The Paying Guests (47 page)

When Lilian caught sight of this she gave a cry, and Frances and Vera moved close to her, to read the paper over her shoulder. The report had a quote from the man who had found Leonard’s body, and another from Inspector Kemp. It mentioned Lilian by name: she was said to be still in that ‘collapsed condition’. But it was the photograph of Leonard that seemed to bother her the most. She didn’t understand. Who had let the paper have it?

Leonard’s father looked slightly shifty. Well, he said, a man from the
Mirror
had been round at Cheveney Avenue yesterday. ‘We didn’t see any harm in it, Lilian.’

‘
You
gave it?’

‘Len’s Uncle Ted did. We didn’t feel easy about letting a picture go. But Ted ran home and fetched his album, and we picked out the best. It might help the investigation, the
Mirror
fellow said. It might prick a conscience or two, to show what a fine boy Len was.’

Lilian wouldn’t answer him. She stared at the photograph for another few seconds, then pushed it away from her as though the sight of it made her sick.

Outside, the crowd seemed bigger than before, and a man with a camera was darting about. There was no chance to say an ordinary goodbye to Leonard’s father, to Charlie or Betty; Frances and her mother became separated from them as soon as they left the steps. The gusty weather made everything worse. Hats and coats were flapping. Then two reporters approached Frances, having discovered – how? she wondered – her connection with the case. Could she and her mother say what their feelings had been, on learning of Mr Barber’s murder? Could they spare a few moments for the readers of the
News of the World
?

‘No, we can’t,’ she said, turning her back on them.

Her mother’s hand had tightened on her arm. ‘This is frightful, Frances. Let’s get home, can we? As quickly as we can.’

‘Yes, of course. I’m just looking for Lilian. Wasn’t she behind us when we came out?’

‘I don’t know. Does it matter? We’ve done enough for her, surely?’

‘We can’t go without her.’

‘Her family can see to her now.’

But there she was, just emerging from the building with her mother and sister, seeing the man with the camera and nervously putting down her head. She moved forward into the crowd, then lifted her gaze and looked around. ‘Where’s Frances?’ she asked Vera; Frances saw the words rather than heard them. She raised her hand, and after another moment or two of blind searching, Lilian’s gaze caught on hers. They picked their way to each other through the stares and the jostles.

‘All these people!’ said Lilian. ‘What do they want?’

Frances took hold of her arm. ‘Come quickly. This way.’

But she pulled back. ‘Frances, wait.’

Her mother and sister had caught up with her. Mrs Viney, brick-red, was glaring furiously at the faces turned their way.

‘A lot of vultures, I call ’em! Ain’t they got no sense of decency? Ain’t they got no notion of shame? You and your mother get going, Miss Wray, or they’ll have the skin off your backs! We’ll go by the quiet way back to the shop. Lil’s coming with us. We managed to talk her round at last.’

Frances looked at Lilian. ‘You’re – You’re going, then?’

Lilian’s expression was wretched. ‘It seems the best thing, after all. Vera and my mum can’t keep coming to the house. It isn’t fair on them. It isn’t fair on your mother, either. I’ll stay just for a few days. Till after the funeral.’ She saw Frances’s face. ‘It isn’t so long, Frances.’

‘You don’t have any of your things.’

‘Vera says she’ll fetch them tomorrow. I can borrow hers till then.’

‘I could bring them to you. Say we need to talk, or —?’

‘I don’t know. But Vera will get them. I won’t need much.’

There seemed a thousand things to be said, but no chance to say anything with so many people about – with Mrs Viney and Vera right there, and Frances’s mother looking on tensely from the crowded pavement. Even Inspector Kemp had appeared and was watching them now. So Frances nodded, that was all. They reached and patted at each other – patted, she thought, so clumsily, that they might have had paws rather than hands, or been wearing boxing-gloves. And then they parted. Lilian turned, to catch hold of her sister’s arm. Frances re-joined her mother; they headed back to Camberwell.

