Rehearsals for Murder (2 page)

Toby let her run on. She reached out her cup for more coffee and, with a cold-bleared yet vivid smile at George, said: “One thing that'd be good about it is that I'd learn something about the human body. It's awful how little I know about it really. I don't let on usually, of course, but really I know next to nothing. I don't mean that I mind letting on to someone like you, but d'you know, I'd never let on to Druna. She knows such an awful lot about things like that; she knows the technical names for things and everything. But a nurse is taught all those things properly, isn't she? I don't mean that that's why I want to take it up”—she gave a deprecatory giggle—“but all the same, I think it's a good idea, don't you?”

“I think,” said Toby, “that if you're staying here the night the sooner you get to bed with that cold of yours the better.”

She started to protest that that would mean turning them out of their sitting room since it was in the sitting room that she was determined to sleep. Nothing, she said, would persuade her to allow either of them to disarrange themselves because she happened to be staying there.

“And, really,” she said, “it isn't late, and it's such ages since I've seen you, Toby; it's nice to be able to talk.”

“No,” said Toby, “it's quite late enough. You run along off to bed.”

“But I'm going to sleep in here,” said Lou. “You needn't argue about it. It's definite.”

“Is it?” said George, and it was in George's room that she slept, while George arranged blankets and cushions for himself on the sitting-room floor.

“Who is she, Tobe?” said George, after she had gone and he and Toby had been left in peace to finish the coffee.

The worried laugh with which Toby answered mixed itself up with a yawn. “I met her first about two years ago. It was at some sort of a party. She'd had a very little to drink but she was pretty helpless already. It frightened her rather. I took her away and walked her round the place and counselled her, and after that she attached herself to me and tried to get me to instruct her in everything about life—including facts of same.”

“What's she do?” said George, prodding with his spoon at some sugar.

Toby replied: “Looks for jobs, mostly, and lives on the dole. Now and then she's a secretary for a bit or a shop girl or a doctor's superior young lady who opens the door and books appointments. She hasn't any parents. So far as I know the only relations she's got are a brother and sister-in-law in Surrey, and she's not too keen on them. She likes her company a bit colourful. Wonder what's frightening her now. Might be blackmail; she's just the sort of idiot who could be made to believe that some perfectly innocent affair had got to be paid for through the nose. I ought to have made her tell me what it was. I'll have another go in the morning.”

He threw the stub of his cigarette onto the cold hearth, rose and trod on it.

“Part of her trouble, of course,” he said, “is that she's got a spontaneous humanity that's really quite unusual. She'll do anything for anybody. A nice kid.” He yawned again. “Pretty often I'd like to murder her.”

When somebody did murder Lou Capell Toby was among the first to hear of it.

Lou had left the next morning before either George or Toby was awake. She had left George's room neatly tidied, with a note propped up on the chest of drawers thanking them both for their kindness.

Toby had spent the afternoon and some of the evening at the newspaper office where he sometimes put in an appearance.

It was at about a quarter to nine that he received a telephone call at his flat. A faint voice which he did not recognize said to him: “Toby Dyke? I am speaking from Wilmer's End. Lou Capell is dead—murdered. Did you hear what I said?—murdered. Your cheque has been removed. But hadn't you better come here?”

The speaker rang off.

Toby set the telephone slowly down and sat staring before him. …

The death that came to Lou Capell was a horrible one. It was so horrible that the young man who had to describe to the police how he had found her body had turned, in spite of his recent medical degree, a blanched mauve in the face, while his hands were restrained from trembling only by an effort obvious to all.

The police had been summoned to Wilmer's End by a hysterical telephone call from Mrs Clare.

Wilmer's End was a house about a mile and a half out of the small town of Larking in Surrey. It was one of those houses that present to the road the appearance of little more than a roomy cottage. Bricks and weather tiles of an old, warm red and honeysuckle over the doorway heightened this impression. Yet it had, in fact, an amazing number of rooms, several bathrooms, electric cooking and garage space for at least three cars. It was known in Larking to be the property of Roger Clare of the publishing firm of Roger Clare and Thurston. Larking also knew that he had recently divorced his wife and left her to live at Wilmer's End without him.

