The Evil Seed (27 page)

‘Nice room,’ she said,
pausing a moment to marshal her thoughts, and fidgeting nervously with the
handle of her raffia bag.

‘Take your time,’ said
Menezies, turning a paperweight over in his large sunburned hand.

His colourless eyes gave
nothing away; his body language carefully studied to give the impression of
quiet interest. He asked no questions, simply allowing Alice to talk, and when
she finally stopped, he waited for a long time before he said anything in
reply. When he spoke, it was to ask a question.

‘Have you been to the
police?’

Alice shook her head. ‘I
didn’t think they’d believe me,’ she said. ‘Besides, I don’t have proof of
anything. It all sounds crazy.’ She shrugged. ‘But somehow it seems to make
sense. That’s why I wanted to find out about Ginny … I needed an explanation.’

Menezies watched her for
a moment, then his eyes hardened and left hers.

‘I’m sorry, Ms Farrell,’
he said. ‘I can’t deal with your problem. However, I’d be happy to recommend a
colleague who …’

‘Why?’ Alice was
completely thrown. ‘I
…
I want
you
to help. Why can’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘I
don’t feel qualified,’ he said. ‘I’m too much involved already. I’m sorry, but
I don’t want to have anything more do with this.’

‘What do you mean?’
Alice was dismayed. ‘How can you say that? At least give me a chance. Read the
manuscript. Daniel’s manuscript. I tell you, it all makes sense. Read it!’

Menezies gave a sigh and
ran his hands through his thick hair.

‘Ms Farrell,’ he said. ‘I
don’t have to read his manuscript.’

Alice opened her mouth
to say something.

‘Please don’t interrupt,’
he said irritably. ‘I don’t have to read it because I already know what’s in
it.’

Alice looked at him
questioningly, but he continued in his new, weary voice, as if every word was a
little too heavy for him to enunciate.

‘I used to share a room
with Jeff Pryce,’ he began, ‘back in the days when we were young doctors and
didn’t have very much money. We were still training; we were each assigned an “incurable”
patient at the hospital to write part of our thesis on. Jeff got Daniel Holmes.’

He swallowed, almost
painfully. ‘For three years he worked with Holmes, night and day. It began as
professional interest, and developed into a real friendship. He used to go to
libraries all around the country to try and find the books Holmes was always
asking for. In a way, I think he loved that old chap. I met him a few times,
but most of the time Jeff and I discussed him. He was casebook schizophrenic,
intelligent, erudite; and Jeff always claimed he was non-violent, despite his
fixation with violence. He was a chronic alcoholic and he was taking a lot of
heavy medication, but it never seemed to do much good. Jeff and he used to talk
psychology together, and he would show Jeff the chapters of his book. In turn,
Jeff showed me.’

He paused for a moment,
reminiscing. ‘The arguments we used to have about Daniel Holmes! I used to twit
Jeff all the time about how much effort he wasted on the man. I wrote the whole
of my thesis on the basis of a few preliminary visits to my “incurable”, but
Jeff
…
there was no stopping him. I think he would have gone on seeing
Daniel Holmes for ever, if he’d lived. What was worse, I’m not sure Holmes hadn’t
convinced him, in some odd way, that what he believed was true.’

Absently, Menezies
traced the lines on one worn palm.

‘He’d been talking about
dying long before his suicide,’ he continued. ‘Making arrangements and the
like. He seemed to think that the people he was afraid of were getting closer,
that they wouldn’t let him live much longer. I took that for a typical paranoid
delusion, and if Jeff had had any sense, he would have too, and taken steps to
protect Holmes from himself. But by that time Jeff was nearly as bad as he was.
Out of bloody-mindedness he wouldn’t give the case to anyone else, so it was
too late before anyone got an inkling of the old boy’s deterioration. Then one
day Holmes cracked and hanged himself, and the whole thing came out. It nearly
ended Jeff’s career.’

For the first time since
he had begun to speak, Menezies looked at Alice and smiled. ‘For years after,
Jeff Pryce was a man consumed by guilt,’ he told her. ‘He blamed himself for
Holmes’s suicide, kept saying that he should have looked after him better. I
think the reason for his being such a good doctor was something to do with the
fact that he never forgot about Daniel Holmes, and spent his life trying to
make up for that first mistake.’

