Five Roundabouts to Heaven (20 page)

“You have evidence that Mrs Bartels died from the effects of a poison which it is extremely difficult to detect, the symptoms of which, but for the praiseworthy vigilance of the local practitioner, might easily have been confused with those indicating coronary thrombosis.

“You have the evidence of the Manchester chemist that a man, whom he has identified as the prisoner Bartels, bought altrapeine in his shop, that he had removed his glasses to make himself less readily identified, and that he signed the poisons book using the name and address of a perfectly respectable Leeds businessman who bore no resemblance to the prisoner, and has never bought altrapeine in his life.

“And you have those highly significant remarks in his letters to the woman Lorna Dickson: ‘We shall be alone this weekend. A good opportunity to do it.’ And again: ‘from you I will draw the strength to enable me to do that which we both know has to be done sometime.’ Note the words, please: that which
we both know
has to be done. Ample evidence, I submit, that the woman Dickson knew that this horrible crime was going to take place.”

The witness Miss Latimer. The hotel bartender. Agitated and distressed.

And on and on and on.

Nobody would put anything but the most sordid constructions on his love for Lorna. Nobody would believe that it was love and not sensual lust which had prompted the crime.

Bartels swung round from the fire. It was 9.20 now. He said abruptly:

“Lorna, my dear, may I have back the letters I wrote to you—now?”

Lorna said: “Of course you can have them back. But you don’t want them tonight, surely?”

“Wouldn’t it be better?”

“What do you want to do with them? Burn them, I suppose?”

“It is better for both of us to have them out of the way.”

Lorna smiled faintly. “You are being very practical, Barty.” She thought for a moment and added: “Won’t you trust me to burn them for you? Or post them to you at your office, if you wish?”

“It’s the sort of thing one can forget,” said Bartels, trying to keep his voice steady. “It might be better if you gave them to me now, Lorna. If you don’t mind, that is.”

“My dear, they are all over the place. Some in the bureau, some in the drawer of my dressing table, all over the place.”

Bartels thought: Ten minutes to collect them, or fifteen minutes, or perhaps more. And then no guarantee that he had them all, that he had the important ones. What was the good of it? Better to go now, and drive fast. Already ten minutes had gone by.

“You don’t think I’m going to blackmail you with them, do you, Barty?” Lorna spoke jestingly, trying to lift the tension which had settled in the room.

But he answered her seriously. “No.” He shook his head. “No, I know you wouldn’t do that. No, it’s not that at all.”

He couldn’t press the matter any further. Apart from the time factor, it would look peculiar. He felt that already he had gone further than he should have done.

He looked at her helplessly, his brown eyes worried behind the old-fashioned spectacles, his hair standing up slightly on the crown of his head. His face, with the wide mouth and thin straight nose, normally sallow, was flushed by the whisky he had drunk, and the heat of the room, and his state of excitement.

“Never mind,” he said slowly. “Don’t let’s bother about them tonight.”

“I’ll post them to you tomorrow, Barty—to your office, by registered post, marked private and personal, shall I?” She tried to seem brisk and normal.

“No,” said Bartels quickly. “Don’t bother to do that. Burn them, Lorna, tomorrow morning. The whole lot, without fail.”

Lorna nodded. “As you wish.”

Bartels looked once round the room, and then at Lorna Dickson. She stood under the chandelier, and returned his gaze. For fully a minute they stared at each other, sad-eyed, uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what to say now that the moment had come to part.

Bartels felt little bitterness now. Numbly, through the pain and the eddies of fear in the back of his mind, he realized that this was the end of his search. Whatever happened, there would be no love in his life of the kind of which he had dreamed as a boy, because there never would be and never could be another Lorna.

Watching Lorna, he began to doubt for the first time whether in fact she was, or ever had been, truly in love with him. Else why had she shown comparatively little emotion this evening?

Surely, if one were in love, as he was, you forged ahead irrespective of other people’s feelings, ruthlessly, driven on by a fire which nothing could withstand. You cared nothing for anybody, you were prepared to strike, and even to destroy as he had planned to destroy.

That was it, that was the test: you were prepared to destroy. Lorna wouldn’t go even halfway with him on that score.

Illogically, he felt irritated at her calm. Childishly, he thought that she might at least pretend to feel more emotion. Petulantly, he thought that greater signs of distress were even his just due.

But he said nothing.

He turned round suddenly, and opened the drawing-room door and went into the hall and put on his coat and hat and gloves, and walked slowly to the front door.

Lorna followed him to the front door, and the corgi dog, thinking that a walk might be in the offing, was at her heels.

He opened the door and the dog went out. Bartels paused.

“Well, what are you going to do now?” he asked inconsequentially. “Going to bed?”

She nodded. “I’m tired.”

He pulled out his cigarette case, and offered her one, and when she refused, lit one himself.

“I’ll wait till you’re upstairs—as usual.”

It was an old custom. When she was upstairs she would open her window and wave to him.

Only now did she show any real emotion. She tried to smile. Her lips trembled. Bartels looked quickly away, and walked through the doorway.

“Well, I’m off,” he said. Outside, he turned round and said: “Well, goodbye, Lorna.” He hesitated a second; he wanted to add: “Goodbye, darling.” But he didn’t.

