Rehearsals for Murder (9 page)

“Do you smell paint?” he asked Max Potter.

The scientist stood still and sniffed.

“Yes,” he said definitely after a moment.

“So do I,” said George.

“How extraordinary,” said Max Potter. “Now why…? Wait, I've got it! The house has been painted.”

“That's right,” said George.

The two of them looked at one another in a bright confederacy of intelligence.

“But I was under the impression,” Toby drawled in Max Potter's ear, “that you were a fairly frequent visitor here. Wouldn't you notice the house being painted?”

“Yes, quite right, I should have. Unquestionably.” He looked round him, his high brow furrowed in an intense effort. “I did,” he announced.

“That's fine,” said Toby. “Now what's all the excitement about a bit of paint, George? Is there a point? Or is it just like standing still in the middle of a lane in springtime and saying: ‘Do you smell violets?' And where did you get to last night?”

But Max Potter was saying: “Of course I noticed. I'll tell you how. Fell over a bucket of paint. Fortnight ago it was. Fell right over it, ruined a pair of trousers. Ha, ha, I was tight. Never saw the thing, fell right over it. Ha, ha!” And, shouting with mirth, he strode out of the room, presumably in search of Eve.

They both stared after him for a moment, then George observed: “Nice man. Answers the questions you ask him.”

“Well, have a shot yourself at answering one of mine,” said Toby. “What's the fuss about the paint?”

“Just somethin' I seen, Tobe.”

“Then suppose you let me see it too.”

“Right, Tobe.”

“George.”

“Eh?”

“That man you met just now—he's a scientist of note, a profound intellect.”

“Sure, Tobe, I could see that. I like 'em like that. Come along, it's this way.”

G
eorge led Toby up the stairs and along the passage to Lou Capell's room. This time George's discovery consisted of two scratches in the paint at the foot of the door.

“There,” he said, “ever seen anythin' like those before?”

A low whistle came from Toby.

“Yes,” he said, “certainly I have. This door's been locked on the inside—from the outside.”

“Changes things, don't it?”

Toby nodded earnestly. Stooping, he looked more closely at the scratches. They were about an inch apart and about six inches from the side of the door.

“Must have used a thin piece of wire,” said Toby. “He could have used string, and it wouldn't have marked like that.”

“Paint's pretty soft still,” said George; “it might have marked anyway.”

“But, George, if this door was really locked from the outside…” Toby halted.

He resumed: “If this door was really locked from the outside, then the time the bottle of poison must have been slipped into her bag was when she was having her bath. All that business about where she was in the afternoon and whom she was with and whether she put her bag down anywhere simply doesn't arise. It's all a question of who was where round about seven o'clock. Somebody wanted to make things look as if she'd locked her door when she went up to undress. But, after all,
would
she lock her door? One doesn't usually lock one's bedroom door in the house of a friend.”

“Except,” said George, “that she had a reason for locking it.”

Toby looked at him.

“She was cryin',” said George. “She had a good cry before she had her bath. You mightn't lock your door just to get undressed, but if you were in floods of tears, well, you might take extra precautions like.”

“You might, I suppose. But how d'you know she was crying, and how d'you know it was before her bath?”

“I been lookin' around,” said George.

“And?”

“There's some blue sort of cotton trousers hangin' up in the wardrobe, and I asked one of the maids and she says yes, that's what Miss Capell was wearin' yesterday afternoon. Well, there's
three
handkerchiefs crumpled up in the pockets of those trousers, and they're still soakin' wet. But the handkerchief in her dressing-gown pocket's perfectly dry. So I reckon she had her cry while she was still wearin' her trousers.”

“Good enough,” said Toby. “You've been finding some interesting things, George. Now what happened to you last night?”

The answer to this came rather less promptly than George's other answers. His tongue, working round inside his cheek, made it bulge even more than usual.

“We-ell,” he said after a bit, “you know how it is with me, Tobe—I can't ever sleep in the country; it's too noisy. Maybe it's all right when you're used to it, but when I went up to bed last night I started remembering——”

“If this is going to be the story about the dog knocking the lid off the dust bin,” said Toby, “I've heard it. How did you get to London? I didn't hear the motor bike starting.”