‘But I don’t understand,’
said Alice. ‘If you already know about Daniel, why can’t you help me? You’re
probably the only person who might …’

‘No,’ Menezies shook his
head. ‘Because that isn’t the end of the story.’ He pulled at his tie to loosen
it, and went on. ‘Because when you phoned me about Virginia Ashley the other
day, and I said I didn’t know her, I lied.’

Alice’s eyes widened.

‘She was Jeff’s patient,’
said Menezies. ‘I told you the truth about that. She was admitted for a few
months only. She had been taking drugs, amphetamines mostly, but some
hallucinogens too, things like belladonna and muscarine. She was in a state of
emaciation, she was addicted to the amphetamines, and she had had experiences
while under the influence of hallucinogenic toxins which she could no longer
distinguish from reality. Jeff and I had been good friends for a long time; he
used to tell me about the most interesting of his cases. Nothing
unprofessional, you understand, but enough for me to see that he was really
quite excited about this girl. I never saw her, but I think he was quite taken
by her. Then one day he came to my house to see me. He looked terrible. He was
shaking. I thought he was going to have a stroke. I tried to calm him down, but
I really couldn’t get much sense out of him, except that he’d seen something or
someone who had disturbed him. I gathered that it was something to do with
Ginny, or some friends of Ginny’s, but on top of that he was also ranting about
Daniel Holmes and some things he had read in his manuscript. It didn’t help
that he was more than a little drunk.

‘I did the only thing I
could. I gave him a Valium and put him to bed. The next day when I tried to
talk to him, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and pretended he didn’t remember.
That night he took an overdose.’

Alice stared at Menezies
for a moment.

‘He saw Rafe and Java,’
she said.

‘I don’t know what he
saw,’ said Menezies. ‘But maybe now you see why I won’t help you.’

He shook his head. ‘That
damned manuscript.’

‘Look,’ said Alice
desperately. ‘Don’t you see? No one else
can
help me! You’re the only
one who will believe me. You knew Daniel, you knew Doctor Pryce. You have to
help me. If Daniel is right, then Ginny
is
Rosemary.’

‘I don’t want to know.’
His voice was flat. ‘I’m a doctor. I do my job, and I’m good at it. But I do
know my limitations, and this is where my involvement ends. I’m not interested
in finding out any more about this case, and I wouldn’t be any good to you if I
was.’

‘But she may have killed
Daniel,’ Alice said. ‘And probably Jeff Pryce, too. Who knows what else she
might do?’

‘I don’t know!’ His
voice was strained, almost cracked. ‘I don’t want to know!’

‘If she went to the
trouble of finding Jeff Pryce,’ went on Alice, ‘how do you know you won’t be
next?’

Menezies was silent for
a long time. ‘I won’t promise anything,’ he said eventually.

‘You’ll think about it?’

He shrugged. ‘Just leave
the manuscript with me. I’d like to read it all the way through. But don’t
expect anything more; any help I can give you will be for my own interest, and
nothing to do with my personal practice. OK?’

Alice nodded.

‘OK.’ She drew the
manuscript out of her bag, took it out of the box she had carried it in. ‘I’ll
ring you up tomorrow. Is that all right?’

He nodded.

‘Don’t get your hopes
up,’ he warned. ‘You’ll probably find that I can’t help you.’ Then he seemed to
reach a decision. He reached up to a shelf above his desk where a number of old
books were stacked.

‘You might as well have
this,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.’ Alice looked at the spine
of the book, and smiled. It was Daniel’s book,
The Blessed Damozel, a Study
of Pre-Raphaelite Archetypes.
Glancing at it briefly, she saw that it had
no illustrations except for the black-and-white reproduction on the cover (a
rough-looking sketch by Burne-Jones of his own Blessed Damozel, Maria Zambaco)
, but she held it tightly, her eyes bright, impelled by the sense of
rightness
she felt at having it.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank
you so much.’

Menezies gave a twisted
smile. ‘I’ll take the manuscript. Nothing more. No promises,’ he told her. And
though Alice smiled and nodded agreement as he stood up, carefully placing the
manuscript into a big post office envelope, and though she kept her features
carefully indifferent while she shook hands with him and left his office, she
still felt a tiny lifting of tension within her ribcage, as if a small bird
imprisoned there had just begun to sing.

