The inspector nodded.
‘I write novels,’ she said.
He nodded again.
‘And sometimes,’ she said with a small, tight-lipped, deprecatory smile, ‘I find my characters quite a problem. I find I do not know nearly enough about them – about their backgrounds, their professions, the day-to-day details of their way of living. I myself live, you see, in a very secluded way. I really know very little indeed about the world.’
‘Ah,’ the inspector said, ‘then you mean you wanted to use Sir Peter as a character in one of your novels?’
She nodded brightly.
‘Yes, I’m just planning a novel which concerns a newspaper proprietor,’ she said, ‘and when Mrs Lynam chanced to remark to me that Sir Peter Poulter had come to live in their neighbourhood, I told her that it would really be most useful to me if I could meet him – most useful.’ She paused. ‘But now I shall never write the book.’
To her own ears what she was saying sounded fantastic nonsense. Fanny had been right when she said that Clare never wrote about anything but her own family. Clare had never felt that she knew any other people sufficiently well to write about them, and besides that, no others had ever been sufficiently important to her for her to want to write about them. Over and over again in her work, she had grappled with the same characters and the same problems. Varying the plot that contained them only a trifle, she had always tried to reach a little deeper under the surface, groping her way closer to some ultimate answer which she felt, with quietly indignant doggedness, was owed to her by life.
However, there were, she believed, other ways of working. Writers existed, she had heard, though she found it a little hard to believe in them, who did arrange to meet unfamiliar types of person in order to study how they pronounced or mispronounced their words, ate their food and cracked their finger-joints, while some writers actually went on expensive journeys in order to be able to describe accurately the backgrounds which they had mysteriously decided were appropriate to their stories. At the least, the lay public believed that writers did this kind of thing, and the police, it was to be hoped, were part of the lay public.
Just so long as this inspector did not turn out to be one of those utterly unexpected people who for reasons that she had never been able to comprehend, apparently found great pleasure in working slowly and painstakingly through the products of her curious imagination …
If he was, he appeared to have no difficulty in concealing the fact. He nodded, as if he found her explanation perfectly convincing.
‘Did Mrs Lynam mention to you how she made Sir Peter’s acquaintance?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Clare said. ‘But I believe the fact is that I know more about that than she does. Mrs Lynam is such a friendly and unselfconscious person that it would never occur to her to look for reasons for the friendliness of other people. But Sir Peter, I believe, was not at all a naturally friendly man. He had great skill with other people, but was not genuinely genial or accessible. From what he told me, I’m sure that he made Mrs Lynam’s acquaintance with a purpose.’
The inspector looked interested.
Clare went on, ‘His purpose was simply to be invited into that house. It was, you see, the house in which he had been born. His origins, you know, were very humble. His parents kept a small shop – the shop in which Mrs Lynam now sells her antiques. And the house, during his childhood, was divided into two cottages. His parents occupied one of them. And he had felt a great desire, so he told me, to see his old home again.’
‘He told you this, but did not tell Mrs Lynam?’ the inspector said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But he would certainly have told Mrs Lynam later.’
‘If he had not started to feel ill and left the party rather abruptly?’
‘We don’t know that he left the party because he was feeling ill,’ she said.
‘Quite true,’ he said. ‘But that seems to have been the general impression of the people who were there.’
‘It’s their impression now,’ she said, ‘after the event. At the time I don’t think such a thought occurred to anyone.’
‘What was your own impression at the time?’ he asked.
‘I think I took for granted that he had suddenly recollected that he was expected at home for some reason – his usual dinner-hour, for instance.’
‘And during the time that you were talking together, he seemed to you quite normal?’
‘So far as I can guess what his normal behaviour was. He showed no signs of undue depression, if that’s what you mean. He talked in a most interesting way and was charming to everybody.’
He went on then to ask her what she could tell him about the lobster patties.
She told him that they were a specialty of Fanny’s, and that she was peculiarly proud of her ability to make them. When she had said that much, Clare hesitated.