When Inspector Vanner and Sergeant Gurr arrived Eve Clare herself was waiting in the doorway. She was in a wild impatience to tell her story and to shift responsibility. One of those very slim women with quick, delicate movements, in whom even restlessness has grace, Eve Clare was thirty-five, and though she looked neither less nor more than her age it was natural to speak of her as if she were astonishingly youthful looking. She had a small head that she carried high, with hair of a shining fairness, tinged with copper, cut so that it made the most of her head's subtle modelling. Her skin had a golden, sun-toasted freshness; her eyes were light blue under narrow, curved brows; her mouth was broad, sensitive and egotistical. She was very unsuitably dressed for a murder in a pale green linen dress with scarcely any back to it and had gaily coloured beach sandals on her slim, brown, stockingless feet.

She would have started the story standing there in the doorway with half a dozen people clustering behind her had not the inspector, glancing round, interrupted with a peremptory request to be taken straight to the body.

“Very well,” said Eve, “Charlie can show you.” She grasped by the wrist the young man who stood beside her. “This is Doctor Widdison, Inspector, who's the only one of us who's actually seen her. He must take you up. Come along, it's this way.” She started a few steps down the paved path that ran along the front of the house.

The inspector stopped her. He was a compact, brooding man with an assumed decisiveness of speech and action.

“Do I understand,” he said in his firm, cold voice to Charlie Widdison, “that it's impossible to get into the room except by the window?”

The young man said: “Er, yes.” A fluting voice and a habit of hesitation gave his speech a disturbing preciousness. “I climbed up by the—balcony. It's quite easy. But I left the door locked and came down the same way because I—thought it was the right thing to do. I mean, I left everything as I—found it.” Though his rather beautiful face was exceedingly pale and his hands, long and elegantly bony like the rest of him, fidgeted wildly with a coat button his large brown eyes had an odd look of eagerness.

This look, in different degrees, was to be seen on the faces of all who were listening from the doorway.

“What made you go up?” said the inspector.

The young doctor answered a different question. “You mustn't take me too—seriously, and I'm aware, of course, that on the very short inspection I made of things I'm not qualified to give an authoritative—opinion. But I think, you see, it's strychnine.”

“What made you go up?”

“Strychnine, you see, is a thing that——”

“What made you go up?”

A woman's voice in the doorway said on a note of nervous laughter: “I wonder if he always asks every question three times.”

Eve Clare said: “I asked him to go up, Inspector.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she replied, her voice growing vicious, “all the people whose clothes don't matter as much were out of the way! I thought you said”—it was obvious that the mere manner of authority was enough to rouse her to headstrong temper—“that you wanted to go straight up!”

“All in good time, madam.” He gave a look that slid slowly down from her bright hair to the crimson toenails that showed through the bars of her sandals.

She recognized the implications of the look and was quick to sneer back at him. “If you don't like climbing we can get you a ladder.”

“Why didn't Doctor Widdison use a ladder?”

“For God's sake,” she cried, “do you want to go up and look at her or don't you? Why didn't you use a ladder, Charlie?”

“Well, it's quite—easy without one.”

A man detached himself from the group in the doorway. He was a small man of a mild and commonplace appearance. He wore an open-necked shirt and corduroy shorts. Muttering: “I'll just go and get that ladder,” he made off round the house. Coming to himself with a start, Sergeant Gurr followed him. In a few minutes they returned, carrying a ladder between them.

The room in which Lou Capell lay dead with the arched rigidity, the congested face and staring eyes that had so shocked the nerves of Dr Widdison was on the first floor at the end of the house. The balcony outside the window was only a wooden one and looked as if it had been added to the building comparatively recently. A climbing rose sprawled over it; the scent of the roses, great, milky-white blooms, hung warm on the evening air; sweetly it penetrated through the open windows into the room where the girl lay dead.

