lacy handkerchief and dabbed her nostrils with it. The impression was that the tears, though near, would be restrained. "She left me two thousand pounds. Dear Ivy, she was so kind and generous. I knew I was to have something, I didn't dream as much as that." Elsie Parrish smiled, a watery, girlish, rueful smile, but still he was totally unprepared for what she said next. "I'm going to buy a car."

   His eyebrows went up.

   "I've kept my licence going. I haven't driven since my husband died and that's twenty-two years ago. I had to sell our car and I've always longed and longed for another." She really looked as if she had, a yearning expression crumpling the roses still further. "I'm going to have my own dear little car!" She was on the verge of executing a dance on the pavement. "And dear Ivy made that possible!" Anxiously: "You don't think I'm too old to drive?"

   Wexford did, but he only said that this kind of judgement wasn't really within his province. She nodded, smiled again, whisked off surprisingly fast into the corner supermarket. Wexford moved more slowly and thoughtfully away, his eyes down. It was because he was looking down that he saw the matchbook, and then he remembered fancying he had seen her drop something when she got out that handkerchief.

   She wasn't in the shop. She must have left by the other exit into the High Street and now she was nowhere to be seen. Deciding that matchbooks were in the category of objects which no one much minds losing, Wexford dropped it into his pocket and forgot it.

"You want Roy?"

   "That's right," said Wexford.

   The foreman, storekeeper, proprietor, whatever he was, didn't ask why. "You'll find him," he said, "doing the Snowcem on them flats up the Sewingbury Road."

   Wexford drove up there. Roy was a gigantic youth, broad-shouldered, heavily muscled, with an aureole of thick curly fair hair. He came down the ladder and said he'd just been about to knock off for his tea break, anyway. There was a carmen's café conveniently near. Roy lit a cigarette, put his elbows on the table.

   "I never knew a thing about it till I turned up there the next day."

   "But surely when Mrs. Betts came in the afternoon before she asked you how her mother had been?"

   "Sure she did. And I said the truth, that the old lady'd got a headache and asked for something for it and I'd given it her, and then she'd felt tired and gone in for a lay-down. But there was no sign she was
dying
. My God, that'd never have crossed my mind."