Give a Corpse a Bad Name (14 page)

When Toby pulled his car up behind Mrs Milne's outside the wrought-iron gates of Chovey Place, remarking that Adrian Laws must still be at the house since his three-wheeler was still parked there, it was George who got out and opened the gates. When both cars stopped again a few minutes later in front of the house, it was George who was out first and setting a thick finger, tipped with a dirty fingernail, firmly on the bell.

‘And now that we're here,' said Mrs Milne, as they waited for the door to open, ‘what do we do?'

‘You show them the letter,' said Toby.

‘And?'

‘Oh, you just show it.'

‘But that'll imply I think that they've got something to do with it,' she said sharply.

Toby grinned.

She took a step towards her car. ‘Mr Dyke, you may be a—'

The door opened. Toby started explaining to the butler that Mrs Milne had called to see Sir Joseph and Lady Maxwell about a most urgent matter. She returned to his side. From that moment on she showed no further reluctance or indecision; indeed, when the door of the drawing-room was opened for them, she entered the room with a manner that was both assured and formidable.

The Maxwells were all there, having tea. Sir Joseph and his brother, so the butler had informed them as they were crossing the hall, had just returned from the funeral. Stuart Maxwell was standing to one side of the fire, an elbow on the mantelpiece. His face had a blanched, unusually flabby look. His gaze on Anna Milne was bewildered, almost stricken.

On the settee before the fire sat Lady Maxwell, still with her fur wrap round her shoulders. Adrian sat beside her. On her face there appeared surprise and pleasure, on his a curious, smooth blankness, behind which lurked secretive, malicious amusement. As his eyes met Toby's one eyelid, without actually dropping, seemed to tense itself significantly behind the horn-rimmed lense.

Sir Joseph was sitting at a slight distance from the others. He sat near an open window, a cup of extremely weak tea on a table at his side. He had a lettuce-leaf in one hand and a slice of brown bread and butter in the other.

At sight of the visitors he crammed the lettuce-leaf into his mouth, moved in one long stride to the French window, opened it, stepped outside and shut it again behind him. Through the glass his large, yellowish face, his beard and his spidery length, showed against the deep shadows of the afternoon twilight with a patchiness that was eerily unpleasant.

‘Joseph!' Sunk in her corner of the couch, Lady Maxwell was trying to jerk herself up on to her feet. Her blue eyes were furious, her lips munched against one another.

But Mrs Milne had not waited for her. Only a moment after Sir Joseph, she crossed the room and flung the window open.

She was cool, almost assertively cool.

‘Sir Joseph,' she said, ‘you're a damned humbug.'

He had already retreated a pace or two.

‘You can't bolt off like that,' she said loudly, ‘as if you'd a genuine grief to excuse you. If I believed you were suffering from grief I shouldn't have come here. I've come here to show you something. If you walk off across the park I'll come too and see that you get a look at it before I leave you. Grief!' She laughed. In speaking her voice had been level, but in her laugh it betrayed her; it quivered, like a taut string, with anger.

‘Grief?' he echoed. ‘I hadn't thought—no, certainly I hadn't thought—of offering that as an explanation of my leaving the room when you entered it.' He spoke abruptly, nervously; one hand was fidgeting at the corner of a pocket. It was an arresting voice, and the angular figure with the cold eyes set far apart in the big face, was striking in its aloof, nervous dignity.

‘I left the room,' he continued, ‘simply because I had no wish to speak with you, nor with your—friends. I am not a humbug. I have always made my attitude towards you perfectly clear. Now please allow me to go. This must be very unpleasant for the others who are present.'

‘Joseph!' cried his wife again, but was too filled with emotion to say what she wanted to say. She was standing, her small hands tightly clenched together. There was fury on her face, but also the abjectness of keen humiliation.

Stuart Maxwell's pallid face had flushed. It flushed blotchily, making him look ill. In a slurred voice that sounded dangerous, he said: ‘You're an unmannered dog, Joe, you're a hypocrite, one day I'll kill you.'

Mrs Milne, still with that cool, angry control of herself, held out the anonymous letter to Sir Joseph.

‘This,' she said, ‘is what I came to show you. When you've seen it you can go or stay, so far as I'm concerned.'