For the remainder of that day, and for the two or three days that followed, though Frances and her mother were regularly bothered by reporters, there was no further sign of police activity on the streets around Champion Hill – no more going through the gutters, no more knocking on residents’ doors. The cinder lane was re-opened: Frances screwed up her courage and went down the garden to look at it. But there was nothing to be seen. She couldn’t even with any certainty pick out the spot where she and Lilian had dropped Leonard’s body. That part of the affair had been so densely dark, so urgent and improbable, that it had begun to seem like something from a dream – just like one of those violent acts she’d sometimes committed in her dreams, then marvelled at on waking.

On Tuesday morning Vera came, to put together a suitcase of Lilian’s things. Frances went up to the bedroom with her, desperate to make the most of the link with Walworth; wanting to know, or to gauge, how Lilian was coping. Vera said that she was feeling stronger, was eating and sleeping better. Inspector Kemp had called to see her again the previous night —

‘He saw her again?’ asked Frances. ‘What did he want?’

Vera didn’t know. Just more questions like the others. Anyhow, he hadn’t stayed long. But some press men had called too, and they had been more of a nuisance. Had Miss Wray read today’s papers? They were full of the murder; it was awful. Lil had taken one look at them and burst into tears.

Frances had seen only that morning’s
Times
– which, she’d thought, was unsettling enough, the original inaccurate mention expanded now into an account of the opening and adjourning of the inquest and Lilian’s ‘trembling’ attendance at it. So when Vera left she went with her as far as the news-stand on the hill; she bought every paper she could afford, the
Mirror
, the
Mail
, the
Sketch
, the
Express
, the local papers too. Lilian’s image, she saw, unnerved, was on all the pictorials – she tucked the bundle under her arm, feeling squeamish about looking at them there on the street. She didn’t want her mother to see them, either. Once she was back at the house she took them straight up to her bedroom and spread them out on the floor.

She recalled the man with the camera. The pictures showed Lilian leaving the inquest, leaning on her sister’s arm, nervously lowering her head. They were grainy and unsubtle – mere approximations, really – but, all the same, they had captured something of Lilian, they had got the life and solidity of her, and it was incredible, dizzying, mad! to think of the masses of people who, just that morning, must have studied her face over their breakfast eggs and on their trains and buses; who must be gazing at it right now. The
Daily Mirror
carried a second picture. Perhaps it had been lent, along with that portrait of Leonard, by helpful Uncle Ted. It showed Lilian and Leonard in what might have been someone’s back garden. Leonard had an arm around Lilian’s waist, her hip was tight against his; they looked like any young couple of the clerk class, smiling into their future in Hammersmith or Forest Hill. The caption read, ‘Mr and Mrs Barber, before the tragedy’.

The tone was the same in the other papers. There was no suggestion anywhere that the marriage had been anything other than happy. There was nothing but sympathy for Lilian, the ‘pitiful young widow’, the ‘pathetic wife’. The accounts of the inquest stressed her bravery, her emotion and her looks; there were careful, approving descriptions of her costume. The murder was condemned as the work of a brute who would soon be apprehended, and the police were said to be ‘pursuing several lines of inquiry’, one of which was that theory, already reported by Charlie, that Leonard’s killer might have marked him out in the City and followed him home. Inspector Kemp was inviting members of the public to come forward if they’d noticed any suspicious behaviour on the streets of Blackfriars or Champion Hill on the fatal night.

Going from article to article, from picture to picture, Frances felt as if something that had, until now, been secure in her hand had dropped, had shattered, had burst into a thousand flying pieces. Then again – well, wasn’t it all just what she and Lilian could have hoped for? Charlie’s lie, whatever was behind it, had been enough to give the police their pointer; it didn’t matter which direction they went in now, so long as it took them away from the house. And for how long would the case attract this sort of interest? Another day or two? A week, at most? Soon, surely, it would become clear that the lines of inquiry were so many dead-ends – that Inspector Kemp, for all his confidence, had failed to deliver his man – and the newspapers would look elsewhere. Some more sensational story would be bound to come along. It’s just a question, she told herself, of doggedly sitting it out… But she looked again at those grainy front-page phantoms, more unsettled than ever to think of all the strangers’ gazes to which they had been exposed. Finally she tore the pictures free, screwed them into a ball, took them down to the kitchen, and stuffed them into the stove.