Then she spoke of the pronounced bitter taste of the lobster on the evening of the party and the strangeness of Sir Peter’s being unable to taste it.
‘Some people, of course, like bitter flavours,’ she said, ‘but this was too extreme. No one could have liked it.’
‘So everyone else who tasted it has told me,’ the inspector said.
‘I don’t know what it can have been,’ Clare said. ‘It didn’t remind me of anything I knew. It was just bitter.’
‘Can you tell me something else,’ the inspector said. ‘Who handled the dish with the lobster patties on it?’
‘Besides Mrs Lynam, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘I did.’
She thought he made a small movement of increased attention. He said, ‘When you were sitting beside Sir Peter?’
‘No, it was I who brought them in from the kitchen, just as Sir Peter was arriving.’
‘You were helping Mrs Lynam?’
‘Yes, she’d gone upstairs to lie down for a little. She was tired, so Mr Lynam and I got things ready.’
‘Then Mr Lynam handled the dish too?’
‘Not just then. Earlier, I think, in the kitchen. But it was I who brought it into the sitting room. You’ve probably been told, however, that the patties were simply left on the kitchen table for quite a long time. Anyone who watched for the right moment could have gone in, even from outside, through the back door. But tell me, Inspector, is there actually any evidence that the poison was in the lobster?’
He replied guardedly that he was exploring all possibilities, then went on, in only slightly different words, to ask Clare all the questions that he had already asked her.
This took her by surprise. She had been assuming that he was an intelligent man who would not need to be told a thing twice over. Then all of a sudden she recognized, with a flash of anger at her own stupidity, that the repetition was deliberate.
This made her extremely nervous, not because she was afraid that her second answers might contradict her first, but because it seemed to imply that she was actually under suspicion. Her voice grew a little hoarse, while her manner took on an added shade of hauteur and reserve. From an appearance of almost meek and retiring gentility, she changed to one of formidable severity. She began to look at the inspector, of whom she was now feeling wildly frightened, as if he were the least intelligent boy in her class.
Smoothly and quietly he changed his tactics. Leaning back in his chair and relaxing, as if the important part of the interview were now over, he said, ‘I wonder if the same thing has struck you about all this, Miss Forwood, as struck me as soon as I began to make enquiries as to what had actually happened that evening.’
She said nothing, but sat there looking prepared to be intensely critical of any suggestion that he might make.
‘I find the whole situation,’ he said, ‘somehow a little – how shall I say it? – well, lopsided.’
She raised her untidy eyebrows in a question.
‘Put it like this,’ he went on. ‘We have a group of people gathered together to celebrate a certain engagement. These people for the most part know each other well and it appears that there are certain – how shall I say it? – tensions, animosities almost, between them. Some serious, perhaps, some not so serious. What’s serious and what isn’t is very hard to judge until one has some real knowledge of the people involved. A father’s rage, for instance, because he believes his daughter has been jilted, a woman’s rage because she fears her son – actually her half-brother, of course, but in fact almost a son – is to be taken away from her, another woman’s rage because she thinks her husband has been insulted …
Any one of these feelings might be serious or trivial according to the general make-up of the person in question. Don’t you agree?’
The turn the conversation had taken surprised Clare agreeably.
‘Of course I agree,’ she said. ‘But none of these things has anything to do with Sir Peter.’
‘And that’s why I called the situation lopsided,’ the inspector said. ‘Here we have this group of people amongst whom – how shall I say it? – motives for murder might be discovered. Yet the person who dies is a person who apparently has no close connection with any other person there.’
‘Are you trying to tell me,’ Clare said, ‘that the person who got the poison wasn’t the one who was meant to get it?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘certainly not that. I’m not even saying at this point that anyone was meant to get the poison. Accident really makes rather more sense of the evidence than murder does, or else perhaps – how shall I put it? – ’
‘In the first words that come into your head!’ Clare suddenly snapped, his verbal mannerism doing more to shatter her self-control than anything that he had asked her.