He took the letter, coming into the room and shutting the window behind him. The room had been growing exceedingly cold while it was open, but he seemed to have no awareness of temperature.

‘Well?' he said when he had read the letter. ‘Well?'

‘Do you understand it?' she asked.

‘Possibly, in part.'

‘You do?' she said, on a sharp note of surprise.

‘Please, Anna, may I see it too?' said Lady Maxwell.

Mrs Milne took it from Sir Joseph and handed it to his wife, but her attention did not leave him for an instant. There was irony in his small, cold eyes. He almost smiled.

‘
I
can't understand it at
all
,' said Lady Maxwell. ‘Do you really understand it, Joseph, or—?'

‘Or,' said the major, who had taken the letter from her and read it too, ‘is brother Joe refusing, as usual, to admit when he's stumped?'

‘If you had considered the evidence we possess,' said Sir Joseph, ‘this letter—'

Mrs Milne cut in: ‘This letter, you would realize, accuses me of murder. It's the second of the kind I've had. Someone in this village is exercising an astonishing amount of ingenuity in an attempt to make it seem that I worked that accident the other night deliberately.'

‘Anna!' And turning suddenly to Toby, Lady Maxwell said: ‘Mr Dyke, I'm quite, quite at sea. Won't you please explain? Anna can't mean what she's just said.'

In a grave voice Sir Joseph announced: ‘This must be given to the police.'

‘Certainly,' said Mrs Milne.

‘The police,' he continued, ‘will take a serious view of it.'

‘They will!'

‘You should have taken it to the police at once,' he said.

‘I preferred,' she said, ‘to bring it here.'

‘You believe I can assist you in some way?'

She turned to Toby with the smile that could flash so brilliantly over her face. ‘I like it, don't you,' she said, ‘when he turns into the grave magistrate, the worthy adviser? Do I think you can assist me, Joe? Well, that depends. I can assist you, I think. I can explain that the police are asking me over and over again one question—
one
question. Is there anyone, they want to know, who's got a grudge against me?'

‘Well?' he said.

‘So far I haven't answered them. But if there's one person in this neighbourhood who's never hesitated to show his dislike of me, or to take any opportunity that offered to make trouble for me—'

‘Oh, Anna,' cried Lady Maxwell, ‘no one in this neighbourhood dislikes you. Nobody could. Everyone admires you—I know they do.'

‘Except,' said Anna Milne, ‘your own “prating fool”, as you call him.'

‘My—?'

Lady Maxwell stopped. She gasped faintly. Her husband, sitting down and crossing one bony knee over the other, remarked: ‘So that's what you call me, is it, Emmie?'

She was working her lips together, her blue eyes filled with a deep surprise. He smiled. There were chips of ice in his smile.

‘ “Prating fool.” Indeed,' he murmured, ‘indeed.'

‘But—' she said, ‘but I don't—'

A short, harsh, uncomfortable laugh broke from Mrs Milne, and she looked at Toby Dyke. ‘Why the hell,' she said venomously, ‘did you bring me here?'

‘You needn't stay,' he replied.

‘Thanks,' she said ironically. Then harshly, defensively, to Lady Maxwell: ‘I'm sorry, Emmeline, that was unforgivable of me. I don't know how I came to say it. This whole thing's damnably on my mind. I don't believe I'm quite sane at the moment.'

‘Oh,' said Lady Maxwell in a quick, gentle voice, ‘I don't mind. It's only that I'm puzzled. I can't understand how … But I don't
mind
. I'm never in the least ashamed of my opinions.'

‘No, indeed,' said her husband, ‘Emmeline never makes any secret of her opinion of me. You needn't concern yourself, Mrs Milne, nor exercise yourself with an unaccustomed delicacy. Emmeline herself is quite without delicacy in certain directions—for instance, the matter of our son's death. She's acted in such a way as to make all our acquaintances terrified of meeting us. For she so forces her own singular view of the circumstances upon them that they're forced either into an insincere pandering to her delusions, or else into showing their doubts of her sanity. I shall not blame them if they completely avoid us in the future.'

Lady Maxwell did not appear to have heard him. She said: ‘And I'm still very puzzled. What I cannot understand is—'

Mrs Milne interrupted her by once more addressing Toby Dyke. ‘I hope,' she said, ‘you've got what you came for. As I've your permission to go, I'm going. Emmeline, I'm sincerely sorry. But we'll talk it over another time, shall we? Goodbye.' For a moment, before she went, her eyes met Stuart Maxwell's. It was the only time during the visit that she appeared to be aware of his presence.

