‘But you say she knew nothing about this bitter-tasting stuff?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘You told her there was something peculiar about Laura, but never what it was?’
‘Yes. At first I didn’t remember myself what it was, I just knew that the name, Laura Greenslade, meant something unusual to me, and forgetting what Fanny’s imagination can do with an odd bit of information like that, I said as much. After that, when the facts about her suddenly came back to me, I felt that Fanny would think them such an anticlimax that I could hardly tell her. Science is fundamentally uninteresting to Fanny.’
‘But, Basil, that means …’
‘It means that if anyone tried to murder Laura, I did, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ Clare said, ‘of course not. It means that Sir Peter must have been the right victim after all. Which is what I’ve thought myself all along, in spite of Laura’s determination to draw attention to herself. But there’s still another possibility and I’m not sure it isn’t actually the likeliest of all, and that is that there was never any intention of murder. Someone wanted to spoil Fanny’s party, that’s all. Whoever it was never thought that one person would get all the arsenic.’
‘Did that detective-inspector suggest that to you?’
‘He did, as a matter of fact.’
Basil nodded. ‘And to me too. It’s a nice theory, of course.’
‘Only you don’t believe in it,’ Clare said after a moment.
‘Only
he
didn’t believe in it,’ Basil said.
After that they were both silent and a minute or two later Basil stopped the car in front of his house.
Fanny must have been listening for them, for she came to the door and opened it before they reached it. Her face had lengthened with anxiety and lost some of its colour. Her manner was both subdued and restless. She seemed eager to see them and yet at the same time hardly able to drag her thoughts out of some dreary dream of their own. She was wearing slacks and her grey knitted sweater and for once no jewellery of any kind. A cigarette dangled from her lip with half an inch of ash on it. As Clare came up the path she saw the ash drop and settle unnoticed on Fanny’s bosom.
As usual Fanny spoke immediately about her own affairs.
‘I’ve shut the shop,’ she told Clare. ‘Ever since Saturday we had such a stream of people coming in, I was disgusted. Don’t you think it’s disgusting? Could you ever do a thing like that yourself? Why are some people like that?’
Basil laughed and said, ‘And I told her that now at last she had a chance to make some money.’
‘You didn’t, you were the one who advised me to shut it,’ Fanny said solemnly.
She turned and went back to the sitting room, her slippers making a sliding sound as she shuffled them down the stone passage.
There was a big log fire burning on the hearth. The room was warm and cheerful, gay with bowls of spring flowers. Kit was sitting by the fire, reading an evening paper. He got to his feet as Clare entered and gave her an uncertain smile. He was showing the signs of strain even more than Fanny. Looking at Clare with an intensity of questioning in his blue eyes, he was wondering, she supposed, if she had seen Laura, or perhaps even knowing from Laura herself that she had done so, was trying to guess what had brought her.
She sat down close to the fire, thankful when Basil, remembering as usual her shrinking dislike of cats, picked up Martin, who was showing an eager interest in her ankles, and thrust him out into the passage.
After that Basil brought her sherry, while Fanny, taking the chair facing Clare across the hearth, picked up her own half-empty glass.
‘Well,’ Fanny said, when she had gulped what was left in it, ‘what’s happened?’
Clare wished that Kit was not in the room. That would have made it easier to talk. With his intent, anxious gaze upon her, she felt a great embarrassment at having to speak of Laura. Then, to her relief, Basil began to speak for her, and told Fanny and Kit of Laura’s visit to Clare, of Laura’s peculiarity, of Laura’s suspicion, of the inspector’s questioning and suggestions.
Kit turned away in the middle of it, sitting down, leaning back and fixing an expressionless stare on the ceiling. Fanny, frowning, fixed a steady gaze on his set face. She took the information that her future sister-in-law suspected her of having attempted to murder her with surprising calm, even, Clare thought, with a trace of relief.
Fanny’s first words, when Basil stopped, were, ‘Well, at least that makes some sense of it all.’
Kit exclaimed something unintelligible. It had the sound of bitter anger, but against whom the anger was directed was not clear. He did not move.
Fanny went on, ‘And I suppose really it’s perfectly natural that Laura should suspect me. That’s what I think I’d do in her place.’
