The Paying Guests (51 page)

Lilian said, ‘What is it? Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

She nodded. ‘But I don’t know how bad it is. I just don’t know what to think.’

And quickly, quietly, she told Lilian everything: the conversation with Mrs Playfair, the scene with her mother to which it had led, the visit from the inspector… Lilian grew pale again as she listened. By the time Frances had finished she had reached for the newel-post at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against it as if she might faint.

‘Oh, Frances, it’s the end! If your mother’s guessed —’

‘She hasn’t guessed all of it.’

‘And those people in the lane!’

‘They didn’t
see
anything. Even the inspector admitted that.’

‘But why did he tell you about them at all? Why would he tell you so much?’

‘Yes, that’s the frightening part. He was trying to startle me into confessing something. Something about you and Charlie? Or about you and other men?’

‘Not – Not about you and me?’

‘I don’t know. No, I don’t believe it. But he knows I was at Netta’s party with you, and that I pretended I wasn’t. I wish to God I’d never done that! And I wish I’d never thought to say you were spring-cleaning on the day Leonard died. There’s no going back from that now. It’s in all our statements. Everything he’s turning up looks so damaging! That – That insurance policy.’

She must have sounded odd as she said it. Lilian looked at her in a new way. ‘But that’s nothing. All the married men at the Pearl have them. They get them as part of their job.’

‘Five hundred pounds. It seems such a lot.’

‘But I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘Had you?’

‘Yes! Or —’ She shook her head, confused. ‘I don’t know. Len used to make jokes about it, I suppose. You’re not thinking —?’

‘No,’ said Frances quickly, ‘of course not.’ She wouldn’t allow the thought at all. ‘I’m just trying to look at it as
he’ll
look at it.’

At the mention of the inspector, Lilian sank on to the lowest step of the staircase. ‘Oh, he frightens me to death! I knew he was thinking things about Charlie and me. I guessed it, from all the questions he asked me on Monday night. If only Charlie would tell the truth! He’ll have to now, won’t he? If that couple were really in the lane? But then, if he does – Oh, Frances, I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Every time the doorbell goes I think it’s the police. But if it’s Charlie they’re watching… Betty was here yesterday. I could hardly look her in the eye. I can’t look anyone in the eye, except you. They won’t arrest him or anything, will they?’

Frances squatted down beside her. ‘I don’t know. I think they might.’

She looked terrified. ‘Oh, don’t say that! It’s getting worse and worse! First you’re caught up in it; now him. And all from that stupid, stupid moment —’

It was clear what she was remembering: the swing of the ashtray, the cricket-bat crack, Leonard’s heavy collapse to the floor. Upstairs there were voices in the kitchen, the scrabble of the dog’s claws on the lino; she seemed not to hear them. Instead she hung her head, and spoke levelly and wretchedly.

‘You wanted to go for a doctor, didn’t you? I should have let you, I know it now. Whatever might have happened, it couldn’t have been worse than all this. I’ve started to think —’ She couldn’t say it.

Frances stared at her. ‘What?’

‘I’ve started to wonder whether I shouldn’t just tell the police everything.’

‘
What?
’

‘I’d say I did it all by myself. That you didn’t know anything about it.’

‘Oh, Lilian, you mustn’t! We’ve left it too long. They’d never believe you.’

‘But it’s the truth. They’d have to believe me.’

‘Believe that you carried him? Down the stairs? Up the garden to the lane? And all without my knowing?’

Lilian’s mouth had begun to tremble. ‘Well, I can’t think what else to do! I’ve got you into all this —’

‘Don’t think about me.’

‘You’ve done so much. You’ve done it all!’

‘You’ve been brave too. You just have to be brave for a little longer.’

‘I don’t know if I can be. It’s more like a nightmare than ever.’

‘I know it feels that way,’ said Frances, ‘but there’s no evidence against anyone. They can’t arrest people with no evidence. They can’t —’

But her voice was wavering now. Her last bit of confidence seemed to be melting away. Lilian looked at her, then caught hold of her hands. ‘Oh, don’t be frightened too! You mustn’t be frightened too! If I know you’re frightened, I’ll die!’

She was wringing Frances’s fingers. That panic was back, that dark electricity. They hung on to one another, but might have been gripping each other’s hands over some great gulf, so horribly fused yet separated were they by their terror.

As it had once or twice before, the panic ran through them, then burned itself out. Lilian drew free and put her head in her hands. ‘I wish I could make it be different,’ she said. ‘I wish I could take it all back. I wish, I wish —’ She stopped, exhausted. ‘But wishing’s no good. It never was, was it?’

