‘And now you think you can get what you want without a fight?’ Clare said.
Her tone made Laura glance at her doubtfully, but Clare’s face expressed nothing but nervous concentration on her driving.
‘Oh, I’m sure of it,’ Laura said. ‘She isn’t at all a selfish or domineering person – and honestly, that’s what I was a bit afraid of. Though everything Kit said about her was complimentary, I had somehow the fear that she was going to be possessive and difficult about Kit and would hate me if I stood up to her. But I’m absolutely sure now that she isn’t like that at all.’
‘And so Kit and you are going to live in London, are you?’ Clare said. ‘It’s all arranged?’
‘Arranged?’ Laura said, and for some reason her colour deepened. ‘We hardly even discussed it. But knowing Fanny now, I know it’s going to turn out all right.’
‘Kit wants to go, does he?’
‘Of course.’ There was a slight sharpness in Laura’s voice as she said it.
‘Well, I’m sure you’re right to insist on it,’ Clare said, hoping that the subject might be dropped. To have spent, out of more than twenty-four hours, only a few precious hours of sleep by herself, and during the rest of the time to have endured what she considered an almost shocking amount of emotional experience, was something that at any time would have produced in her a mood of acute dislike of other human beings. She was feeling at that moment an almost physical lust to be alone. If that was impossible, then the next best thing would be silence.
But Laura went on, ‘You know, if I could have helped at all, I’d have stayed on, but I got the feeling that Fanny and Basil wanted to be on their own. I do hope I was right. D’you think I was?’
‘Probably,’ Clare said.
‘But I still don’t understand what actually happened yesterday.’
‘I don’t think anybody does.’
‘I didn’t like to press Fanny for details,’ Laura said, ‘because she was obviously so upset, but I can’t help puzzling over it. Kit said that there was something wrong with the lobster and that nobody but Sir Peter ate any of it.’
‘Yes, that’s what happened.’
‘But why did he eat it?’
‘He said it was delicious.’
‘But if everyone else – ’
‘I know, I know –
why?’
Clare broke in, suddenly fierce, making the car leap ahead wildly for an instant, then rear back on its haunches. ‘Why did the silly old man insist on eating the things when everyone told him they were bad? Why couldn’t he do the same as other people? He’d be alive now if he had. Why do people have to do these ridiculous things that only make trouble for other people?’
Laura gave her a thoughtful look, her eyebrows lifting a little, as if she disliked the tone of these remarks. But she went on pertinaciously with her enquiry. ‘The lobster actually tasted so unpleasant that other people wouldn’t eat it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yet Sir Peter said it was delicious and ate a lot of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘But isn’t that quite extraordinary?’
Clare did not reply. She was beginning to feel nervous of what she might say if she spoke. Scowling ferociously at the road, she wondered whether she might not find it useful in her life to suffer from deafness. But this thought immediately produced a superstitious fear in her. She had noticed, or thought she had noticed, that if she thought of an illness, she was almost immediately attacked by it. To ward off this danger and show that she had heard Laura’s question perfectly well, she gave a non-committal grunt.
‘Did you taste the lobster?’ Laura asked.
Clare grunted again.
‘But whatever did it taste like?’
‘Bitter.’
‘Bitter? Just bitter? It tasted – ’
There Laura stopped. She stopped with a little catch of her breath, while one of her hands, lying in her lap, gave a jerk and seemed to lift itself automatically a few inches, as if some nerve had been struck.
There was silence for nearly a minute, then, in a soft, careful voice, as if she were making an effort to keep all expression out of it, Laura said, ‘You’re quite sure that the lobster tasted
bitter?’
The change in her way of speaking was so noticeable that Clare dared for an instant to shift her gaze from the road and snatch a glance at the girl beside her.
She found that Laura was staring at her with a fixed, intent look, her eyes unusually wide open and her face very pale. The way she was sitting had changed too, although she had not moved. Instead of looking relaxed and comfortable, she had become rigid.
‘Yes,’ Clare said, her curiosity aroused. ‘It was very, very bitter.’