‘However,’ Basil said, ‘I don’t think
we
need waste time on suspecting you. The question is, how are the police going to like the theory that Laura, and not Sir Peter, was the poisoner’s object?’
‘They aren’t going to like it much,’ Fanny said, ‘yet it could easily be true.
I
think it’s probably true.’
‘With you as the poisoner?’ Clare asked sharply, annoyed that Fanny should be ready to help Laura in her dramatization of the relations between them.
‘No,’ Fanny said.
She said no more just then, but Clare could see that some thought had started working in her mind, some thought that comforted her and gave her peace.
With a look of helplessness, Clare turned back to Basil. He shrugged and smiled.
At that moment Fanny abruptly stood up, went purposefully to the door and out into the passage, took her old coat from the peg on the wall, draped it round her shoulders and went quickly out of the house.
She walked down the path and out into the quiet village street.
Darkness had come by now, broken only by the lights in windows, most of them closely curtained, and by the few street lamps under the elms. The sky was starless, covered in low cloud. It was cold, with a sharp wind blowing.
Fanny tightened her coat about her, but she did not hurry to keep warm. She was not going anywhere in particular. She had come out simply to give herself a chance to take a firm hold on a thought that had come to her while Clare had been speaking. If Kit had not been in the room she would not have come out at all. But Kit’s presence had made it impossible to discuss her thought with Clare and Basil, and to have remained there with them, pretending to think about something else, would not have been possible to Fanny.
Walking along slowly, talking quietly to herself, she put her thought in order. It was an astonishingly reassuring thought, for it lifted the load of guilt from her shoulders. In a way, it did even more than this. It convinced her that her feelings, her intuitions were reliable. It put her back on terms with her own nature that she could understand. For the first time since hearing of the death of Sir Peter, she felt like herself.
Besides this, she felt suddenly at peace with her surroundings. Guilt had made her feel that this small, pleasant world of hers, which was extremely dear to her, had turned, had had the right to turn, against her. But this evening it was her friend once more, accepting her and supporting her.
Walking on to the point where the houses of the village ended, she hesitated there, then went on a little farther down a narrowing lane. She knew the way so well that she hardly noticed the darkness. The roughness of the ground under her feet and the shadowy pattern of the hedges against the sky were familiar. But the wind cut more keenly here and after a few minutes she turned back. She walked more rapidly now as the comforting remembrance came to her that after all there was someone with whom she could talk over her precious thought. She knew where to find him, too, at that hour. Walking on past the gate of her own home, she turned in at the doorway of The Waggoners.
There was perhaps just a moment of silence in the bar as she entered. It was the first time that she had come in there since the day of her disastrous party. But after that first moment she was greeted with the usual good evenings, and Colin Gregory, in his accustomed corner, asked her what she would have to drink. As she sat down beside him, he added, ‘Glad to see you coming out of mourning, Fanny. How are things?’
‘Fine,’ she answered. ‘Just fine, Colin.’
The sound of the slow, country voices in the room, the crackle of the big fire, the snug familiarity of it all, wrapped her round in reassurance and calm.
Colin looked at her thoughtfully.
‘Something’s happened,’ he said. ‘You really do look better.’
She nodded and smiled. Sipping her drink, she felt that it was the first that she had actually enjoyed for days. ‘I didn’t kill Sir Peter,’ she said.
‘You fail to surprise me,’ Colin said. ‘No one but you ever thought you did.’
‘Oh, they did,’ she said. ‘They must have. They didn’t think I’d done it on purpose, but they thought it was my fault. I could feel it.’
He shook his head. ‘You just felt what you were thinking yourself. It’s a good sign that you’ve changed your mind. What made it happen?’
‘Simply finding out how Sir Peter really was killed,’ she answered.
‘Simply that?’
‘Don’t laugh at me,’ she said. ‘I do know. I haven’t decided what to do about it yet, but at least I know how it was done and that it wasn’t by my own muddling and bungling. I know who did it too.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Laura.’
He went on looking at her steadily for a moment without saying anything. It was a good-humoured look but sceptical. It spurred her on, more than further questioning would have done, to explain herself.