Then neighbours began to call. They had bought the papers too – or had been shown them, they claimed, by their cooks and parlourmaids – and wanted to discuss the latest developments. Mrs Dawson had heard that Mrs Barber had suffered some sort of seizure at the inquest – was that true? The elder Miss Desborough, from the house next door, understood that a
second
murder had now been committed, but that the police were keeping the matter quiet for some reason of their own. Mr Lamb and Margaret, on the other hand, had been told on good authority that the police were poised to make an arrest. No, there was absolutely no doubt about it. The man was local – a shop-keeper or trader. He had taken against Mr Barber because of an unpaid bill.

And next came Mrs Playfair. She had just that moment returned from Sussex, having cut short her holiday on the Wrays’ behalf.

‘I simply can’t believe it!’ she said, as Frances let her into the house.

Frances answered thinly. ‘Yes, everyone’s saying that.’

‘I opened
The Times
and actually yelled. You look ill, Frances.’

‘I’m worn out, that’s all. The last few days have seemed endless.’

‘Oh, why wasn’t I here! I could have done so much. But, tell me, how’s your mother?’

For answer, Frances led the way into the drawing-room. Her mother had heard Mrs Playfair’s voice; now, at the sight of her, she seemed close to tears. Mrs Playfair stepped quickly to her and took hold of her hands.

‘What an ordeal, Emily! You look worse even than Frances. I don’t wonder at it. We thought all our horrors were behind us, didn’t we?’

Frances’s mother nodded, unable to speak. But as she wiped her eyes and put away her handkerchief some of the tension went out of her.

‘It’s such a great relief to see you, Jane.’

‘You ought to have telegraphed to me at once.’

‘I’ve hardly known what I’ve been doing. Frances has taken care of most of it, but – I don’t know. It isn’t like an ordinary death or an illness at all.’

Mrs Playfair sat down and began to tug off her gloves. ‘Well, I want to hear everything that’s happened, every little last thing.’

Frances sat down too. The prospect of going through it all over again made her feel boneless with exhaustion. At the same time, she realised that here was an opportunity to tell the story of the murder as the police had begun to construct it – to fix it more firmly in her mind. So, with her mother now and then putting in some detail of her own, she gave a careful, thorough account of the events of the past few days, beginning with Constable Hardy’s arrival at the house on Saturday morning, and finishing with the inquest. Mrs Playfair looked shocked, appalled – but also, unmistakably, excited. As soon as she’d heard Frances out she narrowed her eyes.

‘Now, who’s the coroner at the moment? Is it still Edward Samson? I know him a little. He used to be friendly with George. I might pay him a call, do some digging. What do you think?’

‘Oh, I wish you would,’ said Frances’s mother. ‘If he knows anything at all that the police aren’t saying, I’d so like to hear it. It’s the senselessness of the thing that I find so horrible. The blindness, the waste. Poor,
poor
Mr Barber. He was such a cheerful young man, so very full of life. Can you really believe, as Inspector Kemp seems to think, that someone set out, purposely, to kill him? Someone with some sort of grudge against him?’

‘Well, no,’ Mrs Playfair answered, ‘I’m not sure I do believe it. There seems no evidence, for one thing. The attacker was clearly one of these louts one sees hanging about on the street corners! I wonder the inspector doesn’t simply round them all up and question them one by one. That’s what I would do.’

She went on like this, laying down certainty after certainty – and sounding oddly, in her confidence, like the inspector himself, so that Frances, listening to her, began to feel a return of the mild elation she had felt on Sunday while listening to him. For, the street-corner lout, the man with the grudge: whoever the culprit was meant to be, what did it matter? So long, she thought again, as no one was thinking of Lilian and her. So long as no one was imagining that they had ever made that journey down the stairs and over the garden with Leonard’s body… She remembered leaving him in the darkness. She remembered closing the door on him. And then another thought came – came like a whisper behind the hand.
He’s gone
. Lilian was free now. If they could just hang on to their courage, just until everything died down…

She chased the thought away. But the touch of elation remained. She put back her head, and closed her eyes, while Mrs Playfair laid her plans.