But now, just when she would have liked Laura to go on talking, explaining the strange emotion that the thought of bitter-tasting lobster caused in her, Laura became silent and slowly turning her head away and looking out of the window beside her, so that Clare could not have seen her face even if she had looked at it again, did not even reply when Clare presently enquired, ‘Does that mean something to you?’
Laura scarcely spoke again before they reached London. The rigidity slowly went out of her body, but she then sat in a slumped and exhausted way, as if she were suffering the after-effects of a shock. After a while she complained that another of her headaches was developing and supporting her head on one hand, she covered her eyes.
Clare felt almost as irritated by this change as she had at Laura’s earlier inquisitiveness. More than once she tried to draw her into talk, but all her attempts were failures. When they reached the block of flats where Laura lived and Laura got out of the car, turning at last to look at Clare and thank her for the drive, Clare saw that her eyes still had a fixed, empty look, as if her whole mind were occupied with thoughts that she did not mean to risk revealing.
But as Clare drove on to her own flat, she forgot about Laura, for as soon as she found herself alone, the thoughts that had been obstructed in her own mind by the mere presence of another person, began to flow with a feverish speed that washed away all interest in what did not just then immediately concern herself. She had plenty of thinking to do about the weekend. She had many things to sort out, many things about which she must come to some conclusion.
Next day she attempted to do some work. But she was wholly unsuccessful. Everything that she wrote she tore up. It was the same on the day following. The trouble was not merely that problems unrelated to what she was trying to write kept crowding into her mind, but that she felt incessantly that she was waiting for something. It hardly seemed worth her while to concentrate fully on anything, because it seemed certain to her that as soon as she did, she would be interrupted.
She did not clarify to herself what form she expected the interruption to take, but when it did not come and the hours passed without any disturbance of her quiet solitude in her Hampstead flat, she began to feel an unbearable suspense. The longer the time that passed, the more compelling became her conviction that some terrible thing was about to happen. The future seemed dreadful and her life shadowed by disaster.
At last, four days after her return to London, the interruption came and at once, although the event was sufficiently grim, Clare felt better. She had great skill in detaching herself from reality, once she knew what the reality was. Her voice, as she listened to Fanny’s hurried and desperate speech on the telephone, was calm and unexcited.
‘So it
was
arsenic?’ she said.
‘Yes – and enough of it to kill a horse!’ Fanny’s voice reached her wildly. ‘Dr McLean told me how many grains it was, but that didn’t mean anything to me, so I asked him was that an awful lot and he answered that it was enough to kill a horse!’
‘But isn’t arsenic tasteless?’ Clare’s question sounded like a pedantic insistence on accuracy.
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ Fanny answered. ‘But they don’t seem to be worrying much about that. They – ’
‘They?’ Clare interrupted.
‘The police, of course,’ Fanny said. ‘They’ve been here all day, asking questions and questions and questions. And Clare – ’ Her voice stopped for an instant. ‘I think they’ll be coming to see you.’
‘Yes, I rather expected that,’ Clare said.
‘Of course I didn’t tell them anything about your having specially asked me to arrange a meeting with the Poulter man … Oh God, how I wish I hadn’t! I just said you were a very old friend whom we’d asked down to help celebrate Kit’s engagement. But Mrs McLean told her husband that you and Sir Peter spent most of the evening talking together and I suppose he told the police and they asked a lot of questions about you and whether you’d ever met Sir Peter before and all that sort of thing. I just went on saying I didn’t know anything about it at all – which of course is quite true. And as soon as I could get to the telephone I did, to warn you to expect them.’
‘I see,’ Clare said. ‘Thank you, Fanny.’ A sense of cold had suddenly slid down her spine, but her voice did not change. ‘Thank you very much. I gather they think it’s murder.’
‘I think they think so,’ Fanny said, ‘except that they’re trying to find out how I could have done it by accident. But there just isn’t any arsenic in the house.’
‘And they’re quite certain the arsenic was in the lobster?’
‘No, of course they aren’t. They can’t be. It might have been in one of his drinks, or in a stuffed olive or anything – though I don’t know if you could put enough arsenic into a stuffed olive to kill a horse. Perhaps it would take spoonfuls – I just don’t know.’