He inclined his head slightly, as if in thanks for the advice.
‘Malice, then,’ he said. ‘That’s what I was going to say. An ugly but not actually murderous malice, directed, of course, against Mrs Lynam.’
Clare’s forehead wrinkled. This was an idea that had not once occurred to her and she found it interesting. She leant a little forward.
‘I think I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘Someone may have wanted to humiliate her and just because she was known to be so proud of the way that she cooked lobster, deliberately spoiled it for her. All the same, surely using arsenic for the purpose was going a little far?’
‘A little, yes. But suppose that amount of arsenic had been shared out among all the guests at the party instead of being consumed almost entirely by one. Everyone would have had an unpleasant night and said that it was something they had had at the party, probably Mrs Lynam’s lobster. But no one would have died.’
‘But the bitter taste, Inspector!’
‘Yes, I agree that makes it complicated.’ He gave a sigh. ‘Yet that might have been an accident, after all. Mrs Lynam herself seems to think that she can sometimes act so absent-mindedly that she might easily have used some quite inappropriate ingredient by mistake.’
‘And then just the one man in the neighbourhood who can’t taste that ingredient, whatever it was, comes to the party and eats up all the lobster patties by himself. Isn’t that just a bit too much of a coincidence, Inspector?’
‘It would be a coincidence, certainly. And yet it’s a very important thing in my sort of work to remember that – how shall I say it? – well, coincidences do happen. One’s inclined, of course, to look for a pattern in everything and to refuse to believe in the purely chance occurrence. But that can be a great mistake. Yes, a great mistake.’
‘And how will you test your theory?’ Clare asked. ‘How will you find out if there’s any truth in it?’
‘Only by tracing the source of the poison.’
Soon after that the inspector and the sergeant left. Clare felt that an ordeal was over and for the moment was so relieved by the feeling that she put out of her mind the thought that there would certainly be more interviews, more ordeals.
Sitting down at her desk, she picked up her pen and started to stare absorbedly at a sheet of paper.
Half an hour later the sheet of paper was still blank and some of the sense of peace and security had evaporated. Against her will and against the rigorous discipline that she was usually able to impose on her mind, she found it thronged with distracting images of a group of people in most of whom, she assured herself, she had next to no genuine interest.
The Mordues, for instance, and horse-faced, garden-loving Mrs McLean, and the excitable young woman with the delicate flushed face, who had burst into the kitchen, carrying an armful of almond blossom, and her husband who had been so insulted, but whom Clare had not yet seen.
What did any of them matter to her? What, in a sense, did even Sir Peter Poulter mean to her?
Sighing, she pushed her chair back. At that moment her doorbell rang.
At any other time she would probably not have answered it. If the sheet of paper on her desk had had even a line or two written upon it, the bell could have rung again and again and Clare would not have stirred. But now, almost glad of the interruption, she actually hurried to the door.
Outside she found Laura Greenslade. She greeted Clare with an artificial smile and mechanical-sounding apologies for disturbing her, and when Clare invited her to come in, walked in with her head held unnaturally high and her whole body oddly stiff. It was the walk, and her voice had been the voice, of a person desperately controlling some violent emotion.
In the brighter light of her sitting room, meeting Laura’s china-blue eyes, Clare knew at once what the emotion was. It was the emotion of which she knew so much. It was fear. Laura was in a state of panic which might erupt at any moment into screaming hysteria.
Becoming rigid with resistance to the infection of the feeling, Clare did not speak, but left it all to Laura.
Standing quite still in the middle of the room, her arms hanging straight at her sides, Laura said in a thin, high voice, ‘You’ve heard, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Clare said.
‘About the arsenic?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you know – you know, don’t you, who did it?’
‘I certainly do not.’
‘But you must know!’
‘I know nothing whatever about it, Mrs Greenslade.’ Clare’s voice was empty and cold, not angry or excited, but simply toneless.