The Paying Guests (46 page)

But Netta, Min and Mrs Viney were fussing with the baby, Vera was thumbing a flame from a ladies’ lighter, and no one gave the ashtray a glance – no one save the little girl, who capered around it, the lipstick held between her fingers in a flapperish way. She hadn’t got a doctor’s light now, she announced, she’d got a cigarette; no she hadn’t, she’d got a cigar. And for the next few minutes she made elaborate play of puffing on the end of the crayon, then tapping it into the bronze-effect bowl.

When Lilian and the men emerged from the bedroom, Lilian stood in the doorway, saw the ashtray, and the last remaining bit of blood in her face seemed to drain out of it. She looked so dreadful that her mother gave a cry at the sight of her, and Inspector Kemp said, Yes, he was sorry to have kept Mrs Barber so long. ‘But,’ with a lift of his eyebrows at Sergeant Heath, ‘we’ve everything we need for now, I think?’

Frances saw the sergeant nod. He was tucking a bundle of things into his pocket: letters and papers, perhaps a railway ticket… She was too far off to be sure. The inspector stepped forward to retrieve his hat. Passing Violet at the ashtray, he gave her a genial tap on the head. ‘Having a smoke like the ladies, are you? What have you got there, a Player’s?’

‘It’s a De Reszke,’ she answered, in her withering way.

‘Oh! It is, is it?’

Chuckling, he and the sergeant made their way out to the landing. When Frances rose to escort them, they waved her back. They could see themselves out, they assured her. They had put her to too much trouble already…

As their steps faded on the staircase, she looked at Lilian. ‘Are you all right?’

Lilian nodded, her head lowered. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m all right. They just asked the same things, all over again. I – I need the WC, though. I’ve been needing it all this time. Where are my shoes?’

Her mother found them, and held them out. ‘But don’t go down there on your own! Not with murderers all over the place! Have someone go with you. Ver —’

‘I’m all right,’ said Lilian. She sounded fretful. ‘Just let me be.’

‘Let you be?’

Frances moved forward. ‘I’ll go down with Lilian, Mrs Viney.’

‘Oh, Miss Wray, are you sure? You’ve been so good.’

And, ‘Yes,’ said Lilian, ‘let Frances take me down. She’s the only one who doesn’t fuss me. I can’t stand it! Let Frances take me.’

The sharpness of her tone set Siddy off crying. She put a hand to her forehead, then caught hold of Frances’s arm; they left the sisters seeing to the baby, and went in silence down the stairs.

Once they were in the kitchen with the door shut she sank into a chair, making a pillow of her arms on the table and letting her head fall forward.

Frances, alarmed, sat beside her. ‘What’s happened? What is it?’

She shook her head without raising it, and answered in a murmur. ‘Nothing.’

‘What did the inspector ask you, really?’

‘He asked all sorts of things. All about me and Len. Where we go, what we do, who our friends are – things like that. But something’s not right, Frances. He kept asking me about
Charlie
. You heard what he said Charlie told him, about Friday night?’

Frances nodded. ‘Why would Charlie say that?’

She hid her face again. ‘I don’t know.’

‘To lie like that. It doesn’t make sense, unless – well, unless he has something to hide. Something he’s keeping from Betty? Do you think he’s been seeing another girl? It must be that, mustn’t it?’ And then, when Lilian didn’t answer: ‘God! It’s more of a muddle than ever. And what did the sergeant take away?’

‘I’m not sure. It was all Len’s stuff. Oh, it was dreadful, having to go through his things like that. And what they said about his – his brain. It was almost worse, wasn’t it, than seeing it?’ She looked over at the door. Her pose, with the twist in it, added an extra layer of strain and urgency to her voice. ‘What did they say about the wound? That it was vicious? How could they say that? They don’t know. They weren’t there! They’re turning it into something else!’

Frances caught hold of her hand. ‘But that’s what we want, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what they turn it into, so long as they don’t think of us. It doesn’t matter about Charlie. It might even help us, because of the timing. If they think he died at eleven – well, my mother was here then. She knows that you and I were in bed.’

‘But they’ve taken those hairs.’

‘The hairs don’t prove a thing.’

‘And they must have seen the ashtray! Oh, Frances!’