Frances put an arm around her, kissed the side of her pale face. ‘Just be careful, when the inspector comes. Don’t let him catch you out. We’ve come so far; we can keep going, I know we can… But you won’t think again about – about what you said? Telling the truth? You won’t think of it?’

Lilian hesitated, then shook her head. ‘Not if you don’t think I ought to.’

They hauled themselves upright, stood close for a minute, and kissed with dry, clumsy mouths before they parted.

Out on the pavement, Frances blinked against the daylight. A man was standing at the window of the shop, looking over the display, and in the blindness of the moment she just avoided colliding with him. She caught his eye in the dusty glass, mumbled an apology and moved on.

But after a second or two she looked back, to see him stepping rapidly away in the opposite direction. He was dressed in a buckled grey mackintosh, she realised now. Was he the man she had passed earlier, on her way down the hill? She wasn’t sure; but the thought set her panicking again. It hadn’t occurred to her before, but wasn’t it possible that Inspector Kemp had put men to watch the house? Men to follow her when she left it? Perhaps they’d been doing it all week. How else, after all, would he have known to find her on her own today? And she had done just what he’d wanted her to do! Gone rushing off to Lilian! Gone to Lilian, to get to her first, because he had taken care to let her know that he would be coming here later himself…

She headed home feeling sick, feeling trapped and exposed – now and then, as she crossed a road, furtively turning her head to glance back over her shoulder. But there was no further sign of the man in the mackintosh.

Two days later, the funeral took place. Frances had planned to attend it with her mother. But her mother rose in the morning looking more burdened and fretful than ever, and complaining of a sore throat; so she went alone, walking gloomily to Peckham through the sunless, shadowless streets, then taking a bus to the cemetery gates. She found a crowd of black-clad figures there, waiting for the cortège to arrive. She recognised aunties and cousins from Netta’s party; she shook one or two hands. When the motor-hearse and cars appeared she strained for a sight of Lilian, catching only the merest glimpse of her as the vehicles crept by. The last of the cars entered the cemetery, and she and the other mourners moved silently to follow. It took about ten minutes, then, on a winding road through the graves, to reach the dour little chapel where the service was to be held.

The atmosphere, in the circumstances, could not have been anything other than grim. The coffin was set on trestles in the aisle; gingery with brass and varnish, it was disconcertingly reminiscent of Leonard himself, and the floral wreaths that were placed on it – one marked
BROTHER
, the other
SON
– recalled the awful untimeliness of his death. People wept into their handkerchiefs as the minister gave his address. Frances, afraid of where grief would lead her, feeling their tears as a sort of contagion, sat as rigidly among them as if she were holding her breath.

But there was something else to the occasion, she began to realise, some extra current in the general distress: she saw it in the closed, set faces of Leonard’s family; she saw it in the oddly challenging way in which, when it was time to leave the chapel, the Barber men rose to shoulder the coffin. On the slow walk to the grave, the mourners, like vinegar and oil, somehow divided themselves into two distinct streams. And at the grave itself the streams pooled, with the Peckham crowd gathering on one side and the Walworth crowd gathering on the other, and only a few individuals – men who might have been colleagues of Leonard’s from the insurance business or, perhaps, had fought alongside him in the War – looking bewildered about where their loyalties lay. Frances didn’t care whom she stood with. She simply wanted the thing to be over. She kept trying for more glimpses of Lilian; she could see only her bowed head and shoulders, shaking with sobs as the coffin went down. As soon as the minister had uttered the closing blessing and the mourners began to disperse, she tried to pick her way through the grim-faced crowd towards her.

But, as if the tension that had been simmering just below the surface of the whole affair had at last been allowed its release, she had barely taken a dozen steps before she became aware of a small commotion at the head of the grave. Those family wreaths,
SON
and
BROTHER
, had been placed prominently among the flowers, but Vera and Netta, it seemed, were attempting to move them in favour of a large sheaf of lilies. Leonard’s mother, and another woman who must have been a sister or sister-in-law, had hold of the stems of the lilies and, with white, determined expressions, were trying to tug them from Netta’s hands.

It was all done in silence, but the dumb-show hostility was as shocking as a shout. People had turned to watch, open-mouthed; no one seemed to know what to do. Mrs Viney, scarlet and furious, was heading back to the grave as though she intended to join in the fight. Lilian was pulling on one of her arms: ‘Leave it, Mum. Oh, it isn’t worth it!’

A couple of the cousins stood near by, along with Min and Min’s young man. Frances joined them. ‘What on earth’s going on?’

At the sight of her, Min’s hand flew to her mouth and she let out a burst of nervous laughter. ‘Oh, Miss Wray, isn’t it awful! Lenny’s mum won’t let Lil’s flowers be put at the top of the grave!’