“Late bus,” said George. “But it wasn't just one dog, Tobe, it was all the dogs in the neighbourhood. And they must have put the lid back each time after they'd finished with it, because it was on again for the next one to knock off. And that always started some bull roarin' and some cock crowin' and some bloody nightingale showin' off and——”

“You wouldn't know a nightingale if you heard one, George. Now look here, I can guess why you went to London. I started thinking last night, after you'd gone, that Druna Merton's flat'd probably exercise a fatal fascination on you. And I knew you'd explain to me that it was so easy to get in it'd have been a crime not to. You've got certain ways of looking at things that I wish I could alter.”

George gave a diffident laugh. “Well, it
was
easy. And I thought it'd be a good idea to get in and take a look round ahead of the police.”

“Oh, that's always a good idea.”

“That's right,” said George.

He wandered away and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, all the same,” he said. “I don't know. I just went to take a look round, and all I found was——” Sitting on the bed, he started groping through his pockets. “Hell,” he said, “where'd I put it? Maybe, as I was sayin', it's nothin', but it struck me—— Here it is. Maybe it's nothin', Tobe, but then maybe it isn't nothin'. You never know, do you? There was just one other thing I found, too, but I'll tell you about that when you've taken a look at this.”

Toby was looking at the half sheet of paper George had handed him.

He said somberly: “Let's hope it's nothing, because if it isn't, you've been tampering with evidence, and we may get into a mess.” He read the pencilled words on the piece of paper. After a moment he said: “We
will
get into a mess.”

“You think it's somethin'?”

Toby shrugged his shoulders. “Unless I can find some way of using it that isn't simply turning it in to Vanner we'd better decide it's nothing.”

The words on the piece of paper, written in a small, neat hand, were a rough estimate, it appeared, of certain expenditures.

“I don't know the writing,” said Toby. “It isn't Lou's.”

“Seems to me,” said George, “that
that
”—and he pointed at the word “clothes” which was written in bold, block letters—“was added in by somebody else?”

“Yes, I think so,” said Toby. “Clothes—question mark. An unusually honest way of putting it. You said you found something else, George. What was it?”

“Oh, just that those two girls were darned hard up. There's a note from the telephone threatenin' to cut 'em off and a milk bill that's got to about two pounds and notes about the vacuum cleaner and the wireless and there's what you might call a volume of correspondence about the rent.”

“I should think one could guess that without being told,” said Toby.

“Well, then,” said George rather woodenly, “there's somethin' else interestin' I found out last night, but that was this end, not in London.”

Toby grinned. He lit himself a cigarette he had extracted from George's packet, pocketed the packet and questioned: “Well?”

“Remember those suitcases in Mrs Clare's room? Well, after you went downstairs I took a look inside 'em. Tobe, I don't know much about what women take away with them on holidays, but if it was scarcely anythin' but a lot of dresses all very thin and flimsy lookin' and a lot of beach things one could be pretty certain it wasn't goin' to be a holiday in England, couldn't one ?”

Toby said: “I daresay.”

“Besides,” said George, “she's just had her passport renewed. It was in her dressing-table drawer.”

“Then I'd say it was pretty definite.”

“But this mornin',” said George, “everythin's unpacked. I been in again to have another little look round. Dresses are all in the wardrobe.”

Toby opened the door. They strolled down the passage together and down the stairs.

“Dresses are all in the wardrobe,” Toby muttered, “and Eve Clare's angry. Eve's very angry indeed.” He stood still at the foot of the stairs. “So Eve was going away. D'you know what I'm wondering, George? I'm wondering whom she was going away with. Because Max Potter is in the middle of giving a series of lectures. It couldn't be Max Potter.”

“You're wrong, Mr Dyke,” said Eve Clare from the doorway of the dining room. “
I was not going anywhere!
” With her eyes bright and her face cold and hard with fury, she thrust past them and ran swiftly up the stairs.

In the room from which Eve Clare had just emerged, leaving the door wide open behind her, Toby and George found Vanessa and her uncle Dolphie.

They were sitting at the table, each with a glass of milk and with a large and homely looking currant cake between them. Only Vanessa was eating the cake; her uncle, sipping his milk, was watching her with a certain amount of uneasiness.

As if they were in the midst of a discussion, he started talking to Toby.