She stood in the doorway while the corgi walked past her into the warmth of the house. She raised her hand and waved; it was a confused, feeble little movement. She said nothing.

That was the last picture he had of her, standing in the doorway while the corgi dog walked past her. Then she closed the door.

He walked to the little garden gate and waited as usual. The light went out in the porch. The light went out in the drawing room, and in the hall, and he thought: She is going up the stairs now.

The light went on in her bedroom.

He waited for half a minute, wondering whether she would open the window; holding his cigarette ready to wave to her, as he had always done in the past.

But the window remained shut. A sob of self-pity rose in his throat.

He drove along the lane as fast as possible in third gear, to warm up the engine, swung into the main road, and changed into top.

Where the road filtered into the main London-Guildford road he slowed down, dropped into Cobham, drove along the winding road through Cobham, and then accelerated up to fifty.

The snow still lay on the grass verges and partly cloaked the hedges, but the continual traffic had mostly cleared the road itself. He drove with the car astride one of the lanes of catseyes, and the long lines of little reflector studs, looming up endlessly out of the darkness ahead, threw back the light of his headlamps so that he had the impression of a continuous stream of tracer bullets entering the body of the car, entering his own body and causing the pain which dragged interminably at his inside.

There was not a great deal of traffic about. The night air and the temperature, still below freezing point, had kept most people indoors. But now and again he passed a car, and occasionally a coach, the windows misted up, the interior alight and suggestive of warmth and human company. Bartels, in the dark interior of his car, alone with his fear, thought again of the letters he had written.

“Never put anything on paper, old boy,” that’s what they had said, the knowing ones in the Army; the ones who boasted of their conquests, in the Mess; the love-spivs, and fly Casanovas, the speculators in fornication, and the gamblers in the dicey game of adultery. “Tell ’em what you like, but don’t put it on paper, old boy…no letters, old boy, no letters…women always keep ’em…fatal.” The damnable thing was that they were right, and he had been wrong.

A good opportunity to do it.
To do what? Murder, of course, that’s what any jury would say.
That which we both know has to be done.
What? Murder, obviously: he and Lorna in the dock, Lorna looking at the judge, unafraid. Blue-grey eyes and firm chin. Un-afraid, because she believed in British justice.

No innocent person is ever hanged in England, people said.

Better that a hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person be punished unjustly. That’s what people said.

Justice, British justice, world renowned, and a jury, doing its best, but swayed by the instincts and prejudices inherited over the centuries: respectable men and women trying to rid their minds of the knowledge that Lorna was the third point in the eternal triangle.

What chance had “the other woman” on a murder charge before ten respectable men and two respectable housewives?

Before he found the answer, he saw the dark car as it slid past him, and took no notice of it, but pulled further in to the side of the road to let it go by. He always kept an eye on his driving mirror, and he had seen no car behind him.

It must have been following him without sidelights, or else it must have swooped upon him out of a side road where it had been lurking.

The bell throbbed loud and clear as the dark car passed, and speeded up, and then drew in to the side of the road some yards ahead. Now he saw the
POLICE
sign, illuminated above the roof, and a hand waving him to slow down and stop.

So soon, Beatrice dead so soon.

But it wasn’t fair. They shouldn’t have known he was on this road. Even if they had found her, and had found the number of his car, they shouldn’t have known he was on this road. They shouldn’t have been able to diagnose the cause of death so soon.

A question leaped at him out of the darkness, suddenly and without warning. What proof was there that Beatrice, a human being, would react to the drug in the same way as the dog Brutus? He gripped the steering wheel to fight down his fears.

Subsidiary questions crowded in upon him. Supposing the book on poisons had been wrong? Supposing she had managed to reach the phone before she lost consciousness? People react differently to drugs.

Supposing she had had her moment of fear after all, her seconds of terror; like the attack of palpitations, only ten times worse, and in her panic had called out his name: “Barty!” Perhaps she had called a second time, instinctively, even though aware that he was not there: “Barty! I feel so queer, Barty!”

Calling to him for help, calling to her murderer, in implicit faith, and staggering to dial 999, and dying in fear and pain after all, like the butterfly in the flames.

His heart throbbed in his throat. He had an absurd urge to ignore the signal, to sweep past the police, and on for a few yards, and then make a wild break across the fields.

But he pulled up behind the police car, and lowered the window by the driving seat, and sat waiting while a wave of nausea swept over him. Two officers got out of the police car and walked towards him. One stood in front of the car, and wrote down his registration number in a book. The other came up to the car, and bent down and put his face through the window.

“Are you aware that you have no rear light, sir?”

“No rear light?” whispered Bartels. “No rear light?”

“No, sir. Perhaps you would care to get out and confirm what I have said?”

They want to see if I’m sober, thought Bartels, they want to see me walk to the rear of the car, and see whether I walk properly. Perhaps he smelt the whisky on my breath. I must be careful not to slip on the icy road as I get out; slip and fall to the ground; I must be careful not to slip as I walk to the rear of the car; I must walk carefully, but not too carefully; I mustn’t hold on to the side of the car, even though I might normally do so on a road like this. That would look bad. If they take me in charge, it is the end. And I must not enunciate my words too carefully when I talk to them. That would be bad, too. Mustn’t speak too carefully, and mustn’t speak thickly. If I’m arrested, Beatrice will die, be consumed in the flames as the butterfly was burned in the grate.