One

I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT HE DID NOT SEE THE
GUILT written so clearly on my face; it seemed to me that for an endless moment
we stood there, speechless, in the little circle of the knowledge we shared. My
head spun as his cold eyes held me, appraisingly. Then I recognized my paranoia
for what it was and slipped into my artless role. There. I was committed. I had
declared war against the light.

‘Inspector Turner!’ I
said. ‘Do forgive me; I really wasn’t expecting you. For a moment I even found
myself forgetting your name.

The Inspector raised his
hat with meticulous politeness. I recognized the technique; he wanted me to
speak too much, thereby giving something away. I smiled at him.

‘Do come in. I’ve just
made some coffee; would you like a cup?’

‘I wouldn’t refuse one,’
said Turner. As I showed him in, I noticed his eyes flick over the room, taking
in the unmade bed, the cold grate, the rows of books on the shelves by the
fireside.

‘Please take a seat,’ I
said. ‘In fact, I’m rather glad you’ve come.’

He gave me a mildly
questioning look.

‘I’ve been wanting to
thank you for your support last time we met,’ I said, with a mixture of
openness and slight embarrassment in my voice.

‘I wasn’t myself, you
know,’ I said. ‘I’d had a bad shock, as well as having just recovered from a
severe illness at the time, and I’ll always appreciate the way you put me at
ease.’ I wondered if I were overdoing the act; turned, rinsed him a coffee-cup
in the sink, and began to fiddle with the coffee-pot, waiting for him to state
his business. He did not. I poured, set the cup on a saucer, offered the
biscuit tin, watched him help himself to two iced rings. He dipped them,
methodically, in his coffee, with the same serious watchfulness, and I began to
wonder whether my earlier awe of him had not been the product of my
imagination. Then I realized that the biscuit dipping was an act; he was watching
me from beneath his eyelashes, waiting to see if I would break.

‘Anything I can do to
help?’ I said. ‘Have you found out anything new about that poor woman?’

‘No,’ said Turner.

‘There’s been another
murder?’ I said. It wouldn’t do for me to seem too obtuse.

Turner shrugged. ‘It’s
rather early to say,’ he said. ‘So far, there’s no reason for anyone to think
that the deaths are even related.’

‘So there
has
been
another death?’

The Inspector nodded.

‘Two,’ he said. ‘A
waitress and a bartender of the Swan public house late the night before last.’

I frowned.

‘Wasn’t that the place
that burned down? I read about it in the paper.’

Turner nodded. ‘That’s
right. But the pathologist’s report seems to suggest that the two victims hadn’t
been killed in the blaze, as we first thought. The bodies weren’t badly
charred, you know. It takes quite a big fire to destroy bodies.’

‘So the criminal tried
to hide his tracks by setting the place on fire?’ I said, pouring another cup
of coffee. ‘It’s amazing what modern science can discover, isn’t it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Do you think it’s the
same man?’ I kept my voice interested, though inside I was reeling with panic.
He
knows, my God! He knows.

‘I don’t think anything.’
His tone was final. ‘I’m not in charge of the case; Scotland Yard are better
equipped to deal with that. It’s just that, well, I do like to keep a
professional interest in these things.’

‘Ah.’ His face was
unreadable, but I thought I was beginning to understand a little. Turner had
struck me from the beginning as being a forceful character. He had questioned
me himself instead of asking someone else. His manner was understated,
efficient. And this had been his case, the body in the weir had been ‘his’
body; quite natural, in fact, that he might feel some resentment at the way his
case had been taken in hand, so publicly, by the Yard.

The Inspector changed
the subject abruptly. ‘I see you’ve changed your lodgings,’ he said. ‘Was there
a reason for that change? Your landlady tells me it was very sudden. You left
without even saying goodbye.’

‘Ah, yes. There was a
reason for that.’

Turner waited patiently.

‘I was beginning to be …
intimate … with a young lady,’ I said. I did not need to feign embarrassment;
my unease was real enough. ‘There are reasons, for which the young lady and I—’

‘Of course,’ said the
Inspector. ‘Please don’t feel that I am prying into your private life.
Everything you say will remain confidential, naturally.’