The room was a large one, a room of bizarre contrasts, of stark black furniture and old, leaded panes, of dim silvery greys and splashes of scarlet.

In the middle of the silvery-grey carpet lay Lou. Her face had become a thing of horror. Her legs were thrust straight out; her back was arched; her whole body was rigid. She was wearing pyjamas. They were of cheap, artificial silk satin, trimmed with poor lace. Over them she wore a dressing gown, vividly flowered.

“You see, she'd been having a bath,” said Charlie Widdison. His tone was stiff and strange.

“Where's the bathroom?” asked Inspector Vanner.

Charlie nodded at the corner of the room. The inspector strode across to the door there, opened it, took one glance round the shining black and silver of the small bathroom, closed the door and returned to stand beside the body. He chewed at his lips. The sergeant prowled round the room, peering at hairbrushes, vanishing cream, powder and discarded underclothes.

“Strychnine, you say?” said Vanner.

“I—should think so. That rigidity, you see, it's got nothing to do with rigor mortis. She couldn't have been dead more than half an hour when I first got in here.”

“You still haven't told me why you broke in. What made you think there was something wrong?”

Charlie shifted his weight from one foot to the other. One hand was still tugging at a button on his striped flannel coat.

“She'd got a bad cold, you see, and told Mrs Clare she'd like to go to bed, and Mrs Clare said she'd have her dinner sent up to her. Then I gather what happened—was this. The maid or someone brought the dinner up on a tray and couldn't get in. At first she thought Miss Capell was still in the bathroom and took the tray away again. But when she came back she still couldn't get in and couldn't get any answer either. So she fetched Mrs Clare, and Mrs Clare started calling and knocking. My room's next door; I heard the noise and—came out. So Mrs Clare asked me to climb up by the balcony and see what had happened.”

“What time was that?”

“I think about eight-thirty, perhaps a little earlier. It was about half-past six when she went off to bed. Then she had her bath——”

“How d'you know?” Vanner snapped at him.

“Well, the bathroom's quite—warm and steamy still, isn't it?”

“Had a good look round, didn't you, last time you were up?”

Charlie gave a vague nod. His large brown eyes for a moment met the inspector's. “I mean I looked round a bit,” he said.

“Noticed
that
, I expect?” said Vanner.

Looking where the inspector was pointing, Charlie nodded.

“Touch it?”

Charlie shook his head.

Vanner stooped. With a handkerchief wrapped over his hand, he picked up from the carpet close to the bed a small, flat bottle. It had no stopper and a good deal of its contents had splashed onto the floor.

“‘Breathynne,'” he read from the label. “That's stuff for a cold, isn't it?” He gave it a cautious sniff. “Didn't smell like that last time I used it for a cold. Here—no, don't touch it, smell it.” He held the bottle out to Charlie.

Charlie sniffed at it. “No,” he said, “that isn't Breathynne.”

Sergeant Gurr came up and wanted to have his smell at the bottle, too, but Vanner, wrapping the bottle tenderly in his handkerchief, strode out onto the balcony.

He called to one of the constables: “Where's Doctor Syme?”

“Not got here yet, sir. He was up at the golf club but he's on his way here.”

“Well, when he comes,” Vanner called back, “you can send him up the stairs. The door's unlocked.” Returning into the room, he crossed straight to the door and unlocked it.

Charlie said apologetically: “I didn't like to unlock the door myself because one's always told to leave things—exactly as one found them.”

“Doctor Widdison,” said Vanner impressively, “I unlocked that door because it was locked merely in the ordinary course of events. The girl just locked herself in when she came to have her bath. So there's no reason to bother about it.”

Charlie started to say something, but Vanner went on: “She administered this poison, strychnine or whatever it is, to herself.”

“Not suicide!”

“No, Doctor Widdison, not suicide. She administered it herself, but in the belief that it was her ordinary dose of Breathynne for her cold. You'd seen her use it during the day, I daresay?”