She caught her breath sharply. Then without a word she started walking away towards her home.
Colin looked for a moment as if he might be about to follow her to say something more. But then he turned and went towards the village.
Presently he said aloud, ‘Poor Laura?’
He said it questioningly, experimentally, as if to discover whether or not it sounded appropriate and convincing.
A few minutes later, in much the same tone, he said, ‘Poor Susan? … Poor Fanny?’
Then he laughed again.
Colin did not go home immediately. First he went to the Lynams’.
Fanny opened the door to him and was taking him, as a matter of course, to the sitting room, from which the voices of Basil and Clare Forwood reached him, when he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder, saying, ‘Can I see you alone for a moment, Fanny? There’s something I want to tell you.’
‘Let’s go into the office, then.’
She took him to the small room in which she and Basil had heard the news of Sir Peter’s death from Dr McLean.
Her face had lost the look of peace that it had worn when Colin had seen her earlier in the evening. Her theory, that had shifted the load of guilt from her own shoulders on to those of Laura Greenslade, appeared not to be wearing very well. But in the doubt and discouragement that made her shoulders sag and her plump cheeks look almost hollow, there was a new element of exasperation, of sheer bad temper, as if some pressure were developing in her that might shortly produce an explosion.
Throwing herself down in a chair and giving Colin an irritable, scowling stare, she said, ‘I’ve had nearly as much of all this as I can stand. D’you know what I’d do if I could? I’d pack up and clear out. Now. This evening.’
‘And not come back?’ Colin asked.
‘Not on your life!’
He answered with a laugh.
Snatching up a packet of cigarettes from the desk, Fanny fumbled inside it. The packet was empty and she flung it at the wastepaper basket, which it missed by a foot, falling on the carpet.
‘Oh, what the hell!’ she said. ‘It’ll never be the same again, will it?’
‘Why not?’ Colin said. ‘This old village has seen far worse things than an odd little case of poisoning and not been rocked to its foundations.’
‘Well,
I’ve
been rocked to
my
foundations,’ Fanny muttered. ‘I’ll never be the same again.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘I liked you as you were.’
‘You!’ she said derisively. ‘You don’t care about a single damn thing, so long as you’ve got your quiet life.’
He had sat down on a corner of the desk and was giving her one of his steady but guarded looks that gave away nothing of what he was thinking.
‘I suppose that’s very nearly true,’ he said after a moment.
Fanny stirred in her chair like a sulky child.
‘Now for God’s sake don’t take anything I say personally,’ she said. ‘You should know better than that. It’s just that this is all more than I can stand, it really is.’
‘I’d say that’s a healthy sign,’ Colin said. ‘You were a little too anxious to carry the whole load yourself. All the same, what you said about me must be nearly true, because I’m quite surprised at how much I’m ready to do to protect this quiet life of mine. The fact is, I’m so well pleased with it, that I’m ready to go to considerable lengths to keep it just as it is – or as it was a week ago.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Fanny asked. ‘What lengths are you going to?’
‘Well, for one thing, I’m trying to put this lazy brain of mine to work,’ Colin said.
Fanny cocked her head on one side, looking at him frowningly and perhaps for the first time since he had arrived, giving him the whole of her attention.
‘Yes,’ she said at length, ‘you’re up to something or other.’
‘What I’m up to,’ he said, ‘is a sort of prevention-of-cruelty-to-Colin campaign, or, if you prefer it …’ He paused and his tone changed, becoming entirely serious. ‘No, Fanny, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be honest with you. The fact is that I can’t bear the situation at the moment any more than you can. I’ve been sitting around seeing something that I value going to pieces – and I can’t bear it. So I’ve got to do something about it.’
‘Something that you value …’ Fanny said musingly. ‘Our sort of life here?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yet we’re all frauds, aren’t we? None of us really belongs. The people who belong here are the farmers and the shopkeepers and some of the queer old maids who’ve lived here all their lives. People like us are just suburbanites who’ve put on country clothes.’ She glanced down discontentedly at her shapeless slacks. ‘And not even the right country clothes.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Colin said. ‘We like it here. We like each other. And the village quietly goes its own way without taking much notice of us. In an overcrowded world, horribly tired of trying to make too many readjustments much too quickly, what could be more satisfactory?’