“I'm not at all sure about this sort of cake,” he said. “It's quite a simple cake but it's made with white flour. What d'you think, Mr Dyke? I don't suppose it's actually unwholesome—to suggest that might be a little dogmatic—but it can't have any special nourishment in it.”

“You have some cake,” said Vanessa to Toby.

“May I?” he said. “Thank you very much.”

She picked up the cake knife to cut it.

Her uncle said hurriedly: “If you're hungry, Mr Dyke, I've some whole-meal biscuits in a tin upstairs that I can recommend as being a great deal more beneficial. It wouldn't be any trouble to fetch them.”

“Thank you,” said Toby, “but I shouldn't dream of——”

“But, really, I'd like your opinion of them.”

“Have some cake, have some cake!” cried Vanessa.

Toby smiled apologetically at Mr Fry and took the cake. George also accepted a generously though unskillfully cut slice of it.

For a moment there appeared in the eyes of Mr Fry the gleam of a wild and disproportionate anger, the anger of an offended fanatic. Then he made up his mind to have a very little piece of cake himself. He munched it with his front teeth, mistrustfully yet sensuously.

“Odd, doesn't it seem,” he said softly to Toby, “to be sitting here eating cake when only yesterday evening…?”

Vanessa looked up at George who was standing near her.

“I was a silly girl yesterday evening,” she said. “I was frightened of a policeman.”

“Not you,” said George.

She nodded her head violently. “I was.”

George shook his head. Vanessa went on nodding hers with a curious exaggeration of gesture.

“I know what frightened you,” said George.

“What?” she shot at him quickly.

“I know what it was,” he repeated.

“No, you don't. You're an awful big liar.”

“Vanessa!” said her uncle.

She amended it: “You're pretending.”

“Not me,” said George.

She stared at him with large, unblinking eyes, as if she were trying, without allowing her own expression to give her away, to penetrate the meaning of his. Then she looked down at the cake on her plate.

“I was frightened of a policeman,” she said in a half whisper.

Dolphie Fry got to his feet. “And so,” he said, “Eve was going away. I heard what you were saying out there. You know, I can always tell when Eve's lying. Only I suppose one shouldn't say such things in front of the child. Now, remember, Vanessa, you mustn't eat any more of that cake when you finished the piece you've got there.”

“Shall we have a game then?” she asked.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” With a little bow to Toby and George he went out onto the terrace. His wife was sitting on a chair on the lawn doing some needlework. A great circular straw hat, grimly embroidered in coloured wools, was on her head. He picked up a chair from the terrace, carried it across the lawn and sat down beside her.

Toby went to the window and looked out. The day had settled into a still radiance. The radiance, absorbed into the creamy clumps of the lupines, the hot blaze of the poppies, the vividness of the June green kindled in all a sweet warmth and gaiety. But not in Max Potter who was sitting a little way along the terrace smoking and glowering and obviously ignoring the conversation of Druna Merton. Hunched in a chair, the man looked like a ponderous vegetable.

Vanessa was saying to George: “You've eaten all your almonds.”

“That's right,” said George.

Vanessa went into peals of laughter.

“What's the joke?” said George.

“You didn't ought to have done,” said Vanessa.

“Why not? I like 'em.”

“But one day, you never know, they might turn out to be special almonds.”

“What d'you mean by special almonds?”

She hesitated. “Almonds that change you. That's why I laughed just now, because I pretended to myself you'd eaten enough to be changed.”

“Oh, God help us!” groaned Toby.

But George went on with stolid curiosity: “Changed into what?”

She thought. “An axolotl.” Again she was convulsed with mirth. Over Toby's face came a look of repugnance, but George seemed gravely impressed. She grew serious herself. “It's all right, really; you didn't eat enough to be changed into an axolotl. It takes eighty to change you into a monkey, so I should think it'd take more still to change you into an axolotl. Besides, these are just ordinary almonds really. Special almonds taste horrid; I know, I've tried them.”

Toby gave a shudder and strode out along the terrace.

“Morning, Druna,” he said, sitting down beside her, “feel like answering a question?”

She looked pleased to see him. This morning, instead of the elaborate curls she had worn the evening before, she had done her hair with extreme severity. A dress of grey linen matched the severity well.