The Paying Guests (42 page)

The matron succeeded in chivvying Mrs Viney, Vera and Frances from the room. ‘I shall be just out here, my darling!’ Mrs Viney called to Lilian, as the door was closed. But they were not allowed to wait in the corridor, no matter how much fuss she raised. They were shown down a flight of stairs to a public waiting-area noisy with voices and footsteps – another grim lobby, with a dozen poor-looking people in it, who lifted their heads at their approach, broke off their conversations, to stare at them in open curiosity.

Mrs Viney, in response, seemed to expand into the stares. A youth in a torn jacket gave up his chair so that she might sit, and she sank on to it in a grateful, unembarrassed way, saying, ‘Thank you, love. Thank you, son.’ She took out her handkerchief and wiped her lips. ‘Oh, my Lord. I can’t hardly believe it. I can’t
credit
it, Miss Wray! When the policeman stepped into the shop and I saw his face – well, it gave me such a turn. I made sure it was one of the grandchildren, burned in a fire or drowned. Then he said it was poor Lenny killed in an accident, and that we was to come here for Lil! Thank heavens you’ve been with her, anyhow. Oh, but don’t she look shocking, though! I should hardly have known her, she looks that dragged! What’s happened? Do
you
know? The police haven’t told us nothing. Only a blow to the head, they said. Was it a motor-car done it, or what?’

Frances was conscious of the other people in the lobby. She had not said the words yet, to anyone. When she spoke, her mouth felt rubbery.

‘They’re saying that someone might have killed him.’

‘
What?
’

And, ‘What?’ echoed Vera, her gaze sharpening. ‘Killed him? Len?’

‘Why would they say such a thing as that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Frances.

‘But who are they saying done it, and why?’

‘I don’t know.’

Mrs Viney looked stricken. She wiped her mouth, wiped it again, then made a ball of her handkerchief and held it at her breast. Vera asked Frances what she knew. Where had Len been found? When had it happened? What time had the police come to the house?

‘Oh, what a thing,’ Mrs Viney said once, ‘for you and your mother, Miss Wray!’

All the time that they were talking, they kept peering over at the stairs leading back to the matron’s room. Policemen passed and re-passed, but no summons came. The muddle of echoing steps and voices went on without a pause. Frances grew increasingly uneasy – a dreadful, animal unease it was, at being separated from Lilian. She pictured her up there, frightened to death. What might she be doing? What might she be saying?

At last the matron reappeared. She darted forward to greet her – but it was Mrs Viney, of course, who was wanted. She stumped back upstairs as fast as her monstrous legs would carry her; when she returned to the lobby a few minutes later, her face was a tragedy mask again. Frances’s heart gave another leap of fear at the sight of her – but she had already started on a noisy account of what had happened. Oh, wasn’t it atrocious bad luck? Didn’t it beggar belief? Poor Lil had been in the family way for the first time in years and the doctor was saying that the shock of Len’s death had brought on a miss.

At least now, Frances thought, Lilian could admit to being ill. When they returned to the matron’s room they found her looking pale but tearless, sipping another cup of tea. She met Frances’s gaze just once, and after that kept her eyes lowered, but Frances could see that some of the panic had gone from her expression, and that made her own anxiety die down. Even Mrs Viney grew calmer. For here, of course, was something she could understand, a homely female crisis over which policemen and doctors, with all their nonsense, could have no sway. She held her hand to Lilian’s forehead as she drank; she put back the hair from her white face. As soon as her teacup was empty she took it and handed it to the matron.

‘Thank you for that, nurse. But I shall take my daughter home now. Vera, pass us Lil’s hat and coat. Here you are, my darling, you just put your arms through here.’

The matron, alarmed, went off to fetch the inspector; he returned in time to find Mrs Viney doing up the buttons of Lilian’s coat. With his face as smooth as ever, he said he was sorry to hear that Mrs Barber had fallen ill. Had they known about her condition, they of course would never have asked her to identify her husband’s body.

‘I shall speak to Constable Hardy about it, you may be sure,’ he said. To which Mrs Viney answered hotly, ‘Yes, I should think you will! A disgrace, I call it, asking a wife to do that! Police or no police, we’d be quite within our rights to bring an action against you!’

Lilian put a hand on her mother’s arm. ‘It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Doesn’t matter?’

‘I just want to go home.’