‘But why not?’

‘It’s all on account of what’s been in the paper. Haven’t you seen? A man and a woman are saying they heard things on the night of the murder, and —’

Frances looked at her in sick dismay. ‘That’s in the papers now?’

‘It was in the
Express
this morning. But we knew already, from the police, and Lenny’s family have been ever so funny with Charlie over it; they say they don’t know who to believe. He was meant to have helped carry the coffin, but they only told him last night that they didn’t want him to do it. They got one of Lenny’s cousins to do it instead – the Black and Tan one, too! Lil thinks they did that to get at her. They’ve been saying such awful things about her.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘That she wasn’t a proper wife. That she and Charlie have been too friendly. And things about her money. That it’s too much, or —?’

‘Her money?’

‘The money she’s meant to get because of Lenny’s having died.’

That damn insurance policy! If the five hundred pounds had become public knowledge, how long before the papers got hold of it? What would
that
do to the case?

‘Lil’s been in such a state about it,’ Min was saying now. ‘The Barbers won’t say anything to her face, but none of them will look her in the eye. They wouldn’t let our car go first after the hearse. And now they’ve moved her flowers —’

She was interrupted by Vera and Netta, who had come striding over from the grave. They were furiously brushing yellow pollen from their black silk gloves.

‘Well, Miss Wray,’ said Vera, ‘isn’t this charming? Len would laugh his head off, wouldn’t he? We’re all meant to be going back to Cheveney Avenue now for tea and biscuits. I’m surprised they asked us, aren’t you? You’d think they’d be afraid of Lil putting arsenic in the drinks! I wouldn’t set foot in their house after this, not if they paid me. We’re going home.’ She looked around. ‘Where did Mum go?’

One of the cousins said, ‘She and Auntie Cathy’ve taken Lil to the gate. Lloyd’s gone on with Pat and Jimmy to fetch the cars.’

‘Right.’

The three sisters put down their heads and started off along the narrowish path, with Min’s young man and the cousins following. Frances stood still for a second, then hurried after them – hoping to see Lilian, if only for a moment, before she was whisked away.

But even in the fifty or so minutes that had elapsed since they’d all arrived, news of the funeral must have spread. Back at the cemetery entrance, the scene was chaotic. There were reporters and photographers, and more of the sort of gawpers who had been at the inquest, people who’d materialised on the pavement to watch the mourners emerge. Boys were sticking their heads through the railings; a few were even balanced on top. Two of them caught Frances’s eye and called to her – called in the urgent yet amiable way in which they might have appealed for directions in the street.

‘Hi! Lady! Which is the chap?’

They meant Charlie, she realised. And an instant later she saw him, talking to one of the undertakers; Betty was beside him, holding on to his arm. They both had mortified expressions. Charlie’s face was so peaked it looked waxy. Perhaps he was asking if the cemetery had any other exits to it: the undertaker was nodding, gesturing back towards the graves.

A motor-car blasting its horn made her jump with fright. But she turned her head to it, recognised the car as Lloyd’s – and at last saw Lilian, sitting in the back of it with her mother and her aunt. The car was trying to leave the cemetery, but was being prevented from doing so by another car, which had stopped to open its doors to a harassed-looking Barber party. Lloyd and the Barbers’ driver had let down their windows in order to remonstrate with each other, and a red-haired man, whom Frances had never met before but had seen in the chapel and identified at once as Leonard’s older brother Douglas, had got involved in the argument. He had Leonard’s voice exactly, she noticed with a chill.

Finally the Barbers’ vehicle closed its doors and shuddered into life; Lloyd’s car began to inch forward; and then there was nothing she could do but stand and watch it leave. Its windows reflected the grey and black of the scene: when, at the very last moment, Lilian turned, caught her eye, put up a gloved hand to the glass, she might have been gazing hopelessly out at her, Frances thought, through flowing water; she might have been drowning.

Her expression haunted Frances on the journey back to Champion Hill. She kept remembering what she had said, the last time they had met – that she’d been thinking of going to the police and telling them everything. Suppose she had made up her mind to do it? If only they could have spoken! Was it worth pressing on to Walworth, trying to see her again? But what was the point, if all they could do was stand and murmur in that narrow passage?