Frances squeezed her fingers. ‘But they’re not looking for an ashtray. They’re looking for a pipe, or a mallet. They’re looking for a
man
. Don’t you see what it means?
It means we’ve done it
. The whole horrible business – it means it was worth it. It means it worked.’

Lilian was gazing bleakly at her, but began to take in what she was saying.

‘Do you think so? Truly?’

‘I think so, for now. We still have to be careful, but – I think so, for now.’

Some of the strain left Lilian’s expression. But when she spoke again, it was with dreadful weariness. ‘I almost don’t care any more. I care for your sake, but not for mine. I care for our sake, I mean. For the sake of everything we planned. But —’

‘That’s all still there.’

‘Last night I kept dreaming about Len. I kept waking, and putting out my hand, and Vera was there, and I thought it was him, and —’ She gave a shudder, and couldn’t finish.

After a long moment of silence, she pushed herself to her feet. ‘I’d better not take too long or they’ll think I’ve fainted or something. I really do need the lavatory. There’s still blood. It’s still sore. Will you – Will you come outside with me?’

She asked it as if embarrassed. And once the door was opened she hesitated on the step. She must have been thinking, as Frances was, of the trips they’d made out here on Friday: the agonised hobble to the WC and then, a few hours later, the darkness, the haste, the strain and terror… She went quickly across the yard, then let Frances hurry her back out of the cold. In the kitchen they hugged each other, and Frances felt her quiver like a string.

But soon she eased herself away. ‘I’ll go back up on my own. It might look funny if they see us together too much.’

Frances kept hold of her hands. She felt, weirdly, almost elated. ‘I don’t want to let you go!’

‘I don’t want it either. But sometimes it’s worse being with you in front of them than not seeing you at all. Don’t you feel that?’

‘No. I can’t bear to be apart from you.’

‘It puts me on edge. They’re still on at me to go to the shop with them. Maybe I should, Frances.’

‘What? No, you mustn’t!’

‘They don’t understand why I want to stay here. I can’t say it’s because of you… Oh, if only we could just be together, alone! I feel like we never will be again. There’s the inquest, and then the funeral; and how will it be after that?’

‘Don’t think about all that yet. I love you. I love you! Think about that.’

She came back into Frances’s arms. ‘Oh, I love you too.’

But her features were doughy with tiredness again, and she didn’t cling to Frances as she had clung to her the night before. Even that quiver had gone out of her now. Once more she eased herself free, to spend a moment putting herself tidy. She let Frances support her to the bottom of the stairs, then dragged herself up them alone.

This time it was Mrs Viney who stayed the night, while the sisters and the children went home. She was less noticing than Vera, but more of a presence in the house, clattering about, sweeping and tidying, letting out bursts of sentimental song in a music-hall quaver. When Frances went up at half-past nine she found her in the little kitchen, already undressed for bed, her hennaed hair loose about her shoulders, an inch-wide strip of grey at the parting; from beneath the hem of her nightdress her stockingless ankles stuck out like two great pegs. She was happy to linger and chat, however, as she heated the water for Lilian’s hot bottle, regaling Frances with stories of other family catastrophes. Hard confinements there’d been plenty of, sudden deaths, maulings, scaldings. A Midlands cousin had got her scalp torn off by a loom… But they’d never had a murder, she concluded with a sigh, screwing in the rubber stopper. No, there’d never been a murder in the family; never till now.

Frances was almost sorry to say good night to her. Her own mood was still unnaturally buoyant. She lay in bed open-eyed, going over and over the inspector’s visit, her mind running like an engine in too high a gear.

Even next morning the feeling persisted. She was up at half-past six, had washed and dressed by seven, determined to be ready for anything the day might spring on her. To the goggling boys who brought the bread and the meat she spoke in a terse, un-encouraging way. When
The Times
arrived she went through it looking for a mention of the case, and found only a brief, brief report; Leonard’s name was misspelled as ‘Bamber’. The paper was full of events in Turkey and Greece. There was an account of a massacre at Smyrna. It was the sort of bad news from which, ordinarily, she turned in despair. Now she seized on it as real, important – nothing like the patchwork of blunder and police supposition that had become this phantom thing, this imaginary murder, on Champion Hill.