‘You sound serious,’ Fanny said.
‘I am serious,’ Colin said. ‘So much so, that to protect what I like, I’m developing an altogether new line of interfering in other people’s business. And now I’ll tell you why I came here. I’ve just been out to see the Mordues. I had an idea about them, put into my head by something you said, so I went out there to make an experiment. And the result of it was that I got told something that I’d half-suspected, though I wasn’t sure of it. As a matter of fact, I’m not absolutely sure of it now …’
He got off the desk and turned to the window. It was a small window with small panes, set high in the thick wall, and it faced towards his own home. One window there was lit up, the window of Jean’s study.
Keeping his eyes on this light, he went on, ‘You see, Fanny, during the last few days I’ve kept getting the feeling that this whole thing must be my fault in some way. I know that doesn’t make any obvious sense and I wasn’t even taking it particularly seriously myself until this evening. I’ve had certain worries on my mind recently, among them the idea I’d had that I might be able to help Susan, and I thought I was probably just mixing them all up together … Well, that part of it isn’t important to anyone but me. But still, it got tied up with an idea I had that there couldn’t have been any intention of killing Sir Peter. The method used was too slapdash, I thought. It could have gone wrong so easily. As a way of murdering anyone, it was chancy beyond words. And then when you talked in the pub this evening about Laura Greenslade having done it as a way of hurting and humiliating you, I suddenly thought I saw something that you hadn’t. If anyone had wanted to do that to you, I thought, it wouldn’t have been Mrs Greenslade, it would for certain have been our dear old friend, Tom Mordue …’ He looked round at Fanny. To his dismay, she was gazing vacantly at the ceiling, with no sign on her face that she had been listening to anything that he had said.
‘Fanny – ’ he began.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Tom Mordue. Yes, I know. The moment there’s trouble of any kind, one’s thoughts are bound to fly to poor old Tom. I’ve been thinking of him quite a lot, but I haven’t said anything at all about it, because he’s the sort of dog everyone wants to give a bad name to and hang. All the same, I don’t think he’d have done anything of that sort to me, I really don’t.’
‘Don’t you, Fanny? No, of course you don’t.’ He turned back to the window. ‘All the same, after my own recent experience with him, I’m inclined to think that if Tom were able to work out in that queer mind of his that you’d done him an injury, there are almost no lengths to which he wouldn’t go to get even. And if Minnie knew of it, there are no lengths, none at all, to which she wouldn’t go to protect him from the consequences of his own idiocy, whilst doing her best to protect you – but still, Tom would come first with her. And there you are – d’you see now what my theory was, the one I thought of while we were talking in the pub? I thought, Tom put the arsenic into your lobster to make all your guests ill, then Minnie came along and put some foul-tasting stuff in – ’
‘Phenylthiourea,’ Fanny interrupted. ‘I’ve got it written down and learned it off.’
‘But we don’t know that that’s what it was, do we?’ Colin said. ‘Let’s just say something very unpleasant that was meant to stop people eating the lobster at all. And then it turned out that there was some defect in Sir Peter Poulter’s sense of taste and so he ate up nearly all the lobster by himself. And Minnie couldn’t, didn’t dare stop him.’
‘No!’ Fanny said. Her chair scraped on the floor as she jerked it back a few inches. ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘Nor do I any more,’ Colin said. ‘That is …’ His voice was hesitant, as if there were something that he was keeping to himself, and Fanny’s eyes, watching him now, filled with a new, uneasy doubt. He went on, ‘I’ve been out there this evening, trying shock tactics. I don’t think they did much good. They scared Tom all right, but then in his heart he’s permanently scared of the antagonism he rouses in people, so that by itself doesn’t mean much. And Minnie rallied to him, of course, and so by now, if there’s any fragment of truth in what I thought, they’ll have a story of some sort concocted to defend themselves with.’
‘Let’s hope to God they have!’ Fanny said earnestly.
This time, as Colin looked round at her again, there was no smile on his face.
‘It’s murder,’ he said, with an unfamiliar edge on his voice.
‘No, it isn’t,’ she answered. ‘Not if it happened like that. They didn’t mean to kill anyone and so it’s manslaughter.’
‘Except,’ he said, ‘that they watched it happen and didn’t prevent it.’