By the time she arrived home, to find her mother still unwell, she felt ill herself, her throat gritty, her eyes sore. She went to bed straight after dinner that night, but lay fretful and restless for hours; she felt ill again the next morning, but made herself go down to the news-stand for the papers. Every one of them, now, had picked up the story of the couple in the lane. There were quotes, and pictures, along with descriptions of the funeral. And for the first time, too, there were photographs of Charlie. The
Daily Sketch
had even got hold of an old snapshot of him and Lilian. It showed them dressed for a party, Lilian with a band across her forehead and drop jewels at her ears; the picture, clearly, was a group one that had been cropped, but cropped in such a way as to make them look almost like sweethearts. The caption identified them as ‘The widow, Mrs Barber, and her friend Mr Wismuth, who is continuing to assist the police with their inquiries.’

The horror of it stayed with Frances all day. It followed her like a shadow to bed, and found its way into her dreams. In the early hours of Monday morning she awoke with a dreadful start, convinced that she’d heard the sound of someone furiously knocking at the front door. Could it be the police? Could it even be Lilian? The hallucination was so vivid that at last, quaking with apprehension, she lit her candle, tiptoed downstairs, and quietly drew the door open on its chain. She found the porch quite empty, the street beyond it dark and still, with only a few mouse-like movements here and there as the breeze got hold of fallen leaves and made them scuttle.

Later that day, worn out by the lonely churning of her thoughts, she took a tram into Town and went to Clipstone Street. And the moment the door to the flat was opened and she saw Christina’s familiar face – the childish blue eyes, the terrible haircut – she appalled herself by bursting into tears.

‘Oh, Chrissy.’

Christina came forward and took her in her arms. Frances wept against her shoulder, then fished for a handkerchief, holding the back of her hand to her running nose, embarrassed. ‘Stevie isn’t here, is she?’

‘No, Stevie’s at school, of course. Come in off the landing.’

‘I’m disturbing you.’

‘Don’t be an idiot. Come in. I’ve been longing to see you.’

She led Frances into the flat, put her to sit in the velveteen armchair. She drew the hat from her head and the gloves from her fingers; she set a kettle of water to heat on the gas-ring, then opened a drawer and produced a bottle of brandy and two tumblers. Frances’s tears had begun to subside. She was wiping her face. But when Christina put the tumbler into her hand the gesture set her off again, worse than before. She took a single unsteady sip, the glass rattling against her teeth. Then she set it down and cried into her handkerchief – cried until her head was throbbing.

‘I’m sorry,’ she managed at last.

‘Don’t say that,’ said Christina, ‘for God’s sake. Drink your brandy. Will you have a blanket? You’re freezing! Why are you so cold?’

Frances tried another sip, then put the tumbler aside. ‘I don’t think I’ve been warm, not for a moment, since —’ She couldn’t finish.

Christina fetched a tartan rug, brought out the electric fire. Sitting down in the opposite chair, she said, ‘What on earth’s been happening to you?’

Frances shuddered. ‘The first couple of days after he died – I don’t know, now, how we all got through them. We did it inch by inch, I think, like climbing a cliff. Then it seemed to be all right. But now – I don’t know what’s going on. The police have got some idea in their heads. It’s terrifying.’

‘Terrifying, how?’

‘Have you been following the case in the papers? You know there’s this man, Leonard’s friend? Charlie Wismuth? He’s supposed to have spent the evening with Leonard before he died. But the police don’t believe him. And the worst of it is, they think that Lilian – they think that Lilian might have – Christ!’ Her lips were twitching. ‘I can’t even say it. I haven’t seen her since the funeral. And even then I couldn’t get near her. It was unbelievable. No one on Leonard’s side will talk to her. The two families were practically tearing up tombstones and hurling them at each other! At home I do nothing but worry. My mother’s as bad as the police. I just don’t know what to do. Lilian’s at Walworth. We can’t talk, we can’t see each other —’

‘It can’t last for ever, surely?’

‘I feel so utterly alone.’

‘But it can’t go on and on, can it?’

‘Something dreadful’s going to happen, I know it is.’

‘But I still don’t understand. You say the police suspect Lilian? But of what, exactly? And why?’

‘It all turns on Charlie’s statement. He isn’t telling the truth about where he was on the night Leonard died.’

‘They think he had something to do with the murder?’

‘Yes. But he didn’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just – I just know he didn’t. But they’re imagining that there’s been some sort of love affair between him and Lilian. That she… put him up to it. I don’t know.’

‘Do they have any evidence?’

‘Of course they don’t.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Well, of course I’m sure! What are you suggesting?’

‘Nothing, I suppose. It’s just, to see you dragged into all this…’

‘The police are simply fastening things together. Ridiculous things. Lilian’s behaviour at her sister’s party. The fact that she and Leonard weren’t happy. The fact that his life was insured —’ But Frances didn’t want to talk about that. She shook her head. ‘It’s all nonsense. But they believe it! They’re twisting things about.’