But at nine Vera returned, to help prepare Lilian for the inquest. The five of them set off an hour later; and after that her spirits lost some of their buoyancy. The day was gusty and chill. Their journey was the one that she and Lilian had taken to view Leonard’s body, but this time they were travelling on foot: they must have made an odd-looking group, processing down the road at Mrs Viney’s clumping pace. Shoppers paused to stare at them; they were stared at again in the mean little residential streets beyond the Green. And as they approached the coroner’s court they discovered that a crowd had gathered, people who had heard about the case and, attracted by the horror and glamour of murder, had come simply to gawp. Unnerved, they pushed their way through them. But then there was the confusion of arrival at the building itself; there were newspaper men, starting forward with questions, all calling Lilian’s name. When Frances caught sight of Inspector Kemp, she felt a rush of pure relief; he was bizarrely like an ally here. He took them along a corridor into a crowded panelled chamber. She saw faces that she recognised: Constable Hardy, Leonard’s father, Charlie Wismuth and Betty. There was more uncertainty for a minute or two – over where to sit, this time. Finally a clerk led Lilian to a lonely place beside the coroner’s chair while Frances and her mother remained with Mrs Viney and Vera, beside a man who introduced himself as Leonard’s superior at the Pearl.

The whole thing, she decided, was like a nightmarish wedding, with Lilian the unhappy bride, Leonard the eternally jilting bridegroom, and none of the guests wanting to be there or quite knowing what to do. Even the coroner, Mr Samson, looked a little vicar-like, in a chinless, wet-lipped sort of way. He settled himself fussily in his special chair, and the jurymen were brought in. Inspector Kemp rose to give a statement of events, the police surgeon spoke briefly about the suspicious nature of the injury, but the only other witness called was Lilian. It was agonising to have to watch from a distance as she got to her feet, her face as pale as ivory, her figure made small by the trumpery panelling of the room. She was asked to state her name and her relationship with the deceased, and to confirm that she had made the identification of the body. She spoke almost inaudibly, her gloved hand put out to a table at her side to steady herself. Her dark velvet hat had been borrowed from Vera. The open collar of her coat gave a glimpse of sooty-looking crochet: her frock was the plum-coloured one, Frances realised, dyed black.

The coroner declared the inquest adjourned, pending the results of the police inquiry, and they found themselves dismissed. Again it was oddly like a wedding: the abrupt release from ceremony, the confusion about what was coming next. But this time they were all thrown together in the narrow corridor. The man from the Pearl approached Lilian to tell her how stunned they all were at the office. Leonard’s father came to exchange a few words with Frances and her mother. ‘To think of people like us being mixed up in something like this!’ he said, mopping his forehead.

And there too, of course, was Charlie. He gave Lilian a clumsy hug. ‘How are you bearing up?’ Frances heard him ask her.

Lilian shook her head. ‘I can’t think how I am, Charlie. It doesn’t feel real, any of it. When I saw you sitting in there, before, I couldn’t believe that Len wasn’t going to walk in and join you.’

‘I thought the same,’ he said, ‘when I saw you. It just – It just beggars belief.’

Betty took hold of his arm. ‘The police won’t leave him alone, you know. They saw him on Saturday, and yesterday too.’

He blushed. ‘I just wish I had something to tell them! They say this fellow might have followed Len all the way home from Blackfriars. That he’d been watching him all evening. But if that’s true – well, I didn’t see him. Honest to God, I wish I had! When I think of Len going off like that – when I think of us shaking hands at the tram-stop, saying, Good night, see you next week —’

His voice thickened, with real emotion. But Frances, who knew that he was lying, though she still had no idea why, could see the falseness of his manner; she could see it in the tug in the muscles of his face. And it struck her that, of course, they needed his lie now. They needed it almost as much as their own. The same thought must have occurred to Lilian: Frances saw her pose slip as his did, her expression grow forced.

But then someone produced newspapers, the
Daily Express
and the
Daily Mirror
. The crush in the corridor grew more awkward as people drew together to look. The papers were not like
The Times
, Frances saw with a chill. They’d both made room on their front pages for the
CHAMPION
HILL
MURDER
, and while the
Express
offered only a blurry artist’s impression of ‘The Lonely Spot At Which The Body Was Found’, the
Mirror
included two good-quality photographs. One showed policemen on the street, picking their way through the gutters: ‘The Search for the Weapon’. The other, more startling, was of Leonard himself – a younger Leonard, uniformed, some studio portrait from the War.