‘She didn’t mean to kill him,’ she said, ‘any more than I did. I was the person she meant to get at. I don’t mean she meant to poison me, but she meant to hurt and humiliate me. You see, she’s tremendously jealous of me because of Kit. She thinks I’m going to try and hold on to him. She thinks I’m going to keep him here in this job I made for him and make him go on living with Basil and me. I suppose that’s all my fault because I didn’t make it clear to her when she came here that I only wanted to help. If he can find some other job and wants to go away, I’d naturally never dream of interfering.’
‘And does he want to go away?’ Colin asked.
Fanny stirred uneasily.
‘I haven’t asked him directly and I don’t mean to,’ she said.
‘I see.’
She gave him a doubtful glance, then went on, ‘Really, Colin, I do know what I’m talking about. I’ve been thinking it out very carefully. I went for a walk by myself just now and thought it all out. You see, Laura has the peculiarity that she can’t taste some chemical or other with a name I can’t quite remember, but Basil can tell you all about it. And she found out that she had this peculiarity when she was at the university and volunteered as a guinea-pig in some experiment of Basil’s. The stuff’s got a frightful bitter taste to most people, but just a very few people can’t taste it at all. Her idea was to use it and a little arsenic to make my lobster taste foul and give everyone tummyaches, getting out of it all herself by having a phoney headache. But of course she made several mistakes. To begin with, she didn’t know how much of the stuff to use. Not being able to taste it at all herself, she probably thought she had to use a lot to be sure that other people could, and so she put in so much that in fact they could hardly swallow the stuff at all and so weren’t affected by the arsenic. And another mistake which she couldn’t have known about, was that there was another person at the party who couldn’t taste this stuff any more than she could. I gather that’s a very unlikely thing to happen, yet it
can
happen …’ She paused, seeing that look of reserve on Colin’s face that she generally connected with the idea of an unvoiced criticism. ‘You don’t think much of it,’ she said.
‘My mind’s quite open,’ he answered.
‘I don’t think it is,’ she said. ‘I think you think I’m talking rubbish.’
‘It’s just that it’s all a bit complicated,’ he said. ‘It would be so easy to make something taste a bit unpleasant without using this mysterious substance you’re talking about.’
‘Of course it would,’ Fanny said.
‘And perhaps she didn’t use it
.’
He gave a slight shake of his head, ‘I don’t get it, I’m afraid.’
Fanny herself had only just thought of the point she was about to explain to him and she had to frown and purse her lips in a great effort to clear her mind before she went on.
‘Look,’ she said at length, ‘nobody knows that that stuff was actually used. But Laura’s going to go to the police and tell them that it was –
that’s
the whole point of the thing. She’ll tell them that and then tell them that Basil was the only person who knew about this peculiarity of hers – or – or perhaps she won’t actually go to them and tell them that, but she’ll threaten to, to try and make us do whatever she wants. Of course I don’t know quite what’s going on in her horrid little mind, but you’ll see, it’ll be something of that sort.’
She thought that at last she had made an impression on Colin. A frown appeared on his usually tranquil face and his eyes searched hers for a moment, as if he were trying to draw out of them something more than she had said. But then he said, ‘Fanny dear, have another drink.’
‘What’s wrong now?’ she said. ‘What have I said now that doesn’t make sense?’
‘It’s just that you’ve said a bit too much,’ he said. ‘Some of it might make sense without the rest of it.’
‘Such as which?’
‘Well, spoiling your party and your reputation as a cook by giving everyone a little pinch of arsenic in the lobster is one thing,’ he said. ‘But faking up a case of attempted murder against you and Basil is another.’
‘Well then,’ Fanny said, ‘the one I’ll stick to is the faking up a case of attempted murder against me and Basil.’
‘It’s evident,’ he said, ‘that you don’t really like the girl.’
The statement moved her to a fit of nervous laughter. Beginning quietly, it suddenly seemed to take a twitching hold of her muscles, so that she felt herself shaking and chuckling without any true sense of amusement. She saw heads turning towards her and eyebrows curiously raised, yet she could not stop until Colin, taking a hold of her wrist, tightened his grip on it till it hurt.