‘Oh, God!’ she said and thrust a frantic hand through her hair. ‘Well, it didn’t happen like that, Colin!’
‘No,’ he said, ‘probably it didn’t. And, as I said, I don’t think my visit this evening did much good, except that Susan followed me when I left and told me something about herself and Kit. Tell me, Fanny, isn’t it your impression that Kit treated Susan rather badly, suddenly producing Laura when everyone thought he and Susan were going to get married?’
She nodded, though her forehead creased in a defensive frown. She was resentful of any criticism of Kit but her own.
‘Well, Susan’s story,’ Colin said, ‘is that she’d refused to marry Kit before Laura appeared on the scene at all, which means, of course, that Tom, if he knew about it, had actually no grudge against you and no reason to put arsenic in the lobster.’
‘So that was it!’ Fanny said. Her tired eyes brightened with interest. ‘Susan refused Kit! Aren’t we all fools?’
‘Well, that’s what I want to ask you about,’ Colin said. ‘Did she?’
Fanny thought it over for a moment.
‘You don’t believe it, do you?’ she said at length. ‘Why not?’
‘I’m not sure that I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘In fact, I do believe it. The only thing is, I’m inclined to think the rejection wasn’t meant to be permanent. I think she intended …’ He paused. ‘Well, I may as well tell you, because I want very badly to know what you think about all this. I think she intended it as a way of putting pressure on Kit to move away from you. She told me that she was very fond of you, but that all the same she wanted a husband who was much more independent than Kit.’
Fanny’s eyes narrowed a little and her cheeks flushed a dull red.
‘Susan said that –
Susan?’
she said.
‘I’m afraid so – and I’m afraid, my dear, that any young woman is going to say it. I didn’t drag that in just to hurt you, but because – well, because – ’
‘Because you wanted to tip me off?’ she suggested bitterly.
‘In a way. But mostly because I wanted to know, quite simply, whether or not you think that story’s likely to be true.’
Fanny’s chair scraped again as she shifted it another few inches. Leaning back in it, she clasped her hands behind her head and her gaze went back to the ceiling, not vacantly this time, but with a calculating stare. The smoke from her cigarette drifted up towards a dark beam over her head and wreathed delicately around it.
‘Well, it may be true,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think it’s true that Tom and Minnie knew anything about it. Minnie was horribly unhappy about Kit’s engagement and didn’t try to pretend not to be.’
Colin nodded. ‘That’s just about how I had it figured out.’
‘And if Minnie didn’t know, Tom didn’t. Susan might easily have confided in Minnie and not in Tom, and Minnie, just possibly, might have kept it to herself. But it could never have happened the other way round.’
‘Which means,’ Colin said, ‘as I thought, that Susan was frightened enough to lie about her parents.’
‘No,’ Fanny protested, ‘no, it can’t … That is … Well …’ Her voice died away. The vacancy had returned to her face, making her look withdrawn from Colin, occupied again, as she had been ever since the death of Sir Peter Poulter, with incommunicable thoughts of her own.
‘Still, even if it were so,’ Colin said, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, does it?’
Fanny did not answer.
‘Or all it need mean,’ he added, ‘is that Susan was frightened for no reason at all, which can happen to the most sensible of us. And that brings me back, very reluctantly, I must say, to the possibility that after all somebody – somebody who knew you well enough to get into your kitchen and poison your lobster – did deliberately murder poor old Poulter.’
‘I don’t think I’m reluctant to return to that idea,’ Fanny said, ‘not after the other things you’ve been suggesting.’
‘But it was such a messy, preposterous way of doing it,’ he said. ‘Ingenious at first sight, but really as stupid as hell.’
‘And none of us even knew Sir Peter – ’ She broke off the sentence abruptly. Colin seemed to take no notice of it, but from something in his face, she guessed that he was perfectly aware of what she had nearly said. It was always very difficult to Fanny not to say whatever was on her mind, and during the last few days she had had continuously on her mind the memory of Clare Forwood’s uncharacteristic desire to meet Sir Peter. She coughed and said, ‘Of course, Laura says she knew him.’
‘Laura,’ he repeated after her. ‘Laura, the unknown quantity. Is she really as terrible as you seem to think her, Fanny?’