And, yes, said Inspector Kemp, Mrs Barber should certainly go home now and do all she could to recover her strength. Sergeant Heath would report to the coroner, and would advise him to hold over opening the inquest until Monday, by which point it was to be hoped that she would be well enough to give her evidence.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he told her, ‘I shall be glad of the extra days. It’ll give us more time to gather information. We’ll keep you posted as to our progress, of course. You’ll remain at home now?’

‘Oh, she’s coming back with us,’ said Mrs Viney, before Lilian could respond. ‘Don’t you think that’s the best thing, Ver? We’ll take her to ours. She can go in with you and Violet, and —’

Lilian took in what her mother was saying. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t want to go to the shop. I want to go back to Champion Hill.’

‘Back there? It’ll give you the horrors! You ain’t in a fit state. Look at you!’

‘I don’t care. I just —’ She glanced at Frances. ‘I just want to go home, and have all my own things around me.’

And again the inspector agreed. Yes, it might be best if Mrs Barber stayed at her own address for now, in case he and his men ‘should need to get hold of her in a hurry’.

Had the situation been different they could have walked up the hill in twenty minutes. As it was, Sergeant Heath led them back to the cobbled yard and the four of them piled into another taxi, Mrs Viney and Vera sitting with Lilian between them, each holding one of her hands, Frances looking on uselessly from the small seat opposite. The rain was falling as heavily as ever; it came down the gutters in a torrent. Champion Hill had one or two pedestrians on it, hurrying beneath umbrellas, but apart from that the street was quiet; Frances was glad of that, at any rate. As they pulled up before the house her mother’s pinched face swam into view at the drawing-room window, and by the time they’d got across the front garden she had opened the door for them.

For an aimless few moments they all stood about in the hall. No, nobody could believe it. It was too horrible for words.

‘It just ain’t sunk in,’ said Mrs Viney. ‘Poor Lenny, as never harmed no one! I tell you this much, Mrs Wray, I hope they catch the devil that done it, and I hope to God they hang him! I hope they hang him twice over! Once for what he did to Lenny, and a second time for what he’s done to Lil!’

‘All right, Mum,’ said Vera. She had seen Lilian’s expression.

‘No, I
will
have my say!’

‘Yes, I know. But you can have it upstairs, can’t you?’

So, puffing, exclaiming, Mrs Viney made her slow way up, with Vera following, supporting Lilian for the climb. Frances helped as far as the turn; after that, Lilian’s arm slid out of her hand like the rope of a boat tugged away on a current of water, and she could only stand and watch the three of them disappear across the landing.

‘Frances?’ Her mother was looking up at her with frightened eyes.

She went back down the stairs, trying to disguise the stiffness of her movements. She said quietly, ‘Yes, the police are saying now that it might be murder.’

‘Murder!’

‘And Lilian —’ She dropped her voice further. ‘It seems she was pregnant. But in the shock of all this —’

‘Oh, no.’

They went together into the drawing-room. She looked around. ‘Where’s Mrs Dawson?’

Her mother lowered herself like an invalid on to the sofa. ‘Oh, I sent her home an hour ago. Another policeman came —’

‘Another policeman?’

‘Wanting to ask more questions. It was too dreadful, somehow, to have to answer in front of her. The men have been up and down the street, and all over the lane. One of them has been in the garden. I think he might be there still. Frances, it can’t be murder – can it?’

Frances didn’t reply. Instead she went quickly to the French windows, to see another mackintoshed constable, dark, bulky, anonymous: they were becoming objects of horror to her. This one had a measure in his hand and was making notes, as best he could in the rain, using his arm to shield his notebook. The door in the wall stood wide open. He must have been sketching a plan of the lane and how it related to the house. Had he spotted anything? Had she and Lilian left any traces of their journey with Leonard’s body? But even if they had, wouldn’t the endless rain have washed it all away?

She heard movement in the kitchen overhead, and thought of the stains on the sitting-room carpet, the greasy clinker in the pail.

But her mother was waiting. ‘Frances? Come and sit down, will you? You’ve told me nothing. You’ve been gone for hours. Why were you away so long?’

Reluctantly, she left the window. She went to the chair beside the hearth. Again she had to disguise the soreness of her legs and arms as she sat. She kept at the front of the chair with her hands held out to the flames; she felt unnaturally cold, she realised. ‘We’ve been at the police station.’