‘And what about the inquest?’
‘It’s the day after tomorrow. I expect you’ll have to come down for it. And so will Laura. The Mordues and the McLeans all remembered the Poulter man’s saying that he remembered her and I think Tom’s told the police all about it, with knobs on.’
‘But is there any certainty whatever that Sir Peter got the poison at your house?’ Clare asked.
‘I suppose there isn’t – no absolute certainty, anyway. But his servants say he’d had nothing to eat or drink at home later than lunch-time, and if he’d had that huge dose of arsenic then, the symptoms would have come on much sooner.’
‘Suppose he had it after he left.’
‘Well, so far as anyone knows, he went straight home and he was taken ill before he even got into the house. And d’you remember how suddenly he left and how his manner changed. I thought at the time that you’d said something that had upset him, but now I realize that he must have been feeling ill and wanting to get away before anything happened.’
‘And suicide isn’t even being considered?’
‘I suppose they’re considering everything, but …’ The telephone was silent.
‘I see – yes, they think it’s murder,’ Clare said. ‘Well, thanks for warning me, Fanny.’
‘Oh, but I don’t mean they’re going to suspect you!’ Fanny cried. ‘I don’t think they’ve started to suspect anyone yet. They seem to think he was a man who had lots of enemies. I suppose people who make big fortunes always have. That’s to say, they must be pretty ruthless sometimes, even when they’re very pleasant to meet. And I dare say there were women too. He gave me that sort of feeling, in spite of his age. So there’s no need for you to be in the least afraid of the police when they come, because apart from anything, the man I saw seemed to be quite reasonably intelligent and not at all likely to rush off madly after ridiculous ideas. But I know you don’t like surprises, or strangers turning up unexpectedly and so on. That’s why I rang you up at once, not because I thought they’re going to suspect you. Personally, I should think they’d be much more likely to suspect Laura. In the light of after events, that headache of hers looks to me just a little suspicious. But naturally I haven’t said a thing to turn their thoughts in that direction. I still believe that I’m responsible – though I haven’t the faintest idea how I did it. Goodbye now, Clare. Let me know what happens.’
‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘Yes of course.’
She put the telephone down. But she did not remove her hand from it, indeed the grasp of her fingers tightened round it. Sitting there, gazing absently at the wall before her, she kept a hold on the instrument as if it were a buoy on the end of a line that linked her to safety.
The police called on Clare the next day. A detective-inspector and a sergeant from Scotland Yard arrived together and spent about an hour with her. Before they came, she had thought out carefully the limit of what she meant to tell them. Their questions did not probe beyond this limit and so she talked, for her, fairly freely.
‘No,’ she said in answer to a question as to whether or not she had ever met Sir Peter before the occasion of the Lynams’ cocktail party, ‘I had never met him. But I wanted to meet him. I had even asked Mrs Lynam to arrange a meeting with him for me, if she found herself able to do so.’
She had decided on making this admission readily. This was not because she doubted that Fanny had said nothing to the police of her request concerning Sir Peter, but because it seemed almost certain that Fanny, before the day of the party, would have spoken to a number of people of Clare’s uncharacteristic desire to meet a man who had owned a string of newspapers and that these people would not now forget that.
‘I did not really expect Mrs Lynam to arrange the meeting,’ she went on, speaking primly and distantly, while her big, deep-set eyes under the heavy forehead that overshadowed the rest of her small, lined face, bored steadily but in fact rather blindly into the eyes of the inspector. ‘At the time I spoke of it she had never even spoken to Sir Peter, so I was hardly serious in making the request. But then she telephoned me one morning to say that she had met him and she invited me down for the weekend so that I could make his acquaintance.’
‘Was there any special reason why you wished to meet him?’ the inspector asked.
‘Yes,’ Clare said, ‘but it will be a rather difficult reason to explain.’
In her own ears her manner of speaking sounded pedantic and false, betraying obviously how fully she had rehearsed her answers, but she hoped that to the two policemen it would seem a quite normal way for a nervous little old maid of literary leanings to speak.
‘You see,’ she said carefully, ‘I am a writer.’