Enough to Kill a Horse (26 page)

‘Good God!’ Colin exclaimed, sounding genuinely amazed. ‘You don’t mean you ever suspected him.’

‘Not very seriously,’ Basil said. ‘I learnt that the accident he’d been called to, the one that prevented his coming to the party, was perfectly genuine, whereas your quarrel with Tom had something a little queer and engineered about it.’

‘Quarrels with Tom don’t take much engineering,’ Colin said.

‘Perhaps not – but then I realized you’d been behaving altogether rather queerly recently,’ Basil said. ‘You’d been pursuing a course of action not very characteristic of yourself, but which was quite certain to lead to trouble with Tom. And it all began when Fanny told you that Laura was coming down for the weekend. It was then that you started to take such a surprising interest in Susan’s situation, and decided you must go away to see your friends in Essex about giving her a job. It was while you were away that you got hold of the arsenic and the phenylthiourea, wasn’t it?’

Colin nodded. ‘I must always have underrated you, Basil. It seems you do a lot of observing in your quiet way.’

‘Well then, you went on behaving in a curious fashion,’ Basil said. ‘That quarrel, for instance. I know it was Jean who refused to speak to Tom again and decided that the two of you couldn’t come to the party if Tom was coming. But I didn’t believe that could have happened if you hadn’t wanted it to. You could easily have calmed Jean down if it had suited you to do so. And I remember Jean’s telling us how you laughed when she turned on Tom. She was very upset by that laughter. She couldn’t understand it. But the truth was, I think, that you couldn’t help laughing because your plan was going so beautifully.’

‘Yes,’ Colin said, ‘I’m afraid my self-control slipped up badly there. What other mistakes did I make?’

‘I think, on the whole, your continued interference in the course of events,’ Basil said. ‘It suggested anxiety. At the same time, everything you did seemed designed to cause trouble. Your attempt to frighten the Mordues, for instance, into behaving suspiciously. It might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Susan. Then you handed on to Fanny what Susan had told you in confidence, and did succeed that time in making trouble between Fanny and Kit. And it was all a little too clever and at the same time too desperate, like your attempt to incriminate poor Clare Forwood.’

Colin nodded again.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was feeling desperate. Yet there was a certain amount of truth in what I said about her and it made a very nice case.’

‘You knew that she’d been to see Laura?’

‘Oh yes, I saw her. I was in the yard when I heard her coming. So I stood back in the shadows till I saw her leave. She was in such a state of shock that she looked quite guilty. She wanted to get away without being seen, without getting involved in any way. It was that that tempted me. You can apologize to her from me, if you like. There was nothing personal in it. I had nothing against her.’

‘I almost feel,’ Basil said, ‘that there’s been nothing personal in your attitude to any of us, either love or hate, except to Laura.’

‘Oh no, I shouldn’t like you to think a thing like that about me,’ Colin said. ‘I’ve liked you all very much. But you still haven’t told me when you realized the truth about Laura and me.’

‘I have,’ Basil said. ‘I told you, it was just before I came over here. It was when Susan told us all about Laura’s telephone call to her and then about how she found an envelope by the telephone in The Waggoners, an envelope that she showed us. It was addressed to Mrs Charles Greenslade and it had the Mordues’ number and yours jotted down on it.’

‘Laura’s call to Susan – what was that about?’

‘Laura told Susan that she was handing Kit back to her, breaking off her engagement to him.’

‘Oh,’ Colin said. ‘I see.’

‘Yes, having seen you in the street this morning with Jean, Laura realized that she couldn’t go ahead with her marriage. I suppose that is what happened, isn’t it? When she pointed Jean out to Kit in such excitement and wanted to know who she was, you’d actually been with Jean the moment before.’

‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘We went out together. Then I went into the paper shop to buy cigarettes and Jean went on to do some other shopping. I suppose that’s when Laura pointed her out to Kit. It was rash of me to go out at all that day, but I hadn’t expected Laura to arrive till the actual day of the inquest. I’d been all prepared to develop ‘flu on that day and stay in bed.’

‘And Laura, on discovering not only that her husband was still alive but bigamously married to a rich woman, realized that this could be a very profitable situation for her – particularly as she could easily prove to Jean that you were responsible for the death of poor old Poulter.’

‘I was awfully sorry about that, you know,’ Colin said. ‘I’d nothing whatever against him. I realized what a crazy thing it had been to try to kill Laura in that way and I decided that next time I’d try something quite simple that couldn’t slip up. I pointed that out to you, you know, when I was working out the case against Clare Forwood.’

‘Yes, you pointed out that the phenylthiourea was really such a crazy thing to have tried that it couldn’t possibly be the true explanation.’

Another rigid, unnatural little smile tugged at Colin’s lips.

‘And I thought I was being so ingenious, working that in,’ he said.

‘Too ingenious, too ingenious all the time,’ Basil said.

‘But when did you realize that I was Charles Greenslade?’

‘I was very slow about that,’ Basil said. ‘It wasn’t until I saw the envelope, with your telephone number on it and your initials, C. G. – Colin Gregory or Charles Greenslade. Then things clicked together. Yet I’d known from the first that Laura must have been married already when she was my student. It was her name I remembered her by when Kit produced her and her name hadn’t changed. She’d stuck in my mind, of course, because she was an interesting specimen. A homozygous recessive, presumably. Most interesting indeed. But being married, one could be sure that her husband would have been one of the people who’d have heard all about her peculiarity and who’d have remembered it. And it seemed not unlikely too that her husband was a student, and, since it was wartime, and the question of reservation would have arisen, a science student. What was your subject, by the way?’

‘I began taking a degree in zoology,’ Colin said, ‘but I gave it up. I realized I’d never care for that sort of thing. I liked studying the ways of animals and so on, so I thought that meant I was cut out to be a zoologist. A complete mistake, of course. But a worse mistake was meeting Laura in my first week at the university and falling in love with her and marrying her. She was a selfish, scheming, ambitious, empty-headed creature, who decided I’d got to slave my guts out becoming important in some way. After a few weeks I hated her. So I got myself de-reserved and got away into the army. And then – and then I was spending a leave with my mother, whom Laura hated, and a flying-bomb hit the house. I’d gone out only a few minutes before and when I came back there was nothing – nothing left. And in a moment I knew I could vanish. I got into the army again under a false name and got sent to Italy. That was when I met Jean, in hospital …’

His voice faded and he took an uncertain step towards the figure at the desk.

Looking down at it and with his back half-turned to Basil, he said, ‘It wasn’t her money, Basil – I swear it wasn’t. It was that she was so awfully good to me. She gave me everything I’d ever wanted.’

Suddenly he stooped and picked up the revolver that lay just out of reach of Jean’s dead fingers.

‘And now you might go, Basil,’ he said. ‘You can tell it all to the police and tell them I drove you out at the point of the gun. I’d sooner not do that in fact. I do like you – I like you and Fanny very much. I’ve nothing whatever against you. So you’ll go now, won’t you?’

Basil hesitated, then he turned and went out of the room. He went down the stairs and out into the garden. There in the darkness, with a cold wind blowing against him, he stood still.

After a moment he heard the shot.

He gave a convulsive shiver. Then, with his face white from cold and from strain, he started running towards his own home.