After tea that day, however, Mrs Playfair returned; and this time she looked uncharacteristically subdued. Yes, she said, she had spoken to Mr Samson. He had been quite willing to talk in confidence about the case. She had also had two or three conversations with her parlourmaid, Patty.

‘With Patty?’ repeated Frances.

‘Patty’s sister’s girl, over at Brixton, is engaged to be married. The boy’s a constable in the police, and he’s let one or two things slip.’

Frances couldn’t believe it. ‘You sound like Mr Lamb! According to him, Leonard was killed by a disgruntled local grocer. Mother and I will be next on the list, at that rate.’

‘Frances,’ protested her mother tiredly.

‘Well,’ Mrs Playfair went on, ‘this boy’s meant to be the horse’s mouth. Patty speaks very highly of him. And the fact is, both he and Mr Samson —’ She paused, strangely awkward. ‘It caught me quite by surprise, I can tell you. But they both gave me more or less the same impression. They both hinted pretty plainly that – well, that there’s something not quite right about the case.’

Frances looked at her. ‘What do you mean, “not quite right”?’

Mrs Playfair paused again. She seemed to be carefully choosing her words. ‘Well, for one thing, Mr Barber is supposed to have spent Friday evening with his friend, Mr – What’s his name?’

‘Wismuth.’

‘Mr Wismuth, yes. They’re supposed to have gone from one public house to another, getting drunk as lords on the way. But the police have been to every public house in the City, showing photographs of the two men, and no publican or barmaid has any recollection of them. What’s more, the police surgeon, Mr Palmer, tested Mr Barber’s body for alcohol when he carried out his post-mortem. He found very little trace of it, apparently – less than the equivalent of half a glass of beer. Looks odd, don’t you think?’

It took Frances a moment to answer. ‘Well, it sounds to me as though Mr Wismuth was the drunker, that’s all.’

‘Yes, perhaps,’ said Mrs Playfair. ‘But here’s the queerest part. It seems now that a man and a girl have come forward to say that they heard some sort of disturbance in the lane on Friday night, and —’

Frances felt the words as an almost physical shock. She began to blush – a horrible feeling, nothing at all like simple embarrassment, more a scalding of her cheeks, as if she’d had boiling water flung at them. Mrs Playfair, seeing her reaction and misunderstanding it, said, ‘Yes, isn’t it a ghastly thought? The girl’s in service at one of the houses further down the hill. She’d slipped out without the family’s knowledge – a naughty girl, obviously – but still, it’s enough to give one nightmares. She didn’t
see
anything, I believe; evidently it was too dark for that, and she was too far off – down where the Hillyards’ wall juts out. But she and the man both say they heard footsteps and sighs. The man made light of it at the time, said it must be another pair of sweethearts. Then, of course, when they heard about the murder… It took them until last night to make up their minds to talk to the police. The girl was frightened for her place; the man didn’t want to come forward on his own for fear of making himself a suspect. But the point is, you see – the point
is
, it was quite early in the evening when they were out in the lane – not later than half-past nine. Well, according to Mr Wismuth, he and Mr Barber were still in the City then.’

The blood was roaring through Frances’s ears. To think that when she and Lilian had gone staggering out into the darkness – that when she was going over Leonard’s body, trying to pull his clothes straight – to think that all that time, less than fifty yards away, there had been this couple, this sinister spooning couple —

‘They must be mistaken,’ she said, trying to will the heat and colour from her face. ‘Whatever they heard – probably it
was
another couple. I’ve seen couples in the lane myself, countless times. Or else they imagined the whole thing – or are telling stories, for the thrill of it.’

‘It’s certainly possible,’ said Mrs Playfair, with a doubtful air. ‘But the police seem to be taking them seriously all the same. They’ve kept the detail out of the papers for now. And they’re – well, they’re keeping a close eye on Mr Wismuth, I can tell you that.’

Now Frances couldn’t answer. Miss Desborough had spoken yesterday of things being kept out of the papers, and she hadn’t believed it. But if the police really were doing devious things like that, if they were plotting and watchful like that – And if they really suspected Charlie —!