She had given no sign in her abrupt withdrawal of whether or not she expected Toby and George to follow her. Toby's attention was on Lady Maxwell, and it was clear that, for a moment at least, he intended to stay behind.

‘You were saying …?' he remarked.

‘Yes, that it's a most puzzling …'

‘Perhaps,' he said, ‘I might be able to help explain …'

She took the suggestion thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,' she said slowly, ‘you could.' And she smiled at him, as if they had just been making an arrangement.

A contemptuous sound came from Sir Joseph. ‘Fortunately,' he said, ‘this house is my property. I do not invite either of these reporters, these sensation-hunters, to remain. Can't you perceive, Emmie, that what they want from you is the biggest exhibition of yourself that you're capable of making?'

‘If it's making an exhibition of myself,' she replied, ‘to assert a simple fact against the ridiculous and perverted view which you have forced on people, deceiving them and—'

‘For God's sake,' said Major Maxwell, ‘if that's starting again, let's get out.' And grabbing Toby by the elbow, he pushed him out into the hall. George and Adrian followed them.

*

Adrian was the first person Toby addressed.

‘Well,' he said, ‘you enjoyed that, didn't you?'

Adrian was thrusting both hands through his copper-coloured hair. The smile on his face expressed a quiet satisfaction of spirit.

‘Yes,' he admitted, ‘I did.'

‘Scenes and such-like,' said Toby, ‘you appreciate them.'

‘Although, of course,' said Adrian, ‘the best's only beginning now.'

‘Oh, quite,' said Toby.

Adrian stood still in the middle of the big, barren hall.

‘What are you looking at me like that for?' he demanded.

‘So's to get you anxious and asking questions,' said Toby. ‘Most people around here are pretty anxious about one thing or another, seems to me.'

‘No, but really—'

‘Well, you did something pretty funny in there, don't you think?'

‘I didn't do a thing.'

‘Not a thing,' Toby agreed. He turned to the major. ‘Come to think of it, you'd do pretty well as a suspect, wouldn't you?'

The major's jaw set sullenly. ‘What d'you mean, suspect?' He said it with a heavy dullness that did not sit upon him too convincingly.

‘He means,' said Adrian, amused, ‘that he thinks you're the one who's been sending Anna those threatening letters.'

‘No,' said Stuart Maxwell, and all at once his features were taut, his eyes, for all their weariness, were keen, and he looked more like himself. ‘No, Adrian, don't be fooled. Go on, Dyke.'

‘Well, suppose,' said Toby, ‘suppose for the sake of interest, of argument, and, just remotely possibly, of truth, that the hints in those letters are not totally, entirely without foundation. Suppose, that's to say, that murder isn't an utterly fantastic suggestion …'

‘Ah,' said the major, with a sort of sigh that sounded, oddly enough, relieved, ‘at last somebody's said it. Murder. Thanks, Dyke. There's just a hope now of getting somewhere. Murder. Good. I don't like this edging around things. Murder, murder, murder!' The last time he said it it was almost a shout, and then his voice cracked into sudden laughter.

‘Here, steady on, old man,' said Adrian. ‘I know this is all pretty damnable for you—worse than for the rest of us, but—'

The older man turned on him. ‘Get out,' he said, ‘I want to talk to Dyke.'

‘But—'

‘Get out!' Then his tone changed. He said: ‘Sorry, Adrian. I don't mean it like that. But I want to talk to Dyke. You don't mind clearing out for a bit, do you?'

‘I want to talk to him myself,' said Adrian, ‘some time.' He looked vexed. But, shrugging his shoulders, he wandered off down the drive.

George, watching him go, observed: ‘And Lady Maxwell wants to talk to you, Tobe, and so, I shouldn't wonder, does Sergeant Eggbear. This is what I call no sort of holiday.'

‘It isn't a holiday any longer, it's work,' Toby reminded him. ‘I'm employed now.'

‘What's that?' said the major quickly.

‘Mrs Milne's employed me to find the letter-writer. But let's forget the letter-writer for the moment, and go back to—'