‘The police station?’

‘They drove us there from the mortuary. They wanted to go through Lilian’s statement.’

‘They took a statement from me. They said there’ll have to be an inquest, that we might have to give evidence at it!’

‘Yes, I know. What – What did you tell them?’

‘Well, just exactly what I told Constable Hardy.’

‘They didn’t go upstairs?’

‘No, they didn’t go upstairs. But they asked some very odd things. All about Mr and Mrs Barber, whether there were ever arguments between them, or strange callers at the house. They seemed almost to be suggesting – Oh, it’s too horrible.’ She put her fingers to her temples. ‘It was bad enough to think of poor Mr Barber falling over, hitting his head, then lying there helplessly in the dark. But the idea of someone setting on him, deliberately – Surely it
can’t
be murder. It
can’t
be. Do you believe it?’

Frances looked away. ‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps.’

‘But why? Who could have done it? And so close to the house! Just yards from our garden door! When you were in bed last night did you hear nothing?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘No cries, no —?’

‘The rain. I heard the rain, that’s all.’

Self-conscious, she moved forward, to scrape up a shovelful of coal from the scuttle and tip it on to the grate. But moving back, dusting her hands, she felt her mother’s eyes still on her; and when she met her mother’s gaze she was unnerved to see in it a touch of that oddness, that wariness, that had been there the night before.

With a jerk, she got to her feet. ‘I think I’m too on edge to sit. We’re all at our wits’ end, aren’t we? Have you eaten?’

It took her mother a moment to answer. ‘No. No, I’ve no appetite.’

‘Neither have I. But we must eat. What time is it?’

She looked at the clock, and saw with astonishment that it was nearly one. The morning had passed with the weird pacing – hectic, yet clogged with repetition and reversal – of a bad dream.

Going over to the sofa, she offered her hand.

‘Come out to the kitchen with me, and keep me company. I’ll make some sort of a lunch. Come on. You oughtn’t to sit here fretting.’

Her heart was squirming as she spoke, but her voice was strong again. Her mother looked up at her, hesitating, still with a touch of that oddness about her; then she lowered her eyes, nodded, and let herself be helped from the sofa.

While they were in the kitchen, Vera came down in her hat and coat. Lilian, she said, had been put to bed with a hot water bottle. She had had a mouthful of bread and butter, more tea, and some Chlorodyne, and they hoped now that she would sleep; her mother was sitting in the bedroom with her. She herself was heading off to the post office to telephone to the rest of the family. No, there was nothing else they needed, though it was kind of Miss Wray to offer. She wasn’t to trouble any more. They could look after Lil now.

She must have taken Lilian’s key with her, because as Frances was clearing away the lunch things she heard her letting herself back in. And when, a half-hour later, there was a knock at the front door, she came clattering down again to answer, beating Frances to the hall. Netta and Lloyd had arrived. They’d brought along the baby, Siddy, and the youngest sister, Min. The women went straight upstairs without attempting to speak to the Wrays, but Lloyd came out to the kitchen to say how shocked they all were, and to ask if he could go down the garden: he wanted to take a look at the lane. Frances supposed she ought to go with him. She ought really to have gone already, to be sure that nothing was amiss. But the thought of doing it brought on a flicker of the terror she had felt at the mortuary. She got as far as the back step, then stood and watched, transfixed, as he picked his way along the wet garden path and peered from the doorway at the end of it. He came back shaking his wet head. It was just like something from on the films! The police had put ropes at the end of the lane to keep people from coming through. They had marked the place where Len’s body had fallen, and set a constable to guard it.

He took the black oak armchair with him when he went upstairs; and after that the house became a stew of anxiety and unfamiliar voices, of impossibly creaking ceilings and frayed nerves. Frances’s mother sat by the drawing-room fire; Frances fetched her a shawl, a book, a newspaper, a parish magazine. But the papers lay in her lap, unopened. Instead she gazed bleakly into the hearth, or closed her eyes with a troubled expression – or flinched, at some extra-heavy footstep overhead. Some time after four, Mr Lamb and Margaret called. A little later, Mrs Dawson returned; she was followed by Mrs Golding, from the house next door. Had Frances seen that policemen were still in the lane? Did she know that they’d been going up and down the street, poking about in gutters and gardens? Was it true what people were beginning to say? Could Mr Barber’s death really be
murder
?